The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  Emily had been inducted into a different kind of mystery of the faith when the man she looked up to turned on her, told her with certainty that an all-powerful God had created her to be an abomination in His sight. Her life itself became the mystery, not something she could explain or share, not with anyone she knew from her life then. That’s what shame did, the real undiluted stuff. After you’d been singled out by it—pushed, stumbling, onto the stage while the crowd laughs and points—it was safer to hide, even from yourself. I didn’t know the details, but that had to be how she ended up with Sammy. She must have felt something familiar there, even if it was never articulated, and so traced a circle that ran from her life through my own past life in the church.

  This circle enveloped Mike, too, and his church—a place I couldn’t imagine as being too different from the others. Between the guy they eulogized at the funeral and the one I knew, it was hard to see Mike as a single and whole person, but I could picture the God he envisioned: one of those masculine, laissez-faire, free-will, no-bullshit, ain’t-no-queer, suck-it-up gods, made in the image of the collective American unconsciousness’s bourbon-breathed Southern Baptist grandfather. The kind of God who’d call you a cocksucker Himself. If God was a man, and the man people imagined was one of these kind of men, then something was wrong with men.

  Gustafsson was the kind of man people based gods on, the worst kind. His financial form of prayer could part the American seas, and he, too, was part of this. He was at Mike’s funeral service, at Canaan Hills, and his name was on the deed to the land I sat buried within. His threat to find another security firm moved Watt to fire me; his charitable support meant people like Lambert follow the bouncing ball to whatever tune he requested for their moral karaoke. A not-so-invisible hand, with exceptionally managed cuticles, and calluses formed only by his weekends at the rock climbing gym, among the other wealthy hedonists, as much from the ropes as from the hand jobs in the sauna after.

  What was I doing, thinking like this? It was only a desire to make the irony perfect, the kind of irony we’ve come to expect: that the man using his wealth to combat the scourge of homosexuality was covering his own unpalatable lusts. There’s a poetry to completion, to a total understanding, that’s difficult to resist. It has a meter all its own, making it easy to memorize and easier still to dance to, right off a goddamn cliff. Still, the more I thought, the more it seemed like Gustafsson was important, that he was the innermost sharp-toothed gear, connected to the driveshaft, around which the wider gears turned.

  32.

  THE GROUND WAS TOO COLD. IT LEFT ME SORE AND SHAKING, SO I started pacing, sweating—my body desperate to make itself useful while the gray matter spun its stories. By the ladder, I listened awhile. Maybe I could catch that voice again, could hear him discussing options, making calls. But no. Nothing. Silence.

  This underground room: Gustafsson had to know about it. This wasn’t a little false vent where a person could stash an ounce of weed. It wouldn’t be simple or cheap to build, and impossible to do so without someone noticing. I’d heard a story about Mexican drug cartels digging border tunnels near San Diego with forced labor, making the captives sleep on-site, threatening to kill their families if they left in the middle of the job. When the tunnel was done, they were all taken to a ditch and shot anyway. Secrets want to stay secret, have helpful friends. Instead of Sammy’s face appearing when that hatch opened, I wondered if I’d see Gustafsson’s smug grin instead.

  Hours must have passed—how many I didn’t know—and I was stewing in paranoid sweat, fuming and on the edge of a sleep I couldn’t resist but also couldn’t reach. Eventually my mind began to cool back down. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do with any of these thoughts. The hatch would open, or it wouldn’t, without any input from my pathetic self.

  And what was I doing anyway? Trying to help a girl I barely knew. It was uncomfortable, how comfortable all this was, how familiar. There was something happening out there, and I was one of only a few who truly understood—was in all likelihood the only person who could do something about it. My mind was blind and blinking into the harsh spotlight of self-importance. I used to feel like that all the time. I’d been running from the feeling for years, only to end up right back in the thick of it.

  Everything except for giving up was out of my control, so I decided to get good at giving up. I tried to clear my mind, focus on the present, let the exhaustion do its work. I was back with the blackness and blank walls of thought. Even the smell of the earth faded. How quickly our senses integrate the new into the expected and thus unperceived. Most of the world streams by like that. Dark matter.

