Gospel (106 page)

There, all nonalcoholic purchases made: total, $1.13 with tax. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, O'Hanrahan buys a bottle of spirits here. Before the humiliation of the Nair and the pitying looks of the pharmacist, he had bought liquor at great discount at the drugstore, but creeping back there is out of the question now.

(You really think anyone remembers this imagined humiliation?)

Oh ho, yes indeed, pharmacies deal in humiliation—that's their job: here is your prostate medicine, stuff for your diarrhea, your incontinence diapers, ma'am, all the successions of drugs that permit us to know our elder customers' bodily deteriorations, pinpointing decrepitude on our little graph that leads to the cemetery! No, I wouldn't give the pharmacist another excuse to pity me: How sad, he'd mourn, how tragic, Dr. O'Hanrahan is an alcoholic too …

(Well, you are.)

Anyway. Don't buy booze the same place every day or they stare at you like you're an alcoholic, but break it up a bit, and no one is too sure. Wouldn't want Zelda to think I was an alcoholic. Frankly, Lord, if it's any of Your concern, I was doing
well
to drink a bottle of spirits a day, quite often much less. Many drinkers are self-destroyers who if they could afford it would knock themselves insensate nightly, two or three bottles if they could manage it. Not me. An afternoon drink with lunch, a steady, regulated stream through the day.

What O'Hanrahan really adored was the middle of the night.

Now anyone who is up with him, in other houses, out on the highway, wherever, is alone like he is. 3:13
A.M.
The lonely person's hour. But not without a hint of comfort, a trace of glamour, the threes—so much of the night left. The book one is reading is more interesting at that hour, the movies on TV more lost to another era. There's something desperate about the fours—will you get back to sleep or not? And the fives and sixes, when the working-class world awakens and the Eisenhower Expressway begins its rumble and O'Hare receives the day's first planes—it is no longer night.

Patrick O'Hanrahan never did his chores in the day, for all the idiots on the road, not to mention so many close calls for his short attention span for driving. He's not addled, nosiree, but driving a car never engaged him fully. The Antiochene Schism of the late 4th Century! The intrigues of the Tridentine Councils! These are worthy of his mind, but not suburban traffic. Anyway, at three
A.M.
there is no traffic. And he could drive as he pleased. He would drive to the Dominicks Supermarket, open 24 hours.

(In the days before they took your license away.)

Oh shut up, let me relive those glorious late-nights of freedom and carelessness. The world at 3:30
A.M.
matched my old man's pace, my moodiness and reflectiveness. The half-awake check-out staff do not censure me for thumbing through the magazines. I settle on a
Cosmopolitan
or a
Vogue,
turn the pages slowly, looking at the youth of the women, women too pretty and young to lust after, because one would have had to have some experience with women like this to even fantasize, to make it visceral for one. Why do I trouble myself? Why look at what you can't have, never had, aren't going to have … Why this ritual, this ceremony of taking in a dose of female beauty, 3:45
A.M.
, while the Hispanic boy sweeps the aisles with the wide broom, while the black ex-athlete-now-cashier dozes on his feet. I am in my element. You want a gauge of how many loners there are in society? Go to the frozen-food coolers in November and right before Thanksgiving look at what happens to the Lean Cuisine and Weight Watchers piles of low-cal turkey dinners. Look how many fellow Americans are going it alone with the diet frozen microwave dinners instead of getting with their family. Each Thanksgiving I swore I'd buy lasagne, noodles, anything but turkey … but then I'd break down and look for a Swan-son's turkey dinner. How impossible was that solitary meal, how hard to choke down, bringing back its memories of candlelit tables and Beatrice bringing out the turkey. And Rudy who couldn't get enough of that cranberry sauce from a can.

But let us leave the grocery store and escape back to the nightroad.

Those hours of driving. Glorious driving. Down to the Loop, out to the airport, sometimes the toll road down to Indiana and back again by the Skyway, a smile and a brief conversation with the toll keepers—our stylites! What philosophers they must be to stay awake all night as America zooms past them; what wisdom they must have as they observe the nightworld
danse macabre
of people on half-speed, an unconscious parody of America during the daytime. And it was on such a spree that I got pulled over by a real fascist.

Where you going, “Pops”?

Where do you live?

Have you been drinking?

