The Monk Upstairs Read online

  The turning point had come when the construction crew realized what was going on. For some reason Mike’s struggle caught their imaginations, an underdog thing, perhaps, and suddenly a much higher quality of materials began to appear, mysteriously, in and around the dumpster: actual two-by-fours, whole boards consigned to the scrap pile for dubious degrees of warping, bags of nails with the merest tinge of rust, an entire piece of plywood someone had used for a sign, and another sheet that had been used as a walkway. Just when the shack’s frame was finally up, a skeleton without much hope of a skin, half a roll of battered but viable tar paper got thrown away; several sheets of flashing and a slightly damaged tube of sealant appeared at a crucial moment in the roofing.

  It all took place quietly, invisibly, under cover of darkness and silence, and by the time Abbot Hackley even realized he was losing, the fight was almost over. To add insult to injury, on the day the cement truck came to pour the final flooring of the new refectory, Mike was summoned from the monastery’s silent lunch by one of the workers “to help them find a place to dispose of the extra concrete.” He’d conceded that he had a place to dump it, and they’d backed the massive truck as far as possible into the woods and used a wheelbarrow for the last stretch of trail, hauling just enough cement for the shack’s rough floor. The crew had poured out the gray stuff cheerfully, shared a cigarette with Mike and given him a wink, and driven off. Mike had been called back to his own monastic duties before he’d been able to fully level the floor, and even now, twenty years later, you could set a marble in the northeast corner and watch it slowly wander southwest, to bump at last against the far wall. But the thing was done.

  Mike had knocked together the prie-dieu the next morning, having saved up a chunk of unblemished two-by-six. He’d never knelt on it himself, but in the years since then, the kneeler had come into its own: two distinct impressions were hollowed into the unpadded board, the knee shapes, decades deep now, of several generations of other monks. Despite its problematic history, the renegade prayer shack had quietly become an integral part of the monastery’s life. For some years now, you’d even had to sign up in advance, particularly during Lent, for time in what had come to be called, formally, the Retreat House, though the old-timers still called it Brother Jerome’s hut, if Abbot Hackley was not around. There had even been talk recently of rebuilding the structure, of making a proper chapel here, with a consecrated altar, a side cell, sink, and toilet, running water, possibly even electricity: a pious haven of stone stability. Mike hoped this would not happen. As it was, the hut felt just right: flimsy, isolated, almost furtive, a place to pray truly, a theft of time from a greedy world. A place where prayer still felt like what it really was, something dangerous.

  Is not my Word like a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?

  He had drifted; you always drifted. Mike found his breath and rode it into the flame again, and memory sweltered and cracked in that soft fire, into shards of regret and bewilderment, benediction and dread: the mystery, the burning knot, the impossibility of self and world. The slipshod walls of scrap and junk sighed and settled like a hearth; the fear within him burned and burned, and he sat at the heart of the fire it fed and breathed cool air. It was his wedding day, and then it was any day; it was nothing, and then it was forever.

  Chapter Two

  If anyone wishes to become a disciple of mine,

  let them take up their cross and follow me.

  MATTEW 16:23

  Rebecca had a bad few minutes, thinking she might have gone down the wrong path, but at last she rounded a bend and spotted the odd little hut that Mike called the prayer shack. She’d heard the story of the thing’s contested construction a couple of times by now, and she still had a hard time understanding what the fuss had been about. The shack was a harmless peculiarity, a whim. It looked like a kid’s tree house that had fallen out of its tree, or the junk sculpture of a mad beachcomber.

  Beyond a creek still swollen with late winter rains, the trail turned muddy for the last stretch, and Rebecca stopped at the edge of the water and considered the soggy passage with dismay. She was getting angry, disgusted with Mike and his holy extremities. She really wasn’t dressed for all this muddy sacred ground, slogging up a redwood-forested Sinai, through manzanita bushes ablaze with the voice of God. But that was her man. At some point there was nothing to do but take your shoes off and let the shrubbery burn.

