Page 85 of Saint
Elijah’s voice is curious. “And so that’s why you’ve chosen not to be ordained? Because you think you’re not good enough to turn wine into blood?”
I look out the windshield, struggling for a way to put how I feel about it into words. “Not in an internalized monastic class system way—because I had no idea that hierarchy was even a thing until I came to Mount Sergius—but yes, I guess. And not necessarily with performing the sacraments so much as the pastoring. I mean, who am I to hear anyone’s sins? Who am I to hand out penitence or advice or...or...wisdom nuggets?”
Elijah pauses with a fry halfway to his mouth. “Wisdom nuggets?”
“You know,” I say, gesturing vaguely. “When someone old and wise gives you the perfect soundbite that eventually solves everything? A nugget of wisdom?”
“Ah.”
“Anyway, I’m not qualified for that! I was a catastrophe of a person until I became a monk, and I still barely know which way is up, morally speaking.”
“You weren’t a catastrophe of a person,” he says. Softly. I look over at him, and he stares back at me. And even though we are in a gas station parking lot with fast food wrappers everywhere, we could be at a candlelit dinner with the way he’s looking at me now.
“I loved the person you were,” he continues. “And I think I might love you even more now, which I wouldn’t have thought possible before, but here we are.”
“Elijah,” I start, but he shakes his head at me and keeps speaking.
“In case you need to hear it again, you weren’t a catastrophe. You were human. Impulsive and a flake perhaps, but maybe that makes you more qualified to give out those nuggets of wisdom than someone who’s been sensible and well-behaved his entire life. And even though I think that you should do whatever you want to do with your life—whether it’s to be a brother or a priest or anything else—I want you to know that the idea of deserving something you want is only ever going to be an incomplete qualification. You’re far more likely to remember the reasons you shouldn’t have something you want than the reasons you should, and you’re far more likely to let shame steer you than joy. Maybe we can talk about what is good and healthy for you and the people around you, butdeserving? That sounds like Catholic nonsense to me, and I should know.”
I touch his knee. “Elijah?” I say.
“Yes?”
“That was a wisdom nugget.”
He throws a fry at me.
* * *
Ireland doesn’t look big,but it takes longer to get places inside it than you’d think, which I discover as we hit Galway and turn north-ish to follow the coast along a series of ever-narrowing roads.
Soon the sea is in view, a dark reach leading out to the gray horizon, and everywhere are emerald cliffs and black rocks and tiny, hidden inlets carpeted with oat-colored sand. The rain returns as a mist, which veils the world and even the nearby sea, and then there’s only the road—narrow as a crepe paper party streamer—and the stone walls which stitch the island into a quilt of green, brown, and gray.
The rain picks up, making everything smeary through the windshield, and I slow down to a crawl, worried I’m going to drive us off a cliff.
“So this is the Bell motherland,” Elijah says, checking the directions on his phone for the umpteenth time to make sure this is actually the way to the abbey and not to the middle of the ocean. I brake the car as a sheep steps onto the road, shits a giant shit, and then meanders across to an open field.
“Charming,” says Elijah.
“That’s probably the Bell family crest,” I reply. “A sheep shitting in the rain.”
That earns me a laugh as I roll over the dung and along we go, ribboning over hills and down into bright green vales lined with stone walls and dotted with more sheep. Sometimes in the distance, we catch glimpses of shadows on the sea. Small islands.
At one point, I look over at him, and my heart feels like someone’s slid a tuning fork into an atrium and struck it. I wish, desperately, that I had a phone of my own, so I could take a picture and have this image of him forever.
His long legs are bent like mine in order to fit in the tiny car, but while I look like someone tried to trick the Hulk into driving a go-kart, he looks like he’s in an indie music video. Bare feet, fitted trousers, leather satchel. One knee now pulled up as he stares out the window, the top of his pen between his teeth as he watches the land reveal itself, bit by stony, green bit.
He glances back at me, and that tuning fork strikes again, vibrating everything through my chest and bones and strumming the fibers of my muscles and fascia like an eolian harp left outside in the wind. With the world reduced to gray and green around us, the dark, dark bronze of his eyes beckons me in.
In the flash before I tear my eyes back to the road, I see his hand flex on his knee, and I think about how it felt to hold his hand last night at the Tate, about his mouth against mine on the bridge, about the warm slick of tears on my chest as he cried.
I think of the fact that we will get to St. Columba’s today, which is a Monday, and then we will leave first thing Saturday morning for Dublin, where we will have separate flights back home.
I think of all I haven’t told him.
I think of how much I love him and how much I love being a monk and it’s not fair that I can’t be a garden of my god and Elijah at the same time—
I look back to the road as I open my mouth to say some of this, any of this, but right as I start to say his name, his phone breaks into the noise of the rain with its chipper voice.
