But the anger got me thinking about something other than eating a pile of unnamed pills, so I let the anger come. I let it get me to my feet. I went back to where I left off feeling the earth, the wood, the steel—feeling for the light switch. The farther down I went, the more the grip on my heart seemed to tighten, the colder my hands felt.
Lambert deserved this anger; Sammy deserved it; Andy at my old church deserved it; Gustafsson deserved it. I deserved it, more than ever. I’d picked Emily up, sure. I’d offered to drive her to Portland, a little closer to Seattle. But I didn’t tell her my trip was more a figment, that it had been sabotaged from the start by my own inability to have a relationship with my daughter, and she had to see my eyes, where they darted. I was just another man who couldn’t see past his own interest in her, an interest about six inches long on average. I hadn’t used her, but I would have if given enough time and opportunity.
But I wasn’t trying to find her to ask her to forgive me. She shouldn’t forgive any of us. Forgiveness was the hangover the entire Western world, Christian or not, couldn’t shake. God had come up with this scheme to forgive us our sins through Jesus’s planned-for and ordained murder—which made it a Trinitarian filicide/suicide/ghostbusting all to undo the damage of sins that He Himself had demarcated, sins that He had created us to desire or be susceptible to—or He would have if He and Jesus both weren’t the mirrored white space on a few hundred pages of scriptural invention. But in our injunctions on how to live, the beneficence and power—and the obligation—of forgiveness had soldiered on, forever reanimating like a moral zombie. It had become neutered of metaphysical power, sure—practicalized, psychologized, turned into that slippery move of me forgiving you because I hope it will make me feel better. But it was still the forgiver’s call, the forgiver’s moral charity and well-being with which we were concerned.
I didn’t want to explain myself to Emily. She didn’t need Lambert and Daniella and her parents to explain the machinations that had pushed them to treat her in the ways they had. Accounting for that was beside the point. But I wanted her to know that I was sorry for the part I played.
Running my hand along the edge of one support, I snagged a split in the wood and felt it pierce deeply into the fat of my finger pad. I spat out a few fucks and shits and motherfuckers, felt the blood running across my puffed, numb hand, hit the wall again and again and again until some specific pain bloomed—warm, at least, while it hurt—in my palm. The general pain issuing from my chest caused my lips to curl back in a grimace so wide my skull could have slipped out between them.
My anger turned back on me. The panic and fear Emily had shown when I’d picked her up asleep on the patio that night—that wasn’t about me. That was about other men. What I’d done was nothing compared to what Sammy had done, nothing compared to how Lambert had hurt her. I hadn’t done anything at all, and still I’d made myself the center of her tragedy—made my thoughts the core of what had hurt her, and that was a shameful, selfish thing, done by a shame-filled, thought-policing person. It was all because I’d had a desire. For years, my desires hadn’t extended much further than burritos and a couple hours in the ocean. Then she showed up, I had one passing paroxysm of lust-care-loneliness, and it led me here, like a Christian even to the end, even without God.
God and the entire host of heavenly attendants were all still floating in the formaldehyde of my brain. They were dead, but some part of me thought they were watching nonetheless—not gone but near infinitely far away. I hadn’t known it, but there it was. Even so, I didn’t feel a need to explain to them what I’d done. I didn’t need to be told that they understood, that I could be accepted despite it—always despite. If there was some near-dead wish of mine still bloating in that brine, it was that I wanted an apology. Something I’d never get. I wanted to hear their regret at how much was fucked in the world’s founding, how much was fucked in my own. I wanted them sorry for what they’d made.
My hands moved more quickly now, fumbling over the chiseled earth and the wall supports, leaving streaks of my blood I pictured but couldn’t see. A switch had to be somewhere in this hellhole. They couldn’t have it up in the shop; it’d be a giveaway. The air was thinning in my head. I knew I was threatening to collapse—that part of me wanted its forced calm, its cold comfort.
