Damascus
Two atheists are driving through the Mojave desert on their way to a confirmation. The young man in the passenger seat is a stranger to these parts. He’s a typical, watered-down, my-mom-and-step-dad-never-thought-much-about -religion-and-neither-did-I, type of secular. The driver, he’s native to the landscape flying by. Of the two, he’s the true atheist, because he’s just as much of a Catholic as a non-believer. He figures there isn’t a heaven or a hell, or anything else for that matter, and still a Saint Sebastian medallion he bought from a church gift shop hangs from his neck.
The small black rosary bead shaped car is becoming brown in the dust & wind. If we were to angle a night-vision camera out of a worm-hollowed eye socket of any one of the roadkill possums or kangaroo rats along the way, we would hardly catch a blur as the Volkswagen roars past. Partly because the desert this far north of LA has no street lamps, only a huge grid of paved roads that intersect nothing but themselves. This, and the car is traveling at roughly the same speed that Madonna’s soul was assumed into paradise. That’s a little over a hundred MPH.
The passenger’s name is Lucio, and the driver’s name is Sebastian. These are not their real names. Sebastian’s mother, who’s waiting for the two to arrive from their drive across the high desert plains, insists on calling people by their confirmation names if she can help it. The day Sebastian was conscripted into confirmation, he felt inwardly like a Roman soldier dragged off to fight in one of the Culture Wars. Lucio was not confirmed, but his middle name was Italian and that was good enough for Philomena.
Lucio asks, why Philomena? Sebastian shrugs and keeps his eyes on the dark hills ahead. It’s probably because his mom had six kids, and Philomena is the patron saint of babies and whatnot. Sebastian, thinking out loud now, says it could be that his mom is obsessed with sex, but Lucio doesn’t get it. Isn’t Phoilomena (and here we mean the mother of six, not the virgin who the emperor Diocletian shot with arrows and had dragged underwater with an anchor in 304 CE) super prudish? See that’s the thing about Catholics, Sebastian adds. They’re obsessed with sex, the way that anorexics are obsessed with food.
Lucio nods and says that that’s some deep shit, man. Sebastian says he wishes he’d been the first to phrase it that way, and not to go repeating it because maybe it’s true but it’s still kind of a fucked up thing to say. Lucio agrees it wouldn’t be polite. Is that why you’re obsessed with sex? Because you’re Catholic?
Sebastian answers that of fucking course that’s why he’s obsessed with sex; there’s no aphrodisiac like a chastity belt. He keeps his eyes on the road, but his eyes are smiling: And forget French perfume, I like my girls smelling like Frankincense. This makes Lucio laugh even when he doesn’t get it. He’s like this, always laughing at what Sebastian says, not because it’s funny but because he loves him. Lucio never had a brother, except his eight-year-old half brother named Miko who was kind of a shit head. Lucio says that’s hilarious, brother.
But he isn’t a little nervous, and he confesses as much to the driver of the black dusty car traveling at the relative speed of the nail being hammered into Christ’s right wrist. That’s going upwards of a hundred-and-ten MPH. Sebastian questions what there is to be worried about.
The complex structure of mass looks to Lucio like a theoretical physics equation. Vectors pointed every which way. First you’re seated, then you’re on your feet, then you’re on your knees. Then you’re walking, sipping on wine and munching on bread, and next breath they’re splashing you with water. It’s as if the Catholics had a thing for aerobics. Not to mention, the priests look like Jedi-knights. Sebastian just tells his friend that there’ll be a book for him to follow along.
This doesn’t calm Lucio much. He hadn’t grown used to it is all. It was Sebastian’s youngest brother who would be confirmed early the next day. His chosen saint is Valentine. He’s mostly taken the name because it sounds cool, Sebastian explains rolling his eyes, not because he needs the patron saint of epilepsy and the bubonic plague. The whole family planned to show: hordes of primos and primas, tias and tios, relatives two, three times removed, then again, Sebastian’s immediate family. None of them are as Catholic as I am, Sebastian throws in, except maybe mom. They’ll all tell you they believe in God. They’ll all say their rosaries and go to confession and go through the motions. But they’re Catholics in the sense that a cow is a bird if it was born in a tree. Speaking of trees, look.
Sebastian points at the encroaching army of Joshua trees, lit only by the moonlight. That species of tree, which danced now like a contortionist in wind from the south, was named after the biblical Joshua. He lifts a geriatric Moses in a pose not unlike the one the trees sketch against the sky. As long as the staff was raised, he had read, God’s chosen would prevail against the enemy.
