The Book of Harold Read online

  At some point I closed my eyes and slept. When I opened them again it was dark. My heart froze. Where was I? I blinked. I could not see a thing. It was so dark my closed eyes seemed to see more.

  “Mr. Waterson,” I heard Peter call from somewhere and I remembered. “Mr. Waterson, wake up.” There was a weight to that darkness. It covered my body. Held me against the cot. “Mr. Waterson.” His voice was urgent. “Now, Mr. Waterson. We have to go right now.” I heard other voices, loud and angry. Yes. Now. Move body. Go. But my body did not go. I was too frightened to move, to speak. Not afraid of my captors, but afraid of losing them. Afraid of being free again.

  “Mr. Waterson, please. The generators. The alarm. Please.” Other steps, fast steps. I held my breath. Run, Peter. They’re coming! Run! I can’t move. The black like a lead blanket. “Mr. Waterson. Mr. Waterson!”

  Closed

  When the lights came back on minutes later, the door was closed and I was alone. I heard muffled yelling and more steps. Then everything went quiet. I lay awake for hours. Not moving until a knock came from the door and an older man walked in with my breakfast on a tray.

  “Where’s Peter?” I asked.

  He placed the tray down and said nothing. His eyes darted from side to side.

  “It was my fault,” I said. “Where is he?”

  He was sweating. He moved quickly. The door clicked closed behind him.

  Peter, what did they do to you?

  Dies

  No lunch. No dinner. No face peeking through the door’s window. Not a sound. They’ve left me to die.

  I’m writing from my cot. If I had the strength I could fill the bathtub and finish the job. But I wouldn’t, even if I could. How do you die? Still don’t know.

  Piece by piece this boat is falling apart. My weak limbs, my weak mind, my weak voice. This boat is sinking. I suppose the boat has to sink or I would never choose to swim. Even when it sinks I might not swim. I could drown scraping at the boards of a boat that was never designed to last this long.

  Doesn’t a fetus think it’s dying? Its gills fade away, it can’t move, it feels the pressure pushing it out of its world. It must think the end has come.

  Even my memory fades. It’s not a time for memory. Everything is telling me to look forward, to lose the old eyes so I may gain the new. But I don’t. I hate the blackness. Why should I hope there is any good, or anything at all beyond that black? So I’m clinging to the sides of the womb.

  Go to the black and don’t come back.

  I wish Beddy were here. I wish he would slip through my vent and sit with me. Maybe he’d tell me a story. Ramble like he always did. Tell me about the aquarium in Monterey where he worked for a summer.

  “Yes, yes, there’s the blue in those waters,” he tells me. “Like the water is making its own light. And all those fish and crawlers and floaters and things I would have sworn were made up by a child, like sea horses and jellyfish.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” I say. “Maybe God’s just a five-year-old.”

  “Maybe on the fourth day God created mushrooms, got high, and that afternoon he made all this.” He laughs and his bangs fall over his eyes. “Nice. Nice to see reality a few steps ahead of my imagination. Gives me hope.”

  But he won’t come anymore.

  If you move not forward from silence or backward from silence, but downward into silence, then the moment of silence is an abyss.

  Instead, my daughter’s cat comes. The mother of the kittens I drowned. Her rusty fur is sticky and clotted. She tells me she’s come to watch me die. She doesn’t seem angry, doesn’t hiss or scratch at me. Just curls up on my chest as I lay on the cot.

  “Does my daughter miss me?” I ask her.

  Not in a painful way.

  I’m sorry about your children.

  I’m sorry about yours.

  “Please tell her I love her.”

  Of course.

  Waterson Fires; Peeks Falls

  It had not rained in nineteen days. No clouds, no gray, just the blue sky stoically refusing the earth any relief. Back in Figwood, men were holding hoses over brown grass, praying for rain and resurrection. But the sky held its breath, and the ground dried up like dead skin. Then, on the day I drove to Austin, on the day Harold died, the sky exhaled and the rains came.

