THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance

by Thomas M. Disch

  The Bishop summoned up the strength to command: “Leave me!”

  The Abbé left with no more persuasion.

  The pain continued, but with some abatement, so that the Bishop was able to remove his pectoral cross and to slip the pallium from his shoulders. But with the folds of the pallium bunched about his knees, he found it impossible to untangle himself from chasuble, tunicle, alb. He collapsed to the floor with his arms spread across his chest, his fingers clutching his shoulders, as though to protect himself from his invisible torturer.

  But the torturer continued his work and even became, for an instant, visible—if not to the Bishop’s physical senses (for he’d pressed his eyes tight-closed), then to some other organ of apprehension.

  The man was a scrawnier St-Loup, the same gray-tufted beard, the same tonsure, but strangely dressed, with a curious device of wires and glass mounted on his nose and ears. He smiled at the Bishop and spoke in a strange language, which the Bishop nevertheless understood: “Good timing, Damon. We’re almost done with the outline. I’ll show you where we are.”

  The man put aside the instrument of torture and held up a speculum of incredible rarity and precision. Slanting its silvery face, he showed the Bishop his own naked, bleeding torso—and rising from it, yet intrinsic with it, a face of smoke, the face of hell itself, dim but undeniable.

  “What do you say to that, Damon?”

  “It’s Satan,” the Bishop whispered.

  “You bet your fuckin’ ass it’s Satan.”

  The Bishop turned away his face from the smiling, demonic visage in the speculum, closed his eyes, and found himself once more on the sacristy floor. The vision of hell had vanished and, with it, the worst of the pain.

  He knew what had happened. Hell had claimed him for its own. His sins were to be punished, as he’d always feared they would be. Perhaps not at once. Perhaps he might be spared some hours or days. But the yoke had been placed on his shoulders, the collar was about his neck.

  5

  “Hello,” said the answering machine in a voice that could have been anybody’s. “You’ve reached 555-0023. Sorry there’s no one home. If you would like to leave a message, wait for the beep.”

  She waited for the beep, which seemed to take forever, and then she said, “Petey, hello, are you there, this is your mother.”

  She gave him more than ample time to pick up and then, when he refused to, she continued: “Well, whether you’re there or not, I hope you’re all right. I had another little episode today, but I’m fine now. There were chicken tenders for dinner, and I always like that, but the cook here doesn’t know how to make a cake and I swear she uses Crisco to make the frosting. This was not really my idea, calling up, but if I refuse to call, that goes on my record and I get the third degree from my counselor. ‘Why aren’t you using your phone privileges, Mrs. Bryce? Are you angry with anyone?’ As though I had anything to get angry about! Anyhow. Your brother came out to the cemetery and found me there, and I remember there was something I told him about your father, and now I can’t remember what. But something you’d want to know, too. He’s a priest. Well, of course, you’d know that, wouldn’t you? What are you? I know what you look like, because the nurse, who’s sitting on the other side of the ward at this minute, knitting, pointed you out in the picture on my dresser, the one with just the two of us, and I’ve got to say, you ought to lose some weight. Your brother is much trimmer, and he’s your twin. I do remember some things. I mean, about the two of you. But mostly back when you were little. Or even teenagers. I remember, vaguely, that you used to fight. I guess with boys that’s inevitable. And you would always get the worst of it. Which is funny when you think that it’s your brother who became the priest. Is this machine still recording me? Anyhow, this should satisfy the nurse about my mental equilibrium. For tonight, anyhow. Oh, it just came to me, isn’t that always the way. It was about your father—not Paul, your real father. And I’ve told you already, haven’t I? I never told your brother, but I did tell you. Years ago, when we got drunk, after Grandpa McCarthy’s funeral. You should have seen the look on your brother’s face when I told him today. I didn’t say who it was, only that it wasn’t Paul. And he didn’t say a thing, but I had a feeling that he was pleased. You were, weren’t you? I mean, who would want Paul Bryce for their father? Not that the alternative is so much better, I guess. In fact, that was what was at the back of my mind just now, when I agreed to have the nurse dial your number. I can remember his face, sort of. Not bad looking, but no Clark Gable either. I remember he wore a cassock sometimes. But then I also remember him wearing one of my dresses. It’s like watching Geraldo on TV, some of the strange people nowadays. Then, too—only then people didn’t talk about it on TV. They didn’t talk about it at all. Anyhow, I can’t for the life of me remember his name. But I think I told you. So you would know and I don’t, which certainly is a peculiar situation. We could go on Geraldo, as a team. Anyhow. It’s nice talking to your machine. I always feel we’ve got this special bond, your machine and me.

