The Dark Path (11 page)

This is as close as I've ever gotten to talking about the dark path with anyone. I fidget my hands. Father Tillermacher has a complicated light in his eyes. Is he impressed? Concerned?

“David, do you know the passage in Matthew that reads ‘From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force'?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think it means?”

“That God and His followers are surrounded by conflict. And if you want to know God, you might have to relish that. You might have to battle and claim a place in His company.”

Father Tillermacher studies me. “And that's what you want to be? A violent man in that sense? A man fighting to find—I'll use your phrase—God's danger and darkness?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

“Why ‘hmm'?”

“If you look hard enough for that kind of fight, God just might give it to you.”

I sense that he's warning me seriously, but I want to be accepted by his club. I try some levity. “Do you think the Jesuits will want a fight-picking punk like me?”

He smiles, letting down his guard. “I think we already do.”

He gives me a hug, which has become our custom, and I leave.

•   •   •

I AM OBSESSED
with short stories lately. Each evening I go to Lauinger Library and sit in a big cushioned chair and lose myself in the short stories of Bernard MacLaverty, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor. Like poetry and Shakespeare have rocked me in the past, short fiction is dazzling me now. I read over and over two short stories in particular—“Goodbye, My Brother” by John Cheever and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. These stories make me feel like I'm plugged into a secret electrical current that runs under the surface of life. They're so damned good that they make me want to throw a thousand punches or fuck a thousand girls or kiss the sun.

I can't understand why, but when I read them, I feel carried far outside myself and simultaneously driven deeper into myself. Only praying, running, and sex with Mara have ever made me feel that way. I'm jealous of these stories . . . I want to have written them. I want and need to get at truth the way that they do. I feel like God must be entertained or moved by these stories, and I feel like they're the answer to something dire.

Something is shifting inside me as a student of the world. I've begun thinking that the world's leaders—the people I've studied for years in my Foreign Service program—need to shut the fuck up about themselves and their agendas and geopolitical this and national sovereignty that. Maybe if everyone could just read more American Cheever and drink more Italian Chianti and eat more German spaetzle and try whatever sexual positions the French are inventing lately, we'd all have more fun and we wouldn't get so ripshit defensive with each other. I have no fully evolved theories about all this, just suspicions. And my suspicions make me want to write fiction. If there is truth in John Cheever's and Joyce Carol Oates's work, then God is in that work, too. And priests are committed to all facets of the truth, I tell myself. I decide that I will be a priest who writes fiction. And plays Ultimate Frisbee. And says “fuck” sometimes.

So throughout the fall I start writing my own short stories, forgoing classwork to do so. Every night I make brilliant progress. Every morning, whatever I wrote the night before reads like utter shit and I throw it out. But I keep doing it. I get better.

As Christmas approaches, I write a special story, a semiautobiographical one. I write it for my father. It's clunky, but it ends with a young man at night on a dark path. As the young man stares into the shadows under some trees, the fireflies above the shadows swirl and form letters that say:
be a priest, be a priest, be a priest
.

One afternoon when I'm home over Christmas break, I ask my father to go into the kitchen. “I left you something on the table to read,” I tell him.

My mother and sisters aren't home. I lurk in the living room while he reads. Soon he joins me. He is holding my story and looking at it like it's a ticket to some miraculous place.

“David? Does this mean what I think it means?”

I nod. “You're the only one I want to know for now, Dad, but I'm going to be a priest. If the Jesuits will have me.”

His cheeks pink up. He hugs me. “Oh, David. I'm so glad for you. Your mother and I . . . we've wondered . . .”

He sits on the couch. His eyes mist. And then suddenly, awfully, something in his facial expression falters, or falls away. I've never seen it happen before. It's as if there's some cave inside him, some haunted place I didn't know about, and for the first time I am seeing the entrance to it. My father starts crying. Hard. He looks agonized.

My muscles lock up in panic. He has never even teared up in front of me.

