The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  I’m confiding my vocation in Father Tillermacher rather than Father Prince. I still love Father Prince’s Masses, but he scares me. He never swears or even gossips, and he’s so emaciated that it looks like God took a knife to the guy and whittled him down. I love playing Ultimate Frisbee too much to want to look like that. I want to be strong. A warrior priest!

  Father Tillermacher is more approachable. He’s originally from South Dakota and has muscles and says “fuck” sometimes. As I sit with him, he asks me why I want to be a priest.

  “I can’t stop thinking about it. I feel like God is inviting me to do it for Him and I don’t think I can live with myself if I say no. And because of . . .”

  “Yes?”

  The clock in his office tings and tongs.

  Because of the dark path, I think. It’s where I come from and it’s where I’m headed and it makes no sense to live on it alone, but I have to. I have to empty my life and go there and worship God from there.

  “David?” asks Father Tillermacher. “You were saying?”

  I clam up. I don’t talk about the path with anyone. “I can’t think of anything gutsier that I could do.”

  Father Tillermacher raises his eyebrows. He asks if he can give me some Scripture passages to read and pray over with regard to my feelings. I agree. He asks if I’ve discussed my vocation with anyone else. I say no.

  “Is this something your parents encouraged you towards? Giving a son to the priesthood can be a great honor for parents, but it can also be a pressure that they place on—”

  “They’ve never suggested it.”

  “You came to this on your own?”

  I nod.

  “And it’s just between you and me, for now?”

  “Yes, please,” I say. “For now.”

  • • •

  I LIVE IN a house off campus with five other senior guys: the Alabama Boys (they’re now a force of three—Mason, Daniel, and Austin—because Bob fell away somehow), and a painter and an actor. Our living room has ratty purple couches. The Alabama Boys and the painter have girlfriends, so any one of these couples can usually be found on the couches. On the walls are oil-on-canvas works that the painter made, inspired by notes we’ve left around the house. My favorite says WHO DRANK MY FUCKING MILK?

  I get home one evening to find Mason standing on one couch, rapping from memory the song “My Hooptie” by Sir Mix-A-Lot. Mason’s girlfriend and the other Boys sit on the opposite couch, laughing. Cross-legged on the floor is Daphne Lowell, a pretty brunette from Vermont who shares a dorm room with Mason’s girlfriend.

  “Hey, cannibal!” Mason yells as I come in. “Get in here!”

  I join the others. Mason stands astride the couch, glaring down at me. “I saw you today, going into that secret dining hall with What’s-His-Face.”

  “Father Tillermacher,” I say.

  Mason folds his arms. “What goes on in that place, Schick? Isn’t it suspicious that I, a lapsed Baptist, don’t get invited, but you get the inner sanctum buffet?”

  “Here we go.” Austin sighs. He and the others are used to watching me and Mason go at it.

  I say, “Father Tillermacher’s a really good guy.”

  “They’re grooming you, Schick!” Mason stomps his foot. “The Jesuits are fucking recruiting you and I won’t let it happen.”

  Daphne smiles to herself. Besides being beautiful and smart, she’s the only other person in the room who was raised Catholic and still goes to Mass. She gets a kick out of it when Mason goes apeshit on me. Also her voice and laugh are wonderful and she might be my wife.

  “Mason,” I say, “why is it so bad if I have a harmless lunch with—”

  “It’s not harmless! Those priests are fucking sneaky and you’re my buddy!” He paces on the couch. “You’re not like them, dammit, you’re like us!” He stabs his finger around at our friends. “You can’t be a Jesuit, Schick. Don’t beat your head against that two-thousand-year-old wall. I want you to be free!”

  I point a finger at him, too. “You want me to be free the way a Bolshevik wants a man to be free. Meaning, as long as I bail on believing in God and thinking that maybe that requires something of me . . . as long as I bail on all that, then I’m free.”

  He looks like he’ll leap down and punch me.

  “Guys, enough,” says Austin.

  Mason unclenches his fists. “Schick. If you become a priest—You. Will. Be. Miserable.” He storms off to his room.

