Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  ~~~~~

  Meanwhile, Conroy finished the phone call with the dulcet-voiced apartment agent—he could have the townhouse Saturday and planned to move a few of his things on Monday evening, which was the fifteenth and the day of the department committee meeting—as Leila hurried into his office. She closed the door behind her and braced herself against it. “That priest showed up at my place last night.”

  Conroy jumped and his knees rapped the underside of his wooden desk drawer. “What?”

  “Monsignor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi, asking all sorts of stupid questions. He asked if I was sleeping with you. Are you sure your wife doesn’t know about me?”

  “She doesn’t know.” He should have kept Leila’s rules. He shouldn’t have screwed any of those other women. One of his eyelids twitched as if it couldn’t decide whether to blink.

  “Okay,” Leila left his office, still preoccupied.

  Conroy opened up a new window on his computer and typed, Dearest Beverly.

  ~~~~~

  In the deep dark of her curtained bedroom, Bev could barely breathe from Dante’s weight, though he didn’t move, and she closed her eyes as one last crest lifted her and her body clenched. A sunlight sliver poked through the curtain gap and laid a knife of light on the sheets beside her hand.

  Her body, ferocious bone and skin around her soul, had liberated her because she understood why her husband screwed around: it was just sex, instinct and friction, not her soul, not her heart. She had barely touched Dante, her friend, her priest, and he had leapt at her as if she were prey, and that’s all that sex was, a movement of biology, a reflex. An orgasm, even a molten-spine, skull-blasting orgasm, wasn’t a tremor of the soul.

  Dante lifted above her. Air rushed in her lungs. His face still pressed against her shoulder. His breath was shallow, gasping.

  “Dante?”

  He pushed himself up and rolled away. He curled on the bed, his broad shoulders a night-shrouded mountain with a faint frost of sunlight that sneaked through the thick curtains. He clutched the sheet and gasped.

  “Dante?” She rolled over and touched his shoulder. He was wrapped in muscle, but this had been obscured by his black clothes and the flowing cassock he wore. The dark of her bedroom was so black that it seemed they were both inside the priest’s black clothes. She stroked his shoulder. He had the body of a young man, a beautiful, healthy, young man with chest and arm muscles of round, firm flesh, and he was uncircumcised. Ribbing on condoms must be to replace that cushiony, frictionous foreskin.

  He remained turned away from her.

  He must think she was too old. Her body had birthed two children, though she ate well and kept active, she was thirty-seven and in the last throes of fertility, not nubile, not virginal. And there were the scars.

  His hands covered his face. His breathing wasn’t sobbing, more like the gasps after a solar plexus punch, the wind knocked out of him.

  She shook his shoulder. “Dante!”

  ~~~~~

  Leila walked back into Conroy’s office and slammed the door behind her, catching her fingertip. Paper stacks on his desk and the floor shuddered and verged on implosion.

  Conroy, behind his desk, looked up from his typing and raised one gray eyebrow.

  She shook blood down into her stinging finger and tried, hard, to control the shaking in her voice. “Who else knows about us?”

  He frowned and squinted at his monitor. “I haven’t told anyone.”

  “You haven’t bragged to anyone? You haven’t hinted that you were nailing a twinkie?”

  “No.” Conroy dipped one eyebrow and deleted something he was typing. He turned his calfskin-leather face to her. “Don’t get paranoid.”

