The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  Well, says the urinal, your life is a competition between you and the strongest version of yourself, the version God wants you to become. And that strongest version of you lies on the dark path, in the solitary contemplation of—

  “Shut up,” I beg my own mind in a whisper. “I’m in love with Mara, not with God, so just please, please shut up.”

  I wash my hands and go back out to my father.

  “Well, what do you think, David?”

  “Um, it . . . it all sounds great, Dad.”

  • • •

  GERMAN UNIVERSITIES have almost three months off between winter and summer semesters, so on Valentine’s Day, 1990, I take a train to Florence to spend a month with Mara, which will be followed by a month of backpacking with Graham.

  Florence is pretty, but I care only about Mara. Each night she and I make dinner in her apartment. Her friend Reston (another Hoya studying abroad) usually comes over, too. Reston boils pasta to a perfect al dente, while Mara and I make sauce. Often it’s merely aglio e olio, just garlic and olive oil, but we get it down to a science. One night toward the end of my visit Mara pours olive oil into the frying pan and heats it, and after cutting the garlic finely I slide the minced-up cloves off the chopping blade, into the pan. We watch the white garlic specks roil in the oil.

  Mara points to them. “Are they suffering?”

  I put on a Darth Vader voice. “It is their destiny.”

  She laughs her murmuring laugh. The kitchen fills with the fruity smell of the oil and pungent garlic and Reston is singing “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and he strains the pasta and we eat. After dinner Reston goes home, and Mara brings out a bottle of Badedas, a European bath bodywash the color green of B-movie Martian goo.

  “Smell this, Max. You’ll love it.”

  She opens the bottle. It has horse chestnut extract in it, and we stand in the kitchen, inhaling like we’re doing whip-its. Then we get in the tub and wash our bodies and hair with the Badedas and we look electric green from head to toe.

  “You’re an alien,” she tells me.

  “So are you.”

  We go to bed. I’m still cleaving to my no-actual-intercourse rule, but I have other ways to make Mara come, and I love to cause and witness and cheer the peaking powers of her body. Afterward, we lie in each other’s arms.

  “David . . .”

  I somehow know what’s coming next.

  “You have to start making love to me again. Having full-on sex with me. Please, you have to. Sometime soon. I just . . .”

  “I understand,” I say.

  “I can’t help wanting all of you. That’s how this is supposed to work. I want to raise your babies. Not yet, you know that, but . . . I just need all of you. I miss all of you. And what we do now, orgasms are great, but it’s not enough . . . it makes me feel . . .”

  She sighs. She sounds tired, ground down in a deep part of herself. “I’ve even tried going to church about this. I’ve tried praying to your God.”

  This floors me. “You’ve tried praying?”

  “Yes. But . . .” Her voice gets small. Possibly angry. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Mara, you don’t have to pray. Don’t ever think that I think that you have to.”

  “David . . . please, we need to start fucking again. Sometime soon. Maybe by the time I come to Tübingen this summer? I’ve been trying to meet you halfway, honey, but . . .”

  I nod into her neck. I nod because I understand, not because I know what I’ll do. Later, after Mara is asleep, I call my mother from Mara’s apartment phone, which is in the kitchen and out of earshot of the bedroom.

  My mother is surprised to hear from me. Usually we schedule our calls. She asks if everything’s all right. I say that it is.

  “Hmm,” she says. “What’d you have for dinner?”

  My mother never believes that I’m okay unless I’ve recently dined. I once heard her tell someone that I eat as much as a horse and then I eat the horse.

  “I had aglio e olio,” I say.

  “Stop showing off.”

  “I had pasta.”

  She is quiet. I listen to the international clicks on the line.

  “Mom . . . you know all about Dad’s deaconate stuff?”

  “Of course.”

