The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  The microwave roared on. No doubt she was being fatally irradiated, standing here.

  Mike confided, with an air of concession, “The Old Testament reading was from Lamentations.”

  “I’m not up to speed on the scriptural subtleties here, buddy.”

  “Let’s just say it made your point.”

  Rebecca crossed back to the table and sat down. A peace offering.

  “It was the good priest, at least,” Mike said, apparently still determined to process this with her as if they were on the same team.

  “The gay one or the Vietnamese guy?”

  “The gay one. He said a few words to us after the mass, very pleasant. Mary Martha likes him.”

  “Have you told her yet that she can’t be a priest? Or gay, for that matter?”

  “I thought I’d hold off on the critique of patriarchy and sexuality in Western civilization until second semester.”

  They were silent a moment, as people who had almost stepped off a curb might be silent after a bus had roared by.

  “Jesus, Mike,” Rebecca said at last.

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “Literally.”

  “I suppose I should have seen this coming.”

  “You did see it coming. We both did. And neither of us particularly wanted it.”

  “Bullshit. You’re happy as a clam.”

  “A very conflicted clam.” She smiled, almost grudgingly, at the image. Mike smiled back and said as mildly as a human being possibly could, “I’m betting your coffee is hot enough by now.”

  Rebecca shrugged and let the microwave roar on. She wasn’t prepared to give away the store here. There were only so many things she was going to let him be not wrong about on a morning like this.

  “Those are yesterday’s clothes she’s wearing, you know,” she noted, because she could.

  “At least we got the buttons right…. Did you know that she can tie her own shoes now? I mean, like a pro?”

  “Since when?”

  “God knows,” Mike said. “It must have come together for her while we were in Hawaii. She sure nailed it this morning, two flips and a twist, and stuck the landing.”

  “I saw her yesterday—”

  “Me too,” Mike said. “But she’s been bluffing.” He hesitated, then said, “She told me she goes slow for Phoebe. So she won’t feel bad.”

  Rebecca’s eyes filled with quick tears. Mike met her look in acknowledgment, that’s our girl, and then stood up and said, “I guess I’d better get up there and make sure she’s not setting up a secret shrine to the Sacred Heart or something.”

  “Or something,” Rebecca agreed, brushing her eye with the back of her hand; and as he bent to kiss her, “I still hate you, you know. Just so we’re clear.”

  “I hate you too, sweetheart,” her husband said. His lips touched hers, and they held the kiss for a moment.

  “She wants to go on Sunday too,” he said as he straightened, and fled.

  As soon as he was out of the room, Rebecca jumped up and hurried to the microwave, but her coffee had already boiled away, explosively, leaving the inside of the machine dripping gory brown like the aftermath of some kind of caffeine massacre. There was still half a cup of oily, acidic residue puddled in the carafe, but she just dumped it and put some fresh grounds into a clean filter. If this kept up she was going to have to get Mike to at least start a new pot of coffee in the morning when he got back from complicating their daughter’s life with God. And, Rebecca vowed to herself, the next chance she had, she was going to teach that kid what a dollop really was.

  Later, when Mike took Mary Martha to the bus stop, Rebecca went upstairs to her daughter’s room. Sure enough, Mary Martha had somehow managed to set her alarm clock herself, for 5:59. It was a pretty impressive bit of technological initiative for a seven-year-old, and Rebecca realized that she was relieved she hadn’t jumped all over Mike about that, at least. It looked like this was something she was probably going to have to live with.

  Chapter Seven

  Get up and walk. Your sins are forgiven.

  MARK 2

  Dear Brother James,

  Thank you for your letter, and especially for the update on Abbot Hackley’s condition. The swirl of monastic politics, the posturing and positioning over his succession, is inevitable, I suppose, but no less disgusting for that. I am truly sorry to hear that the chemotherapy did not lead to more improvement, but it does seem that the abbot’s state of mind is good and his soul is increasingly at peace. Apparently all he had to do, to appreciate the contemplative side of the monastic life, was begin to die. (It is true of all of us, I suppose.) May he finish the job as beautifully, with God’s grace.

