They sat in the next to last row while the school chaplain labored through a speech that showed every sign of being watered down bit by bit by a committee of overseers whose main job was to keep anyone in attendance from being offended. No one would be inspired, either, but their bigger concern was the first one.
Emmett Vossedek taught Comparative Religion, which was required school-wide, plus separate Old and New Testament classes you could take by elective. He did his better work in the classroom, more suited to a simple ring of desks than rows and rows of seats; not everyone in the clergy had the same exact gifts, and large-scale public speaking was sadly not one of Emmett’s.
Pick elbowed Goody, who was doing his best to listen. “Check it out,” he said. “He says one thing about Jesus, and then right away he backs off twice as far.”
Goody asked, without turning, “What do you care?”
“Hey man I like Vossedek. He’s a good guy. But he lets these people rattle him.” Pick pointed down at the front of the chapel; the clean necks and trimmed hairs of the officials who ran the school. “ You got too many religions to take care of—it’s like they’re scared somebody’s going to not let their kid go here if Emmett Vossedek knows less than he should about Hindus one day. Now how many people in this place give a fuck about Hindus?”
“I don’t know,” Goody answered. “But we should. We should give a fuck about all of them.”
“You’re crazy—you think they care about us?”
Goody nodded. “If they’re good Hindus, they do.” He turned to Pick. “I think maybe that’s the point. He’s saying that’s what we’re all supposed to do.”
Pick looked at him. “You are fuck plain out of your mind, you know that?”
“Keep reminding me,” Goody said. “I might forget.”
After chapel they borrowed bikes to ride out to Rossmiller’s Creek, an underused park about five or six miles from school, where they liked to hang out and throw rocks. Some beavers had started a dam there, and Pick and Goody were providing tactical help—aiming for just the right places on the banks, to loosen things up for them.
“People only use religion to keep everyone else in line,” Pick said. “It’s propaganda through and through. Gimme the matches.”
The creek was also a great place to get high, when they were flush enough to have something, which was gratefully the case today: Armstrong had visited his cousin at Rutgers again, who was financing his way through business school by selling opiated hash, in quarter-ounce and smaller amounts. Goody and Pick pooled their resources and bought three grams, for this weekend and the next—longer if they really disciplined themselves.
“They want you to behave a certain way,” Pick went on, “so they throw Jesus at you. Look at history, for Christ’s sake.”
Goody shook his head. “It wasn’t propaganda when it started though.”
“You think he was the Son of God?” Pick asked. “I didn’t think you guys were allowed to.”
Goody crumbled up some more hash and dropped it into the pipe bowl. “To me, Jesus is … he’s like the older brother, you know? Like the ultimate older brother.” He lit a match, and kept sucking in till a couple pieces caught and he got a good hit. “I mean, God is the father, right? Everybody at least agrees with that.”
“Everybody who believes in God.”
Goody looked at him, to see if he could actually mean that. He passed the pipe and matches. “Well when you’re a kid, you know, your father … he’s this powerful thing. He’s this—”
“—Asshole. My father, anyway.” Pick took his hit, coughed out most of it, and huddled over the matches to try again. Goody pulled his coat over both their heads, so it could help block the breeze.
“He’s this force,” Goody went on. “And he’s above you and he’s mysterious and everything comes from him. And then Jesus, he’s like your older brother—he explains your father to you. He’s off to the side, just a little. And from there he interprets things. So that you can understand what the hell is going on sometimes.”
Pick looked at him. “That’s what the Jews think?”
“I don’t know what the Jews think. Nobody ever talks about him.”
Pick looked surprised. “Well don’t you ask? Guy like you, you’d think you’d be on their asses all the time about this kinda shit.”
“Every time I ask somebody, they cough or sneeze or something,” Goody told him. “Then they change the subject.”
“That’s fucked,” Pick said, and threw a rock to underscore how fucked it was. He bent down for a fresh supply, from the pile they’d collected ahead of time. “So if God is the father, then who’s the grandfather?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, does God have a God?”
