The Deposition

Pete Duval

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781625345707
• eBook ISBN: 9781613768259
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An insurance lawyer driving across Iowa engages a wounded, hitchhiking priest in a metaphysical debate. A vacationing air traffic controller with a penchant for Saint Francis of Assisi is bitten by an ancient parrot. The Marxist owner of a Florida curiosity shop confronts a local church community's rising anger over a jarred fetus, while a fasting husband of an evangelical minister holds bloody communion with the leader of a suburban coyote pack and a Catholic cable news cameraman tracks a missing stigmatist through a Caribbean port city. As cosmic struggles play out against the backdrop of forgotten strip malls, suburban cul-de-sacs, and grimy cities, guidance comes from the unlikeliest of sources. In prose both dreamlike and vivid, the characters in Pete Duval's second collection navigate paths through a landscape of vestigial faith and nagging doubt.

Strange Mercies

It’s terrible the way that prayer is answered.

—Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

The more Mayhew pretended to pray, the more he doubted the project of documentation, and yet the spectacle of what he’d already videotaped seemed fully real only now, the images wavering with unstable pixilation in the low light of his rented room. In one clip, the blood runs in streaks that snake from triangular wounds at the woman’s palms upward along her wrists and forearms, as though she has held her hands slightly raised and out to the sides long enough for it to dry. Mayhew’s neck ached as he sucked the last lozenge of ice from his rum and coke and wiped his forehead with a paper napkin from breakfast. It was night again. He’d lost track of the time. There was no time. He slowed the progression of images to a crawl so he could nudge up to a clear shot of the dark ragged punctures. The woman is eighteen or so, more girl than woman, beautiful to Mayhew in the way all young people were, even more so. She’s thin, almost spindly, but with rich folds in her neck that glisten dark gold and deepen when she turns her head to scan the crowd, or looks up into the sky, or meets the gaze of the camera. Even now, it was hard for Mayhew to look at her eyes.

In another clip, rain pocks the buckled concrete just as she’s concluding another of her unintelligible what—sermons, he guessed? He had so little Spanish. For five minutes, she had watched Mayhew with squinting suspicion and maybe a little superiority and certainly a degree of pity as he crouched in the street, duck-walked closer, angled to the left or right, dipped low, then held the camera above the heads of the onlookers. At the time, he wasn’t paying full attention to the content of the shot, just that it was well framed and in focus, the sweat streaming from his temples into his beard, then leaking from his chin.

Now she stands on a splintered wooden spool tipped on its side.

Now she’s talking to the crowd of mostly old women, some apparently blind, their eyes wandering, and to legless men in grimed soccer jerseys on the curb, their skin like jerky, the tattered hems of their pants folded back under their knees, and to ambulatory cripples, street people resting puckered stumps on the cross-bars of their crutches.

Now a woman in her eighties turns half-smiling to the camera and lifts her dress to reveal the archipelago of running sores that traces the ridgeline of her shins. In that moment, weeks before, Mayhew hadn’t had time to take it all in. It was almost too painful to watch, like some medieval pageant of horrors, but he watched again and again, for hours. Mostly, though, he watched because she is fascinating. The alarming nonchalance of her gesticulation is fascinating. She’s in control, but more than this. She radiates. In her Jordache jeans and home-sewn camiseta, the white ear bud wires of an iPhone draped over her shoulder—she seems outside time looking in. This is serenity. The more he looked, the more radiant she became. He found it difficult to put a label to what he felt—other than shame, because he wondered whether such thinking might be the ghost of colonialism talking shit in his head.

He’d shot the woman over a number of days, while the network correspondent, Bob Yoshida, whose Spanish was also practically nonexistent, shouted questions and the locals all around them curled their lips in disgust. She was not someone who granted interviews. In one—only one—clip does fresh blood well up from the wounds unmistakably and in real time, twenty-one seconds worth; it drips to the street with each gesture of her arms—some of it splattering people as they beam into this chance benediction. (Washed in the blood, he’d thought, with a wince. There’d been dried blood that night on the barrel of Mayhew’s lens.) Now she’s shifting painfully from one foot to the other, two red-brown stains where the blood has surfaced through the bandages.

