by Неизвестный
“. . . of Jesus, Marianne. . .”
“. . . a cock in a cunt, like a hand in a glove. Mine do. . . did. . . will. . .”
Suddenly she vibrated in a high-pitched scream, shoulders, hips, thighs, feet, hands, all beating against the hands that held her down, like a woman driven to insanity with caresses but cut short of orgasm: “Will somebody fuck me, fuck the esse out of my ass, Peter. Put your esse in me and fuck me, fuck me.” She ended in a forlorn wail.
Marianne's uncle gasped for air, as if throttled by a blow across the throat. Peter's eardrums ached from that scream. He almost felt the hot tears of her father, who was now crying quietly, biting his lips as he held his daughter down.
Peter knew: the Pretense was wearing thin; something had to give. But they were not yet in sight of the Breakpoint.
Suddenly Marianne went limp. The men relaxed their grip on her and stood back. A high color crept into her cheeks. The voice that came from her throat now was youngish, full of interest, calm, as though reciting a lesson, cascading with soft syllables. As she spoke, her head moved from side to side, eyes closed. The whip-smile was now a coy kitten playing around the corners of her mouth.
“I have been on a simple quest. You see. No harm to anybody. Not even to myself. Only, I wanted to end all the painful choosing. Mummy and Daddy could not help me. Nor my teachers. Nor boyfriends. All of them were split with decisions. All of them tortured by their choices. Afraid. Yes. You see? They were afraid. Had fears. Like dogs yapping at their heels. Is this right? Is this happy? Is this possible? Is this impossible? Miles and miles of yapping mongrel questions. I knew if I found my real self, there would be no more need to respond to choices and therefore no more fear of error. No more guilt.”
Peter understood there was no hope of arresting this flow of her speech. She was eluding him now by a stratagem of logical talk into which he could not enter without closing steel jaws around his mind. It would be all over. Fatally. The only way of “teasing” her out of this tricky stage of the Pretense was by an equally sustained flow of talk in direct contradiction to the sense of what she was saying.
For long minutes and at various stages, Peter and Marianne responded as if chanting antiphonal psalms, one taking up where the other left off. But there was no sequence or logical connection between what each was saying. The only point on which he endeavored to match her was the manner of speaking. When she whispered, he whispered. When she shouted, he shouted. When she murmured, he murmured. When she interrupted, he interrupted her. When she was silent, he fell silent. If one could have visualized their struggle at this phase, it would have been like a surrealistic slow-motion Olympic wrestling match in which the contestants strove with each other's shadow, while all colors and actions faded into blurry grayness, and scores were kept by a referee never seen or heard but felt as a sure and eerie presence.
“Possible and impossible,” Marianne cooed, “make all human happenings impossible, posing suppurating distinctions and pat partisanships and perfunctory periods. . .”
“If a man has any love for me,” Peter read, “he will be true to my word.” He was battering against the confusion, the numbing use of words that lulled the mind toward nothingness. “And then he shall love my Father; and we will both come to him and make our abode with him. . .”
“. . . in between us and our other halves,” Marianne interrupted. “Saying to the Yin in me: Thou shalt not have thine Yang. Saying to the Yang in you: Thou shalt not have a Yin. . .”
Peter cut Marianne off again. “The branch that does not live on in the vine can yield no fruit of itself.” The very simplicity of the words gave Peter new blood. His voice was calm. “No more than you. . .”
“. . . making a male the creature of his dangling ganglions,” screamed Marianne violently, “and a female the bed of her clit and her clots and her. . .”
“. . . if you do not live on in me,” Peter said at the top of his voice. “I am the vine; you, its branches; if a man lives on in me, and I, in him, then he. . .”
“. . . tomby womb.” Marianne was now snarling the words in a hoarse yell. “He out. She in. And never the twain shall meet except in sweat and groans. Ugh! For out's out. . .” Now Marianne blew out a great gust of air at the candles on the night table at the foot of the bed. The young priest shielded them with the cupped palms of his hands.
Peter would not disengage. He went on, still knifing at the confusion, the verbal expression of the stink in the room, using the words that kept him free. “. . . will yield abundant fruit; separated from me, you have no power to. . .”
“. . . and in's in,” she broke across him. “This cut-and-dried business started long ago with all that crap of master and slave, creature and creator, god and man. The whole cotton-pickin', mother-fuckin'. . .”
“. . . anything,” Peter continued imperturbably with his text. “If a man does not live on in me, he can only. . .”