  “Bye.”

  His mother was always so much friendlier and more interesting when she talked to his machine than when she had him on the line that Peter Bryce rarely picked up the phone when she called in the evenings. He’d even taken to recording her different messages on the answering machine on another tape as a kind of keepsake. Possibly he might play it at her memorial service, assuming there was one, and that he’d be attending it, which lately had come to seem a more and more unwarranted assumption.

  After she’d hung up, he rewound the tape and poured himself another rum and Coke so as not to waste the last half of the can, his third of the evening. There was just enough Bacardi left in the second half-pint bottle. Then he replayed the answering machine tape and used his Walkman to add tonight’s message to the anthology of her other messages. Tonight’s was surely one of her finest, especially the suggestion that he was the only one who could reveal her dark secret, her Alzheimer’s having wiped the slate of her memory clean. Neat.

  He wondered if elderly lifers in penitentiaries came down with Alzheimer’s and had to ask guards or cellmates what they’d done to be there. He also wondered, as he had other times, if his mother was quite as fuzzy-headed as she made herself out to be. Sometimes she just seemed devious. Of course, it was possible she was both fuzzy-headed and devious. Devious could become a habit, like drinking, that a person maintained in a variety of circumstances. Richard III was devious and physically challenged, so why not devious with Alzheimer’s? Peter was devious himself, and as he approached the end of his rum and Coke he had a genuine brainstorm of deviousness.

  If he’d been sober he wouldn’t have succumbed to the temptation. But he wasn’t sober and he did succumb. He dialed his brother’s number at the rectory. He knew Pat’s habits, which weren’t that different from his own, and sure enough, instead of his answering the phone himself, the answering machine came on.

  “Hello,” said Father Bryce in a tone of professional warmth, “and thank you for calling. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number and a brief message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Meanwhile, why not get in touch with God—and say a prayer for me while you’re talking with Him. We all need each other’s prayers. God bless.”

  After the beep, Peter played the tape he’d recorded on his Walkman into the phone receiver. If Pat was by his phone monitoring his calls, Peter was sure he would not pick up the phone but just let their mother go on talking, and he’d assume that she’d dialed the rectory by mistake. She regularly confused her sons’ phone numbers, or else she’d simply forget which of them she’d meant to talk to when she dialed.

  As soon as the tape reached Mrs. Bryce’s “Bye,” Peter hung up. Now, what would Pat make of that? Would he believe Margaret’s story about their father not being, after all, their real father? For that matter, did Peter believe it? He would have liked to. He couldn’t remember that much abou
t Paul Bryce, who’d died when his sons were in kindergarten, and even the little Peter could remember bore the impress of his mother’s recollections, which had varied from maudlin to embittered according to her mood and her narrative purpose. Sometimes Paul had been a model Catholic layman, a regular Sunday communicant and keeper of Lenten fasts; other times he was a drunken brute who’d given his wife black eyes and overturned Christmas trees. Peter could dimly remember a wrecked Christmas tree, though he hadn’t witnessed the event. In either case, whether a Knight of Columbus or a standard-issue Irish drunk, Paul Bryce was no prize as a father from Peter’s point of view. A mystery father was a much more exciting idea.

