Flagged Victor (19 page)

I was alone in the backyard.

I kicked a log in the fire and watched sparks rise. I wondered how such a day could have occurred, what strange humour God was in to conjure it into existence, whether life itself wasn’t a hallucination of sorts, a tortured dream.

I had a long walk home, and set out.

It was cold away from the fire. My jacket was too thin for such weather. My legs and teeth were numb. The streets were shadowy with tall trees and strangely unfamiliar. I needed to piss, and decided that the picket fence of the house in front of me was as good a place as any. A dog started barking. A car pulled up behind me and stopped, headlights trained on me as I gushed urine. I could not look back. Just my luck for the house
owner to arrive home as I relieved myself. But when I was done, and zipped, I heard a familiar voice.

I think I’ve owed you a rowboat ride for about a year now, right?

Leah. In a car.

It was a giant Chevy Impala sedan, rusty, misshapen with dents.

I pulled myself together and walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. It creaked like the cellar in a horror movie.

About time, I said, and felt swallowed by the front seat.

It amazed me that she would reference that afternoon at the lake, given what had occurred. It amazed me that she was the last to leave Rivers’s house. All us writers gone, and Leah left over.

Rivers okay? I asked.

She shrugged and looked pained. He’s not so hot these days.

I guess he’s got a lot to deal with.

Meaning the leg, I thought. Meaning writing, maybe.

Megan is so sweet, she said.

I said nothing.

So, Leah said, you live near Chris, right? I’ll head over there and you can direct me.

I was too drunk not to try something.

I don’t want to go home.

What do you mean?

I’m sick of my parents. I had a big fight with my dad yesterday.

I was blurring fights in my mind, remembering the encounter from the last time I’d visited Rivers’s house. I was making it up as I went along.

What did you fight about? Leah asked.

My future. Stuff.

Right, she said.

You ever have those fights with your mom? I asked.

She laughed. Nope.

I saw something there to leverage, a crack in a secret door.

Can I crash at your house?

What?

Seriously. I don’t think I can go home tonight.

Don’t be silly.

Well, just let me out near the harbour then. I’ll grab a coffee somewhere and wander around for a few hours.

Of course, Leah was unable to allow me to do that.

She lived in a neighbourhood called Jellybean Square. It was a housing project made to look like a community, a maze of tightly packed duplexes, each unit with a front door of a different colour. The effect had been intended, no doubt, to be colourful and vibrant, to project a cheery, hopeful, even prosperous aura. But it looked cheap, as though every resident had stolen their door from some other house. And the moniker as much as the various social assistance programs seemed to give birth to the diverse racial mix of the inhabitants, black, white, red, yellow, brown, like so many leftover jelly beans stuck to the bottom of one of those candy dispensers.

She parked at the curb, and shushed me as we walked in. I was drunk, stealthy, and conniving. She bid me hold at the foyer and peered inside. I heard her huff in frustration over whatever she saw.

My mother’s asleep on the sofa, she told me. You can use my room and I’ll sleep in hers.

It was a wonder to me that such an arrangement could be made, and though I was exhausted now, I was also kindled by the thought of sleeping in Leah’s bed, even alone, surrounded by Leah’s smells, by her flakes of skin, by the stains of her fluids.

A small room, stacked high with stuffed animals and paperback books. A narrow bed.

The bathroom is down the hall, she told me.

I tugged her inward.

What are you up to?

I pawed her shoulder and touched her hair.

Aren’t you the romantic, she said.

I said something charming.

Not a good idea, she answered.

With stubborn insistence, I convinced her to lie on the bed with me and talk.

We talked about Rivers and about Chris and about how many stuffed animals she had. While we talked, I rubbed her back and then, when the resistance proved minimal, I drew the outline of her breast with my fingers, and then, when it seemed her defences had been exhausted, I reached lower and fumbled my way along her thighs and beneath her skirt.

Please don’t, she said.

It was a plaintive, surprisingly earnest but mild rebuke, as rebukes went, though unexpected. Why rebuke me? I thought. Others who should have been rebuked had not been; and it seemed unjust to rebuke poor me at this moment, with so little to offer or offend. I hesitated, fluttering like a butterfly before her, weighing the merits and the detriments of continuing, then plunged my hand in again.

