The Shrine at Altamira

by John L'Heureux

  “You’re a nice little dog,” he said aloud, and stopped to give him a pat. The dog stopped, too, and looked up expectantly, and Dr. Clark froze there, with his hand above the dog’s head. He stopped, frozen, because he saw not the brown and white dog with its head tipped up, expectant, but a brown and white dog with its four legs spread out and strapped to a board, a slit from its throat to its pelvis, and wires leading from a machine to its heart and back again, for an electroshock experiment. The dog convulsed, the heart beat wildly, and the little lights on the machine blinked as the essential data were recorded. And the high, thin scream of the dog—who had no feelings, they said, not like us, not like human beings—went on and on.

  Dr. Clark stood and looked out over the water. After a while he started walking again, and when he got in sight of his parked car, he said, “Go away,” but the dog kept with him. He stopped and pointed back to where he’d first seen the dog. “Back,” he said, his voice hard. “Go!” He stamped his foot. The dog cringed and backed away. Dr. Clark turned and began walking more rapidly toward his car. The dog followed at a little distance. In a minute Dr. Clark looked back, saw the dog, and stamped his foot again. “Get out of here,” he said. “Go! Go!” He began to walk faster, and then to run, and finally he was at his car, fumbling with his keys. The dog stood far off by the lake, looking at him.

  Dr. Clark got into his car and drove back to the hospital, doing forty-five in a thirty-mile zone, refusing to think, refusing to feel anything. He would never have a dog. He would never have any living thing.

  John always made sure to spend an hour at Billy’s house before his father picked him up, so that when his mother or his grandmother asked him where he’d been, he could say honestly—more or less—that he’d been with Billy. Today Billy was showing him jewelry he swore he had stolen from Barker’s House of Gems. He had a man’s ruby ring with a Stanford crest on it, a white and black bracelet with a gold clasp, a pearl necklace, and a little locket on a thin gold chain. He spread them out on his bed for examination.

  “You didn’t steal these,” John said.

  “Did.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “Fuck you. I did.”

  John thought for a minute. “Give me one.”

  “I did steal them.”

  “Give me the locket.”

  “Not unless you admit I stole them.”

  If he stole them, it was from his mother and father. But John wanted the locket, and so he said, “You stole them. Okay? Now give me the locket.”

  “I’ll trade you.”

  “No, you’ve gotta give it. You said I had to admit you stole them first, and I did, so now you’ve got to give it.”

  Billy put his loot away, one thing at a time, until only the locket was left, and then he gave it to John.

  “Okay,” John said, “now what did you want to trade it for?”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “I’ve got shit. What do you want me to trade you?”

  “I’ll have to think.”

  “Fuck you, Billy. You tell me now, or you don’t get anything.”

  John didn’t care what Billy asked for. His father would get it for him and he’d pass it on to Billy. The important thing was that he had a nice present for his mother. A gold locket. He’d put a picture of himself inside it. The one from his sixth birthday. The last one taken before the accident.

  “I’m thinking,” Billy said. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.”

  “You must believe something” Peggy said. “You must have hope? Right?”

  Dr. Clark had asked her to come have a drink with him, and then he’d dumped all this stuff on her. Depression. Despair. Maybe even suicide. And before this they’d never even had a personal conversation. She could have died of embarrassment.

  “But think of the wonderful work you do. Surely that must—you know—give you something to live for.”

  “I believe nothing. I hope nothing. My work is just work.”

  Peggy took a sip of her drink and put it down again. She had to say something meaningful. Something to help this good man, this good doctor, a saint, really. She took another sip of her drink and then pushed it away, all business. She surprised herself by what she said.

  “You’ve got to get a grip,” she said. “You’re just feeling bad for yourself. Think of that kid John. Think of his father. How’d you like to be one of them? Get a life. Go dancing, for God’s sake.” She shot a quick look at her watch. “I’m late,” she said. “Gotta go. Got a hot date.” And she left Dr. Clark sitting there in the bar.

