Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  Dante led the recitation of the Gloria since they had no music, and the congregation blended with his voice. At the end, he said, “Let us pray,” and consulted his notes, which said that his prayer was to start Lord, we stand together in this community, but he couldn’t read his scant, fatuous notes in the presence of these people who were here because they believed, because he stood before them in a state of mortal sin, daring to lead them in prayer.

  He said, “Lord, we are all sinners, all of us, but Your mercy astounds even the most callous among us.”

  Pain spiked Bev’s palm, and she dragged a handkerchief from her purse with her good hand. Her eyes were unaccountably dry, but she needed something to clutch. Her fingernails dredged into the fleshy meat of her scratched hand and curved around the cast and dug into the gauze and plaster, driving her fingernails back into her nail beds. She should scratch at the coffin until Conroy stopped pretending, until God heard her and gave Conroy back. Conroy had brought this all on himself. He had allowed himself to get mixed up with Leila Faris and that Peggy woman, whose name had shocked Bev, even though she had known there was someone else, somewhere. That this Peggy had such a prosaic name seemed yet more insulting.

  Her left eye burned and tossed a tear down her cheek. She dabbed it with the handkerchief.

  If God gave her another chance, Bev would not confront Conroy with those pink panties. She could live with his affairs. She could offer the suffering to Christ as her cross to bear.

  God, she needed one more chance.

  Dante said to the people on the other side of the wide altar rail, “A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark.” Shoes scraped the wood floor of the church as everyone bobbed up.

  Dante leaned on his pulpit and listened to the deacon read about the crowd that had mocked Christ and dragged him, literally, to crucifixion. He glanced up at the deep wood carving of the crucifix that threw a shadow of a low mountain range intersected with a Cheops-sized pyramid on the floor of the apse behind the altar. The stained glass windows tossed sparks of vibrant light that clung to the wood.

  John the deacon read Christ’s words, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”

  Dante hadn’t read Aramaic since the seminary. Even Christ had cried to God about abandonment when he was on the cross, in pain, alone. Even Christ was lonely in his very soul. Perhaps the abandonment and isolation are the natural state of man.

  Bev curled inward and adjusted her pinned arm in its sling. She would have been a member of that crowd, mocking the Christ. She never recognized a good thing when she had it.

  Leila toyed with the edges of the pamphlet. She would have been reading the Torah while the crowd dragged Christ to Golgatha, having long since chopped off her hair and impersonated a boy to gain entrance to rabbinical studies. The veil in the temple would have rent itself in the midst of her studies as Christ died, and she would have debated the meaning with her fellow scholars. The tearing of the veil would have been mysterious unless they had known that the man who called himself the Christ had died. Context was everything. Results had to augment each other for the context to be understood.

  John closed the Bible and whispered to the book, “May the words of the Gospel wipe away our sins,” and looked at Dante, the cue. Dante recited, “The Word of the Lord,” though his hands shook as he tapped his note cards. The congregation responded “Thanks be to God,” and Dante cleared his throat for the homily while people swished, sitting down.

  “Lord, we come before you today to give to You our brother in Christ, Conroy Robert Alexander Sloan.” Within the Mass, the homily should be short. Eulogies were scheduled for the funeral home afterward. Dante was here not to praise Sloan but to bury him. His note cards were pathetically brief. Last night, he had wandered, distracted and drunk, through the empty rectory and church, knowing he had cuckolded Sloan, hadn’t kept him from harm, and had stood aside while a knife dove into his heart.

  Dante stood at the podium and said, “Dr. Sloan was an important man in this community and a sinner in the deepest sense of the word,” some grumbling, some fidgeting of bodies out there amongst the pews that Dante looked across, “as we are all sinners in the deepest, darkest aspects of that word.”

  Redemption eluded him, but the Church’s dogma was a safe bet.

  “Sin pervades us, haunts us, turns us against ourselves and each other, and Conroy Sloan was no exception. Those who knew him, knew that he suffered as we all suffer and as the Christ suffered. In the Gospel, the Son of God cried out, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which translates as, ‘God, God, why have you forsaken me?’”

  Dante said, “Yet this is a mistake. God did not forsake Jesus that day in Golgotha when He suffered. The Lord God could not have forsaken Him. The Father is a part of the Son, an indivisible quantity. Their essences cannot be put asunder. They were both crucified. They both suffered. But neither was forsaken. Neither was alone.

  “And this, finally, is what Jesus, the Christ, wanted us to know: our fundamental spirit cannot be divided from Christ and from the Lord, our God, Eloi. Though we sin, though we feel alone and forsaken, we are indivisibly a part of God and part of our community. God cannot forsake us. Though we feel pain, though we sin, though we are sinners all, we are also the blessed of God, and God is with us. Even when we feel most alone, we are never alone, though we suffer, though we ache, God is with us, and He shares our loneliness and our pain.”

  Dante bowed his head and recited the Nicene Creed with the congregation. “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father.” He recited the rest, meditating on the unseen, the begotten, and Light.

  “He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man,” Bev said. God and the Holy Spirit had been a part of Bev, a slice of her soul, but Dante was wrong. That holy part had been torn away, and she was forsaken. She could feel it.