  After our long combat over the balance of the active and the contemplative lives, I hope Abbot Hackley in his belated contemplative peace enjoys the irony of my own tilt into involvement in the world. Although I am singularly ineffectual in my activities. The only really obvious thing I do these days, aside from spending a lot of time sitting around drinking tea with Phoebe, is teach Mary Martha’s first communion class on Sunday mornings. Rebecca seems more or less reconciled to her daughter eventually receiving the sacrament; I think she is resigned to the notion that Catholicism may just skip a generation sometimes, like male-pattern baldness or hemophilia.

  The classes themselves are a hoot. What do you say to a six-or seven-year-old about the meaning of the Eucharist? Before he was given up to death, a death he freely accepted, he took bread, and gave You thanks. He broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body, which will be given up for you. That we are fed by God, with God? That Jesus had to be broken, like the bread, to make us whole? That we are made one with Him, and with all believers, through this shared meal that, unfathomably, is Him? The church pastor, who is sort of an old-school jerk, insists that we make the sacrifice real for the kids by teaching them a gruesome version of the stations of the cross, and he and I have already come close to real trouble with each other a couple of times. I find, though, that it is easier now for me to see past the crap—these children in front of me are going to be introduced to God one way or another, whether I blow up at Father Merkle and storm out or not—and it is a real motivation for me to dig deeper for patience.

  And so I steer with the skid of the curriculum, and do what I can to keep it solemn without getting gory, true without getting intricate, and suffused with love without getting foofy. It is a dauntingly difficult and delicate balance, and there is no way around the fact that for a child of that age, all this amounts to a sort of bait and switch anyway. With this first communion they are beginning a lifetime diet of a love so deep that, God willing, they will be strong enough to just keep walking into it when they realize that the torn and broken body, streaming with blood, nailed to that splintered wood on all those fearful icons, really is their own as well, that Love really does go through that death, and the Word through that suffering flesh, in order to be made real in this terrible world. There is no warning them, much as I would like to; and certainly there is no preparing them to suffer it by the book, much as Merkle would like to. I feel like a con man, sometimes.

  Perhaps in compensation for my guilt at that, and as a penance of sorts for so frankly subverting Father Merkle’s maniacal agenda, I have been teaching the kids a modified form of contemplation: they say “Hello, God,” in their hearts and listen quietly and silently for an answer that is not words. I cannot communicate to you the sense of awe that arises from the twenty seconds those seven-year-olds are able to be quiet before they begin to stir and titter. God knows what God is giving them, but I cannot help but believe that those twenty seconds of silence are the better part of my so-called ministry.

  The job hunt continues worse than futile, a series of small humiliations and exercises in absurdity. It is probably only a matter of time before I go back to cooking hamburgers. I had gotten a bit ahead on money during my stint at McDonald’s, but that cushion is prett
y much gone now and I definitely feel the pressure of being so nonproductive, economically. Rebecca has been wonderfully patient and supportive, but I have to step up somehow.

  I really don’t see how anyone finds time to earn a living, frankly. I mean, when do they pray? By the time you’ve got the most minimal meditation done, and found a little quality time with your loved ones, and taken a shower, there really doesn’t seem to be a moment left in the day.

  Love,

  Mike

  The world had stopped, and Phoebe waited, because the world whirled on. The stopping wasn’t something you did, and the whirling wasn’t something you could stop. It was the dawn of the last day, which went on forever, and the sleepless night of time, and the hour of our death, amen. It was darkness everywhere and always, and it was always bright, and the wind beat at the windows. The storm was grief over everything that love had failed to do; and when you finally knew that love had never had anything to do but spend itself as love, you turned somehow into the nothing that love did, and the wind blew through you as peace, and the storm was soft as a baby’s grip.

