by Jane Smiley
The three big boys had come upon him in the hallway, picked him up, and carried him into one of the math teacher’s rooms, and they had upended him and tied his shoelaces together, but he remembered what he had been thinking about at the time. He had been thinking about breakfast that morning. He was eating his Wheaties, and his mother was walking back and forth between the stove and the kitchen table. She was scrambling eggs. Paul’s sister, Lisa, was saying that she thought she could see the stigmata in the palms of her hands, which were beginning to tingle in a funny way, and also there was a mark on her side. She had pulled up her blouse, and Paul’s mother had left the stove, taken off her glasses, and bent down to look at the mark. Then the two of them weighed the pros and cons of what they thought stigmata probably looked like and how stigmata probably began, at which point Paul drank down the milk at the bottom of his cereal bowl, put his bowl in the sink, and ran out of the house. Paul was eleven; Lisa was sixteen. Thank God she went to the high school, because, at the very moment when Max and his friends grabbed him, Paul was praying the stigmata away—dear God, leave her alone; dear God, this is the last thing we need at our house; dear God, I will say ten thousand rosaries if you just give the stigmata to someone besides Lisa. And as it turned out, Lisa did not get the stigmata, and Paul spent several years saying rosaries—he tallied them on a sheet of paper, and got up to 6,014 before losing track of the project.
The brother of one of Paul’s ancestors was a saint. Exactly how many generations he and his mother were removed from this saint—Saint Joachim of Neibsheim—he did not know. Saint Joachim’s younger brother, Albrecht, was the ancestor. Paul had visited Neibsheim on his own when he was twenty-three and traveling in Europe with Gloria Smithwick. Saint Joachim was considered to be the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth. If a Neibsheim woman was infertile and she prayed to Saint Joachim, she would get pregnant and have a successful delivery. Gloria Smithwick had found this fact hilarious, given Paul’s unceasing desire for sex. After he got home from Germany and broke up with Gloria, he translated the brochure and discovered that Saint Joachim was more interesting than anyone in the family knew.
Saint Joachim had lived a long and sinful life, partly as a small-time lawyer but mostly as a goon for a wealthy merchant. He had traveled all over Europe and was famous for being able to exact payment, with interest, from even the toughest hooligans, such as, apparently, the citizens of Burgundy. He was also famous, according to the brochure, for enthusiastically committing deadly sins. He regaled himself by having sex with anything that moved, whether female or male, human or animal, married or single. He always lied in preference to telling the truth, and he gloried in bearing false witness. He was gluttonous, and regularly ate and drank until he passed out and vomited all over himself. He lived until the age of almost seventy, when he was stricken with what sounded to Paul like either cirrhosis of the liver or kidney failure. He was known to have killed at least four people in anger, not counting those he offed while pursuing his profession. He held money back from his employers out of sheer uncontrollable greed, even after he himself was beaten up by a couple of his goon friends for doing so. As far as Paul could tell, the only sin Joachim did not commit was sloth. As for pride, he paraded his transgressions around town, perhaps as a form of intimidation. Late in his life, his boss, a merchant on a large scale who allowed his customers to buy on credit but then had to get paid, sent Joachim to Burgundy, in France, to collect on some long-outstanding debts. After a day’s ride and a heavy meal of some seven courses, Joachim collapsed at the home where he was lodging.
The two brothers who owned the house knew all about Joachim, and they were afraid that if he died in the house, especially without confession or absolution, local thugs would use his death as a pretext for entering the house and having revenge. As the brothers were talking about whether to throw Joachim out in the condition he was in, Joachim called to them, and asked them to get the holiest priest they knew and bring him to his bedside. The brothers were amazed that he would want to confess the kinds of sins he had on his conscience, and they were certain that he could not gain absolution, but they went and got a man famous for his quiet life, Brother André.
Brother André had lived so cloistered a life that he had not heard of Joachim or the two brothers. He asked Joachim if he had recently confessed, and Joachim said that since his illness he had not confessed, the space of about a week, but before that he had been to confession every week for his entire life. Nevertheless, Joachim said, he had terrible sins on his conscience.
