Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  Up above, McLeod could see the last holdouts of evening giving way before the first muted stars of the night. The top of the sky looked cobalt, the sides blue, the bottom gray. Not enough day remained to power the tunnel of refracted light along the tops of property walls; the jagged teeth rose instead in darkened silhouette. The phone rang out in the silence. Once. Then again. On the third ring Passos picked up and said, “Hello? … Yes, fine. I know how busy you must be.” His voice sounded falsely companionable, falsely cool. “So, yes, go right ahead. Pen at the ready … Yes, okay … Yes … Got it … To Pampulha, got it, yes …” Then he said, “Kimball gets a new companion? Okay. So he stays, then. Got it. Keep going.”

  Elder McLeod noted what he took to be a gesture on his behalf—repeating aloud the news about a friend—but then, not thirty seconds later, Passos said in a buoyant voice, “So Sweeney’s going to Sete Lagoas, you say? He’s getting transferred way down there? Okay, got it, got it … And what about De Freira? … He stays? Okay. And Álvarez? … He stays too. Got it … And you didn’t mention Elder McLeod. Does that mean he stays? … McLeod stays in Carinha, got it. And so do I. One more transfer, then. Okay. Good night to you—”

  McLeod rushed around to the front of the pay phone just as Passos ended the call. He pushed his companion aside, grabbed the receiver. “Hello? Hello?” He pulled a contact card from his breast pocket and dialed the mission office’s number on the back. Elder Tierney answered the office phone. “Yes, Elder Passos? Is there something else you needed?”

  “This is McLeod. Did you say I’m not being transferred? I’m staying with Passos? Did I just hear that right?”

  “Elder McLeod?” The voice on the line paused. “Elder, we have a longstanding system set up for relaying—”

  “I want to talk to President Mason. Put me through to him right now.”

  “Elder McLeod, do you have any idea how busy we are tonight?”

  “Put me through to President Mason.”

  “It’s out of the question, Elder. We have a system in place.”

  The line clicked dead. McLeod choked the receiver, bowing his head in a surge of rage, feeling dizzy with it. After a moment he lowered the phone back to its cradle, a conscious, forced-gentle gesture. Then he stepped away from the pay phone and noticed his companion at his left. Passos opened his palms to him, his mouth, but Elder McLeod warned them shut with one hateful look.

  He sat in the blue chair in the entryway/living room, considering the sight of his shoes before him. Elder Passos was undressing in the bedroom, though McLeod didn’t hear him, didn’t even notice the light. McLeod felt furious and calm at once, numb and adrenal, resigned and scared. His body pulsed, yet strangely relaxed away from him, at the very thought of what he might do. If I take my shoes into the bedroom, he thought, that commits me. Then I’ll have decided to do it. Elder McLeod didn’t think about the money, or what he might wear. He didn’t think about the consequences, immediate or otherwise. For now he thought only of the shoes. They sat deflated and sad, side by side, several inches in front of him. He could simply slide them under the seat, as Passos had done, and as he normally did at the end of a day. He could treat tonight like any other. Dear God, if you exist at all, dear God, if you are in fact … He supposed this wasn’t what President Mason had in mind. He wasn’t kneeling. He wasn’t even closing his eyes.

  McLeod tried again. He pushed his shoes aside—not under the chair but beside it—and he kneeled to pray, resting his elbows on the blue concave seat. The floor felt hard underneath him, unforgiving. His knees began to throb after only a minute or two—he had barely cleared the preliminaries of the prayer, the I thank Thees—and he wondered how he’d ever managed the long pleadings he offered almost nightly at the beginning of his mission. Please God. Now. Make yourself known to me, he used to pray. I’m keeping up my side of the bargain. Keep yours. One night in the MTC Elder McLeod spent a full hour in prayer, mostly listening, mostly waiting, and at the end of it a repeated phrase, like a water drop gathering weight, released into his mind: It’s enough, it’s enough, it’s enough … But now it wasn’t. He prayed with a sterner, gamier heart. He offered less a plea than an ultimatum, a sort of threat: God, if you really exist, if you are at all, then you will stop me, you will protect my virtue … McLeod listened and waited, waited and listened.

