The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  “He sounds great,” I say. I hope he died an hour ago.

  I keep looking at the door, waiting for Ellen to come in and station herself between me and the river-rapids scar under Mara’s hair. I can’t talk, can’t tell Mara anything real, not if her kid sister is coming.

  We eat and pay the check. Ellen never shows.

  “Where are you staying?” Mara asks. “I have to pick my boyfriend up at Logan, but I can drop you.”

  I’m staying nowhere, but I name a waterfront hotel. She drops me at it, we hug good-bye, and she drives away. I don’t have money for a hotel. I walk to the docks and stare at the harbor, thinking back over our conversation.

  After I get cold, I pull my address book out of my suitcase. It has lots of scribblings and crossings out, and I paw through it until I find someone who I think still lives in Boston, my friend Neil. We grew up together, and his parents believed in making very strong Manhattans.

  I call him and spill my story. He picks me up, takes me to his apartment, serves me very strong Manhattans, and lets me crash.

  In the morning I call Mara again and try to be more forthright. “I need to see you today. And please, no Ellen. No boyfriend.”

  She agrees, but says she can meet only for lunch. She requests Uno’s again. I meet her there at noon. We sit at the same table. Most everyone around us is dressed for work, in sleek suits and skirts. Sunlight floods in the windows, and Mara launches into a story about her sister Mavis. It is a nifty story.

  “Mara, please . . . stop. Please let me talk.”

  I can tell that she’s afraid to, that she suspects something. She looks down at her lap and nods once, like okay, and then looks back up, giving me the green of her eyes. Either the rest of my life is about her doing that or it isn’t.

  “Mara,” I say. “Mar.”

  It’s never been harder for me to turn air into words, but I tell her. I tell her that I’m still in love with her, that I’ve never stopped being in love with her. I tell her that I’ll never be a priest, that God might be a lie. I tell her that I’ve been rolling around in bed for two years with a girl I don’t care deeply for, that I tried to be a fighter and fucked my body up, maybe permanently, and that I can’t get enough breath, that I’m dizzy and scared and not right. I tell her that I know that people can’t save each other, but that I had to come see her, because . . .

  I stop talking. The panic tugs at me. I stare at the parmesan cheese shaker on the table, feeling the stupidness of saying all that I am in this place.

  Mara takes my hand across the table.

  “I’m so sorry, Mara. I’m sorry that . . . I thought I was going to be a certain kind of man. And I never talked to you about it. And I think that’s what came between us.”

  We’re looking into each other’s eyes. She looks as scared as I am, but she holds my hand and I feel like we’re trying to be something together. Brave, maybe.

  I tell her that whatever fuel I’ve been driving on up till now in life, I’ve run out of it. All I feel capable of is being here. I say that I’m too exhausted to share words or time with anyone else, to want anyone else. I tell her that this is rude, presumptuous, and melodramatic, but that it’s also true. “I just . . . I love you.”

  She sits quietly, crying a little. She’s wearing black pants and a dark gray fisherman’s sweater. She looks like what she is, a New England Irish world-beater. Her pizza sits uneaten.

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately too,” she says. “A lot. And my sisters keep asking me, ‘Do you ever think you’ll see Dave again?’”

  I wait for her to say more. I think, David, just because this feels like the fulcrum conversation of your life doesn’t mean that it is. Then Mara squeezes my hand and it is after all.

  She says, “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “I don’t know what to do with this. With your being here, saying all this.”

  “I know.”

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  “I know.”

  We hold hands. Ice cubes float in her glass of Coke. Why do people have careers and meetings? I only want her. I’m scared shitless.

  She says, “I have to think about this.”

  • • •

  I FLY HOME to Rochester. Inside me is the good-bye embrace Mara gave me. She also gave me her home phone number and told me to call her from Vermont in a couple weeks.

  My sister gets married. During the wedding ceremony, I stand on the altar with the other groomsmen and smile and try not to shred my cuticles.

