The Lowest Heaven

THE COMET’S TALE ^{MATT JONES}

No one had heard of our dumb ass town before the comet came. Afterwards, the whole world knew the name Meridian. Those of us who called it home would come to wish they hadn’t, and no one more than me.

They say Meridian is the sixth biggest city in Mississippi, but before you go getting all impressed, take a look at the competition. Exactly. If you ask me, calling Meridian a city is giving it airs and graces it has no business putting on. Main Street may boast a dozen stores, but the smaller streets that run parallel to it and the railway track have never filled all their plots. There’s a movie theater, a library and a lot of bars, none that a woman with half her senses would venture in alone. There’s the stone Municipal Building that must’ve been built in a grander age. Opposite that is a prefab office where Meridian’s six Democrats eat pizza and talk about how they’re gonna bring Reagan down.

But for a couple of weeks, during an otherwise uneventful spring in ‘86, Meridian was packed with reporters and cameramen, and you couldn’t get a room at the motel or even rent a spare bedroom, not for love nor money. And everyone was talking about the comet and the thirty-six people that lost their lives on account of it. One of the dead was Jordan Danes. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone as much as I loved him.

He was seventeen when he died, two years older than me. He’d been held back twice, so we could’ve shared some classes but we didn’t. He’d been in so much trouble that half the teachers wouldn’t have him in their class. As far as I could make out, he did double Shop and not a lot else◦– not that I had memorized his whole schedule or nothing.

Jordan would disappear from school for weeks, there were always talk as to why◦– mostly people decided that he was in juvenile detention or had overdosed. People were always talking about Jordan Danes. I’d never spoken a single word to him, although I’d imagined whole conversations, so you can guess how relieved I was when he’d show up, I guess just to prove to the world that he wasn’t dead or in jail.

He’d done another of his disappearing acts that winter. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of months until I spied him on Main Street with the flying saucer people, looking a little sheepish and holding a placard that said “THE ASCENSION IS NEAR”.

Just seeing him made my stomach drop like a bowling ball. You’re wondering if I’m a fag, right? I’m gay. There. I said it. I don’t go around telling folk, obviously. Meridian isn’t New York City. There was a guy working at the movie theatre. He let slip to his boss that he was moving in with his boyfriend and got fired on the spot. Two days later someone painted “AIDS SCUM” on his door. Last I heard he was making a living as a female impersonator down in New Orleans.

So, no, I don’t go around telling folk.

Jordan saw me coming and surprised me by calling out my name. I had no idea he knew who I was, or that I’d made the tiniest impression on his life. I acted all nonchalant, told him I hadn’t seen him in school, but all the while I was sneaking looks at him, just soaking him up.

“They made it clear that I wasn’t welcome,” he said. “Some shit went missing from the A/V closet,” he shrugged, and looked away with what might have been regret.

Jordan was mixed-race◦– black, white and maybe something else, something exotic like South American or Egyptian. Tall and lean, but shy of lanky. His skin was the color of caramel and flawless, his hair was black and curly, but loose, like it didn’t have the will to wind itself up into an Afro, and so it hung down to his shoulders in corkscrew curls. He was beautiful alright, big brown doe eyes and sculpted lips, the lower one a pale rose pink. Beautiful and troubled boys◦– I still got no defense against them.

“You gonna come or what?” he asked.

I blushed, thinking he had caught me looking at him, before I realized he was holding out a leaflet.

“Huh?” It was cheaply printed, black ink on blue paper. There was a photograph of a flying saucer. Not a real one obviously. I’m not a total dick. It was from one of those 1950s films, that always look like the color’s been turned up too high, and where the sexy space aliens look like those women from the B-52s.

The leaflet read “PREPARE TO ASCEND”. It told me that there was a meeting tonight for anyone who was ready for “the trip of lifetime”.

“Are you gonna be there?” I asked, before kicking myself for how desperate that made me sound.

Jordan chuckled, and for a second I was sure he’d seen straight through me, then he looked a little sad and shrugged.

“It ain’t like I’ve anyplace else to be,” he said.

“How dumb are you?” My father yelled and waved the leaflet in my face. “Those folk are as crazy as snakes and twice as dangerous.”

Well, at least now I knew for sure that he was going through my things. I wouldn’t be hanging my jacket in the hall again anytime soon.

“Are you done?” I said, recklessly.

“No, I am not done. I will tell you when I am done. And get your hand off your hip,” he said and slapped my arm loose, “What kind of boy are you?”