  It was days before she could look him in the face again.

  . . . . .

  John opened the package excitedly, tossing the ribbon aside, tearing at the paper. It was exactly what he’d asked for, a Stanford sweatshirt, white, with Stanford printed across the chest in red. He tried it on.

  “It’s too small,” John said.

  “It’s a medium,” Russell said. “It fits fine.”

  “But it’s supposed to be loose. It’s supposed to sort of droop.” They were in Russell’s bedroom. John was standing in front of the mirror, and he looked up and saw Russell’s expression. “But it’s fine,” he said. “Maybe after it’s washed it’ll get bigger.”

  “Come on,” Russell said, and they got in the car and drove up to the Stanford bookstore and bought another sweatshirt, large.

  Again John stood in front of the mirror. The sweatshirt was much too big. “Perfect,” he said. He turned to face Russell, shy suddenly. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m going to leave it on.”

  They went into the living room to watch TV. Something was tickling the back of his neck, and John reached around, fiddling blindly, until he brought out the pin that held the price tag there.

  “A pin,” he said. He shifted on the couch until he was leaning against his father. They were watching a western, with Clint Eastwood. John turned the pin over and over in his hand.

  “Thank you for the present,” John said.

  Russell put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and patted him.

  “How come you always give me presents?”

  “Because you’re my son and because I love you.” He had found it easier to say as the months went by.

  “Do you really love me?”

  “You know that.”

  “Are you making it up to me? For what you did?”

  Russell didn’t say anything for a while, and then he said, “Nothing can ever make up for what I did.”

  John stuck the pin idly into the sofa cushion and then, idly still, pressed the point through the knee of his trousers. He felt a sting on his kneecap. It did not feel like a pin.

  “But would you make up for it if you could?”

  “We shouldn’t talk about this, John.”

  “But you would, wouldn’t you? If you could?”

  A long time passed, perhaps a minute, while the only sound in the room was the television. Then Russell said, “I’d give my life for you, John.”

  John snuggled up against him. He rolled the pin between his thumb and his forefinger, he stuck it lightly into his knee, he held it between his lips. Then he sat up straight and, leaning forward, he took Russell’s hand in his own. He turned it palm up, and held the index finger out straight. He took the pin and placed the point of it very lightly against the pad of his father’s fingertip. He pressed the pin. The skin went white. He looked up into his father’s face. His father was looking back at him. Without taking his eyes off his father’s eye, John pressed the pin harder, a little harder. His father blinked, but he said nothing and his face did not change. John looked down, and he could see a dot of blood forming where the pin pressed. He looked back at his father and pressed again. There was no change in his face. John looked at the pin and could see it had sunk into the finger—he wondered how deep?—but still there was only a drop of blood. He wanted more blood. He wanted his father to beg him to stop. He pressed harder, looking at the finger, and the pi
n seemed to go so deep that John could feel the pain himself, not in his finger, but in his chest. He looked up, and there were tears in his father’s eye, but his expression was still the same, and he was only looking. He was not angry or pained or anything. He just looked sad.

  John pulled out the pin and ran to the bathroom and returned with a wad of toilet paper. He pressed the tissue to his father’s finger, squeezing it to get the blood out so there would be no infection, and then he wrapped the finger in the paper. In a minute a dot of red appeared. John went back to the bathroom and found a Band-Aid. He concentrated on the finger, and he did not look up at his father’s face.

  When there was no more sign of bleeding, John said, “I want to go home, please. I want to go now.”

  Russell drove him home. They rode in silence, and John did not say goodbye when he got out.

  But that night John cried himself to sleep.

  Russell did not cry. He lay in bed, shaking. He shook, convulsed, with the cold knowledge of his helplessness. He would give anything, even his life, if that would help the boy now. But nothing would help. What you destroyed, you could never make whole again.

  And so, what could he do?

