THE DEPARTED

THE DEPARTED

     After stirring a spoon of sugar into his second cup of coffee, he opened the newspaper to the editorial page and scanned it for what he would read first.  His wife was sleeping and would not come down before he left.  He rose early so he could enjoy a leisurely breakfast before showering and leaving for the office.  It was his favorite time of day, a time when he could read and think unbothered.  Usually, the editorial page offered something he could mull over.  It was a starting point from which he free associated, drawing connections between whatever the editorialist ranted about and his own obsessions, what he called, in his moments of self-candor, his personal lunacies—“my personal lucidities,” he sometimes joked to himself.

     He liked the quiet of the house.  Still dark outside, he turned on only the dining room light and sat at the table in his pajamas and robe, unshaven, his hair all askew.  He could hear the furnace in the basement kick on and a few moments later the soft whoosh of warm air rushing  through the ducts.  He could see through the arch the silent dark shapes of the sofas and chairs in the living room.  The familiarity and hominess, the sense of security in the peacefulness of the morning, more than anything grounded him and gave him a sense of belonging and rightfulness that he lacked when he stepped out of the house, out into the twilight, into the busyness of the day, among people, telephones, meeting rooms, handshakes, decisions, paperwork, “strategic planning”—all of which he did well.  Before his morning commute, he had his morning commune, and although he did not explicitly contemplate ultimates, he left the house feeling as though he did.  It was that feeling which charged him for the day.

     Smoothing the newspaper, he laid it on the table, pushing aside the empty plate, and grabbed his cup and took a sip of the hot coffee.  There were two conservative columnists.  The newspaper’s editor was fair and balanced, offering liberal columnists one day a week and conservatives the other six.  But that was OK.  It wasn’t for their opinions he read them, it was for the game he played and for what they prompted in his own ruminations.  He would read the first paragraph of a column, then, knowing the writer, predict exactly the opinion he or she would end up with.  “If they printed the subject matter and then the columnist’s name,” he mused, “I could fill in the rest.”  This morning, the first of the columnists was ranting about a liberal presidential candidate’s “religion.” 

     After playing his game and feeling satisfied, he sat back and sipped again from his cup.  Religion.  He was not a church goer.  He had the misfortune of going to Catholic school from first to eighth grades.  The boys were taught by Franciscan brothers, those creatures of gentleness, who first taught them about God and then beat them into oblivion.  He recalled Brother Blaize.  He was a red-headed Irishman, tall and muscular, who prowled the playground in his black robe and singled out those who played unorthodox games like shooting marbles or flipping baseball cards.  He lined them up against the back wall of the school building and one by one slapped them hard across the face and sent them in to the principle.  It was not so much the cruelty or what was taught that bothered him now as he reflected on those years.  It was what wasn’t taught.  No science or music or art.  These were not hammer and anvil subjects.  They were kites, bound to the earth by the most gossamer threads.  Graduation, he thought, should have been called emancipation. 

     He read the second columnist with the same satisfaction.  But nothing there sparked a personal reflection.  Then his eye fell on one of the letters in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the page.  The bold head read “Moral Leadership.”  He glanced at the end of the letter to see who wrote it.  It was Laura Simpson.  He smiled.  She wrote a weekly letter to the newspaper which was faithfully published.  She was an Old Testament, wrath-of-God fundamentalist who condemned our culture for its permissiveness, quoting liberally from the bible.  He imagined her as a white-haired, bespectacled lady, thin rather than hefty, with a constant scowl on her face, the kind of woman he ran away from in the public library when he was a kid.  While he could predict her attitude toward any issue, he was often struck by the aptness of the passages she quoted, which elicited from him a grudging compulsion to read her.

     He read her letter.  “No Government that makes rules or laws defying God will prevail,” she began.  “No churches or church leaders have the right or authority to justify homosexuality or any other thing that God condemns.”  Ah, he thought.  That’s her game this time.  He scanned the letter for quotations.  “There were sodomites in the land; and they did according to all abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel.”  This one was followed by, “Good kings removed sodomites out of the land.” 

     Endure. 

     This land will not endure, she prophesied.  Unless. Of course, this is where she wants to lead us.  Unless we cast out our own sodomites.  Hmm.  Where, he thought, should we cast them?  He sat back and cupped his coffee between his hands, sipping and thinking.  His nephew was gay, something he knew about him before he himself knew.  He was a good boy and grew up to be a fine man, only he was gay.  He imagined those illustrations by Doré he had seen years ago that depicted the damned in Dante’s Inferno, the tortured bodies variously submerged in mud or ice, exposed to rains of fire, limbs lopped off, wracked and torn.  He wondered if she imagined such things herself as she wrote about casting out the sodomites.  Religion as terrorism, terrorism as religion—white-haired ladies. 

     The letter induced a mood in him that he knew was going to be hard to shake off.  Pitilessness combined with horror representing itself as spiritual insight, offering prophecy to the reader.  He felt a shivering resentment at the tone of it, at her.  What is it about people that makes them think that way?  Is it religion that calls forth this stony, unyielding side of our nature, or this side of our nature that expresses itself as religion?  He caught one time, as the sweeping hand made contact with his cheek, a twisted smile on Brother Blaize’s face.  He could imagine that smile on Laura Simpson’s face.  It scared him.

* * *

He looked at his watch.  Time to shower and dress.  Time to wake her up, too.  He thought about his wife, snug and safe under the blankets.  She was the meaning of life for him, and his love for her was his only religion.  Maybe he should leave her there this morning.  He wished he could crawl back in with her.  He imagined her body heat rising to him as he lifted the blankets and sidled in.  No.  Not today.  If he was anything, he was conscientious.  He had work to do.  Too many people depended on him.  He looked at her asleep and in his imagination kissed her, then closed the bathroom door. 

