by Cara Hoffman
“Don’t you want to go in there and play too?”
“I have to watch Danny,” she said.
“Gotcha,” he said, and he gave her a quick nod. “You’re in charge.”
She took off Danny’s shoes and the soldier picked him up and said, “All right, little dude! Let’s see how high you can jump.” Then he set him inside the castle.
Danny put his arms out at his sides, took a couple of tentative steps, fell over, and was immediately tossed into the air from the impact of a heavier kid landing next to him. He squealed and started laughing, a throaty belly laugh. Stood up and looked back at her, grinning so wide she could see his gums, rocking on the taut inflated plastic, his hands balled into fists in front of his narrow chest. His eyes so bright and excited, and she felt her face mirroring his.
He hopped, fell on his knees, bounced in the air, and then flopped flat on his back, his curly hair light about his face. Two little kids in jeans and T-shirts bumped into each other and fell on top of him and he started laughing again, his head back, his face red. They all struggled to get up, a scrambling tangle of limbs, socked feet slipping against the shaky foundation. Danny made his way to the middle of the castle by scooting on his knees, stood and jumped over and over, threw himself down on his stomach, flopped over on his back, giggling. She hunched and dodged where she stood on the pavement as other children knocked into him. If she had seen anyone as happy as he was right then she couldn’t remember it. He staggered, dizzily elated, his light body flew and landed, he rolled and struggled and convulsed with laughter, and she could feel how it must be to be so small and soaring inside a safe cocoon. She hadn’t ever played in a bouncy castle like that, but watching him she could feel how it must be. The pleasure of falling and rising. His face made her laugh, his eyes made her laugh, everything about his tiny body made her laugh, and she stood transfixed. Danny’s smile, Danny’s face, the way his eyes lit as he was lost in a fit of absurdity. A cord of joy was tied so tightly between them, all she had to do was see his tiny square teeth and she felt it, felt the world order itself in the sound of his voice, his throaty baby laugh.
This was the thought she called upon in training, in transport, in the emptiness of waiting that would never again be called boredom. It was with her the whole time, that sound. And there was no way she would have come home without it. No place outside that sound where she could live. No home, no country, no body to inhabit. It was the last breath of music she still felt in her belly, a little fire that she needed to stoke and carry.
Seven
LOURDES CHURCH a simple stone building with a slate steeple that rose and disappeared into the fog. Across the street the strip-mall parking lot was empty, but the glowing lights of the Rite Aid sign shone dully through the mist, like the lamps around the blast walls during a dust storm.
The doors were open, and she went in and sat in the dark cavernous chapel on the creaking pews amidst the smell of wax and pine cleaner and frankincense. The stained-glass windows were dimly lit and she looked at them pane by pane; the long slow journey of Jesus, dragging his cross from window to window, until the Roman soldiers crucified him. It was a storyboard, she thought, like the kind you have to make and go over with your CO when you get back from a capture or kill. The stations of the cross were so everyone had their story straight, created agreement and uniformity in reporting the event.
She’d spent nearly every afternoon in that church since she was fourteen, and loved the windows, the acoustics, the empty haunted feeling, the freedom of her voice rising and filling the space. But this was the first time she’d thought about the stations of the cross. Insurgent Jesus. Another pretty thing put into its proper context. Like the way running wasn’t the same anymore, or sitting in the sun; the way washing sand out of her hair would probably never feel the same, wouldn’t remind her of nice things like waves lapping against a beach. The stations of the cross made sense now, one more common war story hiding in plain sight.
Lauren had no compulsion to pray and didn’t want to acknowledge the exhibitionism of the crucifix with a glance. And this was also new. She’d never cared much one way or the other about looking at wrecked Jesus with his crown of thorns. It was religious art, and it had been beautiful like the stained glass. But now it made her think of bodies, real naked tattered bodies and real blood. And the strange phenomena of seeing soldiers break and become religious so they’d have someone to blame or someone to forgive them the unforgivable.