  The drollest part of the situation was that Peter had no way of knowing whether or not Margaret had told him who his mystery father was, as she claimed, because he’d blacked out the entire three days of his grandfather’s wake and funeral four years ago. That had been his first sustained blackout and a very scary experience, though not scary enough to have stopped his drinking. So it was quite possible she had told him and that he’d thereafter dealt with her confidence with perfect discretion, never mentioning it or passing along the information to his twin brother, because it had got misfiled into that part of his memory he couldn’t access. There were card files on his hard disk where the same thing had happened. By some glitch in his software he got a message that said IRRECOVERABLE PROGRAM ERROR anytime he tried to access those particular files. They were there, but they couldn’t be reached.

  The mind was like a computer. It consisted of an infinite number of on/off switches. The cartoonist’s cliché of ideas as lightbulbs was not far off the mark. And just as, with a faulty switch, a bulb would sometimes be turned on and sometimes not, so with the switches of memory. You see a face and think, I know who that is, but memory won’t yield the name until too late. And some of the switches were faultier than others, for reasons not completely understood, although it was pretty obvious that alcohol did not improve the operation of any of the switches. Somewhere he’d read—was it in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone?—that a person who hides something when he’s under the influence of opium can only hope to find it when he is once again under the same influence.

  Therefore, another rum and Coke? Why not.

  Father Cogling was on his knees before the statue of the Virgin in his office at the rectory, and was on the third decade of his third rosary of the day, when the telephone in Father Pat’s office began to ring. Although he knew the answering machine was on, he could not resist the temptation to interrupt his prayers and monitor the phone call. It might, after all, be an emergency that ought to be addressed immediately.

  It was, instead, Father Pat’s mother, calling from her nursing home, and calling (it gradually became clear) a wrong number. For she’d dialed Father Pat’s number, thinking she’d dialed her other son, Father Pat’s apostate twin, Peter.

  The message she left was appalling. If Father Cogling had known how to operate the machine so as to erase the filth that Mrs. Bryce had spewed out against her husband and herself, he would have done so, but playing back what the machine had recorded was the furthest extent of Father Cogling’s capabilities. That much he did: He played back Mrs. Bryce’s message, which seemed even more dismaying a second time. The woman was perhaps not responsible for what she said. She was deranged by the disease that had put her into a nursing home. But for that very reason her words might seem more credible to her son, because we tend to suppose those who are deranged have some special relation to the truth, when in fact the contrary is often the case. An exorcist would often be of greater benefit to the insane than so-called mental health professionals.

  If only there were some way to spare Father Pat the needless pain of hearing his mother’s message. It wasn’t, after all, intended for his ears.

  And there was a way. Really quite an easy one. If the tape were rewound to the beginning, which it was, and someone else were to call and leave another message just as long, or a little longer, the later message would replace Mrs. Bryce’s. Father Cogling might make such a call himself, from his own phone line in the rectory, but how could he explain his doing such a thing? No, it would be better to have someone leave a call about ordinary parish business. But whom to ask for such an odd favor? Who wouldn’t want to be given some reason for what he was doing?

  Gerhardt Ober.

  Of course.

  6

  Even in a state of mortal sin, which was surely his condition this morning, Father Bryce found a familiar, antidotal comfort in celebrating Mass. As he lifted the chalice at the moment of consecration, his body felt a single integrated ache that was his hangover, his penance, and his dread, and when he drank the wine from the chalice, his usual doubts were added to the mix—doubts not only as to his own priestly powers but also concerning all things supernatural and divine. But for that very reason he could pray, with the father of the child possessed by the demon, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” If one has known (or has been) such a child and seen its convulsions, seen it foaming at the mouth, seen it in its fits of self-destruction, then one must believe in that demon, at the very least. Could he, as well, believe that Christ could and would drive out the demon? That was where he needed help, the help even of this tainted sacramental wine.

  He ought not to be celebrating Mass in a state of sin, and the very act of consecration added to his inventory of misdeeds. But to have avoided performance of priestly duties would be tantamount to a public confession. He was entangled in his daily routine as in a net. It was like the dream he’d had last night, when he had fainted from the pain of the tattooing: He’d thrashed on the floor, trapped in his priestly vestments like a fish in a net.

