Kage Baker: Dark Mondays

Sighing, he put his hands in his jacket pockets and moved on. Salt mist was beading on his clothes, chilly and damp.

The arcade that used to be at the foot of the pier was gone, had been gone since a long-ago winter storm sent waves over the seawall and collapsed its roof. There was a doughnut shop there now. Father Souza stopped in and bought a latte, and settled into a vacant booth.

He warmed his hands on the cup and watched the early twilight falling. Something came rolling down the sidewalk, on a wobbly trajectory: a cocoanut. It came to rest against a planter containing a skimpy date palm, as though huddling with a fellow exile from tropical climes. Father Souza wondered how it had got there.

A woman was sitting in the booth across from him, sipping coffee and making notes on something with a red pen. Grading papers? Yes. He recognized Ms. Washburn.

He cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “You teach at the public school, don’t you?”

She lifted her eyes to his, and he had a mental image of a figure in armor going on guard. Her eyes were gray as steel.

“I do, yes.”

“You’re Patrick Avila’s teacher?”

“Ah,” she said. “I imagine I know what this is about.”

He smiled awkwardly and extended a hand. “I’m Father Souza. I guess you did me a favor; one of my parishioners actually got upset enough about something to ask my advice. Can I hear your side of the story?”

But he could tell his attempt at self-depreciating charm was wasted. It was plain, from the look on her face, that she saw a host of blood-drinking popes and Inquisitors in phantom form standing at his shoulder.

“I don’t particularly see any need to defend my actions to you,” she said. Her accent was patrician, with a certain New England starch.

“Defend, no, no. I just thought you could enlighten me a little,” said Father Souza. “Patrick was pretty upset.”

“Patrick had a violent episode in class,” said Ms. Washburn.

“So I gathered.”

“I’ve made a recommendation that he should be tested for Attention Deficit Disorder.”

Father Souza winced. “I wouldn’t have said Patrick’s problem was paying attention, would you? Just the other way around. He was able to keep focused on the monkey thing for five months.”

“Are you an educator, Father Souza?” inquired Ms. Washburn.

“No,” he admitted. “But I know it’s not a good idea to be in a hurry to pin a label on a child.”

“Neither is it a good idea to let a condition go undiagnosed,” said Ms. Washburn. “The sooner Patrick can undergo corrective counseling, the better.”

Father Souza sat back and stared at her, baffled. “What exactly did he do that was so bad? Did he hit you?”

“Not physically, no. He resorted to verbal abuse. He kicked a chair across the room. He disrupted class to the extent that a full hour of the school day was lost,” said Ms. Washburn.

“Sounds like a pretty angry young man,” said Father Souza. Ms. Washburn flushed and took a sip of her coffee.

“Patrick was clearly acting out,” she said. “His home life, possibly. I understand his father is in some kind of paramilitary cult. If his parents encourage violence as a means of accomplishing goals—”

“I don’t think they do,” said Father Souza. “I think Patrick was angry about getting laughed at, when he thought he’d invented this wonderful holiday. Patrick’s mom thinks you were trying to demolish belief in Santa Claus.”

“ Demolish is a loaded word, don’t you think?” said Ms. Washburn. “I would have said that, as a teacher, I have an obligation to teach what is true. I will not teach lies. If I can encourage my students to see through lies, I owe it to them to do so.”

“So the point of the made-up holidays assignment was…?”

“To teach my students the truth about social rituals,” said Ms. Washburn, looking Father Souza in the eye. “People simply make them up. Patrick made up Monkey Day. These events are only as real as we make them. They have no significance, otherwise. If people are ever to be free, they need to understand that. All that absurd… panoply , all that pageantry and symbolism, is a trap.”

Father Souza remembered her frown lines, as she’d watched the parade go by.

“It’s folk art,” he said. “It’s the celebration of people’s faith, it’s their identity. You ought to at least respect cultural tradition.”

“It’s a trap,” she repeated. “An impressive spectacle that keeps people from thinking.”

“Okay… and how do you feel about respecting other people’s beliefs?”

“I tend to favor truth over illusions. ‘Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but Truth is the strongest of all,’ ” Ms. Washburn quoted. “That’s in your Bible, isn’t it?”

“Third book of Esdras, actually,” he said.

“There you are. And the truth shall make you free.”

“Gospel of John. Look, you know that Patrick’s parents are pulling him out of Harloe,” he said. “They’re going to send him to Saint Rose’s, all the way out in San Luis Obispo. That’s a twelve-mile commute every morning and afternoon, and the tuition isn’t free. You’ve lost a bright student, and I know they made a formal complaint against you. Nobody’s winning, here.”

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” said Ms. Washburn. “Perhaps you ought to convince them to reconsider.”

Father Souza bit back a retort and stared at the wall above her head, trying to summon patience. The wall was covered in bright yellow vinyl, with a pattern of green monkeys linked together by their tails. They seemed to writhe and blur, under the fluorescent light, vaguely menacing.

“Look,” he said, “we shouldn’t be at odds, here. We’re both in the same business, aren’t we? We’re working for the common good. You get their brains working, and I look after their souls.”

Ms. Washburn shook her head. “Between Reason and Unreason there can be only war,” she said with certainty. He looked sadly at her, realizing that he envied her. She was young, and beautiful in a severe kind of way, and had endless strength to marshal for her argument.

“The thing is,” he said, “the pageantry doesn’t matter. It’s just something they do because it’s fun, because it’s always been done, because they want to see their kids dressed up. About God, they’re apathetic. The Unreason isn’t there, don’t you see? The, the direct, bolt-of-lightning, burning-bush moment when they know He exists—isn’t there for them. You think religion holds people in chains… Ma’am, I barely have a congregation. What harm can a few parades and statues do?”

Mrs. Washburn gave him a shrewd look, not entirely without sympathy.

“You’ve lost your faith,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I never had any. I knew . That knowledge, that’s what I’ve lost.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said, leaning forward and almost—but not quite—putting her hand on his. “You’re free of illusions, that’s all. And, once you move past that—”

“Then what is there?” he said. “You think there’s some kind of utilitarian political paradise awaiting us all? Some future where we’re all rational and accept seventy-five years of consciousness as all there is and all there’ll ever be?”

“You’ll learn to accept that.”

“Then what was the point of leaving the jungle?” said Father Souza. “We’d have been better off as monkeys. Why become creatures that can imagine a Heaven with a God in it, and want Him there?”

“Because we’re engineered to progress by outgrowing our primitive selves,” said Ms. Washburn. “And that means we must leave our fantasies behind, and our need for them. We’re leaving them already.”