Invisible boy, p.28
Invisible Boy, page 28
That’s kind of cute, I said.
It meant more to them than to me, she responded.
Tee met Cory at Richmond High. She was precisely his type. He was a popular jock with a sports car, accustomed to getting his way. So when he asked for an audacious sixteenth birthday gift—his girlfriend’s virginity—she gave what she imagined was already gone, and together they created what she thought she could never have.
And life became difficult, I said aloud, recalling how Cory had once put it.
I named you Jordan Nathanael. You were my gift from God, she said. I wanted to keep you.
I knew that from Cory, but I hadn’t expected to hear it from her. I held the phone upside down, fighting back tears, blinking and squinting to keep them from falling.
We wanted to raise you, she said. But his mother was mortified. She sent Cory away to this boarding school in the Prairies, hoping to change his mind. I think it was called Briercrest?
Bridalquest! I shouted.
Saskatchewan’s Briercrest Christian Academy was known for its marriage material. Girls outnumbered boys there three to one, it was said. It was perfect for righteous young men seeking wives, and for God-fearing families who wanted their children to fall for the right kind of people. New couples were created every day, and save-the-date announcements came so early and so often that, at Trinity, the students called it Bridalquest. Anyone who goes there gets engaged, they said, and everyone who transferred here from Briercrest is married.
But others called Trinity Bridalquest West. Teenage engagements were common on campus, and all of us knew two or three kids whose parents had sent them to find a good wife, or good husband. My family had tried it, to rid them of Ashley; my birth father’s family, it turned out, employed the same trick in their bid to get rid of Trinika.
While he was away, Trinika said, his mother wrote this really nasty letter. She said I was a slut, and Cory was never coming back. Her letters were just brutal. She really hated me. She accused me of trying to trap him. But I’d been speaking with Lynn Braidwood and she was really kind. She took me out for dinner at this mansion in Vancouver. She promised that if you were placed in a good Christian home, you’d have a much better life than I did.
Debatable, I said.
We had five days in the hospital together, Trinika said. I kept on asking to see my baby. I remember the ward nurses arguing in the hallway, afraid that too much time with you would make me change my mind about the adoption. So each time they brought you in, the women would hover, and they’d take you back out after five or ten minutes.
You’d hate for a baby to bond with its mother, I muttered.
We bonded anyway, Trinika said. I called you the Frog-Man. You had the biggest eyes. Like you could see everything clearly already.
Turns out I needed glasses, I said, I couldn’t see a thing.
I left you with a couple of stuffies, she said. Do you still have them?
I have the bunny, I told her. The unicorn…I’ve only seen it once. My mom put it away until I was older, for safekeeping, and I never got it back.
Of course you didn’t, she scoffed. That’s so typical. I picked that one out special for you. Maybe she could tell. It’s a wonder she didn’t bury it in the backyard.
She mostly buried scripture with her friends, I said. But wait—if you wanted to stay in my life, then why didn’t you push for an open adoption?
I did, Trinika said. And originally, it was open. I saw you a few more times that first year. But after your birthday, your mom cut me off.
What do you mean, she cut you off?
She closed the adoption.
Closed it? I stood up on my bed, my head spinning, suddenly defensive on my mother’s behalf. How did she close it? No, she didn’t.
I got another letter, Trinika said. Your mom explained that the family was moving to Fiji or something, so it wouldn’t make sense to see me anymore. That’s what I was told, and legally you belonged to her, so there was nothing I could do but go away.
We did go to Fiji. That’s where the elephant statues were from. But still, I wasn’t ready to accept what she was saying. I crawled back into bed, sitting speechless, convincing myself that this woman was trying to manipulate me. But who else could I ask about her claims? Certainly not my mother. We were barely speaking now, and we’d never speak again.
Many open adoptions are closed retroactively. Once the birth mother becomes inconvenient, she’s easy enough to dismiss. Her rights have been completely signed away.
But I didn’t know that then.
The accusation addled me, disrupting our chemistry, creating an audible distance between us. I wanted to think that Trinika was lying; the context of my life changed if she wasn’t. No longer sure of what to say or what to do, I only listened to Trinika breathing in and breathing out, the shallowness of every breath a disconcerting sound. I couldn’t handle any more tears, and my growing agitation was apparent from my silence.
I’m sorry, she said.
Everything had been taken from Trinika. They took her history, and then they took her future. She spent her life a stranger, seeking shelter. No one helped her. They helped themselves to her. First her body, then her baby. Whatever she could not protect was theirs before she knew it.
But at some point, I thought, sneering, siding against her, you have to take responsibility for your actions.
It’s not your fault, I lied to her.
Trinika said: The last time I saw your face was in a photo Lynn gave me. It must have been around your second birthday. You were still my little Frog-Man, with your big, huge eyes, and I was encouraged, because a Black woman was holding you.
I know that photo, I said. Cory showed it to me. He keeps it in his wallet.
