“Your lines just need more work,” my uncle told me. “You have no patience. I bet, if you did…” He would always trail off theatrically. I was glad to have someone to stay with in Chicago, somewhere beyond the horizon of endless cornfields. It meant very little to him, to move around in a place full of edges. Edges allowed obscurity. Margins allowed realization. The cost was his insistence on church.
I was often dragged in front of an Evangelical firing squad. I saw their faces. The way they looked at me, knowing I hadn’t been baptized. My robe had been the lashes of the men who told me I was worth driving into the woods for. I think my parents thought I would be happier with my uncle. He was a bachelor, a painter, and a decent cartoonist. My parents were both loners, they waited out the good and the bad on their farm, dodging debt with new installments and missing church more Sundays than they wanted to acknowledge. I admired their ethics. They wanted to stand up but never quite grasped commitment. My uncle was the opposite. He came from a long line of pastors but refused to go to seminary. Instead he drew the bulletin and got freelance work in the eighties, enough to do well and live in a small studio off Logan Square. I’m sure he hated many of the other tenants in his building. Once I made a joke about Boystown and he threw me a nasty look.
A few months into art school and church, I had my double life balancing act down. My uncle’s smoky, cat-filled apartment was home. The yellowing paperbacks and dying plants centered around an old glowing television provided a cozy atmosphere to sit down and look at the ceiling’s cracks. I didn’t care that time seemed endless. I didn’t care that I was bored. Somehow life felt less adventurous in Chicago. Maybe it was because I was too scared to go cruising. When I lived on the outskirts of Kokomo, I needed to keep up with the outside world or I’d get lost in the foggy tree line.
The baptism came up naturally. After meeting the pastor and a few elders, they asked me if I was a believer. My uncle was standing right next to me, so I said yes. They added my name to a clipboard and told me they would be doing baptisms in the park once the heat wave let up. Easy enough. I didn’t know the heatwave would take so long to let up.
My uncle liked to take us to cafeteria-style restaurants. He liked haddock and potatoes, catfish, and jell-o. He rarely cooked. Breakfast was always simple. Toast and coffee. I hated the burnt smell of eight in the morning. I got up and rushed out to get to school, usually skipping the sick meal altogether. It was our ritual of disgust. He thought it was stupid I never ate a proper meal.
“You’re always snacking.”
I shrugged and he shook his head, locked over the truth. Perhaps neither of us could look the other’s habits in the eye.
It was always an event getting to school. By the time I got there I was ready to pass out and sleep all day. It took a decent amount of caffeine to make it in the door and take out my charcoal. The teacher, Mr. Jen, was a short, stout queen who smoked Virginia Slims and kept a bunch of beef jerky in his drawer. His room was always the most humid in the building, I don’t know how his spider plants didn’t wither. I could usually stand the heat but his room made me nauseous. Every Monday morning, he set up a makeshift still life. Most of the time he would set down a mug, a few paintbrushes, some other kid’s backpack, and those awful metal spheres. The spheres were the worst, the light kept shifting all morning. The heat index would skyrocket as the balls melted with shadow. I knew Mr. Jen gave some kids advanced placement for sucking him off after class—-and I considered it—but I didn’t care that much. I went from class to class because it was the thing to do and it was something I didn’t have to think much about. I hated the conceptual classes where I was expected to execute thematics. I had no theme.
It wasn’t that lust didn’t keep me up at night. I drank a few hard ciders every weekend but the illicit world I’d been so in love with was foggy. It sat behind a veil waiting for me to come back. Sometimes I would stroke my cock every so often thinking about some old guy railing me in the back of his Chevy parked at a Kroger’s. Desire just seemed like a deflated balloon. The men I met in art school were idiots. They smoked a ton of pot and talked about Foucault. I never read Foucault. I refused.
