by Ann Bauer
“We need to keep this all-business today, Gabe,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. And I nodded. “But whatever shit storm comes down here today …” she paused to park in the space painted with M. M. MURRAY. “I had a really good time with you last night. And that’s, ah, separate.”
I took her hand, and after a quick glance around, she let me. “Do you know you’re the only one who calls me Gabe?”
“No.” She laughed nervously, and I realized this whole scene had an eerie serial killer set-up. The abandoned parking garage, an unshaven man with a secret.
“Everyone else calls me Father. Even Isaac. And if they swear around me, they apologize.”
“Yes, well, at this point I’ve done so much more than swear.” She was getting anxious, glancing at the elevator bank. “Gabe, we really need to …”
“I know,” I said. “I just wanted to say thank you …” Did this sound pathetic? Self-serving? Because that was not my intent. I wanted only to exalt this woman who had taken me in. “You are amazing, Madeline.”
She stared at me for a moment then leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Now let’s go,” she said, prodding me in the side. “Isaac is waiting for us.”
But when we got off the elevator, Madeline spied Isaac and rushed off, closing them in her office alone. Candy was not at her post; instead there was a card alerting visitors to an electronic bell I’d never noticed. So I wandered back through the labyrinth of Mason & Zeus.
There were only a couple of real offices with doors. Madeline had one, as did the controller, a tall thin man named Wilson who wore a narrow dark tie and seemed as if he’d time warped from 1962. Everyone else sat in open areas festooned with posters and strings of Christmas lights and cartoon figurines. They had individual enclosures and there was an elaborate color-coding system: The group where Ted sat had red chairs and between the desks were stretchy dividers that doubled as bulletin boards. Ted waved as I walked by and asked, “Can I help you find something, Father?”
“Coffee?” I said, though what I really wanted was food.
“Sure thing.” Ted stood and led me rather than simply pointing, the way grocery store clerks are trained to do. “I’m sorry, Father Gabe. Someone should have given you a tour so you could make yourself at home here. Do you have time to do that right now?”
“If I’m not pulling you away from what you’re working on.”
“Yeah, right now, you are what I’m working on.”
Ted bestowed that warm white grin that made me feel both protective and taken care of. That’s when I saw that someday he would be like me, hearing strangers’ confessions and sadness and fears. I could imagine him out in the city with his friends, riding the El, feeling the tug of other people’s doubt. He was young enough that he probably hadn’t realized: Not everyone heard the whispers of passersby and felt their pain. It would be years before strangers would come to him for counsel. But once it happened, he would become a doctor or a therapist or a preacher. This office was a brief stopping place for him. Ted would go on to do better things.
I decided all this as I trailed him through a hallway lined with bright posters. “Sit-in against hemorrhoids!” proclaimed an ad for medicinal cream that featured a picture of at least twenty-five middle-aged people in hippie garb sitting cross-legged on the floor of a flag-draped political office. “Gold Health Raises You Above the Rest” appeared above a diagram of a patient in a hospital gown being levitated by a man in a business suit above a maze. Then simply “RUN” above a photo of enormous neon shoes in mid-stride, their ghostly, absent wearer racing along a misty road.
“Some of our work,” Ted said, waving at the wall. “That hemorrhoid campaign won a Bronze Effie. We had a YouTube video and a song. Customers could post their ‘sit-in’ status on Facebook. And they were doing it. It’s crazy what you can get people to talk about online!”
“Where was it taken?”
“The mayor’s office. No fooling. One of his aides got us in over a long weekend, but the deal was we had to let him be in it. The aide, I mean.” Ted tapped a wild-eyed man with a long beard and a suede vest. “That’s him.”
“He looks like the Unabomber,” I joked.
“Who?” Ted asked.
“Uh, 1994, ’95?” I tried to place myself when Kaczynski was in the news.
“So I was, like, six,” Ted said. And we both laughed. “Also, I think we were out of the country that year. My dad ran his company’s division in Milan for a while.”
