Angelhead by Greg Bottoms Page B

in any rush to take him to doctors, even though he'd watched his own mother temporarily lose her mind years earlier. We all assumed—me, my parents, teachers—that it was another loss, albeit a graphic and uniquely strange loss, to the perils of teen drug abuse.

    One day the world turned white for Michael. Each object—door, floor, table, human—was wrung dry of all its meaning and he was left floating in a stark nothingness. It was his second severe psychotic break that I witnessed, and it happened during one of the last days of school. He was getting ready to graduate with almost straight Cs and Ds (a gift from his teachers at the insistence of the administration).
    It was after lunch, your basic midweek school day—lockers slamming, bits of conversation and gossip drifting through hallways. Michael had just left his remedial math class, where he had realized that the teachings of Jesus were encoded in numbers. He knew His spirit was everywhere, in everything, but he had never considered numbers, never considered looking at the small things, at ideas. It was all bits and pieces, fragments, and no one had told him about the importance of numbers. It was everywhere in the Bible. How could he have missed it? He began to feel a horrible sadness at the fact that he didn’t understand math, had never paid attention to it, and now, today, he realized that Jesus Christ, our Savior, our coming Lord, was also contained in numbers and theorems.
    Michael floated through the halls in a state of confusion. Faces hovered past like images of faces hovering past, flat and inhuman. The yellow lockers stretched toward the single window at the end of the hall that was now filled with concrete-colored sky.
    And then there he was: Jesus Christ, the real guy, the giver of life, the forgiver of sins, the breaker of bread and maker of wine, standing at the end of the hall, suffused in white light, as if in a picture, his hands raised and bloody, a deep wound wet and glistening in his side, a crown of thorns on his head. It was the Christ we’ve all seen in paintings, except for two modern affectations: a pair of black Levi’s 501 jeans and black combat boots.
    Michael began speaking in tongues.
    Ssshhhaaaaammmmmaaaaaaallaaaaabok.
    Kids turned, looked, laughed.
    He bumped into the flat, lifeless people—
hey, hey
—walking, then running down the hall.
    But then Jesus disappeared, and Michael knew it was because he had failed him, failed Christ, failed God, by being so lazy, by failing to learn what needed to be learned. He looked up at the numbers above doorways. They crushed him with their secrets. They whispered. The numbers were real. If he just concentrated on the numbers he'd be okay, he'd find Christ again; he'd learn about numbers, the curves, the lines, what they meant, how they related to things.
    He saw the number 16. It was magical, important, a last tether—he began to cry.
    Michael stood in front of room 16, tears streaming hot down his face, dripping off his chin and landing on the floor. He made squeaking noises; snot bubbled out of his nose; he punched himself in the face, hard, screamed. How could he have missed this?
    Kids began to gather around him. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . . a crowd.
    The hissing was soft, distant. Whispers behind a wall. Snakes behind the glass. Voices in distant regions of his skull. He heard the tears squeeze out of his eyes.
    He walked into room 16, sat down among the students, an advanced placement history class. Even though he was crying, he was happy, too, in a way, because now he knew what he had to learn. He started laughing. He was laughing and crying, but he was mostly sad, but then sometimes when he was really sad he couldn’t help but laugh at how sad he was. He put his greasy bangs in his mouth and chewed them, sniffling.
    Everyone stared silently—at Michael, at each other. He began shaking the desk, tilting it up on two legs.
    Miss Smythe,