“Tom!” My mom interjected.

I felt hot shame sting my face. Shame for what my father thought of me, and for my mother’s need to protect me from it. I stalked off to my room not saying another word, and laid low for a couple of hours.

My father and I hadn’t seen eye to eye since, well, since I could walk and talk. You don’t have to wear gold eye shadow for your Pa to know you’re never gonna be a quarterback. And as much as I act like I don’t give a twirly fuck what he thinks about me, it ain’t always easy to live with that look of disappointment on your father’s face.

I waited til I heard the opening music to “Highway to Heaven”, the only TV show my Pa said was worth giving the time of day and snuck out the front door with my sneakers in my hands.

The meeting was in an old plantation house on the outskirts of town. It’d been converted into a luxury holiday home◦– the Flying Saucer People were clearly living in style. I rode out on my bike, abandoning it amongst the wisteria that hung from the trees and veranda. The sun had only just set and the front yard was still warm and full of the noise of crickets and the heavy sweet scent of gardenia. There was the sound of a party coming from the back yard and I followed the veranda around. There were forty or fifty there, more than I had thought, but they were exactly the kind of oddballs, lonely and lost you’d expect.

Jordan was in charge of a small trestle table of refreshments. He’d tied his curls back into a ponytail, and was wearing dungarees that made him look like he was what my grandma would’ve called “slow”. For a horrible moment, he looked like he belonged among the all the other sideshow freaks of Meridian life.

Then he caught sight of me, grinned and waved me over. His smile lit me up like a toy turned on for the first time◦– blazing into action, lights flashing, motor whirring. My heart pounded. A bead of cold sweat was making its way down past the small of my back by the time I got over to him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hay’s for horses, ass-bite,” I squeaked in a high voice I didn’t recognize. Could I have sounded more like a moron?

“They got me serving juice,” he said, and then lent in conspiratorially, “but I can modify yours.”

He tugged a flask of whiskey from the inside of his pants.

“I’m good,” I said and took a sip of juice. My folks don’t allow alcohol in the house and the unpopular girls I hang out with don’t go near it. Hooch ain’t so big in Bible Study. While I was pretty sure I wouldn’t go crazy after one glass, uninhibited was the last thing I could risk feeling around Jordan Danes.

Someone called the meeting to a start. Jordan touched my arm as he guided me over towards a makeshift stage in the back yard, where a well-dressed couple was preparing to address the human detritus. The warmth of his hand left an impression long after it was gone. I could feel the memory of his fingertips against my skin.

Carlton Ray and his wife didn’t look like UFO freaks, more like TV evangelists, but they sure knew how to work a crowd. He was maybe fifty, with broad shoulders and a wry smile that somehow made you feel he knew what you were thinking. His wife was an off the shelf Southern Belle, with a huge, immobile hairdo and shoulder pads that made her as broad as her husband. She glowed with confidence and a salon tan.

“You may be wondering why you’re here,” Carlton Ray announced to the weirdoes, who inched forward, anxious for the answer. “Well I ain’t gonna make your life easy for you and tell you. I want you to search deep inside yourself for the answer to that question. Why aren’t you out in the world◦– living, loving, succeeding? Why is it you feel you fit no place at all?”

Carlton turned his attention to me, “you got an answer for me, son?”

I was so surprised by him addressing me directly I froze and looked away.

“You think you’re out of step with the world? Well I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong, it’s the world that’s lost its footing and lost its way. The solution is not in the size of your paycheck or the car you drive. A few of you are wise souls, sensitive enough to know this◦– and that is why you’re here.

“What can we do? How do we turn back the tide and get the human race back on course? I have bad news for you. We can’t. There is no hope for them. They have de-evolved into selfishness and selfism.

“But there is help for us. You are here because you are still on the true path. You are still evolving. I have good news. Those of us still alive to generosity of spirit, those of us desiring a simple, unselfish connection to another person have a way out.”

He looked to the heavens. “Above us a comet is heading towards the Earth. A thousand tons of stone, a three hundred mile cloud of dust and ice in its wake. Zooming past the Earth to be flung around the sun and back out into the farthest recesses of the solar system. But hidden in the comet’s tail is our way out. A space ship is there, avoiding detection from NASA and the CIA. Slipping into the solar system without any scientist or politician being any the wiser. As I speak to you, Zedekiah is piloting his ship, dodging the chunks of rock and glaciers of ice that break away from the comet. He’s travelled light years. He’s coming. He’s coming for us.”

