The Natural Order of Things (31 page)

As the day wears on, De Vere shudders uncontrollably and then starts to scream. Somewhere far away he hears the bells of the Jesuit school begin to toll, and above their awful cacophony he can make out the sound of distant voices, like the buzzing of wasps after their hive has been smashed to bits—agitated, frenzied, joyfully descending on their enemies with the promise of swift and pitiless annihilation. The voices grow louder, more senseless and savage, the boom and bellow of a mob that obeys no law save that of its own implacable desire for justice, retribution, blood.

From the stairwell the woman shouts, “The sonofabitch is up here! This way, men, this way!”

She leads them in a relentless march that ends just outside the bathroom. A hush falls over the deranged delegation. The ritual of death requires order, a long taunting silence. Someone knocks gently, almost playfully, not with bare knuckles but with the claws of a hammer, the rough edge of a galvanized pipe. De Vere tries to steady himself. He looks in the mirror, checks his hair, straightens his collar, adjusts his cuffs, then he slumps down on the toilet and leans forward to study the door. In the interlocking spirals of wood grain, he sees a map of Paris with its labyrinthine streets and stately boulevards. He yearns to taste the bittersweet absinthe one final time and to listen to the tender laughter of the French whores as they sit in the café near the square.

As the lock clicks and the door bursts open, Edward de Vere marvels at how fate sweeps so many people up like the unstoppable wave of a tsunami, how it hurtles them toward a wall where they are crushed and impaled by still further people. Life uses us as battering rams, one person against another, and few, if any, ever escape the catastrophe.

The newspaper provides the abominable details: another woman attacked while sleeping on a park bench, her dark hair and ragged clothes doused in what must have been gasoline or lighter fluid and then set ablaze with a book of matches. The old man reads the story with an indifference so alien to him that he later puzzles over it and wonders if he, too, has finally succumbed to the modern epidemic of apathy, but as he stands alone in the sacristy, preparing for that afternoon’s ceremony, he suspects that something far more insidious has wormed its way into his brain, something that started off as small, larval, almost benign really, but has over the past year swollen into a voracious creature of spectacular size. Having already gorged itself on his reasoning faculties, it is now beginning to wreak havoc on his soul. The signs are obvious.

In the lopsided mirror beside the door, he studies the folds of skin that hang loosely from his withered cheeks and neck. He is wasting away to nothing at all, a Lazarus whose decomposing flesh has been commanded to rise from the grave and wander the Earth while his spirit continues to languish in hell, a pit of infinite suffering with long and winding lava flows, glassy slagheaps, mountains of flinty black rock where a pitiable parade of condemned souls, in a desperate quest for salvation, trek across untold miles of blistering desert sand, leaving behind only cloven hoof prints as evidence of their wicked existence.

The old man feels suddenly dizzy. His head spins; his knees buckle. He clings to the back of a chair, but when he tries to focus on the floor, he finds that he is standing not inside the sacristy of his beloved chapel, but at the edge of a vertiginous void. He reaches out, arms flailing. He drops the newspaper and collapses into the chair. Desperate to slake his thirst, he grabs the mug on the end table and spills scalding coffee on his white vestment and green stole. A warning. The Church forbids priests to eat and drink one hour prior to administering the holy sacrament of communion.

“Oh god please help please god oh please!” he wails.

Edmund Campion comes racing into the sacristy. The boy’s glasses magnify his protuberant eyes and give him a look of perpetual shock, as if everything he encounters in life is some kind of indecent spectacle. His face is featureless, doughy—a rich, creamy, vanilla pudding sculpted with gentle hands into an oval with two small indentations for nostrils. How many years will it take for that soft face to harden, for the deep lines and fissures of experience to crack its smooth surface?

“Is something wrong, Father Loomis? I thought I heard you scream …”

When the old man sees the look of alarm in the boy’s eyes, he turns away in shame. “Oh, it’s nothing. I’m afraid I’ve gone and made a terrible mess.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Yes, get a new vestment. Over there.”

“Of course.”

