Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  “Dante,” Bev said. “Please stop.”

  “This is what is wrong!” Dante wanted God to hear this. If there was a God, since there was an absence of evidence that there was no God, He should know about the miscreants He had created. “It is obsession with self. You don’t believe in humanity. People are objects to you, Sloan,” like children were objects to that damned, damned pedophile.

  Sloan turned to Bev. “This isn’t counseling. He’s just a priest threatening damnation.” He spun and flicked his finger at Dante. “You priests make up rules and then threaten everyone else with some stupid punishment that even you don’t believe in. You have your own problems, asshole.” He stalked out, leaving Dante ashamed at his temper and exhausted, alone with Bev.

  Bev rubbed a tear off her cheek. “It took so much to get him to come to counseling.”

  “I thought he would see that he was hurting people. But he did not,” Dante said. At confession the next morning, Dante drew a few prayers in penance for his outburst and another sad grimace from Samual.

  Her eyes dropped tears and she rubbed them off her cheeks. “Now what?”

  “It’s up to you.” He scratched his scalp and finger-combed his hair back. Dante wished he were back in his lab discussing brains and cells and proteins and not screwing up people’s lives. “There are the children to consider.”

  “I don’t know how this happened. A couple of weeks ago everything was fine.”

  Dante pushed himself up, walked past the neat bookshelves, sat in Conroy’s still-warm chair and held Bev’s cool fingers. “One thing leads to another. It is a succession, a chain reaction. I think that about Nicolai, too.”

  Bev scrubbed at her reddened cheeks with her other hand.

  He petted her hand. Swollen veins sneaked under the surface of her skin like thick threads in raw ivory silk. “For pedophiles, first there is the pornography.” Dante turned to Bev, who was leaning forward, staring down. “He told the Dominicans he was doing research on pedophile priests, that he wanted to testify before the American bishops.”

  “So Father Nicolai wasn’t a pedophile!” Her hand covered her chest, her cleavage, her heart, which Dante broke anew.

  “That is what they all say. They all say that it was research. Every last one of them tries to convince you that the boxes and crates and metric tons and terabytes of raped children are research. It is a cliché.” Dante’s hands fell in his lap, useless. “If he had been researching pedophiles, he would have known what a ragged old excuse that is.”

  Bev looked down, saddened again. Damn, he hated himself for bruising this sweet woman. The blue carpet in the library still smelled musty though he had vacuumed it. His imagination picked up whiffs of spunk and turd. Beside his shoe, the carpeting was torn in a right angle, a handhold. He should rip it all up.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Dante couldn’t even lift their linked hands, so he rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. “It’s incremental. First the pictures, then small transgressions which could be explained away as play or wrestling or an accident and, as they improve their lies and their manipulations, large transgressions.”

  “You make it sound so clinical.”

  “It’s not. Each step is a betrayal and destroys people.”

  Bev rustled, shifting in her chair, and she turned her hand over so they held hands palm to palm. Her hair was loose. Usually, her dark gold hair was knotted or twisted somehow, but today it hung across her shoulders, and she looked so young, like the co-ed she had been when Conroy had met her. “So what should I do about Conroy?”

  Dante was the Church, there in his medieval mourning clothes and ringless fingers and blood rushing at the sight of the light touching the gold in her hair, and he knew that she would take his slightest cue as the Word and that he was condemning her to living with an adulterer but he said, “The girls,” and over their joined hands she watched him with solemn brown eyes.

  “Well, then.” Bev’s fingers slid away and she stood, brushing wrinkles out of her skirt, “I need to think about it. Instead of counseling on Monday, do you want to come for supper?”

  If he went to her house for supper, there would be the opportunity for another incremental movement toward each other, but Dante could handle women friends. Eventually they became sisterly and platonic. He could guide women away from the romantic path because, before he took Holy Orders and had done his penance for betraying them all, he had steered crowds of them down that path to its final, dismaying, nebulous conclusion.