  Let it, I told myself. Let even what I could perceive—the dampness in the air, the sound of my breath, the aches in my joints, the way gravity flattened my muscles and skin against the pebbled earth—let it all melt when it struck me, like snowflakes hitting a sun-warmed road. Let none of it stick. If I could manage that, I knew, I might get out of this alive. And by alive, I wasn’t thinking bodily, and certainly not in spirit. No: I wouldn’t have named it, but to get out alive was to make it to the end without excess suffering—without suffering and fear causing me to abandon all the hard-won lessons of my life that had led to this moment. No one would find my corpse with nails ripped off, wild claw marks on the ceiling. No one would see, despite all evidence pointing to the futility of it, that I had acted so desperately, so outside rationality and sense. No one would see that, in the end, I had tried.

  33.

  BUT THE MIND HAS TROUBLE WITH DARKNESS. OUR BRAINS WILL SEE EVEN if there’s nothing to see and will hear even if there’s nothing to hear. When the senses can’t forage, they farm.

  The forms harvested from my memory were vague at first, amorphous, shapeless. Then it seemed like there was a faint light shining through a fog-heavy morning, and there was a horse nickering in the dimness. I remembered that day, just one in ten thousand normal days. The air was cold on my face, but there were blasts of heat coming from the car’s vents. It smelled like cut grass and dry oak and the sweet, cakey aroma of fresh donuts warmly greasing a paper bag. A Styrofoam cup of coffee squeaked in my hand comfortably. Aracely, still in yellow-footed pajamas, was sitting in the passenger seat, her hair a debutante’s day-after rat’s nest. She was eating a sugar twist, a carton of milk held between her plum-sized knees. “Where are the horses?” she was asking, and I knew I’d tell her we’d be able to see them soon, when the sun came up and the fog burned off—knew because I’d lived this, had taken her some mornings to the racetrack to watch the jockeys do warm-ups so Gabby could sleep in. I tried to detach myself from the memory, to see it more dispassionately, to let it dissipate like the fog. But in the dark my recollection of the morning only became more insistent, and I beat my hands against the cold metal of the ladder, trying to shake it from my head.

  Then, as unbidden as it had come, the memory was gone. There was a bitter flavor in the pit of my stomach. It was no use entertaining the past. Not here. Not now. But in the boredom and stillness that I couldn’t avoid, my mind had other plans. Out of nowhere I remembered being a child in a twin bed, in a dark room. I was sitting up, sobbing. My mother came in to change the pillow, which I’d thrown up on. Then she wiped my face with the satin-lined sleeve of her robe. It felt so smooth. She eased me back down on the cool cloth of the fresh pillowcase and rubbed my back, pulled up my shirt to run her nails along my skin, which was feverish and prickled where her nails dragged.

  I hadn’t thought about that in decades. It was simple, I told myself: I’m in the dark, I’m scared. It’s association, a wire connecting two parts of the cognitive machine separated by forty-some years. I tried to shut my eyes, to block these passing memories. But then they’d snap open onto nothing different from when they were closed—it felt like I’d lost the ability to blink—and a fresh recollection whispering in the dark.

  I was failing at giving up. How like me, to fail even at that—to be trapped in a hole in the ground, facin
g what in all likelihood were the last however many hours of my life and using them to berate myself as a failure. I couldn’t stop myself. Aboveground, there was always something I could find to direct my ire at. Now there was me and only me, who was failing at giving up, at resigning himself to this, but who had been trying to give up for half his life—trying, trying. And now, too, I was failing—when I was so close—to help Emily.

  My bladder started to hurt. That gave me something to focus on. First it was almost enjoyable, a little distracting game to see what position I could put my body in to relieve the pressure the most. Then all of them hurt about the same. I should have just pissed, but then I got stubborn about seeing how long I could wait. I walked the twenty-five feet of my human-sized ant farm, hopping when necessary to keep things under control. Then I remembered hearing about a woman who died during some talk radio challenge, holding her urine so long her own body turned toxic. If I was going to die down here, I didn’t want it to be for such an asinine—or is it more urinine?—reason. The acrid stench filled my limited pocket of air so powerfully that the black seemed to become almost green.

