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 recalclass="underline" “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.