The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “We should take a left turn soon, then,” Mike said. “What’s in Mexico?”

  “God knows,” Phoebe said. “That’s the point, dearie.”

  “There’s a little Bethanite monastery on the Yucatán peninsula, near Guatemala. It’s built near some old Mayan ruins.”

  “That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Exactly.”

  “We’ll have to be careful about drinking the water.”

  “You don’t live to be my age without learning a thing or two about Mexican water,” Phoebe said. “Is it time to rest yet?”

  “Not if we’re going to make it to Mexico today.”

  “I never said I was in a hurry,” Phoebe said, and she sat on the bench at a train stop. Her favorite bench, the outer limit of her mobility now. The N-Judah drivers had long since learned not to stop for her; they would just wave as they went by. Mike sat down beside her.

  “So Mary Martha is going to make her first communion?” Phoebe said when she had gotten her breath back.

  Mike shrugged. “Unless I kill the pastor first. Or he kills me. She’s pretty excited about it.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “We have to get her baptized first, of course.”

  “Oh, she’s already baptized.”

  Mike glanced at her in surprise. “Rebecca told me—”

  “What does Rebecca know?” Phoebe said. “I wanted Mary Martha baptized when she was born, but Becca wouldn’t have it. So I did it myself.”

  Mike laughed. “Really?”

  “In the bathtub. Mary Martha was about two weeks old, I think. Right after the shampoo: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”

  “Lather, rinse, and repeat as necessary,” Mike said.

  “Do you think it counts?”

  He shrugged. “Ecce aqua: Quid prohibet me baptizari? It’s not like John the Baptist had a license. It was you or the angels, at that point.”

  A train rattled by, the driver waving. Phoebe waved back cheerfully.

  “You can’t really count on angels for anything,” she noted. “As a rule.”

  “They mean well,” Mike allowed.

  “Piff,” Phoebe said. It was clear what she thought of angels.

  They sat quietly. The fog was burning off at last; they were beneath gray sky, but you could see blue sky and sunlight if you looked east. Like a promise.

  “I think I would like a beach party for my memorial service,” Phoebe said after a while.

  Mike smiled. “A beach party?”

  “Yes. With a band. And barbecue grills.”

  “No funeral mass?”

  “Been there, done that.” Phoebe added, “None of my old Marin County friends would be caught dead in a Catholic church anyway.”

  This was true enough, Mike thought. Phoebe had moved to northern California after her husband’s death and had lived for several years in Stinson Beach, where she had worked part-time in an art gallery and cultivated a wide circle of friends united only by a thoroughgoing heterodoxy. Her beach parties had been legendary in their time. But it wasn’t going to make it any easier to tell Rebecca her mother wanted a barbecue at her funeral.

  “A beach party,” he said again.

  “Frisbees flying, dogs romping, the smell of hamburgers. Lovers sneaking off behind the dunes. Children making sand castles. And…balloons.”

  “Balloons!”

  “Big fat ones,” Phoebe said. “To be released as my ashes are given to the sea.”

  “You want to be cremated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that a little, uh—”

  “Un-Catholic?”

  “Something like that.”

  Phoebe shrugged. “Ashes to ashes, sweetheart.” They were silent a moment, and then she offered, as if to soften it all, “Mary Martha can supervise the balloons. And try to get Rory involved, somehow, would you? I don’t want him to feel left out.”

  “Okay,” Mike said, thinking, Thy will be done. But maybe he’d hold off for a while on telling Rebecca about the cremation. “Any particular color, on the balloons?”

  “Surprise me,” Phoebe said.

  Rory was not at the fuse box in the garage, which was disconcerting but not surprising. Rebecca finally found him sitting at the bottom of the back steps, smoking a cigarette that turned out to be a joint. He cupped it hurriedly in his hand when he spotted her, trying to hide it, but he had a lungful of smoke, and Rebecca watched his face turn red until he finally had to release his breath in a cloud of fragrant incrimination.

  “This explains a lot about the electrical situation,” she said.

