The Chronic Resurrections of Jack Clinker

Delberta Clinker, Jack’s mom, had attended this Pentecostal revival during her son’s third trimester. This revival was in the same neighborhood as snake handlers, but no snakes arrived. People fell down writhing in the middle of the aisle, babbled in tongues with fewer phonemes than any real language, prayed over one another. The sick were healed. The record can’t just lie and act as if healings didn’t happen. They did.

Amid this writhing, babbling, dancing, praying, healing circus, Delberta sang with both of her swollen hands waving up in the air alongside other arms. A devoted field of wild grass. She wanted an experience. An experience that would do her good and help her do good.

The preacher shouted about bodily resurrection. If Christ rose then we shall rise. And if we shall not rise then Christ has not risen. And if Christ has not risen then we are still dead in our sins.

As if his decibel changes would never suffice for emphasis, he highlighted each word with flailing hands. You know the great balloon fan men you see outside of a used car parking lot?

Like that.

At his hand-flail-decible-boosted-shout on the word “dead,” several things happened at once.

First, the preacher pronounced “dead-uh” like he later pronounced “sins-uh.” A white man preaching as if black pentecostal.

Second, when the word dead-uh came out, six fell down into the aisle amid other writhing congregants.

Third, Delberta Clinker crashed down into the pew with a swimming headache. This was not the experience she’d wanted.

Moments later Preach said, “But Christ has risen. And on that great gettin’up morning, we will-uh… rise-uh… again-uh!” When he said “rise-uh,” weird stuff happened all over.

First, Long Islanders from the choir confused “rise-uh” with “riser,” so they took the preacher’s cue to walk up to the risers. It was an accident, but one fool lead and others followed. When that one fool unsure in his own leadership ability looked back to see he had followers, he continued onward toward his destination. If he’s leading that way, we should follow. If people are following me, I should lead.

And so forth off a cliff.

Because of this, the choir had assembled long before the third point of the preacher’s sermon.

What hands remained upon the hips of the congregation rose into the air. Several older patrons who had no business leaving the security of cane and walker strutted to the front. They danced on unsound joints. Not a few orthopedic surgeons would be called the following morning to fix what they busted in that moment.

Delberta witnessed none of this.

The reverse of her palm lay on her sweaty-dripping forehead to collect what energies near-fainting had stolen from her swollen body. She thought to leave.

But Preach kept talking in that strange voice (not his every day voice). When he finally said “rise-uh,” Delberta felt the fetus she’d named “Jack” somersault within her womb.

The momentum of Jack Clinker’s prenatal acrobatics hit his mother’s ribs.

Said ribshot launched his mother up out of her pew once more to join in the singing and dancing.

And so began Jack’s condition.

Somewhere an organ revved up and the choir sang. These things — the choir assembly and organ music, the hand raising, the geriatric dance number, Jack’s summersault — happened at once. It was the hypocrite Aunt Ruthie who noticed Delberta jumping up on Jack’s cue.

Delberta hadn’t gotten the experience she’d wanted. She’d gotten something far, far worse.

Fast forward past gross details like umbilical cord care and twelve diapers a day to eight-day-old Jack. Grandmothers, aunts, and second cousins all surrounded Delberta Clinker’s bed. An eight pound, eight ounce baby boy lay in her elbow crooks. Baby Jack would only remember what followed through second hand retelling. Though he would forget feeling so, baby Jack Clinker sensed danger. He wanted to be safe.

Jessie, his six-year old cousin, didn’t want competition. Jessie enjoyed her position as the only Clinker grandchild. She didn’t want a cousin to play with. She wanted to play by herself, with herself, wanted a monopoly on grandma’s ooey-gooey-butter bars and, much later, grandma’s trust fund. Jessie asked to hold Jack and coddled him like everyone else. She pet Jack’s head and took a step backwards. Pet. Step. Pet. Step. A subtle dance-retreat until she stood beside the open window of the thirteenth story of the hospital.

Baby Jack Clinker again sensed danger, wanted safety.

“Be careful,” Delberta said. Nervous laughter. “Wouldn’t want Jacksie to fall.”

“Why?” Jessie asked. Before Delberta could answer, Jessie flung her infant cousin Jack, swaddle and all, out a thirteenth story window.