  And here he was again, the one for her daughter. One of the last ones she could see, barely blurred at all. She wondered how he stayed in focus, moving through the storm like that.

  “Good morning, Phoebe.”

  “Is it morning again?”

  “Like clockwork,” Mike said. “Would you like some tea?”

  “If that’s what’s on the schedule.”

  Mike ran some water into the kettle, took it to the stove and brought up the flame, then came back and sat down at the table with her.

  “You’re up early today,” he said.

  “I may have forgotten to sleep,” Phoebe said. “Is that terribly important?”

  “Right up there with eating.”

  “Points off, I guess,” Phoebe said. “My bad.”

  “No big deal. Nobody’s really keeping score.”

  “Liar,” Phoebe said, and was pleased when he laughed. Because everyone was keeping score, of course. It kept their minds off the storm until the roof blew off. Her mother and father used to give her pennies when she was good. Her grandmother gave her nickels with buffalo on them, and those dimes they had before Roosevelt. And so you lived your life that way, piling up penny payoffs for good deeds, with the occasional nickel-and-dime bonus, trained trick by trick into the performance of decency, until it became the only way you could see the world, as if truth and love were a bank account and the game was to accumulate a hefty balance. And in the end you had this mass of cold dirty metal that you spent most of your energy hauling around and protecting, and just about the time you broke down under the weight of it, you realized that God didn’t care a bit what you’d piled up, and never had, He only cared what you’d spent.

  But there was no one to say this to, and no comfort in the telling, for the living or the dead. The words turned razor edged in the wind and left an aftertaste like blood or smoke. And who spoke, anyway, and who heard? The voices only burned in ears that could bear the hurt.

  Something screamed, a rising shriek, a voice broken by the storm into pure keening, a soul readied at last by despair for salvation, and Mike rose and went to the stove to turn off the flame beneath the kettle and pour the water over their tea bags in the mugs.

  “How do you know what to do?” Phoebe asked, impressed.

  Mike shrugged modestly. “I just wait for the whistle and get to it.”

  “God doesn’t tell you?”

  Mike laughed. “God doesn’t tell me shit.”

  “Ah, He tells me everything now,” Phoebe said. “But not a word about what to do.”

  “Honey?” Mike asked, bringing the mugs to the table.

  “Sweetheart,” Phoebe echoed fondly, and watched as he upended the little bear and squeezed the sweet gold from it. He was so good, she thought, amid the complexities of it all. He really was the most amazing man.

  “I should give you a penny,” she said.

  “No need to tip,” Mike said. “I’m in it for the company I keep.”

  Rebecca was trying to find an extension cord that would make it from the living room to her printer in the dining room, but the only extension cords long enough to do the job were already hooked up to the refrigerator. It seemed to be coming down to a choice between printing her graphics and having unsoured milk. Rory had a day off from work and was using it to take a determined run at getting the kitchen finished, which was wonderful in principle, but he was doing something complicated and Rory-esque with the fuse box and there was no power in the kitchen. This was not that big a deal, since they had not used the kitchen seriously for weeks now except for storage and transit, but it also meant there was no power in the outlets on the kitchen side of Rebecca’s studio-cum–dining room, and her fax machine, printer, and scanner had been useless all morning. She was working on a deadline and needed the printer badly. She would need the fax machine badly once she had used the printer. She had needed the scanner since yesterday, but that was arguably for work she should have done last week and so not entirely Rory’s fault.

  It would also have been nice to have light, but the ceiling bulb was out too and she was working from a single lamp plugged into the overloaded outlet on the room’s street side. Rory had been assuring her for the last hour that it would only be five more minutes until the power was restored, but it had been twenty minutes since he had zipped through for the last reassurance before disappearing into the basement again with a different screwdriver, and during that time the only thing that had happened was that half of the power upstairs had gone off too.

