Rapture

by Evangeline Giaconia

I

“And God commanded that man shall not lay with a man as with a woman—and that is why, my friends, we must not tolerate homosexuality. Not because we are evil or coldhearted, as those dissenters like to call us, but because we are faithful to God’s word!”

Below the pulpit, their faces are upturned, rapt, some speechless and others murmuring agreement as if they can’t help it. John likes those moments best, when his words punch so deep into someone that noise is startled out of them.

“But do we hate our brothers and sisters who stray from God’s teachings?”

“No!” calls out someone from the back, a few others echoing.

“No!” he repeats, his words washing over the room, rebounding off the ceiling. He imagines he’s a prophet. “We love them through their sin—but sin it is!”

“Amen!” someone shouts, and it bounces around the room. “Amen!”

His gaze falls to Sarah for encouragement, for the glittering half-smile she sends him whenever he catches her eye, forgetting for a moment that she’s not there. Home with Charity, like last week. And the week before. In the middle of feeling the divine word buoy him up, he remembers she asked him to pick up eggs. The reverie of the moment before leaves him.

He recites the rest of the sermon on autopilot as he checks the clock and decides to wrap things up early, the memory of Sarah’s somber gaze that evening drowning out his congregation’s ardor.

“And, my friends, when you go home tonight, as you consume the media that surrounds us on all sides—TV, internet, all of it—remember to be critical! Look at the world through the lens of God’s word alone!” He stares out at them all, faces shining with passion. “God be with you, and good night.”

They repeat it back, quieter now the geist of the sermon has faded. He exits the pulpit and walks down into the crowd, greeting people, shaking hands with visitors, confirming who’s coming to the men’s retreat the next weekend, but his mind isn’t in it. It’s still hooked somewhere on the downturn of Sarah’s frown.

Eggs. He needs eggs.

II

It’s seven p.m. and John’s doing calculations in his head, trying to figure out which eggs are the best price—Sarah wants them to go organic and get cardboard cartons to recycle, but they’re two dollars more than the cheapest pink Styrofoam cartons. Scrambled eggs are still about the only thing Sarah will eat right now, two months after giving birth. His sermon rings in his head. It was a good one. He wishes she’d been there to hear it.

Fluorescent lights flicker overhead as he tries to pinpoint when Sarah stopped going to church with him. Most nights now, she stays home with Charity. But other mothers bring their babies to service. There’s childcare in the basement.

He loosens his tie, undoes the top button of his shirt, and picks up one of the cardboard cartons, opening it to check for cracks. Beside him, another man is doing the same thing. The man catches his eye and smiles at him, then takes his eggs and leaves.

But for some reason, John remains there, caught in the meeting of their eyes.

He shakes his head, rubs his chin, and puts the cardboard carton in his basket. The man beside him had had stubble, and green eyes, and was due for a haircut. He had been slightly taller than John, wearing a black t-shirt with red lettering and jeans with frayed hems. The neckline of his shirt had been stretched, his fingernails chewed. There were six or seven freckles across his cheeks, and his lips were the color of roses.  

Somehow, John had absorbed all this in half a second, as their eyes met over fluorescent pink cartons under fluorescent yellow lights.

Gone from his ears is the sermon, and gone from his eyes is Sarah’s frown.

John walks to the register, pays for his eggs, sits in his car, and stares out the window.

Every inch of that man is still burned into his mind and seems to grow clearer every second. John touches his chin and imagines he is touching the man’s stubble. He touches his cheeks and imagines tracing six or seven freckles under his fingertips. He is in his car, clutching his eggs, but at the same time, he is frozen in that moment in the aisle, checking his eggs for cracks as the man beside him does the same.

He puts his hands on the steering wheel and imagines the man’s bitten nails stroking his wrists. He turns his palms over and imagines running them down the man's forearms. His mind spins off in directions unknown and unwanted, John a helpless bystander.

