Thomas M. Disch (39 page)

“I wish it were possible, my child.”

“Because you see, Father, there are things that I could tell you, if we were in the confessional, that somehow, here, like this …” She finished her sentence with a blush.

“The problem, my child, is the elevator. I am unable to summon it.”

“But if you tell Hedwig you want to go up to the Shrine, she can’t refuse you. She told us that you are in charge of the Shrine. You’re her superior. And there’s another reason, too.”

“And what is that, my dear?”

She had told him then of the relic of the Holy Shroud that was kept in a reliquarium in one of the side chapels, and he had listened dumbfounded. To think that such a treasure could be so close by and no mention made of it till flow! Why was not the Shrine teeming with pilgrims? Of course, there were spurious relics, but Alison had assured him that this was unassailably genuine. Many books had been written attesting to its authenticity. Alison had read one of them herself. She mentioned it now because it had been her hope, ever since she’d learned of the relic’s presence at the Shrine, to be able to venerate it. She was certain that if she could press her lips to it, she and the child she carried could suffer no mischance when her time came. And beyond her concern for herself and her child, there was Mary Tyler, who was now very near her term and so sick that she almost required a miracle if she was not to miscarry.

Silvanus had let himself be persuaded to take Alison to Mary’s cell, not without misgivings. He had not seen the girl since he had spent his seed upon her, and he was not certain if she would receive him in a spirit of humility or of grievance. She had seemed dazed at first, but then, as Alison had dwelt upon the benefits Mary might reap from being able to venerate the precious relic, she came to share her friend’s fervor and insisted on having her restraints undone so that she might rise from her pallet and put on a loose robe over her bedclothes, in which habit she proposed to visit the Shrine.

All the while that Alison and Mary sang the praises of the Shroud and its miraculous powers, Silvanus began to formulate his own prayerful hope. For he, even more than these girls, stood in need of a miracle. They would pray to be delivered of healthy children, but he would pray for another kind of deliverance. Not knowing by what agency he’d been translated to this latter-day kingdom of the Antichrist, Silvanus had ceased to hope that he might be returned to his own era. “Lead us not into temptation,” Christ had bade us pray, “but deliver us from evil.” Never had those words rung with such urgency as now.

And yet, even as the hope stirred in his heart that the relic of the Shroud would enable him to return to the precincts of Notre Dame de Gevaudon in his own kinder and more Christian era, the very temptation that he would escape from assailed him with more force than ever. He thought of being with Alison in the confessional, of pressing his ear against the black veil that separated priest and penitent until he could feel her breath upon his cheek.

Her whispered sins would be a spice upon the air. Until (his fingers stroked the nape of his own neck in anticipation), of a sudden, his hand would rip through the veil and clasp her neck. He would draw her lips to his, let her protest as she might, let her writhe in that private darkness, nothing would avail against him, he would force her compliance, she would be his. As the dove is the falcon’s, as the lamb is the wolf’s, she would be his.

When the door of the elevator opened, Alison stepped out of the cage with an unspoken but heartfelt
Thank you Jesus!
She knew that the gray dome overhead represented only a larger prison cell than the one from which she had just been released and to which she might have to return. But there was real summer sunlight streaming in through the high, narrow windows, and a feeling of
space
. Not freedom. But at least here freedom was visible.

Father Pat was right behind her, and in her delight and thankfulness she could almost have given him a hug. Mary Tyler had already managed to warn her, by whispered hints, that the guy was some kind of lech. Even without Mary’s signals, Alison had got that message. A year or two ago, she might have been shocked at the idea of a priest wanting to do that kind of thing, but now it almost didn’t register as news. Maybe the only surprising thing was that he wasn’t queer. For the last couple of years the news on TV had been full of stories about priests who’d been caught groping altar boys. She’d even heard Greg tell a joke, the last time she’d seen him, about how do you get a nun pregnant—by dressing her up as an altar boy. Not this priest. This one was a plain, old-fashioned sleazeball. She could have wished he were queer, except that in that case he probably wouldn’t have been so eager to follow up on her suggestion that they pay a visit to the Shrine to look at the relic of the Shroud of Turin. Three threads did not seem like a big deal, but Father Pat had reacted like it was a chance to kiss Jesus in person. The same creep who two minutes earlier had been trying to get into her pantyhose.