“Parli Italiano?” I calculated that I was in Rome at the same time, about three hours from young Ted.
“Sì,” he said. “But I’ve forgotten most of it. Not much use for a black dude who speaks Italian in Chicago.”
“Ordering in restaurants? You could really impress your dates.”
“Yeah, well, if I had dates my wife would kill me.”
“Your …?” It was as if the six-year-old from Milan had spoken of marriage. I looked down and saw the shiny new ring on Ted’s left hand.
“Four months,” he said and lit the hall with his smile. “And I still just like saying it, you know? Wife.”
“No, I actually don’t know,” I said. “But I can imagine.”
Ted laughed and it had the mellow sound of an old singer. “I suppose that’s true, Father. But someday? Maybe?”
We moved on, and Ted pointed out the account team, purple; public relations, orange; and creative—a deep jewel of a color that wasn’t green or yellow or blue but a combination of all three. Everywhere I looked, someone was examining a printout or a screen related to Forgiveness4You. My own image was on at least half of these: posters and flyers and what looked like a bus ad on a young bandana-wearing boy’s enormous computer screen.
“This is everyone who makes stuff: writers, designers, infographics guys, and animators,” Ted said. And then, as if he heard what I was thinking, “Right now, about two-thirds of the agency is working on you.”
I stood watching dozens of people click and mark my face, baffled that such a thing could be true. Slowly I realized how many salaries and lives were now tied up with mine—how many people would be hurt when the buried part of my past came out. I began to sweat imagining this throng of earnest young people stilled, all their hard work undone by an awkward and regretful middle-aged cleric still coming down off the high of last night. Just then I caught the familiar outline of a surfer dude and felt a calming rush of comradely goodwill. I waved at Scott, who was standing at a mammoth copier. He waved back in the awkward way of a junior high friend you’d made on a field trip who wasn’t sure he wanted to acknowledge you in school.
“Okay, so here’s the café,” Ted said as we entered a sunlit room.
When I was a child, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory ran on the local Boston channel at least one Saturday every month. It was my favorite movie, and I wished for a place where I could live and play and eat candy all day long. Mason & Zeus seemed to be answering my long-ago childhood prayer.
I turned with wonder, from the row of dispensers that poured out every sweet, brightly-colored, marshmallow-studded cereal of my youth—Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Trix, Cap’n Crunch—to the bins of Lay’s Potato Chips, Nacho Cheese Doritos, Little Debbie snack cakes, and the cooler stocked with chilled Snickers bars, cans of soda, seltzer, iced coffee, and beer.
“There’s yogurt and cheese and OJ in the refrigerator,” said Ted, oblivious to my Charlie Bucket moment, pointing to a bank of silver appliances. “Coffee’s over there. We have tea in the cupboard, if you’d prefer. Uh, I think that’s it.”
Abel sat alone among the tables, reading the Wall Street Journal and eating from a large bowl of something.
I turned to release Ted. “I know you have to get …”
But he was quiet, staring down. He had the look, which surprised me. Because this man was not a drive-by confessor.
“Do you still pray?” he asked and then blushed, which I felt rather than saw on his dark skin. “I mean … I’m sor
ry. That was a bizarre question.”
“No.” I put my hand on his. “No, it wasn’t. And yes. I still pray. All the time.”
“Could you pray for my brother? He’s my twin. Tyler.” Ted looked shy and young, hands stuck in the pockets of his designer jeans. For the first time, he seemed uncertain about what to say. After a long pause, he started rattling off facts. “We grew up with a lot. Our parents are rock solid, married twenty-nine years. We had a nice house with six bedrooms and a pool. We went on great vacations.”
“I’m not seeing the problem yet,” I said, thinking of my parents’ apartment with its creaky, slanted floors and closet-sized rooms.
