Rabid (34 page)

He sat on the front pew and pressed his palms against his burning eyes. The sinuses behind his forehead were scalded, too. His symptoms might be psychosomatic or they might be due to insomnia, which had plagued him since his arrival on this infernal continent, peopled with pedophiles and adulterers.

He swiveled on the undulating front pew and lay down, setting the bottle on the floor beside the pew. Drinking himself unconscious in the front pew of the church to be found in the morning by a clucking Samual appealed to Dante’s sense of irony.

Lying on a pew did not convey proper penitence. He pushed his insomniac, drunk body and kneeled on the wood floor, not on the padded kneeler, his arms folded on the rail. The rail was cool on his forehead, and he lay there, hurting.

He had failed. He had failed everyone. Dante had been puffed up with hubris and pride, believing he could rise above his body and inhabit his head. With the merest touch of Bev’s breath on his flesh, he had dived like a hunting hawk into her body.

Her breath had sanded the skin on his neck, but her bites marked his skin.

The wood floor ground at his knees.

Let his weak flesh suffer.

Moonlight and lamplight seeped in the stained glass windows depicting the Holy Virgin Mary, striping the floor with shadows and random splinters of color. He tried to focus, tried to imagine a glowing cross floating a few feet before him in the dark church. 

Glowing sunlight, insinuating itself around the curtains of the bedroom window, had trickled on Bev’s body, brightening her breast.

All he wanted was an envisioned cross to pray to. God is with us even in our most forsaken moments, as that idiotic poem about sand and footprints struggled to say, but Dante couldn’t conjure even a simple image of a cross. All that he had thought was holy within him had been nothing but his imagination and longing for a reason for life other than the mindless pursuit of sex.

The glowing gold that he tried to fashion into a crucifix was her skin. Darkness in the church was his body plunging into hers.

Pedophiles did not control their urges, either.

His body and its urges were no better than those beasts who tortured children.

He should have stopped. He was a Vatican magistrate. He should have walked away: he was judge and jury of sexual crimes, his Holy Orders committed to the Church, and he had hurt Bev again. She was a wounded deer in the woods that he had wolfed down.

What about the woman?

Hypocrisy stabbed him.

He focused his tired eyes on the wooden crucifix, the tortured and dying Christ, immobilized behind the altar.

His meat heart flailed.

He pressed on his knees and stood, glaring at the crucifix; he wanted to scream at it to speak to him or to fall to pieces, but insanity hovered in the act of speaking aloud in the empty church and in the wavering, gem-shining windows at the periphery of his vision.

He vaulted the prayer rail and strode past the altar to the Christ, crouched on the cross and ready to spring. Dante grabbed the only part of the Christ he could reach on the looming crucifix, the nailed wooden foot. Grit ground his palm.

If only the foot would warm, would drip blood on him, or would turn to light and fill him with grace, anything, but the Christ on the cross was a dead tree knifed into a human shape, encased in varnish, in need of dusting.

Dante mumbled prayers, all the prayers he could think of, the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary and the Act of Contrition and portions of the Mass and bits of the Last Rites and the Exorcism, and he clung to that unyielding wooden foot. Splinters from the Christ’s big toenail embedded themselves in his palm. He tried to believe that the Church itself was the miracle he needed, that life was proof enough, yet his cells metabolized without divine intervention, and he began talking to himself in the dark church.

“If there is a God,
since
there is a God,” and his grip on the wood loosened and he glanced away, protesting, lying.

He had imagined it all, the Call, an invigoration when he prostrated himself at Holy Orders, his priesthood. He had run away from his body, but his skin under the rough wool coat and cotton pajamas had rebelled.

There was no priesthood, not for him. His life in his mind was an illusion, every bit as unreal as a dream or a psychotic hallucination.

He had nothing but biology and an empty church.

~~~~~

Chapter Eleven

Around ten o’clock on Wednesday morning in the green-tiled hallway, Conroy tapped Leila’s arm.

She carried a potted dieffenbachia on her hip like a toddler. “I’m on my way to visit Danna. They said it’s viral.”

Conroy shrugged. “Did they say which virus?”

“No, just ‘viral.’”

He snorted and glanced down the green-tiled hallway, preoccupied. “Then they have no idea what’s wrong with her.”

Leila shifted the plant. “Could you take a look at her?”

Conroy said, “I’ve visited Danna four times. I took her some papers to read.”

“I mean look at her chart. The attending doesn’t seem interested in her.”

Conroy’s attention flickered across the crowd of green-smocked surgeons and blue-clad staff, like color-coded workers from a dystopian film. A pharmacy student, garbed in raspberry scrubs, wandered as bright as a berry in a salad. “One does not poach another physician’s patient.”

“Just stop by and take a gander at her chart,” Leila said and struggled with the Mexican clay pot that sprouted foliage. “Consider it a
favor
.”

Her glaring innuendo promised sex. Maybe he could use a favor to get back into her bed again. “Okay.”

“Dr. S., it couldn’t be anything that she picked up in the lab, could it?”

He scoffed, “No. We don’t work with anything that needs more than a P2 lab.”

“You’re sure? Your mice are acting weird. Really sick. They’re getting moribund. If your secret experiments can infect a mouse, they can infect other mammals, like humans, right?”

He scoffed harder to cover up that he was worried. “God, no. What could she get, vaccinia? Or pig herpes? She probably got something at one of those terrible bars you take her to.”

