by Ann Bauer
Lori
From: Ted Roman
To: Scott Hicks
Cc: M. Madeline Murray
Subject: Re: Priest project
Hi Scott—
I’m sure you didn’t mean to suggest that I should be used as fashion consultant on the Forgiveness job. My role, just to review, is Interactive Media Specialist—which does NOT include reenacting episodes of What Not to Wear. I’m flattered that you like my sense of style. But sending the black man to dress some middle-aged white guy is very 18th-century. Don’t make me call HR.
With regards,
Ted
P.S. Also, in case you’re wondering, I won’t teach him to dance. I know my people were blessed with a better sense of rhythm than yours. Deal with it.
From: M. Madeline Murray
To: Scott Hicks, Abel Dodd, Lori Inman, Joy Everson, Ted Roman
Subject: going forward
Hi Forgiveness Team—
It’s been brought to my attention that there’s been cross-talk about the Gabriel McKenna project. I want to do some level-setting here right off the bat.
This is a huge opportunity and an extremely important account for Mason & Zeus. We’re helping to establish a first-and-only in the field of forgiveness. That means long hours, evenings, weekends, and you may be required to do things that don’t technically fall under your job description. That said, let’s be sensitive to everyone’s contributions, and all assignments outside the scope of our SOW—fashion makeovers, for instance—should go through me.
If you are not on board with this 110% I invite you to step off the team and make way for someone who is. Your colleagues would kill for the chance, if they knew about it (please remember, this is confidential even within the walls of M&Z!!!). FYI, I’ll be seeing to Father McKenna’s wardrobe personally.
Oh, and let’s all remember to run spell-check on emails.
Onward.
MMM
From: Joy Everson
To: Scott Hicks, Lori Inman
Cc: M. Madeline Murray
Subject: Forgiveness creative brief
Hi Scott, Lori (and Madeline)—
I have preliminary competitive findings on the environment and audiences for forgiveness services. I’ll be sending out a meeting notice to the full team shortly. Please review the attached creative brief.
Yours,
Joy
Mason & Zeus Advertising, LLC
Client: Gabriel McKenna
Project: Forgiveness
Date: March 1, 20--
Key Insight:
Today’s busy professionals are seeking a faster, more service-oriented route to achieve spiritual peace than traditional religion or psychotherapy.
Learnings:
Most data collected on guilt is “soft” or inferential, but several signs point to a need for more efficient forgiveness mechanisms. Many Catholic churches extend their hours for confession prior to major holidays (Easter being the big one for the “washing away of sin”). In a random survey, clergy from other Christian denominations also claim to be busier during the holidays with conferences related to absolution—often meeting someone for the first time (a non-churchgoer, or NCG) in a one-on-one to address issues of guilt, conscience, or criminality. (Note: Approximately half of all NCGs offer a contribution or “tithe” in return for the clergy’s time.) I spoke to three psychologists who reported a similar uptick in patients who unburden themselves about a single wrong act—often paying out-of-pocket, so the notes on their session will not be sent to an insurer or employer—but refuse to delve into painful memories as part of the therapeutic process and/or analyze their own behavior for the purpose of changing it in the future. With this audience, repeat business is the low-hanging fruit.
Community:
Heavily weighted with former Catholics. Also parents of teenage children, repentant felons, people who are or think they are dying. Jews, Muslims, and atheists appear least likely to seek this service—until they’re facing a major life event, e.g., terminal illness, death of a loved one, or loss of a job or marriage.
Conclusion:
There is a sizable gap in the market where a paid but spiritual adviser offers immediate forgiveness of guilt without any commitment on the part of the consumer.
Opportunity Landscape for Paid Forgiveness Service:
III
I WAS REACHING THE FOR THE DOOR HANDLE OF THE TAXI WHEN A MAN spoke into my ear. “Excuse me,” he said, so close I could smell the sharp limey scent of his cologne. “Would you mind sharing a cab?”