  I nod and stare around Mara’s kitchen. It is a true Italian kitchen with bottles of Chianti on the table next to a bowl full of pepperoncini and an Italian newspaper open to an article about some soccer game. This afternoon Mara sat on the kitchen floor reading that article in just her underwear and a T-shirt of mine while spooning up from a bowl a snack of white beans with raw garlic and juice from fresh lemons. I think of my family’s kitchen back home, the room my mother is in right now. She is a first-rate cook and baker. She makes unrivaled Rice Krispie brownies, not with marshmallows, but with German sweet chocolate and butterscotch. Neither of my parents has ever sat nor will ever sit on a floor in their underwear while munching garlic and beans. More things in that experience would be too raw for them than just the garlic.

  “Mom . . . how’d you know that Dad was the one?”

  “Uh-oh,” says my mother. “David, you’re only twenty.”

  “You were only twenty-two when you got married!”

  She sighs. “I knew your father was the one because I would have been fine without him.”

  “That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

  “Well, it is. I would’ve been fine without him, but I knew that life with him was what I wanted and that it would be wonderful. I chose it. I was free, and it was the right thing to do with my freedom.” She pauses. “Did you have meat with the pasta?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t do well without meat. Next time have some meat.”

  “Okay.”

  There is more I want to ask her. But I can see the conversation in my imagination:

  ME: Mom, should I be a priest or should I resume screwing Mara’s brains out nightly?

  MY MOM: (No dialogue. Horrified, she passes out. A pan of butterscotch chocolate Rice Krispie brownies falls from her hand.)

  So I ask no more questions. We say that we miss and love each other and then we hang up.

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS LATER I catch a train up to Vienna to meet Graham and we launch a spring trip we’ve been planning. Our first stop is Prague. Its famous castle is sprawling and stately. The exchange rate is enough of a steal that at dinner our first night I pay just two American dollars for a whole roasted duck and a bottle of Riesling. I’m so happy that Dam-and-Grave are reunited that after finishing, I order the whole meal again. Graham keeps pace, putting away two plates of venison and two bottles of cabernet.

  Next is a train trip to Budapest, and while we’re on board Graham discovers that I carry a rosary in the front pocket of my jeans. He’s told me several times that he doesn’t believe in God, and he looks stunned now, or betrayed, and he asks me questions. When it’s clear to him that I actually use the rosary regularly, he harrumphs.

  “Wait . . . you haven’t ever prayed for me, have you?”

  I lie. “Um, no.”

  “Don’t you ever pray for me,” he threatens. “I mean it, Schick.”

  He has dark moods and motivations sometimes. One reason we stay friends is because when he gets a certain glare in his eyes, I leave him be.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Our goal is Greece. After Budapest, we get a train south but it stops at the border between Hungary and Yugoslavia. Intimidating soldiers in gray overcoats board and start yelling in Hungarian and looking at passports.

  They order off the train all Americans and everyone who’s not Hungarian or Yugoslavian. I’m in the train’s bathroom, suffering chronic diarrhea, but even from the bathroom throne I can see out the window a concrete building into which all American
passengers are being herded. A knock comes on the door and I hear Graham.

  “Hey, come on out, man, there’s a guard here. He needs to see our passports and they’re in there with you in your rucksack. I think we’re getting booted.”

  “I can’t come out,” I grunt.

  “He can’t come out,” Graham tells the guard. He tries to explain my plight in German.

  “Him, name.” The guard raps the door, speaks broken English. “Him, in there, name . . . what is?”

  “You don’t speak any German?” Graham asks.

  “No.” The guard bangs on the door again. “Him name . . . what is?”

  I’m not sure why Graham says what he says next. I think he knows that I’m stressed about Mara. In any case he tells the guard, “His name is Delphin. Dell-fain.”

  The guard raps the door. “Delphin in there, you come out.”

  I’m still indisposed, but I start laughing, hard. It gets up under my ribs.

  “Delphin? You, out, now!”

  I clench my teeth and hold back howls. The guard keeps calling me a dolphin. He opens the door and juts his head in. He’s glaring, then his hand flies up to cover his nose.

  “Oh, Delphin,” he says.

