Levi looked up and made eye contact. “No,” he said. “Just a busy summer, I guess.”
Uncle Thomas maintained a firm grip, even as Levi tried to move along. He pulled him closer and in a low voice he said, “I heard about your grandpa. Real sorry to hear that. He was a good man. I served him for many years.” His breath reeked of coffee and stale tobacco. “If you need anything, anything at all, you let me know, okay? Even if you just need to talk, drop by anytime, okay?”
Levi pulled his hand away.
“Tell your folks I said hi, will ya?”
“Sure thing.”
“Okay, then Levi. Okay.” He left and the bells on the door rang behind him.
There were no customers. Oma watched the evening news. They all sat in a row next to her.
When she broke the silence, she sounded sad and tired. “You kids have class today?” She kept her eyes on the screen mounted on the wall.
“I don’t know,” Nick said.
She turned and put her hand on Nick’s cheek, just below where the pale skin below his eyes turned a sickening shade of blue. “What’s the other guy look like?”
Oma moved her mouth without opening it, as if she were talking to herself, the way she did sometimes when she got anxious.
After only a few minutes, Nick’s grandmother broke the silence again. “Oh, get out of here,” she said. “Let this old woman watch her country fall apart in peace.”
Nick put his hand on her forearm. “I can stay.”
She patted his hand and shook her head. “Scram.”
“Let us take you out to dinner,” Eris said.
She shook her head. “People need a place to go sometimes, and I need to be here for them. This is where I need to be.”
Eris got up and gave her a silent hug. Nick kissed her cheek, and they left. Levi looked over his shoulder at the old woman sitting alone at the bar, staring at the television, twirling her wedding band around her skeletal finger.
•••
Eris dropped them off, but didn’t come in.
On the television the president sat at his desk in the Oval Office, his hands folded, his lips pursed and twitchy.
After he had finished speaking, Levi turned toward his room. “I should probably call my parents.” He dialed his Aunt Trudy’s from his desk. No one answered. He tried reading, but he found himself repeating sentences. He tossed his book aside and went for a walk through the deserted streets of a world that made no sense.
He found himself passing in front of the church, and he crossed the street to the parsonage where Uncle Thomas lived. He walked up the two steps to the door that entered directly into the study, and he stood there a moment picking juniper berries from the bushes by the door. He knocked once and heard Uncle Thomas’s raspy bellow to come in.
The desk inside was broad enough to dominate the room, but it was not a pretentious desk; the immensity of the scratched steel frame, monochromatic legs, and chipped laminate top only served the functional purpose of holding enough books to allow for uninterrupted study, transcription, and translation. The old pastor sat in front of the typewriter with his black tie loosened and the top button of his starched white shirt undone. He crossed his arms over his chest. A burning cigarette sat in the amber glass ashtray next to the typewriter, sending smoke up to the heavens. A Bible sat open on the other side of the typewriter.
Uncle Thomas didn’t look up from the paper in the typewriter. “Nicodemus? The one who comes under the cover of night’s darkness.”
“Am I interrupting anything?” Levi asked.
Uncle Thomas brought one hand up and rubbed his chin. “Just an old man and his lucubrations,” he said.
The two plush chairs for the visitors who frequently came for counseling—the meek, contrite, and brokenhearted—were more comfortable and lavish than the preacher’s own squeaky, fake-leather office chair. Levi took a seat and waited. Uncle Thomas continued staring at his page. He typed a sentence or two in a fury of clicking and then leaned back again.
Levi looked around at the thousands of books. Three of the four walls were themselves bookshelves. The books they held were not arranged alphabetically, but rather, dogmatically. They weren’t separated by language, but by doctrine. The books in Greek mingled with the Latin and they brushed spines with the Hebrew. The ancient Aramaic pressed hard against the German, and the English books were there for when the man needed a break. There were, of course, Bibles in all of these languages, and although Levi had learned long ago that the man at the desk knew every word, their spines were broken and worn.
Uncle Thomas once again began typing, but he broke their comfortable silence. “What’s on your mind, my boy?”
Levi hesitated. He had been weighed down by his conscience for months, unwilling to believe, yet unwilling to leave. He had come to confess. He had come to bare his unbelieving soul, to explain that he wouldn’t be returning to the church. He had come to beg absolution for his apostasy and ask the old man’s advice, and if it was denied, to sadly depart anyway. Now, however, he faltered. “I dunno. What’s on anyone’s mind? It’s like I woke up this morning and the world was one way, and then out of nowhere, the world is another way. This is like,” he paused, lit his own smoke, and tried to find the word. “Unprecedented.”
“Ecclesiastes one, verse nine: ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’”
“So maybe ‘unprecedented’ was too strong a word.”
“Indeed,” Uncle Thomas said, still focused on his page.
“So what then? America’s under attack, but just another old day under the sun?”
Uncle Thomas rubbed his chin again and still didn’t bother to look up at Levi. “Matthew twenty-four, verse six.”
“Which says?” Levi said, already reaching forward to grab the Bible from next to the typewriter.
Uncle Thomas beat him to it. “‘You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.’”
