The Breath of Suspension (2 page)

So it was that I came to be lying, one bright early-winter morning, on the floor of a roofless summerhouse half filled with beach sand, staring up at the sky and feeling my lungs burn. Layers of multicolored wallpaper peeled from the walls like the tattered pages of a long-unread book. Sand trickled down the neck of my cassock. My pectoral cross, having caught on a projecting door frame and almost strangled me, hung on a nail. Winter sand is cold and hard, carrying with it the memory of its glacial origins. I felt it press against my back with resentful solidity. Surf hissed foaming across the hard-packed beach, lapping at the leaning walls. I let my breath out slowly. I was staying here.

I was seventeen years old and absolutely miserable. My family had dropped me into the Monastery of St. Thecla with stern admonitions and would not be back for me for—I calculated, though I already knew the answer—another ten months. Another ten months with St. Thecla—and Brother Michael.

It was an Osten family tradition that each member spent a year in a proper Orthodox monastery before assuming his life’s responsibilities. Even my Uncle Cosmas, luxurious and corrupt as an old wine is corrupt, spoiled in just the right way, had spent a year in a monastery in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He claimed to remember it fondly. Though he was known in the family as an excellent liar, I didn’t believe him.

The tradition dated back to my grandfather’s time, when a majority of the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod converted en masse to the victorious Orthodoxy. Being early Persuaded had always given the Osten family high status, since the things that are Caesar’s are available only to those who have granted to God the things that are His. In my case, that included a year of my life.

I had been told all these things, but they did not console me. Just the previous night... I sat up. The memory still seared. Below me, Lake Michigan had swallowed up half the house, sucking at it until only the foundations remained. The beach here was cut with ancient boat slips and piers. Traces of this house’s dock still remained as a line of weathered gull perches, driftwood piled against it. Out beyond it the pointed-arch outline of a sunken pleasure boat could be seen through the clear water. It seemed to have settled placidly at its mooring, forgotten by masters simply attempting to survive during the wars of the twenty-first century.

Above me were the buildings of the monastery, peeping over the edge of the sand dune. The nucleus of the Monastery of St. Thecla had been a cluster of old summer dwellings much like the one I was currently feeling sorry for myself in. Maple and oak trees had sprouted through the sidewalks, and dune cherries clambered over the toppled fences. Wild grapes covered the walls. Traces of ancient pleasures were scattered through the sands. I remember that after one heavy winter storm a stretch of the old macadam beach road reappeared, like some dweller of the deep seas coming to the surface to see if the sun was still there. A few weeks, and sand covered it again.

The monks had rebuilt the shattered buildings, adding chapels, dining halls, an MHD generator, and a water filtration plant. If anyone noticed the unfortunate symbolism of building a monastery on sand dunes, he was not unwise enough to mention it. Even I knew better. St. Theda’s was the personal monastery of the Patriarch of Milwaukee and dominated the affairs of the Michigan coast between Manistee and Traverse City. I understand that it’s still there, still fighting the ever-hungry sand and lake, though it will soon succumb like the rest of us.

A skein of geese quacked by overhead on its way south. I could see the sun flashing on their wings against the dark sky. I couldn’t join them. I was stuck here at St. Theda’s with the odious Brother Michael, the life-monk who served as my spiritual guide. My eyes stung with remembered humiliation.

The previous night I had awakened with a chill. The thin wool blanket the monastery had provided was completely inadequate. I shivered desperately.

The dormitory was dark. “Michael,” I said. “I’m cold.”

He was awake instantly. “Eh? What’s that?”

“I said I’m cold, dammit.”

“Thank the Lord you’re alive to feel it, then.”

“Michael, I’m freezing. Do you understand me?”

“No, boy, I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you at all.” His voice boomed, waking everyone else up. I was mortified. He looked around. “Vikram’s cold. Is everyone able to hear that?”

There was a low murmur. We got little enough sleep as it was, and here this buffoon was putting the blame on me for waking everyone up.

“Wait. All I said was—”

“Here. Stay warm, little man.”

Brother Michael, a big red-faced man, stood from his cot and with a contemptuous gesture flung his own blanket over me. Then he lay back down, closed his eyes, and affected sleep. I could see his breath steam. He shivered slightly. All right then. I could stand his contempt as long as I was warm myself. I composed myself for sleep.

