THERE’S NO GOD ANYWHERE, ESPECIALLY DOWN HERE
1
The girl who pushed Tony Ruda teeth first into the water fountain was the first one I remember telling I didn’t believe in God. Her bowl cut hung into her eyes. Her eyes stared at me like a cat watching a television.
She didn’t believe me and neither did any of her friends sitting on the floor with her. They shook their heads and insisted I must. Everyone believed, they said. They even got our teacher to come out into the hallway and tell me it wasn’t possible. Ms. Wallington. The deep wrinkles of her face clenching all the bible verses she’d memorized close to her skull. She could feel them lodged in there like crumbs when she moved her mouth to frown down at me. Explained how I did believe in God after all, I just didn’t know it yet. Then she went back into the classroom, leaving me with these girls laughing at me and calling me a liar. Telling me I was going to Hell for what I had said. As I walked away, I kicked one of Tony Ruda’s teeth down the hall. The sound of it just as tiny as I imagined God to be.
During recess, I stood on a park bench half buried in snow and looked out at everyone huddling against the cold, hobbled in galoshes, slipping and cracking their knees on the glistening ice. From far away, their struggle seemed much too lonesome for God to notice them all. But I stood watching them for a long time. Found myself shivering along with those who’d been left to perish unsaved in their snowsuits. Just like me.
Jumping to the ground I took a handful of snow, and packing it tightly between my mittens, began using it to write on the red brick wall of the school. One simple word to draw them near. Written only in lowercase letters, but big enough for them to be read from far away. I let it glitter in the winter sunlight long enough for them to crowd around, and when they began to ask why I had written God on the wall, I knew what I had to do. With two violent strokes of my arm, I crossed it out. Told them to forget everything they’d ever heard about him. Soon he would melt from the wall and wouldn’t matter to any of us anymore.
And so commenced the first ever meeting of The No God Anywhere Club. Membership was limited only to those who would step forward and join me at the wall. Grab themselves a handful of snow and get their fingers cold with blasphemy. But as I stood waiting, it seemed those I had been calling to me had not made it across the howling tundra of the schoolyard. My fellow disbelievers had all sunk beneath the snow without a trace. Leaving me to be stared at by only those with faces like angry Gods. All of them now close enough to begin hurling enormous chunks of ice at my head.
As this winter shrapnel began exploding all around me, I ducked. Felt the sensation of melted snow running down the back of my winter jacket. Bits of parking-lot asphalt became caught in my collar, against my bare neck, and stung cold like lost teeth thawed loose from the snow. When recess ended, only my best friend Garrett remained with me as everyone else went back inside. They were all content to leave the heretic I’d become collapsed in a snowbank.
“I was outnumbered. I didn’t have a chance. God has already got to them all.” My words were mumbled. I hardly expected them to be heard.
Garrett didn’t care, one way or the other. He was still under the impression he would live forever, and so shrugged at my insistence that there was nothing after death. He was similarly unmotivated to encourage any hopes regarding the future of the No God Anywhere Club. When I asked who might ever join, instead of volunteering himself, he brought my attention to Tony Ruda, who had spent his recess inside with the teachers, applying paper towel to his toothless mouth. When I pointed out I had once caught him praying by himself in the boy’s washroom, Garrett offered Chloe up for my consideration. While he couldn’t speak for anyone else’s dog, he didn’t think Cocker Spaniels were a particularly religious breed, and so maybe I could have her as an honorary member.
“Or something”, he said with a shrug and a shiver, indicating he was ready to go back inside.
As I sat at my desk later that day, still wet from the slush of melted ice that had infiltrated my parka, I realized I was alone. And even worse than this, everyone surrounding me was now possessed with the divine purpose to shove snow in my face as soon as the school day ended. As the clang of the school bell rang out, I could feel all of their eyes turn to me. And with the heavy hands of a condemned man, I slowly pulled my snowpants back on, preparing myself for whatever punishment would greet me beneath that cold and Godless winter sky.
