by Dennis Must
That’s when Jeremiah slapped me hard against my backside and began rolling over on the linoleum floor in laughter.
“You gullible queer!” he cried.
He jumped up onto the bed, clutching his groin.
“I’m the Circus Man!”
In a way, Jeremiah was. He never rode elephants or went up on the trapeze. But he liked to play with fire.
When I took communion for the first time—I had to learn the Twenty-third Psalm—Mother and I sat in the car, waiting for my brother to finish dressing. She was drumming on the horn to get him moving. When she heard the back door slam, she shoved her foot onto the ignition and throttled our old Dodge alive, never paying him any mind.
He looked fine, dressed in his Sunday best, but then there were these several-sizes-too-large two-tone black-and-white dancing shoes Father donned on summer evenings when he went out alone. Jeremiah had stuffed newspapers into the toe boxes and wore a solemn expression.
Anxious about whether I’d remember the Psalm, Mother handed off the bouquet of lilacs she’d freshly cut to present to me at the close of the communion.
“Jeremiah, go hand these flowers to your good brother.”
When he stepped into the aisle, parishioners cupped their hands over their mouths.
“Here, queer,” he announced, stumbling up the pulpit steps. “Compliments of the Circus Man.”
“What’s it feel like?” I asked as I lay next to him that night, feeling the heat coming off his red backside and knowing he was hurting.
“Circus men don’t cry,” he sniffed. “This ain’t nothin’.”
We knew it wasn’t—for each of us could feel it in our bones that one day we’d hear real breathing outside our door.
Father’s irreverence was more subtle.
Draping his tie over the crucifix that hung above their nuptial bed, for instance.
Or secreting spare bills he was saving for a rainy day between the pages of the Book of Revelations.
One reason for his apostasy was that our Uncle Alexander, his brother, was a monsignor. It’d be like Jeremiah wearing the clown shoes, I thought.
“Westley, suppose you saw your brother dressed up in a chasuble with a big silver crucifix dangling from his neck and blowing incense out of a lantern over the parishioners’ heads?”
“I’d think he was in the carnival,” I said.
“Not your grandmother. She believes he’s her ticket to heaven. ‘He’s going to save us all . . . even if the rest of you heathens don’t deserve it!’ she’d scold. But Alexander was a snotty-nosed prick. And now he’s even a bigger one in the Roman Catholic Church. But don’t let me stain your mind, son. Maybe your mama is right.”
I’d seen no sign that she was. Except my conscience talked like she was its ventriloquist.
Until the day Jeremiah set farmer Eli McKinley’s alfalfa field on fire. Racing through it—flames curling off him like ribbon. A charred scar in his wake. And a woman in a nearby farmhouse screaming on her porch, fanning the wind, deranged.
Father’s car down by the roadside, smoke puffing from under the hood. An air filter lying on the gravel alongside Jeremiah’s lit cigarette—and a container of gasoline.
That’s when I thought the Circus Man had finally come.
Pay up, Jeremiah. Show’s over.
For months Mother, Pap, and I sat next to his hospital bed, listening to his labored breathing, his legs and arms suspended from some trapeze-like contraptions, and us barely able to see through the bandage mask he wore. Except his eyes still kindled.
I was grateful for that.
Because I was a pansy. Not a queer—but a pansy. I ached to be fearless like Jeremiah but was afraid of heaven, the scolds who professed they were happy because they were Chosen, but I knew they could never be lighthearted like Jeremiah and our old man.
Theirs was a brittle kind of rapture. If you’d promise me God wouldn’t seek to avenge the irreverence, I thought the joke was on them.
Except the fire queered Jeremiah.
He wasn’t entertaining any longer. Our old man began going to bed when Mother read the Bible. He no longer smoked in bed.
Jeremiah even said it was time to be moving on.
“Whaddya mean?” I asked.
“Gettin’ out of here.”
“What about me?” I hollered.
He rolled over without answering. The next morning I awoke to find his side of the bed empty.
The only person who didn’t act surprised was Father.
“Where do you think he went?” I asked.
Jeremiah never let on. Even to him whom I know he revered. “Papa taught us to heavy breathe,” he said.
At night I’d call out, “Is that you, Circus Man? Will you give me a sign?”
But it was still as sin outside our bedroom door. Only the silver light of the moon puddled on the hallway floor.
A prelude, dear brother, to your journey across a meadow just this side of the magnolia trees, just this side of hell.
CHAPTER FOUR
JEREMIAH DIED FOR ME
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
Jeremiah would often repeat Mark Twain’s words to me. I’d laugh, brushing him off. But what perplexed me was this childlike faith that I continued to hold sacred. For there is no other word to describe its grip on me. In truth, I believed that it was such an intrinsic part of who I was, to forsake it would have been tantamount to drawing a final breath.
Why?
I was terrified of living alone, and by that I mean having only one self. There had to be someone wiser residing within me to whom I could turn in a time of need.
Even his running across that wheat field while on fire caused me to see him as larger than life, someone out of mythology, perhaps. As if he had broken through the skein of reality during that flight across the farmer’s acreage.
