1.

Erika and Jonathan were staying in The Suite of the Orchids in the very charming and very expensive Hotel Rex in Cuenca, Ecuador, when she told him she didn’t bring the $3000 her father, Big Gerald, had given them to spend in Latin America.   This was a flat out lie, two lies, probably more.   The truth was she did bring the money, hundred dollar bills zipped in her money belt, and that she had decided to give it away to Marta’s daughter Sylvia but she didn’t trust Jonathan’s reaction to her decision.  This last worried Erika most of all because it had to do with love, not money.   Not ready to tell him the truth, she had to make up something, what with how nice the suite was and how much it must cost.  Unlike Jonathan, Erika usually took no interest in the price of anything.

Three thousand dollars.  More than half of what he thought they had.

In a flash of instinctive, budgetary insight, Jonathan knew that this beautiful suite with its writing desk, instant room service and endless hot running water would be the last decent one they’d have for the remaining months of their trip.  He knew it would be second class buses and trains, and cheap hotels and lousy restaurants from then on, and no more room service or American newspapers or magazines and no more searching for peanut butter which was supposed to cost a fortune down there if they could ever find it.  But, as a kept man, he was in no position to complain.

“I left it home,”  Erika said.  “In the bureau drawer with my leotards.”

Jonathan knew the drawer well.  Top left.  Once, early on, he had stuck his face in it.  

“And you did this because...?”

“So we’ll have it when we get back, you know.”

I’m really bad at lying, Erika thought. 

“You thought that?”

“Uh huh.”

“You never think about money.”

“I know,”  she said, smiling that beautiful smile of hers.

Her smile meant, of course, the child they were going to have when they got home.  This trip to Latin America was to be their adventure before that adventure, their search for beauty, truth and mystery in this world to last them as they settled down to other things.  Of course, a baby could come with them anywhere they wanted to go in the world, she reminded him.  A baby was very portable.

“Didn’t he give you the money just for traveling?”

“Big Gerald won’t know the difference.”

“He doesn’t think about money either.” 

“I know.  He doesn’t have to, except on his movies where they used to called him Dr. No.  Even when he wants to say Yes he says No, to get a better deal, to win.”  Big Gerald, her father, was a movie producer.  “Mona even called him that.  ‘Ask Dr. No.’  Because he’d never screw her until she had a fit and started throwing expensive things against the walls.  He used to keep thousands in twenty dollar bills between the face towels in his walk-in closet, like nobody knew it was there.  After I got to be a hippie, I’d peel off a few twenties to give boys to pay for the taxis they took over to the house at night, when my parents were out.  And for pizza and stuff.”

This was better.  It would distract him.  Maybe she wasn’t bad at lying after all.  But the lies were piling up especially for someone as naturally truthful and bad at hiding things as she was.  She knew Jonathan would never understand why she was going to give Big Gerald’s three thousand dollars to Sylvia, if she could find her once they got to Lima.  She had learned on this trip that the man she loved was pretty strange when it came to money and she could see him adding things up even now. 

“You mean the boys were too young to drive?”  

“I know.  Before I was a hippie, I was too chicken to take any twenties, I don’t know why, but after I got to be a hippie I figured it was okay because of what a capitalist pig Big Gerald was.  He never noticed the face towel money and he won’t care about this.  He won’t even ask.”

“So you paid for boys to take cabs over.”

“Uh huh.”

“How many boys?”

“One at a time.”

“I don’t think your father would be too happy about you using his money for that.”

“I wasn’t de-virginated until college, remember?  My comparative religions professor, remember?” 

“Absolutely.  How could I forget?  Carl Rossman, with the moustache that tasted like sweet coffee.”

“I was overwhelmed by Carl Rossman, really overwhelmed by him.  Like by his brilliant mind.  And by his intensity.  Like by how much he wanted me.  It’s funny:  If I ever feel like remembering Carl Rossman, all I have to do is put sugar in my coffee.”

“I’ll watch out for that.”

Erika had just smoked a bowl of hashish.   Jonathan didn’t smoke.  He said his throat was sore and maybe he was coming down with something.  With so much unfamiliar and dangerous around in South America, hash had started making him schizoid, paranoid and generally uptight but he loved to keep Erika talking when she was ripped like this. 

“Did Carl Rossman just teach religion or did he believe in God?” 

