Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  Elder Passos took the sudden injection of energy—energy upon energy, line upon line—and let it slingshot him down the final stretch of his speech. “In God’s infinite wisdom and mercy He has given us another chance to embrace the truth, the full truth, the full and saving truth. He restored His true church through the Prophet Joseph Smith, beginning in the year 1820, and now, a hundred and eighty-three years later, we—Elder McLeod and I—we represent that very church. We are young elders of this church, down from Recife, down from Boston, and there are thousands more like us all over the world, overspreading the four corners of the earth to bring the good news once again, in all its fullness. We proclaim absolutely that God lives, that Jesus Christ paid the price for our sins, and that the latter-day gospel, the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel contained in the church we represent, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—we proclaim that this gospel is true indeed! Amen!”

  “Amen!” Josefina all but shouted.

  “Amen and amen!” Passos did shout.

  Then Leandro: “Amen!”

  And Josefina a second time: “Amen!”

  And Passos turned to McLeod. The curious smile gone wondering now, the blue eyes bright with amusement or Spirit or both. Too caught up to care, Passos nodded his assurances, It’s okay, it’s okay to let go. Then even McLeod, the brancão beside him, even he said “Amen,” though he said it like an experiment, a question. And Passos answered it: “Amen!”

  He rode that feeling for the rest of the night and into Tuesday morning, and Tuesday afternoon, where he needed it. The unbroken sun, the unanswered doors, the unpeopled abandoned streets—all of it tried even Passos’s patience, Father Abraham notwithstanding. But at least he had something to focus on now; he could cheer himself with the thought of Josefina and Leandro. The two had agreed to a second discussion early next week, having promised to read from the Book of Mormon and pray about it.

  “You know,” Passos said at one point, as much to himself as to McLeod, “I think this couple might be golden.”

  “Which couple?” McLeod said, but then he smiled.

  In midafternoon the elders went to knock a neighborhood close to downtown, passing a gauntlet of pornographic newsstands en route. Passos noticed how McLeod kept his eyes to the ground—a good technique, he observed aloud, but not ironclad. You still ran the risk of glimpsing pages rain-plastered to the sidewalk. What was best was to look straight ahead, not focusing. Passos glanced at McLeod. He wondered if he’d said too much, rushed to judgment once again. But his junior companion nodded.

  Then two more hours of fruitless knocking. The dusk still hovered an hour away, and given the championships, the postgame shows, the celebrations, Passos held out little hope for the dusk. At a few minutes before six o’clock he suggested they get off their feet, maybe stop for a restaurant dinner. Passos knew something of his own reputation in the mission, and tonight he wanted to counteract it. So how about the rodízio downtown, the one by the post office?

  “Really?” McLeod said. “That’s allowed?”

  “We need to eat, don’t we?”

  McLeod smiled. “Okay then! I’m buying!”

  Passos smiled himself, a little uncertainly, acknowledging the joke. He thought it was a joke, anyway. On the way to the restaurant he noted McLeod’s buoyant stride and his light, carefree humming. Of course it was a joke. How could it matter who bought for whom? He and McLeod, all the missionaries in the mission, received the same stipend each month from the church’s general missionary fund, a vast communal pot that each mission drew from, each according to its relative costs, each according to its needs. Elder Passos thought of the fund in just these terms—Marxist ones, ironic ones. The fact was that American missionaries and their families filled the coffers most of the way, and then the Americans got the same amount in the field as everyone else, even people like Passos, too poor to pay anything into the general fund. It intrigued Passos that such an anticapitalist system should count on the support of so many Americans—it originated in America, in Salt Lake City—and, really, it surprised him. He tried to bear that surprise in mind, storing it alongside Father Abraham. He thought of his teachers who had held forth on the bottom-line evils of Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush, and he thought Yes, but. Let that be his mantra. For as he sat down in a restaurant booth across from McLeod, Passos knew that America, in a sense, had already picked up the tab, for which he felt vulnerable, if also grateful, especially since McLeod had not personalized the debt. Elder Passos still burned to think of the time his only other American companion, Elder Jones, had garbled something about footing the bill for Passos and all the other freeloaders, and was it too much to ask for a simple thank-you? In the person of Jones he had hated America. In the person of McLeod—what did he feel, exactly?

