from The Angelic Doctors

They took their name from Thomas Aquinas, and they beat me within an inch of my life . . . An inch of my life, as if life is distant, and you have to get your jawbone shattered just to approach it . . . And even then, it’s still an inch away . . . My jaw is wired shut, Ana Maria, but I still have so much to say . . . So many dumb, unanswerable questions, the kind I used to hound you with when you were trying to watch TV in peace . . .  How many angels can dance on the head of a pin, that kind of shit . . . As the Angelic Doctors were bashing my face in, I kept catching glimpses of the dead eyes of a sparrow . . .  There were only two of them. The Angelic Doctors, I mean, not the sparrow eyes . . . Though I guess there were two sparrow eyes as well . . . Always one sparrow, one sparrow at a time, pinned to a corkboard in their warehouse squat, in a delicate, spread-winged crucifixion . . . Always at roughly the same point in the decomposition process . . .  Which means there were two possibilities. One: whenever a sparrow started to putrefy, they threw it in a dumpster and crucified a new one. Or two: they found a way, somehow, to stop the decay of a corpse . . . I never considered until right now whether the Angelic Doctors were hunting sparrows out in back of the warehouse, sniping them off power lines, or if they were capturing live sparrows in their fists and pinning them, still squawking, still squirming, to the corkboard . . . Whenever I asked the Angelic Doctors, over K2 and near-lethal quantities of crappy Polish beer, about the sparrows, they started talking about everything besides the sparrows . . . About a sculpture called Samson Slaying a Philistine (one of them, when I asked about the sparrows, said, “Lemme show you something real quick,” and brought up an image search of the marble slaughter, which we all stared and nodded at for a long time, and agreed was “super fire,” though what it had to do with the sparrows, I had no idea); about Deborah and Yael from Judges smashing a tyrant’s head like a watermelon; about the knife glittering in Abraham’s fist . . . It didn’t take a genius to understand sparrows were their lab rats . . . It didn’t take a detective to understand that, though they moved silent and committed a litany of crimes, the least of which was bashing in my jawbone and knocking out several of my teeth, they didn’t comprise a cabal, a conspiracy, or even a gang . . . They were just two stoners bent on breaking through the threshold of immortality . . . Fencing stolen auto parts out of their warehouse, yes . . . Plugged in with some Bayonne car thieves, yes . . . But that was just to survive. Their real work, as they said, was theoretical, theological, stonedly talking about Thomas Aquinas all day, a lifestyle that, in our neighborhood, required some illegal sideline or other to support . . . You couldn’t just not work and stonedly discuss Thomas Aquinas all day . . . This wasn’t Bushwick . . . Considering they started beating the shit out of me for no discernible reason, without me having done them dirty in any discernible way, then maybe we can, in fact, call the Angelic Doctors a gang, and as such, the beating they gave me, my jumping in . . . What else could it have been? . . . You remember that rap duo hot with all the white trash kids when we were growing up . . . Used to paint their faces like clowns, had that song called “Miracles” . . .  Except it wasn’t really about miracles, it was about magnets and shit . . . I’m pretty sure they used to cry onstage . . . Either they used to cry onstage or they shot somebody onstage . . . I’m concussed. My rap mythology’s all mixed up. Feed me some more morphine, Ana Maria, and tell me I’ll be alright . . . That’s who the Angelic Doctors reminded me of, those clown-rappers, with the makeup off . . . Pseudoscientists of the miraculous. Pseudotheologians of the rotting sparrow. In other words, my ideal company . . . It made you smile on our first date: “I’m not a theology student, I’m just some machinist who likes to think about shit” . . . “Some lunch-break mystic” . . .  To which you replied, “I’m not a nurse, I’m just a girl who likes jabbing needles in people” . . .  I annoy the shit out of everybody I meet—even myself; even, eventually, you—and so the machine shop is my antidotal habitat, all that metal-metal crash and screech rendering even one’s own thoughts inaudible . . . But I accepted long ago this solitary life of questioning, the way a born thief accepts a life of crime . . .  