“Of course he didn’t believe in God.  Wouldn’t that be like a conflict of interest or something?  God’s a metaphor, he used to say that too all the time, like you.  You know, whether God exists or not, he’s unknowable and the only way we can come close to knowing him is through images, like in your poetry.   Metaphors.  God’s a metaphor, he always said.”

Erika pronounced it ‘meta-fer’ not ‘meta-phor’, making metaphors sound like pine trees.  The way she said it bugged him.  The way she said it made it sound like God was more important than the images.

“A metaphor fer what?”

She frowned but the light never wavered in the darkness of her eyes.  Her eyes were hungry for him, eating him up even now.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“A little.”

“Stop it, Querido.  You think you’re so smart.  Carl Rossman said it like that and a lot of other people say it like that including the great Allen Ginsberg.  Meta-fer.”

“Wait a minute.  How do you know Ginsberg does?”

“’Cause I spoke to him once, after a poetry reading at Grace Cathedral.  Before I knew you.  I was looking for you there.” 

“But I was late.”

“I know.  You were late.  You didn’t know enough to come and look for me too.  You’re always playing catch-up with me in love.”  (Another smile.   He wished she’d stop smiling like that, those beautiful almond eyes of hers, stoned black but lit up with this love she was talking about more than he could stand.  Two dark rooms, lit with lanterns way back.  You could get lost in them searching for the source of the light.)   “First thing Allen Ginsberg says to me is that I’m too beautiful to be actual and real, actual and real is what he said, and that my beauty is a meta-fer for something, I don’t remember what.  I don’t know why everyone’s so hung up on that I’m beautiful.  I mean, what’s the big deal?”

“You can only say that because you are beautiful.”

“So I know it’s not important.”

“Because you take it for granted.”

“And what if I wasn’t?”

“Then you wouldn’t be you.”

“When I was a girl I was fat.  Really fat.  Tremendously fat.”

“Come on, Erika.”

“Well, maybe not tremendously, but my official parents thought so.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I don’t take it for granted and I don’t think it’s all that important either.”

“To you.”

“What about to you?”

“I love beauty.”

Wrong answer, Erika thought.  You love me.

“Can’t you see, Sweetie, that it’d be just as false for people to pretend not to notice you’re beautiful?”

“I know and I wish they’d stop it.”

“I give up.”

“I know what you’re talking about, Chico.  It’s you who doesn’t see because no matter how deep I take you in you’re still on the outside of what it’s like to be me.  Me.  Me.  That’s the big difference between us:  I want you to know me totally and I want to know you like that but you don’t want me to.”

“I just don’t think it’s possible.  I don’t even know myself like that yet.”

“I know.  That’s the point.  It’s why we’re together.  It’s why we’re down here now.  You’re the one always talking about discovering yourself in the world and the world in yourself.  And here we are.  And here I am.”  She paused.  There she was.  “But now that you mention it, Carl Rossman never said what God was a meta-fer for.  The mystery, I guess.  Right?”

Jonathan felt better hearing this.  The mystery.  The mystery.  Like it was his signature on her.  Or maybe she was throwing him a bone.  She could be tricky that way, whether she knew it or not.

When Erika first told him she believed in God, he thought she was kidding.  But no.  She had a child-like faith that life and consciousness and love and art and sex and dope were about getting closer to God.  To her God existed flat out and so she didn’t worry about anything.

At first, Jonathan called God a fairy tale for soothing worried children but eventually he learned to keep his mouth shut about it.  HHTo get around this, they believed in mystery together.  The abundance of mystery everywhere in the world and in themselves.  So much to be discovered.  The profound mystery of existence and every part of existence (seeing a world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour).  Life was about searching for the mystery and the marvelous through love and art and sex and the systematic derangement of the senses.  Then one day she called him on it.

Let’s go to South America, she said.  I’ll pay.

It was 1981.  The hippie-avant-garde-artist thing was spent, the writers and artists he knew scattering to teaching jobs in Kansas.  Jonathan, always poor, had gotten himself stupidly fired from his teaching gig at State College.  Time to get out for a while and see the world, if she was paying.  He thought he’d getting a lot of writing done, poems, stories, travel pieces, but South America was so strange and dangerous all he did was write in his journal about how sick he was of being afraid and homesick and other insights into his habits of mind and how they were keeping him from a naked experience of the place.  He chided himself constantly in his journal, never out loud to Erika, no way, for using the trip to South America to think and dream about North America. 

