The Dark Path (4 page)

At the end of each lap I zip through the woods and up the hill on the dark path. I can feel around me cool shadows touching my skin. I breathe these shadows in and they're more than oxygen, they're a dark essence thrilling my blood. When I charge along the path like this, alone, I feel words gathering at the tip of God's tongue. If I can just run fast enough or purely enough or with the whole of my being, He'll let loose the words. He'll speak and tell me my one sentence. He'll tell me my life.

IT'S SEPTEMBER 1987,
and my parents are dropping me off for my freshman year at Georgetown University. As they're preparing to leave, my father hugs me close.

“Don't get mono,” he warns. “Schickler men are highly susceptible to mono.”

“All right, Dad.”

We're standing in my dorm room. My mother is getting something from the car while my father gives me last-minute advice.

“Have adventures.” He pulls me close once more. I smell his aftershave and another smell that's just him. I've always loved the mix of these smells.

“I love you, David. Don't get mono.”

“I won't.”

A week later I have mono. I lie alone in my dorm room all day each day, missing classes, losing weight, spitting up blood, staring at my Morrissey poster.

I've never been so sick. My neck is hugely swollen, and any word I try to speak scrapes like a razor blade in my throat. Despite being bedridden, I can't sleep day or night. Even just raising my head off the mattress is a blinding-white mistake, so I just lie here, scared that I'm dying.

My father knew what he was warning me about. He had mono severely once and it almost killed him.

He too attended McQuaid High School, back in the fifties, and he worked his ass off there to get a full college ride to General Motors Institute. At GMI his nickname was Saint Jack because he got flawless grades and never slept around or did anything to impede his path toward marrying his sweetheart back home—my mother—and rising like a comet through the GM ranks. He pulled all-nighters in the library and lab, and this frayed him so badly one season that he collapsed with mono and ended up in the hospital.

I guess I've frayed myself, too. At McQuaid I did five hours of homework each night and graduated fourth in my class. Over this past summer I put in ten-hour days at an auto dealership to earn college tuition money. Weird older men customers kept gripping my shoulders and saying I was bound for great things. One imparted to me what he described as the key truth of living.

“A nigger will work for ya,” he said, “but not a nigra. Learn the difference. There's niggers and nigras, and nigras are useless. Remember that.”

Another man frowned when I told him excitedly that I'd spoken on the phone the night before with Adam Goldman from Bethesda, Maryland, my soon-to-be roommate.

“Adam Goldman,” the man repeated. “I bet he'll be a very earthy and unspiritual person. They all are.”

“Hoyas?” I asked.

“Jews,” he said.

•   •   •

I LIE LIMP
in my dorm bed, all energy sucked from my body. I've been here a month, but all I've seen of campus so far are my room's concrete walls. Painted pale yellow, they look jaundiced and sickly. They look like the mucus I keep spitting up.

“Do you need blankets?” asks my roommate. “Should I call the doctor again?”

Adam isn't earthy and unspiritual. He's kind and funny and on the football team. When his mom finds out about my mono, she moves Adam out of our room for a while, but she drives in from Bethesda with soups for me. My own parents, after dropping me in D.C., flew to Europe for a vacation, their first time abroad. They don't know yet that I'm this sick.

Each day the hundred other guys on my floor herd past my closed door, laughing and firming up friendships. I live in New South, a dorm of hard-charging strivers. One midnight as my throat aches there's a thump out in the hall, followed by love grunts. A toga party is raging downstairs in the common room and some probably-sheet-clad guy and girl are getting Roman up against my door.

“I'm going to fucking rupture you,” growls the guy.

“Yes,” begs the girl.

“Gonna split you in half.”

The girl makes a sound of agreement. Then they're screwing against my door. Each time they bang against it I feel it in my swollen tonsils.

“Scootch me higher,” yells the girl.

I send telepathy through the door.
Please don't scootch her higher
.

“Keep drilling me!”

Please stop drilling her
.

“Oh yes! YEEEEEEEESSS!”

I put my pillow over my head. Who in the hell are these people? I try to imagine any girl I've ever met telling me, out loud, to keep drilling her. Or for that matter to
start
drilling her. I had a couple second-base experiences in high school, but I'm still a virgin . . . Saint David. I pull my pillow tighter to my head to drown out Orgasma Girl. Finally she and her battering ram move on and I sleep.

