Pivot

by L C Barlow

  I shook my head. "I don't care if you throw Brian in that fireplace. I'm not answering the question."

  "Excuse me? What did you say?" said Brian. He cocked his head and placed a hand behind his ear.

  "What's a little fire? You know you're going to hell anyway," I replied.

  "See? Right there." Brian pointed his beer at me. "A believer."

  "That isn't proof," Patrick said.

  "Uh huh, it is. These jeans are safe." Brian made invisible circles around his butt with the hand holding the beer.

  Patrick walked to me. "Answer that question, or I'm doing it."

  I laughed, thinking how he could never pull something like that off in a room full of this many people. "You can't bully someone into seriously answering a question as important and heavy as that one is."

  I sat down on the arm of the couch behind me and pulled out a cigarette. I looked to the blonde, and said, "Besides, you have better... things... to be doing." I lit the cigarette. "You'd have a better chance at bullying me over my favorite color," I said as an aside.

  "It's going to be chaos. Chaos that you could have stopped," Patrick said with a soft voice, as he inched to my left, towards Brian. He bumped into a few people on the way there. Brian's eyes were widening.

  "Patrick, you're being ridiculous," I said, squinting at him.

  "How can you live with yourself, Jack? Knowing that you could have saved those designer jeans with a soul? Gucci is going to rain down on you. Hard. 'Fuck!' you'll say. 'Gucci's rainin' hard!'"

  "I hate you," I replied.

  Brian, I could tell, was thinking about running. His body turned away from Patrick before his eyes ever did. "I am ser-i-ous, Patrick. Don't you come any closer. Don't you do it. I will pour these hors d'oeuvres all over this white carpet," he said pointing to a plate on a stand nearby. "I will do it! Jack, just answer the damn question!"

  By now, Patrick was right by Brian who was swatting uselessly at him with a magazine he had grabbed from the coffee table.

  Then, BAM! they were both on the white floor. People shot back like they were at a murder scene. The girls squeaked as they scampered away in their heels.

  "Motherfucker," said Brian. "Oh, it's on, now. It is on!" He put an arm-hold on Patrick as Patrick was grabbing the waist of Brian's jeans and tugging hard enough to pull them down past his ass. I could see Brian's bare stomach now, and the jeans threatened to slip lower. I thought someone would stop them, but nobody made a move. In fact, some of the group started laughing. Two people entering the loft merely stood and watched while they closed the door.

  "Aaahhh!!!" Brian screamed, high-pitched, like a girl. Patrick laughed and turned as red in his face as his hair before he was able to slip out of Brian's lock, and then he grabbed the legs of Brian's pants and pulled hard.

  The pants didn't budge, and Patrick ended up dragging Brian across the carpet. People scurried out from behind him. By now I had forgotten about my cigarette, and I sat on the armrest of the couch, frozen, holding it on the tips of my fingers.

  "I ain't never gonna forget this!" Brian screamed. "I hate you Patrick!" More laughter from the crowd.

  "Look at what you're doing to us, Jack." Patrick said this to me as calmly as would a waiter telling me the specials on the menu. He dragged Brian's wriggling body over the carpet, one slow heave at a time. The others looked from the wrestling men to me, but I didn't move.

  Patrick scrambled to the fireplace and pressed the gas on. "And you could have stopped it all," he said, shaking his head like, "Isn't it a shame?"

  "No! Noooo!" Brian screamed again like a girl. "I just wanted to go to a party, motherfuckers! God, how does this always happen to me?!"

  "Just answer the question, Jack, and all of this ends," Patrick said calmly.

  But all of this bedlam was too hilarious for me to end it.

  While Patrick held onto Brian's pants with one hand, he grabbed a cigar lighter on the fireplace's white brick seating area and lit the gas. Whoosh! it went.

  Now Patrick pounced on Brian. "My God this is gay," I commented.

  "Oh yeah?" said Patrick. He glanced at me as he fought with Brian by two women and three men I had never seen before. "Does it offend any moral structure set into you by overly conservative Baptist ministers?" he asked amid grunts and hollers from Brian. "Or does it flatter your liberal tolerance given you by your lesbian Lutheran church leader? Or do you as an atheist or agnostic simply not care, or believe there's no way of knowing if this homosexual facsimile is okay?"