  In hysterics, I slap the wall. As the guard ducks out, I can tell from his face that he won’t haul me off the toilet. When the train continues south minutes later, Graham and I are the only Americans still on it.

  We stop in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, for one night. There are visible bits of soot in the air from some factory or another, and when I sneeze into a white Kleenex, it turns black. We order food at a local restaurant and get served some cooked intestines that, as near as we can tell, are stuffed with other cooked intestines. Feeling like very ugly Americans, we end up eating dinner instead at a McDonald’s, where an old woman patron with kind eyes and zero teeth tries to sell me playing cards featuring pornographic pictures of naked gymnasts. Belgrade is not for us.

  We end up in Matala, on the south shore of the island of Crete. There are white cave-pocked cliffs. It is fifty degrees out at best. It’s early April and the season doesn’t start until May, and Graham and I are the only tourists in town. We sit shirtless on beaches of tiny round stones, shivering, indignant that the sun won’t warm us and that we’re not getting the dream vacation which we planned. Finally we leave Crete for Ios.

  I’ve arranged for us to meet up on Ios with Mara and two Alabama Boys (who are studying abroad as well) and their girlfriends. The Alabama Boys and their sweethearts arrive first, and while they settle at the hostel, I wait on the dock for the day’s last ferry. It arrives with a searing orange sunset at its back. Mara is on the ferry deck and I can tell it’s her just by her silhouette.

  “Maaax!” She bounds down the gangplank into my arms like a soldier’s wife.

  I’ve splurged to get us the nicest hostel room, a private one with a big bed. At a local restaurant we and all our friends have a giant laugh-fest of a meal that lasts until midnight, and I get the DJ to play “Stir It Up,” my and Mara’s favorite Bob Marley song. But later as Graham is singing Sinatra and making the room whoop, Mara starts crying. She’s watching an Alabama Boy and his girlfriend kiss and I know that she’s seeing in them some unassailable oneness, some deep agreement of being. She goes out onto the terrace and I follow.

  “Mara,” I say. “Mar.” It’s a nickname that I use only in emergencies. I put my arms around her while she looks at the ocean.

  “You’re upset about the Medjugorje plan, right?” I say. “Look, let’s just bag it.”

  Mara has agreed that after Ios, she and I will break off from the others and travel to Medjugorje, the Yugoslav village where the Virgin Mary has allegedly appeared. I have doubts about the place, but I’ve longed to see it.

  “We’re not bagging it,” Mara insists, wiping her eyes. “It’s important to you . . . so it’s important to me.”

  • • •

  FROM IOS, she and I take the ferry to Athens. We take a train to Yugoslavia and then get up into the mountains to Medjugorje by bus. The terrain is free of vegetation. Among the dirt and rocks is a church, and pilgrims visit a hillside spot where visitations have allegedly happened. We see candles and crucifixes around a shrine. Most of the pilgrims are middle-aged Americans in windbreakers. I arrange for Mara and me to piggyback onto a tour group as they meet the eldest visionary.

  She is a young woman named Vicka, and speaking through a translator she answers questions. I ask Vicka what she or for that matter Mary feels about the world’s many religions and the bitter divides among them. Once she understands my question Vicka smiles and speaks to the translator.

  “Vicka says,” the translator tells me, “that there is only one God.”

  Later in the day we go to the nearby seaside town of Dubrovnik. While Mara goes off to take photographs I duck into a church. There’s an American tour group celebrating Mass. They’ve just been to Medjugorje and are soon to fly home. Several people in the group keep glancing at one woman among them. She is around fifty, and the others nudge her to talk. She shakes her head until the group’s priest asks if she’ll please tell the story just one more time. She stands.

  She says that a few years ago she had malignant tumors in her head—a large one at the base of her brain, and a smaller one on the left side—and that surgeons removed them. She convalesced, losing her hair and lots of weight. She eventually came through it, but she had a paralyzing fear that the tumors would come back.

