What We Are (3 page)

I reach down, grab the vodka bottle, say, “You gonna go for your little Swiss Army knife, you piece of shit?”

He's coming down off the crank, talking to himself in our mess. I'm already turning away, as he utters, “No, no, brother,” and then, calling out after me, “It's cool, man! It's cool! God bless you, brother! You can have the liquor! It's okay, okay?”

I'm walking right toward the table of boys and not one of them can look me in the eye. For once, it's exactly what I want: it's how it should be. All I get from the paisa is the top of his hat. The girl watches me—I can feel it—out the exit and back again into the darkness of night. If I hear the whining sirens of authority, I'll run. But if she sheds the boys and follows me down the street, then for the sake of her courage, or her lunacy, we'll split a free bottle of blueberry Stolichnaya as I escort her highness wherever she wants to go through the shadows of this valley.

I
CAN SEE THROUGH
the fuzziness of hangover a sliver of light behind the morning clouds. The Stoli is right there beside me, and I wince at the thought of my liver, heavy with labor this morning. I guess it's good that the empty bottle is upright, uncracked, but it still feels like someone busted it over my buzzing head. The girl's nowhere to be found. She may have never made it here, I don't know; she may have been shy about drinking in the heart of a Christian mission. I remember saying, “It's a school now, don't worry, been a university for a hundred and fifty years, I know, I went here for a while, trust me,” and her insisting, “You did not have to hit that guy in the Jack in the Box.”

I look up at the bottom of Jesus' palms, his forearms laced in flowers and rosaries. In the midnight hour my freshman year at the University of Alviso, I used to sit at the feet of this chiseled statue. The courtyard would be drowned in the kind of layered silence that seems to let out the tiniest of sounds, a soft whistle, beaded in the center of your ear. Now I push up to my elbows to see why I hear Spanish everywhere, Mexican Spanish, mixing in with the symphony of blackbirds and finches.

About twenty paisas are standing, hands in pockets, at the base of the mission steps. They're wearing variations of the same threads:
Pendletons, paisley flannels, L.A. Dodgers baseball caps with little Mexican flags in the mesh. A couple in cheap rodeo gallon hats. All with breath clouds coming up before them, a few sipping coffee, their long mustaches steaming at the wet ends.

I gather up the last thread of spittle in my mouth, aim it at the bushes, and let it fly. It's like I sucked on cotton all night. I hear from behind, “This is going to be a beautiful day.”

I rub the crusty sleep from my eyes and find Father McFadden, my old priest, standing above me. Been almost ten years. He's got those same clover-green eyes, a little tired now, but still alive and jovial behind the thick black-framed militaristic glasses. He's completely bald, pink and beige sunspots mottling his scalp. He's reaching down, lightly clapping my shoulder, almost with felicity, saying, “Paul. Paul.”

There's a young student in the gathering, model-thin, almost-white-haired blonde. She's very clearly undamaged and clean, healthy-pored. On her hands and knees etching into a cardboard sign with a big black marker. She hasn't done a thing to me, but I already know I don't want to talk to her, and that I may soon, and that she'll do most of the talking, and at length.

This must be a march: they're about to take to the streets, starting here at the Alviso Mission. The blonde is nearing. You can see it in her eyes: she's a believer. Nothing else in the world matters at the moment. She's probably a poli-sci major, minoring in sociology. Maybe a leader here, an organizer.

Father McFadden says, “I'm proud of you, Paul. You've done the right thing.”

I say, “I was trying to pray at the shrine last night. I fell asleep I guess.”

He puts his hand up to stop me from self-indictment. He wants to believe in me with the same desperation that I'd wanted to believe in God as a kid. I feel bad for him, for his calling, for the sadness he must
feel every Sunday when his master's beatific house of stained-glass splendor is four-fifths empty. I can see the refracting light of blue and red tickling his trembling cheeks at the altar, the imported marble saints collecting dust in the crevices of nostrils and armpits, in the four corners of the crucifix.

