Change of Heart (27 page)

“I just got back from the prison. Shay Bourne had another seizure.”

“Did you tell Maggie?”

“Not yet.” I looked at him. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I haven’t had my coffee.” He got up and poured us each a cup, putting milk and sugar in mine without asking first. “Jews don’t think Jesus was the Messiah because he didn’t fulfill the criteria for a Jewish messiah. It’s really pretty simple, and it’s all laid out by Maimonides. A Jewish
moshiach
will bring the Jews back to Israel and set up a government in Jerusalem that’s the center of political power for the world, for both Jews and Gentiles. He’ll rebuild the Temple and reestablish Jewish law as the governing law of the land. He’ll raise the dead—all of the dead—and usher in a great age of peace, when everyone believes in God. He’ll be a descendant of David, a king and a warrior, a judge, and a great leader … but he’ll also be firmly, unequivocally
human
.” Bloom set the cup down in front of me. “We believe that in every generation, a person’s born with the potential to become the
moshiach
. But if the messianic age doesn’t come and that person dies, then that person isn’t him.”

“Like Jesus.”

“Personally, I’ve always seen Jesus as a great Jewish patriot. He was a good Jew, who probably wore a yarmulke and obeyed the Torah, and never planned to start a new religion. He hated the Romans and wanted to get them out of Jerusalem. He got charged with political rebellion, sentenced to execution. Yes, a Jewish high priest carried it out—Caiaphas—but most Jews back then hated Caiaphas anyway because he
was the henchman for the Romans.” He looked up at me over the edge of his coffee mug. “Was Jesus a good guy? Yeah. Great teacher? Sure. Messiah? Dunno.”

“A lot of the Bible’s predictions for the messianic era
were
fulfilled by Jesus—”

“But were they the crucial ones?” Rabbi Bloom asked. “Let’s say you didn’t know who I was and I asked you to meet me. I told you I’d be standing outside the Steeplegate Mall at ten o’clock wearing a Hawaiian shirt and that I’d have curly red hair and be listening to Outkast on my iPod. And at ten o’clock, you saw someone standing outside the Steeplegate Mall who had curly red hair and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and listening to Outkast on an iPod … but it was a woman. Would you still think it was me?”

He stood up to refill his coffee. “Do you know what I heard on NPR on the way over here today? Another bus blew up in Israel. Three more kids from New Hampshire died in Iraq. And the cops just arrested some guy in Manchester who shot his ex-wife in front of their two kids. If Jesus ushered in the messianic era, and the world I hear about on the news is one of peace and redemption … well, I’d rather wait for a different
moshiach
.” He glanced back at me. “Now, if you don’t mind me asking
you
a question … what’s a priest doing at a rabbi’s office at eight in the morning asking questions about the Jewish Messiah?”

I got up and began to walk around the little room. “The book you loaned me—it got me thinking.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Shay Bourne has said things, verbatim, that I read last night in the Gospel of Thomas.”

“Bourne? He’s read Thomas? I thought Maggie said he—”

“—has no religious training to speak of, and a minimal education.”

“It’s not like the Gideons leave the Gospel of Thomas in hotel rooms,” Rabbi Bloom said. “Where would he have—”

“Exactly.”

He steepled his fingers. “Huh.”

I placed the book he’d loaned me on his desk. “What would you do if you began to second-guess everything you believed?”

Rabbi Bloom leaned forward and riffled through his Rolodex. “I would ask more questions,” he said. He scribbled down something on a Post-it and handed it to me.

Ian Fletcher
, I read.
603-555-1367.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||

The night Shay had his second seizure, I was awake, gathering ink that I planned to use to give myself another tattoo. If I do say so myself, I’m rather proud of my homemade tattoos. I had five—my rationale being that my body, up until three weeks ago, wasn’t worth much more than being a canvas for my art; plus the threat of getting AIDS from a dirty needle was obviously a moot point. On my left ankle was a clock, with the hands marking the moment of Adam’s death. On my left shoulder was an angel, and below it an African tribal design. On my right leg was a bull, because I was a Taurus; and swimming beside it was a fish, for Adam, who was a Pisces. I had grand plans for this sixth one, which I planned to put right on my chest: the word
BELIEVE
, in Gothic letters. I’d practiced the art in reverse multiple times in pencil and pen, until I felt sure that I could replicate it with my tattoo gun as I worked in the mirror.

