by Simon Rich
I rolled my eyes at Fabiola, but she did not reciprocate. She was staring at Mordecai’s chest, her eyes wide with amazement.
“Whoa,” she said. “Is that a cross?”
Mordecai looked down and shrugged. “Oh, this old thing? Yeah, it’s a cross. I carved it one night in a fit of devotion.” He flicked his wrist. “It’s no big deal.”
“Oh my Gods,” she said. “I need to get a picture with you.” She opened up her art chest, took out a canvas, and handed me a brush. “Do you mind painting us together?”
“No pictures!” I said. “Let’s just get this stupid journey over with.”
And so the three of us headed up the mountain. Mordecai had taken the lightest crates, so he could keep up with Fabiola while I fell increasingly behind. I tried not to listen as he boasted to the girl.
“Did it hurt? Well, yeah. It’s a full cross. And I carved it right into my chest. But what can I say? A monk’s got to do what a monk’s got to do.”
I clenched my jaw in stoic agony. The Lord tests me often in the desert, but nothing compares to the pain of having to listen to Mordecai, with the possible exception of sand hemorrhoids, which are pretty crazy.
“You know what I think sometimes?” Mordecai rambled. “What if none of this is real? What if we’re all just, like, in some guy’s dream? And if that guy woke up, we’d disappear?”
“That’s not even Christianity!” I shouted. But they ignored me.
“I think about words sometimes too,” Mordecai continued. “Like when you say a normal word over and over again, it starts to sound weird. Like, for example, look at the word ‘word.’ Word, word, word, word, word. It starts to sound weird, right?”
“Man,” Fabiola said. “I’ve never thought about any of these things before. This stuff is deep.”
“Really? You think so?”
“Big-time. I feel like I’m getting the full authentic monk experience.”
She flashed a small, subtle smile over her shoulder. Was it possible she was only praising Mordecai to torture me?
We came to a sunlit clearing. “Okay!” Fabiola said, setting down her crate. “Break time.”
“We’re not taking a break,” I said. “We’ve barely started climbing.”
“What do you think, Mordecai?” she asked. “Should we lie down and break for a bit?”
Mordecai’s face flushed. “Break sounds good,” he murmured.
I shot him a disgusted look as the girl opened her crate and laid out a debauched feast: honey, breads, and three cups made of pure Anatolian silver.
“What are those for?” I asked.
“It wouldn’t be a picnic without wine,” she said. She pulled out a large green bottle and began to fill the cups. When she got to mine, I politely held up my hand.
“Just urine for me, thanks.”
“Come on,” Fabiola said. “You can have a little. Even Jesus drank wine, right?”
“I have taken a vow of ascetic devotion,” I reminded her as I took out my urine bag. “I know it must shock you, but some of us value things in life beyond base pleasure.”
I turned to Mordecai and saw that he had already finished his entire cup of wine. He wiped his grape-stained mouth and burped a little.
“I was going to bring urine too,” he murmured to the girl, “but I was whipping myself so hard that I forgot to bring some.”
I rolled my eyes and snorted.
“What?” Mordecai asked defensively.
“If you wanted to drink urine,” I said, “you could easily produce some right now. Lord knows your bladder is full enough with decadent, syrupy wine!”
His face reddened. “Maybe I will produce urine!” he said.
“Guys, this is crazy,” Fabiola said. “Nobody has to drink urine.”
“She’s right,” I said. “Nobody has to be devout and holy. Some of us can be decadent hypocrites who are too afraid to drink their own urine.”
“I’ll be right back!” said Mordecai. He grabbed his empty cup and ran into the forest.
“You’re way too hard on him,” Fabiola said. “He’s obviously incredibly insecure.”
“He should be,” I said. “The only reason he even got to be a monk is because he’s the son of Hagaron.”
“Who’s Hagaron?”
I groaned into my hands, dismayed by her ignorance.
“Okay,” I said. “So you know how we all walk around completely naked all the time, except for a tiny strip of fabric to cover up our penis holes?”
She nodded. “I’ve noticed that.”
“Hagaron invented that. That’s his look. We’re all kind of just, like, doing variations on it.”
“Huh,” she said. I could tell by her tone that she didn’t think Hagaron was that big of a deal.
“He was a very big deal!” I said.
“What about your dad?” she asked.
I choked a little on my urine. “Excuse me?”
“What does he do?”
“Why does it matter what he does?”
“I’m just curious,” she said.
“He works for a wealthy man,” I said. “You might have heard of him. His name is the Dark Lord Lucifer!”
There was a long pause.
“He’s a merchant,” I explained. “He sells silver to aristocrats.”
“That’s impressive.”
“Generating wealth is not impressive,” I said. “Denying it is.”
“Sounds like you’re pretty competitive with him.”
“That’s absurd,” I said. “I’m a monk. Monks are incapable of competitiveness.”
Mordecai emerged from the forest. “Okay,” he said. “I urinated in my cup, and now I’m going to drink it.”
“That’s not urine,” I pointed out immediately. “It’s water from a stream.”
