Pilgrims: An Excerpt

My brother ran away from home and never came back. He was sixteen. My dad was there when it happened, standing on a hill overlooking a field somewhere in Virginia, a field where once a thousand men charged across the space between one row of trees and another, and nine hundred men died.

According to my dad’s account, my brother took off in the lead pack. He was a really good runner. Better than I ever was. In the Post, they ranked him as a “Runner to Watch” before the season began. There were only a few others. He was with that pack after the first mile, before they bent themselves into a single track trail through the woods, a trail where once—running against me—Dylan Johnson jammed his toe up against a rock and went headfirst into the root of a tree, his body prone on the ground as the other kids ran right over him.

My dad was at the mile marker the day my brother ran away. He was surrounded by a handful of coaches and parents. He hasn’t seen my brother since. Later, they interviewed a runner—Marty Wells—who was in the lead pack with him. Marty was right behind my brother as they went into the woods, and then the trail veered left within the woods; my brother never turned. He ran straight through the bramble and kept on going. Marty yelled after my brother. He admitted later that the yell was halfhearted. There was sweat in my throat, he said. I was like, what, he said. He was the last person we know who saw my brother.

My dad recounted all of this to me. He told me about Marty Wells’s half-hearted yell, and how the bramble opened to take my brother’s body and closed right up behind him. That day, over the phone, my dad sounded so alone. Like someone telling a story about a bird that flew away. But not just any bird. A cardinal, maybe, that someone took a picture of as it bent its body to nibble the feed that someone had gently sprinkled along a porch’s cast iron rail. A cardinal, eventually, that someone took to be a friend—a visitor from somewhere else. And then one day, no more. My dad sounded like that. Like someone fucked over by mystery. Mystery will do that. It will open some door far off in the distance, and close all the ones you can see.

What do I do now, my dad said.

You wait, I said. The word’s out. There are people better than us at handling these things.

How can you not be worried, he said.

I am worried, I said.

It’s because he’s joined you, he said.

What?

He’s joined you. First there was you, now there’s both of you.

I held the phone away from my ear, feeling my dad’s sadness grow into its old and familiar frustration. From somewhere in the back of my brain emerged an image of him on the other end of the phone: a bearded man, loose denim shirt, holding the phone with his left hand and, with his right, pulling a slot machine’s lever one more time, that big huge slot machine of life; the machine was broken now, and when it once worked, he never felt he’d hit the jackpot.

I took that phone call from a wood-walled room inside a building with so many wood-walled rooms. I was a postulant then, in my year of candidacy at a Trappist abbey perched on a hill in upstate New York. When I talked to my dad, a great silence welled up around me, a silence that was always there. I held the phone back to my ear, and even then it was there. It was the silence of kitchens in dark houses, the silence of someone waking up to find something to eat, shuffling their feet so as not to wake anyone, stubbing a toe against the couch’s wooden legs, muffling the noise from their mouth with a tired palm.

I am not lost, Dad, I said.

I know you’re not lost, he said. But you’re not here.

You’re right. I am not there. I am here.

Here or there, he said. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are away. And your brother is, too.

Away from what?

The world.

I am very much in the world.

You are in your world, he said. Not mine. Not anyone else’s.

There are other people here.

I’m sure there are.

There was a pause. I felt my dad’s sadness become a kind of anger. And then I felt the anger go away. I felt it washed away by breath. And then there was more silence, and the sadness resumed. And then even more silence, and the sadness became weary. A big leaf drooping. And then we sat in the weariness, which was its own silence, except heavier, like we weren’t holding phones, but rocks. And like we didn’t know what to do with these rocks in our hands. So we just looked at them, each on our own. And then we set them down.

I’m sorry, he said. It’s hard.

I know it’s hard, I said.

Are you going to quote the Bible at me, he said.

When have I ever quoted the Bible at you?

I wondered about his choice of that little word: at. Little sharp thing it was. It sounded like cat. Or scat. Even attack. It sounded violent. And I wondered: do I come across as violent? To anyone? To my father? Strange—that such a tiny word could be so barbed. Though even a stab wound is just a little slit in the skin.

I know, he said, I just mean.

I could feel him quivering then, and he suddenly seemed old, so old. He seemed the kind of old you cannot reverse, which I guess is all forms of old, no matter what anyone says. He reached that point of oldness. And in his oldness he became small, and I thought he could maybe crawl through his end of the phone, cross the space between us, and emerge from my phone in the same room as me. But he didn’t, because he couldn’t. He was old and small and far away.

