Eden

At four in the morning, when the dark sky turned deep blue and Vigils was ending, Rob wrote:

baby joy,
fragile as a sunbeam
i almost missed you
why do you whisper when you command
why do you startle with your sun kiss when you remind
with the scent of a rose
with the lifting of shit from shoulders
you laugh like a little river, like the little hills
and ask to dance in grey times
like their cornfields
to dance out grey times
to waltz with light
laughing singing
crazy joy
pulsing blood through every cold thing
changing form
saying, crying
i am all the leaping
i am the drinking, praising, fucking
i am the flesh, the blood
the blessed come
and all the life

“He’s writing,” Frey said. “I told him write like a religious, like it’s your vocation. I am not a monk or anything like it,” he said to Anigel, “but for a year I lived in a monastery, when things went bad. When I needed to get my mind right.”

“I think things are always going bad,” Anigel said, shaking her head, and when she shook her head, all of that thick black hair moved like a curtain. “And I think we always have to get our minds right. As for being a religious, I’m not sure. I think it was always hard to tell who had a monastic soul and who was just a religious asshole.”

When Frey laughed, he added, “I don’t think it was ever hard to tell who was the asshole.”

“True,” Anigel raised her finger and nodded as they drank tall glasses of lukewarm water and looked at the river, brown and twisting, flowing thick through the green earth.

Every morning when she rises, Anigel tells Frey, she prays.

O my God, I wake on this break of Day to think of Thee, to love Thee and to serve Thee. Behold me, O my God, Thy holy will shall be mine, I will observe it with all my heart the whole of this day.

This God is not the same one she knew then, and the calling not the same either. Nor are the clothes. Once she saw a stain glass of Saint Solange. It was in the church her Irish grandmother attended in Chicago. A father who was Mexican, a mother who had a Black father and an Irish mother…. The story of America, huh? Anigel eventually wore that garment, but now she exchanges it for white cotton dresses. While she puts on the cotton dress she prays:

“Lord, prepare my soul interiorly while I prepare my body to go to Choir. Clothe me, O my God, with the fervor of Thy Divine Spirit and with the precious gifts of Thy grace. Clothe me, O my God, with Thy holy religious practices so that I may appear before Thee such as our habit and profession require.”

“Life without belts should not be lived,” Anigel said. “Everyone needs to know you actually have a form. Everyday I put on this hemp belt, which is the only one I have, and it’s getting kind of old, I remember what I would say when I put on the girdle of the of the old habit :

“Unite me to Thee, O my God in an intimate union and attach me to Thee in the bonds of charity, the links of which may never break.”

“Do you miss veils?” Frey asked her.

“Yes,” Anigel said, simply. “I’m not going to lie. If I didn’t feel like it was kind of silly, I would wear one all the time. These days, like when I was a kid, I settle for a bandanna.”

“And still use the prayer?”

“Oh, yes.”

She recited: “This veil should teach me, Lord, that I should die to the world and to myself so as to live no longer but for Thee. Grant me, therefore, the grace that nothing of this miserable life may remain in me, which prevents my union with Thee.”

And in the evening they prayer:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
abides under the shadow of the Almighty.

He shall say to the LORD,
"You are my refuge and my stronghold,
my God in whom I put my trust."

He shall deliver you from the snare of the hunter
and from the deadly pestilence.

Anigel thinks, the beauty of poems and songs is the beauty of the Psalms. It is the beauty of the certainty that, though you have lost all words for a thing, no thing you pass through is so rare and strange that it cannot be laid here, in the words spoken by others so long ago.

“Let’s go away from here,” Josh says. “Let’s go see my brother. We need to. Please?”

“At that house you say he’s at?”

“Yes.”

“When?” says Pat.

“Tomorrow.”

In the night, Pat whispers, “ I don’t have any good sense. I’m not a movie, you know. I’m not that guy that has the right things to say or much to offer.”