As I learned the rhythm of art school and the amount of effort I could get away with, my uncle began his education process. I had to go to special Bible classes. I had too many gaps in my knowledge of the Old Testament. Not that my knowledge of the Gospels was that great either. I used to see one guy who recited John 3 as he came on my back. It was disgusting. But fun too. It was hard sometimes not to think about him when I sat in a pew hearing the pastor talk about Mary Magdalene or Thomas. They all seemed so horny to be free. That’s what Christianity seemed to me back then, this paradox of wanting to be free from horniness in order to be liberated in love. Well, isn’t love a fundamentally messy act?
Church, on the other hand, was less like a rhythmic drum and more like an erotic chase. I had developed a crush on the guitar player in the church band. His name was Daniel. He was a few years older than me and clearly doing penance for something. He smelled like smoke when he came in the large wooden doors. “Foundation of Hope Church,” he would say as if the name itself was a joke. My uncle was the only other one whose smoking habit was tolerated. I understood that deception was not part of the equation. Both men, my uncle and Daniel, portrayed enough light and hope to get through the gates of judgment.
He was beautiful. He was kinda short, a bit bulky, with hands that looked like they could crush concrete. He dyed his hair red. He wore band t-shirts and necklaces, coming across a little silly and a little heroic. His world seemed full of interesting people, on the off chance I stood by long enough to hear him talk about it. He made jokes.
After a few Sundays, he noticed I was hanging around. I probably looked like I was waiting for him.
I must’ve been humming.
“You enjoy the songs?”
“No,” I said, jerking abruptly. His eyes were locked on me. I felt tiny and futile. I was thinking of him undressing me with his eyes. I wanted him to baptize me.
He frowned and then let his dry lips form into a half-smile.
“I need a cigarette. Do you want to go on a walk?”
I looked around for my uncle, who was nowhere to be found. I could always say the guitar player asked me to lunch. There was no harm in that. If anything, my uncle would be happy I was making friends with a respectable Christian.
“Sure.”
We walked out of church and walked along the sidewalk. It was June and the heat was decisive. The church across the street was still in session, the music rising into the blue sky.
Daniel was listening to the music. He stopped to light up, offering me one. I took it, even though I’d rarely smoked and coughed profusely. He laughed at me. I felt that it endeared me to him, otherwise I would’ve felt embarrassed. We got to the first major cross streets away from the church.
“There’s a park a block away, it’s the one with the pool they use for baptisms. It has swings too.”
“Ok.”
I wasn’t sure if he was commanding me or asking me. I didn’t want to break the spell of whatever was happening.
The street light turned and we walked on. I was going to miss Sunday School. Not that I cared beyond the fear of punishment.
A few hipster coffee places later, we reached the park. It was a small wooded, fenced-in mess. Its greatest attraction was a shallow pool and water features. Otherwise there was a rusty swingset and a climbing area with pictures of penises drawn in Sharpie. A few oak trees provided shelter from the sun. I realized I was already sweaty and wearing a white t-shirt. I forced down a fake smile and put out my cigarette.
He sat on a swing and patted the other one with his cigarette dangling between his fingers. I sat down staring at him as I walked backward into the constricting seat. He started pumping his legs, getting higher and higher, smoke trailing behind him in a haze. I felt humorless.
“My name’s Daniel.”
I knew that already but I didn’t want to come across as a stalker so I didn’t point out that they announced his name every Sunday morning when he shredded a holy guitar solo.
“Joseph.”
I watched his calves carve neat cycles as we talked.
“I hope you don’t think I’m a complete idiot for playing guitar in the band.”
“No. I don’t think that.”
“Good.” He paused for a minute, as if choosing his defense carefully. “I got busted for possession a few times too many and my parents thought it would look good if I did something… for the community.” I nodded, trying to absorb any and all new information about him. “My parents have been going here for a year or so, they think it’s fine.” He laughed. “I know how that sounds.”
I did not know how it sounded. I opened my mouth to respond and shut it again. Better to let him direct the conversation.
“I used to have a band and a girlfriend and all that… I flunked out of college though.” He laughed, grave and buoyant. I felt my chest skip. “And then I was back to crashing at my parents. I tried to move out but.” He let the swing slow down, abruptly looking a little less bright. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know how to give anything to someone else in a dead end. I thought that was just par for the course.