  “Supper would be nice,” he said.

  ~~~~~

  After he had stormed out of counseling, Conroy pounded on Leila’s door, and she yanked it open and pulled him in. She held his biceps in her strong grip and whispered, “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing.” Conroy grabbed her arms, crinkling her silver shirt, and kissed her.

  “It’s never nothing.” The buttons up the back her shirt slipped in his fingers, but he pushed each one through its buttonhole.

  He swept the shirt off her shoulders and reached for her fly. The rose perfume on her skin left a bitter residue on her belly, but he licked it as he worked at the yet-more buttons of her fly. The door lock clicked behind her, and then her young, bronze hands slid through his whitening hair.

  He was not selfish. He licked lower.

  ~~~~~

  Bev said, “One more thing,” and fidgeted with her purse. She set it on the chair behind her because she had to do this even though she didn’t want to. “Is Father Sam around?”

  “Father Sam is at St. Jude’s, performing Mass. After that, he goes to St. Theresa’s.”

  She swallowed even though her mouth was dry. “I need to confess.”

  “You’ve committed mortal sins since last week?” His head tipped, amused.

  She had grown up confessing to a priest. It was habit. It was comforting. She picked up her purse and stepped toward the heavy library door. “I could wait for Father Sam.”

  “Bev, I’m still a priest.”

  “All right.”

  He rummaged in his desk and pulled a slim, purple stole from the drawer like a recalcitrant purple snake from its den. Holding the cloth in his open palms, he closed his eyes, muttered, kissed the center, and looped it around his neck.

