The Monk Upstairs Read online

  The Monk Upstairs

  A Novel

  Tim Farrington

  for Laurie Fox

  beloved comrade

  But what mystery there lay

  in “The Word was made Flesh,”

  I could not even imagine.

  —Augustine, Confessions

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  It was seven minutes past the appointed hour, and the…

  Chapter Two

  Rebecca had a bad few minutes, thinking she might have…

  Chapter Three

  Phoebe had come to see the slowness as a blessing…

  Chapter Four

  Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall…

  Chapter Five

  It was one of the days when things were not…

  Chapter Six

  Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

  Chapter Seven

  The world had stopped, and Phoebe waited, because the world…

  Chapter Eight

  Mike checked the address on the slip of paper, but…

  Chapter Nine

  Saturday mornings were Mary Martha’s soccer games. Mary Martha had…

  Chapter Ten

  As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth…

  Chapter Eleven

  This is my last sunrise, Phoebe thought.

  Chapter Twelve

  Back at the house, they set Phoebe up in the…

  Chapter Thirteen

  The sand at Ocean Beach was warm for once in…

  Chapter Fourteen

  By the time they got back, the spiral dance had…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  But what mystery there lay

  in “The Word was made Flesh,”

  I could not even imagine.

  —Augustine, Confessions

  Chapter One

  Thy vows are upon me, O God: I will render praises unto Thee.

  Thou hast delivered my soul from death:

  wilt Thou not deliver my feet from falling,

  that I may walk before God in the land of the living?

  PSALM 56

  It was seven minutes past the appointed hour, and the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. Everyone was trying to put a good face on it, but a certain tension was inevitable. The organist, an ancient monk with a round pink face like a dried pomegranate, was muscling through another round of “On Eagle’s Wings.” Apparently his repertoire was limited; but the music took on an unsettlingly dirgelike quality the second time through. The guests sat quietly, their small talk long since expended, glancing discreetly at their watches, reading through their programs again as if they might have missed something. Chelsea Burke’s baby had begun to cry, in one of the back pews, and the noise was approaching crisis proportions. Abbot Hackley, who was to perform the ceremony, stood at the front of the chapel with his hands folded in front of him, his heavy white chasuble trimmed with dazzling gold, a benediction waiting to happen. The look on his face was determinedly serene and seemed to suggest that this was all in God’s plan, but from time to time he would sway a little, as if in a wind. The poor man was in the middle of the third course of some particularly savage clinical trial treatment for colon cancer, and the wedding had been scheduled to avoid the worst of his debilitation post-chemotherapy.

  Peering through the crack in the door at the back of the chapel, Rebecca reviewed the major decisions of her life and decided that it had been a bizarre lapse of judgment to get married at all, much less at Mike’s old monastery. They should have just eloped if they were going to take this mad leap. She had actually, seriously, truly in her heart wanted to do that, to jump in a car and drive up to Lake Tahoe. They could have gotten the damned thing done in some roadside chapel, had a few margaritas and some Mexican food, and been home before anyone was the wiser. But she’d made the mistake of mentioning the plan to her mother, and Phoebe had swung into panicked action and taken charge of constructing a more or less traditional fiasco.

  Which was now duly unfolding. Rebecca turned to her mother and said, “I told you—”

  “Don’t even start,” Phoebe said. She sat placidly on a folding chair someone had dug up for her, with the walker she’d been using during her recovery from the stroke she’d had the year before parked beside her. When the time came to process into the church, Phoebe had insisted, she was going to do it without the prop. Rebecca wasn’t sure her mother could walk that far unsupported, and the image of Phoebe sprawled halfway up the aisle like a beached fish was not helping her stress level. But there had never been any stopping Phoebe.

  “He’ll show,” Bonnie said. She was the maid of honor; it was her duty to be upbeat. And Bonnie could afford to be generous: her own wedding at Grace Cathedral the previous autumn had gone like extravagant clockwork. “His watch is probably off. Did you make sure he’d reset it at the switch from daylight savings time?”

  “That was weeks ago. Surely we’d have known by now if he was running an hour behind the rest of the world.” But even as she said it, Rebecca realized that it might not be so. Mike was often enough several hundred years, if not millennia, out of sync with the rest of the world, and he was perfectly capable of losing the stray hour here or there, like a pair of socks kicked under the bed of eternity.

  “He’s out there praying, or whatever it is he does,” Bonnie insisted. “Or having a drink for the road.”

  “He’ll show,” Phoebe seconded. “Just relax, sweetheart. The man’s a goner.”

  “If he needs to pray or drink at this point, we shouldn’t be doing this,” Rebecca said, but she was surrounded by resolute Pollyannas, and she took a deep breath. It was, clearly, a moment to simply exercise her inner resources and cultivate serenity. To Zen out, as Phoebe liked to say. Unfortunately, all that came to mind in terms of spiritual substance was the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Rebecca had been cruising along in what she thought was acceptance until five minutes ago; but apparently that had just been denial, because she was seething now, in the old familiar way. It felt like she had spent most of her adult life in stage two of grief over her relationships with men.