I met wetness, a grotto swampy with desire. This too was a surprise and a concern. Why rebuke when the instinct was so strong, when her undercurrents were roaring with as much desire as I felt? Her voice changed, and went mousy. Then she twisted and restrained my shoulders with both of her hands rather forcefully, pushing me back an inch or so. It was all I needed to stop, her message clear enough even for me, even then.

She unwound and gave me a chaste peck on the cheek.

Wait, she said, and left.

I lay on the bed barely large enough for my frame and my God-like erection and took in the loneliness of this rundown room. Her life here, and me an invader. I felt the bed begin to spin and a buzzing start up in my ears. I felt dryness in my throat, and knew myself to be the worst kind of son of a bitch. I felt the heaviness of guilt pressing me down, and closed my eyes for whatever sleep was left.

I was awakened by her touch, and her pressing, grinding insistence, growls in her throat, and bites on my neck. She wore a T-shirt and I felt her naked hips and her knees astride my thighs, and I discovered that my pants were around my ankles. But something was wrong. I had gone sallow with sin. I was lousy with remorse.

We tried this and that to no effect.

Have you heard the expression
too drunk to fuck
? she asked.

I laughed bitterly at my shame. It was my oldest companion, my only true friend. And now that its presence in my life had been revealed publicly at last, I felt a tremendous relief. The rock-bottom kind. She cuddled my neck. It was probably for the
better, we agreed. That way our friendship would remain less complicated. We needed each other. We were both abused, in a way, by the vagaries of a cruel world, and it helped to have a pal.

But then, after a mere hour or so of entwined sleep, the problem resolved itself, and we fucked so hard, she pressed a stuffed animal into her mouth to muffle the sounds.

Another writer who came along for the ride in Southeast
Asia, naturally enough, was Graham Greene. If Conrad had fathered a child with the depressed wife of a British civil servant during a tepid monsoon in Bombay or Rangoon, Greene might have resulted. He was the patron saint of the post-colonial backpacker. By this I mean Greene revelled in a cheap, exotic kind of sordid, and his heroes were always
farang
and functioned perpetually as double agents, romantically cynical, traitors to their countries, their traditional values, and even their own hearts, the kind of betrayal and cynicism that tastes exquisite when there’s a smell of clove cigarette in the humid air and you are drunk in the afternoon and intermittently engaged in conversation with some wayward, morally lost fellow traveller, of whom there are many. What Henry Miller was to the pubic louse, Graham Greene was to the poste restante; both wrote poems about the bliss of disappointment in foreign places.

But while I steeped myself in Greene’s books, and occasionally got roused from a late-afternoon heat-or debauchery-induced stupor by some intense and unexpected insight into
the awful depths the human soul can crawl into, I never understood why the fuck he converted to Catholicism.

Yes, I know he did it for marriage, initially, to some reluctant Victorian priss he decided was the one and later abandoned for all the others, though, tellingly, he preferred to carry the stain of adultery into all his serial transgressions. Clearly, this meant he did not live much like a Catholic, if ever a Catholic did, except to make a fetish of the guilt of sin, which all Catholics do. But I couldn’t understand his conversion at an intellectual level. Why would an intelligent, literary, worldly man make such a choice? You can believe in God, vaguely or even mystically, but why that God, with such specific requirements and limitations? At that point in my life, it seemed the stupidest of religions, except for all the others. My father had been a devout Catholic, though he’d never forced it on us, and while I retained a requisite fear of God, I did not really know him or feel him in my life, moments in foxholes notwithstanding.

It seemed to me that if you were Catholic, the thing you would dote on most was the man himself, nailed to the cross, experiencing the pain and sorrow of the failings of others. But that wasn’t a pain I could relate to, perhaps because I’ve never suffered for anyone’s sake my entire life. And so it seemed a stretch, to put it mildly, to feel any desire or gratitude for someone willing to do that for me, some self-satisfied, superior type who wanted to take on my sins and failings, which, after all, are mine and mine alone, thank you very much.

