The Dark Path (13 page)

“Yes I can! Andrew Greeley . . . he's a priest and an author.”

“David, he was a priest for a quarter century before he wrote. You think he'd have gotten ordained if he'd come in saying he planned to write bodice rippers?”

I'm stymied. I wish he'd hug me or hit me, anything but judge me.

“You think women will read your perverted stuff and let you baptize their babies?”

“My writing's not perverted! It's . . .”

He is already storming out, off to what will be a solo dinner.

“It's
real
,” I say. But I'm talking to myself.

•   •   •

A MONTH BEFORE
spring semester ends I'm walking on campus when Melvin runs up to me. He's in his flamingo sweatshirt with the coffee stains. “I've been looking for you at the Learning Center.”

“They shifted my hours and I'm there on different days now.”

“You were right about my Huck Finn paper. My professor wouldn't accept it and now I might fail.”

I'd been eating a bagel as I walked, but now I stash it in my coat pocket. There's a revolting scent coming from Melvin. He smells literally like a latrine.

He pulls out a rolled wad of cash, holds it toward me. “Two hundred dollars. Take it and write my paper for me. Come on, we'll sit here and you can riff about Huck and I'll write it all down. It'll work and I'll pass.”

I stare at the money. I'm broke and I could use it.

“That's unethical, Melvin.” I inhale only through my mouth. His stench is enough to make me vomit. “And I'm sorry to say this, but you also . . . really smell.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, sometimes I don't wear it. It's a pain.”

“Sometimes you don't wear what?”

“My colostomy bag. It's not fair that I have to have it on all the time, so sometimes I just go without.”

I look at him in shock. The stains on his sweatshirt make a new, awful sense. He is still holding the money toward me and his expression seems impatient, as if to say,
Come on, you wanted mess and raw truth, here they are
.

“You need help, Melvin,” I say.

He scowls and jabs my chest with the money wad. “What, you're better than me?”

I bat his arm aside. I've had enough of him, of my father, of the fourteen Books of Mormon in my underwear drawer.

“If you poke me again,” I say, “we might have a problem.”

His face crumbles and saddens, like he'll cry. Pocketing his cash, he runs off, and I feel sick, sick, sick to my stomach.

“Melvin, wait,” I call, too late. He rounds a corner and is gone.

It is my last interaction with him and it haunts me. As a tutor I've failed him, and I've failed my father with my fiction. To combat these failings I practice Shotokan obsessively, especially my spinning back roundhouses. Karate classes end, but I work out alone at my apartment. I get better and better, and my workouts get longer. When I finish I stand under a hot shower with aching muscles. I tell myself that they're good aches, the cost of strength, the growing pains of a fighting soon-to-be monk.

In July I fly to San Francisco. Mason is living there and he has gathered our old Georgetown crew for a weekend. Graham and the Alabama Boys come, plus some girls, including Daphne Lowell. One sunny day we walk on the Embarcadero toward Fisherman's Wharf. Mason points out attractions. I have trouble keeping up due to a weird sensation building in my right calf. I want to be walking next to Daphne, so that she'll sense that my karate-tuned body is as dangerous as my fiction is becoming. Eventually she hangs back as I grimace and soldier forward.

“Are you okay? You're hobbling.”

“I'm fine.”

She bumps my shoulder with hers. “Can we talk about the concierge?”

“Okay . . .”

The feeling in my calf is intensifying. It smarts but it also feels like a falling away of strength, as if the flesh around my shinbone is losing substance with each step I take. I feel like my leg might buckle and give way.

“David, you and I have some deep talks and . . . well, you never even mention her.” Wind is blowing Daphne's hair around her face. “Please don't be upset that I'm saying this, but I feel like you're just clocking time with this girl. I feel like you're cut out for . . . something bolder. More lasting.”

Like priesthood
, I think.
Or you
.

She says, “There's something else. I'm getting engaged.”

I stop short. The pain in my calf is now so bad that I can't keep moving.

“He teaches at Tapwood with me. He's twelve years older, but . . . well, we're in love and we're getting married.”

There's a flagpole beside us with a thick concrete base. I sit down on this base. “That's so great,” I say, wincing. “You'll be so happy.”

“David, are you all right?”