  McLeod rapped the restaurant table with his knuckles. “Where are you, Passos? Is the Spirit on you again?”

  “Huh? Oh. Are we ready?”

  They ordered drinks—Guaranás, naturally—and toasted Josefina and Leandro, their companionship, and whatever else came to mind, collecting cuts of salty meat off the spitted slabs that wheeled around the restaurant like characters in a morality play: Appetite, Pleasure, Greed … At the end of the night they ordered two cans of Guaraná to go and stepped out onto the street like the gluttonous princes of this world, happy, silly even, holding their bellies and groaning, ambling the sidewalks, swilling their sodas. Cars and people passed by every now and then, but Passos hardly noticed, hardly cared. How often could he claim to be truly unself-conscious, what with his uniform and his name tag and his companion at his side? The moment floated outside reality. He wanted to stay in it, cocoon-like, for as long as he could.

  A car slowed down on the other side of the street until it appeared to be tracking the missionaries’ movements. A man leaned his upper body out the passenger-side window, cupped his hands to his face, shouted, “Bin Laden! Boo! Bin Laden! Why don’t you and your Bush go …” Then the car sped up again and the Doppler bent the last words out of language. The sounds of raucous laughter trailed behind.

  Elder Passos turned to his companion, watched his face fill up with blood.

  “Does that happen often?” he asked.

  McLeod said, “Whatever.”

  “Since the attacks in New York?”

  He nodded.

  “You were in the field, right?” Passos said. “How long had you been out?”

  “Three months. I was in my first area.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Passos noticed the muscles in McLeod’s jaw gripping, ungripping.

  “It happens more now, actually,” McLeod said, “with all this talk about a possible war with Iraq.”

  The elders walked in silence for several blocks. They didn’t have a destination; they simply moved.

  McLeod took a sip from his can of Guaraná.

  Passos shook his head and pronounced a word: ignorantes.

  McLeod nodded.

  “Do you have that word in English?” Passos said.

  Another nod.

  “Will you teach it to me?” Passos said.

  Two weeks later the elders came home from another long, hot, unproductive day, and Elder McLeod went straight to his bed and lay down on the covers in full uniform, even kept his dusty shoes on. He hung his feet just off the bedspread and felt the blood going to them, the twin heartbeats in his soles. Tomorrow was their day off. Preparation Day, technically. They were to prepare for the coming week, according to the Missionary Handbook, by doing laundry, shopping for groceries, cleaning the apartment, writing letters home … Tomorrow McLeod planned to do as little as possible. The fridge was stocked with Guaraná, if little else, but he could worry about that later. The apartment was clean enough. He could set his clothes to soak tonight, hang them up in the morning. If he felt ambitious, he might head over to Sweeney’s tomorrow, but for now that “if” loomed large, as large as the pain in his feet that would only get worse after he removed
his shoes and the soreness expanded, in a sort of osmosis of aching, beyond its daytime confines.

  “Passos?” he called out. “Companion? You ever slept in your shoes?”

  No answer.

  “I’m just wondering if that might be better. Forestall the pain, you know? Or no. Not really. Passos?”

  Again no answer.

  After a while McLeod dragged his legs to the side of the bed and placed his feet flat on the floor, bracing most of his weight on his arms. He removed his shoes, then transferred his weight, slowly, from arms to legs, like a car jack cranking down: the tires give a bit of their roundness, the pavement gives its back for support—an exchange of burdens. Elder McLeod let out a yawp as he stood up, exaggerated for effect, and loud, for Passos to hear.

  He took ginger steps into the entryway/living room where his senior companion sat studying. He deposited his shoes under the blue chair by the door—the chair on the right; Passos’s was on the left. When McLeod sat down in it, just a few feet from Passos’s desk, his companion still ignored him. Or maybe didn’t hear him? Was that possible? Elder Passos appeared to be reading, or rereading by now, the single letter he’d found in the mailbox that night. Nothing for McLeod, but he didn’t worry too much. His mother wrote every week, sometimes twice a week.