“No. Of course not. God’s God. All there is.”
“And there’s nobody bigger.”
“There can’t be anybody bigger.”
“But we’re made in his image, right?”
“That’s what it says.”
“So, if we’re made in God’s image, and we have a God, then God should have a God too. And if he doesn’t, what else can it mean except there isn’t one? Case closed.”
Goody laughed. “I don’t know what the name for it is,” he said, “but you just did that thing where someone can sound completely right about something, and still be dead wrong.”
“It’s called Logic. Gimme the matches.”
“You have them,” Goody pointed out, and Pick discovered that he did. Goody got out the rest of their first gram, and together they knocked off three more bowls before it was time to head back to school, and sign themselves in before dinner.
They looked across the creek, surveying the work they’d done on behalf of the beavers. “What we need are some fireworks,” Pick said. “Some M-80’s. We could blow that whole stump out, and help those fuckers with their dam.”
Goody nodded. “M-80’s would do it,” he said. “M-80’s would definitely take out that stump.”
They laughed the whole way back; did daredevil tricks on the borrowed bikes and caught hell for forgetting that dinnertime on Sunday was an hour earlier than it was every other day of the week. But Goody didn’t mind; he felt great. It was a perfect afternoon and he was lucky enough to know it at the time. Yet all that night, he thought about what Pick had said, about “Everybody who believes in God.” Goody couldn’t imagine not believing in God—he could understand people not liking God, or being angry, or feeling like there was no way in. But to not believe at all? Might as well just not believe in the sky, he thought. Might as well not believe in breathing.
And it couldn’t have been the hash that kept him up; thanks to Armstrong’s cousin there was a nice and steady supply, all year long. And all those other times, Goody slept just fine.
“Well what do you know?” Pick said. “Leave it to you to find this place.”
He walked down the aisle and joined Goody in the pew he was in. There was one other person in the chapel; an overweight polka mom, in a quilted jacket and sweat pants with the name “Steamrollers” going sideways down the leg. She bent at the altar, then turned around and passed them on the way out, leaving behind the stale scent of Marlboro Lights, and black licorice.
“A lot of hospitals don’t call them ‘chapels’ anymore,” Pick went on. “Did you know that? They have to call them ‘meditation rooms,’ or ‘spiritual centers,’ or ‘reflective zones,’ or some such shit. Sign of the times, I guess. Nowadays people’ll throw a class action suit if a traffic light lasts too long.”
He looked around, to prove his point; there were several different places to pray in here, depending on who you prayed to and which way you faced. The pews were fixed but there were clots of folding chairs and you could angle them either way. It seemed fair.
“So, I guess you don’t have a problem with this,” Pick said. “Former Jewish guy, in a Heinz 57 room. Could be a disco ball up there and it wouldn’t bother you, right? Could be Elvis before he got fat. You’re past that crap.”
Goody smiled, softly—as if to say, maybe no one’s past that crap.
“And maybe I need more of it,” Pick said. “Or just some at all. Maybe I need it to be a box in a stadium, or many roads up the side of a mountain, or angels on a ladder or whatever the hell that other stuff is that people say. I could use something, though. Man could I use something.”
He looked over. Goody was watching some candles flicker on a shelf, where you could make a donation in someone’s name and light one. The shelf looked like it was moving, shifting from all the shadows tricking back and forth. It was hard to tell which was the illusion anymore.
“Want to hear something funny?” Pick asked him.
“Always,” Goody said.
Pick got ready. He looked comfortable at this: collecting his thoughts, running down the mental checklist he relied on, back since Lawyer 101. “Any time we build a case, first thing we do is nail down the timeline. You can learn a lot about things by looking at the order they happened in. So that’s what I did with your movie. I went back and put together a timeline. I combed through all the stuff that was available.”
He looked at Goody. No reaction. “Anyway—I always thought that the way it happened was, the movie fell apart and then you took off. I never considered it might be the other way around. And then, because I’m a moron sometimes, I finally did. And it was, wasn’t it—you went first?”
