Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  Dante didn’t understand and she didn’t think she could make him understand. “But sometimes I missed him. Sometimes I called him during the summers to talk to him, but I don’t want to see him now. He doesn’t know where I am.”

  “But how could you love him? Still love him?”

  “I just do.” Her pulse patted her wrists. Panic lit her vision. The priest was lounging on her pillow like triumphant Caesar. “Do they already have him?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they aren’t going to, right? You wrote that letter and I sent it.”

  Dante turned his head away. “Yes. Correct.”

  He was a terrible liar.

  “Then why are you here again?” She grabbed a pillow off the end of the bed and stuffed it against her abdomen, something to curl around.

  The priest leaned back on his hands, his long legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles like an ad for Versace Clerical Wear for the fashionable Vatican wonk. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

  The printer slid a mostly blank sheet of paper into its tray and started chewing out a new chapter.

  She said, “It’s past midnight, and I have to deposit my thesis tomorrow morning before I leave for New York, Father Dante.”

  “Not ‘Father.’ I am leaving the priesthood.”

  “No, you’re not.” Her lungs simpered, wanting nicotine. She shook out a cigarette and lit it.

  He crossed his ankles the other way. “The only time I feel anything is during an exorcism. I believe in the Devil more than I believe in God. I have seen more evidence for the Great Diabolical than of anything else. A priest should not be excited by battling the unholy. My ordination and Holy Orders will be nullified.”

  “You’re getting an annulment from God.”

  He scratched a thick eyebrow, ruffling it, and smiled. “So to speak. ‘Laicized’ is the term.”

  “Sorry.” Sarcasm was uncalled for with this man who had not called the police when she had threatened him with a gun or when she had assaulted him, who had offered a friendly ear because he was the only person alive who knew about Sean, and who had wrapped his body around hers that one perfect night that still defied definition in her head.

  He hadn’t tried to fuck her.

  She still didn’t know how to deal with him.

  He smiled. “No one else would joke about my leaving the priesthood. ‘An annulment from God.’ I love your sense of humor.”

  “You like my bitter sense of humor?” Unease wafted around her head. His vocabulary was weird. She didn’t like it.

  His legs bent, and he rested his elbows on his knees as if idly tossing twigs into a campfire. His inhalation was too deep for casual conversation. “It is one of the things I love most about you.”

  The drifting uneasiness grabbed her scalp and dove under her skin, racing toward her extremities and compacting her flesh. “Stop.”

  “Leila.” He clasped his hands, imploring or praying, but stared at the floor.

  “You should go.” Her jaw and her chest clenched.

  “Leila.” He touched the bed beside her leg.

  Such a small gesture would not be threatening to someone who didn’t have extraordinary intimacy issues and who wanted to run like hell at the sight of his black priest’s clothes and blunt, empty Roman collar, open like he had ripped out the plastic insert. “Don’t say anything else.”

  “Leila, I love you.”

  She wanted to run screaming from the room. She wanted the solid weight of her gun in her hands. “You don’t.”

  “I can talk to you. You understand when I talk about science and religion. I could allude to Voltaire and Watson and Crick in the same sentence, and you would understand.”

  She tried to joke to turn the conversation away from its black ice skid. “What would that be, modeling the best of all possible, possible replication mechanisms for Candide albicans? Or that man won’t be free until the last king is strangled with the double helix, B-form DNA of the last priest?”

  His lips opened. “That’s your phrase. I knew it must be.”

  “It’s Voltaire.” She smoked the cigarette, and warmth from the smoke opened her lungs.

  “It doesn’t matter.” He turned his head aside and seemed to be talking to himself. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  He looked at her like he was trying to stare into her soul, her bitter and black soul. “Did you love Conroy Sloan?”

  “No.” She puffed the cigarette. Calm, sweet smoke drained into her arms, cooling her. “It was just ass. We were going to break it off when I graduated.”

  The priest’s long fingers floated toward her elbow. “Don’t move to New York. Stay with me, here.”