  Confessing to Dante was going to make everything worse, but one must confess before taking communion. She held her breath, hoping for strength, but none came.

  ~~~~~

  Leila buried her fingers in his hair and held on, gasping, then released Conroy. He sat sideways on the floor while she held the doorknob and panted. She asked, “What is going on?”

  “Nothing.” Conroy lurched to his feet and smoothed his hair. He slid his hands in his pockets and slouched. “Sometimes I’m unpredictable.”

  Unlikely. Something weird was going on with Conroy. He didn’t go for cunnilingus. “Do you want some coffee or something? I think there’s still coffee.”

  “Got any of that vodka left?”

  “Yeah.” She tugged her jeans up over her hips and buttoned them on the way to the kitchen. Meth, her deaf black dog, lay in his basket in the living room, asleep. She poured one scant shot of vodka into the screwdriver and knife-stirred it. Conroy’s odd behavior was unpredictable, and she didn’t want him to be unpredictable and drunk.

  He was sitting on the couch when she handed him the drink.

  He sipped and seemed twitchy, like a dog with an itch. “Thanks.”

  He scratched his neck, put the glass down, and jiggled his knee.

  Leila slid a silver coaster under his glass. That ornate wood coffee table had survived both world wars and both French revolutions before her father had imported it, and Conroy’s drink wasn’t important enough to sweat a ring onto it. She sat on the other end of the couch, posture open, the television remote behind her. Maybe he just needed a friend, which was not part of their deal but what the hell.

  Conroy downed a third of the
drink, ruffled the book by the Dalai Lama lying on the end table beside him, scratched a nubble on the couch cushion’s upholstery, and picked up the screwdriver again. He was fidgeting in circles.

  He asked, “Why do women get married?”

  Was he pimping her? “I’m not aware of any research on the matter.”

  “I’m not talking about research. You have it all figured out, that women are promiscuous like gay men. So why do women get married?”

  Oh, that conversation, when she had been drunk, like two weeks ago. Mulling that dialogue around in his head for two weeks could explain why he was so weird. “Maybe pressure from a predominantly patriarchal society.”

  “Don’t give me that crap about the patriarchal repression.”

  “Women aren’t repressed. Men think women are repressed.”

  “There’s no difference.”

  “Sure there is. Subterfuge.”

  He picked a nub off her couch upholstery. “So why do women get married?”

  She considered this miserable, post-middle aged man. “So they can screw around.”

  He grimaced and flapped his head as if he had been slapped. “Not if they’re married.”

  He was going to birddog the subject until she expounded. Her theories had driven him over the edge. “Women do best reproductively if, first, they give birth to the children with the best genes and, second, if they have a spouse to help raise them. She gets the best genes from having sex with the best males, however you define ‘best.’ Frequent sex with the spouse suggests that the children are his, so he stays around. So marriage works best for women if the women are promiscuous but the men don’t know it, and so women like sex, all sex, as much as they can get. Most men do best reproductively if they have sex with one fertile woman a lot and no other men have sex with her. So marriage works best for men if women are monogamous. So men tell women to be monogamous, and women pretend to be.”

  Conroy snorted and stared into his glass as if there were something other than opaque orange liquid in there. “But that’s crazy.”

  “A study done a few years ago that found that one of every three children born within marriage was not related to the husband.”

  “One out of three? That’s got to be wrong.”

  She agreed, “‘There are lies; there are damned lies; and there are statistics.’”

  Conroy shook his head. “You think it all boils down to sociobiology.”

  “Here’s the thing, Conroy. It’s like evolution. Evolution only talks about changes at the population level: gene frequencies and gene flow. Evolutionary theory doesn’t apply to individuals: not individual people or ibexes or flies or viruses. The paradigm doesn’t apply to me personally, except maybe that populations of people like me who opt out of societal norms tend to leave fewer children, so this trait is selected against, but it says nothing about me. That some women bear cuckold children says nothing about your children.”

  He blinked and gasped and sucked down the last of the screwdriver.

  He hadn’t thought about his own children yet. She wasn’t helping shit and should shut up. “Let me get you another drink.” In the kitchen, she poured him straight orange juice and brought it back to him.

  He said, “But that’s wrong because men want sex. Men want all the sex they can get, any time they can get it.” He sat back and crossed his legs, his usual posture at his desk when he was debating hypotheses. “According to you, men should be monogamous, so why am I here?”

  “Well, sex feels good.”

  Conroy gulped his juice. “This is really weak.”

  “You can’t taste vodka.”

  “There’s got to be more to sex than just feeling good.”

  “The salmon exception.”

  “Yeah, the rock star salmon.” Conroy sounded bitterly jealous of the fish.

  “Rather than the efficient one. And, you know, it’s adaptive to have sex whenever you can. People and monkeys who like sex leave more progeny who also like sex.”

  He drank half the glass and thumbed away a juice bead on the corner of his mouth. “But isn’t that selfish?”

  Leila settled on the sofa opposite him. “That depends on what you mean, Conroy. Selfish is a societal norm. It has nothing to do with biology. It’s a construct.”

  “Constructed by society.” Conroy nodded. “And the priests. So the Church represses people again.” Conroy stared into his juice. “The Church has always repressed people and science and sex and men’s natural instincts.”

  “God, Conroy, you sound like me. You might want to be careful. I’m nuts.”

  “So if the Church is repressing us, then it’s wrong.” He wandered out to the kitchen.

  Leila followed him. Her dog rumbled, snoring. “Yeah, the Church is a sick corporate culture that produces twisted, deranged priests for the masses’ consumption because the masses like to be repressed.” In the kitchen, Conroy dumped several shots’ worth of vodka into his juice. Leila said, “Hey, man, go easy on that.”

  Conroy stirred the drink with the knife. “If the Church is repressing us, then it doesn’t matter.” He drank a gulp.

  She asked, “What happened, Conroy?”

  “Nothing.” He chugged the drink. Conroy set down his glass and picked up the goose-necked vodka bottle.

  “Conroy, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  He swigged straight vodka.

  Leila went over and rubbed up against him, located his car keys, and picked his pocket while he was staring into space. She slid his keys behind a burgeoning arrowhead plant on her kitchen windowsill. Just because he was being a jerk and selling the Porsche to Yuri didn’t mean she was going to let him drive with that much vodka in him. “Conroy, you can’t get wasted here.”

  “Why not? There is no God. There’s no reason not to.”

  “Nihilism is useless. Give me the bottle.”

  “I like to get drunk. There’s no reason not to. The Church represses people, makes them feel selfish for doing what’s natural.” He grabbed her ass and slammed her pelvis against his. “And women. There’s no reason not to grab as much pussy as I want.”

  “That’s flattering.” She wasn’t afraid of him. If he got too rough, she could lock up his joints and force-march him out the door. The ultimate back-up was in her nightstand drawer, not that she anticipated any need for a gun with flimsy, skinny Conroy.

  He said, “That’s why you grab as much dick as you want. Because you’ve opted out.” He held her jeans against his dick bulging his pants, and drank from the bottle again, a long drink, and bubbles flitted in the clear liquor.

  “Yes, Conroy.” His arms were stronger than she had guessed. She squirmed.

  “You’ve got it all figured out, the casual fucking, the whole thing.” He slammed the half-empty bottle down and lifted her by her ass onto the counter. His hands grabbed her bones and flesh, clenching roughly.

  Rough could be fun. When she got rough, he cringed a little, as if someone were watching and judging. Drunk, he might fuck like a big, silverback gorilla.

  He bit her neck hard enough to leave a mark. Pain sparkled in her body.