Lucio is laughing at nothing in particular. It’s not a bad thing in any case to have a friend who thinks you’re funny. Especially if you’re not. Sebastian insists God is comfortably dead, to which Lucio counters somewhat unsettled by the irreverence. Being Catholic has nothing to do with God, not in America, Sebastian assures him. Lucio says he’ll need an example as he adjusts his huge frame in the tiny car, looking indifferently at the collective of streetlamps that have just shown distantly on the horizon.
Al Capone, for example. The man was a walking contradiction. He was a murderer, extortionist, gangster, fill in the blank. But he kneeled and prayed; it may even be his hands were calloused and his knees bruised with prayer. In my opinion, you’d be hard pressed to find me a better Catholic this side of the hemisphere besides maybe Fidel Castro. Lucio thinks aloud that that doesn’t feel right to hear someone say. And this is precisely why Sebastian said it to his friend at two in the morning speeding through the desert, without a soul in sight but for the person he trusts most and a distant white truck, which Sebastian doesn’t realize is headed right at them because he’s using stop signs as suggestions.
When Sebastian does spot it, it’s less than fifty feet away and they are traveling faster than Peter’s doubting body when it plunged into the Jordan. Sebastian’s always been like this. Can talk your ear off, pick it up, and sew it back on without losing a beat. This is great for passing time on a six hour drive. It isn’t great when Sebastian gets on a self-righteous roll and doesn’t look down the road. Lucio sees the truck coming but not much sooner than his friend.
He’s sure that he’s doomed to be compressed into a garbage-compacted cube of roadkill like the rotting coyote he notices in the headlights moments before the incident. So sure that he doesn’t think about warning his brother. Actually he’s forgotten he’s there at all. For a second he does think about his stepsister, and that’s because he loves her deeply; or, maybe because she’s a smartass, know-it-all, and he sees faint traces of her in Sebastian. He’s mostly concerned with what position he can bend into that will either cause him the least pain or kill him the fastest. As he braces for impact he’s able to squeak out BUD!
Tire yank. Burnt rubber. Escaped death.
The car moves horizontally, and the inertia of it moves the soft parts of Lucio’s left face as close as they’ve ever been to the parts on his right side. The whole apparatus is on two right wheels for a split second, like in a Betty Boop cartoon; in this fashion it dodged the truck, and is now slamming down and bouncing up again on the shocks. Sebastian with his life still flashing before him pulls the car to a stop at a bend not far off from where the dead coyote lay. They sit there in silence a while.
Lucio isn’t really thinking, so he misses his chance to be angry. His mind’s sunken deep into his body, and his body is just glad to be alive. The wind in the desert can be horrendous, but it blows away any clouds that might block the sky. They look at the hardened blue almost black sky, interrupted only by stars and a lowering moon and eventually by the horizon and the earth they’re thankful to still be on.
Sebastian asks Lucio if his last and immortal dying words were going to be ‘BUD’? The dazed passenger admits that God damn, you’re right Sebastian, I’ve got to find better famous-last-words. They laugh hysterically. It’s the kind of laugh that can only happen once you’ve looked Death in the eye and Death winked back. It’s a laugh that doesn’t come from humor. It comes from the same primal fear that causes people to piss themselves or erupt bile from their mouths. Luckily for these two, tears of laughter are the only body fluids that escape. In that crazed laughter is an apology and forgiveness.
Sebastian says he can’t drive for a minute. Says he needs to get out and walk around. Lucio agrees. The soft glow of the streetlights from the grid in town is closer. An orange dash in otherwise endless purple sands, spotted with yucca and Joshua trees and not a whole lot else.
When the cold wind hits them they decide they need to piss before hitting the road and they do it as friends, on a Joshua tree. They avoid eye contact and avoid splashing the other or getting caught in a runaway gust. Mid stream, and after a moment of quiet contemplation, Lucio asks his brother why he chose the name Sebastian. Well, he’s the patron saint of Athletes, Sebastian explains. But it was also to piss off my mom because he’s the patron saint of gay men. Lucio asks if that isn’t a big no-no for Catholics. Sebastian says it is but again, contradiction. Lucio implores his friend to go further–it’s not like the church can make homosexuality a sin and then make one of their superheroes gay, right?
Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s more of a question of European art history than it is of Dogma. You see, Diocletian (who you’ll recall persecuted early Christians) was a particularly evil soul. Sebastian was a soldier for Rome and a Catholic in secret, and he was beautiful. Diocletian wanted him as a concubine, but Sebastian refused. He was tied to a tree and shot with arrows for weeks and wouldn’t die; they eventually had to club him. It’s speculated Sebastian was a homosexual, and we can gather as much from how artists depicted him throughout time. To say that the paintings of this soldier being tied to a big piece of wood, impaled while naked by smaller pieces of wood are homoerotic is an understatement. This turned out to be a big PR problem for the church, so it was decided Sebastian would be the patron saint of homosexuals struggling to stay chaste. Now I don’t know what side of the street either of you boys play on, but I think it’s safe to say that the artists meant for even the straightest man to feel a bit more blood rush to his own bow and arrow after looking at one of their paintings. All of this was said by the coyote.
