Worlds of Hurt Page 9

  It was explosive.

  The greatest revelations usually are.

  IX. Descendo ad patrem meum

  “You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.”

  It was Carl Jung said that. My uncle had only borrowed it.

  I nearly bled to death on that night of the divination, the stigmata persistent and reaching for the very core of me. In the weeks that followed, as the Sisters nursed me back to health like a faithful dog they couldn’t bear to have put to sleep, I often fondled an old pewter crucifix while my thoughts turned to the subject of fear.

  Fear the Lord thy God, we were taught since childhood in my family, and how we quaked. How we trembled. How we fell daily to our knees and supplicated for continued mercy.

  I’d long ceased to fear; fear is for children, no matter what their age. But when fear is no more, that’s still not the end of it, because beyond fear lies despair, and so far, I don’t know if there’s any end to despair at all.

  Once I was well enough to get about again, to stand without dizziness, to walk and run without weakness pitching me toward the nearest chair, I decided I could no longer spend my life with the Sisters of the Trinity. They, and the rest of the Misbegotten, were so much more than I could ever be. Their eyes saw more, their ears heard more, and with their tongues they tasted it, and their feet had walked it, and their minds comprehended it, and they had lived the histories that others only analyzed, and wrongly…

  And still they were not gods. They’d have been the first to admit it.

  To see them day by day was too hideous a reminder that I was nowhere near their equal…and worse, that I’d never really gotten past that deeply instilled need to believe, but had now been left with only the Void.

  “So what did you learn from it?” I’d asked the Sisters, soon as I could, from my bed; asked more than once. They’d look at one another and smile with something like sadness and pity and even embarrassment for my sake; but for their own, with maybe just the tiniest ray of hope. Or maybe I saw that only because I wanted to. And then they’d tell me to rest, just rest, their 2,700 years to my thirty-one like quantum mechanics to a dog.

  On my own for the first time in my life, I hiked my homeland like a student tourist, my old possessions sharing backpack space with something I thought of as belonging to a newer Patrick Kieran Malone. The knife was large, with a contoured Kraton haft, and a huge killing blade of carbon steel and a sawtoothed upper edge.

  I walked an Ireland different from that of the times of the Troubles, when a bomb had left me standing on a new road. Up north there were no more bombs going off, nor bullets flying, the I.R.A. having decided to lay down its arms—for the time being, at least—and I saw that most everyone was caught up in a cautious optimism that people with differing ideas of the same god really could live together after all.

  I wondered if, somewhere, in his jealousness, he missed the smoke and blood of those earlier days. But time was on his side. The old bloodlusts never die, they just lie dormant.

  Saw a bumper sticker while on my way back up to Belfast. Nuke Gay Whales for Christ, it said.

  Had to come from America.

  “So what did you learn?” I’d asked the Sisters, refusing to give up, and finally Maia sat down on the bed where the marrow in my bones frantically churned out new red blood cells.

  “How can I tell you this so you understand it?” she said, and thought awhile. “What’s God really like…? Imagine an arrogant and greedy and demented child on a beach, building castles in the sand…only to kick them over out of boredom, leaving what’s left for the waves. Which of course begs one more question:

  “Where did the sand come from?”

  In Belfast I returned to the church I’d grown up in, and as I entered the sanctuary that quiet afternoon, it smelled the same as it always had, old and sweet with wax and incense. It took me back twenty years and more, the shock of it overwhelming and unexpected. Smells can do that to you. It was here where my family gave thanks for my life being spared on that day of the bomb, where they lit candles for the souls of my friends who’d been killed.

  I genuflected before the altar, out of old reflex.

  Or maybe it was disguise.

  The priest didn’t recognize me at first, but then it had been awhile, a decade of monasticism and nearly another year of heresy in between. Such things leave their mark on a man, and even his blood knows the difference. The priest had already heard that I’d left the order; clasped my hands warmly just the same; would be at least sixty now. He told me how deeply my leaving the Franciscans had hurt my mother, dashing her most cherished expectations for me.

  “Can’t help that, Father,” I said. “Wasn’t my idea, but I’ve learned a brand-new doctrine. I just count myself lucky that I learned it while I’m still a relatively young man.”

  I could see that he was puzzled. And I remembered a childhood friend who’d told me, when we were altar boys, how the father had put his hands on him, and where. I’d not believed him. Nobody had. Everybody knew that God loves little children.

  “Gospel of Matthew,” I said. “Remember what Jesus had to say about new doctrines? Comparing them to wine?” The priest nodded, back on familiar ground. “Said you can’t go pouring new wine into old wineskins. It’ll just burst them, and what’ve you got then? Spilled wine and a wineskin that’ll never hold anything again.”

  From my backpack I took the sleek, dark knife, and when I unsheathed it, the blade seemed to keep on coming.

  “Some days,” I confessed, “I do wish that fucking bomb had done me in too.”

  * * *

  I don’t know why I killed the priest. Don’t know why I did such a thorough bloody job of it. Or why I killed twelve more in the coming weeks, or how I managed to get away with it for as long as I did. Blessed, I suppose, in my own way.

