The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  I pray this prayer daily. Nothing happens.

  • • •

  I SHOW UP for my first day at M.U.P. House, on the Upper East Side. I meet the two women who run the place, Lillian and Anita. Lillian is in her forties, single, and has long white-blond hair and gives quick smiles. Anita is just a couple years older than I am, married, African-American, with fine cheekbones and a Sociology PhD. They meet with me in private and ask me many screening questions. They ask if I’m a practicing Christian and I say that I guess that I am and they nod.

  “Wait,” I say, “what about the clients who come in? It’s not a problem for you if they’re not Christian, is it? Your literature says ‘no judgment.’”

  “And we stand by that,” Lillian says.

  “And you don’t proselytize?”

  “We don’t proselytize.”

  “Okay.”

  They approve me for training. I begin the next week. There are thirty hours of instruction over a period of several months. I learn extensive details about adoption and abortion, but the focus is mostly on dialogue do’s-and-don’ts. The other future peer counselors and I learn about active listening skills and nonthreatening body language. We also get up to speed on the other services in the city that M.U.P. House works with, from day care and child care centers to doctors to midwives to crisis hotlines. We learn that the House’s clientele for the most part are not the poor, but rather working professional women and men.

  By July I am trained and ready to work with clients. I’m nervous but hoping to make a difference. My mother has always quietly encouraged me to volunteer or do something charitable and this is the first time I’ve committed to something where it feels right, where it feels like my life experiences might resonate with others, might help the greater assembly.

  Around noon on the day when I’m set to meet with my first male client, I have lunch with Martha at my apartment. She still lives and works in Rochester, and we’ve been dating long distance for ten months. Right now she’s in Manhattan with me for a two-week stay that we’ve both been looking forward to.

  During lunch, though, she seems nervous. We ordered in from It’s-a-Wrap, our favorite sandwich and fruit smoothie place, but she isn’t eating much.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  After looking at me for a long moment, like she’s considering whether to say something, she leans in and kisses my forehead. “It’s nothing. Never mind. I just want you to have a good first day.”

  I thank her. We finish lunch and kiss good-bye and I take a crosstown bus to M.U.P. House. My first client, a man named Greg, is supposed to come in by himself half an hour from now. I get the counseling room ready with bottled water and a fresh Kleenex box in case he gets thirsty or upset. While I’m preparing the room, Anita comes in, closes the door behind her, and sits on the couch.

  “David, we need to talk.”

  “Okay. But can it wait till after my meeting? I could use just a few more minutes to get ready.”

  “Your client is not coming. Well, he is, but he’s coming tomorrow and a different peer counselor will see him.”

  I sit in a chair opposite her. “What are you talking about?”

  “I finally read your book, David. Kissing in Manhattan. I bought it and read it.”

  Normally I would thank her. But she’s sitting in the nonthreatening body language position. She’s aiming a therapy-ready face at me. For the first time in a long while, I feel the quicksand in my chest, just for a second.

  Please, I think toward Anita. Don’t say any more.

  “David, I’m sorry, but . . . well, the things that you wrote in your book . . . they aren’t something we can accept in one of our counselors.”

  I stare at the Kleenex box on the table in front of me, waiting for the rest of the verdict.

  “You told us you were a Christian. But the sex in your book . . . the darkness of that main character, that man . . .”

  “It’s a love story,” I say.

  “I don’t know how you can say that, David. All the swearing, the violence . . .”

  My mind careens. I think suddenly of Drake, my old Tapwood student, and his homicidal, killing-spree writing. Then I think, lightning fast, through all of Kissing in Manhattan. There’s a rich, gun-toting male main character in it who regularly ties his naked girlfriend to the bedposts in his bedroom and leaves her there while he throws huge parties in the next room. But he also adores her and he never hurts her physically and he takes her to the best restaurants in the city and buys her five-thousand-dollar dresses and dotes on her. And there’s humor and beauty in the book, I think. The girl is naked a lot, but the gun gets fired only once. So, am I Drake? Maybe I am. Because my writing is about to get me expelled from something.

  “My book,” I tell Anita. “It’s gritty and weird, but . . . it’s real. That’s the man’s journey.”

  “We’re Christians here, David.”

  “No judgment.” I can barely hear my voice. “What happened to ‘no judgment’?”

  “We don’t judge our clients. But our counselors have to be in a certain place morally. They have to be completely above reproach.”

  I think of my dad in my Columbia days, how he hated my thesis novel, how offensive he found it. Then I look out the counseling room window at Manhattan, at the sweet, venal, fucked-up city that I love. I know only one way to write about it and that is to tell the truth.

  “I’m worried for you, David,” Anita says. “Reading your book, I feel like . . . like your heart is full of sin. Choked with it.”

  “I see.” I’m still unable to meet her eyes.

  “I’m worried for your soul, David.”

  “I see.”

  She puts a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, we won’t leave you alone to deal with this. If you need to cry, go on, let it out. God forgives even the most stubborn sins. I can recommend you to so many different kinds of counseling—”

  I jump to my feet. “I’ll be right back. I need the bathroom.”

