Sleeping with Jesus
Kristin Kearns

Jesus came into my room and I tried to keep reading, but it was hard with him standing there all caked in the blood of our sins, arms hanging at his sides, like he'd just stand there forever until I looked up. I laid down my magazine, open to the article about diet programs that deliver. "Christ," I said. "I was planning on having a me night."

He shuffled over and got into bed beside me and I felt like the world had just ended and started up again, with me the same but different. Just like that, I missed Brian so hard I thought I might crush myself.

Jesus looked at me with sad eyes, his face like a little boy's. He nuzzled my shoulder with his chin, and it itched but I let him do it. If I blurred my eyes his presence felt like Brian's, heavy and hot and vacant. "Hello, Love," I said. "What's wrong?" I ran my finger around and around the scar in the middle of his hand.

He shook his head. I felt funny going back to my magazine so I told him about finding the computer file where Brian had kept all my credit information, and the notice from the bank that someone had overdrawn my account, and finding out from the landlady that Brian hadn't paid the rent for two months. I told him how I'd felt like a bubblegum machine for the past two weeks, but tomorrow it would be all right because they would harvest me and then I would have 5,500 new dollars.

My room was cold, and Jesus's body was warm and soft. I didn't know how it could be so warm and soft when there was so little of it. I remembered the Jesus candle that I'd bought at Albertson's as a joke when Brian and I moved in together, and tried to remember if I'd left it out in the open. I didn't want to make Jesus feel cheap. It was nice lying there next to him, the way I used to lie next to Brian, except that then I wasn't the one doing all the talking.

I told Jesus I couldn't do any messing around because of the hormones, which was all right with him and probably all right with me, too. I could still feel Brian on and in me, in a sad, creepy way.

"Want to wrestle?" I suggested.

Jesus smiled and hit me with one of the pillows, and I hit him back but neither of us seemed to have much energy. I asked Jesus to tell me a story, about anything he wanted, and he did. He told me a wonderful, glorious story. It was all in pictures, and the detail was so small I needed a magnifying glass to take it all in. But I didn't own a magnifying glass so I squinted instead, and told him I could see just fine.

*

In the early morning I let Jesus sleep while Janelle drove me to the clinic. During the drive I told her about an article I'd read, about a woman in Los Angeles who had had a tiny jewel implanted in her eye.

"People do stupid things," said Janelle.

"She spent more than 3,000 dollars."

"What kind of jewel? Does she have, like, a ruby stuck in her eye?" Janelle's hair was shorter than Jesus's. I had an urge to go home and run my hand through Jesus's hair, to press myself naked against him, but they were waiting for me at the clinic.

"It's silver, actually. A sliver of silver. If it were a ruby she'd look like she had a broken blood vessel."

"So you can't even really see it."

I lay my head back. "Not all the time."

"What a waste," Janelle said.

"I guess it gives her something to look for when she looks in the mirror." I flipped down the visor and turned my own head back and forth. I looked dull in the morning light.

The waiting room was blue and clean. Karen ran over and handed me a wrapped box. "This is it," she said, peering at me like maybe she'd get a glimpse of the embryo waiting inside. "Are you nervous?"

"I don't think so." I was just cold from the starkness of the room and not enough sleep. Jesus's story had blended into my dreams and kept me awake.

"Everything will be fine," she said.

"Are you nervous?"

She smiled and leaned into her husband, who looked like he needed a few shots of Jäger and a long nap. "I'm ready," she said, rubbing her empty belly.

"She's been ready for years," her husband said, his lips rolled into a putty grin.
I wondered how it would feel to be ready for that. You'd have to be awfully permanent, and have a whole lot of money, and feel like you'd already done everything.

Janelle sat on the blue chair nearest the door, and the receptionist got her a cup of coffee. Everyone in the clinic looked around and smiled and nodded like we were waiting for the paperwork to come through on a nice new car.

I knew exactly what would happen. They would put me out, and twenty minutes later I would be emptied and free, and they'd stick all my eggs inside Karen. She hadn't wanted the process to be anonymous. To her, the whole baby-bearing process was far too fragile and beautiful and personal. She was fond of me, the way I'd be fond of my ovary if someone told me the only way I could keep it was to be fond of it.

They put us in separate rooms and I kind of imagined that I was going into labor while the anesthesia took hold of me. It was as warm and nice as sleeping with Jesus.

*

When I got home, Jesus was squeaky clean and wrapped in a towel, drinking coffee. The paper was open in front of him, but he was looking at it with glazed eyes.