  A few weeks later Mara invites me to her apartment for dinner with her and Akoni, her Hawaiian boyfriend. All fall she’s been inviting me to do things, but I’ve declined. I can still smell the skin over her ribs just by thinking of her, and I’ve jolted awake many nights after moving my lips toward what my sleeping body still trusts will be the nape of her neck beside me. This makes me sure that any post-breakup time spent with her will be torture, but Mara keeps calling me, insisting that we’re friends who can stay close. Maybe she just wants to see if I’m okay. Finally, stupidly, I agree to dinner.

  Mara says on the phone that we’ll be having pasta aglio e olio, our old favorite. I arrive at her apartment with a bottle of Chianti. Mara greets me at the door, looking killer good in a green sweater and black stretch pants. Behind her stands a tall, beefy, black-haired guy who looks like maybe his ancestors sacrificed virgins in volcanoes. Mara and I hug awkwardly. She holds her hand out, indicating the Polynesian elephant in the room.

  “Dave, have you met Akoni before? Akoni, Dave. Okay, Dave, you’re on garlic duty, you’re the pro at that, and I’ll be on oil and pasta, and Akoni, you pour wine.”

  We go to our stations, do our jobs. The meal goes fine until dessert, by which point Akoni is a bit drunk and stroking Mara’s hair and sneering at me. I focus on my dessert, a dish of vanilla ice cream with crushed Skor bars. Mara and I ate this regularly sophomore year and I know that she’s served it now to make me comfortable.

  “So, Dave,” says Akoni, “you’re pretty Catholic, yes?”

  Mara clears her throat. “Don’t ask him about that, please.”

  I say, “I guess I am.”

  Akoni keeps stroking Mara’s hair. They’re sitting across from me. His hand keeps a lazy rhythm on her, up and down, then burrows into her hair to where her river-rapids scar lies.

  Don’t touch that scar, I think toward his hand. It’s hers and mine.

  “I hear that you take the Catholic stuff really seriously.” His sneer hasn’t quit. “Like, you don’t even believe in having full premarital sex.”

  Mara slams her spoon down. “What did I say?! Don’t ask him about that!”

  “This has been wonderful.” I leave. Mara follows and catches me on the landing outside. She holds my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “What’d you think would happen? He’s a guy, I’m a guy . . .”

  “He’s heard so much about you from me that this is hard for him.”

  This is hard for him? “I should go.”

  “David—I saw you yesterday talking to that cute Asian girl from the nursing school.”

  I have sweat behind my knees. I wonder if a sharpened Skor bar could be stabbed through Akoni’s eyeball, into his brain.

  “She seems great. You were making her laugh, and Reston tells me he’s seen her going to Mass, so she probably believes the same things that—”

  “Mara, don’t.”

  “Ask her out, honey.” She squeezes my wrist. “Please, I need you to be happy. Call her, okay?”

  We say a tense good-night. I go to the campus pub and drink and dance. “Tenderness” by General Public plays, and I move with the beat, stomping my feet on Akoni’s face, which is really just the dance floor. Swaying couples around me look pissed, but I keep it up. “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals comes on and I morph to the beat. My fath
er’s father was a solo flyer on dance floors, too. He, Grampa Joe the farmer, would escort my grandmother to hoedowns in barns. She’d head home early, but he’d stay and whirl in the sawdust till the fiddlers quit.

  I stumble home from the pub at two a.m., sweaty and chilly and weaving along the Reservoir Road sidewalk. The wind stings. I stare at trees and shadows.

  One sentence, Lord, I pray. Just talk to me once. Tell me I’m moving in the right direction.

  I hear nothing. The wind whips. My armpits are raw with sweat. When I get home I collapse in my clothes on my bed. The room spins. A knock comes on my door.

  “Who’s there?” I croak.

  “The Bolshevik.” Mason lets himself in. I aim my face at the wall, not looking at him. He pulls off my shoes and tosses them, then sits on the floor near my head.