  Air. That was something I hadn’t considered. I went to the far end of the chamber and climbed the ladder, feeling with my fingertips around the edges of the hatch. I sniffed, trying to catch a fresher scent. Nothing on all counts. This room was only so big, with no ventilation I’d seen, and the hatch appeared to make an airtight seal.

  They wouldn’t have to wait for terminal dehydration to set in. I’d just pass out, and then my body, starved of oxygen, would expire after one final exhalation. If they waited long enough, maybe they’d find me shriveled but preserved like those Japanese monks who mummified themselves alive at the end of their lives, eating bark and drinking lacquer and chanting away in a sealed tomb until their hearts gave out. But they’d done it to reach a new spiritual plateau, to become bodhisattvas who would later help others reach enlightenment. I’d do it only because I was stupid and stuck.

  I climbed back down the ladder. Was my heart pounding more than it should have been, considering the climb wasn’t exactly a workout? Maybe it was just the anxiety at the thought, the prospect. Or maybe it was my body already working overtime to pull oxygen from this thinning air. I closed my eyes, tried to calm down. I wanted my heart rate to drop, but I couldn’t get a handle on it. I knew adrenaline and epinephrine and cortisol were ramping up my system now, these new inputs triggering the physiology of panic. This would cause me to breathe more heavily, which would burn up my limited oxygen. I had no way to know how long this air would stay breathable—how long until this unseen, life-sustaining ether would turn, as invisibly as so many things had, to poison.

  I sat on the cook’s table. Sitting was good, I reasoned. It didn’t use much oxygen. But it didn’t feel right. I couldn’t sit still. It was like I had vertigo in my limbs. It felt better to be standing—on my feet, able to move.

  I held my forehead with both hands. Brains weren’t falling out my nose yet. That seemed like a good sign. Pulling on my hair helped. The pain seemed to focus my body and mind, at least for a moment, creating little flashes of light in my mind’s eye. It reminded me: before I was sealed in, I’d seen lightbulbs along the ceiling. I’d been sitting here in the dark for however many hours, and there were lightbulbs in the goddamn ceiling. They couldn’t give me air, but if I could see, maybe I’d find something that could help me get out of here. I would take anything, from a radio to a pipe bomb.

  In my mind, I ran through everything I’d seen in this chamber: The small table, nothing under it. The rows of racks, polished chrome bars that framed bags of pastel and chalk white. Nothing else on the shelves that I could recall—just the drugs and nearby the table for sorting them. I’d walked the length of this room, checking the shelves fairly well. Then I’d looked back, and that’s when I heard the sound and the room went dark. I’d never seen a light switch, but I could feel my way around.

  It was good to think in these terms. I’d have to be systematic. I would start at the ladder, work my hands up the wall as far as I could reach, down to the floor, too, then move six inches to the left. I could travel the whole room along the wall that way, like a spider.

  My hands felt numb, tingling, while I felt around the ladder mounts, behind the rungs, and along all four sides of the tunneled earth as it approached the false shop-floor opening itself. Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it was a sign of oxygen deprivation. And besides, I reminded myself, this problem didn’t tell me anything new—it only bumped the timeline up a few notches. It was part of what was coming no matter what, part of what would pass. By the time it passed, if I hadn’t found my way out, I wouldn’t even be there to feel it or to mourn it. No one would, really. Not Gabby, even. Not Aracely. They’d done their mourning for me. Whether I lived or died, in the end, wasn’t of any great significance.

  I pictured Esme at Mike’s funeral while I fumbled up and down the wall adjacent to the ladder, feeling around the wood and steel supports that kept this place from caving in on itself. We weren’t all that close, but still Esme would mourn. I couldn’t pretend she wouldn’t. I knew how she would do it: how she’d attend whatever there was to attend, would see about helping where help was needed, would cry when it was time to cry, would console when there was someone to be consoled. And I’d be the reason—or her memory of me would be the reason. I couldn’t be the reason for anything after I was gone, anything that was properly me having collapsed into dead neurons, into ash and dust.

