Who Put This Song On? Read online

  But I am vigilant to find my words. I want to explain myself.

  “You know that movie It’s a Wonderful Life, the Christmas movie?”

  “That’s a great movie.”

  “I love that movie. I cry every time. And I can’t tell if I’m crying because I love George, and I love how he’s so special to everyone in town, or because deep down, I know I’m not George Bailey. I’m not this epic person who changes everyone’s life. If Clarence the angel came and showed me what the world would look like if I was never born, I know that my family and everyone would be happier. I hate to say it but it’s just the truth.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I just do!” I snap, and cross my arms tightly, closing up again. “I mean, it’s fine, that’s just reality.”

  Susan employs her favorite strategy: silence. She loves doing it because she knows it makes me so uncomfortable, just sitting there calmly while I squirm anxiously in my seat and dart my eyes around. She makes it so I have to sit with whatever I’ve just said—I’m not allowed to just zoom past it and make a joke.

  Ugh, she’s good. I actually have to give her props.

  “So, it looks like we’re out of time—”

  “Oh, okay,” I say, standing up and exhaling for maybe the first time in an hour.

  I pull a folded check from my pocket. It’s swirling with my mother’s loopy handwriting, and looking at the number, I think, See? All this money they spend on me, all this stress—there’s no arguing with numbers.

  “This is from my mom.”

  Susan accepts it but looks back at me again with probing eyes. I move mine around nervously, waiting to be released.

  “See you in two weeks.”

  Dashing for the lobby doors, I give Framed Portrait of Bon Jovi the stink eye. What does he know? Who wants to live on just a prayer, especially if you’re only halfway there—or in my case, if you don’t know where there is.

  Sometimes, after therapy, I feel even more lost than before. I also feel ridiculous. What was the point of that? I think, seeing other cars buzz around the lot of the office park, other lives just going on, regularly, unobtrusively. Other people relaxing without the aid of several doctors and medications.

  Why do I have to make everything so difficult?

  THE FAKE RAPTURE

  In middle school, I went to church camp with Marissa. Frankly, I don’t know why I thought it would be fun. I hated Vacation Bible School, youth group, chapel, Sunday services, and any other activity with Marissa’s church. It’s too many creepily-friendly white people. A bunch of bland food, cheesy music.

  Harvest Christian Church Camp was a nightmare in this respect. Overly smiling adults, shorts to the knee, sloppy joes that didn’t taste like sloppy joes, and a trillion group activities. I was pissed I couldn’t get any reading done—the days were packed with chipper strangers getting in my face about rock climbing or whatever.

  One night after dinner and before campfire worship, we were split into small groups in the auditorium and tasked with writing skits about Why Heaven Will Be Awesome. It was during this activity, huddled in a circle with Marissa and three meek strangers, that I realized I have almost no cold hard facts about heaven. Trumpets? White robes? No bad words or secular music? Is that it?

  (Obviously I could never say out loud that heaven doesn’t sound all that great, since it’s supposed to be the literal definition of paradise and everything.)

  Our skit was not a skit at all. All of us onstage looking down at the beige crowd with theater-kid enthusiasm, exclaiming about what we most look forward to about heaven.

  Marissa said, “I can’t wait to walk with my bare feet on streets that are paved with actual gold! Can you guys believe that?!”

  “And we’ll never have to go to the bathroom!” I said.

  Literally that’s what I could offer: the amenities seem so-so, but mortal bodies are a nuisance. My comedic pitch was terrible. I suspect the chuckles were pity laughs, or like when my cousins say they’re “laughing with me, not at me” (I’m never laughing when they say that).

  The next night, when they asked if anyone wanted to devote or recommit their life to Christ, I raised my hand. (Why did I do that?) Walking down the aisle, hundreds of missionary eyes on me, I instantly regretted my impulsiveness. And when I stood next to the pastor, his hand resting on the shoulder of my jean vest, all I could come up with was, “It just felt like time.”

