“The Apocalypse Has Been Postponed Until Gym”: My Last Year of High School & the End of the World, Part 2

Alvin High School, May 2004

On the night I returned home from a long trip at the end of January, I called Booth and he filled me in on what had happened in Alvin during the week I was gone.

Winter had taken over our high school. Friends were behaving differently, not like themselves at all. They were grumpy and depressed. They walked through the halls with scowls on their faces, barely lifting their heads to greet one another. Even the timid and pure were drinking, throwing wild parties, having sex. Booth had been invited to an orgy, but politely declined: he could see what the lure of sexual temptation was doing to the rest of his friends, and it scared him.

But the biggest changes of all had taken place in Brandon. He had injured himself playing soccer and was no longer sure he would be able to attend the school of his dreams. His teammates had held him down and shaved his head. Now he was bald and wore a hood all the time like a Sith lord.

And he hated me. “I hate Boze,” he told Booth. “And you’re turning into him!”

For much of the first half of the school year Booth had been skeptical of our prophetic encounters and the battle that Adriana and I both felt was coming to our campus. But now he was beginning to reconsider. He told me how Brandon had yelled at a girl and threatened her with a baseball bat because she took a kitten that he wanted. He related how Mr. McGowan had snapped in the middle of class and started running through the room with a pair of scissors, screaming and laughing.

“I walk through the halls in the mornings,” said Booth, “and all I can see are faces of despair. I look into their eyes, and there is no hope. One by one, it’s overtaking everyone.”

It was after midnight. Booth told me to hang on for a second and put down the phone. When he returned a moment later, there was a note of worry in his voice.

“I don’t know what that was,” he said. “There was this thing, this noise… I think it was coming from under my bed…”

And then, without any warning, he began yelling hysterically.

He took the phone and ran from the room. From the safety of the kitchen, clutching a knife, he explained to me what had happened. There was a heavy breathing sound, and at first he thought it was the cat. But the cat was in the other room, and the noise was getting louder, and closer…

When Booth’s parents found him sleeping in the hall the next morning, they grounded him. But it didn’t matter. He knew what he had heard that night, and for the first time all year we were unequivocally on the same side. Too long had the darkness lingered. It was time to take back our campus.

*           *           *

Over the Christmas holidays Blazes O’Reilly had returned home and summoned a council. Though I had not mentioned to him the specifics of Adriana’s prophecy, I told him I felt they needed to become better acquainted, so the three of us gathered one wintry night in a back room of his parents’ house.

The reception was not cordial. From the beginning of the meeting Adriana sensed a dark aura around Blazes, “the darkest I’ve ever seen.” At one point when he left the room to make tea, she confided, “My voices just told me not to trust him, because he’s been tempted”—an assertion that was seemingly affirmed a moment later when he returned and told her as much of his story as he had already told me. How could she possibly have known that? I wondered.

For his part, Blazes swore he could see spirits of deception circling around Adriana. “There were three of them,” he explained with a casual air. “They were each taking turns whispering lies in her ear.”

Oddly, though, Blazes couldn’t deny that he felt a strong sense of destiny about her. “I just have this feeling about her, like our fates are intertwined. Like we’re destined to fight to the death. Kind of like Lucifer and Gabriel, only I’m not sure which of us is which.”

Adriana was sure, though. “My voices have shown me,” she said, “that Blazes is the Antichrist!”

*           *           *

For my own part, God had revealed to me during the break that Lauren and I would be sexually tempted in the first week of March. Each of us who were called to be players in the end-time drama would be tempted by the end of the trimester. Whether we passed on to the next stage of our mission would depend on whether or not we passed the test.

As if to confirm my suspicions, my first week back on campus I was propositioned by a sweet blonde girl with a twangy East Texas accent and her best friend in gym class. They wanted to know if I would have a threesome with them. I reached into my tote bag and pulled out a copy of the most recent edition of the school newspaper, in which I had written a long article about the importance of saving yourself for marriage. They read the article with expressions of deep fascination and thanked me. I implored Booth not to tell anyone else, but the whole school knew before lunch.

