Original Prin

by Randy Boyagoda

  “This is not the way the meeting was supposed to go,” said Prin.

  “Lots of things don’t go the way they are supposed to go. Just ask Rae. We don’t want her doing that kidney stuff anymore, do we? We want her to have a nice life like you have, with your wife and your kids. All you have to do is sign. And trust me, whatever’s going on with you and Wende is none of my business, unless it affects my business. Understood?”

  “You didn’t see anything. Because nothing—”

  “Hey, what happens in Dragomans stays in Vegas. You know what I mean? Unless it’s uploaded to YouTube. But forget worrying about that. Just sign. Or don’t. And then what you’ll be worrying about won’t be YouTube. It’ll be my Uncle. Are you?”

  “YouTube?”

  “Please, don’t even think about my Uncle right now! Oh no, are you? Please, don’t believe what you read about him online. It’s all exaggeration. And it’s nothing compared to what these people here, in this place, do to people who get in their way. Who don’t sign. Remember that Osama bin Zuckerberg who introduced you for your lecture? His father’s done things so bad, he can’t even visit North Korea,” said The Nephew.

  “You would email my wife?” Prin asked.

  “Is that what’s worrying you? Your wife and your four daughters, and my Uncle? Just sign and don’t worry about it,” said The Nephew.

  “I wasn’t thinking about that at all, actually. I was asking what you said about last night; wait, what did you just say about my daughters?” asked Prin.

  “Molly and the girls—what is it again? Maisie, Chiara, Philo-something, and what’s the fourth one’s name?” asked The Nephew.

  Pippa.

  “All of you living in that nice little house on Candlewick Avenue. You and Molly sleeping in the front bedroom, the girls in bunk beds in the back bedroom …”

  Prin signed.

  33

  He forced down celebratory date smoothies with Rae and Wende and The Nephew and then went back to his room to pack. Their flight was that night. Finally, Prin’s cell coverage returned. His phone buzzed and pulsed again and again. He had thirty-two new messages. How did she know already?

  But she didn’t. Not yet. He would tell her, soon. The thirty-two messages were from his parents. His Drag Racer lecture had been posted to YouTube and someone had forwarded it to his parents, who now knew he wasn’t in Milwaukee; he was in the Middle East.

  Seventeen of the messages were from Lizzie, sixteen of which were incoherent sobs with a pug barking in the background. The other was from her husband, Kareem. He told Prin that if he met anyone who wanted to harm him—though Islam is a religion of peace, so he probably wouldn’t meet anyone who wanted to harm him, but just in case—that he should say La illah ila Allah, Muhammad Rasul Allah. Kareem’s translation: “Don’t worry, brother, we’re on the same team!” At least, that’s what Prin thought he heard as Kareem tried to speak over Lizzie’s sobbing and the pug.

  Kingsley had left fifteen voicemails. The first was addressed to Prin. The rest were addressed to his kidnappers. To Prin, Kingsley asked why he was risking his life and ruining the lives of his wife and children by growing a beard and giving a lecture in the Middle East, “the suicide-bomber-exploding-toilet-bowl-of-the-world.” If Prin survived and came back to Toronto, he was grounded for a year. Finally, Kingsley was taking back the flat-screen television he’d given Prin as a housewarming present years before, because he was sure Prin never watched it or let his children watch it, which, in the twenty-first century, is like child abuse. Also, Kingsley obviously had to go to Sri Lanka to get a new wife now.

  This last piece of information felt very, very tacked on.

  The other fourteen messages from Kingsley were a rotating combination of insult rants directed at his son’s terrorist kidnappers, offers of guaranteed future casino winnings in exchange for Prin’s release, and hoarse begging for his son to be spared. In the final message, Kingsley took it all back, then offered it all again, and then just said, “Please, he’s my son, please,” before hanging up, poorly, and at length.

