Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  ~~~~~

  Dante shook hands with people in the bright, cold sunlight and smiled, glad that he had only one more Mass for the day.

  That Coptic Orthodox woman, Leila Faris, something was odd, there. Dante hadn’t introduced himself, but she had known his name. Of course, his name had been listed as a celebrant in the Order of the Mass in the program. That must be it.

  But she had called him Monsignor, which was correct, but not generally known.

  Behind a few more people, Sloan pushed his girls out of the church. He caught Dante’s eye, and Dante extended his hand.

  Sloan looked around, and then straightened and his shoulders dropped. He smiled.

  ~~~~~

  Jesus H. Fucking Christ. Conroy wheeled the girls aside as if shielding them from a blast.

  Leila was talking to that priest. Conroy never should have mentioned the priest in the lab. He had invaded the no-man’s-land that separated his family and casual fucking.

  Leila shook off the priest’s hands, trotted to her car, and hopped on one foot as she tumbled behind the wheel.

  Leila probably hadn’t said anything substantive to the priest. Conroy was off the enormous, barbed meathook that Beverly’s putative divorce attorney would’ve rammed up his ass if the Leila situation ever came to light. He inhaled the metallic January air and said, “Hello, Father Dante.”

  “Hello, Dr. Sloan,” said the priest. “Nice to see you. Hope you enjoyed the Mass. See you tomorrow.”

  “Monday?” Conroy asked. “Why?”

  Father Dante said, “As usual, for our session.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  If they thought he was going to more counseling after that last debacle, they were in a state of neural insufficiency, goddamn it. Conroy sauntered to his Porsche parked in the gravel overflow parking lot, trailing his flitting daughters.

  ~~~~~

  Bev arrived home and stripped off her gloves, tossing them and her purse on top of the dryer. “Conroy?” she called.

  “In here!” he yelled from the kitchen. Bev wandered over to the kitchen, where he was eating a sandwich.

  Conroy said, “Something weird, today. That priest said he would see me tomorrow.”

  Conroy couldn’t have forgotten. She whispered, “Counseling.”

  “No, I stopped doing that other,” he glanced toward the doorway to the living room where the girls were watching cartoons, “thing.”

  Bev had thought that he was going to say woman, doing that other woman.

  “I did everything that priest asked.” He ate the last corner crust of his sandwich. “I broke it off. I confessed. I was heartily sorry I had offended God.”

  Such rote verbiage sounded like he had faked it and deceived Father Dante and her. Oh, Virgin Mary, this was too hard. “We need more than one week of counseling.”

  He asked, “Aren’t you happy?” and ate the end of a pickle.

  The conversation would proceed: If you’re not happy, then we should get a divorce. She said, “If you were happy, you wouldn’t have done that other thing.”

  From the living room, television cartoons jingled and beeped. The set was on too loud, but if the girls ruined their hearing they wouldn’t be able to hear their parents’ fighting.

  Conroy’s mottled face was stiff. His thin lips barely moved. “It was a one-time thing.”

  “You said in counseling that the affair went on for six months.”

  He clarified, “It was only one affair.”

  That might be another lie, that there was only one affair. There might be more affairs. God, she hadn’t thought of that. More affairs. Stupid anger welled up. “Was it only one?”

  He dropped his dishes in the sink. Water splashed. “Yes. I broke it off.”

  Bev dug her fingernails into the wood of the kitchen table. Outside, cold wind blew a swing on the girls’ swingset, like a ghost rode it. “How do I know?”

  “I sent you the email. You saw it. We’re quitting the counseling.”

  “No. That was the deal, Conroy. We go to counseling. Not for just a week. Not just until you give up your—” whore, lay, bitch, cunt, “—affair. Until I say we stop.”

  “Priests are always meddling. The whole Vatican is a sick, twisted, corporation that micromanages people’s lives, everyone, the priests, the laity, everyone. I stopped the affair. You can’t leave me now. How would that look?”

  “It would look like you screwed around and so I left you.”