“It’s so big,” said Mary, looking across the great expanse of the nave.

“I’d forgotten how big this place is.”

“It is enormous,” Father Pat agreed, slipping into his reverent tone of voice.

“It’s like it was built for a city that isn’t here. Instead, there’s just us.” Mary made a nervous sign of the cross.

“Where is the relic kept, Mrs. Ober?” Father Pat asked of Hedwig, who had remained inside the elevator.

“It’s in the reliquarium, and the key to the reliquarium is in the sacristy, and I can’t enter the sacristy without triggering the security system. Which means that nothing can be done until we’re back down to Four, where I can turn off that part of the system.”

“You surely don’t need our help to do that,” said Father Pat. “So while you take care of that, I can wait here with the girls.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Father,” Hedwig said. “I’m not supposed to leave them on their own.”

“They won’t be on their own, will they? They’ll be with me. Indeed, I’ll be able to hear Alison’s confession while you’re away. Unless we need another key to open the confessional?”

“No, of course not. But, Mary, perhapsyou should come with me.”

Alison exchanged a glance with Mary.

“No,” said Mary, in a tone of tentative self-assertion. “No, if I could, I’d like to say a prayer before the altar.”

“A fine idea,” Father Pat agreed.

Hedwig offered no further opposition beyond a reproachful lowering of her head.

When the elevator doors had closed, Alison almost skipped up the side aisle toward the nearest confessional, which was built on the same XXXL scale as the Shrine itself, though more old-fashioned in its style, with its dark wood carved into all kinds of twisty shapes and curlicues. She parted the heavy curtain and at once knelt down on the stone floor and felt under the kneeler for what she hoped would be there.

It wasn’t, but there was still time (Father Pat had lingered beside Mary) to check out the compartment on the other side. And there it was, a smooth cylinder the size and weight of a flashlight. In the curtained darkness of the confessional it was too dark to examine the can of Mace to see if there were instructions on it explaining how it worked, but she assumed it was like any other aerosol, a deodorant or bug spray.

She heard the central half-door of the confessional opening, and a moment later, after some fumbling, Father Pat had pushed aside the panel separating confessor and penitent, and she could see, through the loose mesh of the screen, his bent head, in silhouette, black against the darkest of grays. “I’m here, my child,” he whispered.

“Bless me, Father,” she began, “for I have sinned. It’s been—I don’t know, a pretty long time—since my last confession. I haven’t even been to Mass for a while. We haven’t been able to, of course, until you came, but even before I was brought here—”

“Yes, yes, my child,” said Father Pat impatiently, as though he knew that she was playing for time until Hedwig returned.

Which of course was what she was doing, but being inside the confessional she felt protected. He was a priest, after all, and had to play by the rules. Even so, it would probably make sense to offer him something more interesting than missing Mass or using profane language or even sins of disobedience. Confessing sins of that sort was a little like riding a bicycle with training wheels. It was what you confessed before your first communion, when you hadn’t had a chance to find out what sin was all about. On the other hand, she didn’t want to start with sex until she absolutely had to.

“Well, Father, one of the worst things. .

“Yes?”

“I did a lot of shoplifting.” This was a lie. She’d done a little shoplifting. Mostly things like candy bars, or batteries for her Walkman, and, once or twice, clothes. But nothing expensive or risky. The last time, at Kmart, she’d almost been caught stealing pantyhose (the very ones she was wearing now and into which, under the waistband, she’d slipped the can of Mace), and that had cured her of shoplifting.