An apology from my own fleshy, fumbling, faithful father would have sufficed. An apology by proxy. But he’d never given one while he was alive and was offering up nothing as one of my numerous dead. They all owed me as much. Ellen, for abandoning me to replace her faith with fact. My father, for so quietly accepting her fate. My mother, for following him. They had all gone away, left me. Leaving is what people do. As soon as a person arrives, they promise to go. But all these people had left, and none had apologized for the abandoning.
Even Gabby: she hadn’t died, but when my faith gave out, it was a divide just as eternal that separated us. She had held fast to the spiritual terms by which I could cross it—terms I couldn’t live with, terms I pushed at to discover who she loved more. The discovery of being second best only sent me further away, set me up—I saw it clearly then—to work out how unlovable I could become.
I didn’t blame Gabby for leaving, for taking Aracely. But I wondered if she ever wanted to say she was sorry they had gone, even if she couldn’t see having done it any other way. I wondered if she had any idea what it would have meant to me. I hadn’t.
It felt like days, though it must have only been minutes, before I reached the back wall. It was as empty of what I was looking for as everything else I’d touched. Now I was at the far end of the racks of bagged drugs, feeling behind the cheap, chrome-plated bars for that small protrusion of plastic that, at this point, was only the difference between me dying in the dark or dying in the light. Which was no difference at all.
The first bag I found, I tore a hole in. I shook a few pills into my shaking, senseless hand, got them into my mouth. They stuck to my tongue dryly. Not enough to kill me. Just enough to kill some of this pain, until I was killed by other things.
Aracely never needed to forgive me. She was the one who deserved an apology. I could see that now, could picture doing it, but my self-defeating attempts to reach out to her over the years stunk of the opposite. Now I wouldn’t get the chance. She’d never know she didn’t need to forgive me—that I didn’t want her to forgive me—that I needed her not to forgive me. I wanted her to hear, in my own voice, how deeply, how fully I knew I’d done wrong by her.
But I was taking this voice with me, it seemed, into the pit. Then I would be one of the dead, too, and I would have left her, in the tidal surge of fetishized and therapeutic forgiveness, feeling like she’d withheld her mercy past when she could change her mind—that she’d never find catharsis in giving it to me, never find peace because she’d held on to her anger and disappointment for too long. Then I’d become a ghost lesson, teaching her something I didn’t want her to learn.
Her memory of me would do this to her, for the rest of her life, even if I was dead for what was left of it. She’d keep wishing she could press her forgiveness into my hands, like a small, wrapped package, and I—handless, bodiless, being-less—could never take it. I was so furious at the thought I barely felt the pain in my chest anymore. Or, if anything, the pain had become so total, so extensive throughout my body, that it became another constant I could disregard.
Forgiveness wasn’t what I needed, I wanted to tell her. It wasn’t where anything like salvation persisted. No: it was in apology, and in blind chance, time’s erasures, human grace.
The pills on my tongue: I spat them out. The taste of stale flour lingered, pale and bitter. I leaned against the wall, holding my face. My palms were wet. Thrombotic shapes swam across my vision in puce and amber. The lurching of my heart and the pain racking my body terrorized my mind. I told my whole body to go fuck itself. There had to be something I could do. I couldn’t leave Aracely like this—couldn’t leave her with yet another awful
inheritance.
I inched my way along the rack, slowly and painfully, using the bars for support. The grip on my heart tightened, and panic rose up like bile in the back of my throat. I was losing whatever thin sense of control I’d found. Maybe the bad air was pooling at this end of the room. Maybe all the air had gone bad. I was breathing harder, but my throat felt constricted. The thin air that reached my lungs had a parched, unleavened taste. Drunken spins seized my proprioceptors, unstabilized the floor beneath me. The backs of my knees sweated, and the joints unlocked. I tried to steady myself on the rack, but I couldn’t grab it with my fat, stupid hands.
I got one arm hooked around an upright, just in time for the air to vacate my skull. The rack wasn’t bolted to the wall, so the whole thing came down on me. I’d failed, even briefly, to break the descent.
35.
