Elders (26 page)

“Elder,” Passos said. “It’s not
about
you. And the fact is …” He paused. “Listen, I’m sorry. I should have said something. I
tried to—I tried—but I should have tried harder. Okay? I’m sorry, Elder.”

McLeod’s face was still hard and withholding.

“But the fact is,” Passos continued, “that Maurilho is not a missionary—you are. You represent the Lord and His church, and you’re going to have to apologize to Maurilho for what you said to him.”

Elder McLeod shook his head at this, wagging it, snorting. He let the head hang down, let it swing side to side as if he no longer controlled it, a mere pendulum. After a moment he lifted his face and showed the same amused smile he had shown to Maurilho. “All you lecturers. All you foreign-relations experts. One on every corner, right? Right next to the glue sniffers. Right next to the drive-through customers. Or no, no—they’re experts themselves! I just wish I knew as much about your country as you all know about mine. Even the janitors, huh?
Especially
the janitors. Even the filthy shirtless little kids. And of course the drunks. We can’t forget about the drunks. And what about all the favela dwellers? The people living in places even the cops won’t go near? They must know too. The falling-down shack builders, the thieves, the drug traffickers. Even the dead dogs rotting in the streets must know. So many lecturers. I should feel grateful, I guess. I do feel grateful. And for you too, Elder. How did I get so lucky to get you for a companion? How can I ever thank you?”

Elder Passos felt a smile on his own face now, an irresistible impulse, it seemed. He had meant to rebuke, then show an increase in love, as the scripture counseled, but now, and instead, Elder Passos heard the unmistakable voice of his former companion.

“Did you know Elder Jones?” Passos said.

“I knew of him,” McLeod said. “Sure.”

“May I tell you a story about Elder Jones?”

“Sure.”

“He was my first American companion, as I think I’ve told you. Very obedient. Very curious. For example, one day he asked me if Brazil had a Fourth of July. Just like that. ‘Do you guys have a Fourth of July here?’ ‘A Fourth of July?’ ‘Yeah. Do you?’ I said I wasn’t sure I knew what he meant. He said, ‘You know, a Fourth of July!’ So I told him, yes, we did have a fourth day in our month of July. Was that what he meant? He said, ‘You know what I mean! A Fourth of July!’ But he couldn’t explain it. He just kept saying, ‘Fourth of July! Fourth of July!’ I think he might have been the most ignorant person I’ve ever known. And you remind me of him, Elder McLeod. You really do.”

“Oh,” McLeod said, more a sound than a word. He lifted his hands up in the air like a faith healer, and said in English, in a singsong, “Are you ready, then? My last words to you, Elder.” He hesitated, mouth ajar. “Fuck you. Fuck. You. All right?”

Elder McLeod turned around and continued undressing. A minute later Passos moved to his own dresser. He undid his tie, his shirt; he removed his socks. He changed out of his dress pants into a pair of mesh shorts.

“All right,” Passos whispered.

That night McLeod
went into the bathroom and masturbated out of anger—anger more than lust. Succor me, Lord, for I am compassed about by assholes. But the Lord didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t. After twenty-one months he had gone away for good, dissolving through McLeod’s grasping fingers like sand, or the
hope
of sand, and leaving him Passos instead. And Maurilho. And Leandro. The big-bellied men in the dark houses. The idiots shouting from their cars. And now Josefina too, and the hardness of her silence, the finality. What more did he need?

He conjured the images from the newsstands, the call cards, the racy billboards, the spectral train of bodies. He accessed the silo of stored stolen glances—women in the streets, women on buses, women who bared their breasts for infants, and secretly, he imagined, for him—and now, on the topmost layer, the image of women in the nearby drive-through.
Those noises
, Rômulo had said.

Afterward he tore down the Jesus pictures from the mirror. He crumbled them into balls and flushed them down the toilet one by one.

The next morning Elder McLeod canceled his alarm and slept in. He missed breakfast, personal study, companionship study. At a little past nine o’clock he finally got up. He showered, dressed in the bedroom. Then he went into the entryway/living room and sat in his blue chair, taking his shoes out from under it and lacing them in silence. Elder Passos sat at his desk in full dress. From the
slope of his shoulders he appeared to be reading. A minute later he stood up from the desk, letting the soft leather cover of his scriptures slap shut. He came over and knelt with his arms on the chair beside McLeod, waiting, his head bowed. McLeod went to the door and opened it. Passos looked up at him, a long blankness on his face, then he stood up too and led them out into the street.

For the rest of the day the elders looked everywhere but at each other. They spoke to door contacts, street contacts, bus drivers, but never to each other. That was Friday. On Saturday McLeod started dropping from his door introductions even the mention of his companion’s name. No longer “Hi, I’m Elder McLeod, and this is my companion Elder Passos, and we’re representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” but rather “Hi, I’m Elder McLeod, and we’re representatives …” and so on. Elder Passos took to using the same technique on his turns. They became invisible to each other, closed off by degrees, each on either side of a chasm that widened, deepened by the day. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday.

On Wednesday, McLeod and Passos boarded a crosstown bus bound for Sweeney’s apartment—McLeod in street clothes, Passos in uniform. McLeod and his friends had agreed to meet up for a P-Day powwow, something they hadn’t done in two months, more. It would be a chance to relax, to let down their guards, and a chance for McLeod to escape nearly a week’s worth of silence. He felt weak and dull, trapped in his own head. When he’d called Sweeney last night en route to home, he’d simply said, loud enough for Passos to hear, “I need to hang out tomorrow, Sweeney. Tell Kimball.”

