Part Sixteen

After I finished the first round of the interviews I retreated to St. Michael’s and tried to ignore the New Age fruitcakes while I worked on their bleedin’ archive. Which no one will ever read.

They let me stay in one of the rooms. Not Preacher’s. Harkin had dibbed that one. Made him feel like the boss.

And if you’re thinking this is the part where I find the secret passage or hidden document or coded message that explains everything, well, you’re wrong.

I read a lot of old e-mails. To and from Preacher. Plus the posts on the various sites from people who claimed to have met him, and his responses (when he bothered to respond, which was less and less as time went by). A lot of these people didn’t identify themselves and while Preacher himself ID’d some of them at the time, there were a few more they thought I (who had, by this time, talked to just about everyone who ever knew him) might be able to at least tentatively recognize.

It worked in a few cases. I would read e-mails from a particular sender, make a content-based guess as to who sent it, call that person (“remember when I did your interview?”) and get a confirmation.

A couple of times I guessed based on style, not content. A couple of his LA friends used two different handles when writing to him, and based on syntax and usage I was able to figure out that they were the same person.

Probably in a hundred years – IF anyone cares – there will be computer programs who can do that better than an ordinary reader. Isn’t that how they decided who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?

Anyhow I read a few e-mails from a few years back from someone called SYNH@hotmail.com and knew right away who it was. I didn’t say anything. Just waited for her to call me, because she checked in with me every week or so anyhow.

“Hey,” I said the next time she phoned. “When were you going to tell me that you traded e-mails with Preacher after your divorce?”

There was just a very brief pause. A good lawyer never lets anything throw her. “So that’s what you’re doing now? Reading other people’s mail?”

“That’s pretty much all historians ever do,” I said.

“So should I have told you?”

Not really. “Yeah.”

“I had forgotten about it, to tell you the truth. Or I might not have been so eager for you to take the job. That stuff’s kind of personal.”

“There’s one missing.”

“The last one he sent me.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have it?”

“No.” I don’t know if she was telling the truth or not. I’ll assume she was. Worshippers don’t lie. They omit and obfuscate and mislead, but they don’t lie.

I let a few beats of silence pass. “So what’s the elephant in the room?”

“What?”

“There is something you two weren’t saying. Something which I guess was in the e-mail he sent you. Something that he decided he should delete, even though he didn’t delete many other things.” I found clues about a few such missing documents here and there. We used a forensic computing guy to try to recover stuff. There wasn’t much there.. Harkin pointed out the obvious: Preacher, while not being particularly computer-savvy, was no dummy. If he wanted to make sure something was truly deleted, he was smart enough to find out how to do it.

“It’s nothing, really. Preacher saw how quickly he’d ceased to have a private life and was maybe a little overzealous in protecting everyone else’s privacy. He didn’t want anyone to become publicized, he said. Not unless they wanted it.”

“He got a little paranoid toward the end.”

“Well, someone tried to shoot him. That might make anyone paranoid.”

She had a good point.

“So what is this nothing that Preacher was so anxious to keep out of the public record?”

“It was stupid, really. It was the sort of thing that nobody would have been interested in anyhow, except for the two of us, and it’s not like it was really embarrassing or anything, it was just… it was just private, that’s all.”

“If it’s so inconsequential, why are you avoiding the question?”

She laughed and sighed at the same time. “No reason. I mean you might not like it.”

“You didn’t… I mean you two didn’t…” I said, feeling the scream rising in my throat.

“No!” she said quickly. “No, no, he wouldn’t go for that. Believe me. Believe me.” She hit that second “believe” a little too hard for my liking.

“So what, then? You to plan a bank robbery together? You… do you know where he is?”

“No, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” she said. “He left for a reason. If he wants to get in touch with you, he will.”

I didn’t say that I think the SOB is reading my blog. Clearly she didn't know about it, and I would just as soon keep it that way.

“So what is this private secret that the two of you have kept so well? Or do you want to keep withholding it? I promise, I’ll seal it in the archive.”

There was a long pause. “OK,” she said, with some finality. “Here’s the story.

“When the two of you came home that first Christmas, well, it’s no secret that I had a huge crush on him. I was a high school senior then. He’s only ten months older than me but like he said, those were ten fairly significant months. Funny how ten months is nothing when we’re in our thirties but was a big deal when we were teenagers.

