"Kreuz im Gebirge" Caspar David Friedrich.
They sip their drinks against the heat, kissing chastely but for his dismissed attempts to slip a hand under her shirt. As they cool off, watching sprinklers animate the far end of the park, she asks what books he likes, hoping his answer might move her toward some clarity about this boy, what she wants from this relationship.
It turns out he reads all the time. He loves Brandon Sanderson.
The guy maxes out the page length with all his books, he says. They literally won’t let him go any thicker.
She hasn’t read any of the series he references, so he spends twenty minutes synopsizing. She tries her best to follow, but has some questions.
It’s all explained in the book, he says. You just have to read the book. The world-building will blow your mind.
As he ends his last, least comprehensive synopsis, she doesn’t speak. She watches him unlid his cup and gulp down Coke and ice, awaiting an acknowledgement of her patience through the rant, her interest in his interests, his failing to return the question. When it doesn’t come, she looks up at the sunlight pulsing through the canopy. The branches sway with trembling leaves. She knows this tree, she thinks. A maple.
It’s funny, she says, how far we’ll suspend our disbelief to feel close to made-up people.
What do you mean?
Well, today at church an older man stood at the pulpit to bear his testimony on the thinness of the veil.
Like, how close we are to dying?
It’s an expression we use to mean the closeness of the spirits of our dead. How they often intervene on our behalf, and how sometimes we feel them. Hear them, see them. Seeing’s rare, but not unheard of. I’ve never seen a spirit, but my mom has.
Interesting.
He said that ever since his youth, he’s been afflicted. He kept using that word, affliction, to describe his physical attraction to young girls and sometimes even boys. But he’s never acted on it, he said, because every time a child stirs his wrong desire, he sees in their face the face of his grandmother, who died when he was young. Her face is, like, superimposed, I guess. But she speaks to him in these moments, reminding him that this desire does not come from God, and therefore will end with death, unlike his spirit, which is pure and good. He said she gives him comfort and strength to conquer the temptation. He kept using that word, strength. He started sobbing toward the end, I was moved, and as he took a minute to collect himself, I heard whispers, and I looked around and saw fear on people’s faces. Betrayal. Then a younger guy stood from his pew in the left row, near the front, and walked his wife by her shoulders past the nearest aisle and across the front of the chapel, so we all would see, then down the aisle on the right, wagging his head all the way to the exit. They don’t have kids. This was the same guy who’d borne his testimony a few minutes earlier. He talked about atonement, likening Frodo to Jesus, like, as Frodo bore the ring, so did Christ bear our sins, Mordor as Gethsemane … Do you see what I’m getting at?
First of all, he says, rolling shrunken ice chips to one cheek, there’s no such thing as a virtuous pedophile.
Lamb is an American writer.
High Horse 