by Dennis Must
And as I sat across from the two brothers, I couldn’t help thinking that I had a brother too, one I was equally attached to . . . yet mine nobody could see. But Jeremiah was as present at that table, I believed, as I was, sitting across from Chang and Eng. I never went anywhere without him. Yet we were just as dissimilar as the conjoined Bunker twins. At various moments while watching them, I found myself thinking I was in the proverbial hall of mirrors, seeing Jeremiah and me. The true reflection of what only I knew beyond any doubt. There were two of us. Nursing a drink, I’d occasionally glance over at Albert/Alberta and we’d exchange knowing grins of recognition. He was not in the least strange to me, but instead a visual manifestation of how I’d often felt while wearing the chasuble emblazoned with a cross of gold on its back and sweeping up the aisle of an empty sanctuary at night, the incense still wafting in the air from a late holy mass. There were moments I’d felt very much like a seraphic woman under that garment.
I had begun to experience a sensation of liberation.
Whadizit? came over to our table and pointed to the door that led off the bar. Standing there was Brother Stanislaus, who was trying to attract my attention. He gestured me over.
Passing in front of the bar again, I heard the bartenders shout “Happy hour!” At that moment, every bar denizen became mute, focusing intently on his or her image in the gigantic mirror that ran the counter’s length. I, too, became mesmerized by what I saw. Each of the “living wonders’” images projected normalcy. They looked no different from those strolling the midways outside the circus tents, the special attraction booths, the so-called freak shows.
Suddenly the tables behind them became silent as if happy hour was a moment of reflection, a kind of memorialization. The bartenders stood immobile. I didn’t know what to expect and dared not look anybody in the eye. Even Whadizit? seemed fascinated by his image of normality, as if it were his long-lost brother staring back at him. The one who had died, or maybe whom he had simply been told about, or yet again perhaps it was his imaginary brother, the one he missed more than any living thing.
It was the Living Venus who broke the spell, bursting out laughing, whereupon all the others joined in. Caught up in the expression of exuberance, patrons began tossing coins at Whadizit? once again, while he flung each one back just as the reflections in the blue-tinted grand bar mirror turned normal once again.
Brother Stanislaus now stood opposite me. “Come,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
He opened a door that had the markings of an entrance portal to a sanctuary; as I was about to enter, Whadizit? hollered, “Schlitz!” I turned.
“We go on soon. Hurry back.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“FRERE, IL FAUT MOURIR.”5
We go on soon?
Perhaps Whadizit? and I were a duo routine. He would call my name and begin laughing, and the customers would join in while tossing him coins that he would hurl back, crying “Schlitz!”
A performance not unlike the one I’d been living.
Give me a role that simple men like myself can understand. Build a little box on which I can stand and permit passersby to ridicule me. If it be flagellating to express my eternal damnation, that is just the performance I can comprehend. So when they point and laugh, I can do the same.
Why include me in a narrative that I can’t live up to, and when I’ve tried I failed? The concept of God’s love simply overwhelms me . . . where a woman’s or a brother’s does not.
Whadizit? said we were to go on soon. In this world and not a mythical other place no living being has ever experienced.
“You are lost in thought,” Brother Stanislaus said as he led me down a dark passageway, which opened into a large courtyard that I assumed was the monastery’s cloister. He pointed to one corner, yet I could see nothing but several mounds of dirt. As we moved closer it became apparent that these were freshly dug graves, and once we were alongside them, we witnessed monks sitting in them, lashing themselves with disciplines and crying, “Frere, il faut mourir!”
“It’s when they are the most happiest,” Brother Stanislaus explained.
The hooded monks flagellated themselves with acute intensity, as if they were beating molten ingots into some preconceived shape. In this case, Christ . . . or his facsimile.
I recalled Thomas Merton describing his earlier dissolute life in The Seven Storey Mountain:
I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God? With every nerve and fibre of my being I was laboring to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust. . . . But what people do not realize is that this is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.6
I thought, Men longing to transform themselves on the smithy of their souls.
“When will they stop?” I asked.
“At dusk, they return the soil to the graves and carefully put the sod back in place, and then it will resume once again tomorrow with new penitents. But I brought you here to see what is soon about to occur. Wait here.”
Brother Stanislaus disappeared into one of the many entryways encircling the green.
He reappeared, pulling his wagon of the enshrined. Accompanying him, a white-cowled monk transported a man-sized scale with a round glass face. They made several more trips, then set about erecting a tiered stand on which they stacked the ceramic saints. Alongside it they situated the scale.
“It’s not all tedium inside here.” He smiled broadly.
And as I watched the monks climb out of their graves and begin to shovel them full again, others commenced entering the green, shouldering timber crosses that overshadowed their stooped bodies. Each positioned himself at a designated spot in the courtyard and, after stripping to a loincloth, lowered the base of the cross into the ground. (Reservoirs lay disguised under the sod for this ritual.) Within moments, a dozen monks had strapped themselves to their roods.