I know, I said. He will be found.

He will be found, he said.

I received that call on the communal phone at the abbey, in this room that felt purposely tucked away from everything else, as if it were a place where someone might keep a golden calf away from everyone if they had to keep a golden calf at all. The abbot beckoned me there and held out the phone like a foreign object, a diaper perhaps, something covered in shit. Though what would he know about that? When I hung up the phone, I was alone in the secret room, as I often found myself. Alone. In rooms. Some secret. Some not. Some of my own making. Some of the world’s. And I sat there, knowing I would be undisturbed, and thought of my brother, all five-foot-eight-inches of him, all skin and bone, trudging through streams like some character out of the third edition of Discovering Ourselves in Time: An Illustrated Early American History Textbook for High School Students. I let myself imagine him identifying edible plants, figuring out which berry wouldn’t kill him, even fashioning a small pickaxe out of the earthly things this earth provides. He was there in front of me, and we were together in our secret room, and he held out a berry to me that looked poisonous though I trusted him when he told me it wasn’t. And then he was gone, and I lost the taste in my mouth. All of that—that image, that moment—lasted less than five seconds. And then I returned to simply knowing how it must be. My brother: young, despondent, alone, thinking that he was partaking on a mythical story, when really he was most likely enacting—a little bit too convincingly—some wayward fantasy of youth. And me? Then? I rose early at the sound of bells and mumbled my prayers. I spent my days baking, in the company of other prayerful bakers. I knew so much silence at that time that the sound of my father’s voice had felt like a missile. A sorrowful missile moving in slow motion through the doldrums.

The following day I awoke in complete darkness, as I always had. Three in the morning. The moon was still in the sky, a little feverish and wobbly. I wandered, quiet and breathless, to our morning vigils. I held my non-yet-worn psalm book in my hand, murmuring myself awake in the back of the abbey’s church. Up on the altar, Brother Olds droned on, perhaps not even awake yet. Though I think he was. He had a voice fit for his name. It sounded ancient, as if the voice had traveled the long length of a subterranean tunnel to arrive at the end of the darkness that marked the opening that was his mouth. We made our way through the Book of Psalms.

What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest?

When I heard that line, I felt myself catch. Or be caught, like someone yanked by an invisible string. I felt myself caught by something, yes. I don’t want to say God. No, not yet. I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll never be.

I didn’t come to the abbey out of devotion to Christ. I came, instead, out of fear of the world. I wanted less of it and all its incessant beeping, how it so often took someone’s eyes off the small joy of a dog doing that thing where it is breathing so hard it is kind of smiling and placed those eyes—without their permission—onto something else, a flash of ten million lights condensed into something so small it could fit in a pocket sewn inside a pocket. So I came to a place that had less. Though that’s not the whole story. The whole story is longer, and involves my name, which I have revoked, and it involves fear, which I still have, and sadness, which I carry with me like a paper bag of groceries.

But sometimes, in my time at the abbey, I felt myself caught in this way. Caught by a line or a word or an image. Once, walking between the abbey’s church and my room, I looked at the moon and then looked away and then looked at the moon again. And then I saw the moon droop just a little bit in the sky, like the woman tasked with the job of holding it up had grown tired, and let the yarn fall. But then the moon regained its presence. Shone above the trees. Relit the dark.

Don’t worry, the moon said to me.

I know, I said.

What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest?

And so, when I heard that line, I felt myself say God, are you there? God didn’t answer. I think he was sleeping. I tried again. I said: Is that you speaking to me? And I thought maybe this is why we rose so early, to still be a little sheepish, a little less prepared and so more ready for God—all of their weird and wild ways. So that we might even say yes, there’s a little less I know and a whole lot more I don’t. Because instead of sea, I heard brother, and instead of fleddest, I heard rannest the fuck away.

What ailed thee, O brother, that thou rannest the fuck away?

We often went straight from vigils to breakfast, which was served communally in what one might imagine to be some kind of Gothic nave of long tables and holiness, but really resembled a late-century Denny’s, somewhere between wood and formica. That morning, though, I went straight from vigils to who knows where. It was still dark out, but the sky had arrived at that quality of, well, morning. There was some kind of light shimmering beneath the edges of the sky, like a stage lit from under its floorboards. The monastery was south of Rochester, not far from the Genesee River, and everything around it was flat lands and fields, roads that went on nearly forever. I knew the trees eventually ended. They always do, either at a road or a city or some distant shoreline. Nothing goes on forever.