"Hi," said Janelle, looking at me for an explanation.

I waved my hand toward Jesus, then toward her. "I'm going to call you in a few hours," I said. Jesus nodded his head at her as she left.

"Jesus, I need to rest," I said, flopping onto a chair beside him. There was a bicycle in the corner of the living room, shiny green with a scraped-up green helmet hanging off the handlebar.

Jesus pushed his coffee over to me, but it was weak and cold like I felt. I went into my bedroom and fell facedown on my comforter, which Jesus had pulled up sloppily. I was too tired to move. I breathed out and my breath went and went, until I wasn't sure if I'd ever get around to breathing in again.

Jesus came in and sat on the edge of the bed, crossing one scarred foot over the other as if he was stepping on his own feet. He took off his towel and laid it over me. The weight was nice, but it was damp. I decided to pretend to fall asleep and then toss and turn and throw it off.

"Hey Jesus," I said after a few minutes. I was too tired to pretend to be asleep.

He rested a hand on my back, pressing the damp towel into my shirt.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know, do you think I'll regret this one day? Maybe I'll run out of eggs and end up regretting it." I felt him shift on the bed, and in a moment he was stretched out beside me.

"Brian wanted to marry me. It feels like a million years ago." I flopped over and looked at Jesus, and all of a sudden he struck me as very understanding. It was the beard that did it, and all the scars, like he should be grateful that he wasn't too wounded to listen to me like this.

"You know what he liked to do? He liked to tickle me. And I would stick my finger in his belly button. He said it made him feel violated." I poked my finger into Jesus's belly button. It went in and in all the way to the last knuckle but Jesus just lay there. I pulled it out and looked at it. "Anyway."

Jesus gave me an encouraging sort of frown, but he didn't answer. It was a frustrating conversational style.

"So I wouldn't mind if you wanted to talk, now and then," I said.

Jesus rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling, and I smoothed my hand over his bare belly and the little cloth tied around his waist.

"Hey Jesus," I said. He blinked, and I knew he was listening. "I'm tired too, you know. But I'm making an effort here. I'm trying to share myself with you."

He slid his leg under mine and closed his eyes, and pretty soon he fell asleep. I lay there staring at him, like I used to do to my mother in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep, and she would jolt awake as if somehow the heat from my eyes had burned her.

I sort of missed my mother. I hadn't talked to her since Brian stole her watch and engagement ring from her dresser drawer. I'd insisted it couldn't have been him but before he left that last time, he'd gotten angry and told me it was, and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on my lap. "Finder's fee," he said, on his way out of the apartment furnished with things my parents had been saving to get me started. That hurt me. That, and knowing that they'd never imagined things ending up like this, when they were young and expectant like Karen.

*

When I woke up my room was very bright and Jesus had gone, along with his bicycle. There was a note on the pillow, but it just said, "Call Janelle." While I waited for her to come over, I took my scissors and started cutting the ends off my hair. I wasn't sure why. It just felt good to be doing it.

"Who was that?" said Janelle, as soon as I'd opened the door. She cocked her head at me, and reached out to touch my hair.

"Hey Janelle, do you think you'll ever have kids?"

"I guess. It seems to be the thing to do."

"Brian wanted to have a kid."

"No, he didn't."

"Well, but he did." It sounded kind of nice, being pregnant. I could picture Brian buying me magazines and cartons of ice cream late at night. He was so capable and resourceful.

Janelle held out her hand. "You left this in my car." It was the box that Karen had given to me at the clinic. Inside was half a gold heart on a thin chain, the kind girls bought in middle school to symbolize their friendship.

"I have the other half," the card said, "and will keep it always as a reminder of you."

"That's sweet," Janelle said, making a sour face.

"And I will keep this half as a reminder of the half-baby I have floating around out there," I said, dropping the heart back into the box.

"Maybe it's a tracking device, so she can find you if the baby turns out bad."

She sat down and slid Jesus's half-full coffee cup around on the kitchen table.

"What if it comes to find me one day," I said. "When I'm married and have my own kids."

"That doesn't happen."

"Sure it does. That's a lot of people's biggest fear, having their kid try to find them."

Janelle tipped the coffee cup until the coffee almost spilled out of it, then tilted a drop onto her hand and licked it off. I sat down beside her. The apartment looked emptier than it ever had, even though Brian hadn't taken anything with him when he'd left. Except my identity, which he was now using to squeeze money out of Citibank and MasterCard. None of the furniture here was his, and besides, it would have been too big to fit in his old clunked-out Honda.

