There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

I admit that, aside from those basic desires, I also longed for something to believe in. That was greedy. My mistake. I had not learned that the search for belief is very likely the most violent known to man, not infrequently ending in death or derangement, but I did learn and I now know. The search has not yet killed me, though I am a bit deranged—and that may be the best that I have been in all these years.

All we know from this artifact is that this family took one pretty picture together on one fine fall day in 1991 or ’92. That they stood together and wore crisp blue jeans and clean white blouses. That they smiled, heads straight or crooked. See the family. Savor them. Soon, they will be destroyed. They will destroy each other. They will destroy themselves. The world or fate or mysteries untold will destroy them in a little while, for the boy needs to travel most of this journey alone—and if he does not need to (which, as the boy, would be my argument), then he will anyway. Not yet.

You see, a great man is an inconvenience as a father, in part because every boy wants to be a man (until it happens), his own man, and that is hard enough to do without everybody calling you the son of somebody.

People always underestimate the power of children and that is probably why the world is so messed up right now.

It was simple, really: identify who was in charge, find out what they want, give it to them immediately.

Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a slippery slope and find, instead, a cliff. Maybe that’s what happened to them that night or maybe, bless their hearts, they had spent a great deal of energy keeping it together—since my tenth birthday, since the seizure, since the beauty convention or the move to Columbus or the first time they met. Who knows? It’s amazing, either way, how quickly you can become a thing you’d never thought of being and may not even want to be.

I remain one of the very best liars you will ever meet, thanks to my mother and father, who also taught me never to ask anybody for anything.

As I later learned and proved myself, once you get away with a major lie a whole new world of possibilities opens up, possibilities that don’t require lying at all. That might explain why she only said I’ll be right back that single time.

Hope and delusion, often hard to distinguish, also make folks do strange things sometimes.

And if insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then I guess you could say I went insane, but I did not feel insane at all in those days, though I did sometimes feel a gnawing pain in my stomach, not like I wanted to vomit but a bit like I have felt, maybe you have felt, when you rush to catch the train and make it just in time based on the schedule and you stand there at the platform’s edge, leaning over, peering down into the dark and empty tunnel where the train was meant to be, five, now twenty minutes ago, and arrival times have come and keep on going and you wonder where’s the train and you worry that you’ll lose your job or you know that you will miss your big appointment or you wonder if your mother’s dead. And you just don’t know.

And now I figure this: If ever your mother asks you to choose between her death and disappearance, have her die. Always. Though not immediately, of course. Death has a certain elegance to it. A date. A time. A body. A clean hemline, so to speak. Death is, more and more by the day it seems, very expensive. Whatever the cost, pay it. A disappearance, on the contrary, is a messy, sordid enterprise.

The hardest point to determine is when the Disappeared would say they disappeared, since they never disappear to themselves. All you know for sure is that they’re not where they used to be, with you. And since there are so many missing people who wanted nothing more than to vanish, it is unclear whether you, the Left Behind, are suffering a hardship or committing an injustice when you canvas the neighborhood and staple posters to light poles and pray or ask for prayer. What kind of just God, after all, would help you hunt somebody down? And in the event that you stop searching—stop waiting, close the curtains in the living room, switch the station from the news, sleep soundly through the night, see many women on the sides of roads and speed up, don’t look back—it is unclear whether you have set the Disappeared free or simply given up.

And I ask myself—ask you—what if all the terror of the world, not all but some of the Big Terror, is actually lost forever? Too much to remember, too loud a terror to listen to again. What if to remember nothing is to remember something: to remember that you, at some point, had to forget?

You see, I have been on this earth for thirty years and have not met a single faggot, starting with myself, who survived without finding another place, real or not, to call home. If you know what I mean, I hope you’ve found it. Will do what I can to help. If you don’t know, if that word sounds harsh, it should.

I’m pretty sure middle school was awful for everyone, and I’ve come to believe that the general role of school in American life is to introduce young boys and girls to inescapable misery at an early age so they won’t complain too much when they reach the workforce.

Goddamn it, son! Listen to me. You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re embarrassing your family. Get your ass low, keep your eyes open, and run for your life! And wouldn’t you know it, the very next play—42 Trap for the third time in a row, to show how much faith Coach Walton had in his men and how little imagination he had in his playbook—I scored my first and last touchdown as an Atwell Archer. It wasn’t the thought of embarrassing myself that did it, as I was no more or less ashamed than usual. It wasn’t the fear of embarrassing my family, none of whom came to any of my games, which I knew because I spent most of my time on the sidelines looking up into the stands to see if anybody was there to watch. I really just needed a little instruction, that’s all: get your ass low, keep your eyes open, and run for your life. I ran like that all the way through my life, right up until I couldn’t run anymore.

