The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  But something had gone wrong when he got to college. Almost immediately, a darkness settled over him. He felt foggy and tired all the time; he slept badly and couldn’t concentrate on his schoolwork. The doctors called it depression, but that didn’t seem right. Depression comes from inside you; this had come from outside, like someone had dropped a heavy blanket over his head.

  He lived beneath this blanket for ten long years, working part-time when he could, taking a class here and there. He had few friends and suffered from a debilitating loneliness that could only be soothed, temporarily, by pornography or violent video games.

  Not long after his twenty-eighth birthday, for reasons no one could explain, he began to feel a little better. He took a full-time job in the computer department of the old Best Buy in Griswold Commons (the store had since relocated to the Arcadia Center), where he impressed his supervisors with his positive attitude, technical know-how, and strong communications skills. There was talk about management opportunities, a long-term future with the company.

  And the cool thing was, he liked Best Buy; he felt at home there. It was a privilege to be surrounded by all these amazing products—big-screen TVs, audio components galore, wafer-thin laptops with ultrafast processors, pocket-sized digital cameras, rack upon rack of movies, music, and video games—the accumulated bounty of the world’s hightech wizardry. It was, he often thought, like working in a Museum of Wonders.

  At least that was how he felt for about six months, until the old man showed up late one Saturday afternoon, a burly white-haired guy in a shabby suit, gimping around on a bum leg. He came hobbling up to Dennis with a sly smile on his face, as if they were pals from way back when.

  “There he is,” the old man said. “Just the kid I’ve been looking for.”

  “Can I help you?” Dennis asked.

  The old man held out a fat paperback.

  “The boss told me to give this to you.”

  Dennis accepted the book, surprised to see that it was a Bible.

  “This is from Kenny?”

  Kenny was the Assistant Manager on duty, a middle-aged frat boy who always headed straight to a bar when he was finished with work. Dennis had tagged along a couple of times, but once he had a few drinks in him, all Kenny wanted to talk about was how he loved women with huge bottoms, the bigger the better. He could hold forth on the subject for hours.

  “I told you,” the old man said. “It’s from the boss.”

  “You mean Phil?” Phil was the weekday manager, Kenny’s direct superior.

  “It’s not from Phil,” the old man scoffed. “Phil’s not the boss.”

  By this point, Dennis was losing his patience.

  “I’m a little busy right now. Is this some kind of joke?”

  The old man looked offended.

  “I traveled a long way to bring this to you. Believe me, I would’ve been happy to stay home.”

  “I think you got the wrong guy,” Dennis told him.

  “That’s not possible,” the old man replied.

  “But I don’t want a Bible.”

  “That’s not my problem. I just said I’d deliver it. What happens after that is your business.”

  The old man gave him a searching look, then turned and walked away, moving at a pretty good clip for a guy whose right foot never quite made it off the floor. Dennis would have followed him—he still wanted to clarify this issue about the boss—but he was waylaid by an imperious young woman carrying a handwritten list of questions entitled, “Wireless Networking Problems/Solutions.”

  Dennis wasn’t sure what to do about the Bible. He didn’t want to take it home, but he didn’t feel right throwing it away. In the end, he just stuck it on a cluttered shelf beneath the Computer Information desk and forgot all about it.

  But the Bible didn’t forget him, though it took him a while to realize it. All he really knew at the time was that the store suddenly began to feel strange. He’d always thought of it as a humming hive of useful machines and ingenious works of art, but now it struck him as soulless, vaguely malignant. The customers didn’t seem excited so much as dazed, pod people hypnotized by flickering images, stupefied by all that shiny metal and molded plastic. Sometimes, walking down the DVD aisle, he was almost certain he could smell something putrid, as if rotting flesh were hidden inside those elegant little boxes with pictures of handsome men and beautiful women on the front. He’d watch kids trying out video games on the in-store consoles and have to suppress an urge to rip the controllers out of their hands and scream for them to run for their lives. On more than one occasion, he found himself on his knees in the employee restroom, puking up his guts, although he didn’t feel the least bit sick.