She paused for a moment, laughing quietly to herself. I thought she was crying again. That bozo, she finally said. What a goof. He told me that he lost it.
That night, the Scary Man found me again. A banging at the front door woke me up inside a nightmare. Certain that Isaac had locked himself out, I went to the hallway to check. Instead, I saw the homeless guy who camped beside the Mr. Sub. He waved as he walked by the window. I waved back, and returned to bed. Then I heard the same pounding, so I woke up again, but this time, the hallway was different. Now it was the hallway of the house on Glenn Mountain. As soon as I stepped out and saw the white doors, the Scary Man burst from the Big Room, constricting me, dragging me off to the darkness. He wanted to take me to hell, I just knew it. I fought him as Harrison, squirming and flailing, desperate to show I was stronger than before. But the Scary Man’s hood was reflective, and the mirror-mask revealed that I was not only back in my childhood home, but back in my childhood—still just a boy. Help! I cried out, retrogressing, terrified to live my life all over, and I woke up thrashing, weeping in a stranger’s bed, forgetting I was grown, and that the bed belonged to me.
* * *
—
I hobbled down to Stone Rolled Away on Sunday, dragging my anguish and anger behind me like iron balls, chained to my ankles. I knew of nowhere else to go but church. My mother wouldn’t have me, and my other mother couldn’t, I decided, she was lying, so I’d better keep my distance. Only the Lord could clear up my confusion; only His Spirit could soothe me. In shambles, exhausted by dreams I kept having, I sat before the altar, demanding to see Him, and waited, intense and impatient, prepared to throw hands.
It’s now or never, Lord.
The Schumachers arrived to start the service. They opened with a classic, based on Psalm 121: I lift my eyes up to the mountains. Where does my help come from?
The answer was swirling about us that Sunday. I could feel it. The presence of the Lord was in the building. Certain He was here for me, having heard my cries, I rose up to meet Him immediately. Everyone else seemed to follow my lead. The music swelled, a chorus came, and Stone Rolled Away erupted as the Spirit issued forth like living water from the stone.
God was in control of everything. That’s what they had told me. Only by His grace had I been whisked away to safety. He knew me in Trinika’s womb and moved me to another life, the one that I was meant to live. He rescued me from darkness. He chose me for a purpose that was yet to be revealed.
But now, I had been tempted to believe in something else, in something awful: that my mother was a thief; that I was a victim of the same sort of passive abduction that took Trinika out of Africa; that justice demanded I cleave unto her, defying God’s will, and my family besides.
The devil was trying to trick me.
This is how he operates. He takes the truth and twists it. The enemy sought to draw me from the path with his deceptions, compelling counterarguments that made it seem like up was down. Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness the same way; he hadn’t changed his tactics in a thousand years. Trinika was summoned to confound me, to mislead me. Consciously, or moved by the Jezebel spirit, she enticed me with the things I wanted most of all: a context for my life, a sense of self, a love that seemed to come without conditions. These were false promises, rooted in false needs. The only love that mattered in the end was the love of God. She wanted me all to herself, when I didn’t belong to her. I was a child of God.
But if He loved me so much, then where was He now, when I needed Him most? Was He waiting for me to have nothing, like Job? I was already broke. The spring semester took what little money I still had; I put enough aside to pay for rent and books and gas, but nothing was left over to buy food. Lately, I ate what my roommate threw out, or my girlfriend provided to keep me from starving. Once, in desperation, I stopped by the Sikh temple, a known demonic hotspot, and accepted the free lunch. It made me so ashamed I called the Captain afterward, begging for five hundred dollars. I promised to pay it all back in the summer.
He said he would give it some thought.
Bankrupt in one sense, I could not afford to be morally bankrupt as well. The enemy would like nothing more than to see me descend into Blackness, I thought, to run to Trinika, go down to the ghetto, and find myself trapped or imprisoned in no time.
I will not be persuaded, I swore to myself. I rebuke this false narrative in the name of Jesus.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding, the worship leader said, quoting Proverbs. That’s what God is telling us this morning: lift up your voices, press into his presence.
He launched into an old hymn, an unlikely song choice that could only have come from divine inspiration. We sang the first verse and the music dropped out, and we went through the chorus, again and again, a cappella:
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art
As a seven-year-old boy, I encountered an angel. Looking back, I remembered my great need to see it. It seemed to me now that the need was far greater. The angel in the tent, the rock upon which I had built my church, was a fading memory, and my faith was fading along with it. God had been absent thereafter, I felt—unless, perhaps, I wasn’t straining hard enough to see Him.
A cacophony of tongues went up, a rarity at Stone Rolled Away. It had to be a sign. This was the moment. I knew that if I did not press in, I would miss my encounter with God. So I lifted my hands and my voice, in a language I’d spoken since childhood but never for a moment understood.
Shattah talimama, shattolio talimama, shattah.
