The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “A bicep study group? If you’re trying to entice me to join, I’ll wait until they start to focus on other body parts.”

  “You’re very clever,” Esme said. “Don’t be annoying.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “Besides, if anyone needs a bicep study group . . .” She started pulling me. “Let’s sit down.”

  We took seats near the back of the room. The din of the place was something else. The bare walls made it an echo chamber. Esme and I didn’t try to talk. She read the funeral program. I looked around and felt out people’s soft spots—their weaknesses, their points of hypocrisy and failure. There was no shortage of options: People-pleaser. Attention-grabber. False piety. False humility. Disguised vanity. Power hungry. Self-absorbed. Sex absorbed. It’s wonderful how many looks of frank sexual appraisal you can catch at a funeral, if you’re watching.

  Then the din subsided and the lurkers sat. Everyone turned toward the front. That’s what I’d been avoiding, was one of the things I was avoiding. Our semicircle of attention focused on a small, wooden platform, cloaked in cloth. On either side were ceramic pots holding tall, vaguely tropical plants—birds-of-paradise, cattails, hibiscus. They were like living candles at a pagan altar, rehabilitated from yesterday’s discards in the alley behind a La Quinta hotel. On one side of the platform was a simple oak podium with a microphone protruding from it. In the center of the platform, on a small table on a white linen runner embroidered in blue, was a black marble urn with a gold band at its waist—was Mike Padilla, or what remained of him.

  As I studied the urn, the room quieted in a way that made me wonder if it was in my head. My thoughts grew loud and dark and full of death, inexistence. There were ashes in there, ashes only—ashes that would be spread, scattered, absorbed, broken down, bonded, reconstituted. Nothing of the guy would take part in any of that, and I knew it. The end didn’t look like an urn and a hundred close friends in attendance, not for him. The end was watching his blood mingle with metal shavings and dust in the corner of a shitty fabrication shop, at a job he never cared about once. The end was cheap and unexpected and without grace, and I knew that, too.

  A man walked up to the podium, and I realized the silence wasn’t just in my head. The service was beginning. The man beginning it was Tom Gustafsson.

  He wore the same smug smile he used on me right before I was escorted from the security office. Unlike many of the people here, he wore crisp slacks and a wide-collared dress shirt, sleeves rolled up in an apparently haphazard way, like he’d spontaneously grabbed a shovel at an Earth Day tree planting just outside.

  “Hello, everyone,” he said evenly but with an undeniable hint of ebullience. “I wish we were coming together under better circumstances, but here we are.” On his face, sobriety looked slapstick. There was too much pleasure in his eyes—all the time, I imagined, so damn pleased to have been born who he was instead of any of us. The only crack in the brickwork was his habit of sucking in his cheeks a little between words, cheating out those cheekbones. He must have wished they were a little more prominent.

  Esme placed her hand on my back. I hadn’t realized I was leaning forward, arms braced on my knees. She mouthed, “Are you okay?”

  She hadn’t seen my firing. Maybe she didn’t know who Gustafsson was. I didn’t want to upset her, wasn’t going to cause a scene here. I nodded and sat back, folding my arms casually. But it became clear with every word the man spoke: his was the voice of Screwtape that I’d carried in my head for years. A voice that wasn’t gravelly or grave, not snide or twisted, just a clear, confident, everyday voice saying everyday words that were a little off in their ring, hollowed out, rotted from within, infected, as they mentored his young demon in the art of temptation. Screwtape’s voice, I could see through its representative standing before me, was the voice of American success.

  “I didn’t know Michael Padilla,” Gustafsson said after a heavy, theatrical pause. “And I want to turn things over to those who did. But very briefly, I wanted to thank the people at Cremation Services International for donating their services and this space, especially Matt and Harry Hadrys, Carolina at Floral Creations for the beautiful flowers, and the kind folks at the Carlsbad Café on Palomar Airport Road for the refreshments. I appreciate their generosity in this trying time, and not just because I’m their landlord.”