“Convenient. What do you tell the people trapped under the rubble or the family members?”
Uncle Thomas clacked away on the typewriter.
Levi dropped the Bible onto the desk with a thud. “Well?”
“Luke thirteen, verses four and five, ‘Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.’”
“So that’s it, huh?”
“Maybe this will get people of this apostatical age to think about God. Has it gotten you to think about God?”
Levi took his chance to say what he had come to say. “I think about God a lot.”
“Good. And what do you think?”
“I think god-awful. I think when things get really awful, people put god in front of it all, and that makes everything worse. God-awful.” It had not come out how Levi had wanted. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to disassociate himself from things he didn’t believe without separating himself from those who still believed them.
Uncle Thomas ripped the page out of the typewriter, crumpled it, and threw it into the trashcan under his desk.
Uncle Thomas finally turned and gave Levi his attention, but he changed the subject altogether. “How are your folks doing? Your dad in particular. He holding up okay?”
“They’re fine,” Levi said.
“You doing okay? I know you and your grandfather were close.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The old man frowned and shook his head. “Blessed are those who mourn.”
Levi threw up his hands in exaggerated exasperation. “Don’t you have anything to offer for yourself? Or does it all come out of that book?”
Uncle Thomas turned away again and inserted a new page in the typewriter. He manually turned the platen knob until he had it where h
e wanted it. “Oh, what do I know? ‘The one thing needful’ isn’t exactly a reference to my own personal musings.” This is how the man always spoke, how he lived. Everything he said pointed back to the Gospel, and Levi couldn’t figure out how to get a real conversation going.
“Sure. Go on back to your typing.” Levi sat there tapping his feet. “I didn’t come here for a sermon, you know.”
“Well you haven’t been around on Sundays, so I have to give them to you when I can.”
Levi grabbed his pack of smokes from the edge of the desk and shoved them in his pocket. He leaned forward to go. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have wasted my time.”
Uncle Thomas turned toward him again. He leaned back and laced his long fingers behind his head. He looked down his nose at Levi for a moment. He didn’t bang his fists on the desk or lift his trembling hands up toward the heavens as he thundered his message in the way that Levi had seen him do so many times from the pulpit. He spoke gently, conversationally, as a man talks to his friend.
“I’ve known you since you were a small boy, Levi. Watched you grow with my nephew since you were knee high to a grasshopper. I’ve seen you hit your Little League balls and I’ve seen you scrape your knees. But you’re no longer a child.” He reached up and took his glasses off. He chewed on the stem for a moment before twirling them between his thumb and forefinger. “To be honest, I don’t know exactly why you came here. But I do know one thing.” He set the glasses on the desk and leaned forward. His mouth turned down and he stared at Levi with pale blue eyes that seemed to somehow cut through him. “You sure as hell didn’t come here to shoot the shit about the evening news.”
[That was my opening, I suppose. I had been lingering around, waiting for him to ask me point blank why I had come, and I should have known that’s as close as he’d ever get. In a way, I guess, I had lost my nerve. Or maybe there was some kind of mustard seed remaining deep inside my unrepentant soul. It’s more likely that I simply realized that you can’t break up with your pastor like you can with your girlfriend. You can’t just waltz into his office and say, “I’m done with you and your kind, but let’s all stay friends.” They’ll never let you go.
You’ll never let me go, will you? Giving me the space and freedom I want isn’t your idea of love, is it? You’d rather cut me deep on earth to spare me pain in hell, whereas I think hell is right here.
I’m recalcitrant, and you’re indomitable. We’re all impervious to change.]
Levi stood up and pushed his chair back with his legs. “I don’t know why I came here. Maybe to confirm what I already knew.”
“And what, my boy, did you already know?”
“That I can’t just pretend.” He waved his hand around. “That this hell is the product of some benevolent deity. Turn on the news. Not just tonight, but on any given night.” Uncle Thomas stared at him and the silence grew uncomfortable. Levi looked down at his shoes and muttered, “God is dead.”
“You can’t pretend? And quoting philosophers now? You’ve got it all figured out? Big smart grown-up, full of logic and reason?”
“Oh forget it.”
“Oh, did I offend you?”
Levi moved to the back of the chair and pushed it in, but made no move to leave.
“Fair enough and perfectly natural, I suppose,” said Uncle Thomas with a shrug. “Young men are often filled with doubt, with restlessness and aimless wanderings. No direction really.” He leaned back in his chair again, and gripped the armrests with each hand. “But you come in here tonight, I try to help you find that direction somehow, and what do you do? You hear something you don’t want to hear, and you stick your fingers in your ears and say la la la la. I didn’t expect that from you.”
Levi walked to the door. “And I didn’t expect to hear the rote recitations of a brainwashed old preacher.”
He walked back through town, through dark alleys, and then he went out of his way to walk along the river. He pulled leaves and twigs from the trees as he walked, picked them apart between his fingers, and dropped them on the ground.
[I spent so much time that year walking alone, trying to figure it out, trying to articulate in my own mind why I was so full of ennui and discontent, but I couldn’t. I still can’t. Maybe restless is just how it feels to be young.]