  “Passos?” McLeod said, more softly now. He stood up and crossed behind the desk, pausing at Passos’s left, a respectful distance, though close enough to see the letter: a single page of notebook paper covered in blue, uneven scrawl. McLeod tried again. “Is everything all right, Passos?” He touched his companion on the shoulder.

  “Huh?” Passos looked up quickly, brief eye contact. “Oh. Yeah.” The eyes seemed to have returned from a great distance.

  “What is it?” McLeod said.

  “It’s nothing.”

  Elder Passos turned his attention back to the letter. He didn’t look up again. And McLeod didn’t press.

  An hour later, in bed. Lights out. Elder McLeod lay facing the wall, still awake and wondering, and annoyed, though mostly at himself. Passos kept his private affairs private. Why had McLeod expected him to do otherwise? Why had he been stupid enough to think that Passos might confide in him, share the contents of a personal letter? This was the mission, after all. What friendships cohered on the mission cohered because of the Work. You meet these people—companions, local members, investigators—and they flare up into your life like fireworks, brilliantly, and then they fade and disappear after four months, six months, a year at the outside. The final, irreducible strangeness of the mission.

  How had he gotten here? How had this become his life? Most of McLeod’s high school friends were at college now, studying, joining fraternities, going to football games, parties, having sex (lots of it, probably), living the life of the body that McLeod had only glimpsed, and forming the kind of relationships that run much deeper than a transfer or two. He thought of Sweeney again, and Tiff: McLeod used to roll his eyes at the mere mention of her name, but of course he envied them. One night in the MTC Sweeney called from his desk, “Hey Monk, you’re bookish, tell me what you think of this.” He quoted a paragraph from a letter to Tiffany that incorporated lines from Song of Solomon—something about the lover’s neck like ivory, and her breasts like two does that feed among lilies.

  “You’ve seen her breasts?” McLeod said.

  “No comment,” Sweeney said. He put down the letter and took up the framed picture of himself and Tiffany in front of the carved tree. He smiled—an impish smile, McLeod thought, though after a moment it turned tender, sad.

  That same night McLeod wrote his only letter to Jen. He hadn’t spoken to her in months. He had no illusions about a future with her. He kept her picture on his desk—Jen standing just inside a doorway, in a winter coat, brown bangs slanting down into one eye, a smile of surprise on her reddened face—but mostly he kept it out of habit, or to keep up appearances. Dear Jen, he began the letter,

  You remember me? The doubter? The foul-mouthed blasphemer? Well, I’m here in the MTC now, in São Paulo, Brazil. Had you heard? I must have slipped through the cracks in the screening process. I suppose it helps when the bishop is your father. You can always bribe him with the promise of yard work. In seriousness, I hope this letter finds you well.

  They had met through youth group, gone to church dances together. One day in the spring of their junior year she invited him over to her house for a swim. They stood in the shallow end of her inground pool, just the two of them, lathing their arms, adjusting to the water. Jen wore a simple, one-piece bathing suit, modest, and all the more alluring for it. They must have talked about something or other, but McLeod had forgotten the conversation. All he remembered now was the inverted triangle of shadow that hovered like a keystone over her swimming suit. He remembered how she put three fingers under his chin, lifting his head. “I’m up here, okay?”

  A year passed. A year and a half. They kissed a lot. They didn’t go further. McLeod reached for her breast over her shirt one night in his Cavalier, idling at the edge of her cul-de-sac. Jen’s breathing caught, then quickened. They kissed deeper. McLeod pressed and rubbed and after a time moved his hand down to the bottom hem of Jen’s shirt, tucking under it. At the first touch of his fingers on her stomach—he felt her muscles grab—Jen turned away. She stared at the blackness beyond the window. She whispered, “Seth, I’ve told you. What have I told you?”

  McLeod pushed quavering air through his nose. He flushed red in the driver’s seat, was glad of the darkness, was suddenly eager for his girlfriend to leave.

  “I’ve told you I’m not comfortable with that,” Jen said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” she said. “It’s not. I’m really not comfortable with it, Seth.”