  He waited while there was a polite round of applause, light and relief-desperate laughter. His eyes scanned the crowd without a shade of insecurity. Insecurity was how I existed—constant doubt being the way to feel out where I actually stood—and people who lacked it made me wonder. He looked in my direction, and I had a momentary impulse to hide and a simultaneous idea that he’d heard my thoughts. But he kept sweeping the room with his eyes. Then he looked down ceremoniously before lifting his head and speaking again.

  “This is an unmistakable tragedy. There’s no way around that. All I want to suggest is that we shouldn’t forget to be heartened by the ways in which, during hard times, the community comes to our aid.” He looked at a person in the front row pointedly. It was the tall woman from the photographs. She was wearing a summer dress made of white linen. “Darcy,” he said. “Please accept our condolences and our support in this trying time.” I watched her daub at her eyes and nod. Then Gustafsson was walking back down the aisle, head bowed in a humility I had no faith in.

  Another man stepped up from a seat in the front, a shortish guy with a yarmulke-sized bald spot and a goatee. I heard a click from the back of the room and turned to see Gustafsson stepping through the double doors. He wasn’t even bothering to stick around. I wondered if he thought this was a professional obligation, or if it was the nice bit of necessary PR it seemed to be.

  The next guy introduced himself as the pastor of a church that had some arrangement of words like “new,” “love,” “song,” “peace,” and “community” in the name. The order wasn’t fixed, didn’t matter—Evangelical Scrabble. This person at least knew Mike. He talked about meeting him years before, about Mike’s service at the church, guiding traffic in the parking lot, cooking a whole goat on the men’s retreats to the Borrego Desert. He had a funny story about seasoning a stew with wild sage that turned out to be something else, something that made their tongues numb. I missed most of the details because I was thinking about Gustafsson, wishing I hadn’t seen his ugly face, how I wanted to see his kidneys sold on the black market. Those kinds of distracting things.

  When the man finished the story, he laughed once and then began crying. That brought me back to the present. He made an honest and hard transition to talking about the loss of a person in terms of scripture. It was a struggle, but he kept on. At least he spoke with an awareness of how far short a few Bible verses come.

  Of the funeral services I’d led, I had lacked that awareness at all of them save Ellen’s. She was the real exegete anyway. I was the one who was good with people, with standing up in front of a crowd, with marshaling them toward a single and supposedly worthwhile purpose. If I was stuck on a verse, I always called her. But I couldn’t call her after she was dead, and prayer didn’t offer much hope when I knew the eternal consequence of a suicide, and turning to the Bible seemed like a mistake when the person who knew its words—their spirit and their letter—better than I ever would had killed herself out of a hidden doubt. She had to know: was God there, or not. This dire impatience not to believe or to maintain in doubt, but to know, without question, the truth of eternity had bloomed in her heart like a secret spring—one she’d known would be endangered if shared, even with me. Some doctors suggested different pathologies, after the fact. A deficiency in the brain. An obsessive-compulsive need for certainty. Suicidal ideation masked by intelligence and a disordered desire for divine communion.

  The wish for certainty was a wish for death. I saw that. So that’s what I gave up: God, certainty, control, a hold on everything I loved. The only way I’d stayed alive was by running in the opposite direction of knowledge. I found life more livable in disbe
lief, uncertainty, ambivalence, and doubt. Even in death, Ellen was my teacher, helping me find new words.

  I watched this pastor wrestling his doubt at the podium, the way he’d surely wrestled it before and would again. What allowed him to go on in his way? And what about my self sent me down mine?

  Then I stared at the urn. The white marbling in its black stone made it appear full of inexplicably large distances. If I looked hard into it, it would only go on and on. I knew that. Spaces between the atoms that formed molecules. Spaces between the protons and electrons that formed atoms. Quarks within, more empty space between. This was how I saw death. I’d never fully understood someone being gone, how something that had been was now nothing. But Mike wasn’t sitting on a cloud or living as a beetle in Korea either. Neither was Ellen. So the best my brain could do was imagine them being infinitely far away, always moving beyond me, out of sight.