Actually, I did. It had been a long day of meetings, and the French lunch had been tasty but miniature—a saucer of scrambled eggs drizzled with foie gras, and two poker chip–sized hamburgers (one for Madeline, one for me) served on an oblong plate with some snarled carrot garnish and one radish like a staring eye. I’d wondered if my brother the chef would approve.
“My parents would kill me for eating this,” Madeline had said, using bread to soak up the last puddle of duck fat before closing her eyes, tipping her head back, and placing this last bite on her tongue. “All those poor little ducks with their feet nailed to planks, being force-fed till they nearly explode,” she’d said after she’d finished chewing, her lips slick with grease. “Does it make you feel guilty?”
And I’d nodded, not because of the fattened ducks but because of what I’d been thinking as she swallowed. Now, three hours later, I was exhausted, ravenous, and horny, and I wanted to be alone with my thoughts.
In addition, sharing this fare would pose an ethical problem. Madeline had tucked fifty dollars into my hand before showing me out the door of Mason & Zeus, sweetly suggesting I take a cab. Pocketing half of her cash would be pathetic, if not actually wrong. I was about to say no, tell him I was a surgeon headed to the hospital on an emergency. But the man I saw when I turned was still half-boy, barely in need of a shave, and though he was well-dressed, right down to his long pointed shoes, he had an air of desperation that made me relent.
“Where do you need to go?” I asked. “I’m headed south.”
“I know. I’ve seen you around the neighborhood, Father. That’ll be fine.”
“Get in,” I said, stepping aside and into the slush of a sudden springtime melt. The man-boy obediently bent and folded himself into the back seat of the cab.
I briefly considered walking away once he was in the cab. It was rare for people to recognize me from my church days before I spotted them and ducked inside a florist or a travel agency to hide out until they’d passed. It wasn’t that I resented or disliked my parishioners. There were, in fact, many I missed. But I could never adequately answer their questions, and this caused me frustration that bordered on muteness. My sudden departure, the abrupt absence of “calling.” How could I explain to people what I did not understand myself?
I had somehow agreed, while thinking mostly about Madeline’s grease-smeared lips, to think about offering my services as confessor to a clientele that she assured me was accustomed to paying for succor and could find peace no other way. It was a transparent argument, much like the rationalizations I’d used as a very young man when making money without actually doing any work. What drew me now wasn’t—I was acutely aware of this—a desire to help wealthy people with their guilt, but rather a desperate need to keep myself in a relationship with this woman, with her wit and occasional honesty. But more than that, I hungered for the activity she brought into my life, the welcome newness that kept me from re-living, alone every evening, the transgressions of my own long-ago past.
Now I needed to get home, to do what Madeline and her people called my “homework.” I was to write a personal statement about forgiveness that their writer could refashion into a mantra, whatever that was. I’d been assured it was important, that these words would be the cornerstone of “our” enterprise. (“Our?” I had echoed. But she’d simply nodded and gone on.) To encapsulate and deconstruct the purpose of absolution in a few paragraphs, it was a lo
fty task. A real challenge. And the Saturday night sermon writer in me was itching to give it a shot.
So I climbed in to the taxi and slammed the door with purpose, the set of barbells I sometimes raised and lowered while watching TV finally paying off. My posture—leaning back and against the smeared window to my side—should have indicated a wish for silence. But my cabmate was intent.
“My name’s Chase,” he said, proffering a long hand with a large gold watch at the wrist, glinting in the afternoon sun.
“Gabe,” I responded as we shook, but the boy squinted at me as if I must be wrong.
“What are you doing downtown, Father McKenna? Church business? I hope you don’t mind me asking.”
“Well, actually, it was more personal,” I said. Why should I tell this young man anything? It was none of his concern, and, besides, my errand was too difficult to explain. We had twenty minutes together in this back seat—maybe thirty, when you took traffic into account—and I searched my mind for something agnostic to say.
“You probably don’t remember me,” said Chase. “I was younger when we met.”