“That’s because you’re not black. You go out into this world as a black man who grew up easy, it’s like you’re already a traitor. Some places, I mean. Not everywhere. But Tyler was ashamed. After high school, he started hanging out with ‘hood kids.’” Ted blinked. “That was his name for them, not mine. But it’s like he’s on this crusade to … I don’t know … prove his street worthiness or something. He’s been arrested a couple times. He’s into drugs. Heroin, I think.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“I don’t want you to think he’s some junkie.” Ted recoiled stiffly. “I mean, he’s just really messed up.”
“It could happen to any of us,” I said, crouching a little to meet his eyes straight on. “Sincerely, Ted. As a priest and as a man, I understand exactly what you’re saying.” I was never one to take the medallions they pass out like Boy Scout badges in my NA meetings. But now, I wished I had one so I could pull it out and place it in Ted’s hand. “I will be praying for your brother, every day.”
“Thank you, Father Gabe.”
And I couldn’t help saying, because I felt it was true at some level, “You’re welcome, my son.”
After Ted left me, I picked up a bowl and poured a stream of Cap’n Crunch that tap-tap-tapped exactly the way it would have in Willy Wonka’s world. Then I went to the refrigerator and peered inside, but there was only yogurt, beer, and cheese.
“The milk is right behind you,” Abel called from his table.
I went back to the bank of cereal dispensers and looked: nothing.
“To your left. Raise the lever,” Abel intoned from afar. I lifted the silver handle on what looked like a keg, and milk squirted out all over the countertop. “Now put your bowl underneath next time,” Abel said drily. I was the only one who laughed.
I cleaned up the mess with a paper towel and let milk into my bowl until the cereal was coated but not mushy—a precise calibration I’d learned by the age of five. Then I got some coffee from the urn behind me and weaved my way through the empty tables.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked, approaching Abel.
“Please,” he said, leaning back, his legs extended for what seemed like seven feet in front of his chair. The clock on the wall said 10:32, and everywhere else in the expanse of colored pods people had been rushing around brandishing papers and electronic devices, but Abel was composed and seemed to have nowhere else to be.
“I can’t believe how much food they provide,” I said, lifting my spoon and breathing in the scent. It was the peanut butter kind; I marveled at my luck.
“Synthetic trash,” Abel said precisely as I inserted the first spoon into my mouth. “I wouldn’t call it food. I bring my own from home: Granola. Real cream. Some fresh strawberries.” He waved at his empty bowl. “That’s been breakfast every day for the past twelve years. Of course, the fruit varies with what’s in season. Peaches in summer. Blueberries in August. Winter’s hard. Sometimes I have to resort to raisins or dried apricots.”
“Bananas?” I offered. “They’re always in season.” Now that Abel had pointed it out, this cereal was awful. It had a gritty perfumed taste and sharp corners that cut the inside of my mouth.
“I don’t like bananas,” Abel said gravely. “They have a texture I just can’t place. There’s no word for it.”
I thought about this for a few seconds and had to agree with this, too.
We sat for a bit in a silence that I would have filled by eating, but I could not face another bite of the industrially sweet cereal. At least last night’s ganja had been just as good as I recalled—better when you factored in the sex that followed. Not all of my adolescent memories were being dashed.
“Tell me about yourself, Abel,” I said after taking a few furtive sips of coffee I did not want. It was a little late to be getting to know people here; everything we’d started together might soon come to an abrupt end. But I was jacked up on sex and caffeine, plus I was curious. Abel was the first human being I’d encountered since entering the priesthood whom I needed to prompt to talk.
“Well,” he drawled, “I’ve worked here since 2001. I have a dog named Killer; he’s a Chihuahua, naturally.” He dropped off, and I thought he might be done but it turned out he was only thinking. Then another fact bubbled out: “I’ve lived with my girlfriend, Eve, for twenty-four years.”
Abel and Eve? I wondered if this could be true. No one ever pranked a priest, so I was out of practice spotting sarcasm and tall tales. “Twenty-four years? You must have been, what, eighteen?”
“Something like that.” Abel stretched back even farther. His body now formed a plane at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor. “We met in high school, and there’s been no real reason to change things since.” He stroked his long beard, the fingers of one hand disappearing into the tangled fur. “We’re not married,” he volunteered, “for exactly that reason.”