  In the morning I call Sabine and tell her as much of the truth as I can. I say that as near as I can tell, I’m having a nervous breakdown. I tell her that she’s great, but that my heart is deeply fucked right now, that I’m lost, that I’m so sorry but that I can’t be with her anymore . . . I can barely be with myself.

  “You’ve lied to me this whole time,” she says. “You could have trusted me and talked about it, but you kept it in. You lied.”

  I don’t argue.

  “Your church did a fucking number on you.”

  I don’t argue with that either. And then we hang up.

  • • •

  I MOVE UP to Vermont. I drive there at night and on the way I listen to my Billy Bragg cassette, playing “Greetings to the New Brunette” over and over, maybe thirty times in a row. An attack comes somewhere around Lake George. The quicksand fills my throat. My hands shake so hard on the steering wheel that I yank it too hard in one direction and send the car into a skid. I pull over, park, get out, kneel in the roadside gravel. I’m on a two-lane Adirondack road and there are no other cars, just woods, brisk air, and sky.

  I realize that I’m not just sad, I’m livid, too. I stare up at the dark sky.

  We were supposed to be something together, I think. I wanted to end up Yours, only Yours. And now You don’t want that, You don’t want me, and I feel fucking worthless, do You understand that? And maybe the joke’s on me, maybe You’re a lie, because I’ve listened all my life, I’ve prayed and listened, and You’ve never said one fucking thing. And never mind me, how about Graham and Mason, arguing with me about You all these years, kicking at Your door, never getting word one from You? And how about every child dying from starvation or from the bites of those huge pink poisonous jungle spiders I saw on TV? What possible purpose could You have had for creating those creepy pink fuckers?

  Seriously, are You off talking to dying kids in distant lands, and that’s why I’m not hearing from You now, when I need You? Are You off speaking comfort into their little ears while their bellies distend and they breathe their fragile last and their mothers wail and put them in the ground?

  I close my eyes. If You’re real, if You’re there, please . . . give me Mara. Or give Mara and me to each other. If You give that, I’ll have a path, a joy. I’ll have Something rather than the Nothing that is sucking me down.

  Chapter Nine

  FIVE DAYS LATER I am standing in a classroom at Tapwood Academy, wearing a bright yellow mask. Standing beside me is Alex Bergeron, a pudgy, gray-haired man who will spend the next two weeks teaching me how to teach high school English before I’m trusted with my own students.

  Alex is wearing a mask too, a black one. Both of our masks are the ornate kind that cover only the eyes, the sort that Shakespeare characters wear to balls. We each hold a xeroxed copy of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado.” We are “performing” the story for the ten senior students before us.

  It’s my first day of teaching. I walked into this room minutes ago and Alex, already in his mask, introduced himself to me—in front of the students—by putting the yellow mask over my eyes as he chuckled. He handed me the story and whispered, “You’re Fortunato!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He tapped the story in my hands. I glanced at the
title.

  “I don’t know this story.”

  “Sure you do,” Alex whispered. “Sorry that I don’t have the cap and bells, but you look like a jester. All right, let’s do this.”

  Then in a booming voice Alex began reading the story aloud, complete with cackles and aggrieved harrumphs, like a Central Casting madman. He’s been pointing to me each time it is my—Fortunato’s—turn to speak.

  He is pointing at me now.

  I look at the next line of text. “‘Amontillado,’” I read.

  Alex puts his hands on his hips, vamping. “‘I have my doubts.’”

  “‘Amontillado!’” I declare.

  Alex rubs his chin demonstratively. “‘And I must satisfy them.’”

  I say, “‘Amontillado.’”

  The students are staring at us with a look I know well. It’s the same look that my neighbor Mike Langini wore for years while he stared at our nun teachers back in grade school. It is a look that says, What the fuck is happening? Why are adults such tards?

  I don’t know what’s happening either. I’ve only become more disoriented and panicky since arriving in Tapwood. When I got here five nights ago Clement and Daphne helped me move into an off-campus apartment attached to an Academy art teacher’s house. Each day since, I’ve walked around this hilltop town of seven thousand people, trying to get my bearings. There’s a grist mill, and postcard foliage on the trees, and one quaint bookstore and one quaint newspaper, but I can’t grasp any of it. I’m so scared now that I’m stupid. I keep blanking out. The quicksand is in my brain, pulling under even simple things. Each morning I stare at spoonfuls of Special K, wondering why they’re headed toward my face, guided by my hand.

