It’s been three years since the pain began and Katie has watched all of it through her wise, soulful owl eyes. She and her husband, John, have two children now and live in the suburbs where the schools are good and the grass is short and green. She still loves Jesus and she still has the nubby-paged Bible she brought to Camp DeSoto. She’s been praying for me, the congregants at her sweet little church have been praying for me, and one Sunday a woman there tells her about a famous faith healer coming through town, the kind who makes deaf people hear music and blind people see their reflections in the mirror for the first time. Katie knows I don’t believe in miracles taking place on carpeted stages or in speaking in tongues. She knows that I’m angry at God, questioning him, that I have no desire to visit his house, since he refuses to come to mine. She also knows that I’m desperate, so she mentions it anyway. I call her the day of the service and ask her to come with me, which surprises both of us.
The church is a giant tower of blocks at the end of Music Row, an area of town filled with recording studios and record labels and country music managers, all busy plotting the takeover of pop radio. The healer is set to begin at 7 p.m. but the place is already wild when we walk in at six-fifteen. The sanctuary is like the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange; too-loud background music thumps under our feet, and white men in suits wave their hands in the air. Everybody is dancing, but everyone is hearing different music; some people sway sweetly and others jog in place until they get big wet circles under their arms. Big pink and purple lights shine up from the ground, and tall, cross-shaped shadows stretch their limbs up to the ceiling. In big swirly cursive letters, projected text at the front of the room reads:
SO, DO NOT FEAR, FOR I AM WITH YOU; DO NOT BE DISMAYED, FOR I AM YOUR GOD. I WILL STRENGTHEN YOU AND HELP YOU; I WILL UPHOLD YOU WITH MY RIGHTEOUS RIGHT HAND. —ISAIAH 41:10
I glare at it and beseech it, believe in it and curse it all at the same time.
Where are you, God? Strengthen me. Help me.
Katie leads me up the steps to the balcony. We dodge believers who speak in tongues and stretch their arms toward the sky, begging the Heavenly Father to lift them. We pass people like me, broken and desperate, willing to sit through the magic show on the off chance that magic is real. We settle near the aisle in case I want to leave, and it begins.
A white-haired man with lily-pale skin and a headset microphone steps onto the stage. People scream for him, he’s a Backstreet Boy, and the lights swirl and dance up and down the walls. At first he’s soft-spoken, but he becomes so possessed by his own passion that his cheeks look sunburnt and fill with blood in the first five minutes. He talks about some of the great wonders God has delivered in his presence. This is when I really start to pay attention, when I try to find myself in his stories. There’s the autistic teenager who started looking his mother in the eyes, the woman with a mysterious chest pain that the Lord lifted from her heart, the other woman with horrible psoriasis who now goes to the beach in a polka-dotted bikini.
The audience oooohs and ahhhhhs and amens and the lights swirl again.
I notice the man’s son standing beside him; he speaks softly, a little awkwardly, and Katie tells me that he’s hearing-impaired. He looks so tired. It’s his job to play magician’s assistant, to catch the falling bodies as they drop toward the ground, anointed. I see him take a big breath and I know the healing is about to begin. It’s showtime.
A long line forms out the front door; people are anxious for their redemption, and an hour in, the stage is a battlefield, the healed lying still like the wounded with their arms crossed on their chests. The son is gentle with them, he’s so careful as he arranges their limp appendages and puts his hands on their foreheads. One by one the bodies pop up, they raise their arms to the ceiling, and everybody cheers. Katie cheers. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and hope for something extraordinary. The bright red preacher looks up, finds my eyes, and says, “Does anybody suffer from chronic back or neck pain?”
“She does!” Katie yells, grabbing onto my arm. “She does!”
Swirling lights and blurring and thumping music.
Instantly, the magician’s assistant, the son, the gentle one who is hearing-impaired, is beside me and we’re in the middle of the aisle under a hot white beam. He places his heavy hands on my shoulders. We stare into each other’s eyes and I wonder how God decides who aches and who doesn’t—why he stole part of this man’s hearing and gave me pain. The man’s eyes are olive-colored, steady and kind, and I don’t look away from him while the rest of the room careens into a premature celebration of our healing.
Where is your miracle? I think at him silently.
I don’t know, I imagine he thinks back, but I have to believe.
I have to believe too.
For a moment, as we hold on to each other, steady each other through the circus of color and music and faith, adrenaline resurrects hope. The man disappears as silently as he came to me and I feel lighter; I close my eyes as a giant mob of prayer forms around me and I dance my way into ecstasy. I wonder if this is finding Jesus. I wonder if God is finally paying attention. I wonder if I’m healed.
The days pass. The weeks pass and the miracle packs its bags and moves on just like the man and his son. I don’t dance again for a long time. The seasons change and the skies darken to black wintry soot. Something in me darkens too. Jack is gone from the end of December to February. We talk less and less. I want him less and less. My caretaker, my confidant, my perfect codependent partner is a shih tzu poodle with an underbite, the only other heartbeat in the house. I talk to God less and less, want him less, and continue my slow unraveling from the church. All I want is relief, all I want is more medicine.
The pain wakes itself at dawn no matter when it goes to bed, and when I open my eyes, the first thing, the only thing I think of are the little canisters beside me. The sweetness of pills on my tongue is the only mercy, and though I don’t abuse them, they abuse me, erase me. I become a robot fueled by shitty snack food and reality TV. I watch at least six episodes of The Real Housewives of Orange County a day. I disconnect from my own reality completely. The daily news looks like this:
Jo is trying to get a record deal.
Lauri gets engaged.
Slade dumps Jo.
Vicky drives her friends and family crazy.
I take up residence in their stucco-roofed subdivision by the ocean. I live in their stories so I don’t have to live in my own.
When Jack comes home, he finds me listless, stoned, and frizzy-haired, carrying on an emotional affair with six women from Newport Beach, California. He doesn’t know what to do so he calls his mom. Now it is Sandra’s turn to fix me.
* * *
I go to Houston in March 2009, when the weather is just under eighty degrees and everything with blue petals is blooming. Jack is touring all over Texas with a big group of our most musical friends and I am meeting him there so that we can visit his family and try to be in love with each other again. When he’s home, we go to therapy because I’m not communicating and we’re not having sex and Jack is worried. I don’t want to lose him, so when the therapist says we need to spend more time together I slap on a fentanyl patch, my newest strongest medication, and crunch my body into an economy seat on the airplane. I take a hydrocodone just as we take off and take a tingly nap the whole way there.