  He opened his eyes and saw the shoes. Why did their positioning matter anyway? It was because of the windows. The entryway/living room window was chest high and gave out onto the hard concrete, the loud concrete, of the outer courtyard. The bedroom window, waist high, by contrast, gave onto a strip of soft loamy earth to the side of the courtyard. Where McLeod put on his shoes mattered less—or it mattered, but only because he had already decided to leave from the bedroom window. Tonight. Tonight, McLeod decided.

  Elder Passos lay in bed with his English Bible open on the mattress in front of him. He read the book often lately for English practice and inspiration, though mostly for English practice. First Corinthians 14 sat under his gaze now, but it went unread as the events of the night drew his mind away into roiled reflection. Of course he hadn’t expected McLeod to take the news well. He hadn’t expected an instant change. But Elder Passos had expected at least something—some recognition, some acknowledgment of his vulnerability, or of the fact, at the very least, that this hadn’t been his fault any more than McLeod’s. Passos had probably wanted this even less than McLeod. But now here they were—another six weeks—and since there was nothing at all to be done about it, they might as well adapt to it with a measure of grace.

  After the call with the assistants, Elder Passos had contacted all the senior companions in his zone, passing along the transfer news as McLeod paced back and forth behind the phone, adapting to his own transfer news with all the grace of a mental patient, kicking at the dirt, hurling rocks against property walls, erupting from his low steady mumble into guttural shouts.

  “What was that noise?” Elder Sweeney had asked.

  “My companion is upset,” Passos said.

  “Is he still your companion?”

  “Yes.”

  Sweeney sighed. He laughed and sighed at the same time. He muttered in English, “Poor bastard.”

  “I can understand you,” Passos said.

  “Yeah, well, go easy on him, Passos. He’s having a pretty hard time of it.”

  “And what about me? I’m not? Huh? He should go easy on me, Elder Sweeney! Elder Sweeney?”

  But the line had gone dead.

  In the bedroom now, Elder Passos readjusted the pillow propped up under his chest. He trained his eyes back on the verses in 1 Corinthians, and after a time his attention followed. The passage continued on the subject of love, or “charity,” as the King James Version had it. Passos turned a page with great care, wary of tearing it. Most of the pages were already brittle, some of the edges serrated like paper knives, though less from use, he gathered, than from brittling serrating time. Elder Passos had found the Bible a year or so earlier in the closet of his second missionary apartment, the book abandoned, apparently, by an outgoing elder. The missionary must have received it or inherited it many years earlier—a faded ink inscription on the front cover read To our son: Herein you shall find the words of Life—and he must have read it only once in a great while. Passos could find very few fingerprints on the pages, oils, smudges, grease stains; he could find no marginalia of any kind anywhere; and he found only a few colored pencil underlinings of the most obvious verses: Genesis 1:27, Amos 3:7, John 3:16 … In 1 Corinthians 13 someone had underlined Paul’s famous words about the need to put away childish things. Elder Passos tried to recall the exact language in English, though his effort lacked conviction. He turned back two pages and reread the verse in question: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  He thought of McLeod. How could he not? Passos, after all, had started reading the King James
Bible in earnest after McLeod had taken back his cartoon book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Passos didn’t miss the book at all: it had never really challenged him, and what little affection he’d had for the story, he had since put away and felt much better for it. He thought of McLeod, too, because of the chapter the verse came from. He happened to know that 1 Corinthians 13 was his companion’s favorite section in the Bible. McLeod had volunteered this information early on in their companionship in the casual, almost forgetful way that Passos hadn’t yet come to recognize as vain: “Oh, First Corinthians thirteen? Love it. Probably my favorite chapter in all scripture. Just beautiful, beautiful language. Memorized most of it I like it so much. That’s one place where nobody does it better than the King James.”