This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.7
The comment made by Brother Stanislaus—”It’s not all tedium here”—unsettled me as I watched these men assume the positions of the narrative at Golgotha. Periodically, the voice of one would ring out across the courtyard:
“Why have I forsaken Him?”
This refrain continued throughout the evening. The only illumination as night fell upon the hanging men in loincloths was that coming from the votive candles in various colored jars illuminating the weight guesser’s stall. He stood impassively beside the scale as if he were on a midway awaiting the crowds that never showed.
I sat in one corner of the green, transfixed by this pageantry and the fitful sonorous lament. My perception was that these were coveted roles assigned by the abbot to those he deemed the most devout members of the religious community. Yet they marked the passing hours as if they had murdered Christ within themselves again and again.
At intervals throughout the night the abbot reappeared, brandishing a long rod on whose tip hung a metal cup. Upon filling it with water, he would lift the cup to the lips of each monk. The official sentry, Brother Stanislaus, stood alone in his stall with the flickering faces of the ceramic saints stacked behind him.
I thought about the room I had recently exited, with the living curiosities mingling and relishing their time with each other, knowing that soon they would have to return to acting out their roles on midways set up in meadows and cow fields just outside town limits. There would be a barker outside their tents cajoling fairgoers inside.
Juxtaposed with that memory was what I now witnessed: monks reliving the death of God’s only begotten Son while experiencing celestial joy at having been selected for this role they would perform from dusk until
sunup.
I read their lamentations as the yearning of the consecrated to hoist themselves out of their bones, their flesh, which burdened their souls and hindered them from ascending to another place. I envisioned them dragging their bodies about like veritable crosses.
As if their enacting of the crucified Christ was liberating, and as if, come morning, each, in a state of euphoria, would feel cleansed, after twenty-four hours without sleep.
At some point I’d become aware that I wasn’t the only outside witness to this spectacle. Far to the left of me, in one of the entryways, huddled Albert/Alberta. Shortly I saw the Living Venus de Milo slip in, and in her shadow Whadizit?. One living curiosity and then another. Randomly, as if they hadn’t conversed with each other, sitting separately, mesmerized by the cries punctuating the darkness while Brother Stanislaus looked on.
As if the cries were uttered on their behalf . . . perhaps even mine.
That the keening might carry us aloft.
Surely another hour must have passed when the lamentations began to give evidence of a draining stamina. They had in fact become more melodious and had begun to meld into one collective supplication for release. I couldn’t help imagining that the petitioning monks were now sensing that only their voices remained, that they, in fact, were singing themselves out of their pilloried bodies. There existed a tangible air of gratitude, of thanksgiving, in those more harmonious sounds. As if they felt, in some heightened hallucinatory awareness, that they were escaping, cry by cry, out beyond their parched throats and lips. And come daylight, their bodies would be left to unshackle themselves and tramp back into their monastic cells.
It was then that I heard a rustle and turned to my right to see Cleo, the normal and lovely wife of debonair two-school-rulers-tall Hans, pushing the baby carriage before her. Unlike the others, who sat partially disguised in various entryways about the courtyard, Cleo rolled the buggy directly among the crosses before sitting down and lifting Serpentina upright to witness the incantation.
I couldn’t speak for the living curiosities, or even Cleo, as to why they maintained a prayerful attitude—as did I—in the presence of the multiple witnesses to the crucifixion.
Except to say that, independent of the monks’ liturgies and the practices of the church to which they belonged, the images of twelve men who had bound themselves to timbered roods upon which they sang “Why have I forsaken Him?” throughout the night spoke inscrutably to a longing that each of us is unable to quell.
And in the adjoining room, the Great Waldo was downing the final libation before he returned to his designated role of swallowing white rats. Or the Eng brothers echoing “You first” as they accompanied each other to the tents.
What was my place in this constellation?
But I must have dozed off, for when daylight broke, the green was refulgent in the morning sunlight, with no sign of the living curiosity audience, a dozen men on crosses, or fresh sod over the monks’ graves.
Even Brother Stanislaus’s booth had been struck.
He was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER NINE
WE LIVE TO AUDITION
These coveted Calvary roles were the apogee of any monk’s life. How one’s soul must have thrummed when the announcement came from the abbot and the grudging congratulations, wordless of course, from the other monks.
And it came to me that just hours earlier I, too, had stepped out of the identity I had borne with me for decades.
Except this day I am no longer him.
Last evening, as I watched the living curiosities witnessing the Calvary spectacle, I imagined that Albert/Alberta was somebody other to himself than the person who wore a lady’s size four shoe on one foot and a man’s size nine on another. Or Serpentina, her head held up by the lovely Cleo, listening to the monks’ lamenting; surely she wasn’t the lusus naturae “mermaid,” the role that others had assigned her.