  Ana Luisa had been out dancing, but it just wasn’t fun anymore. Maybe she was getting too old. The men were clumsy, they were pigs. And she had this ache in her chest. So why not go home and have some nice wine and watch a little TV?

  She got home well after midnight, but the lights were on next door, so she went around back and tapped on the kitchen window. John came to the door, a book in his hand.

  “Poquito” she said, and gave him a kiss. “You’re up so late. You read too many books.”

  “Les Misérables” he said. “It’s kind of boring, actually. Would you like a beer? We don’t have any wine.”

  “I hate beer,” she said, and made a face.

  John got her a beer and poured it into a tall glass.

  “So where is your mother this time of night?”

  John smiled.

  “Arturo? Or another one?”

  “There have been quite a few since Arthur.”

  “Pobrecito”

  “Well,” he said, imitating, “she has to have a life too.”

  Ana Luisa looked at him.

  “She’s not dead yet, you know.”

  “What are you saying, Juanito? What do you mean?”

  Out front, a car pulled up, and they heard a door slam.

  “Here she is,” John said.

  Maria came in, locked the door behind her, and turned to face them. They were sitting at either end of the kitchen table, just looking at her.

  “Well, what?” Maria said.

  John said nothing.

  Ana Luisa looked up at the clock.

  “So it’s almost one,” Maria said. “So what?”

  “I didn’t say a thing.”

  “God!” Maria stormed into the bedroom. They could hear her slamming things around in there, and then suddenly she was back, wearing only her slip. “I have a life too, you know,” she said. “I’m not dead yet.” She went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  “See?” John said. He took his book and went into the little alcove and pulled the curtain. He was going to read in bed.

  The fight would go on for a long time, he knew.

  An hour later, when his mother and grandmother had shouted and screamed at one another, and said all the mean things they could think of, they cried and made up and it was all over. They hugged each other, and then Ana Luisa went home and Maria went to bed. It was quiet in the house. It was quiet all up and down the street.

  John lay in bed, still wide awake, thinking that he would see his father tomorrow. His father would do anything in the world for him. Anything.

  Emory got out of detox, but he did not have the courage to go home. This had been the longest binge of his life, or at least the longest since he’d joined AA.

  He was sober again, and he could remember how it began—with Russell’s return from jail—but there were whole weeks since then that remained a blank. Where had he been? What had he done? Had he attacked Russell? Tried to burn his hand? Or was that Ana Luisa, the one who used to cook for him? And how long had he been gone?

  He walked to the nearest homeless shelter and, by sheer luck, he got a bed for the night. The next morning—more luck—he got a one-day job packing dishes for a moving company. He was still shaking pretty badly, but he broke only a plate and two cups, and nobody seemed to care so long as the stuff got packed. They gave him forty bucks. He ate at Burger King and went to a flophouse for the night.

  In another week or so—if it was a good week like this one—he’d be ready to go back to his AA group. And once he’d faced them, he’d be ready to face Russell. Maybe.

  Dr. Clark had been a Catholic once and, thinking about where he could turn next, he discovered that nothing much was left except religion, so he decided to give it one more try. On the morning of Good Friday, therefore, he arrived at the Trappist monastery above Point Reyes to make a three-day retreat.

  The liturgy was beautiful. He was moved by the chanting of the monks as they sang the Office. And the monastery itself, a stone building on a stone cliff, took his breath away.

  He found himself tempted once again, despite everything, to confide in someone. The shrink had proved hopeless, of course. Big surprise. And when he’d tried to confide in Peggy, she had put him—firmly—in his place. What he had felt as despair seemed to her no more than self-pity, and her brisk down-to-earth response over drinks had made him see that sometimes despair was self-pity. But he was smart enough and fair enough—even to himself—to realize that he was becoming immobilized, that he could no longer feel as a normal person, no longer function as a competent surgeon, and that this was not self-pity but something final and fatal.

  What he feared was not death, but this living death.

