Falling Idols Read online

  Willy shook his head again, as if he’d been pounding his skull against the wall rather than looking at it. “Just give it up, painter. You beat by something you won’t never understand. You beat before you even started.”

  Leo stood mutely, watching as Willy tossed a friendly arm around Calvin’s shoulders and steered him away. Calvin managed one more quick glance at the wall, at the sweat and paint and hopes that brightened it, at Leo’s eyes. And then they were gone.

  Along with whatever impetus Leo had to keep working.

  He packed up and called it an early night.

  *

  Leo finished two nights later. It took him scarcely an hour, blending lighter and darker shades of green with touches of black until the second rose’s stem swept down to the foundation of the building. With neither run nor stray dribble to mar, to detract.

  Then the calm appraisal of elation, standing in the presence of a work brought to completion. Brainchild’s maturity, left to stand on its own. There was no other feeling like that in all the world.

  Still stung by Willy’s words from two nights ago, at heart Leo had to suspect Willy may have been right. But sense of duty was greater still, to contribute something to this blighted cityscape. If beauty was in the eye of the beholder, perhaps hopelessness was, as well. Even a fool had to start somewhere.

  Leo returned the spray cans to his new nylon bag, then backed up for a broader view of the roses. Magnificent, his master work so far. Dawn was too far away, that first kiss of sunlight when this completed work might shine, and he wanted to be back here for the moment, so he could see, so they all could see.

  Except…

  They all were seeing right now. From the streets. From the sidewalk. From a scant few feet away, he noticed as he turned. Talk about losing yourself in your work — dozens of them had approached and he’d never heard. Standing motionless, staring. Young and ancient, black and white, Asian and Hispanic. Junkies. Winos. Mothers. Whores. A cop. Children. Dealers. Gangbangers. All of them half-lit by streetlights too few and weak to cut through much darkness on this edge of town.

  Leo gave them a queasy, gentle smile, feeling sick within because no one seemed to appreciate his efforts. Feeling sicker still when the faces did not change.

  Silence, except for the distant master mix of traffic and sirens, wailing babies and TVs blaring from open windows.

  Someone in the street hit the play button on a monstrous boom box, speakers blasting gangsta rap, here’s life as we know and live it, brutal and dirty. The savage four-four rhythm prompted many, those who could, to dance. Whirling, contorting, letting themselves go with abandon, circling around a teenage girl who swayed and knelt beside a squirming cloth bag.

  Leo, not liking this, not at all, saw no joy in the display. There was nothing of celebration in the movement, no release. It was darker, somehow, more elemental, obligatory. People in chains would dance this way.

  From the comfort of shadows, Willy came forward to meet him. He looked much the same as the other night, gray sweats for black the only difference. The sad shake of his head was the same.

  “Warned you once, cuz,” he said. “I told you you’s messing with shit you don’t understand.”

  “I can’t understand what nobody’ll talk about!” Leo shouted. His only defense.

  “Sometimes you got to take things on faith. I know you mean well, but you past the point of no return now, you know what I’m saying?”

  Leo looked past him to the nightmare conga line out in the street. Dancers still caught in a frenzy of muscle and bones. The girl in the circle, still kneeling, swayed with lithe serpentine fluidity. Wild hair tossing to and fro about her shoulders, head thrown back in an act of perfect supplication. She reached into the bag beside her, drawing out its source of erratic movement: one of those plump rats so prevalent in the neighborhood. She lifted it to arm’s length above her head, and it squirmed like a worm on a fishhook, fat pink tail lashing at her wrist and forearm like a tiny whip.

  Leo thought of films that he’d seen — strange rites born of Africa, of the Caribbean. Priestesses doing much the same thing with live chickens. Only now, rats were so much more in keeping with the locale.

  “There’s a way things run around here,” Willy said. “We may not like it, but we understand it, and so we know how to live with it, you see what I’m saying? And we get by. Bricklord wants a building burned out? We give it to him. He wants to smell some food rot in the street? We give that to him too. He don’t never ask for life so long’s we keep him happy with all the other shit. Sacrifices, cuz. That’s what it’s all about. Keeping the place the way he likes it.”