No, the pain I could relate to was different, and later—I think I was bombed then and alone, stoned or drunk or frazzled with overindulgence—I glimpsed a sudden understanding into
the nature of Greene’s Catholic fascination. He didn’t truck with Jesus. It was Judas he got.

I knew this because, of all the bastards in the Bible, Judas perplexed me the most. Job was another I thought about, but Job’s plight seemed self-indulgently juvenile, a mewling and unlikely series of woe-is-me what-nexts, conveniently blamed on God fucking around with Satan, all of it perversely fascinating in a Mary Karr–memoir kind of way but lacking plausibility. Cain, too, put a little hook into my consciousness, because Cain also seemed unfairly afflicted, and he’d even done something about it, something Job hadn’t had the stones for, which was to lash out in defiance at God, who was clearly, at that point, a son of a bitch. The fact that Cain was forever damned for standing up for himself seemed poetic in an epic sense, rather than psychologically astute, a bit like Gilgamesh or Ulysses thwarted repeatedly by immature gods bent on petulant revenge.

Judas, on the other hand, his story, his predicament, really worried me—at some level even frightened me. Here was a guy they said loved Jesus a lot, like a brother, and he’d sold him out for thirty pieces of silver, then hanged himself out of remorse. Yet, since there was next to no explanation for the betrayal, I could not help but puzzle the reasons. (And for this plot twist alone, let’s recognize that story as the Bible’s big literary moment.)

Even as a kid, I related to Judas (and felt guilty about it) because his actions seemed so personally plausible. Who among us hasn’t wished ill on a more successful friend, even fantasized about their cruel end? Who hasn’t secretly felt like a traitor even in the midst of friendship? It isn’t revenge or hatred that motivates such emotion, it’s the bitterness born of love. So, like
an emotionally neglected school chum, Judas turned on Jesus and lived (briefly) with the consequences. Distraught at what he’d done, Judas then went out to a field, found a withered tree, threw a rope over a branch, and hanged himself dead, thirty coins of silver glinting on the ground below his feet. Even worse, this act, above and beyond the betrayal of the Son of God, was the seal on his ticket to hell.

If weight could be defined in Biblical terms, surely its closest parallel is damnation. I get that part. They don’t call hellfire
eternal
by accident.

What I don’t get is the Biblical reaction. Where’s the pity? Where’s the compassion and understanding? Is forgiveness of that kind of betrayal beyond even Jesus? Wasn’t Jesus nailed to the cross for Judas’s sin, as much as every other man’s? (Perhaps it’s easier to forgive the transgression of a stranger than someone you really know.)

Furthermore, if we take the whole redemption of mankind through the betrayal of Jesus metaphor seriously, wasn’t Judas necessary to kick-start two thousand years of religion? Every cardinal and pope, every parish priest should be on their knees thanking him. He’s the guy who made your careers possible! He’s the guy who let you slaughter infidels, sexually abuse minors, or siphon the donation basket and get the holy free pass.

But although divinity students explore the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and transubstantiation and the virgin birth, they pretty much skip the mystery of Judas’s terrible guilt—the cause and effect of it, the lingering weight.

I believe the deficiency is due to a lack of literary understanding. We don’t follow Judas from the point of view of plot,
so we don’t see the necessity of him. Maybe that’s why a writer gets him more. Writers, by nature, are tearfully grateful for their plausible villains or faulty heroes because they make story possible. There’s a little Judas in every great character Greene created.

Still, I recognize the spiritual danger here. A character in a story that we identify with provides a glimpse of understanding into our own psychological mysteries, however infinite and multi-faceted.

To say I identified with Judas is only a small step away from being Judas.

Chris, of course, was Christ.

I
didn’t get home until late Sunday morning, and was so bedraggled and hungover that my parents didn’t even question what I’d done. I counted this a moral victory since they’d known I’d been at Rivers’s party the night before, and the obvious suspicion they would have, I presumed, was that I had been ass-fucking until dawn. I’d gotten fucked all right, but the difference was all the world.