Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  It reminds me of this D. Z. Phillips thing, Dot says. How we need to move from a hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of contemplation.

  Uh-huh. And what on earth does that mean? says Jesse.

  Dot blinks at her. He’s talking about what it means to understand something, Amy says. Different modes of inquiry.

  Modes of inquiry, Jesse says.

  Yes, Amy says. How do we understand something? By picking it apart or considering it altogether? For example.

  I don’t understand anything, Jesse says. Starting with this conversation.

  Yes, you do, says Amy.

  Jesse smiles. No, I don’t. It’s nice of you to say, but I don’t. Because where do you begin and end, right? There’s that rubber spider above the bar. Okay. What’s it doing there? You could say a lot of things. You could say they put it up for Halloween and kept it. You could say a child glued it together in Malaysia or wherever and it was shipped here to be sold in drugstores. You could say we find spiders creepy because they bite us, or look weird, I don’t know, or that we think it’s hip to put things where they don’t belong for whatever reason. Or— You get the point.

  But there you go, says Dot.

  Where? says Jesse. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m tired.

  Dot smiles. She’d do well in grad school.

  No, sorry, Jesse says. No. I could never spend all that time worrying about what mode of inquiry I was using.

  Don’t you though already? says Amy. She stares into the Christmas lights that hang from the wall. I mean, I think about why I’m in grad school. I think, Here we are brought up being told all truth and meaning can be found in one book. What if I’ve just added lots of other books?

  That’s a bit glib, though, isn’t it? says Dot.

  Is it? I didn’t mean it be.

  Dot turns to Jesse. You were brought up religious too then?

  Jesse finishes her beer. I think of it as a very narrow literary education, she says.

  And they laugh—they laugh!—and Jesse would cast the world in bronze right then to keep it still.

  Smoking outside she makes eyes with a tall woman. The woman has dark hair and broad pale cheeks. She holds Jesse’s look a beat past comfort, turns, spits.

  You don’t do that so good, Jesse says, hacking up phlegm and spitting herself. The woman looks on behind impassive eyes. Boredom hungering after unlikely surprise. This is what Jesse sees dancing in the dark light of her pupil.

  But I can spit farther, the woman says.

  I’d like to see that.

  They take turns spitting and spit until their mouths are dry. Tell me your name and I’ll buy you a drink, Jesse says.

  I’m not telling you my name.

  I’ll call you Randi then.

  Fuck off, the woman says, smiling.

  Jesse flicks her cigarette. Bye forever … Randi.

  We were just saying how it’s like that whole ‘religion without God’ thing, Dot says when Jesse sits back down. You know, what’s-his-name’s?

  No.

  Oh, never mind.

  Sorry, I don’t mean to be an asshole. It just feels like intellectual masturbation to me.

  So?

  So I guess I never came jacking off that way.

  Dot looks right at her. Oh yes, you have.

  It is a flash like the unbending of time’s clenched fist in which Jesse sees it, the hours laid out before her, half lost to the shadows of drink, some zealous making out in a doorframe, arms lifted to ease a passage of shirts, the emigration of clothes from body to floor, new skin—all that is waiting for them back home in a chapter of the night breached by visions. Cigarette smoke drifts in tendrils to the streetlamps. Midges play in the hot dirty air. And how many nights like this must a life contain, spent half waiting to be caught up in urgencies we can’t invent?

  But of course waking in Dot’s bed the next morning, it is Amy Jesse imagines beside her, among the tangles of thrown sheet. If she could stop right then and disinvest Amy of demure mystery, the innuendo of beatitude, this would be a different story. A happier one perhaps, if she could rebuff the small imaginary production in which she rolls over to Amy—Amy asleep, with her head cradled in her arms, kinked hair falling at her shoulders, heavy, graceful curve of her ass to the ceiling—and kisses her shoulders, telling her she’s sorry as she comes awake.

  About what?

  I acted like I didn’t understand you last night when I did. I don’t know why I did that.

  And what had Amy said? There’s a bit of cruelty in every judgment, don’t you think? Don’t you think every judgment enacts a kind of violence on the world?

  Enacts violence on the world … Jesse had said, like she were confused, which she doesn’t understand because of course she knew, of course she thought. When were we not violence to one another? Her father’s ungiving silence, Amy’s unreachable heart. Marissa in college, who after months of ardent fucking introduced Jesse to her parents as a friend. Jesse’s mother, lit on wine, so sad, so scared Jesse would have no one to protect her and would never know the joy of having a family of her own. This sort of joy, Ma? Her mother was not a stupid or an ignorant woman. From within the grip of what elect delusion did she speak? Through the kaleidoscope of what half-turn disarrangement of truth?

  But Jesse had pretended Amy had lost her.

  How’s your sex life? she’d said.

  Ha, what sex life, Amy said.