  The harsh buzz of an instrument cable being inserted into a live amp jolted me out of my head. A young woman with a guitar was preparing to sing. I knew it wasn’t Emily, but that’s who I saw when I looked at her. The short hair, staccato with ocean salt. Her changeable face, the theatrics of her poses, the careful way she kept herself a secret within herself. Mike was beyond me, but Emily I could reach. It was Emily who was vanished, first from my house and then from Sammy’s, but not from the world—not as far as I knew. Wherever she was, there was a gravity pulling from that place. I decided I should let it.

  16.

  WHEN THE SERVICE ENDED, ESME PLACED HER HAND ON MY KNEE. “I’M going to give my condolences. Do you want to meet me outside?”

  Did I want to sneak out? Yes, I did. Facing Darcy, whom I had never met, keeping my head up to see her; saying a few words that meant next to nothing—no part of me wanted to do those things. And Esme’s maternal touch was there, giving me an out. But it wasn’t really a choice, I knew. I wouldn’t take it and said instead, “Come on then, let’s go.”

  There was a receiving line proceeding toward the widow, like an inverse wedding. The two people in front of me, early thirties maybe, were speaking to each other quietly, but I could hear the woman complaining about the tacky choice of flowers and see the man strain not to let his laughter register on his face in a way that Mike’s wife could notice from afar. I looked at the picture of Mike in a reflective vest, directing traffic with a smile couched in unreasonable cheeks. I suspected he’d made a few lewd jokes using the two neon sticks in his hands, despite everything his pastor had said about him. But at the end of the day, I’d known so little about this man—and despite that, he was one of the closest human contacts I had in my life. Too close, it turned out. Not far enough away to keep all possibility of pain or obligation at bay.

  And then we were at the front of the line. Darcy was still sitting in a chair. She looked like she wouldn’t get up until the end of time. Her face was wet, and the blonde hair that hung nearest to her eyes was damp and darkened, clotting thickly, unlike the golden sheen spilling down her shoulders and over her bright white dress. The dress made her look like a bride, almost.

  Esme held out her hand. Darcy didn’t seem to see it, but her hand raised as if moved by something other than will. The two hands gripped each other. “You don’t really know me,” Esme began. “But Mike, I worked with Mike.” Neither Darcy nor Esme had let go; their hands were still holding.

  I noticed that Darcy was looking at some spot below Esme’s face. Every time Mike’s name vibrated the air, she glanced at the urn holding her husband. It was a word that had become unfathomable now, I knew: with a depth that couldn’t be plumbed, all the deep and dark pressure of a life lived sent permanently pastward.

  “He was a beautiful man,” Esme said, “in so many ways.” Something about calling him beautiful sent a shudder through Darcy, and the semidry tracks of tears on her face surged. She sucked air through the scrim of mucus and grief in her throat. It was like watching a person in a shipwreck movie come up for breath among miles and miles of waves—the sight of no one, only debris, no hope, none coming. There’s terror, and then there is that.

  Esme let go, Darcy’s hand fell, and something in my stomach yawed. It wasn’t about Mike, not exactly, not entirely. It was coming to this precipice of grief again, the memory of my own having lost none of its awful prospect for all I’d done to avoid it. What it felt like. Where it led. No good.

  But Esme had let go so as only to hold Darcy’s shoulder. They looked at each other. I couldn’t see her face, but Esme’s shoulders were crying. I had a moment to catch my unruly mind. Then Esme was stepping away, and Darcy looked to me. No doubt she saw my weak face, my pocketed hands, my unwilling body—the next piece of debris that wouldn’t float her.

  17.

  MY EYES REVOLTED AGAINST THE LIGHT WHEN WE STEPPED FROM THE funeral home—that pure California sunshine, redoubled by white stucco and concrete. It made me feel seasick. Maybe it was the exhaustion. I could feel the jailhouse cot I’d slept on in each spasm of my back. The thwacking of a hundred sandals around me wasn’t helping.