  She slipped off her sling-backs, drew up the hem of her dress with the hand that still clutched the champagne bottle, and splashed through the creek, feeling the shock of the cold water. She slogged up the muddy rise toward the shack, and as she cleared the brush she found Brother What’s-His-Name, James, Mike’s best buddy at the monastery, sitting quietly outside the entrance on the big boulder someone had hauled in at some point, a sort of Zen centerpiece to the shack’s hapless little garden of stones and herbs. James might have been thirty, but he looked too young to drink. Too young to vote, too young to drive, even. But Mike said he read fluently in four dead languages and three live ones, that he was some kind of theological prodigy, and that he had a killer three-point shot and a way with altar flowers.

  He was whittling something, Rebecca saw, a female figure. A Mary, maybe: the Virgin on a stick. They sold the things in the monastery’s gift shop. Sometimes James made whistles out of them. She’d bought one for Mary Martha the day before and then had to take it away because her daughter couldn’t stop blowing on it and driving everyone crazy. The wooden sculpting was exquisite, but the details were so fine, and James’s pocketknife’s blade so crude, that Rebecca wondered how he did it without cutting his hands. It looked dangerous to her.

  The kid looked up as Rebecca approached, his face a study in sudden dismay, like a teenager caught smoking.

  “Busted,” Rebecca said.

  “He said he’d be right out,” James assured her hastily, speaking in that pointedly lowered tone characteristic of so many of the monastery’s exchanges. A perpetual shush, as if Our Lady of Bethany were a librarian. Rebecca had been here less than twenty-four hours, and it was already starting to drive her a little nuts. You couldn’t ask someone where the bathroom was in this place without disturbing somebody at their prayer. When these maniacs were talking at all.

  “How long ago did he say that?”

  Brother James just smiled, a trace of mystical smugness: God’s time was not the time of human beings. Rebecca considered hitting him with the champagne bottle, then conceded the delay by setting her shoes on the boulder beside him.

  “I’m sure he’ll be out in a minute,” James said amiably.

  “Sixty seconds,” Rebecca agreed, mirroring his tone. “And then I’m going in there and getting him.”

  Brother James looked alarmed. He’d meant a God-minute, of course: the divine margin for error. But she was twenty human minutes late for her own damned wedding. Rebecca said steadily, “Fifty-nine…fifty-eight…”

  “I love your dress,” James offered.

  “Thank you. Fifty-six…”

  James gave up and returned to his carving. Rebecca watched an even strip curl away along the Virgin’s belly, lifting discreetly toward the end, shaping the holy breast. The forest around them was silent in that distinct way redwood groves had, a churchlike stillness. The drooping, primeval ferns dripped audibly, and she could hear the stream. It felt a million miles away from everything. Mike said there were even spotted owls back here, in groves that had never been logged. Georgia-Pacific wanted to cut the whole mountainside down, had offered huge sums repeatedly. But the monks hadn’t sold out yet. Mike had told her that hardly any of them cared about the owls, they just didn’t want all that noise.

  “Forty-five…,” Rebecca said. “Forty-four…”

  Brother James carved on. He had a quality that Mike had, the ability to serenely confound the most fundamental social expectations, to be silent in situations where most people would have felt the need to talk as
strongly as the need to breathe. He was still working on the breast, was about half a shaving shy of the erotic, holding that fine line. Rebecca had an urge to startle him somehow, perversely, to see if the knife would dip too deep and sharpen the figure into carnality. Though she actually suspected that James was gay. His carvings of Jesus were exquisitely buff, managing to both venerate the reality of Incarnation and gently suggest that our Savior might work out at a gym in the Castro. She’d asked Mike about it the night before, and he’d shrugged and said he wasn’t sure, that it would likely be years, if not decades, before James really dealt with his sexuality. But: probably.