~~~~~

That afternoon, Dante rang Bev’s doorbell. The wind was colder than before, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything. The chime rang through the house.

Bev answered the door and she bobbled, startled to see him, and he pushed his way into her house, slamming the door behind him, and vised her between the wall and his body, the crushing, third type of kiss detailed in the
Kama Sutra.

She pushed against his chest. “Don’t.”

He kissed her harder to make her shut up, even though women’s protestations excited him. His famished body thundered so that he could hardly hear her.

“Dante,” she said, but under his lips, her mouth opened and her tongue curled.

“It’s just this once,” he said, and he knew how to lie and what she wanted to hear. Holy Orders, that sham demarcation in his life between the carnal and the intellectual, couldn’t stop him now. “You’re so
bella
, beautiful. You make me a madman. I can’t stop myself.” He dragged her shirt off her shoulder. Her fingers ran into his hair, grasping. He licked the pale espresso cup of skin between her clavicle and her neck.

“I can’t do this,” she said, and her larynx thrummed his lips. She dragged her shirt back up and over her shoulder. “I can’t give you up every night and have you come back every morning.”

With this, he knew how to spin her around and catch her. He said, “I can’t stay away from you.”

“Dante, I can’t.”

He lifted one of her hands away from her eyes, turned it over, pinned it to the wall above her head and, that old Valentino trick, kissed the blue ribbons of veins on her thin-skinned wrist. “I can’t stay away from you.”

“Then no more saying that you have to go back to Rome.”

“
Si.
I will not leave.”

He would have her here, against the wall. He lifted her other arm and held her wrists, pinned above her, and chewed down her arm to her breasts under her open shirt.

~~~~~

Wednesday afternoon, Sister Benedicta called Bev’s house looking for a substitute teacher for that afternoon.

Bev, wrapped by Dante’s hot flesh from behind in the blackened bedroom, had said that she, too, was indisposed at the moment but she could be on her feet the next day.

~~~~~

Thursday afternoon, Conroy was typing the letter to Beverly when Leila walked in. Her shirt was unbuttoned so far that he could see a curve of breast.

She shut the door.

Leila popped open another button on her shirt, and her black bra spanned convex curves, and he glimpsed nipple. He missed that nipple. He wanted it again.

She asked, “Did you take a look at Danna’s chart?”

“Hmmm? No. Sorry. Haven’t had time.” The grant, the upcoming committee meeting, the new apartment. He was so busy that he only thought in sentence fragments.

“Conroy, I promise,” her voice was husky and his ears and dick pricked up, hearing it, “that if you take a look at her chart,” Leila leaned on his desk with her fingertips nudging aside the paper sprawl, and her breasts fell forward and kissed, “I will blow you under this desk,” she tapped the hollow wood, “while everyone is in the lab.”

If that wasn’t actually on his bucket list, it should be.

“I’ll drop by to see her this afternoon,” Conroy promised.

~~~~~

Conroy flipped through Danna’s chart while Leila smoothed Danna’s damp, frowzy hair back from her feverish forehead and spoon-fed her clear broth. Heavy drapes masked the room from the afternoon sun.

He squinted at her chart in the gloom, held the paperwork aloft and aslant to catch sterile fluorescent light leaking from the hallway, and wrote careful observations in the margin with a thick, black pen.

Danna had no problems swallowing the broth. That was good. His little side experiments would produce throat spasms if it jumped into humans, so whatever Danna’s problem was, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t need explain his moribund mice to anyone.

The preliminary diagnoses included febrile encephalitis, non-bacterial or viral, or encephalomyelitis. Her bloodwork showed counts typical of viral infection.

Could be anything. Could be a herpesvirus from a cold sore that had headed into her central nervous system. Or an adenovirus. Or a retrovirus. Or an endogenous retrovirus stimulated to excise itself to infectivity by an innocuous, infectious retrovirus. Or a trick of autoimmunity. Or a poison.

Conroy lifted an edge of a curtain to see the hasty, illegible handwriting scrawled in the lab column by one of the overworked, inattentive residents. Her gonococcus screen was negative.