I was at a Catholic university in New York City when I decided to visit the monastery for the first time. I confessed to a priest-professor my ever-rising sense of urgent malaise. I think that’s what I called it: urgent malaise. I feared everything.

One day, leaving class, Stu Johnson—Stooge, people called him, deepening their voices and lengthening their vowels as they yelled his name from across the campus—touched me on the shoulder. He was a known person. Across social groups, across sports teams—everyone who was anyone knew him. Beloved and statuesque, he played the guitar each Tuesday night in the announcer’s booth of the football field, a crowd of people gathered in the bleachers below him, each of them looking up toward him as he led them softly through a verse that built and built and built until it crescendoed into a foot-stomping shout.

Hey, the song went, I was looking for my home.

Hey, the song went, and then I met you.

Hey, the song went, and I ain’t looking for my home no more.

Home, everyone sang together, home home home.

Yo, Stu said.

Hey, I said.

Beside us, all along the field that marked the center of campus, people from different companies sat in different tents, recruiting interns with free water bottles and promises of unpaid labor. I heard the word network a hundred times, and I felt disconnected and alone. Floating out in space.

What’s your ten year plan? Stu said.

My what, I said.

What’s your ten year plan? Your goals. I’ve been asking everyone.

I’m not a business major.

No problem, he said. Your life is a network. Now organize it. Job. Wealth. Health. Relationships. Put them each in a column. Now tell me: in ten years, where are you at with each one?

I, I said.

It’s not necessary—he touched me on the shoulder again—but it is necessary.

Behind the job fair, in the middle of the wide open green field, people sunbathed or tossed frisbees. Stu and I walked through a maze of suits. Someone handed me a pair of socks embroidered with dollar bills.

Free money, they said.

I tried not to take them, but it seemed I had to take them. I put them in my pocket, and fuzzy dollar bills peeked out.

So, Stu said. Your goals.

Okay, I said. Well, I still, I still don’t really know.

Let me tell you some of mine. I want to run a marathon by the time I’m twenty-five. And then another marathon each year, each faster than the next until I’m thirty and people call me Mr. Fast. Like, I’m talking about people looking at me and knowing that I know how to endure some shit, and endure it fastly.

Fastly, I said.

Fastly, he said.

He smiled at this, and I tried to smile, too, but I did what I always do when I try to smile and can’t—I looked down.

And, he said, that’s what I’m viewing as my job. That’s my job column. Serious stuff. Separately, I’ll lock down a full-time hobby. Something in wealth management. I’ll tackle that like a marathon. Each year, I’ll manage another million, another million, another million. Manage and grow.

How many millions are there in the world, I said.

There are at least a billion millions, he said.

And how many—

It’s all exponential, he said.

And with his finger on my shoulder he drew a line that soared off my skin and into the air, until he was pointing at the sun. As he did this, we emerged from the job fair and had to walk around a tree breaking through the sidewalk, its gnarled trunk stretching for light.

It’s not about how much or what’s possible, he said. The world out there doesn’t care. You have to believe in the limitless. You have to be as violent as the world is. You grow because you need to get big enough to answer its violence with your own. You grow big, baby. Big as a thundercloud.

But what if I don’t—

It’s winners and losers, bud.

I don’t want to believe that.

No plan, Stu said, no life.

I watched someone chase a Frisbee down with a long, loping stride, bare feet touching the grass and then lifting off again. He soared into the air, leapt up to catch the disc, and just missed. I thought maybe he would cry, scream, slap the ground with his fist. But he just lay there, face down in the grass, and laughed a big belly laugh that made his whole body bounce. Once, after it snowed four feet one day in my childhood, my dad took me to the second floor of our house, bundled me in coats, and threw me out the window. I spread my arms, thinking them wings, and fell headlong into the winter dunes. My dad was there, seconds later, to grab me from the depths. My nose was red and my cheeks were red and my eyes stung so bad and we laughed so hard we cried.

I was a bird, I said then.

You were so bad at being a bird, he said. And you were so good, too.

What do you do, I thought, in a world that speaks in a language so different from that first one—that trying and failing and flailing language of being and becoming yourself?