  “It would look like I’d stopped and you still left me.”

  The solid edge of the kitchen table threatened to crumble under her fingers, leaving her holding sawdust. “You have a morals clause in your contract. The university would fire you.” The cold tile counter pressed her hip and she gathered her breath inside to threaten him. His eyes were narrow, blue slits. “The scandal would derail your career for years. And the chair is open now. It might not be open again for decades.”

  Bev started to push a strand of hair off her face.

  Conroy gestured his disdain for her opinion.

  Their hands rose at the same time, fast, and slapped in the air.

  Conroy grabbed her. His big hand lassoed her wrist.

  Her breath snagged.

  The room spun around the point where his hand held her wrist. Spinning howled around her head and her other arm wrapped around her head like a helmet. “No!”

  Her wrist ripped from Conroy’s grasp and she caught herself on the counter.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you all right? Tell me you’re all right.”

  Air scratched at her closed throat and parted the clamped muscles. “Fine,” she said.

  “I thought you had been,” he looked away, “drinking.”

  “How could you think that?” Bastard. Idiot.

  “Last week, you drank with that priest.”

  “It’s not like that.” She hadn’t broken her rules. There was no problem.

  “I don’t like that priest coming over here when I’m not home, and you shouldn’t drink, especially in front of the girls.”

  “I haven’t.” Not to excess.

  “I can’t go to counseling every night. I have that grant to finish, and experiments.”

  Negotiate, she thought, don’t escalate. “We could reduce the counseling.”

  Conroy leaned on the edge of the kitchen table. “Once, every other week.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” She rubbed her raw wrist.

  “Once a week.”

  “Wednesdays and Saturdays,” she offered.

  Conroy stared at the ceiling Bev had sponged yellow to look like the plaster wall of a Tuscan farmhouse. “Just Saturdays. I don’t know if I’ll be home for supper at all next week.”

  “Fine.”

  Bev went upstairs to lie down. She took off her wedding rings and speared them on the ring-keeper next to her bed. They chittered down the post to the silver base.

  Tomorrow was Monday, and after she went to the indoor driving range and smacked golf balls into the air like a repeating bazooka, she could keep their appointment with Father Dante. She could talk to him, alone.

  From her bed, she prayed to the Virgin to open Conroy’s heart and for strength and peace and calm. Her crucifix chained around her neck itched, and she held the graven image between her palms and prayed harder. The head of the tiny Jesus pressed into her palm.

  ~~~~~

  Leila, double-gloved and lab-coated, pipetted fuchsia fluid over the infected cells. The biological hood whooshed, and the air chilled her arms. Her white lab coat sleeves were wound tight around her wrists and sealed to her gloves with lime-green masking tape.

  The lab door from the hallway banged open. Leila pipetted steadily. If she blasted the sick cells clinging to the dish, it wouldn’t matter if anyone discovered the experiment because the cells would all be dead.

  The tissue culture door slammed open and banged the refrigerator behind it. Conroy held the door open with one splayed hand. “
Why the hell were you at my church?”

  Media dripped onto the last gauzy monolayer of cells, and Leila capped the dish. She slid the long pipet into the tall bucket of bleach-spiked water. “Is anyone else around?”

  “No one’s here.”

  “You checked?”

  Conroy stomped around the dark lab, slamming doors. Leila put her samples in the body-temperature, breath-moist incubator. She stripped off her gloves, inside out and inside each other, tossed her lab coat in the biohaz laundry bin, and washed her hands with antiseptic soap.

  Conroy slammed open the tissue culture door again and rattled the refrigerator as she rinsed foam from her hands. “What the hell were you doing at my goddamned church?”

  “I wanted to the see that scientist-priest.” She dried her hands with a paper towel and dropped it in the biohazard box. The towel landed on discarded clear six-well trays, sallow latex gloves, and a haystack of inch-long, yellow plastic pipetter tips.

  “That goddamned priest saw you. My family saw you.” He slapped the sheet metal hood.

  Leila sat on one of the lab chairs and leaned back, glaring. “Shut up.”

  Conroy spun around and stared back. “What did you say to me?”

  She held her eyes open wide and didn’t allow her body to fidget. “I said, ‘shut up.’ You’re being an ass. You didn’t break down and confess everything to your wife, did you?”

  “No.” He slumped in the other chair. His head flopped in his hands and he rested his elbows on his knees, curved around his vestigial stomach paunch. “What did that damned priest ask you?”

  Conroy’s vitriol was usually reserved for the anonymous peers who reviewed his papers, but he seemed to be in quite a snit lately.

  She shrugged. “He just wanted to know why I didn’t take communion.”

  He looked up and Leila was startled anew by his cobalt blue eyes. No, lighter than cobalt. His irises were the electric blaze of methylene blue cell stain. He asked, “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. He wants me to go talk to him. I’m not going to.”

  Conroy blinked slowly, unattractively. “Fine,” he said. “Fine.” He stood. “I’ve got to work on that grant.” He left the tissue culture room with three strides of his too-long legs.

  Leila exhaled and bent over in her chair. She was dizzy from holding her breath, hoping that he wasn’t going to demand to know what experiment required her presence on a Sunday night. He had almost seen what was written on the tops of her dishes.

  He would have freaked. He would have thrown her ass out of the program.

  She wiped out the hood with two percent bleach solution, which will kill anything from HIV to rabies virus to poliovirus to mad cow prions.

  You can’t be too careful when you’re working with human pathogens.