WARM AIR WAS BLOWING ON MY FACE, GENTLY. I’M FINE, I REALIZED.
I was lying on a couch. The windows were open. A breeze billowed the flower-patterned curtains Gabby had made herself, blowing them into the living room on one side and causing them to flap out the window on the other. I could see the curtains as if I were now on the street, looking up. They waved like a botanical flag from the apartment complex—a warning from that vantage, and where I was cold—and then I was back on my sun-warmed couch. The ashtray on the end table was empty and clean, there for my father’s occasional visits to “his favorite” and only grandchild.
There was singing. In the back room there was singing. It was Gabby. Her warm, low voice. I couldn’t place the song, couldn’t identify the words. I wanted two things: to stay still on this couch and listen as I drifted back to sleep, and to go back to that room and watch Gabby sing, to hear the words. The room. It was Aracely’s room. She was singing to Aracely. I wanted to see her, too. I’d been wanting to see her for a long time. But I couldn’t move. The cushions had curled and re-formed around my back and shoulders. I couldn’t get myself to leave them. I couldn’t leave the blanketing light that came through the window. It felt so perfect, to be warm and wombed on a soft couch in this living room.
The singing stopped. There was an indefinable sound, and then came laughter. Aracely’s laugh. Not her genuine laugh but the stage one she’d picked up somewhere. The one she used when she knew, already, that she was supposed to laugh. It was loud and harsh and sweetly cartoonish.
I would see her if I could get up. I couldn’t get up, and then I did.
The U-shaped apartment kitchen shone hazily in the sun pouring through the dirty skylight. It had stained-oak cabinets, antique white tile counters. I turned back to the couch I’d slept on—the hand-me-down, a great-aunt’s, the pale blue monster. On the living room shelves were all the books. Out and in view. I could see them, remembered how often I pulled them down, not even to read them but just to touch on that set of ideas, then another, to bring them back to mind through these blocky artifacts—the bookmarks, too, each signaling a particular place or time: a train ticket, a brown leaf, the torn corner of Los Angeles Times newsprint; and the people who bought me some, turned me on to others, taught me how to read still more—but I remembered, too, painfully, that I’d stacked them in a closet, in a different house, and how they’d remained there in the dark into a new millennium.
But no, I didn’t live in that house. I lived in this house. Apartment. The singing had begun again. I followed my footsteps on the path I’d known so well, the path I knew and was learning to know, was knowing. The one from this living room back to my daughter’s bedroom. In this apartment. On the second story. Our second apartment on the second story, that’s what Gabby had taken to calling it; the first was the cramped studio near the seminary. On the wall were pictures, eight matted into a single frame: a wedding photograph, Gabby in lace and tulle, me in a brown suit and cummerbund; Gabby, pregnant and waist deep in the sea; Aracely in her first bath; my father shaking my hand at the seminary graduation ceremony; my mother holding Aracely in her rocking chair, in the house I’d grown up in; Ellen and me in camp chairs, laughing around a fire; two images of Gabby’s parents, people who had loved me and whom I had loved but who were so completely gone from my life that it was like I’d never known them at all. So many of them were gone. But they weren’t. The picture with Ellen was taken only a year ago, only twenty-two years ago.
The singing. It had stopped again. I waited for the stage laugh, but none came.
I started to run. The hallway was only a few feet, but it took so long—forever—like I was a born-again Zeno running in a river of Californian light. The hallway seemed to stretch and darken, became lined by metal racks, and then it was my hallway again. What had been or was my hallway. Then, abruptly, I was standing at Aracely’s door. I was looking in.
There was nothing to see. It was pitch black, dead black. Not dark. Something less than dark. I reached inside for a switch. There wasn’t even a wall. Inside was nothing. Inside wasn’t.
