8
The bass of Hutch Hutchinson was shaking his windows. Bonnie Raitt was rasping out “Feeling of Falling,” its blues lyrics pitched from the musical sweet spot somewhere near her spleen. With a slender paring knife Mikesh cut earthy-smelling peels from parsnips, carrots, potatoes, and turnips. He was hungry, and grass-fed beef was browning in the pan.
Earlier, doing chores he noticed the ground softening. In less than a month he would be checking for the first calves. Through the window the yard light glowed hazy; the night was going to turn into another fog. But the animals were fine, Mikesh was inside, and he was doing the point check Mary Towers taught him on the places where the tension used to be. A used-to-be refrain, running through his own mind, meant that, no matter how unhinged the healer, his therapy session was money well spent.
After his meal, he sat down with a glass of pale ale and turned on his computer, thinking of Mary Towers’ scorn, but typing the words he should have tried out two days ago: Joshua King. A few news stories, a few discussion forums, a page warning him that Shekinah would send him to hell, then a Joshua King video: my brother had an Internet movie presence.
My brother’s presence. A British scientist once said that the universe is not only stranger than we know, it’s stranger than we can know. That in part explains why, the autumn before the accident, I left my work in contract archeology for the uncertain future of life on a commune, following a brother whose charisma I always, in part, resented. My brother Josh’s charm came from his keen sense for where the Spirit is at work—almost everywhere, as it turns out—and of sad corners where people so easily get trapped: the lifeless places where the Spirit has been nearly sucked away and where evil starts to grow and elbow its way around.
I have a life of experience witnessing Josh’s success in drawing people to him.
Twins might look like copies of one another. But don’t be fooled. None are. Starting in the womb, one fills out the space the other fails to occupy. If Josh was head up, I was head down. If, as my mother informed us, Josh came into icy air above the bed of that sleigh without crying, so much more startling the silence for me to shatter with howls. Josh’s quiet gained him more worried attention from Dr. Razavi, the EMT, and my grandmother than my squalling. In school, when no one raised their hand or volunteered a response, the teachers called on Josh. What he said sparked discussion. Girls wondered, secretly and aloud, whether Josh noticed them. Boys repeated, in their banter, the astonishing utterances that darted from my brother’s alien-visiting-earth lips. My brother was like a black hole; you couldn’t avoid the gravitational attraction of presence, even when he was out of sight and thousands of miles away. Realizing that as an-almost-thirty-three-year-old adult, I decided to join Josh’s fold.
Seeking is the pole star of animal urges, the source of all the rest, just as pride, they say, is the source of all evil. Josh sought people out. Then he redirected their seeking impulse toward what mattered to him. My twin brother sought the Spirit, and with his last breath he asked Arnold Mikesh to join him. Josh had a force that drew people to him. Mikesh was my first evidence that, in his death, my brother might not have lost that power. In turning up at Mary’s door, Mikesh traded his knotted-up back for a tiny, hot, Josh-King coal in his brain. Why not admit it? At this same time, even with Josh dead, I was finding some heat of his life burning in me too. To my wonder, in spite of Josh’s death . . . no, rather because of his death, this would be the first spring in years that I would not return as planned to summer fieldwork in contract archeology.
The clip Mikesh pulled up, titled “Root of Power,” had been posted by someone whose address was sunnybob4. The setting was a social hall: the camera positioned perhaps ten rows back. The video came on with a low-level murmur of white noise and my brother—Mikesh guessed it was him—was walking to the front of the room, his narrow back to the camera. Neither the brightness nor the resolution was good. The camera was hand-held, unsteady. Mikesh was startled when Josh took the low platform and turned to the people seated in chairs. Mikesh was looking at the whole, clean, right-side-up face he had found buried in that wreck, and the zoom was careening in for a close-up. Mikesh wished he could have slapped sunnybob4’s finger from the control button and kept the distance. Instead, he could now read the features of the speaker, my brother, a young man with a mop of wavy, sand-colored hair, firm dark eyebrows that almost met, protruding brown eyes, and Roman nose. His shoulders hunched as he raised his arms out wide toward the audience to talk.
“Brother Randy and Sister Maxine called us together tonight, joined us together here in the Spirit,” he began, his voice steady. The words tripped Mikesh’s recollection: “Mikesh . . . join.”
“They asked me to answer a question. Who do I say I am?”
My brother was looking into faces directed toward him. He turned from the camera. The zoom backed out, and Mikesh could see my brother, dressed in loose khaki slacks and black t-shirt, an unbuttoned white oxford shirt open and hanging free at the waist. From the back, with his rumpled clothing and slightly messy hair, my brother would not have caught anyone’s attention. His face, however, and the way he measured his words had power Mikesh could feel, even from a blurry video on a low-bandwidth Internet signal.
“Because Brother Randy comes to us from the Christian Action Fellowship, and Sister Maxine is Catholic, they have asked me to speak tonight. They want to know who I am.”
Josh gestured to a woman in the front row. “Sister Maxine, tell them what it is you want to know.”
The camera focused on a middle-aged, whey-faced woman. She stood with great self-possession. “I just want to know about my old church. Can I still be a Catholic and also be a part of Shekinah?”
Josh called on Brother Randy. The camera panned back and forth before finding the profile of a thin man with close-cropped hair, wearing a red plaid shirt and sweater vest, who stood up uncomfortably. Mikesh could not see his face.
“I’m like Maxine. I want to know, Joshua, if you mean to drive me from my Christian faith.” The questioning man looked at Josh, turned to nod at the person seated at his side, and sat back down.
My brother was looking down at them. “Randy, Maxine, thanks for speaking from your hearts. I am not here to come between you and the Spirit. I’m here to point you back to the root where each of us began, back to the root of Action Fellowship and the Catholic Church, back to the root of Christianity and the ministry of Jesus.”
He walked closer to the man who asked the question. “Randy, did Jesus put aside his Jewish heritage to bring his message to his fellow Jews?”
The camera could only catch the back of the man’s head: “He can’t have been too good a Jew,” it sounded as if he said. “They killed him.”
“But did he forget Jewish teachings? The Jewish scripture?”
“No,” the man shook his head emphatically. “He knew his scripture.” The fuzzy, muffled sound quality made Mikesh think, at first, he’d said, “He knew his picture.”
“I’m here to tell you to read your scripture, too. Read your Christian scripture. Read the Jewish Old Testament. They carry you back to the root that still sustains us, the place, that small infinitude, where we each look face to face with the Spirit, feel her presence, her breath, the force of the Spirit’s words on our own hands and lips as she wakes us each morning. You’ve dedicated your Christian lives to Jesus. Jesus returned again and again to that presence. In fact, he lived every moment of his earthly life in it. That place, our beginning as well as our end, is also where we are, Shekinah, though as we sit in this room tonight it is easy to forget that.”
Josh told a story he