  “No, no, I was straight when I started. This is just emergency stress relief.”

  Rebecca took a deep breath. She was surprised, she realized. This was, in its way, her archetypal Rory moment, caught between the crush of actuality and his blithe subversion. But what she felt was not the usual knee-jerk anger and despair, the sense of being trapped. She actually felt sad. And, even more strangely, disappointed. She had, it seemed, begun after all to tentatively believe in the miracle of Rory’s turnaround.

  At least, in the light of such a painful letdown, the catastrophe of the Marzipan job assumed its proper perspective as not that big a deal. But it made her wonder what it actually took to change a life, how deep you really had to go, what price you really had to pay.

  Rory, also expecting her anger, seemed baffled by the lack of an explosion.

  “I work better on a couple hits under stressful circumstances,” he said tentatively, as if to give her a second chance to blow up. “You know that.”

  “You know, Rory, if it really comes down to the kitchen never being finished and you staying clean, or the kitchen being something out of Better Homes and Gardens with you on dope, I’ll eat microwave dinners in the living room every night. It’s just not that important. What’s important is our daughter’s father keeping his life together.” She shook her head. “I really thought you were trying to stay clean.”

  “Well, trying,” Rory said. They were silent for a moment, and then he said, a bit incredulously, “You really didn’t know?”

  “How the hell would I have known?”

  “Phoebe didn’t tell you?”

  “My mother knew?”

  Rory began to answer, then reconsidered, all too transparently. Rebecca shook her head, but she really didn’t feel that she had time for the intricacies of this discussion. She said, “The reason I’m down here is not to bust you, dear. The power just went out in the whole house.”

  “That’s probably just a fuse.” Rory glanced at the still-lit joint, clearly considering taking another hit.

  Rebecca said, striving for patience, “Just put it out, Rory, and get me some electricity upstairs. Jeff is holding off a bunch of suits for me downtown, and I’ve got to get this stuff printed.”

  Rory knocked the ember off the joint obligingly enough, pinched the tip and secured it with a roach clip, and slipped the joint into his pocket. “I may have to take a run to the hardware store,” he said.

  “Fine, but please put the fuse in first.”

  “No, I mean, to buy the fuse.”

  “You don’t have fuses?”

  “I’ve got twenty and thirty amps. But if the whole house blew out, we’ll probably need a fifty.” And, at the look on her face, “It’s only a fifteen minute round-trip, Becca. I’ll have you up and running in no time.”

  Rebecca surprised herself by laughing. There was nothing else to do but laugh.

  Rory smiled uncertainly. He looked like he always looked at moments like this, like a faithful dog, a bit bewildered by all the emotional complexities but eager to do whatever he could to make it better.

  “You’ve changed,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve changed. You’ve mellowed. This thing with Mike is good for you, I think.”

  Rebecca shook her head. She probably shouldn’t have been so pleased. He was stoned, after all; th
e whole world looked mellower. And he had a clear self-interest in reinforcing her mildness here. But she suspected that he was actually right.

  She said, “Thank you. Now, please go to the hardware store and buy the fuse you need, and a few extras to keep here in the house. Come back here and get the lights back on, or some of them, at least. And then go home to Chelsea and the baby. And count your blessings, Rory. Sober up and count your blessings, over and over again. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Rory said. He got it, she saw. He really wasn’t an idiot. He was just a truly wishful thinker.

  The back door opened just then. It was Mike.

  “Oh, hey there,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

  “We were just taking a little break,” Rebecca said.

  “Well, the power was out in the house. It looked like the main fuse blew, so I stuck a penny in there and it should be all right for a little while. I’m going to run up to the hardware store and get some fifty amps. Hopefully I’ll be back before the place burns down. But keep an eye on it.”

  “Okay,” Rebecca said.

  Mike closed the door and was gone. Rebecca and Rory stood in silence for a moment. She could hear the chatter of her printer upstairs, as the job resumed. She had changed the ink cartridge before coming downstairs, so there was basically nothing she could do for the moment but let the world roll on. How completely weird.