Unlike him, Erika was ready for anything and never thought about dying down there.  Unlike him she’d eat the blotter acid they brought and get ripped out of her mind on the hash she stored in a tampon tube you-know-where whenever they crossed a border.  Unlike him, she was really open to mystery.  Maybe because of her child-like faith in God, Jonathan didn’t know, but thinking about it made him feel like a fake because what he was discovering in South America was that he wasn’t a fearless poet of mystery but one who was afraid of everything mysterious in the world and in himself.  He wanted to go home and never go anywhere again.  He’d much rather think about the boys. 

“So you paid for the boys to take cabs over?”

“Yeah and we’d get naked in my parent’s bed.  Being in their bed made it more fun, like a joy ride in a stolen car.”

“Like sneaking into the movies.  Like finding money in the street.  Like standing in all four corners of the room at once.” 

She leaned to him and kissed his ear.

“I love you so much, you know that.  We’d fool around, that’s all, until they could hardly like walk.  I was still saving myself for you.”

“But I was late.”

“Too late.”

He wanted details.  Like about blow jobs, she was so good at them.  To protect his fragile equilibrium, he knew better than to ask.  This time he didn’t have to.

“I know.  Really late.  We did everything but screw.  You know, slide around on each other on the satin sheets.  Five hour make out sessions.  And we were so innocent we didn’t even know about oral sex yet.”

“No?”

“It’s not like you could discover oral sex by yourself.  You had to know about it to do it.  Though this one boy did know about it and wanted me to and I thought he was crazy.  That’s where pee- pee comes from, I said and phoned for a taxi.  The guy was like dumbfounded.  I didn’t know anything yet.”

“But now you do.”

“You’re so yummy, I’m still a total sex maniac for you.  I’ll blow you anytime you want, you know that, anywhere you want.  Just say it and its yours.  Even if we’re fighting.  It’ll be like a timeout in the fight and, after I perform oral sex on you, we can start fighting again.”

“Even if we’re broken up.”

“Sure.”

“Not a bad deal.”

“Even when I’m nursing the baby.  Especially when I’m nursing the baby.”

“I think you’re supposed to look into the baby’s eyes to establish the mother-child connection.”

“I know.  Babies are so cute and dependent.  Oh well, better not.  Might give her the wrong idea.  Well, then, even when I’m eighty years old and like all pruny.”

“Great.  I’ll look forward to it.”

“And wrinkled.”

“Got it.”

“And like totally toothless.”

“Got it, Erika.”

“I'll gum you.  I’ll even put it in writing right now, if you want.”

He couldn’t help laughing. 

“It was only after Marta died that I started inviting the boys over anyway.  Big Gerald was having lunch all day and all night doing his deals and Mona was out on Rodeo Drive spending the money from the deals.  Big Gerald was the worst parent ever and Mona was even worse than that.  If it wasn’t for Marta, I’d be either like dead or, you know, one of those Rodeo Drive shoppers.  Through all the craziness, Marta loved me like her own child.   She loved me when I was fat when all my official parents kept trying to do was get me to lose weight.   It was really Marta who taught me to love myself and to love you, for that matter.  You should thank her.  Her heart will always be a lantern inside mine.”

Though this last image was a rough translation from the Spanish, Erika choked up.  Her eyes pooled with tears.  Not ever again, the bitter almond smell of her, her engulfing, welcoming softness, her dignified calm, her quiet passion.  Marta.  No more Spanish lullabies or silly Spanish word games, laughing themselves to tears and crying themselves to laughter in Marta’s little bed.  No more dark, semi-sweet cocoa at any hour of the day or night.  Or heart-felt talks down by the orange trees.  No more feeling like she had a home at home, safe and warm and accepting of her, and that she belonged with someone there and wasn’t just visiting these crazy cartoon freaks so caught up in the drama of being themselves.  Erika never realized, she just didn’t know…that the dead must be mourned for years, that the dead must be mourned in terrible detail, each thing, each smell, each song, each piece of clothing or jewelry, each talk, each word and image, each hope and memory, said goodbye to over and over again and it never warned you it was going to come, it just came.  You had your official parents and then you had someone who acted like a real parent because love is an action not a word.   Jonathan had said that, “Love is an action”, more words but she had loved him for it.  Marta had done the actions.  That was why she had decided to find Sylvia, Marta’s daughter, and give Big Gerald’s money to her.  To make things a little righter.  But she had to figure a way to tell Jonathan about it soon.  She just didn’t trust him to go along with her on this, as she would certainly have gone along with him.

