The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  “What?” he said coldly.

  “What you saw up there …” I didn’t know how to explain, but I wanted to, even as I realized how little I owed him.

  “Big deal,” Pawel said, his eyes on the banister over my shoulder for no reason other than it wasn’t my face. “You’re back with your old boyfriend, congratu-frickin’-lations.”

  “Hey!” I snapped. “You don’t get to be mad at me, you broke up with me, and you were the one who brought a date to this party. I came with my friends.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but Derek also broke up with you, and yet you were upstairs with your tongue down his throat.” I could tell that as soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted them. His eyes widened with the knowledge that he’d betrayed a personal secret.

  I could’ve let him off easy, but I didn’t. It wasn’t in my nature. “And why do you care about that? I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends!” he cried. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’m not going to get hurt. Derek doesn’t want anything from me besides what you saw up there, and I don’t want anything from him,” I said, knowing the words were true as I was saying them. Derek was never going to be more than my ex-boyfriend and a casual acquaintance from now on. I’d let my imagination get away with me, because I’d screwed up with Pawel and I wanted to grab hold of something, so I built it myself. “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  “I need to go home,” I said. I felt a surge of pride, like I was finally starting to get it. Finally starting to figure out why Hannah had gone to the Sisters of Grace: she couldn’t find peace with God on her own, so she looked for a way to create it.

  “I’m too drunk,” he said. “I can’t drive you.”

  “Yeah, whatever, I live ten blocks away, I’m just going to walk,” I told him.

  “You’re leaving?” he asked, incredulous. “In the middle of—”

  “In the middle of this super-fun party?” I finished for him, knowing that wasn’t what he was going to say. “You bet. See you in class, Pawel.”

  As I walked away, I imagined I left him befuddled in a cloud of dust.

  21

  Knowing Hannah would be awake when I got home, even though it was two-thirty in the morning, I marched straight upstairs as soon as I snuck noiselessly through the door.

  “I get it!” I announced as I burst into her room. She was sitting in her chair, reading.

  “Get what?” she asked, turning her eyes to me in that placid, saintly way she had about her.

  “Why you went to the convent,” I said.

  “Okay, so tell me—why did I go?” She sounded bemused, although she wasn’t smiling. She rarely smiled when she talked about her time away from home.

  “For the same reason I made out with Derek tonight even though I don’t really want to be his girlfriend,” I said.

  “I don’t follow,” Hannah said. “Your old boyfriend Derek?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Where were you tonight? Did Mom and Dad know you were out of the house?”

  I waved off the question. “Derek took me upstairs and I knew he was going to try to kiss me and I let him because I was trying to convince myself that if Pawel had moved on and was dating someone else, maybe I should, too, and maybe Derek could be that person,” I said. “So I kissed him, and I kept kissing him even though it didn’t feel right, and I was thinking about you and why I was doing all of this and I just … saw it, I guess.”

  “So you’re saying that kissing Derek even though you didn’t want to is like how I went into the convent?” Hannah’s face was blank. I couldn’t tell if she was upset or laughing at me.

  “I mean, they’re not the same, but you and I both tried to create something that wasn’t there to distract us from what was missing,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

  “No,” Hannah said. “I don’t.” She closed her book. “I’m really tired, Caro. It’s almost three in the morning.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. I was confused—was Hannah angry with me? Wasn’t Mom the enemy these days? It was hard to tell with her. Usually she wanted to talk to me more than I wanted to talk to her, but suddenly the roles were reversed. I felt like I was being rejected. “I guess I’ll go to my room, then.”

  Hannah nodded and rubbed her temples. “Good night.”

  “Night,” I said, leaving and shutting the door behind me.

  I stayed after school to do some setup for the experiment I planned to run later that week—with or without Pawel—and missed the late bus. On my way home, I took a slight detour and ended up at St. Robert’s. I was pleased to see Father Bob and excited to tell him about my science project, which he seemed interested in.

  “I’m something of a scientist myself, you know,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “You sound surprised,” he said. “Before I went into the seminary, I got my master’s degree in astrophysics.”

  “But … you’re a priest,” I pointed out.

  “Well observed.” He laughed. “What gave it away? The outfit?”

  “Isn’t ‘scientist priest’ kind of an oxymoron?”

  “There’s a great tradition of scientist priests. Ignazio Danti, Jean-Felix Picard, Gregor Mendel—I’m sure you’ve heard that name before. Father Georges Lemaître, the originator of the big bang theory: also a priest. Compared to them, I’m just an amateur, but I do like to dabble.”

  “Okay,” I responded, not sure what else there was to say to that.

  Father Bob said, “It was Einstein, I think, who wrote, ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’ They need each other to be complete. Are you going to argue with Einstein?”

  “I guess not.” I mean, the man discovered relativity; the least I could do was give him the benefit of the doubt. “But you can’t prove God exists. And isn’t that what all science is ultimately about? Proving theories about the universe?”

  Father Bob squinted at me skeptically. “Provability is not truth, Caro. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem tells us that, if we didn’t already know it intuitively, which we do.”

