Saint Francis
Imagine this: way back when, two heathens meet in a wasteland. The desert, the steppe, wherever. What matters is that it's rough wilderness, far away from God’s light. Maybe one of the heathens is wearing furs and the other is wearing cotton. One has a beard, the other doesn’t. One has a sword, the other has a big axe stained with the blood of slain animals.
After the usual aggro posturing, they settle around a fire and start talking.
They’d never think to ask each other something like: “What Gods do you believe in?”
They’d say, “Who are your Gods?” or maybe, “What gods do you worship?”
Like this: “What do you eat?”
Not: “Do you eat food?”
Or so says the podcast I was listening to on the walk with my dog the other day. He was working some barely-there scent in the snow, nose down and zigzagging through the dried weeds and trash in the city park, and all at once I started thinking about the time I went driving through the Yukon. And once I started, I just couldn’t stop.
It was the first week of September and I was with a woman I thought I was in love with. I only thought I was in love with her because three weeks before, she’d broken up with me. This was in 2012 and we’d been living in Homer, Alaska, and working at a tourist lodge when, for some reason, she started going to church. An Eastern Orthodox church, all gold foil and onion domes, up in the black spruce outside of town where nobody could see it. She’d told me she was going to beach yoga. But one day she came back to the cabin we were renting with tears dripping off her chin. She said we had to break up. We had to break up because the priest said so. I looked out the cabin window. A tall skinny priest was sitting in an idling Subaru, reading a book. He was wearing a long black smock. He looked just like Rasputin. I cracked my knuckles, made sure she was watching. Then I slipped on my rubber boots and began to stretch.
“Just stop,” she said. “You’re not going to fight the priest.”
“Oh yeah I am,” I said. “I’m going to fuck that priest’s shit up.”
She said he was huge. Six-four at least. His beard was intimidating, just a few strands of gray. I grabbed a hammer from my toolbox.
Then she said she was leaving regardless. Priest or no priest.
We hardly owned anything, so the packing was fast. But as she walked out the door with her backpack and a cardboard box, I said, “Hey. Don’t take the portable speaker.”
“I paid for it,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m the one with an iPod. It’d be pointless to take it.”
She said, “But I paid for it.”
“I’m not disputing that. I’m saying that you don’t have an iPod. If you leave it, one of us gets to listen to music. If you take it, nobody does. It’s just illogical.”
She said, “This is your problem, Jake. How you see the world is the problem.”
Then she walked out and got into the priest’s car. He had the audacity to wave at me—a little flurry of bony fingers, driving off with my perfect girlfriend.
A few days later we met on the beach overlooking a glacier the color of peppermint gum. I brought her my iPod and tried to convince her to take it, but she’d brought the speaker for me.
Shaking the speaker, I said, “See? We love each other.”
She was far too sincere to ever roll her eyes.
I said, “I want to understand, but you have to explain.”
She said she couldn’t explain the feeling of God. There weren’t words for the desire to live in his image, and when she lived outside of his image (which was somehow also his light) she felt crooked and hollow. She wanted every breath of her life to be a prayer. She wanted each minute to be filled with constant prayers reified in breath. She was speaking with words she didn’t usually use. Like “constant prayers reified in breath.” I asked if those were the priest’s words, and she said it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to talk about the priest, she wanted to talk about God. She told me that in Orthodox iconography Jesus has one soft blue eye and one sharp dark eye. She wanted to be seen with the bright blue eye. The priest had convinced her that it was impossible, impossible because we’d been fucking like crazy.
I said, “Are you serious? What goddamned year is it?”
She’d tried telling the priest that her parents didn’t care, and he told her that her parents must also be outside of God’s light. This was especially hard for her to hear. I remembered going to meet them in the mountains of Virginia the year before. Her dad was a former Baptist, a missionary kid who left the church at nineteen then found Orthodoxy twenty years later. He said that Baptists had lost sight of the mystical. He owned an 800-year-old bible made from camel skin, still hairy on the cover. When he ran his hand over the binding, he closed his eyes so lightly that his eyeballs trembled like a dog in a deep dream.
