This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near-Kabuki volume during an appalling free-for-all in the office of the Mother Superior who hadn’t saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns — who’d been tough and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted bike-chicks — teaming up and kicking Blood Sister’s ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling habite-ments and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of the wall’s huge decorative mahogany crucifix, with Blood Sister giving a good account of herself but still getting her wimple beat in and finally, after several whirling kicks to the forehead, starting to bid adieu to her corporeal map and commend herself to the arms of God; until the unsaved recidivist Vice-Mother Superior nun who’d saved Blood Sister, wiping blood from her eyes after a head-butt and seeing the Mother Superior about to decapitate Blood Sister with the souvenir Champlain-era tomahawk the Huron nun who’d been saved by the original founder of the Toronto tough-girl-saving order had used to decapitate Jesuit missionaries before she (the tough Huron nun) had been saved, seeing the tomahawk raised with both arms before the normally pious-eyed old Mother Superior’s face — a face now rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of humility and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil — seeing now the upraised hatchet and demonized face of the M.S., the unsaved Vice-nun has a moment of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister’s demapping by leaping across the office and cold-cocking the Mother Superior with a large decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn’t even be named, the object’s symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. Now Blood Sister has the Champlain-era hatchet, and the unsaved nun who’d saved her has an unnamed object whose mahogany’s no match for a hatchet, and they stand facing each other over the prone Mother Superior’s puddle of skirts, chests heaving, and the Vice-M.S. has a writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had saved you but ultimately couldn’t even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever. They stare at each other for countless frames, the office wall behind them cruciformly pale where the unnamed object’d hung. Then Blood Sister shrugs in resignation and drops the tomahawk, and turns and with an ironic little obeisance walks out the Mother Superior’s office door and through the little sacristy and over the altar and down the little convent nave (bike boots echoing on the tile, emphasizing the silence) and out the big doors whose tympanum overhead is carved with a sword and a ploughshare and a syringe and a soup-ladle and the motto CON-TRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA, the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it’s Boone who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for.[298] On-screen, we’re still following the tough nun (or ex-nun). The fact that the hatchet she resignedly dropped fetched the prone Mother Superior a pretty healthy knock is presented as clearly accidental… because she (Blood Sister) is still walking away from the convent, moving emphatically and in a gradually deepening focus. Limping toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn. The cartridge’s closing sequence shows her astride her Hawg on Toronto’s meanest street. About to lapse? Backslide back into her tough pre-saved ways? It’s unclear in a way that’s supposed to be rich: her expression is agnostic at best, but the huge sign of a discount Harley-muffler outlet juts just at the horizon she’s roaring toward. The closing credits are the odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield.
It’s hard to tell whether Boone and Bash’s applause is sarcastic. There’s that post-entertainment flurry of changed positions and stretched limbs and critical sallies. Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill. Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man brought Blott in to speak to Hal about something disturbing they encountered during their disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels that P.M. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, flipping through cartridge cases to see whether Low-Temperature Civics is up here. All the cases are clearly labelled.
The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging view of Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters and looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint than swallowed. Kate Gompert held her hurt head and heard it roar. Ruth van Cleve’s pursuit was slowed by her arms, which were waving around as she screamed; and the apparition was swinging their purses to clear a path on the sidewalk before it. Kate Gompert could see pedestrians leaping out into the street way up ahead to avoid getting clocked. The whole visual scene seemed tinged in violet.
A voice under a storefront awning right nearby somewhere said: ‘Seen it!’
Kate Gompert leaned over again and held the part of her head that surrounded her eye. The eye was palpably swelling shut, and her whole vision was queerly violet. A sound in her head like a drawbridge being drawn up, implacable trundle and squeaks. Hot watery spit was flooding her mouth, and she kept swallowing against nausea.
‘Seen it? Bet your ever-living goddamn life I seen it!’ A kind of gargoyle seemed to detach itself from a storefront hardware display and moved in, its motions oddly jerky, as in a film missing frames. ‘Seen the whole thing!’ it said, then repeated it. ‘I’m a witness!’ it said.
Kate Gompert put her other arm out against the lightpost and hauled herself mostly upright, looking at it.
‘Witnessed the whole godfdamn thing,’ it said. In the eye that wasn’t swelling shut the thing resolved violetly into a bearded man in an army coat and a sleeveless army coat over that coat, spittle in his beard. One eye had a system of exploded arteries in it. He shook like an old machine. There was a smell involved. The old man got right up close, looming in, so that pedestrians had to curve out around both of them together. Kate Gompert could feel her pulse in her eye.