How many angels dance on the tip of this morphine injection? How many dance on a synapse? How many dance inside a bruise? How many dance on the tip of this dick? (Couldn’t resist.) How many dance across the inch of life I was beaten within? . . . You came up with this incredible analogy on our first date, and it told me you, too, thought deeply about shit. It told me I wasn’t alone. It was something about how me being an amateur theologian in a machine shop had much in common with you being a fat woman in health care . . .  “You and I both confront people with something they don’t expect, and it fucks them up sideways, they don’t know how to react” . . . Karl Barth said to believe means to no longer be alone . . . Ana Maria, I believed in you . . . Our first date, you wore those big gold hoops your friend brought you back from the Bruno Mars show that said chunky in the middle . . . I liked how you said “fucks them up sideways” with no hesitation. I liked how you said “fat” with no hesitation, not “thick” or “big-boned” or anything like that, which I guess should be expected from someone you meet on a dating app explicitly geared toward the overweight, but still, after you dropped that analogy, gold hoops glittering like Abraham’s knife, I saw our next half year sprawl out in front of us, I saw you cuddled on my sofa in my oversized sweatshirt the color of failure with rutgers across the chest, I saw you frying chorizo, queso blanco, and arepas on my cast iron, I saw all the stupid shit you’d watch on TV, the reality shows, the televangelist, I saw it all, the way Saint Clare, patron saint of television, used to see and hear a Catholic Mass at will against the bare wall of her room . . . It didn’t take long for you to set up shop in my little low-ceilinged attic loft . . . Did you love me, I couldn’t help but wonder, or did you just need to get the hell out of your mother’s house? . . . It didn’t take long to realize you were a recluse. It didn’t take long to realize you were a virgin. It didn’t take long to realize there was only one Catholic in the apartment, and it wasn’t you . . . It probably wasn’t me, either, if we’re being strict about it . . .  I’m Catholic in the sense that I want to sit around stoned and discuss Thomas Aquinas all day, not in the sense that I’d say no to being on the receiving end of a blow job . . . I’d work all day; you’d work all night—third shift, emergency. I’d get home at five thirty, and you’d wake up and yawn and wrap your arms around me and turn the TV on and start tweezing metal splinters out of my hands, like some grooming ritual of gorillas . . . A half hour of all hands and no eye contact: the splinter removal, then a cocoa butter–heavy hand job as you stared at the TV, or through it, past it, beyond it . . . God, all I wanted was for you to look at me . . . You didn’t even have to jack me off. All I needed, at that point, were your eyes . . . Your vagina also would have been nice . . . And so I left my copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions on the same folding tray table where you kept your tweezers, phone, and coffee mug, with Augustine’s quote “Lord, grant me celibacy, but not yet” underlined, highlighted, dog-eared, bookmarked, sticky-noted, starred, arrowed, and interrobanged . . . Augustine didn’t stand behind this quote of his. No, it was an example of the vain way he used to pray, an example of how foolish and dick-driven his twentysomething self was, before he gave up the playboy life to sing to God . . . But I was hoping you would read this quote out of context and safely assume the father of the Church was giving you the green light to get your reverse cowgirl on . . . Oh, to get you out of that Rutgers sweatshirt, those pajama bottoms knotted noose-tight . . . That Rutgers sweatshirt, that constant reminder of the not-quite, which made your titties shape-shift into two Sisyphean boulders . . . You’d be jacking me off, zoned out in the general direction of 90 Day Fiancé, and I’d start thinking, how did I get here? . . .  I could’ve stuck it out at Rutgers, studied classics, but instead, I was making a so-called living by operating complex heavy machinery while high enough to swallow a star . . . I’d be precision-cutting some microscopic superalloy connector—some obscure part for some obscure machine to be shipped off to some distant assembly line—all the while considering how many angels could dance on the tip of it . . . The only true endpoint is inquiry. The only questions worth asking are unanswerable . . . My jaw is wired shut, Ana Maria, but I still have so many questions. For example: Did you wipe your pussy on my copy of Confessions? . . . After you left for good, I found Confessions out of order on my bookshelf, pages all bloodstained . . . I sniffed it and it smelled like nothing. I sniffed it again and it smelled like nothing. I sniffed it a third time and it smelled exactly like you, though that was probably just the power of suggestion . . . Your periods were positively Vesuvian . . .  