“It’s ok. I’ll find roommates soon and move out. Maybe then I can stop doing all this bullshit.”
I laughed at him. I never heard anyone from church cuss. A lot of the men I fucked in the woods rarely cussed. As if they were only allowed one sin at a time.
“It’s bullshit I’ve put up with my whole life,” I said.
“Howso?”
“I used to live outside of Kokomo, Indiana on a farm. My parents weren’t as crazy about God as my uncle but they definitely had a sort of… holier-than-thou attitude. We had to look like good WASPs. Except we didn’t have those potlucks or some of the fancier shit my parents maybe wanted.”
Daniel smiled. “My family probably does have a lot of that. We’re proper WASPs.”
“Good for you.”
I’d been staring down at the ground but when he said it I felt a current pass through his voice so I looked over at him. He’d stopped swinging and was staring at me. His mouth formed into a smile, his jaw accentuating like a hungry dog. I looked back down at the ground and tried to think of anything uncool.
“When I get a place you should come over,” he said.
“That’d be fun.”
I wanted to say, no I want to see you sooner, with a firm plan in place. I wanted desire to end. I got lost in thought, trying to get myself to fly higher into the sky. I let the heat wave burn my legs between the foliage of the trees.
“It’ll all be over soon.”
“I hope so.”
I got sick. So I didn’t go to church the next week. I was laying in bed sweating out a fever and wishing I could eat more than just saltines and tomato soup. My uncle tried to feed me grilled cheese and give me a pep talk when he got back from church.
“It’ll be ok, I’m sure you’ll be back in classes before you know it.”
“Thanks.”
“Some guy asked about you—the guitar player who took you to lunch. I gave him your number so he could wish you well.”
I sat straight up in bed.
“What?”
“Yeah. I think his name was Dan or Mark?”
“Daniel, yeah.”
My uncle smiled. “Well I’m glad you found a mentor.”
“He’s not that much older than me.”
“No, I guess not.”
He left me to my zombie laptop afternoon. I scrolled through forums and ancient horror VHS compilations. UFOs were on the rise. Women coming through televisions to ask for vengeance. It was the liberals’ fault. Creepypastas were evidence of demonic cults roaming the countryside, looking for prey. Everyone was writing their conspiracy theories about Obama with relish. People were trying to coordinate the complex lines of moral arcs and progress into one axis. I went from one thread to another, hopping and skipping over them, dimly reminded of my exorcism.
Apparently, when I was around eight, my parents were convinced that I was possessed by a demon. The exorcism was performed by my uncle’s friend, a pastor with experience in spiritual warfare. He came to our farm with a bunch of books, olive oil, and a few candles. He explained holy water wasn’t necessary—it was a Catholic invention. He made a cross of oil on my window and lit a few candles, which mostly seemed to be there for the effect they gave.
I wasn’t supposed to do anything. If I did anything, it was a sign the demon was resisting. So I stayed stiff as a board, praying I would not levitate. I was sure they would kill me if I did something out of the ordinary. It would confirm everyone’s fear, I was hell incarnate. Perhaps even the Antichrist. I hoped it was merely a minor demon, like Legion, like the pigs going over a cliff. If I could die small, that would be enough. Being alive yet dead possessed by something stronger than me scared me more than an immediate dismissal to the afterlife. I was a joyless kid. The exorcist told me I would do well to remember the fruit of the spirit. I didn’t smile though since he was in the middle of a long prayer. It was a chant of sorts, “Demons go away in the name of the Lord.” It would become a refrain I repeated for years. I would write obsessively on paper, “To God be the Glory, Not Me.” As if that would do anything other than become a sign of latent OCD.
After he murmured the prayer, he left me to sleep. He told my parents it was successful. They paid him with some cash and called it a tithe. I slept like a rock that night and woke up to see the olive oil cross on the window shimmering with dust and cold light. My uncle came in that morning with his signature burnt toast.
“How do you feel?”