  With that sacrificial blade I opened them, throats and chests and bellies, opened them lengthwise or crossways, and out of each poured their stale old wine. And then I’d have to sit awhile and gaze upon their burst skins, and reflect upon the way they weren’t good for anything else now. This was my main comfort. But I could never get them all.

  That, too, was my despair.

  So I imagined those beyond my blade, Catholic and Protestant alike, shepherding those even more desperate than I to believe, telling them about an impotent, slaughtered lamb whose history and words had been agreed on by committees. And in his captive name, the eager converts would rise from their watery baptismal graves to go forth and seek to propagate the species.

  Over those weeks, I was not a particularly beloved figure in Ireland. Knew it couldn’t be much longer before I was caught. And when at last I grew too tired, too sick at heart to continue, only then did I return to the one place, the one people, that would have me, and they took me in as one of their own.

  I knew better, though.

  No matter how much blood I’d drunk, it hadn’t made me one of them.

  “Hide me,” I asked those voracious and beautiful Sisters of the Trinity. “Hide me where they’ll never find me. Hide me where they never can.”

  Of course, they said. Of course we will.

  But Maia wept.

  X. Consummatum est

  And thus finishes this testament of a boy who wanted only to grow up and be a saint.

  There are many who’d say he couldn’t have fallen any farther short of such a lofty goal. After all, there are saints, and there are butchers, and they believe they know the difference.

  But a few—a growing few, perhaps—would say that he achieved his dream all the same. But this depends on your idea of paradise.

  “Think of it this way,” Lilah tells me. “You struck some of the first blows in a coming war. You’ll be venerated, I don’t have any doubt about that. I’ve seen it before.”

  And now, at the end of all ambition, where too ends the flesh and the blood and the seed of life, I can’t help but thinking of my old hero, obsol
ete though he may be: Saint Ignatius, on his way to the lions in Rome. Would that he’d had such beautiful mouths to welcome him as I’ll soon have.

  Take me into you, Maia. Take me in, my angel, my deliverer, and I will be with you always…until the end of your world.

  Caress then, these beasts, that they may be my tomb, Ignatius wrote in a final letter, and let nothing be left of my body; thus my funeral will be a burden to none.

  As for me, I’ll not mind leaving bones, and I hope they keep them around, gnawed and clean, true relics for the inspiration of disciples yet to come.

  WHEN THE BOUGH DOESN’T BREAK

  I

  It wasn’t a conversation to have saved for the plane, halfway across the Atlantic, but that was Ethan for you. She’d once heard someone describe him as the type of person who wouldn’t tell you he didn’t really want to play Russian roulette until the bullet was halfway through his head.

  “What I think?” he said. “I think deep down you’re in love with a man you never met, who’s been dead for years.”

  Pandora, looking Ethan in the eye: “Says the guy whose first love was Batgirl.”

  “Plus he was celibate. Dead and celibate—it’s the safest infatuation you could possibly have.”

  “He was not celibate. Patrick had women.”

  “A few pub tarts…one-nighters, by the tone of his description. His stigmata bled the first time and scared her off, so that one doesn’t count. That part’s got to be true—who’d make up a humiliating thing like that? And maybe, maybe, Maia. If she even exists, and wasn’t just some figment of his fevered imagination. Add everything up, it’s close enough to celibate for me.”

  “She exists,” Pandora said. “They exist. And if you don’t think they do, you’ve done a pretty good job of faking it for the past couple of years.”

  Ethan’s unexpected skepticism was the prelude to a couple hundred aeronautical miles of frosty silence, until he thawed her out again by doing nothing more than being his pitiful-looking self. His nose was too long; his eyebrows peaked in the middle and sloped outward, making him appear as though he were perpetually on the verge of bursting into tears. His hair was an unruly shock that could only be cured by a buzz cut or the weight of a heavy mane, nothing in between. He brought out maternal instincts in girls who swore they hated children—hardly the reaction he craved.

  They’d been friends for years, probably since before either of them had sprouted pubic hair. Ethan, the boy at school who had made her feel less lonely because he was as shunned as she was…what else could he be by now but a brother, and often a better brother than the pair she’d been stuck with by birth.

  Ethan, she feared, had come to see things differently. Which probably explained the fine line he walked lately, veering between disapproval and devotion. As though in his eyes she was spurning him to save her affections for a man who could not have been more remote if he were living on Neptune.

  Yet once she’d made up her mind to scrimp and save for the trip to Ireland, there was no question but that Ethan would do likewise. He had all along shared this strange obsession of hers, although she suspected it was something he never would’ve arrived at on his own; that for Ethan, this was like football had been for the more bubbleheaded girls who’d outshined her every day of high school: something they’d convinced themselves they liked so the guys they wanted would want them in return.

  So here he was, seeing it through with her from start to finish. Because that’s what brothers did. She only hoped that it was for the right reasons. There could be but one wrong reason: hoping that after she’d completed this peculiar pilgrimage, gotten it out of her system, she would turn to him as some sort of consolation prize.

  Please, Sisters, anything but that…because he’s had enough hurt for one decade.