“Dad!” I sit, put my arms around him. “Dad, what's wrong?”

He's shaking. Then he tells me, in a rush. He's leaving General Motors, where he's worked for three decades. GM closed Rochester Products a while back and he's been commuting by car—on his dime—to Detroit for a year, spending weekends in Rochester with my mother and living in a Detroit motel on weeknights. I've known about his commute, but he says that the traveling isn't the problem.

He says that there's a certain powerful colleague who's making things impossible for him. “So I'm resigning. And I've got an idea for a company to start, and I'm pursuing the deaconate, but I . . . I just want to be a good man, David.” He clings to me.

Still terrified, I pat his back.
Be stronger than me,
I beg him in my mind.
Please stop crying and be stronger than me, that's your job.

He says, “I thought I was part of a good thing. And here now you're going to do the best of all things—”

“I'll do it for you,” I blurt.

As he leans against my chest, I focus on the wild gray hairs and stray liver spots on the back of his neck. I listen as his breathing eventually eases. I'll give up anything to calm him and make him proud. Anything.

•   •   •

ALL WINTER
I keep up my talks with Father Tillermacher as I prepare to tell my friends and family of my priesthood plans. I also keep writing short stories and on a lark I apply to some master's programs in fiction, just to see if I get in. For me priesthood and creativity will intertwine. At McQuaid I admired a priest who wrote books and had a role in the film
The Exorcist
. He seemed to praise God through art and I decide that I'll do that, too. The Jesuits have room for all types, Mystics, Bodybuilders, Cut-Ups, everything. What they don't have yet is a Kick-Ass Author Priest who wins the National Book Award for fiction. That's where I will come in.

The priest who acted in
The Exorcist
was also a singer, and in February at Georgetown I try singing. I audition for the annual talent show, Cabaret. It's a night when a house band plays at a bar while students sing covers of rock songs. I make it past the first audition round by performing “Stray Cat Strut.”

The final callback is in the campus pub one weeknight. Performers pack the place. The Alabama Boys show up to support me as I take the stage and launch into “Somebody” by Depeche Mode.
I'm halfway through the song when the crowd shifts and I see Mara and Akoni sitting, drinking beers, listening, as he strokes her cheek. They look oddly good together, her with her long red hair and him with his black chop of a haircut. I stare at them. It takes cleared throats in the crowd for me to realize that the music's playing but I've stopped singing. Mara's mouth opens with what looks like concern for me, but although I've practiced for days I can't remember more lyrics.

Crimson, I hop offstage and leave the pub. Mara follows me, alone. She catches up with me in the Student Union hall.

“You were doing great,” she says. “What happened?”

I look off at the posters outside the pub, advertising guitar lessons, Spanish language lessons, fencing lessons. Everybody has lessons to offer.

“You know what happened.”

We look at each other. Mara shakes her head, as if to deny any tension between us. “Can't we just be friends, honey?”

“Mara, you can't call me ‘honey' anymore. I—I can't—”
I can't live life when you're around. I can't pretend that I don't crave and miss every inch of you. I've made a choice about my future and you're fucking it up by continuing to exist.

“Just go be with Akoni,” I say and I leave.

•   •   •

ON AN APRIL
day I sit praying with Father Tillermacher in the living room of his on-campus apartment. We've prayed like this before, since Georgetown students often visit priests in their living quarters (each dorm has one live-in priest so students can ask for spiritual guidance).

Outside, the cherry trees are in bloom. In a few minutes I'll be on Copley Lawn, playing Ultimate with Graham. But right now I'm thanking God for the path that I feel strengthening in me. I plan to contact the New York Province of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits' technical name—within the month to start my application.

Father Tillermacher and I each say things that we're grateful for, and we make sure to name each other.

“I'll be proud and excited,” he says, “when you become my brother Jesuit.”

“I will, too.”

We stand and give each other our customary parting hug.