“Anyhow he gave me a kiss on the cheek when I gave him a present before you left to go back to school. I thought I was going to pee my pants. My lips felt like ginger-ale, you know, like when you get really drunk and can’t feel them anymore?”

I vaguely recalled that. “What did you give him?”

“Hat and gloves. I remember he said that he completely forgot about the concept of winter in the time he spent in San Diego, and when he came back east it caught him unprepared.” She laughed. "Funny, I don't remember what I gave my husband last year."

I remembered seeing Preacher in a black wool cap and gloves.

“Anyhow, so when you guys showed up the next year – that would have been Christmas of… 1986? – I was convinced that year was going to be different. Because now I wasn’t some dorky high-school kid. I was a woman. I was a college woman. I had read Proust. I had lost my virginity. We were both consenting adults. In the same house. And I was going to play it cool. No more mooning after him. I was going to attract him with my grown-up womanly mystique.”

I laughed, and she did too, then.

“OK, OK, she agreed, “it sounds really queer now. But that was my view. I mean I was irresistible, right? Except… he resisted. Pretty easily.”

“Oh, little sister,” I said. “Do you know how long a line you were standing in?”

“You know, honestly, I never thought of it that way. I remember wracking my brains to think of a subtle way to find out if he had a girlfriend, and then Dad – quite unintentionally, I’m sure – saved my by asking Preacher flat-out the first night. And when he said no, I figured, well hell, clearly he’s been waiting for me.”

I laughed some more.

“Shut up!” she laughed back. “Then he gave me that first edition Anne Sexton for Christmas. Any reservations I might have had – and I didn’t have any – vanished. Clearly he was in love with me. I still have that book, you know. Transformations. Preacher told me he thought a little bit of confessional poetry went a long way, but that he liked this one. He didn’t know – I mean he had met me, he knew how old I was, so he could have guessed that I was enthralled by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath back then, but I certainly had never told him about it. So the fact that he picked out that particular gift…” she trailed off.

“Anyhow,” she resumed, “so I knew he must love me, too, right? I mean, come on. God, I was such an arrogant little bitch back then! But I was determined to play it cool. Cooler than the year before, anyhow. Oh, I dropped a few subtle hints. But – thank God – I didn’t do what my friend Sharon suggested, which was to tiptoe into his room one night, undress, and slide under the covers with him.”

“Thank God,” I muttered, my mouth dry with horror at the thought.

“But do you remember what we did for New Years that year?”

“Went to the Mummers Parade?”

“Besides that?”

“No.”

“We went to a party at Christy Oglevie’s house.”

“Was that that year?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm. I remember that.”

“That’s because you and Christy got drunk and spent most of the night making out in her bedroom.”

I remembered that. I got to third base. Do teenagers still have bases? Are they still counted the same way? Or is a blowjob second base now?

“Oh, right,” I said.

“So I told Preacher, look, we’re both flying solo at this thing – I expect you to be standing next to me at midnight. And he made a joke about me finding Prince Charming, but when midnight rolled around I sidled up next to him and laid my best one on him when the ball dropped.”

“I’m glad I didn’t see it.” I wanted to use my thumbs to gouge out my mind's eye.

“I am, too. But he kissed me back, too. And I’m not talking about some little peck, either. Both hands. And, at least on my part, a little tongue.”

“Na-na-na-na-na-na-na!” I said loudly. “I can’t hear you!”

She laughed again. “Oh, calm down,” she said. “It’s not like Mom’s telling you this story.

“OH MY GOD!” I groaned, feeling everything I’d ever eaten in my life rise up in my throat.

She just laughed some more.

“Don’t even joke about that,” I said, once my heart resumed beating.

“So finally he pulled me off him, and I gave him a look – a very practiced look, I assure you; I spent fifteen minutes on it in front of the mirror earlier – that said, there’s a lot more where that came from.”

“Slut.”

“Yeah. Well, didn’t work. He laughed and said, you know, Nick’s head would explode and your father would castrate me with a pipewrench, but that was worth it.”

“He was right on the first two counts, anyhow.”

“Well, I should have let well enough alone, but I held on to his hands and I looked down the hallway and looked back at him and raised my eyebrows a little. I felt like Veronica Lake.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. I felt sexy, that’s all. And he gave me a wry smile and led me out the front door instead. To talk.”

“Preacher was big on that.”