  It was the closest thing to a prayer she’d composed in years, silently uttered over a patchwork of emerald fields, as west of Dublin they began to descend in what she’d always been uneasy hearing called their final approach.

  II

  The signposts of history once seemed to her to read like grave markers, instead. A not-uncommon teenage revelation, although perhaps occurring earlier to her than to most, the kind of thing that comes upon the kind of girl prone to suddenly finding the world an unbearable place to live, with a closetful of somber clothes to show for it, and the thing she’s most tired of hearing is her mother telling her how much prettier she would be if she’d just make an effort to smile once in a while.

  Pandora at fourteen, that was…when history class became as impossible to tolerate as, she would later admit, she herself probably was. When she didn’t want to be pretty. When she had no right to be pretty…assuming she could’ve believed that anyone who hadn’t given birth to her might think she was. And she definitely didn’t want to smile. Not when—wait for it—there was so much misery in the world.

  At home, in the stale sanctuary of her room, she began making the chart on the wall that so dismayed her parents. Her dad, even at that late post-countercultural date, could still be caught wearing the occasional tie-dyed T-shirt. After each particularly wrenching class or solo discovery, she added to the columns of dates and events and body counts that reflected such a scale of suffering that she couldn’t understand how to other people these could merely be numbers in books or lectures:

  YEAR: 79

  PLACE/EVENT: Mt. Vesuvius buries Pompeii in ash

  CASUALTIES: The entire city

  YEAR: 1066

  PLACE/EVENT: Battle of Hastings

  CASUALTIES: Dunno; just lots of dead Saxons

  YEAR: 1845 - 1848

  PLACE/EVENT: Ireland – potato famine

  CASUALTIES: 1,000,000

  YEAR: 1863

  PLACE/EVENT: Battle of Gettysburg

  CASUALTIES: 48,000 (North + South)

  YEAR: 1883

  PLACE/EVENT: Krakatoa eruption

  CASUALTIES: 36,380 (163 villages)

  YEAR: 1905

  PLACE/EVENT: St. Petersburg, Russia - Bloody Sunday

  CASUALTIES: 100s (exact # not germane to U.S. history books?)

  YEAR: 1912

  PLACE/EVENT: Titanic sinks

  CASUALTIES: 1,513

  YEAR: 1937

  PLACE/EVENT: Hindenburg blows

  CASUALTIES: 36

  YEAR: 1939 – 1945

  PLACE/EVENT: WWII Nazi death camps

  CASUALTIES: 6,000,000

  YEAR: 1963

  PLACE/EVENT: Dallas, TX - JFK

  CASUALTIES: 1

  YEAR: 1972

  PLACE/EVENT: Londonderry, Ireland - Bloody Sunday

  CASUALTIES: 13

  YEAR: 1990

  PLACE/EVENT: Mecca; stampede in pedestrian tunnel

  CASUALTIES: 1,400

  And so on. And everyone knew better than to get her started on earthquakes, volcanoes, monsoons. Out of this, the name Pandora—“A box, a room, what’s the difference, just don’t open it up unless you’re ready to deal with all the woes of the world”—tacked onto her by a scoffing brother and promptly assimilated out of defiance.

  On those rare occasions when her mother entered the room and could bring herself to look at it, she would regard the chart with the same repugnance she might feel toward a slick crop of fungus crawling up the wall. Pandora eventually suspected that her parents’ discomfort stemmed from a dread that it would evolve into some grander, bleaker declaration, more sinister than the idea that so many could die for no apparent purpose. That she would slap up another posterboard and summarize everything in one final equation:

  YEAR + PLACE/EVENT + CASUALTIES = NO GOD

  Or goddess. You couldn’t quite pin them down, divinity being beyond gender and all. They were like that, in their New Agey way, and oblivious to the fact—clearly shown by the 1963 Dallas entry—that it wasn’t just a numbers game for scrawny little Melanie, now signing household notes and birthday cards as Pandora.

  Yet their worries were more justified than s
he let on: The chart wasn’t just more of the same morbid curiosity that marked her as a classroom freak, but a big screaming question mark, taking the form it did because she wasn’t sure whom to scream at out loud anymore. Even before the maudlin thing hit the deep purple paint of her wall, whenever she learned of some atrocious event, she would ponder all the prayers that would’ve gone unanswered.

  A bearded, pissed-off Patriarch on His throne, demanding love and threatening grim consequences for its withholding; a meek Lamb willingly trudging to His own slaughter, sent by a Father who had by now mellowed into an all-merciful old duffer…they each seemed equally improbable to her, and equally frightening. At least the state of the world seemed like something you could more easily pin on the former.

  Which was why the chart’s final entry—even as she wearied of updating it, the point having become redundant—seemed out of character, bush league. Serial killers had never greatly interested her, most of them just kinky products of a warped upbringing. Yet long before she knew the details, and the rumors his spree inspired, Pandora sensed that this one was different. That he belonged on the chart because his acts were, in some crude and misguided yet brutally poignant way, a response to the entries that preceded them:

  YEAR: This autumn

  PLACE/EVENT: Belfast, Ireland, et al; Patrick Kieran Malone

  CASUALTIES: 13, all priests