  “Yeah,” Leila’s face warmed. “Okay.”

  ~~~~~

  Dante waited for the blinding flash of lightning, the deafening agony of a brain hemorrhage, or the paralyzing lurch of an earthquake swallowing the house. The cold sheet slithered on his skin.

  When she had touched him, when she had kissed him, his body had shouted rebellion. He should have stopped his hands from tearing her clothes away. He should have stopped his mouth from tasting her skin and leaving a moist snail-trail of saliva leading to her breasts and her sex. He should have walked away instead of forcing his body into her, but it all seemed undeniably foretold or beyond his control, like possession.

  The universe’s silence rang in his ears, a piccolo’s shrill and a television’s dead channel static but, as he had suspected, no retribution rained down on his ocean-sticky body.

  Bev said, “Dante?” and her light hand fluttered on his shoulder.

  His skin hungered again, already wanting her smooth body again.

  His priesthood, which had led him to higher realms of the mind and scholarship, which he had thought had saved him, was an empty, black hole he had dropped himself into. His black clothes were a Swartzchild radius, the absence of escaping light hiding the famished, warping singularity that was only a condensed body and the absence of a soul.

  “Dante!”

  His silence was upsetting her.

  Habit suggested several alternative comments: I’ll call you tomorrow. I have a meeting early in the morning; shall I call you a taxi? When is your husband going to be home?

  Or, depending on his objectives: Just this once. Your beauty makes me do terrible things. I was out of control. You seduced me. You make me a madman. You or I or we or all of us had too much drink. You wanted me to do that. I couldn’t stop myself.

  Dante said, “I am so sorry.”

  “No!” Her hand yanked him onto his back and she hovered above him in the dark. When he had pushed her onto the bed, she had bounced up and drawn heavy curtains and it was almost night-dark in the bedroom. Her loose hair hung around him, cloth-of-gold glinting in the sunshine glimmer that sneaked around one edge of the navy blue drape. “No,” she said.

  More guilt. “And now I should be the one comforting you.”

  She smiled at him, and she pulled the sheet up a little on her breasts in the deep gloom. “It was just this once. We lost control. We couldn’t stop ourselves.”

  His breath caught in his chest, a cough, a coronary infarct, all corporal reactions. He couldn’t summon outrage at her disregard for her marriage and his priesthood. He had said those words so many, many times. His evil nature reflected in her and spun, winding him up.

  His body had felt lust and leapt to its old habits, refined in the Roman Testaccio district night clubs. His virtue had been in his imagination. His Holy Orders meant nothing. He was destroyed.

  He rolled over on her and forced her down into the dark bed again, penetrating her mouth with his tongue. He would show her that it wasn’t just this one time, that this was sin, and that evil permeated him like smoke.

  Her arms tightened around his neck, and her legs around his back.

  ~~~~~

  Conroy wedged himself into his car and trudged the rush hour-congested highway and through the suburbs to arrive home before six. The girls were watching cartoons while Beverly cooked something garlicky for supper.

  He leaned against the kitchen wall. Beverly turned and smiled at him, and hope blossomed in his chest. Maybe the priest hadn’t ratted him out. “Um, hope I’m not too late.”

  “Nope. It’s okay.”

  Supper was so pleasant that he wondered if Beverly had poisoned his food.

