2.
JESUS OF THE DARK NIGHT
He didn’t miss Maryland, but he thought about it all the time. He should have gone to bed, but tonight he needed to be up late. Some nights things were just hard, and James Nespres didn’t know how to explain that to anyone, didn’t really know very many people he wished to explain it to. He was such a dark hole of a person.. On a night like this everything was ugly. He left his lonely room and exited Abelard Hall to take the winding path under the dormitory and under the church, past the coffee shop and up into the old body of the college chapel. Reflexively he crossed himself and genuflected to the tabernacle dimly lit by the red votive candle, and he stood up on the altar, not the altar proper but the sort of raised dais, He’d heard an Episcopal friend call it the chancel. Chancel, what a name, and he sat down at the piano and before he knew it he was playing.
He wasn’t great, not like his little brother. He was only alright, and playing made him feel better as the notes tinkled from the piano into the darkness cavern of the church. It went through is head for a moment that maybe he wasn’t a mediocre musician. Maybe it was just his parents had told him Brett was better. But it didn’t matter. None of this mattered now, and he played on, nothing religious, just a little Chopin. No one was his company but Jesus. People thought he didn’t believe in Jesus, or that he didn’t care or that he was just a superstitious Catholic. He believed in Jesus terribly. Jesus understood the shit he did that looked fun and wild and was fun and wild but spoke of separation Jesus saw his fear, his loneliness, the hollowness. Jesus saw when he wanted to die. Jesus saw him in the middle of all of his many sins. And loved him. He wouldn’t have said that to many people, and though he was in the church tonight, he wouldn’t’ be here come Sunday morning.
As impossible as it was, Jimmy Nespres felt the votive candle burning at his back, felt the presence of Christ. Not the many Christs he’d heard about and he had heard about a lot. There was the Jesus of Catholic school, at least up until about fifth grade. He was the Jesus of folk guitar songs, smiling, happy, probably white, eager to be your friend, stupidly in love with you. Working miracles seen in coloring books. Fit for a child. And then there was, almost incongruously, the Jesus they met when they were taken into the big church for Mass on Fridays, when the altar boys in their white robes marched with tall bronze crosses and there was incense and old murals of saints, some he knew, some he never learned about, and scenes from the bible and scenes==presumably from heaven or possibly hell. This Jesus was grand and majestic, white and gold and agonized and not just a little distant.
“Let us proclaim the mystery buffet!” the priest would sing.
“Christ has died, Chris has risen, Christ will come again.
Only he learned when his older brother went into seminary that what the priest was really chanting was, “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”
He preferred the buffet.
And of course there was the buffet, a line to get your food, and what strange food, certainly a mystery. Bread, but it was barely bread, wine, but it was terrible wine, and it wasn’t bread or wine, it was Jesus.
And then there was the Jesus that threatened to haunt so many of this days. Church Jesus, Vatican Jesus, an extension of white and gold Jesus. He wanted to be obeyed, He wanted to be your friend, yes, but he wanted to be obeyed and friendship seemed impossible with one so very wounded and bloodied and easily offended. Jesus the son of a Father who all sin was the same to, lying and murder, all the same, a strangely disproportionate deity who, according to the formula, craved, actually needed a murder, a death, a bloodshed to make up for your swearing or not finishing your homework. He required your death, but your death was not good enough, so he was content for it to be his son’s. The whole life of Jesus lived to the perfect moment of ripeness where he was picked and prodded and promptly nailed to a cross, full of an earnest obedience. How could you ever properly love, or be loved by someone who held such a guilt trip over your head?
James Nespres was unaware his playing was growing louder and more frantic. He wasn’t aware of his long fingers running over the keys. Was it shame that made him stop believing in that Jesus? Was it an earnest hope that this Jesus was bullshit that had made him feign a disbelief that had become real faithlessness? The little Jimmy who sinned with bad grades and hitting his brother became the older Jimmy of strange desires, of experiments he didn’t like to remember with kids in basements and closets. Before he’d been Confirmed, his Uncle Joe, who was a priest, who would lead his brother KJ into the priesthood had said, “You know Jimmy, it’s good to make a clean confession if you’re going to be a full fledged Catholic, if you really want the Holy Spirit to come down on you.”