  Bowing his head and closing his eyes, he could see it again. So clearly. The fat little man he’d struck and shrieked at in a language he’d never heard before but at once understood. The chill of the stone floor against his cheek at the moment of his complete collapse, like a cold cloth pressed to one’s forehead during a bout of fever. The stiff fabrics of the vestments as he tried to pull them off—especially the coarse wool of the pallium. The orphrey work embroidered on the chasuble, at once so painstaking and so crude, the toil of fingers still fumbling at the first tasks of civilization.

  He was no archaeologist, but undoubtedly he’d acquired enough visual cues and memories in his years in Rome, during the afternoons and weekends of touring all the antiquities within a fifty-mile radius of the Holy City with his Michelin Guide in hand, that now his unconscious could create, in his dreams, simulations of the medieval past that seemed entirely authentic. In any case, he had brought back no photographs of what he’d dreamt. Only the dreamer knows what his dreams look like, and his memory of them, when he wakes, is evidence of nothing. People have flying dreams, but that doesn’t mean that they are able to fly.

  Yet it seemed so real. It seemed as if he had actually been there (wherever and whenever that might be) in the flesh. The flesh was, indeed, what the dream—or vision?—had chiefly been about: the bleeding flesh pierced by the enamel pin, the gout of blood staining the white wool of the pallium, the flesh beneath the priestly robes being tortured by the tattooist’s needle. Undoubtedly, it had been some kind of psychological mechanism for escaping the pain of the tattooing, a retreat not only through space but through time, to another continent and another century, yet all the while preserving his priestly identity.

  And not just preserving but enhancing it. For he’d felt more perfectly a priest in those instants on the stone floor of that dreamt sacristy than even at the moment of his ordination in A.D. 1969. If he knew how to, he would return to the dreamt era, step beyond the sacristy door, and see how large a medieval world his unconscious could construct. Just that little glimpse, despite the horror attending it, had seemed… Beautiful was not the right word. He did not have the word that would express it. He had only the desire to return.

  All the while he entertained these fancies he continued the prescribed ri
tuals of the Mass, and now the inevitable moment had come when he must offer the Host to the communicants. Only two of the six people who’d come to the 7:30 Mass had approached the altar, old Mrs. Smede and Gerhardt Ober. Mrs. Smede received the sacrament from his hand with a furtive smile and averted eyes, as though she shared his sense that the Communion wafer had been sullied by his sins but yet, like him, she could not resist her hunger for it. Gerhardt, by contrast, insisted on making eye contact as he took the Host in his own gnarled fingers and placed it on his tongue, and chewed, and swallowed, as though these were acts that must be performed under priestly supervision.

  Gerhardt had left another of his tirades on the answering machine last night, apparently in response to Wilfrid’s having relayed Father Bryce’s wish that he would stop harassing members of Agnus Dei, a group of laywomen that met at various churches in the Twin Cities—at St. Bernardine’s on the first and third Wednesday of each month—to discuss issues peculiar to their sex. The membership included some women who had once been in religious orders, some of whom had spoken out in favor of pro-Choice political candidates, while others were ardent advocates of opening various church offices, and ultimately the priesthood, to women. In some parishes they had managed, briefly, to have girls assist at Mass, a trespass on ancient masculine privilege that had provoked Gerhardt Ober and some few other old-timers into a fury of denunciation. Even now that Bishop Massey had clamped down on the practice and “altar girls” were no longer tolerated in the Minneapolis archdiocese, Gerhardt continued to picket meetings of Agnus Dei and to inveigh against the organization in a steady outpouring of crank letters to parish bulletins, to local news media, and even to the papal nuncio in Washington, who had replied to one of Gerhardt’s missives with a form letter thanking him for his frankness and concern. That letter had acquired in Gerhardt’s mind the magisterial importance of a papal bull. It had become his license to go on making a nuisance of himself every time the urge came over him. And because he was Father Bryce’s parishioner, the leaders of Agnus Dei tended to hold the priest personally responsible for each of Gerhardt’s outrages.