Stu, I said, do you play guitar in your ten year plan?

Do I play the guitar?

Yeah, is there—is there any part in your plan that talks about the guitar? And you playing it?

No, he said. I just love it. It doesn’t belong in the plan. The plan is not about that.

Sure, I said. Yeah. I get it.

Speaking of. We’re getting together above the field tonight. You know where. You’ll come?

He slapped me on the shoulder and walked away. The Frisbee man was back to striding again. I moved past table after table of prospective employers, each arranging cards and papers at their respective places. There were so many of them out already. What is this life, I thought, and I didn’t have an answer. I walked, then, to find Father Stilts.

Father Stilts was my priest-professor. He was, by his own admission, someone who had seen Forrest Gump too many times. He was one of those priests who had a life before the priesthood, and when I met him for office hours, he told me stories about this life. He did not withhold much. He smoked in that life before, and had girlfriends—even, once, a boyfriend—and he did various hard drugs that left him in various states of consciousness of which he remembered very little except where he would wake up. These stories often ended with him saying such a moment was bad news or not great. He eventually had enough bad news, and longed for better. He longed through theology classes and vows of silence and shifts on an oncology ward until he was there, sitting in front of me, with three stray cats he had collected from campus and a tattoo on his arm that quoted a question from one of Paul’s letters: Are your hearts tender and compassionate?

I always feel nervous, Stilts, I said.

A symptom of your greater awareness, my friend.

Do you mean I will always feel nervous?

I mean, he said, yes.

I gripped the chair’s arm, thinking of Stu sitting high above me in some building’s top floor, then taking the elevator down for lunch and seeing me on the street—me, still trying to figure out what to make of my life in the midst of year six of his ten year plan—and not even remembering my name.

Do you want to feel less than nervous?

I don’t know what that means.

To accept your state of nervousness as part of who you are, to reframe it as a sign of your attention, and to live with it rather than to try to be apart from it—what do you make of that?

One of the cats walked a slow slalom between my legs and then fell to the ground and looked up at me with a scowl. I pet its belly with my foot while it attacked my shoe.

Another cat used one quick, sharp swipe of its paw to snag and snatch the pair of money socks that had been peeking out of my pocket.

I think I do accept my state of nervousness, I said. I just wish it wasn’t the case.

Do other people anger you?

I just feel alone. It’s like the world has said: here I am, and I don’t like the world, and then the world says: it is me or nothing, and I don’t want to choose nothing.

There’s more, he said.

There’s a brutality to life, I said. Maybe not life. But life, yeah. People want to attack it. Like, they really want to attack it. It all becomes work and warfare. Every employer—I gestured out of Stilts’s window to the job fair below—is saying first year salary this, starting salary that. They promise more money in a year than I ever thought possible, and then I still bet when Stu or anyone gets that job, they’ll complain about it all. They’ll say what they say on campus when they’re up late in the library. This shit sucks me dry. This shit kills. I want nothing of that world. It’s so mean. But everyone lives in it.

Ah, he said. And then he coughed. And then he paused. And then he looked down at the cat still attacking my foot, and then at the cat mauling a pair of socks. Sometimes Father Stilts seemed like he was pretending to be somebody else, but then I remembered the stakes of his vow, and this life of renunciation he imposed on himself, and I felt a desperate admiration paired with a vague bewilderment in his presence.

The meanness of the world, he said. You know it exists alongside—and not in the absence of—peace? Let me tell you something. Once, I woke up handcuffed to a pipe in the green room of a music bar in Portland. A guy was screaming at me the moment I opened my eyes. He said I owed him two hundred bucks for a snare drum I had picked up and smashed my forehead through.

The meanness, I said.

Oh boy, he said. The meanness. That was not great. I don’t know where it came from or why I did it, and I never will. But I will always remember that I did it. And maybe that I could again. I live with that meanness. And you know what?

Yeah?

My friend told me the next morning that I had tried to baptize a complete stranger’s baby under a soda fountain.

The peace, I said.

The peace, my friend. You have to find yours.

I don’t know how, I said.

It’s not about knowing how, he said.

I looked down and saw that my shoelace had been, somehow and irrevocably, entirely removed from my shoe.

You know, he said, let me tell you something else.

You don’t have to, I said. But I’ll welcome it.

Once I woke up in a bathtub in a stranger’s house in Seattle.

Not again, I said.