But not long after Mayhew shot the footage, she had disappeared. It all seemed to happen at once, a rushing confluence of events. There was an email from the network calling him and Yoshida back to Chicago, which Mayhew had refused to obey. Soon the network’s emails stopped, and in the weeks since, he had not left the walled city’s square mile, its morning smells of shoe polish and fresh-squeezed lime. He was a little unclear about the terms of his visa. He convinced himself not to worry. He was talented that way. He would find her. She was here, somewhere. He needed more footage. He thought he had time enough and, with one exception, everything he needed in his small room on one of the narrower streets near the cathedral. The air conditioning was weak and intermittent, but Bob had left behind two and a half cases of bottled water. The man had been scrupulous about not drinking from the tap. “Hydrate!” he would yell whenever he saw Mayhew break a sweat. Then his voice softened into ironic fecklessness: “But don’t drink the water.” Considering it a cliché, Mayhew had not heeded that warning. He’d rinsed his toothbrush at the sink, and spent a week and a half navigating, like a cripple himself, a new universe of bacterial consequences. “Baptism by fire,” he’d yelled from the toilet. There was also the beer, Aguila, not great but entirely serviceable. And, of course, Mayhew’s supply of rum, the good stuff, Ron Medellín. He and Bob had split the cost of a case, even though Bob himself, knightly Bob, rarely drank. (It had taken Mayhew all of one day, but he’d learned to operate the goddamn twist cap—at about the same time he’d determined that Ron wasn’t Señor Medellín’s Christian name.) For entertainment, aside from the editing and re-editing that occupied most of his time, he’d brute-forced access into a Wi-Fi network from one of the surrounding hotels. The connection almost always worked, and no one seemed to be monitoring the bandwidth he regularly chewed up. Now that Bob was gone, Mayhew gorged himself on all the amateur porn he could consume, usually late nights, or sometimes right after morning mass at San Pedro Claver, his horniest time of the day, when he’d seek refuge from the day’s heat and ubiquitous light like some inarticulate cave animal. The heat was something he’d not grown accustomed to. He was used to Chicago summers, the legions of elderly fading away in their narrow hovels. But this was something entirely other, an all-out frontal, almost ontological, assault on corporeality, a late-morning movie trailer for the Last Judgment. It was fucking hot.

---

* * *

Mayhew convinced himself he missed nothing of his former life—the hour commute, the notional cheese and tasteless supermarket tomatoes, the scrape and blare of the El, talk radio. Almost nothing. After the producer’s emails stopped, some part of him knew the video would never see the light of day. But he was beyond concern—he told himself this—and he felt that only now could he get down to the real work. International Catholic Broadcast Network? ICBN? God bless them, but the swill they served up 24/7 staggered the mind. (He never watched it himself.) One of the producers had spoken of the network as “the Fox News of American Catholic broadcasting.” This was assumed to be a point of pride. Their audience “for now,” the suit explained, was, in a phrase Mayhew particularly admired, the “low-information consumer of religious media.” And while they were idiots, they were all God’s children, with not insignificant disposable incomes. So, the reasoning went, Mayhew could lose his elitist pretentions in a hurry. And who the hell was he, anyway?

During the job interview the year before, the network hadn’t seemed to give a shit if he attended mass. Or even if he was Catholic. He was—Roman Catholic—though any such self-identification arose more from a vague and residual feeling of clannish nostalgia than from actual conviction. He was just a guy, like any other guy. In a conference room looking out across the beige steel of the Loop, the gray of Lake Michigan beyond, he’d sat across from the ICBN HR person, a perpetually kinetic woman with ironic eyes and acid tone, and a hell of a tailor—this turned out to be Jasmine, in her finest raiment. Also present: the executive producer, a man about Mayhew’s age, name of Timothy, Mr. Timothy, who looked like could bench three hundred pounds in his button-down oxford without breaking a sweat. What the hell had Mayhew expected? Nuns with clipboards? Tonsured monks in bulky headphones? The network had advertised for a cameraman. Here he was in a new tie. He’d been laid off from his job providing AV support at Columbia College, basically setting up digital projectors for professorial PowerPoint presentations and reformatting user-hosed hard drives. It had been months since he’d known the joys of biweekly direct deposit. He would have told Jasmine whatever she wanted to hear. He took it as evidence of divine intervention that no one checked his references—a fortunate development in that these were fictional characters. How hard could it be to hold the camera steady?

In that meeting, Jasmine had spoken at length from boilerplate she’d internalized the way people once knew the Apostles’ Creed. Mindshare, soulshare, eyeballs, deliverables. Product. He’d felt a little woozy. Did he know that ICBN had recently launched—“set loose” were Jasmine’s words—its own version of EWTN’s Mother Angelica, though with a somewhat harder-core on-air presence? In five years, Jasmine crowed, no one would know or care who came first. Sister Payne. Can she bring it! He’d caught glimpses of the woman’s pasty countenance glowering from the ceiling-corner flat screens, news ticker tracking every jot and titter of the pontiff’s Asian visit. The second week on the job, he’d even passed the sister herself in the halls on one of her rare visits to flyover country, caffeinated entourage trailing behind with their cradled tablet PCs. Not a simulation, mind you, this was an actual nun. They’d only recently moved her show to an afternoon slot. The format was straightforward: she opened with a decade of the rosary, then fielded rambling call-in questions from whiners about the rhythm method and masturbation. The same shtick every day. She’d come off all quiet and understanding at first, but then, carefully folding her bony fingers, smiling Sister Payne tore them all a new one. Mayhew immediately understood the appeal; he recognized in it something deeply satisfying. The first time he heard them queue the bridge from “Breakout” by Swing Out Sister as segue to a commercial, he thought he’d wet his business casuals.

