Pure Land

For his 25th birthday, Michael removes everything from his room except the mattress and explains that he will lock himself inside for the next two weeks. He asks Oliver to bring food and water to the door twice a day.

“I’m going to save humanity,” he explains. “Blaise Pascal said that all problems of mankind come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone with oneself. I’m taking a step here for all of us.”

“What about the cat?” is the least of Oliver’s questions but the first to come out.

“He’ll be fine. He likes you more than me. He’ll sleep anywhere.”

“Where am I supposed to sleep?”

“Easy there, Alyosha,” says Michael. He kisses Oliver and taps him on the forehead with two fingers as if conferring a blessing. “Wherever you want. You’re a free man. The couch, the bed, the floor, take your pick.”

The door closes with a neat click. Oliver leans his ear into it for a moment but catches only air particles buzzing around. Hold a seashell to your ear, hear the ocean? No, just air particles.

The empty bedframe now occupies the main room along with desk, chairs, lamps, bookcase, art objects, unidentified musical instruments et al., like horses tied in the background of a Western film: placid, oblivious to the main action, too large to share the screen with the leading man, only here they have been pushed into the foreground and Oliver is forced to climb around them whenever he wants to go anywhere.

Oliver climbs around them to the kitchen and makes a pot of coffee. The machine makes gurgling noises like something coming out of an old man’s chest, like his grandfather in the hospital waiting for Jesus. He pours himself a cup and flops down on the couch with it. He opens his laptop. He is going to find a job.

Everyone needs a job, yes?

Unemployment is probably a fine excuse for sharing a bed and bodily fluids with another man. Shame to give it up but all things run their course sooner or later. Three months now he is living with Michael in an unspoken limbo, a guest but one’s who’s not leaving, one with no belongings of his own to contribute to the pile of chaos now stretching itself languidly from wall to wall.

First, a resume. New and fresh. An empty Word document blinks up at him. He types his name, saves the document. Oliver Donahue. Good so far, strong start. Next line. Stubbornly gay half-priest? Seminary dropout? Non-Jesuit living in sin with a psychotic hipster? Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, if that helps?

Stirring up the thick sugar sludge from the bottom of his coffee, he mentally apologizes to Michael for referring to him as psychotic, and to Jesus out of habit.

The cat hops up and walks pointedly over him to sit on the other side of the couch, sure of his course, blinking slowly.

Oliver decides to skip the introduction and stick to the cold, hard facts. He has a phone number, a college graduation date and a few jobs to present in reverse chronological order. The font looks boring but professional enough. Could that be his tagline? Oliver Donahue: Boring but professional enough. Seeks employment in a field that doesn’t ask too many questions.

Although he knows no one will see it, he shoots a dark look at the closed bedroom door, as if it’s Michael’s fault that his mark on the world is lined up here in reverse chronologically ordered bullet points.

The place holder in the Word document blinks at him. The cat has closed his eyes, rolled into himself in a fat orange loaf. The ceiling is unhelpful. The extra furniture, arranged in jagged angles, has turned the room into a shipwreck. Just the sort of chaos Michael would enjoy but he’s not here to look at it, and Oliver’s already had enough.

Time to take this show on the road, maybe to the coffee shop a few blocks down. Sliding the laptop into a backpack, he kisses the cat goodbye, leaves a cup of water and a bag of chips by the bedroom door and shrugs on his coat on the way out.

The hallway floor and stairs have a slight sheen, traces of mud and melted snow and oil rainbows tracked in by tenants’ shoes. In this city, winter seems to never end but just gets dirtier.

A figure stands by the mailboxes, and with dismay Oliver recognizes it as Chuck, a squirrelly guy from the first floor. He pretends like he’s fiddling with his mailbox combination, but Oliver knows he’s really just waiting for someone to come along to talk to, and Oliver is a prime target. Chuck gets a hungry look in his eyes when he sees him, like a crocodile who has been waiting all day for a deer to come drink from the river.

It’s not Oliver’s fault he has “good listener” written all over him. Oliver Donahue: Good listener, doesn’t ask too many questions.

“Hey Ollie, what’s up?”

“Nothing, just going to Little Skips.”

“No way, me too!”

Oliver nods patiently. Oliver Donahue: Human lie detector. “Won’t you be cold?”

Chuck’s thin shoulders already seem shivery under his sweatshirt. “Nah, I got my coat right here.” And he does actually, crumpled up in the corner next to the door.

“So, uh, how’s Michael?” Even with the coat, Chuck is trotting to keep warm, grasping elbows against his chest. Oliver’s eyes start watering from the cold air, and he pulls off his glasses to rub at them.

“He’s fine. Same as always.” No need to share about the empty room where Michael even now could be pacing like a tiger or sitting in meditation, or napping, or throwing himself against the blank white walls, or jerking off.