This took me a moment to parse, and while I was at it, Abel followed with, “I don’t believe in God.” Most people are challenging when they say this to someone like me, but Abel was singularly matter-of-fact. It was as if this statement and the information about Killer the Chihuahua were on par.
“Now you,” he said. And I could hear in his voice the molasses of some near southern state—Kentucky, perhaps.
“Now me what?”
“I showed you mine.” He might have smirked but it was impossible to tell under the beard. “Now you show me yours.”
“Okay.” Just two spoons of Cap’n Crunch plus the caffeine and sugar in my coffee had set my middle-aged heart to racing. I decided as long as it was happening I should just relax and enjoy it. Lean in. I took another sip. “I live in a decrepit apartment on the south side, partly because it reminds me of my first congregation here in Chicago, but mostly because it’s all I can afford.”
I paused to think. This was hard. Every piece of the biography Abel had given me was as clear and hard as diamond. I could from the few sentences he’d uttered construct an entire person: devoted to one woman since high school; owner of an ironically-named dog; loyal employee of a dozen years; nonbeliever in marriage and in God. I owed him a similarly terse but evocative sketch of my life.
“I’m Catholic, always have been, and though I don’t hold with the Church I still talk to God every day.”
I cut my gaze to check with him. Abel was unmoved but still listening.
“I’m a recovering drug addict with nineteen years of sobriety.” What about last night? asked a voice inside my head. Does that episode in Scott’s truck set me back to zero?
“My drug of choice was cocaine,” I said, explaining both to Abel and myself.
Finally Abel reacted, his eyes behind thick glasses bugging forward, his body ratcheting up a touch. “No shit?” He shook his large head. Then he settled back down. Surprise had a very short half-life for this man. “You’re okay, Father,” he said in his standard twangy monotone.
“I like your writing,” I said, because it was true. Something in Abel brought that out. “You’re very funny without being mean. That’s a gift.”
“Thanks.” He seemed, if anything, to be sinking further into repose. “I’ve been working on a screenplay.” He chuckled, a low rumble like the shifting of tectonic plates. “That’s my embarrassing confession. It’s the most banal thing about me: What copywriter isn�
��t working on a screenplay?”
“Well.” I scratched my cheek, and it made a sandpapery noise. “I’m feeling a bit hackneyed myself.”
“I don’t know.” Abel’s gaze was like a lizard’s. “Ex-addict ex-priest. It’s pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll write a screenplay about you.”
“You’re welcome to the material.”
“But I wouldn’t put in any of this bullshit about forgiveness for hire. That’s just stupid.”
“Yes.” I filled with relief—someone had finally said it—and sat up a little straighter. I was the emperor, and Abel the incredibly large little boy who named my naked state. “Yes, it is.”
“There is a luxury in self-reproach,” Abel intoned like the preacher I never was. “When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.” He paused then added, “Oscar Wilde.”
“Gabe!” Madeline appeared at my side as if she’d teleported into the room. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Isaac has drafted a media release, and I’d like you to take a look at it.” She turned. “Abel, I’m so glad you’re here. Why don’t you join us? You can give us your expert opinion.”
“Certainly.” Abel rose, unfolding slowly until he was like a mighty tree over Madeline’s head.
Rise up and shine, for your light has come, I thought.
“Isaiah 60,” answered Abel.
I stopped, crouched, on my way to standing. “Did I just say that out loud?”
Madeline took my arm and hauled me the rest of the way. She was—as I’d discovered during the thigh-clenching woman-on-top portion of the night before—much stronger than she looked. “You all right, Gabe?” she asked.
“How did you know that?” I asked Abel. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“Just because I’m an atheist doesn’t mean I don’t read,” he said. “Sheesh!” Then he caught my eyes and nodded deeply—a small but unexpectedly benevolent gesture. My nerves calmed for a moment and, grateful for his kindness, I bowed my head in return.