Spencer Dew

Spiritual Advancement

She tells me she always wanted to be a nun. This with both hands on me, a move she calls “climbing the palm tree” and which she claims comes from the Kama Sutra. She’s a woman of many scriptures, a diligent and polyglot exegete, pocket-size paperback format, pink highlighting. It’s their walk, of course. “Their stride, though that’s too strong a word. They don’t swing their hips. They walk like saints, like martyrs.” She offers examples from adolescence, as a supermarket checkout girl, the nuns who would humbly trundle in with burlap bags, buying rice and dried lentils, figs, skim milk. “The system says that what makes them strong is their vulnerability to everything. How sexy is that, huh?” I take her word on it. She’s climbed too high for me to pay much attention to the finer points of her argument. After, as she licks her fingers clean, she returns to the issue, with historical reference, telling me about the great deeds of Catherine of Sienna, of some Swede who kept refusing to die, whose floral-scented body kept coming back to life, or at least bobbing up whole, defiant of decay. “Maybe that’s all I want,” she says, “Not to rot.” Switching genders, she says that when the body of Thomas á Kempis, suspected of sainthood, was exhumed, instead of an air of roses and fleshly tranquility they found the coffin full of blood and broken fingernails, the dead man with a two week beard. “Back then mistakes were made so often,” she says, “It fuels a whole genre of myth and misbelief. Plays to our deepest fears, our most primal desires.” For her part, she prefers the dildo, citing its rigidity. I try not to take offense, though I have dreams about it, which is a bad sign. Sometimes she prays when we do it, rhyming couplets she must have picked up at some Sunday school: “Oh Lord, you make the flowers grow / the sun that shines, the rivers flow.” She sleeps with a teddy bear under her head, one she stole from her volunteer gig in the pediatric burn ward, a stuffed bear with a little bowler hat and a mechanism inside its chest that thumps, all the time, like a human heart.

She consults the lighter-blackened mirror she employs for such tasks and tells me that bad energies are coming, a lack of desire on my part, possibly the result of someone stealing my hair clippings from the barbershop floor. She tells me I will need to buy her some reversible spell-casting candles and an aerosol container of sex magic spray. She is in one of her moods. Before she buttons up her blouse, she hangs a scapular of some lice-ridden saint between her unbound breasts, continuing her speech about the irony of the charges – the speech she interrupted a blow job she was in the process of delivering to start, which became doubly disturbing. She says even the abuse was ironic, and tells me that the bishop should have been indicted on theological grounds alone. “It is an internal issue,” she says. “The agents of Caesar should make their arrests elsewhere.” As always, the topic is not open for discussion. By the time we reach the botanica, however, she’s warmed to me again, and asks me three times what I think of her new plum-colored skirt. She admires it in the doublewide display window of the store, her silhouette reflecting back against the racks of religious supplies, the plastic and ceramic saints. Inside, she asks if I will buy her everything, approaching me with each item, one by one: witch hazel, anointing oil, ritual daggers, scrying dishes, pendulums, and pain relievers. She toys with a set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like chickens ridden by tiny Chinese warriors, browses among the household gods, the devotional objects. But she drew up a list, before we left, on a scrap of take-out menu. We buy only what is written, a half dozen of those big candles, wicks at either end, two small aerosols of spell, a handful of pictures of bleeding hearts, virgins. As the old man at the counter wraps her Attract/Repulse candles in old racing papers and lowers them into the bottom of a brown paper bag bearing the logo of the organic yuppie grocery down the way, she takes a whiff of a folk depression remedy, runs her fingertips over a broken Buddha. “At least let me touch everything,” she says, raking an incense stick across her bare arm. “If I can’t have it, I at least I want to rub my hands all over it.”

Our relationship suffered a liturgical decline. She entered a new fashion phase, which she said was annual, switching from the dark, spilled blood colors she wore when we met – all silks and straps, slits and layers engineered for revelation in unexpected places – to white, preferably cotton, often baggy. She took to spraying sex magic in my general direction, once into my eyes, which burned and watered and which I had to rinse for twenty minutes in her bathroom sink, after which time she said, “You just don’t understand that I need to be alone, that I need to think, to meditate on the world.” I told her these were mixed signals and she called me by a racial slur. I don’t know if that was a mixed signal or not, or if she was just confused, in the moment, about my ancestry. We stopped seeing so much of each other after a few of those scenes, one of them involving an open carton of tofu flung in my face, another involving a restaurant full of people inflicted with accounts of my impotence, and a third, over money, ending with my wallet being flung over the faux rock lip of the spectacled bear den at the zoo. The decline continued, however, without me. In fear of spell casters, she started cutting her own hair, very short, with slanting bangs. She worked over her fingernails, too, clipping them back to the quick, all except the thumbnails, which she grew long so she could pierce, at certain contemplative moments, her own palms. These things I learned from friends and neighbors, along with accounts of her new habit of standing on the platform of the fire escape, staring straight into the sun for its final hour of setting. She had her reasons, I’m sure. I have no doubts. This was a girl, after all, who believed that all religions were the same in their essence, primitive pragmatisms. Her words: “Reality does things for you if you do things in return.” And surely that’s what she was doing, when I saw her last, after another nameless bar had closed around me. She stood under the scrolling display of the twenty-four hour check cashing store, sucking blood from her own broken skin, staring up blindly at the brilliant, flashing ads for money orders, cash advances, and payday loans.