His bible lies on the seat next to him, and he hears his own voice proclaiming the sin of homosexuality. He imagines that in that endless second over the egg cartons, the man had kissed him.

As he drives home, he contemplates how an hour ago he had publicly condemned thinking of rosy lips, six or seven freckles, and green eyes.

He parks the car, puts the eggs in the fridge, and brushes a kiss over Charity’s head in the nursery. Sarah is already asleep. It’s only eight. John puts on his pajamas, lays on the edge of the bed, and stares at the wall.

III

“And God commanded that man shall not lay with a man as with a woman—and that is why, my friends, we must not tolerate homosexuality. Not because we are evil or coldhearted, as those dissenters like to call us, but because we are faithful to God’s word!”

He looks down at his enraptured, shining congregation. He, too, feels shining—feverish, soaked in sweat and full of impurity—but his audience can’t see it. His mind is up in the clouds with the angels, watching his body preach mindlessly, call and response, call and response. It’s muscle memory. Last night, he had been worried about Sarah’s absences from church; tonight, he is near-haggard at the thought of rosy lips and stubble and a stretched neckline.

“But do we hate our brothers and sisters who stray from God’s teachings?”

“No!”

“No! We love them through their sin—but sin it is!” Sin it is, thinks his cloud-mind to his preaching body, but his body doesn’t stop.

Before he knows it, he has finished the sermon, and somewhere between then and now, his soul has come back into himself. He feels like he did as a child with measles. He passes through his congregation, excusing himself apologetically, and goes to the bathroom and vomits.

He huddles by the toilet on the tiled floor until he’s sure everyone has left, then goes back out into the sanctuary. Prayer. Prayer is what he needs. He forgoes the pews and drops straight to his knees before the cross on the wall.

Only his prayers, which start off humble and entreating, quickly become the frayed hems of jeans and bitten nails brushing over the surfaces of eggshells.

“God help me,” he moans, and the response is a vision, so rich it just might be divine, of that man taking his face in his nail-bitten hands and placing his rosy lips on John’s, kissing him so deeply he collapses right there in the dairy aisle under the fluorescent lights.

John shakes the vision out of his head and looks up at the cross and wonders if he’s going to Hell. Then he looks at a picture of Jesus on the wall and wonders if Jesus had stubble and rosy lips. Then he gets the hell out of that church, apologizing to God if he’s listening.

IV

He doesn’t see the man again. Part of him wonders if he was a figment of his own mind, eggs and all, an apparition of the devil’s temptation. He catches ghostly glimpses of him—sees someone with his eyes in line at the drugstore, his stubble on the bus driver. He stares at his own ragged nails and trims them until they no longer look bitten.

Is this an intervention from God? The thought crosses his mind and won’t leave. Is he being punished? What has he done that he deserves this? Only preached what he knows to be true of the Lord, but if this is how the Lord is paying him back for his devotion, then one of them must be in the wrong. And God is never in the wrong; this he has also preached. There is no wrong in God, for He is God, and God is right. This is a fact of life, poured deep into his bones since he was four years old in Sunday school, true as the sun shining or fingertips brushing across eggshells.

They get worse. The imaginings. Divine punishment or no. Suddenly they aren’t limited to that man at all. He notices the crisp collar of the bookstore cashier, the curled hair of the postman, glimpsed through the window. Edges, curves, jawlines and eyelashes, he notices them everywhere. He can’t seem to stop. He can’t seem to do anything about it at all, a passive bystander to his eyes’ new attention to masculine detail. After two days of this, he retreats into the house, where the only man he sees is his reflection. And even then, he avoids his own eyes.

V

He succumbs to a feverish state for the next week—not a fever of body, but a fever of mind. Convincing Sarah he had caught something, he sleeps on the couch piled under blankets to sweat out the infection. He skips all of his sermons and tries to read his Bible, but the words swim on the page and his mind drifts.

Sarah watches him and worries. His blistering presence on the couch is overwhelming. She leaves Charity with him and begins her slow reintroduction to running, trying to sweat out his infection herself. It’s hard, though. She is hobbled by her aching body and the secrets she carries deep inside it.