  ~~~~~

  Bev, bereft of divine strength, implored the Holy Spirit to enlighten her mind that she may know the sin she ought to confess, though it was obvious to her already.

  Dante said, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

  And she had to say it. Maybe he wouldn’t understand. “Father, I have committed adultery in my heart.”

  Dante’s blinked, and those long, lush, black eyelashes swept down to his cheekbones. “Two Ave Marias and make a good act of contrition.”

  “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for my sins.” She was sorry that her mind had strayed and was really sorry that she had to confess to Father Dante, who sat with closed eyes and no hint of a smile like a Roman statue of Apollo at rest. “And avoid the near occasions of sin, Amen.”

  He gave her absolution without g
lancing at her. “Amen.”

  She gathered up her purse and coat. “Are you still coming for supper Monday?”

  He removed the violet stole from his shoulders, kissed the embroidered cross in its center with his soft lips, and smiled at her. “Sure. I’ll bring wine.”

  ~~~~~

  After Conroy fucked Leila on the counter, slamming his wrapped dick into her until she gasped, he lifted her and fucked her against the wall (a picture of an eggplant jumped off its nail and dropped on the floor) and finally on the linoleum floor.

  Afterward, she laughed. “God, Conroy, what’s gotten into you?”

  “Nothing.” And he felt the nothing, around and within him in that vacuum that gobbled up everything. The nothingness hungered, so he fed it more vodka.

  “Conroy,” she gently took the bottle away from him. “You have to go home. You can’t stay out all night.”

  “Why not?” Her kitchen spun as if there were hidden gyroscopes under the tiles as well as rubbers in the kitchen drawers. He braced himself against the refrigerator and stared at the magnets: an Eiffel Tower, several universities, a geometric tile, glittery things. They moved with his eyes like shining, cometary corneal scars. “Why the hell not? Nothing matters.”

  There was more liquor on the top of her fridge. Conroy stepped back and perused the selection: Macallen, Stoli, Woodchuck, Jack. He reached for the Jack.

  “Hey, Conroy,” Leila said. “Let’s watch some porn.”

  He held the Jack Daniels, stared into its deep mahogany silence. “You have porn?”

  “Lesbian porn. The Divine Secrets of the Ta-Ta Sisterhood.”

  He jiggled a starry magnet on her white fridge. “And I’ve been watching golf over here?”

  The floor of her apartment lurched as if it was drunk, and he stumbled over to the couch.