  Slamming her hands over her ears would block out such vile sentiments, but her body would not move.

  If he touched her, if he lunged for her, her gun was in the laundry basket behind her, under the potted plants and quart cans of touch-up paint. The hollow-point semi-wadcutter rounds would blow his guts through his back.

  If the bullets missed, if he still came at her, her hands were strong enough to twist his neck until his spine broke between his C1 and C2 vertebrae, and she would do it.

  She would do it.

  She prayed for the strength to do it.

  She took a shuddering breath and said, “You need to leave, now.”

  “Leila?” He said it like he was singing and he reached toward her again.

  Her arm recoiled and elbowed her own ribs. “Don’t touch me.”

  “When I am finished with the counseling here, we could go to Roma. The university would give you a professorship. You would have your own lab, could research whatever you want.”

  “You’re drunk.” Leaning back, her hand hovered near the laundry basket. “You’re drunk again.”

  “I have had a few drinks, but I have thought about this, lately, often. Leila,” he set a knee on the floor and moved over it until he was kneeling in front of her. “Would you marry me?”

  She scrambled backward off the air bed and kicked the velvet-napped balloon at him. “I can’t. I won’t. You’re a priest!”

  He fended off the airbed and shunted it aside. Meth woke and grunted. Dante said, “I wouldn’t be a priest, just another professor. We could collaborate or not.”

  “No.” She spider-crawled backward. The laundry basket bumped her back and plant leaves itched her neck. “No.”

  “I want a family to belong to, to belong to you.”

  The words expelled as if she had been punched in the chest. “You’re a priest.”

  “I’m not. Being in America, alone, made me realize how lonely I was as a priest. I’m leaving the priesthood.”

  “You’ll always be a priest.” In the laundry basket among the plants, her hands found waxy leaves and gritty soil ground under her fingernails. “Ontologically changed, that’s what you said and you meant it.”

  “That is James Joyce, and it is not what I think. I felt nothing. Nothing happened.”

  “Of course it’s what you think.” The rough pots scraped her searching hand as she delved farther into the basket, but the towel-wrapped gun eluded her. “It’s what all of you believe.”

  He turned his hands palms up and sat back, gazing at his hands as if inspecting for stigmata. “But I don’t believe.”

  “Pray to God to help you in your unbelief.”

  Leila’s hand was wedged between the plants, amidst the laundry and paint cans, searching for that damned gun that slithered away every time she got a pinky on it.

  ~~~~~

  At midnight, the presses stamped headlines onto the morning paper rushing underneath the template:

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Murder

  By: Kirin Oberoi, Syndicated Columnist

  After a trial fraught with shockers, the jury is deciding the fate of Beverly Maria Sloan, who allegedly stabbed her husband, Dr. Conroy Robert Sloan, last Valentine’s Day. A verdict of not guilty is
anticipated, considering the complete breakdown of the prosecution’s case.

  The sordid trial was rife with accusations about the victim’s adultery and dueling medical experts, but something about this trial just doesn’t add up to a nice, tidy sum. I watched this trial in person every day, read every analysis, watched the pundits on LawTV, and I don’t have the answers, either. The questions outnumber answers.

  I do know this: truth and justice are different entities. The court system will roll through the lives of everyone in this trial, but the point of the trial was not to find the truth. The jury didn’t hear the truth; they only heard what the justice system determined to be relevant and admissible facts. There was more to this trial than the jury heard.

  Here are some of the truths that the jury did not hear:

  Conroy Sloan was conducting unauthorized, reckless experiments with rabies virus in his lab. One of his graduate students, Danna Kerry, aged 23, died of rabies. If Sloan were not dead, he would undoubtedly be on trial for her murder. He may have been suicidal because his student was sick and he might soon go to prison for it. In addition, his own rabies test produced unclear results. If he was infected, even at an early stage, the virus might have affected his behavior. If he knew he was infected, he may have killed himself to avoid that painful death.

  Even though she in the hospital and on heavy narcotics, Beverly Sloan ensured that her husband had received Last Rites before he died, as if she knew he had committed mortal sins and his soul was in danger of damnation. Though Mrs. Sloan had undergone surgery, she did not ask for Last Rites for herself, perhaps knowing that she had not committed a mortal sin, such as murder.

  Dr. Leila Sage Faris, whose testimony concerning Dr. Sloan’s threatened suicide proved disastrous for the prosecution, published Sloan’s rabies virus results and her own data about the HIV virus. Her data suggests that near-death experiences, those friendly tunnels and lights that people attribute to God and Heaven, can be changed or eliminated by the presence of viruses in the brain. HIV brings on vibrant hallucinations in the wake of dying neurons. Rabies virus suppresses such visions. Her conclusions suggest that all religious experiences and thus deities are artifacts of neurology. Her research is being denounced from pulpits as an affront to God. Her previous mentor might have not published his own data in this manner. She has accepted a prestigious fellowship at Columbia University.

  If near-death experiences are artifacts of neurology, one wonders what Conroy Sloan saw as he lay dying on that kitchen floor with the knife with his wife’s fingerprints in his chest, held by Dr. Faris, his mistress, with Monsignor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi praying for his soul.