2
I could hardly expect my townhouse friends to be any more understanding. Tough, mean kids, all of them, they went to the Catholic school at the other end of town and believed in God deeply. Sometimes would even talk about him during their crimes. While harassing the balding, old woman in unit 17. Or when climbing trees and spying through the windows of neighbours.
“I hope last night everyone prayed for naked girls”, they would confer between each other, as they dangled from branches.
They assumed I went to church every Sunday just like they did and I didn’t dare tell them otherwise. They had never even considered the possibility that someone might not believe. Sometimes they even made me go into closets with them to pray and all I could do was kneel next to them and pretend I knew the words they were muttering. Tell them I thought God had been listening, even though I knew he wasn’t.
“Isn’t Jesus the best”, they would say, thumping me on the shoulder. Then, because they were all much bigger than me, they would want to go upstairs to the bedroom and wrestle. Throw me headfirst off the bed into the corner of a dresser. I would crumple on the carpet. Touch my hair and see my hand come back bloody. I’d look up to see them trying to lure me back to the mattress they stood upon triumphantly, ready for another round.
“Hey, David, get back up here, we’re not done with you”
“But...I’m bleeding”
“Chicken goes buk buk buk buk buk”
That would be when I told them about monsters. Usually, one I had seen in a neighbor's window on the way over. It was the only thing I could say which would interfere with their need to toss me into furniture. They would grow quiet and seem anxious. Tell me they didn’t believe in monsters. That I was just as bad a liar as I was a wrestler.
When the Gazardzik Brothers inevitably demanded I swear to God that what I had said was true, I would do so eagerly. Over and over again and as loudly as they needed me to prove it. And with every new detail I thought to add to my story, I would swear to God all over again. Swear that this monsters face had turned into a puddle of blood. That its eyes popped out and rolled down its cheek and its mouth was full of cobwebs. How it had even said both of their names before disappearing into the shadows.
As they grew increasingly worried, I would even show them my hands to prove I hadn’t been crossing my fingers to protect myself. Would let them follow me outside where I would look up at the sky, right at the cloud where they had told me Heaven was, and mouth the words ‘****’ over and over.
“We believe you, we believe you,” they would cry out, scrambling to get me to stop. Pin me to the ground. And I would begin to laugh, now knowing that along with God and the Devil, they now had to contend with whatever monster I had just made them believe in. A monster I could make exactly as bad as I wanted it to be. Because they thought I was on God’s side. Just like them.
3
At bedtime, my grandmother would always watch to make sure I didn’t pray before I fell asleep. Sitting in a chair at the end of my bed, she would wait for the nightmares sure to come. She alone would protect me from them. There was no need for me to bring God into it.
I never said anything to her about how all those scruffy kids from the townhouse were into wrestling and Jesus. Or that Ms. Wallington read the Bible to us in class, and always locked eyes with me when she spoke of King David. I didn’t want to give her reason to look too closely at me laying there beneath my covers. I could still remember the disappointment in her eyes when I told her about the time my mother took me to church. Held me in a pew and told me about how demons get into little boys. Splashed holy water into my face, scooped it down the collar of my shirt.
“And how’d that bit of nonsense make you feel?”, she asked from her place at the end of the bed, leaning forward, the chair beneath her wooden and old.
“I didn’t feel any different,” I answered. “It made me wet.”
“Well, I hope you remember that next time she tries to spill something on you.”
I said I would. I closed my eyes. Bad dreams were already there, even though I could still hear the creak of my grandmother’s chair as she leaned back into it. Even when dreaming I knew she was still there with me. Always willing to wait until I had settled into my sleep. Wait until my legs stopped kicking at the long arms and long fingers I believed were reaching out for me. Until my lips stopped moving and I was no longer pleading with my nightmares. She would not go anywhere until she was sure I was out of danger.
Then, when everything grew still, she would slowly get up. And even though I was asleep, I could always tell when she finally walked out of my room. Leaving me feeling like a small shape in a big bed. In an even bigger house. Somewhere in the center of an enormous amount of nothing.