Archive of Our Own ^beta

Okay, so maybe he isn't such a man of God after all. Maybe he never was. Sometimes things like this happen: sometimes he goes to the 7-11 one night to get a pack of cigarettes and ends up in a motel room getting fucked by the only person that makes him feel anything anymore. Anything, he doesn't even know what. He's reluctant to even name it. It finds expression in how hard she digs her nails into his back and how hard he bites back.

Her leather jacket and his clerical shirt are in a pile on the floor, but the cross is placed neatly on the table by the phone.

She rides him fast, an act of conquest, then slow, so slow as she pins him to the headboard and takes her pleasure and her time. She throws her head back, and he latches his mouth onto her neck, then trails the suction down to hollow at the base of her throat, savouring the taste. She's beautiful. She's devastating. She blew into town with the early autumn rains, and when the weather cleared to let the rest of summer have its way, she stuck around, circling him. He felt not unlike a hare that just spotted the shadow of a hawk.

Father Christopher, he said when they shook hands.

Meg, she said when she stopped laughing. We used to fuck.

Life, with its mysterious ways.

Christopher tightens his grip on her hips and thrusts up hard, and Meg's moan sounds like a growl. The lights flicker, and for a second she is wreathed in shadows, in teeth and knives and wildfire. He blinks, and she is just a woman again. He is just a man. They are alone here together, which is as much the problem as it is the solution, and it is too late to go back.

+

Realizing that he remembered nothing was an eventual process. There were too many other things to consider at the time, like how his body ached, how the sun was too bright, his shoes that squelched, his clothes that smelled like wet dog. It was only when he wondered how to get to the road that he realized he didn't know where he was, or where he would go, or why he was here in the first place. From there the holes in his head clinked into place like links in a chain, and he staved off panic by keeping on moving, keeping on walking, ignoring the looks people gave a man with damp clothes and a crazed glint in his eyes.

The end of the day found him sitting in the back pew of St. Mary's. He had been sitting there for hours, and he wasn't sure if that made him a patient man, a pious one, or simply frightened. In any case, he was soothed. In a place where you are meant to be filled with God's grace, it is convenient to be already emptied. He prayed, and when he ran out of things to pray for, he watched the play of light through the stained glass windows. Then he prayed some more. Every plea to God he knew from Hail Marys to the al-Fatihah.

How strange, he thinks, to know prayer after prayer but to be deprived of his own name.

"Are you all right, son?" a voice asked, and he looked up. It belonged to an old priest who had the kind of wispy hair and dark eyebrows that made men his age look perpetually melancholy.

He wasn't all right.

"It's just that you've been here all day," said the priest. "I'm Father Anthony, by the way. You new in town or just passing through?"

He replied with the only truth left to him: "I don't know."

+

"This'd be what you boys in black call a blessing," Meg says as she pulls on her boot. "Tabula rasa, Clarence. You can do anything. You can be anything."

He slouches in a chair, peeling the label off a beer bottle. "Did I like this beer before?" he wonders aloud.

Meg raises an eyebrow. "Do you like it now?"

+

He becomes a man of the cloth because it feels right, and because his encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and obscure hagiography impressed Father Anthony to no end. ("I never knew Teresa of Avila was allergic to strawberries.") After some time Father Anthony, who in his old age and loneliness encouraged the conclusion that Christopher must've been a priest before the 'great forgetting', bypassed bureaucracy to offer him a position at the church. He accepted, both the position and his new name.

"Welcome to St. Mary's, Father Christopher," said Father Anthony as he poured them celebratory shots of whiskey in his office. "To beginnings."

"To beginnings," Christopher echoed, and the whiskey burned going down. Bottoms up, feathers, crackles something in his memory, but it disappears before he can hang on to it.

It wasn't that he found peace, but that he found silence, which is an adequate placebo for now. Life as a priest gives him a home, a name, and a function, and it soothes him to stay in this place while he waits for the fog in his head to lift.

One day, as he is taking the confession of a parishioner, he gets a flash of sitting in the passenger seat of someone else's car, hearing another confession, one he has no ability to forgive or redeem. He tries to remember the face of the man beside him, but the parishioner is distracting and in the end he can focus on neither. Christopher prescribes ten Our Fathers for whatever it is she feels guilty about, and when she is gone, he takes two slugs from his flask. He closes his eyes. The whiskey dredges up the cozy hopelessness that inhabits 2 AM and a rough voice asking him if he'd like to stay, and something inside him aches.

When he reads the Bible, he can visualize every scene down to mundane details, except for the parts he's somehow sure they got wrong.

