The Schwarzschild Radius (8 page)

“Come in.”

Gabriella entered and closed the door. She was fifteen, barefoot with thick black hair down to her waist.

“I came as soon as I could.”

“Have a seat,” said the priest, beaming. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” He could feel the girl’s eyes on him.

She worshipped him. He had rescued her at the age of thirteen from an abusive pimp who happened to be her father. She had come to Transcendence House black-eyed and emaciated from being chained to a basement radiator for three days without food or water. In that time, she had lost enough weight to slip out of her bonds. The first step was to prosecute the father, which they succeeded in doing. She was then handed over to a foster family, where conditions became painfully familiar to her. She reappeared at Father Massey’s door five months ago and dedicated herself entirely to him. She looked things up for him, ironed his clothes, tidied his office.

“Writing a letter?” she asked.

“Oh, taking care of a few things.”

“I wish I could type like that.”

The priest closed his laptop and now was ready to give the girl his full attention.

“I got that book you wanted,” said Gabriella, handing him a library copy of
The Elements of Fly-Fishing
.

“Ah, exactly what I need. And plenty of pictures too. I’ll dazzle Mr. Wright with my fly-tying.”

“You like it?”

“Hey, you’re good. What would I do without my administrator-slash-researcher?”

“I went to a couple of libraries, but I remembered you wanted something with a lot of pictures.”

“Good choice. I can always count on you, Gabriella. That’s a great quality.”

He sat next to her on the couch and took her hand.

“How did tonight go?” she asked.

“Outstanding. We raised over twenty thousand dollars and focused media attention on our cause. That’s a mighty combination.”

“It’s great that the law went through.”

“Yes. Do you know what it means to make a law? Think of it. You can build a bridge, castle, or cathedral, but nothing changes the course of our lives and of history like creating the laws by which we live. Why are you smiling?”

“I like it when you talk like that. Sometimes I try to quote you, but I can’t.”

“You don’t go quoting everything I say, do you?”

“I mean, no.” She gave him her other hand too. “I’m totally discreet, you know that.”

“A lot of things go on between us that no one must ever know about.”

“I know that.”

“I confide a lot of things to you that others might use against me.”

“I would never hurt you, Father Evan.”

The priest held her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth. She wrapped her arms around his neck and redoubled the passion. His hand slid up the girl’s checkered skirt and she responded by unbuttoning her blouse.

“What do you want me to do for you?” she asked.

He looked at her and brushed her hair away from her face.

“You want me to dance for you?”

He smiled.

“I’ve got on the new underwear.” She got up off the couch.

“I’d like that. No, stand over there. Let me get this out of the way.” He removed the print of Guernica from the wall and put it on the floor.

“No distractions,” he said.

As the girl began to writhe, the priest’s mind became a tangle of guilt, passion, fantasy, and hard consequence.

She showed him a devotion that he was incapable of giving to anyone but himself. Aspirants prayed for this kind of dedication, and here he was, receiving it. Why couldn’t he love a woman? Why had it always been children that made him burn? Why was it always thoughts of young girls that accompanied him to bed and awoke him in the morning? And those photos he had collected through the years… He thought they were the most beautiful things in the world, and knowing that it was wrong didn’t change it.

She removed her panties now, and every time she was naked before him, he was as paralyzed as though he had been impaled by a stake. In such moments, he would give up all that he had, and could ever hope for, in exchange for those thighs. Others might think that it was he who had power over her, but he knew the truth.

Father Massey’s hand groped behind the library shelf and threw a switch. The video camera began to roll.

areful getting back to bed,” said Massey when they were done.

She stood up on her toes and kissed his cheek. She had already turned to leave when he pulled her back for one last kiss.

Father Massey stood looking at the door as though following her beyond the room. He put the poster back on its nail and contemplated the bombardment, the twisted figures, the wailing that was Guernica. It was an image that evoked Dante’s Inferno.

He thought about where he had gone wrong.

He had been born into a broken family. His father was an interstate truck driver who was on the road eight months out of the year. His mother had two men on the side. At an early age, he learned to deal with solitude―a gift that would assist him later. With his father away, and his mother entertaining in the next room, young Evan had to care for his three brothers and sisters. A natural organizer, he planned the meals, distributed the household tasks, and scheduled all TV programming. Indeed, his first attraction was to the military, but his nature required immediate results and four years was too long.

He enrolled in Suffolk Community College in Long Island, majoring in pre-engineering. Evan was fascinated by cathedrals and the endurance of the artisans that labored over generations to build them.

After getting his associate’s degree, he landed a construction job through a friend making good union scale wages. It would be a good job, he thought, until he could decide on what he was going to do.

