Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  His breathing had calmed by now—from the running, anyway—though he still looked around as if someone or something might see him. He scoured the street for security cameras, though McLeod had never seen one during his entire time in Brazil. Still: the thought, the mere thought of embarrassment, of being caught out in his sins … McLeod moved closer to the walk-in gate, if only to gain shelter from the street. “Just go, just go, just go,” he mumbled under his breath. The metal door appeared before him. He took a pair of deep breaths and arranged his face in an expression of nonchalance, and before he could stop himself he stepped in off the street.

  Some fifty feet inside the door was a tollbooth-like structure, its windows yellow against the darkness, and sitting in the booth, a dark-haired woman. Beyond the booth stretched a low-lying series of curtained stalls. Elder McLeod thought of a row of outsize voting booths, or a stable. He started forward, startling as the pitch of his footfalls changed: the pavement had turned to small white gravel, bluish in the moonlight and the glow of the neon sign, the ground like the floor of a fish tank. The crunch of McLeod’s footsteps alerted the woman in the booth, who looked up to see him hesitating. She slid open a glass window and nodded at him. McLeod strode forward with sudden feigned purpose.

  “Good evening,” he said, forcing a smile.

  “Good evening,” she said, a smile of her own. She looked thirtyish, maybe fortyish. The skin of her face, stretched smooth across her cheekbones, bore no signs of makeup and only a few lines that gathered at the corners of her large eyes and mouth. She wore a simple red tank top. Her arms were firm. Her cleavage ample.

  “You know I could charge you for this,” she said.

  “What?” McLeod said, looking up.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Are you here with someone or are you looking for someone?”

  “I guess I’m looking.”

  “How much time do you want?”

  “How much time?”

  “How much time. You pay up front.”

  McLeod gripped the narrow counter protruding from the tollbooth, looked at his feet as if he’d dropped something. A moment later he bent down (“Sorry, just a second”) as if to pick that something up. It was curious: Elder McLeod, after so many years of moral training, was utterly empty of moral concerns in this moment. Only practical considerations, cordiality, proper procedure—only these things clamored in his mind. What was the language for such an occasion? What was the Portuguese for “escort”? He didn’t know. For “prostitute”? He couldn’t think of it. He was sure he knew the word, but he couldn’t make himself remember it. The only word he could call to mind came from his reading of the Portuguese Book of Mormon. He had needed more time to prepare. He didn’t have a condom. He had never actually used one. What was he doing here? Was it too late to back out? He could just turn around and walk away, couldn’t he? Run away, flee, like Joseph from Potiphar’s wife.

  “How much time?” the woman said again. She seemed to be losing her patience.

  “I am …” McLeod said. “I’m not from around here.”

  “I noticed,” she said. “You want fifteen minutes? Thirty minutes? How much time?”

  “You mean with a harlot, right?”

  The woman paused. For the first time she really took McLeod in, up and down. He felt conscious of his close-cropped hair, probably too close-cropped, his freckled face, forced smile, overformal attire.

  “Where are you from?” the woman said.

  “The United States.”

  “I’ll give you fifteen minutes for fifty American dollars.”

  “I only have twenty. I have a hundred reais, though.” Elder McLeod produced the fold of bills from his pocket and passed it across the little counter. The woman stood up and took the money and stuffed it in the back pocket of her short jean skirt. “Okay,” she said. “Follow me.”

  “You?” McLeod said.

  “I’m your harlot,” she said.

  Elder McLeod followed the woman into one of the middle stalls, a dim-lit, oversize cubicle of a room: three cement walls and the fourth, a curtained partition, which the woman stopped to Velcro shut. She took McLeod’s hand and led him to the edge of a small bed, sat him down on it, then stepped back and peeled off her tank top with both hands. She did it in one fluid motion, more efficient than seductive, but Elder McLeod still thought: I can never unwatch this, even if I want to. I can never undo this, worlds without end.