  “The next line is yours,” a gray-haired man whispers to me.

  I look at him. I think his name is Amontillado. I can’t breathe.

  “Turn the page,” the man encourages me. “Hey, stop clenching your fists. Jesus, are you crying?”

  “No,” I lie. I lift my jester’s mask and wipe my eyes.

  • • •

  MY APARTMENT is on Mulligan Street, a mile from the Academy. Daphne lives just four doors down in a house with her husband, Andrew Preevy, and his daughter from a former marriage. Daphne and Andrew both teach English at the Academy. They have me over for dinner one night, after which Daphne walks me home.

  “Have you called Mara?”

  “It hasn’t been two weeks yet.”

  “Call her tonight.”

  We walk along. Daphne bumps my shoulder with hers. Her husband is a kind, spooky man who doesn’t like me much because he stared into my soul the second I met him and saw how sexy I find his wife.

  We reach my apartment. The house it’s attached to, the home of art teacher Ed Neville and family, is a clean, well-lighted place. On the lawn in front of my apartment there used to be a tree, but when it got large enough to threaten the house, Ed had most of it cut down. He kept the six-foot-tall stump and had some woodworker carve the stump into a statue of his hero, Knute Rockne.

  I look at Knute, stalwart and huge on the lawn, a man famous for being one excellent thing.

  Daphne hugs me.

  “Go in and call her,” she says.

  I go in and call Mara. She answers on the third ring.

  “About time you called.” She laughs her murmuring laugh. I hear a voice in the background that I recognize.

  “Ellen’s over,” says Mara. “I’m helping her with a history paper. What do you know about fossil fuels?”

  “We’re running out of them,” I say. In my head I replay her words, About time you called. About time you called.

  I try to say funny, attractive things. I tell her about Fortunato and the masks. The phone cord is hangman tight around my fingers.

  After a few minutes, Mara sends Ellen into the other room.

  “I miss you,” she tells me.

  I tell her about the Billy Bragg ballad. I tell her that even though she’s not a brunette, she’s the girl in the song and I’m the guy.

  She says, “I’m thinking of you every day. My boyfriend’s coming into town again next weekend, and we’re supposed to go on a trip, but I don’t know . . .”

  I wait, knowing that she’s thinking, that her eyebrows are pinched together, making a skin ridge of worry between them. When we first dated, if her face screwed up like that, I’d press my thumb to that ridge and bulldoze it for her.

  “David, I . . . I have to talk to him. Please . . . I just need some time. I’ll be in touch soon, all right?”

  We hang up.

  In the coming days my hip pain returns. As I limp around the Academy halls, something deep in my right hip socket clicks loudly—and hurts sharply—with about every fifth step I take.

  I call Matt Argento and tell him about the clicks, the pain.

  “That fuckin’ piriformis.” He sounds solemn, like he’s speaking of an old enemy. “Minghia! It’s a tricky muscle, David, the piriformis, and once you fuck it up, it’s hard to heal it for good. Also, if you’re under stress, that might slow the healing. You dealing with some fuckin’ stress?”

  I don’t feel like going into it, so I make an excuse to get off the phone.

  I am now teaching on my own. I’ve taken over Alex Bergeron’s class of ten seniors, and I also teach two sophomore classes. The Academy is unusual since two-thirds of the kids are local day students—many from somewhat poor local families—while the other third are students in the expensive boarding program.

  Academy English classes are basic, standard, or accelerated. My sophomores are accelerated, and my seniors are standard.

  My seniors don’t like me, and, maybe because I’m young, they interrogate me daily. The most vocal ones are Paul and Max, both beefy football jocks; JoBeth, a seventeen-year-old with an infant son at home; and Kira, a bright Swedish girl who feels insulted to be in a standard class.