  He wondered if he was losing his mind, if he was going to have another episode like the one that had knocked him for a loop in college, but this seemed different. Back then he’d felt thickheaded, two beats behind the rest of the world, but this time around he was lucid, hyper-aware. It was the store that was messed up, not him; he was sure of it.

  He thought seriously about quitting to preserve his sanity, but he didn’t want to alarm his mother. She was so thrilled to have him working, to be able to believe that her son had recovered, that everything would be all right. He didn’t want to take that away from her, to do something that would make her frightened again.

  One busy Thursday night, he crouched down below the Computer Information desk to get a manual for a Handheld Organizer when his eyes landed on the Bible the old man had given him. What he saw struck him with amazement. The book was glowing like a beacon, pulsing with energy, calling out to him. All at once, as if the knowledge had been poured into him like a fiery liquid, he understood who the Boss was, and what he was required to do.

  “Oh Lord,” he said, placing his hand on the book. “You found me.”

  His own memory of what happened after that was dim and fragmentary—all he really knew was that the Spirit had entered his heart and irrevocably transformed him—but he’d been able to reconstruct much of it from the police report, conversations with sympathetic eyewitnesses, and the amateur video taken near the end of the incident.

  By all accounts, he had emerged wild-eyed from below the counter, holding the Bible aloft with both hands, and babbling in a language that had never before been heard in Best Buy. He stepped out from behind the desk, knocked a flat-screen monitor to the floor, and proceeded to kick over a display of knockoff MP3 players.

  The Spirit was still overflowing from his mouth, though a few people claimed that there was intelligible speech mixed in with the divine gibberish, warnings to specific customers to turn a blind eye to the sinful works of man and fix their gazes on the Lord.

  Dennis was not a big man, and he had never done much exercise, but the Spirit made him strong. He tossed all-in-one printers through the air like they were empty boxes, toppled a shelf of home-theater components, scattered CDs like playing cards. A couple of his fellow employees tried to stop him, but they were too weak. A gaggle of customers—some moved by his passion, others excited by the possibility of violence—began to follow him as he made his way, inevitably, it seemed, to the back of the store, where he planted himself in front of a three-thousand-dollar, sixty-one-inch, wide-screen flat-panel plasma TV that was playing Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

  “Whore!” he shouted. “Abomination!”

  There was some uncertainty about where the boombox came from, whether he’d picked it up on the way or someone had handed it to him just then, but there was no dispute about the fact that he raised the sleek black tube overhead—it was a JVC with built-in subwoofers—and hurled it at the screen, causing Angelina Jolie to disintegrate in a rain of shattered glass. Screams of protest and cheers of approval mingled as Dennis fell to his knees and called out to God.

  Some witnesses believed he was about to demolish a second TV, but he never got the chance; two security guards jumped him from behind and began attacking him with fists and billy clubs, delivering a savage and prol
onged beating that was captured by a customer on a display model camcorder. Tim remembered seeing the grainy video on the TV news—he was going through his divorce at the time and was a long way from God—and thinking, “Big deal, the jerk had it coming to him,” which he later realized, with a feeling of deep shame, was exactly what lots of “good” people must have thought two thousand years ago, watching a half-dead man getting whipped by soldiers as he dragged a wooden cross up a hill in the desert.

  INSIDE, THE Tabernacle didn’t look like much: a big open room with a low ceiling, white walls, and gray industrial carpeting. Two smaller areas—the lobby and the Young Apostles’ room—were carved out of the larger space by temporary office partitions. Tim said good-bye to Carrie just inside the main entrance—she was on the Loaves and Fishes Committee, which served refreshments in the lobby—and continued into the Sanctuary.

  It was quiet in there, a field of empty white folding chairs, and Tim paused at the back of the room, as he did every week, to savor this moment of homecoming. No matter what else was going on in his life—how distracted he was by problems with Abby, Carrie, or Allison—he never failed to be cleansed and lifted up by these first few breaths of sanctified air. He could feel God’s presence surrounding him, a calm but still mighty benevolence radiating down from the ceiling and up from the floor, and his heart swelled with a mingled sense of awe and gratitude and humble pride that a man such as himself could have his own small part to play in the ceremony that was about to unfold.

