The woman’s forehead furrowed. A man from deeper inside the place asked if she was alright, who was there.
“Sir, you’ll have to come back Sunday, please.” The man inside said something about the damn gate’s supposed to be down.
The fumbling, stammering thoughts congealed and the one-time English scholarship winner regained his functionality with language. “No, you have to let me in now. Something very significant happened to me last night and I need to know if it was God’s doing or if I’m losing my mind.”
“Uh …”
“Please, lady, just let me in. The guy came to my daughter’s wake yesterday and invited me here. I even … beat up his partner a little.”
“Oh.”
“Shelly, what is the issue?” The door swung wider and the short, stocky guy who had taken a hell of a beating from an skinny book editor peered out from behind a face swollen in red patches. A band-aid was stuck to his cheek, some dried blood gathered just beneath it like a zit.
* * *
Anthony expected a revenge punch, even an all-out got-you-back pummeling, and he was willing to take that beating if it eventually led to some form of deeper understanding about what was going on in his life, but the guy introduced himself as Dwayne and invited Anthony inside.
Instead of resembling a church, the room opened up to a large hall in which rows of folding tables with folding chairs pushed in neatly around them made the place look like the setting for a spaghetti dinner benefit. Maybe that’s just what they use it for. That’s how they lure in the masses.
No free dinners were needed to get Anthony here. But this was not what he had anticipated and he couldn’t hide his disappointment.
“Not what you expected, huh?” Dwayne said with a smile. When he grinned, the places where Anthony had really done some damage on his face stood out as white spots on sunburned skin. Anthony had to look away. Shelly, the woman who had answered the door, stood beside Dwayne, arm looped inside of his.
“I’m … sorry for what I did. I freaked out and acted like some crazed maniac. I’m sorry.”
Dwayne was already shaking his head before Anthony finished apologizing. “It’s fine. I understand. You’ve had a rough go of it.”
“Still …”
“No worries. God puts each us through trials. Taking your beating was one of mine, that’s all.”
Anthony marveled at the simplicity of his response. “You believe that?”
“Of course.”
Anthony waited for more, but Dwayne apparently had nothing else to add. He stood before him, face swollen in patches, waiting for Anthony to make the next move. For a moment, Anthony thought of punching him again, another test of philosophy. If God really, really wanted Anthony to be here right now, this broad-shouldered guy would drop to the ground and suffer another barrage of hits.
Instead of testing his theory, Anthony smiled, nodded, and asked where the other guy was, the one Dwayne had been traveling Anthony’s neighborhood with.
“We weren’t just walking around your development.”
“What do you mean?”
“We went right for your house.”
“Why?”
Dwayne shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Ellis.”
“Ellis? He’s the other guy? Where is he?”
“Praying,” Dwayne said and pointed toward the back. “Go ahead. God’s back there, too.”
Anthony wasn’t sure if that was an attempt at humor or not and when neither Dwayne nor Shelly laughed, Anthony thanked them and headed to the back toward a pair of nondescript doors. No one stood watch outside the doors, but a pair of men in matching grey suits sitting at one of the folding tables watched him walk past without saying anything. Their silent stare unnerved him enough to slow his step. What was behind those doors? He might open the doors and find an empty room or an exit but he might also find people chained to the walls and severed body parts rotting before them on dinner plates. Jesus, where had that come from? He massaged his head as though that would ease away the dark thoughts.
A small plaque at eye-level on the doors labeled it The Empowerment Temple. No points for title, there. The editor in him wanted to find the clever guy who thought up that name and ask him if he wanted people to actually believe in his religion or if the whole place was really some New Age massage parlor.
He assumed he should knock—it was only polite—but he elected to put his God wants me here philosophy to work. He pushed open both doors with enough force to knock over anyone who might be standing on the other side.
An enormous Jesus Christ glared back from the far wall of a candlelit room and Anthony almost screamed.
* * *
Anthony walked several feet into this dim room as if in a trance. Like he’s drawing me in. The Jesus was only a statue, a large statue, and incredibly life-like, but not some real guy in a terry cloth acting out some empowerment ritual. The large, sorrowful eyes were the exact ones from the flier. This was their mascot Jesus and it was obvious why it should be kept back here: the thing was so absorbing that were it in the other room nothing would ever get accomplished. People would stare at it, at HIM, all day. This wasn’t just a statue; this was something profound, a gateway, perhaps, to God’s listening room. This is God’s listening room, he told himself and then someone touched his shoulder.
Anthony slapped his hand over his mouth to stifle the scream. Other people were in this room. They were kneeling on small rugs in between tons and tons of candles. They each appeared deep in prayer; his shout hadn’t disturbed even one of them. A melange of flower aromas pulsed in the room amid the scattered flickering candles. But where were the flowers?
“I’m glad you’ve come,” the tall man with the blue eyes said. He had shed his black door-to-door suit for a more casual grey polo and dark trousers.
“You’re Ellis.”
He smiled in a way that calmed Anthony. It was a smile you wanted your doctor to have before he relayed the results of your latest blood tests. “I’m so glad you came.”
Anthony could only nod. The giant Jesus pulled his attention again. Had the figure just turned his head? Must be the candlelight.
“There are no hard feelings about what happened yesterday,” Ellis said. “In fact, I feel it necessary to apologize to you. We handled it in a very haphazard manner.”
Anthony wanted to be pissed. He wanted to tell this guy to shove it up his ass and see if he shit out a more reasonable excuse, but he couldn’t. Something, Ellis’s smile perhaps, kept the anger at bay. Not Ellis’s smile—it’s the giant Jesus that’s doing it.
“You’ve come to pray?”
This was what he was waiting for, why he had skipped out on the free cold cuts and potato salad at the church. This was why he had been carrying the flier in his jacket pocket all day. What he wanted—assurance that his encounter (That’s for you, Dad) was a genuine message from the next world—seemed so ridiculous here in this place of flickering candles and silently praying believers. These people didn’t demand authenticity for their faith; they simply fell to their knees before this giant statue and searched their souls.
When he was only nine years old, Anthony begged his parents for a top of the line Schwinn Bicycle. He cried for one, promised to do anything for one. He wrote Schwinn Bike forty times on a piece of paper and handed it to his mother as his Christmas list. She frowned. On Christmas morning, there had been no bike under the tree, no bike in the garage, no bike in the driveway—no bike anywhere. After he opened his presents, things he could no longer remember because of the weight of his disappointment, his parents told him they had a surprise for him. He knew it would be the bike. They got in the family station wagon and drove to what Anthony was sure would be the National Schwinn Factory or some equally marvelous place, but it turned out to be a soup kitchen in a particularly rundown section of Middletown, N.Y. He helped his parents serve turkey dinner to people who had gotten no presents that morning, had no tree under which to find any presents, and in some cases no house even in which to display a tree. His parents never asked him if he learned anything that day but maybe that was because they could tell he had. He forgot all about his Schwinn bike but he never forgot the smiles of gratitude on the people as they held out their plates for stuffing and gravy.