Nervous Walking (the Death of God)

Once upon a time--not in the sense of something that has happened, but in the sense of something that will happen--so, once upon that time there were two brothers, alone in a forest. They were sent there by their father, a wise man who knew well how to raise his children. The brothers were sent to the forest to partake in the ritual of manhood, to learn the things they could not learn in school or from their mother or father. They went to the forest to learn what only the world could tell them…
"Satellite
Big and bright
The first one I've seen tonight
I wish I may
I wish I might
Have this wish I wish tonight,” the younger brother said.
The older brother turned to the younger brother and said "that's not how it goes!”
And the younger brother asked "how would you know?!"
And the older brother said "Grandpa taught me that rhyme when I was a kid. It's supposed to go:
Starlight
Star bright
First star I see tonight
Starlight
Star bright
Make everything alright.
It's from an oldies song."
And the younger brother, seeing the error of his ways, replied "oh, I didn't know that."
The younger brother knew then that the world was not the way he had thought it to be. That night, he found that the natural world was a strange, unnatural place, void of God. In this way, he returned home a man.
~
My brother, Travis, is four years older than me. Our age difference doesn’t really matter much now. When we were children, however, it sure did. The four years he had over me didn't allot him any more freedoms, though, even if he felt that it should. I remember now, as I remembered then (although maybe a little more clearly then), the conversation we had had the previous hour. It began when I heard Travis open the squeaky door to his bedroom as quietly as possible--which was silent enough for his purposes, but I've always been a light sleeper.
It was too risky to argue with me while mom was asleep down the hall. All he could do was stare daggers at me while I followed behind him as silently and cautiously as I could. The inconsequential argument that followed has, for some reason, stuck with me my entire life since.
"You're too young and you should be sleeping," he said while he defiantly lit a cigarette. He knew that I knew he smoked, so around me he allowed himself the air of cool confidence and superiority that brought him to smoking in the first place.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"I'm going to Nick's House. You can tag along if you want, but keep your mouth shut and don't tell Mom anything, Okay?"
"Okay!" I whispered back harshly.
It was a balmy summer night. I said nothing while we walked the half mile to Nick's house. Nick was Travis's best friend. They were similar in many ways, but most beneficial to me was how they both tolerated my presence. The humidity in the air made our breathing heavy without effort. The foreign smell of the cigarette completely covered the sweet smell of dewy grass. Passing the Geerling's house, I wiped a thin layer of sweat from my face and searched for Franklin, the drooly old bull dog, but he must have been in for the night. It was then that I noticed how different everything was at night. All the houses were quiet and dark, with dull halos of light around the doors. The sounds at night were different, too. Among the trees blowing in the wind, the katydids and cicadas in the trees, and the metered crackling of the cigarette, was the ever-present hum of air conditioners.
Travis knocked lightly on Nick's bedroom window. The blinds cracked open to a dark room dimly lit by a bright blue computer screen. We walked to the side of the house, to the side door, where Nick met us and let us in.
"Hey," Nick grunted.
"Hey," my brother grunted back.
"Hey, Nick!" I blurted out, a little too loud and way too excited. Travis looked back at me with a look of utter contempt as we took off our shoes.
We followed Nick down the hallway to his bedroom, past old family photos of him and his parents and little sister (who was three years younger than me). When we entered his bedroom, Nick handed Travis a beer. Neither of them acknowledged my presence as I sat quietly on the edge of Nick’s bed.
The small talk that followed didn't interest me much. Or rather, it just seemed like small talk to me because I didn't yet know what a blow job was, and the name Jennifer Steinsma didn’t mean anything to me. While they talked, I surveyed Nick’s bedroom. It was a mess of dirty and clean cloths piled in little mountains. Motocross magazines and metal CDs hung halfway off both the cluttered night-stand and dresser. In the corner was an unfinished painting of a gigantic eye with what was supposed to be a skull in the middle, although it didn't look much like a skull. I was bored and fidgety and they were still talking about Jennifer. I began making a clickity-clack noise with my mouth, hoping it would signal to them that we should do something more than just sit in Nick's room all night. All it did, however, was spark my brother's anger.
"Listen, if you don't want to be here..." he paused. He didn't trust me to sneak back into the house without his supervision and have me not wake Mom, and I knew it.
"What do you want?!" he finally asked.
"I dunno, let's go outside or something." I suggested.
"Is it cool if we hang out, out back?" Travis asked Nick.
"Yeah, sure," Nick replied. "I could use a smoke."
Outside was dark, expansive in every direction and sticky. While my brother and his friend smoked their cigarettes and sat lazily in the patio chairs, I walked off by myself. The backyard was a long rectangle covered in seldom cut, dewy grass. The end of the yard sloped down to a small creek, one of the many Platter Creek tributaries. The oaks that grew around the creek had always been some of our favorites for climbing and tree fort building, and my brother and Nick had built one of the finest examples of kid engineering anyone had every seen. The summer they built it, it was all anyone talked about. I don't think I've ever been more proud of my brother, even now. They built it with stolen supplies from an emerging housing development nearby. Those sorry construction workers must have come back almost daily to missing boxes of nails, 2x4s and plywood. Their endeavors were much more important to them than any punishment the law or their parents could hand down.