  The back door swung open, and Rebecca’s heart leaped instantly into the purest stage five, without transition, but it was her daughter and her ex-husband, who had slipped out to look for Mike. And, it was clear at once, not found him. Mary Martha, looking a bit flushed in her pink flower girl dress with its even pinker ruffled front and puffy sleeves, had an air of uneasy compliance with circumstances beyond her grasp, like a dog on the way to the vet’s. Rory looked the way he always looked when he had managed to escape a social gathering for a while, like he had just had two hits of something in the bathroom. He was wearing his only suit, the blue off-the-rack thing he kept on a hook for court appearances.

  “No sign of him,” he informed Rebecca, trying to look appropriately downcast and managing to keep it short of gleeful. But she couldn’t begrudge him a little legitimate schadenfreude. No one wanted their ex’s wedding to go perfectly; it was too much to expect of a human being.

  “He’ll show,” Phoebe said.

  “Has anyone tried his cell phone?” Mary Martha asked.

  Everyone chuckled indulgently, it was so cute and precocious and postmodern, and then they all reached simultaneously for their phones because it was actually a great idea. Mike had resisted getting a phone for quite a while, but the dance of urban coordinations centering on Mary Martha being in first grade had eventually broken him down.

  Bonnie,
with her phone stashed for instant access in a nifty white satin dress-up purse the length of a tampon and the width of a pack of KitKats, won the race to get the number dialed. They all waited hopefully, but after a moment she shook her head and said, “No signal out here.”

  It made sense, unfortunately. The Bethanite monastery that had been Mike’s home for twenty years was so far out in the second-growth redwood forest on the coast of Mendocino County that it always seemed like a surprise that they had running water. They still did the books by hand out here, the nearest paved road was six miles away, and the monks used the place’s single computer mostly for playing blackjack.

  Rebecca peeked through the door into the chapel again. Chelsea Burke had quieted her baby by opening her blouse and beginning to breast-feed. The monks sitting near her were all looking straight ahead toward the altar and had taken on an air of rapt absorption, as if they were listening to faint tendrils of angel song.

  “He’ll show,” Rory said generously.

  That did it. Rebecca thought of her wedding day with Rory, of waiting on the beach, four months pregnant with Mary Martha, surrounded by a handful of stoned hippies, her horrified mother, and a minister of the Church of the Perfect Wave who had gotten his certificate through a correspondence course, while Rory bobbed beyond the breakers on his surfboard. If it hadn’t been a little choppy that day, Rebecca had always suspected, he might not have come ashore at all. Rory’s wet suit was still dripping when they finally got around to the ceremony, and his lips had been blue from the cold for their first conjugal kiss. It felt like marrying a seal. Rebecca had hoped for a different ceremonial spin, this second time around.

  “I’m going to go find him,” she announced now, and she started for the door in don’t-mess-with-me fashion. Everyone hesitated, uneasy with the move, then leaned back to let her by. They’d all seen her lose it before, at one time or another, and God knew it wasn’t pretty.

  She felt better the moment she was outside. The May afternoon was chilly beneath a low, thick sky, and her bare arms rose at once into goose bumps. Mike had assured her that late spring was a glorious time in the monastery’s woods, and in fact it had been clear for about twenty minutes just before noon, but the balance between land and sea had already tilted back toward the cool air streaming off the Humboldt Current, and threads of incoming mist wove through the upper branches of the tan oaks, firs, and redwoods, muffling the greens into funereal gray. It was probably a warm, clear day in the low eighties a couple of miles inland, but it was way too late to get married somewhere sunny, secular, and sane.

  Rebecca skirted the jumble of cars in the muddy clearing serving as the monastery’s makeshift parking lot. Ahead and to her right was the main complex of Our Lady of Bethany. Rebecca went first to the refectory where the monks took their silent meals, on the off chance that Mike was in there washing the lunch dishes or something. He was prone to such obscurities of menial service, and she knew that washing dishes always calmed him down. But the only one in the kitchen was a fresh-faced novice in an apron with “Taste and see that the Lord is good” written on it, who was laying out a tray of some kind of neo-Benedictine hors d’oeuvres for the reception. Rebecca saw a young Mike in him for a moment: the shaved head, the air of sturdy resignation and determined cheerfulness, and the heartbreaking innocence.

  “Have you seen my bridegroom anywhere?” she asked.

  The kid shook his head. He seemed distressed by the breakdown of the sacred routine and was clearly groping for something spiritual to say, but Rebecca had no time for it. She grabbed one of the bottles of Dom Pérignon that were stuck into one of the monastery’s washtubs of ice like beer cans at a picnic, gave the startled young monk a wink in lieu of further clarification, and breezed out.