“Big Gerald’s a little better now,”  she said.

“You think?” 

“From his heart attack, you know.”

“The sight of the gallows clarifies the mind.”

“He’s like totally desperate to have me back in his life again.  You know, all I’m going to have to do to be a good parent is the opposite of Big Gerald and Mona did.  And I will.  We will.  Like my Aunt Helen and Uncle Marty, Big Gerald’s older Brother.  They have this low little house in Venice but it’s a happy house.  My cousins still sat on their parents’ laps even when they were teenagers.  If I ever sat on Mona’s lap she’d break like a China icicle.  All you have to know about how to raise a family you could learn by going to their house.  We should go when we get back.”

“For lessons.”

“Stop it, Dear One.”

“Sorry.”

“Once when I was at Aunt Helen and Uncle Marty’s it hit me: Like, don’t these people have a strange idea about being in the same house, the idea that people ought to spend their time together trying to be nice to each other.  We never had that idea in our house.  Never.  Ever.”

The Suite of the Orchids had a writing desk, a shower massage and endless hot running water, instant room service and a balcony overlooking a steamy courtyard of real jungle flora with a fountain and a meandering stream, a flock of noisy parakeets and dozens of posing lizards. 

The parakeets would stay hidden, singing to each other but Jonathan never saw one until he unfocussed his eyes and then they were everywhere.  After he and Erika made love for like the one hundredth time since they’d taken the room the day before, he taught her how to see them too.  They were out on the balcony in the robes the hotel supplied, drinking room service margaritas, looking down at the jungle in the courtyard and she finally got it and her reflecting eyes lit up like she thought Jonathan was magic. 

“There they are.  Wow.  Look at all of them now.”

Then the parakeets decided, being talked about and all, to fly up in a blue and green explosion and perform a loop and another loop inside the trail of the first loop like tying a knot and then get sucked back down together into the fronds.  And Erika, ripped out her mind, looked at him again like she thought that because they were magic together the world was magic.  Her eyes were totally black.

“Mi precio alto,”  she said and he thought she was going to pull him back into bed but she didn’t until she finished her drink and decided the parakeets weren’t going to do it again.

When Erika saw one of the lizards on the balcony railing or walls, she would call them ‘little this’ and ‘little that’ in the Spanish Marta taught her (pequeno this, pequeno that) and ask them what sounded like Spanish questions which seemed to make the lizards thoughtful like they were ready to leap over many species into speech, all because of the spell she cast on everything.  The lizards never left or moved until she was done, so still the air quivered around them. 

But when they were in the courtyard having breakfast and the pure white hotel cat with startling pink lips came over to display itself with a live lizard half in and half out of its mouth, the back end showing and wriggling like mad to get free and the cat sitting statue-still on its haunches like it had suddenly gone stupid and unable to figure out what to do next, Erika couldn’t stop laughing.  Laughing at the dumb, bored look on  the cat’s face.  Laughing at how its eyes were zoning out and eyelids gradually throbbing closed.  Laughing at the lizard’s wildly wriggling, hopeless death dance.  Soon, short circuited by fear, the lizard’s tail detached and she laughed so hard the waiter came over with a glass of water.  If there was something a creature or a person couldn’t help because of their nature, like when Jonathan had wanted her so bad he was shaking like mad and unable to talk, Erika would always fool with it and crack up laughing.  The cat and the lizard were funny, sure, but not that funny.  This love child had a cruel streak he figured he better watch out for.

They were sitting Indian style in the Suite of the Orchids, facing each other naked on the bed, having just made love for like the five thousandth time in their two and a half months in Latin America, when Erika lied about not bringing Big Gerald’s money with her. 

Jonathan had no choice but to forgive her.  She was just so beautiful and hot.  Each breast was a perfectly spilled handful, her skin was satiny smooth and baby soft and the way she gave herself to him he felt like he was falling through the world with her in his arms. 

Even so they had slowed down some at home after a year together.  And now suddenly there was this not being able to get enough of each other again and his always being aware of the swinging golden weight between his legs like a tree backed up with sap and sore from overuse so the only cure for the condition was to use it more and on it went.  