     Leaving the house, he still felt heavy, even after the shower and the clean, crisp clothes.  He started the car and let it warm up as he turned on the radio and tuned in NPR.  The news was not good, as was the case so often these days.  Thirty-five soldiers wounded by mortar shells near Baghdad.  Airline flights from London and Paris still being cancelled.  He checked the heat gauge and saw it hadn’t started to rise.  He pressed impatiently on the gas peddle.  A Tunisian secreting a bomb hiding out somewhere in Europe.  He listened, letting the car idle again, waiting for it to warm up enough to drive off with the speed he needed to merge into traffic.  Our border with Mexico is dangerously porous, mad cow disease in U.S., Canadian ranchers protesting, survivors disparage 9/11 memorial. . . .

     It had begun to snow, and the wind was picking up, reducing visibility.  As he pulled onto the highway, the traffic was moving slowly.  It would be a long, nerve-wracking ride.  He focused on what he had to do when he got to the office, replacing the morning’s mood with his usual sense of fretfulness.  For a fleeting moment he thought of his wife still sleeping when he left the house.  And then the traffic slowed to a crawl.  He could see ahead through the snowy mist the red glow of taillights.  The snow had only just started and there was no accumulation, but it was coming down hard now, and people were uneasy, alternately braking and creeping along.

     An analyst on NPR was talking about an imam in Baghdad who was taken into custody, charged with planning attacks against coalition forces.  Twenty-six insurgents were rounded up along with the imam, and weapons caches were found in the mosque and confiscated.  He turned off the radio.  Peering into the snow, he could barely see the taillights of the car in front of him. 

     He wanted to keep a safe distance between that car and himself, but he found himself driving too close out of the need to see it through the dense falling snow.  He was afraid of losing sight of those lights because they kept him on the road, but he was also afraid of being unable to stop in time when the traffic came to a standstill.  Concentrating on the road, he put all else out of mind.  The wipers clacked, smearing snow into ice streaks across the windshield, causing him to peer intensely over the steering wheel.  He reached for the blower control and raised it a notch then tried to rest back into the seat.

     After a while, as he clung to the steering wheel, Laura Simpson’s letter floated unbidden back to him.  It came vividly, hallucinatorilly, in a high-pitched old woman’s voice, the words oddly pulsing with the rhythm of the wipers, “God created the world, including the human race.  He instituted marriage between one man and one woman.  That was perfection, but the man and the woman made the mistake of thinking they can do better than God, and so the whole creation was cursed by God.  Now nothing is perfect, and many evils exist.” 

     Perfection. 

     “I should have gotten back in bed,” he thought.  “If I had known it was going to snow like this, I would have.”  Shaking off the return of that downer mood, he thought of his wife in bed, her black hair crumpled against the pillow, the blankets over her shoulder.  Because of the storm, it was still dark and she would stay in bed at least another half hour.  There was no snow when he left the house.  It was as though he had driven into a wall of it when he got onto the highway.  She was snug and unaware and contentedly half awake and probably yawning. 

     As he clutched the steering wheel and peered through the windshield, which was clearing better now, his foot hovered over the gas peddle, touching it lightly, letting the car coast, then touching it lightly again.  The thought of his wife in bed called up memories from long ago—their honeymoon when they both burned in the sun and couldn’t touch each other; the first house they lived in, so old the toaster blew the kitchen circuit fuse, and they had to toast their bread in the bedroom; her first job as the crisis-room teacher in the Vinton School for the Blind.  Almost, he forgot the snow as his field of consciousness narrowed to the two disembodied red lights barely visible in front of him. 

     And then Laura Simpson’s voice came again, crowding out his reverie, “The Lord is great, and greatly to be praised: He is to be feared above all gods.” 

     Feared. 

     He couldn’t see the taillights of the car in front of him anymore.  That made him afraid.  He did not touch the gas peddle, keeping his toes arched upward and letting the car coast.  He was moving very slowly to start with and so the car came quickly to a stop.  He heard a car behind him honk its horn, but he couldn’t see even the glare of headlights through his mirror.  Against his better judgment, he stepped on the peddle in response to the urging and crawled along again. 

     He couldn’t see the shoulder of the road.  Expecting every moment to slide into the ditch, he gripped the wheel tightly and set his jaw.  Then he saw a faint glimmer of red.  Gladdened, he pushed a little harder on the peddle and picked up speed.  He glanced at the speedometer and noted that he was moving at fifteen miles an hour.  Suddenly, he saw other taillights.  They seemed to defy order and were all over the spaces in front of him, four or five side by side.  To his right, taillights gleamed oddly,  floating or hovering rather than sitting on the road. 

     Peering through the windshield from left to right, he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing, so he again let the car coast, and as he did so, taillights to his left began to hover, and in front, on what should be two lanes, three sets of taillights, each in what seemed to be a separate lane, drove side by side.  He looked to his left again to see if there were a car beside him, but he could see nothing.  He could see no headlights in the rearview mirror, either, where, oddly, just a moment ago the car behind him had honked.  “Where am I?” he thought.  “Am I still on the road?  Which of those sets of lights should I follow?” 

     The snow began to fall even harder and thicker now, and the wind blew right into his windshield.  He braked to a stop, his vision completely obscured by blinding sheets of snow.  There were no lights behind him, none that he could see, anyway.  He should stop, he thought.  That was best.  Stop and wait it out.  He wondered if he would be surprised when the snow cleared and he found where he was.  He doubted, from what he could tell looking ahead and behind and from side to side, that he was on the road at all.  He seemed to have been swallowed up by a snow cloud.  “I’m probably in a field,” he thought, “all by myself--except,” it occurred to him, “there are no fields along this highway.”