Whatever those were.
“Some of us wonder if religion hasn’t gotten it backwards,” she’d said. “If what the world now calls God was born in the desert out of the needs of people who had to have something bigger than themselves to worship. So it heard them, and asked for more, and they fed it burnt offerings, and the blood of their enemies, and their devotion, and later on they exported it to the rest of the world. But even before then, it was getting stronger, until after enough centuries had passed, they’d all forgotten where that god of theirs came from and thought it’d always been there, and created them instead … and by then, it was ready to feed on them.”
The Sisters of the Trinity took their places while my weight tugged at the lashes that held me aloft. My every rib stood etched against flesh as I laboured for breath, and now, at long last, the empathy I’d always sought with Christ had come. I was no longer in a Dublin cellar; rather, atop a skull-shaped hill called Golgotha, dying in the hot winds and stinging desert dust.
“Who better to feed on than those who considered themselves his children?” she’d explained. “They’ve always called themselves his chosen people … but chosen for what? You have to wonder. From the time of the Babylonian exile, to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, right up to the Holocaust … he’s been eating and drinking them all along, like no other people on earth.”
Salíce stood before me, below, and slowly, reverently, took me into her mouth. Minutes passed, as I writhed upon the cross between the agony of breaths, until it happened anew — the flesh of my wrists splitting layer by layer, the blood freed at last in a gush of transcendence and ecstasy. It trickled first along my arms toward my ribcage, then began to flow heavier, drizzling down into Maia’s wide and waiting mouth. So that none would be wasted, bowls were set beneath my other wrist and my feet.
I turned my eyes toward the heavens, wide and seeing so very clearly now, like those of the martyr I’d once dreamt of being: Saint Ignatius, in that painting hanging in Greyfriars Abbey. I’d so admired it, always wondering if I could show his sort of courage when the teeth of the carnivores began to close. Perhaps, now, I’d equaled him, even bettered him. Or maybe I’d fallen short by the depth and breadth of the darkest abyss.
There was no truth but this: I was not the father’s son I’d once been.
“What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.
“Don’t forget, he was circumcised. In the temple, when he was eight weeks old. The Holy Foreskin — that’s what you papists call it,” she’d said, with a teasing shake of her head. “You people and your morbid relics.”
When I looked down the bloody length of my body, I could see that tiny dark scrap in Lilah’s fingers, stolen from its crystal reliquary north of Rome. Still soft and pliable, it was, neither rotted nor gone leathery. Incorruptible.
But flesh is flesh, and beliefs something else altogether.
“Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me,” he’d asked, and while I’d never known for sure what impact I might have, perhaps the truth alone would be enough.
The truth, they’d insisted he said, will set you free.
Then again, doubt works miracles too.
Lilah lifted her hand, and touched the foreskin to my flesh, to wet it with my blood, then it disappeared between her teeth.
And in the convulsive rapture of fluids and tissue, in that moment that makes us one with gods, I gave them all they’d asked for, all they needed, all I had to give.
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 sake, 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 2700 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 blood lusts 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 smelt the same as it always had, old and sweet with wax and incense. It took me back twenty years, 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.