The Enchanted (16 page)

If I could talk, I could ask others, “What year is it? What day? What number?” But what would be the point of that? What would that number tell me?

Anyway, time is more than counting days. On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning.
I better get up for work
or
It's time to feed the baby.
Or
That was the year I got cancer
or
That is the day we celebrate your birthday.
Or
Remember when our father died
or
Let's remember to plant turnips this spring.
It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and
it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe.

What about for men like me? For us, time doesn't exist. The measurements of life—birth, death, loss, marriage, love, lust, happiness—have no meaning in this dungeon. Time passes here, but it doesn't count. I could have a clock, but what would the dial tell me? Nothing.

When time no longer exists, you don't care about getting up, you don't think about birthdays, you don't think back to people you lost. You float free in the universe, untethered to anyone or anything. Your heart is empty, and because your heart is empty, you have no time. You have no place in the universe.

At least I used to think this way. Only listening to the lady and the priest has made me feel a little different.

I think more about time now. Not for me but for the lady.

Time is running out for the lady, and she doesn't even know it. I hear the pain in her walk, and I feel it float in tendrils through my bars. The lady is searching for time. She is searching for a way to tether herself to someone. Deep in her secret heart, in the pure place she protects, she is afraid she will always be alone—that she will go through life without being known. And she will not survive that.

The lady is afraid she will wake up one morning and learn the answer she asked herself about York: When do you know you want to die?

I wish I could talk to her. I would tell her, “Lady, it is
not a slow awakening. And it is not a sudden revelation. No, it is when you wake up and realize you no longer have time.”

For the first time in my life, I want to help someone. I want the lady to find what I cannot know—the gift of time.

T
he lady and the priest are sitting on a picnic bench by the old rectory building right outside the prison. The old rectory house is faded white. The windows are shuttered with plywood. At one time the prison priest lived here. Now the prison uses it for storage, since the priest has a small apartment in the nearby town, a place with a little kitchen and a backyard and a battered gas stove.

The priest has imagined many times what it would be like to invite the lady over for dinner. He likes to cook. It is one of his few pleasures. He has not gotten up the courage to ask her. He thinks ruefully that he doesn't know how to ask a lady out—he has never done it.

The lady has brought her lunch, and he has joined her. The lady eats a container of cold pasta salad from a nearby deli. She sees the food he has brought—homemade vegetable soup in a thermos, rich and fragrant with chunks of zucchini, the broth floating with herbs—and she is embarrassed by her sanitized lunch.

They are silent for a time, and the lady pushes around her cold salad. She puts down the plastic fork and opens a package of crackers. “Why did you leave the priesthood?” she asks.

He takes a deep breath of relief. He has been waiting for this question.

“I was resentful in my heart,” he says immediately.

Her face invites the story.

“After eight years of education and four years in discernment, I had no idea what I really wanted or how I had gotten there.” He tells her he felt a failure already, a promising boy from a respected church family. But there was something in him that was off-putting, a lack of confidence that his superiors warned him about more than once. “It's not that you lack humility,” an instructor at the seminary had told him. “It's that you lack insight.”

“When I was ordained, I got the rewards of their lack of confidence,” he says. He was assigned to a dying Catholic church on the outskirts of the city. There would be no exciting work overseas for him, no dynamic action. His church had only a handful of parishioners left, almost all over the age of sixty.

“I pretended to myself that I wanted to make our little church into a force. Now I know I was only cherishing the resentment in my heart.”

The lady listens. A damp breeze off the river has picked up, the summer day unnaturally cool. The priest sees her shiver a bit in her cardigan. He pours the fragrant vegetable soup from the thermos into the cup and pushes it to her. “The church ladies suggested bingo nights and Christmas raffles and spaghetti suppers and missions to the city soup kitchen to feed the poor on Thanksgiving.
I went along with all of it, but to tell the truth, I didn't know why I was really there.”

“Who does?” The lady gently smiles, drinking the soup.

“If the devil waits for an open door, I had the whole house open, and it was catching a breeze,” he says, his eyes faraway as he opens a bag containing two homemade rolls. He butters one for her. “But it was not the devil that made me do it.”

H
e tells her it started when a fellow priest from a much larger, popular church reached out to him, inviting his congregation to join their effort to combat child sex trafficking. He would never forget the innocent and appalling words of one trembling church parishioner on their first night of doing outreach. “But where are the red lights?” the woman had asked.

The kids on the corners didn't look victimized. They looked hard. And they were as repelled by his church ladies as they were by any zealot with a fistful of guilt and silver coins of regret. A child prostitute in his church, he had to admit, would live a life of cloying stigma. He saw the choices they were being offered through their eyes—momentary charity with a bounty of shame or prideful indifference.

That first night, the group walked the cold winter streets, handing out brochures for local programs. The next night, half as many of his devoted followers showed
up, and the night after that, he was the only one to go. He understood the cold was too much, the streets too hard. It was easier to plan the winter raffle and the Thanksgiving soup kitchen trip.

That night he ended up walking those night streets alone, a warm jacket over his collar and clerical shirt.

Why did he go into the club? He didn't know. He told himself he wanted to help. But he was confused. His entire life had been spent following his anointed path, like Hansel and Gretel following their trail of crumbs, and instead of finding happy ever after, he found a house built of candy and a hot oven of confusion.

The club was neat and clean. There was a faint smell of bleach. Some of the tables had solitary men sitting at them. A small stage was frocked with silver tinsel. A girl was on it. It took him a moment to realize she was naked. In this setting, her nakedness looked almost ordinary. He had always been chaste, but he was not innocent. The entire scene was devoid of sensuality. He felt as safe as in a library.