“Um, could you ask Mason how I can get a cab to his place? My leg's out of it.”

“What'd you do to yourself?”

“I don't know.” I rub my calf.

She frowns at my leg. “Okay. Hold tight.” She hurries off.

I massage my calf harder. I remember limping through Berlin with a bum ankle. And I remember the dread, the awful feeling of groundlessness that was there beneath the pain. That dread surges in me now and it says,
At last I've got you
.

“TELL ME WHERE IT HURTS,”
Dr. Greer says.

It is September of my second Columbia year and I'm in Dr. Greer's office at Mount Sinai hospital, downtown. Dr. Greer is in his fifties and completely bald. When he speaks he leans back and looks down at me through thick glasses. He is sitting behind his desk, where he's been since I entered his office, not having stood to shake my hand. He's the specialist the Columbia health center referred me to for my persistent leg pain.

“It hurts all through my right calf,” I say. “It's been happening for months. When I walk to school I'm all right for a block and then it starts feeling like someone has my calf in a vise grip and is squeezing it harder and harder. So it feels tight but . . . hollow. Like it's without strength, like it might give way.”

“You've pulled a muscle,” says Dr. Greer.

“I run a lot and I know what pulled muscles feel like. This is different. My calf feels cramped but empty inside.”

“Sciatica,” he says. “Nerve-related, referred pain from the spine. We'll run tests. My office will set it up. I have to head to a lecture. Be well, David.”

So over the next couple of months tests get run: X-rays and MRIs of my spine and right leg. According to the tests, I'm fine. I have no slipped disks or bone spurs or torn muscles. Yet my right calf is shrinking, atrophying, and the clenching feeling gets worse each day. The five-block walk from my apartment to Dodge Hall on campus takes twice as long as usual. My karate ends.

Soon the problem isn't just in my calf. Spasms of pain flare up deep in my right hip and buttock. Sometimes they're so intense that I grab a wall or a stranger's shoulder so that I won't fall. During some flare-ups my eyes ram shut and I see white and blue fireworks.

“Maybe you have HIV,” Dr. Greer tells me in his office one January day.

I throw up a little in the back of my throat. “What?”

“Sometimes a pins-and-needles sensation can occur in the limbs or extremities in the early stages of HIV. Do you think you might have contracted it?”

I stare at him, terrified.

“We'll run a blood test. The results take two weeks to come back, and then we'll discuss those results. Be well, David.”

Be well?
I think, walking out of his building.
Be well, motherfucker? “Be well” is something Ward Cleaver might say to June. It's not what you tell a guy getting tested for HIV.

I take the blood test and in the two weeks that follow I can't write or sleep. I take walks in Riverside Park, enduring hip spasms and clenching in my calf and a nervousness that I now feel all through me. It isn't only fear of HIV. It's that deeper dread, that groundlessness I've felt on and off since Tübingen, and I can't understand it.

One day as I limp beside the Hudson, this dread surges so hard that I stop walking. I lean against a tree and stare at the river, trying to catch my breath. The dread is like a dark, molten thing in my chest, rising up my windpipe, blocking air.

I try to stare at the dread, to scour it, to know it.
You're smart
, I tell myself.
Face it. Figure it out.

The Hudson's waters are grayish black and rough. Wind kicks at them, making them slap and bicker, and looking at the waves, I suddenly do figure out my dread, at least part of it. I trip over a memory, one I buried long ago but that comes back now. I can smell this memory in my sinuses. It oozes between my fingers . . .

•   •   •

. . . I'M YOUNG,
and the dark path in the Black Creek woods is my main haunt, but the rest of the golf course attracts us kids, too. In the summers we climb trees in the woods, and the vines around the trees grow so thick that one day when I stumble and fall headfirst off a high branch, I get caught in a web of vines and never hit the ground. And the rest of the golf course seems like that, like something made to catch me, delight me. The landscaping of the eleventh hole is beautiful: five hundred yards of fairway with the creek along one edge and a large blue pond and mammoth shrubs near the green.

I love the dark path best, but the whole golf course is a buffer between me and life's troubles. In these woods and on these fairways there is no litter, no squawking TV, no bullies giving me wedgies, nothing that doesn't feel natural and good. That's why it's a disturbance when Tommy fucks Lesley on my path.