  “Fantastic. And we are all here to be your witness and your strength as you renew your promise. This is a major commitment. Are you truly ready to be serious about your walk with the Lord, into eternity?”

  I nodded. My stomach churned.

  What if I don’t even want to go to heaven? What would I do there?

  * * *

  —

  One day I was coming back to our cabin from lunch, lagging behind my bunkmates because I stopped to return a Christian Young Adult paperback to the “library,” which was really just a short bookshelf in the staff office. Back at our bunk, I felt uneasy when I didn’t hear the usual obnoxious squeals coming from behind the door. It was silent as I entered.

  The beds were made and empty, each one with an outfit arranged carefully atop the cover. Some accessories, a Walkman, a lip gloss. As if they were just deflated, drained of their bodies. My legs went limp. The walls of the cabin seemed to fall down around me. Dizzy, I started sobbing, my throat tight and airless.

  I’ve been terrified of the rapture since I heard about it. People’s naked bodies flying upward, walking like zombie ghosts into walls. What makes it not a horror movie?

  And of course. Of course, I was left behind. How could this be it, my end? How could the world just stop for no reason? Was I not a Christian?

  As I collapsed into a puddle of shock in a corner of the room, my bunkmates jumped out of the bathroom, grinning. Marissa, all of them, even the fucking camp counselor. I shook with fear. They rushed at me, clammy hands on my shoulders. I pulled my knees into my chest and rocked, weeping hysterically. I am not going to live through this, I thought.

  I had been broken. I was not like them; I couldn’t laugh at it. I had been exposed. A fraud. A nonbeliever. Everyone raptured without me.

  “Morgan, it’s okay! It wasn’t real!” They patted me like a pet retriever.

  “Morgan, it hasn’t happened yet!” they reassured me. “And when it happens, you don’t have to be afraid, you’ll be with us!”

  Folding my hands over my chest, I closed my eyes. “I was so scared. I’m so scared.”

  “How could you be afraid of God’s salvation?”

  At the time, believe it or not, I wasn’t appalled or weirded out by the staging of the fake rapture, like a regular person might have been. I’m me, and this is where I’m from, so I was embarrassed, even scandalized, by my reaction. That’s how I know I believe in the supernatural, but not how they do. I believe in the supernatural power that spooks me, unravels me, that makes me all the plagues at once.

  Years later, though I’m completely vindicated in my decision to leave church camp the following day, I still feel a twinge of embarrassment for being the girl who had to leave early because she couldn’t hang, yet again. Waving at Marissa from the front seat of the Harvest Christian van, on the way to the safety and dorkdom of my parents, I felt even then that I was somehow sealing my fate. I can’t even fit in where I don’t want to.

  MYSTIC MORGAN

  I am way too stoned for this, holding hands with David and James in front of the darkened door to Psychic Visions by Nicole, in the plaza behind Spearmint Rhino. It’s Halloween. Meg is trick-or-treating with her sister, the one who told me I’m brown, and we’re doing this. Pretty much everything we do is to kill time, just like everything we believe is because we need to believe it, and this particular activity covers both bases. What better day
than Halloween to sarcastically commune with spirits we aren’t sure exist? It’s all very Teen Witch.

  The shop is filled with incense and plants. Glass cases display different-colored crystals and stones, arranged specifically, but not in any pattern I recognize. There’s soft New Age music playing, Enya or something.

  (I should not have gotten high. I am like lying-on-the-floor-listening-to-Fleet-Foxes stoned. I want mac and cheese. I’m afraid of what the tarot cards know and I don’t. What my palm could spill.)

  A small, deep-brown woman emerges from a private back room marked with an image of a lotus flower. Presumably, this is Nicole. She holds a bundle of dried leaves bunched together with string and burning at one end. The smell is sharp and sweet, the smoke acrobatic and blooming as it wafts in front of her gentle face.

  “Hello,” she greets us warmly, and we all stand up straight. “Can I help you?”