  Hours of water, pouring down like revenge. Hot rain. I didn’t mind it. I abandoned the car blocks from the middle school where the press conference was being held. The rain soaked through my shirt and pants. It dripped from my shaggy hair and beard. All the world was wet. The gun was heavy in my pocket. I had no plan. My brain was fire and no thought, and the rain did nothing to douse it.

  The school was surrounded with open-mouthed gawkers, wide-eyed wanters—the masses.

  I pushed my way through. “Harold, Harold,” they mumbled and moved closer to touch me. They thought I was him. And why not? There weren’t many good photos. We both were unkempt. My face, like his, was covered with a month’s worth of beard. I looked like Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Charles Manson. I looked liked Jesus. I looked like Harold.

  Closer to the school, the press stood guard. Pretty people with umbrellas, vans with antennas, cameras, and microphones. All sucking images and noises. I did not like them.

  The rain was just slowing to a drizzle as I walked in to the school with a small crowd of reporters and photographers. I stood with them in the back of the cafeteria. In front of the room was a low stage. Irma and Shael were already sitting down. Gilbert showed up soon after. Of course he came back. Of course. They were all dry and clean. I loved them very much. No one saw me behind the cameras.

  The press had set up a long table for Harold and the others to sit at. They took their places facing the reporters. This time it was the Last Supper.

  Harold came last. He was as hairy and wet as me, wearing his red poncho and dripping water onto the floor. Bzzz and whzzz, went the press. There was no smile left on his face. He looked older, and there was a heaviness in his eyes. He moved to the center of the table, touching Shael’s shoulder. I hated him. I hated how lonely I was. He taught me how to feel and then gave me more pain than I’d ever known.

  He opened his mouth to talk. Then stopped. He saw me. His eyes fixed on my eyes. He smiled. I smiled. That moment. That quiet. For an instant it seemed possible that only I could see him. This was a vision, and only for me.

  “Blake?” Shael said. The quiet was gone.

  “Holy crap! Blake!” Gilbert yelled.

  Then they turned on me. Lights and lenses. Harold jumped from the stage and came to me. I was shaking, my hand resting on the pistol. Harold was close now. Smiling. I started to cry.

  Following him cost me my daughter. But that is not why I fired. He let my wife die. But that’s not why I fired. He gave me as much doubt as he gave me faith. But that’s not why I fired. I would have dropped all my anger and embraced him then and there. I would have taken my place at the table, but I saw his eyes. The truth is he wanted me to pull the trigger. It was the one thing I could do for him. I fired.

  Shael yelling, Gilbert tackling me, police pushing my head to the ground, then solid blackness.

  But the cameras sucked on.

  The video footage is famous. The trampling out of the room. The crowd outside yelling and crying as the news rippled through it, Harold has been shot. TVs in cars, TVs on cameras, TVs on phones all showed the event over and over. Me shooting, Harold falling. Me shooting, Harold falling. Harold, a martyred saint on a billion screens. Can anyone see any blood? How bad was the wound? He’s wearing red, we can’t tell. Show it again, show it again. Slow motion, different angle. 3-D graphics. Waterson fires; Peeks falls.

  An ambulance arrives, splashing through puddles. The cameras filmed the attendants squeezing through the crowd and into the school building. They return carrying a stretcher between the two of them.

  Oh, God, it’s Harold. His face. Oh, God, look at the blood.

  And his chest, It’s all blo
od.

  No, no. It’s water. It’s just the red poncho.

  The crowd and the cameras weep and wave goodbye as they load the body into the ambulance.

  One attendant rushes back into the school. In a moment the doors opened and the cameras hiss.

  The footage shows a hurt man held up by an attendant and police officer. He stumbles. He might run. The crowd pounces. The camera follows as they knock the police officer away and grab me. The body bouncing above the crowd, thrown back, finally falling to the cement. Fists and kicking and all I deserve. More yelling and kicking and all America playing along at home, watching my face in a puddle. They’re holding me there in the water. More kicks to my side, to the back, to the groin, and my face is still in the puddle. One man puts his foot on my head and pushes down. The puddle is red, I struggle, but I’m held and then I stop moving. The cameras are there when they roll me over and see that Harold is dead.