In his haste, Edmund collides with the chair. An awkward boy, jittery, angular, uncoordinated, Edmund Campion is someone who literally stumbles through life, frequently knocking over bibles and chalices and boxes of incense, always apologizing afterward with a snort of nervous laughter. His classmates torment him in the usual
ways—trip him in the halls, steal his books, kick him, slap him. This is common knowledge, but the old man rarely offers the boy a word of advice or reprimands the others for their cruelty. Suffering has its place in the curriculum, its lessons to teach.

Edmund brings him a clean vestment and starts to count on his fingers. “Let’s see now,” he says. “I’ve arranged the votive candles around the statue of the Virgin. Filled the stoups at the entranceways with holy water. Adjusted the microphone at the pulpit. Checked the thermostat. Am I forgetting anything, Father?
Father
?”

“Eh? How’s that?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, fine,” murmurs the old man. “It’s this news, this ungodly news. It doesn’t make any sense to me …”

Edmund picks the newspaper off the floor and studies the headline with the same serious demeanor he would the catechism.

“Just awful, isn’t it, Father?”

“Hmmm? Oh, yes, yes, terrible.”

“Do you suppose someone like that can be forgiven? The madman, I mean?”

Edmund’s constant need for black and white answers irritates him. Too many students yearn for rigidly defined notions of good and evil, the dictates of moral absolutism, a wrathful God who descends from a thundering cloudbank to smite every evil thing that creeps upon the earth, but after forty years as an educator, the old man finds that the interrogatory inflection of their voices sounds more and more like another part of the natural order—the rustling grass, the whispering wind, the squawking black grackles nesting high in the branches of the oaks and elms. Those sounds could all suddenly go silent and, for a time, he might not notice their absence, but after a while he would begin to feel uneasy and suspect that something had gone terribly wrong with the universe.

The old man pinches his chin, tries to concentrate, but he struggles to construct a simple line of argument. His skills as a dialectician, honed after many years of waging a war of words with his fellow Jesuits, are beginning to fail him.

“A person who has committed such atrocities would need to fully comprehend the magnitude of his crimes, would need to feel genuine remorse for his sins. While I doubt this person is capable of seeking redemption, I do believe he possesses a soul. He is a human being after all, and the human soul, whether it realizes it or not, yearns for atonement with the Almighty.”

These words are meant to bore the boy, to lull him into submission, but this tactic clearly hasn’t worked. With a little huff of disdain, Edmund removes his glasses, polishes the thick lenses on his sleeve, and ripostes, “In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks of Gehenna and …”

“God helps those who help themselves, eh, Edmund? That’s why we must take action right now.” Wanting to avoid a tedious debate, the old man relies on a cliché because, if he remembers correctly, clichés are usually enough to pacify such boys, the more idealistic ones, the ones who have abandoned the uncertainty of critical thinking for the safety and comfort of ideology. He pats Edmund on the shoulder. “Now, I believe I’ll take a little stroll over to the café.”

“To the café?”

The old man stares into his empty mug. “It’s a weakness on my part, I know, but without caffeine, I find it difficult to focus. A small infraction, hmmm?”

“But the other boys …”

“Other boys?

“Yes, they’ll be here any minute.”

“They will?”

“Father Loomis, it’s almost one o’clock.”

The old man glances at the clock on the sacristy wall. The hands are nearly touching, like the fingertips of a penitent who has come here to pray the Act of Contrition. The clock hasn’t worked in years—it’s always midnight in the chapel.

“Well, I won’t be long, Edmund.”

“But what should I tell the others?”

“Tell them … tell them …” With an almost imperceptible shudder, Father Loomis tries to summon forth from the ravaged labyrinth of his memory a comforting passage from scripture. He massages his temples, closes his eyes, but once again he feels the ravenous worm gnawing its way through his brain. “Ah, yes, tell them this: whoever has come to understand the world has found only a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”

Before Edmund can ask the meaning of these cryptic words, the old man shoves past him and into the empty chapel. As he hurries down the aisle, he shields his eyes from the rays of sunlight that struggle through the stained glass window. A choir should be in the balcony rehearsing, but no one is there, and the old man wonders what has brought him to this lonely place on a Saturday afternoon. He should be at the rectory right now, eating a late lunch with his fellow Jesuits. Sensing trouble, he stumbles into the frigid November air while behind him, the heavy double doors of the chapel slam shut with the terrible, final, reverberating crack of a judge’s gavel.