  “Are you drunk, Schick?”

  “Yes.”

  I’m still facing away from him.

  “So . . . I guess dinner went well.”

  I tell him what Akoni said.

  “Schick, you know that Mara’s probably still in love with you, right? And that you’re definitely still in love with her?”

  I nod. Mason sighs. My eyes adjust to the dark and I see on my wall the things I’ve hung there, a crucifix, and a poster for the vampire film The Hunger. I wonder why people my age have to put shit all over their walls that says This is who I am!

  Mason says, “Can you tell me again why you stopped fucking Mara? You’re afraid of knocking her up? You’re afraid of abortion?”

  I close my eyes. “That’s part of it. But mostly . . .” I pause. “You think I’m a simpleminded papist. Why do you care?”

  “I’m your buddy.”

  The spins get to me and I open my eyes. On my movie poster of The Hunger, standing over a corpse, is David Bowie in a tailored dark suit and sunglasses. Also crouching over the corpse, licking blood from her lips, is a sexy Catherine Deneuve.

  “I can’t fully fuck someone I’m not married to,” I say to the wall. “It taps a part of me meant only for God. If I married Mara, then that part of me would become fully meant for her, with God’s approval, and I could make love to her completely. Please don’t tease me about all this tonight.”

  “I’m not.” He’s quiet for a minute. “So today you had that Pixies song ‘Debaser’ blaring in here and you were singing it crazy loud.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You sing it a lot. Tell me why you’re so into it.”

  “Mace . . .”

  “Just tell me.”

  I think about it. I turn to face him. “Even though it mentions creepy stuff like sliced eyeballs, the song isn’t creepy, it’s just fast and great. And I love how Black Francis and Kim Deal sing together. It’s fucked-up but perfect.”

  Mason is nodding agreement.

  I say, “I wish I could sing with someone like that. Or write something like that.”

  “News flash, buddy. We’re both going to grow up to be debasers and that’s a good thing.” He stands. “Go to sleep.”

  He leaves and closes the door.

  • • •

  A MONTH LATER I’m in Father Tillermacher’s office. We’ve discussed some Scripture passages and now he’s showing me pictures of Jesuit novitiate houses around the United States. For a man to enter the Jesuits, he has to apply to a Jesuit province and upon acceptance begin novitiate training, living in community with other novices, studying, ministering in charity, and firming up his commitments to poverty, chastity, and obedience. Father Tillermacher is urging me to apply to the New York province since I’m a native New Yorker.

  “And how was your Agape retreat?” he asks.

  Last weekend I attended a campus ministry retreat in the Virginia mountains. Unlike my silent retreat freshman year, which was about a personal relationship with God, this retreat was social, focused on community. Thirty Georgetown undergrads attended. There were spiritual discussions, but also touch-football games and skits.

  “It was pretty good.”

  “You’re lying,” says Father Tillermacher.

  “It was somewhat dorky.”

  “Why?”

  On the retreat I met many wonderful people who weren’t dorky. But somehow there was dorkiness in the air. “Someone kept playing ‘Shower the People’ on guitar and people sang along.”

  “So?” Father Tillermacher looks like he’s waiting for me to display something a Jesuit novice will need, something like insight.

  I spill what I feel is the truth. “‘Shower the People’ sucks. Jesus never showered the people. He healed them and scared them. He was gritty and dangerous and never a dork. Agape was dorky. It was too . . .” I’m not sure of the word. Too spiffy. Too upbeat. Too bubbly-safe. “I don’t think I’m above a retreat like that, but when I was on it I couldn’t feel God’s danger. I couldn’t find the Bottom, the . . . the dark of God.”

  This is as close as I’ve ever gotten to talking about the dark path with anyone. I fidget my hands. Father Tillermacher has a complicated light in his eyes. Is he impressed? Concerned?

  “David, do you know the passage in Matthew that reads ‘From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force’?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “That God and His followers are surrounded by conflict. And if you want to know God, you might have to relish that. You might have to battle and claim a place in His company.”