Mordecai’s eyes darted briefly toward the girl. “It’s urine!” he insisted.
“Then why are there little bits of grass in it?” I asked.
“Just leave me alone!” he said. “Leave me alone and let me drink my urine!”
I grabbed the cup from his hands and downed the liquid in a single gulp.
“It was water!” I said triumphantly. “Decadent, thirst-quenching water!”
Mordecai looked down at his feet. His face had turned redder than the desert sun.
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I have to get that pleasurable taste out of my mouth.”
I took out my urine bag and was about to take a sip when Mordecai ripped it from my hands.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to drink your urine!” Mordecai said.
I rolled my eyes. “I’d like to see that!”
Fabiola stepped between us. “Mordecai, this is ridiculous,” she whispered to him. “You don’t have to do this.”
“She’s right,” I said. “Who cares who among us is a true servant of Christ? Who cares whose faith is real and whose is just a ploy to impress a woman?”
That did it. Mordecai opened the bag and poured the cloudy liquid into his gaping mouth. Fabiola turned away, disgusted, as it splashed onto his face and up his nose. When the bag was empty, he fell to his knees and slowly caught his breath.
“I need to be alone,” he said eventually. “I need to find a stream and just…be alone.”
I laughed as he staggered off into the brush.
Fabiola turned to me, her fair, smooth forehead crinkled with hostility. “Why did you do that to him? How could you be so cruel?”
“I was merely trying to teach you a lesson,” I informed her. “You thought he was a man of God, but in fact he was a spiritual imposter!”
I picked up the bag and squeezed the remaining urine into my mouth, sucking down every last drop. I beat on my chest, to suppress my involuntary gags, then turned to the girl and nodded.
“Cool,” she muttered. “You won. Congratulations.”
We walked for several miles in silence. Even by monk standards, it felt li
ke a pretty long time to go without speaking.
“Is everything all right?” I asked when we had reached the tree line. “Are we cool?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re cool.”
“Cool,” I said.
But I still wasn’t totally sure if we were cool. It was a bizarre situation. I was a man of God. She was a demonic hedonist. And yet I couldn’t help but feel like she was judging me.
I spent the next few hours trying to lighten the mood by telling her entertaining stories. Like the time when I fasted for ten days. Or the time when I fasted for twelve days. Or the time when I fasted for eight days, twice in a row, but it was really more like sixteen days because I had had only a little bit of grain between the two eight-day fasts. But somehow these tales failed to delight her. Her eyes remained glazed and her expression cold and grim. She didn’t smile once, until we reached the peak and the tomb came into view.
It had changed a lot over the centuries. Tourists had covered the walls of the cave with graffiti. And the ground was scorched from hundreds of teenage bonfires. Still, the site remained mostly intact. Propped up outside the cave, like a coin set on its edge, was the giant stone disc that the angels had moved to free Jesus Christ from his tomb. There were two indentations on the disc, like a large set of animal tracks, which were thought to be the handprints of the Archangel Gabriel himself.
“A lot of tourists like to stick their hands in the prints,” I said to Fabiola. “If you want, you could do that, and I can paint your picture.”
But she didn’t seem to hear me. She had a dazed expression on her face, and her eyes were moist with tears. I followed as she tiptoed to the mouth of the cave and peered down the crumbling stone steps. Inside was the smooth slab of marble where Jesus’s body had lain. You could still see the outline of his shroud.
“A lot of tourists like to lie on the outline of his shroud,” I said.
But she ignored that suggestion as well. She fell to her knees, tears streaming down her face.
“Geez,” I muttered. “I didn’t realize you were so into Jesus.”
She didn’t respond. Her head was bowed. “I can’t believe how much he suffered,” she said. “It really reminds me how blessed we all are.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.” I cleared my throat. “So…wanna head out?”
She looked up at me with confusion. “Aren’t we supposed to, like, say a prayer or something?”
“Well, I’m a monk,” I said. “So I’m, like, always kind of praying.”
“Don’t you want to at least stay for a bit? And take it all in?”
“I’d love to,” I told her. “But I’ve got things to do.” I held up my hands. “These mitts aren’t going to chop themselves off.”
“Can’t that wait a couple of hours?” she said. “I mean, this is the tomb of Jesus Christ. The holiest, humblest man to walk the earth.”
“I know,” I said. “Jesus is great, his tomb is great, everything about him is great, great, great.”
She stood up and gaped at me. “Holy shit!” she said. “You’re even competitive with Jesus?”
“How could I be competitive with Jesus?” I said, scoffing. “I’m a lowly monk! He’s the king of kings! Besides, it’s not even really, like, a fair playing field. I mean, he had all those connections.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m just saying, like, if my dad was a famous god and my mom was a respected virgin and I was showered with frankincense, like, literally from birth, maybe I could start a religion too.”
“You’re so jealous.”
“Okay, fine!” I said. “I’m jealous! Okay? I’m fucking jealous!”
I stared down at the ground. I could feel her eyes on my face, but I was too ashamed to look at her.