Apologies, but that’s what happened.

Witnesses later described the splatter that had been baby Jack in terms that the city paper, which operated less like a mainstream news source and more like a small town tabloid, ran a special edition of GORE AT HEALTH CENTER.

Baby Jack had failed at being safe from danger and harm. He cannot be blamed for this failure. He was, after all, an infant, and only just beginning to learn how to navigate the try-fail cycle of his desires and goals.

The same doctor who had delivered the infant eight days prior now pronounced him dead. Investigations came and went. Six-year-old Jessie wished for things to return to normal: talks of juvenile detention centers felt a bit much for a child as young as her. Then again, these felt — to the authorities, at least — rather extenuating circumstances. They, after all, had a for-profit juvenile detention center to run and profits had stagnated — they needed more butts in beds.

Unfortunately for Jessie, thanks to her impulsiveness, things would never return to normal. Her ooey-gooey monopoly on family attention had not slowed, but rather — due to her actions — accelerated into the negative.

Had they wanted to do an autopsy, there was no need. Enough of Baby Jack’s innards and outtards splattered the sidewalk to determine his cause of death: Head trauma. From fall. Or toss.

Coroners can be so tactless.

Roughly three days later, they held a funeral for the infant in a two-story country house that had long been converted into a funeral home. The Clinkers were well known, half of them being rich entrepreneurs who owned a chain of “Mexican” restaurants run entirely by kind folks they had voted to deport, a costume store run by the same, several gas stations run by the same. The other half of the Clinker clan were dirt poor car salesmen and realtors, but that half spent their time drinking at lodges like Eagles and Elks and Moose and other clubs named after other taloned and antlered animals. Between the respectability of the rich first half and the popularity of the poor second half, Jack Clinker’s first funeral was well attended.

The same Pentecostal preacher from Jack’s prenatal revival spoke at Jack’s funeral and used that same phrase, “on that great gettin’up morning.” The preacher had stolen from an old spiritual. He rarely studied or prayed over his messages. He figured the Holy Spirit would lead him and so practiced the spiritual discipline of intellectual laziness. He argued in favor of it, of course, with words like “elitism” and “common sense,” but when he bathed at night in Epsom salts, he admitted that he simply didn’t like how much work reading required. When he said his catch phrase “on that great gettin’up morning,” which wasn’t his phrase but another author’s from the last book the preacher had read in college, Jack Clinker cried out from his coffin in a wail only seconded by the wail of his birth.

Somewhere in the audience, an old man had a heart attack. A neighbor called an ambulance.

Delberta rushed to her son’s side and plucked him out of the coffin, blinking through the dark fog of her own runny mascara. Raised up above the crowd in his mother’s arms, Jack giggled, no longer dead, but alive and whole.

It was rather an odd reaction from a child that had just died. But Jack was overjoyed. He could want to be safe from harm. Or he could want to enter into the danger. Safety hadn’t led him so well.

What if the baby could enter into harm and still be unharmed?

That’s why he giggled: alive and well.

“Well it’s a miracle!” the preacher said. “I told you! I told y’all they still happened!” His high-pitched, quivering tone implied I don’t believe this, I don’t believe this, I don’t believe this.

The wake they had planned functioned partly like a baby shower, partly like a mourner’s ceremony, partly like a high school kegger. A waking wake. A Having-Been-Woke. The emotions of the whole event put one-armed Uncle Bill to sleep on the love seat. Jack, when inspected by Vashti, Anna, Rachel, and Aunt Eve, appeared to have healed up: his head no longer caved in, his bone structure normal. All that remained were scars of the fall. Trivial all considered. Jack was alive. The preacher had told them they still happened.

It should have stopped there, but harmless in the midst of harm is quite the desire for a soul like Jack Clinker’s.

At around age seven, Jack had been playing basketball with the neighborhood boys on one of those driveways designed with a decline for rain runoff. Good for drainage. Bad for draining balls through hoops. The boys barely noticed, but the basketball did. Every time it bounced, it bounced closer to the street, closer and closer until it skidded into a roll. Several attempts by the boys to stop it quickened its trajectory. Jack, curious from the joy of play, raced after the thing: he thought he’d bring the safety to the danger.

