Rabid (17 page)

She pedaled and percussed the antique organ. Her wrists ached at the end of the four Sunday Masses from pounding music out of the recalcitrant beast.

Between hymns, she watched Father Sam and Father Dante perform the Mass, and she looked down on her husband and girls from above. Sometimes, an inkling stole into her mind: that she was dead and watching them, not from God’s choir but from hot and stifling Hell. Hell must have its own choir, a respite for lost souls who, even though they were denied the presence of God, could sing their longing. Lucifer was, after all, an archangel before he fell.

She had taken communion at the six o’clock Mass with the rest of the choir. Her dry throat had accepted the wafer and she had swallowed it past her misgivings. Since the Host hadn’t choked her, her penance must be complete and all must be right with the world and Heaven.

~~~~~

Conroy watched the deacons holding long-poled collection basket like fishnets skimming donations from the congregation, and Conroy readied his bills. This offering was in addition to the tithe account with the church’s treasury and the special donation for the new bell tower motor and the tuition he paid for two children’s Catholic education.

Dinah leaned on him, and he slipped strands of her cobweb hair through his fingers. He had meant to braid it this morning but had only had time to plait Christine’s hair into a tight, neat coif.

Father Samual said the majority of the Mass. That other priest, Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi, mumbled the super-secret words over the Host that the congregation isn’t supposed to hear. Holding back parts of the Mass was juvenile, as if the patronizing Catholic Church couldn’t trust the laity with the magic spells lest they escape and form their own church.

The Protestants had done just that, though.

Filthy lucre, the love of which was the root of all evil, rustled as the baskets neared. He turned to gauge their approach. The middle-aged deacon ladling in cash closed on Conroy’s row.

Conroy gazed farther into the congregation, an reaction born of a flash of a familiar image striking his retina while he scanned, and that tremor in his optic nerve reached neurons that caused him to search the faces of men and women and children, the brown and gray clothes smearing into each other broken by the occasional blaze of a bright tie.

Leila
sat three rows back on the other side.

Over her breasts and body, she wore the black blouse he had fondled in her closet.

Conroy jerked back, and his damp body chilled.

~~~~~

Leila sat primly beside an older woman, ankles and wrists crossed, and watched the priest-scientist hunch over the wafers and invoke the supernatural. Monsignor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi looked like his web page photo, though he was a few years older. She could have clipped out his image and pasted him into a temple sacrificing a bull to Apollo or slashing apart a virgin for Quetzalcoatl.

The pulse in Leila’s left wrist quickened. Last night’s whisky must have been contaminated, because fungus tendrilled her tongue even though a friend of hers, a resident, had hooked her up this morning with a pouch of Ringer’s and a snort of oxygen to kill the hangover. Her chest and back were grungy with excreted alcoholic metabolites under her blouse.

Earlier, she had spotted Conroy, but she had no intention of talking to him. Choosing the same Mass as he had was a bit of bad luck, though both flavors of luck were fallacies. There were four Masses today, so a twenty-five percent chance existed that she would choose the same one as he had. If one eliminated the early Mass at six-fifteen, which neither of them was likely to choose, the chance of juxtaposition increased to one in three.

Petrocchi-Bianchi held the crackers as if he believed that voodoo mumbo-jumbo.

But his publications bespoke a mind that was rational and methodical. It was impossible that the seal of Holy Orders and the mind that wrote those beautiful papers could exist in the same chunk of meat.

Leila’s pulse traveled up her arm and knocked at her temple. Rotten aroma filled her mouth, and she gulped incense-scented air.

The problem was the supernatural. The priest and these people around her, like the elderly couple to her left who stole disapproving glances at her and nodded knowingly to each other, agreed on the mass delusion that the priest had the power to draw these people together and that eating a cracker was indulging in divine cannibalism. No scientist should countenance that. No man who had been castrated by the Church could write, as Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi had, that
possession, seemingly caused by supernatural diabolical forces, is a neurochemical phenomenon shaped by cultural expectations,
which means
the Church causes demons
, as if his papers had transubstantiated William Blake’s poetry into science.

Leila recrossed her ankles and watched Monsignor Dr. Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi pray inaudibly over the pyx, raise his jewel-encrusted chalice above the green-dressed altar, and mutter incantations. A nervous itch worried at her mind, not that God would smite her with lightning, but that her damaged wiring and unstable elements might reach critical mass, right here, and explode. Ethanol is flammable.