  "Just answer the fucking question!" roared Brian, who now, except for his shirt and ankles, was completely bare. His entire face was tense with strain.

  "Oh my God, Brian! Why didn't you say you weren't wearing underwear?!" said Patrick, and by this point the entire crowd erupted with laughter. It seemed to go on and on for miles.

  "I am! I am!" Brian yelled. "They're in the fucking pants, you asshole! Let me put them on!"

  "I can't trust you!" Patrick yelled amid whoops and hollers.

  "Yes, you can!"

  "No, I can't. I'm just going to have to throw everything in the fire!"

  "Noooo! Goddamn you Patrick! You are dead to me!"

  Finally, it was over. Patrick ripped Brian's pants off of his legs and plunged them deep into the massive fireplace. Brian didn't even try to save them.

  He bolted straight for the kitchen, his ass mooning me and some of the others behind him as he ran. In two seconds, he was through the crowd and back, and he had Patrick's cooking apron on with the image of a woman's body in lingerie on its front. He didn't tie it firm, though, but instead went for the tray of hors d'oeuvres.

  "Dinner is served, you sick son-of-a-bitch!" he yelled, and he threw everything across Patrick's immaculately white carpet. There was a collective gasp as sandwiches and sauces splashed like paint on canvas, and then the noodles followed, plopping with the sound of raw meat hitting a cutting board.

  Patrick sat on the fireplace's seat, grabbing a poker to stoke the now burning jeans. He looked like a man who was explaining a graph in a business meeting.

  "Oh, it ain't over yet!" fumed Brian. He stalked to the kitchen.

  "I think he's really angry," I said from where I was sitting.

  "Yeah, well, I would be, too," said Patrick. "Now we don't have anything to eat."

  The crowd was completely silent, and Brian returned with a bottle of red wine. "A little vino maybe?" Brian said, looking like a naked, half-female, half black-man, half-demon bent on revenge. Never taking his eyes off of Patrick, he removed the stopper and poured the wine in swirls, splattering as much of the carpet as possible. He threw the bottle on the floor, and then he and Patrick just stared at each other, panting.

  Finally, Patrick turned to me. "When will the pandemonium end, Jack?" he said. "When will it be enough for you?"

  I swallowed the view of the black smoke of the fireplace and the jeans turning to ash, the bloody looking sauce spilled across the white floor, interspersed here and there with purple wine, and then to the crowd and my naked friend, covering himself with the figure of a hot female in black lingerie. I gave in.

  "Alright," I said. "Sometimes."

  "Sometimes what?" Patrick asked.

  "Sometimes I believe in God."

  "Now, we are getting somewhere."

  There were whispers in and amongst the people, and they floated like feathers fresh from a cockfight. Patrick stepped to me. "I'd love to finish this conversation, but I have a girl to fuck," he said.

  He grabbed the wrist of the blonde, and then he turned back and smiled at me. "Unless you'd like to join us?" I looked at him, and he pointed to the red headed girl. "This one I would choose for you." But I replied that I didn't "do" red-heads, making note to look at Patrick's red hair, and after this statement, he turned away from me and grabbed the wrist of the brunette like a man who had almost forgotten to pick a chardonnay off the store shelf to buy. They left for the upstairs, many making the way easy for him by sc
urrying.

  Brian was still panting, but looking less and less angry. He rolled his eyes and came over to the couch. On the cushion close to me he plopped himself, his legs dangerously wide for only a cooking apron covering him.

  When the crowd was looking at us less and less, and talking more and more, Brian's panting had stopped, and I asked him if he wanted some pot to take the edge off.

  He replied, "I'd appreciate that." I rolled us both a joint.

  * * *

  It must have been two hours later, and by then the party was in full swing. Brian and I were fairly high, and Patrick blessed us with his presence. He waded through the people and spotted us in the kitchen.

