B003UYURTC EBOK (12 page)

recreate us. All things grow, all things grow. We had

our mindset. All things know, all things know. You had

to find it. All things go, all things go.

When my brother could find nothing better to do, he would jot down the lyrics to whatever song was playing in his head. It was usually something I’d never heard before. In this particular case, it was a song about a man driving with his friend to Chicago and sleeping in parking lots. One time, about a year and a half before that, I had found a notebook with pages and pages of songs, all of which had played in my brother’s head. He never sang them, just wrote them down diligently as if he had been assigned to or something. Similarly, whenever I used to think a conversation I’d had with someone was especially funny or enlightening, I would jot it down in my notebook, the same one I kept my book titles in. An example of one such conversation was the one I had with Officer Lansing of the Lily Police Department on the day after my brother went missing. It went something like this:

“You say you saw your brother yesterday afternoon, right?”

“Yes. He was sitting in his room,” I answered robotically.

“What did you two talk about?”

“Birds.” “Birds?” Officer Lansing asked quickly.

“Well, actually, we were talking about hamburgers.”

“Hamburgers? Not birds, then?”

“We were talking about the Lazarus Burger and how it was just a Number Three without cheese.” I laughed.

“It isn’t very good, is it?” Officer Lansing joked, breaking away from his serious demeanor.

“It’s just a Number Three,” I said, shaking my head.

Dr. Webb says that sometimes the sibling of a missing child
goes through some sort of strange angry episode. This happens when the child who is not missing begins to feel embittered toward the child who is missing purely because he or she is getting all the attention of everyone around. This is one of those strange concepts like Munchausen’s syndrome, where you make yourself sick to get people to notice you. I will tell you this: I did not crave attention from anyone. Actually, I found the amount of attention that I was getting to be very off-putting. My least favorite thing about that summer was the way in which strangers looked at me in stores, restaurants, and places like that. I would walk by them or enter a room and suddenly, as if they had practiced and been waiting to do so, people would lean their heads down or turn to someone next to them and begin to whisper, saying things, I assumed, like, “That’s the boy’s brother,” and “They still haven’t found that poor brother of his,” and “He seems to be holding up all right, but I hear his mother’s going crazy.”

It was not my mother who was going crazy that summer. It was my father. After the website he’d spent a fortune to get running had failed to do anything but waste his time, he began to read book after book on missing children. My mother, on the other hand, pretended that everything was okay. Maybe she was going crazy too, but it was a less offensive and in-your-face crazy, so it was a bit easier to swallow.

It was the day after my brother had been gone for six weeks that my father brought Vilonia Kline into our house and sat her down in the living room. My mother, Lucas Cader, Mena Prescott, and I all stood across from her on the other side of the
room. My father, awkwardly enough, introduced her as “someone who I think can help us find Gabriel.”

“What?” my mother asked.

“Sarah, Ms. Kline is a spiritual guide,” my father began.

“Oh please,” my mother butted in.

“Mom,” I whispered, nudging her arm.

“Ms. Kline has agreed to help us, so let’s all be supportive of her while she asks us a few things, okay?” My dad’s voice remained calm and steadfast.

“Fine,” my mother said.

“Sure,” I said.

Lucas Cader and Mena Prescott said nothing but looked over at me with expressions that suggested that they were either about to laugh or run for the door. They did neither.

“First, I need a shirt of Gabriel’s. Something he wore often, like a favorite T-shirt or something,” Ms. Kline said in a saner manner than I expected.

My father handed her Gabriel’s favorite T-shirt, a black one with
PINK FLOYD
written across the chest.

“Okay, did Gabriel have a favorite hobby or sport, something like that?” she asked, managing to look up at all of us at once.

“He read books a lot,” Lucas said uncomfortably, looking over at my mother for a silent approval of his participation.

“Yeah, and he listened to a lot of music,” my father added.

“Well. Let me see.” Ms. Kline closed her eyes and thought for a minute. “Bring me whatever book may have been his favorite, or perhaps the last book he had read, and we’ll start from there, okay?”

Vilonia Kline, who my father said had helped solve four other missing persons cases, held my brother’s T-shirt, his copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
, and his previous year’s school picture in her hands. She closed her eyes. We all looked at one another with eyebrows raised, standing uncomfortably in our places, swaying back and forth. I was biting my lips and letting each one of my fingers meet my thumbs over and over again.

“He was a smart boy.” Ms. Kline broke our painful silence.

“He was,” my dad agreed.

“And he was funny, too, wasn’t he?”

“Definitely,” Lucas said.

“Where is the last place any of you saw him?”

“His room,” I said.

“Can I see it?” she asked, standing up, his things still in her hands.

She sat on the edge of Gabriel’s bed, her right hand lightly touching his pillow, her fingers wriggling like worms. We stood in the hallway, my parents half in and half out of the room. She lay down on the bed and put her head on the place where my brother’s had been the last time I’d seen him. We all sort of inched forward slowly when she did this, but then settled back to our places and watched. Her eyes closed, she began to hum. I’m pretty sure it was a very slowed-down version of “Stairway to Heaven.” I looked over at Lucas. He was angry. Mena held his hand and twirled her hair nervously. My mother stared at my father with a look of disgust and pity. Vilonia Kline broke the silence once again, standing up to do so.

“He was religious, wasn’t he?” she asked loudly.

“Why do you say that?” my mother asked.

“There have been many prayers spoken here.”

A single tear fell quickly down the side of my father’s face. My mother stood closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. Lucas Cader’s forehead rested lightly on the back of my shoulder before I heard him sniffle and walk quickly down the hallway and outside. Mena followed him. I stood in place. I looked into Vilonia Kline’s light green eyes and stepped closer.