Well, he smelled as if he had, but he hadn't in hours—another elderly disadvantage. Not good enough. His license was suspended and he never bothered to fight to get it back. And there was the indignity of a social worker coming out to counsel him: “Do you ever feel suicidal, Mr. O'Hanrahan?”

No, but homicidal often, honey, in this city that can't leave the good people alone, or stop the bad people.

(And if one day you drove truly inebriated and killed somebody?)

Thank You for Your support. I guess You're happy now, Lord, just me and the clock. 3:30, 3:45, 3:58 … and then one more look: goddam it, it's not four
yet
? The cigarettes, the reread books, the whiskey, the warmly cantankerous older disk jockey playing big band on the radio:

How I shall end my days.

Until this! Until Mordechai called me with the rumor!

The
Gospel of Matthias
was on the black market—no, now Paddy, don't get excited, it's just a rumor, but it might possibly, possibly be true … Yes, the tantalizing discovery we only heard about in our twenties—it eluded Rabbi Rosen, God bless his soul, it eluded Dupont-Sommer and Albright and Quispel, and it's eluded every great scholar who has sought it, but is there a chance? A chance that Paddy O'Hanrahan and Morey Hersch, old devils, can succeed where man for 1900 years has failed?

And of course, Paddy, Rabbi Hersch claimed last December, you're the only person I can imagine translating the thing.

Not Father Beaufoix? he had suggested. You know, Morey, he's pretty good on African languages …

Do you remember?
How you almost fumbled it away! Preferring for an instant the security of your sepulchral life of cable TV and old-timey radio—preferring the soft inner walls of the coffin! And I called Morey back that night, waking him up, saying yes, oh, God, yes, I am with you!

And there could be no debate, could there?

If it meant selling the house, cashing in the policies, pulling out the savings, all the insurance premiums paid for nothing for as long as he could remember? Do you think I'm going to die in a hospital? Does the world think if I got deathly ill I'd let doctors prolong this void? I'd lie down and keep drinking until it, life, went away. Yessir, in the time-honored family tradition. So screw the major medical, man. No beneficiaries. So of course, I cashed it all in! For
this,
Lord, this wondrous trip across the desert, the very life I was stupid enough to run away from!

Because, You see, that was my greatest offense to You: that I got off the track prepared for me. The Almighty practically brought down flashing neon signs and blinking arrows! But no, no, no, I listened to the
jinns
! I gave up what I loved most—the life of the adventurous, rambling, world-traveling scholar! Forty years of wrong turns and bad decisions and mislived, mistaken, misplayed moments, but now they will be redeemed.

(And if you had to go back home?)

Ah well, that's a sobering possibility. I will live on the street, I suppose. I will join the army of homeless, find a cot in the shelter, wander the street windblown as the scraps of urban trash, live as the anchorites of old, not eating, not finding any rest … It is haunting how that fate whispers to me, in the voice of my own father who foresaw I might repeat his failures, in the hectoring voice of Beatrice who said it was where I would end up, in the voice of my sister Catherine. Yet how I seem to recognize it, step resignedly toward it, how easy it is to see the alley and bottle and tattered overcoat of my destiny. With the other drunks and old men who screwed up or outlived their pensions or were simply unfortunate Americans in this indifferent age—indeed, how commonly my thoughts approach this horror: that perhaps it is with them that I
belong,
my true academic colleagues and equals.

“Delgo,” said Mohammed, tapping O'Hanrahan to look ahead.

Yes, in the waning light there was Delgo, that oddest of notions: a Nubian truck stop. Forty vehicles, all Bedford trucks, were amassed in a central lot, around fires and pots over fires. There were a few real buildings, a guest house by the Nile bank, a police station, a garage and a gas station that looked, inexplicably, attached to what must be the mosque. The other dwellings were simple huts and makeshift accommodations, tents and pieces of sheet metal propped against sticks. Here was Nubia, with the inhabitants tall and dark black, seeming darker for the bleached, full-length white
galabiyyas
the men wore, their heads surrounded by the
emmas,
the loosely wrapped white turban-cloth.

To Lucy, Delgo seemed a bit untamed. Grizzled, sweat-stained men, raucous and then falling silent, gaped at Lucy and O'Hanrahan and Mohammed as they rolled past, no other women to be seen.

