Angel, page 6
“I don’t think so,” Paul said. “But you can feed it hamburger if you want. It will eat that.”
“I don’t have a great history of taking care of things.”
Ian talked about the channels on the television, his roommate, Gary—an aging rock musician—and the controls that made the bed sit up and recline. Paul’s mind was still back in the elevator with hypodermic needles and pubic hairs on soap. He was trying to reconcile who he believed Ian to be with the life he must have led. Ian had such a warm and open energy. He was playful and exuded a childlike innocence. How could someone like that have seen the kind of ugliness he described? How had anyone let that happen?
“You wanna see the grounds?” Ian asked. “It’s the best part. Anyway, I need a cigarette. They don’t let you smoke in the building.”
“Imagine that.”
“I know. They’re a bunch of fascists, right?”
“Maybe you should quit.”
“Well, one addiction at a time. I have to kick my heroin habit first.”
Paul’s jaw dropped.
“That was a joke,” Ian said.
“Right. Sorry.”
Once they were outside of the building, the clinical nature of the property disappeared. The grounds were quiet and serene, with a long winding path through flowers and trees. It circled around a gazebo and ended at a duck pond full of lilies, surrounded by weeping willows. It seemed like an exclusive country club or a vacation retreat. Ian took out a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag. “Fresh air,” he said.
“It’s beautiful here,” Paul said.
“Enjoy the shakes and hallucinations in a lovely natural setting,” Ian said. “I think that’s what it says in the guide book.”
“Did you have that? Shakes and hallucinations?”
“The first week I was cursing you the whole time,” Ian said. “Fucking, fucking bastard do-gooder, son-of-a-bitch minister. Why couldn’t he mind his own fucking business?”
Paul smiled. People hardly ever swore in front of a minister without apologizing. He found it refreshing.
“You see the duck pond?” Ian asked. “When I was still in the medical wing, the ducks somehow got in, and I came out of my room and there was this parade of ducks walking straight down the hall. There was this other guy standing there, and I looked at him, and he looked at me. He said, ‘Do you see ducks?’ I thought, ‘Thank God!’”
“So it was bad?” Paul asked.
“I’ve had better times.”
“Are you still cursing me?”
“Well, you brought me a plant that eats flies, which is kind of weird, so I guess you’re okay.” He took another long drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke out through one side of his mouth.
“You could have checked yourself out if you wanted to.”
“Now he tells me! No, really, I didn’t want to.”
“You look much better. You really look great.” (Am I gushing too much about his looks? Paul wondered.)
They sat down at a picnic table with a view of the pond. The sun’s rays illuminated the right side of Ian’s face, making his features more soft and delicate. His eyes, in this light, seemed more green than blue. The light and shadow, the green of his eyes contrasted with the green of the willows—Paul wondered what classical artist could best have captured this scene.
“You know what I learned?” Ian asked, sucking on his cigarette and blowing the smoke out of his nose. (So much for the classical masters.) “They said that when one spouse is an alcoholic, the husbands usually end up leaving, but the wives usually stick it out. What do you think that says?”
“I don’t know.”
“Men are selfish shits, that’s what I think,” he said, gazing off into the woods. “They say, ‘This isn’t fun for me anymore’, and they take off.”
Paul laughed. “We’re not still talking about husbands and wives, are we?”
Ian tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and let his fingers run all the way down through the long tresses. “It’s okay,” he said. “I probably would have dumped me too if I’d been dating myself.”
Paul wished he could tell Ian what he was thinking: I wouldn’t.
Ian rested his chin on his palm with his cigarette between his index and second fingers, his pinky dangling in the corner of his mouth so he could chew absentmindedly on the much-abused nail. Two bad habits for the price of one, Paul thought. He laughed to himself.
“What?” Ian asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
They gazed at each other for a moment with curiosity. It seemed as if they had just shared a secret, but Paul could not be sure what the secret was.
“I think you’re different,” Ian said. “I bet if your wife was alcoholic you’d stick around.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Well, you’re here. You seem like that kind of guy. A good guy.”
Paul shrugged. “I’m a minister. It’s my job to be a good guy.”
“Come on! Not all ministers are good guys.”
“No, but it makes it easier. Being a minister gives you permission to help people. Do you know what I mean? People are so suspicious of each other most of the time. They’re afraid to accept help because they suspect the other person has ulterior motives. But if you’re a minister, and you want to help someone, they might let you. That’s one of the best things about the job. Having permission to be a good guy without people suspecting you.”
“Like with me, right?” He puffed again on the cigarette and squinted as the smoke wafted into his eyes. “I should… I’ve been joking around, but… thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I’m just happy to see you doing well. That’s a present for me.”
“You see that building over there?” Ian pointed with the two fingers that held his cigarette. “That’s where they keep the priests. They have a special wing for clergy. “
“I didn’t realize there were that many alcoholic priests.”
“Loads. They can’t have sex, you know, so they just sit around drinking communion wine and they end up here.”
“We do grape juice at my church.”
“Do you believe it actually turns into the blood of Christ?”