The clouds break and the white sun washes away every trace of color from the sky and disguises the depth of things, flattening the world into two dimensions, a city without shape or contour. In his confusion, the old man does not wander these streets so much as they wander him, spinning him around like a blindfolded child at a party, turning him first left, then right, pushing and prodding him now forward, now backward, frustrating his attempts to navigate this unforgiving maze. After walking five or six blocks, he pauses at a corner and tries to get his bearings by watching the way the wind carries the amber soot from the nearby factories and deposits it on rooftops and car hoods, transforming the neighborhood into a Martian landscape, arid and reddish; but the wind is calm right now, eerily so, and the smog hangs heavy and inert above the tall stacks.

The old man continues on his way. The afternoon traffic twangs in the heavy smog and ozone. He walks past a row of orange barrels and comes perilously close to a construction site where the Jesuits are building a new auditorium. He shuts his eyes and awaits the dreaded
deus ex machina
. God will surely strike him down for his impudence, of that he is certain. Five minutes go by, but no steel girder plummets from the sky to crush him beneath a pile of twisted debris; no bulldozer comes roaring out of the massive
crater to grind him under its steel tracks. Maybe the madman will suddenly race around the corner, wielding his bottle of lighter fluid and book of matches. The old man longs to feel the searing heat of the flames, a kind of Pentecostal fire that will burn up the poison bubbling inside his brain and cure him at last of his mysterious affliction. If he dies now, he can address his creator with a clear conscience, but should he live long enough to make it back to the chapel, he will be reviled as a sinner and have to answer for the terrible thing he plans to do.

From an alley, there emerges a pack of stray dogs. Like swaggering street thugs who show only contempt for God-fearing men, the dogs trot behind him and whine with hunger. During the course of their lonely travels, the animals accost strangers, begging them for scraps of food, but the old man knows what carrion they feed on late at night. The newspapers never mention these gruesome details, but he has heard stories from traumatized investigators who, after examining the half-devoured corpses that litter the parks and alleys, come to him for solace and comfort. Outraged by the presence of such beasts, the old man lifts his arms high above his head, and the dogs slink off into the shadows.

Across the street, on the loading dock of the local brewery, a dozen deliverymen huddle around a barrel. They roast sausages and warm their hands by the fire, and when they see the old man shambling along the sidewalk, they stare and point.

The old man waves to them but continues blindly along until, somehow, he ends up inside the Stone Town Café where a young woman greets him with a smile too sincere to be trusted. Is she a Catholic? Impossible! Not with those obsidian eyes and cinnamon skin. She rests her elbows on the counter and speaks to him slowly, as she would to a child or a fool. Her accent is unusual, her words a confusing babel of consonants.

He can only nod his head and murmur, “Ah, yes, yes.”

The woman patiently repeats, “You’re back so soon, Father Loomis. Nothing wrong with your Irish coffee, I hope. Was it too weak perhaps? Here, I’ll make you another.” She leans over the counter and whispers, “This time I’ll add a little more whiskey. Our little secret.”

“Espresso!” he blurts.

“Are you sure, Father? I have a bottle of Jameson. Your favorite.”

“Espresso!”

She shrugs, wipes her hands on a towel, fills the metal filter-basket with ground coffee, tampers it into a firm puck, and switches on the huge silver machine that shrieks and hisses and belches out a thick stream of red-brown foam. He watches the process closely and then begins to pace through the café. In the corner, a boy strums a guitar and tries to avoid eye contact.

“You!” The old man jabs a finger at him. “I
know
you. Why aren’t you in class?”

The boy looks startled and stops playing. “But, Father Loomis, it’s Saturday.”

The old man sneers. Another well-fed, rosy-cheeked child from the suburbs sent here on a chartered bus for the privilege of receiving a classical education. In drafty classrooms the boys are compelled to recite Latin aphorisms from antique volumes, and though their curiosity never goes far beyond the words stenciled on the school’s letterhead and chiseled in stone above the entranceway of the main building—
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
, a reminder that only God is eternal and unchanging and that all else is transitory and perishable—they sometimes take the initiative to read the
school newspaper and stand at the classroom windows each morning to place their bets on which of the whores will be burned next like witches at the stake.