  I had watched the whole event from the ambulance. I watched them beat and kill Harold thinking it was me.

  What happened? I remember being knocked down by Gilbert inside the school. I remember the gun being pulled from my hands. I remember being hit in the head until my vision went black. Then I remember coming to and seeing Harold sitting by me on the school floor. His face was red with blood, Shael holding a towel against the side of his head. Shael looked at me only once. It hurt more than Gilbert’s tackle.

  “You’re in shock,” Harold said to me and placed his red poncho around my shoulders. The red poncho that the crowds knew as his.

  “But I . . .” my mouth felt thick. It was difficult to form words. “I shot you?”

  “I think you shot my ear. Hurts like hell,” he said. Shael readjusted the towel. Harold winced, then smiled. “Who knew you were such a bad shot?”

  “I’ll do better next time,” I mumbled.

  “Blake,” he said softly, blood streaming down his face. “I have nothing but love for you. That’s sort of a miracle, isn’t it?”

  The ambulance attendants arrived and lifted me on to a stretcher. Harold stayed beside me, a hand on my chest. Shael went for more towels and for a moment, we were alone.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “For shooting you?”

  “No,” he laughed. I tried to concentrate, to stay awake, but I could feel the blackness rising. “I understand now. At least a little,” he said, his face fading. “I’m not the only one who will suffer for their sins.”

  Nothing but black.

  They carried me out on a stretcher and the world, seeing Harold’s red poncho, thought I was Harold. The attendant and the police officer were helping Harold leave the school. The blood covering his face like a mask. And the crowds grabbed him. I was in the ambulance, my brain aching. I heard the screaming and looked. From my spot crouching by the ambulance, I couldn’t see Harold’s face, only the faces watching his. Faces as they realized it was not me they had beaten. They dropped, they twisted. The attendants who had carried me from the school ran to Harold’s side. But I knew from the faces that Harold was dead.

  I ran.

  I ran. Back behind the cars and vans and trucks with the cameras and televisions. They hid me from the crowd. Then I was across the street and into the woods where the mosquitoes buzzed in my face.

  I ran until I fell. I wanted to cry out and die. But I did neither. Instead I thought: How can I hide?

  I was soaking wet, muddy water dripping from my hair and my beard and soon, very soon, I was going to have the world hunting me.

  The rain started to fall again, and I thanked God for it. It would cover my tracks. I kept running along the creek, trying to think, but coming up with nothing. I slipped in the mud and slid into the creek, swallowing a stomach full of dirty water. Stuck in the branches of a fallen tree, I saw a plastic children’s pool, the kind you buy for a summer and throw away in the fall. I tugged it free, turned it over, and hid under it. It was dark under that shell and my breaths echoed. But it worked. I floated past houses and lawns. I floated under bridges. Above me the police were checking each car.

  Most of the time I could touch the bottom of the creek and push myself along. When it got deep, I held on to the sides of the pool and let the current carry me. Often it was so shallow I had to stick my legs out in front of me. Hours went by and I was exhausted, but I kept going. The water soaked through me, past my clothes, past my skin, into my bones and deeper still. After night fell, I crawled out, lay on the creek’s bank, and immediately slept. I was too tired to dream.

  I woke up shivering. It was still dark. I abandoned the pool and made my way out of the woods, past suburban houses and strip malls. A drop-off box at a thrift store provided some dry clothes, and I slept another hour behind a dumpster. When I opened my eyes again, the sky was that pale blue.

  My body was dry, but my mind had soaked up too much mud. I started walking. I had nowhere to go and was too dazed to care. I had no wallet and no food.

  The streets were already filled with cars waiting in line to get to work. I stood on the corner, no longer trying to hide, and wondered which car would recognize me first. Would it be the Escort, or the minivan or that blue SUV? Who would dial 911 and report that Judas was tramping through their neighborhood?