  He heard a plaint in her voice, not anger but concern, an edge of fear even. He hated it. He felt dirty, predatory, and he hated it. Something ruptured in the center of his chest and poured out of him and he hated it. “You’re not comfortable?” he said. “You are not comfortable!” He drew tight the crotch of his jeans against his erection. “Look at this! Look! I’m eighteen years old! We are eighteen years old! We should be fucking right now! We should be clawing at each other! What is wrong with us, Jen? What is wrong with us?”

  Jen reached for the passenger-side door. McLeod grabbed her shoulder. “I wasn’t finished.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Jen said, jerking away. “Do not touch me.”

  “Why not? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t? Why we shouldn’t! It’s not like we don’t love each other. You’ve said it yourself. Why should we need more than that? Why should we be so afraid of everything? Have you ever noticed that? How fucking afraid we are of everything?”

  “Do you hear what you’re saying, Seth? Can you hear what you’re saying? You’re supposed to be preparing for your mission!”

  “Give me one good reason. One!”

  “Because chastity is important! Because you’re supposed to protect my virtue!”

  “Says who?”

  “Says God!”

  “Fuck God! Fuck! God! Do you know how fucking sick I am of God? What if he’s a story, Jen? What if he’s a cipher? What if he’s complete and utter and total bullshit?”

  … I’ve been meaning to apologize about that night for a long time—to really apologize, I mean, to try to get at the reasons. That was my father’s “assignment,” actually. But the truth is, I still don’t know the reasons. I was a different person then, I think. Just in the last six months I’ve changed so much. I’ve had long and deep and probing conversations. About the nature of knowledge. About faith. And now here I am in the MTC. I’m a missionary, Jen. I’m experimenting on the word. I hope you can forgive me. Anyway, I’m sorry.

  Yours,

  Elder McLeod (Seth)

  In the morning McLeod’s equilibrium returned, but the taste of his memories still lingered: coppery, bitter. He told himself things had changed. He was experimenting on the w
ord again. He was different. He thought of Josefina. Certainly Josefina was different. If only Josefina, then—wasn’t that something? His bedside clock read 7:32. Passos’s bed was empty, unmade. Had McLeod slept through his alarm, or forgotten to reset it? Why hadn’t Passos gotten him up on time? He remembered it was P-Day. Maybe that explained it. Did the 6:30 rule really matter on P-Day?

  McLeod jumped out from under his sheets at the thought. It mattered! Things mattered again. Move. Let him move. The cool tile underfoot like the reassuring end to a dream: he had only been falling in his sleep, he was here now, and with two feet on the ground.

  Crossing the hallway to the bathroom McLeod noticed his companion, in P-Day clothes, already at his desk in the entryway/living room. He thought to call out to him, thought better of it. In the bathroom he threw cold water on his face and noticed a new picture of Jesus in the corner of the bathroom mirror: it looked like a cutout from one of the church magazines: Jesus in the dark purple glow of Gethsemane. In the shower his thoughts returned to that night with Jen, and he tried to replace them, his whole past, with Josefina. She really was different. Josefina and Leandro, but especially Josefina. In the last lesson he had watched her as she answered his nervous follow-ups. Did that make sense, what they’d said? From the corruption of death to the incorruption of life eternal? “Yes, of course,” Josefina said. “I believe that.” Not a breath of hesitation in her voice, not a wrinkle of doubt in her face. Was she for real? What did she know that he didn’t? How did she do it? How can I do it? Lord, let her faith be real, and let me follow her example. Let her justify the message.

  A chill came over McLeod, an uncertainty. When he tried to dispel it, it only thickened, changed, coating him like a sort of weightless film, a feeling that only resolution, sudden resolution, could lift. Thirty seconds later McLeod was in the bedroom changing into his proselytizing clothes. He went out to the entryway/living room and stood over Passos. His senior companion was still deep in concentration at his desk—there was the blue-scrawled letter, and there was his response to it; he hunched over a second letter now—but McLeod, for once, felt bold in the Spirit. He felt inspiration watering his mouth.