  On Holy Saturday he surrendered to temptation. It was evening, and the singing at First Vespers had brought him close to tears, and he was hungry and sick. He entered the cloister and walked down the long stone corridor until he found a door ajar and a light inside. He tapped softly and pushed the door open wider. The tiny cell was barren, with only a crucifix on the wall, and for furniture a cot, a green metal desk, and a kitchen chair. A very old priest sat at the desk with his hands folded in front of him. He was not reading or saying his beads. He was just sitting there, with a purple stole in his hands and a kind of smile on his round red face. He had very thick glasses, tinted pale blue.

  When he saw Dr. Clark in the doorway, the priest shook out the thin purple stole and put it around his neck, ready to hear confessions. He motioned Dr. Clark to sit on the edge of the bed.

  Dr. Clark sat down. “This isn’t confession,” Dr. Clark said, too loudly, and then he repeated himself. “I don’t want to confess; I just want to talk to someone … for a minute.”

  “What a fine voice you have!” the old priest said. “You could sing opera. You could sing on the television.”

  Dr. Clark leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and it all came pouring out. “I’m becoming paralyzed,” he said, “because I see what people do to one another. A boy burned by his own father. And not a crazy man, just a man. People sicken me. I can’t look at them. Flesh sickens me. The cruelty, the rottenness. Even a dog I saw, I saw it flayed, cut open, and it looked at me. I can’t not see. There is this little boy …”

  He went on to the end, a rambling hysterical account of the cruelty he saw everywhere around him, paralyzing him, ripening him up for suicide.

  The old priest listened, his eyes attentive behind the pale blue glasses, as if this account of despair were new to him. When Dr. Clark finished—and it took him a long while—the priest said, “What a good man you are! And what good vision you have!”

  Dr. Clark shook his head, exhausted, not really listening now that he was done.

  “You see things as they are, of course, and that can’t be changed. W
e’re a cruel and horrible race of men. And women too, of course; they’re cruel too. And horrible. It’s all just as you say.”

  He took a deep breath, and for a long time said nothing. He had rather hoped Dr. Clark might listen, but he knew how these things went. You couldn’t tell what was going on inside. He started in again, his voice higher and lighter.

  “But we aspire sometimes—some of us—to love. Sometimes even our cruelty grows out of love. It’s too awful, isn’t it, and too mysterious. But we aspire, don’t you see? And sometimes we love.”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice, as if he were imparting some special message, as if this alone mattered: “What makes life so horrible,” he said, “is that our salvation never comes in the form we would have chosen.”

  “Do you see that?” the priest said.

  And he said again, “You do see that? God sanctifies us—he makes us saints—in his own way. Not in our way. It never looks like sanctity to us. It looks like madness, or failure, or even sin. We don’t know how we stand with God, and we want to know. We want some evidence that we are loved, that we are saved, but all we have is our own darkness, and God’s darkness. But sometimes, in that darkness, there is a single act of love, some selfless gesture, an aspiration, and we see that it’s not been all waste, all hopeless, and we can … well … go on.”

  He leaned back, drifting off into his private thoughts, and for a long time there was silence in the little room.

  “That’s why you shouldn’t kill yourself,” the old priest said, folding his hands. “But that’s my opinion only, and what do I know?”

  Dr. Clark looked up, finally. He had not heard a word. But he was startled, because the priest was looking at him in a funny way. With admiration, almost. He blushed as the priest continued to admire him.

  “Did I miss something?” Dr. Clark asked.

  “You’re like an angel, who sees too much, I think. You see things as they are,” the priest said.

  “An angel,” Dr. Clark said.

  “If an angel came to earth, I imagine he would see things as you do. Or she, of course. But right now I’m considering a male angel, you see, you understand. An angel would see evil as evil, and corruption as corruption, and the stink of rotting flesh would make it suicidal, I have no doubt. We’re immune to all that. Our humanity is a kind of immune system all by itself. But the angel would have no immune system, nothing to protect its pure spirit from the realities of this world. It would see things as they are. And it couldn’t live.”