“You are happy.”
That’s Vlat, the Czech KP. Vlat speaks rather broken English, with four key phrases that he can say fluently, on repeat throughout his shift, like a video game NPC. They are:
“You are boss man,” when you do something that pleases him; “you are racist,” when you do something that upsets him; “you are fat boy,” when he sees you eating leftover food; and “you are happy,” which is a sort of filler fourth, when he wants to switch it up a bit. This time he says the phrase with extra conviction.
“I never see you so happy - what happen?”
The question snaps me out of my reverie. It shocks me, because, up until this moment, I was convinced that I was actually feeling perfectly miserable. Today is Monday the 19th of August, 2019 – the morning after her last shift. When I woke up, I was still thinking about the last words we said to each other, and I could still picture her face when we said them. Those sounds and images are now quickly fading from memory as a new regime in my life imposes itself upon me, with Vlat’s accusation as its mantra: you are happy. I recoil from this idea initially, but is it so crazy? Perhaps I am happy now. It’s not just the relief from the immense (though mostly unrequited) tension between us, and the dread over her leaving being suddenly terminated. It is ever thus in life: the thing you dread the most seems invincible and formidable as it approaches, it threatens to upend your entire world; when it finally comes, it is a pathetic, whimpering thing that leaves you wondering what exactly you were so scared of. There is also the realisation that Niamh would not have really made me happy. I was blind to it while we still worked together, but there was very little between us beyond the physical chemistry. Bit by bit, I realise that Vlat is right. I am happy.
The sensation is very short lived. Niamh was not the only one to leave, and the end of that summer was a great exodus which was like lights going out in the sky, plunging us into darkness. Michael – gone; Karen – gone; Callum – gone; Cara – gone; Orla – gone; Jack – gone. I suddenly found myself, less than a year into the job, one of the most experienced staff members. I ended up having to try to do Michael’s job without Michael’s pay, because the boss was too greedy to give me a rise. Angela became more beastly and inhumane than ever before. I have always suspected that I have seasonal depression, and that particular autumn the fifty dreadful, miserable hours week after week after week in the hotel nearly drove me insane. It was easy being the new guy showing promise and initiative, but I was not ready for the burden of being in charge.
“So you want you want to set the round tables so that nobody has their back to the bar,”
The new start gives me a blank look. I give them a blank look back, hoping that some movement of the intellect will appear momentarily. It does not, and I realise that I need to intervene.
“Like this,” I say, and begin rearranging everything to demonstrate my point. The new start stares at me with complete indifference, as if they don’t understand what I’ve just done, and they’re simply waiting for their shift to finish so they can go home and watch Rick and Morty.
“When you’re folding it, you want these two parts here to be parallel, otherwise it won’t line up properly at the bottom,” I say to the other new start, showing each step, and the different types of mistakes that, once identified and eliminated, point to the one proper method. When you have learned the history of all the mistakes and understand why they are mistakes, it makes it easier to understand what is correct, and why. This is the historical pattern for the formation of nearly all Christian doctrines– each heresy that is debunked leads to a clarifying dogma, the errors highlight and delineate the truth. There is a great universal wisdom to this process, which was co-opted and reformulated centuries later by Arthur Conan Doyle - “when you have eliminated the impossible...”.
“You see that this one looks ugly and messy – because I did this part wrong? Now you do it.”
Blank faces once more. This is hopeless. How did Michael do this, for six or seven consecutive years, while maintaining his saintly patience? Can I remain the person I am if I stay here any longer?
In all this time, Dick Cheney is doing his part to keep me sane. The precious moments we get to discuss intellectual matters are an oasis, a respite, even if we disagree on virtually every important issue.
“I know someone like you,” he tells me one day. Neither he nor I could have realised at the time how fateful that sentence was.
“How do you mean?”
“You know - young, trad convert, terminally online...”
“Based. I would like to meet him.”
And so we are both made aware of each other’s existence and a certain chain of events is set in motion. “We are planning to go to Latin Mass this Sunday with some others – you should come.”
“That would be cool, I’ve never been to a Latin Mass before.”
“So you just go to a normal Mass every week?”
“I actually don’t go to Mass at all, I haven’t been since I was young, really.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. People who are radical online don’t tend to be practicing.”
