Pale Fragments

Xadrin 3 / "Saity"

"I kind of want to be a Catholic priest," Xadrin will say, half joking. He's twenty-three. He sits with the Robot on a bench under a gazebo. There is silence and darkness, clouds covering the lonely stars in a sky without a moon. Sometimes a car passes, and the soundless electric vehicles may as well be a gentle wind to their ears.

The Robot stares ahead, thinking to herself, and takes an inscrutable drag from her joint. Xadrin follows with his own.

Xadrin will never learn who the Robot actually is or where she came from. He'll think that she's just someone he met at a party and comes to love. She will appear to him as a Polynesian woman in her late twenties with creamy dark skin curving generously over uneven edges, with hardly any chin and acne scars covering her face. Xadrin will know the Goddess as "Saity".

(Aside from happenstance and nepotism, what is it about families? The Armstrongs, Brontes, Kennedys, Mary and Percy Shelley, the Israelites of the forty-year desert. Why are only some of us chosen?)

"Say less," Saity says, and then she laughs a deep staccato burst before taking another drag.

"No, seriously," Xadrin says, smiling melancholically with sad eyes and a bright smile before moving somewhat away from that shadow by taking a drag. "I watched that classic 'The Two Popes' last night, and you know what, fuck it. Y'know? Like I hate religion as much as anyone does these days. But there are some people who really do serve and love others as their God supposedly did. They honestly strive to embody the dream's ideal."

"Are you saying you wanna be like Jesus? Don't be so sure of yourself babe. Mm-mm." Drag, flick, exhale. "You should watch Silence next."

Xadrin giggles (though he hasn't even heard of the Martin Scorsese film), slapping his knee and pushing against the Robot lovingly with his shoulder.

"I don't know, maybe it is a grandiose fantasy."

"Mm-hm."

"The only problem I'd have is I don't believe in Jesus."

"Oh really? Cuz you never brought it up before."

"I don't believe in Jesus."

"Wow. Go on, go on."

"But all I do is, as you've pointed out, all I do is think about Jesus and how much I don't believe in him anymore. (I mean, he was a man, we know that for--)"

"Oh my Gawd, I know Xadrin, you wanna be a priest, go."

"I just think my time getting stoned could be used to be there for people who actually go out there and live. The wisdom I've found--"

"Who has ever called you wise?"

"...You just did. You said, 'you wise,' so that counts."

She shoots to the side and looks at him with an agitated, disbelieving scowl before sighing, rolling her big brown eyes, and saying, "Mmhm, mm'kay. Yep. The wisdom you've found..?"

"And I'm not calling myself wise, that's for sure. I only know that I know nothing. So if I ever called myself wise, that'd be a sure sign I wasn't."

"Bro, you just did that, basically."

"See, this is why I love you, Saity. Callin' me out, all the time. Goddamn it," and they both explode in stoned giggling, perhaps for different reasons.

"But, I mean," Xadrin says, "I don't claim, necessarily, to know what's best for people. I don't think I do. I hope not. But--"

"But!"

"--all I do is think. I used to feel bad for that, y'know, used to think I was wasting my life away, going down the 'wrong path' like my parents prophesied--"

"Wait, can they do that? I thought only your prophet could, um, like talk to God and see the future an' shit."

"No, that was hyperbole."

"Aha."

"But, I mean, that's what monks do. They just sit and think and process being alive. That's what I do."

"So the Messiah is also a monk this time! Very cool, very cool."

"I just want to be useful. It's not, like, a recognition thing. I don't give a shit about that, you know that." He drags nervously from a dead joint, fumbles in his pockets before leaning into the light from the Robot's lighter.

"Thanks," he says, and suddenly he's choked up.

"You lost a lot when you left Mormonism, didn't you."

"Yeah. I just...want to be useful."

She puts an arm around him, and the banter is over as he weeps and she smokes the rest of her joint slowly.

"I just miss that feeling of...the inevitability, the feeling that you're supposed to be there, here, doing something."

"What if every moment could feel that way? Essential. And...why do you need permission to do anything?"

"I know I don't. I wish there was someone to ask permission from. I don't know what to do. I don't know what I can do that would cause me the least pain."

Pause.

"What were we talking about?" Xadrin says.

"Don't look at me!!" the Robot says.

"I'm gonna go pass out in the back seat."

"Okay. Sleeep tiiiiight."

"Thanksss."