Feeling the words of the Lord’s Prayer in her mouth made skin prickle with sweat.

~~~~~

Dante stood at the top of the aisle holding a pyx of communion Hosts, intoning over and over again, “The body of Christ,” as each parishioner came forward to receive the sacrament.

The next parishioner was an older woman, sixties perhaps, dressed in an autumnal, flowing dress. The garish rusts, cinnamons, and olives would have glowed to the Roman pickpockets, announcing that she was an American apple ripe for picking.

Dante held the wafer at eye level and said, “The body of Christ.”

She held out her cupped palms and said, “Amen.”

The apple woman turned away, chewing, and Sloan stood before Dante, his hands cupped. Bubbles of perspiration gathered around his white hair above his cold blue eyes. His eyes were wide, as if he expected Dante to deny him the sacrament.

Sloan had fulfilled his end of the bargain. Perhaps he had been slack in the penance but at least he had confessed.

Yet, damp premonition gathered close to Dante’s belly.

Dante held the wafer with his fingertips and presented it. “The body of Christ.”

Sloan said, “Amen,” and Dante placed the wafer in his palm without touching him.

Sloan walked back to his seat, chewing.

Sloan passed a very young woman sitting in a pew, eyes downcast. She was pretty in a Mediterranean way, Italian perhaps, and she wore solemn, European black. She had readily responded during the Mass yet she hadn’t joined the communion line.

She seemed lost.

Dante understood being lost.

~~~~~

The communion line shuffled toward the old priest and the young one. Thirty vertical feet of air hovered above them, and the choir loft spilled music over wooden railings. The congregation did not ruminate upon the geometric permutations involving Dr. Conroy Sloan and Mrs. Beverly Sloan and Leila Faris and Father Dante as they waited to partake of wheat transubstantiated into the body of Christ, which their cells would molecularly rend and burn.

Most of those calories would be spent.

A few of the atoms from the Eucharist—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen or sulfur—integrated with their bodies.

A carbon atom from the wafer failed to repair the DNA in one of Nessa Akins’s lung cells, and it become the cancer that killed her ten years later.

Carlos Valdez’s gut proteolysed the wheat gliadin protein, and his neurons used the energy from those amino acids and from the five shots he had had the previous evening to walk out of the church and to his car. It had been five years since, just after his eighteenth birthday, he had threatened to beat the living shit out of Father Nicolai if he ever touched him or his sister again. Carlos still came to Mass at least once a month to pacify his father, a Hispanic Catholic of the old stripe, and he endured the ordeal stoically. At least this time, he hadn’t had to watch that monster staring at him the whole time.

Josephine Thorgood’s body used several kilocalories from the Host to build the body of her son growing in her uterus, though you’d never know that a few molecules of the body of Christ had been incorporated into that mischievous, incorrigible child who was baptized Patrick Allen Thorgood. Father Dante was the only priest that Josephine would allow to touch her baby, even for those few moments, in his baptismal gown and under her watchful eye.

~~~~~

Conroy shied as he passed Leila sitting demurely in the pew. What the hell was she thinking, showing up at church, where Beverly and that priest would see her and
know
?

But they couldn’t
know
. They couldn’t read his mind or hers. If he jumped up after Mass and hustled the girls out, Leila wouldn’t have a chance to confront him.

~~~~~

After communion, after another song and a prayer, Leila grasped the cool rail of the pew in front of her and readied herself to dash for the door. Bumping into Conroy and his kids on the way out would necessitate an explanation, and she didn’t feel like it.

The white-haired priest said, “The Mass is ended. Go in peace,” and the priests and deacons filed out as the music rose. Leila whirled around the end of the pew and fell in with the eager crowd that battled to beat the parking lot traffic jam.

The priests stood just outside the door in the chill sunshine. The old priest creepily held Leila’s hand too long, nodded over her, and finally reached for the next person in line. Her damp palm left a crumpled place on her coat.

Monsignor Dr. Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi, SJ, MD, PhD, black-haired and black-eyed like a pirate or a Mafia made man, reached for her hand and said, “You did not take the communion.”

Oh, God, he had seen her, sitting alone in the pew, refusing communion. Shades of high school.

“Leila Faris,” she said. “Nice to meet you.” He held her hand, and the bridge of their two arms drooped between them. She tugged but he wouldn’t let her hand drop.

“You are Catholic?” He seemed concerned, too nice, and fake.

The greeting line didn’t seem the place for a theological argument about the untestable hypothesis of an omnipotent Deity. “Orthodox. Coptic.”

“Egyptian rite?” he asked. His other hand settled over their linked hands, further trapping her. His fingers around her hand were too cool, as if he were dead or she were febrile. Or her hands might be boiling off last night’s booze.

Her throat closed like she had inhaled a feather.

The priest said, “How interesting. Have you been to Egypt?”

“My dad moved here before I was born.” Leila couldn’t get away because the priest’s cool hands and lab-strengthened fingers still wrapped her right hand like she was imprisoned in stone. For some asinine reason, she added, “He passed away a nine years ago.”

Beside her, the old priest idled the time by rocking back and forth, toes to heels.

Petrocchi-Bianchi said, “We should speak more. You could stop by the church?”

“This week is rough. Thank you, Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi.”