“But you love him, right?” He sounds invested in the answer. Chuck has a sort of devotion to Michael, like many of the oddballs around the neighborhood do, as if he were king of the misfits come to redeem their eccentricity. “You really love him?”

“Of course.”

It was easy to believe that Michael had seduced him with hot breath in the ear and teeth scraping down his throat, back when he was sure he was going back to St. John’s after Christmas break; with sugary blue eyes and a touch to the soft spot below the last rib and promises of things to be done in the dark, while an evening raga on sitar bent the air around them from a small Bose speaker.

“I got a letter from my sister today,” Chuck says. His voice gets a little quicker and sharper, digging himself into his own story. “You know she lives on the Upper East but I haven’t seen her for six months? Well, I got a letter from her today, in the mail. That’s why I was at the mailbox just now, to see if anything else special would come. So she says that…”

The weird thing here was that Oliver had actually met Chuck’s sister. He had already been hearing about her from some time, repetitively enough that he was starting to wonder if she really existed. They met while waiting for confession at a church on the Upper East Side. Like her brother, she loved to talk.

It seemed too much to believe that he could meet his neighbor’s estranged sister randomly in a city of 13 million people, but when she complained about her no-good little brother Chuck who lived off Myrtle-Wyckoff and who had quit a perfectly good job in IT to hawk vintage postcards from a cart outside the Met, and who would go months without calling her, it was too much to believe that there could be two of him.

“Thank you for listening,” she said. “You’re a nice boy. What’s a nice boy like you got to confess? Don’t you have anywhere better to be on a Saturday afternoon? Sorry, you don’t have to tell me. I’ve just always wondered what other people say when they go in these little boxes. Whether I’m saying it right.”

Then it was her time in the confessional. While she was gone, Oliver looked closely at his hands, turning them over a few times, and left the church.

He has not been to confession since then. Instead he took to whispering his sins into Michael’s ear while he was asleep, and when he ran out of sins he started telling plain secrets instead. Useless ones, harmless, the secrets no one would ever ask for.

“I wish I played piano. I’m afraid to stand on the edge of the roof because I always want to jump. Until I was nine years old I thought the moon was made of chewing gum.”

Or once: “I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of myself. I want to devour you whole. I want to burn myself in you, nothing left. When you look at me there’s a shaking under my skin and so much sound, so much static I can’t hear myself think.”

Dim gray light leaked through the window. In it he could tell that Michael was sound asleep, drooling into the pillow and eyes twitching behind their lids. His fingertips pried one eye open, careful not to wake him, to watch it move. The dark pupil ceased its jumping and settled on him, expanding and contracting within its pale blue halo. He stared into it, trying to see inside, to see who was looking out at him.

Chuck’s story is winding down. Oliver feels a twinge of guilt that he hadn’t listened more attentively. He suspects that Chuck is disappointed with his audience, but can’t tell whether or not he’s imagining this.

“How about you?”

“Sorry?” Oliver is taken aback, wondering if he missed a step in the conversation. A train roars past on the JMZ line overhead.

“Just a second,” Chuck shouts as it passes, “I want to buy something from this bodega.”

For some reason, Oliver mumbles in agreement and follows him inside. He doesn’t need anything from the bodega. Chuck doesn’t either. Apparently, he meant that he wanted to buy something, anything. He fingers through bags of chips and candy, bottles of dish soap, toilet paper, like an old lady checking fruits at the market. Oliver watches himself following behind, trying to catch eyes with the cashier as if to say, “help me, I’ve been taken prisoner and I’m too polite to do anything about it.”

The cashier doesn’t spare him a glance but fills in a Sudoku square, old-fashioned, with paper and pencil.

At the register, while the cashier counts change for a pack of Oreos, Chuck repeats, “So how about you?”

“What about me?”

“I don’t know, anything! I’ve pretty much given you my life story by now, but you must have some interesting beans you’re not sparing. Come on, why’d you drop out of priest school? That must be a juicy story.”

“Surprisingly boring, actually.” They’re back out on the street and almost to Little Skips. He can see it across Broadway, just down the block, like a beacon. Once there he’ll have the good excuse of a laptop and an unwritten resume to crouch behind.

“Do you ever feel like, ah, maybe I should go back? Like the secular world’s just a meaningless parade of hollow experiences, one after another? Like everything here is so nice and glittery but it just kicks you in the face when you try to grab onto it? Like you’ve corrupted yourself hanging low with us damned atheists and sinners? Not that we don’t like you, of course. Can you ever go back to priest school or it’s a one-shot deal?”