  ~~~~~

  Dante raised his head from his hands. His eyeballs stung where his palms had pressed them. If Holy Orders had not branded him, then his soul must be saved for other things, like love. “Leila, I love you. I want to marry you.”

  “How can you say that?” She scurried to her feet and paced in the wide, empty apartment behind the air bed and the laundry basket filled with ivy-trailing, potted plants. Her sock-clad footsteps pattered like mouse feet. “Marriage is stupid. I thought that was the one thing the Catholic Church understands, why they demand a celibate priesthood.”

  “Leila, sit down. Let me explain.”

  “You were looking for some answer that screwing every woman in Rome wasn’t satisfying in you. You took the sacrament of Holy Orders and dedicated your life to the Church. I’m not your answer. I’m not anyone’s answer.”

  A priest should not be an empty shell shuffling about in black cloth. “I’m renouncing it.”

  “You can’t. Life is about desire and pursuit, Dante. It’s not about having. Marriage is owning someone, owning as much as a dog piddling on a fencepost. Marriage may have been a good deal in the past, when childbearing was dangerous, when a man was willing to lay down all his earnings to own a woman who would risk her life so he could reproduce his genes. Marriage may have been best back then because when a woman died giving birth, the man would assume the grub was his and raise it. But it was all just genes. It was all reproduction and bargaining for the chance to replicate DNA.”

  She dodged back and forth, smoking, jumping toward the plants packed in the laundry basket, hesitating then drifting away but heading right back.

  “But it doesn’t have to be like that anymore. It’s stupid, wearing matching rings so the world knows you’re reproducing together and hoping the little gold talismans repel other sperm donors. Keeping women locked up in harems was a better reproductive strategy.”

  Her cigarettes and lighter lay on the sleeping bag, so close, and his cells hadn’t eaten nicotine for hours. He lit one, holding it the American way between his thumb and two fingers.

  She said, “But the Church understood that some things are bigger than one person, bigger than reproduction, bigger than your DNA. If you believe in God, then God is one of them. Making the world better is one of them. Understanding mystery, or the Mystery, is one of them. If you harness yourself to a person, you give in to mere reproduction and you can’t see beyond that. Celibacy allows you to devote yourself. Don’t you see that?”

  The cigarette burned down, and Dante flicked ash in the metal ashtray. “I would have thought you would be the last person to defend a celibate clergy.”

  “Celibate means unmarried. They’re stupid to demand chastity, too. The problem is that you let in people who want to be seen as priests, not people who want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.” She stood behind the laundry basket, reaching into the basket with one hand and smoking with the other.

  His body was dying for her bare skin. Sucking smoke and filthy air from the cigarette mollified his flesh for the moment. “I cannot be a priest. I have no faith.”

