Vandal Love (27 page)

That same week, Harvey became a born-again. Each evening after school, he climbed into an extra-long white van and rode to prayer meetings, to potlucks and political rallies. He edged into the groups, but when he joined the conversations about sports, prospective colleges or the influence of Satan in the Middle East, the others grew quiet and stared at his glossy face, flinched at his piping voice. He was the closest thing to a minority the congregation had had, this boy with a strangely doubled name and dimensions of Eastern deprivation. These youths were handsome, outfitted and sensibly styled. That first week he’d hauled his substantial collection of occult to the used bookstore and liberated the pagan elements of his altar back to nature. He’d taken to reading the Bible, but he couldn’t decide what to make of a book loaded with so much sex and mud and violence. He was still drifting, still without an anchor. The tears that stung his eyes as he prayed were not of fervour. Confused longings merged: a confidante, a girl, love or a glimpse of God. The church smelled of varnish and glue. The pastor tied biblical allusions to jokes about superhero underwear. The singers had acoustic guitars and synthesizers and sang carols in perpetuity.

When the van dropped him off, he walked into the backyard. He and Peggy had recently moved again, this
time to a subdivision of identical houses newly built over a defunct farm so that lawn mowers occasionally sucked up rusted strands of barbed wire, and a gigantic cattle syringe with its needle still intact was peeled from the sod by a three-year-old girl. Not far beyond Harvey’s back porch manicured green gave onto the shag of unmown pasture, and farther still the skeleton of a barn stood like Gomorrah upon a rise. There was no fence, no ditch or row of ribboned stakes to set off the field, just tufted, uneven earth. He dropped his study Bible as he walked, then lay down in a coffin of tall, cow-smelling grass, the sky above framed raggedly to his shape. With the wind, a loose board on the barn clapped at a post, bringing on the rattling of chains, dogs howling up and down the street. Crickets sawed all around him, so close he felt they would devour him in his sleep like piranhas. The cold pressed into his back and filled his lungs.

Shortly after missing graduation ceremonies because of pneumonia, Harvey departed for his yearly visit to his father. He took the redeye. François was waiting at the airport, looking too healthy, dressed for the times, a leather jacket with a synthetic wool collar.

The sky was barely blue, and tired, they talked quietly over breakfast. Harvey had recently considered Québec, that as a Catholic he might be like one of those consoling New York–Italian priests in the movies. It occurred to him that perhaps he had a family somewhere, a place where he would feel at home, where there were others
like himself. He asked about his name, about whether François missed speaking French.

François paused and looked at Harvey as if he’d just noticed he was there. Well, he said and took a deep breath. The sudden enthusiasm in his gaze was frightening.

He started in on stories that Harvey had heard snippets of before and never cared for, though this time he forced himself to listen. François described the Hervé men who were the strongest of any around, who worked and fought and infested the countryside with proud illegitimates. He described the endurance of their lineage that had been among the first to colonize North America, and how his grandmother, in her search for him, had wandered the continent seven years, driven by love and faith. He repeated the stories she’d told him time and time again, of family and history and her visions, embellishing them himself, giving the Hervés a knack for business and a penchant for the sciences.

I seem to remember her saying that one of our ancestors invented a certain kind of sail, François said, scratching his head. Anyway, they were seafarers.

Where are they now? Harvey asked, perched on the edge of his seat, thinking that perhaps there was someplace he could visit after all, a few cousins who, being tiny, hadn’t been mentioned.

All gone, I suppose, François replied, then seemed to catch himself. But, you know, I’ve lived my life that way, too. He went on to describe road trips, adventures crosscountry that he never quite completed so that in the space where he might have told something more, might have
finished, a wistful look came into his eye, a sadness that Harvey wanted to understand, to find comfort in.

François appeared unable to draw loose ends together. He backtracked, talking about how the Hervé men loved women and were restless and passionate. In a hushed voice, he told Harvey he’d lived with a prostitute. He conjured visions of buxom flesh, of a woman whose body moved with cold, indifferent perfection. Suddenly, Harvey realized that this family would hate him, that they would be ashamed of a sixty-one-inch descendant who would surely faint in the presence of a prostitute or out on the open sea for that matter.

François noticed his reticence. What’s up?

Oh, I was just thinking about how meaningless all that stuff is. Harvey tried to call to mind what mattered. He described his own interests, the importance of good posture and recent discoveries in nutritional healing. He hesitated, suddenly ashamed to hear himself.

François probed his cheek with his tongue and looked away.

A few weeks later, when it was time for Harvey’s departure, he’d seen his father’s disappointment too often. François sighed as they were saying goodbye. On the plane, after takeoff, Harvey took down the tray on the seatback. He put his head on his crossed arms. He’d read that in some ancient traditions each searcher believed he was completing the journey his ancestors had begun, carrying on a desire that had been cut short by death. But who, dead in the longing for light, for peace and a modest bliss, could he dream back to?

As the plane bumped through the uneven sky, he wept. The hostess passed, then backed up and hovered over him. Sweetie, she said, are you flying without your parents?

She held out a heart-shaped lollipop.

College proved a poor substitute for the initiation of a prophet. That fall he attended classes nearby and lived at home. His mother didn’t ask him to work but gave him a credit card, which she paid. She bought him a secondhand Toyota that he drove sitting on a cushion. He was humiliated by her willingness to provide, her assumption that he couldn’t do it himself. She was now having an email relationship with an Englishman she’d met on the vegidate website. Occasionally, when she’d chattered too long about her mystic friends and the beauty of the New Age, Harvey skulked away and hid himself, afraid to admit that she might be foolish, that so much of him was her. And what did he know? Perhaps the world was simply more than he could handle. His grades were poor. The only assignment he’d found the least bit interesting was to research his name, and though a genealogy had been hopeless, he’d read about the Welsh and Breton saint Harvey, or Hervé, a blind man loved by animals and led by a wolf and whose presence made frogs sing. But this, too, finished in a big So what? He wasn’t blind and didn’t care much for frogs, which lived in mud, or for animals, especially dogs. Interesting, his professor had written with his red pen:
C+.