  Prin was overcome for a moment with the nose-tingling, eye-watering sense of just how much his parents loved him, how madly. By the time he’d finished listening to the messages, a new one had come through. Prin listened. It was from Molly! Only it wasn’t Molly. It was Pippa, their youngest.

  “Hi Dad. Where are you? I miss you, Dad. I want to show you my mosquito bites and see your hotel room. When are you coming home? Dad isn’t answering, Mom. Can I play a song on your phone?”

  He heard Molly in the background. His heart was already smashing around in his chest just to hear the sweet, slurry sound of Pippa’s little voice. Hearing Molly in the background, knowing she was awake right now, standing in the middle of Milwaukee, their children all around her … now was the time to call. His heart was pulling, thrashing, trying to go deep caught at the end of a line. This was the time he could call, but what would that do to her, just then, there with them all around her? Out of nowhere—worse still, if she wasn’t surprised—what a car wreck he’d be giving her. What if she were driving, in fact?

  Now that there was no chance of her being emailed about it first, what risk was there in waiting until he got home and could tell her in person, in their bedroom, with lots of contextualization and reports on subsequent reflections and prayers, with the children asleep down the hall, with the downstairs couch awaiting him?

  Yes, that’s all it would take—a good and full and thoughtful accounting, and then days, weeks, even months of sleeping on the couch. He could hide sober and scouring spiritual reading under the cushions—hardcovers that he’d sleep on for added mortification.

  He paced around his room, thinking it through, careful not to look to his left when he passed by the mirror.

  He called Molly.

  “Hi Prin! Girls, it’s Dad!” she said.

  “Molly, can we talk?” he asked.

  But she didn’t hear him. There was too much cheering and pleading for the phone. He ended up speaking with each of his daughters, and then with a couple of nieces and nephews. Molly thanked him from the background—chatting with the kids gave her enough time to finish folding laundry.

  He put them on speakerphone so he could look up the metaphysical implications of failing to do penance for a mortal sin. The screen wouldn’t respond to his sweaty prompts. It just smudged and smudged.

  Roasting in Hell for eternity, an eternity of being punished for trying and failing to look up rules for penance because the screen of your phone is soaked in sweat because you’re roasting in Hell.

  But God, he intended to tell her!

  He just needed, well, the right setting.

  It could be the first night he returned home, or maybe the second because of the jet lag, or the third because he volunteered to pick up the house while she went to bed early for a change.

  Or the fourth night, the fifth ... and on and on it could go until they were mild old people and by then wouldn’t he be risking Dante territory for her?

  Prin looked in the mirror. He looked right back. They both nodded. But just before one looked away, the other said hold on, come closer, can you hear me?

  What are you thinking?

  What am I saying?

  “Bullshit,” Prin said.

  “Daddy? What did you just say?” one of his daughters asked.

  “Nothing, sorry. What were you saying?” Prin asked.

  “Daddy, there’s a skunk with three legs living in Grandma’s backyard!”

  “No Daddy, it’s a skunk with four legs. One of them is disabled. And I think it lives under the neighbour’s porch.”

  “Daddy, do you know what would have been a good way to capture the skunk? First, put glue on the pavement—”

  “You can’t put glue on pavement!”

  “LET ME TELL! IT’
S MY WAY TO GET THE SKUNK! First, glue on the pavement and then get a real gun from the cousins and shoot the skunk in a box and then put a box on it. But we don’t have a real gun. And if someone gets hurt, we need to call the ambalance.”

  “Portland’s pet shark died!”

  “THAT’S MY STORY TO TELL DADDY! And it’s not true. She made it up.”

  “Daddy, can you bring us Tic Tacs? Do they have Muslimic Tic Tacs?”

  “Mommy said we’re allowed to sleep in our sleeping bags until you get home!”

  “Daddy, our skunk has only three legs. The fourth is disabled, like when Pippa tries to put the password into Mommy’s phone.”

  “I know her password! It’s a secret from all of you! Mummy only told me, right Daddy? Daddy, when are you coming home?”

  “Alright girls, enough! Now it’s my turn to talk to Daddy,” Molly said.