Sebastian is able to stop pissing and get his dick back in his pants before he steps away in shock. Lucio, for the life of him, can’t stop pissing. He has to watch in fear as the roadkill coyote shakes its bloody fur and cracks its bones back in place. It stands up and places itself between them and the car. It hadn’t noticed what they were doing up that way, in the shadow of the Joshua tree. But by the time Lucio zips up and clambers back to his friend, the coyote is sniffing the air with its broken snout and begins laughing like a coyote. A laugh that doesn’t sound dissimilar to the one the boys just exchanged, probably because the coyote too had looked Death in the eyes.
We died at this intersection, Lucio says under his breath. We’re in hell now. The coyote is stretching its back like a cat and you can hear the last of its vertebrates pop into place. It lets out a howl more like a yawn and says that no, no, no, no, no my friends you are very much alive. Sebastian asks if the same can be said of the coyote, and the coyote says that he should ask better questions. Lucio thinks of one and asks if the coyote is going to eat them. The coyote laughs again but says that no, they’re safe. It bears its teeth though and the rotting things catch moonlight. The two men stand tensely. Sebastian asks why the coyote knows so much about the saints and the coyote answers that it’s because it knows all things. Lucio asks how that could be and the coyote answers, because I am a God.
Then how’d you get hit by a car? The coyote bows its broken head in embarrassment. Well, things change, the coyote explains. People used to worship me, and there used to be no cars. Lucio asks what happened, but Sebastian knows the answer and feels guilty just then.
Catholics–, the coyote snorts, Catholics of the Spanish flavor. The coyote grows this time with each word. That’s why they love to focus on saints so much: They focus on the individuals that were martyred for their faith to distract people from the masses they killed for dominion. Now the beast is the size of Lucio. It sniffs the air. You’re wearing metal, it looks at Sebastian, what is it?
Underneath Sebastian’s shirt is the medallion of his saint.
Are you Catholic? asks the coyote as it stands and looks him in the eyes. It smells the same as a dog that shoves its face toward yours when it gets excited, that and death. Sebastian looks at Lucio and all he manages is a shrug.
More than I’d like to admit, Sebastian says. The coyote-God looks into his eyes and then deeper into his mind and heart.
It laughs, though this time in a soft kind of way. It hugs Sebastian and gives him a slap on the cheek, like Al Capone might. It holds his shoulders to itself: My friend, I think I understand you more than you understand yourself. Say no more. Where are you going?
Sebastian tells him, and the coyote laughs even more tenderly than before. The love of family, it says, is a noble pursuit all mammals share. I am bound to respect this. But, the coyote said pointing at Lucio, you two are having an encounter with the divine. You’re in no shape to drive. We can talk about how much we hate the church, maybe get a milkshake on the way. It holds out a paw, which is almost like a human’s palm now. But Sebastian clutches his car keys tight. He looks to Lucio for help.
Do you reckon we’re really alive? Lucio begins. I honestly think that we’re dead in that intersection. If the coyote says he wants to drive I say we let the coyote drive.
But Sebastian isn’t sure because… ya know.
Lucio says he understands his fear, but the coyote is right on this point: Neither of them should get behind the wheel. Then, the freezing, dusty wind joshes their hair.
Thermodynamics, Gravity, Catholic Guilt are a few of the most observable forces in the universe. Sebastian gives the coyote the car keys. The wounds in his cracked skull and legs are now healed. The rotten stench of death has practically faded away. The beast turns to Lucio and tells him that he is a wise man and a good friend indeed for his honesty.
The coyote hops in the driver’s seat and starts the engine. The young men look at each other, shrug, walk toward the car. But the doors won’t unlock. The coyote rolls down the windows just an inch.
Trickster-God motherfuckers, he says and speeds off. He throws the rosary that Sebastian kept hanging on his rear-view mirror in the dust at their feet.
Ok, Lucio goes, that was my bad, but we’re even now. And then, they laugh because the wind is so cold that it might actually kill them. But Sebastian says they shouldn’t worry too much. The sun is rising and they shouldn’t worry. They’ll catch a ride. Besides, it’s Catholic country, we’ll just tell whoever that we’re on our way to Confirmation and they won’t have it in them to say no to us. Then they started up the road.