  The light turned green, the cars crawled past. But the SUV paused. A hand reached out from the half-lowered, tinted window with a twenty-dollar bill. I grabbed the money, and the SUV drove on.

  My minded cleared. I was hungry. More hungry than I had ever been, but I knew that food was not what I needed most. I needed a haircut. I walked for less than a mile and found a dingy barbershop. Inside a tiny man greeted me in Spanish. I told him I didn’t understand and motioned my requests. He sat me down and snipped away my hair and shaved my face. He spoke Spanish the entire time and I nodded along.

  In less than fifteen minutes, I was a new man. I handed him my twenty dollars and he handed me eight dollars in change.

  I left and walked past a newspaper dispenser. There I was on the front page. The long-haired, scruffy-bearded me. Not the clean-shaven, short-haired me. I read half a page through the plastic window. It was already clear, the crowd had killed Harold but I was the one to blame. I had fired the shot. I was the focus of the anger. They laid their sins upon me.

  At a convenience store I bought a package of Twinkies and a Coke. I sat in the parking lot and took my communion. This is my body . . . a yellow sponge. This is my blood . . . sweet, black, and bubbly.

  What now? What now? What now? What now?

  Simple, really. The play had already been written. I was to buy a field or throw my thirty pieces of silver somewhere and hang myself or let my intestines spill out or something like that. But I had just spent most of my silver on a haircut and some Twinkies, so instead I did what he had taught me to do. I walked.

  All that day I walked, and days more. There was no resurrection, but just as Harold had predicted, people waited. His body was placed under twenty-four hour police guard. Even after his burial at Onion Creek Memorial Park, just south of Austin, converts flocked to his grave in hopes of witnessing a miracle. Only Shael was brave enough to attempt Harold’s request. She was arrested breaking into the cemetery in the dead of night with a shovel and two jugs of gasoline.

  She was quickly denounced as a traitor. Not quite as bad as me, but in the same category. Her mother paid her bail and she disappeared.

  An Introduction to Haroldism

  Self-Examination

  A healthy amount of self-doubt has long been a virtue of the Haroldian movement. Believers need only think of Blake Waterson and Shael Weil to be reminded how quickly a seemingly devote follower can fall into betrayal. By many accounts, no one was closer to Harold Peeks in his adult life than Shael Weil, yet she was charged with attempting to desecrate his grave. Her reasons are a mystery, but her actions, like the actions of Blake Waterson, illustrate to Haroldians that outward devotion is never a guarantee of inner stability and faith. Believers are encouraged
to examine and reexamine their hearts to weed out the envy and pride that can so quietly poison the spiritual life.

  Stop Salvation

  I walked. All that year and years more.

  I walked all over. False names and part-time work. I went north and east. Years and years I walked as Haroldism blossomed around me. Shael never reappeared. Irma died. Gilbert died. I lived on the streets, in shelters or flop hotels with cheap weekly rates. I snuck into Mexico and lived in a cinderblock shack. I walked and grew old. I found myself standing above the oily waters of a reservoir under a single fluorescent light.

  Those rainbows, catching white light and shattering it. This was my Field of Blood. And it occurred to me, while standing above the water, that perhaps there would still be a resurrection, that Harold might return to save us all. I was still alive, so the story was stalled. How could Jesus rise from the dead while Judas was still around? If I loved Harold, if I loved any soul, then I must jump. I was holding back salvation.

  “You don’t have to jump into the water. Just jump into the air. Gravity will do the rest.”

  Then the Pastels came.

  “Mr. Waterson, we’ve come to help you.”

  I jumped. I let myself sink down into the cold blackness. Come on Harold, hold me down. I could hear them jump in after me. I tried to suck the water in.

  Save me and you’ll stop salvation. Stop resurrection.

  An Introduction to Haroldism

  Second Baptism

  The second baptism of the Haroldian year takes place on Stones Throw, which is traditionally celebrated on April 18. Stones Throw marks the end of a month of mourning after the anniversary of Harold’s death. Haroldians take this month to meditate on conviction and guilt. This prepares the faithful for the Celebration of Grace beginning on April 19.