For some reason, this remark wounds my pride very much – probably because of how true and incisive it is. My eyes are opened to what a strange situation I’ve put myself in. For a couple of years now I’ve been fumbling around for truth in the vast realm of the Christian intellectual tradition. I have covered the theory - reading the Bible, the Church Fathers, some modern apologetics. I have covered the praxis - attending services of the Orthodox, Evangelical, and high-church Protestant variety. I have gotten as far as truly believing in every word of the Nicene Creed, and yet until this moment I had chosen to remain agnostic on the question of which was the one true church. I seemed to have avoided seriously considering Roman Catholicism, let alone attending Mass. Now the reality of my negligence was staring me in the face. The time had come for me to move beyond the mere Christianity of Lewis.
***
I am standing in an ancient dock, all made of stone, all bright, looking out into a vast and peaceful sea. I could be somewhere in Italy, or Greece, or Syria, or Egypt. Everything is glistening in the sunlight. There is a great silence all around. I am alone, with no people, or even ships, anywhere in sight.
Suddenly, a wind starts up somewhere in the distance. It grows in speed and strength, until it is whistling past my ears and tossing my hair about like a flag. It grows stronger still, and now I find myself grasping onto the stone structure just to avoid being blown away. My fingers hurt as I grip the walls of the dock. All the while, I am still looking out onto the sea as the water begins to recede before my eyes. Within seconds, the entire seabed is exposed, all the way to the horizon. The wind blows and blows, and every drop of moisture is blown away. Finally, the soil of the seabed begins to crack, like in a desert landscape. I watch all of this take place, and I am too terrified to move or speak.
I burst into consciousness, still short of breath, utterly bewildered by all of the above. It is not the first time in the last year that I have had a strange and cryptic dream like this, but this morning was particularly vivid and violent. Slowly I begin to remember what had happened earlier. I woke up, just in time to make Mass if I dressed myself quickly and skipped breakfast. The church is not even a five minute walk from my house. Instead, as I surveyed the situation, I decided to give it a miss this week, and surrendered myself to an extra hour of rest, which produced this nightmarish vision. In context, this clearly seems to be a warning.
I resolve not to repeat my mistake. The following week, I wake up well in advance, leaving myself plenty of time to get ready. It would be an understatement to say that I am nervous as I arrive at the doors. It is rather like meeting an ex girlfriend after a decade, with all the usual questions and worries that one would expect. How will it go? Who will speak first? What will we say to each other? Will we be civil, or cordial, or rude? Most of all, if I know how painful and akward it will be, why did I agree to this?
I pass through the entrance. The interior is suprisingly warm and inviting – not the garish and ostentatious Counter-Reformation assault on the eyes, but rather the moderately conservative post Vatican II style – plain and simple, yet still recognisably Catholic. A statue here and there, some stained glass, but not much else. The ceiling is high, with tall, tall windows, and sunlight is streaming through them, illuminating the space around the altar. A large, cartoonish icon of Christ the Pantocrator above the altar is smiling down on me – it is tacky, but comforting. I slide into my pew in the middle of the church, hoping to be close enough to see and hear everything, but at the same time not drawing attention to myself. Promptly at 9:30am the priest, a Southeast Asian man, processes down the aisle with some servers in front of him carrying a thin and long ornamental cross. They all bow when they reach the altar and the cross is planted in a slot in the floor. While all this is happening, the congregation sings a hymn from the green books placed in small piles at the side of every pew. Laudate, it says on the cover – I don’t know enough Latin to understand what this means. Once the priest has completed a small series of gestures around the altar, he turns to face the congregation and awkwardly stands and waits until we finish the last verse of the hymn.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
***
Do you remember chapter two, reader? Do you remember the name of that monastery on the hill? That’s where it all began – me sitting on that hard wooden bench listening to some vague and ancient chant, being still for a few minutes, drinking up every drop of the beauty in that scene. Can you believe that more than two years on, my story has taken me to a church of the same name, on the other side of Europe – Holy Cross parish church, on Dixon Avenue in Glasgow. You would just dismiss this as coincidence, wouldn’t you? If even a moment like this is lost on you, then I might as well put my laptop down and stop writing. Yet life is full of little signs like this - those who have ears to hear, let them listen.
