by Dennis Must
A banner is dropped from above my head, reading: MESSAGE FROM GOD.
Whadizit?, in proper obeisance, kneels down before me to receive the communication, intently concentrating with his ear to my lips while he, Whadizit?, mouths the words so the onlookers can see. When finished, I require him to repeat it back to me.
Satisfied that he has heard properly, I bless Whadizit? and send him on his way.
He carries the “MESSAGE FROM GOD” sign as he attempts to find the right party to give it to. But of course there is none. He becomes markedly dismayed as he navigates the onlookers before him, trying to get through them, stumbling en route.
“It is for you!” he cries.
“Me?” an onlooker responds.
“No, you!” Whadizit? answers, continuing his quest.
I played all these skits in my head, anticipating how Whadizit? and I would be star attractions among the “living curiosities.”
I reflected on how it was as if Father Westley Mueller had been Holy-Schlitz’s leaden self, one that he had to sadly abandon. And, dare he say it . . . wondered aloud if his predecessor’s persona was in truth carrying about the corpse of God within him.
Yet who would be the first to utter it?
One could envision carrying a dead Christ around within himself . . . but God?
Those twelve mortifying themselves on the crosses, or burying themselves in freshly dug graves, the incantatory cries of the believers that night, with the living curiosities looking on . . .
Was it not some unspoken recognition that God had died within them? Was not the passion of their collectively sung misery reflective of that truth? The verity that no one dared to voice?
Had the freaks acknowledged that among themselves . . . and is that why they neither grinned nor cried but looked on with an expression of wistfulness as if they recalled a period early on when all men were living curiosities, as was God?
It was then in the inky black that I realized the only light was that inside my head. Yet there I stood in forlornness, lit up in a poignant memory but unable to see my hands before my face. Yet I was still Schlitz . . . or was I?
To whom could I return as Schlitz . . . Jeremiah would not recognize him.
And in the exuberance of abandoning the Father Westley Mueller persona, I became painfully aware that I’d forgotten my brother. In my joy at being able to look back on St. Joseph’s seminary with relief and meeting my new friends, the living curiosities, and then being swept up into the spectacle in the monastery’s courtyard . . . I’d forgotten my other half, Jeremiah.
As if I’d no longer had a heartbeat.
And in this state of abject terror, I walked back in the direction from which I thought I’d come. Except I had no true sense of where that might be. I had auditioned for a role that had no past or future, one that only was, and for which there were no anchors, other lives.
I’d opted for skit maker, a harmless thespian.
But who was I now?
What were my memories worth to Holy-Schlitz? He was not attached to any of them in truth. Whereas Westley Mueller had been intimately connected to each memory.
In this extreme state of anxiety, I stopped walking and considered whether in truth I might be dead.
That’s when I began hysterically laughing.
Dead? Holy-Schlitz?
Dead like the corpse of God within me?
And cried out, “Why have I forsaken myself?”
“Jeremiah,” I yelled. “Where are you?”
And there before me lay the portion of the monastery courtyard where the monks had buried themselves earlier that day or two days earlier.
The rectangles of sod lay freshly in place over the graves as if they were winter blankets. Having fallen to my knees, I stripped one away. The soil was of course not compact, and handful after handful I scooped to the side of the grave. Calling for Jeremiah to rise up and greet me, for I’d seen them lay him down.
Gradually the mound of soil began to rise and the cavity at my knees grew deeper and wider. I sank into it as if it were a tomb. Soon I would hear a faint echo as if Jeremiah were returning my voice.
“Brother, we must not die.”
For flesh turns to granite and the recollection of one’s sweet breath on one’s face is little more than the draft of a closing door. The corpse of God smothers us in such repasts, Jeremiah. Come alive, my voice; give me back my name.
As if I had to summon the strength to roll the corpse of God to one side so that he might begin to stir. And as the water began to return to his eyes, causing him to weep mud and saliva bubbling at the corners of his hoary lips that had begun to blush blue-red, soon stuttering bits of words that rang blasphemous inside his grave:
“Brother, we must not die.”
EPILOGUE
PART ONE
My room is not much larger than the one I occupied in Riverside Suites, except here the window looks out upon a glade of aspen trees. When it is pleasant outside, I walk the grounds and spend time with my thoughts. The staff is considerate and kind.
The irony of being cared for by Franciscan monks is not lost on me. But I don’t talk about my past. It lies on my dresser, several hundred pages of it, bound by twine. The faded photograph alongside it is that of my father as a very young man.
It was he who brought me here, for I had despaired of finding Westley.
“You mustn’t give up your quest” were his last words to me.
That manuscript is the promise of tomorrow for me. By that, I mean it augurs chapters that as yet haven’t been composed. For now it is sufficient that I tried. One might even say I lost myself in pursuing him to prove to each of us that I was very much alive and worthy of his admiration.
When guests are invited onto our premises, there are days I expect him to appear in my doorway. He will confess how physically close we were to each other at times.