As a result of some back-room finagling, I began giving a short message on the intercom every morning right after the Pledge of Allegiance. I urged the campus to pursue joy and beauty and resist the darkness that was seeking to devour. Together Booth and I wrote six pages in the next issue of the newspaper exclusively devoted to that subject. Booth even penned an article about the “Economics of Joy” in which he graphed the school’s GDP: “Good Deeds Potential”:

 

 

 

I negotiated with Mr. McGowan to let me teach European History for an entire week. On Friday I announced that I had brought in a motivational speaker, Mr. “Ebenezer Scrooge” of Scrooge & Marley’s. The entire class groaned as Booth strode up to the front of the room. Then, as if out of nowhere, music began playing. Scrooge and I spontaneously broke into a dance and were joined by a guy in the third row who knew all the lyrics to the original song (from the 1970 Scrooge musical). For four and a half minutes we twirled around the room and sang about the pleasures of enjoying life:

 

Where there’s music and laughter

Happiness is rife!

Why?

Because I like life!

The entire class watched with mounting incredulity, and by the end of the song Lauren was in tears. “That was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen,” she said sadly. Booth and I sat quietly back down as though nothing had happened.

 

*           *           *

 

We waited for the first week of March, for the end of the second trimester.

 

I began having utterly terrifying dreams in which I seemed to be traveling out of my body at night and wandering through the rooms and halls of the trailer in which I lived. There were things in my bedroom I had never seen before. I heard footsteps in the hallway and saw strange lights outside my window.

 

I received my letter of acceptance from Southwestern University. I wondered if it was wise to go. I thought about staying in Alvin and fighting alongside my friends in the battle that was soon to come.

 

And then the trimester ended. We all settled into our new classes. And nothing happened.

 

There was no battle, no moment of tempting. Lauren started dating a guy she had met two weeks before. And I could feel the ground giving way beneath my feet.

 

*           *           *

 

On a quiet and warm afternoon near the end of that week, Booth, Adriana, and I sat facing Mr. McGowan from across the desk in his classroom. We were all disconsolate and hoped he could give us answers.

 

Adriana told the story of how she had nearly died the summer before, and how she began hearing the voices shortly after. Booth and I tried to explain all that had happened since Christmas, but it was clear from the moment we began talking that Mr. McGowan didn’t believe us. And by the time we related how Adriana learned that Blazes was the Antichrist, and how Blazes himself seemed to think that he was, and how we had briefly debated using physical force to try and subdue him, small beads of sweat were breaking out on the sides of his round face.

 

I watched him imploringly. I just wanted someone to explain what was going on. My prophetic gift had never been wrong before. Why had it failed me now, at the most critical time?

 

“First of all,” he said, in a very low and quiet voice, “what you’re going through is not unusual.”

 

I’m not sure what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. “Are you serious?” I asked.

 

He nodded. “For one, the three of you are reading from a shared text. Whenever three or four people read from a shared text, it’s not hard to induce shared delusions.

 

“Second, I think you’re scared. You’re scared because you’re about to graduate, Boze, and you two will be graduating in about a year. And you’re leaving the only home you’ve ever known, and that’s an incredibly traumatic experience. And it’s not uncommon for students who are juniors and seniors in high school to start having apocalyptic visions, because it’s their way of expressing kind of the terror they feel at the future.

 

“Because, let’s face it, the world may not be ending, but the only world you’ve ever known is ending. You know how they say, ‘You can’t go home again.’ You may come back in a few years, but the school that you knew will be gone. Reality won’t live up to your memories. When you go away to college, you’ll forget about me. And when you think about me at all, you’ll think of me as some sophomoric teacher who liked to pretend he knew everything. But I don’t. And some day you’ll realize that.”

 

My entire experience of the last eight months, all I had felt and foreseen and suffered, was slipping away. The apocalypse wasn’t going to happen, it might never happen, or else it had been postponed. But I was determined to hold on.

 

“What about all the others?” I asked. “We’re not the only ones. What about Blazes?”

 

Mr. McGowan shook his head. “There’s something very dark and unnatural about that man,” he said. “He went wrong somewhere… became something different than what God intended.”

 

He stood up summarily from his desk, as though to suggest that the meeting was over. Together the four of us walked to the door.

 

Booth turned in the doorway and faced him.

 

“I do have a question,” he said. “Was it you? Were you the one who orchestrated… you know, all of that?”

 

Mr. McGowan stared at him quizzically. “No,” he said with finality.