The corner was bare without Jesus's bike. That's what was missing. I wondered when he'd decide to come back.

"When I called earlier, that guy said you were gone," Janelle said.

"He talked to you?"

"Kind of."

"He said I was gone?"

"Well, I'm not sure. I think his mouth was full. But it sounded like he said you were gone. I was like, then why are you still there?"

"I wasn't gone," I said. I went to the refrigerator to see what he'd found to eat. There were olives, pickles, and mustard, and three eggs in a half-carton. That was all I'd had in for a while. "What did he eat, condiments?"

"Who is he?" Janelle said, although she was clearly losing interest.

For some reason the Jesus candle was in the refrigerator. I set it on the middle of the table, pushing aside the paper Jesus had been reading.

The image on the candle didn't look at all like Jesus. The hair flowed too freely, the face was too peaceful. Jesus looked resigned, not peaceful, and he had stringy hair. Janelle took out her cigarette lighter and lit the candle. "Burn, Jesus, burn," she said. "Give us light, O Jesus." The candle filled the apartment with a horrible fake-cranberry scent.

*

That night I wrapped my top sheet around me and looked at myself swathed in white. The grimy bathroom mirror made me look like an old photograph—a photograph of a woman who was gone, and you could wonder about her but no one could ever know her again. I felt lost and faded and torn.

I heard a noise in the other room and froze. Jesus was back. I darted looks at myself in the mirror like maybe that would get him to go away. I wasn't in the mood to be all chatty and caring again, and to have him pass out beside me. I nudged the door with my foot. It shut most of the way, and I stood there like a Greek statue.

Since I'd left school, my life had split wide open. I'd stopped reading bell hooks and started buying Elle at the supermarket, and suddenly people felt like they could just walk on in and lie down like their sorrows were worth so much more than mine, like if we walked into a pawnshop and laid our sorrows on the counter, the pawnbroker would snap mine up and give me a buck and take the other one into the back room, to examine it close up before cutting a fat check.

Jesus rapped the kitchen table and opened the cupboards, probably looking for cereal or bread or anything that wasn't salty or spreadable. I wanted to go out there and yell at him to stop taking me for granted, but I was afraid that if I did, he'd leave, just like that, without saying a word, and there I'd be angry with no one around. I heard him shuffle into the bedroom, thumping the bathroom door as he passed, so that it swung halfway open.

A sudden loneliness swelled up inside of me, at being cut off from my room and my magazines and my check, which I'd left on the table beside my bed. I waded into the living room, the bottom of the sheet pooling at my feet. The place still smelled sickly sweet from the candle, which reigned solemn and dark over the kitchen table. Jesus's bike wasn't there. I wondered if maybe he'd sold it, or been robbed, which would be just my luck. Then he'd come back even sadder than before, and he'd need help reporting it and buying a new bike.

There was a glass out on the counter, with nothing in it, and the front door was wide open. I slammed the door and bustled into the bedroom. I'd left the lamp on but it was still dim, and all I could see was a shape that was stockier and more clothed than Jesus. He was booting up the computer, his back to me, and he didn't turn around until I said, "What are you doing?"

His eyes and hair dug into me, sharp and dark. The sheet felt too tight around my chest and stomach. He smiled with half his mouth as the computer lit up behind him.

"There you are," he said.

I just kind of shrugged and stood there, and he half-smiled and stood facing me, since there was no chair at the computer table. "I fucking missed you," he said.

"You didn't miss me."

"Of course I did. I fucking missed you. You have no idea." His face looked tan in the shadows.

"What did you come back for? I thought you were just gone."

He shook his head, hunching back over the computer and opening up a file. "Some crazy shit's been going down," he said. "I had to take off for awhile. You know I do that sometimes."

I sat down on the bed. My check was gone from the bedside table. I stared at the table for awhile and was just about ready to throw up my hands and let him have it all, except that I really wanted that money. "Where's my check?" I said, quietly.

"What?"

"What did you do with my check?" I felt so far away from him, like my sheet had this big force field attached to it, and I couldn't crack it to let him in. "Do you think you can just take everything?"

He straightened up and looked lost-boy hurt, and I wanted to hold him and take it back. "I wouldn't steal from you. I know I do fucked-up things, but I wouldn't do that." He came over to the bed, pulling on my arm until I got up and saw that I'd sat on the check. "That's a lot of money," he said, holding it in front of him.