  His hair was wet, and the red of it sparkled. He smelled of soap and was wearing a dark grey t-shirt and light gray sweat pants. He motioned for us - both me and Brian to follow. Too stoned to care any longer about Patrick's prior behavior, we went upstairs to his bedroom.

  When we got there, the three girls were laying on the bed, but only two of them looked ravished. The third, the red head, looked calm, as though it was just another day at the office. They were passing around a pipe filled with weed.

  Patrick sat on the edge of the bed, and the blonde pressed her toes into his back. He touched her leg lovingly, but did not look at her.

  I eyed the rosary encased above Patrick's side of the bed.

  "Have a seat," he said, and he motioned to the two leather chairs by the fireplace.

  In moments, we were in a full swing discussion about God.

  "Alls I'm saying is, there is no possible way you can tell if there's a God. No way," Brian said at one point. He still had the apron on, but now he was wearing a towel, as well.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Why? Why?! Because there's so much evil in the fucking world, man! You got kids dying of starvation. You got six million Jews being burned and gassed at the concentration camps. You got slavery. Fucking white slave owners killin' and rapin' black people and gettin' away with it for years. And God doesn't come and stop 'em?! Somethin's up with that. It ain't right. Somethin's very wrong here..."

  "Of course stuff is wrong here. The Irish, of all people, know that," interrupted Patrick.

  "Wrong enough to the point that God's existence would be a surprise."

  "I disagree," said Patrick.

  "Oh, yeah? How so?"

  "I think that if there is a God, no matter what happens here, it can be mended."

  "Nuh uh."

  "Aye."

  "There ain't no fixin' it. How do you fix having forty years of education bein' taken from you? Hm? How do you fix bein' raped and caring for some child you were forced to have? You can't. Your life ain't ever gonna be the same."

  "But it's all temporary," said Patrick.

  "That don't mean it don't matter."

  "That isn't what I'm saying. Hear this. If there is a Heaven, and we do live forever, in a better world, then this isn't our life. That is. And there is no ruining that."

  "Then what's this?" Brian swept his hands around in big flapping arches.

  "I don't know."

  "Hm?"

  "I don't know. Maybe it's our death." Patrick's green eyes lively looked round the room.

  "See now, Patrick, have you ever heard the saying, 'Don't outsmart your common sense?' 'Cause that's what you just did."

  "I don't know. How's an Irishman - even worse, an Irish-American - going to tell you the mysteries of the Universe?"

  "That's what I'm saying. You can't know."

  Patrick swatted Brian's words away with his hand and took a swig from a bottle of whiskey on the floor beside the bed. "What do you think, Jack?" he asked. "You're the one who started this whole mess to begin with."

  "You're a liar, Patrick," said Brian.

  "Shh!" Patrick said. Then both of them and the three girls looked at me.

  I sighed, and looked at my own glass of whiskey in my palm. "I don't know, I don't know," I said. "In the few years that I've lived, I've seen enough things to certainly believe that there is... something out there."

  "What things have you seen?" Patrick asked.

  I avoided his eyes. "Death. Things. Just things... And what I've seen," I said, "ultimately makes me think that it's better to believe in a God, whether or not He exists. That, you're right, Brian. The evils here are so... murderous and disparaging. I think that that's why it is actually better to believe in God, even if He is a lie, than to continue to believe in the things that go on here. But... but that doesn't mean that I always do believe in Him."

  "Why?" said Brian.

  "Certain things hold me back."

  "What?" asked Patrick.

  I tapped my finger against my glass and bit my lip. I did not want to answer, but I knew there was no keeping silent through this one.

  "Because then I don't get to do what I want to do."

  Brian nodded and smiled brilliantly. "So, it's your get-out-of-jail free card," he said.

  I shrugged, and Brian rolled his eyes.

  "Well, you have to choose eventually," said Patrick.

  "I know," I said. "But I feel I've got time."

  "You know what that tells me?"

  "What?"

  "That there is something you're holding out for. Something that you have planned."

  "Oh, really?" I asked and smiled. I downed the whiskey.

  "I know you."

  "Yeah?"

  "Aye."