I had to stop myself from laughing. The idea of a spaceman playing Asteroids in a comet’s tail was so much bullshit. I smirked and turned to Jordan to make a joke, expecting to see my expression reflected on his face, but he was staring at the night sky, tears in the corners of his perfect brown eyes.

Afterwards, we retreated to a peeling white swing chair on the veranda, which creaked ominously beneath our weight. I leant forward and blocked Jordan from view as he rolled a joint on the sly. He palmed it like a conjurer when Carlton and his wife came over, and winked conspiratorially at me.

“Evening Jordan, I see you’ve found yourself a friend.”

Jordan introduced me and I shook Carlton’s large, warm hand. He had a grip like a vice.

“Good to meet you son,” he said, and looked me right in the eye, “Are you ready for the ascension?”

“No sir.”

“Oh, and why is that?”

“Well to start with, Halley’s Comet may travel at one hundred and fifty thousand miles per hour, but it still takes seventy-six years to orbit the sun. Your friend Zebedee is going be very old or very dead by the time he gets here.”

Carlton just laughed. “Well, we have a real live wire here, don’t we?”

“Just saying,” I shrugged ungraciously.

Carlton ruffled my hair like I was a Shih Tzu. “Well you don’t seem to find any hardship fitting in on Planet Earth, no need for Jordan here to save you a place next to him on Zedekiah’s ship.”

“No sir,” I said, feeling an inexplicable pang of loss. If there was a seat next to Jordan, I wanted to be sitting in it, even if it and the flying saucer it were attached to were so much baloney.

Carlton’s wife was staring at me with none of her husband’s bonhomie. “Your folks know where you are, son?” she asked, scrutinizing me. She didn’t wait for an answer but instead turned to Carlton, not bothering to lower her voice.

“He’s underage. We don’t need that kind of trouble.”

Before Carlton Ray could respond, a woman rushed into the garden, dragging two bewildered kids in her wake. She charged up to an apple-shaped loser with a comb over who’d been busy chatting up a middle-aged woman with saggy breasts and a disappointed frown.

“Randall!” The new arrival yelled. “Randall, look at me, I’m talking to you.” The man with the comb over didn’t even turn to her, like he was stone deaf.

The angry woman had dyed blonde hair that hadn’t been done in a good while. There were dark circles under her eyes.

“You emptied the checking account. How am I supposed to pay the rent? How am I supposed to put a roof over our children’s heads? You tell me that?”

Randall was putting on a great show of being invisible, but the way he stiffened up told anyone looking that he knew she was there alright.

“Look at me! Will you look at me? I’m standing right beside you!”

Carlton Ray and his wife made a beeline for the woman. She got so agitated on seeing them that the frowning woman had to restrain her.

“You stole all our money!” Randall’s wife screamed at Carlton Ray.

If he was surprised in the slightest by her accusation he didn’t show it.

“How am I supposed to feed my kids?” The anger went out of her. She staggered and almost fell, sobbing hopelessly.

I felt just dreadful for her. I turned to Jordan. He wasn’t paying the scene any attention, but it was taking some effort.

“Happens a lot,” he said eventually and lit the doobie. He took a toke and exhaled discreetly into the darkness.

“You really believe you’re gonna go hitch a ride on a meteor and go bouncing around the satellites?”

He shrugged, “Stranger things have happened.”

When? I thought but didn’t say. “What do your folks think about it?”

“Not a lot. They left.”

“What do you mean, ‘left’?”

He took another long, sorrowful toke on the joint. “I came home. I’d been away a few days. They’d moved out of the trailer. Handed back the keys. No address. No note. Nothing.”

Jordon had been living at the plantation house for a few weeks. He had a tiny room up in the eaves that had once been a child’s. Jordon was so tall he had to crook his neck to walk from the door to the bed. The peeling wallpaper of trains and airplanes made him look younger and vulnerable, and reminded me that he didn’t have a home no more. I wanted to put my arm around him. I wanted it more than I’d wanted anything in my life.

I was already crazy late; if my folks had looked in on me and found me missing, there’d be an All Points Bulletin out by now, but somehow I couldn’t leave. I was paralyzed by lust, pure and simple. I knew I was going to sit there until Jordan or someone else threw me out.

Jordan was really stoned, sweaty, singing along to records of English bands I’d never heard of. He stripped down to his shorts. His torso was long and slim and perfect◦– tight pecs and a hard ridge of abdominal muscles. A line of fuzzy black hair escaped the front of his shorts, ran up to his belly button and made my throat dry.