The fort was built about 25 feet off the ground. Three foot sections of splintery, hand-sawed 2x4s were nailed as a ladder to the thick bark of the trunk of the tree. The fort itself was huge, big enough to fit at least five or six kids. The roof was a tarp, cut and stapled so that it wove around the individual branches and the trunk itself. Inside the fort there was nothing, which made it exactly what every kid wanted--refuge.
When I got to the top of the ladder and pulled myself up into the fort, I finally felt at peace. Even now, I don't have to try very hard to get back to that place, it was so natural. The fort was far enough away from all the houses that the constant air conditioning couldn't be heard. It was late enough that cars and lawnmowers were packed away for the night and wouldn't be out for an eternity- or a night's sleep, whichever came first. The only thing that could be heard was the persistent hum of thousands of bugs singing rhythms I never knew existed. I could imagine it happening everywhere, even though I knew what I was witnessing was special and just for me. Life as it was meant to be laid out in front of me and she was breathtaking and beautiful. It was then that I noticed a pile of something along one of the walls. As I got closer to the pile, it began to take the shape of five or six magazines piled carelessly with crumpled, bent and torn covers.
I had seen naked women before. The previous school year we began sex ed., and there were always the old National Geographic magazines at the library or in Grandpa's basement. What I saw here was something completely different. The women in these magazines had straight blonde hair and were naked, lying on beds or alongside pools, wearing only high heel shoes. One by one, I paged through the magazines and laid them on the plywood floor of the fort while I kneeled in front of them. I studied the new and foreign images, trying to make sense of them and what they were making me feel. The thin layer of sweat on my face had little to do with the humidity now. I felt flushed and the once-pleasant breeze now caused me to shiver. Five women were laid out in front of me, legs spread. They were breathtaking and utterly disgusting. I didn't look away until my brother yelled my name from across the yard.
“I’m in the fort!” I yelled back in a whisper.
I heard the footsteps of my brother, moving hurriedly across the slick grass. Peaking out between the branches and leaves, I could see a dark figure with no definition moving on what appeared to be a cloud of mist, silencing the crickets and demanding my attention.
“Hey, we gotta get going home,” my brother announced without emotion.
I returned to the five women spread out on the floor. My eyes wouldn’t adjust to the natural darkness, which was fine with me. I had seen enough. One by one, I closed the pages and returned the women to the pile they came from and made my way down the ladder.
We said goodbye to Nick and made our way to the street before my brother said anything to me. Talking was mechanical to me, my mind was flashing through the images of the five women. I didn’t notice the silence of the night, or the difference between night and day, the smell of dewy grass or the crescent moon (something that someone once told me was God’s toenail). The only thing I could think of, the only thing I could see were the five women.
Travis stopped at our driveway. The house was dark and non-descript other than the halo lighting the address.
“I gotta finish this.” He said to me, holding up a half-smoked cigarette.
Looking up at the sky, I noticed how clear it was. There were only a few clouds, very far away and nearly transparent. Only the brightest stars were visible.
“What do you think God dreams about?” I asked, looking up at the moon.
“I dunno,” my brother shrugged, “I’m not even sure there is a God.”
“Of course there’s a God! How do you think all of nature got here!?”
“I dunno, it just grew. Besides, just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean… What I mean is there’s no proof either way. So why should I believe in a God any more than I should believe in no God?”
He had a point. But just as it was enough to keep him from believing, it wasn’t enough to stop me.
“Well, I think there’s a God.” I stated, matter-of-factly. “How else can you explain where water comes from? Mrs. Wagner (my fifth grade teacher) told me water can’t be created or destroyed. The same water we drink now was drunk by the dinosaurs.”
My brother was in no mood to have this conversation, so I continued without him.
“And the stars we can see are all billions of miles away, and the light we see is actually really, really old, because it took so long to get here, which means the universe is huge!”
While I was telling my brother all this, I was staring at the moon. In my periphery, I saw something moving in the night sky.
“Trav!” I whispered excitedly, “I think I see a shooting star!”
My eyes were fixed on a tiny glowing dot, moving very slowly across the sky, among the twinkling pinholes of light. I pointed up at it, as best I could, to try and show Travis.
“Hmmm,” he breathed out, “I don’t see it.”
“It’s right there.” I stressed. I went on, trying to explain its placement among the different patterns in the sky.
“Wait, is it right next to those two really bright ones?” he asked.
“Yeah! It’s a shooting star! I’m gonna make a wish.” I was in awe.
“Don’t bother; I think it’s just a satellite.” My brother said, flicking the butt of his cigarette into the street. The cherry broke on the road and twinkled bright red on the black asphalt. Gradually, the little fragments died out and soon there was nothing left of them. I tried looking back to the sky to find my shooting star, or satellite, or whatever it was, but it was gone too.
~
Lying in bed that night I was tired, but my mind was racing with everything I had seen and heard. About how the world is so different at night, and how my brother stopped the crickets. How all the water is the same as it always has been and how maybe all the stars are satellites? How five beautiful women can be so disgusting and how I couldn’t stop thinking about them. About how it takes billions of years, or billions of dollars, to put lights in the night sky. And how it doesn’t matter if it was Jiminy Cricket or Madonna who sang it, wishing on a star won’t do a single goddamn thing. That night I stopped believing in God.