And I stared for maybe an hour at the tiles around the tub, and then at the grout between the tiles. It was orange, rust-like. Gross. Absolutely gross, brother. But there, probably in every house in America. And so I didn’t know the house I was in, but I knew the grout. And that’s all I knew about life. The grout. I didn’t know anything else. Not my own home. Not my friends. I didn’t know myself. I only knew the grout. I had read many books while sleeping on a mattress that sat on the bare wood of my bedroom floor. And I didn’t know them, either. I knew then, finally, that if I wanted to know anything, which is part of loving something, I would have to change my life in a radical way.

Rilke, I said. You must change your life.

This was the only quote from Rilke I knew, and I used it often, mostly to myself. I’d walk around campus and look at the people and say you must change your life. But I wasn’t talking to them. I wasn’t even speaking out loud. I was talking to myself.

Yes, he said. I realized I must change my life.

And you did. 

I did, he said. And you, friend?

Do I feel I must change my life? No. I just don’t want to be so nervous.

I didn’t tell him that I often walked around telling myself that I should change my life.

Well, he said, maybe you should consider someplace different. Someplace far different from this.

And with that, he told me about this monastery south of Rochester that accepted individuals to come out on their own for retreats. He sent an email on my behalf and a few days later, I found myself on a bus. Along grass highways. Beside long lakes. Through towns with factories and towns with one store, a post office, and a gas station clogged with bikers. I got off in Rochester and—because I still, after that bus ride, didn’t know how to drive—walked the thirty miles to the monastery, my few days’ worth of clothes riding in a pack high up on my back. I arrived, absolutely pouring sweat and devastated by thirst, and a monk batted not a single eyelash and showed me to my room, this bare bones thing without internet. From somewhere came the smell of bread.

I took one step outside and drew a deep breath. The sky was a blue, hazy thing, and even though the sun wasn’t as bright and bold as it could be, the buildings on the monastery grounds glittered. Some were built from these dark rocks that speckled like constantly turning crystals, and the grass was wound through with paths that curved, it seemed, just for the sake of it. I didn’t know if I was home, but I certainly wasn’t in New York anymore. Whatever nervousness I still had was for an entirely different reason than anything I might call urgent malaise. I was just wondering if I was crazy.

I had been reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain on the way to Rochester. How many monks show up on their first day with that beefy book lodged in their pack? I’d bet two. At least two a year. I’d bet the number is higher for your everyday folks, which I was at the time, those just looking to get some monkish spirit on a weekend-long retreat. At one point in the book, Merton talks about his vocational godsend, this extraordinary moment that occurred in such an ordinary setting: eating breakfast with friends, a record on, pockets stuffed with cigarettes. He describes his desire to enter religious life as “a new and profound clear sense that this was what I really ought to do.” On the bus, I underlined that passage and then looked out the window as we dropped off a cliff into Ithaca and then slowly climbed out of it until a massive lake emerged. I wanted that kind of clarity. I wanted it to be thrust into my life by a mighty hand punching down from the sky. I stared at the sky, but no hand came. The rocks only continued to glitter.

What I really ought to do. And what was that? Right before I left, I went into the newly-built business school to print an aimless theology paper, a final mess of words and ideas about this guy Karl Rahner, who, upon being asked if someone who wasn’t a Christian could get into heaven, made up this term, Anonymous Christian, basically arguing that anyone could be welcomed into heaven if they were a good person. I wrote about how much I admired the idea but how it also felt a little overbearing to just label people as Christian even if they didn’t ask for it. And so, I churned out pages and pages of how I basically felt a little weird about everything, and I went to print it all off at the newly-built business school, where the whole first floor was constructed as a replica of the New York Stock Exchange. A stock ticker ran the length of the wall.

That day, a crowd of business school kids gathered under the ticker as it threw these coded groups of letters and corresponding numbers and arrows across the room, the harsh neon of them illuminating the once boyish now slightly stubbled but still young and yet remarkably and uniformly chiseled faces of the students watching below. Everything inside was made of glass, so even though I was rooms away, I could see them there, gazing up as the numbers zoomed around and around. They were looking for something. Waiting. It seemed beatific. That was the word that came to mind as I counted the pages of my paper to make sure they all were there. Beatific. The crowd. The gazing. The green glow on the pale cheeks of the faces. The silence that sheltered me.