  The woman unclasped a pink bra and let it fall away. She caught it, placed it with the tank top on the small lamp table beside the bed. The room could fit little else: the table, the bed. The lamp shed a harsh yellow light that cast half-moon shadows beneath the woman’s pendulous breasts. The breasts contoured down just so at the nipple, McLeod noticed. The woman slid her jean skirt and underwear down together. She stepped out of them. Her naked hair at eye level.

  “Aren’t you going to undress?”

  The woman looked down at him like a puzzled god.

  “But I don’t …” McLeod said. “How do you say?” He pointed at himself. “I don’t have anything to cover me …”

  “Ah,” the woman said, and she took two steps toward the lamp table and opened a small drawer, giving her back to McLeod. He tried to undress in that interval, tearing at buttons, belt, zipper. By the time the woman faced him again, an opened condom in her hand, he had his dress pants down at his ankles. He sat hunched over his erection, half covering it with his hands, but then he noticed her noticing—her puzzled expression deepened—and he allowed himself to be totally exposed.

  “How old are you?” the woman asked.

  “Twenty,” McLeod said. “Twenty-one.”

  She gestured with the condom. “Do you want me to do it?”

  “Please.”

  McLeod felt the sudden urge to look at the floor, but he resisted it, holding to the woman’s eyes instead. He imagined he saw a trace of amusement on her face, but it slid away quickly.

  “It’s okay,” the woman said. “Here.” She sat down beside him on the bed and rolled the condom down. The feel of another’s fingers on his penis offset the strange chilling sensation of the condom, if only for a moment. He felt greasy and ridiculous. He felt embarrassed. The woman took him by the hand again and led him to the center of the bed, waddling on her knees. She turned to him. “Do you know which way you like?” He hesitated. “Here,” she said. She lay on her back, breasts spread to either side, and pulled him over her, and took him into her. “Okay?” She moved her pelvis against him to demonstrate.

  “I …” McLeod started to say. I know that much. He felt flooded with embarrassment now; he burned with it. No other sensation anywhere in his body could compete with it, and soon he began to soften. He shut his eyes and for several seconds tried to block out all thoughts, all sounds. The woman said, “Is that okay?” He opened his eyes and saw her watching him, wondering, adjusting her rhythm to heighten his. After a moment more she said, “Are you close?”

  For the second time that night Elder McLeod’s mind emptied of all but strategy, a desire to salvage his situation, a desire for less bad. He had always imagined that sex would be easier than masturbation, easier to get where he needed to go, but now he felt himself ebbing inside the prostitute. He hated himself for it. He redoubled his movements, flexing the arms he braced on. The woman wore a dutiful expression on her face, dutiful yet somehow concerned, which only made things worse.

  “Close?” she said again.

  Elder McLeod shut his eyes and conjured up images in a panic—women on billboards, newsstands—nothing—women in Passos’s magazine—nothing—women in the drive-through—the absurdity of that, the sudden absurdity of everything, his whole life—until only the thought of Josefina, the thought of her under him, only that could sustain him through the last desperate moments. He grunted, pleasure-pain shot through him, and he collapsed on top of the woman. Her body tensed.

  “Sorry, sorry,” h
e said, but he didn’t move. She wriggled partway out from under him, half sitting up in bed now, and he came face-front with her breasts, pendulous and full, the undersides still in shadow. The nipples turned down just slightly, he noticed again. These were the first breasts presented for his touch. The body of a total stranger.

  “You done?” she said, trying to guide him off her. “Was that okay for you?” She gripped McLeod’s shoulders with either hand, pushing gently, but she stopped as soon as his shoulders began to jog. She tensed again. “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m not …”

  The woman paused. “You’re crying?”