When Levi finally returned home, Nick sat smoking a cigarette on the landing at the top of the stairs with his back against the wall. The bruising under Nick’s eyes had turned a sickly yellow at the edges. When Levi reached the top of the stairs, he sat next to his friend.
They smoked together in silence for a while. The weight of that strange day hung between them.
“Hey Nick?” Levi said.
“Uh huh.” He exhaled and stared ahead at the cigarette held up in his lap.
“Remember that first time you did Ex with me? The day when your Opa died?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“You disappeared and I found you two hours later in your bedroom rocking back and forth. The notebook was open where you wrote over and over, ‘I’m going to hell. I’m going to hell. I’m going to hell.’”
Nick didn’t say anything. He just nodded slightly and took another drag from his cigarette.
“I’m sorry I made you do that,” Levi said.
Nick turned toward Levi and cocked his head and squinted an eye. “I know.”
Levi stood and stepped over Nick’s legs to get to the door.
“And Nick?”
Nick looked up.
“You’re not going to hell.”
Nick looked back down the stairs. “I know.”
1.6 IN A WAY, IT WAS WRITING THAT GOT ME INTO THIS MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE
The university canceled classes on Wednesday. Nick went off to work a double at Oma’s Pub while Levi sat on his couch watching the talking heads on the news. He smoked cigarettes, and every few minutes he’d spark his bowl and take a deep pull. At some point during mid-morning, his dad called.
Levi picked up the cordless from the floor in front of the couch.
Not one for pleasantries, his dad got down to business. “I think it probably goes without saying, but just so you don’t complain later that no one told you, we won’t be having the funeral there on Thursday. All the flights have been canceled.”
“Got it, Dad.” Levi kicked his feet up onto the couch and rested on his elbow. “So when do you think you’ll be back?”
“How in the world should I know?”
“I dunno,” Levi mumbled. “I didn’t know if maybe the airlines told you when you could fly again or anything.”
“Nope. It’s a mess.”
“So like, what’s up with Grandpa’s body then?” Levi pictured the body of his grandfather sitting in the back of some truck on the flight line of the Phoenix airport. He pictured the skin drawing tight against the cheekbones, and he imagined the makeup on the face of the embalmed corpse drying out and cracking as it waited. He could see the gray skin underneath the cracked makeup practically sweating in the heat of the truck’s boxy cargo bed. He pictured blue embalming fluid leaking from his dead grandpa’s eye sockets as his waxy face melted.
Levi heard his father sigh with impatience. “What do you mean what’s up with it?”
“I mean like, how long can it wait? You know.” Levi flipped through the channels and stopped on some hip hop music videos.
“No, Levi. I don’t know. How long can it wait? Wait for what? He’s dead.”
Levi sat up. “How long before it rots, Dad? How long before the body rots? I mean, geez. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m saying. It can’t just sit there forever, right? It’s already been like what, four days? Five?”
“I have no idea. I’m sure it will be fine. Aunt Trudy’s been talking to the funeral home. She has a guy.”
“She has a guy? Like a funeral guy?”
“I don’t know. Yeah. A funeral guy. Some friend of hers. I’m sure he’ll know more. Hey, I gotta go. Call me tonight and see i
f I have an update.”
“How about you call me? I can’t afford long distance.”
“Maybe work more than five hours a week stacking magazines and you could afford long distance.”
“In the meantime, you call me.”
An hour later, his sister called. She lived in one of the big new houses on the south side with her husband and was working on starting a catering company. She had good credit.
“Hear from Dad?” Levi was sure she already knew the answer to her own question. He was also sure she had just gotten off the phone, but her conversation with their dad would have been far more detailed and protracted.
“Yup.”
“Can you believe all this?” she said.
“Believe what? Like The Attacks or that Grandpa’s body is rotting in Phoenix?”
“What? Grandpa’s body is rotting?”
“Forget it.”
She moved on and spent considerable time lamenting that they hardly saw each other even though they lived in the same town. She asked him a lot of questions about what was going on in his life, if he needed a job, and he gave a lot of monosyllabic answers rather than ask her the obvious, which would have been, “Why are you just now for the first time taking an interest in what’s going on in my life?” He flipped through the channels some more.
Finally, she drew out her words in resignation. “Guess I’ll letchya go.”
“K, bye.”
“Love you,” she said.
He hung up the phone and went back to watching television.
•••
This is how things went. By Thursday, pragmatism beat out reflection in most of Levi’s classes as many of his professors got back down to business. The Logic professor’s aide taught syllogisms; History of the Civilized World through 1850 hosted a guest speaker with a giant mustache and a propensity for dropping f-bombs, who gave a lecture on misogyny in American politics; and Professor Brendan, a big-breasted post-grad adjunct with thick-framed glasses that drove Levi wild, gave a PowerPoint called “Godot, or No? Minimalism in Modern Casting.” None of the professors dared start a discourse about The Attacks, with the exception of Dr. Buddy Jackson, the Creative Writing transplant from Purdue prone to tie-dyed Kafka T-shirts tucked into his khakis. He had Einstein hair that matched his bright white tennis shoes.
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