  ~~~~~

  Chapter Seven

  Early Monday morning, Conroy was in his office pattering on his computer.

  Text filled the sprawling screen, yet the letters still fuzzed together. He was going to have to get stronger reading glasses or a wall-sized monitor.

  Leila slammed open his office door. The door bashed his bookshelves.

  “What in the hell is this?” Scarlet vegetative mush dripped from her fingers.

  She must have twisted the petals off. “Roses. We had an argument.”

  Her jaw didn’t move and words squirmed in her clenched teeth. “A florist’s charge on your credit card and yet your wife didn’t get flowers. Idiot. Don’t do anything like that again.”

  She slammed the door and the window behind him rattled. The apoptosis poster on the back of his door was horizontally creased by the bookshelves.

  ~~~~~

  Monday evening, Dante opened his library door and Bev Sloan walked in alone. Her clothes were monochrome, black skirt and gray sweater. Her smooth hair reflected auburn and dark gold as if her hair had wicked the color out of her clothes.

  “Where’s Mr. Sloan?” Dante asked.

  “He couldn’t make it.” She placed her handbag on the floor and sat in her chair. “He can’t make it at all this week, or next.”

  Couples’ counseling didn’t work with only one participant, especially with the participant who had fewer problems. “Is there another time that is more convenient for him?”

  “No.” She folded her hands and stared down.

  “All right.” He needed to type his notes for the last three counseling sessions, but Dante took his chair, crossed his ankles, and arranged his cassock over his legs. He would be up late, working, and then lying on his narrow bed in the rectory after saying the Office of Compline, his last prayer of the day. Lines of thought were wearing creases in his mind: the children with the now ex-priest Nicolai in the library, Nicolai with his hand up one little girl’s skirt while another little girl sat on a chair, reading a book, or Nicolai and Dante in a snow-bright monastic cell, with Dante holding a baseball bat or wearing heavy boots.

  Obsession would kill him. Separating that part of himself was the only way to save himself from creeping rage.

  He settled back in the deep chair. “What troubles you?”

  She didn’t look at him. “Everything.”

  “Take your time.” Dante could wait. Entire counseling strategies were based on waiting, either allowing the patient to come to you or as a dominance game. In this case, Bev Sloan needed a minute to compose herself.

  She stared at the books on the walls of the library, but Dante didn’t flinch. In the week since he had arrived, Dante had cleaned the entire library, book by book, ruffling pages, until gray grit ground into the ridges of his fingers. Afterward, he had blessed the room, sprinkling holy water in the corners, wielding a gleaming crucifix, and grinding out Latin in a voice hoarse from dust. He had added a coda from the Rite of Exorcism:

  Begone, now!

  It is He who casts you out, from whose sight nothing is hidden.

  It is He who repels you, to whose might all things are subject.

  It is He who expels you, He who has prepared everlasting hellfire for you and your angels, from whose mouth shall come a sharp sword, who is coming to judge both the living and the dead and the world by fire.

  Dante hadn’t sensed an evil presence lurking in the corners, no black wraith flitting among the shadows on the walls and flowing into the darkness behind the bookcases. Yet, the specters of fear and hate wafting in the children’s eyes, watering their eyes when they entered the library and stared at certain objects—the DVD player and the TV, a now-expunged stack of magazines, a certain slim candlestick—were like possession.