Where had Aracely gone? Gabby? I’d heard them. Calling from where, if not here? I could have called back, but I didn’t. I came to them. I tried to come, but it took too long—I took too long. There was nothing here. The room hadn’t been for such a long time. This apartment didn’t exist anymore either, even if the rooms still stood. Those people and the people in the photographs—vanished, too. Even the ones who were still alive. The ones I knew then, those people were long since departed. Everything worth reaching lived in the past. There was no getting there. They weren’t outside existence, waiting; they’d become nothing within it. Everything worth going back to was gone.
I couldn’t get past that. The longer I couldn’t get past it, the angrier I grew. Time taught me I couldn’t hold on to a thing. Memory wouldn’t let me abandon the wish. So the person I was, the person that was left—I bore the weight, being crushed while still reaching out, still hoping for one more moment of feeling, one more impression, on the tip of my finger, of those wished-for, long-gone people. Pulled forward by desire, drifting backward in resignation, groping blindly and blindingly, seeing every chance only when it was too late to take it.
Then I stepped forward into the room—into the absence where the room had been. The blackness enveloped me, held me, became me. For a long time I was nothing. That isn’t right. I wasn’t. There was only nothingness, of which I was somehow a part. There wasn’t a self to sense it, a body to feel it, a memory to compare it with, a mind to articulate it, time to pass through it. Only me unfolding like undone origami into the flat page of nothingness.
36.
THE ONLY INDEPENDENT, ORIGINAL THOUGHT IS DARKNESS, SILENCE. AS soon as a light is cast or a sound is made, there is recognition and imitation and mistake, and you’re made dependent on everything that came before, everything around.
The first light came out of the darkness. It was a want: I wanted to be alive. I had been nothing. There was nothing to be content with in being nothing, nothing to resist. But then I wanted this. From within that nothingness, I could feel the muscles of my eyelids contract, release, contract, release. What I saw made no change. My world went from black to black, but I could feel this movement. I could register what it meant. I’d wanted to be alive, and I was. Other sensations returned. Cold concrete against my face. The smell of dust and wet earth, piss. Pains in my back, in one wrist and a finger. Weight pressing down on me—the metal rack and bags of prescription drugs.
I tried to lift myself, but my muscles were weak. The pain in my heart was gone, replaced by a deep, physical exhaustion and a postnauseous hunger in the pit of my stomach. I pushed up again, couldn’t get out from under the racks, fell back.
Then I saw the second light. It was at the end of the corridor, a thin shaft of blue-white. It came from above, made a square on the floor at the base of the ladder. It caught and reflected off the metal table, the chrome shelving, each coming toward me as new lights, a few hundred now, now more. The hatch was open. Air was coming in. My head was muzzy and I couldn’t hear well, but I tried to listen for voic
es. There was nothing.
“Hello,” I tried shouting. It came out like a disgruntled purr. “Hey. Whoever the fuck you are, I don’t care,” I said, louder now. “Just come get me out of here.”
It was quiet. I wondered if I was deluded, hallucinating on a better present instead of getting subsumed in all that past. Then a single voice, one that sounded young and eager to hide the fact, said from somewhere above, “And who the fuck are you?”
“Nobody,” I said. I think I meant it. “I’m stuck is who I am, under these racks. I must have passed out.”
Some murmurs of a conversation aboveground reached me. So there were at least two people here. Someone laughed. I didn’t like that sound. It was edgy, anxious. I tried to shimmy out from under the rack, but I was so exhausted I thought I might pass out again.
A head lowered down from the hatch, along with a hand holding a flashlight. It beamed into the backs of my eyes, blinding me. When it clicked off, the face was gone again. I hadn’t gotten a good look, but it was safe to assume these guys weren’t the police, and they weren’t a couple machinists surprised to find a hole in the floor of their shop. These were people who knew why this place existed.
The first person to start down the ladder was wearing flip-flops. The night Mike died, one of the people I’d seen in the shop wore them, too. I was scared, but, without recourse, the fear burned off like a marine layer. I waited while he slapped his way down the ladder. He reached the floor and wound his arm behind the first baker’s rack, reaching as far as he could, and then every second bulb along the ceiling lit up.
The Churchgoer Page 26