The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  • • •

  I MOVE HOME to Rochester in June and live in my old basement bedroom. I see our family doctor, then a neural specialist. Neither can figure out my problem and in desperation I make an appointment with a chiropractor, Matt Argento, my old neighbor from Twin Circle Drive. Matt’s high school football stardom earned him his way to college, he now has a beautiful wife and a cool car, and the colossal physique he always did.

  Everyone around here is proud of Matt. He still looks and talks like a jock, but he’s friendly. When I go into his office he shouts, “Minghia! I ain’t seen you in years! All right, take off your jeans, get on the table, let’s look at you.”

  I do as directed. I’ve already told Matt the history of my injury, but as soon as he sees my shriveled lower right calf, his face goes dead serious.

  “Oh, man.” He puts a palm on my calf. “Oh, minghia. Look at this leg. That motherfucker.”

  “Who?”

  “That doctor in New York. He let this condition get this far? Minghia, I should drive down and fuck him up.”

  I’m surprised. “Matt, I did this to myself. I was doing these spinning karate kicks and—”

  “Yeah, but when did you stop the karate and start seein’ the doc?”

  “Ten months ago.”

  “And the doc took tests and gave you pills, but never friggin’ touched you, right?”

  I tell him that he’s basically right.

  Matt works his jaw under the skin. He moves my leg around more, inspects my hip. “David, this is treatable shit, okay? However it started, what’s happening now is piriformis syndrome. Your piriformis muscle—that’s a muscle deep in your ass!—was maybe hurt by karate, but it’s now slackened from underuse, okay? And it’s impinging on your freakin’ sciatic nerve. That can cause atrophy in the calf, okay? But it’s treatable.” He shakes his head. “And when I see treatable shit and a doctor was supposed to treat it and didn’t, I get pissed. Especially when it happens to one of my people . . . okay?”

  He sounds like Dirty Harry. I haven’t seen him in ten years, but he just called me one of his people the way my other Italian buddies growing up introduced me to strangers as their cousin.

  “Unlike that Manhattan pussy, I ain’t afraid to touch you. I’m gonna fuckin’ whale on your hip, okay? Crack the shit out of it. Promote some blood flow to your fuckin’ piriformis. I’m gonna whale on your hip for a few weeks, then you’ll be out of pain. How’s that freakin’ sound, huh?”

  “Good,” I say.

  So in the coming weeks Matt whales on my hip. He cracks the shit out of it. And everything he promises comes true. In less than a month my hip and leg pain start to ease up.

  But the quicksand in my chest doesn’t. All I’ve thought about for months are the twinges and throbs in my hip and leg, how to kill them. But now that Matt is killing them, I feel a void, and the quicksand is rushing in, filling that void. When I lie on the couch and watch Cheers reruns, my heart pounds. When I drive, my hands shake on the wheel. I can’t get enough air in my lungs.

  Early one August morning I walk out onto the eleventh hole of the golf course. There are no golfers out yet. I stand beside the pond and stare at it. It is silver, like the dawn-gray clouds. I stand where I stood when Danny and I rescued Mike from the mud.

  See, you jumpy fuck? I tell myself. There’s a full pond here. There’s no quicksand here, or inside you. Calm down and man up.

  But the black suction in my chest won’t quit.

  So I walk on the path. I go to my spot, stare at the shadows that used to bring me comfort. I even step into the woods and dig in the ground, looking for a piece of broken china, thinking that if I find one like I used to, I’ll feel okay, I’ll know where I am. I beg the Lord to speak, to break His silence.

  Instead the rival darkness, the black panic, tugs at me inside. It’s sucking my heart down. It wants me to drown.

  Suddenly my hip gives out. The spasms have been coming less often since I’ve been working with Matt, but this one is a doozy. I wipe out in the dirt, landing hard on my elbow.

  Lying there, I try to think only rational thoughts. I fell down, I think, only because my hip gave out, and that happened because of piriformis syndrome, which was caused by karate and then went untreated . . .