He gave Jimmy a little small print card folded in three, a guide to the Ten Commandments. It had each of the Commandments, and then a series of questions under them supposedly unfolding what those commandments meant and what sins violated them. When he came to the Fourth Commandment, “Do not commit adultery,” he thought, “Well that’s the easiest thing in the world, I’m twelve,” and he read down the list of questions that included adultery. He still remembered licking his dry lips in contemplation as he frowned coming to the question: Have I masturbated recently?
Then came the memory of standing in the mirror watching himself masturbate, looking at his own face change as he twisted in the new shock of orgasm, and marveling at his semen spraying into the basin. Up until he was about ten, things that felt good felt good and things that felt bad felt bad, but these sexy feelings were different, powerful scary, embarrassing, hard to talk about, easy to joke about uneasily, the compulsion to pleasure himself, to touch his own body, to watch himself do this embarrassed him. He wondered if Ryan Warren, or Joel Chanek actually did this? Did Sean Parks? He read the question again: have I masturbated? He was sick. He was actually covered in shame.
But not because of himself. No, instantly he was disgusted with the perv who had asked the question. That was the beginning of the Jimmy he would be, who as confused as he may have been about his body, but had some idea that it was his and that no one should really be asking him what he did with it. He never discussed this with anyone—not for years—but it was the beginning of not believing in church, of having a serious lack of faith in anything that came out of the mouth of a priest. The day of his Confirmation, when he took the name Francis, there was no feeling of the Holy Spirit, and he knew full well why. He had stopped believing. The entire Nespres clan was there that night before Pentecost, and a large share of his mother’s family, the Mc.Llarchlahns. Faith had nothing to do with his Confirmation. It was to please the family. and though there was no way a kid could thwart family, he still wondered if God held this hypocrisy against him.
Silence. Jimmy stopped playing and sat in the darkness of the chapel, reeling from the final echoing vibration of the piano, and then savoring the silence. When you sat in the darkness, eventually all the little things rose, the creaks in the old wooden floor, the shifts of the wind outside, the air in the pipes. He wondered if he was quiet enough could he hear the movement in the coffee shop downstairs. He often played with magic like that wondering if he was still enough could he go to the edges of hearing and doing.
Four years later after Jimmy’s, a ruckus went through the Nespres house, a great shuddering, I can’t believe it. His cousin, Russell, had done the thing Jimmy thought he couldn’t possibly do. He had refused his Confirmation.
“But why?”
“How can you do that?”
“What’s his reason?”
“Who cares what the reason is? You don’t do that.”
It was a big family deal for the better part of a week, discussed by his aunts and his father with much upset, and then it faded into the background with judgment for that side of the family. Uncle Frank, the brother of Jimmy’s Grandmother Lilian, had yielded an odd family, a bunch of wackos and screw ups a little too modern and carefree except for Cousin Patti, and it was Patti’s son, that boy in need of a haircut, who had turned his back on the Church at the age of twelve.
“Fourteen.”
“Doesn’t matter!”
“You just don’t do that,” Jimmy’s Dad said.
“What if you don’t understand it?” Jimmy said. “Or if it’s not right for you.”
“It’s God, James,” his humorless father said. “You never understand it. It’s God. It’s always right for you.”
They had gone up to Michigan to visit Cousin Patti’s sister because Jimmy was going to be going to school there anyway, and his Mom had grown up north, in Chicago and some other cousins were coming. Jimmy was eager to see the cousins he had known, but not very well, there were so many of them, and his other Chicago cousins were there too, including Macy who had just started high school. The world of the Lewises was different from the world of the Nepres family. It was broad with sunlight, not made of grey skies, old brick churches and crowded street blocks filled with noise and the rattle of El tracks in the background. They lived in a huge brick house his father didn’t approve of, set off of a great lawn, and Russell was a very quiet green eyed red headed kid in oversized flannel, swimming in cargo pants. A burn out, Rocky Nespres called him, but if so he was the most clear eyed burn out Jimmy had ever seen.