  “He suffered, died, and was buried.” Leila crushed her fingers together. It was all superstition and fiction. People believed it to make themselves feel better because they were going to die just like Conroy, who was in that horrible box under the white cloth. She should have helped him when that knife slid into him, when the blade touched and sliced and internalized into his body.

  “On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Peggy read the Creed from the pamphlet but she had no fear of a Catholic judgment. Peggy was a Lutheran and in love with Conroy. When two people loved each other, they should be together. Conroy was going to leave his wife. He had told her so. When Peggy had read in the newspaper that he had been stabbed in an apartment, she knew that he had finally done it, that he had left his devout little Catholic music teacher wife and was moving on with their lives. Conroy was already her husband in their hearts, and Peggy mourned like a wife.

  “We I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.” The air wavered between Dante and the congregation, out there past the altar rail, reciting. Heat isotherms rode over their heads, and mirage shimmered between Dante and the church. Dehydration parched him. He touched the altar for balance. The stone altar cooled his fingertips. He wanted to lay his febrile forehead on the cool stone.

  There was more to life than what he measured in the lab. There was more than his previous bacchanalian code. There had to be more that that, but he was alone, and he ached.

  “We believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.”

  Yes, yes, Dante agreed, but what else, what else?

  “We look forward to the resurrection of the d
ead and the life of the world to come. Amen.” Reverend Jebediah Kerry sat with his wife, and they prayed as fervently as they could for the soul of Conroy Sloan. In their hearts, they hoped that God would take note of their goodness and their forgiveness and grant Danna the miracle she so desperately needed.

  Dante stumbled through the offering of sacrifices on the altar, remembering the words an instant before he said them, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.”

  A tenor sang a psalm a capella over Dante’s incantations.

  Leila murmured to the wide-eyed Joe, “Have you ever been to a Mass before?”

  Joe shook his head and wondered if this rite was indeed Christianity. It seemed so foreign, ritualistic. Maybe that was why Satanists appropriated Catholic symbolism and rituals, because the Catholics had symbolism and rituals, like the priest at the altar, waving his hands in a thaumaturgic approximation over platters of bread and chalices of wine. A Protestant Satanist would just read from the Satanic Bible and people would stand up and witness about how Satan jus’ transformed their lives, and during the prayer, different members of the Satanic congregation would stand and jus’ let Jesus out of their hearts. No wine, no alcohol at all, of course, in a Protestant Satanist church. No singing or dancing or playing cards, for that matter.

  At the altar, Dante raised his hands and said, “Jesus taught us to call God Our Father, and so we have the courage to say, Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name,” and the congregation joined him for the Lord’s Prayer.

  Dante consecrated the host, and once again the bread lay on the altar, transformed and yet not discernibly so. Then, he called the people to offer each other a sign of peace.

  Bev held onto her friends while they hugged her, holding her. She turned back to the rows behind her and shook offered hands.

  A petite, plump woman sitting two rows behind Bev, a dingy redhead with the coloring of an overwashed floral blouse, leaned through the gap between Mary and Dr. Lugar to shake Bev’s hand and say, “Peace be with you.”

  “Peace be with you,” Bev said. The faded auburnette, her khaki eyes, her plump cheeks, seemed familiar. She held onto Bev’s hand. Bev asked, “Did you know Conroy?”

  “I’m Peggy Strum, the department secretary. We spent a lot of time together,” the woman said and her green-gray eyes flickered, searching Bev’s face.

  The little bitch smiled with her pastel lips pressed together, primly, knowingly.

  Bev yanked her hand back from that woman’s clutches and pivoted to face the altar. Peggy. That was Peggy. Another one of Conroy’s sluts had shown up. Damn her. Damn him.

  She wanted to rage and tear the fat little woman apart, but she stared straight ahead at the altar and the priest she had screwed a few, wonderful times. Their affair was the only spot of lightness in this whole deathly mess.

  John the deacon chanted, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace,” and watched Father Dante.

  Dante broke a communion wafer, mingled it with the wine in his chalice, and recited prayers over the pyx and the cup. “By your body and blood, free me from all my sins, and from every evil.” The flat cracker in his fingers was soggy with red wine and almost disintegrated. A drop of watery wine trailed down Dante’s thumb and beaded in the creases.

  Bev’s knees trembled, and she sat while her friends shuffled past her to the center aisle. Mary’s eyebrow lifted when Bev stood back to let her by. Bev couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t look at that gorgeous, magnificent box bearing Conroy’s body.

  One of Conroy’s whores sat behind her. She should be more careful. Bev might have a knife. According to the police, she was capable of killing anyone.

  Damn that Conroy, lying in that box, shriven.

  God shouldn’t forgive Conroy. She sure as hell didn’t.

  Dante stood next to the deacon, held the wafer aloft and above an elderly woman, and said, “The body of Christ.”

  The woman responded, “Amen.” She opened her mouth and extended her tongue.

  Several of her teeth were gray with silver amalgam. Dante touched the wafer to her tongue, and she retracted it into her mouth, lizard-like.