And Whadizit??
Weren’t we all, that night, questioning the identities into which we are ostensibly locked? Perhaps that’s what the living curiosities in the ersatz West End were letting me in on when Whadizit? christened me Schlitz.
And now I’m beginning to suspect we live to audition.
The priest persona had legitimacy for several years. I felt totally at home in that identity, comforted by the authority of the scriptures, the generations of ecclesiastical decrees and teachings, the personal gratification that I was experiencing, having been created in the image of God. And there were those rare occasions when I believed I personally communed with the spirit of Christ within me.
Some might inquire: “How can you be addressed as Father Westley Mueller one day then Schlitz the next?”
Yet Schlitz, in the eyes of some, has as much legitimacy as Father Westley Mueller in the eyes of others. The question we must ask ourselves is this: What is the final worth of living? How many of us are living in roles that have outlived themselves, ones that are little more than ethers of someone who was once alive?
When I watched my living curiosity acquaintances scarcely illuminated by the lights in Brother Stanislaus’s stall, I felt that each, albeit for a short duration, had, through the intermediary of the monks’ cries, risen out of themselves to become someone other than who they were.
Perhaps I was not going to perform the high-wire act of disseminating to others the love of God who gave his only begotten Son so that we might be saved. The consolation is that now there is neither a high wire nor the net . . . and I rejoice in that liberation.
My breath is my own.
I am no other but myself.
I pray only to myself for forgiveness. And perhaps one day for mercy.
So be it.
CHAPTER TEN
HOLY-SCHLITZ
But Whadizit? was nowhere to be found. Cleo and Serpentina and the baby buggy—they, too, had disappeared. Eng and Chang, the Great Waldo, Venus de Milo, even the monastery courtyard that had been surrounded by various entryways and windowed façades . . . vanished.
I was back on the desolate road where I’d encountered Brother Stanislaus the previous day.
As I continued to wander the gravel roadway, it felt as if I were pulling my new friends in a cart or farm wagon behind me. They had christened me, and as long as I could look about and see them, I knew I’d never be alone.
Perhaps that was why Brother Stanislaus always wore that enigmatic smile.
Then it occurred to me:
I could be who I once was . . . except as Schlitz! Someone who strives to make sense of everything, who has an answer for all of life’s ills.
I’d act it with such earnest sincerity that folks would find me amusing.
I would fabricate a resplendent chasuble with a vade mecum embroidered in gold, wear red shoes, and affect a supercilious air.
Brother Stanislaus could give me pointers.
And as the afternoon wore on, I concocted little skits I could engage in with those who would gather around me on the midway.
I’d wield a censer, releasing its intoxicating fumes from one hand and ringing bright altar bells with the other, and make light of how devout and God-fearing I was. I’d stand on a box so I could look down on them as I made my pronouncements.
First the onlookers would be uncertain how to respond to my spectacle.
All I had to be was someone I once was.
The Confessional:
The confessional with wheels would roll up and down the midway, taking one- or two-sentence confessions, anonymous of course, for a dime. The booth would be fitted out with sacristy bells on either side and Holy-Schlitz in neon bright letters affixed to it. At an appointed time, I’d exit the box to “pontificate” on the terrible things I’d heard inside.
Whadizit? could ring the sacristy bells as if it were an ice cream wagon.
Time and again, my refrain when speaking to the midway gathering would be, After all, how can you be happy and have any real peace if you are not mortifying yourself ?8
The Mirror:
One of my presentations would tell of an aged monk going mad in a monastery.
Sometimes he would fight and shout: “No more rule for me!” Then he would break down and sob and say, “I tried so hard to love God, and it didn’t work.” Father Gerard would give him a shot.9
Perhaps I could enact his anguish, accompanied by Whadizit?.
As night approached, I thought about how I’d have Whadizit? pull alongside me a body-length mirror on wheels concealed by a brightly colored tapestry. We’d wander through the midway, declaring: “The Real You. One Thin Dime.”
Whadizit?, cajoling a person to give him the coin, would then position him before the veiled looking glass. I’d ring sacristy bells to gain attention and dramatically pull back the curtain. The gathering of course would break out laughing, as the subject’s image would be grotesquely distorted.
After one or two stops, with the audience expectation that the next one would be identical, Whadizit? would gesture for me to hand him a dime, which he would then mime handing to himself before stepping in front of the mirror.
He primps before it, miming powdering his face and combing his nonexistent hair in anticipation of seeing himself.
He of course provokes smiles and some laughter.
At which point I unveil the tapestry and Whadizit? views himself in a normal looking glass . . . and he is aghast. His expression mirrors that of the monk who goes mad in the monastery.
He quickly draws the tapestry back over the mirror. We move on.
Message from God:
With considerable fanfare, I am shrouded then prostrate myself on the mobile confessional.