The Great Wheel (7 page)

“You finished it Monday, Fatoo.”

“Damn.”

The remainder of breakfast passed—apart from the noise of the old priest eating—in silence. John remembered his first days at the presbytery, when all this had seemed so gothic and strange. The empty rooms, the dark skies, Felipe with his bandaged and swollen feet, caused, so he said, by rheumatism brought on by his own body’s defense against a minor fungus that had started between his toes. John, who had hardly ever seen a European with a chronic illness, believed that as much as he believed anything else Felipe told him. Sometimes at night, when John came back from the church or the clinic or from wandering the streets, there was music from an ancient piano and laughter in the presbytery’s big upper room. Looking in through the smoke, he would find Felipe with a half dozen Borderers—generally old, male, and tattooed—seated in drink-drowsy poses on the armchairs around him. Of course, John would be beckoned in, encouraged—
amikay
—to find a seat and join and talk, but the music would already have been stilled and even the smoke seemed to hang frozen in the air. He knew enough about Borderer etiquette to understand when he wasn’t welcome.

The old priest finished his breakfast, wiped his lips on the sleeve of the jacket that Bella had freshly cleaned for him, downed three trisoma capsules with his fourth cup of coffee, then levered himself up from his chair and into the leghelpers that waited beside him. He hissed and clicked his way to the window.

“Ah! I’m awaited! I must hurry, John.”

The routine was the same every Wednesday. Felipe clanking down the stairs and across the street to the donkey cart that came to collect him for the bumpy ride along Gran Vía to the Mirimar Bar. There, watched by giggling Borderer kids, swigging from his flask and humming snatches of hymns and old popular songs, waving gleefully to passersby, he would climb out of the cart, and the barman Perez would hold the door open for him, making genuflections of his own invention as he did so. Once or twice, John had gone along: Pérez was, after all, a convert to the Church; he kept an assortment of crosses and religious pictures hung on the Mirimar’s smoke-blackened walls to prove it, even if he never did go to Santa Cristina. At the back table near the odorous toilets, Father Felipe, with his special seat by a screen decorated with cuttings from an illustrated Bible, a big glass and an even bigger bottle before him on the table, was set for the day.

When the front door had banged shut and Bella had returned to the kitchen, John checked his gloves and watch. Leaving his bicycle in the hallway, he started up the hill towards Santa Cristina. The streets were morning-crowded. The souks down the alleyways were busy and bright, roofed over with colored fabrics that sheened and fluttered in the wind. There were hawkers and beggars and people heading everywhere in and out of the alleys, including a koiyl vendor carrying a basket filled with the shriveled leaves said to give a sense of easy resignation, a release from pain. Everything parted in John’s way.

John raised the chalice that contained the sealed packet and turned to face his congregation.

This is the Lamb of God

Who takes away the sins of the world.

Happy are those who are called to His table…

As those Borderers who knew the words repeated them after him, a loud thump came from the patched roof, followed by the sound of claws and wingbeats. Shadows floated over the windows as more birds came in to circle the hill. Primarily scavengers, messily communal, they were black with pink beaks and considerably bigger than rooks or crows. The Borderers called them caroni birds.

People were already drifting along the aisle towards the front of the church to receive the sacrament. John stood a few paces back from the altar rail, murmuring
The body of Christ
as each hand reached forward to take a tiny white circle from the freshly opened pack. Here was Juanita, her jaw working as she chewed on rice paper, mystery, and air, taking the blessing of God even now that her son Daudi was dead from leukemia. Here was Kassi Moss. And here were all the others, people John knew without knowing. Homes he had visited, babies he had blessed without the touch of his gloved and dysol-anointed hands.