Maybe it was the jungle turning them on, steamy and ripe and swollen with fertility and the lizards and insects waiting like petitioners on the walls and the invisible parakeets making their racket and the orchids growing out of pure rock and the greens so green they looked black and the rain at the same hour every day like a reminder to go to bed and water gushing everywhere and…  Fertility? Was he ready for that?  No.  Maybe it was like he told her, that North America was the brain and South America the genital.  Maybe it was the last big fling of it all.  Maybe deepening love.  Maybe that soon making love might mean what it was supposed to mean and accomplish what it was supposed to accomplish and was he ready for that?  A kid?  He was only twenty-eight for god sakes and Erika twenty-three, so what was her rush?  When she explained to him that it was her job to end the chain of injuries, it sounded too abstract to be a real reason.  He just didn’t get it. 

Or maybe it was the presence of death everywhere down there turning them on which was why Jonathan felt like a fake because for all he went on about mystery and discovering and facing real life and death fearlessly without cover and about systematically deranging the senses like Rimbaud said, he was afraid to actually do it and didn’t inhale because hashish started good and evil voices battling in his head, and when Erika ate the paper blotter acid he only pretended to eat some by cutting off the corner of a page in his journal which looked exactly like it, swallowing that while she took the real thing. 

So, though she didn’t know it, Erika was really tripping on her own that time in the forests outside Popayan, Colombia and in the stately city of Quito on their mad search for a jar of peanut butter and he could blow her mind with images like she was a little child and once she said she was so in love with him she couldn’t stand it and yanked him behind some bushes in a public park because she just had to do her oral thing while looking up into his eyes.  This was nuts.  And didn’t they execute people for stuff like that down there?

The bed and room in the Hotel Rex were king sized and perfectly clean, without scorpions and with flat plaster walls not the stone ones like at the higher elevations, glowing with Andean cold.  There were so many different environments close together on the western side of the continent that you could travel by bus from the sea through a desert, a jungle, high mountains and more jungle in just a few hours.

After Erika told him about leaving the three thousand dollars home, Jonathan knew it was goodbye to hotels like the Rex and room service breakfasts and margaritas and showers where the hot water didn’t run out in less than a minute if there was any hot water at all.  He had believed that Big Gerald’s money was only given for the trip and had been trying his best to use it all up.  The idea that they didn’t have it now was overwhelming to him.  Three more months of never feeling clean and no peanut butter, three more months of rides on mountain roads above rocky gorges on groaning buses driven by fatalistic maniacs raised in a culture where everyone believed in an after-life, where life was cheap and the bus dashboards were decked out like religious shrines and three more months of plane rides on ten-seater prop planes with passengers who crossed themselves at any turbulence and of landing in airports where they didn’t even bother to mow the stinking runway grass and of freaking pirhanas and scorpions and snakes and of every terrible disease described in the South American Handbook (especially the ones they didn’t get shots for) and of crazy taxi drivers and taxi drivers who delivered you to murderers instead of a hotel and of the murderers on every corner looking for gringos to murder.  It was just inconceivable to him that they would ever make it back.  Such fears darkened his enjoyment of the place.

Erika was as matter-of-fact about the trip and about not taking the money as she was about her beauty and about the boys she paid to come over to get naked with her in her rich parents’ bed.  Her casualness twisted him into knots.  He couldn’t figure out if she was trying to mess with his mind or not.  He hoped she was because that was better than if she was that way naturally, without trying.

He’d seen pictures of Erika as a teenager and she was more beautiful than all the girls who wouldn’t go out with him in high school put together, even more beautiful than she was now because of the illusion of innocence.  Her kind of beauty didn’t happen to real people, much less to a six-foot, three-inch tall brainy beanpole like him.  

Later when he found out it was only three or four boys it made little difference.  His mind was already blown that it happened, that she talked about it like it was no big deal and that she was happening to him.  He wondered if he’d ever really believe all this was happening to him before it killed him.  South America was showing Jonathan that he was just as full of fear as his immigrant parents, that he was the very opposite of who he wanted to be.

And now the money.  He planned their itinerary and did all the budgeting and knew they were in for much harder times. 