"Well, I need it to pay all the rent we owe." I took it from him and sat on it again.

"I told you I paid the rent."

"Brian, stop it. You make me tired."

"What, you don't believe me? I told you, you don't have to pay the rent. It's taken care of. I told you that before I left."

"Anyway." I lay down, keeping the sheet around me.

"I know you're mad," he said. "What do you want me to do? I came back because I fucking love you. I'm sorry I've fucked up, but I fucking love you. I don't mean to make you this way."

"You're not making me any way," I said. I looked at the ceiling while he stared at me like he was trying to rearrange my insides with his eyes.

He finally turned away and clicked around some more on the computer, doing God knows what. If our internet hadn't been disconnected, I'd have thought he was searching around for more credit agencies to defraud. The sounds of the computer were comforting. All I wanted was for him to come and put his arms around me, but he wouldn't. I wished he'd start talking about marriage again, or children, and I could pretend to believe him. Instead, he was cussing and saying he loved me and thinking that was enough.

As I lay in my sheet on top of the 5,500 dollars that I'd earned by letting a doctor sedate me and empty my ovaries while Jesus lay silent in my bed, it almost was.

*

When I woke up, I thought the moon was burning through the window, but it was just the streetlight. Brian was asleep with his back to me, still wearing his t-shirt with his boxers. He looked far away. I wanted to pull him closer. I wanted him to have sex with me, and tell me to look at him, and when I looked at him I would be able to see everything.

Remembering our conversation made me feel dirty. I let the sheet fall away and walked out to the kitchen, feeling suddenly hopeful. Maybe Jesus would be asleep on the futon, and I'd have a chance to apologize for putting a guilt trip on him last night.

The kitchen light was still on, Jesus's coffee cup was still on the table. It hadn't occurred to me that he might not be coming back, but of course, he wasn't about to move in. He might have wandered into my apartment by accident, lost in the city, tired of going up and down hills looking for a place that looked like every other.

I sat down heavily and thumbed through the Lifestyle section, which Jesus had left open that morning. There was an article about eyeglasses that converted into chopsticks, and one on travel sex that quoted a woman from Philadelphia saying, "I need a vacation from all my responsibilities—including my husband's sexual appetite."

I pushed the newspaper away, and it knocked the box Karen had given me to the floor. The sudden noise made me jump, and I looked around to make sure no one was there. The apartment bristled, as if any second someone might appear behind me. The necklace had fallen out of its box and lay coiled on the tiles, the half-heart bright in the overhead light. I wondered what Karen had paid for it. Probably not much. I snatched it up and squeezed it hard so that it bit into my palm and it was like I was holding everyone's pain in my hand.

I went back into the bedroom and pushed Brian's body until he almost rolled off the bed. "I want my mom's ring," I hissed into his ear. He opened his eyes and registered my nakedness.

"Hey," I said. "You stole my mom's engagement ring."

He looked at me, saying nothing.

"You stole it," I said, pointlessly, pushing at him again. Then I got up on the mattress and kicked him with my bare feet, but he just curled up and looked at the ceiling. It was like he knew he had nothing to say, anymore. It seemed like no one did.

It made me sadder than anything to think of my mother losing that ring, and even sadder to think she'd accepted that it was gone. She hadn't even seemed sad when she told me. It was hard to believe that you could let someone in and share yourself with him, and never imagine that he was just as separate and unknown as anyone else. I didn't see how our selves could let us down like that. I sat on the edge of the bed, as far from Brian's side as I could get, holding the fake-gold broken-heart necklace. My 5,500 dollar check lay within reach, like Jesus had, as if by just lying there it were acquiring greater significance. It didn't seem like much at all, anymore. A few rents and it would be gone.

I felt Brian's eyes on me and I didn't know what he was seeing, but I knew that it wasn't enough. I wanted to cry, in a way no one ever had before; I wanted my soul to leak out of my tear ducts and fall into his curled-up body and make his heart start beating. I thought about the woman with the jewel in her eye, paying thousands of dollars so that from a certain angle, in a particular light, there would be a glint, like a sudden flash from a lighthouse that had long since gone dark. If you happened to look at her at just the right time, you might need to lean in closer to recapture it—the brightness and the coldness and the sense that you'd seen something that couldn't be real but that had, for the briefest of moments, made you wonder if maybe it could.

© Kristin Kearns