But then comes another disturbance, just a month after Tommy screws Lesley. It is July and the greenskeepers drain the eleventh-hole pond. They're scheduled to widen or dredge it, but all summer long they never do. Instead the great brown pock that was the pond's bottom lies exposed. Hundreds of long-lost golf balls dot the surface of this pock and the greenskeepers never skim them away. My friends and I often scavenge in the woods for lost balls which we clean and sell to golfers, so the drained pond looks like a jackpot.

One afternoon I'm at the pock's edge with two of the Langini brothers. Mike Langini, who's thirteen like I am, strips to his briefs.

“Schickler, you watch for golfers. Danny, hand the net out to me when I say.”

Danny is Mike's kid brother. The Langinis are fearless hooligans.

“Let's make some fucking money,” says Mike.

He steps onto the drained bottom of the pond and sinks up to his chest. The mud makes a furious sucking sound and releases a wafting stench of sulfur.

“Mike!” I shout. “Get out of there!”

“Minghia,” Mike says.

Then, like nothing serious is occurring, he grins and reaches for golf balls that are within arm's length. He tosses them onto shore, but he's already sinking farther, up to his armpits, disappearing from view.

“Fuck.” Mike sounds annoyed. “Better reach me out the net, Danny.”

Danny does, but he's short so I help him shove the long bamboo pole toward Mike. We can barely jut it far enough, but Mike finally grabs it. We pull. I feel through the pole handle a power working against us, trying to claim Mike's body. This mud, it's alive and willful. It wants my friend.

“Mike,” I beg. “Mike!”

Sucks and slurps of sound come from the mud around Mike's chest. They are awful, hungry noises. We reel Mike closer, but he's still sinking down, almost up to his neck, and I can't reach him with my hands yet.

Help us, Lord!
I pray.
HELP!

I pull on the pole with all my strength. Mike churns through the mud another couple inches, then Danny and I finally get him by a shoulder. As we pull him out, the mud gives a last, spiteful, violent suck. Then Mike is on land.

“Mike.” I hug him hard.

“Schickler, you faggot, let go.” Mike snorts, shaking his head, looking out at the hundreds of balls. “What a fucking crock. We'll never get them.”

That night I wrap my sheets and blankets around myself and curl in a ball on the floor of my basement bedroom. I need solidity. Even my mattress is too soft, too much like mud. The Langinis are insane with bravado, but I know the truth: Mike almost drowned. If he'd stepped out even a foot farther, he would've been beyond our reach and we would've watched the mud close over him and take him away from us, from his mother, his future. There'd been no adults around who could've rescued him.

I lie on my floor, trembling. That mud is not far away. It's waiting, ready to pull down anyone who steps in it. The power it had as it sucked at Mike overwhelms me.

I've always trusted nature. I've felt that the dark path, the creek, the woods have cared about me because they're part of the world and God made the world and God cares about me and Mike and all people. But that pond mud is part of the world and that mud didn't care about Mike today. It would've swallowed him or me as easily as it would've a rock. And worse, it had
wanted
to swallow Mike. It had been in its nature to try to take him under.

I squeeze my eyes shut.
No
, I think,
God loves me. He loves me, He protects me, He cares what happens to me
.

But then I think of the temptation of those golf balls on that mud. Part of me says sure, mud is dangerous, like sharks and lightning. But those shiny balls lying on that mud like bait . . . that detail seems designed, arranged by some cruel force.

The Langinis and I aren't the only kids who find and sell golf balls. Tons of local kids do. And there's a public playground near that mud, on the other side of a thin strip of trees. And some kids who play there unattended are barely five and sometimes they wander onto the golf course.

As I lie on my floor, my blood races. The pond mud fills me up inside, drowning out my organs and bones, obliterating safety.

You made a mistake
, I tell God.
That mud shouldn't be out there
.

I barely sleep.

The next day I begin a ritual that I keep up all summer, at least on fair-weather days. Every afternoon for an hour before dinnertime, when the playground is busiest, I hide in the shrubs near the drained pond. I bring binoculars and a rope. I keep my binoculars trained on the trees between the playground and golf course. I'm scared just sitting near the mud, but I'm here to correct God's mistake. I will make sure that no child strays near the mud. Or I'll rescue any kid who falls in.