  In retrospect it seemed inevitable to Elder Passos that McLeod should say that, and just that way. Of course he loved 1 Corinthians! All the tentative believers did, the worldly wise! To their minds Paul said nothing about obedience or devotion or actual literal belief except to say, Hey, don’t worry about that—just love, man. In general Passos knew to be wary of such feel-gooders, apostates defining love as lawlessness. Why hadn’t he been more wary of McLeod? Why hadn’t he seen through him all along? To think that all of McLeod’s flaws—his shallow-roots faith, his arrogance, his false superiority—all of them hid out in the open in that statement. McLeod loved 1 Corinthians 13, he and every other so-called Christian. And why did he love it? The beautiful language. The undemanding surface of things. And why was the language so beautiful? Why was it, in fact, the very best? Because a group of aristocratic proto-Americans had written it. Because some English king hundreds of years ago had rammed it down the throats of half the world, made an imperialist weapon out of it. Because it trucked in obscurity, difficulty, in so-called tradition, in “hath” instead of “have,” “doeth” instead of “does,” “giveth” instead of “give,” and even “charity” instead of “love.”

  Love: even the most unmistakable word got substituted out lest the uninitiated gain admittance to the club, lest they prove themselves equal to the club members and complicate their plans to continue raping, pillaging, plundering, exploiting, bombing the uninitiated. But Passos, now more than ever, understood the implicit challenge, understood the stakes, and he refused to be turned away by all the thees and thous, the moneyed diction, the unspoken rules. Turned off, certainly, but not turned away. Elder Passos had determined to finish the English New Testament—at least that much. He was halfway there. Then he could go back to the New Life Portuguese translation he had read since his early youth, a translation of the Bible in which Jesus sounded less like an overcareful Englishman, adjusting his powdered wig as he cast out the Devil—Get thee hence, Satan—and more like the Son of God, a carpenter, a workingman, a man of strong words. Get out of here, Satan! Get out of here!

  A few minutes later Elder McLeod finally came into the bedroom. He carried his shoes in his left hand, placed them on the floor beside his bed—an odd change of precedent, as if he feared that Passos might steal or vandalize the shoes and wanted them closer to him to protect them. McLeod stood at the dresser, his back to Passos; he seemed to be undoing his tie. He left his shirt and dress pants on. When he half turned from the dresser Passos snapped back to his Bible. He sensed out of the corner of his eye a long, hard stare from his companion, who at length lay down on his bed, on top of the covers. McLeod didn’t move from that position for the next twenty minutes.

  At ten thirty exactly Passos turned out the bedroom light. He kneeled at his bedside for personal prayer, tried to ignore his sarcophagal companion behind him. He prayed for a change of heart for the both of them, and he meant it, or at least he thought he did. When Elder Passos opened his eyes again he felt like he was underwater: blue light on the blue-green floor, a baptism by moonlight. The moon itself, silver and round, hung in the window like one of the Christmas ornaments that used to fascinate Passos. Christmas globes, his mother called them. He loved how they caught the light and held it, magnified it, and how they magnified and seemed to age a little boy’s face as he leaned in close. Elder Passos was still on his knees at the bedside, and he hardly felt a solid floor underneath him. His memory of an early Christmas was another of the pearls he didn’t share with anyone, much less the McLeods of the world. He himself hadn’t thought of it since the previous Christmas. He and his mother and brothers all there, even his father—Passos and Felipe little boys, Tiago in diapers. In the center of the memory, a conical green tree hung with bright shining balls, some red, some green, some silver. The green of the tree against the red of the throw rug underneath it, and the porcelain crèche on a nearby table. Under the tree, three matching soccer balls, white with black pentagonal tiles. Tiago’s ball rivaled him in size, a useless toy for an infant, but now Passos felt he understood it: a sign of relative largesse, along with the modest Christmas tree, the rug, the crèche. The husband has work for a change, the wife has her sons—three of them, a respectable number. She sits on the floor in front of the tree, cross-legged, her hair swept back, smile wide. At one point she holds up her own gift, a bright white sweater, to pose for a photograph. Then she widens her arms to take in all three of her boys, her embrace encompassing them together, like a mother hen gathering in her chirping young. Who could deny such a woman her right to happiness? Who could believe that life for her would ever be anything but full and new?

