back to the city [pan solo]

[jamie]

20 january 2014

Before the sun did Pan rose. He used the telephone in the kitchen to call the church and leave a message on its answering machine bidding Rosa call him at this number. He did not tell her what the number was nor did it register on the telephone in the office but she knew the number anyway. Wrote it down before he went away from them and claimed to keep it locked up. She knew herself to be a liability and did not want to be a liability and so she kept it safe.

He had few things to pack. Everything he brought with him still fit into the duffel bag and everything others gave to him he found room alongside everything else. He washed the bedding from the room where he'd slept the last two months and put it back where he found it. Dusted down the furniture and cleaned the carpet with the carpet sweeper. By the time the sky lightened with winter sun he had moved to the kitchen to read. These things killed time until the phone rang.

"Are you coming back?" Rosa asked.
"Yeah," he said.
"When should I tell Manuel you're coming back?"
"Today."
"Are you joking? That's not enough time!"
"La rectoría tiene dos pisos, ¿no? Me alojaré en el piso de arriba hasta él sale."

Rosa sighed a deep and weary sigh.

"¿De acuerdo?" he asked.
"Whatever you want, Francisco," she said. "I'll tell him when he gets here."
"Thank you."

---

By the time the others in the house awaken from their nightmares and their parrying of nightmares the Chorister has left the place. His room is always clean when he is not in it but it has an empty cleanliness today. Shoshannah may be the first to find the note but even if she isn't it stays on the refrigerator for a time. The writing is tall and thin and born of a pen that did not shake in the owner's hand.

Gone back to the church, it says.
Thank you for the tea & hospitality.
Call if you have trouble.
-- Fr. Echeverría

---

Mid-morning saw the street where La Iglesia del Buen Pastor stood hemmed in by cars parked on either side. The only empty space was a 15-meter no-fly zone around a yellow fire hydrant. Someone chained a bicycle to the NO STANDING sign at the corner of the street. The children were back in school and the daycare center playground at the back of the property rang with the sound of the little kids chasing each other around while the aides stood watching them.

Amanda and Claudia were out front. Claudia, in her forties, was smoking a cigarette and Amanda, nineteen years old, wore the bruises of sleep deprivation like a second skin. She was not smoking but she wanted to stand and talk to Claudia anyway. They were the first to see a familiar red Toyota Tacoma pull into the church driveway.

"Santo cielo," said Claudia.
"Hi Father Francisco!" Amanda called out after he closed the driver's side door.

He lifted a hand to wave and walked down the sidewalk and past the front door of the church. Bypassed it to greet the women. He hugged Claudia first and then hugged Amanda. He and Claudia spoke in brief Spanish about the daycare center staffing and when she inquired after his health he did not lie. He said he was feeling better.

"Tan flaco está," said Claudia.
"Sí," said Pan, "pero cuando las Marianas descubran que yo he regresado, voy a aumentar."

Claudia laughed. Amanda shuffled her weight between her feet and looked up at the priest's face.

"I know you just got back," she said. "But if you have a minute, can I talk to you? Now?"
"Of course."

They waved goodbye to Claudia and started towards the breezeway between the daycare and the church.

"Besides," he said, "if you're with me when I go in the office, maybe Rosa won't yell quite so much."

[mnemosyne]

Father Francisco Echeverría has a few days to settle into the routine of bachelor religious life. Which must feel both familiar and strange, like slipping one's arm's into a favorite sweater rediscovered, years later, on the closet floor.

Oh, yes. I remember you.

The morning light and the spare streets and their emptiness. The service workers who stop by for the earliest mass before heading off to man the coffee shops and bakeries, the convenience stores and muffler shops, the lunch counters and the parking garages. The toddlers still scrubbing sleep from their eyes being handed off to the day care workers scrubbing sleep from their own. The earliest bus and the early bus and the still fucking early bus, hydraulics sighing as they kneel at the corner, to expel or accept a new congregant. The prostitutes and the dealers and the homeless vets who might stumble by on their way to wherever it is they go when the sun threatens to show up in the sky.

--

Morning. It is morning. No candles are yet lit and the sky is dark but lightening somewhere, on of those strange corners of it, out to the east, the long flat expanse of the high fucking plains, and the streets are quiet and sanctuary proper has that echoing, empty sense that must make it feel haunted to strangers who do not believe in his god. Incense, candle wax, Murphy's English Soap: all familiar, all sunk into the plaster and the lathe, the beams and the nave.

Another scent too. Less common though not unknown here, lingering in her hair and on her skin.

She's sitting in the fifth or sixth pew, close to the center aisle, legs tucked up beneath her body, elbow resting on the spine of the bench, temple cradled in the heel of her palm, slouched bonelessly aslant, the rise and fall of her shoulders so slow and steady that he might assume that she fell asleep like that, waiting for him because why else would she be here at 4:49 a.m. on a Saturday morning, not far from that statue of the Virgin Mary, crowned with a slow-drying circlet of roses by the League this Thursday last. Perhaps in honor of his return.

Not asleep, though.

Because she stirs, quiet and lazy as he approaches. Lifts her head from her hand and gives him a half-smile over her shoulder and something about the way she moves, the indolent pleasure she takes in that movement, tells him with certainty that she is a long way from sober.

--

Maybe he stops in the middle of the central aisle, hand on the back of her pew, a solid and strangely bright presence at her back, in a way that makes her wonder at the cold fire of the each breath she pulls into her lungs. The way the shadows were banished to all but the farthers corners the moment he walked through the door.

Makes her wonder at the immediacy of the moment. At the immediacy of every moment.

She's already standing up, Sera. And god she's wearing the most ridiculous pair of Nina Ricci's, but he hardly has time to glance down and take them in because she's tumbling out of the pew and reaching for him and putting her arms around his neck and laying her head against his shoulder for a long, solid moment, intimate as you please.

Lifts her head a moment later, pulls back far enough that she can find his eyes in the shadows of the sanctuary and meet them and find herself reflected therein, and favor him with a dreaming sort of smile.

"I like your statue of Mary," Sera tells him, mouth curving around the words. She does not tell him that they have been talking, Mary and Sera, but the way she smiles, oh, like she's met a new crush. An old friend. A soon-to-be-lover.

Her arms are still around his shoulders, her fingers laced behind his neck, and rather like Don Quihoxte tilting at windmills, she leans in closer then, inhales through her nose. Settles her mouth at his ear. And says, "I just hope she didn't actually die a Virgin.

"Welcome home, Pan."

She lets him go, then. And saunters out the door.