  He wandered the streets of Carinha for the rest of the night, the city reduced to a sort of miniature: the blacked-out storefronts along the main street, the occasional cars, their tail-lights blurring orange-red, the wan yellow halos of streetlamps on the sidewalks, and the moon, always the moon overhead. The glowing disk grew larger as the night wore on, sinking into a haze of thin, disconsolate clouds. The cloud cover broke for minutes at a time and the streets became ghostly in the darkened light, the city all but abandoned at this hour. Elder McLeod had expected many people about, even at three, three thirty in the morning—he had imagined a great licentious nocturnal host, shadowy but real, bristling—but instead he saw only a handful of people, and most of them asleep. He passed forms wrapped in patchworks of dark coarse blankets, like mummies. One of them lay under a bus-stop bench, another in a recessed store entry, another on a bench in the park downtown. McLeod sat on the bench opposite this last bundle, to rest, feeling unafraid for several minutes until he saw the sepulchral form roll over. McLeod got up and lurched away as if he were alive among the dead, but only barely: he felt numb, emptied out—of chemicals, of everything. He tried not to think of what he’d done. He tried not to think at all, tried not to know anything, and for a stretch of an hour, two hours, he largely succeeded. He only knew that he didn’t want to go back to the apartment, back to Elder Passos and the life of a missionary.

  He drifted away from downtown into the residential neighborhoods, stopping again to rest on an unoccupied bus-stop bench. It must have been four in the morning. The slab of concrete felt cool underneath him, chilly. The chill deepened and broke through his thin layer of dress pants and gathered in the undersides of his thighs. Elder McLeod couldn’t have rested, really, if he’d wanted to. Alone on a bench in the middle of the night, not sleeping—for fear of what?—but not wanting to go home either. Trapped, liminal, purgatorial. And his mind waking up now, returning in spite of himself to another cold, restless bench. He returned to Joseph of Egypt and the Sunday school lessons he’d received as an early teenager, and to the times he snuck to the woods behind his house where his neighbor, an older boy of fourteen, kept a zip-locked stash of Playboys. The young McLeod must have repaired to the tiny clearing in the pine boughs too often, or often enough to arouse suspicion, for one Saturday afternoon his father followed after him at an unseen distance.

  McLeod remembered sitting cross-legged in the clearing, flipping breathlessly through the pages, freezing at every rustle, every soughing crack, and pushing down the erection that never seemed to leave him now, that never stopped clenching his stomach like a fist. He remembered his father crashing through the trees like a warrior god, catching him with the magazine in one hand, his penis in the other, but just holding it, just pinning it down, not knowing what else to do with it. “What great wickedness is this?” his father shouted, an allusion to Joseph with Potiphar’s wife that McLeod recognized, even then. He had learned the verse in Sunday school and, later, alone, in puberty’s thrall, had fleshed out the story in his mind: the indentured Joseph serving Potiphar’s wife, who drops her robe one day—her naked breasts, stomach, legs—and commands, Lie with me. Joseph stumbles back at the sight of her, at the suggestion. How can I do this great wickedness? Joseph says as McLeod’s father rips the magazine out of his hand. His father stands over him now, looms, holding the magazine away from his body like a beshitted diaper. “Young man, you had better …” he says, but his stern voice falters as McLeod struggles to cover himself up, to get himself back into his jeans. He can’t get his pants up fast enough, and suddenly he’s crying. “Get out of here,” McLeod shouts, “get the goddamn fuck out of here!” He finally manages to fold the erection into his pants and stands up, crying in earnest now. “Dad, just—just leave …”

  But something has changed in his father’s bearing. All of a sudden he leans down to hug McLeod, the offending Playboy still in his hand. McLeod punches the embrace away. He punches his father for the first and last time in his life, a glancing ineffectual blow to the chest. Then he tears out of the woods with his father calling after, “Seth, wait! Seth!” and the pine boughs whipping his face. He keeps running, running, the breath burning his throat, until he reaches Memorial Park at the center of town, the park with the pond where he and his father used to feed the ducks in springtime, but now it was fall. He spends a sleepless night on a park bench, his heart catching, again, at every rustling branch, every windy moan.