“. . . winners-and-losers game.” She paused slightly for a moment, as if listening. “The fella in that white robe with that camp-following whore and her vaseline. And then for us. . .”
She broke off. Her eyes opened and she sat up in bed. The ex-policeman and the bank manager, fearing violence, reached for her arms. But there was none. Father James thought of the old lithograph of Jesus and Mary Magdalen that hung in the rectory.
“Yeah, my young eunuch. That's him and her,” said Marianne, laughing and looking at James crookedly and conspiratorially.
But Peter's voice recalled the stunned James to reality.
“. . . be like the branch that is cast off and withers away. Such a branch is. . .”
“Mother Mary Maidenhead Virgilius announced that the impossible can't be possible.” Marianne was lying back once more on the bed. “You're telling us, we all chorused at her. . .”
Peter caught the sardonic tone. His voice went hard as he cut her off.
“. . . useless and cast into the fire, to burn there. I pray for those who are to find faith in me through their word; that they may be all one; that they too may be one in us, as thou, Father, art in me, and I. . .”
“. . . withered boobs and remembering her fallen womb and her pasty complexion at curse time every month.” Marianne's voice was once again rising to a falsetto. “If only you had known, Mother dear! The impossible isn't. . .”
Marianne was chuckling. Peter kept the hard note in his tone, as he took up where she had cut him off: “. . . in thee; so that the world may believe that it is thou who has sent me.”
Still talking, Marianne now turned over on her side, relaxed. While she spoke, the doctor took her pulse as he was supposed to do every quarter of an hour, when her movements didn't make this too difficult. “. . . possible unless the impossible is actual. Otherwise the impossible would be impossible. Must be really impossible, though. Really.” Her tone was confidential. “For the possible to be possible, I mean. Must have both. Must have. . .”
Peter's voice sank low and vibrant: “This is my commandment that you should love one another, as I have loved you. This is the greatest. . .”
They all jerked to attention: Marianne's body had become rigid as a plank of wood. She was still talking: “. . . both.” Now her words ran ahead of him. He looked up, listening and watching for any telltale sign that the Breakpoint was upon them. She continued feverishly.
“The real is real because of the unreal. The clean, clean because of the unclean. The full, full because of the empty. The perfume, perfume because of the smelly. The holy, holy because of the unholy.” Then in an intense rush of words interspersed with grunts intent on hammering home contradictions, in an unholy pursuit of all that could confuse and confound human thought and open blankness in the mind: “Sweet sweet huh bitter. What is is huh what isn't. Life life huh death.” Each grunt preceded an opposite and sounded as though Marianne were being punched in the stomach each time. “Pleasure pleasure huh pain. Hot hot huh cold.” Then in a chain of words pasted together in a scream:
“Updownfatthinhighlowhardsoftlongshortlight-darknesstopbottominsideoutsidealleachalleachalleachchchchchchchch-ch. . .” The piping voice died away on that long, coagulated mishmash as if choking on its breath. The effort had been so violent that Marianne seemed to be almost plucked off the bed, every part of her prone body straining upward.
Peter resumed his reading evenly. “I have no longer much time for conversation with you. One is coming, who has power over the world, but no hold over me. Now is the time when the Prince of this world is to be cast out. . .” He paused in the middle of the sentence and looked at Marianne.
She was still lying rigid, her legs apart, hands on her crotch. A low whispered growl started in her throat and parted her lips.
Peter started to whisper: “Yes, if only I am lifted up from the earth, I will attract all men to myself.” He stopped, no longer hearing that growl.
Marianne's body relaxed. She rolled over jerkily on her other side. In a girlish voice, a seemingly instantaneous departure in a new direction: “Binaries, we need them, y'know? Yessir. Cybernetics has 'em. Before and after. Plus and minus. Odd and even. Negative and positive. Always to be with us. But just as far as that: with us. Not splitting us.”
Peter would not be pulled aside or try to follow any sense of Marianne's words. That same trap, that constant, easy invitation to defeat. He took up again: “He who rules this world has had sentence passed on him already. The spirit will bring honor to me because it is from me. . .”
“He who is not with me,” she took up, interrupting in a dreadfully mocking falsetto, “is against me, sez the Lord. No man can serve two masters, sez the Lord.” Lowering her tone: “Ever see two pricks in the ass and cunt of one broad and she pumping back and forth servicing two masters?” Her father turned his face away and leaned on the policeman's shoulder.