If you’re not going to sleep, Casey, I want you to take these and write every word you see on the wall. One word on each card. This will be your little word bank, okay? Yes, ma’am. For the rest of kindergarten, while my classmates lay under the spell of tyranny, I sat cross-legged, eyes bulging in the no-light of nap time as I strained to make out the words on the wall. And if I could find Ms. McLemore again, that stocky, sweater-vested woman with the incredible gray-blonde Dallas hair and the ruler hand that struck like a jackhammer, I would thank her for not forcing me to sleep and for teaching me that home is what you think about when you don’t want to be where you are—like Clarice’s house, not least because she did not want me there herself.

And even though Jesus had not come the way folks said He would, even though they claimed I could not have Him anyway, I found—thanks to this song’s description of what Jesus was truly like—that He was in fact still alive, and was living in the Internet.

In a 1986 Washington Post article, a reporter warned: It’s certainly the illusion of intimacy—the instant gratification of human contact without responsibility or consequences or actual involvement . . . but the danger is that going online instead of going into the real world ultimately turns conversation into a spectator sport. But what the authorities call danger is often nothing more than a better option. I mean, what was in the real world, anyway? Names we hadn’t chosen, families we couldn’t leave, language that had to be spelled out instead of the much more sensible LOL and BRB—whole lives confined by the school you attended or house you lived in or country to which you pledged allegiance every morning.

So I sat in the glow of Jesus on the Internet, His easy yoke and very light burdens, and chatted for hours, first in the near-endless chat rooms, then over AOL Instant Messenger, until I ventured out into the new cyber landscapes that popped up before social networks were something to make a movie about: CollegeClub, Yahoo Chat, BlackPlanet, and so on. I even broke my first heart on the Internet, when some man from somewhere I don’t remember asked when we were going to meet. I want to see who you are in real life. Um, never. And I never talked to him again, because aside from probably being a murderer, he had outed himself as an old person who missed the whole point of the Internet: Who I was in real life was not important. The only thing that mattered was who I wanted to be at any given moment.

Anyway, I tell you this so that you know we never lose the need for make-believe, for carousels and fake IDs, imaginary friends and mermaid mothers who dropped us off to hide us from the nasty truth of this dark world down here. In that way, the Internet was just about the best home I’d ever known, where the unexpected things that happened felt like magic, not like death.

I want to say that I was smiling, but I’m pretty sure that’s just the now me trying to make the then me seem tougher than I was. I want to say that I felt peace—the peace that comes when someone finally admits the thing you’ve long suspected. But between peace and emptiness, the line is thin. Maybe that’s what it was. The beginning of an emptying. That’s the image I see now, the one that feels true. A little boy with a heavy sack on his shoulder. He’s trying to get somewhere but doesn’t know where exactly, or how. This sack is so heavy he’s starting to limp and he can’t go any further. He stops on the side of the trail and sits down on a rock. The cool night wind feels gentle on his aching neck. He unties the heavy sack and looks at all the things he’s been carrying. He smiles. No wonder this walk has been so hard. He decides to leave some of the things here on the trail—the heaviest things, the jagged things, the things whose use he doesn’t know. These are the things that he takes out first. He sees a stick nearby and uses it to dig a hole next to the rock. In the hole, he buries the things in his sack that hurt too much to carry. He doesn’t know he will need them later. Doesn’t know that they will wash up in the next rains. For now, all that matters is that his limp is gone and his sack is light and he’s on his way—I’m free.

And I learned, as I watched, that if you only see the surface of things, you might as well be blind.

“Myself” by Edgar A. Guest. I have to live with myself and so I want to be fit for myself to know I want to be able as days go by, Always to look myself straight in the eye; I don’t want to stand in the setting sun And hate myself for the things I have done.

In one week, Joan did what women—kin and stranger—have done for me since I was born: saw me wandering through the world and grabbed me by the wrist to say C’mon here, boy.

The only way I start to understand it is by looking past the surface of the violence, into the packs of brawling gangsters, to see my friend and brother Juice, who was just like me in ways that we both recognized but could not articulate. We both knew he was smarter than he let on. We knew that he never complained about the nights he and his older brother slept in the park, nowhere else to go. And we knew—or I know now—that beneath the mask of viciousness, Juice was just a little boy. We were all just little boys, you know. Somebody must have forgotten that. Forgotten us. So we found each other.

Casey, I got a two-bedroom for you. You are not sleeping on the floor anymore, boy. You’re gonna live with me. You know, every time I see a stray dog on the side of the road I want to yell or whisper in its ear—Say man you better run for it before some crazy bastard comes and picks you up and gives you a bath and takes away your sperm and makes you sleep in a tiny dog house till you die. I mean, really, who the hell do these people think they are, just walking in our lives trying to save us?