Then, while he's hugging me, he squeezes my right ass cheek in his left fist and holds on for ten seconds past what would be an acceptable football-field or locker-room ass slap from a coach to a player.

Wait
, I think.
What's this, wait, wait
—

As he holds my ass, I hear a rushing in my ears, like in a cartoon when a character freezes solid,
whoosh
, because ice wind is blasting him.

I break away, though not violently. Father Tillermacher hasn't attacked me. It is worse for having been a probing, secret handshake of a gesture: an invitation.

“Okay, 'bye,” I say brightly, trying to sound normal.

I leave. On Copley Lawn I climb up into what some students call Uncle Treemus, a massive oak tree with thick branches. I sit on a high branch and don't move. In my mind I flip through every interaction I've ever had with Father Tillermacher. I look at the blocking and the dialogue, where he stood, where I stood, what he said, what I said. There's a faint noise in the air. It's my voice whispering “
G
odfuckingdammit, godfuckingdammit
.
”

Looking back, I can't find suggestiveness in his behavior on any prior day. And I know that there won't be more unless I ask. Something quietly unambiguous has been left in my court.

“Schickler? What the hell are you doing up there?”

I look down. Graham is at the base of the tree, holding two Frisbees. In Tübingen we threw these same disks each afternoon. When we play Ultimate, each of us can bullet the Frisbee through dozens of opponents' waving arms and bull's-eye the disk into the other guy's hands. It's our closest connection.

“Time to throw, man. There's like twenty other chumps waiting for us to chew them up and spit them out.”

I don't answer. Graham climbs up beside me.

“What's the problem, Schick? Too busy to throw with your best heathen buddy?”

He clonks my head with a disk. When I still don't speak, his face gets serious. “Hey, for real, are you all right? Did you get into something with somebody?”

He glares around the base of the tree, looking for potential offenders. He is a loyal, impulsive friend. If I tell him what happened, he will go rip the priest's lungs out.

“Don't worry about it,” I say quickly. “It's just SWM.”

Graham groans. SWM is our code for Shit With Mara. If I show up at Graham's off-campus house at night and say “SWM” he gets us a couple Anchor Steams and we sit on his lawn, drinking, not needing to talk.

“Schickler,” he says now, “no moping about pussy today. The sun is shining and it's time to throw.”

I stare at the sky. It's not like I haven't heard of priests making moves on young people. There was a priest in the drama program at McQuaid who had to “go away for a while” because he'd been caught sharing “hugs” with several girls from our sister high school, Our Lady of Mercy, during rehearsals for a McQuaid-and-Mercy spring musical. And here at Georgetown there's a handsome, witty priest who's rumored to be an actively gay regular on the D.C. nightclub circuit. But stories like that have always been around, and whether they've been cautionary whispers or jokes, they've been peripheral to me. Until now. Godfuckingdammit
.

“Hey.” Graham nudges me. “If you don't get off this fucking branch, I'll shove you off it.”

Inside I'm still jarred. But I'm grateful for Graham and I hop down out of the tree and he does too and we run out onto the lawn to chew up chumps and spit them out.

I GET ACCEPTED
into the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University and in August I move to New York City. Inside, I remain shaken. My plans to apply immediately to the Jesuits are stalled.

I yell at Father Tillermacher in my mind.
THERE'S NO FUCKING ON THE PATH!

I thought sacrificing sex and Mara had cleared my way for a priestly, contemplative life. Now contemplative life has literally grabbed my ass and I can't reconcile it. By mail I keep in guarded touch with Father Tillermacher, never bringing up what happened. I still know that I'll end up an Artistic Priest, but I confide to my father—without saying what happened—that I need some time before joining the Jesuits.

I lecture myself.
You were talking too much with one man behind closed doors. You should've been out in the world, acting, building up what you can bring to the Jesuits, what you can do for God
.

