the bespeckled rag on his lap and reached into a wooden bracket attached to the pew ahead of them. Every church pew had this same cubby, and from it the old man pulled a worn copy of the Bible. He flipped his wrist up. Right here, he said.
The main door of the church opened behind them and the two turned in their pew to see an older lady peek her head inside. They both waved and their waves were friendly enough to suggest familiarity, and she edged her shoulder inside enough to give a wave back and she reminded the old man that he was the one locking up tonight. He said that he always was, and she wished them a good night before slipping back into the darkness.
They both turned in the pew to face the front of the church again. The old man said, Son, you’ve been telling me about this idea of yours about being a saint, and if you’re trying to be a Christian saint then there is one truth. It’s right here.
The old man tapped the Bible that he then placed on the pew next to him.
Silvio chewed on the inside of his lip. He said, I know that. But maybe the omniscient, omnipresent—you know, the omni words—can’t be understood in that way. I’m not convinced that one collection of testimonies can possibly embody the everything that ever has been and will be, everywhere. How can the alpha and the omega be compressed into one book? It should be more complex than that.
Son, those aren’t just testimonies. That’s the word of God in there, as spoken through his prophets and the like.
Prophets declaring themselves prophets doesn’t make them anything. Just arrogant, and big mouthed. Claiming to be a hero or a villain can’t alter your very essence into something it is not—into something it is not designed to be. I’ve met people that had no claim for what they thought they were, and the ones that did hardly ever got it right by my estimation.
The old man ran a hand over his sparsely haired head. He said, Well if we are going by that logic, I’d declare you to be something like a Quaker.
I’m not a Quaker, Silvio said.
Okay, but that goes to your point.
What point?
The old man said, That, when confronted with a mirror, we hardly recognize ourselves. That, if we take someone at their word, they will likely fool us. But they are what they are, and you’re no different Silvio. I know that I, for one, am comforted by the fact that inside all of us is the true knowledge that something, somewhere, knows what we really are, and a time will come when we will need to answer for whatever that is.
Well if we are what we are, then what is there to answer for?
The old man’s beaten face didn’t change and neither did his tone. His right hand still rested on the worn Bible cover as he stared forward at the generic jacket of the hymn books shelved in the pew’s cubby.
It’s not a test where everyone gets the same questions. We each of us have our own events to answer for, and the better we answer for them here the better we can answer for them wherever we are going. We know what we are supposed to do, but whether we do it or not is something else entirely. Whether we do it or not is what we must answer for.
Now the old man leaned forward on the pew with his hands folded in his lap and his feet gone under the bench like some existential gargoyle. Silvio measured him momentarily with a look of concern and then diverted his attention toward the front of the nave again. On the wall hung a large crucifix with an exhausted depiction of Jesus carved skillfully out of the wood’s origin. Like the pews, it was heavily lacquered, and it glowed dully in response to the church’s indistinct lighting. Even with the poor lighting he could make out the defeated features immortalized by the carving. An alleged god come to the dirty stratum of man to share a message of life and love and here hung the response to such things. And what else to do with a slain god other than forge trophies of its defeat?
Through his stony lips the old man said, If you were to send a blind man down some path, would you let him know where that path ended up if you knew so yourself?
What path?
Any path. Would you tell him?
Well I guess if it ended up nice I’d go ahead and tell him. If it didn’t end up nice I’d as soon not send him down the path in the first place.
And if you didn’t know how the path ended up?
Silvio considered this for a minute.
If I didn’t know how it ended up then there wouldn’t be much to offer as far as him taking down that path or not. I’d tell him to go right ahead. As far as some blind man is concerned that path is as good as any other.
What if it ends up bad?
Well, there’s no telling what worse or better path he would have taken. If it ends up bad there’s no telling that down another path it wouldn’t have ended up worse. If you ask me, a blind man knows more about bad luck than just about anybody. They don’t seem like the bunch to bemoan a little misstep here or there.
The old man laughed and said, No, they don’t.
What are you asking me about this anyway? You got a blind man in your life that needs directions?
The old man was still hunched forward in the pew. It’s a parable, he said.
A parable about what?
He said, It just depends on who you think is blind and who you think isn’t.
——————————————————————
I worked through high school at a local grocery store. I was technically hired as a bagger, but I had to do a little bit of everything—bag groceries and stock shelves and sweep aisles, and so on. Basically anything that limited me and my fellow bagger’s contact with the customers, which is fair because this kid Peter had the same gig as me but he mostly was just stoned out of his mind the whole time he was on the clock. He’d light up in the parking lot in his car before his shift, and he’d go back out there on every break. He smelled like mother nature and did every part of the job with an idiot’s smile on his face—always reeking of cheap weed. I think he got the job due to some distant family relation calling in a favor. But honestly, aside from his habit of snacking on the store’s fresh produce, he was a pretty good worker, so long as customers couldn’t smell him and didn’t look into his eyes long enough to appreciate just how bloodshot they were. Drugs never appealed to me, but eight hours of bagging peanut butter and toilet paper and yogurt and eggs and shampoo and fruit snacks and bread and milk can almost drive a man to smoke anything. After a particularly depressing shift I took up Peter’s offer to go to his car. I had no point of reference in terms of how high I was, but he offered up a string of muffled giggles and kept telling me, You’re baked out of your gourd, man. He continued laughing and said that people in there were going to confuse me with one of the cakes in the bakery section. What kind of cake bags groceries? I didn’t know, but I laughed too. When we got back to work it felt like the whole world had gotten itself a coat of molasses. I suspect it took me about thirty minutes to load one bag of canned corn and tomato soup. After a few customers I was approached by my manager and was sure that I was in trouble. I was, but not the kind that I thought. She told me that there had been an accident and I was needed in our produce section. I arrived in produce to find a cart of cleaning supplies waiting for me, as well as a trail of diarrhea leading to the restrooms. Apparently, somebody had shit their pants while looking for some properly ripe bananas. That was maybe the worst thirty minutes of my life up to that point,