He used to go to Father Anthony with these jigsaw pieces, share his theories about his previous life (I think I traveled a lot, I think I had a family, I think I ran away from home ), but he stopped doing this when he realized that it made the old priest uncomfortable and sad. "If God wants you to remember, you will remember," he kept saying. He likes Father Christopher, not whoever he was before, and he is afraid of losing his new friend to the past.

So Christopher keeps it all to himself, collecting all these bits and pieces the way a dragon hoards its gold. He brings them up with no one but Meg now, unless provoked by the well-intentioned curiosity of a parishioner wanting to get to know the new priest. To them, he would tell this tale: his parents have passed, he is not from around here, he has a fondness for Led Zeppelin, and he has a brother, currently traveling, who has green eyes and rough hands and a laugh like a bullet to the heart.

+

After sex, he and Meg lie on their respective sides of the bed with too much space between them. They don't cuddle. Proximity is an all-or-nothing affair for them, and the buffer zone at least provides the illusion of separate countries. It's just that she's the only one who knocks the static loose these days. When they touch, he can't tell which one of them is on fire.

Did he love her once? He doesn't know how to name this. Something about her resonates with him, the way they both seem to barrel through this world without being of this world. Meg is as coy with her answers as he is with his questions. Finally here is someone who knew him before he forgot everything and he finds himself unable to cross that bridge. He has come to appreciate the space they have carved for themselves on stolen afternoons, but he is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"You crack me up," she tells him one day after a particularly ponderous soliloquy on his fragmented life. She helps himself to one of his cigarette and says, "You think you're the only one who lost something?"

"Who have you lost?"

She smirks, but looks away. "I'm going after my father. See, he got himself involved in some deep shit. That's just his way, he's a stubborn bastard." There's something different about her smile now, a fragility she fails to cover up. "I'm trying to get him out."

"What kind of trouble?"

She barks out her laugh. "Maybe I'll tell you when you're older, huh? Hell, maybe I'll even let you help me out."

+

They are holed up in a different motel, this time on the other side of town. He wears his old suit. A disguise, he thinks wryly. Meg is waiting in room 213 as planned, and upon seeing her he feels once more that familiar fire, the simultaneous need to touch and devour her whole. She is beautiful the way a weapon is beautiful, a knife with a blade so sharp you can't feel it when it cuts you.

"Right on time," she smiles, tugging on his tie, and then she pushes him to the bed and they don't say anything for a while.

This, too. This shakes things loose. Christopher thinks he remembers shitty motel rooms, the shitty beer he drank in them, the blurry line between proximity and intimacy.

"Harder," Meg gasps. "Harder, fuck."

As he goes harder, he slows down, concentrating power. He rolls his hips with every thrust and she pushes back, moaning, shuddering and calling his name. It's only later, when they're putting their clothes back on, that he realizes the name she called wasn't Christopher or even Clarence.

He turns to her. "What did you say?"

"What?"

"What was that thing you said? What did you call me in bed?"

Meg laughs. "What, is 'fuck yeah' your name?"

"You called me something else when we fucked."

"What did I call you?"

"You tell me."

"I didn't call you anything."

She continues deflecting in her easy-breezy way, and his anger only seems to delight her more, which exacerbates it, and so on and so forth, building and building until suddenly he is slamming her back against the wall and demanding, "What's my name? Why won't you tell me my name?"

He sees fear in Meg's eyes for the first time. He sees, superimposed, some infernal monster baring its fangs at him, hissing.

He blinks - once, twice.

The monster is gone. Meg is looking up at him with apprehensive surprise.

"Christopher," she says slowly, and it's one of the few times she deigns to call him by that name.

He looks away, cursing under his breath. Steps back and mutters an apology without looking at her face. He can't look at her face.

"Well, damn," she says, trying to put her bravado back on again.

He finishes dressing as fast as he can and leaves without another word.

+

This dream again.

The voices, all these voices inside him, none of them human, all of them straining to break through his skin. Here's the water, the way it rises up and swallows him, and there's the way the sun dissipates as the water's surface gets farther and farther away.

Someone is telling him don't ever change.

I'm going to find some way - he tries to say, but the water rushes into his mouth before he can finish.

Sometimes, instead of water, it's fire. Instead of unfinished promises, it's all the things you thought you never had to say, said too late.

I'm going to find some way to -

+

The next time they meet, she bites twice as hard, digs her nails into his back, and he relishes the pain. She doesn't call out any names.