The service ended with a ragged hymn. Afterwards, he stood waiting behind the altar rail as the congregation departed, muttering, blinking like sleepers, returning to the cares of their lives. Some came up and placed cards on the rail for him to pick up later, or paused to fumble the relics by the Inmaculada, or asked if Fatoo could come around and visit some member of their family who was
mal
—sick, old, or desperate. They were fat or thin, tall or short, dark or light-skinned, and had that air of vigorous health that Borderers, when they weren’t actually ill, usually radiated, although one was scarred across the neck, another was missing a finger, another limped…John was still useless at remembering their names. A girl paused on her way out, scratching the flaky backs of her arms as she asked if in Europe they knew when it was going to rain, and did it always snow at Christmas? She nodded when he turned on the translat and explained that,
na,
no, it wasn’t like that. But she still looked doubtful; it would have snowed at Christmas on every satellite broadcast from Europe she’d ever seen.

He was alone in the church, filled with the emptiness that now always came upon him after Communion. He remembered raising the chalice filled with the host for the first time, and how even then there had been no lightning bolts, no shivers; how it seemed to mean more to everyone else around him. Even his parents, so doubtful for so long, had been a little awed. Then his first solo duties had commenced, in a parish up in the high grazing lands of Yorkshire, where communities were scattered and the sheep were like boulders dotting the moors. The gray-green and purple landscape was fresh and new to him—in a way, it was almost like the Magulf, for there was deep cloud cover and often rain. He would stop on the way to his pastoral visits, get out of his car and watch as the wind silvered the hills. The sheep, slow and curious animals with heavy snouts and blunted horns, would amble over and gaze down at him. Close up, they were big as mammoths.

Soon he began to stop for the sheep, and talk to them, rehearsing the arguments and conversations that he might have at the big slate houses that waited beyond gates, walled gardens, windbreak pines. At least twice a week he was called to one of the local resthomes or some back bedroom and asked by sad and yet generally clear-eyed relatives to look down at the rags of flesh and bone on the bed. And was asked, Father, don’t you think the time has come? He seemed so chipper in summer, but now. A shrug. He seems to have given up…And, as if to emphasize its unhappiness, the figure might moan and turn in the shadows. A glimpse, perhaps, of an exposed powerpack or a silver thread protruding from the spine like a crude aerial, or a pool of blood thickening over the screen of a watch. Or, more alarming still, a quavery voice agreeing, saying, Yes, Father, it all seems to have gone from me now. My friends, my life. Even this room, the presence of my family and the scent of these flowers. I visit past times in old photographs, but nothing tastes. Someone once said that, didn’t they? Nothing tastes. One of those phrases you remember even though you don’t understand until later when something happens that makes it clear. Perhaps I’ve already lost my soul, Father, maybe that’s what it is. Perhaps I’m already up there with my Lord, the part of me that matters. So you will say I should make an end to it, Father, won’t you? Your prayers and a blessing would be a great help…

Nothing tastes. John gazed up at Santa Cristina’s stained and sagging roof, the rotting pillars, and he felt the cool and ancient air on his face and remembered the wild beauty of the moors, the streams in torrent as they hadn’t been since the ice ages, scents and strange airy fruits on the breeze at the height of summer, the shining cars, the smiling silver-eyed people, and music in the old churches, the world perfected into some alien dream, and half wrecked in the process.

He destroyed his old gloves, changed from his cassock, wiped the surfaces with dysol, and went outside, looking up at the stained buttresses and weeping blocks of stone. His presence caused muted squawks and chattering, brief eruptions of wings. The caroni birds had made nests of Magulf litter and the torn remnants of the roof, choosing spots sheltered from the wind in the rotting stonework. The juveniles, this year’s brood, still had scraps of down clinging to their new plumage.

He turned away from the church. Up here on the hill, in the flowing, powdery light, he could see the shimmering Breathless Ocean, the grainy tangles of oldtown, the levels, the smoking finger of the chimney of the incinerator plant at El Teuf, where he was sometimes asked to speak the funeral rite. As with everything else he did here, he was left drained afterwards with a mixture of humility, anger, and powerlessness. As if, like one of the cancers to which his body had been made and remade immune, a white and empty space was forever growing within him.

