Brian Gifford
Tommy Frazier had spent the better part of the 1980s fearing his life on earth would end abruptly one way or the other. So when the electricity went out in the Frazier’s home on a hot summer day adorned by a bright cloudless sky, the only rational explanation twelve-year old Tommy could think of was that a nuclear electromagnetic pulse had fried the power grid. He raced to the basement to escape the coming inferno, calling out to his mother and brother to follow him.
“What in the blazes are you doing?” his mother called down the steps.
“It’s The Day After,” he yelled up at her.
“What?”
“The movie. Nuclear war.”
Tommy had positioned himself underneath the pool table to which his family fled whenever there was a tornado warning. His fifteen-year old brother, Phil, came down to the basement. Phil was both astute and profane. “Jesus Christ, if it was a nuclear bomb, you would have kissed your ass goodbye already,” he said, Guns N’ Roses’ Paradise City blaring from the battery-operated boombox he carried on his shoulder.
“Phiiil! Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” their mother yelled from the top of the steps. “And turn that noise down.”
A half hour later the boys’ father arrived home from work and said he heard on the radio that the power was out because a car had hit a utility pole over on Parklake Drive. It was only then that Tommy came out from underneath the pool table. “Tommy,” his mother said when he came back upstairs, “you know we’ll be raptured before the bombs start flying.”
Although she probably should have, Ellen Frazier had never regretted letting little Tommy watch The Day After. Because it was after seeing that movie that Tommy had gotten saved, had gotten down on his knees with his mother there beside him and asked Jesus to forgive his sins and come into his heart. And if you were saved, you would be air-lifted out of the burning ash heap of earth to meet Jesus in the air. This was known as the Rapture. Those who believed in the Rapture could be broken down into three camps. You had your Pre-Tribulationists, who believed the saved would be raptured before the real suffering started, you had your Post-Tribulationists, who believed the saved would suffer the whole time right along with everyone else, and then you had your Mid-Tribulationists, who split the difference. Like all good Southern Baptists, Ellen Frazier was firmly in the camp of the Pre-Tribulationists. She and hers would not suffer; they would wait the Tribulation out in heaven until it was time for Christ to return to Earth and begin his thousand year reign. And Ellen also believed in eternal salvation, or once saved always saved. So even Phil, who was backslidden but saved, would not be left behind.
Tommy feared the Rapture almost as much as he feared the Bomb, because the Rapture would mean missing out on the good things of this life that he had not yet experienced. He knew it was sacrilegious to think this, but he couldn’t help it. One of the things he was afraid to miss out on was kissing girls. In a book he found in the teen section of the public library, which he read while standing in the stacks because he couldn’t dare bring it home, the main character, Robbie, slow danced with a girl named Rhonda, his hands on her hips, and hers on his shoulders; swaying to Journey’s Open Arms, Robbie could feel the heat coming off Rhonda, and then she put her hands on his face and slid her tongue into his mouth . . . and as Tommy read this he hoped the Rapture was many years away, not soon, as predicted by another book he was reading—one he spent a lot of time debunking—entitled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be In 1988.
The way his mother talked sometimes, the only thing that seemed to matter was being saved and the only thing worth looking forward to was the Rapture. But one Saturday, Tommy went with his mother as she drove the church bus around a new neighborhood to ask parents if their children would like to ride the bus to Sunday School, and at one house a woman cracked the door open and asked through the aperture “Are you religious?”
“No,” said Tommy’s mother. “We’re Southern Baptists. It’s not a religion. We just love Jesus, and we’re here to see if you have any children who would like to ride the bus to church.”
The woman behind the door stiffened like a cadaver over which a white sheet had been draped. She said she thought Southern Baptist was a religion . . . but it didn’t matter anyway why they had come; she had no one to send to church on the bus because her only child, Melissa, age twelve, had died from brain cancer last month. “How could a loving God let that happen?” the woman asked. “She was so beautiful.”