  She said to Rory, “Would you have thought of sticking a penny in there?”

  “No way, man,” Rory said. “That’s dangerous. Not to mention illegal.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jesus said to them. Daughters of Jerusalem,

  do not weep for me, but for yourselves,

  and for your children.

  LUKE 23:28

  Mike checked the address on the slip of paper, but this was definitely the place. St. Luke’s Mission was housed in a decrepit old luxury hotel on Powell Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He slipped in through the open doors and found himself in a badly lit lobby. An enormous glass chandelier, with maybe half a dozen of its hundred tiny low-wattage bulbs burning, leaked a thin light the color of weak tea over an expanse of inert maroon carpet. To Mike’s right, the elevators, with their old-fashioned iron-grate doors, were blocked off by two sawhorses with a strand of yellow crime-scene tape strung between them. Nearby, the hulk of a stuffed couch, once grand, perhaps, and perhaps once pink, had settled like a dead walrus toward something like gray. Beyond it, a set of wide stairs curved upward, the sweep of their ascent freighted with that same carpet of drearily darkening maroon, a muffling layer where light had ceased. The gray walls were punctuated by neat squares of relative white, the scars of old artwork, now filled like strange windows with graffiti, and in every corner of the place the long brown shards of long-dead ferns flopped from fat urns of greening brass.

  Behind the massive oaken lobby counter, a lone woman bent over the keyboard of an ancient Macintosh computer, hacking away with singular urgency, like the telegraph operator on the Titanic trying to get out one last SOS before the ship went down.

  “Lunch is over, dinner’s not till five,” she said, without looking up, as Mike approached. “We won’t be registering for rooms until after dinner.”

  “Actually, I was here to see Father Dougherty,” Mike said.

  The woman paused and looked up. In the bad light it was impossible to tell her age, and it seemed likely that she didn’t care in any case. She was somewhere between thirty-five and sixty years old, with unexercised laugh lines traced faintly in skin innocent of makeup, wearing a sweatshirt several sizes too large, with the sleeves rolled up, and a Forty-Niners cap. Her eyes were cool blue, and very intelligent. She looked like someone who lived with exhaustion as a matter of course, who really didn’t have the time to be a human being very often, but who could rise to the occasion and even, at times, enjoy it.

  “That would be Tom,” she said. “He’s in the kitchen, I think. Right through the dining room there, swinging doors at the back.”

  “Thank you,” Mike said.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. The keyboard was already clicking again.

  The hotel’s banquet room, also shadowed by long-dead crystal chandeliers, had probably once rated three or four stars but had been converted to an efficient-looking cafeteria, with long plain tables and a lot of metal folding chairs. Each table held a funky handmade flower pot, like something from a kindergarten crafts session, and each pot had something colorful protruding from a litter of torn brown scraps of paper. The colorful bits on closer inspection turned out to be paper flowers, also of kindergarten-level workmanship. The petals of the flowers had inspirational words written on them: Hope. Faith. Dignity. The brown paper scraps that served as their soil also had words on them: Bitterness. Addiction. Despair.

  Behind clean plastic cough guards, the steam tables along the food serving lines gaped empty in gleaming steel counters, by far the newest things in the place. Mike slipped through the doors at the back and found the big industrial kitchen similarly well equipped: nothing overly shiny, but everything solid and durable and well maintained. The place had the quiet air of a busy operation between shifts, like a parked race car. A lone black man with a face seamed like a topographical map, wearing a hairnet and a spectacularly dirty white chef’s jacket, stood by a sink full of potatoes, peeling them with a placid air.

  “Father Dougherty?” Mike said.

  The man laughed, revealing a profound lack of teeth and suggesting that you couldn’t have paid him to be Father Dougherty.

  “That would be Tom,” he said and pointed with the peeler. “Back in the dish room.”

