by Sarah Hina
I step urgently, him hissing my name in pursuit. I like the skeletal restraint imposed on us by the sacred stones. The chase is the thing, yet there should be consequences. The line is blurred. I want to see how far we can take it.
The heat of Mathieu’s eyes on my neck enflames my madness. He reaches out and flips my wet hair. I flick it back. I can sense him recoil, and falter, before picking up the pursuit anew. He steps on the backs of my shoes, but little does he know (wearing those expensive-looking leather things) how one relies on Keds to slip on as readily as slippers. He tries feebly for my hand, but I shake him loose. I am young in flesh and blood, and I have a child’s profaneirreverence for the law of this house. Even Jesus up there, suffering for me on his eternal cross, cannot dam the wicked flow of mirth in my heart. I want Mathieu to hunt me until the end of time, so that we can, like the Hindus, create new cycles.
I run out of church. Confronting a barrier that points me to the pulpit, I move into that painful heart of a church and stop. Mathieu bumps into me in surprise. I look back at him and smile weakly. We stand in the middle of the transept, caught in the crucifix. Silently, we turn and regard the massive wooden organ at the rear of the church, with its tight fractals of pipes protected by dark angels. The organ is monumental, the biggest I’ve seen, so imposing that my ears instinctively cringe for the cacophony that must engulf this house of God during Sunday mass. How those unworldly notes ricocheting off the floating domes must storm the transept, before reverberating down, down into the smallest artery of the smallest worshipper’s malleable tongue, commanding—like a father’s grip—the rebellious blood flowing within to deliver the right words, with reverence. What a grand, and terrifying, magnification of a man’s touch on a pedal, his pushing the right keys. I strain for the swell, knowing it won’t come, but my ear, with its alerted machinery, cannot help but listen. It is deathly quiet. There is an uneasy dissonance: the expectation of sound slamming a hard silence. The flickering flame of my exuberance cannot survive this vacuum. A cold hole opens, and a memory surfaces.
There are wooden chairs, not pews, set up in rows throughout the nave, and I sit down, the chair rubbing harshly against the stone. Mathieu follows suit. There are half a dozen people scattered about, hands clasped in prayer, heads bowed, shaming my earlier exuberance. The remaining chairs are empty, some slightly askew, as if abandoned, en masse, by the secular citizens of this modern France. I finally turn toward Mathieu, who looks at me with some curiosity.
“You caught me,” I whisper, trying to recapture our playfulness.
“Did I?” he asks, not fooled.
“Didn’t you?”
“Something did.”
“Yes, something.” I place my chin in my hands’ cradle. “Funny, huh?”
“What?”
“How churches make you feel like you’re already dead.”
He glances at the dogma of stonework and statuary. “I feel nothing.”
“Really?” I ask, only a little surprised.
“No. But you do.”
I nod. Who was that girl who wore laughter for wings? She has been clipped by the absent voices of a terrible superstition. “I just remembered something that I haven’t thought of in years.”
“Tell me.”
I wave him off, embarrassed. “It’s irrelevant … silly.”
“I like silly irrelevance.”
I smile, hesitating.
“Will it help if I promise to tell you something equally silly and irrelevant when you are finished?”
I laugh. “Okay.” Taking a deep breath, I organize my thoughts. My eyes take solace in the half arches of natural light spilling from the generous windows that try mightily to brighten this darkened space. “When I was really little, I hated visiting airplane hangars.” This is not an auspicious start. Compared to Mathieu’s eloquence, the line is a letdown, my voice pinched and strange.
Daisy, just say what you want to say. Your essays always read like you’re lifting a page from your father. Think for yourself, honey.