  I didn’t know what to make of that prospect. For a moment I witnessed it coldly, from behind the two-way glass, while I searched for the switch around the cook’s table and, having failed to find anything, began to inch my way down the length of bare wall. My death was a plain fact, as meaningful as a mussel being picked off a pier by a gull. But my memory, my ghost, would put Esme through pain—a pain I could see clearly because of Mike’s death. As much as I might doubt it, how could my death not hurt Gabby or Aracely, too? Still, though I wanted to defer it, though I preferred to spare them that unnecessary suffering, I refused to let myself, even then, see it as any great loss.

  My body, however, had other ideas. The longer I searched and didn’t find a switch, the tighter my chest felt, and the harder it was to get a full breath into the clenched fists of my lungs. Then a brilliant pain burst out from my heart. It refracted along my ribs, flickering in thin, nail’s-point tendrils like searing light on the rushing water of a river mouth. My body ran cold, and those tendrils turned icy, painfully so, while my heart tried to collapse in on itself, go nuclear or form a white dwarf from a red giant or something else cosmically catastrophic. Yellow-orange shapes began to warble and agitate in my vision. I felt dizzy and hungry and sick, so I sat back down. It had begun: my body was starving for air.

  34.

  KNOWING THE WEIGHT OF THE CONCRETE AND THE MILL ATOP IT, THERE was no way I could muscle the hatch open from below. Still, I found myself running back to the ladder, clutching the rungs clumsily, relying on a hooked elbow a couple times to manage the climb through the suffocating tightness in my chest.

  Blood seemed to be pouring into my eyeballs, sloshing red in my view of the dark surroundings. I pressed my ear to the metal underside of the hatch, stretching out my hearing with all the effort I could manage. I tried to believe I could hear something, someone, on the other side. But no, there was nothing.

  That wasn’t true. I had silence, darkness, solitude. I had no one I could call to, no one there to hear me. And I had this pain now, like my chest would cave in on itself in order to bury the weak and struggling muscle for good, my body the soldier diving onto its own grenade. These things would keep me company.

  I climbed back down and sat with my back to the ladder—woozy, rushing, thirsty. My fingers and toes were cold. My limbs felt fat and heavy with chilled and thinly watery blood, while everything beneath my ribs combusted. This was my body, sending up flares, putting on a somatic light show to get me to recognize
what was happening. I got the message, but it didn’t know that and I couldn’t tell it, so my body kept running through the routine again, again, marshaled by an invisible theatrical producer who still believed there was some way to get this number right. This was survival, my brain getting ahead of me in the most complete and terrorized way.

  I focused on slowing my breathing. My gut cinched hard, and I felt a pungent craving for whiskey. I knew immediately I’d been living with this craving for a while now, could recognize the raw lines it scored on all other feelings. It had been sawing away somewhere down below, muffled by the business of the last week but giving it all its anxious, desperate edge.

  The baker’s racks loomed in the dark, and I thought about what mystery compounds were engineered and synthesized into those pills. They wouldn’t help, but help wasn’t what I craved then. Help was what I’d been trying to give. This desire was about something different from help. I wasn’t thinking about a few pills, a temporary palliative. I was thinking about a few handfuls and an end to this—the pain and all the rest.

  The idea tugged at me. It would be clean. I’d go on my own terms. The fear and despair would take over soon enough, and I’d be helpless at that point, a passive witness to whatever desperate things I would do with the end of my life—animal instinct forcing one last pathetic fight against the unchangeable and unmovable. Ellen had possessed the courage to do it, once she’d chosen that path out of interminable not-knowing—not knowing if God was real, if the book she’d been raised to live by was worth the price of ink and onionskin. She chose that over knowing what it would do to us, what it would do to me. It wasn’t fair to her to think like this, I knew. She was mentally ill, she was terribly depressed—had lived with it, in secret, for a long time—she couldn’t have known the consequences, she was out of her own control. But I had never let that go, never forgiven it, and never would. I would be angry with her until they burned my remains. My ashes would cause steam to rise up from where they were poured into the ocean. The ashes of an angry man.