  From the other end of the table, she smiled. “This weekend, maybe we could get a babysitter and go out.” There was a little tilt in her eyes. “Sunday is Valentine’s Day.”

  ~~~~~

  The crucifix behind the altar glowered at Bev, hating her, and she smoothed her hair back, trying to press that image out of her head. That crucifix and its representation of her Savior couldn’t glower. It did, however, need dusting.

  With that mundane detail, the cross and Christ solidified into wood again.

  She should go home. One of those torrid affairs, humid and equatorial and Mediterra
nean, tree-shaded and reeking of shore leave, was out of the question.

  Yet she had never passed the library’s dungeonesque door without knocking and a quick word with Father Dante. She had to see him some time, even though this afternoon he had gathered his clothes and sneaked away while she was showering. She knocked, confidently, forthrightly, with heavy and non-conspiratorial raps.

  “Si? Come in.” Dante’s voice scraped against her skin.

  She cracked the door open and leaned in. Boxes partly packed with books built a half wall between the two counseling chairs. “Father?”

  “Do not call me that.” He was leaning over in his chair with his arms crossed over his stomach, as if sick.

  “Are you all right?” She slipped sideways through the doorway and leaned on the door to close it behind her. “What are you doing?”

  He held his head in his hands as if it might fall off. His shiny black shoes poked out from under his black cassock. Again, he had shrouded his young flesh in thick black layers. “I am so sorry.”

  “No, Dante.”

  “I broke my vows and betrayed you.”

  “No,” she said. “No, we were swept away.”

  He gasped, as if punched. “There is no such thing.”

  The stupid words hovered in Bev’s ears, meaningless chatter. “It didn’t mean anything.”

  “It meant something to me.”

  A wall of boxes barricaded the room. “What are you packing?” She pulled a thick, doorstop book, DSM-IVR, out of a box.

  “I am leaving tomorrow.”

  She set the book on his desk. “You’re abandoning those kids?”

  “The Vatican will send someone else.”

  “Luke and the other boys need you. Laura said that he smiled this week, that she can touch him without him flinching like she had slapped him.”

  “I have to go back to Roma.” He sat hunched over, as if cancer consumed him from the center.

  She didn’t need to pray for enlightenment this time. Once again, the problem intrinsically lay with her. She had seduced a priest. There was no good ending to this.

  The poor man, he was crouched in the chair as if the gray stones and mortar of the church walls were crushing him.

  She had to give him up. She knew where to grab and yank.

  She said, “Listen to me.” Her soul flinched, but she grasped that thing that had lodged under her sternum and said, “We’ll just stop.” The warm thing clung, and ripping it out took with it long strips of flesh and muscle and artery. “Conroy and I will quit counseling. He’ll be relieved.” The wound gaped in her side and the ragged edges rubbed when she breathed. “You can’t leave.”

  Dante’s fingers worked into the lanks of black hair at his temples. “I can’t stay.”

  She wanted to hold him, stroke his silky hair. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see. We just won’t see each other anymore.” She worked the doorknob behind her back and stepped out.

  The church was silent. The choir had gone home. The gold wood overhead echoed her footsteps in the empty air. She wanted to fall before the altar and beg forgiveness from the Virgin Mary, but she didn’t want Dante to find her there, and it seemed melodramatic, and she could reconcile herself with God later. This wasn’t the only reason that she suffered His absence.

  She snatched her coat from a pew and ran into the cold, sad night and the spot-lit parking lot.

  ~~~~~

  Chapter Ten: Dante

  Dante’s closed eyes burned as if phosphorus fumes filled his dark rectory bedroom. His fingertips pressed his eyelids and cooled his eyeballs, but his mind flipped and tumbled, falling.

  The louvers over the silver moon glowed, reflecting the rectory’s whitewashed walls, milky furniture and bleached bed sheets. His body shadowed the white sheets and blotched the white-pickled wooden floor as he paced. He drank from a bottle of whisky.

  The room was too confining. He needed to walk.

  His coat offered scant protection from February’s winter wind. Soon, winter would grow feeble as spring sucked it away. Soon, he would return to Roma and sequester himself in the Vatican with the other celibates. The Roman sun could warm his scratched shoulders.

  He unlocked the wooden doors of the church and slipped inside. The air echoed even though the wooden pews absorbed his footsteps as he hurried toward the altar at the heart of the cruciform church. He could sit. He could rest. Surely, if there was a God, since there was a God, he would find a measure of peace in the church.

  He sat on the front pew and pressed his palms against his burning eyes. The sinuses behind his forehead were scalded, too. His symptoms might be psychosomatic or they might be due to insomnia, which had plagued him since his arrival on this infernal continent, peopled with pedophiles and adulterers.

  He swiveled on the undulating front pew and lay down, setting the bottle on the floor beside the pew. Drinking himself unconscious in the front pew of the church to be found in the morning by a clucking Samual appealed to Dante’s sense of irony.

  Lying on a pew did not convey proper penitence. He pushed his insomniac, drunk body and kneeled on the wood floor, not on the padded kneeler, his arms folded on the rail. The rail was cool on his forehead, and he lay there, hurting.

  He had failed. He had failed everyone. Dante had been puffed up with hubris and pride, believing he could rise above his body and inhabit his head. With the merest touch of Bev’s breath on his flesh, he had dived like a hunting hawk into her body.

