Vellum (22 page)

six

THE PASSION OF EVERY THOMAS

The Crucified Shepherd

S
he finds him in the church, sitting on one of the wooden pews with a plastic bag between his legs; it clinks as he shifts position. This is the last place she would have expected to find him but she supposes that's part of the reason he's there. It's the last place she would expect to find him. He glances at her sideways, clocking her approach, and reaches into the bag to pull out a beer bottle. He doesn't look at her as he cracks the cap off on the pew in front. A priest starts toward them from a door over to the right behind the altar; Finnan just mutters something under his breath and the man stops, turns around and heads back out the door.

“I didn't think you believed in any of this shit,” she says.

“I don't,” he says. “But it's a nice idea, though, eh, Phree? Redemption.”

“That's not what you used to say.”

“No? What did I used to say, then?”

“‘I'll die for me own bloody sins, thank you very much,'” she says, imitating him.

“Aye,” he says. “I probably will. That's a shite accent, by the way.”

She slides into the pew beside him.

There are no bruises on him, from what she can see, but he's pale and sick-looking. Actually he's almost white, and when she reaches over to touch his cheek—he flinches, looks away—it's cold, like marble.

“What happened to you?” she says.

“Angel took me heart, he did. Reached in and plucked it out with his fingers. Oh, I felt him rearranging the plumbing, hooking up arteries to veins, veins to arteries. It's all tied together, neat and tidy, like, apart from the missing pump, that is. So you see, I have to keep a little mantra going in me head all the time now, to keep the blood flowing. And that uses up a lot of heat. You ever noticed that, when you're using the mojo? There's some scientific word for that, ain't there?”

“Negative entropy.”

“That's the one,” he says. “Someone should investigate that, don't you think? I mean, maybe it's not fookin magic at all. Maybe there's a perfectly rational explanation for all of this shite.”

“Maybe,” she says.

“And that would be nice, wouldn't it? We could actually learn something about what makes us all tick, if the fookin eedjits weren't all so busy playing fookin sodjies.”

“
Sodjies?
What?”

He makes a mock salute.

“Sergeant Seamus Finnan reporting for duty, sir.”

“I guess they're fookin gearing up now,” he says. “They're not even offering an alternative. No, if you're not with them, then you die. But if you kill an unkin it has consequences, you know; what we're hooked into, that mojo, runs pretty fookin deep under reality. You cut one little thread, just one little thread…But they don't care. Sod it, says they. Let's just burn the fookin world and start another one.”

He takes another swig.

“Christ,” he says, “they're still living in the fookin neolithic. Burn the fields before you plant the new crop.”

And another swig.

“But they didn't have to kill him. They didn't have to do that. If you kill an unkin—no, I said that already—you create one big fookin” he waves an arm in the air, grasping for a word “rip in the Vellum. There are places in this world where the…repair work ain't too tight. Days which are just holes.”

I have a lot of days like that,
she thinks.

“You know what an angel's voice can do,” he says. “Think about the damage from a scream.”

She remembers hearing it in her bones, waking up in the dead of night, the sound still echoing in her skull, ringing in her ears. The shock wave of her brother's death.

“So are ye going to fookin kill me or what?” says Finnan.

She looks at him, sitting there pale and pathetic, and she finds herself shaking her head. She doesn't have the heart. She knows that if she'd had any more to give the angels than a fragment of a word, the one syllable of a place-name Thomas forced on her before she had the time to cut him off, if she'd had any more than that
Ash-,
the angels would have taken it from her as well. Ashton? Ashbury? She doesn't know enough for them, but Finnan obviously did. She can see it in the way he doesn't look at her. He looks down, away to the side, anywhere but at her.

“No,” she says. “I just want to know…”

She doesn't know what she wants to know.

He looks up at the crucifix, points with his bottle.

“D'ye think himself was one of us, then?”

A RAG DOLL OR A SCARECROW

They crucified Puck in a field outside of town, stripped naked on an October night on a mountain where the cold wind brought the temperature down near enough to freezing—not on an actual cross, of course, not literally, but they left his body hanging, tied with ropes around his broken arms to a barbed-wire fence before they beat him near to death with the butt of a shotgun, caving in his skull in a fracture that stretched from the back of his head down and around to the front of his right ear. They left him hanging there spread-eagled like some World War One soldier caught on the wire in no-man's-land, cut down by enemy gunfire, and there he hung for eighteen hours, limp as a rag doll or a scarecrow, until he was discovered, still dying. He never woke from the coma.

Just so you know how this story goes and that it's not a happy ending. Puck—my young buck, my slim, fairy fuck—didn't rise from death after three days entombed, and there was no salvation for our sins through his murder, no life everlasting for him or for us. Puck—Thomas Messenger, as he was christened by his parents—for all that his green hair and smirking cherub lips and blinking lashes long and dark gave him the look of some eternal child, some Peter Pan—died like we all die, without resurrection, with no miracle rebirth. I can still remember the feel of his peach-fuzz downy legs under my hand, the fine flutter of a feather across my chest, the point of a horn pressed into my side as he butted me, the goatish kid. But Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. And we should weep for him, as the women wailed for Tammuz in Jerusalem, in the sure and certain knowledge of his absence.