The truck wheezed to a stop. O'Hanrahan began to search for the cans of food in his bag but Mohammed knew people and no one would let these emissaries from the Western World go without the gifts of tea and food around their campfire. Lucy stood to the side, trying to project docility and allowing the truckers to admire her as O'Hanrahan's young bride—a charade that would save her from any harassment. She edged away from the main fire wondering how they could stand so near it when the afternoon heat was hardly abated.

Lucy and O'Hanrahan shared a room of cots in the guest house, being escorted there by a veiled old Nubian woman who was delighted with the foreign visitors and babbled on, unconcerned that she wasn't understood in the least. Mosquito nets were produced by the woman, and then a candle. Above the uneven wooden door, which did not meet the doorway, there was painted an Islamic slogan beneath a faded postcard of Mekkah. Lucy noted there didn't seem to be a lock or any way to prevent anyone from entering. But as all who travel in this part of the world, she surrendered to fatalism: one just can't fantasize about every bad thing happening. Besides, she sensed, these are more moral people than in the Western World. They believe Allah is watching.

Then it was night. After a few hours of stretching out and relieving her sore backside, and a meal of roast chicken brought to her by the woman, Lucy ventured out to O'Hanrahan, who was upon a box, sitting silently by the fire with a number of men. Now she longed for the fire in the desert night chill. A million stars shone above her.

“It's not an all-male fire, is it?” asked Lucy, a step back, her face in the shadows.

“Nah, I think it's all right,” said O'Hanrahan. “I haven't said anything to anyone in half an hour, so unobtrusively make your way in here, Miss Dantan.” He pointed to a flat place in the sand beside himself.

Lucy smiled, warmed by a tone that came from weariness with the day. He surprised her by kissing her.

“You're my wife, remember?” he whispered.

“Yes, master.” She sat at his feet.

“I can't sit down on the sand like you,” said O'Hanrahan, from his crate. “My circulation is so bad. They'd have to cut off my legs—I'm sure I'd never rise again…”

Uncle Liam, thought Lucy. He had this farm outside of Kankakee, south of Chicago, a small farm. When her father and his brother Liam were getting along, the family would take the bus down, getting up at some unnecessarily early hour, six
A.M.
or something, due to her mother's maniacal fear of lateness. And Lucy and her four siblings would play with their five cousins, two of whom, Danny and Sean, she was wildly in love with. With their cuss words and defiances and small attentions and white T-shirts that smelled of detergent when they'd play fort and wrestling would ensue in a leaf pile. And Uncle Liam would build a fire. She had conflated the memories of summer days with autumnal nights and herself in her hooded St. Eulalia's windbreaker that was too thin to ward off the chill but Lucy had decided she looked good in it, slim and like one of the guys, so she wore it even when told to go wear something warmer. Uncle Liam piled old barn wood and trash and doused it haphazardly with kerosene that smelled so intoxicating and all eleven Dantan kids would thrill and get giddy at the prospect of Uncle Liam sneaking up close with a lighted match … no, it didn't take that time. Then he'd try again as the girls would squeal, anticipating Vesuvius when the pile went off … sometimes Uncle Liam would get a piece of paper lighted and we all would wait for the rest of the bonfire to erupt, but the wind put it out.

Then suddenly the memory turned incomplete and confused. Her father and Uncle Liam had had one of those Irish family fights about something, something irreconcilable, something political. And Uncle Liam was dead from then on, and so was his family, and too much insistence on going to see Uncle Liam on their farm would occasion a scene at the dinner table. Lucy's thoughts turned bitter. What stupid, baseless argument did her father dredge up, raise to great heights in order to cut off that wing of his family, expunge that fellowship?

Sure, sure, in Irish fashion one day one of the men would be diagnosed with cancer and there'd be some kind of tearful reunion and a quick handshake, a reunion with Irish whiskey and bathos. But that's not good enough, Dad. It doesn't do
me
any damn good. What about all those bear hugs from Sean and Danny, what about all those bonfires your stupid need for enemies and Irish melodrama deprived me of? She smiled.
That's
who Dr. O'Hanrahan reminded her of, in a strange way: Uncle Liam. It took awhile to place him, but they had the same bulbous nose and silver hair. And no wonder it all had come flooding back to her, since in the firelight the resemblance was even closer.