And then it happened. A once green arrow that pointed up turned red and immediately pointed down. And though I could not hear anything, I saw the mouths open and the arms go up. Something had happened. Something had been lost, and because of that loss, something had been won. And the students, eyes glittered with ambition, opened their wide and somehow beautiful mouths and opened them even further, and even wider. And their arms—pits free from sweat—reached skyward and touched shoulders on their way to God. And I saw Stu there, on the ground, his face gleaming as if just-lotioned, glowing green and then, briefly, red. I looked at the pages I had printed, full of words like predestination, risk, and faith. And then I looked through the glass at the crowd. They were priests in suits.

I spent my three days of retreat at the monastery reading Merton. There are worse ways to spend one’s time, I guess. And wandering. I did a lot of that. I ran, too. Like my brother, who at the time had just broken his middle school’s gym mile record as an eighth grader, and who we—myself and my dad—assumed would etch his name into record books, would run a mile in a time that began with the number three.

Jim Ryun, my dad kept saying. He’s going to be the next Jim Ryun.

And I’d think of Jim Ryun—hair cut close to his head, collarbones divoting his shoulders into shadows, running a world record on a dirt track somewhere in Kansas.

Jim Ryun, I’d say back. Jim Ryun.

On those three mornings, I woke to the sound of bells in what seemed like pitch black, though, when my eyes adjusted, it revealed itself as more of a blueblackpink, like someone had taken a soft pink watercolor brush and run it over gasoline. With nothing else to do, I’d put on my running shoes, which I always triple-knotted, untied, then triple-knotted again, and jog down the monastery’s cinder road until I found a path that ran along the river. I’d run until dawn became, well, dawn, and then turn back around and make my way toward that bare bones room. It was the smell of bread that would guide me back. By the end of my few days, I could’ve managed the way back in total darkness.

And it was that smell of bread I remembered the most when I returned to New York City, where sometimes the smell of bread would knock me senseless, how it snuck between the humid stink of dead rats and the bleachy exhaust of laundromats, reminding you of something good, like passing by the open door of an air-conditioned store on a hot summer day. It was hard not to be just a little romantic about it. I mean, yes, Jesus said something about man not living on bread alone, but it often seemed like living on bread alone could put you just a little bit closer to whatever you might think of as heaven. And making bread? That seemed right.

I spent my last morning of the retreat watching the monks make bread. It was not as romantic as I’d hoped. Though the walls of the monastery glittered like the eyes of a thousand old and wise men peering into the dark, the inside of the monastery didn’t have the same allure. But the monks made a shit ton of bread. It was an operation. It got bagged and packaged and shipped off to, I imagine, those who might have, hooked by the novelty, once purchased a loaf of bread made by monks, only to find that, to their strange surprise, the loaf was quite good (and why wouldn’t it be), and ordered a loaf again. And again. This consumption became part of their personal journey to salvation.

I watched these old baking monks shuffle from one massive machine to the next, gentle captains of industry. There was a kind of playful reverence to it, maybe enhanced by the minimal quality of the room they were in, which looked like something made only out of plywood and metal. If these guys weren’t monks, I’d have thought them to just be old Italians. Little dudes playing these larger than life roles of tradition and culture, sometimes smiling, but mostly knowing exactly what their hands were supposed to do. You don’t often get to witness someone doing something with a lot of love involved. But it happens every day. Every waking minute, someone is doing something somewhere, almost solely out of love. You have to decide to witness it, decide to pay attention to these acts—because it takes some looking before what seems ordinary becomes extraordinary. When it happens, when you see it—you look at something so small and notice the whole world churning to life inside of it.

Back at school, I realized how hard it was to find those moments of attention. Even my professors seemed somewhere else. I got A’s on my papers just because they were long enough and contained an invisible prerequisite amount of properly punctuated compound sentences. The job fairs came and went, but I never attended. People left to go abroad and came back tanned, newly dressed, vaguely hungover.

One morning, after a group of students had succeeded in protesting the appearance on campus of a regressive and reductive political figure, I walked to class and passed a man with a microphone standing in front of a camera, interviewing random students about why they hated the person that they protested. Most students, oblivious, definitely hungover, couldn’t put together an answer. Some students, I’m sure, could. But I watched the clip later—viral, already making its rounds—from the segment of the news organization’s show that featured only the stammering of students who didn’t know why they were being asked a question. Over and over again, the host called them idiots.

