What We Are Read Online Free

into a cardboard sign with a big black marker. She hasn’t done a thing to me, but I already know I don’t want to talk to her, and that I may soon, and that she’ll do most of the talking, and at length.
    This must be a march: they’re about to take to the streets, starting here at the Alviso Mission. The blonde is nearing. You can see it in her eyes: she’s a believer. Nothing else in the world matters at the moment. She’s probably a poli-sci major, minoring in sociology. Maybe a leader here, an organizer.
    Father McFadden says, “I’m proud of you, Paul. You’ve done the right thing.”
    I say, “I was trying to pray at the shrine last night. I fell asleep I guess.”
    He puts his hand up to stop me from self-indictment. He wants to believe in me with the same desperation that I’d wanted to believe in God as a kid. I feel bad for him, for his calling, for the sadness he mustfeel every Sunday when his master’s beatific house of stained-glass splendor is four-fifths empty. I can see the refracting light of blue and red tickling his trembling cheeks at the altar, the imported marble saints collecting dust in the crevices of nostrils and armpits, in the four corners of the crucifix.
    But he must be used to the faithless by now, to his flock being daily lost to tech and science and genetic manipulation, MTV and the Internet. An electric ocean of amorality. I can see the struggle in his face as he’s retrieving for the first time in many years certain failures in faith that I’d had as one of his lambs. Things that seemed harmless then, perhaps even endearing and precocious, but blasphemous now, as a man. I’m not the prodigal son this father’s looking for.
    Still, he gives it a shot. “God watched over you.”
    I smile.
    â€œYou’re a lucky young man.”
    â€œYes,” I say, “I believe that, Father. But it doesn’t help.”
    â€œHungry?”
    I don’t want an allusion to the bread of the Lord. “Well.”
    â€œHere.” He hands me a Sausage McMuffin. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Paul.”
    I don’t say anything. Like, for instance, that the first thing out of my mouth this morning was a lie. Passing out drunk and delusional doesn’t pass for devotion at the shrine.
    Shit, man, I wish a drop of the old demon water was all I needed. If I could find God in liquor or weed or any other hallucinogen necessary, I’d be the first to volunteer at whatever Monte Cassino the paltry handful of priests of this valley begin their training, AA and NA be damned, the health of my body temple be damned. I’d be just like that crankster, wandering the streets for my next fix. I’d be a son of Jameson’s whiskey just like I know the good Father is, or I’d be a reefer like a Rastafarian. I’d make premium boc in the Belgianlowlands, a monk’s brown hood and brown frock and how to brew good German beer my only earthly possessions.
    But any altered state I’ve tried just seems to induce sleep. It’s temporal, flighty, and I become an eyesore to myself, can’t look in the mirror at the broken-down man. And I don’t forget a thing about this life, and the dreams—even as I’m dreaming them—I know to be false. That’s perverse, pointless. Like telling the punch line of a joke not last but first.
    â€œYou know,” he says, “this beautiful mission came to life at the hands of a people in toil. Today we’re going to get them what they deserve.”
    â€œFather, I—”
    â€œGod’s children endured true pain for their heavenly rites.”
    The blonde has arrived, observing me as if I were a colorful anemone on the reef at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. With curiosity, yes, superior spinal cord curiosity. This close I see that her legs are crisp with blond hair, having recently changed her mind about shaving. Now she’s