  I stride out of the counseling room, out of M.U.P. House.

  Fuck them, I think.

  I am livid and shaken and will never go back. With my mind spinning, I hurry along East 84th Street and into Central Park. I go to the bridle path around the reservoir where I often run, and I duck under the overhanging branches of my favorite tree, the one I always stretch under. I stand motionless under the canopy of branches and stare out at the reservoir water.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, I think.

  My teeth are clenched and I try to relax. Runners trot past on the reservoir path, many of them good-looking girls.

  The thought comes that this is the perfect place for me, skulking under a tree, spying out at the trim, sexy legs of young women runners. This is the perfect dark place for a pervert, a deviant apostate who’s just been told that he has no business ever trying to help other people, or ever voicing publicly—on the pages of a book, in a counseling room, anywhere—the things that he thinks are beautiful, the things that he thinks are art or salvation. There is nothing priestly about this cretin. He is misguided, a deceiver, a twister of thoughts, words, and images, a man who believes he’s taking part in grace when in fact he’s a disgrace, and a disseminator of disgrace.

  Fuck them, I think. Fuck them all, fuck M.U.P. House, fuck all Christian churches and dogmas, and most of all, fuck You, God, or Lack-of-God, or Whoever the Fuck You Are. Fuck You for the long con that You’ve been all my life, fuck You for always trying to sucker me back toward You, for making me think that there’s a purpose or a place for me, at M.U.P. House or anywhere else, really. And most especially, Fuck Your Silence, which is all You ever give me or any of us. Fuck You, I am cashing out of this one-sided conversation for good. I will do fine on my own, thanks. I will stand apart and alone.

  I stay under the tree. I stand fuming, ashamed, apart and
alone.

  • • •

  AROUND SIX I go back to my apartment. I have to tell Martha what happened at M.U.P. House, and that will make me frustrated and sad and furious all over again. It will probably also make me snappish and unpleasant to be around.

  When I come in, Martha is sitting in the apartment corner in my brown-leather buster chair. She sits with her arms wrapped around her knees, looking anxious.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” I say.

  She shakes her head and waves off my words. But she still looks worried, very worried, and suddenly my shitty day and my agenda of debriefing it seem moot. I sit on the ottoman beside her.

  “Hey. What’s the matter?”

  She shakes her head again. Sometimes she’ll do this many times before I can coax words out of her.

  She says, “I want to tell you something, and I’m not sure I should. I’ve wanted to tell you for months, but I’m afraid to.”

  The quicksand tugs one more time. Martha has already read my book, so I know it won’t be about that. Another man, I think. A man back home.

  “Just tell me.”

  She looks down at her lap. “You have to remember,” she says, “that I don’t go to church much. Hardly ever.”

  “I don’t care that you don’t.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, I don’t know all about that stuff like you seem to.”

  I want to protest again, but I keep my mouth shut.

  “The night we met,” she says. “You know I don’t like meeting new people . . . introducing myself.”

  This is true. When she came to Thanksgiving at my parents’ house, she hid behind doors or tall furniture to avoid greeting relative after relative of mine, and then she walked around clenching my hand in hers, her nails digging into my palm.

  “I never would’ve introduced myself to you at your reading, except for what happened.”

  I wait.

  She scrunches down in the buster chair. “Listen, I’m not a freak. I’m not a wack job.”

  I say that I know that. I ask her just to tell me.

  “I was in the audience, fooling with my cell phone, waiting for the reading to start. Then you came out onstage. And the second that you did and I saw you . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . a Voice spoke to me. I heard it in my head and . . . I don’t know, my soul. I can’t explain. It was strong, like overwhelming, and . . . it came from outside of me . . . and it said, This is the man you’ll spend the rest of your life with.”

  I gaze at her.

  Her eyes widen with worry. “Don’t freak out! It was just one quick thing I heard and—listen, maybe it wasn’t even real.”

  I can hear all the world’s naysayers agreeing. It wasn’t real, David. There was no Voice. Love is a chemical thing. It’s Darwinian, that’s all. Well, fuck the naysayers.

  Martha waves her hands before her, as if to clear the air. “You’re freaking out! I knew it.”

  It’s late in the day, but there’s still good sun coming in my windows. And everything inside me is getting sucked out through a point in the center of the top of me. Everything except for the future.

  Thank You, Lord, I think. Thank You, thank You, thank You forever.

  “Forget it,” Martha pleads. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I never should’ve told you.”

  I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a diamond jeweler.

  “I just had to say it once,” Martha tells me. “Why are you smiling like that? Look, it probably wasn’t real. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” I say. “I’m not afraid.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’M FORTY YEARS OLD, sitting alone in the pew at morning Mass, listening to the priest deliver his homily. I don’t know this priest, not even his name. He is a stranger to me. I’m in Sacred Heart Cathedral, the main seat of the Catholic Diocese of Rochester.

