Eden

“I didn’t think you’d ask me to come over,” Pat said.

“Can I get a cigarette?” Josh asked.

“You don’t usually smoke,” said Pat.

“It’s a lot of things I don’t usually do that I end up doing when I’m with you.”

Pat handed him a cigarette, and then the lighter.

In a moment Josh tossed it back. He inhaled.

“Why didn’t you think I would ask you to come over?”

“It took you a while to message back,” Pat said.

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Well…”

“Well,” Pat said

Then Josh said, “Is that the only reason?”

“No,” Pat said, then, “Of course not. I see what you’re getting at.”

Neither one of them spoke for a while, and then Josh said, “What the hell was that?’

“I don’t know,” Pat said. Then he said, “I know what it was. We both know what it was. We were there.”

“Well, then why the hell was it?” Josh said.

“They were there. They came. We did it. Did what we did.”

“And didn’t discuss it.”

“What’s to discuss?” Pat said.

Again, they didn’t talk, as if there was nothing to discuss, and then Pat said, “Discussion only gets you so far.”

To prove this they went on smoking, tight eyed, exhaling, saying nothing and finally Josh said, “I used to think life made since, and I made sense and now I don’t really recognize myself anymore.”

Pat only nodded. He exhaled. He said, “I don’t know if I can do it anymore.”

“Do…What?’

“Watch people die.”

This was turning into an awfully silent night, Josh thought, and Pat said, “That night I wasn’t thinking about anything, but today I thought about tonight. I thought about it and it’s like today I understood how I felt before. I felt like I could forget everything, forget feeling, forget being there, forget ice chips on old dying peoples’ lips and silly people and death and sadness and tiredness and decisions. It was forgetting. Sometimes you just need to be freed from all that. And the truth is, no matter how I should feel, I know how I did feel, and I don’t regret it. I don’t understand it, but I don’t regret it. If I think, how could I do something like that, then maybe… But then I don’t really think there is anI any more. And I think we’re just trying to get by. Day by day, just breathe. And then it doesn’t matter. Whatever gives us relief is what matters. I remember when those two guys showed up, for just a moment I thought, ‘maybe they’re angels.’”

“Angels coming from heaven to fuck us?”

“And be fucked. By us.”

Josh stared at him.

“If an angel is what you need, if an angel is someone who comes to give you what you need.”

“And you needed that?”

“You didn’t?” Pat said, not looking at him. “Because you seemed to. You were right there with me. We were all right there together, doing what we did. Maybe we were their angels too.”

“I don’t know that God works like that.”

“I don’t know what God works like.”

Josh crushed his cigarette out.

“What do we work like?”

“What?”]

“What are we?” Josh said. “Are we together, or are we not? Or are we just making each other feel good. Or, the way you said, just getting through each day by using each other.”

Pat didn’t answer right away. He took out another cigarette. He felt like chain smoking tonight. He pushed the pack and the lighter across the table to Josh and Josh, after a moment decided to light one as well. Pat could smell Josh’s cigarette burning.

Pat said, “I don’t feel like I’m using you, and I don’t feel like I’m being used.”

The Monastery of Saint Clew

Schedule
WeekdaySunday
3:15 am Vigils
3:15 am Vigils
5:45 am Lauds
6:45 am Lauds
6:15 am Eucharist
10:20 am Terce
7:30 am Terce
10:30 am Eucharist
12:15 pm Sext
12:15 pm Sext
2:15 pm None
2:15 pm None
5:30 pm Vespers
5:30 pm Vespers
7:30 pm Compline
7:30 pm Compline
8:00 pm Silence
8:00 pm Silence

As the bells rang for Vigils, Rob thought that this was the most foolish thing he had ever done. For the last few days, everyday, he woke up this early in the morning. Isaiah was already dressed or as dressed as he would be, in baggy shorts, tee shirt and thick Jesus sandals. Isaiah had already lit the candle and then lit another one, and wordlessly handed it to Rob. After all, they were still in the Great Silence.

The lights were not on yet in the abbey, and the two of them trudged down the hall. Down the hall other doors opened, and out of them came people bearing candles. There was something conspiratorial in this, something that made Rob not ever want to miss it, and so far, he had not. The bells tolled on, and as they made their way down the steps he could hear the river rushing by on both sides of the old abbey. Downstairs he saw others with their candles, walking silently, faces floating in the dark over golden lights. There, the beautiful face of Sister Anigel, there the sphinx like face of the bespectacled Layla Lawden, and behind her, the light on his red curls, Kenneth McGrath the artist. They all swayed out of the side door and into the abbey church, long and high and deep. They moved over the cool pavement stones, and into the stalls. They sat there. Anigel lit candles with Layla and with Anne, and then, all of them, in a darkness lit by candles, sat in silence. Yes. The silence seemed to be broken by the movement of flames. That made no sense, Rob thought, but even so, there it was.

It was a deep silence, and Rob had no idea how it would be broken, though, in some way, it always was. It went on and it was like a rolling river, and he passed in and out of sleep and then, suddenly, out of the darkness, he heard:

Nos autem gloriari oportet in cruce

Domini nostri Jesu Christi:

in quo est salus,

vita et resurrectio nostra:
per quem salvati et liberati sumus.
Deus misereatur nostri, et benedicat nobis:
illuminet vultum suum super nos,

et misereatur nostri.

They kept singing, and mostly in Latin, and when they sang, Rob always thought of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and remembered what Isaiah had said, how those times of the year church had felt like church and Christians like Christians. Here, in the Abbey, Rob felt a mystery he had never felt before. He felt like he was inside of something. Back in Catholic school there had been these stuck up boys who were in Bible study and headed for the priesthood, and they had felt like they were in something too, something to the exclusion of common people such as red headed, sexually confused hick Robert Dwyer. That’s how religion felt. But right now Rob felt as if he and everyone around him really were inside of something, and that something was inside of everything, not out of it, inside of himself, only he had never been there before. It was an open secret. It was the secret of the world.

His eyes adjusted to the dark, and through the shadows he saw on the wall things that belonged in no church. He saw the shadow of Venus rising naked from the waters on a shell. He saw the long streaming hair of a Gorgon serpent. He saw a barely etched labyrinth on the wall. He saw schools of fish, weird squid reigning from ceiling to floor on the black night sea, and as his eyes grew used to these he heard Sister Anigel reading.

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

When Vigils was over, Andy got up and flicked on a few of the lights so the chapel was suffused with a low golden light. They all blew out their candles, and with order filed out of the chapel, moving in all direction. There was a long corridor along the east side of the chapel leading back to the dormitories and there, before the seated woman, more full breasted than any Virgin Rob had ever seen, and with hair streaming down her shoulders, someone went to their knees and knelt, stretching out their hands. Back in the courtyard, no one wanted to speak. No one wanted to interrupt the quiet. The moon was still up in the blue sky, and Rob said, “Are you going to bed?”

“I was thinking of writing. I was thinking of writing a long, long poem and doing it until Lauds.”

Rob yawned, and Frey said, “I will do it outside, or in the library. I’ll let you sleep. There’s no need to keep you up.”

“I feel like if I sleep I will miss everything, and I feel like I’ve missed so much already.”

“We’ve only been here a day,” Frey said. “And we’ve been to every office.”

“That’s not what I meant.”