  Father Tillermacher studies me. “And that’s what you want to be? A violent man in that sense? A man fighting to find—I’ll use your phrase—God’s danger and darkness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Why ‘hmm’?”

  “If you look hard enough for that kind of fight, God just might give it to you.”

  I sense that he’s warning me seriously, but I want to be accepted by his club. I try some levity. “Do you think the Jesuits will want a fight-picking punk like me?”

  He smiles, letting down his guard. “I think we already do.”

  He gives me a hug, which has become our custom, and I leave.

  • • •

  I AM OBSESSED with short stories lately. Each evening I go to Lauinger Library and sit in a big cushioned chair and lose myself in the short stories of Bernard MacLaverty, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor. Like poetry and Shakespeare have rocked me in the past, short fiction is dazzling me now. I read over and over two short stories in particular—“Goodbye, My Brother” by John Cheever and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. These stories make me feel like I’m plugged into a secret electrical current that runs under the surface of life. They’re so damned good that they make me want to throw a thousand punches or fuck a thousand girls or kiss the sun.

  I can’t understand why, but when I read them, I feel carried far outside myself and simultaneously driven deeper into myself. Only praying, running, and sex with Mara have ever made me feel that way. I’m jealous of these stories . . . I want to have written them. I want and need to get at truth the way that they do. I feel like God must be entertained or moved by these stories, and I feel like they’re the answer to something dire.

  Something is shifting inside me as a student of the world. I’ve begun thinking that the world’s leaders—the people I’ve studied for years in my Foreign Service program—need to shut the fuck up about themselves and their agendas and geopolitical this and national sovereignty that. Maybe if everyone could just read more American Cheever and drink more Italian Chianti and eat more German spaetzle and try whatever sexual positions the French are inventing lately, we’d all have more fun and we wouldn’t get so ripshit defensive with each other. I have no fully evolved theories about all this, just suspicions. And my suspicions make me
want to write fiction. If there is truth in John Cheever’s and Joyce Carol Oates’s work, then God is in that work, too. And priests are committed to all facets of the truth, I tell myself. I decide that I will be a priest who writes fiction. And plays Ultimate Frisbee. And says “fuck” sometimes.

  So throughout the fall I start writing my own short stories, forgoing classwork to do so. Every night I make brilliant progress. Every morning, whatever I wrote the night before reads like utter shit and I throw it out. But I keep doing it. I get better.

  As Christmas approaches, I write a special story, a semiautobiographical one. I write it for my father. It’s clunky, but it ends with a young man at night on a dark path. As the young man stares into the shadows under some trees, the fireflies above the shadows swirl and form letters that say: be a priest, be a priest, be a priest.

  One afternoon when I’m home over Christmas break, I ask my father to go into the kitchen. “I left you something on the table to read,” I tell him.

  My mother and sisters aren’t home. I lurk in the living room while he reads. Soon he joins me. He is holding my story and looking at it like it’s a ticket to some miraculous place.

  “David? Does this mean what I think it means?”

  I nod. “You’re the only one I want to know for now, Dad, but I’m going to be a priest. If the Jesuits will have me.”

  His cheeks pink up. He hugs me. “Oh, David. I’m so glad for you. Your mother and I . . . we’ve wondered . . .”

  He sits on the couch. His eyes mist. And then suddenly, awfully, something in his facial expression falters, or falls away. I’ve never seen it happen before. It’s as if there’s some cave inside him, some haunted place I didn’t know about, and for the first time I am seeing the entrance to it. My father starts crying. Hard. He looks agonized.

  My muscles lock up in panic. He has never even teared up in front of me.

  “Dad!” I sit, put my arms around him. “Dad, what’s wrong?”

  He’s shaking. Then he tells me, in a rush. He’s leaving General Motors, where he’s worked for three decades. GM closed Rochester Products a while back and he’s been commuting by car—on his dime—to Detroit for a year, spending weekends in Rochester with my mother and living in a Detroit motel on weeknights. I’ve known about his commute, but he says that the traveling isn’t the problem.