The two brothers knelt outside the room, pretending to pray for Joachim’s soul, and eavesdropped. They heard him say what his sins were: he had taken two pieces of bread when he meant to take only one, and he had drunk his fill of water one day after a long hot walk (he said nothing about the seven-course meal of goose and carp and venison and doves cooked in wine and onion confit that had done him in, or the twenty goblets of the best red Burgundy). Once he had happened to glance at a girl passing in the street (he said nothing of the three boys he had brought to the house the second night of his visit). He had given only half of his daily allotment of food money to a beggar one day, though he had attempted to make up for that the next day by giving all of it. He said that one time, as a child, he had spoken angrily to his mother. Brother André reacted with enthusiasm—he had never confessed anyone so truly penitent for such minor transgressions! The two brothers were laughing outside the room, but of course making no sound. Shortly after the confession and the last rites, Joachim died.
Joachim had begged Brother André to have his body brought to the monastery, and so it was, and Brother André could not stop exclaiming about Joachim’s confession, about what a holy fellow the old guy was, and so humble and punctilious about every little thing! The monks let the body lie in state in the chapel of the monastery for a day or two, and as a result of this public-relations effort, people from the town went to the chapel to see what such a holy man looked like. They began to pray for his intercession with God on their behalf; Brother André said he would jump right to the head of the line and see God almost immediately after death! Within a day, not one but two local townspeople declared themselves healed: one of severe headaches that sounded to Paul like migraines; the other had been inhabited by a devil who caused him to curse and cry out, which sounded to Paul like Tourette’s.
The interpretation of these events suggested by the brochure was that, after a sinful life, Saint Joachim made a worthy confession and his soul was cleansed. In the terms of the Parable of the Vineyard, Joachim had managed to get in the gate just before the end of the day—if the grace of God could redeem even this guy, then the grace of God was like the wind inside a tornado, which drove chopsticks through tree trunks and set cars on top of houses. And over the years, Saint Joachim’s shrine produced a steady stream of miracles that in the end bore little or no relationship to the life of Saint Joachim himself.
Paul’s interpretation was slightly different. As a Buddhist, he did not believe in sin, or virtue, or redemption, or a personal savior, or an individual fate. He saw Joachim’s frenzy of activity as pointless and self-defeating, his deadly anger a manifestation of the intensifying unhappiness that always results from the cycle of desires felt and satisfied and then felt again with even greater sting. What interested him about Uncle Joachim was the monumental quality of his appetites—seven courses, three boys, twenty goblets of wine, followed by vomiting and unconsciousness, obviously a form of bulimia.
According to Paul’s thinking, Joachim’s entrance into heaven was less likely than reincarnation, but there were also two other afterlives. One of these was his afterlife as a saint, and therefore as a concept. Something about Joachim lived in the imaginations of the townspeople of Neibsheim, where his corpse was returned and was entombed some six months after death, richly accompanied by enough stories of miracles in Burgundy to overcome his local reputation. Over the centuries, he became a benign, embracing figure, little Sa
int Joachim, who was especially interested in babies and children, the patron saint of gestation. His other afterlife was in Paul’s family, as the most famous representative of a familial religious impulse, a combination saint and sinner who happened to achieve stardom but who was not much different from certain offspring in every generation. Paul had seen other families like his, all-God-all-the-time families. His was German and Catholic, but he had known one that was English, in which his friend, a Marxist, turned out, unknowingly, to have English Catholic ancestors who lost the family estate in 1605, when they had to flee to Ireland after the failed Guy Fawkes rebellion. What Paul saw in that family was a contrarian, absolutist impulse that was always ready to give up mere real estate in favor of doomed revolution. The other was Ulster Irish, the family of Sarah Cochran. In Paul’s own hearing, one of Sarah’s aunts, a kindly old lady of the purest orange Evangelical hue, had expressed the opinion that the citizens of Waterford and Wexford did not actually have souls, and that was why they remained committed papists. While his own family members were discussing stigmata and ecstatic flight (had Aunt Eva really risen from the front porch to the crotch of the maple tree in her front yard not through her own will, or was she deluded?), the Cochrans were writing each other letters in which they marshaled pages and pages of doctrinal arguments to demonstrate how and why each of them was right and each of the others was wrong. The goal was to get all the Cochrans into heaven, but God was picky and legalistic, and the rules were complex and hard to understand. Judging by his experience of Sarah, lust was the underlying difficulty, as with many religious families he knew, but actual discussion of lust never got into the letters.
