Magnificent Vibration (7 page)

“I think we should go somewhere a little less crowded and noisy where we can talk, do you agree?” I suggest, trying not to sound like a mass-murdering wingnut cannibal.

“Okay. I’m open to that,” answers Alice, grabbing her purse off the bar and standing. She is long-limbed and slender but with curves and a pleasant fullness. She is actually wearing a dress that displays her attributes. I am even more perplexed, intrigued and yes, seriously turned on, Bobdamnit!!!

We leave the bar/club/pickup joint where I didn’t get the pizza I so seriously craved and head off into the well-lit metropolis.

Out in the relative sanity of the city streets I see she is wearing fairly sensible flat shoes. If she’d been strapped up in high heels I would have had to rethink the whole “nun” thing. She carries herself with a calm confidence and appears completely unaware of her beauty. So that’s a point in favor of her whole story—and then I realize: Who
am I to doubt
her
?
I
told
her
I’ve been chatting with the Almighty . . . the Almighty Whack Job, I’m beginning to suspect.

“That’s quite a pick-up joint, that bar. You must have been hit on fairly regularly tonight,” I begin, still trying to drag my reeling imagination out of the cesspool of lust and longing in which it seems happiest to abase itself: it’s always been a difficult task.

“The ‘nun’ word usually quashes any interest,” she smiles. “Although it seemed to have had the opposite effect on you.”

I color with the rush of blood to my cheeks.

“Not really,” I lie. “I felt like I had to talk to someone, and you seemed open to the insane possibility that God had my cell number.” This part is very true, I realize as I say it. “I don’t even know where to begin,” I offer. “Me having a most bizarre conversation with Jehovah, or you, Sister-Inmate-Escaping-Over-the-Barbed-Wire-Encrusted-Convent-Wall as the Mother Superior releases the hounds and busts open the shotgun rack.”

She smiles at this but says nothing.

A couple of young guys walk by and toss out a few lewd comments from the safety of the group at this holy, burning-hot bride of Christ, and I think we are all going to hell, we men. Alice hears them but says nothing.

“Well, let’s start with me, since there’s probably a little less to my story than there is to yours,” she says.

“Not necessarily,” I suggest. “Now that I’m away from it I’m starting to think I could have just imagined the whole thing.”

“Okay then, let’s start with you.” She seems fairly affable without any real hint of a hidden agenda, and I’m now pretty much buying into the whole escaping-nun thing. As odd as it seems. But I am hardly the one to talk about odd.

We pass one of the three thousand coffee bars that crowd each side of the street and I guide her inside, where the warmth and the smell of ground coffee seem to say, “Come on in and have a cozy chat. All your crazy shit will seem much more plausible after a large, skinny, triple-shot, cinnamon dolce latte, served extra hot with whip.”

We order something simpler and sit in a corner, as far away from the students with their glowing banks of laptops as possible.

“There were no dogs released or guns drawn when I left the church. In fact it was my Mother Superior who suggested it,” she begins. “She’s a remarkable woman and did something that she could be easily chastised for, letting a neophyte free on her own recognizance for two weeks so she can find herself. It’s not something that’s encouraged within the order. They’d rather have the ones who are struggling or having a crisis of faith hunker down with books and religious instruction from counselors and other sisters. Grace, my Mother Superior, said she didn’t think that I was cut out for the life of a nun and that I might be better suited to doing God’s work living in the outside world. So she suggested I take a short sabbatical and, with God’s help, try to locate my rudder and find my course.”

“That’s like a scene from
The Sound of Music.
” I think I’m trying to be funny but I regret it as soon as I’ve spoken. A fairly regular occurrence in my world.

She smiles anyway and agrees, “Yeah, it does a bit. ‘Locate my rudder?’ I don’t even know where the
boat
is.”

“I’m sure the boat is out there somewhere. You just have to find it,” I reply, having no idea at all what I mean by this! After the obligatory uncomfortable silence, I continue.

“So what were you doing in a bar at one in the morning?”

“Seeing if the high life was something that still had a hold on me,” is her answer.

I’m trying to grasp where this is going. “Isn’t that like saying ‘I used to have a heroin addiction so I’m going to do a little heroin now to see if I’m still hooked?’ ”

“Maybe,” she answers, “but I was thinking I had a grander view of it than that. Maybe not.”

“You said ‘still’ had a hold on you. What does that mean?” I am possibly probing beyond my capacity to actually help here and maybe doing it for more prurient reasons. I hope not. Stand down, Woody, damn you!!!

“I was very young and got caught up in something I wasn’t ready for. A group of guys who were supposed to be friends took me away from a pretty messed-up home life. My father was an angry man. He beat my mother—and me occasionally—any time he felt bad. These boys gave me somewhere to feel like I had a place, y’know, where I could belong. They introduced me to alcohol and drugs and the party life. And then one night they gang-raped me. I was sixteen.”

Silence from me. Mr. Clueless has no idea what to say. Prurient interest is out the fucking window. The longer the silence, the more embarrassed I am at not having said something after my probing. All the possibilities sound lame—“That’s terrible”? “I’m sorry”? “Wow”? “Must have been awful”? Sometimes it’s better just to shut up. In a very short space of time I have learned a stranger’s dark secret because she has entrusted it to me.

I stumble. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

“It’s okay,” she says, and I feel she is being truthful. “I think it’s part of my path to see where I fit into this world I’ve been cloistered away
from since I was twenty-two. And of all the pick-up lines I heard tonight, you asking me if I was possibly ‘God’ got my attention, considering where I had come from and what I am looking for,” she finishes.

Oooooowwweeeeee!!!!! Although I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work on most women, I actually came up with a winning opening line and this burnin’ babe wanted to talk to me over all those other handsome dickheads in that place! In your face! YEAH! . . . Wait, what am I saying? Damnit, Woody, shut the fuck up!!!