  “I’m sorry about that, but I’m not your answer.”

  “You talk about desire. I want you.”

  She stepped back and crossed her arms over her red shirt. Her hand that held her cigarette popped out of her knotted limbs, and the smoke climbed past her shoulder and black hair and long, silver earring. “You can’t have me.”

  “Because I’m a priest.”

  “No, that’s why you shouldn’t want me.” She picked an ashtray out of the laundry basket and stubbed out her short cigarette. “I’m not that kind of girl, Dante. I’m not the kind you love.” Her brown eyes were wide and moist, almost tearful, but no remorse blunted her stare. “Oh, I screw around. Casual fucking is fine, but when men love me, it destroys them. Look what happened to Conroy. Look what happened to Sean. If I latch onto you, you’re finished. I’m a walking apoptosis ligand.”

  Such a terrible thought, to think that about oneself. His chest hurt for her. “Leila, don’t say that.”

  “It’s the best metaphor out there. I must be cardiac tissue specific.”

  Dante’s heart seized as this girl described herself as an inducer of orderly, programmed death of the heart. His cigarette left a long smear of black chalk ash in the ashtray as he stubbed it out. “Who told you this?”

  “Nobody had to tell me. In ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ the one by Nathanial Hawthorne, the girl was permeated with poison because her botanist father had fed it to her since she was a baby, like a Monarch butterfly that eats digitalis and becomes poisonous so birds won’t eat it, and she killed people she kissed. The first time I read that, when I was twelve, I wanted to be her, and now I am. I destroy men, every man I get close to.”

  Twelve years old, after two years of molestation, she had wanted to be poisonous so she could kill her tormenter when he forced her to kiss him, and then she endured several more years of abuse. Intervening years cemented those terrible lessons.

  That pedophile priest, Sean, had hurt her so much, so very much.

  The memory is, as it were, the belly of the soul, St. Augustine had said, an agnostic comment. With those searing memories, Sean had immolated Leila’s soul. If Leila believed that she couldn’t love, then it was impossible for Dante to
reach her.

  Damn that man.

  Damn him.

  Dante’s damnations filled with weight as though oil poured into them.

  The other children, John, Luke, Valerie, Sarah, Zach, and the others, were as spiritually mauled and mangled as she was. Nicolai and Sam and Sean had done this to them.

  Damn them all.

  His hands pressed his eyes. Smoke lingering in the air circulated with his breath. There were more pedophiles out there.

  Beyond his fingers, something rustled.

  The pedophiles should be ripped out and thrown into the pits of Hell, if Dante had the stomach for it. He could avenge Leila, and Luke and John and Valerie, and the rest. He could use the savage resolve of the Church.

  Damn that priest who had ripped out Leila’s soul and had convinced this beautiful, beautiful girl that she was poison and that she couldn’t love, that she killed with love. The soul is the source of love, and memory is the belly of the soul. Damn him and all the others like him.

  Damn him. Damning rose out of Dante’s stomach and swirled in his chest. The words ceased to be a curse and became an imperative.

  If Dante were a priest, since Dante was a priest, he could damn people. If he became a Vatican politician and took control of the CDF, held the reins of the Inquisition, he could change things.

  He could make sure that not one of them ever hurt a child ever again.

  His hands slid down his cheeks.

  Leila was right. For life to have meaning, you must serve something bigger than yourself. Dante could parcel out logical, measured revenge.

  She watched him from beyond the laundry basket full of foliage.

  “I have to go back.” He stood.

  Leila stood behind the basket, hands on her hips, and squinted. “What?”

  She might not understand why, or she might think he was the worst of them. He was contemplating sending them to Hell, becoming Leila’s avenger and Bev’s demon. “You’re right. I’m still one of them. I think like them.”

  He took a business card out of his wallet and tossed it on her navy blue sleeping bag. The card tumbled through the air and landed carelessly like a whore’s payment. Handing it to her would have been a better gesture.