  "But," I said and stopped. After a few moments, I could feel both of them teetering on edge in waiting for me to speak. "It's pointless," I finally finished. "It's pointless to talk about God."

  "How is this pointless?" asked Patrick. The blonde was now running fingers through his hair. He grabbed her arm and put her hand back down on the bed. She sighed and rolled her eyes at him in irritation.

  "Whatever God is out there," I said matter-of-factly, "words aren't going to get to Him. They'll circle Him. They'll circle like a planet caught in orbit, but they'll never reach Him."

  "What do you mean?"

  I looked at Patrick and the girls. "You're not going to fuck with words. You're not going to fly with words. You're not going to save a drowning child with words. You're not going to get to God with words. Nobody will. There's no point in talking about Him."

  "Ah," Patrick said, "I see. I see. But here, my friend," and he slapped the bed, "here is where the miracle of whiskey and heroin and cocaine and sex comes in. You drink enough whiskey, and you'll get there. You do enough heroin, and you'll touch the face of God."

  "Oh Lord. Patrick's answer is to binge. I should have seen that coming," Brian said.

  "Moderation is a fatal thing," replied Patrick. Then, he looked at me as though his gaze was the only thing keeping the world together. "If you want to get to God," he said, "truly, you fuck, and you drink, and you load your body up with so much bliss it can't say no." The girls on the bed laughed. He looked at them, smiled, and then his smile faded. He peered back at me.

  "I can't do what you do," I said.

  "Have you ever done what I do?" he asked.

  Brian shook his head back and forth. "What the fuck are you asking?" Brian said.

  "Jack?" Patrick asked, ignoring Brian's question.

  "No," I replied. Brian did not understand. The girls did not understand. But we understood, Patrick and I, what he was asking.

  * * *

  I passed out there on the floor, spent the night across from Brian and Patrick, both of whom were also asleep. The three girls were in the bed. There was a fire in the bedroom's fireplace.

  Right before I tried to fall into unconsciousness, I whispered to Patrick, "Why do you want to believe in God?"

  He cracked one eye open at me and said, "Oh, you know. So the good people get what they deserve. All children who die get a second chance. All the people who really try and help others, who love, get healthy and strong."

  "Ah," I said.

  "And so those that have murdered and raped and tortured get
to experience that for all eternity."

  "You believe in hell?"

  "Yes, of course. Of all things, I believe in that." He swallowed, and I heard a click. It was as though we were in another house, in front of another fireplace. "I want that there is a place for people like Hitler, people like... You know, the evil fucking bastards of the world. The ones that go and murder families in their sleep. The ones who do no good, who..." he smiled, "never go under bridges and donate first-hand to the needy. Who never help friends. I hate them." When he said the latter half, he looked far more aware than he did before.

  "For all you know, that could be me you're talking about," I whispered.

  "No. It could not. I mean the real, real motherfuckers out there."

  I did not press the point. "Why do you want... hell so much?" I asked him.

  For a long while, he didn't say anything. Then he sighed, squeezed his eyes closed. He turned his face away from me, pushed his forehead into the carpet. "I'm fuckin' tired," he said. "Let's go to sleep." He rolled to his other side.

  But I could not sleep at all that night.

  * * *

  Finally, around five in the morning, I left. It was pitch black outside, and nearly everybody had already gone home. There were a few lingering cars, but not many.

  I decided I would walk from Patrick's to my dorm, that perhaps the cool air and bit of exercise would help me sleep by the time I arrived. I pulled my jacket tighter around me and shivered.

  As I walked, I thought of Patrick and his question. "Have you ever done what I do?" he had asked. I had not, and I willingly told him. Twenty-two years old. Geez. It bothered me. But I could not tell if it bothered me because I had told him, or because it was true.

  I rubbed my numbing face in the dark, and I pulled out my pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  Soon, I was walking through yet another parking lot for a different set of apartments. I brought the cigarette to my mouth and flicked on the lighter, felt the warm flame come alive. Breathed easy. A fucking virgin... and not out of some declaration of abstinence, but because of something far darker. It was so...