“Yeah. So we had a talk. And agreed – well, he agreed – that nothing was ever going to happen between us. Because you two were such good friends and because we had sort of adopted him and because, he said, I couldn’t live with myself if it was just a one-time thing, and you couldn’t live with myself if it was more than that. And I told him it didn’t have to be a one-time thing and he said yeah, that’s the trouble. You’re in Philadelphia and I’m in Annapolis. We both have separate lives and neither of us is in a position to change things anytime soon. And he said, tell you what – after we’re both out of college, if we’re ever living in the same area code, and single, and you still haven’t realized you deserve better, give me a call.

“And I told him I would hold him to that.”

“And did you ever… give him a call?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Not really,” she said. “But that conversation was absolutely in my mind when I sent him that first e-mail. I found his e-dress on some directory. He was just getting the whole Worship thing started. I sent him a chatty how-are-you, I-am-fine thing. When I found out he was in Maryland, though… I mean I was divorced and I wasn’t seeing anyone and I was kind of emotionally vulnerable and not very far in the back of my mind was, here’s this great, adorable guy, and he said if we were both single… and the thing is, he knew. He knew that it was in the back of my mind and after a few months it was in the back of his mind, too. And he sent me an e-mail saying that he couldn’t discuss personal stuff with me anymore because he was afraid that his own personal feelings would color the advice he gave.”

“That’s the missing one. The missing e-mail.”

“If that’s missing, then that’s one of them. Do you have the one I sent back saying that he should come up to New York for a few days, give himself a vacation from quasi-Messiahood?”

“No. Chronologically, the last one I have is where you are telling him about meeting Bryan. So I figured there was probably a response.”

“He deleted more than one, then. The last one he sent me said that until this whole Worship thing died down, he couldn’t have a real relationship; he’d tried it and it hadn’t worked, and it wasn’t fair to the other person to even try. And that it could create problems for me and for Johnny if the two of us were linked. And third…” she stopped for a moment and caught her breath. “Third, he didn’t know if he had anything worthwhile to offer to anyone anymore, least of all someone he really cared about.” Johhny was my nephew. There had been some unpleasantness over custody.

I thought about that. It didn’t sound like him. Not the last part, anyhow. The first two managed to sound considerate and self-important at the same time, but the last one sounded like something… I would have said.

Holy shit. Preacher Haywood was depressed.

“I sent him a reply, but never heard back from him,” she said. “I told him he had changed my life since I rediscovered him, and that he was wrong to ignore his own feelings, and all kinds of other mushy stuff. I told him I thought I could… I told him that we could touch the Divine in one another. Have you learned enough about Worship now to know what that means?”

“I have an idea,” I said.

“So I never heard back. I wish I could say that this was right before he disappeared, but it wasn’t. He just, true to his word, he just stopped it. Because he… how can I explain this. To Preacher, integrity beats happiness every time, and he thought that his own happiness as a human being compromised his integrity as a, a messenger.”

“And the message was more important than you.”

“I think he knew I could be perfectly happy with Bryan. Happier than with him. I mean I see that now. I was in love with two different concepts of Preacher. The cute college guy who rocked my world with a New Year’s Eve kiss in 1986, and the immeasurably wise and, yes, I’ll say it, holy man who came out of the desert with a few suggestions on how to understand our existence. And Preacher was neither one of those things. He was – is – a thirty-something year old guy with a lot of miles on him. And no job. I can see having a very happy, intense love affair with someone like Preacher. But I can’t see having a very happy lifetime with him. And he knew that, even when I didn’t.”

“So what do you think happened to him?”

“If I had to guess? He probably went back to school. Changed his name. Got a real job.”

“He told someone once that he wanted to be a Forest Service fire-spotter. Spend months at a time alone in a tree house in the middle of Idaho.”

“Preacher is not cut out to be a hermit. He thinks he is, but he’s not. He doesn’t want to be a hermit so much as he wants to be anonymous. But he can’t do that, either. If he changes his name and lives in another city and keeps his head down and works at some meaningless desk job… he’ll still gather a circle of the best and brightest around himself, still touch a lot of lives, still make an impact. He can’t help it.”

“It sucks to be universally loved,” I said.

“Why do you think he liked you?” she told me. “Because you were one of the few people to both be his friend and tell him when he was full of shit.”

“Which was most of the time.”

She laughed. “You really need to read Notes with an open mind.”

No thanks. I like my mind slammed shut like a bear trap where Preacher is concerned.