That autumn I found myself increasingly not knowing who I was or what I was doing. People now talk of a quarter life crisis – perhaps this was mine. On Halloween I went to Edinburgh and climbed Arthur’s Seat by myself. Forgetting the time of year, I found that the sun had set by the time I reached the top. I had to descend in complete darkness, occasionally guided by the flashlight of someone who was walking their dog. I could have injured myself. I didn’t care. I was sick with boredom and anxiety. I needed to do something different. The city lights shone at me – directly at me – as I stood on the peak. They accused me and dared me to find the secret of their charm. Look at us. We are bright and beautiful. And what are you? You will see us for a moment like this, and then you will go home and forget. You can take a picture but it won’t be enough. You will get sad and bored, you will miss us, and you will come here to see us again.
Slowly, Christmas Day approaches. Only those who have worked in hospitality will understand how a day which is associated with peace and joy by most, the second happiest feast in the liturgical calendar, can be a source of such dread and anxiety. I don’t know how long it will take me to heal from this unholy trauma, the little shudder and the dryness in the mouth at the sound of the word Christmas, how every year I promised myself that I would leave before Christmas, that I would never spend another Christmas in the Hotel. All those years when my body was groaning for its Sabbath rest were not in vain, as I learned the fullness of this commandment, how deeply it touches the totality of man’s being. The Sabbath was made for man.
It was in this time that Dick Cheney left. He tried to violate the Hotel’s upside-down commandment to work on Christmas, tried to negotiate more time off for exams than management were happy to give him, until they got upset and banished him from their Eden. The darkness got darker. At first I felt upset at Dick, for allowing himself to get sacked. All he had to do was accept the subnormal working conditions and the mediocre pay on offer at The Hotel, and then I would have this one consolation left at least, of having just one other person with a three-digit IQ to talk to at work. Of course my anger subsided the more I thought about it. How could he stay? How could I stay? What madness kept me in that place after that point? Sometimes think that what followed was useful to me, that it humbled me and strengthened me, and made me more of a man. Sometimes I think that I had already been humbled enough by 25th December 2019, and everything after that was just gratuitous cruelty.
St Paul tells us in the letter to the Philipians that Christ “emptied himself”. The Christmases that I’ve worked in the Hotel are the closest in my life that I’ve gotten to unfolding the meaning of this phrase. It is 7pm, my shift is almost finished. I have served over a hundred people in the space of a couple of hours. The work is almost accomplished as the guests start to leave and all we need to do is clean up. The endless din of voices quietens down to a murmur, until the songs on the Christmas playlist can be heard clearly again. The lyrics sound positively moronic now. Children singing Christian rhyme. Logs on the fire. I get a little warm in my heart when I think of winter. What utter fucking tripe.
Every inch of the bar is covered in glasses. Some boxes and crates have appeared on the floor. I feel weak and defeated. No gas in the tank. I had wanted to cry multiple times today, like the moment when that cheeky old bitch made a sarcastic comment about getting her cranberry sauce too late, except I was probably so dehydrated that no tears would actually come. Now that the ballroom is almost clear and Declan is bagging up the dirty linens, God Rest You Merry Gentlemen comes on the playlist. Glad tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. I use every bit of moral strength I have to lift myself out of my misery, and lock eyes with Declan.
“Do you feel comfort and joy right now?” I say, perfectly deadpan. We both laugh; it is weary but genuine. I feel like I have achieved some kind of spiritual victory. I am dead, and yet I live. I went through hell, came out on the other side, and had the audacity to laugh at it. I am empty, but it’s not a bad emptiness – no, my emptiness makes me rise, like a hot air balloon that has thrown off its dead weight.
A few more days remain of the year, which ends at Gary’s party on Hogmanay. It is a completely different world, so difficult to imagine now. We listen to Old Town Road and Bad Guy on repeat, and we laugh about the Chinese Virus. Somebody had read on the news that there was a case in Italy. Somebody read that it came from bat soup. Somebody read that it came from a lab. Somebody confidently said that it would turn out to be nothing, like the swine flu. We danced and drank and sang and not even a time traveler could have convinced us what would come next.
This is a serial fiction project, published fortnightly together with Ross Anderson at the Broken Quill.