“Puzzled,” I said. “Puzzled, worried, and excited, all at the same time.”
“Yeah, like that. He put the rings against my ears—using the tongs, you know—and then asked me to push the button on the control unit, since his own hands were full. I almost didn’t, but I flashed on the pistols in all those pawnshop windows, and I did it.”
“Then blacked out.” I didn’t ask it as a question, because I was sure of it. But he surprised me.
“There were blackouts, all right, and what I called prismatics, but they came later. Right then there was just an almighty snapping sound in the middle of my head. My legs shot out and my hands went up over my head like a schoolkid who’s just desperate to tell the teacher he knows the right answer.”
That brought back memories.
“Also, there was a taste in my mouth. Like I’d been sucking on pennies. I asked Jacobs if I could have a drink of water, and heard myself asking, and broke into tears. I cried for quite awhile. He held me.” At last Hugh turned from the mountains and looked at me. “After that I would have done anything for him, Jamie. Anything.”
“I know the feeling.”
“When I had control of myself again, he took me back out into the shop and put a pair of Koss headphones on me. He plugged into an FM station and kept turning the music down and asking me if I could hear it. I did until he got all the way to zero, and I could almost swear I even heard it then. He not only brought my hearing back, it was more acute than it had been since I was fourteen, and playing with my first jam-band.”
Hugh asked how he could repay Jacobs. The Rev, only a scruffy guy in need of a haircut and a bath, considered this.
“Tell you what,” he said at last. “There’s little in the way of business here, and some of the people who do wander in are pretty sketchy. I’m going to transport all this stuff to a storage facility on the North Side while I think about what to do next. You could help me.”
“I can do better than that,” Hugh said, still relishing the sound of his own voice. “I’ll rent the storage space myself, and hire a crew to move everything. I don’t look like I can afford it, but I can. Really.”
Jacobs seemed horrified at the idea. “Absolutely not! The goods I have for sale are mostly junk, but my equipment is valuable, and much of it in the back area—my lab—is delicate, as well. Your help would be more than enough repayment. Although first you need to rest a little. And eat. Put on a few pounds. You’ve been through a difficult time. Would you be interested in becoming my assistant, Mr. Yates?”
“If that’s what you want,” Hugh said. “Mr. Jacobs, I still can’t believe you’re talking and I’m hearing you.”
“In a week, you’ll take it for granted,” he said dismissively. “That’s the way it works with miracles. No use railing against it; it’s plain old human nature. But since we have shared a miracle in this overlooked corner of the Motor City, I can’t have you calling me Mr. Jacobs. To you, let me be the Rev.”
“As in Reverend?”
“Exactly,” he said, and grinned. “Reverend Charles D. Jacobs, currently chief prelate in the First Church of Electricity. And I promise not to work you too hard. There’s no hurry; we’ll take our time.”
“I’ll bet you did,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He didn’t want you to buy him a moving crew, and he didn’t want your money. He wanted your time. I think he was studying you. Looking for aftereffects. What did you think?”
“Then? Nothing. I was riding a mighty cloud of joy. If the Rev had asked me to rob First of Detroit, I might have given it a shot. Looking back on it, though, you could be right. There wasn’t much to the work, after all, because when you came right down to it, he had very little to sell. There was more in his back room, but with a big enough U-Haul, we could have moved the whole kit and caboodle off the 8-Mile in two days. But he strung it out over a week.” He considered. “Yeah, okay. He was watching me.”
“Studying. Looking for aftereffects.” I peeked at my watch. I had to be in the studio in fifteen minutes, and if I lingered longer in the picnic area I was going to be late. “Walk with me down to Studio One. Tell me what they were.”
We walked, and Hugh told me about the blackouts that had followed Jacobs’s electrical treatment for deafness. They were brief but frequent in the first couple of days, and there was no actual sense of unconsciousness. He would just find himself in a different place and discover that five minutes had gone by. Or ten. On two occasions it happened while he and Jacobs were loading equipment and secondhand sales goods into an old plumbing-supply panel truck Jacobs had borrowed from someone (maybe from another of his miracle cures, although if that was the case, Hugh never found out—the Rev was closemouthed about such things).
“I asked him what happened during those times, and he said nothing, that we just went on moving stuff and conversing like normal.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I did at the time. Now I don’t know.”
One night, Hugh said—this would have been five or six days post-treatment—he was sitting in his fleabag hotel room’s one chair, reading a book, and suddenly found himself standing in the corner, facing the wall.
“Were you saying anything?” I asked, thinking, Something happened. Something, something, something.
“No,” he said. “But…”
“But what?”
He shook his head at the memory. “I’d taken off my pants, then put my sneakers back on. I was just standing there in my Jockey shorts and Reeboks. Crazy, huh?”
“Muy loco,” I said. “How long did these mini-lapses go on?”
“The second week there were only a couple. By the third week they were gone. But there was something else that lasted longer. Something with my eyes. These… events. The prismatics. I don’t know what else to call them. They happened maybe a dozen times over the next five years. Nothing at all since then.”
We had reached the studio. Mookie was waiting for us, his Broncos gimme cap turned around backward, making him look like the world’s oldest skateboarder. “The band’s in there. They’re practicing.” He lowered his voice. “Dudes, they’re fucking horrible.”
“Tell them we’ll be starting late,” I said. “We’ll give them extra time on the other end to make up for it.”
Mookie looked from Hugh to me and then back to Hugh—taking the emotional temperature. “Hey, nobody’s gonna get fired, are they?”
“Not unless you leave the soundboard on again,” Hugh said. “Now get in there and let the adults talk.”
Mookie saluted and went inside.
Hugh turned back to me. “The prismatics were much weirder than the blackouts. I don’t really know how to describe them. Like the man said, you had to be there.”
“Try.”
“I always knew when it was going to happen. I’d be going along through my day, you know, business as usual, and then my vision would seem to sharpen.”
“Like your hearing after the treatment?”
He shook his head. “No, that was real. My ears are still better now than they were before the Rev’s treatment, and I know a hearing test would prove it, although I’ve never bothered to get one. No, the vision thing was… you know how epileptics can tell a seizure is coming by a tingling in their wrists, or some phantom smell?”
“Precursors.”
“Right. That sense I got of my vision sharpening was a precursor. What happened after was… color.”