“Now this spoon is a magic spoon,” says Henry. “Turn it around and use the handle, and it is a knife!” Holy shit. I never forgot this moment because it taught me that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you have. All that matters is what you’re trying to do—there’s always some way to do it. The Boxcar Children also helped me hold space in my mind for something other than the villains of the Bible and the racists of Black Like Me and the fruit balloon from James and the Giant Peach.

All this was ours—our fine white sugar, our freezing air-conditioning, our steamy water, our kitchen fire. And our laws. For who shall provide the law at the bottom of the world? What means shall justify which ends? When shall the score be settled, in this life or in the life to come? Now, I say. Now is the time and we must write the law ourselves, not draw it from on high. At least that’s what I figured when I took my mother’s money.

When my mother disappeared and my father grew too hard to carry, there was one verse from the Psalms that I wrote over and over in my spiral notebook during class, and repeated while I warmed up for the mile relay during track meets, and remembered when I could feel tears trying to sneak out of my eyes: When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. And in the moments when I felt like the last boy in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way, the void too large, the air too thin, I would close my eyes and sing— Walk with me, Lord Walk with me Walk with me, Lord Walk with me While I’m on this tedious journey I want Jesus to walk with me And the second verse, my favorite— Hold my hand, Lord Hold my hand Hold my hand, Lord Hold my hand While I’m on this tedious journey I want Jesus to hold my hand I can’t explain it in scientific terms, but I felt something there, walking with me, holding my hand. Maybe it was just my imagination, I don’t know. But when you seem to have lost everything else that matters, the imagination is not a bad thing to have left.

Even then, I was never afraid that my sister would kick me out of her house—when we finally had an explicit conversation years later, she said I was waiting for you to tell me. You’re my baby, I don’t care how wrong you are. And even though this confirmed that she believed I was wrong, it still meant a great deal in practical terms that she could accept my sinfulness enough to care and provide for me. Jesus, according to John Hagee and most every other pastor I’d heard, would not be so understanding. Abomination, he said, means the ultimate, worst kind of sin—punishable by death and separation from Christ. I could not afford to lose Jesus, or did not want to at that time, even if I could.

And I’m so glad he left me alive because I was having such a hard time securing salvation in the life to come that I couldn’t afford to jeopardize my chances in this one.

Victories don’t fall from the sky. Somebody’s got to suit up. Somebody’s got to lift and run and vomit and strain and weep. Somebody’s got to stand there in a jersey with salty sweat running down his cheeks and accept your loyalty and your faith. That’s what the boy down on the field is for. I wanted to be him. I wasn’t alone. So many of us who became that boy have been broken because of it. They will put our body in the ground a little earlier than the rest of you. Our tendons might be frayed and our bones might be chipped and our brains might be sitting in a lab somewhere. But man, even if it was just a little twinkle of light that we held on to like a dying firefly for the rest of our lives, the game gave a lot for all it took.

You may not have been a star, but you were a member. And the only thing worse than being an insignificant member of something is to not be a member of anything. Jefferson should have put that right in the Declaration, so true is it of life in this country.

This was the first time I learned how far you can make it in America if you have enough disregard for your personal welfare. Maybe that’s why football is the national pastime.

The trouble isn’t that we are defined by our circumstances. It’s that we are so defined by running from them that we don’t understand what they mean, what they did and are still doing to shape the way we see and move through the world. And we call the running rising to the challenge. Not so. Not so.

You can’t ever tell if he’s upset or not. He doesn’t show emotions. He just moves on. Perhaps she could have asked if I was upset, or how I felt at all. Perhaps she or anyone could have knocked on the bathroom door after twenty minutes of hearing the faucet run. Perhaps instead of being proud that a kid could endure so much, she should have been troubled that there was little sign of any harm. Where had it all gone? Did it just evaporate? How did this boy—all these boys—become so brave?

I’m not old enough to have witnessed the Inquisition, but I’m willing to bet it was more interesting, if not less painful, than living through a herd of parents who catch the question spirit.

And when I think about this little coincidence, I realize Jimmy Bishop was the first person I’d ever met who had left Oak Cliff and stayed gone for a good reason, and Gloria Bishop was the first parent I’d met whose questions didn’t make me sick, and Alex and Avery Bishop were the first perfect black boys I’d met that didn’t make me want to punch them in the face. And all these firsts ope’d a space for me to consider, even if I could not know for sure, that here at the other end of the world there might be yet a little room for me.

You see, every journey is really two journeys: a going-to and a going-away. And it’s not until the journey is over that you can see what’s what, because you can’t get away from nothing if you’re looking at it all the time, and you can’t go toward something you see too clearly because if you saw exactly what it was you’d have enough sense not to chase it. So you stand there at the shoreline of decision—maybe you are more desperate to get away than to go anywhere, or more eager to find someplace new than to leave the place you know, but you need both impulses or else you’re in trouble. If all you’ve got is a going-away, you might end up lost, since the only thing on your mind is running. And if all you’ve got is a going-to, you might end up sad because what you find is rarely as good as you thought it would be, unless it’s different from what you imagined, so it helps to remember how awful the thing was that you left. It’s a simple equation, really, and the stranger the journey the better the math works. Just plug in what you were trying to get to and multiply it by what you were trying to get away from, and you’ll understand a hell of a lot more precisely why you did what you did. At least this works for me.