Thinking this way, I decide that there will be a new fork on my path toward full priesthood. Saint Paul says that if we are richly gifted in any one way, we should use that gift for the building up of the greater assembly, the wider community. Well, Columbia MFA Admissions seems to feel that I have a gift for writing. So I've moved here not only so that I can write fiction for God, but so that I can teach others to write well, too. All of this will make me a better Father Schickler someday, I tell myself.

This new MO of mine lands me one September day in the Columbia Learning Center, a tutoring facility in Lewisohn, a building that sits along Broadway. I've been hired to tutor students in writing during one-on-one sessions. On this day I work with an Israeli exchange student, and when we're done I check the sign-up sheet. Written in my next time slot is the name Melvin Duggles. I look around the center.

“Is there a Melvin Duggles?”

“Psst,” hisses a voice. “Over here.”

The two large ficus plants in the corner are whispering to me. I approach and see a human figure crouched behind them.

“Melvin?”

“It's a game,” says the figure. “You have to find me.”

“I found you. We're talking.”

He emerges from behind the plants, grinning shyly or wickedly, I can't tell which. He looks about my age with bulging, froggy eyes and a tattered cap pulled down over greasy black hair. He is wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt that features a flamingo standing on it. The sweatshirt is also covered with huge coffee stains.

When the girl at the check-in desk sees who I'm talking to, she waves me over. “Most tutors won't work with him,” she warns.

I look Melvin over. He has a picked-last-on-the-playground air about him, but I tell myself that the Lord cares for fringe individuals, so I should, too.

I think,
Be priestly, Schickler. Help the greater assembly. Help Melvin
.

Melvin and I sit at a table and he shows me a paragraph he's working on for his English class. His assignment is to describe a room and a person entering it, and he's been told to “set a mood via description.” As I read, Melvin watches me intently.

“I like you,” he says. “I know you'll help my writing. And looks-wise, you have a real Mel Gibson thing going on.”

His paragraph is single-spaced in caps and bold type. It reads:

THE MAN WALKED DOWN INTOO THE BASEMINT, WHICH WAS DRAK AND DICKENSIAN. ALSO THERE WAS A BAT IN BASEMINT AND THE BAT WAS ALSO DICKENSIAN. THE MAN DINT HAVE A NAME BUT HE WAS DICKENSIAN. PHANTASMAGORIA. THE MAN DINT LIKE THE BAT, ‘AH' YELLED THE MAN, HE STEPPED ON BAT, THE BASEMINT WAS IN WALES.

My first ungenerous thought is to wonder how the fuck Melvin Duggles ever got into Columbia. I ask him questions. It turns out that he's a gifted math major, but he needs to pass English Logic and Rhetoric to graduate and he failed it last year. As we talk I try to ignore his scent. He smells half soapy and half sour, like a hospital floor scrubbed with too weak a detergent.

Get past it
, I tell myself.
Help the community
.

“We'll handle grammar later, Melvin,” I say. “First let's talk about diction. You're trying to set a spooky mood in this piece, but—”

“You're right!” Melvin crows. “Halloween is coming up and I want this essay to be creepy. And Dickensian.”

“Okay. But ironically
Dickensian
isn't a very Dickensian word. For example . . . which word sounds more powerful to you,
stab
or
violent
?”

Melvin blinks at me with his owlish eyes. “You're saying the guy should stab the bat instead of stepping on it?”

“What? No. It's just . . . you're trying to write a dark piece, but
phantasmagoria
, for example, isn't a dark-feeling word. It's scientific sounding.”

Using a pen Melvin crosses out sentences on his paper and writes over them. “I'm just gonna do what you said and put in lots of stabbing.”

“That's not what I said.”

“No, you're right,” says Melvin. “Life is violent. I'll tap into that.”