“Fine,” I mumbled.
No one ever talked about it again. It was added to the chain of family secrets. No one wanted the rumor of an exorcism to rock the foundations of their reputation. I can’t say I wanted people to know either.
That afternoon, sick in bed, I looked at the window expecting to see an olive oil cross to protect me. A blue box popped up on my phone.
i heard you were sick, hope you’re feeling better, i just signed a lease !
He gave me a Tarot reading. The kind that hopefully leads to sex. His hands shook with jangly bracelets made from guitar picks. A few hours ago he’d been playing guitar on the church stage.
On the way to his apartment, I told him I thought it was weird he hadn’t identified himself in the text.
“Well I told your uncle I would text you.”
“How’d you know who my uncle was?”
He just smiled as he led me to the L.
His two roommates kept walking by the door. They were probably trying to figure out if he was bisexual. Or they just couldn’t easily navigate the cramped, trash-ridden apartment. He turned over the Tower, the Sun, and the Knight of Swords.
“I don’t know what any of that means.”
“You’re not very patient.”
“No,” I said, my tongue closing back into my mouth slowly. I wanted him to squeeze me to death. Crush me. Destroy me. That felt more sexual than any luxurious kiss. To be annihilated by contact was the goal.
“My ex is back in town. She asked me if I wanted to get drinks.”
I moved my legs off the bed and let my feet hit the floor with a thud.
He shifted back to the cards. “The Tower is an upset, something major is going to change for you. Some people say it means utter disaster.”
I looked at him dubiously.
“The Sun is kind of the opposite though.”
“Surprise.”
“It’s joy.”
“I hate joy.”
“Shut up.” He paused, his lips open like a pond, his tongue a little fish lost in thought. “The Knight of Swords is about the inability to commit.”
“You’re sure this is about me?”
He looked at me as if confused. The thing I hate about men is their inability to think. Thoughts, words, ideas don’t connect for them. I guess I’m probably the same way sometimes. Men don’t think of causality, the world is spontaneous, bursting over and over again, as if the past is not anything but a low whisper. Only occasionally did the past roar back: STDs, broken condoms, abortions, felonies, debt. The past is never a source of joy to men. I guess I can say I’m just like other men that way. I don’t look to the past for comfort. Men don’t fake confusion. I think annoyance is almost part of love, a quest for some cock.
“Yeah,” he said finally. Stupid.
I wanted to tell him what it meant for me to play with the devil’s toys. Magic, Tarot, astrology, all of it was life or death for me. Or it had been when I was a believer. I decided it should wait. I didn’t know him all that well, even if I felt he was an ocean I wanted to drown in. Being in his bed then was the closest I could be.
“Do you want to meet my ex?” he wheezed between puffs on a little blue glass pipe.
“Sure.” I turned my legs away from him, closing them neatly. Defile me, I thought intrusively. I knew that our window was closing.
The ex-girlfriend was beautiful. Lauren. I could smell him on her as we sat down in the dive bar. Daniel downed a beer and awkwardly introduced us. I didn’t touch my gin and tonic. Lauren was drinking a hard cider and laughing at Daniel’s church jokes. Lauren hadn’t been raised religiously.
“What do you do?” She turned to me with a patient look on her face. Her skin was immaculate, short black hair fell around her face. She was in a band too, she’d just gotten back to Chicago after a tour.
“I’m in art school.”
“Oh wow, which one? Are you at SAIC? Columbia? I have a few friends at both.”
“It’s just a community college.”
I was sure she could tell I was sulking but she kept trying to bulldoze me with her sunny disposition.
“Are you from Chicago originally?”
“No, I grew up in Indiana.”
“Oh cool! I played Bloomington a few times.”
I nodded, saying nothing.
“I didn’t know you were in art school,” Daniel interjected.
“Oh.”
“What’s your focus?”
“I don’t know. I do a lot of charcoal drawings. I haven’t taken a big painting class yet.”
“Painting’s so expensive,” Lauren said.