  “We were hoping for some…guidance or something,” James says, drawing nearer to her. I keep my mouth shut, still waiting for the clouds of my high to clear.

  As she rattles off her services—tarot card readings, palmistry, crystal meditation, hypnosis, something about chakras—she studies each of our faces, and nods at James, smiling slyly, before resting her gaze on me.

  “You have a question,” she says, somewhere between an inquiry and a declaration.

  “Nothing specific. Or, maybe, yeah.”

  I shift my stance, cross my arms like a weirdo.

  “Yes,” she says plainly, almost aggressively. “There is something you need to know.”

  Understatement of the whole damn year.

  “How much for a palm reading?” I step forward.

  “Five dollars.” A skeptical bargain for a direct line to the spirit world, but I only have a twenty, and I want to get Cold Stone later.

  * * *

  In the closed-off room, Nicole and I sit in two throne-like chairs, separated only by a small round end table topped with a single white candle in a garish holder. I drop my bag and sit, feeling awkward as hell.

  The psychic commands, “Give me your hand,” and I obey.

  She speaks quickly and casually, rattling off the information like a shopping list. I squint down at my hand, too (not like I can see anything).

  “I see a long life—I see health and success—I see you have a gift for helping people—I see you are a communicator. I’m sensing you have recently overcome a hardship—does that mean anything to you?”

  I nod yes. (She probably says stuff like this to everyone, right?)

  “I’m sensing some loneliness, does that mean something to you?”

  There’s my familiar pain, eager to burst from behind its rightful gate. I lower my eyes, silently chide myself for being so gullible and weak.

  “I hate to tell you this,” she begins, her voice suddenly maternal. “I’m seeing a very negative spirit. A negative spirit somewhere in your past.”

  Darkness isn’t a bad thing. Open casket. Black black dog.

  “You mean my childhood? My parents?”

  If you don’t have a map, make a map.

  “I think perhaps even before them. There is a dark history. Does that sound familiar?”

  “Hmm.” I twist my mouth and slump a little in my chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, sounding genuine. Maybe it didn’t work. “Let’s consult the tarot. It’s on the house!”

  She rises joyously toward a set of drawers in the corner of the room. She doesn’t walk, she glides, as if pulled by a flock of animated birds.

  “We’ll pull one card to help point you in the right direction on your journey.”

  She nestles gingerly back onto her throne and shuffles a brightly colored deck of cards. They’re pretty and everything, but they look achingly regular. (How can they contain answers? How can they, cousins of Uno cards, be magic? Or is it her who’s divine? Is it me, my “energy”?) I press my lips and eyebrows together tightly in anticipation.

  “Think very deeply about this darkness,” she instructs with closed eyes, still shuffling meditatively. “Concentrate on the journey. What must you discover? What is holding you back? What must you avenge?”

  There is a lot of stuff we don’t know.

  Police brutality. Harriet Tubman.

  “All right.” She flips a card to the table. It’s a naked white lady kneeling at a river.

  “The Star! This is such a joyful card!” she proclaims. She sounds surprised, which makes me feel like shit, because of course, and because I’m also surprised. An inkling of hope leaps up my spine.

  “It is beaming with light, can you see?”

  “Um…maybe.” I do not (duh), but suddenly I’m obsessed with acing the quiz. I want to make the card belong to me.

  “The Star is a gift, a guiding light. It is a card of hope, of inspiration and creativity. See how the woman is pouring water into the river and into the land? She is generous, and she is blessed. The Star comes to us to replenish, to offer peacefulness that will carry you on your journey, to offer clarity as you discover your true purpose.”

  “Whoa,” I gasp. “So, what does that mean for me? What’s going to happen to me?”

  “That’s not really the sort of thing the cards can tell us. They tell us where to look, what to remember. How to get there, but not where there is.”