Goody didn’t say anything. Which said everything.
“And right before you did, Laura came to see you—that was the first part. She saw you, you took off, the movie fell apart. And so whatever she told you, that’s what made you do it.”
Again, Goody said nothing. And again, everything.
“I’m right though, aren’t I? You pulled the rug out from your own movie. That’s the order it happened in.”
“That’s the order it happened in,” Goody confirmed.
“And the baby,” Pick said. “You knew about that all along. That’s the thing Laura came to tell you.”
Goody nodded. She’d told him, and it all but did him in. In less than a week he was on the run again. And it did nothing. Just like it always does.
Someone opened the door behind them, saw that people were in here already, and left. The candles flickered back into relief. “Maybe Carmine was right,” Pick wondered. “My fitness for this shit. Then and now. Maybe everyone’s right.”
Goody looked over. “You really think that?”
Pick nodded slowly. “It’s all Laura. They could do without me in a second. But her …” He made a little explosion with his hands. “We wouldn’t last a day.”
Goody had a hard time believing that. “The way your boy looks at you. You’re his hero.”
“Give him time,” Pick said.
The door opened again; this time, the person came in. A businessman, by the look of him. He went straight to the front, pivoted when he got there, then turned around. He looked at Pick and Goody. “Does this shit farm have a priest?” he asked.
Pick looked back at the guy. He’d seen a million like him, and wasn’t impressed. He tipped his head towards Goody. “Got one right here,” he said. “Zen Buddhist.”
“I meant a real one,” the guy huffed and left, adding disgust to the list of things that day. They heard something crash out there, and swearing. Sue their fucking heads off, he was promising, and they’d better believe it. The sounds faded away as the tirade moved down the hall. Goody listened, and thought, and waited.
It was time.
“Listen,” he said finally. “Pick.”
“She’s unhappy.”
Goody looked over. Pick kept his gaze forward, as if seeing Goody’s face right then would kill any chance of getting through this. “Laura. She’s unhappy.”
Goody’s pulse began to race. He thought about Roshi, way early on, at the beginning of Goody’s formal training. They were climbing to higher ground, and had come to a section of rapids that had no good place to cross. He had just this long to consider drowning.
“Has she said anything?” he asked Pick.
Pick shook his head, shrugged. “She doesn’t have to. You can see it on her, like clothing.” He shifted in the pew; call it the hard wood it was made of, but right now he’d be uncomfortable in the sweetest hammock on a perfect summer day. “I’ll reach out and she’ll pull back. She’ll reach out and I’ll pull back. You feel like you’re shouting through molasses. And then you stop doing even that.”
Shouting Through Molasses, Goody thought. Sounded like the title of a book on Zen. Or a koan, a teaching riddle that drives a person crazy—for years, sometimes—until the moment comes when they get it, finally get it. And in that moment, brief as it is, they know what it’s like to feel sane. What is the sound of shouting through molasses?
“She wants us to go see somebody,” Pick said, looking pre-defeated about it. “Fuckin’ therapy. Everybody’s solution has to be God damn fuckin’ therapy. Lay it all out, to a total stranger. And then pay them? Rather put my feet in a bucket of scorpions.”
Goody laughed, and Pick knew it was at the image, not at him. “Is there anyone?” he asked. “A golf buddy, someone at work. A bartender.”
Pick grinned a little, about the bartender. There was a pamphlet on the floor that had fallen off the rack on the pew in front of them. It had the word Grief???, with each of the three question marks increasing in size. Pick shoved it out of the way with his foot.
“I talk to you,” he said to Goody. “All the time. In the car, especially. I talk to you, and I imagine what you’d say.”
Up to his waist in freezing water, Roshi turned and looked back at Goody, who still hadn’t moved. The Old Man laughed, shouted “too much attach!” over the roar, and kept going. Even when it was life itself.
Goody turned to Pick. “So,” he offered. “Talk to me.”