In the meantime, Paul’s mother’s idea of a vacation was combining a trip to Lourdes, say, with a tour of the Pyrenees and four days in Barcelona—churches, shopping, and beaches. “Have you said your prayers? Have you brushed your teeth? You haven’t masturbated, have you? You’re serving Mass at six a.m., don’t forget.”
One girlfriend he’d had, Monica Horner, with whom he had gone to the Grand Canyon and then on to Sedona, in Arizona, and Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico, the home of the Anasazi peoples, and after that made a tour of various medicine wheels around the West, had come from an entirely secular family. They considered religion a topic unmentionable at the table and talked instead about sports, the neighbors, and current events. If heaven existed, they had no doubt that they would be welcomed there as they, a sociable and kindly set, were welcomed everywhere. Before Monica, he had not known that there were such families. Monica truly thought religion was a stage civilization had already passed through. She went on to become a wildlife biologist.
He was stiff. Zoe had turned the other way, and now her shoulder and the back of her neck were pressed against him. Her fragrance was still potent, a combination of the verbena of the soap she used and the lemon-thyme of her shampoo. It made her seem French. His jaw ached again. It was a discrete ache, like a bubble that apppeared, expanded, and popped—possibly it was related to the blood pumping in that area, but it was not repeated or rhythmic. As soon as he thought about it, he also could not help thinking about Stephanie Larsson. Stephanie Larsson was a client he had had who suffered from fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. She had worked with him for about three years and also with his friend Barney Chang, who was an acupuncturist. She suffered from constant fatigue and pain. She was unhappy and obsessive. Her history included a car accident that knocked her cervical vertebrae out of whack, and she was allergic to dairy products. She did not have a husband or a boyfriend and was, more or less, isolated. Stephanie Larsson was a stable system, he thought (though Barney did not quite agree with him), and all the elements of Stephanie’s stability—her depression, her loneliness, her social awkwardness, her pain, her fatigue, her tendency to bump into things and drop things, her perfectionism, even her desire to find a cause for her condition that could be relieved, as if she could go back in time and relive her life—tended to reinforce one another. He would begin each session with Stephanie with a new idea—to pluck a particular thread out of the tangle of Stephanie’s symptoms and understand and then repair that thread. The theory was that getting Stephanie to experience one, and then two positive and pleasurable things would rebalance the whole system, or, rather, unbalance the old system, and move her out of her stable and painful unhappiness, through a mix of unhappiness and happiness, and into a stable system of less pain, more pleasure, and more energy. It became clear as he worked with her that the sort of session she expected, which was to narrate and analyze her particular problem of the day, was not working. She was eloquent, and her own eloquence frightened and in some sense enthralled her. Once she had embodied the problem in words, it was harder to dislodge her sense of its pernicious and unprecedented effects. But if he ever so gently tried to guide her attention away from the current problem and toward something positive, she felt that he wasn’t taking her seriously and balked, which was unproductive in its own way. Sometimes, after he directed her toward visualizing beautiful or good things, she might leave his office in a better mood, but when she got home, her own situation, in an unbeautiful neighborhood and surrounded by ugly things, reminded her that she was spending so much money on treatment that she couldn’t afford much else. He and Barney agreed that she was a difficult case. On the one hand, she truly believed in her illness; on the other, she was truly ill. They never diagnosed her as stubborn or hypochondriacal. As far as Paul knew, he never showed impatience with her, and Barney certainly did not, but she gave up on the two of them anyway, leaving Paul with the knowledge that the very thing he had put all his faith in up to that point, technique, could turn powerless after all.