In my girlfriend’s childhood bedroom, there were icons over the headboard. Saint Francis with the beasts bowing to his open hand. The sharp dark eye of Christ looking like my worst hangover. And that night my girlfriend woke me up before dawn. Outside I heard the sheep bleating. She wanted to fuck on the floor. I assumed, at the time, so that the bed wouldn’t squeak.
On the beach, I said, “Wait. Are you in love with this priest?”
She said, “Only in as much as he is a reflection of God.”
Which was more pathetic: a sudden procession of faith, or trying to compete with one?
She moved in with the priest and his wife. I spent my days working at a tourist lodge, cleaning planes and hauling suitcases. Every day the tourists came back on the little prop plane the lodge owner flew across the bay, taking the tourists to view bears catching salmon at a waterfall in the wilderness. I shucked the tourists’ oysters and refilled their beers while they showed me their photos. They knew that they paid to do things that other people got paid to do, or at least they did for free: fishing, for example. And because of that, they longed for authenticity. Hazing was the clearest path. The worse I treated them, especially the men, the better they tipped me.
I’d look at their pictures of bears and say, “Wow, a whole bunch of little cubs.”
Or, “Even Jesus couldn’t work a miracle with fish that small.”
That’s the strategy I was using on the leadership team of the National Association of Legislative Staff and Assistants, who were on a “bipartisan vision and planning getaway” at the lodge. No strangers to hazing, they seemed to be into it. “In your opinion,” the only woman in the group asked me, “what are the most important issues affecting young voters today?”
I said my biggest issue was being asked survey questions during work hours, and they laughed. They invited me to their bonfire on the beach that night.
I got good and drunk and watched the tide eat the fire. They made up stories about senile senators and secret phone calls, and I made up stories about bears and moose. Then I fucked the congressional aide from Kansas ten years older than me in the backseat of my SUV. She was on her first vacation in five years. I hadn’t showered in five days. She said the last person she’d screwed was a lieutenant governor of a neighboring state.
“You taste intense,” she said, thumbing cum off her chest. “Super briny.”
I slid out of the backseat with my pants down so she could find her panties among all the tools and trash on the floor, and I was silhouetted against the sand from the first big moon of the summer, looking all weird and monstrous with my hoodie still on and my dick swinging around.
The aide climbed out and faced me. She had a very round, ruddy face with a bunny-scrunch nose. She pulled up my pants for me and called me a good sport. Then, she asked me to eat her out the next morning in the raspberry patch down by the beach I’d shown her earlier. She even knew the log she wanted to lean against. She was a person with vision and planning. I could have been any warm body.
In the morning, I stayed in bed. I stayed in bed hoping that my girlfriend would outsmart God.
A few weeks after that, she did. It had suddenly turned cold and the blue glacier across the bay was white with fresh snow. I was packing up my car to drive back to the Lower 48 when she showed up at the cabin. I told her I had a job lined up in Pennsylvania, picking apples and living in a canvas wall tent. She’d been crying. I saw her puffy, sad face and said, “Did that priest touch you?”
“No,” she said. “But his wife wouldn’t stop looking at me. It's like I can feel her eyes on my back when I’m washing the dishes.”
I told her more about the orchard again. How there were horses in the orchards that ran between the rows of trees, snorting in the fog. She said that was so beautiful. She asked if she could come with me. There was a bare footprint on the window from the congressional aide. I’d left it there in case my girlfriend came back.
We drove north into the heart of Alaska then east across it. Glaciers the size of cities. Huge, braided rivers chalky with pulverized rock. All the alder turned gold like the double ribbon in the center of the road. I was twenty-three and had a copy of HOWL in the car. Holy, holy, everything is holy. I watched moose work the bark from willows and tried to believe.
In Palmer she told me she wanted to take me to church with her back home, and I agreed. She said there would be roast lamb and baklava afterward. She said the priest would spin a ball of incense and the church would turn to smoke like the universe on Day One. I stroked the back of her ear and she shivered, then sighed. She added that while she considered herself in a relationship with me, we couldn’t have sex right now.