  This casualness was wrong, all this was wrong, and I wished I were in a black suit, black tie, black polished shoes. It would be a better container for whatever I was feeling. That’s all form is anyway—a way to give shape or structure to feeling. It’s where California had gone wrong, something the Jesus Freak churches of the 1970s that California spawned had taken into absurdity. Their Christianity’s shape was the absence of shape. It fit itself to the life it found, like a parasite. It attached itself to the longhairs but was still feeding off the self-help ethos of the early twentieth century and the morality of the 1950s, before it began to bleed off the business culture of the 1980s and then late ’90s, the sprawl and comfort of our architecture and lifestyle, the self-empowerment centered on pleasure and influence, the range of your spiritual Rolodex. Like Hollywood stars, its most steadfast ethic was to act light in spirit, free of worry, convinced of the beneficence of tomorrow. It was ridiculous. Tomorrow is coming for us. And not to hand us an award.

  People milled about the concrete pad in front of the funeral home, chatting, smiling wistfully, crying tastefully. Esme dug around in her purse. Plastic objects clacked. She pulled out sunglasses and slipped them on. With her swollen eyes now hidden, she was a different person. Even her posture changed. “You have time to grab some dinner?” she asked. Her voice was lighter, a little flirtatious even. We could be anywhere, any two people—anywhere but where we were.

  But my mind was on other things. “Do you have a cell phone?”

  “Of course. You don’t?”

  I told her the same thing I told everyone: that they’d rot my testicles off. “Can I borrow yours a minute?”

  “Sure,” she said. There was more clacking of plastic, and then Esme produced the phone from her purse. I walked with it to the side of the building and called Gabby. It was all I’d been thinking about doing as I stood before Darcy, failing to express any sentiment of comfort. Even in her grief her face was patient, as if tolerantly aware of how below the task I was.

  Gabby answered with a skeptical edge to her voice. “Hello?”

  “Gabby, hey. It’s Mark.”

  “Where are you? Already milking the long distance at a new job?”

  I had to laugh. “No, not a work number. Maybe soon. Then I’ll call all the time on the boss’s dime.” I tried to laugh again, but it sounded terrible, an embarrassing betrayal of how I felt. “No, I’m just at Mike’s funeral. I, uh . . .”

  There was something I’d wanted to say. Now that I was talking to Gabby, I didn’t know what it was.

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “I’m sorry. Did everything go okay? Are you okay?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course. I didn’t call to talk about me.”

  She hummed skeptically. “Then what were you calling about?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Then you must have been calling to tell me about your early-onset dementia. It’s the only thi
ng that makes sense.”

  I didn’t trust myself to force a laugh again. I didn’t know what kind of yelp or sob would come out in its place. So I just said, “Hm,” and then we were quiet a time.

  “Well,” Gabby said eventually, “if you were calling to check in on me, I’m great. Love my job, love my apartment, love my yoga instructor—let me tell you, that man is flexible. And strong. His legs, my God. It’s a dream.”

  “Oh, I was going to ask about you, I was.”

  “Sure you were, Mark. Sure you were.”

  “No, really. Are you okay? I think that’s why I wanted to call.”

  “Right,” she said sarcastically. “If that’s the case, then something really is wrong. But okay, I’m fine. Really. Aracely hasn’t changed her mind, though, to get that out of the way.”

  “I didn’t figure she would have.” There was a long pause while the blankness in my mind slowly developed into more blankness. “How,” I said, “are you liking being a grandmother?”

  I listened to her breathe for a couple seconds. “Are you really asking? Or is this the setup to one of your mean punch lines?”

  It was a true-enough thing for her to say that it didn’t even hurt, I think—not much. “I really want to know.”

  “It’s incredible,” she said. “He’s a beautiful boy, and Aracely is a beautiful mother. Exhausting, too, though I still can’t get enough of them. Which isn’t to say that he’s the only handful. Aracely’s, well . . . She’s a kid herself, and everything has changed. And the father situation . . .” I braced for some new accusation, deservingly. “It’s hard for me to accept that she doesn’t know who it is. Jared was a loser, but she loved him, and maybe it would have been better if he’d actually been the one.”

  “Good,” I said. “I mean, I’m glad it’s good for you, and I’m glad Aracely has you there.” Again, I ran out of things to say. Then I knew: I’d been feeling the feeling of wanting to help. It was Emily I thought I could help, but I’d called Gabby instead, some wire getting crossed between the two.