Suddenly someone else came up and threw his blanket over me. A moment later another. Then another.

“Damn you all!” I struggled up as blanket after blanket was flung over my head. When it was done, thirteen monks slept freezing and uncovered on their cots, and I lay with their blankets piled on top of me, suffocating. Damn them. Damn them. And damn Michael most of all. I had burrowed my face in all the blankets to hide my tears.

I turned over and tried to bury my face in the cold sand. I dug in my fingers, feeling concealed fragments of the old house. A sea gull flew by and hooted at me, as if criticizing my laziness on Brother Michael’s behalf. Hearty Brother Michael, who had gotten up in that morning after having humiliated me with the glad hosanna “Rejoice, for this is the day the Lord has made,” walked over to the basin, broke through, washed his wide red face, and beamed, steaming breath coming between thick white teeth. He’d snuck into line a second time when God was handing out vitality and thus missed getting into the line for sense.

Suddenly, I heard the laughter of young women. I rolled over and peered out over the window frame, half expecting to see some odd lake mermaids playing in the shallow water. Instead, I saw half a dozen blue-uniformed girls from the monastery school, all my age or younger. I recognized several of them. They jostled each other for a perch on a driftwood log, like me having momentarily escaped the tyranny of duty. None of them was dressed for the cold, and they hunched against each other, giggling. Occasionally one would stand, brush the sand from her bottom, and sit again.

I watched in fascination. Women in general don’t understand how charming they are when they aren’t trying to impress men. They fussed with their breeze-blown hair and the shoulder badges awarded for schoolwork and Bible memorization, gossiping about teachers and absent classmates.

One stood and gave her red-brown hair to the lake breeze, letting it blow behind her like a comet. She looked out across the water as if awaiting a ship, then walked down to its edge. She had a long neck and full lips, which she pursed at whatever she imagined she saw across the lake.

“Come on, Laurena,” one of her friends, a small blonde, cried. “We’d better get back.”

Indeed, I could hear the bell that marked the change of hour. I was expected back as well. Brother Michael needed my help. One of the three magnetohydrodynamic generators that powered St. Theda’s and much of the surrounding countryside was down for cleaning and maintenance. I was to spend the afternoon crawling through tubes getting covered with coal dust. Punishment was certain if I was late. I couldn’t move but watched as Laurena tossed her head disdainfully, kicked off her shoes, and waded into the water. A wave wet the bottom of her skirt. Her uniform hugged her waist, showing off the curve of her hip and her breasts. I learned later that she had taken it in herself, in private, with a razor and needle and thread.

“Laurena!”

“Go back if you want. I’m not going.” Balancing delicately on her bare feet, arms floated out for stability, Laurena walked onto the driftwood decades of storms had jammed against the pier pilings. “I have other places to be.” The curve of her bottom as she stepped up on a piling made me dizzy. She was as luscious as a basket of fruit. I was in love at that instant, totally and irrevocably. I had something to which I could dedicate my life. I pushed my erection into the sand, feeling the roughness of the cassock against it.

“There’s a bit of a gap between the end of the pier and the coast of Wisconsin, if that’s where you’re going.” This voice was dry and amused, not the voice of a schoolgirl. It had a dark, rough quality, like weathered wood.

Laurena turned challengingly, almost losing her balance. She steadied herself, trying to look dignified. “And what’s that to you, Aya Ngomo?”

“Not a thing, Laurena Tarchik. Except that if you don’t come back with us, you’ll be missed. Then they’ll figure out where we go, and we won’t be able to do it anymore.”

“Let them try to stop us. I’m tired of it anyway. It just feels like freedom. It’s only a longer leash. I want to get
out
of here.”

There was a whispered conference among the five girls still on the log. Four of them stood and ran lightly back up the trail that wandered through the dune grasses to the monastery. Left on the log was a small, bent girl with dark hair and skin. This was my first sight of Aya Ngomo.

Despite the luminous presence of Laurena Tarchik, she caught the eye at once. I may sound as if I am writing standard hagiography, Thomas, but the unfortunate thing about hagiographies is that they are sometimes true. Aya Ngomo focused my vision, even without the benefit of having had her icon at the front of my classroom as I was growing up.