I dream of the path. I miss it: the Black Creek woods, the tart northern air, the shadows. Even from my dream, I pray to the Lord who somehow lives in that darkness back home.
Where are You in this new place? I'm sick. Please help
.

A voice cackles from above: “A-HAW-HAW-HAW-HAW!”

Is that You, Lord?

“A-HAW-HAW-HAW-HAW!”

I lurch awake. The cackling is music blaring from the room next door. My clock says two a.m., and the song pulsing through the wall is ZZ Top's “La Grange.” It's the go-to song of the guys next door, Pike and Brett. They play it about thirty times in a row whenever they come home drunk, which is virtually every night.

I burrow my head under my pillow again. When the music quits, my room phone rings. I pick up but can barely speak a hello.

A male voice says sneeringly, “This is the SS.”

The line goes dead. My ears, clogged with mono, are unsure of what they've heard until the phone rings again a minute later and I answer.

The same male voice says, “We are the SS. The train is coming for you.”

I get similar calls for several nights. I'm enfeebled enough by the mono—and I guess innocent enough—not to comprehend what's up until one night when I force my pained vocal cords to answer.

“What's the SS?” I croak.

“Aw, fuck.” The voice on the other end leans away. “Hey, man, I think it's the roommate.”

“The Jew-mate,” laughs a voice in the background.

“Whatever. Goldman's not there.” The line clicks off and “La Grange” kicks into gear next door.

Pike and Brett, prank calling. Duh, Schickler.

When my mono's contagious stage is past, Adam returns to our room, but the late-night calls from the SS still come. After answering them, Adam often storms out and pounds on Pike and Brett's locked door, challenging them to come out and fight him. They never open up. They just guffaw at him from their cave. One morning after such a night, Adam helps me walk down to breakfast in the dorm cafeteria—I'm too weak to go alone—and there Pike and Brett are, showered, eating pancakes, looking like good little Boy Scouts. Adam could lay into them, but he sticks with me, his hand guiding my elbow.

•   •   •

ANOTHER WEEK PASSES
and I'm still not well enough to leave the dorm—I get dizzy just stepping outside—but my voice has healed enough that I can talk on my room phone. One night I speak with my mother and sisters.

“You should've seen Dad at the airport when they got home,” Pam says. “When we told him you had mono, he was so shocked and worried that he grabbed the wall so he wouldn't fall down.”

“Don't tell him that!” calls my father in the background.

“He went white as a sheet,” Pam continues.

There's commotion and then my father's voice takes over.

“David? How are you feeling?”

“I've lost twenty pounds and I look anorexic. But I think I've leveled off. I'll try classes Monday.”

“Good.” I can almost hear him nodding brisk approval. Then there's a pause. My father hates speaking on the phone, but I can tell that he has more to say, something to do with how pale he turned at the airport. “You're really out of the woods? Twenty pounds is a lot to lose. Do I need to come down there?”

“I'll be okay.”

Another pause. He clears his throat, sounding normal again, relieved. “All right then. Go have adventures.”

The next Monday I go to a political theory class. I'm in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, which I applied to because my father said it would open up the world to me. This class is a two-hour lecture about Plato's Cave. I pass out cold twenty minutes in. When I come to, I'm shaking and nose-bleeding onto my spiral-bound notebook. Some students escort me back to New South. I crawl into bed, exhausted and humiliated.

Days later I feel strong enough to hobble out again. This time I do so at night. I don't want to go far from New South in case I have another blackout, so I walk the hundred yards to Healy Lawn. It's two acres of grass in the middle of campus, with shrubs and trees and a fat pill of a moon overhead. It's the closest thing on campus to my woods back home.

I sit in the grass with the breeze on my face. Tired from just a stroll, my legs tremble in my jeans. Half a year ago I could run a mile in four minutes and forty seconds . . . now I have bedsores on my ass.

The Healy tower gongs eleven o'clock. Minutes later I see a few students move through the Healy building toward Dahlgren chapel. I follow them, curious why they're headed there so late.