  Something about this and other memories, granted, seemed too perfect to Elder Passos, too composed, as if the scenes had reinvented themselves out of the photographs meant merely to mark them. Sometimes the photographs moved in his memory, his mother and brothers, even his father, moving as if in the wash of a strobe light. Sometimes they appeared to be moving backward, back toward that Eden around the Christmas tree, but they never made it. They never would, of course. The only hope lay forward.

  Elder Passos felt this familiar piece of knowledge alight on him like a sudden revelation. The only hope lay forward. He sensed it moving down his body like a warm draft of drink. He felt it in his heart and in his mind: a chance. For him. Maybe even for him and his companion. Why pray for a change of heart in McLeod if he didn’t believe in at least the possibility of that change? Give him a little time, Passos thought. McLeod wasn’t ready tonight, but who knew about tomorrow. The future slept unformed and void, and only God knew what could be made of it.

  Passos rose from his knees and got into bed. He looked over at McLeod. His companion still lay motionless atop the covers and still mostly dressed, from what Passos could tell. He wore his dark socks (or were his feet just in shadow?), his dark pants, and his white shirt, palely blue in the moonlight. Give him time, then. Give him a little more time. Maybe as early as tomorrow, Passos thought, turning over and starting the slow drift toward sleep.

  He opened his eyes and checked his clock again, checked his companion: 1:28 a.m., and Passos displaying the clear signs of deep, oblivious sleep, his chest rising and falling at slow steady intervals, a small snore even, a wheeze, like the breathing of an old man. Elder McLeod slowly brought his feet around to the side of the bed, and stood up, even more slowly, into his pre-tied shoes. He transferred his weight from his arms to his legs, an exchange of burdens, and another commitment. On the floor just past the elders’ beds lay a pane of bluish, cloud-mottled moonlight. McLeod stepped into it and turned to see his face in the dresser mirror across from him. He looked gaunt, deliberate, suffused in blue, like a man in a Picasso painting. He felt his reflection was of a kind to make a noise, almost, a low, ancient moan. Quickly, then, but very quietly, he climbed out the bedroom window and into the night.

  The outer door presented the first obstacle. Elder McLeod had never noticed how loud the catch sounded, how sharply the door hinge creaked, until just now. He shut the gate behind him carefully, so carefully, but then he wondered at his care. And what if Passos had heard him? So what? He could have made a run for it if he’d had to, and he would have. He did. He started into a jog. Down their st
reet under a remote perfect moon that held off the clouds and stood directly above him no matter where or how fast he ran. Onto the main street and past the bus stop, past the darkly silhouetted husks of the bank, the supermarket, the post office, the second bus stop—until the drive-through’s blue neon sign loomed up suddenly, too suddenly, and McLeod stopped. He heard the breath inside him, like wind in a cave, as if he’d covered up his ears. Why had he run, and had he really run so fast? They lived nearly two miles from the drive-through, yet here he stood already. McLeod felt it should have taken longer to get here. He should have had more time to prepare. He felt as if God, whom he did not believe in, had cast a net over the world and hauled it in, drive-through first, dropping it squirming at his feet. To force the issue.

  Elder McLeod moved to within a few hundred yards of what he took to be the drive-through’s walk-in entrance, a small metal door halfway down the stucco perimeter wall. An automatic gate beside the door opened up to let cars enter, as one did in the time McLeod stood waiting, a young Jonah under low, luminescent clouds, feeling the cool night air prick his skin, insinuate itself between the gaps of his white button-down. This was the only style of presentable shirt Elder McLeod owned. He needed to feel presentable. He didn’t know why. He had left his tie behind, though, and his missionary name tag, as well as his undergarments and any form of identification. In his pocket he carried a hundred reais, and twenty American dollars for good measure.