I realized that I had caught glimpses of her around the monastery. She suffered from a progressive nerve disease, some mutated by-product of the artificial plagues released during the twenty-first-century wars. Her spine was twisted and she was in constant pain. She walked crabwise and crept slowly along walls. Her long hair was a lustrous black. She had an odd beauty, like an exotic caged bird. Her skin was dark velvet, her eyes wide and all-seeing.

She was, I had heard, a ward of the Patriarch of Milwaukee himself. He had taken an interest in this quick, intelligent girl. She held your eye by more than just her deformity. She was like a jewel with a complex flaw, much more interesting to gaze into than a transparent stone.

“Go away, Aya, for God’s sake!” Laurena was almost shouting.

Aya looked composed. “Why are you being such an idiot?”

Laurena turned her back to Aya and walked farther out on the piled driftwood. It creaked and shifted under her weight. “Haven’t you ever wanted to escape? To go”—she stared at the horizon, squinting to see something—“somewhere?”

The crippled Aya Ngomo put her thin arms around herself. “Escape? Laurena, you don’t know the half of it.”

“Then let me go! Let me—” Her foot sank through a rotted piece of wood. The rest of the pile shifted. She gasped and tried to pull back. She almost fell from the effort, something that would have snapped her ankle. She was well and truly stuck, her foot trapped by a heavy log.

“Aya!”

Aya shook her head slowly, as if things had happened exactly as she had predicted. Perhaps they had. She stood, wincing, and walked to the end of the pier.

Laurena stood motionless, her hands clenched at her sides. She sucked breath heavily, in obvious pain. At that instant I thought less of the pain in her ankle than the way her breasts moved as she breathed. I couldn’t even make myself feel ashamed of that later. She was a wild animal caught in a trap. And I, as the hunter, would come and free her.

Aya Ngomo crawled slowly across the shifting driftwood toward her friend. “Don’t worry, Laurena. Does it hurt?”

Laurena drew a breath. “Yes,” she said tightly. “Dammit.”

At that point I finally stood. I brushed the sand from the front of my cassock, correcting my appearance as much as the damn shapeless thing allowed, put my pectoral cross back on, and stepped out through the house’s tilting door. I felt exposed on the beach below the monastery, black as a crow, immediately visible to anyone as a truant monk. I stepped onto the pier behind Aya.

“Are you ladies in need of some assistance?” The casual seemed to be the proper tone to take under the circumstances.

They turned and I was faced by two pairs of appraising eyes, Aya’s dark, Laurena’s a vivid green. I was then tall and slender, with a high forehead and a sharp nose. My skin was just as dark as it is now, though far smoother. I was already known for intelligence and ambition. Still, I quailed before those female eyes.

Laurena rolled hers. “Just what I need.” She returned to her contemplation of the horizon.

Aya just laughed, a low throaty sound. “Where did you come from? Are you appeared like a miracle? Such excellent timing.”

I’m afraid that I blushed. Laurena was too obsessed by her own predicament to consider, but Aya guessed that I had been eavesdropping.

“I may not be a miracle, but you can use me as one.” I stepped past her and onto the driftwood. I weighed more than either of the women, and it swayed under me like a ship’s deck in a storm. I made my way over to Laurena, kneeling down next to her. She ignored me.

As I bent by her slender ankle, I could feel the exhalation of her flesh. Her own sharp scent made itself known over the bland floral aroma of soap. I let my shoulder rest against her calf. The wet bottom of her long skirt had plastered itself against it. The log had jammed tight. Bruises were already appearing around her ankle. I pushed against the wood. Pain caused her to suck in her breath sharply. She didn’t speak.

“Well, miracle, what are we to do?” Aya had made her way out to us, moving as lightly over the wood as a stalking spider. She held a thin cylinder of wood out to me, a piece of an old porch railing or chair. With its help I was able to pry the shifted log far enough for Lnurenn to pull her foot out. She put her hand on my back to steady herself as she did so. I felt her fingers warm on my shoulder blade.

“Thank the gentleman,” Aya said chidingly.

I stood. Laurcna looked me in the eye. “He works with my brother, Michael. His name is Vikram Osten. Michael says he’s lazy and only here because his family has ordered him. The Ostens are a powerful family.”