Delberta Clinker lived on that stretch of neighborhood that counted as part of the subdivision, but her driveway connected to Green Street — the artery tying her city and the next together. It had been a highway at one point, but now served as a main road.

Because of this, the sight of that semi trailer out the window of her kitchen was not unusual. What was unusual to Delberta was her son Jack chasing after some basketball into the highway.

Orange and trundling and sucking his attention like some myopic drug, the ball seduced Jack into the street where he heard the call of the last trumpet.

Again.

He wished it would play a different song.

Delberta, however, heard no such thing. She heard the blare of a semi horn and the squelch of brakes. Also the crash-shatter of the mixing bowl she had been washing as it fell through four feet of indoor silence onto linoleum.

The thud-rumble following was Jack’s body tumbling under an eighteen-wheeled meat tenderizer. Then the groans, shrieks, shouts of seven boys.

At the second funeral, Delberta wept. And wept. And never looked up. She’d gotten him back only to lose him to death once more. Her running mascara, which had once been a fog at the first funeral, turned oil spill.

Many came to comfort her. The Pentecostal preacher had been replaced by a Baptist. The Pentecostal had run off after getting caught by his daughter in the women’s bathroom doing something with his secretary other than replacing toilet paper.

On second thought, that’s exactly what he had been doing.

Delberta hated Baptists, but she had no other choice. The Church of Christ preacher had been on the road, the Anglican had been confirming young men, the Presbyterians had some knitting group. She wasn’t about to get Poped in order to host another funeral. She’d never heard of Eastern Orthodoxy. Neither had the town.

The Baptist preached hellfire and brimstone, repent before the judgment, turn or burn. He hoped to get one convert from the pissed off masses and would ignore said convert later when someone said convert cared about died and he became one among the pissed off masses of converts the next time The Baptist raved about hell. It almost sounded like he liked hell more than heaven, which a young man in the audience wondered if it made him a sadist. That same young man referred to it as a “dunk ‘em and punk ‘em” message. The Baptist failed. Especially after slandering Jack by listing out all manner of sins the seven-year old child had committed in his short, apparently scandalous existence.

Jack, as if in protest, sat up. “What are we doing?” The seven year old asked.

Delberta, for whatever reason, stood, stared at her son, her deluge of tears quenched. She wiped her eyes, about-faced, and walked right out the door in view of the several hundred, not looking back.

“Mom?” Jack asked. “Did somebody die?”

“Your last funeral did,” she called behind her. Delberta had been thinking of the cost of the first funeral (four thousand dollars) added to the cost of that second funeral (six thousand dollars) could not, as a total sum (ten thousand dollars), be justified on her nurse’s salary. She had made preparations to bury her son twice before he was old enough for grade school. Let alone old enough to drive. That kind of whiplash would ruin any mother’s compassion.

Jack, meanwhile, had gotten what he wanted. He’d taken safety to the danger. At what cost? It had jeopardized his relationship with his mother and therefore had left him wondering whether he should play it safe or play it dangerous. The safe route had gotten him killed at someone else’s hands. The dangerous route had gotten him killed at his own.

Maybe it wasn’t about safe or dangerous.

Maybe it was a lesson in finding mortality?

He’d thought about that for years. At thirteen or fourteen, Jack grew fond of his own mortality — or perhaps he grew tired of his immortality — and he depressed his happier feelings. At first this looked like the typical high school version of the terrible twos, but then Jack shoved all-in and committed suicide. He didn’t cut sideways for hospital. He cut down for hole in the ground.

Pain, pain like fifty stabs from a soaping sink hiding a kitchen knife, bombarded the core of his right arm, his good arm. Redness leaked out faster than his artery’s clot-managers could slow down. Life and light faded from Jack’s eyes, escaping out his wrist. Shadows let themselves into his vision, through the back door where his blood was let out.

Jack’s room faded from his view.

He died.

His mother came in and saw the scene. She stumbled into the door, slid down its solid surface onto the floor, held her head in her hands and started to sob. Then she remembered the two funerals, glanced back up at the mess of blood, grew very angry that she would have to buy new sheets and rent a carpet cleaner, grabbed her keys and stormed out of the house.

