Free Magnificent Vibration by Rick Springfield

It’s not quite going how I always thought it would.
    “I have friends who want to join,” I lie like a bastard, trying to keep her attention at any cost.
    “I don’t really do recruiting anymore,” is her disconnected reply.
    “You’re fucking kidding me???” is what I, again, want to say, but I settle for “Oh.”
    “But I’m happy you let Jesus and the LDS into your heart.”
    “What’s an LDS?” I ask, still pitching to her catcher’s mitt, but she doesn’t return the ball.
    “Excuse me, I have patients to see,” she says, and brushes by me with her cart and a curt, tight smile.
    Like a man wronged, steely-eyed and determined to set his woman straight on his affections, I march after her, although I’m sure I look more like a whipped puppy running for a corner to hide from a well-aimed hose.
    “But I’ve been going to that church for months now. You told me you’d see me there,” I whimper pathetically.
    She stops and turns to face me. “Look, I must have recruited fifty boys your age, and I wouldn’t recognize any of them if they came up and bit me. Sorry. God bless you.” (God bless me?) And with that she turns and continues pushing her wheelie-tray full of tinkle collectors down the bright, antiseptic hallway—and out of my life. Camera pulls back, music rises. Fade to black. Cut and PRINT!!!
    Woodydamnit!!!
    I limp back into the waiting room, where the stone statues that are my parents still have not moved. I want to say something about the ignominy of life, woman’s inhumanity to man, the delicate balance of emotions that is “love,” and how life couldn’t possibly get any friggin’ worse if I stood up on my principal’s desk and told the whole damn faculty to go fuck themselves. But instead I cross to the vending machine I had been trying to rob earlier and give it a swift, hard ass-kick. Only my mother looks up briefly and then she goes back to staring at her folded, blue-veined hands. Is God really this careless with our hearts, I wonder, though probably not in those exact words, and as if in answer there is a muted, papery “plop.” I look at the vending machine dispenser drawerwhere the sound came from and see that my hostile punt has dislodged a yellow packet of peanut M&M’s. Obviously God is still mocking me. So I grab it, tear it open, and stuff the M&M’s into my mouth in a sort of “substituting food for the absence of love, resulting in severe depression” thing. I am aggressively chomping away when the waiting-room door opens and a thin, balding man in pale-blue scrubs and an off-white coat steps into the room.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Cotton?” he asks my parents.
    “Yes,” answers my mother.
    “I’m Doctor Ellis.”
    We all freeze and time stands still. I am thinking now only of Josie.
    “Uh-huh,” says my little, crushed, heartsick mom.
    “We have managed to save your daughter’s life . . .” he says, with no flicker of emotion and no hint of what may come.

Bobby
    “T here’ve been two calls, actually.” I don’t really know how to explain this as we convene over coffee at this late hour, the blistering-hot postulant and I. In my reeling mind the phone conversations all sound like scenes that might have been cut from Agnes of God, or maybe even The Exorcist V. And with good reason.
    This is really freaky. I know it. And I suspect she knows it.
    “Two? Lucky you,” she says lightly.
    “Yeah, you’d think so, right? But it turns out he, God, may be a bit crazy, or a lot crazy. Or something totally different than we all thought he’d be.”
    “Well now you’re not saying ‘he/she.’ You’re just saying ‘he.’ ”
    “Yeah, I know. When you talk to this voice, it really doesn’t havea defined sex to it. Like there’s no real gender distinction. It’s so strange. I don’t know how to explain it, and it’s not something you really notice, though it caused me to almost involuntarily say the ‘he/she’ thing, but it’s a bit of a pain to