“No, it’s symbolic.”
“I think the Catholics believe it actually turns into blood. It’s like cannibalism. Isn’t that kind of creepy, drinking blood?”
“We’re only symbolic cannibals.”
“I don’t get it, though. I’m not trying to be, you know, critical. I just don’t understand. I mean… isn’t cannibalism a bad thing?”
“I can’t speak for the Catholics, but in my church, we don’t believe in the transubstantiation.”
“The what?”
“When the bread and wine are literally transformed into flesh and blood. In our church, it’s for remembrance. It reenacts the Last Supper. So it honors Christ’s sacrifice. And it’s one of the few traditions we have that Jesus actually set into motion himself. He didn’t put up a Christmas tree. So it goes all the way back. That is amazing to me, every time, to think about people performing this same ritual for centuries. You’re part of this long stream of time, of generations.”
“Okay, I can see re-creating the Last Supper, but why drink Jesus’s blood?”
“That’s always seemed very powerful to me, the blood. Just the whole physical nature of it. Did you know that some Romans thought the blood contained the soul? They saw that when people died they lost their color, so they figured their animating spirit must be in the blood. So if you drink from that cup, it’s making Jesus a part of you, not just in your mind, in your spirit, but in your body. So he’s part of your physical being and your everyday life.”
“In your body…. I just…. It sounds nice but I don’t really know what that means.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, but I’m not putting it down. I’m interested. It means something to you. I’m trying to understand why.”
“I don’t want to preach to you. I don’t want you to think that’s why I’m here.”
“You’re not. I’m asking.”
“Okay, the body of Christ. Well, it’s about being nourished by his sacrifice. You’re making the essence of Christ part of you. It’s about destruction and rebirth. The way the tree that falls in the woods decays and nourishes the flowers. Jesus was a man and existed in a physical body, but he doesn’t anymore. But now he exists in all our bodies. He keeps living in us. Christianity is about resurrection. Or at least it is for me. Different churches focus on different parts of the story. The cross, it’s a difficult symbol because it was what the Romans used for torture, but it’s been transformed. Now it’s a symbol of resurrection. What I think that means—one thing I think that means, is that everyone has a chance to be reborn. You don’t have to get it right the first time. You start where you are. Everybody deserves a second chance.”
“Hmm,” Ian said. He turned his eyes upward to the left and took another drag on his cigarette. He was thinking about what Paul had said, and he seemed to like what he heard.
“You told me your mother was religious. What kind of church did you go to?”
“Pentecostal. Real fire and brimstone stuff.”
“Wow.”
“It was all about Christ’s army and going to war with the devil. You wanted to be on the right side of the war.”
“Did people speak in tongues?”
“Yeah. They’d lift up their arms to God and cry and fall on the floor and babble.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, I did it too,” he said, glancing at the ash of his cigarette.
Paul tried to imagine a young Ian on his knees, his arms uplifted to heaven, with tears streaming down his face, babbling incoherently for the Lord. Paul had always had a certain fascination with Pentecostalism. There was something uncomfortable and disturbing about it, and yet he admired and longed for the Pentecostals’ completely immersive, emotional relationship to the divine.
His own religious tradition was so comfortable and staid. Respectable people stood at neat pews; they read prayers in an inflectionless monotone. They opened their hymnals and sang “Hallelujah” in an oddly flat and soulless way. (Although every church had one or two choir members who loved to belt out the high notes and harmonies.) His church’s European heritage expressed reverence in hushed tones and quiet contemplation. It did not make noise. It was an antidote for the flashing lights and frenzy of rush-hour traffic and evening TV. Yet he also wished he could feel worship in his guts. He admired the call and response of the black Baptist churches and the energy of a gospel choir, and he wanted to be so swept away that he couldn’t express it in true language, like the Pentecostals did.
“What did it feel like?” Paul asked. “Did you feel like you were having a spiritual experience?”
“Mmm. I guess, sometimes. You get wrapped up in it, everyone is around, and there’s all the music and energy and people dancing. You feel the energy. At the time I thought that was, like, God energy. Now I think it was just adrenaline, you know? I just didn’t want people to think I was with the devil. I was putting on a show. I knew I was damned to Hell.”
“Why?”
“Leviticus 18:22. The inerrant word of God.” Ian gave a rueful look, crushed out his cigarette, and took another out of the pack.
“Is that the one about….”
“‘A man shall not lie down with a man as with a woman. It is an abomination.’”
“I can’t believe you memorized chapter and verse on that.”
“My personal verse.”
“Did you really believe that? That you were going to Hell?”
“My mom believed it. She believed in evil forces. Like the devil was hiding in the bushes just waiting to grab you. If you didn’t fight him off, you know, he’d drag you down. Like with the couch. We had this couch. See, we lost everything in a fire when I was thirteen. So we moved into this little apartment, but we didn’t have any furniture or anything. So this really nice woman across the street gave us a couch. It was this old beige thing, smelled like incense. Me and a friend lugged it up the stairs. Well, then the woman invited us over for dinner one time, and my mom saw that she had a Ouija board on the shelf. She absolutely flipped out. The devil was in that house. We had to leave right away. We couldn’t even finish dinner, and I wasn’t supposed to talk to the woman anymore. And we had to get rid of the couch too, of course, because the devil was in it. It was contaminated. This guy from the church brought over a pickup truck, and I helped him lug it back down the stairs and load it, and he took it to the dump. So we had to go back to watching TV sitting on folding chairs. It was just stupid. When she found out I was gay, she probably thought the couch did it.”
