100 People:xiii. Jim O’Donovan

Jim O’Donovan and Tatiana pulled into the parking lot of the hotel. He had stopped being surprised that his ’82 Honda was still running. After all, it had made the six-hundred plus mile journey to California from Utah so he could meet a random woman he had met on some internet chatroom. The two exited the car, Tatiana grabbing the bag of food from Del Mex.

“I’m fucking starving,” Jim said as he unlocked the door to the room.

“You’ve got a filthy mouth for a Mormon,” said Tatiana. Jim looked down at the ground and bit his bottom lip. “Not that I really care. I’m just saying you’re supposed to be all perfect and stuff.”

The two reached into the bags of food and started eating dinner. With a bite of his burrito in his mouth, Jim said, “There isn’t anything perfect about Utah.”

“Obviously, if I’m able to lure one of you down here just to fuck me.”

Jim swallowed his food and looked away from Tatiana. He wondered if he liked her or just the fact that she had a Russian name. That she used to be a prostitute and he was just looking for some kind of Dostoevsky-ion redemption. Or maybe he just had not been laid in three years and just needed to get some. He took another bite of his burrito.

“I just don’t get how someone like you survives in a place like BYU. Why did you go to school there? I mean, if you hate living in Utah so much, why didn’t you move away to go to college?” Tatiana asked as she ate her nachos.

“I don’t know. Just seemed like the right thing to do. It really isn’t as bad as I make it out to be. I mean people are all Jesus-freak like there. You can even freak them out by being too religious.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious,” Jim said as he finished his burrito. “I was taking this one class. It was a philosophy of religion class. And we were discussing if God can know everything. Well, half the class says yes. The other half, no. So this debate starts.”

Tatiana picked up her food and moved from the table to the bed. She then picked up the television remote control and turned on the television and started flipping through channels, “We could order a porno movie.”

“Nevermind,” Jim said quietly. Tatiana looked over at him and Jim was looking down at the floor while eating a taco. She turned the volume down.

“Baby, I’m sorry. Tell me the rest of your story.”

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does. Stop being so sensitive. I just like television. I was listening. Finish telling me about how everyone isn’t crazy in Utah.”

Jim took another bite of his taco, “I’m just saying if you’re too religious you could freak people out too. So this debate starts about what God can know. So this guy starts speaking—and this guy was always weird, real pompous fuck—and what he says doesn’t really make sense. So he turns to this other guy in the class who was claiming God doesn’t know everything. And this pompous fuck cast the guy out.”

“Like threw him out of the class?” Tatiana said as she flipped through the channels on the muted television.

“Uh. No. He like made this religious sign with his hand and said ‘Satan, I cast thee out.’”

“That’s pretty fucked.”

“Yeah,” Jim said looking at Tatiana, who was looking at the muted television, “So this guy starts crying and runs out of the class.”

“Just for being called the devil?”

“Yeah. So I stand up and say, ‘This is a bunch of crap,’ and I walked out of the class. I walk out of the kid is just crying in the hall, saying, ‘Did he really call me the devil? How could he do that?”

“I don’t get you Mormons,” Tatiana said as she chewed on a nacho.

“So I just tell this guy to not worry about it. That the other guy is obviously crazy. And you know what, the next class that guy wasn’t there—the guy who called the other one Satan. And wasn’t in class for a week. The professor apologizes for the whole incident and says that the guy wasn’t taking the medication he was supposed to be on. And like two weeks late the guy finally shows back up and just sits in silence, like he was lobotomized.”

“Fuck. That is crazy,” Tatiana turned up the television and began watching The Cosby Show.

Jim finished eating his taco watching Tatiana eat her nachos while watching television. He thought about the incident in the college class. Maybe it did work, he thought. Maybe he did cast the devil out. There was no reason for me to leave. But I left anyways.