“Younger than you are now?” That hardly seemed possible. He was a floppy-haired, Justin Bieberish boy.
“Yeah.” He grinned, pointing up with one dexterous finger. “It’s the face. Everyone thinks I’m … innocent.” He let out a loud rather dramatic sigh. “If only they knew.”
I nodded, determined not to bite at his bait. What I really wanted was a pot pie out of my own freezer and time to think about what had just happened at Mason & Zeus. I closed my eyes and willed Chase to be silent. Of course, that didn’t work.
“Father?” he prompted.
“Gabe,” I said, grudgingly opening my eyes. “I left the church last year.”
“Oh. I’m … sorry?”
At which I softened, because it was as good a response as most. “Me, too, some days. But it was time.”
We rode for a few moments in a companionable quiet. Dusk was melting its pink over the city and inside something had changed; we’d become partners in this ride. The cab had bad shock absorbers, and as it bumped up and down through the streets, Chase bobbed like a toy.
“Do you remember Laura Larimar?” His voice was hopeful, clear as a child’s.
I startled. Yes, it was nine years ago. But how could I forget? First there was her name: Laura Larimar sounded like it should belong to a 1940s movie star, the sort of spitfire who wore pants and rode a bicycle and sparred with Clark Gable or Cary Grant. (Nights in the rectory, I watched a lot of Turner Classic TV.)
But there was also her hair, a shade of red that had never seemed real. It wasn’t carroty orange or strawberry blonde. Laura Larimar was the only person I ever saw with red hair that actually was the color of ripe strawberries, nearly scarlet. It was thick, too, and long. There was so much of it that the makeup artist at the mortuary had to wash it in sections and lay it out on pillows overnight alongside Laura’s body so it would dry.
Her family came to me on a Friday, as I was closing up. They didn’t have a church. They were part of that earthbound, non-religious movement, the one espousing hemp clothing and hybrid vehicles that took hold in the wake of Whole Foods. They recycled their aluminum cans and kept an herb garden and sent money to Planned Parenthood. That was their belief system. But when their daughter died it was all suddenly not enough.
Once, long ago, Laura’s mother had been Catholic. She wanted the full treatment, with an open casket and altar boys and incense. Despite my church’s ironclad policy, I agreed. After the service, her father—he had not spoken one word up to that point; I wasn’t sure he could—handed me an envelope and said in a strange, high voice it was for “the priest’s discretionary fund.” Inside, there were ten new $100 bills.
“Yes,” I cleared my throat. “I remember Laura Larimar.” And in that moment I remembered the newspaper photo: a slim, frightened boy who looked, perhaps vaguely, like the little brother of this young man.
“I killed her,” said Chase, as I’d known he would.
This was the point I’d been told, just a few hours before, that I’d have to learn to manage. I needed what Madeline called a “talk track” to convert people gently from free confessions to paid. It would be easy, she assured me, once I got the hang of it, once I’d developed and memorized my speech. Lawyers who were asked for free advice did this all the time; they wore it like armor at parties. It would help, she said, to have business cards and privacy forms that I gave people to sign. But here in this cab, it was just the two of us. Well, the three of us, technically, if you counted the driver. And I had a sense he was listening, though he kept his eyes straight ahead on a creeping bus.
“I’m not a priest anymore, Chase,” I fumbled, caught between my revulsion at the idea of asking for payment and fury at him for cornering me in this cab.
“I know.” He leaned back and scrutinized me. “So this isn’t quite as lucky as I thought.”
“Lucky?”
“When I saw you, I thought it was outrageous. Like a sign from God. I could finally get over all my hang-ups and stop … this.” Chase waved his hand around the ashy-smelling inside of the cab. “Always looking for a taxi.”
“You don’t live South, do you?” I asked, staring again at his shiny Italian shoes.
“Nope.” He grinned. “Lincoln Park.”
“And why were you looking for a taxi just now?”