“You’re on your way to medical school.”

“And then I will have medicine to offer. At the end of eight years.

“But my heart is fucked up,” he tells Josh as they lay curled together. “Even now I feel a million miles away. You ask me what it means. Us. You to me. All I can say, and I’m sorry to say it, is that I just want not to hurt. I want to not feel dry and semi dead.”

Sometimes the radio or the television is on, but right now there is silence. The whole house is silent. They are not at Pat’s. Tonight Josh wanted to have sex in his own bed. Tonight, he and Pat fuck as quietly as possible, Josh, putting a hand over Pat’s mouth, or biting on Pat’s palm to stifle his own cries. They try to make the bed shake as little as possible. When they are done, the bed sheets are wet with sweat and so are they, and they strip off the sheets and Pat walks across the room to open a window. Now they lie naked in the dark and there is no sound. At last, Pat speaks.

“I think you feel that way too. I think we feel it less when we’re together.”

“I’m not paying for a hotel room another night,” DJ decided shoving his baseball cap onto his head.

“I don’t feel like anyone’s asking you to,” said Javon.

“I’m not ready to go back to Calverton.”

“You wanna go to Chicago?”

“No,” DJ said.

Then he said, “Dad’s house is still there, and no one’s in it.”

“You wanna go?”

“It looked peaceful. He felt peaceful.”

“Before we came,” DJ shrugged. “You wanna just hang out there?”

Javon said nothing. He just packed the bags and they checked out of the hotel. Check out time was at eleven o’clock, and it was ten thirty when they handed over the keys. They got breakfast at Bob Evans, and while Javon turned a sausage link over and over with his fork, he said, “At Bob Evans it seems like the whole world is a happy place.”

“Maybe it is,” DJ suggested. “Maybe once in a while, for a few moments, the whole world really is a happy place.”

They drove down the road and out of town to where there were only power lines over high green trees. The trees were greener when the sky was greyer, and they stopped in front of the hedge that was in front of the yard that dipped in front of the plain white house. Even though they had been there when Frey had left with Rob, they still looked around the house for signs of him, and then Javon went into the bedroom and fell on the bed that smelled like his uncle and his uncle’s cigarettes, and like other subtle scents that might have been Rob, this new lover they barely knew.

DJ did not go to sleep beside his cousin. He went to the yard. He went out of it and along the long walking path. Occasionally a bicycle came, and to his right the land dipped lower for the trains. He crossed a reservoir. He walked until he was tired, until he thought, damn, now I have to turn back, He began the walk back, his thighs burning.

Back in the house he showered and stood under hot water letting it soak his limbs till he turned it to cold. He came out dripping, shaking himself like a dog. In the hallway before the bedroom where Javon slept, DJ dried his body, willing Javon to wake.

He turned over and blinked, and DJ stood there, padding his skin, feeling himself rise.

The first time he came to Javon was when his father Jason came to visit, gave him a hundred dollars and left. He had been so used to Jason all of his life, but suddenly his heart cracked. His mother was dead. He had never known her, and his father had no time for him, not really. And he had cried till his eyes were red, and his face was hot. He didn’t want Isaiah to see him like this. He didn’t want to feel ungrateful for Frey’s love. He had washed his face in cold water and gone upstairs to Javon’s room. They should have both been grateful, not grateful like orphans, not grateful the way people always wanted you to feel half humiliated and unworthy, but grateful because of this love Isaiah showed them, never questioning if they should be in his house.

“What is it, DJ?” Javon had said, sitting up.

At the time DJ was fifteen, and Javon was sixteen. DJ had wanted to say all of these things to him. Instead he had come into the room and shut the door behind him.

Sometimes DJ forgot himself, who he was, where he was. He was like that now, half holding the towel, his penis standing up as his head hung down half looking at the floor.

“Are you just going to stand there?” Javon asked, slowly pulling off his shorts, struggling out his tee shirt.

“Come,” he said.