  Then in Medjugorje she was on the shrine hill during a prayer ceremony. Afterward a man came up to her. He was Latvian and spoke no English, and he could communicate only via his friend, who translated. He told the woman that during the ceremony he’d been in the crowd below her. He said that he’d seen two glowing images on her head, one larger one near the base of her skull and a smaller one on her head’s left side. He said that they were faces shining in her dark hair. He said that he believed he’d seen the face of Christ.

  “So I just know now that they . . .” The woman gestures at her own bowed head. “They’re gone for good. I’ll die someday, but not from them.”

  When the Mass ends I hurry to the city’s castle ramparts where Mara and I agreed to meet. She’s sitting on a giant black ship’s anchor.

  “What happened?” she asks. “You look keyed up.”

  “There was a woman at church . . .” I try to tell the story, but it comes out puny and false.

  “Did you believe her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mara squeezes my hand, but looks off at some clouds. She knows that whether or not I believe the story, I want to, whereas she requires only the day and the sky and Dubrovnik and me.

  • • •

  BACK IN TÜBINGEN I will myself not to fret about Mara’s upcoming July visit. For a while I distract myself, because Tübingen is summer-beautiful. Each morning there is bright dew on the lawns around Waldhäuser Ost. The Neckar River is rapid with bubbling mountain runoff and every day is sunny. Graham and I have classes all day on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but then, incredibly, a five-day weekend each week. We throw Frisbees and cook dinners with Audrey and Nicole.

  And then Mara arrives. Her first night in town there’s a giant party in a dorm called Studo. Beer flows and there’s no air-conditioning and the dance floor is a packed, bouncing fire hazard. Mara’s wearing a peasant-green dress and purple, pottery-made earrings I bought her and we dance and dance.

  When “Love Shack” comes on, we tug each other down a hall. Clattering into an empty, echoing women’s shower room, we sneak into a shower stall, kissing and groping. I hike up her dress and pull off her underwear and she leans back against the wall. I’m hard and ready and Mara’s eyes on mine are warm with urging. I tell her that I love her.

  I kiss her neck while the B-52s tell me to Just Fuck This Girl Already.

  My arm
s are wrapped around her. My cock stays on the brink, uncommitted.

  Go on, I tell myself. This is what lovers do!

  I kiss her shoulders and neck. We stand there, with me wavering. I wish, God how I wish, that I were anyone but me, that I could believe anything but what I do. When Mara finally sighs, it’s a death knell. I slump against the wall, my cheeks red-hot and emasculated.

  “David, the fact that you can’t . . . the fact that you won’t . . .it makes me feel like I disgust you.”

  I taste something acidic in my mouth. I stand there naked, sorry. “Mara, please. Mar.”

  She turns away and leans her temple to the tile wall, hanging her head, letting gravity do what it does to her hair. I see the river-rapids scar on her neck, vulnerable and crooked. I reach out and touch it.

  “Help,” I say, like I have a thousand times. “I’m a ship caught in these river rapids. Somebody help.”

  Mara whirls around, her eyes wide and afraid and she hugs me hard. “What’s happening, honey?” she cries out. “What’re we doing?”

  Ending, I think.

  Just weeks later we’re back at Georgetown. Mara and I break up and she starts dating and sleeping with a Hawaiian guy named Akoni, and my fairy tale is done.

  Chapter Five

  A MONTH LATER, on an October morning of my senior year, I sit in the office of Father Roy Tillermacher and tell him that I want to become a Jesuit priest.

  An hour beforehand I paced around on Copley Lawn, trading telepathies with inanimate objects.

  I’m afraid, I told a stone wall.

  You’re ready, the wall assured me. Take the leap. You’ll still be you once you’re a priest. Just a stronger you.

  I’ll be lonely, I thought toward the John Carroll statue.

  God’s grace will get you through, the statue said.

  Finally I closed my eyes. All right, Lord. I love You. I’m all Yours.

  Father Tillermacher has an office just a couple buildings away from the Jesuit Residence, known as the Jez-Rez. The Jez-Rez is a red-brick building containing Jesuit apartments and the white-linen Jesuit dining hall, which students can visit only with a priest.