  In the morning, more tired than he’d ever been, McLeod returned to his house. His father had stayed up too, all night, worrying about him, angry, he would tell McLeod later, but angry at himself more than anything. He must have been watching at the big bay window as McLeod appeared at the edge of their property. He must have seen him while he was yet a great ways off, like the father of the prodigal son, for he ran out into the front yard and fell on McLeod’s neck and kissed him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry. I love you, Seth. I’ll always love you.”

  McLeod had never felt his father so close to him before, so urgent. His voice was strange, and his embrace too. They stood in the wet morning grass like that, not moving at all.

  In time the rows of teeth on top of property walls started casting their silhouettes more sharply against the night. Elder McLeod watched the dark drain from the sky in the reverse order that it had filled it up the night before: from the bottom first, then the sides, then the top. At the first pink underblush on the clouds he stood up from the bus-stop bench and started walking again. He repassed the storefronts along the main street, passed by Maurilho’s street completely, made a giant buttonhook of a detour around the drive-through. McLeod didn’t fear temptation so much as reminder, though of course the detour itself reminded him. The very fact that he tried not to think of what he had done betrayed a certain hubris. He was Jonah again, trying to hide from the God he doubted. Trying to hide himself from himself.

  McLeod turned toward home, and it loomed up even faster than the drive-through had. So be it, he thought. So be it. He opened the front gate, crossed the courtyard, then opened the front door, not caring if Passos heard him. Elder McLeod stepped into the front room at exactly five thirty, though he, watchless, thought it must have been closer to five. The room was dark. The air through the open window was warm.

  McLeod took a seat in the blue chair and began to remove his shoes as if he had returned from a day of tracting. The force of habit. He had to laugh, or half laugh, a single push of air through his nose. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. As if his life had not changed forever. But he took off his shoes, still, and placed them back under the blue chair. He was like a man arranging chess pieces—just so. He noticed his companion’s shoes, a few feet from his own, slumping there in the darkness. Passos’s shoes looked like things grown up from the floor, like blackened roots protruding from the ground and retreating back to it, repenting their mistake. In the instant a rush of remorse and embarrassment, profound embarrassment, came over McLeod. It felt like a swooping chill, a sickness. The thought of repenting his own mistake—the thought of confession, or forced confession—brought to McLeod’s mind a terrible scene. He didn’t imagine God, or hellfire, or eternity. If he could have believed in these things he might have taken comfort in them—at least in the fact of their remoteness from him. But the scene McLeod imagined now had the hard feel of real
ity, time-bound, earthbound, the earth rushing up at him as in his falling dreams. He saw his mother and father at the airport, there to pick him up two months early. A dishonorable release, a ruined son. He saw the dead eyes in his father’s face. He felt his mother’s hug, too eager to comfort. And he wished in the depths of everything he was that he could repent everything he’d done, undo it.

  As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Elder McLeod became aware of his body in the room, of what noises it made. For a long moment he listened for movement from the bedroom, not moving at all himself, barely breathing. Maybe Passos hadn’t heard him. Not going out or coming back. And just maybe—the idea occurred lightly, almost jokingly.

  After a minute McLeod stood up, taking soft stockinged steps across the tiny room. He slowed his movements as he reached his goal—the light switch just to the left of the bedroom door. He paused, considering the room behind him: the desks, the chairs, the shoes underneath them. Something began to loosen in McLeod, to move. He willed it to move. He reached for the nub of the light switch for the entryway/living room, but he reached for it slowly, very slowly. He didn’t want the click to sound.

  For the moment he existed in that liminal space between subconscious and conscious, dreaming and waking. Something had drawn Elder Passos up toward the surface such that he felt he could almost control the dream, as if he were an actor in a scene he had written himself, and yet he worked to stay asleep so he could learn what would happen. He and his mother walked hand in hand in green woods, a winding trail of the kind he had seen in pictures, but never in person. The trail was soft from accumulated pine needles, and somewhere a stream ran down among rocks. The water burbled in a playful vein that belied the soberness in his mother’s voice. “If you go there, of course you’d need to take your brothers too.”