  Bev’s friend Lydia was next in line, and she held her hands cupped in front of her, so Dante laid the cracker in her hands and she walked away.

  Dante looked over at the long pew, and Bev was sitting alone, hunched over, pressing her forehead to the railing. He should not stop the communion rite to go to her, and he hesitated, but he held the plate of wafers on one hand and walked toward where she crouched.

  Leila watched from the back of the church. The people in the short communion lines received wafers from Dante and the deacon. Each person came forward, received the little bread crumbs, and walked away, hands clasped in front of their chest.

  Saps.

  Suckers.

  It was like the communion wafer stopped them from thinking, made them stupid, killed brain cells.

  Leila remembered that the dry communion wafer adhered to her tongue as soon as it touched. It had seemed mystical when she was a girl, the way the wafer burrowed into her mouth.

  Now, it seemed viral, the way a virus clasps a molecule on the outside of a cell, climbs the receptor hand over hand like a gym rope, and slinks into the cell.

  If the communion Host was a virus, the wafer would travel though her alimentary canal until it reached the vagus nerve and, prion-like, propagate like a string of firecrackers through her peripheral nervous system to her spinal cord and up to her brain, gumming everything in its path with insoluble gunk plaques and streaming through her cerebrum like ribboning bullet trails, sending all the neurons into irrevocable apoptosis, programmed cell death.

  That made the communion wafer a neural apoptosis ligand.

  Leila snorted ha at the biochemical heresy.

  That knife had entered Conroy’s chest the same way: it touched his skin and, biochemically propelled, the serrations chewed their way inside to his left ventricle and killed him. That made the knife an apoptosis ligand, initiating a caspase cascade causing the programmed death of all Conroy’s cells. Maybe the knife was an apoptosis superligand.

  The knife and the communion wafer were both ligands initiating biochemical events. The knife ripped apart Conroy’s heart. The cracker caused apoptosis in brain cells.

  Heresy.

  Leila shifted her legs on the hard pew and watched Just-ah Dante set a wafer in a woman’s hands. The Inquisitor handing out the communion wafers might burn her at the stake for such heresy.

  If she took communion, and the wafer adhered to her tongue and internalized, she might spontaneously combust for her heresy, then the wafer would be an apoptosis superligand like the knife, but it wasn’t, of course. The wafer was much more like a viral factor, insidiously inducing apoptosis over time, with repeated exposure.

  Maybe that had been her father’s problem: all that communion he took had a neuron-specific apoptosis factor, and that’s why the AIDS-related dementia ravaged his brain and he hallucinated God and angels until he forgot how to breathe and drowned in his own flooded lungs.

  Conroy’s rabies virus, however, infected brain cells without killing them, until the very end. It didn’t produce neural apoptosis ligands, so the virus was killing Danna but not her consciousness.

  Together, her own clandestine HIV experiments and Conroy’s secret rabies experiments coalesced into a terrible beauty.

  Neurons must have their own apoptotic cascade that was different than other cells’ death throes. HIV had a neuron-specific apoptosis factor that it secreted from its roost in the microglia and killed brain cells, and her father had died demented and raving. That was why she couldn’t find classical apoptotic activations in the HIV-infected neurons even though the neurons were definitely apoptotic, because neurons had their own, unique pathway.

&nbs
p; Rabies must encode a neuron-sparing factor, or it short-circuited the neuron-specific apoptotic cascade, so Danna was going to die perfectly lucid as the virus burned away her peripheral nervous system.

  Leila and Conroy had run the same experiment from two different ends of the question.

  HIV killed neurons without infecting them.

  Rabies infected neurons without killing them.

  If Leila looked at Danna’s fMRI, she could see Danna thinking but not dreaming about God.

  And, if she called Florida and got her father’s fMRIs, she could see his demented dreams of God.

  It was awful, and wonderful.

  Oh, Conroy. They had it.

  They had evidence for a grand, unifying theory about consciousness and the neural locus of God in the brain. They had proved that the brain dreams of God, and they had proved that God is all in your head.

  They just didn’t know what they had done because they hadn’t talked to each other, because they were both running secret, dangerous, illegal experiments.

  God, she missed him.

  Leila should have stayed inside his apartment that night. She shouldn’t have left stupid Conroy alone with that crazed woman. He had probably said something stupid. He was such an ass. He couldn’t even stop skinny little Leila from wrenching his arm around behind him. He had stood no chance against a furious wife with a knife.

  Oh, Conroy, you mad, tragic scientist. The church blurred and swam as if a flood had burst through it. Leila tried to stop the damned tears dripping out of her stupid eyes.

  At the front of the church, Bev rested her cast on the communion rail and bent over. That bastard. That bastard who lay in that box. That bastard had left her and her girls far more irrevocably than if he had merely moved into a love shack with his honey. He had left. He had left them all. Her eyes flicked raging tears down her cheeks. Her arm throbbed.

  Warm flesh pressed Bev’s good hand, and she looked up from the wide railing.

  Dante asked, “Why do you not take communion?” His whisper echoed in the church.