Aside from sex with the congressional aide, sex with my girlfriend was all I’d thought about since she ran away with the priest. Now I was crushed, and we were heading into the deep, far from any airports. I asked her why she waited so long to say this to me. She said if I loved her, loved her like I’d said on the beach, then it wouldn’t matter. She said that she could see I was full of love and she thought, thought and hoped and believed, that God would notice my love and wave his white hand at me. I wanted to fuck her so bad in that moment. More than I’d ever wanted anything. The want went from a feeling to a material thing, like a billiard ball in my chest, and no matter how much I sighed and groaned, or whacked off in roadstop vault toilets, I couldn’t loosen it.
We drove. It rained on the glaciers and the alders and the spruce. I stroked the back of her neck while driving. I twirled her fine hair in my knuckles. I held her hips at every postcard rest stop and said, “I’d rather look at you.” The want throbbed inside of me.
At Deadman Lake, the campground was closed for the season and signs warned of “habituated bears.” We slept in the car with an airhorn within reach. I barely slept, and my girlfriend never once rolled over to face me. In the morning I told her that I was really struggling. Struggling with my needs. My needs in relation to the closeness in the car: her head on my lap on the empty road, the way her hair blew when the window was down. She said blow jobs were too intimate for her currently. But she offered to jerk me off in the car at a pull-off overlooking the largest glacier accessible by car in the United States. She looked forward at the blue ice as she did it, stopping twice to lick her palm.
We crossed the ridiculous border the next morning and drove through the Yukon wastes–millions of alders and millions of black spruce all tilted where the frost had heaved them from the muskeg. The frost had lifted the road into a weird undulation that made us drive slow. I felt like a warped record. Some of the hours sped by and the others lagged, and our voices grew low and warbled and strange. We really had been in love not all that long ago. Love like a carbon monoxide leak. Once we’d stayed up all night, fucking and talking and fucking, and she told me about the lunch hour after church, when all the families brought dishes to share, and the children ran around the church basement yipping with the rose water from the baklava stuck to their little red faces. And I’d told her about the circuit I was working out. Summer in Alaska, with the low sun at midnight and the fish that jump onto your plate, then apples in Pennsylvania, then the Virgin Islands in the winter, working at a lodge on a bluff near a reef where rare sharks prowled.
We dropped down from the barren hills into a valley of spruce and alder and stopped at a stream so thick with mosquitos they looked like smoke. Grayling were rising from the water and I walked down the streambank to get a closer look. That’s when I heard the flies buzzing. On the sandbar lay a dead beaver with its insides outside. Wet and greasy, a maze of fur ripped wide at the belly with folds of pink meat dripping blood and white rot at the edges. I bent down and was hit with a violent hyperawareness of everything around me. The water and the sunlight and the alders were all brutal and clear. The water and the wind and the branches in the wind were all brutal and clear. My senses hurt like nerve pain, a full-body toothache, then I saw myself from behind. Not imagined, but seen. My eyes were some place in the alders behind me, in a new body, skulking from a low, shadowed space in the brush. I saw the outline of my hair and shoulders. My hat wavering in my back pocket, stinking mildly of cum. The twitch of my fingers, the swoop of my pulsing neck, my feet heavy in the sand. The deep and easy aloneness.
I felt a decision, a pounce, a whole universe of suicides, but before I could choose I was snapped back into my human form. I heard a rustle, and I shot around and stared into the bush but saw nothing. Every part of me was prey. Even my skin hurt with fear.
Back at the car, my girlfriend asked what I saw.
I said I saw a dead beaver.
She was making us tuna sandwiches on the tailgate and in the silver light she was stupefying. Her cheekbones were high and sharp and her acne was gone, like the light had changed the actual, physical reality of her body. I stared at her like that, a slice of white bread in each hand, and I thought of the priest hiding in the corner of her heart. I imagined a mystic with a pocket watch. The snakeskin still clinging to Siddhartha. I wanted to be the teacher instead. The clear word of God. Rasputin’s huge cock! I knew soon I’d propose, and she’d say yes. But for now, I told her there was something out there. A bear maybe, a wolf, a lynx, I don’t know. I said we should probably finish making those in the car.
She said, “Oh God!” Her voice was so excited and alive. She was looking around into the bush, saying, “Did you see it?
“Did you see it?”
“Well, did you? Did you? Did you? Did you?”
Jake Maynard is the author of the novel SLIME LINE. His writing appears in Southern Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and others. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he works in a plant nursery and curates a popular local reading series.