  I consider this for what feels like forever, searching my brain for the meaning, I don’t want to be the one in the group standing back from an abstract painting for like an hour, still insisting I don’t get it. If the universe wants me to be happy so badly, why is life such a disappointment? Honestly, I just want her to say, I see the end of the movie, and you win.

  When I walk through the velvet curtains I’ve almost forgotten it’s daylight. James rushes at me holding out three necklaces with different colored crystal pendants.

  “Which one?”

  “Jade.”

  He saunters up to the counter and places a gentle hand atop Nicole’s. “I would like to purchase this, please, and I am also interested in a reading of my chakras.”

  James and Nicole draw the velvet curtains closed behind them, and I join David under the shop’s awning, where he’s snickering down at something on his phone.

  “Sooo? How was it?” He sings snarkily as I light a cigarette.

  “Stop laughing!” I flirt. “I don’t have to tell you.”

  “I kind of don’t get why you guys wanted to come here, anyway.” He says it like it’s an admission, like it hasn’t been obvious all afternoon. “No offense, just, maybe you’re not as doomed as you think you are.”

  He looks away from me, so I look away from him, smirking with butterflies. Funny what passes for a compliment these days. Not doomed is not the same as beautiful and amazing, but I’ll take it.

  (David Santos is sucking up. He gifted me a mix for today, likely an attempt to cement our just-friend-ness. It’s called “Mystic Morgan,” and starts and ends with Sonic Youth. “Teenage Riot” and “Do You Believe in Rapture?” respectively—he is definitely sucking up. Also cleverly featured: “Ghost” by Neutral Milk Hotel, “Every Artist Needs a Tragedy” by No Age. I have to give him credit; he makes a hell of a mix.)

  “Yeah” is the totally unacceptable thing I say in response.

  * * *

  —

  Wrapped in a cloud of marijuana come-down, I feel a prickly, scary excitement from my session with Nicole. She saw something in me, I’m sure of it. Something dark, of course, but also something promising, something full of love. Maybe I’ve been trying to get in touch with the wrong spirits. Maybe there are spirits, ghosts, who are on my side.

  Darkness isn’t a bad thing.

  There is no going back.

  “Do you guys want to go see Saw 5?” James blurts from the backseat as soon as the
car starts. He checks showtimes. I don’t care about anything. I switch to the final track of “Mystic Morgan.”

  “So, are you like totally pagan now?” David leans into me scandalously, trying to be cute. I know why he’s teasing me, but I don’t want it. “Did you learn the secrets of the spirit realm, or what?”

  “It was just like ‘you’re on a journey,’ or whatever. Just like, bullshit. Anyway, none of your business.”

  “Bullshit,” he repeats, scoffing.

  I know that I basically instructed him to laugh it off, but all of a sudden, I’m disappointed that he’s obeying. I feel further away from him than ever.

  EVERY ARTIST NEEDS A TRAGEDY

  This is a story about me, and I am the tragic antihero. Me and my bad ideas. This is a story about me believing in nothing.

  It begins delightfully! In the opening shot, three sort-of-stoned suburban young adults in ill-fitting denim are gazing up at a marquee of corporatized pleasures delivered in criminal portions. All around them, children run amok in identical Halloween costumes. The soundtrack is Spoon and Arcade Fire.

  “I might just get Milk Duds and call it a day,” David announces to James, with his signature blend of casual and thrilled. “You getting something?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure, young David,” he replies. “I might be sort of obligated to Raisinets, or Sour Patch Kids. It’s a ruthless duel.”

  We laugh our way to the counter. I get “Uh, I don’t want anything, no, wait, what are you guys getting again, actually I’ll have Junior Mints, yeah I’m sure, no, nothing else, a water cup.”

  While James accessorizes his popcorn, David looks over at me. “You really like those things?”

  “Oh, I fuckin’ love Junior Mints, dude. I used to eat them as a little kid.”

  He guffaws. “What about like, you know, sour straws or Airheads—you weren’t into any of that?” He flings a hand into the air; those deadly dimples crinkle perfectly with his grin.