  Probably, my ass, Rebecca thought now. She said, “Ten…”

  “Nyuhn-uh,” Brother James said, a perfect kid’s inflection, exactly the way Mary Martha would have said it. Rebecca laughed. “Nyuhn-huh,” she said. “Nine…eight…seven, six, five four three two one.”

  Brother James stood up. Agreeably enough, a good loser. “Shall I go back and tell everyone you two will be along soon?”

  “If anyone’s still there.”

  “It’s actually sort of hard to get out of this place,” James said. He closed his pocketknife and slipped it, with the carving, into a deep pocket somewhere in his robe. It was amazing to Rebecca how much stuff some of these monks carried with them, invisibly, lost in those deep brown folds. Keys, hymnals, reading glasses, pens, screwdrivers, rosaries. They were like holy kangaroos.

  She waited until James was out of sight, then stood up herself. She’d half-hoped Mike would respond telepathically to her presence; it would have been very romantic, in its way, if he’d appeared at the door just now, refreshed by the mystery of communion and primed by prayer to exchange their vows in an atmosphere of consecrated serenity. But apparently she was going to have to bust in on him after all.

  The door was plywood, not a single sheet but three separate scraps, barely coherent, like pieces from different puzzles made to fit. It hung at a slightly drunken angle, and she could smell incense leaking around the edges, the Nag Champa Mike loved to burn. Rebecca put one hand on the door, carefully, to avoid splinters, and pushed. The thing stuck, and she pushed again, more firmly. The rack of wood swung grudgingly inward, more of a flop than a swing, and she stepped inside to meet her bridegroom.

  The door slapped shut behind her at once on its own gravity—it was probably harder to get out of this place than to get into it. The wooden thump sounded enormous in the silence, and Rebecca flinched, then thought, Good, that’ll wake him up.

  It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the hut’s dim interior; Mike either hadn’t had the resources for windows or just hadn’t cared. The only light in the room came from the single votive candle burning on the altar shelf and the tiny orange glow of the incense stick. By the time Rebecca’s eyes made the transition and she could make out his figure sitting on the floor in the middle of the space, Mike’s own eyes were open and he was smiling at her, quite naturally, as if they’d been watching a football game together and she’d gone out to the kitchen for a moment and come back with beers.

  “Isn’t this bad luck or something?” he said.

  Rebecca laughed in spite of herself. She had assumed early in the relationship that his prayer states, which she imagined to be quite deep without really understanding what that meant, were more dramatic things, trancelike ascents into transcendent bliss or sunken plunges into exotic ecstasies, requiring elaborate reentry. What was all the fuss about, otherwise? What else could have compelled him to leave the world for so many years, what else could have sustained him in that weird exile, except something potent and remarkable and spectacularly impervious to normality? But she’d learned soon enough that he was right there, immediately, without transition. However she came in when he was at prayer, loud or soft, delicate or crude, loving or angry, Mike opened his eyes, and there he was. As if, for all the world, he’d just been sitting there waiting for her. He smiled, and there she was too.

  “Bad luck is missing your own damned wedding,” Rebecca said. “This is simple sanity.”

  Mike unfolded his legs by way of reply, lifted his butt, and rolled up his prayer mat. He never got mad when she disturbed him at his prayer. But Rebecca had noted that he did move farther away, in the long run, quietly and relentlessly, like a cat looking for a better nap spot: early in their relationship he had meditated in bed, and then on a pillow in the corner of the bedroom, and finally in the living room. Lately, apparently finding even the most obscure corners of the downstairs insufficient, he had taken to praying in the attic.

  Rebecca hoped he didn’t ever get farther away than this. She wasn’t sure how many more creeks she was willing to cross.

  She stepped close and held out a hand to help him up. Mike took it, and she leaned back against his weight as he rose, then came back to vertical in his arms. She could smell his shaving cream, the cheap stuff, with a touch of aloe; she could smell his cheap balsam-and-honey shampoo. He had a perfectly normal head of beautiful black hair now, and he had sworn not to cut it short again.

