Awesome wonder
When I, in awesome wonder
Consider all
The worlds Thy hands have made
Jahseh has the entire tape fully graven to the core of his memory, from stem to stem. The three prefacing seconds unintentionally zoomed, so the grainy images are twice over distorted. Coarse and sandy. And then the headlong push and pull. You get this sweeping tide of a thousand fireflies suspended in the twilight of a midsummer's evening, but in daunting truth rather the hundreds of poised candlesticks, aglow and alive with the atmosphere of that strip. Yes, the entire strip ablaze with the smouldering ginger of grief. The undiluted hellfire of grief.
I see the stars
I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout
The universe displayed
The eery pan from left to right, as if to smear his face in the magnitude of it. Every few seconds one flare splits into two, and then three, and then four. The focus dials, un-dials, redials. Blithely striving for an image the tacky camcorder is feeble to capture. Trembling hands heed the frame. Shadows become silhouettes, silhouettes become faces. The darkness becomes a street, the street becomes a sullied phantom of a place he once called home. The crowd become a people, the people become a tetrastich harmony. One voice threading itself without dissent to the next.
There's a real heft to a fusion like that. Not a choir to lead them, yet one voice, one house. A thousand chambers to one broken heart. Heads bowed, candles steadied, as the mahogany woven casket floats amidst them like a ship at sea, destined for the darkest depths of its bed.
Then sings my soul
My saviour God to Thee
How great thou art
How great thou art
They breathe life into that song as they sing it, that blasted song. Jahseh is sure it takes the most fazing of forms in his head, strums the iron bars of his caged heart like the silken strings of a guitar. The humbling taunt of a song. Jahseh could stare through the gaping barrel of a gun with the grit of a mountain, immovable spunk. But that song, those voices, can come hell and the highest of waters bring him crumbling to his very knees, every blessed time. It haunts himâas he sleeps, as he wakes, as he breathes. The monster beneath his bed, the skeleton in his closet.
Jahseh knows it will always haunt him, just never as unyieldingly as the sobs to follow.
In an uproar of harmonies and sorrowful weeping, one sob racks him naked, to the literal fabric of his core. A cry that he daily prays had rendered him deaf. That curdles his blood and erects unsparingly the hairs along the back of his neck. Because despite the gravelly pictures that grate along the hundred inch screen and the measly projector clear in its definition of that mahogany casket and that alone, Jahseh knows that cry and he knows who cries it. He knows that cry like he knows his own name, he knows the blinding anguish it bears like he knows himself.
Yet every blue moon, onset by a lapse in his uncaring pretence or a reminder that he isn't at all a quarter let alone half the man the world takes him for, he binds himself to one of the six chairs in that room to run the wretched tape till it's ragged. It's deeper than self-harm. And although he feels as it kills him slowly, Jahseh is convinced it is in the same fell swoop the only thing keeping him alive.
So he sits, destroyed, and lets it.
And when I think
That God, His Son not sparing
Sent Him to die
I scarce can take it in
That on the cross
My burden gladly bearing
He bled and died
To take away my sin
"Jahseh! Jah!"
It's paralysing. His limbs become one with the plush cushion that seats him, his skin infuses with its fibres and his being itself bleeds right into it. Jahseh can feel it. That, if anything. He cannot move, not even at the frantic hollering of his own name. Even at the hysteria in it. His debility exceeds debility.
He doesn't hear the door to the room open when it does, nor the thunder to each step as they draw nearer. In fact, it isn't until Sullivan is soldiered before him, looming shadow and chestful breaths, that Jahseh realises he is no longer alone. Sullivan, stoic, stares at his brother. His attempts at calm are past pathetic, as he teeters over to inspect the daze to his glare. "What's wrong with you? What happened?"
Jahseh searches for words his mind has yet to form. All that lingers at the tip of his tongue are the doting lyrics to the ballad that fills the room. He stares through Sullivan like he has all the lucency of a plastic bag. It makes Sullivan sick to his stomach.
"Jah, what'd you take?"
Jahseh squeezes his eyes shut.
Sullivan scours the area about him, all beady-eyed and such. Then he uprights himself, and is begrudgingly slow to 180 towards the wall-worth of screen behind him.
Then sings my soul
My Saviour God to Thee
How great thou art
How great thou art
Slowly but surely, Sullivan's suspicions fall slack, as does the rod that stiffs his shoulders square. He untwines into the seat beside his brother. His wordlessness all the while only makes it that much harder for Jahseh to fend against the burn of emotion behind each of his eyes. And so the brothers sedately sit. Sullivan's glare cuts toward Jahseh by fits and starts. Readying himself for the chronic undoing to follow, yet never comes.
Jahseh can only think about Kamale.
And as the two watch the battalion of grievers reach a head on that screen, the casket sinking slightly before it can wade through torrents of steady hands and the red bifold doors of the community centre, Jahseh is ploddingly returned to his senses. That's all the tape ever is to him. The closest he'll ever need to get to a narcotic again. It is in its fullness emblematic of the man he is today. And every blue moon, when something remotely adjacent to redemption crosses his mind, he rears himself full circle to this sequence of sandy footage to ensure he never forgets that. To the sandy song. The sandy casket.
This is Jahsehâthis is the Jahseh that had wrangled Kamale senseless. That quake that'd rattled through the boy like Jahseh had shifted the plates within him, is all but a stark reminder of who he was, who he is and who he always will be. Kamale was right. Jahseh, if not for Eve, would have killed him. Better yet, he wouldn't have thought twice about it. Perhaps, not even once. As naturally as a deep breath.
How great thou art
How great
Thou
Art
The screen falls black and the room, the seats, the boys themselves are submerged in an airy darkness. So to say, Jahseh uses his entire body to inhale. Exhale. That first breath after a lifetime underwater. The flickering words along the screen make the corners of his mouth quirk upwards. Yet to anyone with eyes it feels the furthest thing from a smile.
Long Live Ghost
And just as any other time the brothers have sat to reel in the dysphoria that is this tape, together they pledge into the darkness, "Long live Tatum."
The point somewhat is to throw you completely through a loop. I gave a proper lay of the land with Eve's past because she's meant to be an open book but Jahseh is entirely the opposite. This is all prominent, but I think I wrote it in a way that no matter how you try to read, you can't from this gather what happened to him to make him the way he is now. Not until it's all revealed later on.
Thoughts, feels and opinions?
There is a link that can be made but I highly doubt anyone will think to make it, lol.
Next chapter, back to Eve and Kamale! Stay tuned!