It’s the monotony of the expected that diminishes me.
All of this came rushing back to me once Jeremiah left.
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIVE
HALL OF MIRRORS
In The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet describes witnessing a friend trapped in a fairground’s hall of mirrors. The labyrinth assemblage of transparent panes of glass and mirrors permit those assembled outside to poke fun at the victim, who curses their mockery but is helpless to escape the distorted mirror images staring back at him.
In similar respects I, too, felt as if I were trapped among various reflections of myself, none of them satisfyingly depicting who I thought I was or wished to be, but unable to escape any one of them. I often sensed that those around me were addressing one of these distorted images when socializing with me. “Who do they see today?” I felt an urge to cry out. “Speak to me, please, the one trapped inside here . . . the authentic me, Westley Mueller.”
It was as if by will to become fully aware of myself, I’d been ambushed by my many selves.
As days passed, I fantasized that I was caged in that labyrinth of mirrors and windows, being paraded through the streets for the townspeople’s delight. When sleep arrived, my dreams continued the script; I was the labyrinth’s sole occupant, but there were several of me abandoning hope of being set free.
During this period I read omnivorously, hoping to glean a deeper self-awareness. And just as the Jean Genet description of spotting an acquaintance caught in the fairground’s hall of mirrors labyrinth affected me, I was equally struck upon reading a passage in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky:
Now she did not remember their many conversations built around the idea of death, perhaps because no idea about death has anything in common with the presence of death.3
What if I substituted God for death in the passage?
Because no idea about God has anything in common with the presence of God.
What, in truth, does any one of us know about the presence of the Supreme Being in the same way that we have experienced the presence of death? I mused.
> What saint has not embraced the conviction that the human condition is, by its very nature, sinful, or pledged a lifetime of expunging all pride before the All-Merciful?
Yet is not one’s faith, whether that of a saint or that of a lowly sinner seeking redemption, little more than a will to believe that the thought of God will one day become manifest in His presence?
For no idea about God has verily anything in common with the presence of God.
And just as I personally witnessed how the presence of death mocked how I perceived it, I found an ineluctable release in realizing I could truly know nothing of Adonai either.
The holy writ, despite its being judged divinely inspired, I came to understand as the work of devout men using language to sanctify our nature as having been created in the image of the God of Abraham.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.
The Lord of Hosts, I decided, lay beyond all understanding.
A veritable absolute, unsullied by the longings of mankind.
No one could judge me now. Myself included.
When I passed houses of worship, I no longer viewed them as holy places but monuments to man’s conceit at believing himself to have been created in His image. I saw nothing inherently unreasonable about this. Except a caveat should have been appended to those edifices.
That caution might read: HOUSE OF THE MAN-MADE LORD.
How liberating it would have been if I’d viewed Jehovah not unlike one of the ancient Greek or Roman deities I’d read about. How much more magnificent if I could have seen the holy writ in that light . . . instead of trembling at the prospect of incurring His wrath while always coveting His love.
Fear and trepidation coupled with the prospect of a benevolent reprieve merely served to attenuate one’s spirit . . . one’s imagination.
CHAPTER SIX
SAINT JOSEPH’S SEMINARY
A man who considers life absurd does not dream of being surprised at his individual misfortunes; he regards them as being a confirmation of his theoretical views.4
There were no doors marked “EXIT” in the seminary. A closed universe inside God’s house. Self-doubt was viewed as a liability—to wit, yours. Is it pride standing in the way? Perchance you don’t belong at St. Joseph’s.
Being discharged was commensurate to being cast out of Eden—a black scourge on your nimbus the remainder of your days.
The priestly theologians brooked no ambiguity.
Yet therein lay my attraction. I willed myself to be unencumbered by other men’s beliefs, aspirations, fears, or dictates.
The true condition of man is that of an acrobat who performs above an illusory net, whereas the true believer permits no doubt that the net is God.
Then why perform?
NOVEL EXCERPT
Men with no self-doubt have a “spiritual” air about them: like cash registers, they always ring when you press them.
One encounters very little inquiry in a divinity school. The professors did not principally concern themselves with epistemology, metaphysics, or ontology. Instead, they taught history and biblical interpretation. Texts had to be deciphered in their original tongues. God had manifested Himself in Jesus Christ; now it was simply a matter of wicking it all up.
Why in Christ’s name had I ever ended up here?
Father Eustace Hope, ThD, a five-foot-tall professor of church history who wore elevator shoes and whose head, neck, and torso were carved from a tree trunk, or so it appeared, commenced his lectures with wooden prayers, a Bunraku puppet-like head dangling forward over the lectern for several seconds before it snapped back and the lecture rolled on.
Seconds after he had begun discussing the Canaanites one October morning, the lecture hall’s oak doors opened in their cathedral arches: a middle-aged man and young boy entered. As the pair self-consciously sidled along the back wall of the lecture hall, Hope bellowed:
“Nobody arrives late to my lectures!”
“John Gables, class of ’47. My nephew Jonathan . . .”