•   •   •

MAYBE MELVIN READ
my subconscious, because violence has been on my mind. Ever since Father Tillermacher got a fistful of my ass, I have felt fragile. I've been skinny since my cross-country days, but where I was once happy about that, I now feel defenseless. And increasingly fucking pissed. I love God but no one gets to just grab me. In the TV show
Kung Fu
, which I watched as a kid, Caine is a contemplative monk but also a lethal motherfucker. I decide that I'll be like him. It will be another honing, a sharpening of myself, a priestly preparation.

I start taking Shotokan karate. I'm living on West 121st Street, across from Teacher's College, and the Teacher's College gym is where the Columbia Shotokan club trains two nights a week. Wearing a
gi
—a karate uniform—I learn punches, kicks, and blocks, and I do hundreds of push-ups on my knuckles on the hard gym floor. My knuckles hurt all the time from this and they're constantly bruised, but I can feel the bones in them getting denser, stronger.

One Monday night after karate I trudge across 121st Street to my apartment building, exhausted. My place is on the ground floor and through its open front windows I can see into my living room, where a crowd is having a party with my apartment mate, a law student named Tom Gumm. The university housing board threw us together randomly. Tom is a funny, smart Mormon guy from Salt Lake City, and every able-bodied local Mormon girl wants him as a husband.

I enter the apartment, go to the kitchen, get out my favorite stein and fill it with two bottles' worth of New Amsterdam beer. Then I head for the living room.

“Hi,” I call to the group. I lift my stein in greeting and take a big swallow.

Everyone turns and stares at me and my beverage. It turns out that this isn't a party as I understand parties, but a Mormon tradition called Family Home Evening. It's a time, I learn later, for strengthening bonds of Christian love and maybe having a wholesome game or lesson (with no alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine allowed). As a leader of the singles in his Upper West Side ward, Tom will host Family Home Evening every other Monday this year.

The Mormons are quick to say that they're not offended by my beer, so I keep drinking and talk with three Mormon girls in a corner.

“Tom took me to see
Bob Roberts
last Saturday,” says one. “The movie was cynical, but we had a nice dinner beforehand.”

A second girl says, “Tom took me out for soul food in Harlem.”

The third girl, Lurlene, is a quiet charmer who works at the concierge desk at a midtown hotel. She alone seems uncomfortable with the idea of openly discussing Tom, with whom she'll soon have her first date.

“How can you all like the same guy?” I ask. “If my sisters ever liked the same guy, they'd attack each other with machetes.”

“Well,” says the
Bob Roberts
girl, “a true union can't be based on that kind of jealousy and selfishness. You'll learn that, David, if you ever fall in love.”

I stare into my beer, wondering what Mara Kincannon is doing at this moment. I've heard from Graham that she's working for a D.C. advertising agency and living with Akoni.

“I have. For two years I spent every second I could with a girl. But we broke up because I'm going to be . . .” I trail off, feeling stupid.

Lurlene touches my arm. “Hey, my friend didn't mean to pry. Right, Sarah?”

“Oh,” says Sarah. “Right.”

A guy sidles up and nudges me. “Bro . . . you look upset. Can I give you something?”

He pulls from his pocket a copy of the Book of Mormon and presses it into my palm. “Don't say anything. Just take it and put it aside and think about reading it someday and, for now, enjoy your alcohol.”

“Okay,” I say. I go to my room and stash the Book of Mormon in my boxer shorts drawer, feeling it would be rude to throw it out and misleading to display it. Then I go to the fridge for more beer.

As the weeks pass, Tom Gumm never tries to sell me on Mormonism. He lives his faith with calm and joy and I admire this, but I also admire the calm and joy with which he is dating virtually every unwed Mormon girl in Manhattan. He isn't fucking them or even getting naked and hooking up with them, yet he never seems frustrated. He eventually begins exclusively dating Lurlene the Mormon concierge. They come back from dates holding hands and cooing to each other.