Erika didn’t think about money because she never had to while money or the lack of money was the air Jonathan breathed growing up and still breathed now.  Money was the look in his parents’ eyes across the kitchen table and the mood in the car and their lowered voices and the tension in restaurants so if they ever went out to eat no one had a good time and they would end up fighting over how much to tip and money was the late night discussions whose details he didn’t have to hear from his bed to understand what they were about.  Money meant everything and stood for everything including love and whether you were a good person or not and had the right to be alive one more day on the Earth.  Because everything had to be earned nothing could be freely enjoyed.  You could never just ride the planet like you deserved it or sleep until noon or pig out on shrimp cocktail or order from room service.  You were always adding the costs up and your totals up and your life up and yourself up, like his Pop’s store receipts at the end of the day.  He knew this was in him as deep as things get in a person, bone deep, and that now, on learning they had three thousand less than he thought they had, he was about to pay big time for violating his principles by going first class and using the outrageously priced room service and having to tip instead of fetching the things himself from the market as his upbringing had taught him to do.  

Jonathan’s mind was working like mad, in The Suite of the Orchids.  Adding things up.  Days and miles.  Nights and meals.  Just like his Ma and Pop again if the rent on the apartment or store went up or the car broke down or like a tooth or like a gall bladder that time, there they’d be with his Pop’s adding machine on the kitchen table, drinking instant coffee into the night and totally recalibrating their lives down to whether they really needed boxes of Kleenex facial tissue or could blow their noses in the toilet paper they had to buy no matter what?  Why?  So that their Jonathan could go to school and be something, not some would-be this or would-be that trying to be and achieve something, but be something with the letters Phd. after it, that could be hung on the wall facing the front hall, the first thing you’d see when you came into the apartment.  He said writer, they heard doom.  He hadn’t even told his parents he’d lost his teaching gig and assistantship, had only said he was taking a semester off to go traveling.  When he did, his Pop exhaled a black frown into the phone. 

“I guess we’ll just have to really watch the money from now on,”  he told Erika, thinking it’s done and he could figure out a new budget and if worse came to worse he could convince her to wire her father for more money.

“I’ll leave that to you, Babe,”  Erika said, thinking if worse came to worse she could always wire Big Gerald for more money.   But then again he might use it as an excuse to fly down with four or five thugs or extras or stunt men or CIA spooks and try to kidnap her back home.

After Erika fell asleep, Jonathan stayed up reading the South American Handbook late into the night.  In it, he came upon the city of H______ described as ‘a tragic city in a magnificent mountain setting, difficult to reach but well worth the trouble’ and told about the Benedictine monastery above the city where The Brothers of Saint Benedict were happy to put visitors up for free and for as long as they wanted in modern dormitories with great showers and feed them American food they had sent down frozen in meat lockers from the states.  Perfect.  And it wasn’t that much out of the way.  There, he could rest up and plan the second half of their trip.  There, he could write in his journal and work on stuff he’d already written and write and send out the travel piece he’d been planning along with letters home and to friends.  Jonathan had a craving for extended time to write as fierce as the one he had to be clean which was as fierce as the one he had for peanut butter which often gave him insomnia just thinking about it in the Andean dark.  And maybe the monks would have some of that too.

2. 

Brother Guyatano was in some deep, mysterious trouble with The Abbot.

Brother Guy was sure this trouble had nothing to do with his service as a teacher at the monastery school, but was something essential about him his perceptive Superior apprehended and the very thing he needed to overcome if he was to ascend the ladder of humility rather than descend the ladder of pride.  In accordance with The Rule of Saint Benedict, those two ladders, one humbly up through prayer and silence, service and obedience, the other pridefully down, were the only ladders by which an Abbot was to judge the Brethren under him.

Brother Guy knew he was stuck on the ladder, (at the fourth or fifth of twelve degrees of humility) holding up Jacob’s traffic of angels.  He knew The Abbot had seen the truth of his hidden selves and that he not only deserved His Superior’s bad vibes, but a prescribed period of excommunication from the order, public reprimand and private retreat, debarring from the common table and main chapel, taking his meals and praying apart from the other Brethren. 

 Brother Guy knew it was his secret selves who had put him in this predicament and caused him to laugh inwardly at his Superior’s strictness in administering The Rule of Saint Benedict.  Never out loud.  Never in word or deed.  And never, he didn’t think until lately, so it showed.

Brother Guy knew his secret selves if he knew anything about himself at all.  He stood watch for them and worried over them as if they were imps who might pop out at any time.  One was an Imp, in fact, who believed, based on hard experience, that all rules existed to uphold a single principle; the power one person had to do what he wanted to another person.  This belief made The Imp skeptical about other people’s motives. 