  Leo, shaking his head in numb refusal, Just who the hell is this Bricklord guy that’s got these people so beaten down?

  “And then you come along with your spray cans,” Willy said.

  Out in the street, the girl pulled a dagger from the folds of her dress. Within a tightening circle of dancers, she slashed at the rat with a deceptively gentle arc of the blade, then bucked beneath its all-but-severed head, catching the sudden dark drizzle on breasts and throat, forehead and tongue.

  And everyone fell motionless. Waiting.

  “Me, I think you do fine work,” said Willy. “But my opinion don’t mean shit. And Bricklord? Cuz, you done pissed him off good.”

  Leo at first thought it was an earthquake. But it was too centralized. A low, subsonic rumble emanating from within the four-story building across the street, shock waves vibrating asphalt underfoot. Noise swelling like the approach of a subway train.

  The maelstrom of sound reaching zenith, every window in the building blew outward with sudden fury, a rain of glass circling the foundation. Bricks rattled loose, tumbled free, hit ground in puffs of red dust. The entire structure sagged, like a balloon deflating of a few breaths of life. As Leo watched, the side of the building broke out in creeping webs of mold that filled in the cracks between the bricks…

  And then the shape began to bleed through the wall.

  It was gargantuan, immense. An amorphous, three-dimensional blackness taking form from the building’s structure like fog pouring through a screen. Its head reached midway between the third and fourth floors, featureless except for twin globes of eyes like harvest moons. Its hide reeked of rot, of despair. When its lower face split to reveal rusted metal teeth, its methane breath stank of the sewers.

  Bricklord, behold his great and terrible majesty.

  “Probably don’t mean much to say I’m sorry,” Willy said. “But you know it ain’t nothing personal.”

  Even if Leo had been able to move his feet, it would have done little good. Bricklord crossed over to where he stood with three thunderous steps. As Leo stared aghast, numbly trying to fathom this apparition, its enormity and origins, it reached for him with one tree-trunk arm—

  Then closed its hand around him. For something that had materialized through brick, it had gelled into something awfully solid.

  He was lifted up, up, legs flailing and arms straining, and Bricklord aimed him at his own creation. Leo’s head was but a yard away from the roses, the only things in his field of vision, and with overwhelming sorrow he knew they would be the last things he ever saw.

  Pressure.

  The hand tightened around his middle, an encircling vise-grip, tighter, tighter, and Bricklord’s forefinger began to grind down upon his shaggy head. Much as Leo’s own finger had sought the nozzles of countless spray cans. His ribs caved in with a wet splintering.

  Just before the huge finger pressed his head down into his shoulders, Leo could feel the unbearable pressure boiling like a volcano, then could feel no more, see no more, hear no more.

  As Leo’s mouth and nostrils and eye sockets erupted into a red, unidirectional spray, Bricklord held him before the wall. And with bold, sure strokes, began to create.

  *

  Another gray day, a day like all the rest. Infinity before, infinity behind.

  The status quo maintained.


  Out in the street, home away from home, Calvin sat curbside and studied his own feet. Getting too big for his shoes to contain. Such fast feet.

  He remembered seeing something on TV once, called the Olympics. Just exactly what they were he didn’t know, but he’d gotten into watching them just the same. Eagerly awaiting the moment when the runners would explode from their marks, looking so fast and free. Unchained.

  I can do that, he’d thought at the time. And still believed it. Wondering who you talked to to sign up for the Olympics. Hoping that someday he would find out, get his chance to prove himself. Show them all what he was made of.

  Maybe someday. Maybe. Find another kid and do some practice races, and for the relays, instead of a baton they could pass each other this dented can of spray paint that he’d found in the gutter this morning.

  And had used once already.