I hated sitting between them. Lauren was in a chair to my left and Daniel was in the booth next to me. It felt like a strange mating ritual where I was being dominated without any of the pleasure.
“So is touring.”
It wasn’t quite an insult but it was aimed like one. The table fell quiet for a minute.
“I just never understood how people could get so wrapped up in religion,” Lauren said.
“I think people who don’t grow up in it, can’t understand it. It’s this in or out mentality, you can’t argue with its logic on its own terms,” I countered her.
“Apologetics,” Daniel said.
“Right, if it’s not real it’s not real. But if it is real, it’s everything, so you may as well hedge your bets and be a good believer. Plead your case to Saint Peter.”
“Aren’t saints only in Catholicism?” Lauren said smiling as if this was a woozy way to flirt with Daniel.
“Yeah kinda-” Daniel started.
“Yes, but they’re still revered by Protestants. It’s not like Peter’s a nobody to us. Besides, I think I can joke about it. I had an exorcism once. I know what it’s like to be the target of God.”
“The target of God,” Lauren laughed. “Jesus Christ.” She realized her second joke and stopped.
“I didn’t know that,” Daniel said tenderly.
“Ok.”
“Was it awful?”
“It wasn’t great. My point is you can’t disentangle Christianity with Christian logic. You kinda just have to step away. Otherwise, you just end up arguing about the problem of evil or suffering which Christians have plenty of nonlogical logics to defend.”
“Like God’s infallibility and giving us free choice and all that?” Lauren said, taking another sip of her cider.
“Wait, you’re just gonna speed past the exorcism?” Daniel asked. He was looking at me with a raw tenderness I hadn’t seen before.
I looked back in defeat. We spent the rest of the evening talking about exorcisms and demonology. Lauren kept referencing the X-Files. I told her I tried to steer clear of it.
“Nightmares.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. It’s a great show.”
“Well I should get you home to your uncle,” Daniel said. “Maybe we can do this again,” he said to Lauren. “Just us.”
“That sounds nice,” she said. We got up and parted in the humid summer night. I’d spent the whole day with him. It was the worst kind of edging. He thought he knew me after one day of conversation. Throwing around an exorcism in conversation was like that—it created this quick intimacy fix. Really any awful life event can do that I guess. I felt I knew all the drunk girls at parties who told me something deeply traumatic. I felt I knew them better than their boyfriends. Maybe even better than their best friends if it was a real closed-door bathroom secret. More people have them than we think. Normal people too. Maybe even Lauren. I couldn’t tell if Daniel’s parting words to Lauren were romantic or just friendly.
Somehow we ended up back at the swing set. I was trying to open a plastic water bottle we got from the all night grocery store down the street. I felt the gin coursing through my veins, hot and neat like vessels of starlight. I felt bubbly. The kind of drunkenness that makes you want to kiss someone. I couldn’t correlate what I was seeing with what I was feeling. That happens. I remembered one time in a 2003 Chevy a man poured me a disgusting shot of Vodka and I almost puked twice. Once after the shot and the second time after going down on him a few minutes later. He talked about his wife a lot. Sharon. I don’t remember his name anymore but he described her like a Greek goddess, full of fury and organizational skills.
The drunk feeling buoyed me up from the seafloor fear. I loved Daniel. The kind of dredged-up kid love, desperate and hopeful all at once. I crushed the water bottle in a cruel, sobering gesture. Daniel was singing on the swing set.
“So damaged,” he said with a stormy smile, his lips parted this time to reveal his yellow teeth.
“Shut up.”
“It sounds like you’ve had a hard life.” He jumped off the swing and ran up the slide on the little playground.
“We’re gonna puke.”
“Not if we drink a little more water.” It felt like he was taunting me.
I didn’t move toward him this time. I could feel myself preparing to cry, trying not to, worrying he would look at me like an idiot. I wasn’t depressed, I just had a lot on my mind.
“Hey,” he said softly, running toward me in his unlaced sneakers. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The sound barely escaped my mouth.
“Joseph.”
“I’m gay. You know that right?”
“Yeah.”