 

We waited. I looked at him, more confused than ever.

 

“Do you mean, was I pandering and manipulating you?” He laughed lightly. “Oh, of course.”

 

He clapped us both hard on the shoulders. “It was quite fun, actually. I’m honestly kind of sad it took y’all that long to figure it out. Your senses were picking up on stuff, but I was putting a spin on it. It’s good that you wanted an order to life, but you have to want it in order to see it. That’s why the super-sensible is so hard for empiricists to get.”

 

He closed the door behind us. Adriana and Booth and I walked forward into the harsh sunlight.

 

*           *           *

 

It’s been ten years since that conversation in Mr. McGowan’s room, but the course my life has taken since graduation has been in a lot of ways a vindication of his warnings. Sociologists tell us that conspiracy theories and apocalyptic thinking are deeply intertwined, and that wherever you find one, you’re likely to find the other. It’s a pathology in the American psyche, a sickness, this fascination with the end times. There’s something deeply un-Christian about it. It’s as though Jesus and the Bible have become nothing more than cultural totems with the power to drive us mad.

 

I’ve held on to my faith, but just barely. The realization that I was not a prophet was devastating, but what has been much worse is seeing the damage caused by End-Times fanaticism, the toll that it takes. I’ve seen it drive otherwise sane people to the brink of madness. I’ve watched it transform them until they were no longer recognizable, until they were willing to do the most horrible things to even their closest friends. I’ve seen it claim the life of one of my dearest friends in the world.

 

So I find myself thinking about the events of that year, and the great disappointment of third trimester, and Mr. McGowan’s explanation for what had happened to us. I think about it whenever a good Christian whom I respect is incredulous that I’m not prepping for the end times, as though it makes me some lesser species of Christian that I don’t have an opinion about when Jesus is coming back. I think about it when I’m sitting on the shuttle next to a man who wrote a 200-page book about the role of the nephilim in the last days that he’s trying to sell me, when I’m in a meeting with Christian counselors who are demanding that I pray out loud to accept my calling to battle the forces of the Antichrist. I think about it whenever someone on Facebook tells me they can’t wait to be martyred, that they hope they continue to laugh long after their head has been severed from their body.

 

“Boze, where do you find these people?” Bethany once asked me, the first time I recounted my story—back when the dangerous group was just forming.

 

And sometimes I listen to that song, “Lake Geneva,” by The Handsome Family, about a woman whose husband is hospitalized because he sees visions of the heavens in the stumps of falling trees:

 

“You remember how he cried

When they strapped him to the stretcher

Convinced his arms were burning

With electricity from heaven

 

“You remember how he told you

Black holes were like Jesus

And the crucifix was a battery

That filled the air with fire”

 

And I hear that and I think, isn’t that my story, and the story of our country? That we’d rather read about the mysterious code that foretells the day of judgment than lift a finger to help the teeming masses on whose treatment the nations will be judged? And aren’t we a sick society, when conspiracy theories and end-times mania, the province of the young and confused and deranged and scared, are mistaken for true worship?

 

After my last conversation with Mr. McGowan, I accepted the nature of the fantasy I had been living in. I was no prophet. I wasn’t destined for greatness. The only certain thing in my life at that moment was graduation.

 

And instead of running away from it, as I had been doing all year, I learned to accept it. I embraced my own normalcy, and in doing so I found freedom and a certain measure of happiness.

 

And at the end of May I graduated and left high school behind me. I worry that some of us are there still.

Advertisement

Two Stories About Bells

One thing you learn in writing stories is that certain objects have a mysterious and almost magnetic power that defies words. Castles, swords, rings, goblets, buried treasure—the appearance of any one of these in a story is like a radiant stone that vibrates with its own intensity. Perhaps that’s why I became Catholic, because as a storyteller I was naturally drawn to a religion that invests material things with sacramental power: holy water; crosses; bells, books, and candles.

 

Bell towers have fascinated me ever since I saw the movie Vertigo when I was nine or ten years old. Recently voted the greatest film of all time in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound poll, Vertigo tells the story of a retired detective (James Stewart) hired to trail a young woman (Kim Novak) who may be possessed by the ghost of a long-dead ancestor. He pursues her to an old Spanish mission, the Mission San Juan Batista, where, at the very top of the bell tower, tragedy strikes. And then strikes again.