“Yes?” he said, but it was a different yes, not so much impatient as puzzled, as though shoplifting was a foreign concept.

So she began to invent details: shoes from Dayton’s, CDs at Music Mart (even though she didn’t have a CD player), and then, because she could tell his interest was flagging, she topped it off with, “And one time, at Walgreen’s, I shoplifted some condoms. The thing is, I was just too embarrassed to take them to the cash register.”

She was certain he’d want to know more about the condoms—especially whether they’d actually been used for their intended purpose— but evidently he was after bigger sins, because he didn’t bother with the condoms but proceeded straight to the real sin that had brought her to BirthRight.

“You’re pregnant,” he pointed out.

“Yes, Father. That was the time we didn’t use condoms.”

“Oh.” And then another “Oh,” as though he was just making the connection. In some ways Father Pat seemed awfully dim, even for a priest.

“You used these… condoms… to prevent the natural passage of the male essence?”

“Yes, Father.” She might have fibbed and said she’d been worried about MDS, but she knew that from a priest’s point of view that probably didn’t matter. She still remembered Father Cogling’s little speech on the subject of contraception, how birth control was worse than incest.

“Oh, my dear child, that is a very grave offense!”

“I realize that, Father. That’s why I felt such a strong need for confession.”

“I can well understand.”

“I know it’s wrong, of course. A mortal sin. But my boyfriend insisted, and the truth of the matter is that if we had always used the condoms I wouldn’t be here now.”

“Your boyfriend”—he pronounced the word as though he were repeating an obscenity—”might insist that you follow him to hell. Would you do that? Would you like to spend eternity in flames that are never extinguished and that never consume but forever visit new pains upon your sinful flesh?”

Did he expect her to reply? He’d fallen silent and seemed to be waiting for her response, and for just a moment she imagined reaching into her pantyhose and taking out the Mace and squirting him with it right through the veil of cloth between them. That would have been stupid and definitely sinful.

But how in the world do you answer such a question?

“I’m really very sorry,” she said at last. “It was a terrible sin. I see that now.”

“Tell me,” he said in a gentler tone of voice, “how it is that you have come to be with child.”

“Well, Greg and I—Greg is my boyfriend—I think the first time we went all the way—”

“You must be more specific, my child. How did you go ‘all the way’?”

“When he— When we—” What did you call it when you were in the fucking confessional? “When we had intercourse.”

“So.” He sounded pleased. “When you had intercourse: Where were you?

What led up to it? Were you cooperative, or did he force you?”

“No, he was kind of… insistent. But I wouldn’t say I was forced. I mean, it wasn’t the first time we were together. We both had— Oh, you know.”

“Yes? Go on.”

Maybe, Alison thought, he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t have a clue.

Maybe for all that he was certainly a lech, he hadn’t had five minutes of practical experience, so the idea of her and Greg getting each other off was beyond his comprehension. She’d known kids like that in eighth and ninth grade, little wise guys who pretended they were sex fiends when in fact they’d never done anything but jerk off, if that. You had to feel sorry for them, in a way. But what could you feel for someone as old as Father Pat who was, sexually speaking, in eighth grade, and retarded at that?

Alison realized, to her complete astonishment, that in some very important ways—maybe in the most important way—she was more of a grown-up than the man on the other side of the confessional screen. Who was—she did the arithmetic in her head, not without difficulty— probably three times as old as she was.

It was just then that the alarm went off.

Alison was up off her knees and out of the confessional in a flash. But she came to a sudden stop as she felt the cylinder of Mace, as though by its own willpower, dislodge itself from the waistband of her pantyhose and fall to the floor of the Shrine. She scooped it up at once and glanced back at the confessional—while the
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
of the alarm, magnified by the dome, filled the air of the Shrine—but Father Pat had not yet come out, and she was able to push the Mace back inside her pantyhose, this time shoving it down alongside her thigh, where it couldn’t possibly escape.