  But the dread in me says, This time, I wiped you out, David. I knocked you on your ass. Because I’m sick of waiting. Have I got your attention?

  I wait. And then the dread speaks. David, I’ve waited so long to tell you this . . .

  I somehow know what’s coming next.

  . . . You’ll never be a priest.

  I sit there in the dirt. Dew seeps through my jeans.

  Never, David.

  Back home my father is getting ready to paint our front door because my sister Anne Marie is getting married in a few weeks and out-of-town guests will stay at our house, and my father wants the place looking sharp. He is waiting for me to help him.

  But I can’t even stand up. Because somehow, right this instant, adult life has arrived. And I’ve always believed deep down that everything I’ve ever done—running, writing, Georgetown, Columbia, karate, romance, pain, all of it—it has all been apprenticeship, steps on my path to priesthood. I’ve been preparing myself for God, for a simple, solitary life where I’ll worship His Truth, where I’ll empty myself out and let His dark, weightless, mystical grace fill me and claim me for the Jesuits.

  No, says the panic now. Not you.

  And the panic is right. I know it. I finally feel it. It will never happen. That life, contemplative life and priesthood . . . it won’t have me. Without saying why, it is vacating my heart, breaking up with me, suddenly, now, forever. It was the most basic thing I believed, the ground I stood on, even when I wasn’t thinking about it. And it’s gone.

  My stomach seizes up.

  • • •

  “DAD?”

  “David, where have you been? Grab that tarp and let’s cover your mom’s flowers here to keep the paint off them.”

  He’s standing up on the front porch and I’m on the lawn below. I hand him the tarp and he spreads it over the flowers. I’ve just limped back from the path.

  “Dad.”

  He hears my tone and turns. “What is it?”

  I look at him, my thoughts zipping and tumbling.

  Dad, you’re so . . . decent. Look at all that you do. You take care of your kids, you give to charities, you counsel prisoners, you never get drunk, you read Catholic Digest, you take Mom to Anne Murray concerts, you pray with her in bed each night, I’ve heard you two whispering—

  “David.” He steps off the porch. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  —and what do I do, Dad? I get plastered and I give head to a nymphomaniac concierge and I tell myself that it’s semi-chaste because at least it will never get her pregnant. And I hate Anne Murray. I freaking hate her. And I love wine and blow jobs and the feel of the word “fuck” in my mouth and I have to have these things and—

  “I can’t do it, Dad.”

  “How’s that?”

  I sit on the porch. I can smell something like metal, or rotten eggs, in my sinuses. “Oh fuck, Dad. I can’t be a priest.”

  I sob. He sits beside me. He looks alarmed and hugs me.

  “David, my God, it’s all right.”

  “It’s not, it’s not.”

  He holds me.

  “Dad, I don’t even know if I still . . .”

  “Just tell me.”

  My breath keeps bucking. The quicksand, the sucking panic, is pulling under everything I’ve ever loved or used to define myself. The Great Gatsby and “Rosalita” are going under, and so are my writing, my running. God Himself. Scripture says that I should love the Lord with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind. But even though I’ve always tried to do that, God is going under anyway.
He is drowning and disappearing, and I can’t save Him.

  I look at my father, stunned. “I don’t even know if I still . . . believe.”

  My father doesn’t say anything. He just holds me.

  • • •

  I KEEP UP my sessions with Matt, and he tells me to lift weights so that I’ll wean myself off his adjustments and strengthen my piriformis. But each day, as my hip and leg get stronger, my panic grows. For months my calf was disappearing . . . now hope is. I feel twitchy and sick. I remember what Merton wrote, that despair is self-absorption, but I can’t get out of the quicksand. The mere thought of Mass makes me nauseous.

  I think, I’ll never be a priest, and God might be a lie. I’ll never be a priest, and God might be a lie.

  I call Sabine in New York. I tell her that I always thought that I’d become a Jesuit, but that I can’t. She gets pissed off.