  On my third solo teaching day I sit among them, trying to lead a discussion of Lord of the Flies. They were supposed to have read the novel for Mr. Bergeron. I think half of them have opened it.

  I ask, “Why does Piggy die, do you think?”

  Paul, sitting beside me, nudges my arm. “Hey, Flatlander . . . how come your hip clicks?”

  The local kids call me Flatlander. It’s a Vermont term for outsiders, for people not from the mountains.

  “I know, right?” JoBeth is looking at my hip. Her face is squinched, like she’s smelling something off-putting. “I heard it do that, too. It’s weird.”

  “Piggy dies,” says Max, “because a rock crushes his head.”

  I think, Lucky Piggy. I think, I have no business being here, pretending to know more than they do.

  “Yes,” I say, “but do you sympathize with him? Does he deserve to die? How do you feel about Roger, the boy who kills Piggy?”

  Kira taps her book urgently. “This book is about American exceptionalism.”

  “Piggy’s a pain.” Max always sits the farthest from me. He has ever since I wore the Fortunato mask. “They kill him because he’s a wuss. Maybe he doesn’t deserve it, but that’s what happens to wusses.”

  Kira sighs. “There are no girls in this book.”

  JoBeth says, “I know, right?”

  Out of nowhere my chest fills with panic. I feel all the blood and competence drain from my head.

  “Mr. Schickler?” someone says.

  “Excuse me.” I hobble out into the hall, shutting the door behind me. I rest my cheek against the cool hallway wall, trying to calm my nausea.

  I’m holding on to what Mara said. About time you called, she said.

  • • •

  MOST NIGHTS I go to Clement Lowell’s house for a couple of hours. One of the few times that the quicksand stops pulling at me is when I sit on one end of Clement’s couch while he sits on
the other end. He watches TV in silence, in the dark. I close my eyes and just sort of feel Clement watching a show or movie. Somehow this helps me, maybe because he’s at peace with his life. I never fall asleep, I just sit there with my eyes closed and listen to Clement breathing and to the TV dialogue and music, and sometimes I hear the Lowells’ dog wander in and out. Clement acts like what I’m doing is normal.

  “This film is garbage,” he says one night, “but now I’m committed.”

  I don’t open my eyes. “I shouldn’t be teaching. I blow. The kids hate me.”

  “I have to see how this ends,” says Clement.

  Around ten Clement heads to bed and I leave. I’ve had insomnia since arriving, but lying in bed or sitting alone in my apartment is unbearable, so each night I drive. I head north through the autumn night on two-lane rural roads while my hip spasms and twinges. I keep the windows open, needing the frigid air. The cold is one of the few things I have in common with Tapwood natives. Because I grew up in upstate New York, I have the cold in me like everyone here does. It’s like an instinct in my skin, the cold is, a slapping awake of the senses. It doesn’t need to be thought about, only accepted.

  One midnight, driving up close to the Canadian border, I find a lake. It is set deep among the surrounding mountains. It has no cottages on its shores, just fir trees on the slopes that wall it in. There’s a rock pebble beach on the north shore and I park and hobble out to it and sit. I can see no other cars, buildings, or people. There are clouds blocking the stars and a massive darkness over the black water. I stare at this darkness. If it had substance, I’d kick it, but I can feel nothing in it now, no Person or presence. Thoughts gather and shove in me like prisoners rioting, desperate to break out.

  Lord, I think toward the darkness, You are utter bullshit. Do You know what You are, actually? You’re a complete Lack of You. You’re a Lack-of-God.

  And don’t think that I feel this way just because things suck right now, just because of this awful pain in my leg that’s back again. I know life can’t be perfect. It wasn’t perfect back when Tommy Marzipretta punched me in the stomach at Olympic Roller Rink, and it wasn’t perfect when I had mono, and it wasn’t perfect when Mara fucked Akoni. But during those times I had You. I had the dark, close sureness of You, and now I have the Lack of You, and it’s miserable, okay? And You’re a coward for deciding not to exist right when I realize that I can’t be a priest, that I can never live for You alone.