My mind pole-vaults out of the gutter.

“I’m sure there’s a whole lot more to your story,” I say to her honestly, though I am still uncomfortably aroused, given the proximity. But Alice is apparently done spending time on it for now. Or she senses that my libido has taken a sudden turn to the left.

She sips her coffee.

I look around the atmospheric room. There are a few other couples (if I may be so bold as to call us a “couple”) as well as the previously mentioned overcaffeinated students prepping for exams, sucking down Adderall and studying last-minute CliffsNotes on their computers. I focus on a guy in the corner. Big. Slightly menacing. Kind of out of place. He glances up and we catch each other’s eye for a second. He breaks the connection and looks down into his coffee mug as Alice speaks.

“So, Bobby . . . tell me about your phone call.”

T
he massive weight of the great Loch pushes against the peeled and faded blue husk of the old wooden boat. His recent stroke has left Ronan Young with a heavy limp and
only one working arm, making life considerably more challenging. It is with this good arm that he now steers the
Bonnie Bradana.
They are heading out into deep water, he and his faithful girl, neither of them really sure of the destination nor the exact reason tonight. Something in Ronan has driven him to make this journey, no doubt inadvisable in his current physical condition and at this late hour, but he has lived by his own rules so far and sees no reason to abandon that path at this point in his life. The Loch is calling. He knows that at some point in their lives, every human being dreams of a great and meaningful end when the time comes. But most of us will spend our last hours in small, antiseptic, windowless rooms, hooked up to beeping machines, attended by a scrubbed impersonal staff, when a good death is all that is really and truly desired. The moon crests above the snow-dusted crags that have watched over the great Loch since she first filled and formed. They have borne witness to the creature that found its way into the then salted sea, before the world changed and shifted and closed. Ronan has learned that there are things on this earth and under the sky that we will never fully understand and he realizes that he now, at this late stage in life, accepts the unacceptable, trusts the impossible, and sees logic in the illogical. He has been schooled by the great creature. She who seems to be a spirit of this lake as much as she is real flesh and blood. The lapping of waves against the hull and the sleepy purring of his craft’s small motor are the only sounds Ronan hears as the surrounding mountains reflect their faint echoes back into the darkness. It is chilly out here on the lake but Ronan is at peace. His life has been both arduous and enviable. Small successes have been hard won and he has felt at times as though the weight of
the great Highlands were strapped across his shoulders. Then again, in the quiet company of his precious Evelyn or travelling the great Loch at the helm of the
Bonnie Bradana
he has believed he was as blessed as any man on this earth. Now everyone he loved is gone. And he is no longer the man he once was. Life has become painful and exhausting. His mind swims in and around old memories. Meaningful now in their precious distance and the irretrievable moments lost. He thinks of his childhood family. His mother and father who loved and were loved . . . and his brother.

His elder brother Devin had moved to Glasgow in his early twenties to make his fortune, or so he vowed, and seldom contacted the family nor made his whereabouts known. Devin always loathed this brutal and beautiful land. Was sure he was made for the comforts of the “civilized” world. He had been a brawling, brutal bully of an older brother who seemed to care little for his immediate family and even less for his friends and workmates. His anger would boil over often and cause mayhem for whoever was standing nearby. Ronan frequently took the brunt of Devin’s irrational rage and could never understand where all the fury came from. “I’m just fuckin’ angry is all,” spat out in a hoarse brogue, was the only explanation given to Ronan for the beatings. Devin longed for what he referred to as “the comforts of progress and culture” and swore an oath that he would never come back to the Highlands once he’d made his way and even if he were on his deathbed would not cry out for home or family. And he never did. Such is the power of a vow uttered in passion. Ronan and his kin heard little from Devin after he left. A short, curt letter stating matter-of-factly that he was heading to America to pursue his dream of a better life, believing, he said,
that Scotland was no place for a man of ambition and vision like himself. Ronan’s not-overly-maudlin mind still hovers on the outskirts of a memory of his older sibling. At this late stage in his life he wonders about a life missed with a brother he should have known and loved but really barely knew. Visions of the two of them as small children playing at the lakeside a half-century ago that are now reduced to nothing more than a scratchy black-and-white movie stored in his memory. Age-old visions of life as it was meant to be before his brother’s ego, desires, and lunatic imaginings took hold of his soul and drove him away. So much gone so fast. All of it in an eyeblink. Ronan listens to the gentle thrum of the engine and the restful lapping of the waves against
Bonnie
’s hull. Light is leaving the slate sky. The birds disappear from the air. There is a presence on this great inland sea.

Soon the motor’s repetitious thrumming and the rhythmic splashing of the swell are joined by a third sound. In the dark distance a giant breaks the surface of the Loch and a rush of warm, moist air is expelled from massive, primordial lungs. Ronan hears the wash of a wake as a large body begins to move through the ancient expanse of water.

Unsure exactly why he is doing this, he turns the small craft in the direction of this new sound. And it turns to him.

W
e are in the empty hospital waiting room. My mother is perched long-sufferingly upon one of the chairs, my father is slumped into another on the opposite side. I understand there’s been an argument, but I think to myself, “This is about Josie now, isn’t it?” And I’m
wondering why we aren’t all in a tight, affirming circle in the center of the room, offering spiritual and emotional support to my sister. Despite all our feckless crap, we are family first and foremost, are we not? My mother dabs softly at her eyes with a white handkerchief that has colorful flowers embroidered at the corners. It was a gift from her mother, the embroiderer, and to me it has always linked her to something earnest. Something deeply and simply human, despite what we have all morphed into as a fairly flawed family of late. I know that at some point in her young life she was an innocent, open girl who only wanted the best for herself and the ones she loved. When does the ruin set in?