  “Your church did this to you. All that celibacy crap. They screwed you up.”

  I stay silent.

  “Fly back down to see me before the wedding. My aunt and uncle are away and you can stay with me in Queens. I’ll make you feel better, I promise.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  We hang up. Late that night I can’t sleep, so I get up and go outside. I wander out on the golf course. It’s September, dark and chilly.

  I think, Your sister’s getting married, your hip is healing, be happy. Do not panic. Just resolve not to.

  Resolved, I walk on. I hum a song. The woods are placid. I break into sobs.

  The next morning I go to see a therapist, a psychologist friend of my parents. I tell him that I’ll never be a priest, that God might be a lie, that I know there are greater problems in the world, but that I don’t know what to do, what I am.

  The therapist says, “You have a big ball of stress inside you. We have to crack it open, get to its nucleus.”

  I say that I feel pretty cracked open already.

  When I get home, I sit on the living room floor. No one else is home.

  See? You’re not panicking right now. You visited a therapist, and now you’re all better. See?

  The phone rings and I answer. I try to sound healthy. “Hello?”

  “David, it’s Daphne Lowell.”

  I picture her beautiful, married face. I haven’t spoken to her in months.

  “Hey,” I say shakily.

  “Your Manhattan number is disconnected. How are you?”

  I tell her. It takes an hour.

  Daphne says, “You need to come up here. To Vermont, to talk to my father.”

  “Why?”

  “I was originally calling because we need a new English teacher, and I told my dad to interview you. But given what you just said, you have to come for the interview. Come, like, tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Just come.”

  “I can’t. My sister’s getting married Saturday and before that I’m supposed to go see Sabine.”

  “Forget the concierge. And you’ll get back in time for your sister. You need this.”

  I turn my brain off. “Okay.”

  The next day, on the flight to Burlington, I have my worst attack yet. Buckled in a seat beside a stranger, I clench my fists and feel sweat down my spine.

  I’ll never be a priest, and God might be a lie.

  The quicksand sucks air from my lungs. It might suck this plane down, crash it.

  You’re a fucking baby, I think. But I’m still gripping the seat dividers like mad.

  A flight steward looks at me, concerned. “Afraid of flying?”

  I’m not, but I nod.

  I put on my headphones, turn on my Walkman, play a mix tape. It’s U2, then Creedence, then the Billy Bragg song “Greetings to the New Brunette.”

  I listen to this ballad, one of the rawest and sweetest I’ve ever heard.

  The plane is steady, no turbulence, but inside I flail, try to grab hold of some memory, or future. And then she’s there in me, strong and unsinkable.

  I say out loud what I still love and want to cling to.

  “Mara,” I say.

  Chapter Eight

  “WHY SHOULD I HIRE you to teach English?” asks Clement Lowell.

  Clement is Daphne’s father. We’re sitting in his headmaster’s office at Tapwood Academy, in the small mountain town of Tapwood, Vermont. The town is high up in the state, in the Northeast Kingdom. It’s late September and on the winding back-road drive to Tapwood from Burlington (Daphne picked me up at the airport), I stared out the window at foliage the bright orange color of hazmat suits. The view didn’t calm me. And here in this oaken office, I’m tweaking out, shredding my cuticles with my thumbnails. I want to bolt, but to where? It’s eight at night, an odd time for an interview, but Clement said he wanted to be sure we’d be alone.

  He is tall and thin and has a no-nonsense bearing, like a founding father. I can picture him signing the Constitution. Earlier at his home I had roast beef with him and his wife, Beatrice, and Daphne. The Lowells are putting me up in their guest room.

  “You shouldn’t hire me,” I say.

  Clement is behind his desk. There’s a picture on the wall of a river, a fisherman.

  “Why not?”

  “I think maybe I’m going crazy.”

  “Why?”