  And how funny now to think back to a night like that and remember that they had no idea what came next, that they sat in the bar happy enough to let the blank nothing of the future open out before them like a landscape in the process of being drawn. That in that moment, before the night collapsed into nothingness, into three still images perhaps, into itself and other nights just like it, they let themselves believe that for its very vividness, for its particularity, it might never end. But there was so much still to happen. This was before Amy had been touched or loved. Before her family shook apart after her father’s affair with an elder’s wife—an unconsummated intimacy, not unlike prayer—and he was driven from the church he’d built. Before Jesse’s mother got cancer (breast, she is fine). Before Amy dropped out of school and disappeared into the revolutionary politics that would consume the rest of her youth and Jesse took the job as office manager at the start-up clothing company in Baltimore, painting in what free time she had left. She had a dog, Peter, and a girlfriend, Sally. On good days it seemed she had grown old enough to feel at home in her skin. She considered her friend sometimes and wondered how much thought one ought to give to the way one lived. Then she thought that only Amy knew.

  I was a child raised by wolves, she tells Sally one nothing October day. They are on a beach in Delaware, the ocean wrought and glinting. In grays and browns the day presents as grades of rupture, bands of oblivion unfolding outward—the sky, the water, the sand, the sedge. The thought settles over Jesse in the absence of other thoughts: there is nowhere else she needs to be.

  Later she will think how foolish our dreams of arrival are. How many times must we say to ourselves, Maybe this is it, maybe the struggle is over, when we are only on the vast crescent of an expansive boredom, some beach in Delaware with our back to the sea?

  Peter runs after a flight of sandpipers that rise into the air like spangled filaments after light.

  Everyone thinks they were raised by wolves, Sally says.

  (III)

  You are twenty-nine. You are going home. This is happening. Kick and scream if you will. Carp all the way to the airport. Complain to your friends, to Anita. Such a drag. A duty, really, and joyless. No, you love your mother, she’s just impossible, deluded. The way parents are. Such lame-o’s, irredentists lost to an irrecoverable past. You look a bit bedraggled, you must admit. A bit showily causal in your knockabout jeans and Keds. No sense getting dressed up for your mother, but it’s like you’re trying to prove you’ve left. Prove you don’t belong. And yes, you’ve been away too long, it’s tru
e. A year, can it be? And yes, everyone else in what was once your family now has a different family of his own. Meanwhile your mother’s life has shrunk to the space of three stories she tells herself not exactly riveted to the truth: that she and your father continue to enjoy a spiritual bond since the split; that she is happy, all things considered; that you and she are a pair, alike in loneliness, although you often have girlfriends whom she continues to conceive of as very close women friends.

  It rains your first days home. You sit with your mother in the back room and she says she’s been feeling close to God lately. We talk, she tells you and says He put her on her own to know Him better. Water runs down the frosted glass. You should have more conversations with real people, you say. You know the sort: flesh-and-blood, visible, prone to unfortunate differences of opinion. I never knew what profound companionship I could find in God, she says. And what you want to say is that a person can’t find companionship in an echo, that she is listening to her echo and the thing about an echo is it will never surprise you. But you say nothing. You can rip the bandages off everyone else’s private wounds, not hers.

  Your father and me, Jesse, we just wanted different things.

  Anita told me to tell you to date more.

  It’s nice you have such nice friends, she says.

  The rain taps out your silence. On your third day home you escape Ma.

  The weather has broken and hot sun floods the shadeless downtown. The heat culls moisture from the hollows. You pause at the old department store. Through the windows you can see the dais and pulpit where Amy’s father used to preach. People you don’t know are gathered at a card table with coffees and notepads—congregants, strangers, new stewards of what was once yours—and you have the brief urge to go in and tell them to stop, that you and Amy have explored this blind alley and can tell them the dimensions if they like. It is a kind of vertigo you feel, a queasy lurch at the precipice of collapsed time, seeing those things continue on from which your own life has diverged. And it reminds you of watching the high school girls play soccer on a visit home years ago, the sudden truth in your stomach, as they ran in their red pinnies through the quickening dusk, that new bodies would keep coming to fill those jerseys year after year, shouting in a joy that was itself the very act of forgetting—forgetting those who had come before, forgetting how they would disappear themselves.

  At the new coffee shop a barista pulls the lever on the espresso machine like she isn’t sure what will happen. A finger taps your shoulder. Oh, goodness, you say, and you and Amy’s mom are hugging. She’s grown bigger over the years, cut her hair short, let it gray. How is she? Just lovely, she says. She’s remarried. Yes, you heard. A younger man, a naval engineer, the stuff of light gossip. Larry, she says. You look so great! Well, thank you, she says—but she does. And how beautiful are women of a certain age, when they stop obsessing over weight and clothes and come to inhabit the world without pretense.

  I’m doing yoga, she tells you.

  My girlfriend likes that, you say. She smiles, says nothing. And what do you hear from Amy? you ask.

  A shadow passes over her face. Do you know, Jesse, I haven’t heard from her in months? I hardly recognized her the last time she was here. She got involved in, what do you call it, helping the janitors at her school get a decent wage? And she was in those protests up in New York. Helping folks after the storms hit. I said, Amy, we got storms down here, honey. People in need down here. That’s what the church teaches, after all. And you know what she said to me, she says, What about the church, Ma? Do you have any idea what goes on in this country while we talk about Jesus this, Jesus that? Well, I said, you can’t save everyone, sweetheart, try as you might. And she says, Talk to me when you’ve tried. But I think she felt bad because she said, We could all be trying a little harder. My own daughter! But you know, I was proud of her too, Jesse, because I could hear God’s love in what she said.