 

The understated use of Hispanic and southwestern folklore in this movie slowly worked its way into my brain, taking root in dark corners. During my first couple of months at Southwestern University, ten years ago this summer, I was enchanted by the beige limestone, the rounded-arch doorways, the old chapel at the heart of campus with a door leading up to the tower, a door that was only unlocked on the rarest of occasions. I remember being struck with a sense of the history of the place.

 

It was there that I had the idea to write a series of children’s books, books that would draw on the cultures and legends of the Celts (my ancestors) and the Southwest (my adopted home). This summer in going back and rereading some of the folklore and mythology of England I’ve been struck by how many stories center around the ringing of bells. In the days before telephones and wireless, sometimes the cathedral bell was the only means of communication between one town and another, or between the church and those in peril on the ocean’s dark waters.

 

One such story from County Surrey tells of a man, Neville Audley, who was captured fighting on the wrong side during the long-ago War of the Roses. Arrested and sentenced to die when the curfew bell tolled on the next night at Chertsey Abbey, he realized that the only hope of being spared was to obtain a pardon from the king.

 

Neville conferred with his girlfriend, Blanche Heriot, and their mutual friend Herrick. Herrick agreed to ride towards London to seek pardon. But on the next day, with only five minutes left before the bell tolled, Herrick was seen flying towards the town from half a mile away—still too far away to save Audley’s life.

 

The minutes passed. The townsfolk awaited the tolling of the bell. But the bell did not ring.

 

Just as Herrick arrived in town, the sexton, accompanied by soldiers, went up into the tower to investigate. There they found Blanche Heriot, dashed against the bell and frame but still clinging to the clapper with a tenacity born of desperation. Luckily she had hung there just long enough to save her beloved, who was spared from death by the king’s timely pardon. The two were married shortly afterwards.

 

Another story with a less happy ending is told of the tenor bell of Burgh le Marsh church. The people of Burgh le Marsh once made a living off the debris of doomed ships, lighting the beacon on Marsh Hill to lure poor sailors to their deaths. Once the sailors were all drowned and the weather had calmed, the townsfolk would scramble ashore to loot the broken vessels.

 

As the story goes, in 1629 the Mary Rose was sailing from Leith, Scotland along the Lincolnshire coast on its way to Flanders. A storm began to gather. The wind howled and the rains beat against the ship, while the people of Burgh watched from the shore with growing excitement.

 

But not everyone was pleased by the buffeting of the storm-tossed ship. The elderly sexton Guymer, when he learned what was being planned, begged them not to light the beacon. No one listened.

 

A crowd made its way towards Marsh Hill and the beacon was lit. Captain Frohock, seeing what he mistook for a lighthouse, called out to his men that they were safe. The crew turned the ship in the direction of the light.

 

Back on shore, desperate to avoid the collision that was imminent, Guymer ran towards the church. Ascending to the top of the bell tower, he grabbed the rope and rang the bell with all the strength he could muster. Captain Frohock, realizing how close he was to shore and certain death, ordered the Mary Rose back to sea, away from the treacherous sands.

 

Enraged by the tolling of the bell, the townspeople stormed into the church. Breaking down the belfry door, they found Guymer, still clinging to the rope, his dead body swaying to and fro. His heart had burst open from exhaustion.

 

When Captain Frohock returned to the village a year later and learned what had happened, he bought an acre of land known as “Bell String Acre.” He ordered that rent from the land be used to buy a silken rope for the bell. It’s said that he married the sexton’s daughter.

Thirty Days of Poems: Dolorosa (Day 4)

            I went to a wedding today

            the second I’ve attended since

            you got married.

            You would have loved the venue:

            a small stone chapel

            almost like a cottage

            in the woods

            with a high Gothic ceiling

            and a stained-glass portrait

            of the via dolorosa

            hanging just over the altar.

 

            And the ceremony

            may have been more high church

            than what we were used to

            growing up in Texas

            but the bride processed in

            to some Elvish-sounding music

            and after the exchange of vows

            we all had communion

            and the newlyweds came in together

            bearing the grail and bread.

 

            The whole first year after

            when I heard about a friend’s engagement

            my immediate reaction

            was to try and stop it.