But he must be used to the faithless by now, to his flock being daily lost to tech and science and genetic manipulation, MTV and the Internet. An electric ocean of amorality. I can see the struggle in his face as he's retrieving for the first time in many years certain failures in faith that I'd had as one of his lambs. Things that seemed harmless then, perhaps even endearing and precocious, but blasphemous now, as a man. I'm not the prodigal son this father's looking for.

Still, he gives it a shot. “God watched over you.”

I smile.

“You're a lucky young man.”

“Yes,” I say, “I believe that, Father. But it doesn't help.”

“Hungry?”

I don't want an allusion to the bread of the Lord. “Well.”

“Here.” He hands me a Sausage McMuffin. “Don't be so hard on yourself, Paul.”

I don't say anything. Like, for instance, that the first thing out of my mouth this morning was a lie. Passing out drunk and delusional doesn't pass for devotion at the shrine.

Shit, man, I wish a drop of the old demon water was all I needed. If I could find God in liquor or weed or any other hallucinogen necessary, I'd be the first to volunteer at whatever Monte Cassino the paltry handful of priests of this valley begin their training, AA and NA be damned, the health of my body temple be damned. I'd be just like that crankster, wandering the streets for my next fix. I'd be a son of Jameson's whiskey just like I know the good Father is, or I'd be a reefer like a Rastafarian. I'd make premium boc in the Belgian
lowlands, a monk's brown hood and brown frock and how to brew good German beer my only earthly possessions.

But any altered state I've tried just seems to induce sleep. It's temporal, flighty, and I become an eyesore to myself, can't look in the mirror at the broken-down man. And I don't forget a thing about this life, and the dreams—even as I'm dreaming them—I know to be false. That's perverse, pointless. Like telling the punch line of a joke not last but first.

“You know,” he says, “this beautiful mission came to life at the hands of a people in toil. Today we're going to get them what they deserve.”

“Father, I—”

“God's children endured true pain for their heavenly rites.”

The blonde has arrived, observing me as if I were a colorful anemone on the reef at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. With curiosity, yes, superior spinal cord curiosity. This close I see that her legs are crisp with blond hair, having recently changed her mind about shaving. Now she's straight barbarian/bohemian.

I sit up, shake my head out, rapidly blink to rejoin the world.

She shouts out, “And what is your purpose here?”

Verbal judo, just like I predicted. Father McFadden nods so I relax a bit, leaning against the rainworn pillar of the shrine. Her sign reads,
HOY MARCHEMOS, MANAÑA VOTARAMOS
.

I don't like her arrogance or the way she stands, with one hand on the high end of her thin hip, neck slightly tilted toward the same side, so I say, still sitting, “The sign is wrong.”

“Excuse me?” she says, like a drill sergeant.

“That sign is wrong.”

“What someone like you needs to understand,” she says, “is that these people have a right to be here. They're working the jobs that people like you should be working.”

“I've been employed by McDonald's,” I lie, “for the last five years of my life.”

She's stifled, can't say a word. I'm not an envious wino trying to pilfer from the cause. I'm just someone who knows how to win an argument. Genuine in purpose, I like to think, or hope, however disingenuous in fact.

I push out the McMuffin. “Bite?”

“I won't go near dead bovine.”

“Is there another kind?” She exhales really loudly. “By the way, nice leather purse.”

“It's pleather.”

“My name's Paul,” I say. “And you are?”

“Busy,” she says.

Father McFadden says very politely, “This is Athena, Paul.”

“I can introduce myself, Stanley.”

Stanley. I never knew. I nod at the father to assure him that, despite my theological issues, I'm definitely not on her side. To prove it, I say, “Athena? Birth name?”

“Does it matter?”

“Sort of. I mean, if one takes the name of a Grecian goddess of wisdom and war, it matters. You know. Like if I called myself Zeus or Thor.”

“I matter,” she spits out. “And that's all that matters.”

“Does conjugation matter?”

“You're drunk.”

“I wish. But I'm only hung. Over.”

“And vulgar.”

“The sign's wrong, Madam Athena. As I said before. It should read
HOY MARCHAMOS, MAÑANA VOTAREMOS
.
Los verbos estan marchar y votarer
.”