When Sarah goes out, John holds Charity as she sleeps, presses his face into his little daughter’s hair, unable to comprehend how he could have helped make something so perfect. Then Sarah returns and brings them both into the garden for some fresh air, and he thinks maybe he had no part in it at all.

His wife of four years is beautiful, youthful, and faithful. He thinks of the last time he kissed her—two weeks ago. He tries to imagine kissing her now and can’t. The fantasy of kissing his wife doesn’t live up to the fantasy of kissing a stranger over egg cartons.

But he loves her. He loves how she walks and talks and digs her trowel into the dirt, and he loves her thoughts on novels and television and the nature of the world. He loves how she kisses their daughter and holds her up in the sunlight.

Sarah watches her husband and worries, worries, worries. He hasn’t met her eyes in days, his gaze skidding off and landing on her hairline, her nose, her chin. She dreads the day he asks why she stopped going to church. She holds Charity up in the air like an offering. Please.

VI

“You have to go to work,” Sarah tells him a week later, and so here he is, at the pulpit again, wondering if she could tell. He’s supposed to continue Leviticus, but the thought makes his whole body hot, then cold. He steals a glance at the painting of Jesus and thinks that he probably did have stubble, and he certainly could have had green eyes.

The thought no longer makes him want to throw up.

He looks down at his shining congregation. “Friends, how many of you know that there are two versions of Genesis?”

Murmurs ripple down below him.

“That’s right. We’re going a little off-script today, but bear with me and open your Bibles to Genesis 2. That’s right, 2, not 1. You’ve probably seen it, probably been confused by it, and probably moved on. But tonight, let’s dig a little deeper.”

His soul stays in his body. The picture of Jesus purses his lips and blows, and John’s fever lifts off him, floating away on the breeze.

That night, he sits alone at the kitchen table and in his head says, I am a homosexual. I am a gay man. Green eyes flash across his vision, but the man himself is abstract. The feelings he triggered in John are not. They are crisp and solid.

He goes to the bathroom and showers and stares at the tiles until his fingers prune, because he doesn’t know what to do. All he knows is that one thing he told himself—it’s all he knows to be certain in the world.

Well, two things. As he lays in bed across from Sarah, failing to sleep, he thinks another truth. I am a gay man, and I love my wife.

VII

The next evening, he makes Sarah a mug of tea and sits her down across from him at their kitchen table, cradling a sleeping Charity.

“I love you,” is the first thing he tells her.

“I love you too,” she says steadily. She holds Charity closely, carefully. She knows what John is going to ask.

“I have something to tell you,” he says, and she holds Charity closer for different reasons. “I wasn’t sure if I should tell you, because I love you, and I love our marriage, and I love Charity. But something happened to me a week ago, and I decided my respect for you as a person outweighs my love for you as my wife. You deserve to know.”

He takes a deep breath and fixes his eyes on Charity. “I am gay.”

He keeps his eyes on his daughter as he listens to Sarah think. When Charity begins to shake from the trembling of Sarah’s arms, he looks up. There are tears rolling down his wife’s face.

He forces himself to keep talking. “I was at the grocery store getting eggs for you, and there was a man beside me getting eggs too. We were both checking for cracks at the same time. We made eye contact, and he smiled and walked away, but I’m still trapped in that moment. I’ve prayed about it, and it hasn’t stopped. And I hate myself because just before, I was preaching about how wrong it is for a man to love a man, and I just can’t do it anymore.”

Sarah is still crying, her shoulders shaking, and he’s crying too. But then, she begins to laugh, and John cries harder, sure she is about to leave and never return.

“Sarah, I’m sorry. I love you, I’m sorry.”

She laughs so hard she almost wakes Charity, so hard she shakes loose the fear and misery that had been shackled around her ankles for the last half-year.

“John,” she says, “ask me why I’ve stopped going to church.”