They could tolerate (if not embrace) a liar, a thief, an idiot—as long as he was one of ours. But woe to the man who hears You must not be from around here. Maybe the whole world is broken up into two kinds of people: those who are outsiders and those who distrust them. I can’t tell you how much good it has done me to have been born into the latter camp, but one by-product is that my going-to was as simple as licking my forefinger and holding it up to see which way the wind of my people blew.

Maybe little brothers exist solely to give their sisters extra burdens—so many burdens that the burdens start to form their identity. Maybe that’s what all boys do to all girls, then to women, then to the world. Or maybe that’s just what I did to my sister.

It’s hard enough to get used to a crappy life. But once you do, you see that even crap can be cozy and the coziness becomes important to you. And even the slightest change—in the name of progress or healing or uplift—feels like a threat to your existence, so you ignore it as long as you can. Sometimes you ignore it even after you supposedly can’t. This is one thing liberals continually miscalculate: the human desire to leave things just the way they are. Some of it was rooted in the fact that you can wait so long for something that waiting becomes the thing itself. You take your wait and cut it into little stars and the wait makes the face of heaven so fine that you fall in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.

For nearly five years, I had prayed for this one thing to happen—well, I also prayed to be delivered from sin until a few of my sins got too good to give up—and each prayer required a little more desperation and earnestness, new words since the old ones had not worked, larger mustard seeds since the mountains had not moved. And over time, each prayer brought with it more resentment and formed a callus on the heart to match the knees. And daily prayer turned into weekly prayer then annual prayer at someone else’s request, then no prayer at all because even dogs and babies know when to stop asking for the same thing.

I’ve been watching Granny for a long time. Have known so many women like her—well, not so many, but enough. And as I’ve watched I’ve grown suspect of all that strength they show. Granny still has the scar from when she fell out of a tree as a little girl and split her upper lip; still has the picture of her baby Janet lying in that tiny coffin with the lace around her wrists; still has her dead husband’s coats and some of his bills. And for all those years I was trying to move on, she still had her disappeared daughter’s papers and children—children who had gone off on their own and had done about the best they could, but who were still children, even if she was the only one who knew it. So she carried them, too. But one of these days, Granny and her kind might crack. They might pick up the last straw that must be right in front of their faces. And when they do, when all the Grannies have had enough, what is the world gonna do? Who’s gonna carry the cross and the children and wipe the tears of the old women? Will you be ready? Will I?

Almost as if we were producing a blaxploitation Fellini movie, everybody played right along and even offered their own special storyline to this grand delusion, including my father, who despite not coming to my graduation, despite likely having had a hand—though I’m not making an accusation!—in his wife’s disappearance, offered not only to bring me a couple dollars as I headed off to college, but to rent a U-Haul trailer and drive me the 1,600 miles from Dallas to New Haven. Not just me, but Granny, Mama, Tashia, and Tashia’s newborn baby. (I like that baby, now a girl, a great deal and will leave her out of this.) And for that entire, surprisingly pleasant journey, we pretended that we were not a group of people who had destroyed one another, but a family. Maybe there’s no difference between the two.

See, if you catch it from the right angle, a boy picking himself up by his bootstraps looks just like a suicide.

All I know, or what I believe, is that Death itself matters much less than the terms on which death is offered, the circumstances by which death comes. What those terms, those circumstances, do to us.

I should say—or maybe I shouldn’t, but I will—that I do not recommend this life to anyone. Not that mine is worse than any other, just that it is the only life I know well enough to speak on with some authority and so I say: Don’t do it. That is also what I would have told my mother and my father when they got the idea of me in the first place but, of course, no one asked for my opinion (or yours, as you are here with me). Now the milk is spilled and we can cry over it—we should cry over it—but we can also find some use for all that milk down on our floor. If, for example, you find yourself in a dark confusing period of history, when the gods have ceased to be and the Christ has not yet come and man stands alone, you will have some sense of how things fall apart and a dim view as to how they might be put back together. You will know that it is hard to draw a clear line between this falling-apart and that putting-together; impossible to stop the one or to prophesy the other. You will know, when you look back on the other times you stood alone, that the question is not whether you are alone but whether you are standing. You do need a place to stand.

I found the prospect of needing a human being, trusting them, extending myself for them, to be more horrifying than being abandoned, or almost killed, or damned for all eternity. People seemed to be the most dangerous things in this world.