Few things were as unsettling as a person getting combat-induced religion, rambling about ghosts, life after death, being surveilled by some all-powerful thing. Nothing was quite as baffling as a hired killer, a soldier, a person from the very profession that killed Jesus, saying what he fought for was Jesus. But it just got crazier from there: They were fighting for a man who’d died thousands of years ago but actually wasn’t dead and he wanted you to love your enemy, and not to kill, and not to be greedy. His dad’s God and his mom’s a virgin. It was like a nonsense song from kindergarten: “It rained so hard the day I left / the weather it was dry / The sun so hot I froze to death / Susanna don’t you cry.” People loved this religious stuff because it actually made no sense. Just like the war made no sense. And she knew now for certain that feeling of mystery, that impenetrable false logic was necessary to make people do stupid things.
Of all the things Lauren had seen that she didn’t want to see, battlefield baptism was among the worst. She could feel it rising in her again, just looking at the stained glass. “God’s grace” settling over someone’s face and the relief they radiated once they gave into the unreal, and it was too much for her, actually horrifying. Created a thick knot in her stomach. The hypocrisy. The cruelty and terror it was meant to wash away, absolve. She didn’t care if it made people feel better. It was fucking retarded and incredibly dangerous. Serving with men and women who believed in God and Jesus and Mary made her nervous. Why would it make anyone comfortable to be around a soldier who thought they’d be getting God’s reward after they died? Those were the people they were supposed to be fighting, not standing beside. She wanted to be with folks who knew that all you got, you got right now. Everything else was make-believe, stories to tell and stories to keep straight. Daryl had put it best: Anyone who came away from what they’d been doing in Iraq believing in God was a total cocksucker.
She shivered in the pew and folded her arms across her chest, looked over at the rows of memorial candles flickering by the feet of the Virgin in her blue robes. The smell of wax was strong and the lingering scent of smoldering wicks from prayers that had been extinguished by chance, or snuffed out when she opened the heavy door, gave the place an air of fixed melancholic nostalgia; hopeful birthday cries of “make a wish” and the faint odor of wreckage.
She stood and walked quickly through the church and into the chantry and then down a flight of stairs into the basement, passing storage rooms filled with holy hylics: clear plastic sacks of Communion wafers, not yet transformed into the body of Christ; boxes filled with candles; stacks of hymnals and Sunday school supplies.
The corridor was cloying and almost dank but not unpleasant; the cement floor, the brick and paneled walls were welcoming in their humbleness. At the end of the hallway a red exit sign hung above an ornate wooden door that let out onto a cracked and weedy parking lot littered with small, Ziploc glassine baggies. The lot was home to garbage cans and a basketball court where she’d played sometimes when she was little; beyond that, a bent and sloping chainlink fence guarded an ancient playground, metal climbing bars, swings and a slide and a teeter-totter.
Lauren stopped at a small white door between the exit and the boiler room and knocked lightly, then took the handle and pushed, peeking her head around the corner into the room.
Troy looked up from his desk. And then gave a quick, startled, “Ha!”
The room was just big enough to fit his desk, a file cabinet, and a living-room chair upholstered in yellow and orange flowers that
had long ago lost its springs and showed its stuffing at the seams. Every wall of the office was taken up by bookshelves filled with binders and folders and sheet music, and there were no windows, just a desk lamp glowing hotly in the little windowless space.
Troy was thin and pale, his wavy black hair shot through with strands of white. His blue eyes bright behind the thick black-framed glasses he’d had for twenty years. She knew they were military issue, that he’d been wearing them since his tour ended back in the ’90s, but they looked like Buddy Holly’s, hip, of an era. He knit his eyebrows and then smiled, revealing the gap between his front teeth, stood up to greet her as she came in and closed the door.
Troy shook her hand heartily, then went back behind his desk and sat facing her in a kind of awkward mock formality as she sat down in the beat-up chair, hanging one leg over the side.