Brother Guy, however, being a good and loving person, had managed to suppress The Imp with a supreme vigilance successful until lately.  But now he suspected The Abbot was well aware of The Imp and hoped he hadn’t caught a glimpse of The Queer who slid along his inner walls like a scared shadow.

The Queer was afraid, silent and loved The Abbot.  The Imp was brazen, loud and hated him.

The Imp held that The Abbot was proud of his own humility and lauding it over the Brethren through the strictness of his administration of the ancient Rule of Saint Benedict in these modern times.  And couldn’t the guy smile once in a while?  Or if smiling was too much for him, couldn’t he let The Brothers speak in English at table occasionally, about their students, the sick or dying of the city of H_____ or other elevated concerns?  Or if not, because an Abbot has latitude concerning the virtue of silence, couldn’t The Brethren talk about their own families sometimes, even in their adopted language of Spanish, especially after one of them, during his monthly call home on the short wave radio, had gotten some news which could be as instructive as “The Lives of the Saints” they read without fail in Spanish every stinking lunch and supper?  With no family of his own, Brother Guy had a powerful craving to hear about other people’s families.  The gregarious Brother Guy, decades younger than all the other brothers except Brother Ernesto, was lonely and suffered most when school was out of session as it was now.

Brother Guy couldn’t silence The Imp through any form of self denial, such as eating only one hot dog and serving of beans at supper when he wanted four.  Rather than diminishing, The Imp’s thoughts were growing more frequent and louder, loud enough for The Abbot to hear them, so to speak.

Brother Guy sat at the right hand of The Abbot at meals and was usually the Brother he designated to read from “The Lives of the Saints” because he needed the Spanish practice and because his stumbling rendition would afford The Brethren the least pleasure and hence greater instruction through self-denial in accordance with The Rule of Saint Benedict. 

Brother Guy suffered the glance of The Abbot’s magnified eyes when he was eating four hot dogs (the sin of gluttony) and when he was eating one (the sin of pride in trying to be like The Abbot who only ate one hot dog as well though he worked twice as hard any Brother under him with the possible exception of Brother Ernesto). 

The Abbot didn’t get to be The Abbot by acting like The Abbot before he was The Abbot, cracked The Imp.

Brother Guy sensed cracks like this were starting to show on his face or in his eyes.

The Abbot’s weird vibes were telling him that soon he might not be allowed to teach the lovely children of the city of H_____ which was the only thing Brother Guy found worth doing in this world. 

After three years at the monastery, Brother Guy had come to the conclusion that he would never be able to do anything right by The Abbot he so wanted to please. 

The Imp, however, said that The Abbot was onto Brother Guy because, hardly humble himself, the man was especially attuned to The Imp’s own lack of humility, and Brother Guy hoped this terrible Imp would be the next big hurdle he’d overcome after he’d succeeded in overcoming The Queer by becoming a monk. 

It wasn’t that easy.  The Imp was the scrawny, theatrical, tortured kid Guy Knoll, down to the foaming hatreds and wise cracks, showmanship and secret feelings of superiority.  And for all the changes he had made, Brother Guy was afraid he hadn’t changed at all and the whole thing was coming back around again.  You could go to the mountains of Peru.  You could go to the ends of the Earth.  But everywhere you go, there you are.  That’s what The Imp said in his squirrelly voice that never changed during puberty.  The Imp absolutely hated that The Queer wanted to do forbidden things to the beautiful Abbot.

The Abbot was an unaccountably handsome man of around fifty who seemed to have willed himself to stop aging.  He was of medium height with a powerful, big boned build without an ounce of fat and big beautiful veins swelling out of the smooth white skin of his thick, square wrists and forearms, a sign of the strength of his muscles and heart, (veins The Queer wanted to touch to feel their resiliency), and bulging, rock hard calves from walking fast everywhere except when he flew his plane over the mountains to minister at the leper colony (shocking, awesome, hairless, alabaster calves Brother Guy saw when The Abbot raised his frock crossing a stream), and thick rimless eyeglasses because rims would have been an adornment. 

Near blindness kept The Abbot from physical perfection and lent the man a drowned lost look behind his thick eyeglasses, so that, according to The Imp, he resembled a stupid goldfish who would never stop being bewildered by his stupid bowl.  And then The Imp would buzz rat-like that for all The Abbot’s strength and physical superiority, he would be vulnerable out in the wild because he couldn’t see a thing without his glasses.

