Pew

by Catherine Lacey

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

What I know about churches is that they usually have many doors and often at least one of those doors, late at night, has been left unlocked. The reason churches have so many doors is that people tend to enter and leave churches in groups, in a hurry.

I don’t think they’re so great—churches. I don’t think they’re so great at all. That’s not what I mean when I say you can go to one when you’re tired. I’m not talking about grace or deliverance—a person cannot really speak of such things. What I mean is a church is a structure with walls and a roof and pretty windows that make it so you can’t see outside. They’re like casinos in that way, or shopping malls or those big drugstores with all the aisles, music piped in from somewhere, the endless search for that final thing.

Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. I’ve received no word from death’s brother. I have not entered a church in some time.

but the church is just a building. The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.

If you do manage to have a night’s sleep in a church, you’ll notice how nice it is to wake up there. It will almost make you want to believe in God if you don’t believe in God, and if you do believe in God, it will be a nice pat on the back for you. It must be so nice to be patted on the back in this way, to walk always followed by this constant, gentle pat.

cloth. It must be that I—whatever I am—am lying on the floor of a canoe, lying there, looking up at the sky. I am unable to sit up or move. I cannot remember getting into the canoe. Sometimes I hear people speaking to the canoe as if they are not aware that I am in here. Yes, that’s what it feels like, what living feels like.

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

Anyway the only good preacher I know isn’t sitting up in any church just to get looked at. She’s just the one that keeps the children all day, and sits in the hospice at night. She don’t say nothing about God, the Bible. Don’t have to. You see the way those children look at her—ask them what they know about. They know plenty.

A person draped in heavy cloth stood at the front of the church and said things in such a way to make those words seem obvious and true, how simple the world was, how no one need worry about anything, how everything was here, all the answers were here and we could all just accept them, roll over and accept them like a sleeping body accepts air.

I wasn’t anyone’s son or daughter. What a freedom that was and what a burden that was—to not have a home to go home to, and to not have a home to go home to. All I could have told the Reverend, if I could have spoken, was that I was human just as he was human, only missing a few things he seemed to think I needed—a past, a memory of my past, an origin—I had none of that. I felt I wasn’t the only one, that there must have been others, that I was a part of a “we,” only I didn’t know where they were. We were and I was, not entirely alone. Maybe we were all looking for one another without knowing it.

There were many kinds of insects, I knew—I had seen many of them—but how many kinds of respect existed?

What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.

But at some point you have to ask yourself, Roger said, whether remaining silent is something that is having a positive effect or a negative one on your life. You have to ask yourself whether it’s something you’re doing or something that’s being done to you, from the inside, from something else.

Something cloying and pungent hung in the air—not flowers, something else, something closer to the smell of a baby’s head.

Sea lo que sea, pase lo que pase, puedes contarme. Recuerda eso.

Since I had woken up on that pew, the meals had been endless and I wished I could have reached back and given one of them to those days of hunger in the past, or that I could have moved this plate to a place—there must have been such a place—where someone else was hungry.

We’re just trying to create an understanding—do you understand? That’s what people do. We can’t live each other’s lives, and we can’t see each other’s memories or feelings, so we try to find ways to share them with each other.

Beside them a little girl held a child-size guitar, plucking at it thoughtfully, seeming disinterested in speaking or being spoken to. One of the men said, Play us a little song now, won’t you? She began to strum the guitar, quickly and intently, as if she were a little machine that had just been plugged in, her expression unchanging and sad. The adults clapped along; the girl played her fast music and the camera focused closely on the child’s unmoving face, then cut to her quickly moving hands. Below it, a caption: CHILD PRODIGY STUNS LOCAL MUSIC TEACHER.

I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight.

Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals? The room was all white and gray and the air was warm and the air hung on me and I hung in this flesh that all those unknown centuries of blood that had brought into being. I had to tend to this flesh as if it were an honest gift, as if it had all been worth it. Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

How lucky we are to have the moon.

I leaned back across the table and shut my eyes and thought that at some point in the future, long after humanity had run its course, after some other creature had replaced us, maybe, or maybe even after the next creatures had been replaced by whatever came after them, at some point in a future I could not fully imagine, a question might occur in some mind, and that question might be What was the human? What was the world of the human?—

The question arose then—did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these failing things, weaker or stronger, lighter or darker, taller or shorter? Why did they cause so much trouble for us? Why did we use them against one another? Why did we think the content of a body meant anything? Why did we draw our conclusions with our bodies when the body is so inconclusive, so mercurial?

Resting on that table, not getting undressed, not putting on the paper gown, I feared I’d become something sacrificial, but I would not lay myself out on this altar. Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.

Seems like children are often the first to just come out and say what’s wrong with something.

The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.

Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody?

I don’t mean to be so negative. I know that’s not what people like. Sometimes it’s just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can’t take back, to think about what it is.

She smoked and stared out at the yard. Where do people go when that kind of look comes over them?

All right, well, I can’t make you do nothing, she said then, quietly—nobody can make you do nothing.

Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

but I was still thinking about Nelson’s dream, and wondering why it was that anyone believed the human body needed to be any particular way, or what was so important about a human body. Was it possible for a human’s mind and history and memory and ideas to live inside the body of a horse, and if it was, did that make that being a human or a horse? What difference did it make, one life or another?

Hello, Mr. Kercher said, stooping to pet a pile of green moss. He looked at the moss the way I’d seen people look at children or babies sleeping in strollers, soft bodies someone larger had to protect. Goodbye, he said just as quietly and seriously as before. He stood again and we kept walking.

Where I am from, we have many woods, many hikers. Here, not so many—people go to church instead. So we must let the forest know we appreciate it.

know my granddaughters are all their own people, of course—people don’t repeat—but it’s natural to go looking for the dead in new faces.

But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.

It’s always seemed to me—and as I get older, I feel this even more intensely—that kindness to other people comes with its own reward. It can be immediately felt. And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …

Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

What about dandelions and how they’re all asexual and reproduce all by themselves? And Mrs. Goldwater just said, Maybe that’s why they’re considered to be a weed.

It just seems to me that part of some people having a lot of things depends on other people having less things.

I wondered if I might ever return to Hal and Tammy’s house. I imagined Tammy might give me a peacock feather, something useless and beautiful, a real thing to pass between two people since we cannot see all the unphysical things that pass between people.

It began to seem possible that a person might have pains and thoughts that resisted language and had to be transfigured through an instrument, turned into pure sound, spun into the air, and heard.

Everybody knows who he is, Leonard said, seeming to speak to everyone. Everybody knows and nobody says. Isn’t that always the way? Everyone knowing and nobody saying.

It can’t scare you if you know it’s going to happen. But then there’s all kinds of things we don’t know that are going to happen. And so it’s scary sometimes, I think it is, scary to have to go around out there.

I felt so sure then—of course I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then—and the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting. I don’t want it to be so—but every year, just before it begins, I start to feel this way. And then what? I forget about it.

It’s a ritual. We make them, people make them, and they don’t really mean anything, even the ones that supposedly mean something—even they don’t really mean anything. They’re just something to do.

A large group of boys all together carried one wide sign— ALL FAILURES ARE FORGIVEN And a group of girls carried another behind them— ALL FAILURES ARE FORGOTTEN