“I have to go up and play in two hours,” he told her, rearranging some papers. He spoke quickly, his voice resonant and overly clear, perfectly articulated like it was coming from a radio. His eyes were downcast, but he was smiling broadly, seeming to take in everything about her. She liked that he didn’t say “welcome back.”
“I figured,” she said. “I wanted to stop by and see if you were here early.”
He nodded vigorously. “I have time right now and no one else is here if you want to go up to the choir loft.”
She shook her head. “I just wanted to see you.”
He smiled, the corner of his mouth twitched, and then he looked down. “Or you could come after mass or before vespers,” he said. “I still have your score here. I have it in the cabinet and we could start where we left off.”
She shook her head again. “I’m out of practice.”
“Well exactly,” he said nervously, almost angrily, his smile vanishing in an instant. “You need to get back in.” He looked up at her with something bordering on contempt or incredulity. “You haven’t missed a thing, really. I mean you missed all those years while your voice would be ripening, so to speak. You have to get back in. I don’t see any other option.” Then he said, “Have you been in touch with Curtis?”
“Man, fuck Curtis,” she said.
He looked taken aback, gave a short offended laugh through his teeth.
She just wanted to be there with him. She did not want to talk about Curtis or her voice. The truth was, she wanted to smell the church, sit in that chair and look at Troy across his desk. Maybe after a few months of doing just that they could talk about something else. Not that she still measured time in months. Second to second worked best if you wanted to feel like you were going to make it.
“Well what do you think you’ll do? Get a job? What did you learn to do? I think you should come upstairs and practice now. I mean, what else are you going to do?”
She cringed and put her hand over her eyes. Get a job was exactly what she was planning on doing. A good job, one that could support her whole family; any other idea was just a dream. “Have you been outside in the fog?” she asked, changing the subject.
He smiled and nodded emphatically. “Yes,” he said, “it’s mythic.”
“How was midnight mass?” she asked.
“It was beautiful. I played Arvo Pärt’s Annum per Annum.”
“You’re kidding me. With that beginning? What’s next, Schoenberg?”
“I’m not! I’m not kidding you! That’s why I like it here. I can play whatever I want.”
Lauren looked at Troy, his face open yet completely impenetrable, unreadable. Most people accepted that the line between crazy and genius was blurred, but few people thought about the line between genius and retardation until they met Troy. She loved him. Every awkward honest sentence. His dandruff. The reserved, repressed way he carried himself and then the way that carriage shattered into a languid, confident coordination, his whole body suddenly engaged when he played or listened or began talking about music. She tried to imagine the congregation at Lourdes listening to the silences and dissonance of Arvo Pärt on Christmas Eve instead of Handel. Musically the choice made sense. Minimalists, sacred music. But one was still alive, denied what he wrote was sacred and composed music that was so stark, so spare and clean and desolately beautiful she’d wanted to hear and sing nothing else. She knew she was biased, felt this as a person who’d been trained to hear by Troy, and she didn’t care. Her ears, her mind, her mouth, the sinewy bands of flesh that vibrated in her throat, better that he had shaped her than anyone else.
Troy had been accompanying Lauren since she was fourteen and her ninth-grade music teacher brought her to meet him. He’d been playing organ at Lourdes for ten years before she showed up—and he was nothing like any teacher she’d had. He was distracted and then suddenly hyperfocused on things she couldn’t even hear. He talked to her almost like she was a peer, and apart from one small, slightly confused-looking smile he gave when Ms. Heimal brought her in to sing for the first time, he acted as though he wasn’t remotely impressed with her voice.
Now Troy was someone who knew her deeply, knew a part of her she didn’t like very much. Some useless part she was embarrassed to talk about. Still she wanted to be nowhere else that morning, was compelled to hear the acoustics of her own footsteps in the hallway and to see his face, if nothing more.
“I read that Arvo Pärt’s not a Holy Minimalist,” she said.
Troy’s face broke into a huge smile and he laughed, nodded vigorously. “If we can take the man’s description of his own work, then yes, I guess it’s true. He doesn’t like the term, says no. It’s just fascinating!”
