Lewis or Clark.

 

We had decided to set up a new religion. So we found an empty classroom with a whiteboard and colored markers. It was a Sunday, early afternoon. We’d had a good lunch: ribs, mutton. Greens. Mark was there. He had a sniffle. He always seemed a little sick. Perhaps it was just his immune system being run down at this point in the semester, but I always suspected that it had more to do with Mark’s essential cast of mind. His emotional outlook was that of a sick person: despairing, weakling, woe-is-me. He needed something to be romantic about—usually, his tribulations with women.

And she was there too: Robin. In an Easter-blue sweater, and those mom jeans she liked to wear, and with good reason. I felt I could read her like an open book. Her looks, yes, but also her attempts at humor, which so often fell flat, so often irritated. Her timing was bad. She’d start rushing to what was funny in a story too early, or a beat too late. It was slightly endearing, until it began to bother, then annoy.

Sometimes, God, I hate my friends.

Anyway, we decided on four gods. Three would have been better—one for each of us—but we did not want to appear to be ripping off the Christian trinity. “All the good ideas are already taken” is the complaint of losers and nobodies. The kind of people Steve Jobs would be mean to. For our thing to work it had to be new: something never before encountered by anybody in the whole history of the universe. A revelation.

We called one god Nasta, which was a place name we picked up in an atlas, and he was to be a monkey god, goatteed, with a paunch and a satin vest with buttons: also deity of water, also of advanced middle-age: that phase of ignored senescence which begins when one becomes an empty-nester, and lasts until retirement.

We called one god Roche, and she was goddess of wrath, of pre-K, of lawyers, and of renewable energy.

Robin mocked up illustrations on the whiteboard. It was what she was there for. She could do amazing effigies in just two colors. Her way of using the markers, heavy strokes of the thick felt tip, gave our gods the look of woodcuts.

We named our third god John of Gaunt, sometimes called “Black John” or “Black Gaunt” or “The Black Gaunt” by those of his cult, and he was god of England, of boyhood, and of transportation.

By the time we had sketched all this, the light had changed in the windows. The winter sun was not yet casting long shadows, but the warmth had gone out of it, like a bulb buried deep in the dirt. Robin had covered both boards with her writing and her diagrams. No message, no structure, no throughline was discernible in all her scribbling. Mark, close by her side, reminded me of some kind of authoritative goblin. He’d make a suggestion, then shimmy backward a few steps, surveying both boards together. I’d catch him looking at her as she wrote. Her air, that hair. That jaw. The cant of her head, and the thrust of her chin.

Me? I was eventually put in charge of recruitment. It’s not a role I can thrive in. I shrink from others. I ought naturally not to consult with other men. I am (I have been shown to be) one of those reluctant, reclusive, dominating types. I once read that Lewis, or Clark, one of the two, was supposedly like this. He did not get on well with his men, “The Corps of Discovery.” He didn’t know how to speak with them normally, casually, and they did not trust him. All this, even as his sense of rivers was unparalleled. He could intuit, from the mouth of a fork of the Missouri, something in its pulse, its channels, that told him where to go. Which path to climb. As they pushed north and west, into the very teeth of winter, it must have seemed to every soul aboard those chained flatboats that they were going to learn something about rivers. Whether they came (as was rumored) ultimately from heaven, and at the uppermost waters would be discovered a shining, glowing waterfall, silver pouring into gold and back again. Or whether they came (as was rumored) from a geyser, spewing and coughing and choking and gasping boiling foam from the innards of the very earth. Lewis, or Clark, one of the two, was the one who was going to ferry them all, like Odysseus, or Charon, or Orpheus, one of those three, through Hell’s gates. Yet for something so simple as requesting pork chops for dinner from the chef, this farseeing inquisitor needed his partner to serve as emissary and go-between.

We endured a brief but gorgeous sunset. Then it was night. Flicking on the fluorescent lights, we burrowed back into our work. (The designer of our building had left the guts of the structure, the vents and electrical cables and such, running in exposed thoroughfares along the underside of the ceiling.) Robin transcribed the contents of the messy whiteboards into a word document, and began arranging by topic. Then, like those Himalayan monks who make intricate mosaics in colored sand, only to stomp or piss on them, she erased everything. Her final task was to see about real estate, an important matter. She stepped into the hall to make some calls. Unless we were to make do with a big tent, revival-style, a suitable venue (venerable, yet understated) was needed. And Mark was going to write the scriptures for homework.

He was very coy about this. It got under my skin. What was he specifically going to say in there? He wouldn’t divulge. It wasn’t so important, he averred, and I could see he had a point. What matters is how we treat each other, I could almost hear him saying. Nothing else. What matters is how we treat each other? Nothing else? I could practically hear him saying it.