A server put down a napkin. Five dollars for a soda drink? Apparently, yes.

He sat for a while, feeling strangely relaxed. He had no idea what he was doing, but he was here. He sipped his soda.

Songs played. Girls rotated slowly throughout the room. One came over to his table. She was young and fresh-looking, with round cheeks and puppy fat on the sides of her waist.

“Want a table dance?” she asked.

He shook his head, not knowing what that was.

“Buy me a drink?”

“Sure.”

She sat down, and immediately, the server was there. The girl ordered a large Diet Coke, and the priest was out ten dollars and could see the deal.

“How old are you?” he asked, looking at her bright skin.

“Sixteen.” She shrugged, sipping the soda. Seeing the alarm in his face, she quickly added, “But I have a license that says I'm of age. You aren't a cop, are you?” She looked with innocence at his Roman collar.

“I'm a priest,” he told her, and felt thankful when she didn't make the obligatory child molester joke.

She drank her soda and told him her story. How she had been living on the streets since she was fourteen, and how lucky she was to work in this club because it was a safe, good place and she made money and had her own apartment. She had plans—she was getting her GED. “I'm going to go to community college,” she boasted. How her most favorite book of all was
Watership Down.
Her story had the artlessness of truth, and in the end, it all turned out to be true. She was exactly who she said she was.

“I'm wasting time,” she said with a laugh after they had been chatting for a little while.

“How so?” he asked.

“Sitting here and not dancing,” she said, and he looked around and saw what she meant. “Do you want a table dance?” she asked hopefully. “Ten dollars for one song.”

“No, thanks.” He smiled. He got up to go.

“I'm hungry,” she said, and before he knew it, he was going to get some food from the jazz club across the street. Her pasta dish cost more than he'd paid for food over a day, but he bought it. He returned with the Styrofoam container and watched her eat. She didn't offer to pay him back.

T
hey became friends. There was no better way to put it. He was sure in his heart that he was not going back in order to do her harm.

The night came when he was in the club as her shift was ending. He offered her a ride. For the first time, he saw the fear and vulnerability in her eyes. With a start, he realized that she had been one of those hard kids on the corner. He could see her tabulate the odds of accepting his ride, not just physically but emotionally.

“Okay,” she said in an unsure voice.

She rode silently in his car for a while, her hand on the handle. Finally, like the teenager she was, she could no longer maintain silence and broke into conversation, telling him all sorts of stuff about her little sister, a girl named Stephanie who lived in foster care. “She likes seafood,” she burbled. “I'm going to buy her a leather jacket for Christmas.”

Her apartment was a studio in a run-down building above the freeway. His heart vanished when he heard the cockroaches scatter as she turned on the light, and he saw
the downturned shame in her soft, round face. Why had he thought it would be better? She was a teenager fresh off the streets.

“It's clean,” he offered.

There was a bed made with one blanket and a flat pillow. A tiny kitchen had a saucepan in the strainer on a cracked linoleum counter. There was an opened box of Cheerios on the upper shelf and a stack of three tuna cans. “I like tuna,” she explained. There was an impossibly tiny refrigerator that he discovered later had exactly enough room for a pint of milk, a small jar of mayo, and one container of take-out Chinese. A single shelf held three mismatched coffee cups, two with broken handles. The main room had built-in shelves that stood for dressers and, incongruously, a bright pink plastic beanbag chair. “A friend gave me that,” she said of the beanbag chair.

She dropped on the floor the duffel bag that contained her dancing clothes and ridiculous plastic wedge high heels. He said good night, and he tried not to think why she looked sad when he left.

On the way down, he got stuck in the old rickety elevator with the folding accordion doors and had to be rescued by an old woman with black starling eyes who told him all about the pet clinic next door and how they performed experiments on the animals they stole.

T
he hot tea he drank after meals now tasted like mud. The shower in the morning after a long run felt like a
waste of water, the run a waste of time. His sermons—his one source of pride, because he had such a strong voice—now felt like artifice. One night he put down his Bible and looked out the window blinds of his rectory apartment and thought about the layers of life a man can live without even knowing his shadow lives on the floors below.

He hungered to see her. It was not a sexual hunger or a romantic hunger. He just wanted to see her.

He knew she was using him in the way that she used everyone. He knew it wasn't personal; that was how she had learned to get by. She delighted in getting him to pay for things, yelling, “Score!” when he did, and he would turn to look at her, so happy to have a thrift store book or a cheap pair of tights, and feel a welter of emotions inside.

Little by little she told him her past, but when she saw it diminished her in his eyes, she stopped. Instead, she became the brassy jokester, the laughing one. He liked her best when he took her places he thought she had never been, like the Japanese gardens or the zoo. Only later would she fess up that other men, at other times, had taken her to those places. For a girl of sixteen, she had a surprising breadth of experience, from living in a commune with her parents as a child to hitchhiking down the coast by herself. He thought of what he was doing as a child—hiding in his bedroom, reading the Bible, and fantasizing about being the pope—and felt embarrassed.

She hated her parents. “Fucking hippies,” she said with scorn. “Communes of destruction.” She kept a comic pinned to her wall that showed an angry hippie threatening
to bust out of his commune because of the crabs, and she laughed every time she looked at it. He had to ask her what it meant by crabs and was repelled at her artless description.

He tried to reason with her about her work, if you could call it work. “I'm the one in power,” she argued almost belligerently. “They're the ones who sit there and give me the money.”

She talked about her future as if people could reinvent themselves like snakes shedding their skins. “It may not be so easy,” he said, but she just looked at him like he was the one who didn't know anything.