  If God loves one person, it’s Amy, you tell her.

  What a sweet thing to say, she says. But you know, she kept saying how revolution was the only hope. I mean, revolution—in this day and age?

  Amy’s very pure hearted, you say. When she thinks something, she’s got to believe it all the way down, as deep as it goes.

  But Amy’s mom is staring out the window. She kept saying how all the problems were structural. Everything was structural. I don’t pretend to know what that means.

  You say you guess it means we’re all caught up doing one another little harms we don’t even notice. You touch her shoulder. You and Amy are still young, you remind her.

  But you don’t feel particularly young. In fact you feel older than just about everyone on earth. And how did mothers get so innocent as they aged? How, instead of revealing itself to them, did the world grow ever stranger and more worrying, as though you formed a system with them and moving in one direction caused them to move in the other, unseen cables in the dialogue of souls?

  So you’re still up north, Jesse, she says. You like it up there? You’ll let me know if you hear from Amy, won’t you? She always admired you so much.

  Oh, well, did she now. Really? You’ll take it. But parents say shit like that all the time and who knows, who really knows? Who can say the filters of necessary illusion the lives of children pass through on their way to settling in parents’ minds? What did your own parents think all those years as your hair grew shorter, when you gave up makeup, dresses, and the posture of an apology? No doubt they had their own confusions to approach in glancing and unpracticed dives. No doubt they would hold whatever they could still in their shifting world, even you. You would hold them still. You would sit like dolls at the kitchen table. What noise? you would say. What rumbling?

  In the days after, your thoughts run to Amy and the trip you took as high school seniors. A storm had torn up the coast where a friend of Pastor Bob’s, another DTS alum, had his congregation, and it fell to you and Amy to drive down the van with all the clothes and food, the tools and blankets, your church was donating. Our very own angels of mercy, Pastor Bob said. And how exciting it had been! The open road, the two of you, set free in service to a simple good. South and east you drove, on country roads that cut through spectral cotton fields and shuttered towns, places boarded up but for old gas pumps and Chinese takeouts. Embry’s. Golden Chopsticks. You ate lunch at a rest stop, sitting next to Amy by a bushy swale that smelled of moist decay and life, and you thought, This. Right here. I will live forever in states of exception, like today.

  Since her arrest the year before, Amy had been more devout than ever, but you had become interested in painting—and what did she make, you wanted to know, of art that flirted with sacrilege, beauty assembled from the raw material of sin?

  But that’s what’s so exciting, Amy says. Looking for God—finding God—where you least expect to.

  In your memory the sun is spilling through a crack in the afternoon. Pale gold sluicing the tidal gray. Washed-out starlight above a Chevron station. And what will you think looking back? That in your rush to know your friend you forgot how statements are postures, not truths, and most people mysteries even to themselves? How we are all waiting to be stripped down to our least garment and known when we can’t even manage it ourselves, from the inside out?

  Years later you paint a series of scenes from your arrival in town. The vantage point hovers in midair, several feet above the eyes of a standing observer. It is evening. The houses have a posed beauty in the glowing light, splintered, hushed, spilling forth clothing and furniture, curtains, toys, downed gutters. People on lawns carry panels of siding and plywood in their hands. They move, as you remember, in something thicker than air. The breeze through the van window is as warm as skin, alive with salt. You sleep in a stranger’s living room that night. Candlelight laps at the ceiling. And you wonder what resolve leads people to go on living in the path of storms, only to remember, slipping among indistinct strata of consciousness, that the people here don’t believe things
happen by accident.

  And where would they go? Amy says the next day in the car. Their lives are there. Their families and friends. Their job, their church.

  And what’s the difference, does she think, between a thousand acts of charity done in faith and the same one thousand acts done without it?

  Well, Amy says, but falls silent. The farmland rolls on beside you, tracts of cash crops growing hay colored in the autumn sun.

  The difference, I think, she says at last, is that the person without faith might think a thousand acts were enough.

  And you remember this much later, like a last remark at the crossroads where you and Amy part. How otherworldly she seemed just then. How awesome and unreasonable. You felt you were walking down into the valley while Amy, growing tiny above, climbed the steep and narrow path to a distant temple. And you felt so happy all of a sudden, so inferior to Amy and so happy to be.

  But that wouldn’t be her last incarnation, not by a long shot. And how does the force of belief not diminish as one conviction supplants the last? Where does Amy go to reemerge, to break apart and come back whole? Where is she now? Where are you, Amy? you whisper. Where do you go?

  And then you see her. It’s back in Baltimore, at some pop-up dance event Anita’s dragged you to. You step outside to smoke and there’s Amy, looking off at the dock lights in the distance, the harbor beyond her, the low buildings and piers like a crust along the shore.

  Amy, hey!

  You might be a ghost to judge by her look. No one else in her group turns.

  Jesse, she says. My God.

  What are you doing here?

  What do you mean? She smiles. Same as you.