Whatever he did, he did well. Massey enjoyed working with mortar and wood, although he hid his aversion to the simple men who did this kind of labor―the sort of men he looked upon with contempt in the trailer park he grew up in.

He had always been drawn to the great mission of helping the downtrodden and became a Claretion.

The Claretions’ special emphasis on outreach to youth and social justice appealed to Massey. As a lay volunteer, he could assist in the many worldwide missions without going through the rigors of seminary.

He began by working in a soup kitchen in the inner city in New York. He tired quickly of this and searched for a greater challenge.

After a few months, he saw an ad in the paper for a passage to India via freighter. This was the adventure he was waiting for. He told his superiors that he wished to serve in India and would be in a position to do much good there. They told him that he was free to go, but that the Order couldn’t sanction the trip. They wished him luck.

Massey signed up immediately and was off. So it was that he found the village of Krupal in northern India.

Now he contemplated the second half of that story, the half that was not in the video shown to all who come to Transcendence House.

It was all true. Twenty-two-old-year-old Massey had saved a people, had altered the course of thousands of lives for the better. And for this, the villagers were grateful. They addressed him as Baba. They declared May 27th Evan Massey Day, the anniversary of the completion of the reservoir. But it didn’t end there.

Massey stayed in the village for twelve more months following the end of the project. He asked that a house be constructed for him, which the villagers gladly did with the finest materials available. There were people to wash his clothes, which now consisted of dhotis made of fine cotton and silk. There was someone to clean his house, to cut his hair, to clean the dirt from under his fingernails. Women were assigned the task of bathing Massey.

No whim of his was too trivial. He needed fresh-cut roses in his living room every morning, and so a boy was given the job of running to another village six kilometers away to fetch them. Massey decided that he wanted satellite TV, and the people spent their hard-earned cash to satisfy him.

He requested a weekly stipend. Small at first, the stipend became a tax, and the tax was raised to support his interminable purchases, which included film and beer.

Playing the role of village counselor, he mediated disputes and imposed judgments which the villagers accepted. And like any bureaucrat, Evan Massey was subject to lobbying. Fathers began to offer the services of their daughters.

Among the villagers, it became a mark of status to have a daughter obtain an “audience” with Baba. Then the daughters started getting younger and younger. Before long, Massey was sleeping with eleven-year-olds. He began filming the girls, then watched the videos incessantly, reliving each conquest.

He still chaired town meetings where he could hold forth, but his audience had changed. While before he was beloved by all, now he was worshipped by some and despised by many.

The end came when accounts of his excesses spread to the surrounding villages and police came looking for him. Massey fled like a common thief.

Returning to America, he found no breathless crowds cheering him. Unemployed with only a two-year degree, he took a job as a waiter in an upscale restaurant. Now he catered to the whims of others. He practiced phrases like, “Will there be anything else, sir?” and “You’re right, ma’am. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

The daily humiliation crushed him, and he couldn’t stop yearning for the approval of the crowds chanting his name. That past praise was now a recurring slur that was with him at every turn. He who had given life, who had designed and set things into motion, now scraped bread crumbs off fine linen tablecloths under the glare of a headwaiter.

One night, the news ran a story about a burnt-out church in the South Bronx that was slated for demolition. Many residents were protesting because it was said that several miracles had occurred as a result of the intervention of St. Cecilia, after whom the church was named. St. Cecilia was condemned to death by beheading and had survived three ax blows from her executioner. Whenever there was a critical injury in the violent neighborhood, relatives would pray in the ruins of the church. Like the saint, it had been condemned, but somehow refused to die. It breathed life into the victims for whom prayers were said within its walls.

Massey saw his chance. He contacted neighborhood leaders and offered his services as a “lay missionary,” organizer, and civil engineer. The reaction was lukewarm. Massey showed up at a sparse demonstration and took the podium. Spotting a television camera, he played to it with a practiced facility that landed him on the Six O’clock News. The mostly Hispanic protesters at first distrusted this Anglo who had inexplicably taken up their cause, but after Massey created flyers in Spanish and organized a successful postering drive through the local Catholic schools, he gained considerable credibility. The drive gave way to a much bigger rally.

He distributed press kits ordered from Kinko’s with his own money. The rally led to a door-to-door fund raiser that financed a one-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner to which Massey invited politicians in need of the ethnic vote. The politicians pushed for the eighty-year-old church to be granted historic landmark status, a move that would buy time for restoration. When this succeeded, Massey was given full control of the project. He established the St. Cecilia Restoration Fund, and through a series of rallies and appeals to Catholic institutions and lobbying of mob-owned construction companies that were under investigation, the church was rebuilt.