---

* * *

A week or so after Bob’s departure, Mayhew’s HD camera had been stolen out of his room. Now he carried its much smaller replacement with him on his twice-daily peregrinations through the city. When the heat wasn’t insufferable, after morning mass and the retinal shock of reentry into the glare of the Caribbean daylight, he’d walk the walls, unthinking. He favored the wide west-facing battlements, the horizon like a vision worked over with Photoshop’s smudge tool. He learned to hug the shadowed side of the street, noted the migration of juice vendors over the course of the day, heliotropes bending to the will of the sun. One of his favorite stops was the Palace of the Inquisition, where he marveled at the many tools of torture, the mysterious tongs and spiked collars, the cells of mercy and of penitence.

At night, among the tangle of café chairs and tables that appeared at dusk in the shelter of the same walls and disappeared long before sunrise, he drank Cuba libres for which he was ceremoniously overcharged. It seemed in keeping with his duties as clueless American exile. The waiters loved to see him arrive, with their smiles and obscene gestures beyond his periphery. He’d gotten chummy with a shockingly thin man from Medellín who shined shoes for tourists and with whom he carried on brief, awkward conversations and, later, hours-long games of chess, which, even after he’d begun to try to win, Mayhew always lost. That he’d already grown used to the routine and anonymity of these days worried him. From the beginning, his cellphone had been useless. Soon his wife’s emails stopped altogether.

He replaced the stolen camera with a pro-am model of lesser quality that he bought from one of the young street vendors. Where the kid had gotten it, Mayhew neither knew nor cared. “¿Que quiere?” the kid had said. It was nearly midnight. He’d been tailing Mayhew for two blocks, a youth of about thirteen, two years older than Mayhew’s own son.

“Nada,” said Mayhew, and went all brittle. He’d had it with the vendors approaching him. One, then another, then another. In waves. He’d bought his share of coconut shell rosaries and faux pastel street scenes and three-CD sets of the local vallenato talent. As word spread that he was no longer an easy mark, the waves had lessened. Yet he wanted them to know he wasn’t like the other Americans they’d met. For some reason it seemed important to prove this to these strangers.

The kid wore a fitted University of Texas baseball cap, its flattened bill turned slightly sideways. “Digame,” he said, keeping pace with Mayhew. “¿Que quiere?” Soon there was a man walking on the other side as well. He wore a bandana around his leathery neck and seemed spry for his age, which was advanced, and his eyes shone under each passing streetlamp. He had the face of someone with too much control of his own expression, someone overconfident in his skill at hiding behind it.

“You want girls?” he said.

Mayhew immediately despised the man’s smile. Everything about him spoke of the kind of conspiratorial male carnality that had always embarrassed Mayhew. Though even in this, he was of two minds. Here, over the weeks, he’d come to admire the language of street glances and the ostentatious—almost ceremonial—display of male appreciation for all the many women one saw during the course of a public day. The sheer variety and wonder of it. He’d convinced himself he’d joined the ranks of these South American men, however provisionally, these Caribbean men who unlike their U.S. counterparts dressed like adults. He’d bought a few guayaberas himself; they seemed to bestow upon his squirrelly personality something of the same mystique of masculine pride and maturity. But he knew it was a sham.

Now the kid and the man competed for Mayhew’s attention, seemingly oblivious of one another.

“What do you want?” the kid asked again, trying out his English.

The man touched Mayhew’s arm. “No hoes, señor. University girls.” Man to man, he seemed to be saying: we all want the same thing.

“University girls?” Mayhew rolled his eyes. “Right.” But if he were honest with himself—and maybe that was what he admired about the men down here, their honesty—the company of an attractive woman just then did not seem entirely unappealing. He wasn’t honest with himself, though, he’d never been, and he knew he’d suffer for it someday. He’d not cheated on his wife in all the years of their marriage. At this remove, though, he’d taken u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Physics of Large Objects
• I, Budgie
• The Deposition
• Common Area
• Sinkhole
• Meat
• Orchard Tender
• Keepers
• Strange Mercies
• Acknowledgments