“Have you failed to recall, sir?”
“I apologize.” Gables turned the boy back toward the great doors.
“For God’s sake, man, enough time has already been lost. Sit down!”
Uncle and nephew slumped into the seats nearest them. Hope waited until he felt them properly humiliated. “Where were we, Jenkins, before the interlude?”
“You were discussing the Semitic language, sir,” the teaching assistant replied.
Gathering my church history, exegesis, and Christian philosophy texts, including the Old Testament in Hebrew—all thick and hard-bound—I brought them crashing down on the schoolboy desk and stood. The clap thundered in the vaulted lecture hall.
Hope quivered with rage. “You’re excused, Mr. Mueller!”
“Have you seen this man before?” I pointed to the visitor.
The students turned their heads.
“Tell him who you are, sir,” I said.
Expectant silence gripped the classroom. Hope’s grip on the podium suddenly relaxed. He stepped off the rostrum and moved to the platform’s apron, first catching his breath. “Who do you think he is, Mr. Mueller?”
“It’s not who he is, sir, but who he may be—”
Hope turned to the visitor. “I believe young Mueller intimates, Mr. Gables, that you could have been the Christ and I wouldn’t have been the wiser. Perhaps if you weren’t so clean-shaven . . .”
Several classmates stifled laughter.
“Why are you so sentient, Mr. Mueller?”
“I take no stranger for granted, sir.”
“What reason would the Son of God have to monitor my class on the Canaanites this morning?”
Jenkins applauded.
“You ridicule my naïveté, Professor?”
“No—it’s your righteous arrogance we find amusing. And why came you to St. Joseph’s?”
“I saw Christ in a gas station.”
Laughter erupted.
“Lost, I presume?”
“I was—in a manner of speaking.”
“And you asked for directions?” Hope smugly surveyed the classroom. “Colloquia aside, Mr. Mueller, may I suggest that we are theologians here, not aisle dancers. Theology is a science, not a felt show. The Trinity reveals itself in history, not fiction. We ask you and your fellow catechumen to penetrate the sacred texts as scholars, not as weeping fools at a Benedictine shrine. A Texaco Christ? Can you sing that doxology for us?”
“Not as mellifluously as you, sir.”
I swept the texts off the desk and tramped to the doors. I visualized Hope racing toward me, his miniature legs pistoning him to leap upon my back like a toad to inject his godly poison into my white and impudent neck.
The sound of the arched doors slamming against the adjoining walls ricocheted down three flights of stairs like a cherry bomb in a toilet. I’d addressed one tyrannical self. I was not about to be shaken down by some self-appointed minion of God.
One evening after the incident with Dr. Hope, I wandered about the quadrangle. I’d blundered in coming here.
And that evening I pulled open the great doors of the lecture hall so that I might enter its massive hallway and cry up its several floors, so empty and dark.
“You up there, Father Eustace Hope. Meet me at the head of these stairs, prick. Stand on your manuscripts if you want so that our eyes may meet, then tell me your secrets. In this sacred darkness, I will tell you mine.
“I want to test you. You and I will climb up the black metal ladder that hangs just outside your lecture hall, the one leading to the turrets. First you and then I will climb up to the slate now glinting in this October moonlight. And it is there—Hope, Faith, Charity—that we will walk to the pediment of this massive brownstone structure and pray.
“You in your sonorous, cathedral-ringing, mellifluous tones and rolled r’s about any subject you wish. But soon you must get to the simple question.
“We, old sir, we’ll re
quest from your God, the one that brought each of us here, one set of wings. Not two, but one. A kind of humility and frugality of spirit, don’t you think? He would approve of that. Yes?
“After you have uttered your prayer, I will one-up you. I will forgo mine. For the God I long for is the one who hears people who don’t have to speak to him with tongues—no matter how trained in musicality. I won’t say a fucking word, sir.
“I will assume He understands my simple need, for it is far down, don’t you agree?
“Too bad. No audience. Some are asleep. Others studying church history? And perhaps a few are indulging in matters of the flesh.
“Even here. “Shame.
“And, sir, we will both leap. I care not whether I go first or second. The test. Which of us will be designated the pair of wings as we dive headfirst into the Boston-paver walkway that girds the great quadrangle?
“Or might we both?
“A Deather and a Lifer. Ecclesiastical wrens who erroneously presumed they could fly in holy places, this one seventy miles north of Pittsburgh and a couple hundred yards south of hell.”
Do I hear you coming up the stairs?
I totter on the pediment, waiting and debating the arc of this act. If I should strip naked and slip at its edge . . . ignominy I own for a brief moment. What does it matter at the lip of darkness how a man swallows his light? Yet, if those are your steps I hear below, for you, I would dive the willowy arc.
With no God strings to feather the fall.
But the loveliest of all gestures to transcend it.
The lecture hall’s granite steps sat mute that night. Unanswered by Eustace Hope. Fitting, for his morning invocations were also met with ghostly silence. The seminary’s quadrangle, leached cold under the lampposts. In the morning, its arteries would swell with acolytes trafficking in faith.