  Her breath had sanded the skin on his neck, but her bites marked his skin.

  The wood floor ground at his knees.

  Let his weak flesh suffer.

  Moonlight and lamplight seeped in the stained glass windows depicting the Holy Virgin Mary, striping the floor with shadows and random splinters of color. He tried to focus, tried to imagine a glowing cross floating a few feet before him in the dark church.

  Glowing sunlight, insinuating itself around the curtains of the bedroom window, had trickled on Bev’s body, brightening her breast.

  All he wanted was an envisioned cross to pray to. God is with us even in our most forsaken moments, as that idiotic poem about sand and footprints struggled to say, but Dante couldn’t conjure even a simple image of a cross. All that he had thought was holy within him had been nothing but his imagination and longing for a reason for life other than the mindless pursuit of sex.

  The glowing gold that he tried to fashion into a crucifix was her skin. Darkness in the church was his body plunging into hers.

  Pedophiles did not control their urges, either.

  His body and its urges were no better than those beasts who tortured children.

  He should have stopped. He was a Vatican magistrate. He should have walked away: he was judge and jury of sexual crimes, his Holy Orders committed to the Church, and he had hurt Bev again. She was a wounded deer in the woods that he had wolfed down.

  What about the woman?

  Hypocrisy stabbed him.

  He focused his tired eyes on the wooden crucifix, the tortured and dying Christ, immobilized behind the altar.

  His meat heart flailed.

  He pressed on his knees and stood, glaring at the crucifix; he wanted to scream at it to speak to him or to fall to pieces, but insanity hovered in the act of speaking aloud in the empty church and in the wavering, gem-shining windows at the periphery of his vision.

  He vaulted the prayer rail and strode past the altar to the Christ, crouched on the cross and ready to spring. Dante grabbed the only part of the Christ he could reach on the looming crucifix, the nailed wooden foot. Grit ground his palm.

  If only the foot would warm, would drip blood on him, or would turn to light and fill him with grace, anything, but the Christ on the cross was a dead tree knifed into a human shape, encased in varnish, in need of dusting.

  Dante mumbled prayers, all the prayers he could think of, the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary and the Act of Contrition and portions of the Mass and bits of the Last R
ites and the Exorcism, and he clung to that unyielding wooden foot. Splinters from the Christ’s big toenail embedded themselves in his palm. He tried to believe that the Church itself was the miracle he needed, that life was proof enough, yet his cells metabolized without divine intervention, and he began talking to himself in the dark church.

  “If there is a God, since there is a God,” and his grip on the wood loosened and he glanced away, protesting, lying.

  He had imagined it all, the Call, an invigoration when he prostrated himself at Holy Orders, his priesthood. He had run away from his body, but his skin under the rough wool coat and cotton pajamas had rebelled.

  There was no priesthood, not for him. His life in his mind was an illusion, every bit as unreal as a dream or a psychotic hallucination.

  He had nothing but biology and an empty church.

  ~~~~~

  Chapter Eleven

  Around ten o’clock on Wednesday morning in the green-tiled hallway, Conroy tapped Leila’s arm.

  She carried a potted dieffenbachia on her hip like a toddler. “I’m on my way to visit Danna. They said it’s viral.”

  Conroy shrugged. “Did they say which virus?”

  “No, just ‘viral.’”

  He snorted and glanced down the green-tiled hallway, preoccupied. “Then they have no idea what’s wrong with her.”

  Leila shifted the plant. “Could you take a look at her?”

  Conroy said, “I’ve visited Danna four times. I took her some papers to read.”

  “I mean look at her chart. The attending doesn’t seem interested in her.”

  Conroy’s attention flickered across the crowd of green-smocked surgeons and blue-clad staff, like color-coded workers from a dystopian film. A pharmacy student, garbed in raspberry scrubs, wandered as bright as a berry in a salad. “One does not poach another physician’s patient.”

  “Just stop by and take a gander at her chart,” Leila said and struggled with the Mexican clay pot that sprouted foliage. “Consider it a favor.”