My first gun had been confiscated by the COs, like Crash’s hype kit. It had taken me six months to amass the parts for the new one. Making ink was hard to do, and harder to get away with—which was why I had chosen to work on this during the deadest hours of the night. I had lit a plastic spoon on fire, keeping the flame small so I could catch the smoke in a plastic bag. It stank horribly, and just as I was getting certain the COs would literally get wind of it and shut down my operation, Shay Bourne collapsed next door.

This time, his seizure had been different. He’d screamed—so loud that he woke up the whole pod, so loud that the finest dust of plaster drifted down from the ceilings of our cells. To be honest, Shay was such a mess when he was wheeled off I-tier that none of us were sure whether or not he’d be returning—which is why I was stunned to see him being led back to his cell the very next day.

“Po-lice,” Joey Kunz yelled, just in time for me to hide the pieces of my tattoo gun underneath the mattress. The officers locked Shay into his cell, and as soon as the door to I-tier shut behind them, I asked Shay how he was feeling.

“My head hurts,” he said. “I have to go to sleep.”

With Crash still off the tier after the hype kit transgression, things were quieter. Calloway slept most days and stayed up nights with his bird; Texas and Pogie played virtual poker; Joey was listening to his soaps. I waited an extra few minutes to make sure the officers were otherwise occupied out in the control booth and then I reached underneath my mattress again.

I had unraveled a guitar string to its central core, a makeshift needle. This was inserted into a pen whose ink cartridge had been removed—and a small piece of its tip sawed off and attached to the other end of the needle, which was attached to the motor shaft of a cassette player. The pen was taped to a toothbrush bent into an L shape, which let you hold the contraption more easily. You could adjust the needle length by sliding the pen casing back and forth; all that was left was plugging in the AC adapter of the cassette player, and I had a functional tattoo gun again.

The soot I’d captured the previous night had been mixed with a few drops of shampoo to liquefy it. I stood in front of the stainless steel panel that served as a mirror, and scrutinized my chest. Then, gritting my teeth against the pain, I turned on the gun.
The needle moved back and forth in an elliptical orbit, piercing me hundreds of times per minute.

There it was, the letter
B
.

“Lucius?” Shay’s voice drifted into my house.

“I’m sort of busy, Shay.”

“What’s that noise?”

“None of your business.” I lifted it to my skin again, felt the needle working against me, a thousand arrows striking.

“Lucius? I can still hear that noise.”

I sighed. “It’s a tattoo gun, Shay, all right? I’m giving myself a tattoo.”

There was a hesitation. “Will you give me one?”

I had done this for multiple inmates when I was housed on different tiers—ones that had a bit more freedom than I-tier, which offered twenty-three rollicking hours of lockdown. “I can’t. I can’t reach you.”

“That’s okay,” Shay said. “I can reach
you
.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I said. I squinted back into the mirror and set the tattoo gun against my skin. Holding my breath, I carefully formed the curves and flourishes around the letters
E
and
L
.

I thought I heard Shay whimpering when I started on the letter
I
, and surely he cried out when I tattooed the
V
. My gun must not have been helping his headache any. Shrugging off his moans, I stepped closer to the mirror and surveyed my handiwork.

God, it was gorgeous. The letters moved with every breath I took; even the angry red swelling of my skin couldn’t take away from the clean lines of the letters.

“B-believe,” Shay stammered.

I turned around, as if I could see him through the wall between our cells. “What did you say?”

“It’s what
you
said,” Shay corrected. “I read it right, didn’t I?”

I had not told anyone of my plans for my sixth tattoo. I hadn’t shared the prototype artwork. I knew for a fact that Shay, from where he stood, could not have seen into my cell as I worked.

Fumbling behind the brick that served as my safe, I took out the shank that I used as a portable mirror. I stepped up to the front of my cell and angled it so that I could see Shay’s beaming face in the reflection. “How did you know what I was writing?”