            It was silly of me, I know:

            not every walk down the aisle

            has a cross at its end.

            And over time

            I got better, or

            learned how to fake it.

           

            But today

            when the priest said,

            “Speak now, or forever hold your peace”

            it was hard not to think of that moment

            in your wedding

            and the silence where

            no one spoke.

 

           And when the bride and groom

           pledged their fidelity to one another

           in sickness and in health

           to have and to hold

           from this day forward

           I thought of you and him

           the vows he made to you that day

          flanked by the groomsmen

          with whom he had already

          betrayed them.

 

          One day

          a few years from now

          I’ll have my own ceremony.

          And with laughter and communion

          my friends will escort me

          into a new realm of life.

          But even amid the celebration

         there will be a quiet ache

         dull but persistent

         because of the empty space

         where you should have been

         and the marriage you never had.

Thirty Days of Poems: She’s Ubiquitous (Day 3)

            She’s ubiquitous

            She wouldn’t call herself a genius

            but I know she is

            A novelist, an actress

            She’s on billboards and Broadway

            The writer, star, director

            of a one-woman play

 

            She’s pale as the sun

            as quiet as the moon

            and she doesn’t

            understand the world

 

           

            She’s ubiquitous

            she wonders what the moral of the story is

            she takes her coffee black

            she stays out past midnight

            sipping Chardonnay and reading

            N. T. Wright

 

            She’s ubiquitous

            but lately she’s been feeling nervous and listless

            She’s sick of putting up with boys

            and their pathetic grandeur

            and wishes she could meet a guy

            who understands her

 

           

            She’s pale as the sun

            as quiet as the moon

            and she doesn’t

            understand the world

 

            (and sometimes late at night

            we take that desert road

            out where the stars are street lights

            and when we hit the end of that trail

            where the dust shines like fog

            and the grass hums around us with a million voices

            I pull out my flamenco guitar

            and she dances).

 

Thirty Days of Poems: Darren and Me (Day 2)

Darren and me

 are sitting in his apartment

 drinking rum and soda.

 

 The glow of the screen

 illuminates

 our tired faces

 as we gaze upon our heroes.

 

            “Clooney’s the MAN,” I say

            and Darren nods a little sadly.

            “I could be like him.”

 

            “Naw, bro,” says Darren.

            “You gotta get yourself a car.”

 

            “Hugh Jackman, man,” I say.

 

            “Hugh Jackman,” he avers,

            and we are quiet.

 

            *           *           *

 

            Darren and me

            we stay up talking

            eating hazel nuts and almonds

            with the clarity that only comes

            from sipping vodka

            after hours.

           

            “Dude, I gotta find myself a girl,” I say,

            “I wasn’t made to live this bachelor kinda life.”

 

             Darren says, “Well, what about Rebekah?”

          

            “Bekah ain’t interested in a guy like me.”

 

            “B. S.!” He points a shaky shot glass at me.

            “You should see the way she looks at you.”

 

            “Ain’t no one ever looked at me that way.”

 

            “Have you ever even asked a girl out?”

           

            “Dude, not if I really liked them.”

 

            Darren sits back on the couch

            and pours us both another glass of Evan Williams.

            On the TV, Louie’s eating dinner in Manhattan.

            Chicken rolls, lamb pasanda, flatbread.

            I grab another handful of pretzels.

 

            “What about you?” I ask him.

            “When you gonna find somebody?”

 

            “Some day, maybe.”

            He never takes his eyes off the screen.

            “Romance is great and all, but man,

            I got so many dreams.”

Song Friday: “Alaska” (The Silver Seas)

I ran across these guys after one of their songs was used as the final song of the first season of Breaking Bad. I was inspired to listen to their whole discography, and I have to say, of all the songs I’ve heard this year, this one is probably my favorite. It’s gorgeous, sad, nostalgic, hopeful, and swooningly romantic.

And I have no idea what it’s about. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

Jesus & J. K. Rowling: Imperfect Matchmakers

Well, it finally happened. Fans have speculated for years over the actual suitability of the series’ main characters for one another, but today Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling affirmed the contentious musings of Harry / Hermione shippers when she allegedly told Emma Watson, in a forthcoming issue of Wonderland Magazine, that the famous boy wizard should have married his best friend.