She drove to the edge of town where she rented a crappy motel room and stayed for two nights and three days. “Cheaper than a funeral,” she told herself over her continental cheese Danish. Why were they called “continental” breakfasts? She didn’t remember them serving these things in the Mexican or Cuban or Canadian motels? Though there was the maple syrup…

Early on the morning of the third day, Delberta Clinker packed up her overnight suitcase and drove back home. She walked into the house and saw Jack sitting at the table, eating bacon. “Made some for you.”
“Thanks,” she said and dropped her bag on the foyer tile. She walked over to the kitchen counter and got herself bacon and scrambled cheesy eggs and a chocolate chip pancake.

“I’ll clean it up.”

Delberta nodded. She had nothing else to say.

“Did you cry?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Sorry for that. Wanted to see if it would work if I wanted it to. If I did it.”

“Why?” she asked. She was facing him now.

“Needed to know if I’m ever gonna die.”

“Why?”

“Cause I don’t want to outlive you and everyone else.”

The frown and lines on Delberta’s face slackened. Then slackened further. Then went completely hollow as she considered the furthest implications of it. “Oh,” she said. “I see. Me neither. Well… eat your bacon, you’ll need your strength.”

“I really won’t,” he said.

She wept silently then, not for herself, but for her son and the life he would have to lead. He watched those tears just rolling of his mother’s cheeks like wet marbles.

What did he need, then? Nothing? Some trading cards? A lotto ticket?

He looked in the mirror: contentment.

He needed to need something, didn’t he?

Soon after that, college came. Like most nineteen-year-old boys, all of the hormones that had previously effected Jack’s chest with hair and Jack’s testicles with libido turned upon his mind. First came the conversations with people who thought differently than those he grew up around, then came the music by artists he had never heard of, then films, art, lectures and projects and finally the books.

Jack, by way of a professor, grabbed hold of writings by Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Johnathan Schell, Martin Luther King Jr., Simone Weil, Mohandas Ghandi, Budda, and William Penn. Through these writers (and many, many more), he even learned something about his Pentecostal mother’s Jesus — the man had also been something of a revolutionary, changing life for Galilean peasants through a series of nonviolent speech-acts, demonstrations of peace. “Turn the other cheek” didn’t mean “bend over and take it.” For people who ate with the right hand and wiped with the left, for people who disgraced one another with a backhand and gave dignity to one another with a fist, “turn the other cheek” meant something more like, “I ain’t your slave, I’m your equal. You want to hit me? Punch me like a man, don’t backhand me.” That kind of ballsy teaching inspired Jack and Jack’s friends, but he wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

For Jack’s friends, these writings motivated them to paint clever slogans upon protest signs, write petitions, even mobilize and march when an unjust bill or two found its way to a vote. Those were considered political radicals, deviants, rebels. Even “hippies” or “hipsters” or other names involving “hip”.

Jack, however, applied the writings of those authors literally, personally. He thought if you gave to an enemy long enough, they would become your friend. He thought if you started a movement of people who stood against violence without resorting to violence, you might change the world. What better weapon for peace than a man who cannot die?

His professor thought he was insane.

But realizing the power of his own survival was the most dangerous, unstable moment in time for anyone that had known or knew or would meet Jack Clinker. In that moment, another thought came into his brain by way of his medulla oblongata — the thought that he could enlist, could run to the front lines and become something of a super soldier like those heroes in the graphic novels of his youth. He needed to find a need, right? Well something only he could need was to be a superhero. An invincible force, though a bloody one, could get any girl he chose. An invincible force, though a scarred one, could win all sorts of medals. His Pentecostal mother would respect that kind of power.

Luckily, Jack was a creative, generative man. Joy, not pain, had driven him to suicide at fourteenish. He had played basketball at seven to make friends, not to win basketball. When his cousin picked him up at eight days old, his infantile mind thought of her arm not as “stable” but “gorgeous.” It gave Jack the chills to realize the prospect of the few and the proud were in reality a group of boys and girls who prolonged adolescence by jumping over rocks and dunes wielding machines that killed other boys and girls.

No.