  “Gödel’s what?”

  “It’s a mathematical theorem about natural numbers,” Father Bob said. “It basically says that within a system, there are always going to be statements that are true but nonetheless can’t be proven without reference to the system itself, which is impossible because the statement exists within the system. So, I mean, if you were to make a parallel between math and God, in this case the statement would be ‘God created the universe.’ There’s no way to prove that the statement is true or false, because a creator god is necessarily outside of creation, and we, as scientists or mathematicians or philosophers or people of faith, are limited by what we can observe, and we can’t observe anything outside of creation—or the universe, or infinity, or whatever you want to call it. Does that make sense?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You talk fast.” I wasn’t a dummy, but I wasn’t exactly a PhD, either, and this was pretty advanced stuff.

  “Well, it’s not a limerick,” Father Bob said. “It’s a little more sophisticated, but keep thinking about it. Now, how can I help you today?”

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Something about Hannah?”

  I told him the story of how Hannah shut me out after I came home from the party. “I thought I was finally getting her, and then she turned all cold and quiet. What’s up with that?”

  “What do you feel you know now that you didn’t before?”

  “I don’t think she went into the convent because she wanted to be a nun,” I said. “I think she went in because she was feeling alienated from God, and she thought being a nun would fix the problem. But when I said that, she completely shut down.”

  “Well, there’s probably more to the story,” he said. “I saw her once at church, Caro. Hannah is clearly not well.”

&n
bsp; “I know.” I took a deep breath, fully prepared in that moment to tell him about Hannah’s letters to St. Catherine and the mystery of Sabra, but at the last second I found I didn’t have the courage. So I changed the subject. “If you were all set to be an astrophysicist, why did you become a priest?”

  Father Bob drummed his fingers lightly on the edge of the desk. “It wasn’t so much a decision as it was an answer. I felt like I was being called to the priesthood. I knew that I would never be a great researcher. I was by no means an extraordinary scientist. But over the years, I became convinced that I could be a good priest.”

  “Have you ever regretted it?” I asked.

  “We all have our moments of doubt,” he said, smiling. “But no, I don’t regret it. I love what I do. And I didn’t have to renounce my interest in science when I was ordained. I still try to keep up, and to look back.” He gestured to the Principia, still laid out on his desk.

  I pointed to a black-and-white print that hung on the wall above his head: Waterfall by M. C. Escher. I was surprised to see it there, and even more surprised that I hadn’t noticed it the first time I came in. “I have that same picture on my binder,” I told him, showing him. “It’s my favorite Escher.”

  “It’s an exquisite piece of art,” he concurred. “I became acquainted with his work during my time at the seminary. There was a priest there, Father Rushing, who was something of a mentor to me. He gave me that print. He said I should keep it with me always, to remind me that there is beauty in paradox. He told me that grappling with faith is a bit like looking at that image, that logic rejects it but that intuition recognizes it as a sort of truth even in its impossibility.”

  “I just thought it looked cool,” I admitted.

  “It certainly does,” he said. “But it’s unnerving, too. It’s a bit like staring into another dimension, one that has a different set of mathematical and physical laws. For me, it also serves as a reminder that the mind of God is unknowable, that things that seem contradictory to us only appear so because we have no context for them, or aren’t seeing the full picture.”

  I thought of Hannah and her dark struggles, how little I knew about her, how little she seemed to know about herself. “So if we can’t see the full picture, how do we know that we’re making the right choices?”

  “That, I believe, is the whole point of faith,” Father Bob told me. “Science and religious belief are very much alike in that way. You can operate based on what you think you know at any given time, but you must always be cognizant that there are forces at work you can’t see, or don’t understand. It’s not enough to blindly believe in what you have been presented with, what you think is true. You must always be open to new information, always be listening and watching and experimenting and seeking. Only then can you really say that you’re doing God’s will.”

  I stared at Escher’s Waterfall, my eyes tracing the impossible objects that created the bizarre architecture of its alternate world. There were only two people in the image; one was a woman doing her laundry, blithely unaware of (or perhaps uninterested in) all the strangeness that surrounded her. But there was another, down at the bottom, an obscure figure that leaned casually against a wall, looking toward the waterfall. I liked to think he saw what I was seeing, the completely unfeasible and yet inarguably existent perpetual-motion machine that towered above him. I wondered what he thought of it.

  22

  With everything that was going on, the holidays snuck up on me. I left home one morning and noticed, for the first time, that the leaves had changed and were falling, blanketing the lawns and sidewalks like confetti.

  The snow came in late November, and it carried on all through December until Christmastime. This was going to be the first Christmas with Hannah in the house in eight years, and not coincidentally, it was going to be the first time we’d gone to Christmas Mass in years. The catch was Hannah wouldn’t come. She’d stopped going to Mass a few weeks after she and my parents had seen Pawel there. I guess after all that struggling, she’d decided that she had lost her faith for good. Of course, she wouldn’t talk about it. She wouldn’t talk about anything at all.

