Everything was happening too quickly.
The police were coming.
The little man was ice-picking his way through my intestines.
Adam was much more believable than Father McNamee and me. You could tell this just by looking at him. And he was a doctor too. Wendy would corroborate his story because she needed him to pay for her schooling. The cops would definitely believe him over us. I knew this. And the truth terrified me.
We have to leave,” I said to Father McNamee. “We have to go now.”
He looked at me, and his eyes were no longer whirlpools sucking in everything around us—the pupils were smaller than two tiny black snowflakes. It looked like he was going blind.
His finger slipped off the intercom button.
I looked up and saw Wendy in the window above. We locked eyes before she turned away. She looked just as scared as I was.
This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be,” Father McNamee said, but it was like he was speaking to himself—like he was looking through me. “What’s happening?”
We have to go,” I said, and then led him away by the arm.
Father allowed me to lead him—it was like he had become a scared little boy and I had become the father.
It all started to feel like déjà vu, for some reason—like I had done this before.
When we were six or seven blocks gone, he pulled out his flask and downed the whole thing, right there on the corner, until thin golden rivers spilled from the corners of his mouth.
Father McNamee was unraveling fast.
I remembered what Father Hachette had said about bipolar disorder.
Whenever I get depressed I go to the Water Works behind the art museum and watch the river flow, which helps.
I had some money in my pocket, so I hailed us a cab, stuffed Father McNamee in, pulled Father McNamee out, and we watched the river flow for a very long time, just looking at the water and listening to its roar.
Around noon, I broke the silence, saying, “Father, are you okay? I’m worried.”
Did God speak to you about Wendy?”
No,” I said, and it was true. I looked around for you, Richard Gere, but you were nowhere to be seen.
Father McNamee peered at the sun and said, “Maybe Wendy wasn’t part of the plan after all. What do you think?”
What plan?” I asked.
God’s plan. For you. For us. For right now. What your mother’s death began. This. Right now. The cycle we are in. The tangent that has led us away from the past and into the now.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Do you believe He has a plan for all of us, Bartholomew?”
Mom used to say that God had a plan for everyone, but I didn’t respond, because I wasn’t really comfortable answering Father McNamee’s questions about God.
What do you hear, Bartholomew?” Father McNamee asked me, cupping his ear and tilting his head. “Right now. Listen. Do you hear anything? What is it?”
The river flowing?” I said, squinting.
He raised his ear a little higher before he said, “Is that the voice of God? I wonder.”
Is what the voice of God?”
The river. What does the rush say?”
I shrugged.
Could it be our burning bush, Bartholomew?”
I still didn’t know what to say.
We listened for an hour, but only heard the constant roar of the river.
I felt like Father was waiting for me to say something profound, and the whole time the little man in my stomach was calling me a retard and telling me to keep my big fat mouth shut. I was stuck somewhere in the middle between Father’s hopes and the little man’s doubts.
We’re lost,” Father McNamee finally said, and then began to walk.
I followed him in silence for hours, and it was dinnertime when we arrived home, but neither of us went to the kitchen.
Father McNamee dropped to his knees in the living room without even taking off his coat. He folded his hands and bowed his head, but then he said, “What’s the use?” climbed the steps, and locked himself in Mom’s bedroom.
I went to my room and wrote you this letter. I kept hoping that you would appear to me again so that we could talk, but you didn’t.
Your admiring fan,
Bartholomew Neil
10
DID YOUR MOTHER TELL YOU ABOUT HER THEORY?
Dear Mr. Richard Gere,
Did you ever realize that Tibet’s troubles with China escalated the year you were born?
1949.
The exact year you—Richard Gere, friend of the Dalai Lama and defender of Tibet—were born.
That’s when China became a Communist country; they invaded Tibet shortly after, perhaps as you were speaking your first words.
What do you make of that fact?
Coincidence?
Synchronicity?
What would Jung say?
Do you believe in destiny?
Or that the universe has a rhythm?
You must if you believe in the Dalai Lama, who was reincarnated and destined to be a spiritual leader.
Two completely unrelated events—your birth, China’s conversion to communism—that no one could have known would turn out to be linked in a very important and perhaps even fated way.
What does the Dalai Lama have to say about this? I wonder.
Have you ever asked him?
Back before she got sick, Mom always used to say, “For every bad thing that happens, a good thing happens too—and this was how the world stayed in harmony.”
Whenever too many good things happened to us, Mom would say, “I feel sorry for whoever is getting screwed to balance all of this out,” because she believed that our good meant that someone else somewhere in the world was experiencing bad. It actually depressed her when our luck was very good. Mom hated to think about others suffering so that we might enjoy life.
Do you believe that?
That in order for someone to win, someone else has to lose; and in order for someone to become rich, many others must stay poor; and in order for someone to be considered smart, many more people must be considered average or below average intelligence; and in order for someone to be considered extremely beautiful, there must be a plethora of regular-looking people and extremely ugly people as well; you can’t have good without bad, fast without slow, hot without cold, up without down, light without dark, round without flat, life without death—and so you can’t have lucky without unlucky either.
Maybe you cannot have Tibet without China?
Bartholomew Neil without Richard Gere?
Mom often used to say she was thankful when something bad happened to us, because it meant that someone else was experiencing good.
Like the time she lost her wallet and the week’s food money with it, when the pension check was still several days away. She said, “Well, we’re going to be a little hungry this week, Bartholomew, but whoever finds my wallet will eat well. Maybe they needed the money more than we did. Maybe the mother of a malnourished child will find our money, and the kid’ll eat fresh fruit this week. Who knows?”
Or like the time when Mom and I were eating dinner at a seafood restaurant to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. She loved soft-shell crabs cooked with ginger, and so we would always splurge on special events—like milestone birthdays—making a night of it, getting dressed up in our best clothes, eating at an expensive restaurant, using our emergency credit card even, which we never did regularly, because we didn’t have the funds and Mom always said that the interest rates could cost us our home if we weren’t careful. But while we were dining, pretending to be rich for a night in the restaurant situated on an old-fashioned boat docked in the Delaware River, while we were pretending that life was grand and wonderful and posh, that we were rich important people who, without a second thought, could order waiters to bring us food originally found underwater, a pack of menacing, degenerate teenagers broke into our house. They spray-painted disgusting phrases and pornographic images on the walls—things like BIG HAIRY COCKS! next to a cartoon of a giant penis and testicles covered in pubic hair, and CUM-STAIN SHITBALL over Mom’s headboard with an arrow pointing down to her bed, where one of these boys had done number two and then apparently ejaculated on top of his own feces.
It didn’t make any sense.
It was perverse.
Disgusting.
Horrible.
Beyond imagination.