Jimmy was surprised by the fact that what seemed to be such an issue down in Maryland in the Nespres house was a non issue in this house. Patti was strangely like Jimmy’s mother, and not very like her at all, a psychologist who suffered little foolishness from her husband and had no time for the opinions of extended family. Russell was the same, and when Jimmy and Macy finally asked him about Confirmation he said, “Because I thought you should choose to do something you believed in instead of just doing what was expected to make everybody happy.”
“But what about your parents?” Macy had said.
“It’s not about my parents.”
“My family was so…” Jimmy shook his head. He wanted a cigarette, but he hadn’t told people he was smoking yet, and this was a family setting. “My dad had a lot to say about it.”
“But I don’t really know your dad,” Russell said the obvious, as if he were fully grown and not a freshman in high school. “And he’s not my concern.”
While Jimmy paused on the fact that the man who had dominated his life mattered not a bit to this fourteen year old, Russell added, “None of their opinions is my concern. I am never going to do something I don’t think is right to make someone else happy.”
Jimmy wanted to bow down. He was such a coward. He would never have been able to do that. Sitting in the dark chapel this night, he wished Russell was here right now.
Jimmy took the little stairway out of the church into the basement where one hall went to the mass communications classroom and the huge cafeteria area for a cafeteria no longer or rarely in use ending in doors going out to the stone porch that looked toward the priests’ house. A glass door was open to Cup of Joe, the school coffee shop, and even at this time of night some folks were still there. These days, from what he’d heard—he’d only come to this place once—it was a game of Dungeons and Dragons. He could hear Ben Steger who was dragon master or dungeon master or whatever the fuck they called it, talking as someone rolled the dice. It was something about strength points and an aquatic elf and they were laughing, and for a minute Jimmy thought about learning to play Dungeons and Dragons and making more friends, but the thought of that shit made him tired, and he heard Jack Palmiciano in there saying something and that kid was a loser, so James Nespres headed back up to the dormitory. The Hub was closed. It was too late to get a burger and he thought of driving but didn’t want to drive alone, and he thought of taking a walk about campus, which should be pretty dead on a Tuesday night, but picturing himself doing that made him feel like a lonely loser and though common sense told him he already was a lonely loser, still he rebelled against this. Best to go up to his room, maybe attempt some work, maybe go to sleep and hope to feel vaguely better tomorrow.
On the third floor there were still the little noises of his fellow inmates, and he was almost relieved to see Ross Allan’s door open. He didn’t want to be a bother, but he needed company and he needed the right company. Ross never left the door open if he didn’t want visitors, and when Jimmy pushed it aside, Ross was in the easy chair and Flip Sanders was stretched out on his bed.
“There he is,” Flip said.
“Where were you all?”
“I was at the coffee shop for a very long time,” Ross Allan said. “And then I was with your cousin Macy, and we went to get some hot wings and you are welcome to them, and then she went to bed, and Flipper saw my door was open so he came in to hang out and now he’s on my bed and I’m half asleep in this chair, and as you can hear, I am playing this Gustav Mahler CD I borrowed from Chris down the hall.”
“You want me off your bed?” Flipper asked.
“When I do, you’ll know,” Ross said.
Jimmy sat down on the floor and Ross said, “You look mildly tragic.”
Jimmy shrugged. “Just feeling restless tonight and walking around.”
“There’s a party in Merlini.”
“There’s always a part in Merlini,” Jimmy said. “And I need to recover. One cannot shake his ass every night.”
“Freshman year I could,” Flipper Sanders said, rolling over to look at Jimmy.