  There came a great gnashing, pleading, and rustling on the line. Finally, she had him to himself.

  “How was the lecture? How are things going? We miss you! I miss you. You’re flying home tonight, right?” she said.

  “Yes, we’re leaving for the airport in a bit,” Prin said.

  “And everything has gone well?” Molly asked.

  “Molly, I, I …”

  “Yes? What is it, dear? Is everything okay? You’re coming home soon!” she said.

  “I kissed Wende.”

  “…”

  “Hello? Are you there? Molly? Are you there?” Prin said.

  She was not.

  34

  He rode by himself to the airport. Rae, Wende, and The Nephew had no interest in making a side trip to visit the famous chapel in the mountains from Biblical times. Neither did Prin. He wanted to go there, now, because it was the only functioning church left in the country.

  Two hours after leaving the government complex, Prin and his driver, a new one, had made it out of the old city and onto the blunt, bland road that ran to the airport. They exited at a juncture between the blast walls that Prin hadn’t noticed on the way into the old city. They went through set after set of security checkpoints until they were cleared to proceed along a thin, dusty road towards a large, orangey-looking mountain, all hard and jagged-edged. There were no green daubs of trees or peaky snowcaps or even clouds floating by. This was all and only mountain.

  This driver had been quiet throughout the drive, leaving Prin with his thoughts. Which was, which were, awful.

  Molly wasn’t taking his calls.

  He needed to kneel down.

  He needed to kneel down and name what he had done. The video cameras on the rooftop would show nothing. The nothing of two bodies pressed together for a minute, maybe two. They wouldn’t show his lusting, leaking, suppurating heart.

  How long? How long, Lord, had he been wanting and not-wanting something with Wende? But in fact it didn’t matter that it was Wende. This wasn’t about Wende. What mattered was that somewhere inside that dented thing, his heart, he did not want Molly.

  For how long? How long, Lord?

  And how to tell that? Who could hear that and let him go on?

  He had to kneel.

  “First time to see Kaneesat al-Himar al-Muqaddas?” the driver said.

  “Is that the name of the place where we’re going?” asked Prin.

  “Is what we call it here,” said the driver.

  “And what’s the translation, into English?” asked Prin.

  “Hard to put in English,” said the driver.

  “Give it a try,” said Prin.

  “Okay. My English is not so good when it’s not stuff about driving, okay? But, Kaneesat al-Himar al-Muqaddas, I think it would be something like the Church of the Holy Ass,” said the driver.

  “So then, okay, well, how did this figure in the crucifixion? Do you know? Perhaps it’s named for the donkey that brought Christ into Jerusalem for Passover?” asked Prin.

  “Yes. Okay. Very holy place for Christians. Tremendously holy, as you Americans say. But not donkey. I mean, you know—”

  “Oh. I’m sure there’s something a little lost in the translation. Also, I’m Canadian,” said Prin.

  “Okay,” said the driver.

  They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip. Theirs was the only vehicle going in to the site. Now and then a tour bus or shuttle came at them from the opposite side, and each driver would pull halfway onto the sand-coloured gravel shoulder so both could pass at the same time, waving. On either side of this narrow road it was all rubble and flatness broken up here and there by clumps of yellow-green shrub and metal-box houses and spindly goats. There was laundry—bedsheets? Tunics? Tablecloths? Was there any point in bringing Molly something from Dragomans?—hanging flat on lines in the hot, dead air. He could even make out the smudge marks of last night’s fires in a few places. Prin saw no people at all. He needed to kneel down and he needed Molly to answer the phone, but shouldn’t this worry him, too?

  Were they all at work?

  Or were they also hiding?

  From what?

  At the foot of the mountain, the van came under sudden shade and they turned off into a parking area half-full of other vans. Prin’s driver made it clear he was going to sit on a bench under a clump of mopey midget palm trees and play games on his phone until Prin returned from the chapel. And so Prin walked ahead, alone, breaching the Biblical mountain and wishing his wife would answer the phone.