  Still, speaking the words of the rite invigorated him.

  In his years as an exorcist, Dante had stared too long into Nietzsche’s abyss, and the abyss had stared into him until he understood it better than the Light, and so fought it on even footing.

  Bev Sloan spoke. “Conroy can’t come to counseling because he’s busy in the lab.”

  Ah, the dominance game.

  Sloan had sent Bev as his proxy. Clever, and a cowardly tactic that dovetailed with his use of email to end an affair. “This week must have been very upsetting for you.”

  Tears filmed her eyes. “I’m fine.” She stared past him at the bookcase beside his desk, beside the well-taped, Roma-addressed boxes. “My husband stopped having an affair. Everything is back to normal. I’m fine.” Her hands, folded on her lap, hardened into a statue of repose.

  In this case, silence covered the truth.

  He prodded, “Your husband had sex with another woman.”

  Her hands clawed each other and settled into a cramped knot. “But it’s over now.”

  “He wronged you. He broke your vows.” A little thrill of the hunt quivered.

  Tears flipped over her lower eyelids. “I prayed for a husband like Conroy, successful, a good father, a Catholic. I prayed and I got him and I’m fine.”

  Dante stayed still, almost non-existent. “What did you give up, for Conroy?”

  “I don�
�t want to talk about this. My husband had an affair. That’s all.” Her shoulders slouched, relaxed. She was moving out of the moment.

  “Did you give up your family?”

  “My parents passed away years ago.” Her shoulders remained down, her face softened, and she blinked.

  Wrong question.

  “Tell me about your marriage.”

  Bev fumbled with her hands. “Marriage is a sacrament. It’s being loving and faithful, having children and being a family.”

  Odd emphasis. Conroy’s affair may have been in revenge. “Did you have an affair?”

  “Of course not.” Still calmly, and thus he was wrong.

  She said she prayed for a Catholic husband. This suggested a non-Catholic man existed. “Was the other man not a Catholic?”

  She jumped to her feet and clutched her purse.

  Dante was on his feet and between her and the door, trapped. “Was he not Catholic?”

  She stood before him and stared at the carpet. Gold and brown hair swirled from the crown of her head and fell over the tops of her ears. “It was a long time ago.”

  Ah, that was it. There was a he and he wasn’t Catholic. “Did you love him?”

  “It was before Conroy. I married Conroy.”

  The moment was gone. She had returned to Conroy. In a cognitive-behavioral sense, it was emotionally mature in that she did not dwell on the past and she sought to fix the marriage.

  In the Freudian-analysis sense, she was repressing emotions and memories.

  Dante held his hand out to Bev and gestured toward her chair. “Shall we sit?”

  She looked up at him, defiant. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

  “Conroy’s affair.”

  “I’ve forgiven him.”

  Dante doubted this. Children were better at facing their anger because they hadn’t been brainwashed to be nice. He held her elbow and steered her to the chairs. “I’m worried about you.”

  She didn’t answer. Her head bowed as if she were pulling against a heavy weight. They reached her chair and she sat. Her hair fell forward and curtained her face. She snatched a tissue from the box by her chair and pulled it inside the veil of her hair.