I'm too scared to tell anyone but I start dreaming at night of mud pouring into my mouth and nose and ears. I wake up sweating, my heart pounding. In autumn the greenskeepers fill the pond back in with water and make life look right again, and my nightmares subside. I force myself to forget the mud. I let God's error go . . .

•   •   •

. . . BUT NOW
over a decade later as I stand by the Hudson, it's back, the quicksand in my chest. The dread, the scary, groundless sensation that plagued me in Tübingen and since: it isn't similar to my old quicksand feeling, it
is
that feeling, back again, stronger.

I stare at a Riverside Park tree, at a scampering squirrel. Doing this—gazing at small pieces of nature—usually clears my mind. Not today.

I close my eyes.
Lord, all I need to feel better is a negative HIV test, right? Once that comes, this dread will vanish, right? I'm trying to bear my hip pain without self-pity. But can You just speak once and tell me that this dread will pass?

I hear nothing.

Two weeks later, the test comes back negative. I don't have HIV. But my right calf is still atrophying. Compared to my left, it is barely half the size around, and the spasms in my hip are constant and acute. When a spasm comes, someone may as well be thrusting a sword in my ass, skewering the place where my femur meets my hip socket.

“I really think you're all right,” says Dr. Greer casually, in February. “Your sciatic might be a tad inflamed.” He yawns. “Just try a little ibuprofen to relax it. Two with breakfast, two with lunch, and two with dinner. Be well, David.”

As I limp home, I write a short play in my head:

•   •   •

Dr. Greer is in a dungeon, locked in an iron maiden, dying. The Dungeon Master sits nearby, yawning, flipping through a magazine.

DR. GREER:
Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgh!

DUNGEON MASTER:
Your innards might be a tad inflamed from the spikes.

DR. GREER:
Fuuuuuuuuuuucckkk!

DUNGEON MASTER:
I have to go give a lecture. Be well, Dr. Greer.

In the coming days I trump Dr. Greer's advice and take three ibuprofen pills, three times a day. When that doesn't work, I take five pills with each meal, and then switch from ibuprofen to extra-strength Tylenol, again five pills at a time. It still doesn't help. Every night from midnight until two, I watch
Mystery Science Theater
on TV and drink most of a six-pack of Bass or the whole six-pack. But my pain perseveres and my dread grows. It turns to outright panic.

“You just need something to take your mind off your hip,” Sabine says, and she pulls me into bed.

“Just read this,” Sad Dog says, and he gives me my twentieth, then twenty-first, then twenty-second Book of Mormon.

“Get some R and R,” Graham tells me on the phone. He's calling from San Francisco, where he's a line cook at a restaurant.

“Stop being Catholic,” Mason says, calling from L.A., where he's in film school. “Your body is bucking a bullshit belief system.”

Nothing any of them says helps. Beer, friends, kisses—it all gets obliterated by my hip pain or dragged under by the quicksand in my chest.

I write nothing. I shuffle around Morningside Heights. When a crosswalk light changes, giving people thirty seconds to cross Broadway, I can barely make it from one sidewalk to the median island.

“Hmm,” says Dr. Greer, in April. “I think the pain is psychosomatic.”

I roll up my pant legs to my knees. My right calf is a skinny joke beside my healthy left one. I let him see this. “I'm not imagining this, Doctor. Something is
wrong
in me. Something is tweaked or fucked-up inside me.”

“Maybe you need a second opinion. Be well, David.”

I leave his office. Teary-eyed, I call my mother. “I have to come home.”

“You can come home whenever you need to,” she says. “Tonight, if you need to. But try to offer what you're going through up to the Lord.”

So I stay in New York for two more weeks, limping through my final classes, offering my pain to the Lord. But when the spasms come, offering dies fast. It becomes begging.
Please, make it stop
.
Please, Lord, please
.

•   •   •

I MOVE HOME
to Rochester in June and live in my old basement bedroom. I see our family doctor, then a neural specialist. Neither can figure out my problem and in desperation I make an appointment with a chiropractor, Matt Argento, my old neighbor from Twin Circle Drive. Matt's high school football stardom earned him his way to college, he now has a beautiful wife and a cool car, and the colossal physique he always did.