And I will ask, “Why didn’t you speak my name, Westley?”
The promise of tomorrow, he will answer.
But I have become accustomed to this place, their way of life. Those days when I wish to be left alone, nobody knocks on my door.
Brother Alexander is my closest confidant. It was he who took me under his wing, so to speak, when I arrived at the sanitorium. My father told him I was a writer, to which he replied that we had something in common because he had once starred in the theater. “Small roles, mind you,” he demurred. “But I was a very good character actor.”
And the three of us laughed.
“What do you write?” he asked during that first meeting.
Papa looked at me expectantly, not certain what I’d say.
“A mystery,” I said. But quickly added, “Not the conventional kind, however.”
Brother Alexander nodded, muttering to himself, “Yes, that’s why we’re here.”
It was at that moment that I truly felt welcomed in this place.
Within weeks of my arriving, there were moments when I imagined we had known each other in the past. As Westley had made up characters in his stories, I viewed Brother Alexander as one who created roles, with the only difference being that he performed them. When we spent afternoons together, often he would adopt a different personality and keep in character the entire time. I engaged as the situation required. Sometimes his chosen persona was especially angry over some perceived wrong inflicted upon him. Once he wept uncontrollably for an imagined slight against another brother in our community. “It’s why we are here,” I consoled. “No one takes offense at anything we might say or do.” Yet my words did nothing to allay his grief.
Most personas he assumed, however, were quotidian, man-in-the-street sorts, a bit down-at-the-heels, a touch sad and fatalistic in nature, gently self-mocking.
When he came to my door, it was rare that I didn’t welcome him to enter. Also, he had a peculiar knock . . . Morse code for “SOS!”
One day, Brother Alexander inquired about the manuscript on my dresser. “What is that?�
� he wondered. “Is it a book you are writing?”
“No,” I said. “Well, it was never meant to be.”
“My characters are never so opaque,” he chided, and was about to pick it up.
“Please, don’t.”
He looked miffed.
“It has nothing to do with you,” I said. “It just isn’t what it appears to be.”
“Then tell me, Ethan.”
I took a deep breath, uncertain whether I was prepared to reveal my story even to him, with whom I’d begun to feel close and trusting. But Brother Alexander wasn’t prepared to let me escape his penetrating gaze.
I walked to the window and studied the aspens. Soon their limbs would be bare and snow would straddle the north side of their trunks.
Without facing him, “It’s not my manuscript,” I said. “It is, yet it isn’t. I find it very difficult to put in words just what those pages represent.”
“But you said you were a writer,” he protested.
“I am, in the sense that I talk to myself in sentences, paragraphs, whole chapters that I compose.”
“Are you suggesting that stack of papers is composed of notes to yourself, nothing more?”
“No. There is a story inside those pages.”
“Well, then you are a writer. Similar to the characters I make up. Except mine I don’t put on paper.” Brother Alexander tapped first his heart then his head.
I sat down across from him. “That afternoon a week ago when you sobbed without restraint . . . you knew that person well, didn’t you? I mean to say it wasn’t simply for my entertainment.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“Because he was you that day, isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“And the following day, when you were that simpleton who sold newspapers at the train station, how you affected that man’s stutter, expressing his longing for the affection of a woman he imagined . . . you weren’t just doing that for my amusement either, were you?”
He shook his head.
“Well, now I feel even closer to you than before. Because that manuscript over there is remarkably similar to those very personas you invent, longtime friends whom you carry around and visit with in my presence. I welcome and understand them just as I embrace your friendship.”
I lifted the book off my dresser, handing it to him.
“In effect, this is that glade of aspens outside my window,” I said. “My anchor. The materialization that I, Ethan Mueller, exist. I can hand it to you and say, ‘This is me.’ For when you shake my hand or place your arm about me in friendship . . . what are you touching? We never know from one moment to the next, do we, dear friend?”
Brother Alexander tucked the manuscript under his arm and embraced me. No words. And I didn’t see him for an entire week, not at my door, at the communal table, or outside in the brisk autumnal weather.
I had almost begun worrying about him.
Then one morning before sunup, he signaled “Help!” on my door. I climbed out of bed and opened it. His first words, accompanied by a wide grin:
“Ethan, I am Westley.”
I merely stared at him.
The intensity of his expression caught me off guard. We faced each other as if frozen in time . . . until I burst out laughing, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him into my room.
“Only you,” I said, “could have pulled that precious moment off.”
Except his mien remained unchanged. He placed the manuscript back on my dresser and walked to the window, now with his back to me.
“I apologize,” he said.
“For what?”
“What I’ve put you through.”
He’s an actor, after all, I thought. Why not let him continue and suspend my disbelief? Play along.
Brother Alexander turned to me, stricken. The morning sunlight caused his eyes to glisten like reflecting pools.
“My God, Ethan, I’m lost. Honest to Christ, all that I have believed about myself has been turned upside down.”
He sat down on the side of my bed and stared at the wall, his hands racing over each other by turns as if to console, to make amends.