Dahlgren is a red-brick building in a courtyard near a fountain. A sign outside the chapel advertises a nightly 11:15 Mass. I haven't been to church since arriving, so I go in. The chapel is simple inside, with dark corners, lit candles in the back, and chairs with plain red cushions. In the pews are fewer than a dozen students, all sitting up front near the altar. I sit near them but not among them.

The priest introduces himself as Father Michael Prince. He's tall and slight, with white hair and clear blue eyes. When he reads the Gospel he hunches over the lectern. His hands are frail claws that curl around the lectern's sides. His voice is a gasping whisper. Possibly because he looks and sounds as reduced as I feel, I listen to him.

“Our faith isn't sorcery,” he gasps. “Yet I'm asking you, in the middle of your classes and even in your coming here tonight . . . Is the magic there? Is there a glad danger calling you forward in life? There should be. God is that glad danger.”

Afterward I hobble home to my room, thinking,
Glad danger, glad danger
. The haiku writer in me considers writing the phrase down until . . .

“A-HAW-HAW-HAW-HAW!”

ZZ Top throbs in my sore tonsils, and the SS calls.

I go back to Dahlgren the next night, and the night after that. As I convalesce and resume classes, I show up every night. I've never been to Mass so late or met a priest like Father Prince. He's only fifty, but when he claws his hands around the lectern and preaches his spare sermons, he seems ancient, like a condor, like something that should be extinct but is stubbornly here.

He's a creature of night and his God seems to be, too. The shadows in the chapel corners, the handful of students in the pews, the way that Father Prince lights the incense and whispers the Agnus Dei, the prayer about Christ being the Lamb of God . . . it's all solemn and beautiful. There is nothing bubbly-safe about it. At these late Masses, when I receive Communion and I go back to my seat and kneel and shut my eyes, minutes feel like centuries. I feel God the way I feel Him on the path back home, only more so. I'm in a new quiet here, a new stillness. Each night when I pray I sense something—or feel or hear it, I can't quite say—in the darkness behind my closed eyes, maybe in my soul. It is something almost like a humming, something just this side of singing. If God is three persons in one—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—maybe what I'm sensing is these three speaking low with one another, whispering. All of me leans forward, leans in, wanting to make out the whispers. To hear God's Voice.

My eyes snap open one night as I kneel in the pew. I stare at Father Prince and an ache in me says,
Really do it, David. Come here in solitude and listen for Him in the dark. Spend your life doing that. BE A PRIEST
.

The idea thrills through me stronger than it ever has.

Then I leap up, scared shitless, and get out of the chapel as fast as I can.

•   •   •

I HAVE FOUR
new friends, the Alabama Boys.

They are two pairs of smart, funny roommates on my floor, all from the same state. In one room live Bob and Austin, and down the hall are Mason and Daniel. Daniel studies voice and can sing any girl out of her clothes, or so goes the rumor. New South girls also love Austin's peaches-and-cream accent and Mason's piercing blue Celtic eyes. It's only November but these three guys seem tight with half the chicks on campus.

As for the fourth Alabama Boy, Bob, he's dating Daisy McKay, who lives one floor below ours but sleeps in Bob's bed. Daisy and Bob have bat-shit crazy shouting matches over who just ate whose Cool Ranch Doritos.

On the night of my running-home-scared-from-Dahlgren-chapel, I reach Bob's room as Daisy is storming out.

“If you ever want sex again,” she shrieks at him, “stop trashing Dire Straits!”

She disappears. I go into Bob's room to check on him, feeling glad for the distraction from my thoughts. The Priesthood Ache is still jangling through me and I don't know what to do with it.

Austin, Daniel, and Mason file into the room, too. I take up my quiet post in the corner. Bob opens his fridge, passes out Miller Genuine Draft longnecks, then turns on R.E.M.'s
Murmur
.

“Daisy's getting on my last nerve,” he says. “I should fuck another chick to piss her off. Hannah Gorham, maybe.”

“Hannah Gorham can't sing,” says Daniel, who's starring in the fall musical.

Bob says, “Does a girl need to sing to sit on my fucking face?”

“Easy on the graphic talk,” says Mason. “The gentle Schick is present.”

“I'm not that gentle.”

“Really?” Bob winks at the others. “I think it's time for Schick to play Who Would You Do.”