It comes at me through the back of the head, down by where my neck splits off, comes slicing through the skin and bone and ligaments and mixing up all the different colors of matter in my brain so it’s finally all grey stuff that hits the inside part of my face like John Henry’s last swing and then I’m Munch’s Scream, the actual painting, completely silent and unchangeable. There’s no definition around my mouth— just the hole in my face. I can’t tell if everything is being sucked into that hole or if everything is warped because it’s spewing out. Impending Doom is the actual clinical term. And this is happening to me once every month or so—in the shower, at the back table at the restaurant, or when driving or parked in the Taco Bell drive through. I hate it. I’m trying to change the way I think about it. When my fists are clenched and my fingers are digging into my palms, I swear it’s just a turbulent bout of ecstasy—a religious experience, maybe. I must convince myself that transcendence has always loitered on the precipice of terror.
*
I was baptized into the Church of Christ sometime in the summer of 1999. George W. Bush wanted to be President. I was pretty damn sure I was Jesus. This had been a nagging feeling for a while. I was particularly bothered by it one Sunday while singing (mouthing the hymn’s bass part) next to my mother in church. I started to plead with God for a sign, asking for anything physical but really wanting something dramatic. I was willing to participate in anything where I stopped a crazed gunman or set anything on fire with my mind or healed an animal if I had to but things with explosions were a specified preference as I raised my eyes expectantly and even stopped mouthing the words to really focus all my energy on receiving a beam of light or some kind of shining pure power. I’ve never had much patience for negotiations. I conceded most of my demands before the hymn was over, and God only ended up intervening in the world by taking the church building’s one broken ceiling fan and making it spin very slowly so that it completed about an eighth of a revolution in the time I could stand to watch the hotness of that divine exhibition. This was before terror. I said fine to God. I put on a white cotton robe and held my nose as an Elder in rubber fishing pants dipped me— fully immersed me—in the warm water of a little whirlpool bathtub at the front of the church. When it was over I was not even aware of how my naked body pressed itself through the soaked fabric of the gown. This was before terror.
*
My mother’s family swears they invented the Church of Christ a few generations back. The Booth family. The most famous member being John Wilkes. This is probably why they are so adamant that the lesser-known cousin, Henry C.—my great-great-grandfather – invented the Church. This is my mother’s side. When I ask her why she originally got baptized she says I was terrified. Henry C. was terrified of God too. He was an avid music lover and was, in this way, part of the Booth family famous for breeding actors and musicians. But when someone pointed out to Henry C. that the New Testament calls for only the use of one’s God-given instrument in hymns, Henry C. slammed the organ into the church wall, banned anything but a voice box for worship, and thereby created the primary tenant of the Church of Christ—nothing in life outside the definition of God’s words. Great fear of the word. John Wilkes had this too. By all accounts he was plagued by stage fright in his career as a thespian. He would forget lines, open his mouth, and have just the space of gape screaming. He would freeze. Once he was literally carried offstage – entirely debilitated by the terror. But after shooting Lincoln he managed to stand up on the stage despite a broken leg and declare Sic temper tyrannis. He became unafraid. The newspapers called him a terrorist. His last journal entry: I do not repent the blow I struck. I may before God, but not to man.
*
The doctor said It’s called Impending Doom. I refused the pills and said I’d better learn to live with it.
—
Joshua Wheeler lives and writes in the village of Mesilla in southern New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and New Mexico State University. He is currently at work on a stageplay about drug smuggling during the American Civil War and a screenplay adaptation of Don Hoglund’s nonfiction book, Nobody’s Horses (Free Press, 2006). His own nonfiction book, Things Most Surely Believed, investigates the religious conversions of men on death rows in New Mexico and Texas. He is looking for a publisher.
Photo by Kristin L. Ware