Something was happening. I trembled and staggered. The Spirit was moving within me. I was backsliding into ecstatic belief. My fingertips tingled, and my prayers became more urgent as I fought to keep my balance in the presence of the Lord. Praise God, praise His holy name, I cried out to the heavens. Shattah talimama, shattolio talimama, shattolio talimama, mama, mama, mama, mama.
And suddenly, I started crying for no reason.
The rains fell down and the floods came up, and I was swept away. I lost control completely, whipping back and forth and, finally, slain by the Spirit, I fainted, expecting to land in the arms of an usher.
But no one was standing behind me. My back hit the edge of an old wooden armrest, breaking it off, and I crumpled into a heap, writhing in pain, then denying the damage, and praising the Almighty God like he let me down easy.
When the service got out, I was stopped at the door by my brother. Tom had been told to invite me to brunch. I rejoiced in my soul, believing that this was a brand-new beginning. The Lord had been working on my mother’s heart too. My prayers had been answered. Revival had come to the Mooneys at last.
The Sunday brunch buffet was like a miracle to me. I stood before the banqueting table and filled my plate with macaroni salad, meat, and tater tots until it seemed to sag. I sat with my family, stuffing my face, and relished their company, laughing at old jokes, remembering all of the good times we shared.
But when the cheque came, I reminded them I could not pay, and my mother looked at Mike as if she had just been proven right.
What’s going on? I asked.
Oh nothing, she said. It’s just, when I was your age, I didn’t need to come running to mommy and daddy for money.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t. She paid for the meal and I thanked her.
In the Aerostar, I blamed myself for coming along in my armourlessness. I knew this woman by now. I knew that you had to be strong, and I’d never been weaker. My biggest mistake had been thinking she wanted to see me, when all that she wanted, I thought, was to see herself, standing above me, victorious.
I decided not to ever ask these people for another fucking thing. If I am starving and you don’t want to feed me, you want me to die; and I would rather die, hungry and all by myself, than owe my life to a cold-blooded killer.
I went back to not needing anyone.
* * *
—
On Tuesday, the first day of the fall/winter term, I fired up the Echo, returning to Trinity, feeling remarkably empty. I hadn’t eaten anything since Sunday, but hunger was just a small part of the problem, and easily solved if you’re clever. Before class, I scavenged a day’s worth of food from the school cafeteria, where the campus community used their meal cards as if the balance was imaginary. By exam week, when reality struck and the hunger set in, students with money left over were treated like royalty. But it was still January, so the freshmen left plenty to eat by the garbage.
Stuffing my backpack with half-eaten bagels, I looked around nervously, feeling unusually seen. But nobody stopped me or offered to buy me breakfast.
The morning began with American Literature. I didn’t expect to learn anything new. I’d taken it as an undergrad at UCFV, and I signed up for the graduate course in a bid to cut down on my overall reading load. Sure enough, most of the works were the same: Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises—the Black book this time was Beloved. (What was it last time? Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was an optional book, so I skipped it.) But master’s level students were assigned a bunch of extra works, by authors that I didn’t know, and all of them were Black: Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin.
It strikes me now that I might never have discovered these cardinal writers if I hadn’t paid extra to upgrade to Premium English. These were the voices I needed the most, and all of my life they were deemed inessential, exactly as I was, just something to chew on, additional reading you don’t have to look at to pass. Instead, a general education consists primarily of what white people believe is important, which is a way of rigging the world, and an education undermined completely.
White people have no idea what’s important.
I started with the shortest work. The Fire Next Time was just a couple of essays. My afternoon free, I went down to the library basement and set up in a corner carrel, beneath a light that flickered, to see what the James Baldwin book was about.
The book, I discovered, was all about me.
The first part was a letter to his nephew, who was fifteen. He warned the boy to not believe what the white world said about him. I tell you this because I love you, he wrote, and please don’t you ever forget it. Touched by the sentence, I thought of myself at fifteen, in my clown suit, aching to be loved and led away from limitation, and what I would have given for a message from an uncle who was wise enough to know what I was in for.
But this was the first time, apart from pleasantries with Prophet K a decade earlier, that I had ever heard a Black man speak to me. In my heart, in my need, I became the receiver, rehoming myself, hearing family.
I am writing this letter to you, he said to the boy who was me now, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist.
Hearing him speak of existence, I paused. How had he known about that? Either James Baldwin’s been reading my blog or the feeling is more universal, I thought, and that’s when I started to trust what he’d written, thereafter to know that this man spoke the truth.
Out with it, then.
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were Black and for no other reason, he said.
And I groaned at the pivotal fact of my life, as it echoed a joke I’d been telling since Bible camp—it’s because I’m Black, isn’t it?—a joke that now felt as relentlessly cruel as I found it relentlessly true.
Surely it must be more complicated. Lives are complex. We are not all the same. This man doesn’t know me, I bristled, disagreeing desperately—his life has been nothing like mine. He grew up in Harlem, in the ghetto, in poverty. I grew up in Abbotsford, medium-wealthy.