It was a stunning performance. I had even greater respect for Brother Alexander now. It would have been so easy for me to suspend my disbelief. In fact, I thought, why don’t I? Just to relish the experience.
“Why did I let it go on so long?” he asked.
An actor’s rhetorical question, I presumed.
“I want to know what I missed, Ethan!” He was more insistent now. “Couldn’t I have been son enough to deliver those stories to him in person? And look what I have made out of your life. Page after page devoted to coming to terms with one Westley Mueller. How do I come to terms with this miserable self I call me? Speak to me, brother. What in God’s name have I done?”
Brother Alexander’s self-flagellating performance had begun to unnerve me. I was now beginning to slip back into the life of my manuscript.
Yet he now sat within inches of me, pleading that I reply to him in some manner.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You are sorry? What have you done except what I’ve caused you to do? Please!”
“No. It’s simply too painful for me. I want you to stop playing this character. Brother Alexander, you underestimate your talent.”
“You are not getting it, are you?” He reached out and gripped my hand. “Ethan, I am Westley. Didn’t you hear me?”
An instinct to lash out at him rose up inside me. He had pushed his character acting too far.
“Your little drama’s expired,” I said, and ushered him out my door.
For several days I didn’t see him. Even at evening meals he failed to show. That was not unusual, however, given the freedom each of us was granted. He could stay in his room for days at a time, and when he reemerged there would be no disparaging asides.
The night that he did appear for dinner occurred on a Friday, always a special event in our weekly habits since the food was more elaborate and accompanied by a better wine than usual. Also, one of us—there were twelve—was expected to provide some form of entertainment at meal’s end. Given that the performance was on a volunteer basis only and never announced in advance, occasionally Friday meals closed with two or more presentations.
Another special aspect of the gathering was its formality. A bit ironic in that nothing in the house was ever required, even our right to leave if we so wished. Yet returning without the full consent of those in charge could be problematic. It was not advised. Why risk it? Furthermore, I and the others had been on the outside; we liked it here.
We sat at a long, groaning table set with white linen tablecloths and napkins, fine bone china, sterling silverware, and crystal wine goblets. This particular evening’s repast consisted of Cornish hens with fresh asparagus and a quality merlot. Other meals were always adequate but perfunctory; we dressed normally and wore name tags identically inscribed: WHO ARE YOU?
The distinguishing feature of Friday’s assembling, though, was how one made his appearance at the table. It was the custom for each resident to identify himself in a manner that characterized the life he had lived outside this place. For some residents, it was the shame they carried inside them that they wore to the table. For instance, Father Jeffreys arrived carrying silver lockets that contained photographs of the children he’d molested in the rectory. He would drop them onto his plate, the sound of which unsettled each of us as we assumed his affliction.
Brother Joseph cross-dressed as Italian Baroque painter Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato’s Penitent Magdalene. He entered the dining room as the artist’s seventeenth-century devotional painting. With eyes closed and his head resting against a wooden cross, embraced as if it were his lover, the pious resident’s long, feminine tresses brushed against his bare shoulders. Assuming his usual place at the table, he’d remain in a fixed position, a tableau vivant. Several of us were mesmerized by his presence, but since eye contact
was exceedingly rare, at least during gatherings, observations had to occur on the sly.
This habit of not looking at each other in an open way for the most part caused us to always be looking down, say, at our plates or our hands. Sometimes one would espy a resident looking about, but then his gaze would be directed above some other resident’s head or at the ceiling.
Upon entering the house, not yet apprised of the tradition, at my first gathering I tried to exchange knowing glances but was summarily rebuffed. In short order I learned, attributing the custom to a sense of communal guilt.
Father Ogden arrived at each Friday’s table nude, with nothing but Christ’s stigmata painted on him inelegantly with an amaranthine lipstick, the shade of which approximated the nimbus about a black eye. He accompanied that with a grief-stricken mien, that too unchanging throughout the meal. Even when he quaffed the fine wine.
Brother Alexander wore a Trappist choir cowl with a taxidermied white rabbit hanging from its hind legs down his back, suspended from his neck by a leather cord.
Father Dominion, one of the pair of septuagenarians who always positioned himself at the head of the table (he saw to it that he arrived earlier than the rest of us), wore about his waist a luminous St. Francis crimson silk cincture, which he would remove and place before him as if its multitude of capuchin knots were the heads of Biblical snakes . . . yet another convenient focal point for many of us throughout the meal, being that we often kept our heads down.
Brother Rostislav, the other aged resident, carried with him a square box, no lid, containing intricately carved wooden torsos of various saints painted in festive hues, which he would place about his dinner setting like a blockade.
I arrived with my manuscript bound in purple ribbon and clutched tightly to my breast; once seated, I’d place it in my lap for the remainder of the meal. My fellow diners knew that I always carried it on my person outside my room. When passing me in the hallways or outside, each would nod to the manuscript as if it were me.