Tommy’s mother invited herself into the house, and they went in and his mother held the woman’s hands in hers and said “I’m so sorry” over and over again as though Melissa’s death were her own fault, and then she said “I understand why you would be mad at God,” and his mother didn’t pray or mention the Rapture or ask the woman whether she was saved or whether Melissa had been. “Tommy here is Melissa’s age, and I can’t fathom what you’re going through,” his mother said. The woman’s visage softened then, and she began sobbing, melting into the arms of his mother, who locked eyes with Tommy and whispered to him over the woman’s shoulder that “everything will be alright,” and Tommy, a witness to his mother’s mere humanity, her kindness and compassion untrammeled by religious belief, didn’t even think about himself, but thought only of Melissa, feeling bad about all the beautiful things she would never experience.
Melissa’s mother sat down on the couch, took a photo album from out of the coffee table and invited Tommy and his mom to set down on each side of her. They did, and she showed them photos of Melissa from the time she was a baby up to just before the time she was diagnosed with cancer. “I always want to remember her this way,” her mother said. “Is that too much to ask?”
That night Tommy had a dream in which he was sitting beside Melissa in her bedroom, holding her hand, about to teach her how to French kiss based on what he had read in the book, when they heard the sound of trumpets coming from the sky and, with a force that nearly broke his neck, he began flying up into the air, and he looked down to see Melissa still sitting there on the bed, and Tommy screamed “Nooo!” and in an instant he was back on the bed beside Melissa, both of them left behind, and Tommy woke up with a start and ran to his mom and dad’s bedroom to make sure they were still there.
Ever alert for trouble, Tommy’s mother woke up. “What is it?” she asked.
“I had a bad dream.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Tommy did not, and his mother let it be. He went to the couch and tried to fall asleep while watching television, but was kept up by a rerun of the original Planet of the Apes movie, in which human civilization had been destroyed by nuclear war and the apes had evolved and taken over. He finally fell asleep to reruns of Happy Days. Then an ape on horseback was chasing Tommy but, realizing it was a dream, he woke himself up.
At church the next morning, the pastor preached from Second Timothy, where the Apostle Paul wrote: “From now on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearance.” During the altar call, as the congregation sang Just as I Am, and as the pastor implored the unsaved to ask Jesus into their hearts, and the backslidden to rededicate themselves to the Lord, Tommy white-knuckled the pew in front of him, feeling the urge to go forward but, longing for the things of this world, stayed put.
On Sunday night, Tommy’s mother was driving the church bus and the trumpets started blaring, and he saw her look up in the rearview mirror at the young people, some of whom were unsaved, and, his mother, unwilling to leave the bus driverless, mouthed the words “don’t take me” and kept driving while the saved children started disappearing, and Tommy, realizing it was a dream, yelled “don’t take me either,” and he was left behind. This was the beginning of the end of his fear of the Rapture. Through dreams, Tommy took control of his life. It was only when he decided he could say no to being raptured, that he stopped fearing it.
His fear of the bomb took longer to get over. It finally happened a year later, after a social studies class in eighth grade, when Mr. Ives, going off script, taught them about the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which posits that the nuclear powers, knowing any launch of nuclear missles would be met with a devastating response, would not engage in a first strike. The doctrine of MAD became like religious dogma to Tommy, as central to his belief system as the Rapture was to his mother’s. He began to lull himself to sleep with thoughts of MAD. In his lucid dreams, in an uninterrupted fashion, he caused summer to turn to fall, and fall to winter, and winter to spring, and spring back to summer, and so on and so on for a thousand years, and, over and over again boys and girls had their first real kisses, and no children died of cancer or anything else, and there was no need for a Rapture, and no Tribulation or any other trouble, but only peace on Earth. He didn’t think all that was too much to ask.
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BRIAN GIFFORD’S short fiction has appeared in Agape Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, BULL, Does It Have Pockets?, Freedom Fiction Journal, andthe Muleskinner Journal, which nominated his short story “So Long as They Both Shall Live” for a Pushcart Prize.
Union Spring Literary Review 