And Passos had gone along with it. He didn’t have to. He could
have refused. He could have planted himself in the apartment this morning, effectively stranding McLeod at home, since for a missionary to cross an entire city alone, leaving his area in the process, he needed a store of insubordination and bravery that Elder McLeod couldn’t quite muster, even now. To sleep in was one thing; to skip personal and companionship study, companionship prayer, was one thing. Even to stalk away companionless, in anger, was one thing. But to be truly alone was another. Twenty-one months of conjoined living and moving had instilled in McLeod, as it did sooner or later in all missionaries, a distinct separation anxiety from his missionary companion, no matter who or how awful he happened to be. Elder Passos must have known this, but he hadn’t exploited it, hadn’t dared McLeod to overcome it and commit an actionable offense. He had followed him out to the bus stop instead, taken a seat across the aisle from him, taken out his scriptures to read.

Which meant that Passos too must have been eager for a reprieve, desperate even, for a break from the silence. He too must have pined to talk to someone, even if that someone happened to be Sweeney’s junior companion or Kimball’s. Jokesters, Passos called them. Unserious, unimpressive, immature. But at least they came from a non-evil country, right? Passos could commiserate with Nunes and Batista about the boorish Americans and their imperialist, blood-spattered ways. He could reprise all the slanders from Maurilho’s diatribe that Passos had endorsed with his willful silence. More than once since that night at Maurilho’s McLeod had started letters to his mother—“I was wrong about Passos,” he wrote in one draft, “and I don’t think you should help him”—but each time he gave up.
I don’t think you should help him
. It sounded
so blunt, so sudden, so unlike the voice of charity and calm that he had cultivated for his family in his previous letters. How could he act out of spite for Passos without betraying the fact of his spite? He decided to let things be.

McLeod could see the finish line anyway. He was in the homestretch. Just yesterday he’d received a letter from the mission office asking him to “please indicate which release date you prefer—May 14, or a transfer later on June 25.” Which did he
prefer
? McLeod had laughed out loud, a joyful, giddy laugh. Less than two months to go, then. A transfer and a half. Which meant less than two
weeks
to go with Passos, since McLeod would demand a new companion in the upcoming transfers. He’d make the appeal directly to the president in the personal interview after next week’s zone conference.

Elder McLeod snuck a furtive glance across the bus aisle—his ogling glance, returned to its old form—and in an instant his bilious revulsion to Passos surged up again. Look at him. The sad, frescoed face, more yellow than brown. The eyebrows diving in concentration, an open book of scripture on his lap, the rigid posture. Everything about him suggested self-seriousness, soberness,
righteousness
, so-called. Is this what everyone wanted McLeod to become? Is this the life his father envisioned for him?

One night in the spring of his senior year, a few months before his nineteenth birthday, McLeod walked into the living room and saw his father rapt in the blue-white light of an old home movie. “Your mother found a place that converts these to DVD,” he said, and motioned for his son to take a seat beside him on the couch. On the screen, two white-shirted teenagers, one of them a younger
version of his father—the same lank parted hair, the same hair
style
even, unchanged across thirty-five years—stood in an open field below the Eiffel Tower. Then, as if at a director’s prompt, the young men started running around in circles, crossing and recrossing each other’s paths. They moved in jerky, stop-time strides, and the film was grainy, swarming with dust motes, but McLeod could still make out his father’s face, and his big, carefree smile.

“That was a Preparation Day, you understand,” McLeod’s father said. “We weren’t usually like that.” He laughed through his nose. “But look at us. We must have thought we were making a Beatles movie. One of our friends from the ward had a camcorder—they were very expensive in those days—and he gave us this as a present. That’s Elder Nielsen there beside me, doing the handstand now—oh my. Well …” He clicked off the TV and turned on a lamp beside the couch. “I’ll finish watching that some other time. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about the mission. It’s hard work, you know. It’s not all sightseeing and games. It’s hardly ever like that.”

“I know,” McLeod said. “I know that.”

“Where are you in your reading now?”

“First Corinthians thirteen.”

“Well, tell me about it.”

“ ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ ”

“You memorized that?” his father said.

McLeod felt sudden tears rimming his eyes. “I’m going to try it, Dad. The experiment. I’m going to go on a mission.”

His father put his arm around his shoulder and pulled him into a sideways embrace. “I knew you would, Seth. I knew you would.”

The bus let the elders off into a new-sprung rain, the sky above them quickly closing, darkening, the undersides of the clouds stained the color of eggplant. McLeod and Passos walked at pace. Sweeney’s building—a narrow three-story walk-up that put McLeod in mind of a vertical desk organizer, one apartment on top of the other on top of the other—loomed up ahead as the rain thickened. They took the last several hundred yards at a run, took the stairs that wrapped around the building two at a time. Sweeney’s companion, Elder Nunes, answered the door in proselytizing clothes. He had his poncho on already, a large umbrella at his side. He glanced up and down the dripping pair of them and laughed. He handed an umbrella to Passos, stepped out into the awninged hallway to join him. Passos tilted his head at Nunes, then up at the emptying sky. “Trust me,” Nunes said. Then to McLeod: “Well?” He swept his arm toward the open front door.