  I argued with my parents about attending the holiday service. I figured if Hannah didn’t want to go, why should we? Dad might’ve backed down, but Mom insisted. Something about it being our job to support Hannah in her faith even when she was unsure of it herself—especially then, she said.

  I’d hoped Father Bob would be saying the Mass we went to, but as it always seemed to be, it was Father Boring. I let my eyes and mind wander during his interminable homily and caught sight of Pawel sitting a couple of rows away from us with the people I assumed were his family. His mother, a short heavyset blond woman in an apple-red sweater, was sitting at the end of the pew, next to his father, who was also short, and completely gray-haired. Beside them were two taller, dark-haired girls—Pawel’s sisters—and a small, lean blond boy. Pawel was next to him, at the end of the pew. I watched them intently; Pawel’s parents and sisters were listening to the sermon, but Pawel and his brother appeared to be engaged in a silent punch war. They were watching Father Boring, but every once in a while a fist would strike out like lightning and land on a soft shoulder, and then another would follow it up in retaliation. I could tell they weren’t hurting each other, or at least they weren’t trying, although a couple of times, during a momentary détente, I noticed Pawel reach up and rub his shoulder lightly. It was just boyish restlessness playing itself out in the least disruptive way possible. I couldn’t help finding it completely adorable.

  During the sign of peace, Pawel turned around to shake someone’s hand and noticed me. He lifted his hand and gave me a little wave; I returned it with one of my own, and a smile. He smiled back.

  Dad leaned over and said, “There’s your boy, Caro.”

  I shook my head. “No, Dad. He’s just a friend.”

  “You sure about that?” I made a face at him. Dad was just kidding around, trying to get a bit of a rise out of me, but I felt warm inside all the same.

  “Come on, Caro, get in here!” Mom called.

  “Just a second.” I was putting the finishing touches on my gift for Hannah. I’d figured out what to get her only at the last second, after weeks of surfing the Internet and prowling through the aisles at every store in town. Hannah didn’t seem to need or want anything, and every time I tried to get her to give me a hint, she shrugged off the subject. It was clear that the whole concept of gift giving made Hannah a little uneasy. Father Bob told me that in the convent, she wouldn’t have gotten any Christmas presents. “They celebrate Christmas in a far less traditional way than most,” he’d told me. “Or, I should say, more traditional. It’s less about gifts, and more about thanks and celebration.”

  I really wanted to get her something that she would like and appreciate, but like I said, perfect gifts for Hannah were thin on the ground. But as I was thinking about Father Bob, and what he’d said about Hannah and Christmas, I started to get an idea. I found what I was looking for online and had it overnighted so it would get to our house on time for us to open presents, post-Mass and post-brunch.

  “Okay, okay, I’m ready,” I said, rushing into the family room, my gift for Hannah tucked underneath my arm. I set it down under the tree and flopped down on the couch next to my mother, who curled her arm around my shoulder.

  “First, pictures,” Mom said.

  I groaned. “I hate taking pictures,” I said. I was the least photogenic person on the planet. There was literally only one good picture ever taken of me, and it was my fourth-grade school photo. My parents had it blown up and framed, they loved it so much. As no other picture of me had ever gotten such treatment, I couldn’t look at that one, propped on the mantel with Hannah’s far-superior high school graduation photo, without feeling insulted.

  “Too bad,” Mom sang. “Evan, can you set the timer on the camera?”

  It took Dad almost fifteen minutes to figure out how to do that, an
d by then I was getting squirmy and annoyed. I was worried about how Hannah would like my gift, and I wanted her to open it right then so I could see her reaction. I wasn’t very good about being patient, and I loved giving presents. Something about watching someone’s face light up when they opened the absolute best gift they’d ever gotten made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

  Finally, Dad came and squeezed in between me and the arm of the sofa. Hannah was on Mom’s other side, sporting her traditional blank expression. It was going to take the most amazing surprise ever to get that mountain to move, and I began to suspect my present wasn’t going to get more than the briefest smile out of her.

  Five flashes later, I was sitting under the tree, passing out perfectly wrapped presents. That was my job, every year. When I was nine, the year after Hannah left, my mother made me a little felt cap that said “Santa’s Little Helper” on it in gold glitter paint. I wore it every year, way after I was old enough to know how dorky it made me look. It was just me and my family, after all. But when we were unpacking boxes of decorations that year, I left it tucked away under a pile of ornaments. For some reason, wearing it seemed like too much of an inside joke, one that Hannah wasn’t going to get.

  I left my present for Hannah for last. By the time I handed it to her, we were all surrounded by torn wrapping paper, multicolored tissue, and other holiday flotsam and jetsam, as well as new perfume, books, DVDs, various electronic gadgets, and sweaters with the tags on. She accepted it gratefully, if a bit nervously. She carefully peeled the bright red wrapping paper off a large black-and-white coffee table book with Escher’s Waterfall printed on the jacket.

  Hannah looked at me with slight confusion. “Caro, what …?”

  “It’s a book of Escher prints,” I told her. “You know Escher.”

  She shook her head.