I clear my throat and try harder. “We lived near Dayton, a city famous for its Air Force base and not much else. But it had a great air and space museum, one of the best in the country. Well, my dad loved to go, so we went often. My mom favored the astronaut displays, as most people did, because they were the more romantic—you know, man’s heroic nature, the undiscovered country, all that Star Trek stuff. But not my dad. He went in for the old-timey displays: those rickety planes used in World War I with their funny nicknames and strange, savage caricatures. He’d stroke their frames, examine the slightest details, moving his hands over the rivets, like he had invented the damn things in some past life. I think he imagined himself as the Red Baron at times.” Tears spring to my eyes. I shake my head, but Mathieu nods, and I gather myself.
“But me—I couldn’t stand going. It undid me to be standing there, all of three feet tall, flanked by those enormous airplanes, hanging from ropes above me, spanning the length of football fields beside me. It was too overwhelming for a four-year-old pursued by this wild imagination. Put me in a real cemetery during daytime, and I would do fine. I knew what that was about. But I could not bear the emptiness of that huge space filled with dead machines.” I shake my head at the absurdity of where I’m going, but soldier on, Mathieu’s silence being of the encouraging sort. “I always had nightmares about walking through that place by myself at night, though I never told my parents. I suppose I was a little ashamed of myself. It seemed so silly, even then. Most kids dreamed about monsters. I was undone by an airplane graveyard.” I breathe out. “But I couldn’t escape the fact that the place provoked a kind of cold terror inside me.”
“And this place? It gives you the same creeps.”
I flash him a self-conscious look. “Crazy, I know.”
“Not so crazy.”
“The weird part is that I was never anything but a casual Christian. My mom is basically an agnostic, now, and my dad a lapsed Episcopalian. I went to church a few dozen times growingup, never really understanding what it was about, but still feeling the enormous power of these rituals and words. I mean—the body and blood of Christ—tell that to a kid once, and she will never look at her parents the same way again.”
“Her parents?” he asks, frowning.
“For making her go up and be a party to that. Parents don’t explain things—they just assume kids aren’t paying attention. But I was. I thought I was literally eating the flesh of Jesus Christ, and drinking his blood … that the reverend up there had worked a magic trick with the little wafers that dissolved like cotton candy in my mouth. I mean, he even whispered it to me before putting the pretty silver cup to my lips. I was mortified by his words, but I always went through with it. Afterward, I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth. It tasted metallic to me, exactly like blood. I’d go home and brush my teeth to get rid of the taste. Even to this day, when I drink wine, I have this strange sacrilegious sensation of getting drunk on Jesus’ blood. Andy bought me a nice bottle of red for my twenty-first birthday, and I couldn’t drink the stuff.”
Mathieu hides a smile with his finger, before saying, “It is a good thing you were not brought up Catholic. You would be a complete mess.”
I lean my shoulder into him. “Easy for you to say. Does anyone in France believe in God anymore?”
“Nobody I know admits to it.” He pauses. “Perhaps it is why we are so unhappy.”
“Are you so unhappy?”
He tents his fingers and leans back. “We can be a little morose from time to time. It is the logical extension of not believing in an afterlife. You Americans can, as you say, ‘smile through your tears’ because you think your suffering is temporary: a kind of grand test from the Almighty. We French know it is cruel and random, that we are ‘being-unto-death,’ as Heidegger would say, before falling into oblivion.”
I groan. “That sounds awful.”
“Yes, it does. Why do you think Conrad called it the horror?�
�� Mathieu shrugs and wipes at his thigh. “We are born clinging to life, and for most, that means ignoring death, or packaging death in such a way that we are lulled into complacency by myths and legends, like naïve children. But there is a third way, which sounds, to me, more like the truth you honor than any of this.” He waves his hand contemptuously, before centering it on his breast and looking at me. “And that is to acknowledge that this life is all we have. This is my religion, and I am passionate about it.”
I consider, chewing on the inside of my lip. “I know that what you say is entirely rational. It does sound like a fairy tale, and a rather vicious one at that.” Eyeing the crucifix on the wall to my right, I sit a little straighter. Jesus’ mournful, martyred expression is drilled across his strung flesh as a permanent reproach. “But it’s a part of my DNA. Even if I don’t believe it, I cannot entirely unbelieve it. Which doesn’t make me a good Christian”—I sigh—“just a bad atheist.”