Though it wouldn’t be easy, The Imp was sure he could take The Abbot, that is if he could just manage to snatch his eyeglasses away before The Abbot’s heavy club of an arm bashed the brains out of his head with a single blow.

The Abbot had a tireless intensity and gave the impression he didn’t need to sleep or that the sleep he did sleep was another form of readiness, like a soldier at war who doesn’t dream because there has ceased to be any difference between dreaming and wakefulness, a completely conscious man, ever on the alert for violations.

But no, but no, The Imp would cackle, spit flying, grin busting out, the real reason The Abbot was so unvarying in his administration of the Rule, was that he had a limited mind full of borrowed wisdom. 

More like a creature in nature than a person, in that he was so true and consistent to himself in every instance, The Abbot fascinated Brother Guy, The Queer and The Imp, none of whom believed in saintliness, not even in the case of Jesus Christ or Saint Benedict and certainly not in the case of The Abbot. 

Experience had taught The Imp Guy Knoll, who lived inside Brother Guy like the past lives inside the future and the future inside the past, that the impression of saintliness concealed some hidden intention.  Experience had taught him that one struggled to do the best one could against other people’s hidden intentions before they came out to do you in.

The Imp saw everyone that way, even Brother Guy’s friend Jesus Christ. 

Brother Guy believed in Jesus not as a God but as a man, a friend and lover in spirit, through whose clear example, like a window onto eternity, one could glimpse the human path to the divine.  This didn’t lower Jesus in his estimation but, because they shared many of the same struggles, made Brother Guy’s relationship with Jesus a more personal one. 

Over the years, Brother Guy had figured out Jesus’ sins:  The sin of trying to get others to follow him rather than simply living a life that deserved to be followed; and the sin of loving all of mankind when there were particular individuals who needed his personal love.  (And wouldn’t he, didn’t he, want to lie down with his apostles or with Mary Magdalane?)  Brother Guy believed in active love, deeds of love, not the mere words and preaching The Abbot was so good at.  Good words not attached to good deeds were the same as lies.  Good actions, despite what might be hidden, were still good actions.   Brother Guy vowed to do those actions by overcoming his nature as it was expressed by The Imp and The Queer.

The Imp Guy Knoll hissed that he had never in three years seen The Abbot smile a smile you could also see light up his eyes.  In other words, The Abbot was always drowning in his blindness and his piety.  Nor had The Abbot ever cracked a joke or spoken one word of English (unless there were English-speaking guests present) and wasn’t that the height of pride to never let up, not once, so that maybe your life story would be added to “The Lives of the Saints”?  And could a Saint be a Saint if, unlike Saint Benedict in his cave, he was trying for Sainthood?   Wasn’t service all about doing something and pride all about becoming something?

The Imp Guy Knoll hated The Abbot for being prideful and for seeing into Brother Guy all the way to where The Imp was.

And so with The Abbot at meals and at prayer, teaching the children of the city of H_____ and ministering to their families, flying to the leper colony or visiting the local hospital, chopping firewood and hacking through vegetation until his hands ached and bled (you couldn’t keep up with the man), praying until his knees were blocks of cold concrete, Brother Guy was terrified that The Imp was about to scream out like Costello “Heeeey, Abbooott”.

For this and for always cracking up laughing inside as he imagined the look on The Abbot’s face, Brother Guy made himself sleep without a blanket or pillow on the cold stone floor of the small chapel built like a wine cellar into the western side of the hill.

Brother Guy hated sleeping on that cold, hard floor.  Sleep and dreams were his only source of bodily pleasure.  He had become a monk and renounced such pleasure because he was a fag.  He had believed this was the right thing to do to cure himself of queerness and now maybe it would work to cure him of The Imp.

All Brother Guy wanted to do was teach the lovely children of the city of H_____ which, as long as no one found out about him, and why should they, a queer could do as well as anyone and he was very good at it.  He wanted to keep getting as far away from his past as he could but then there was his past in the form of The Abbot confronting him every day like a dumb staring fish at his bowl and then one day, in the grove of pine trees where the two of them had been chopping and gathering wood felled by the earthquake, his past came around again when, leaning against a downed tree on a break, The Abbot let his muscular, white forearm and its beautiful network of veins come to rest on Brother Guy’s thigh and stay put there.

(End of chapter and excerpt)