One evening Tom and I are in midtown and we stop in to see Lurlene at the hotel where she works. She introduces me to another woman concierge there, Sabine, who is a couple years older than us and not Mormon. Sabine is funky hot, with long, black hair that she wears in a complicated braid, and she's a very slender six feet tall. She and Lurlene wear matching pink vest-and-skirt outfits that are apparently their uniforms. I admire Sabine as she helps a woman in a wheelchair find the elevator, then as she gives theater advice to a young couple with two small children.

“It's a wholesome production,” she tells them, pointing to a brochure. “Family friendly.”

Then she crouches and plays a version of peekaboo with the couple's shy daughter.

Standing tall in her shiny pink outfit, she looks like every gilded female archetype—the Prom Queen, the Princess, the Blushing Bride—that I'll soon have to leave behind for celibacy. Her cheeks glow each time she smiles.

I can't help flirting with Sabine and I end up getting her phone number. Back at my apartment I tell myself that it's okay to call her. Maybe I am inspired by Tom Gumm and Lurlene's budding romance. Maybe I want to punish Father Tillermacher.
I'll still be a priest soon, Father G
, I think,
but since you acted out and squeezed my ass, I get to act out and squeeze One Last Girl before I'm a Jesuit
. I think I'm basically looking to emulate Saint Augustine's famous mantra:
Dear Lord, make me chaste, but not yet
.

I go out with Sabine on Halloween night. She lives in Queens in a house with her aunt and uncle, and she takes the subway into Manhattan to meet me in Morningside Heights up by Columbia. She wears tight, all-black clothes and has a giant shoulder bag with her. She asks me to take her to see the horror flick
Candyman
. I oblige. After the film I take her to the Abbey Pub on West 105th.

“That movie was so fucking great,” she says. We're at a table in a murky corner under a stained-glass window and we're drinking New Amsterdam ale. There's a lit candle between us and melted wax all over the table.

“I loved the decapitated Rottweiler,” gushes Sabine. “I loved the bees crawling out of the killer's mouth and I loved the way he slashed the back of that woman's neck and she almost bled out, but not quite, and that way he could keep her alive and make her do his bidding. That was so fucking great.”

When I first met her at the hotel, Sabine looked very poised and polite. But now, under the table, she's rubbing her bare foot against my inner thigh.

“I love this song!” She closes her eyes and nods with the music. “I fucking love Primus. Also Anthrax and Megadeth. Also Johnette Napolitano, the lead singer of Concrete Blonde, is the best female vocalist ever, so let's not even discuss it.”

“Okay,” I say.

She leans across the table and kisses my mouth. Her hair is out of its braid tonight and one of her long tresses brushes the candle and catches fire. Flame races up as if along a wick and without thinking I slap my hand hard against her head, snuffing the flame. She sits back in shock, and we both look at the puff of smoke beside her. The air smells burnt.

“Holy shit.” She puts her hand to her scalp. “Did you
see
that?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hit you. I thought it would spread.”

Her mouth hangs open in joy. “Don't apologize. That was so sexy! Right when I kissed you,
I caught on fucking fire
. Are you kidding me?”

“I really didn't mean to hit you.”

Her eyes signal that she wants to be taken home, fast. We walk to my apartment. Tom Gumm and Lurlene are watching TV in the living room, along with a Mormon whom Tom calls Sad Dog because the guy never has dates (Sad Dog has given me three Books of Mormon and they are all in my boxers drawer). Sabine says quick hellos, then pulls me into my bedroom and locks the door behind us.

“David, I am so totally horny for you right now. I feel really confident and horny.”

I blush. I have no experience with dirty talk or really any talk during sexual encounters. Mara and I always just kissed and quietly willed our way forward.

“I can't believe I caught on fire. That was so badass!”

Sabine starts unbuttoning her top. I tell her my stop-at-third-base rules, that I can do Almost Everything, but Not Quite Everything. She nods and keeps unbuttoning. “You took charge when I was in trouble. You hit me really hard.”