Almost there. Oliver steps resolutely into the street, turning his head just in time to see the car — too large registers first, then corrects itself to too close — floating towards him in slow motion like a rogue planet. A horrible hybrid sound washes over him: half metallic, shrieking brakes and horn, mixed with a dull organic thud.

Then silence.

Then nothing.

Pure, absolute. It is good.

It is radiant.

Nothing for a very long time.

Some images take shape. Pleasing to see how they form out of nothing and melt back into it, how they hang in space for a little while like soap bubbles with nothing to say.

With a shock he recognizes a human body lying flat on pavement. He dimly remembers this body pertaining to him in some way, but he can’t imagine now what use he would have of it. There is some gravity shifting him towards it but an equal and opposite force repelling him, like the wrong end of a magnet, so he finds himself stuck vaguely in the space around it.

He observes some pity for this body, flat and abandoned, dropped haphazardly on the ground.

There is a crowd of other human bodies, upright and animated. They are speaking and making sounds, some of them touching the empty body. Their presence is disturbing, making him feel like maybe something is wrong. This hadn’t occurred to him before but now that it has, something is wrong fills the screen and everything starts to move faster. Details of the scene come in disjointed flashes. He wants to pull back, away from the vivid crunch of a pebble underneath someone’s shoe, the thin drip of blood from the empty body’s mouth, the apocalyptic line of its limp hand on the ground, the finger pointing to but not quite touching the pavement.

Apocalypse coming from the Greek apokaluptein meaning “to reveal, uncover.” To unbutton the world and touch its trembling bare skin.

Apokaluptein, he is confused. He doesn’t know this word or this language but then he remembers Michael telling him about it, rainy day sharing an umbrella in McKinley Park, only now the rain is gone and the park is gone, just Michael’s face in oversaturated colors and sounds coming out of his mouth like the screeching of a thousand eagles.

“I’m sorry, Michael,” he tries to tell him. “I don’t understand a word you say.”

Genuinely, shatteringly sorry. But he doesn’t remember Michael having so many eyes or being filled with prismatic light that leaks out of him at the seams. His mind is turning around it all but too slowly, there is something here he can’t put a finger on. The scene starts to dissolve, first into white, then red, then white again. In between he sees the screeching, glowing creature coming towards him and he knows desperately he is supposed to make a choice, but his mind is too slow, dragging him down like a deadweight.

Oliver Donahue: Like a deadweight.

It pops. The force repelling him from his body is gone. The inner shape of his body wraps around him and once again he is looking out through his eyes. A ragged sound of breathing, every gasp tearing new space in his chest. Everything else feels weightless, warm and pleasantly buzzing.

Audio shivers back into alignment, voices telling him don’t move, are you alright, oh my God. He feels into his bones and yes they are alright, they are all in their right place and shape, and his blood is moving and doing its cellular exchanges and the nerves faintly pulsing with electricity just as they should.

He manages to sit up. Cold, wet pavement pressed against him, bits of ice digging in. Things weren’t this brightly colored before, were they? Impossibly luminous, shifting in and out of focus, until he latches onto a lime green outer borough taxi idling across the street.

“Sorry,” he says, “I should have looked both ways.” There are just so many colors.

The driver yells at him for a few minutes, after which he promises that he won’t press charges, that he doesn’t need an ambulance, and finally the crowd disperses. Only Chuck is still here, stepping nervously from foot to foot and pulling at his ears. Oliver can see every line in his face, can zoom into every pore and stray hair, and yes the deep colors are there too.

Chuck helps him up. He catches a glimpse of his own palms and sinks in, the swimming layers of them, brushed now with dark grime and a little blood.

They sit on a bench outside Little Skips and watch traffic for a while. Oliver’s heart is still beating too fast and he is intensely aware of his entire body, quivering like a bee’s wings, like a small animal that children like to hold in their hands. Cold air stings his nostrils on the way in, warm air pools out.

“Hey, want an Oreo? They’re vegan.” He takes the offered cookie, carefully examining the crisp printing on the black wafers and the smooth white filling. A bite tastes like sugar and chemicals, crumbly and shockingly sweet.

“I thought you were dead,” says Chuck. “Man, I’m sure you were dead. No pulse, weird dead fish eyes… Hey, what’s black and white and red all over?”

“What?”

“A priest who’s hit by a car.” He hisses in laughter, bunching into himself. “Sorry dude, too soon?”

Oliver laughs too. In front of them, cars are starting and stopping, streetlights changing, people walking back and forth and left and right, while unseen planets move silently and ceaselessly through space.

“So is there life after? After, you know?”

There’s always life flutters up and hovers between them, bobs up and down. Oliver feels Michael back in the apartment and opens his eyes to that blank white wall. He looks through his eyes into the pure land, into the beloved skyland of his soul, blank and absolute. A train roars overhead. He takes another Oreo and crunches it in his teeth.