Mathieu is not the sort to let someone off the hook easily. He licks his lips and charges. “But your little anecdote of two minutes ago demonstrates your true, authentic instinct for atheism.”
I frown. “How so?”
“What were you scared of in that airplane graveyard? That the airplanes would come to life and run you down?”
“No, not exactly,” I reply, worrying at my fingernails. I find myself hard to explain, the flood of today’s emotions sweeping aside analysis. “I don’t know what I was scared of,” I admit. “That’s why it was so scary.”
“Exactly so. It was you confronting death for the first time, in a real, if limited, way. It was the awful stillness of those ‘dead machines,’ the great emptiness you felt by yourself in the darkness. You had the existentialist’s perception of the void in frontof you. As a four-year-old.” Turning his chair sideways, he more aggressively confronts me. “So what happened in between now and then? What was lost along the way? Why did you wear a saint’s medal, like a charm, around your neck the first time I saw you, on the train? And why is it that you cannot recognize that the shiver you felt in your spine five minutes ago was not the fear of divine judgment, but the fear of the absence of one?”
I flinch and retreat. He is too strident, too perceptive, too demanding of me. He’s calling me out as a hypocrite, of keeping bad faith with myself, when I have tried to be honest. Again, tears reach my eyes, but they are symptoms of anger and pride, and do not fall. I do not look at him, and he makes no move to soften his indictment of me.
After a minute has passed, I observe, “Maybe it was the fear you describe. Very likely, in fact. For it’s true: I have more doubt than faith.”
I look up at the great domed ceiling, an architectural marvel, and my mind, streaming, turns toward the burning and brilliant minds that brought it to life over the decades. It is a noble, beautiful building they raised, in spite of my religious pathology. Centuries later, I sit inside their inspiration, and I fancy their attendance here, lording over the site of their creation, bound to it like a mother to her child. Would they trifle themselves with the purity of my presence within, or care that I doubt the divinity of their savior? Or would they simply hope that I was awed by their craftsmanship, by their scope? If their faith isn’t enough to make me believe in Jesus Christ, their commitment to this idea makes me believe in their, and my, larger humanity.
This building is a monument to all creation, and my trepidation has no place within its walls. It is a fear born of a leaden myth that binds us down with burdens too great to cast off in a single lifetime, and which tunnels our vision so that all we see in this worldis what we can’t see. But my wonder belongs up there, scaling these forgotten masters’ buttresses and lofty domes, and is beholden to a very human act that leaped at transcendence. I smile. They must have felt such pride at its completion.
Mathieu was wrong about the Café Flore. Ghosts exist. Sometimes they even talk.
Stronger now, I say, “Or maybe things aren’t so easily broken down into abstractions: faith versus reason, truth versus fiction. I think that we travel in muddier regions of the spectrum. And some of us need our myths to help us find the way.”
Mathieu maintains his penetrating gaze. He’s like one of the walls surrounding us, yielding nothing.
“I wore that medal because it was a gift from my grandmother, who died last year. She insisted I wear it on trips because St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers. I wear it mostly for her memory, but yes, I have a silly superstitious belief in it too, and rub it like a rabbit’s foot on takeoffs and landings. I’m not a very good traveler, Mathieu, so I can use all the help I can get.
“Sometimes people act upon a weak understanding of probability. ‘Okay, I don’t have much faith in this, but if I don’t do it, nothing will happen, whereas if I do it, something might happen.’ It’s a muddled way of proceeding, I grant you, but it works for a lot of people, including me, and if it doesn’t sound enough like a personal philosophy to you, you can join Jesus up there on his cross,” I suggest, jerking my chin toward the Son of God, “because you sound just as sanctimonious as he did, and I’ll be pretty well sick of both of you in five minutes.”
To my surprise, he laughs, grabbing my hand to kiss it before scooting back his chair. “You are charming like this, Daisy. I want to provoke you more often.”