He caught me looking at him.

“What are you up to?” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was amused or not.

“Nothing!”

“You like girls?”

“Course,” I lied.

“Yeah? What you like ‘bout ‘em?”

“What do you mean ‘What do I like about them?’ Like physically?”

He sat down on the bed next to me. His bare knee touched my jeans.

“Yes, like physically. What you like?”

“Er, I like girls’… asses, I guess.”

“Do you indeed?”

“I do.”

“What do you like about girls’ asses, little boy?”

“Well I guess I like ‘em because they’re… round.”

Jordan looked at me right in the eye, and then he burst out laughing. He was laughing all over.

“You’re a caution, boy!” He said, “and as cute as puppies.”

I sat there feeling exposed, confused, hopeful and covering the rock hard boner tenting in my pants.

I replayed that night in my head a million times. What did he mean by “cute”? Like a little kid? Or maybe, just maybe, cute like, you know, he liked me.

After that night I spent all my free time at the plantation house, or the “Departure Lounge” as Carlton Ray had grandly renamed it. I told my folks I was doing an extra credit assignment on the history of Meridian. I stopped by the library everyday and swapped unread books to leave around the house to throw my Pa off the scent. He was barely speaking to me. Truth was he could hardly bear to look at me. Not that I cared. All that mattered was Jordan and the evenings I spent in his tiny room.

Three days before the comet was due, Jordan was lying next to me on his single bed.

“What are you gonna do after I’m gone?” he asked.

I had spent ten minutes maneuvering my arm so it could flop casually over his. I ran my fingers along his forearm. There were a series of small parallel scars there. I wasn’t a fool, I knew what they were. He noticed me looking and batted my hand away. Some days he would let me touch him, others I just made him pissed. It usually depended on how much he’d drunk and smoked.

“I asked you a question.”

Truth was I didn’t like to think about it. I didn’t believe that Zedekiah was parking up above us, but right now I had Jordan all to myself. Or as much of him as he would ever allow me to have. Who knows what would happen after the comet came and went?

“Dunno. Maybe I’ll come.”

Jordan lifted himself up onto his elbow and looked down at me.

“You serious?”

“Ain’t got much keeping me here.”

Jordan looked troubled. “Look, you can’t tell no one, but I heard Carlton and his misses shouting up a storm. Carlton said we’re going to have to leave our Earthly bodies behind.”

“Like astral projection?” I asked.

I had spent an unsuccessful afternoon trying to spirit walk after reading about it in The Encyclopedia of The Unexplained◦– a book I sent away for from the back pages of the Enquirer and had treasured until my father found it and threw it out, to prevent me from “filling my head with nonsense.”

“What on God’s Earth is astral projection?” Jordan laughed, “Sometimes you don’t make a lick of sense.”

I hated it when he didn’t take me seriously, when he acted like I was more than just two years his junior.

“I just wanna go wherever you’re going,” I said. I had meant it as a bold declaration of love, but it popped out like a babyish whine.

Jordan looked pissed for a moment. I swallowed uncomfortably. The temperature in the little attic changed. He got up and went and sat by the window, sparking up his half smoked joint.

“You should get out of here,” he said, his voice cold. “Your mama’ll be missing you for dinner.”

Three days later Carlton Ray told us exactly how we were going to travel to the comet. Seven people walked out of plantation house that day and never came back. I wasn’t one of them.

Jordan was barely speaking to me. I was more a member of the group than I had ever been, but I had lost my place as his buddy. He kept to himself, running errands for Carlton Ray without complaint. When I tried to hang out with him, he’d be polite and all, but he disappeared first chance he got, leaving me feeling about as welcome as a bad smell.

The Departure Lounge was quiet on the Day of the Ascension. Three more people had left since Carlton Ray’s announcement. Thirty-seven of us would ascend to Zedekiah’s ship. Some people sat quietly and prayed. The woman with the frown◦– her name was Julie and she had joined the group by walking out on a boyfriend that beat on her◦– sat and cried quietly all day. Carlton’s wife paced in the garden and chain-smoked.

Only Carlton Ray himself seemed full of energy. He ordered everyone to stay in the house. Zedekiah would need us to stay in close proximity to each other to pick up our Evolved Vibrations. At about noon, Carlton disappeared into a shed out on the grounds and returned a few minutes later, heaving an industrial can of glyphosate weed killer. It sloshed thickly, like syrup.