+

"Father Christopher, where were you?" Father Anthony asks, and he sounds more hurt than angry.

This is the second time Christopher has missed dinner. He even promised to cook this meal to make up for missing it the first time. He keeps his distance as he apologizes, unable to let go of the irrational fear that Father Anthony might sense her on him.

"You've been acting strange," Father Anthony says instead of accepting the apology, and Christopher resists the urge to laugh. Everything about him is strange. How would some old priest know what's normal for an itinerant amnesiac who drifted into his church for lack of a better destination?

"These are strange times," he replies instead, and takes a step back, beginning his exit.

On this, at least, Father Anthony agrees.

+

"Hey, Clarence, remember the thing I said before?"

"What thing?"

"When I blow this popsicle stand," she says, "you should tag along."

"But the church-"

"You can't break vows you never made."

+

"Was I married?" he asks as he buttons his shirt in front of the mirror.

Meg is still curled up naked on the bed. Her smile is sated, if not gentle. Never gentle. "That is a terrible opening to post-coital conversation."

"Tell me."

"Hell if I know. I said we fucked sometimes, not that we were BFFs. We didn't exactly talk."

("Was I a priest?" he asked her before.

"Yes."

"...You're lying."

"I am. I lie sometimes." She shrugs. "But Clarence, I don't think even priests love God the way you did."

"How did I love God?"

"The way you love man. Which is to say: too much.")

"Sometimes," he continues, "I remember a woman. Blonde hair, dark blonde, blue eyes. I think I loved her." The memory of this woman is wreathed in a warmth he finds intriguing for how alien it is. Her hands were soft and her voice was low, often wry, but he thinks he loved her for years before life took him away from her. Or was it her who left? Does she love him still?

Meg raises her eyebrows. "Interesting."

"There was also a little girl, same blonde hair, same blue eyes. I pushed her on the swings. I lifted her up so she could put a star on top of the Christmas tree." He stops himself, seeing the look on Meg's face. He refuses to give her more material to condescend to, and he feels especially protective of the little girl. In his mind, she is singing 'Silent Night' as snowflakes dotted her knit hat, her small hand in his. "Does any of this sound familiar to you?"

Meg rolls over and stretches, turning to the light as she arches her back. It is a deliberate move designed to distract him, and he is not immune to it.

She replies, "Not one bit."

+

Some other things he remembers: flying along Saturn's rings, what the aurora sounds like, and walking on the banks of the Euphrates thousands of years ago. When he is drunk or slipping into dreams, he thinks he remembers his name, his true name, pronounced the true way, with accents of starlight and the sibilance of grace. No human throat can truly say it. To live in this world is to be transliterated.

What scares him is that these delirious thoughts don't scare him.

In his dreams, the lights flicker as the room materializes around him. Someone asks him something. Someone moves closer and he can feel the warmth suffusing him, can smell the whiskey and gun oil. He can't recall the words, but he remembers the tone: it is deep, it is as tired as he is, and it assures him that he is not alone.

And then he wakes up. He is alone.

+

"This isn't your life," Meg scoffs, flicking the white square at his throat. "Come help me find my father, and then we'll find your life."

+

I'm going to find some way to redeem myself to you.

+

"We'll miss you around here," Father Anthony says, and the way he sounds, Christopher almost regrets leaving. Father Anthony is a man who has become prone to heavy-heartedness in his twilight years, and a loneliness that predisposes him to easy affection and a habit of taking care of anyone that would let him. To people like Father Anthony, the duties of priesthood are as natural as breathing. As for people like Christopher, well. He is about to find out.

"You'll be fine," he assures the old priest.

Outside, Meg honks the horn.

"That's your ride," Father Anthony sighs, squaring his shoulders. He gives Christopher a smile that seems to say it knew this day would come. They embrace, and Christopher closes his eyes and relishes the feeling while he can, this sensation of being loved.

"I hope you find what you're looking for," Father Anthony murmurs.

"I think that's a curse in some cultures."

"Not in mine. You take care of yourself, son. Stop drinking so much. And write me."

Christopher steps out into the noonday sun, which is crisp but not warming. Fallen leaves have begun to pile up in the yard in front of the church, but they are someone else's responsibility now. In front of the church gate, Meg sits in the driver seat of a black sedan.

"What would your father think," he says, getting into the passenger seat, "the way you go around debauching men of the cloth?"

"I think he'd be very proud," she says, and shifts into drive. "And don't lay blame on me, angelface. You were already on your way." She meets his eyes in the rearview mirror and winks. "All I had to do was meet you there."