“What happened?”
“When?”
“When she found out?”
“Oh. It… it wasn’t pretty.”
“I’m sorry.” There was a brief lull. “Have you tried to talk to her since?”
“Yeah, right.” Ian quickly changed the subject. “So now I’m going to do community service in a church. Ironic, right?”
“Well, it’s not so ironic. Things happen for a reason. I’m thinking… no, forget it.”
“What?”
“Well, maybe God wants you back.”
“Maybe.”
Paul drove home filled with a warm glow. He had learned more than he had ever expected about Ian in one afternoon. He finally felt he could say that he knew the young man, that they were friends. Ian’s life was much different than Paul had imagined, but he never went back and revised his image completely, starting from scratch. Instead, he built upon the impression he already had. He was fleshing out the biography of “Ian the Angel.” Every new fact was interpreted in that light. This allowed him to see a side of Ian that others often missed, for all of this was true about him: he was a chain-smoking alcoholic who used coarse language and had sex with men without ever catching their names. He was also a beautiful soul, warm and positive, compassionate and bright, an innocent who longed to be loved.
It was not unusual for people to come to the church to perform community service. What was unusual was for the minister to take a personal interest in them. Usually they called and Julie found some tasks for them to do, signed their papers, and sent them on their way.
Ian was different. Two weeks before he was to be released from treatment, Paul started talking to Julie about what sort of jobs they might have for him. Hardly a day went by without Paul making some statement about Ian's upcoming service work:
“There are a lot of leaves on the playground, you could have Ian rake them,” Paul said. “You know,” he said, “I noticed that the fence by the third-grade classroom needs repair, maybe that’s something Ian could do.” “Maybe we could have Ian check the books in the children’s library and make sure they’re in alphabetical order.”
In the lunchroom, Paul told the staff about visiting Ian in the hospital and how well he was doing. He spoke in great detail about helping Ian sell his car. (Ian didn’t think he needed it anymore after losing his license for his driving offense.) And he mentioned several times that he would be driving Ian to the church himself. When Ian actually arrived with Paul on a Wednesday afternoon, he was nearly a celebrity.
When she saw Ian, Julie sat up straighter and her eyes grew wide. She brushed a nonexistent strand of hair from her forehead. “I’m Julie,” she said.
Emily and Marlee were soon standing at the desk as well. Marlee giggled when she introduced herself. Emily played with her hair.
“Hi, I’m Ian,” he said, nodding his head slightly. He seemed uncharacteristically shy. In his zeal to introduce Ian to the staff, Paul had forgotten that the whole thing might be uncomfortable for him. He was, after all, there to do community service for drunk driving. It was not the kind of situation where a person normally tried to draw attention to himself. Paul suddenly wished he had talked a bit less. He put a hand on Ian’s shoulder and directed him away from the women.
“Here,” he said, “I’ll show you what we have for you to do.”
Paul sent Ian out to rake the grounds and came back inside. The women in the office were still huddled.
“Don’t forget, you’re married!” Emily was saying when Paul came into earshot.
“But I’m not dead!” Julie said. “And don’t forget, you have Bob.”
“Who’s Bob?” Emily said, giggling. “Marlee’s single.”
“He’s too good-looking for me,” Marlee said. “Those cute ones are always trouble. They always know how good-looking they are. They’re heartbreakers.”
“He could break my heart,” Emily said.
“I’m telling you,” Marlee said, “the good-looking ones are always trouble, especially the cute ones. They’re the worst.”
“Ooh, look,” Julie said, “he’s raking by the window.”
“I guess it doesn’t hurt to look, though,” Marlee added with a grin.
Paul put his hands on his hips and struck a mock-managerial pose. “Don’t you people have work to do?” He was enjoying their conversation as much as they were. Their appreciation of Ian’s beauty reinforced his own impressions. What made it even more fun for Paul was that he was the only one in the room who knew how futile their gazing was. He was surprised at how much pleasure he took in sharing a secret with Ian.
“Oh, Paul,” Julie said. “You just don’t understand.”
Paul hummed a little tune as he went into his office.
The Phone Call
“Suppose a Man was carried asleep out of a plain Country amongst the Alps and left there upon the Top of one of the highest Mountains, when he wak’d and look’d about him, he wou’d think himself in an inchanted Country, or carried into another world; every Thing wou’d appear to him so different to what he had ever seen or imagin’d before.”
—Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684
The next evening, Paul was sitting in front of the television. He wasn’t so much “watching” as passing the time. When his cell phone rang, he picked up the remote and hit the mute button. He flipped open the phone without looking at the name of the caller.