Jordan was entrusted to make a trip to the local store and buy orange juice and a pack of Dixie Cups. He asked if he could take me with him. It was the first time he had used my name in days, but Carlton told him I could not be spared. Zedekiah required my presence for navigation purposes.

When he came back with the juice, Jordan was slurring slightly. There was a bottle-shaped bulge in his pant’s pocket and his hair smelt of weed.

We watched in absolute silence as Carlton Ray poured a slug of weed killer into each cup of juice. I took mine and followed the others out in the garden.

Carlton toasted the sky. “Zedekiah awaits us! Let’s leave these de-evolved bodies and let our souls be airlifted to the comet.”

Some people were shaking. Randall, the man with the belly and the comb over slid to his knees, still clutching the cup in front of him. Next to me, Carlton’s wife was staring at her drink and shaking her head from side to side.

All I could do was stare at the red cup in Jordan’s hand, knowing with total certainty that if he drank his, I would drink mine.

As Jordan raised his cup to his mouth, Carlton’s wife screamed and threw her cup across the garden, knocking mine from my hand.

“I won’t do it, Carlton, I won’t!”

Carlton Ray gripped her arms. She was frozen, staring so hard at the ground that he had to crouch a little to get the trembling woman to see him.

“Baby doll, don’t you trust me? Don’t you trust your Carly Ray? Look at me. We are going to fly away from this doomed world and find a new life.”

She didn’t answer him. She couldn’t look at him.

“Don’t you love me?” he asked. He cupped her face in his hand and made her look him in the eye.

“Of course I do.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you,” she said, eventually.

Carlton Ray offered her his cup. “Then trust me now, trust me in this.”

She stared at the cup for a moment and then took it with calmer hands.

“We are going to be together forever,” he reassured her, kissing her softly on the cheek.

He then turned to Jordon and told him to go prepare two more cups of Ascension juice. Jordan took the glyphosate into the house. While he was gone, Carlton insisted we all lay down in readiness and regaled us about the interstellar adventure that lay ahead of us.

The last thing I saw was Jordan’s face as he handed me a fresh cup of juice. For a second, as his head blocked out the sky above me, he gave the tiniest shrug and then he slugged down his drink and lay down beside me.

I drank down my juice in one. It tasted thick and metallic. I thought I might hurl, but I kept it down. I lay back on the lawn. The soft grass tickled my neck. I slipped my hand into Jordan’s. He surprised me by holding mine tightly in return.

Around me people started to moan in pain. It hadn’t occurred to me that the ascension might hurt. Jordan made a noise in his throat, his hand started to spasm violently in mine. But even as I started to panic, I felt my body start to relax, and then I didn’t remember anything else.

“Son? Son, can you hear me?”

Someone gripped my arm and shook me.

“He’s breathing. Get me some oxygen. Bob! Oxygen! Now!”

Something cold clamped down on my face and stale, dusty air billowed into my lungs. I lurched up on my side and coughed my guts up.

It was night. A bright clear moon illuminated the garden. There were electrical lights on stands. A few bodies were in black body bags, most were covered by blankets and sheets.

Jordan’s hand was no longer in mine. A body was next to me, covered in a blanket. I recognized Jordan’s sneakers sticking out from under the end of it. I tried to get up, to pull the blanket from him, but the paramedic held on to me, pulling me tight against his stiff windbreaker, telling me over and over that I was going to be alright, but I knew I wasn’t.

“I was supposed to go,” I yelled, “I was supposed to go with them.”

I looked up at the night sky, desperately searching for him. But if there was a comet with a tail amongst the stars, I couldn’t find it.

I was still crying when my Pa came. They’d told him that I had survived, but he still ran up to me, tears in his eyes, and held onto me.

“I could’ve lost you,” he kept repeating. “I could’ve lost you.”

There was orange juice and a whole heap of whiskey in my stomach, but nothing else. No trace of weed killer. Jordan had never believed that he was going anyplace but the grave. It took my father to explain to me that Jordan hadn’t abandoned me◦– he had saved me.

I was the only person to attend his funeral. Just me and an elderly preacher, with barnacle skin and a mean-ass spirit.

“Some people don’t the sense they were born with,” he muttered as we stood by the grave.

“No, he knew what he was doing.”

“Then he committed a mortal sin,” the preacher said.

“Jordan didn’t do nothing wrong,” I told him. “He stayed as long as he could.”