“I wasn’t.” Chase leaned forward, elbows on knees, as if we were about to make a real estate deal. “I was coming back from lunch. I work downtown.”
“I see.”
“Here’s the thing, Father.” I started to speak, but Chase held up one hand in a “stop” motion. “I know, I know. You’re not a priest anymore. But you kind of are, because you can never really stop, right? And you did Laura’s service. I remember it, every word. How you called her ‘a barely touched soul’ and talked about how God would take care of her in the kingdom of heaven. I was there the whole time. And you kind of saved me that day. Except …”
I waited. Now was the time I should ask him for money, for an envelope slipped my way with new hundreds inside. But how? Once I took off the collar, people stopped feeling obligated that way.
“I haven’t driven a car since that day. Two days, I had my license! Two days and I was showing off in my Dad’s Hummer, and I made a really stupid fast turn that killed Laura Larimar. Bam! Just like that. No going back. I got out and saw her lying there, and I could never drive again.”
“Did you stop because you’re afraid?” I couldn’t help asking. I was genuinely curious. And of course, with my question the moment for a transaction definitely slipped away.
“No! That’s what’s wild.” Chase leaned forward even further until our noses were practically touching. “I stopped because I’m not afraid. I loved that feeling, going so fast that I knew I couldn’t quite pull it back. And I walked away from that accident without so much as a bruise. Humvees, man. They’re built to protect the rich guy inside.”
This was a conundrum. It felt like a puzzle I had to solve: If I absolved Chase of his guilt would he buy a car with his obviously sizable salary and plow into some other young girl? Because here’s what most people don’t understand: Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. The purpose of penance is to remind, and no one in the world understood this better than I. But I did not want to cultivate in Chase a man like myself, shaped and driven entirely by the most terrible thing he’d ever done.
“I think there’s some sort of evil inside me, Father.” Chase leaned over in his seat, protecting a gut pain I knew. “It’s this power thing that comes out when I think I’m a big shot. Buying two-hundred-dollar ties, ordering bottle service. I don’t like it in myself. But at the same time, I can’t seem to stop.” He pulsed forward—the pain was worse, I could tell—and shook his head.
Then he took a long breath before launching into the next logical thing. “There’s this woman I’ve been seeing. Rachel,” he sa
id. “And it’s gotten kind of weird that I don’t drive. She has to pick me up for our dates, and I just thought, maybe …”
Abruptly, he sat back. Though the sentence hung unfinished, midair, Chase had the look of a man who had just expressed his last thought.
It was breathtaking, how perfectly God had arranged this challenge for me. Chase was my doppelganger. He’d been a couple of years younger than I at the time of his transgression; he was a little older now than I’d been when I confessed to Sol. But Chase—unlike me—had the chance of escape. He was still near the beginning. He could see a road out of his guilt and was asking for my help to get on it.
I sat and seethed for a few seconds, freshly sickened by the waste of my own young life. I wanted Chase to suffer just as I had, two full decades at least, or my sacrifices made no sense.
Look, I wanted to say to this addled, privileged boy. You’re talking right now to the grown version of yourself, a guilty man who’s had sex exactly three times in the past two decades: once with a lonely widowed parishioner, once with a Canadian prostitute, and just a couple months ago in a cringing festival of degradation with a woman who only wanted a warm place to sleep. I know what it’s like to encounter a big obstacle between picking up a Rachel and driving her into bed. What’s so special in your case? Talk me into this. Why should I make it easy for you?
Our own driver had apparently decided to take a side route. He lurched off Michigan Avenue and onto a block cluttered with people and posh boutiques. Chase and I were jostled together, elbows and hands bumping unintentionally. His face lit with worry. “What if we hit someone else while I’m telling you about Laura?” he asked. “Would that somehow be my fault, too?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the cabbie muttered. “Would ya rather I take Wacker all the way ‘round and charge ya double?”
“Absolutely.” Chase tossed his flop of hair, fancy-tie attitude showing. “That would be fine.”