Robin returned with bummer news: not a single venue to be had. How was it that all church buildings already had churches in them? Weren’t there any vacancies? In understandable frustration—which is not to excuse his behavior in any way, just to say that we were at our wits end, and felt, at times, overmatched—Mark winged a marker right at Robin’s head. He was prone to such tantrums. It binged against the board, leaving a mark—not from the marker tip, but a little chip in the glossy white. Then on the ricochet it became tangled in Robin’s hair, which, as you might imagine, was red. She wheeled about, facing him, looking like a Christmas tree. It was not clear to me, just then, if she knew something was in her hair. The fact of it occupied me like a secret.

“What the hell was that for?” Oh, she knew alright. The sight of her angry thrilled me. Should we all just worship her? Never. Better to chip away at her bit by bit.

Children, I said. Simple children. Let us move on. What offerings shall we accept—nay, solicit?

We found the traditional manner of request (that is, grubbing for money, passing a pathetic tin tray) to be crude. On this matter we were of one mind. But if not money, then what? We were a little stumped, I confess. Then Mark left to refill his water bottle, and when he returned, he announced that it had come to him, as if in a vision: we would take offerings of water.

Holy water?

No, just water. Water would be our sacrament, our currency, or staple good.

In hindsight, it’s clear we felt vaguely disappointed in our choice of gods. We had said Nasta, the monkey, would also be a water god. But we were just throwing shit at the wall. As time passed, they appeared sulky, even pathetic. They were doing their best, but, like teenagers, their best was not very good, and they were far too sensitive. They couldn’t bear real honesty.

We met, Mark and Robin and I, in grad school. God, we were so young. Mark wasn’t bitter yet, back then. We lived in this rat-infested tenement in Paris. There was a small balcony, where he and Robin would retire to smoke and talk on the days when I could hardly make it out of bed, I was so depressed. My bed was in the main room of our loft, that was how small it was. As I have said, we had a terrible issue with mice, and at nights I could hear them underneath me, also in the ceiling, the sound of them chewing. They were eating the wires, eating the plaster. But it felt like it was coming from inside me. Then one spring morning, Mark put out his cigarette and came in from the small balcony where he and Robin had been standing, leaning against the railing, for we had no chairs, and no space to put them even if we had had them; all we kept on the balcony were dead and decaying and starving potted plants, long dried-out, dying a slow death from thirst, and neglected. Mark came in and dropped to the floor and shimmied on his belly underneath my bed as I lay in it, huddled in my sweaty sheets. He emerged with a mousetrap. He had seen, through the glass, from his perch, that a mouse had been caught but not killed in one of the many traps which we had set down there, then ceased to check—one of the symptoms of my sickness being loss of the sense of smell.

The mouse was hardly moving, and at first, looking up from deep inside my malaise, I did not understand that it was alive. But then it stirred, feebly, as if waking from a daytime nap. Mark laid it on the floor, and with strong, dexterous fingers, pried open the trap, at great personal risk. The mouse clambered free and allowed Mark to shepherd it to the glass door, then out onto the balcony.

What the hell was it going to do on the balcony? We lived on the sixth floor. Would it have the strength, after what it had been through, to climb the limestone walls to the roof, defying gravity? And then living up there, exposed to the elements, that acid French rain which kept the buildings free from tarnish? Or yet more perilous, to descend, level by level, to the balcony below our own, then the balcony below that? As if climbing down a ladder into hell itself? Even if it survived this harrowing descent, then it would be injured on the streets of Paris. This wasn’t Des Moines. This wasn’t Rio. This was the city of catacombs. City of infestations, of festering rebuke. Where would it go from there? Would it ever make its way back to its own kind?

We felt we had come, by the end of the night, to the limit of what planning could do. Vis-a-vis religion, there is a limit. Beyond which, no one knows what.

The last item deliberated upon was this. Should we have a holy mountain?

Yes, most assiduously.

Best of all would be a volcano, an active volcano!—but since these were in rare supply, and presented legal complications having to do with liabilities and insurance anyway, we settled on a has-been, an over-the-hill, once-upon-a-time type of volcano: a laccolith, to be precise. A laccolith is a great underground intrusion, much worn away. And far! Far from anything else, remote, surrounded and isolated by oceans of dry pinyon desert. I am describing the Henry Mountains, in southeastern Utah. Two hours from the nearest interstate, five from the nearest airport, and over seven hours from Denver. Not an easy place to reach. The Henry mountains were our holy mountains. And I have always liked the name Henry: good, solid, people are named Henry: many kings of England. And of course, it’s Hank for short.

In this connection, we named the fourth god Hank. He was god of mountains, of gravity, and of friends.