Once, after class, Harvey asked his slouching history teacher about Québec. The man was a collector of J.F.K. memorabilia. He had every documentary on the subject, the exact model camera that had filmed the assassination, and the same kind of rifle Oswald had used, which he occasionally brought to class, though he’d been obliged to remove the firing pin to do so.

Québec, he said and nodded, hands in his pockets to accentuate his slouch. Basically, they all speak English but just pretend not to in order to be mean to tourists. You’d be better off going to France if you want to learn the language the way it really is.

Late that December afternoon, when Harvey got home, a letter from the college was in the mailbox. It explained that he was to be put on academic probation. He read it twice, then walked into the withered field and stared at the exposed frame of the barn. Single flakes fell from the dimming sky, too solitary to be flurries, too conscious to be snow. The cold made his eyes stream. Harvey Hervé was no more than a random name, Vancouver or Virginia random places. If he stayed, he would never match up to the lives of holy men. No one would accept if he changed, not even his mother. He didn’t want to be part of this world.

He went to his room and threw everything on his bedsheet then folded in the corners and hauled it to his car. His mind quieter than any meditation, he drove through the night. This was his first choice. Somewhere on the road he recalled his father’s stories. He felt bright, courageous, that François might finally be
proud. He sat primly at the wheel, the rearview mirror casting into his eyes the dawn as it rushed up over the plains behind him.

Bravery was a new thing. The indifferent earth seemed ancient, primitive, far from man’s disfigurements, bypasses and industrial parks. Tears welled up at the emptiness before him.

In a spell of uncertain sleet he stopped at a budget motel. Sprawling parking lots rumbled with the bogged idle of semis, and distantly a Budweiser sign glowed in a bar window. He imagined creased dollar bills in the bathroom, truckers undoing flat buckles, waitresses with brown teeth, eyelashes like fishhooks. Perhaps the man at the desk had told them he was here. He got up often to pull back his curtain, to peer out at the terrifying asphalt.

At the Wal-Mart in Amarillo he stocked up on provisions. Women with cumbersome hips moved with the staggered lower-body motion of TV dinosaurs. He called his mother. When her hysterics had passed, her only comment, which she repeated was, You don’t need to go so far away to be holy. Afterwards he found a list of ashrams in one of his books. Many were in New Mexico. He continued towards the sunset, atomic over desolate plains.

The interstate rose into rugged desert basins. Silence hummed within him as if he were enlightened already, though he knew it to be fear, the poised listening of an animal. He gained altitude, the engine of his
car sounding weedy, like a lawn mower. The big blue sky emptied of light. He slept at a rest stop. He thought of names he’d heard that he might someday put to the thing itself: saguaro and sagebrush, paloverde, piñon. Clouds blew past, a few swollen raindrops on the car roof.

In the morning he called the ashram. It was just two hours away but had no vacancies. The woman gave him a number for a man who rented rooms in the nearby trailer park. Harvey dialled, talked a bit, thought the price okay. After the Oklahoma sleet, the Texan wind, he was pleased to end his journey in the high, cold sunlight of New Mexico.

The sign at the entrance read Dry Branch Trailer Park. Originally a commingling of religious misfits, he soon learned, it was built up near a sandy arroyo in the middle of a Martian landscape of dune-like hills and scarps. It had been there since the 1970s, and more than forty families as well as countless singles now swelled its ranks. Windows indicated plurality with Buddhas and dream catchers, blue Shivas, beaded gurus and prayer flags. Organic gardens gave lushness to a few patches between trailers though dust devils passed like spirits along the main road.

His landlord, Brendan Howard, taught religion at the community college. He was a skinny white man with steel-frame glasses, a cardigan often over his shoulders, as if this were not the blazing high desert but a yacht club. He always introduced himself with his full name so that it sounded like a title, the effect being rather cultish. He lived in what appeared to be the library of
Alexandria crammed into a trailer, no walls but shelves, books on tantrism and herbalism and voodoo. Nonetheless, he told Harvey that first day, it is the body that holds all truths.

There were more than twenty-five ashrams, temples, monasteries and retreats within an hour’s drive, and those first months Harvey meditated, fasted, did predawn yoga and saw the clear emanation of sunrise as he practised deep breathing on manicured temple greens. But soon it became apparent that little had changed. Spirituality was mostly health, no better than his mother’s nutritional animism. Devotees discussed how young famous yogis looked. No one paid him any mind. He wished he had the courage to walk out naked, or mostly naked, along the road, disappear into a river and return in song, sleep in the roots of trees.

A few Western Sikh families lived in the Dry Branch but remained involved with an ashram where, for thirty years, white Americans had attempted to live as in the Punjab of Guru Gobind Singh. They invited Harvey to a lecture at which the lugubrious old Sikh master talked of purity to a hundred students in white robes and turbans. Every step taken away from the soul must be taken back, he told them. They did a chant, almost an hour as they held their hands in the air, sweat pouring from their armpits, shaking, crying.

Don’t be so impressed, Brendan Howard said after Harvey had described the power of his experience and
the security of the community. Brendan Howard’s tone was not unlike that of a high-school counsellor going over colleges. He called the ashram a cultish offshoot of Sikhism. And regardless, he continued, religion is linked with anachronistic practices. In fact the Sikh turban has primitive origins and was merely intended to make the holy man resemble the inseminating organ in his approach to the womblike temple.