  Rebecca had a sense of having regressed to a circle of hell from the previous decade. Her ex’s nonchalant incompetence and the constant implication that she was taking everything too seriously were all too familiar, and it made her want to kill him just as it always had. Rory was now a decent citizen and even, arguably, a pretty good father, but he was still a maddening piece of work.

  Ironic, Rebecca thought, considering her options: definitely ironic, to kill him now, after all these years. But never more satisfying.

  Instead, she unplugged the refrigerator and took the precious line to get the printer up. The milk would have to take its chances.

  The phone rang while the machine was still going through its intricate warm-up beeps and rumbles. She noted the number on the caller ID and considered just letting it ring but finally picked up.

  “I hate to seem like a nag—” Jeff Burgess said.

  “I’ve got the images on my screen. I just have to print them.”

  “That’s what you said fifteen minutes ago. I’ve got three guys from Marzipan sitting in the meeting room on their second cups of coffee.”

  “Have you given them any candy?”

  “For God’s sake, Becca—”

  “Sorry. But who names a tech company after a confection?”

  “You have the right to make jokes as soon as you fax the presentation.”

  The printer had calmed down and was online now. Rebecca hit the file’s “Print All” button. There was an unnerving pause from across the room; it would take a minute or two for the large file to get going. She said, “I’m sorry, the power has been out here all morning. They’re doing some, uh, repairs.”

  “Couldn’t they have waited until you had this done?”

  Rebecca considered going into the domestic details, then realized that would be nuts. Jeff had been her boss during her years at Utopian Images, a graphics company downtown that Jeff had begun almost a decade earlier mainly to employ himself and his artist friends and to make some good-karma income. It had been a very hip and laid-back scene for years, with a lot of soft deadlines, after-hours parties, and an ongoing intraoffice sexual soap opera, but at some point they had actually started making money and economic realism in a corporate world had set in. There had been a time when Rebecca could have explained to Jeff that this could be the only chance in the next several months for her ex-husband t
o get their kitchen working again, that Mary Martha hadn’t had a hot meal sitting down since May, and that Rebecca had been spending many of the hours she should have been spending on this crucial project with her increasingly demented mother discussing the planting schedule in a garden where everything died within two weeks, but those days were long gone. Most of the old crew of hippies and dopers had kids and mortgages now, and Utopian Images had a dress code, a good health plan, and accounts with the electric company, Bank of America, and Bechtel. Jeff still wore only the most outrageous Jerry Garcia ties, but he had a haircut like a marine and a second house in the mountains.

  The printer hiccuped and ground its gears briefly, then began at last to spew the sheets. The artwork for this job seemed hideous to Rebecca, a series of cloyingly sweet images. But apparently that was what they wanted at Marzipan.

  “We have liftoff—” Rebecca said, just as all the power in the house went out.

  “Thank God,” Jeff replied, mercifully oblivious to the new development.

  “Yeah.” The printer had frozen with the first sheet half printed. Rebecca noted that everything had come out in a vague bluish purple. Hopefully the machine was just out of color ink and not failing on her completely. Meanwhile, her computer considered the new power situation briefly, then blipped into hibernation mode, its screen going dark.

  In the suddenly dim and silent room, Rebecca said, to Jeff, “I’m going to go get these pages ordered. Stay close to your fax machine.”

  “I knew you’d come through for me, Becca. You’re the original deadline acrobat.”

  “Aw, shucks,” she said modestly, hoping she had another color ink cartridge, and hung up before things got any worse.

  Mike and Phoebe went for the “noon walk,” as Phoebe called it, at 11:17. Mike could see that it was important to Phoebe to feel there was wiggle room in her daily routine now; to bust out of the in-law apartment forty-three minutes early probably felt like a jail break to her. They walked west down Judah Street toward the ocean, with Phoebe taking his arm after two blocks for support. But she was cheerful, as she almost always was these days. She told Mike that she wanted to keep going today, to go all the way to Mexico.