His face hovered close in the red light of the city. I didn’t want to have to say anything more. I didn’t want to create a trauma one-upmanship.
“I got that, kinda.”
“Kinda?” I sat down on the ground. Like I used to do in high school after drinking Arbor Mist or stolen bourbon. I sat next to the girls and cried that some guy wasn’t gay. I worried I was doing it all again. “Jesus.”
“Jesus,” Daniel said, “got us into this mess.”
“Jesus was too lonely to think about the rest of us.”
He laughed. “Do you feel lonely?”
“Right now?”
He sat down next to me. We created twin mountain shadows across the park. A few people walked back the fence laughing and talking loudly about getting it in. We waited for the twilight revelers to pass.
“Are you?”
“That depends.” I pursed my lips and looked at my hands.
“On what?”
“Are you going to make me go home alone?”
The wind picked up. I shivered slightly as he pressed his body close to mine and raised my chin to his.
For a few brief minutes, heaven was his body sheltering me from the moon.
When we fucked that night, I felt like I was hovering. Unlike the possession of men fucking me in cars, I felt like I was floating, untethered, like original sin. I thought about what all the women who read vampire romance paperbacks thought about. That draining lightness. His smooth hands glided over my neck, soft with purpose like a carnivorous butterfly. He kept worrying his roommates would hear me whimpering. I kept asking him to call me his bitch and he laughed.
“Lauren used to say that. I didn’t know guys wanted that.”
I didn’t say anything out loud, I just searched for his tongue with mine.
Dreaming in circles became routine. I imagined the rings of hell or heaven, clawing for apocalypse. Daniel refused to talk about the act. He didn’t look at me during Sunday worship, as if I was only a reminder of what he’d done. I saw Lauren at church one Sunday in October, as Halloween grew nearer. She was bright and bubbly like a good church girl should be. She wore a cotton daffodil print dress that her lacy bra peaked through. It peaked through enough that my uncle mentioned it to me as we ate lunch in a sandwich shop.
“That woman was not dressed appropriately for church,” he said as he spat bits of pickle and cheese over the table.
“That’s Daniel’s girlfriend.” I kept pushing the melt I’d ordered around, stabbing bits of it with my fork. My appetite had left me. At art school I drank cups and cups of coffee, finally giving into the burnt amber taste. It felt like dredging oil from fossils, dirt into water.
“Ohh,” he said, perhaps pleased that Daniel was not an illicit homosexual though he never seemed afraid of that before. “How’s school?”
I answered tersely I would be getting almost all A’s as long as I kept it up.
“Your baptism’s coming up too.”
I nodded silently.
“You gotta buck up Jo. I don’t know what happened between you and that guy, but you’ll be alright.”
“I will.”
Uncle nodded approvingly and continued to eat. I went to the bathroom, throwing my sandwich in the trash on the way. I let out a little cry and came back rubbing my eyes.
“I just need a good nap,” I said to disguise my crimes.
“Some men are not honorable and some men nap.”
I laughed. I felt light again for a moment. We went home and I crashed almost immediately. I had that feeling you only get when you’re overtired and full of existential dread. The fan spun over me as I shivered under the sheets listening to my uncle putter around in the other room rearranging things and feeding the cat. I wished the cat was more of an emotional support animal. It didn’t seem to like me that much.
After a few hours, I tried to get up and do some figure drawing work, watching my uncle flip through channels on the tv. The veins in his arm twisting and bluing with each click. One more fuzzy gray channel after the other. He would never fix the antenna.
“Are you capturing my good side?”
“Of course,” I assured him.
Mr. Jen was holding my hand and guiding it across a large piece of wax paper. He was still trading sex for grades. Still obnoxious.
“You need to get the hang of this for your pieces.”
I was dehydrated and vicious. The night before I had stayed up all night drinking forties and watching Twilight Zone reruns. Someone’s dog had gotten run over across the street from my uncle’s apartment and it had agitated me into a fury. My uncle kept trying to get me to calm down with mugs of tea.