  Daphne has told me that he’s a deacon at the Catholic church down the road. I dump my story to Clement. I say that I’ll never be a priest, that God might be a lie, that Catholicism has been my home all my life and now home just isn’t there. I tell him about my horny fiction, my sexy concierge girlfriend. I tell him that I drink and curse, that my heart is a swamp, that Mara Kincannon is the only thing in it that’s not sinking.

  “And I keep doing this . . .” I wipe my cheeks. “I keep bursting into tears. My hands keep shaking. I may check into a psych ward a week from now.”

  “Teach here for a week first.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that.

  “David, you’re not crazy, you’re humiliated.” He looks out the window. “When I was your age, I was in the seminary. I was their ace candidate for priesthood and I got handpicked to get sent to study in Rome. A great honor. A week before they sent me, I quit. In those days, if you left, you left in disgrace, in the middle of the night, with your tail between your legs. That’s how I did it.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “I couldn’t live without a woman. I loved the sacraments, the Eucharist. But . . .” He trails off. “A life with a woman, with sex . . . I couldn’t do without it. So I bailed. But I felt like a selfish prick.”

  I’m locked in on his words.

  “Afterward it was pretty awful. But I had to go through it.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe so I could be here, telling you you’re not nuts.”

  Black pressure squeezes my lungs. My pulse shoots. Fuck, not again—

  “Breathe,” Clement says. “Ride it out.”

  I clench and unclench my fists. “My faith is . . . gone.”

  “Then stop thinking about it. Just do two things. For one, move up here in a couple weeks and start teaching.”

  “I’ve tutored, but I’ve never taught. I’ll suck.”

  “Then that’ll be on me.”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “You already know. And if you really want to avoid going crazy, do it now. You’ll always regret it if you don’t.”

  I meet his gaze. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Find out.”

  • • •

  LATER THAT NIGHT, from the Lowells’ house, I call Graham and Mason and other Georgetown friends. One finally has the information I need: Mara is in Boston. The friend gives me a work phone number.

  In the morning, Daphne brings me to the Burli
ngton airport. I’m supposed to fly to New York to see Sabine for a night and then continue on to Rochester. I tell the ticket agent to change my itinerary and fly me to Boston rather than JFK. Hours later I land at Logan. I find a pay phone and call Sabine. I feel terrible lying, but I say that I’m stuck in Vermont, that the interviews will go another day, that I’ll call again soon. She sounds suspicious. When we hang up, I try to make the call I’ve come here to make, but I’m too nervous.

  I think, I need to be as close to Mara as possible.

  I take a cab to Quincy Market.

  I find a pay phone beside Faneuil Hall, figuring that it is the city’s nexus, so she must be close. I put in money and dial and it rings five times.

  “Hello?”

  From old instinct, I say, “It’s me.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Hey,” Mara says softly.

  It’s been two and a half years since we’ve seen each other or talked. We ask about each other’s families while I feed coins into the phone and lacerate my cuticles. Mara tells me what her job is. I immediately forget.

  “Are you on a pay phone?”

  “Uh, yes. Actually I’m here. In Boston. I was hoping to see you.”

  She agrees to meet for a drink at six, after work. She suggests Pizzeria Uno in Faneuil Hall. We hang up and I circumnavigate Faneuil Hall about three hundred times in four hours.

  At six I enter Uno’s. Mara shows up five minutes later. She’s in black boots, a long black skirt, and a cream-colored sweater. Her hair and eyes and smile are the same clobbering team as ever. She hugs me.

  “I invited Ellen to come too!” she says. “She’ll be here any minute.”

  Ellen is her younger sister, who loved to pal around with me and Mara.

  A hostess leads us to a table.

  “Are you walking funny?” Mara asks. “Limping?”

  “A little.”

  We sit. I look around at the huge old-timey black-and-white photos of Chicagoans doing blue-collar work in the 1940s.

  We order something. My hands shake under the table. I know that she picked this place for its lack of intimacy, just like she invited Ellen as a buffer. To make it a trifecta, Mara says that her boyfriend arrives in town tonight. It’s not Akoni, but some other guy. He’s an architect! Or something. He travels a lot! Or something.