Enjoying my little moment, I pluck my hand away. “Please don’t.”
Now he looks uneasy. Oh, divine justice …
Mathieu’s eyes flit about, like a moth searching for a flame. He lands upon something, and, stuffing his hands in his pockets, says, “Would you like for me to share my silly, irrelevant anecdote now?”
Hmph.
Mathieu sighs. I admit some interest through the tacit turn of my head. He licks his lips and murmurs, “Please, Daisy. You promised. This is difficult for me.”
I allow a slim nod.
He takes a deep breath and declares, “I regret to say that I have never been traumatized by the ghosts of airplanes past—or present, though I cannot speak for the future—or by my parents forcing wine upon me during predictably pious and public brainwashing exercises.”
My mouth falls open, but he checks my outrage by slipping to one knee and grasping my hand. “Sorry, Daisy. But I could not resist.”
Actually making fun of me. The nerve! I glower at him, and he makes a poor show at staunching his laughter by biting on my knuckles. I withdraw my hands and look pointedly at the forbearing Virgin.
He looks too damn good on that knee.
“But more to the point,” he says, struggling to his chair, “did you know, mademoiselle, that Victor Hugo was married here in 1862?” He adopts his best tour guide voice.
“Hmm.” Though still playing at being miffed, I absorb this bit of trivia and look around the cathedral with increasing curiosity, trying to imagine what kind of bride Victor Hugo had. If she felt intimidated by the grand setting. And the grander man.
Mathieu nods. “Yes, beautiful ceremony,” he adds, like he was there. But his voice is strangled, as if he’s stifling more laughter. “Of course …”
“What?”
“The Marquis de Sade was baptized here too,” he says, eyeing his fingernails.
I let this sink in. Victor Hugo and the Marquis de Sade. Like us in this church, it is the perfect mix of the sacred and the profane. The corners of my mouth start to wander.
Mathieu delicately clears his throat. “Do you think it helped the Marquis to wash away that original sin of his?”
“Mmm,” I reply, not yet broken.
Suddenly, and with great authority, the bell of the cathedral sounds a single, solemn note. We jolt to attention, the vibrations pulsing through our bodies to their completion. It is gone as quickly as it came. We are quiet in its wake, though my heart echoes its thunder. Mathieu and I continue our forward meditation, but my mouth twitches.
“I don’t know.”
“You do not know … ?” he presses, spilling into a grin.
&nbs
p; “Think how much worse things could have been if he hadn’t been baptized.” I shoot him an arch look, and he stares back for a beat.
We break into laughter, the healing kind. We lean in and rest our heads on one another’s shoulders, bodies shuddering. I breathe the sharp scent of his shampoo in between convulsions. This is what I want to believe in. The smell of Mathieu’s hair. It is enough, for now.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” I say, and we jump to our feet, racing down the aisle like a couple of pagans dancing through fire, ignoring the pointed, righteous stares, eager to be on secular ground again.
Once outside, the wind whips up my wet hair, while godless pigeons coo at our feet. Mathieu turns to me and yells, “Admit it. You thought the bell was God.”
“Of course not!”
I run down the stairs, leaping off the third from the last to land neatly on one foot. Smiling, I turn with a flourish. Separated by the steps—I looking up, he looking down—we square off.
“Well, maybe,” I acknowledge, unembarrassed.
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling too.
I jerk my shoulders up and explain, “Maybe God didn’t have anywhere else to be just then. You might not know this about me, but I’m awfully important.”
“And you are supposedly the scientist?”
I twist and bend to the breeze. “When I want to be.”
“And it could not be that the clock was simply sounding one o’clock?”
“At the precise moment I needed a sign? Doubtful.”
We crinkle our eyes and grin.
I conclude, “But if that were the case, then God must have known that I was hungry, and tired of all that pretentious conversation.”
I bounce up the stairs to claim him. He descends at a leisurely rate, but I tug more insistently until he trips down, laughing in protest. My stomach is growling.