Now Mr. Jen was touching my ass gently scoping it for whatever fetish lived inside his brittle body.
“Stop!”
He looked at me through his glasses with a ghastly scowl. “Joseph?”
I got up and walked out of the room, past the dying hallway ferns, and stood looking out the giant window. I could hear him order the class to go back to what they were doing. I heard his swishy shoes clacking down the halls toward me.
“Why are you behaving so monstrously?” his shrill voice cried from down the hall, still marching toward me like a drill sergeant.
“You keep touching my ass.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I haven’t been getting any sleep.”
“Then pop an Ambien like every other stupid twentysomething in the department.”
“I’d prefer not to be a stupid twentysomething.”
“We all do it for a few years. Unless one dies tragically young. Teen stars aren’t a rare breed anymore, I suppose.” He looked like he wanted to be a waning movie star. A Joan Crawford wannabe. It was annoying to even look at him.
“Why are you being such a brat in my class?”
“I’m not a brat for calling you out.”
I trained my eyes on the people moving below. Everyone was wearing pastel light jackets, moving with girlfriends and boyfriends in ordered pairs.
“Ok, I’ll choose a different word. Why are you being a sulky moody twat?”
I laughed. “I can’t say you’re wrong even if you’re a slutty scumbag.”
His eyes narrowed in anger as he tried to let the slight go. I could see him chewing his gums, figuring out his next move.
“Is it a boy?”
I turned too fast, betraying myself before I could sputter a denial.
“A boy,” Mr. Jen laughed in a pitched squeal. “I bet he’s a stupid art boy. He reads you, what, Bukowski? And he’s straight?”
“No.”
He moved his hand to my shoulder. “Close enough, I imagine. You need to learn to find comfort in smaller things. The tryst in the bar, the man who will never call… The pining for a straight man has to stop sometime.”
“I’m not pining for a straight man.”
“Straightish?”
“No.”
He smiled, seeing the nerves break out in my arms and face.
“You have to live the life you can live. Not the one you tell yourself is possible.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m not the one who won’t kiss you.”
I slapped his arm away and started walking away. It was certainly possible he would try to expel me but I wasn’t going to stick around long enough to find out what his punishment would be. I ran down the endless stairs to the lobby and stepped out into the autumn air. I hated him. I hated myself. Sitting on a park bench, I absorbed the smell of American Spirits and bad cologne around me, thinking of Daniel and our night together. How little it seemed to mean in the scope of his life and how much it meant to me. I kicked the leaves at my feet and checked my phone.
He was posting again. A picture with Lauren. She stood tall in yet another patterned cotton dress and he had his arm around her. His hair was all messed up. They stood in front of a bunch of birch trees. The caption just said ‘ hiking :) ’ as if to only gently suggest to the world they’d gotten back together. Officially. I put my head between my knees and let the nausea pass. A few guys walked by laughing and throwing their Monster cans onto the ground near my feet.
Baptism Sunday fell a few weeks before Halloween. The stores were stocked full of candy, spiders, and witch hats. I almost joked to my uncle I would show up in a witch hat and swimming trunks. I decided against it. I wish I’d been able to tell Daniel. My parents had come to Chicago for the baptism. They’d spent the past few days asking how art school was going. I was surprised at how excited I was to see them. I hadn’t expected them to come but my uncle called them, apparently begging them to show up for me.
I knew he was going to be there. They told us they were going to play worship music live in the park. Hallelujah, crown of thorns, love and fire all of us made divine. I couldn’t care less. I had spent the past few days sleeping through class and getting yelled at by my uncle. I was no longer on track to get all As. By the time my parents got to town, it was all he could do not to yell at me. I was shivering on the bench waiting my turn. It was bizarre to me we were doing an outdoor baptism that late in the year. The pastor had tried to sell it to us with a cheap motivational speech. “The wilderness,” he said, trailing off, as if that meant something deep. He was just a different kind of con man than the artists I knew. Really, the heat wave had made everyone lazy and it took them longer to organize than they’d hoped.