“Why did he say it?” she asked. “I mean, the Magnificat? I Am the True Vine? Come on.”
“Sure sure sure,” Troy said impatiently. “You realize of course that’s not what makes it sacred music.” He tapped the side of his pen nervously on the desk a few times. “You know, what is the spirit in the work? You have to ask yourself. What is the ghost in the work? And what is the holy thing we’re trying to impart when we play? It’s not the words, for God’s sake. Words are just gibberish, just empty bodies for the tone to inhabit, right? I mean when you hear something in Latin you are often more transported, right? The mystery of it. Or the meaninglessness of it, something with no meaning is the vehicle that carries something with all the meaning. Listen.” He said, “Seriously, listen, listen.”
Then he sang, full throated and with such rich timbre she felt a surge of emotion, felt lifted. He sang, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoiceth in God thy Savior for He hath provided . . .” Then he stopped abruptly.
“Now listen,” he said, and in the same radiant tone he sang, “Blah blah de blah de blah de blah eggs and bacon wooden nickels, fox in socks, ski trip tornado.”
She laughed. “Beautiful.”
He nodded. “Right,” he agreed. “I often want to get rid of all the words, you know? They’re so silly. So hollow. They’re like a house for the tone and nothing more, some kind of intent, you know . . . or words are a wish, you know, part of the flat world but meaningless without the voice. The sound, or the resonance of this kind of human sound, rather, is divine on its own. Entirely on its own! And oh! This reminds me, I’ve been listening so much to Cantate Domino. Perfect for your voice. You should come up and learn some of it right now. Right now, actually.” He set his pen down and began to stand. “Now is the time.”
She shook her head.
And he shook his head back at her, leaned over his desk, his eyebrows raised in question.
“No? I say yes. I say yes, you do it.” He quietly hummed the beginning of Pärt’s Cantate. Again, his voice was so clear, the tone rang from his belly, from the strength of his gut and lungs, and each phrase was punctuated by perfect metered quiet. The absence of tone, a silent counterpart that gave the sound its power. He smiled at her. She felt her body resonate, a coda of the sounds he was making. She caught her breath, felt her throat constrict suddenly as if she’d been struck by something, then she bent and covered her mouth in a fit o
f coughing.
Troy offered her a mug half filled with ice-cold black coffee, and she drank it, realizing after it was in her mouth that it’d probably been sitting there for days. Her eyes watered, she swallowed. After some silence she said, “I just wanted to let you know I’m home.”
“Well, I can see that. You’re home in form, anyway, and I’m glad. I’m really glad.” He stared at her for a few more minutes and they said nothing. She wanted badly to go up into the choir loft with him. Wanted to become embodied; to become good. But she’d already said no and didn’t want to start herself on the path to some dumb fantasy. She was not going to call Curtis. Nothing would come of it.
Troy was unchanged, or maybe he’d been changed long before she’d ever met him. She remembered riding her bicycle home from practicing with him. The light strong feeling in her body like she could rise up and out of there, out of Watertown, out of that life. The autumn air and the dead leaves in the gutter scuttling and fluttering like pages in a book as she pedaled through them. She would ride no-handed. And the sun would be low but still warm. It was twenty minutes maybe—twenty minutes a day that she carried nothing but the sounds in her head and the crisp, smoky smell of fall. A high precise line of melody now committed to the twin bands of membrane that stretched at the top of her trachea, a muscle memory, a melody committed to her lungs, committed to her mouth, to her gut, to her mind.
Only moments before this ride she would have been standing with him in the cold choir loft, straight shouldered beneath her sweater, hair tucked up into her black wool watchcap, a hand-me-down from PJ. Standing and singing the same phrase until there was no way to do it wrong.
“Again,” Troy would say, his eyes trained on her mouth, his head bowed slightly. So close she could smell the woody, unwashed medicinal scent of him.
She would repeat it until the impossibility of the notes became itself an impossibility.