  “You smell good,” Mike said.

  “You smell good.”

  “We both smell good,” he said. “Let’s get married.”

  “Funny you should mention that…”

  He released her to blow out the candle, and the room went black. The damp darkness smelled of squirrel shit and tar paper, lightly overlaid with Nag Champa. Mike moved to the door and rummaged briefly for his shoes, then groped for the loop of cord that served as the door’s handle. The door stuck, inevitably, but finally yielded with a scrape and a creak, and they walked outside together into the sweetness of daylight. Mike was already dressed for the event, at least, Rebecca noted now with some relief. He’d been out here meditating in the woods in a goddamned tuxedo.

  Outside, Mike moved to the boulder and sat down on it to tie his shoes, then straightened and took out a pack of cigarettes. Rebecca hesitated then decided, what the hell, late was late, a few more minutes couldn’t hurt.

  “You chased James off?” Mike smiled.

  “Like a rabbit,” Rebecca said. He hadn’t offered her a cigarette; he knew she was trying to quit. Mary Martha’s first-grade education included large doses of vehement antismoking instruction; her daughter was now under the impression that it was just a matter of hours or days after lighting up that you would die. It was wonderful, in its way, but very inconvenient.

  Mike took a drag and blew the smoke away from her, then turned and met her eyes.

  “This is crazy,” he said.

  “I know,” Rebecca said.

  “No, I mean really crazy.”

  She recognized what he was offering: A time-out for the countermovement of sanity. A chance to recall their actual selves. It was one of Mike’s best qualities, that willingness to step out of the traffic of the world, to ignore the honking horns, to find someplace amid the roadside trash to seek the moment’s deeper reality. Rebecca had come to count on it in him. She just wasn’t sure she could stand it right now. There were almost a hundred people sitting back in that ridiculous little chapel waiting for them to play the happy bride and groom, and try as she might, she just wasn’t spiritual enough to ignore that.

  Mike went on, “I had really pictured something less…big. Less—”

  “Farcical?” Rebecca suggested, trying to hurry things along a bit.

  “That seems harsh. But—yes. Less burlesque. Less over-the-top.”

  “I told you we should have gone to Tahoe. But you wanted to humor Phoebe.”

  “It seemed like simple decency at the time.”

  “Decency is never simple,” Rebecca said. “You try to be decent, and one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know you’re dressed like the little plastic couple on top of the wedding cake, trapped in costume on a mountaintop with all your friends and a bunch of guys in brown dresses.”

  “There’s a back way down the mountain,” Mike said. “You can follow the river to Fort Bragg. I know a bar i
n town where happy hour starts at three. I think we can still make it.”

  “What about the sacred reality of marriage?”

  “If we can’t find the sacred reality of marriage in the Typhoon during happy hour, I don’t know where we’re going to find it.”

  They were silent for a moment. Rebecca knew that she should be giving her full and undivided attention to this profound and timely discussion of the biggest commitment of their lives, but all she could think about at the moment was snatching the cigarette out of his hand. Just one puff, she thought. She could write it off to the crush of circumstance. To stress management. Surely even a first-grader could understand that.

  “Is that champagne?” Mike asked.

  Rebecca looked down at the bottle in her hand. She had forgotten all about it. “I grabbed it in the kitchen,” she said. “I guess I wanted to have something handy to drown my sorrows, in case you had decided to bail.” Mike was silent for such a long moment that she felt a jarring burst of electricity along every nerve in her body. “You’re not bailing, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “There’s a baby in this damned bathwater. I was just trying to think of another reason to open the bottle.”

  Rebecca laughed. She forgot: it was as simple as that. She just loved being with the guy. Possibly enough that not even their own wedding could screw it up.

  “We really do need to get back before Abbot Hackley dies, Mike,” she said, for the record.

  “That old fart is going to live forever. He’ll bury us all.”