[Just the next chapter in Jenny’s story. Anyway, the news is too sickening to talk about.]
Words in a veiled box
Reb fucks like the whole world’s his personal vagina. It’s what Jenny needs, what the vagina aspect of her needs, but in every other way he’s becoming a growth on her skin, itchy and increasingly unwelcome. He stands too close, he follows her when she wants to be somewhere he isn’t, and makes jokes Joe Miller wouldn’t have put in his books. Something is brewing in her head, unfiltered grounds.
“Reb, what do you think about? When you’re alone, you know, before bedtime when I’m not there to get you off?”
“Jesus.”
“You think about Jesus?”
“Why are you yanking at me?”
“Because I want to.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like celery. You know what I do with celery?”
“What?”
“I stay away from it.”
The massive stone church on 13th St. is the descendent of the one before which Ben Franklin raised his electric kite – or so the historical marker attests. Inside, it’s set up for confession in the old-school model. Here, the priest still lurks in a penitential closet behind an obscuring screen, the penitent still kneels. No relaxed face-to-face sin-discussions.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Pause. “That’s the right formula?”
“Yes. How long has it been since your last confession?”
“I don’t know. Maybe never? Probably never.”
“Have you strayed from the Church?”
“Poor little lambie? No Father… I don’t think I was ever consciously part of it.”
“Are you considering joining, or rejoining?”
Jenny rubs her nose, flexes her nostrils. “I don’t think so. No, I’m sure not.”
“What brought you here?”
“My feet. Bad pun. Bad penitent,. Sorry. What’s your name, Father?”
“Father Umble.”
Jenny stifles a giggle. “More sorry.”
His slight smile bleeds through the gauzy cloth separating them. “It has that effect on people. Some people.”
He waits. Jenny delivers nothing more.
“How have you sinned?”
“I think I have a boyfriend.”
“That’s not normally considered –”
“I treat him like sh – whoa, don’t say that. Here. I act like he has no mind. But he does. He understands Bertie Russell, or maybe – Bertrand Russell, the mathematical philosopher or philosophical mathematician. With Whitehead. Never mind. Why am I nasty to people like Reb, the sort-of boyfriend. Almost nobody’s nasty to me. Mostly. Except when I deserve it. I give bad for good. Like it’s a motto I picked up.”
“Why do you feel that you do this?”
“Because the world deserves it and I can’t change the world – I can’t change it. I hope. So I take it out on people. Like Reb.”
“Have you spoken to your boyfriend about this?”
“I hate that term, but everything else is worse. Insignificant other? He’s a… sexual mechanism. A human dildo. And we didn’t even have sex. The first time.”
Fr. Umble coughs and coughs again.
“Wow, sorrier. I drink a lot. Why do I drink a lot? Well, I like it. It’s not like I’m drinking motor oil. Anger’s why, I said to him that time. Or to somebody. Maybe because of the things, a thing anyway, that my mind… can’t… accomplish. A hole in my thought-works.”
“You seem concerned about your mind.”
“I’m an intelligence snob.”
“Do you consider yourself more intelligent than most people?”
Jenny pauses. “Everybody. Almost everybody. Everybody I’ve met.”
“If your assessment of yourself, of your intelligence, is correct, do you feel that gives you permission to act poorly toward the rest of humanity?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“But you suspect that it does not.”
“I, uh, suspect that I’m lost in some place I don’t understand. The world, life, the universe, I don’t understand any of it. Not enough experience? But if I really am brighter than everybody, shouldn’t I be able to understand the way things work? The way they don’t work? And if I understood, wouldn’t I maybe be good for something? Useful to getting it to work?”
“Perhaps you are too hard on yourself.”
“My life’s easy as pie. I can’t make pies, they get gooey. I ride on easy street and bitch about it. You’re in there, in your box, Father, but you’re doing something. You make it better for people to be alive. To feel like it’s better anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Well it does. Truth matters. But not much… in regard to feelings. People don’t think about what’s true when they decide things, just what it looks like. Feels like. I’m little. Inside, I’m so tiny I could fall through a crack in the floor. But even a roach can be useful, down in the crack, a roach with a mind. I – this isn’t going anywhere, doing anything.”
“Wait.” Jenny is half risen from her knees to leave. “Are you looking for absolution?”
“We haven’t figured out my sins. It’s a sin to be me? This morning I woke up and I was me: I’m sorry, and I confess it. Does absolution make it OK if it can’t be changed?”
“If you have contrition for true sins, that allows absolution to take effect, for forgiveness to enter.”
“I’ve got old sins in the closet, in the clothes hamper, so go ahead. I’ll take what I can get.”
He makes the sign of the cross and bestows three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys as penance for an unstated collection of possible sins. The sign of the cross reaches out like the Gregorian Chant she listens to on her iPod. An unrecalled symbol.
She drops at the altar rail and tries to remember prayers she should never have known, never been taught. Yet there they are, in bits and pieces at first, then spread like a tattered tablecloth of benediction. Where could they come from? She must haul them out, examine them.
“Why the hell aren’t you there when I call? I thought I was sober, almost, when I left that message, but can’t remember anything I said. Did I say something really horrible? What an ass –”
“You are the most self-concerned human being this side of St. Augustine.”
“Oh. Hi. When did you read St. Augustine?”
“I didn’t – read the Cliff Notes. Are you drunk now?”
“No, wish I was.”
“I’m coming over.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Think about that when you wake me up with the goddam phone.”
“I confessed today.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know.”
lickhaven 