Flipper and Jimmy were of a height and to Ross they looked similar if not exactly the same, though sometimes Ross asked himself if this was because white people looked the same to him? No, that wasn’t it. Jimmy and Flipper were both tallish and narrow, a little fragile looking, with floppy hair, though Flipper was almost pretty, black haired with long black lashes, almost milky white with red cheeks and long hands, a wicked earring twisted through his ear. Jimmy was honey haired, brown eyed, a little homely. Ross did not know how to describe himself. He was Black not dark, not light, not tall, not short, myopic. He wasn’t really fat and he wasn’t that thing. He lived in his skin and didn’t think he was that special, but others seemed pleased by his appearance.
Appearance was something he didn’t like to dwell much on except for how it revealed someone’s soul, if it did. Flipper’s appearance never revealed his soul because his long lashes covered up his eyes and when you saw his eyes you were always shocked. It meant he was looking into you, trying to show you himself, and Ross was surprised because till this day he still could not tell you what color they were.
James Nespres hid nothing. He was an adventurer, and Ross had just learned this term: Absolute Id, no Ego. There was a strange gentle sadness that was always in him, Ross would always have his door open for his friend Jimmy Nespres.
And this was when Flipper, Christian name Richard Bradley Sanders the Third, said, “But where were you?”
“We looked for you,” Ross added, though he was stretched out in the chair and not looking at much of anything.
“Wandering,” Jimmy said. “Wandering and being sad and weird and lonely. And then I went to church to play some piano and hang out with Jesus.”
“How is Jesus these days?” Flipper asked.
“He didn’t say much,” Jimmy said. “Just listened.”
“The birds have the air and the foxes have holes,” Ross said. “But the son of man had nowhere to lay his head.”
Ross Allan went to Mass at 11:30 every day in the chapel behind the main part of the church. Ross had, Jimmy suspected, a very different Jesus from any Jesus he’d met before. Ross wasn’t an idle questioner. He wasn’t one of those people who irked you by asking shit that took an hour to answer but that he really didn’t want more than a five second response too. And, also, Ross wasn’t the kind of person you asked a lot of questions. Odd was the wrong word for him. Jimmy felt bound to Ross because he’d met him before college. He’d met Ross when his family was looking for schools and had found Saint Alban’s. They were visiting Geschichte Falls and so was Ross. It had been his home. The Nexpres family had gone to church on the south side because they didn’t like the church his cousins went to, and Jimmy had run into Ross, those little run ins between folks you think would be your friends, who you think about long after you’ve parted and wonder what it would have been like. And then, in about his second week on campus, he had seen him. He’d checked a few times before reintroducing himself.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Ross had said. He was living in Garland Hall at the time.
“You wouldn’t remember me,” Jimmy said.
“I do,” Ross said. “I remember most things.”
Ross went to all the parties, and then he would skip out and you would find him wandering the forest around the school or walking through the graveyard. Jimmy would see him at crossroads, lighting candles or incense, or walk into his room and see saint candles, Tarot cards. He had on the top of his dresser an open Bible, an old Virgin Mary, a crucifix and a dried rose. There were other things, and once someone had said, “Are those little skulls?” and Ross had said yes. And that had been the end of it.
“Never apologize and never explain,” Jimmy had heard someone once say. This summed up Ross Allan.
“How long were you at he coffee shop, cause I was down there,” Jimmy said.
“Till after eleven, and then they started playing Dungeons and Dragons.”
“They were still at it when I walked by,” Jimmy said.
“I never understood that shit,” Flip said, reclining on his side.
“I thought it would be more exciting,” Ross said. “When they said they were going to do it I was excited. For abou three nights I sat there waiting for something to happen.”
“Something to happen like what?” Flip looked at him.
“Okay, so remember when we were kids and there was all that hubbub about role playing games and how they came from the devil?”
“Not really,” Flipper said.
“I do,” said Jimmy.
“They used to say it all the time, and it would be on all the Christian shows, 700 Club, what the not, and my parents watched all that. And on the Christian radio station there was this show called Adventures in Odyssey.”
“What was it about?”
