“Color.”
“The world filled with reds, blues, and greens at the edges of things. The colors would shift back and forth. It was like looking through a prism, but one that magnified things at the same time it was shattering them into pieces.” He patted his forehead, a gentle gesture of frustration. “That’s as close as I can get. And during the thirty or forty seconds it was happening, it was as if I could almost look through the world, and there was another world right behind it. A realer world.”
He looked at me soberly.
“Those were the prismatics. I’ve never talked about them to anyone until today. They scared the hell out of me.”
“You never even told the Rev?”
“I would’ve, but he was already gone the first time it happened. No big goodbyes, just a note saying he had a business opportunity in Joplin. This was six months or so after the miracle cure, and I was back in here in Nederland. The prismatics… they were beautiful in a way I could never describe, but I hope they never come back. Because if that other world is really there, I don’t want to see it. And if it’s in my mind, I want it to stay there.”
Mookie came out. “They’re hot to go, Jamie. I’ll roll some sound, if you want. I sure can’t fuck it up, because these guys make the Dead Milkmen sound like the Beatles.”
That might be, but they had paid cash for their session. “No, I’ll be right in. Tell them two more minutes.”
He disappeared.
“So,” Hugh said. “You got mine, but I didn’t get yours. And I still want it.”
“I’ve got an hour around nine tonight. I’ll come up to the big house and tell you then. It won’t take long. My story is basically the same as yours: treatment, cure, aftereffects that attenuated, then passed completely.” Not quite true, but I had a session to record.
“No prismatics?”
“Nope. Other stuff. Tourette’s without the swearing, for one thing.” I decided I’d keep the dreams of dead family members to myself, at least for the time being. Maybe they were my glimpses of Hugh’s other world.
“We ought to go see him.” Hugh gripped my arm. “We really ought to.”
“I think you’re right.”
“But no big reunion dinner, okay? I don’t even want to talk to him, just observe.”
“Fine,” I said, and looked down at his hand. “Now let go of me before you leave a bruise. I have to record some music.”
He let go. I went into the studio, and the sound of some local punk band playing leather-jacket-and-safety-pin stuff the Ramones did a lot better back in the ’70s. When I looked back over my shoulder, Hugh was still standing there, looking at the mountains.
The world beyond the world, I thought, then put it out of my mind—or tried to—and went to work.
I didn’t break down and get a laptop of my own for another year, but there was plenty of computing power in Studios 1 and 2—by 2008 we were recording almost everything with Mac programs—and when I got a break around five, I googled C. Danny Jacobs and found thousands of references. Apparently I’d missed quite a lot since “C. Danny” first appeared on the national scene ten years before, but I didn’t blame myself. I’m not much of a TV watcher, my interest in popular culture revolved around music, and my churchgoing days were long over. No wonder I had missed the preacher his Wikipedia entry called “the twenty-first-century Oral Roberts.”
He had no megachurch, but his weekly Hour of Healing Gospel Power was telecast from coast to coast on high cable channels where the buy-in price was low and the return in “love offerings” was presumably high. The shows were taped at his Old-Time Tent Revivals, which crisscrossed most of the country (steering clear of the East Coast, where people were presumably a bit less credulous). In pictures taken over the years, I watched Jacobs grow older and grayer, but the look in his eyes never changed: fanatical and somehow wounded.
A week or so before Hugh and I made our trip to see Jacobs in his native environment, I called Georgia Donlin and asked if I could have her daughter’s number—the one who was studying computers at Colorado University. The daughter’s name was Brianna.
Bree and I had an extremely interesting conversation.
VIII
It was seventy miles from Nederland to the Norris County Fairgrounds, which gave Hugh and me plenty of time to talk, but we said almost nothing until we were east of Denver; just sat and looked at the scenery. Except for the ever-present smog line over Arvada, it was a perfect late summer day.
Then Hugh snapped off the radio, which had been playing a steady stream of oldies on KXKL, and said: “Did your brother Conrad have any lingering effects after the Rev fixed up his laryngitis, or whatever it was?”
“No, but that’s not surprising. Jacobs said the cure was bogus, a placebo, and I always thought he was telling the truth. Probably he was. That was early days for him, remember, when his idea of a big project was getting better TV reception. Con’s mind just needed permission to get better.”
“Belief is powerful,” Hugh agreed. “So is faith. Look at all the groups and solo acts we have lining up to make CDs, even though hardly anybody buys them anymore. Have you done any research on C. Danny Jacobs?”
“Plenty. Georgia’s daughter is helping me with that.”
“I’ve done some myself, and I’ll bet plenty of his cures are like your brother’s. People with psychosomatic illnesses who decide they’re healed when Pastor Danny touches them with his magic God-rings.”
That might be true, but after watching Jacobs operate at the Tulsa fairgrounds, I was sure he had learned the real secret of building a tip: you had to give the rubes at least a little steak to go with the sizzle. Women declaring their migraines were gone and men exclaiming their sciatica had departed were all very well, but stuff like that wasn’t very visual. They weren’t Portraits in Lightning, you might say.
There were at least two dozen debunking websites about him, including one called C. DANNY JACOBS: FAITH’S FRAUD. Hundreds of people had posted to these sites, claiming the “cancerous tumors” Pastor Danny removed were pig’s livers or goat guts. Although cameras carried by audience members were forbidden at C. Danny’s services, and the film was confiscated if one of the “ushers” glimpsed someone taking snaps, plenty of photos had leaked out just the same. Many of them seemed to actually complement the official videos posted on C. Danny’s website. In others, however, the glistening goop in Pastor Danny’s hands certainly did look like goat guts. My guess was that the tumors were fake—that part of the show just smelled too carny-from-carny to be anything else. But it didn’t mean everything Jacobs was doing was fake. Here were two men in a boat-size Lincoln Continental who could testify to that.
“You had sleepwalking and involuntary movements,” Hugh said. “Which, according to WebMD, is called myoclonus. Transient, in your case. Also the need to poke things into yourself, as if down deep you still wanted to be riding the needle.”
“All true.”
“I had blackouts where I talked and moved around—like booze blackouts, only without the booze.”
“And the prismatics,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Then there’s the girl from Tulsa you told me about. The one who stole the earrings. World’s ballsiest smash-and-grab.”
“She thought they belonged to her because they were in the picture he took of her. I bet she was rolling around boutiques in Tulsa looking for the dress, too.”