This slow loss of God, it seemed to John, must be like the loss of love in a marriage. It was something he’d never been able to trace back to a beginning; even in the early times of certainty, it seemed to him now, the seeds of emptiness must have already lain. His faith had been slipping away for many years now, but he’d thought at first that it was nothing more than a part of the normal adjustments of priestly life; a settling to a more solid and even plateau after the initial high peaks of his vocation. Then, as the emptiness deepened, he’d started to see it as a test. In a sense, it was almost to be welcomed. His belief had been so sure and easy until then. He discussed the problem avidly with friends and men of God, and he thought and read and shared with Saint Paul and Saint Augustine—great doubters all. And, like a dutiful spouse who fights to retain the affection that he feels is unaccountably slipping away, he threw himself more avidly into the external displays of devotion to the Church that he had once considered superficial, external, ultimately irrelevant.

He freely admitted to himself and, although he grew more circumspect as the gap became harder to bridge, to his seniors and tutors that he’d come to the Endless City hoping it would change his perspective on God: that he’d come to find a way back in. But the white emptiness only widened. All the books, all the knowledge, all the history—all the vows of the priesthood—counted for nothing without the fragile core of belief and certainty. And the world, as he’d always known, made at least as much sense without God as with Him. Probably more. In faith, as in marriage, you did no more than exchange one set of doubts and problems for another. And, like falling in love, faith was ultimately less an exercise in free will than an act of fearful and joyful surrender. Once the feeling had gone, it was irrecoverable.

Later that day, every face in the Plaza Princesa looked up when a veetol came out of the sky.

John had been between patients, studying the useless old cartons of drugs that he somehow couldn’t face clearing, hoping without much hope to find the drug that the doctor had recommended—as though he might have missed it on the occasions when he looked before. Then the sound of fanjets grew unmistakably close, loud enough to set the vials jingling. He ran out of the clinic into the plaza just as a European veetol came into sight over the tangled concrete of the broken towerblock. The engines changed tone as the wings shifted angle. The Borderers who’d been queuing outside the clinic, bargaining, selling their wares, or absently chewing koiyl, were already dispersing, making the sign against the evil eye. Young children lingered in the storm of rising dust, torn between curiosity and the tugging hands of their elders.

Windows trembled. Pieces of jelt and stucco flew off into the red sky. Speaking in the flat tones of a translat amplified to the point of pain, a voice boomed in Magulf dialect, warning stragglers to clear the square.

The veetol, a fat orange beetle, settled on its legs. The fanjets slowed to a growl, and the door at the side swung open. Steps dropped. Standing beside John, Nuru crossed himself and muttered, “What the Jesus fuck.”

A guard came out, her pistol raised. The man who followed her through the doorway saw John and waved to him through the dust. The two Europeans picked their way across the square to the clinic. John glanced to his side for Nuru, but he’d already vanished.

“What’s happened?” John asked.

The guard was about thirty, and she had the pinched, watchful look that often came with her job. The man with her was wearing an engineer’s insignia.

“I understand you’ve got a problem with a doctor, Father?”

“Yes, but I never—”

“We’ve been told to fix it as a priority. That’s okay, isn’t it, Father? We’ll come back in a few hours. Just say.”

“No, no, no—this is fine. Come in. I just wasn’t expecting—”

“Neither were we…”

It took less than half an hour to repair the doctor. Shaking his head when he saw it squatting in the clinic’s backroom, muttering about how the machine belonged in a museum, the engineer sent a nanocrab scurrying up into its main circuitry. Donning a helmet to steer through the dusty innards with movements of his hands, he was soon able to restructure the damaged nerves.

“Do you have a recent case to test?” he asked as he put his things away.

John nodded, and pulled up a file on the desk’s screen.

Martínez

Blood monocytes 23.3 x 10
⁹
/liter

Normal distribution 0.2 to 0.8

“Well there you are,” the engineer said, leaning close over John’s shoulder, his sweat smelling of meat and vinegar.

When the veetol had gone and the scream of the fanjets had finally faded, John slumped back on the stool in the surgery. He found that his hands were enormously tense. The guard and the engineer had left a faint sense of purpose and hope that still hovered in the gray air. He wanted to hold on to it, that promise that you could open a toolbox and produce a scrap of magic.