“Not the point,” Ross said. And then he said, “Well, it’s a little the point. These kids lived in this town called Odyssey and they were all Christians and saved and all that, though what church they belonged to—who the hell knew—but I’m sure they weren’t Catholic. Anyway, all the kids went to this place called Witt’s End owned by this old man—”
“Named Witt?”
“Exactly. Anyway, one day they had an announcement that this very special episode was about role playing games, and one of the little boys in town had his cousin come to visit and there had been problems with the cousin because he’d gotten involved in quote marks: bad stuff. Anyway, it wasn’t drugs or sex. It was Castle and Cauldrons, the role playing game he had that came in a box and had all sorts of little toys in it, like monopoly, and they started playing, being wizards and knights and the cousin was like “You have to take this seriously, and you have to pray to these demons for powers. And then they started playing the game and when they were playing it, the little Christian boy started to see things and then all this witchcraft started happening. And the devil showed up and in the end the little boy and his cousin were fighting some magic battle in the wood against demons or something and then that’s when Witt, the old man, showed up and destroyed the game in the name of Jesus and set everyone free.”
The whole time Jimmy was staring wild eyed, but Flip was laughing his head off and finally he said, “Christians are fucked.”
“You couldn’t play D and D, You couldn’t listen to rock and roll. We had a psychic fair once at my apartment complex and that was definitely a no no.”
“No masturbation,” Jimmy said, remembering the confession card.
“Well no sex of any kind, but no….not much of anything,” Ross agreed.
“But then when I didn’t believe everything was evil, I guess I still believed in everything. So the first few nights they were playing, I kept waiting for the Devil to show up. I mean, I was fucking waiting for the magic, and the magic did not come. It was just those fucking dweebs rolling dice and writing shit in notebooks.”
Flip was laughing while Ross said, “After the third night where no devils showed up, I just lost interest. I mean, I’m a writer. I have an imagination. Watching people roll dice and get points just to do some basic stuff seems kind of disappointing.”
“What if that’s it?” Flipper said.
“Huh?”
“Your Adventures in Odyssey? All of that stuff, the fear of the devil, the man destroying the game and the wooden swords. You know your history. You know about the Reformation when the Puritans were burning the beautiful churches down, getting rid of the Latin and the liturgy. What if at the back of it the real devil to them was your ability to imagine, the ability to create a world where you didn’t have to listen to your preacher and be afraid all the time? What if there really is the magic, but the magic isn’t in the board game or even in the Devil? What if it’s in us? What if it’s in you?”
Jimmy liked Flipper because he was sweet, and kind, and because he had genius flashes where he said stuff like this. Ross’s story was funny and it explained him. Ross, who had been taught that every magical thing and shadow was the enemy of God looked through all of those places to find him. That was, after all, what he’d meant when he’d quoted the Bible and said, “the birds have the air, the foxes have holes, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” It had been Ross who had shown him the Jesus of the dark night and the empty chapel.
“A weird lonely young man,” Ross said that freshman year, before Easter, “who shouted at fig trees and told storms to be quiet, who filled pigs with demons and called his friends Satan. And he wandered alone. And when he wandered with friends, what friends he took! I cannot imagine there was anything he’s never seen.”
Jimmy wanted to tell a story that wasn’t funny, but somehow felt it would ruin the mood, didn’t know how to tell it, how after his Confirmation, when he had well turned his back on being good, or said he did, his dad, who wasn’t one of those lenient fathers or a father who winked at vice had caught him naked in bed with Sarah Rawlston. He’d given her enough time to get dressed and go home, and when she was leaving he’d stood in the room looking at Jimmy and shook his head.
“KJ’s going be a priest and your little brother is a great musician. But there’s something about you, James. You’re just a little animal. Digging around in the dirt. You always were.”
Whether Ross sensed his feelings or not he spoke now.
“It’s one of those nights,” Ross said to Jimmy. “A night where things feel odd and lonely. You stay here,” he told Jimmy. “You stay with us, tonight.”