“Do you realize,” I said, “that by my age Jesus had already performed six major miracles? I haven’t even pulled off one.”
“You’re still young,” she said. “There’s time.”
I shook my head. “I’ll never catch up to him. It’s mathematically impossible. I mean, even if I started performing miracles tomorrow and found some disciples right away, it would still be ten years minimum before the Romans arrested me. By the time they got around to crucifying me—if they even decided to do that—I’d be in my late thirties. And all of that’s, like, best-case scenario. Like, if everything goes absolutely perfectly.”
“You’ll be kind of famous when they cut off your hands.”
“Yeah, kind of,” I murmured. “I mean, it’s something. I’ll have a niche, a brand. I’ll be on the level of, like, a Hagaron.”
“Who’s Hagaron again?”
I sighed. “Exactly.”
She laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said, clearing her throat. “That was rude.”
“No, I get it,” I said. “You think I’m ridiculous.”
“I just think you’re being too hard on yourself. Maybe you should take a break from monk stuff and join our caravan. We’re going to Carthage next.”
“To see another tomb?”
“No, there’s this music festival. Could be fun.”
I nodded slowly, wondering what she meant by the invitation. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could see her face clearly. The devil had worked hard to craft her features; every single inch was filled with beauty.
“Is that music festival the kind of thing where you need tickets?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “But, honestly, they’re pretty easy to counterfeit. Admission is ‘one shiny rock.’”
“Huh.”
“Just think about it,” she said.
The moon rose over the desert, lighting up the sky, revealing the entrance to heaven.
“It’s getting late,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
We slept just a few feet apart—Fabiola in her cushioned tent and me just outside, on a pile of jagged stones I had collected. In the moonlight, through the fabric of her tent, I could see the outline of her chest, rising and falling with every breath. We were as alone as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Our only companion was an older, well-known gentleman. His name?
The Dark Lord Lucifer.
Since becoming a monk, I have managed to keep my vow of celibacy. In fact, in this regard I am even more accomplished than the average monk, since I was also celibate prior to taking my vows. While my schoolmates spent their youth in shameless pursuit of pleasure, flirting with girls, dating girls, and then marrying the girls and starting families with them, I spent my adolescence in monastic isolation.
That night, though, as the wind screamed like a banshee across the desert sky, the dark one came to tempt me. He whispered in my ear, filling my mind with thoughts of Fabiola. About the fairness of her hair and the sharpness of her mind and how she probably was the kind of person who gave really good hugs. Like, you know, how that’s a thing, how some people, when they hug you, it just feels really, really nice.
I couldn’t fall asleep. And as dawn began to break, I found myself hunched over my bed of jagged stones, examining their luster in the moonlight.
“Is this one shiny enough?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “That’ll get you in for sure.”
I grinned with excitement. “Really?”
“Dude, trust me. At these things, everyone is so f’d up on opium, they won’t even check to see if it’s a rock.”
The sun was rising over the horizon, and the sky was lit with fire. I knew the devil had wormed his way into my soul. By leaving the desert, I was defying my vows and cursing God himself. But somehow I felt no shame. I imagined him gazing down at Fabiola, from atop his winged throne, and nodding with silent understanding.
“You sure you don’t mind me tagging along?” I asked.
“Of course not!” she said. “We’re gonna have a blast!”
My eyes filled with tears, and I embraced her. It was even more spectacular than I had hoped. All at once,
everything inside me eased, and I felt a sense of relief beyond anything I’d ever known. It was like eating a mouthful of grain after a yearlong fast. By the time I left her arms I was shaking.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah!” I said, forcing a smile. “I’m good.”
“Cool!” she said. “So…I guess we should get going. It’s, like, a fortnight away, and we still have to pick up the rest of the group, so…”
I felt something tighten in my chest. “Who else is going?”
“Lots of cool people,” she said. “My camp friends, this witch I know…my husband…”
I felt a soft ringing in my ears.
“Look,” she said softly. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention Marcus earlier. I obviously should have. I just assumed, because you were a monk, you weren’t interested in me in that way.”
I felt my face grow hot. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’m not interested in you in any way.”
“I mean, you obviously are,” she said. “When we hugged you started weeping. It was pretty nuts.”
I said nothing.
“Why don’t you come to the festival anyway?” she said. “That witch I mentioned, she’s newly single. Maybe she’d be into you?”
“Out of the question,” I said. “I’m sorry if this shocks you, but not everyone is as selfish as you.”
She laughed incredulously. “Selfish? How am I selfish?”
“Geez, I don’t know. You own twenty slaves, for example.”
“They’re not slaves,” she said defensively. “They’re my retinue.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a huge difference. They’re, like, my colleagues.”
“Cool, cool,” I said. “So what are their names?”
Her soft cheeks reddened. “Excuse me?”
I leaned back and grinned, sensing my advantage. “If they’re your colleagues, then surely you must know all their names.”
She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head. “You want me to recite their names?”
“Sure, if you can.”
“Fine!” she said. “The woman who dresses me is Penelope.”