“His soul has gone now to a better place,” the minister said, and, in a way, I do agree; the silent darkness where a life once was and, like a guttering candle, has been snuffed out leaving only a thin trail of smoke—the grief of others—rising like incense to the heavens, that can only have seemed a mercy in comparison as he felt their blows rain down on him, the blood run down his face, the blame ring in his head. I wonder how many of us can imagine the pain and terror subsiding slowly as the body shut down, shut off from the world as the shock kicked in—as their boots kicked in his ribs—that curling up of consciousness being his only defense. And then a slow slide into senselessness, and, eventually, into nothing.

In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?

THE TEMPORAL WORLD

We lay upon our backs, his head nooked in my shoulder, turned to gaze across my chest, above us open sky, the golden crescent of the sun, the silver-cratered moon. His wings furled around him as a peacock cloak, mine extended wide and flat across the thick-bladed grass heavy with moisture, we lay like something fallen from the stars, indolent with the noon heat, and oblivious to the
tuts
and
tsks
of other students crossing the campus grounds around us on their way from this lecture to that tutorial.

“Fucking fairies,” I heard one mutter, and Puck raised a hand to circle it, slack and lazy, a regal wave in the air that, on the third revolution, came up as a fist, one finger extended to flip the bird, as casual as could be.

“Fuck you kindly, fine sir,” he called after the white-knuckle asshole, never one to let an opportunity for brattishness slip by. “Fuck you very much indeed.”

I put a hand over his mouth, laughing, and he nipped at it with nimble teeth.

“Hey.”

The world, the temporal world—at least that little piece of grass in it outside the campus cafeteria—belonged to us for that lunch hour. The temporal world belonged to us even as we neglected it,
because
we neglected it, my rucksack as my pillow, his abandoned to one side, and a solitary ring binder of polypocketed past papers and handwritten notes that flipped and flitted this way and that under the fingers of a warm August breeze, fingers far more studious than our own. I extracted one of my own shamelessly idle fingers from between his teeth and flicked at the acute of his earpoint.

“Ouch. Bastard.”

“Well, don't friggin bite me, then, scrag.”

He cocked his head diagonally across my chest, half angled to fix me with most innocent doe-eyes, half angled so his smirk, seen from above, curled up with mischief at the edges as he batted the black lashes of those eyes across my skin, and clicked a nip of teeth into my nipple. I bellowed curses loud enough to make a nearby mutt, browsing the remains of student lunches, raise its head and look at me with curious cocked gaze and raised ears.

THE GRACILE AND THE ROBUST

“When compared to the gracile—or dolichocephalic—elven skull, or, indeed even the robust—which is to say, brachycephalic—skull of one of the gnomitic races, the brutish and apelike features of the swarthy ochroid clearly mark him out as a racial type to be categorized as
distinct and inferior
to the more civilized races. The ochroid is, it must be concluded, to be considered as standing at the median point between these modern races of Man and their troglodyte progenitors, those such as Astralopithecus or Pithecanthropus Titanus, so-called Peijing Man.”

Old bluff bombastic Samuel Hobbsbaum, with his copious white beard and sheer solidity of short stature, closed the book and laid it on the lectern, one finger resting lightly on the yellow Post-it note that marked his place.

“When we read the words of the archaeologists of the nineteenth century,” he said, “in a modern context, we can hardly help but be shocked by the racism that is not merely implicit but is, in fact, quite unashamedly explicit. To us, slavery is an abhorrent notion, and yet…”

He opened the book again.

“It is for this reason that the ochre Afritan must be nurtured by his Elyssean cousin, as one would nurture a child, for surely the Afritan is but an infant in comparison to his Elven superiors, his savagery but the wild impulsiveness of youth, lacking in reason and self-control, his superstitions but the untamed fancy of a childish imagination. Without science or mathematics, without history or philosophy—without even a concept of progress beyond the natural cycle of seasons, indeed—he is, like all children, trapped in an Eternal Present, bound to follow his most immediate fears and desires and thus as ignorant in matters of ethics as in all others. He is a slave to his passions, and can only remain so unless the cultivated man take him under his wings and, with firm hand, as guide and master, lead him to his place within society. And it is the clear and present duty of the enlightened Elyssean to deliver that discipline of reason to the passions of the savage.

“This series of lectures is going to be about passion,” said Hobbsbaum, after a pause. “About passion and reason, and about the politics of those two fundamental aspects of human existence, as the artists, philosophers, idealists and ideologists of nineteenth-century Elysse perceived them to be. Passion and Reason. Romanticism and Rationalism. At what point, we're going to consider, in the collision and collusion of these two ideas do the aesthetics of the nineteenth century become the politics of the twentieth? Where does Romanticism become Fascism? Where does Rationalism become Communism? And can we even speak in such simplistic terms?”

STUDENTS OF METAPHYSIQUE

We met, Puck and I, as students of political science in our first class on the first day of our first year at North Manitu State University and, in the course of that first week, we became also students of each other, unsure at first if any of that niggling fancy in our tongues—that tingling appetence that makes you lick your lips and touch the tips of upper teeth in thought—if that, or any of the twiddling fingers or snatched glimpses of furtive glances, if any of that were more than just the wishful thinking of our own fey desires. We scrutinized each other for certainties that we ourselves were not quite ready to articulate in anything more explicit than the same sort of nod or smile given to any other fellow student and familiar stranger.