  Calvin was a far better runner than artist, but what he’d sprayed on the whitewashed wall, mere feet from where the painter had died, was still easy to discern: a tombstone shape, set in between the bottom of the flower stems.

  The wall had become a regular montage of group effort. Calvin’s crude tombstone, the painter’s extraordinary flowers…

  And the other thing, added late last night. Now dried, it was shaded in various rusts and reddish-browns. An oval shape, with splayed legs:

  A gigantic cockroach, eating the roses.

  The Dripping Of Sundered Wineskins

  I. Media vita in morte sumus

  It’s said that William Blake spent nearly all of his life experiencing visitations by angels, or what he took to be angels, but my first time came when I was only seven, and I’d never heard of William Blake and was unaware that anything miraculous was happening. It may have been that my young age kept me from seeing her as anything other than entirely natural, much as I took for granted the checkpoints and the everpresent British soldiers who tried in vain to enforce peace in the Belfast of my childhood.

  Or, more likely, I was in shock from the bomb blast.

  It was years before I understood what was known as, with wry understatement, the Troubles: the politics and the hatreds between Protestants and Catholics, amongst Catholics ourselves, loyalists and republicans. As I later came to understand that day, the pub that had been targeted was regarded by the Provo I.R.A. as a nest of opposition, lovers of queen and crown. To those who planted the bomb that should have killed me, a few more dead fellow Irish were but part of the cumulative price of independence. Funny, that.

  Belfast is working-class to its core, and made mostly of bricks. They rained from the blast erupting within the pub across the street from where two friends and I were walking home from school, late and chastised for some forgotten mischief we’d gotten up to. I knew the gray calm of an early autumn day, then fire and a roar, and suddenly I stood alone. One moment my friends had been walking one on either side of me, and in the next had disappeared.

  “Don’t look at them,” she said, in a gentle voice not of the Emerald Isle, the first of two things I fully recall her telling me, even if I don’t know where she’d come from. It was only later, from the odd translucence of her otherwise light brown skin, that I realized she was unlike any woman I’d ever seen. “Don’t look.”

  But look I did, and I remember the feel of her hand atop my head, although not to turn me from the sight. Lighter, it was, as if even she were rendered powerless by my schoolboy’s curiosity. Well, now you’ve done it, her touch seemed to be telling me. Now you’ve sprung the lid on the last of that innocence.

  They both lay where they’d been flung, behind me, cut down by bricks propelled with the velocity of cannonballs. Nothing have I seen since that’s looked any deader, with more tragic suddenness, and there I stood between them, untouched but for a scratch across my bare knee that trickled blood down my hairless shin.

  I felt so cold my teeth chattered, and thought she then told me I must’ve been spared for a reason. It’s always made sense that she would. It’s what angels say. And whatever reason she had, in the midst of an afternoon’s chaos, for stooping to kiss away that blood from my knee, I felt sure it must’ve been a good one.

  “Oh yes,” I think she said, her lips soft at my knee, as if something there had confirmed her suspicions that in my survival there lay design.

  Even today I can’t say that the mysterious touch of her mouth didn’t inspire my first true erection, if stubby and immature.

  She looked up, smiling at me with my young blood bright upon her mouth. She nodded once toward the smoking rubble of the pub, once at the pitiful bodies of my lads, then said the other thing I clearly recall: “Never forget — this is the kind of work you can expect from people who have God on their side.”

  When I told my mother about her that night, how the smiling woman had come to me, I left out the part about her kissing away my blood. It had been one of those moments that children know instinctively to separate from the rest, and keep secret, for to share it would change the whole world. I saw no harm in sharing what she’d said to me, though. But when I did, my mother shook me by the shoulders as if I’d done something wrong.

  “You mustn’t ever speak of it again, Patrick Kieran Malone,” she told me. Hearing my full name used meant no room for argument. “Talk like that sounds like something from your Uncle Brendan, and a wonder it is he’s not been struck by lightning.”

  The comparison shocked me. The way she normally spoke of her brother, Brendan was, if not the devil himself, at least one of his most trusted servants. I protested. I was only repeating what the angel-lady said.