“Can you find him?” I asked softly.

“He is not near water,” she said plainly.

“Is that it? That’s all you’ve got?” I stepped even closer.

“He has left a lot of energy here. He had a strong spirit.”

I remember hearing nothing as I walked down the hallway. It was as if the ringing in my ears was so loud that noise became silence. The door swung open, hitting the outside wall, and I stomped down the front steps. Lucas and Mena sat at the bottom, both staring at the ground. I walked past them. I grabbed the sides of my head with my hands, pulling my hair back. I brought my hands back to cover my eyes and mouth.

“What is it, Cullen?” Lucas asked quietly.

I said nothing.

“Cullen, why don’t you sit down?” Mena suggested.

I did not sit down.

“Cullen!” Lucas stood up, grabbing both my arms and lightly shaking me.

“She said he HAD a strong spirit!” I yelled, tears now running into my mouth.

“What?” Lucas asked, still holding my arms.

“She said he
had
a strong spirit,” I cried. “She said
had
.”

I lowered my body down to the ground and Lucas, not letting go, lowered his with mine. We sat on the grass. Mena stood looking down at us.

“What does she know, Cullen?” Lucas whispered. “She doesn’t know. She doesn’t.”

“But what if she does?” I asked.

“She doesn’t.”

He looked at me with a half smile. I wiped my eyes with my shirt collar and stood up. I sat down on the bottom step leading up to the porch, and Lucas and Mena sat beside me. I started laughing. I still tasted tears in my mouth, still felt snot running from my nose.

“What’s funny?” Mena asked.

“There’s a psychic in my house and I’m crying on the porch.” “And?” Lucas said.

“And I’m wondering how much more absurd this can all get.”

“Well,” Lucas began, “a couple of guys said they saw the Lazarus yesterday. Said it swooped down in front of their truck, right behind a diesel, over on Highway Nineteen. That absurd enough for you?”

“Yeah. At least I’m not seeing imaginary birds like everyone else,” I said, knowing that I’d had an imaginary conversation with the bird just six weeks before.

When one’s parents storm out of the house followed by a psychic who is still holding his missing brother’s T-shirt and book, he stands up, looks into his mother’s eyes, and wonders where they are headed. He looks over at his best friend, who
has tried his best not to cry, and sees that even he seems to be buying into these terrible theatrics. He follows his mother. She turns around, says, “We’re going to find your brother,” and gets into the backseat of his father’s truck. He waves his best friend and Mena Prescott over, lets them get in first, and then squeezes into the crowded backseat while trying to close the door. He gazes out the window as they pass through town. His forehead is smashed flat against the glass.

Book Title #80:
The Looks of Strangers in Stores.

           The librarian told Cabot Searcy that he could find an Ethiopian Orthodox Bible in the section marked Theology, on the seventh floor, and that he was lucky Dr. Sentell had decided to reference the book in one of his divinity courses three semesters before. Cabot smiled at her, nodded his thanks, and waited for the elevator doors to open. Once inside, he reread the small sheet of paper he held in his hand. It read:
The Book of Enoch is found only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. It is a secret writing.

He had jotted this down after doing an hour’s worth of research instead of going to his Human Anatomy lecture that morning. The elevator doors opened. Cabot Searcy was met
with silent stares as he walked slowly but confidently to the back corner of the room. He crouched down, scanning row after row of books, his finger gliding lightly over their spines, his eyes bouncing back and forth in his head. When he found what he was looking for, Cabot lugged the thick, heavy book to the nearest table and sat down, looking over his shoulder as if he was doing something secretive or wrong. He opened the book.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible is made up of the largest canon of any Bible in print in the modern world. Cabot Searcy, having been raised in a Southern Baptist church in Georgia, had little knowledge of this text before this first encounter. He scanned the table of contents and then opened the book up to I Enoch. This book, referred to more commonly as the Book of Enoch, is split into five major sections, those being the Book of Watchers, the Book of Parables, the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries, the Book of Dream Visions, and the Book of the Epistle of Enoch. Cabot Searcy found himself turning to chapter 10 to read the quote that Benton had left behind. This was in the Book of Watchers, which would serve as the focus of Cabot Searcy’s endeavor.

The scripture was highlighted in yellow, causing Cabot to raise one eyebrow as he read word for word the lines that had brought him to the library that morning. And, though highlighted already, the words “angels have corrupted” were also circled in black ink. And farther down the page another line was highlighted and also circled. It read:

And destroy all the spirits of the reprobate and the

children of the Watchers, because they have wronged

mankind.

And even farther down the page another line was marked in similar ways. It read:

And cleanse thou the earth from all oppression, and

from all unrighteousness, and from all sin, and from

all godlessness: and all the uncleanness that is wrought

upon the earth destroy from off the earth.

And at the bottom of the page there was written something so small that Cabot Searcy was forced to squint his eyes and bring his face down as close to the book as possible. He made it out to read, in cursive and black ink:
The angels taught the humans too much. So, what if they hadn’t been stopped?

Because Cabot Searcy felt the need to do so, he compared the words jotted down in the Book of Enoch to the words in Benton Sage’s journal and, to his delight, they seemed to be a pretty close match. Now Cabot Searcy felt as if he had been given some sort of posthumous assignment from Benton. Some righteous mission of discovery. Some quest for the truth behind existence. Cabot Searcy suddenly found himself consumed by self-important thoughts as to how he could single-handedly save mankind.