  On the muddy driveway again she paused, the champagne bottle dripping on her off-white satin sling-backs. To her immediate right lay the dormlike residence buildings, the slapdash office, and the cute little misplaced abbatial chalet, crammed now with the rented medical paraphernalia of Abbot Hackley’s prolonged demise. Beyond that were the monastery’s gardens and its foggy peach orchard and artichoke patch. Men had been disappearing into this place since the monastery had been founded near the turn of the century by three peevish hermits seceding from the Cistercians; whole lifetimes of devotion had circled the holy drain and vanished into its depths, and it offered no end of nooks, niches, and refuge for those inclined to renounce the world of weddings and other mundane complexities. But Rebecca knew her man. Mike had found even the monastery’s contemplative retreats inadequate, in the long run, and she took the barely discernible trail to the left, deeper into the forest.

  What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee.

  There were two ways in, through fire and through water, and he turned into the fire, having learned by now in every nerve ending that the water’s oasis was a mirage, a comfort that bloated, rotted, and stank; that the only peace, the unimaginable freedom, lay at the heart of the flame, after every oasis had dried up and every seeking after comfort had burned away. It was the precise opposite of what any child learned, touching a hot stove, but it was no trick. It was a thing your bones came to know, a thing burned into you by time and suffering. And this was prayer.

  I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.

  Mike sat on the floor in the middle of the shack, legs crossed, with only a scrap of dirty white prayer mat woven from thick strands of raw wool, a gift from a visiting Shaivite monk some twenty years ago, between him and the concrete floor. There was a prie-dieu with a wooden kneeler built into the east wall, below the shelf shrine to St. Martha, Our Lady of Bethany, but Mike had never used the thing. Neither, though, had he ever bothered to dispel anyone’s impression that he did. His early contemplative experiences had come as a teenager, among Zen Buddhists, and he’d always found the basic cross-legged position best. But he’d had to fight so hard to get this sanctuary built at all that he hadn’t wanted to push his luck by revealing his preference for a posture that might be interpreted as pagan.

  It was strange to be here, back in the center of this rough floor, with the fog seeping in as coolness from every edge and corner of the shack, bearing witness to the thing’s unlikely and haphazard construction. Strangest of all, perhaps, was how easy and true it felt, how much it seemed, sinking into this simple presence, that he had never left, that this was the reality and that all the adventures, the drama, dilemmas, and bafflement in the year between sittings here, had been the drifting of a forgetful instant, a hazy space-out between the moment of remembrance and the moment of return.

  Mike had proposed the idea for the hermitage to Abbot Hackley a year and a half after he’d come to Our Lady of Bethany, believing it at the time to be a slam dunk: a prayer retreat, after all, at a monastery. The activity of building itself seemed another selling point: a sweaty project, calluses and holy blisters, exertion and tangible results. His abbot was relentless in his sense that Mike gave entirely too little energy to robust service. But Hackley had seen it differently, had smelled at once a failure of humility, the stink of holy ambition. And defiance, the incapacity to submit to the discipline of obedience.

  True enough, Mike thought, looking back. He’d definitely wanted too much, at every step of his journey, but in the long run that too-muchness was a greed that only God could really cure. And as for the defiance…He’d paid dearly enough for that. The fights with Hackley had blocked out the horizon of his prayer life for years. Mike suspected it had been as much a catastrophe of ego and distraction of the soul for the abbot as it had been for him. But once the battle had been joined, it went on and on, mostly because neither man was willing to lose. So much for the contemplative community as a peaceful incubator of the love of God, a garden of serene devotion: the monastery was the world in small, petty, prickly, and in your face. To be in it but not of it was still the impossible goal. You realized that
at some point and got on with it.

  They’d cut a deal of sorts eventually: Mike could build the shack, but it had to be done in his free time and with scrap materials only, nothing that could be used for anything else. Since there really was no free time in the round of the monastic hours, and precious little went to waste in Our Lady of Bethany’s frugal economy, where they were all by strict design pauperes cum paupere Christo, poor men sharing the poverty of Christ, the abbot had no doubt believed the conditions sufficiently impracticable to allow Mike to knock himself out, while Mike had just been glad to get to work.

  The new refectory was being built at that time, and Mike had taken to rummaging in the dumpster beside the construction site at two in the morning, in the still hour before the community chanted vigils. As he seldom found any scraps larger than about twenty-three inches, he’d used the chunks of leftover board like bricks. Aside from the obvious, that Mike could build only in the dark, in forty-five-minute eruptions of insomnia flanked by prayer and prayer, the limit on the pace of construction at that point had been the nails: he’d gotten amazingly good at finding bent discards amid the sawdust and the mud and straightening them by candlelight, though his left thumbnail was soon perpetually black and his hands battered from hammer blows delivered in the dark.

  For some time, the shack’s walls had eased upward overnight in semisedimentary fashion, like an accumulation of wooden dew, an inch and a half at a time. But Mike had lost ten pounds in the first month, and his eyes sank back behind soggy bags of black, like bruises. He started falling asleep during the communal mass, and during the daily self-examination of faults against the Rule his dogged confessions of pride eventually began to draw smirks from the other monks. He was a walking lesson in spiritual hubris. The rainy season was coming by then, and the project more than ever seemed utterly quixotic. Abbot Hackley, meanwhile, continued to be serenely tolerant of Mike’s exertions, apparently feeling the work to be essentially penitential, if not Sisyphean.