  He headed down the center aisle toward the altar, a low wooden platform that also served as bandstand for the Praise Team. His fellow musicians were already onstage, tweaking their amps and instruments and glancing over the set list, professionally oblivious to the Prayer Squad meeting taking place directly in front of them. About a dozen church members were swarming around Alice Palmiero, a mother of two not much older than Tim, who’d recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It looked from the outside like a loving rugby scrum, hunched bodies pressing close together, hands wrapped around shoulders and resting on backs, a low murmur of supplication rising from the group. Tim knew what it was like to be at the center of all that powerful energy—the Prayer Squad had taken up the cause of his sobriety shortly after he’d accepted Jesus—and he hoped Alice was drawing the same comfort and reassurance he had from the knowledge that he wasn’t alone in his trials, that good people wanted him to get better, and wanted the Lord to know it.

  A little off to the right of the prayer huddle, Youth Pastor Eddie and Elise Kim were standing with their arms outstretched, their ecstatic faces tilted toward the ceiling. Tim wasn’t sure if they were satellites of the larger group or bystanders with a separate agenda. He slipped between them as unobtrusively as he could and stepped onto the stage, nodding hello to Bill Spooner, the lead guitarist and bandleader, who was down on his knees fiddling with his pedalboard, an elaborate miniature city of metal boxes and multicolored wires.

  “Brother Mason.” He spoke softly, acknowledging Tim’s arrival with a sardonic salute. “Rock on.”

  “Amen,” Tim muttered in reply. “Turn it up to eleven.”

  FOR TIM, Sunday worship was an easy gig; all he had to do was tune up, plug in, and play. His Fender Jazz Bass and Peavey amp were already up on stage, right where he’d left them last week, and the week before that. He didn’t bother taking them home anymore.

  Unlike a couple of guys from the Praise Team—Bill fronted a popular oldies band called Gary and the Graybeards, and the drummer, Ben Malinowski, played in a jazz trio that had a regular Saturday night booking at the Red Roof Inn in Gifford Township—Tim no longer had a musical life outside the Tabernacle. That world was just too fraught with temptation. He wasn’t the kind of reformed alcoholic who could spend the night in a bar drinking nothing but Diet Coke, nor was he the kind of reformed pothead who’d have an easy time passing a joint to the next guy without taking a toke for himself, or the kind of responsible married man who remembered to mention the existence of his wife the instant a pretty woman started flirting with him. He wished it were otherwise, but he’d never figured out a way to separate the rock ’n’ roll from the sex, drugs, and booze that always seemed to come along with it, the good and the bad tied up in a thrilling, sloppy, ultimately toxic package. He remembered laughing about Little Richard years ago, thinking how pathetic it was for a performer of that stature to have found it necessary to denounce “the Devil’s music,” but he’d reluctantly come to accept the possibility that Mr. Tutti Frutti had a point.

  Which was sad, because Tim loved to rock, and knew how good he was at it. A bass player who could sing harmony, he’d been recruited by all sorts of bands over the years—Southern Rock, New Wave, blues, punk, rockabilly, funk—and still got calls from musicians who knew of him by reputation or remembered him from shows stretching all the way back to the mid-eighties, and he always had to fight down a surge of excitement before regretfully declining their invitations to audition.

  Luckily, Bill Spooner had remembered him, too; they’d played a lot of the same clubs in the early nineties, back when Tim was in a grunge band called Placenta, and Bill was the main songwriter and lead shredder for Killing Spree, a locally famous death metal trio that had released a couple of well-received albums on an indie label out of New Brunswick. Bill had called out of the blue a year and a half ago to ask if Tim could bail him out for a single gig on Sunday morning.

  “It’s at my church,” he said. “Just four songs. I can teach ’em to you in half an hour.”

  “You go to church?” It didn’t even occur to Tim to hide his amusement. Killing Spree had done the whole Slayer trip—studded bracelets, gratuitous references to Satan, pictures of dead animals projected onto a screen behind the band—without offering the slightest hint that they might just be kidding around.