  He tried her again. In vain.

  This whole trip—had it been in vain? Had it been about his vanity? Pride? Lust?

  He knew others would laugh at this suffering, at what he was treating as adultery, what Molly was treating as adultery. What bare, numb lives they must have. Not the lives he and Molly had been given, had given each other, were trying and trying and trying to give their girls.

  He swallowed dry and hard at the idea of his daughters asking him what he’d done on his trip. Were the people nice? Did he make any new friends?

  Someone emerged from the shadows wearing a red chequered kaffiyeh. His arms were full of water bottles for thirsty sir. Prin waved him away and made for the church. His wife would not answer the phone. He needed to kneel down and tell and tell and tell and wait in the candle flicker to hear something, someone, tell him he should, please God, what?

  Prin walked forward.

  Here, sun and shadow were at odds in close quarters. The sun lit up long, jagged ruts and cuts, runnels that had gone dry along the mountainside. A few hundred paces away and more in shadow than sun sat a small, squat church carved into the mountain base where the cleft closed. Its facade was a mishmash of bas-relief Eastern domes and classical columns beneath a cross that looked like two big dry biscuits laid one upon the other at ninety degrees. Prin pinched his phone’s screen to get an extreme close-up of the cross.

  “STOP!” said a man.

  Not just a man, a monk.

  He was big, broad, and dressed in black and wore a hammer-thick silver cross under his big bird’s nest of a beard. He was standing just ahead, arms crossed, beside where the line to get into the church began.

  God’s very own bouncer.

  The monk pointed to a sign nailed into the rock wall behind him.

  “We must preserve the holiness of this site. NO pictures!” it read in various languages.

  He then jerked his thumb to the side, to a gift stall staffed by two vacant-faced women in black kerchiefs.

  “Buy pictures there when you leave,” he said.

  “NO!” said another monk, who emerged from the other side of the line. He was as barrelled and grim-faced and nest-bearded, only he wore a heavy silver cross on a jute-coloured cassock.

  “Buy pictures there when you leave,” he said.

  He pointed to another little gift stall, just up from the first one. It was staffed by two vacant-f
aced women wearing jute-coloured kerchiefs.

  Prin nodded at both monks, who were now glaring at each other, and slipped his phone into his pocket. He walked on, joining other pilgrims lined up to enter the chapel. Directly in front of him was a large group of Africans, all of whom were dressed in bright blue jumpsuits and carried white umbrellas. Two turned, smiled, and nodded at him, sweat beading down their faces. They leaned in and Prin smelled floral cologne and Lux soap.

  They wore nametags that read I’M BLESSED BRUCE and I’M BLESSED ROY.

  “Hello,” Prin said.

  “BLESSED! And blessings to you!” said Bruce.

  “BLESSED! and blessings to you!” said Roy.

  “Thank you,” said Prin.

  “Is this your first time visiting the Holy Church?” I’M BLESSED BRUCE asked him.

  “Yes. Can you explain why the church is called, according to my driver’s English translation—” asked Prin.

  “Hello boss! You have questions? You would definitely like a tour guide! I spent a day with Harrison Ford when they filmed an Indiana Jones here! Han Solo! You would like to skip the line! Don’t worry, I’m government-certified and can arrange everything, totally for free. No cost at all. Guaranteed. 110 percent. I just want to practice my English! Come with me! Are you from England? Manchester U! Princess Kate! Princess Meghan!”

  A loud, small, smiling man had appeared out of nowhere. He was bony and a little gristly, his clothes old and threadbare; his sandals mere notions of footwear. He wore a lot of lanyards, all of which appeared to hold formal credentials of one kind or another.

  “Can you tell me why this church has this name?” Prin asked.

  “Of course! I can explain everything!” the guide said.

  He took Prin’s wrist very gently. Then he closed his grip and pulled a little. The Africans watched, smiling beatifically and nodding along with the conversation.