“So how’s it happening, then?”
Nathan looked ashamed. “I’m supposed to know everything?”
Sometimes I took it for granted that he did, Nathan for as long as I’ve known him grasping for every fact he can to reaffirm his militant atheism, to the extent that he could probably debate most theologians to tears. He’d told me that his goal was to feel confident that, if he were only able to travel back in time, he could convince St. Thomas Aquinas that neither of them existed.
I’d never known Nathan before he was like this, so I have a hard time imagining him growing up wanting to be a priest, but he did. Wanted it badly, so he tells it, laughing at the child he used to be as though it wasn’t him, and saying how fortunate he’d changed his mind, because “Father Nathan” sounds like some foreign phrase spoken with a lisp.
His father died before Nathan could know him, so he did a lot of growing up around priests, as his mother felt they’d make the best role models. It was girls that ruined it for him, girls and then the recovered memory of a priest with clammy hands and where he’d put them, although three years after Nathan recalled this in therapy, his counselor was hit with a class-action civil suit for generating false memories, so now he doesn’t know what to think, beyond being convinced there’s no God.
Although maybe he was willing to make an exception, as long as he retained enough control, and now that the right god had come along.
“I’ve started calling him Nihil, thinking of him by that name instead,” Nathan said, then lowered his voice. “I was out there yesterday. I swear his eyes blinked once.”
*
Rachel was eighteen when they kicked her out at home, not as traumatic as it might’ve been since she had someplace to go.
I’d been visiting that afternoon, knowing ahead of time that my mother and stepfather would be away, so Rachel and I had gone to the slaughterhouse to shoot some 35mm film. Lately I’d felt compelled to preserve the place, in case some calamity or zoning change erased it.
When we returned to the house Thumper was still the only one around, with rarely two words to say to either of us anymore, just sitting in his wheelchair watching TV, so Rachel and I were pretty sure we wouldn’t be disturbed back in her room.
We never even heard the squeak of his wheels.
Later we wondered if Thumper hadn’t suspected awhile, picking up on a look or a touch we’d let slip in front of him because he’d gotten to be wallpaper as far as we were concerned. It was the last great snitch of a sterling career, maybe the best night of his life since the accident, kicked back surrounded by his stepmother’s tears and father’s apoplexy, seeing Rachel and me on the brunt of a disowning that would last nearly a year. The man aimed a gun at my head, then lowered it and sank to the floor and pissed his own pants, probably not the climax Thumper was hoping for, but for his sake I was still happy to leave him there with them, alone at last, what he’d always wanted.
And as I drove her to my apartment, her new home, for miles I wondered if the magic would survive, because now we were no longer a secret, and because finally I’d seen on her father’s face the anguish that I had always known this would cause, reveling in it, close enough for him to read my thoughts, You drove my dad away, and now I’m taking your daughter, or at least read it in my eyes.
“They’re not really so bad,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them that an open mind wouldn’t cure.”
She’d been crying, but started laughing, saying that at least she hadn’t been set on fire in her room, like Jamaal’s sister.
“I used to have nightmares about that,” she admitted. “All the time, used to wake up thinking I was burning.”
“You were only, what, six or seven when that happened?”
“Yeah. But I don’t remember anybody ever telling me it couldn’t happen to me.”
As I drove home the city grew around us, denser and taller, and we weren’t heading into it again so much as putting it back on, like armor or a hair-shirt, for protection or abrasion. I’m still not sure what I get out of it.
“Do you think you’ll ever have kids?” she asked, and I could see patterns of light and shadow sliding across her face, and her teeth were chattering because my car’s heater was broken, and her question was so awful in its implications that I didn’t know how to answer, so it hung in the air while I pounded at the thermostat with my fist, thinking I’ve just got to get this thing fixed.
*
I liked the way it felt, coming home to the two of them, or Rachel coming home to me and Mae, or she to us, this entire new extradimensional dynamic generated by Mae’s moving in. I’d heard somewhere, Nathan probably, that the most stable structures in nature revolve around threes.
On the sunnier days, late in the afternoon, if it wasn’t too chilly, Mae would come home from the music store and go up to the roof, near the edge, sitting on a crate turned on end to play her violin. Usually I’d go up after she’d started, sometimes listening from the doorway and sometimes beside her, and some days the notes were slow and mournful, and others lively, but I never knew if it was mood or just repertoire.
This was eight floors up, with a far view of the cityscape, and she would sit in her leather jacket with her hair thrown back, her bowing arm in fluid motion as she swayed against the vistas of brick and steel and bare-branched trees. Most often she faced the west, playing into sunsets as though inviting them to set her on fire, her urban concertos carried away on the currents of traffic, riding them like a feather rides wind.
“Maybe he can hear it, still, somehow,” she said one evening after lowering the violin from her chin. “Maybe it pleases him. Or soothes his torments, if he has any left.”
She played for Nihil, in his dilapidated palace. Nihil in the springs, his mortal coils.
I took it as a matter of course now that the body might be in a slightly different position from one visit to the next; come to expect it, even, Nihil trying to bring us signs and wonders. Not that there was any point to them, ultimately, because Nihil was after all a god about nothing.
“He can hear it, if he wants to,” she said. “That’s the key to this all, I think. His ears were so sensitive maybe death just couldn’t have them. If he was here right now? He could listen to rush hour, and pick out sounds from it like threads in a sweater.”
“Yeah, it’s starting to make sense to me,” I said. “If dead saints could hear prayers, I don’t see why he can’t still hear the things he was most attuned to.”
Mae smiled, that wide lovely mouth going wider. “Like the day in that scrapyard, when the three of us found that big industrial boiler and made a drum out of it? Wasn’t that great?”
We laughed while miming the clumsy, brutal swings we’d taken at the thing with our two-handed cudgels, although I continued to keep to myself what Jamey and I had found inside that she’d never known about, and then Mae reached into the violin case for a soft cloth to wipe her instrument down.
“You know what I like about you and Rachel?” she said. “You never make me practice. You let me find my own pace.”
“Well…” I was demurring, because Rachel and I had talked about such things, and it was embarrassing to me to hear that we’d done something right. “We didn’t feel like imposing someone else’s standards of ambition on you.”
“Jamey, he was always after me to practice more, said how was I going to get anywhere without practicing.”
“Was this before or after he’d shoot up?”