He was not so unlike Stephanie in some ways. Or at least in one way—he had an unshakable belief in cause and effect. This belief, he knew, protected him from the dangers of revelation. He had come to think that there were two religious types. One of these was the type who enjoyed being struck by lightning, who gloried in the very unexpectedness of it, because that was what demonstrated the unpredictable power of God. The other type enjoyed shaping the vessel and making it worthy. That was his type. His type followed disciplines and progressed up levels and prepared the spirit and more or less put off the actual transcendent experience as long as possible. Each type had its advantages. The struck-by-lightning type lived in a more exciting way, courting danger and disintegration but also embracing the possibility of overwhelming meaning. If the meanings changed, so be it, the sense that meaning existed was satisfying in itself. His type, by contrast, often received no revelations at all, died, perhaps, in a state of frustration and spiritual emptiness, but created little fuss and no muss. He was temperamentally inclined to prefer nothing to a something that might scatter his atoms completely, and so he ate certain foods prepared in certain ways, he honed his counseling techniques, he systematically excluded negative thoughts, he developed his erotic skills, and he visited ever more far-flung and arduous holy sites. If he thought of himself as a vessel, it was a vessel that was getting cleaner and simpler in design, if, perhaps, smaller. Take the erotic, for example. After much practice, he had arrived, in Zoe, at the apex of most men’s erotic ambition. She was not only a talented, beautiful, adept, and famous woman, the best the world had to offer, she was generous and affectionate and more or less suited to his peculiarities. Even her occasional volatility didn’t bother him. She was far beyond the erotic fantasies he had had as a young man. But she had arrived in his life at the very time when he not only didn’t want to possess her, he didn’t want to possess. He didn’t want to say she was his, he didn’t want to be comforted by her continual presence, he didn’t want to have erotic feelings much anymore, and he felt no pride in her attachment to him. Embracing her was like embracing a ghost. In what he felt toward her, he could see that he really and truly had come to believe that all of the material world was illusory. The very palpable and physical sensation he had of her fragrance, and the pressure of her flesh against his, of he
r beauty and grace and the lovely sound of her voice singing a song, struck him more and more forcefully as not having actual existence.
There were other signs that he was actually achieving enlightenment: He could make light come into his body and make pain go away; he failed to notice things like money and power and influence. He could drive down the road in his little car and make all the lights turn green, intersection after intersection. For about the past year, he had noticed that all he had to do was think of something in order for it to occur. The first notable and specific occasion had been on Valentine’s Day the year before. He was walking on the beach with his friend Sophie, whose mistake had been to get a pug puppy. The puppy, named Pepper, had grown into a yapping, undisciplined monster. Because the dog spent the entire day while Sophie was at work barking at the front window of Sophie’s apartment, Sophie was about to lose her lease. Paul remembered thinking, “Someone else might like this dog,” and before he could add the “but I can’t imagine who” clause, a man had come up to them on the beach and said, “Oh, I love your pug! What’s his name?” And Sophie had said, “Pepper.” And the man had said, “I am such a pug man! How old is he?” And Sophie had said, “He’s two. Would you like to have him? He’s terribly yappy.” And the man had said, “I can deal with that.” And she had put the dog and the leash into the arms of the pug man, and she and Paul had walked away without a backward glance or a second thought. But that was only the most dramatic incident. His wishes, if only for the rain to stop or the sun to come out, continued to come true. On his pilgrimage to the seven holiest mountains in China, monks and adepts had greeted him everywhere. If he was standing in a crowd at an overlook or outside a temple door, he would be the one who was chosen to come in and participate in the prayers. If he was hiking up a trail and someone passed him, that man would turn out to be a holy man who would greet him without preliminaries and walk on with him as with a brother. Another thing had not happened to him in China that might have happened to him ten years ago—in each temple, he had looked upon the prayers and rituals with pleasure but felt no sense that maybe there was something in them for him, that maybe those prayers and rituals were more efficacious and worthy than ones he already knew. He had finally truly accepted the fact that you walked up the path because it was the path at your feet. You were not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent. You were specific, and so had to take specific steps up a specific path, but any path was good enough—all the Cochrans would get to heaven in the end, even the ones who were wrong.
