Short Story: “Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory”
Caveat lector: There’s a lot of deliberately-unsettling sex stuff in this one.
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“Female heterosexuality is in crisis,” you hear tell, “and has been since Genesis 3. You know this. I know this. I don’t think we need to discuss it any longer.”
When you are seven you meet your best friend, snaggletoothed and free. In your early days seventy times sevenfold you love her. When you are fourteen you realize that in certain lights, in certain kinds of clothing (kinds for which you are still, some say, too young), she looks just like Kate Beckinsale in that Van Helsing movie that your teacher put in the DVD player on the last state-mandated classless day of school. That which you thereby realize and that which you by it mean take another seven years to sink in, and by then you can flee from it, you know how to flee from it, and she is tragically not quite inclined enough to stop you.
And so that desire that you avoid, or that need—but not as separate from yourself as a need; an unintentionality, perhaps, a telos-eschaton—contorts within you, insisting against resistance, a falling stone, a leap from a height, the needle of a compass tearing its way north through your Pauline flesh. Fucking as many guys as possible is your katechon, your Roman Empire, and it takes a lot of effort not to go on a tirade when someone makes a flippantly dogmatic remark (one way or the other) about abortion in your theology classes. Godhead was, for Mechthild, a flowing light—flow implying direction, implying inexorability. You get other images too for that inexorability, from books and movies and television focusing on “homoerotic girlbestfriend situationships” (a new set phrase, apparently—or were people saying this all along, only you, for obvious reasons, were unprivy to it?). The image of a frozen severed ear, a harassing piece of anonymous mail with two cheap dolls in it, a botched murder with a rock in a stocking.
It stands to reason that there are occasions of sin in flight-from-reality, in trying to escape a facts-full-in-the-face full-bore brute-force understanding of who and what you are. Yet such fair-weather theologians as yours cannot simply discourage anything. Demand they instead that you should simply replace an end or a chirality that is, by their lights, phenomenon only, something that could just as well be something else, even though the replacements and the substitutions never actually work, are only ever phenomena themselves, and always leave you worse than you began. No parasamgateing yourself into a straightforward ataraxic equanimity of wholly compassed and integrated sex and love for you. You take your degree and become some kind of sacristan, and amidst the arma Christi you find for yourself Peter’s cock.
Chastity impresses itself upon you before reality does, and you adopt it with another series of excuses, another series of motivated sweepings of your demonless inmostnesses. Will you end up worse than you did before, you wonder? That would not be the first time, if it happened. Your friend, your beautiful and kind and loving friend now married to a carpentrix out Bennington way, calls you often, still at least once a week, long luxuriant calls in which she talks to you with the greatest and sincerest worry. She wonders if you are a real person, which could be asked of a lot of people. She wonders if you are judging her, which you are too busy judging yourself to do, comforting yourself in self-condemnation not over the sereness of the present but over the commissions of the past. You are barking up the wrong damn tree, in the middle of the wrong damn desert, and she knows it, and you do not, and your flippant theologians and sunny moralists have put you no closer to learning it. You do think back, you do, to the unriven living self you once had, childish and muddy and free, and with her even then, always with her, if only you would allow her to be a forerunner for anything except deluded devastation.
From Pimps to Pious: The Confessions of St. Augustine for Barstool Sports Readers, your poorly-considered and not-that-well-intentioned apologetics book, sits on a library bookshelf at a Newman Center that is physically falling apart. The shelf smells of dust, piss, insects; the center, weed, shit, come. You take the book down. It’s very bad. The title was intended as a joke and comes from a Wordle in which you did very badly. You are seven times five. Thus halfway through the days of our lives you are always being splattered with white paint. Father Youngtrad (not his real name) goes on and on about “Christian freedom,” but you are not convinced he knows the meaning of that term, if it has one. Why for that matter would you want to be free, when you cannot even move through the world with stability or with justice? You would only invite more judgment upon yourself, upon the empty house that you will not fill up with love, upon the sinlessness that you now prop up through the same delusion and flight from cooperation with the truth that once propped up the sins upon sins of your early days.
Your old friend returns one day, into your life, messaging you, asking for a visit, and you say yes, either because you are stupid or because you are not that stupid. She is divorced. She arrives and she puts the moves on you. It is an unreal, flaccid, Carolinian January, and you do not need to be warm.
“You really think you have to,” she says, “don’t you?”, with a laugh.
“I do.”
“You don’t; you didn’t have to face me. You have to face reality,” she says, “reality. Let me tell you about a story I read. It’s in a book of old Swiss folk tales. It’s about the Virgin Mary as a knight who seduces sad maidens.”
“I don’t want to hear about this.”
“Yes you do. Leaves ‘em fucked and deserted, as Brother Marquis said. Or was that one of Fresh Kid Ice’s verses? It’s been ages since I heard that song. Anyway. This is in the nineteenth century. And in our own time, I had this idea, a killer idea, so to speak, for a spec script about a hit man. Or he’s an abortion doctor—and I know you’ve had abortions, so I’m sorry about this—but it’s like one of those Luc Besson or John Woo movies about the noble hit man, you know?” She lowers her voice into Don LaFontaine territory. “In a world…where Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided two days ago…”
You tell her that you, for one, are still a loyal daughter of the Church, and do not appreciate this flippant way of talking. She asks caustically if you really think she isn’t a loyal daughter, the way she is talking. You don’t have a good answer for that.
And a bit more from her: “The Witch of Endor was a nice old lady who followed the rules, whatever the rules were at the time. Nicer and older than you are.”
And a bit more from you: “But I haven’t always followed the rules. That’s been hard-fought.”
And a bit more from her: “Because you made it hard-fought. You broke the rules to prove some stupid point about being ‘normal’—you were against the rules before you were for them, because that is what you cared about, really—and also you’re not a nice old lady.”
And a bit more from you: “I’m not autochthonous to the nice old lady way of life, maybe, but is anyone?”
And a bit more from her: “Really, Name? ‘Autochthonous’? Dua Lipa is still not going to fuck you. And you’re not on the royal road to being a nice old lady either, I can tell you that much.”
And a bit more from you: “I’ve kept on the straight and narrow though. Inwardly anyway. In my mind. Pun intended.”
And a bit more from her: “Oh dear. You could have salvaged it until that ‘pun intended’ there, Name.”
And a bit more from you: “Maybe when I’m an old lady I’ll be nice. I’ll be happy.”
And a bit more from her: “And you’ll just sit there and wait for that to happen? Are you listening to yourself, Name? Are you hearing what you are saying? We’re talking about facing reality, not aging into harmlessness, as if that were really a thing. I’m sure the Witch of Endor had been a nice young lady too, and Saul gets the worst of it…yet he was among the prophets.”
And a bit more from you: “He was.”
And a bit more from her: “So again I ask you, Name: Are you hearing what you are saying to me right now?”
And a bit more from you: “God have mercy on me; I am.”
That night you have a dream of Christ, the centurion’s spear-wound in His side wet and willing. What does Christ want from you? It’s obvious, but it’s not what you normally give Him, is it, throwing yourself down on your face in front of an altar, distressed and hiding, your face in your arms, your arms on the floor, hiding not from God or even from yourself but from the flippant certainties of the conservative-secular everyday? Yet hiding in God; you are not prostrate in front of this sopping, lickable gash; you are on your knees, but clear-eyed.
Trembling you part the folds of salmon flesh, and trembling you lap up the saving tide.