The father nods. Spanish, a good Latinate language. Perhaps he remembers my parochial promise back in the day when I was an
educatee of the Jesuit institution that wouldn't hire him because he didn't have the scholarly chops. But I always liked his intellectual humility.

The goddess is looking back at the paisas, then at me, comparing notes. Am I a Mexican farmer incognito? Too tall, too muscular, no cowboy hat, no accent, too American sassy. No chance, just like her.

“I guess you haven't taken your GE in Spanish yet.”

The arrogance comes back, like rushing blood. “I will take care of this immediately,” as if it's my fault for pointing out her error. I smile, she shouts, “Hereberto! Go get that marker for me, will you?”

I say, “I don't think he speaks your native tongue.”

She says, walking off, “Don't go anywhere.”

“Why would I dare move when you're all that matters?”

“I prayed for you and your troubles, Paul.”

There is pity on the father's face. It's good pity, not condescending pity. I don't need it, but say anyway, “Thank you, Father.”

“I was worried about your soul.”

I feel the old smallness rise up in me. I'm not so sure it's bad. “Me too, Father.”

“You haven't been to church in a long time.”

“Probably longer than a decade.”

“Why don't you come to mass this Sunday?”

What the hell can I say,
Tempi cambi?

What the good father doesn't know is that I probably know the verse better than he does. I can now run the gamut of textual inconsistencies with too much ease, from book to book, chapter to chapter, mouth to mouth. St. James vs. St. Paul. St. Paul vs. St. Peter. Magdalene and the missing gnostic books. The insane Dungeons and Dragons game of Revelation. I went through the Bible twice in my life, once at a Jesuit high school (New Testament freshman year, Old Testament sophomore year), and later in a medieval four-by-eight cell in San Quentin, and it ruined me. Not happy about it at all. In
both cases, I was surrounded by history and learning, but I never completely belonged or bought into either place. It was like education and incarceration touted the same book so hard that their irreconciliable differences left me with no system.

“Father,” I say, “I suspect I'm in a lot of trouble.”

“With the law?”

“No. Not this time, anyway.”

“That's good, Paul.”

“I meant with me, Father.”

“I see.”

“No disrespect, Father, but I don't think you do. I can't get any fucking grounding.”

“Pray.”

I don't say, It's gonna take a hell of a lot more than that. Instead: “Father, I admire you. I always have.”

He smiles, knowing what that means: I'm not going to mass.

“Well,” he says, “you'll remain in my prayers.”

At the end of the day or the end of a life, McFadden is a kind man, and I think that's enough. I hope. I wish we could find a new start between us, wherever it might end up. Maybe we'd find an unequivocal key to this life.

Gotta give something back. “I'm gonna do this rally with you, Papa Mac. Okay?”

“Great,” he says. “We need all the numbers we can get.”

“Stanley!” says Athena. The goddess is back. “You're needed over there.”

“I'm talking to my priest, if you don't mind.”

“Oh, no. It's okay, Paul,” says the father.

“That's right it's okay,” says Athena.

I consider this odd couple. She came to the show singing Carole King in her mother's Volvo, he came mourning the fourteen stations in a hearse. She'd like to loosen the starch of his collar, he'd like to
replace her beads with a rosary. She thinks we've come so far, he thinks we've lost so much. She thinks these poor, poor people, he thinks my brave, brave parishioners. She came down from the hills to kick it with the commoners, he follows the carpenter who died on a hill. Allies for a day, a political moment, no more, they are both ready to do good.

“Athena,” Papa Mac says, “will you please sign Paul up here? He's going to join us this morning.”

Athena says nothing.

“God bless you, Paul. I'll see you at the rally.”

“
Mille grazie, padre
.”

She says, “So what are you really here for?”

“On this planet?”

“No.”

“Am I allowed on it?”

“Here. Right here. Right now. Why?”

I'll give her one thing: she has eyes the alluring cobalt blue of Arabian nights. But I'm not fooled. She won't grant that a transient of her embattled earth has a halfway functional brain, despite the earlier tutelage in Spanish.