A few days before the baptism, my uncle told me he was going to kick me out if I didn’t start going back to class. I’d grown up being told things would work out but I think there was a point where I stopped believing everyone ended up fine. Not everyone ended up fine. Some people ended up lying to themselves instead. That was the terror. Lying to myself about where I was really at. Regurgitating a line so many times that I began to believe it.
Mr. Jen had apparently put in a good word for me. It surprised me though I’m sure there was a cost. I figured it didn’t matter. In two weeks at most, I would have too many absences to make up the work. My parents didn’t mention it when they came. They smiled and nodded and blended into the background.
The shivering began again. I wanted to go home and crawl under the covers. My mother gave me a small wave and a goofy smile. The pastor was droning on. A few women in wooly layers stood guard over the casseroles.
My uncle walked over to me and crouched down.
“Are you ready?”
“For God?”
He frowned. The age for crassness had passed.
“For your baptism.”
“Yeah,” I muttered looking down.
“Joseph. You need to get it together. You’re being…” He hesitated, carefully choosing his words. “You’re being an asshole. A million young men would kill for the life you have here.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do. We did our best to raise you right. To keep you safe and healthy from evil…” He was choking up. I felt bad for taunting him. It was the most he’d ever eluded to the exorcism. “You’re going to be ok.” He seemed to be assuring himself more than me.
I bit my tongue, wanting to reference the demons outright. To spit it back in his holy face. I could see the wrinkles in his face. It was salt in the wound as I tried to lay down my sword.
“I hope so.” I could’ve said something more. I could’ve tried to calm his fears, but I couldn’t lie. There was nothing left to say. He let my bland response go unmatched and walked back to my parents who looked equally nervous. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t renounce Satan and the powers of evil before I was submerged under the chlorinated water.
The pastor called the first baptismal subject to the pool. Both of them struggled to stop their chattering teeth. A psalm was being read when I saw Daniel walk over to the bench I was sitting on. I looked up at him as he laid a hand on my shoulder. He didn’t look me in the eye.
“Are you worried I have cold feet?” I said, staring at his kneecaps.
“The pastor has cold feet. This was a stupid idea.”
All the other stupid ideas of the past few weeks crossed my mind.
“Your uncle came over to me and told me I should give you a pep talk. As your mentor.”
“As my mentor, what do you have to say?”
“Listen to God.”
The next guy on the bench walked to the pool with a solemn look on his face.
“I’m tired.” I rested my head on his knee. I felt him shuffle, looking around to see if others considered this an appropriate gesture. His ability to care felt like something snapping inside me. I let myself feel his breathing again. The hovering feeling came back like the faint echo of an old high.
“I didn’t mean to do anything,” he said.
“I know.”
“You just… you are beautiful, ya know.”
“Fuck you,” I whispered in the slightest voice I could.
“You should go to class.”
I ignored him, feeling like we had entered a bad teen movie. We were both too old and too reckless for any kind of warning. We’d made our beds.
“Lauren and I got back together.” He said it as if it was disconnected from everything else.
“I saw.”
“Oh, right.”
The pastor was raising the last unholy victim of God’s love. It was a young woman, her hair slicking back into one singular tendril as she rose up from the water. She smiled, her eyes shut from the sting.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said.
The pastor called my name as Daniel walked away. I walked into the water, praying Daniel would come back and ask me to go somewhere with him just like when we left for the swings. I didn’t have it in me to create my own escape. I went through the ceremony without thinking of anything but Daniel’s sturdy body turned away from the spectacle of my redemption arc. I could see him looking away. My parents and uncle were smiling, glad I had made it to the water without issue.
The pastor dunked me, his words gargling together overhead. I was only scared for a minute. “And now you are cleansed of your demons, free from the wages of sin…” I didn’t hear the rest of what the pastor said. I was staring at Daniel as he walked out of the park.
The image at the top is Jane Dickson. A bulletin of recent writing:
Hiding in corners at work to read this a chunk at a time was exhilarating
loved this so much. cannot wait for your novel <3