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 so many of her expectations for me.
“Can’t help that, Father,” I said. “Wasn’t my idea … but I’ve learnt a brand new doctrine. I just count myself lucky that I learnt 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? Spilt wine and a wineskin that won’t hold anything else.”
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. Oh, 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, obsolete 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.
Sensible Violence
You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. Your palms are pressed against the plate glass of the store’s window, a pet store, you never can resist it, taking time out to squat on your haunches and share a few moments with the puppies. With their big feet and fat little bellies, they squirm and trip all over each other trying to get to you, impress you, maybe you’ll take them all home. Show them the world on the other side of the glass.
“‘s’cuse, not to be intruding or nothing, but I’s needing to ask you something, okay, mind if I conversate with you a second?”
Money. He’ll want money, it’s as good as predestined. When you squatted down to watch the pups he was nowhere in sight, and you’d checked, too. You’re less a target for beggars when you’re moving and they know that, that it’s easier to pretend you don’t hear them, that your ears shut down in midstride.
“Basically I’s wondering if you could spare like a couple dollars so I could get something to eat, you know, I wouldn’t ask but I ain’t had nothing to eat for a couple days now—”
He talks with his hands always in motion to make you feel his urgency, feel his hunger, and you wonder if you should tell him to calm down, quit flailing so much and he’ll conserve more calories. He tells you how your donation will enable him to go back up the street a couple blocks to the Dairy Queen on the corner, alleviate his hunger with a double cheeseburger and fries.
“I’m not giving you the money,” you tell him, “but if you’re hungry I’ll take you to buy it.”
“I heard that, let’s go,” his willingness immediate, without the outrage that comes when they only want the cash, then you’re walking up the street, not looking as though you naturally belong together but are something odder, buddy cops maybe, and he’s just come in from undercover work, the reason he’s dressed the way he is, wearing that dirty sweatshirt with the hood fraying around the edge. He probably really needs the meal, unless he only dresses the part, although some don’t even bother, wearing two hundred dollar warmup suits and pricey new sneakers, as robust as marble statues come to life, with their hands out, telling you about all the meals they’ve missed.
“Got a head for business, must have,” he says about you, “be wanting to eyeball where your money goes.”
“Well, it is mine,” you say, then with a glance back at the pet store: “People eat dogs sometimes. Not here, but…”
“Get hungry enough, yeah, I can see that, my stomach gets to growling too loud, I’d eat me a Benji-burger too.”
“It’s wrong, eating dogs, no matter where they do it,” and he nods along with you, sharing a soft spot for man’s best friend. Or maybe he’ll agree with anything as long as food is coming, so you don’t mention the T-shirt that you own with the wolf’s head in the center, between two slogans: SAVE THE WOLF above, then underneath, PREDATORS KEEP THE BALANCE.
It’s midmorning and the Dairy Queen isn’t busy and the young woman with the dreadlocks behind the counter has no smiles for you or your new best friend, looking at him as if she’s seen him too many times before, and you along with him.