  “Hush! Word of such a thing gets round, they’ll be showing up one day to drag us off and sink us to the bottom of a bog, don’t you know.”

  Of course I wondered who she meant, and why they would feel so strongly about the matter, but as I think about it now I don’t believe she even fully knew herself. She knew only that she had one more reason to be afraid of something at which she couldn’t hit back.

  There are all kinds of tyranny employed around us. Bombs are but the loudest.

  *

  To those things that shape us and decide the paths we take, there is no true beginning, not even with our birth, for many are in motion long before we draw our first breath. Ireland’s monastic tradition predates even the Dark Ages, when the saint I was named for returned to the island where he’d once been a slave, to win it for Christianity. While that tradition is now but a sliver of what it used to be, when thriving monasteries housed hundreds of monks and friars, on the day I joined the Franciscan order my whole life felt directed toward the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

  For as long as I could recall, the mysteries of our Catholic faith had sparked my imagination, from the solemn liturgy of the priests, to the surviving architecture of our misty past, to the relics that had drawn veneration from centuries of believers. Ever thankful for my survival, my parents exposed me to as much of our faith as they could. They took me to visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick, and to his retreat on Cruachan Aigli in County Mayo. Down in County Kerry we undertook pilgrimages to Mount Brandon, and to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin in Kilmalkedar. I touched Celtic crosses that had been standing for a millennium, the weathered stone hard and sacred beneath my fingers.

  Most mysterious of all to me was the 300-year-old head of the newly-canonized Saint Oliver Plunkett, staring from the splendor of his reliquary in Saint Peter’s Church in Drogheda. Blackened skin stretched over his bald skull like leather. His upper lip had shriveled back from his teeth to give him the start of a smile, and I could stare at him in full expectation that those dry lips would continue to move, to whisper some message for me alone.

  It held no terrors for me, that severed head of his. I’d seen the dead before, and a damn sight fresher than old Oliver was.

  Of the ethereal woman who came and went unnoticed on that day death had come so close, for years I hoped she might show herself again so I could put to her the ques
tions I was old enough now to ask, and felt a deep ache that she did not. The mind reevaluates what’s never validated, giving it the fuzzy edges of a dream, and as I grew taller, older, there were days I almost convinced myself that that was all she’d been; that I’d hallucinated a beautiful, compassionate adult because she was what I needed at the moment, since so many others around me were busy killing each other.

  But on those nights I dreamt of her, I knew better. I could never have invented anything so radiant out of thin air. Every few months, a dream so crystalline would unfold inside me it felt as if she were in the same room, watching. Angel, phantom, whatever she was, she was as responsible as anything for my joining the Franciscans of Greyfriars Abbey in Kilkenny, for she had done so much to open my eyes to the things of the spirit, and inspire my hunger to let them fill me.

  “Does it hurt to become a saint?” I asked the first time I set eyes on those sunken leathery sockets of Oliver’s.

  “Some of them were hurt staying well true to the will of the Lord,” my mother answered. “But on that day they were made saints they felt only joy, because they’d already been in Heaven a long, long time, in the company of their angels.”

  “Then that’s what I want to be,” I declared.

  She smiled at such impudence, waiting until later to tell me that no saint had ever aspired to such, as the first thing they’d given up was ambition for themselves. Sainthood was something that happened later, usually decided by people who’d never known them in the flesh.

  While I didn’t claim to understand why it had to be that way, I tried to put vanity behind me like the childish thing it was … and remember I was still alive for a reason that would be revealed in God’s own time.

  II. Corpus antichristi

  The greatest irony about what drove me from the Order of St. Francis is that it was nothing that hadn’t been experienced by the very founder himself, nearly 800 years before.

  The first time it happened to me was a Sunday morning in the abbey chapel, near the close of Mass. The Host had been venerated and the brothers and I knelt along the railing before the altar as Abbot O’Riordan worked his way down the row of us.