  Father Thomas Dougherty turned out to be a burly man wearing floppy rubber boots, jeans, and a black T-shirt with “St. Luke’s: A Mission with a mission” stretched across his barrel chest in an ill-advised red that made the words look like a wound. He stood at the center of the dish room floor with a nozzled hose, using the stream of water to blast food scraps methodically toward a drain. The priest was built like a middleweight fighter, with thick forearms, strenuously muscled, wiry black hair slicked to his head in sweaty eddies, and a jaw like a crag of rock, set in an igneous jut. His nose might once have been elegant, but it had been broken at least twice, and its present lines suggested pugnacity.

  Dougherty glanced up as Mike entered and said, in a brusque urban Jersey accent distinct even over the noise of the water, “Lunch is over, dinner’s not till five. If you’re starving, Art will give you a potato.”

  “I’m Mike Christopher. We talked on the phone earlier.”

  A shard of broccoli had hung up in a crack near the sink. Dougherty directed the water and dislodged it, herding it expertly toward the drain.

  “Remind me?” he said, glancing at Mike again.

  “Sharon Gaston over at the NHC said you might have an opening for a hospice worker.”

  “Right, right.” Dougherty released the nozzle trigger, and the stream of water ceased abruptly. He turned his full attention to Mike for the first time, and Mike felt the shock of his eyes, a furnace of dark brown, almost black, like a peat fire, venting an almost palpable blast of heat. In the sudden silence Mike could hear the breath whistling slightly through the mangled cartilage of the man’s nose.

  “So you’re looking to get rich off homeless people dying, huh?” Dougherty said.

  There didn’t seem to be a real reply to that, and Mike said nothing. Dougherty held his gaze for a moment, then turned the hose nozzle abruptly to the wall beyond Mike’s shoulder and fired a quick burst of water, blasting a cockroach that had emerged from the gap behind the sink. The bug fell to the floor, and Dougherty blew it up against the wall, played the carom expertly, and skidded the body toward the drain with the rest of the debris.

  He turned to Mike again and seemed surprised to find him still there.

  “Well, then—” he said resignedly, as if to say, If you insist.

  Mike resisted the urge to wipe t
he stray water drops from his face. He had a sense of having passed some subtle but crucial aspect of the interview process, though he wasn’t sure whether he was pleased about that or not. Maybe he should just have taken the potato and run. This guy was a piece of work.

  “Well, then,” he said.

  Tuesdays, as they had been for years now, were lunch in some south-of-Market joint with Bonnie. It had started when they were both employed as artists by Utopian Images and they’d used the time after surviving Monday to reconcile themselves to the further woes of the workweek, catch up on the weekend’s developments, and bitch about their jobs and love lives. Nothing much had really changed, Rebecca thought now, except that since she’d quit at Utopian Images the year before to start her own graphics business, she was up to her ears in federal small business loans, and she was paying the backbreaking self-employment tax on her own Social Security, while Bonnie still had a dental plan and got paid time and a half for overtime.

  Today was Vietnamese food, and at Bonnie’s insistence they both had enormous bowls of pho. Bonnie’s latest weight-loss scheme involved eating only things that burned more calories in the labor of consuming them than they actually contained. It was a diet technically indistinguishable from starvation, and the rice noodle soup fit the agenda perfectly, especially if you used chopsticks. Bonnie was using a spoon, however, and slurping happily. She was actually somewhat perfunctory about her nutty diets since she had hooked up with Bob, who appeared perfectly content with her just the way she was.

  Rebecca, who had seen herself recently in a bikini, was using chopsticks. Mike was also delighted with her just the way she was, but the old habits died hard. To complete the ritual absurdity of the whole scenario, both women had ordered big Thai beers.

  The restaurant had a bit of authentic Saigon, the air thick with the smell of coriander, basil, mint, and boiling beef shinbones. There were four angular, hoody-looking men wearing sunglasses at the back corner table, drinking iced coffee and playing cards, and the piped-in background music was mostly tinny Vietnamese covers of Wham and Madonna songs. Rebecca and Bonnie had almost gotten through the by-now-standard period of Bonnie going on and on about how great her relationship with Bob was.