He booked a plane for a city near the border of a particular country. That particular border was shared with the particular country east of the Americas that the United States had most recently declared war — or war-like “conflict” — upon. This trip alone took more time than is worth the telling, what with the passport and the visa and all of that. After several months, Jack landed in the first country and walked out of the front doors of the airport. There he waited for a few days, listening.

Some of the airport security, which were also part-time policemen, which were also full-time secret police, started to wonder if they should shoo him away but as he was neither begging nor causing a disturbance, nor talking, nor even sleeping on the sidewalk, they could find no cause for kicking him out.

One asked through a transcriber, “What you are doing?”

“Waiting.”

“For?”

“The sound.”

Several days after that, Jack was very thirsty. He waited so long that eventually he died of thirst. None of the men realized that he was dead — they thought he had fallen asleep. Luckily, since Jack had not eaten anything for so long, he did not soil himself when his bowels loosened. That was the worst part of dying for Jack — the mess.

Two days later, one of the men kicked him. “No sleep here.”

Jack rose to life in that moment, though it only looked like waking to the security personnel.

“No sleep here.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “What day’s today?”

The one shouted at another in a rapid tongue of which Jack knew little. “Day after Monday.”

“Tuesday?”

“That one.”

“Only took two days. Hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

A bomb and gunfire sounded in the distance.

“Thanks for your time,” Jack said. He stood up and started walking toward the sound of gunfire, toward border of the two countries.

He had little money — he had spent the majority of what he had on his plane ticket. Had he much, he wouldn’t have known the first thing about the exchange rates of this strange currency and would probably get ripped off in the process. Unlike his mother, he had never been outside America. Outside his home state.

Several cabs pulled over to pick him up, but when he ignored their blaring horns, they moved on to pester someone else. The walk took days, partly because of the terrain he had to cross, partly because he died of thirst three more times along the way and had to wait for resurrection. Those three took a day and a half, a day, and half a day respectively. When he awoke, he saw the border in the distance. When in sight, the border patrol from the at-war country started shouting in their tongue.

“Hi,” Jack said.

They shouted louder. Some raised weapons.

“I’m going to cross,” Jack said. He was seven yards from the border.

Many raised rifles.

“Well have it your way, but I’m going to cross.”

The men from across the border opened fire on Jack Clinker and his dead body crashed into the soil. About nine hours later, sooner than the team assigned to remove his body could arrive, Jack Clinker resurrected. The bullets fell out of their various holes, the holes healed up and left little white scars like the one on his right wrist and the ones on his head.

Jack stood.

Jack walked.

They saw Jack walk.

“Walk, Jack, walk,” Jack joked to himself. Running would not help him.

They shot him again.

He died three yards from their border.

Five hours later, Jack Clinker resurrected.

The body-disposal brigade had just showed up.

Jack strode toward the border.

Border patrol was terrified by this point and started firing aimlessly at Jack like kids do in video games with zombies. I believe they call it “spraying.” Of course, Jack died again. He was not impervious to bullets. However when he died, he landed on the other side of the border.

Body-Disposal Brigade glanced up from Jack’s thrice-gunned down corpse on the other side of the border and gave the soldiers from the neighboring country the wide-armed “your problem now” shrug.

Those soldiers, of course, refused to touch Jack — in their minds he could be some demigod.

Jack was not a demigod.

By the time Jack passed all of the checkpoints, the three pools of blood, and all of the soldiers who refused to touch him, he realized that he had developed a stronger pain tolerance. Those bullets hurt less than my knife did.

Over the new country’s countryside Jack ventured. He could have lasted months without food, but the lack of water worsened his hunger. Somewhere in there, he also died of hunger. It took only three and a half hours for him to resurrect again. I do mean resurrect and not merely resuscitate as almost everyone who uses the word “resurrect” means — his body died and grew cold and stayed dead. These were no mere resuscitations or comas from which he awoke. Every system in his body would stop, much like the time he fell thirteen floors onto pavement. Then every system would gain a brand new life inside a completely brand new body that occupied the place of the first, with scars, and he would walk closer toward the sounds of small explosions inside barrels and big explosions outside mountains.

At some point, death became an annoyance, so Jack begged for some change. He collected enough of the odd currency from generous people to go to something like a deli and buy something like a sandwich. He ate it, a slow savory thing, full of garlic. It had been a couple of weeks since those airline peanuts. Had he always enjoyed food like this?