I loved them, probably because I didn’t have to suffer them. I loved them: they reminded me we were alive . . . I wasn’t even mad about my bloodstained Confessions. I reread it, and kept sniffing it, not even expecting to pick up a scent. Read a page, sniff a page. We all grieve breakups in different ways . . . I was reading my—our—bloodstained Confessions at that fake Irish pub I never managed to drag you to, the pub next door to the plastics processing plant, when the Angelic Doctors walked in . . . At first, when they took the two stools next to me, I thought they were deaf . . . Which was fine by me, I’m half-deaf from the machine shop, plus, deaf people are harder to annoy . . . But then one of them started talking about Saint Augustine, his theory that animals don’t have souls . . . Thus began my initiation . . . If you’re wondering why I started spending my evenings and weekends sitting around in a dusty, fly-infested warehouse full of stolen auto parts, then consider how many men spend their spare time sitting around in buildings smelling of sweat and synthetic chemicals—barbershops, auto garages, boxing gyms—discussing stupid shit to no discernible end . . . We were discussing stupid shit, too, we were just convinced our stupid shit was smart . . . But hey, I had some new friends who were heavy into theology, who were smoking me up for free . . . You’d finally had enough of me, Ana Maria . . . What was our last fight about? The televangelist? You were watching him; I was eyerolling. The televangelist bleating about believing in yourself and following your heart . . . And I told you how Saint Augustine had a word for preachers who explicate Scripture using everything besides Scripture: liars . . . Next thing I knew, all I had left was the cum-stained Rutgers sweatshirt, the bloodstained Confessions . . . The sweatshirt folded with expert, ex-retail symmetry, the Confessions misshelved . . . How quiet the attic loft minus the reality shows, the televangelist . . . If not for the endless soliloquies I delivered to nobody, I really would’ve lost it . . . Next thing I knew, weeks passing among the Angelic Doctors . . . The metal overhead garage door open, sun coming in, the three of us sitting on overturned milk crates, one of us reading out loud, from G. K. Chesterton’s The Dumb Ox, a passage about how the strangeness of faith must adapt to the strangeness of the world, the way the intricacy of a key must be commensurate with its keyhole, the other two of us passing a K2 blunt, its smoke like a fish market and a paint factory burning in unison . . . Next thing I knew, they were beating me half to death, without me having done anything to them . . . Why half to death and not all the way? Did I annoy them to the point that a clobbering was warranted, but not manslaughter? Or was this a lesson in grace—an Old Testament God limiting His plagues to ten instead of ten million . . . Let us give thanks for all the bones the Angelic Doctors left unbroken . . . Am I an Angelic Doctor hasta la muerte now, meant to have faith in, to give thanks for, without ever understanding, their mysterious beating? . . .  Ana Maria, good thing I can’t get down on one knee, because I’d probably propose . . . I’d alchemize a gold ring out of nothing but the memory of a dead sparrow . . . Maybe I’m just overly vulnerable after three weekends of K2-induced ego death and three minutes of steel toe–induced near death . . . Good thing my jaw is wired shut, because I’d be driveling, sentimental . . . After I peeled myself off the Angelic Doctors’ warehouse floor, a cabdriver spotted me dragging my body behind me up Garfield Avenue . . .  Didn’t ask any questions, dumped me in emergency, drove off as fast as he drove in . . . Didn’t ask any questions, but answered many of mine. For example: How fast can an angel drive? How many red lights can he blast through? How does he manage to have a heated, irrelevant speakerphone argument in progress as he saves a life? . . . All work is miracle work . . . Ana Maria, you’re well aware . . . Maybe it’s just the morphine talking, but I’m at peace here, among the beeps of the multipara machines and the squeak of your Crocs, beneath the rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10 poster, its smiling and frowning faces gazing down upon me as if to say, at the same time, it’s all fucked, it’s all gonna be alright . . .