Shay smiled wider, and then raised his fist. He unfolded his fingers, one at a time.

His palm was red and inflamed, and printed across it, in Gothic script, was the same exact tattoo I’d just given myself.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||

Shay paced his cell in figure eights. “Did you see him?” he asked, wild-eyed.

I sank down on the stool I’d dragged in from the control booth. I was sluggish today—not only was my head buzzing with questions about what I’d read, but I was also—for the first time in a year—not officiating at this evening’s midnight Mass. “See who?” I replied, distracted.

“Sully. The new guy. Next door.”

I glanced into the other cell. Lucius DuFresne was still on Shay’s left; on his right, the formerly empty cell now had someone occupying it. Sully, however, wasn’t there. He was in the rec yard, repeatedly running full tilt across the little square yard and leaping up against the far wall, hands splayed, as if hitting it hard enough meant he’d go right through the metal.

“They’re going to kill me,” Shay said.

“Maggie’s working on writing a motion at this very—”

“Not the state,” Shay said. “One of
them
.”

I did not know anything about prison politics, but there was a fine line between Shay’s paranoia and what might pass for the truth. Shay was receiving more attention than any other inmate at the prison, as a result of his lawsuit and the media frenzy. There was every chance he might be targeted by the general prison population.

Behind me, CO Smythe passed in his flak jacket, carrying a broom and some cleaning supplies. Once a week, the inmates were required to clean their own cells. It was one-at-a-time, supervised cleaning: after an inmate came in from rec, the supplies would be waiting for him in his cell, and a CO would stand guard at the doorway until the work was finished—close by, because even Windex could become a weapon in here. I watched the empty cell door open, so that Smythe could leave the spray bottles and the toweling and the broom; then he walked to the far end of the tier to get the new inmate from the rec yard. “I’ll talk to the warden. I’ll make sure you’re protected,” I told Shay, which seemed to mollify him. “So,” I said, changing the subject, “what do you like to read?”

“What, you’re Oprah now? We’re having a book club?”

“No.”

“Good, because I’m not reading the Bible.”

“I know that,” I said, seizing this inroad. “Why not?”

“It’s lies.” Shay waved a hand, a dismissal.

“What do you read that
isn’t
a lie?”

“I don’t,” he replied. “The words get all knotted up. I have to stare at a page for a year before I can make sense of it.”

“ ‘
There’s light inside a person of light
,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘
and it shines on the whole world
.’ ”

Shay hesitated. “Can you see it, too?” He held his hands up in front of his face, scrutinizing his fingertips. “The light from the television—the stuff that went into me—it’s still there. It glows, at night.”

I sighed. “It’s from the Gospel of Thomas.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it came from the television …”

“The
words
, Shay. The ones I just said. They came from a
gospel I was reading last night. And so does a lot of stuff you’ve been saying to me.”

His eyes met mine. “What do you know,” he said softly, and I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question.

“I
don’t
know,” I admitted. “That’s why I’m here.”

“That’s why we’re
all
here,” Shay said.

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you.
It was one of Jesus’s sayings in the Gospel of Thomas; it was one of the first things Shay Bourne had ever told me, when he was explaining why he needed to donate his heart. Could it really be this simple? Could salvation be not a passive acceptance, like I’d been led to believe, but an active pursuit?

Maybe it was saying the rosary, for me, and receiving Holy Communion, and serving God. Maybe for Maggie’s father, it was meeting with a bunch of die-hard congregants who wouldn’t let the lack of a physical temple dissuade them from prayer. Maybe for Maggie, it was mending whatever kept her focused on her faults instead of her strengths.

Maybe for Shay, maybe it was offering his heart—literally and figuratively—to the mother who’d lost hers years ago because of him.

Then again, Shay Bourne was a killer; his sentences curled like a puppy chasing its tail; he thought he had something phosphorescent coursing through his veins because a television had zapped him in the middle of the night. He did not sound messianic—just delusional.

Shay looked at me. “You should go,” he said, but then his attention was distracted by the sound of the rec yard door being opened. Officer Smythe led the new inmate back onto I-tier.