And still, throughout the days, I watched in silence from the glass-walled computer room of the business school as the glowing crowd screamed. Fuck, their mouths moved. Yes, their lips moved. And still that phrase—what I really ought to do—hung in the back of my head like a poster framed in the background of a bathroom mirror. The only routine I cherished was waking early on Friday mornings to walk to the bakery a few blocks away from the college bars, where once a week, they made only a few loaves of the richest, most delicious chocolate bread, these darkened balls of buttery dough still steaming from inside of the paper bag they bagged them in. I’d pull a loaf apart with my hands the moment I walked out of the shop, and the smell of chocolate mixed with the dewy scent of dawn as all around me trucks backed into the spaces next to restaurants and butchers and cheese shops, and people grinned and shouted and did the invisible dance of making the world a thing you can find pleasure in by the time the sun has crested the straight line of the horizon. I’d think, in those moments, if this was my life, and then the thought would stop there. Maybe that’s what a vocation is. Just a simple decision to commit to eating chocolate bread.

As graduation loomed, I still had no idea what to do. The world was a place where, it seemed, everyone could be a baker, and almost no one was. The idea of the monastery was something wistful, a beautiful place I had once been, but nothing real–no part of a ten year plan. And then it happened.

My man, Stu said, as he found me once more by the gnarled tree growing out of the sidewalk.

What’s up, I said.

Tough luck, he said, gesturing at his phone before walking away, one single stride of his placing him almost out of sight.

And I sat down on a bench and took out my phone, which I kept on silent, and which was overflowing with Facebook notifications.

Go fuck yourself, messaged someone I had never met.

Fucking psycho killer—this, from another stranger.

Devil worshipping satanic fucker die die die in hell motherfucker.

I scrolled through it all, nearly delirious, wondering what had happened.

A stranger said: I hope the breath you breathe while you’re reading this is the last breath you take.

And another: Sicko monster fucker asshole I hope you die and then die again, but this time with a worse death than the one before.

And again: Your family should rot in hell too for giving birth to you, shitface.

And then I saw the headline: Disgruntled Employee Enters Wal-Mart, Goes on Rampage, Kills Dozens. His name, I noticed, was Bobby Keene. My name, I should tell you, is also Bobby Keene, but I don’t call myself Bobby anymore.

Jesus, I said.

You are what’s wrong with everything, someone said.

And then I began to cry.

I thought of what Stilts had said about the meanness and the peace, and how they existed alongside each other, and I wondered about the peace. I couldn’t find it. I thought of being given something against my will, and not being able to say no. I was holding life in my hand, and I didn’t like it. What is this, I wanted to say. Who are we, I wanted to say. Who am I.

All around me the world still moved. Someone was baking bread somewhere and someone was grieving and someone was turning their rage on someone they didn’t know and someone was silently making a list of everything that was the worst about everything and someone was crossing one item off of their to-do list and someone was praying and someone was getting shot and someone was already taking a photo of something that happened and someone was sharing that photo and someone was receiving that photo and someone was saying good god, what the fuck and all the while someone was smiling somewhere, too, you have to believe it, but I was crying.

And then I turned my phone off, and threw it in the nearest trash can. It was all too much. The infinite scrolls of websites, the data points about the happiest countries in the world, the violence against people who were never given names by people whose names became, briefly, all we knew. The floor-to-ceiling windows. The endless glass. The suits. From inside the trash can, my phone beeped. It beeped and beeped and beeped.

The day after graduation, I boarded the bus to the monastery, trying once again to leave this world while staying in it.

And so, that morning after our collective vigils, I looked out into the dawn I had since gotten used to, and thought: Well, this is my life. I had committed to it after all. I was holding what I had been given, and it contained the dawn. Pink light around the dark world’s edges.

My brother, in that same moment, must have been a small speck of boy running along a river. Maybe he wasn’t fleeing. Maybe it was just his own calling. His own awkward, gangly-limbed calling. Not the greatest. Definitely unsafe. Extremely scary for everyone involved. But a calling nonetheless. And I: I was becoming a monk. I was supposed to be mustering a great and wide breadth of sympathy for all creatures on this planet twirling through the dark. And so I mustered it. I extended it to him. That poor kid. His name wasn’t Jim Ryun. It was Billy Keene. And he is my brother.

____
Devin Kelly lives in New York City. His debut novel, Pilgrims, is available from Great Place Books on November 18.