  “Dude,” he said. “This church saved my life. You know, after Jill died. I was in a dark place.”

  “Jill died?” Tim felt like an idiot. “I didn’t know that. I’m really sorry.”

  Bill and Jill had been a famous rock ’n’ roll couple back in the day. Black leather, tattoos, hair hanging in their faces. They went everywhere on Bill’s Harley, wore matching fringe jackets with the Killing Spree logo on the back, a skeleton with a cigarette in its mouth, blasting away on a tommy gun.

  “Three years ago,” Bill said. “We were living out in Pennsylvania. She was having a baby, and something went wrong. They saved the little one, but not her. Can you imagine? The guy I was, with a dead wife and a newborn baby to take care of?”

  “Not really,” Tim said.

  “I came home to live with my parents.” He gave a soft laugh of amazement. “Man, I was a mess. Then this guy invited me to his church.”

  “And now you’re inviting me,” Tim said.

  “You don’t have to believe,” Bill assured him. “You just gotta play a couple of songs. And besides, it’s all the donuts you can eat.”

  “What the hell,” Tim had said. “I’m not doing anything on Sunday.”

  TIM AND Bill went out to the lobby after sound check to grab a cup of coffee. It was just starting to fill up, and there was a cheerful cocktail party vibe in the air, lots of hugs, handshakes, and how are you’s. Ever since his first visit to the Tabernacle, Tim had been struck by the warmth and fellowship he found there; almost without exception the church members were kind and openhearted, nothing like the grim Puritans he’d expected. It had been the same with the punks and Deadheads he’d known in his wilder days: despite their fearsome reputations in the outside world, they usually turned out to be surprisingly normal once you got to know them.

  Carrie was standing behind the snack table, trying to console Evelyn Braithwaite, who’d lost a son in Iraq a year ago, but was still mourning as if it had happened last week. Tim raised an eyebrow in commiseration as he passed—Carrie had complained more than once about what a trial it was, having to listen to Evelyn recount the same half dozen memories of Jason every w
eek—and she replied with an inconspicuous flutter of her fingers, as if she were typing a brief message on an invisible keyboard.

  Bill’s wife, Ellie, arrived just as they were finishing their donuts, a big-boned, flustered-looking redhead with a three-month-old baby cradled in her arms, and her four-year-old stepdaughter in tow. Little Gillian was a delicate, slightly unnerving child, eerily reminiscent of her late mother, a black-haired waif with pouty lips and an expression of lofty disdain for the world. Tim felt a small shock of recognition every time he saw her, a window into a crazier time, drugs and motorcycles and shrieking feedback from a Marshall stack, glassy-eyed chicks with white makeup and black lips.

  Bill hurried over to greet his family, lifting Gillian into his arms, then planting a hard, lingering kiss on Ellie’s mouth. Maybe it was just for show—Tim didn’t always trust married couples who carried on like teenagers—but it didn’t look that way. Bill was at peace with his new life, liberated from the past. He didn’t seem to mind that he’d lost his hair and put on weight, or traded in his biker’s vest for an outlandish Hawaiian shirt with hot dogs and hamburgers printed on it, just like he didn’t seem to mind that Ellie couldn’t hold a candle to Jill; he accepted his second wife the way he accepted Jesus—unquestioningly, with delight and gratitude for the gift he’d been given, and no apparent desire to look back. It must have helped that Jill was dead, Tim thought. Maybe Bill wouldn’t have found it so easy if he had to see her every week with another man and remember what they’d been to each other.

  Bill kissed Gillian on the forehead and set her back down on the floor. Then Ellie handed him the baby, and his face lit up with happiness. Tim didn’t feel jealous so much as guilty; he still insisted on wearing a condom with Carrie, postponing the child he knew she desperately wanted. He told her it was because he wanted to save some money, get them on their feet financially so she could afford to stay at home with the baby, but that was only part of it. Something else was holding him back, a stubborn reluctance to take that final irrevocable step, to create a new family that would forever supersede the old one.