  It is late May and this is Pentecost Sunday 2009, and I’m trying not to glance too often at the woman a row ahead of me and to my left. She is not my wife, but it’s nearly impossible not to look at her. She has come to Mass alone, too. Strawberry blond, probably thirty, she wears a silky pale green summer dress that comes to her knees and is cut low on her full chest. A galaxy of russet and light blond freckles covers her shoulders and her long hair is buckled back all cool and hip on her head with what looks like a silver Chinese throwing star. Galaxy Girl smiles when she sings the hymns. She doesn’t have a classically beautiful face, but, taken together, her singing smile, her freckles, and her badass throwing star are a funky ensemble. I get a fleeting image in my head of her playing guitar in a coffeehouse and singing Liz Phair’s “Perfect World” and nailing it. Then I get a fleeting image of me totally nailing her, so I look away again, up at the priest, and I try to hear his words.

  My wife, Martha, and our two children are at home. Martha and I lived in Manhattan for six years and then, after we had our first child, a son, we moved back upstate here to be near our families. I’m a full-time screenwriter now and I commute to Manhattan and Los Angeles for work.

  Today, Pentecost, is my favorite day of the church year. It commemorates the morning when the Holy Spirit supposedly first came down on the apostles and appeared like licks of flame over their heads and made them speak in every foreign and marvelous tongue imaginable, so that all those in Jerusalem could understand the apostles as they testified about the wonders of God. The apostles that morning allegedly spoke with such wild, leaping force that the crowd thought that they were drunk even though they weren’t. So Pentecost is about upbeat wildness. It is about having the guts to say publicly whatever wild truth God put in your heart for you to ponder and then shout about.

  The priest’s sermon ends. Ushers come down the aisles with collection plates. Galaxy Girl has a sealed Sacred Heart collection envelope and she puts it in the usher’s plate. This means that she’s a registered member of the Sacred Heart community. When the usher comes to me, I put cash in the plate. I have no donation envelope to seal because I’m not a registered member of this or any parish.

  This is what I’ve come to be: an itinerant, under-the-radar believer who on different Sundays attends Mass at different Catholic churches here or in other cities if I’m traveling. My reluctance to register at a parish runs deep. The Gospels and Mass are vital to me—no matter how many times in life I’ve pretended otherwise—but I remain as anonymous as I can in my faith. My failure to embrace any one community may cost me dearly some day when I or my family direly need community, but for now I’m a floater, because I worry that the politics and trivialities of life in any one parish might kill God’s mystical wonder for me. Coffee and doughnuts and bright nifty chatter after church can still make me uneasy, just like the bright nifty Easter colors used to, the pinks and lavenders. I just can’t picture Christ on the Cross, seconds from death, saying, “Oh, crap! I forgot to tell them about Bingo! And Friday-night fish frys!” I still need God to be dire, universal, literally awesome, clobberingly true. This is surely the writer in me, craving drama, needing to strip each character—even myself—down to his or her most elemental motivations.

  Martha and I have had our children baptized, and sometimes all four of us come to Mass. But more often, at least lately, I come alone and sit alone and I close my eyes as they’re closed now. Alone in this dark, mature solitude, I try as I always have to hear and know God. I may never hear His Voice as Martha once did—or at least as she and I believe she once did—but I catch what seem to be whispers of Him in phrases from Scripture or from the Mass:

  In Him we live and move and have our being . . .

  I am not worthy to receive You, but only say

  the word and I shall be healed . . .

  Shakespeare could have written these words: Shakespeare or some lover, speaking to or about his or her beloved. These words are alive to me. They and Mass are a poem to me,
a poem about death, and the death of death, and second chances, and glory. I eat and drink this poem each week and try to join myself to it and be sustained by it.

  So I have come to love Sunday morning Mass—I no longer need to go at night—but there’s a chance that the other reason I don’t register officially at any church is my understanding that, as a writer, I’ll never be a Sunday-morning kind of guy. For whatever reasons, I am good at writing only about Saturday night things, about guns and screwing and liquor and murder and laughter and desperate kissing. When the fiery tongue of inspiration comes to me, it is a tongue that wants to taste that galaxy of freckles on the shoulder of that woman in the next pew, or it’s the tongue of a gangster cursing some rival, promising some bloodbath. It is always a foreign and marvelous tongue, and I try to hear the wild truth in it and write that. Then at Mass I pray about it. Like right now, even as the priest blesses the host, I keep my eyes closed and my thoughts race:

  Dear Lord, I pray, help me to love You and Martha and our children with all that I am. Help me where I can to help others as You did. But when I’m writing stories, Lord, please help me to forget all about You, at least consciously. Because if there is one thing that Christian rock and roll, and various fundamentalisms, and my writing have taught me, Lord, it is that music and books and movies that are consciously about You usually suck. They are forced and cloying and they rise from a fear that if Your name isn’t on our lips at every second, we’re doomed. And I don’t buy that we’re doomed in that way. I don’t buy that I need to quote the Bible chapter and verse to be saved, or that every word of Scripture is literally true. I don’t buy that the only thing that You ever want to hear us say is “God is great” over and over, and I don’t buy that You gave Galaxy Girl her incredible body just so that she could hide it under a shroud every time she walks outside. I think You trust us and our imaginations more than that, Lord, and I think You’re cool with Saturday night things, and so I’m going to trust You back.