Jack finished his sandwich-like thing hours later, mindful the man at the counter had ripped him off of several extra dollars (or whatever they called their currency), mindful that he had given the money to the man anyway. The man’s young children had appeared through the back curtain of black shiny beads before he shoed them back. His family surely needed the strange paper slips more than Jack, so much depended on so little.

Soon after, Jack stood up from his tiny chair and tiny table and walked out through the front door back into the hot summer sunshine. The explosions and gunfire sounded much closer. In the span of the evening, Jack saw lights in the distance. Sleep sounded like a good thing then, tired as he was from the journey, so Jack slept.

And slept.

And then slept some more.

When he awoke, it was a couple of days later, but since he was used to the rapid passage of time post-mortem, Jack felt neither shame nor shock at having woken up so late. He would get there when he got there — the conflict was not ending any time soon, unfortunately. He shook some dust out of his hair and was pleased to find dawn greeting him on the horizon. Horizonward he marched, hoping to uncover the source of those explosions.

In a day or so he came upon a small town filled with holes due to the ramshackling force that had passed through prior. As he approached, war sounds amplified. Shadowed faces poked out of the windows of bullet-riddled homes. Then, after passing burning cars, smelling scorched rubber and torched earth, after noticing more and more splotches of blood, Jack Clinker came to the heat of one of the skirmishes.

Several American soldiers had pinned down some of the local militia with heavy-rifle fire and the occasional grenade. One grenade rolled next to the local militia. “Good a place to start as any,” Jack said to no one in particular.

The sudden sound of English made every local militiaman turn to face him. They pointed their guns at him, ready to squash the American before he finished his flank.

Jack ignored all of this and threw himself on top of the one thing none of the others noticed — the grenade. In seconds the grenade blew him several feet off the ground, threw some of his more vital parts all over the militia and, of course, killed him dead. Dummy dead.

It only took two hours for his body to recover, perhaps the most miraculous of all the resurrections since his pieces had been scattered to the four winds. By then, the fighting had moved east. Jack picked himself up and felt a chill down his front side. He looked down and his shirt was shredded to bits. His stomach was fine, of course, minus the translucent white scars. He’d have to find a new shirt. Several dead men lay around him, but all wore the colors of the local militia. He didn’t want those. He was on nobody’s side or the side of everyone and everything.

When he came again to the fighting, he walked out into the middle. After the grenade and the previous death-by-border patrol, the rifle fire tickled. Neither side cared that they had murdered a civilian. They kept on shooting.

An hour and twenty later, Jack was no longer dead, but alive. Dozens of bullets had fallen out, their holes mended, their scars present to remind Jack of the firefight years later. The fight had moved east again, but not much further.

When he came upon them once more, a tank had been added to the mix. Jack walked right up to it, grabbed hold of the barrel with both hands and stuck his chest in front of it.

“Get off!” yelled the gunner. He pointed a pistol at Jack.

“Turn around,” Jack said.

“Last warning.”

“Same.”

The man yanked the trigger on the pistol.

Jack died. His body went all ragdoll, but his weight had been distributed in such a way that the gunner had to get down from his perch and shove Jack off. Jack fell beneath the treads of the tank, which ran him over and continued onward.

Ribs, organs, brain all revived like re-inflated balloons roughly fifty-three minutes later. Jack stood up and saw that they had pressed north down the road, shoving the militia down a bottleneck. He was thirsty and didn’t have time for another death-by-thirst so he picked up the canteen of one of the dead and sipped.

And so forth it went. After all, why would a man who truly believed that he would bodily rise ever arm himself for self-protection?

It took a long time for the conflict to stop, but significantly less time than it would have without a dead man walking into battle for them. Significantly less time than the violent route.

It took years and years of dying like that, decades even, but eventually he learned that he didn’t want to be safe anymore. And he didn’t want to be wild anymore. He didn’t want to kill himself and didn’t want apathy. He didn’t want the money that comes from living a thousand lives or trophies or political power (it comes and goes anyways) or the pleasure of being with everyone for every reason.

He merely want the people he met to want the thing that started kicked off their wants in the first place:

To be.

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