Again the falsetto: “Whom do men say I am? sez he. Black and white, sez he.” Now the falsetto rose to a howl that pierced the ears of Peter and the others, making them wince and grimace: “You're in, sez he. You're out, sez he. The Lord God of Ghosts. Sheep 'n' goats, sez he. Doves and devils, sez he. Golden clouds and bloody brimstone. Driving a nail in the heart. Opening up a gaping wound in my oneness.” Then, raising her pelvis up and down rhythmically and shouting at the top of her voice: “Jeebum! Jeebum! Jeebum! Jeebum!”
“. . . the Father belongs to me,” said Peter calmly, finishing his interrupted sentence.
Marianne stopped as Peter said those words. Now he was standing by the window but facing into the room and watching Marianne on the bed. She whimpered piteously: “All I want is no more questions. No more challenges. No more choices. No more yesses and noes. Not even maybes. No thou-shalt-nots. In the Kingdom. . .” Then in a suddenly deep gurgle like a man who needs no air but speaks through gallons of water “. . . in the Kingdom in the Kingdom in the Kingdom. . .”
Every instinct in Peter drummed at him to put pressure on her. He felt that the Pretense was almost over, that Marianne's revolt against possession would break out now, and that the evil occupying her would be forced to fight openly to retain its hold.
Peter moved quietly to Marianne's side, still looking for the telltale signs on her face. If the Breakpoint were near, then all expression should be absent; and there should be queer and unnaturally crooked lines. Sure enough, the face was a frozen mask grained with stark lines. Silence.
“Father, is she going to come out of it?” It was Marianne's father.
Peter ignored the question. Put the pressure on, his instinct told him. Now! Fast!
“Jesus, Marianne. The name is. . .”
“Jeebum! Jesusass! Jeebum! Jesusass! Jeebum!” She was howling again. Peter wanted desperately to cover his ears against the slivers of pain that pierced his brain.
“Watch it!” he shouted to his assistants as he saw her two forefingers shoot into her nostrils and begin tearing at them. He jumped to her side again. “Pin her down!”
Every pair of hands clamped down on her. They held on. Each one had his own memory of some wild animal: a tiger in a zoo cage, a hyena lowering at another hyena, a sow fighting the hands at a slaughterhouse. The sides of Marianne's mouth were pulled back—it seemed the grimace stretched to her ears—baring teeth, gums, tongue. A grayish foam bubbled and seeped over her lower lip and down her chin. Her eyes were open but rolled up so far that they saw only white, red-streaked patches glistening wet. Two men pinned her arms to the bed; one leaned on her belly; another held her legs still.
It seemed no human being could survive what Marianne was going through. The doctor closed his eyes as his own perspiration stung into them.
“Hold on, for the love of God,” Peter said.
The muffled “zheeeeeeeeeee” buzzing between her teeth died away to nothing. Her eyelids closed. “Stay put,” muttered the ex-policeman, “she's still all tight.” The doctor lifted one of Marianne's eyelids, then let it fall shut again.
Peter had won. The Pretense had failed. But it was many hours after the start, and only the end of round one. He recited the second part of the Exorcism ritual, while his assistants stood back watching.
As always before, the Breakpoint came at the precise moment Peter least expected it. It started with a sound difficult to describe. A horse whimpering. A dog whinnying. A man meowing. It was the very sound of pain. Of nature violated by unnature. Of deep agony. Of protest. Of helplessness. “Supposing a cadaver, after the death rattle and after the grimacing of the last breath was over, started to cry for help, what do you imagine it would sound like?” Peter asked later in an effort to describe this indescribable sound. “Or supposing when you were closing his dead eyelids with your thumb and forefinger” (he made the motion with spatular fingers) “and supposing you missed one eye, and it looked up at you still glassy and dead—you know how they look—and it filled with genuine tears. That's the feeling. Something reaching out from the middle of all the worms and putrid flesh and stink and body water and silent immobility of death, saying: 'I'm alive! Pull me out! For the love of Jesus, save me!' That was Marianne when the Breakpoint began. The tug of war for her soul that nearly broke me in two.”
Now, Peter felt, he could appeal directly to Marianne and aid her. He started to read the first part of another “teaser text” slowly.
“Marianne. You were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You belong to Jesus. It was the sacrifice of his life that made it possible for you to belong to God. Whatever of beauty, of love, of kindness, of gentleness there was in you—all came from Jesus. He knows you, knows every fiber of your being, is more than a friend, nearer than your mother, more loving than any lover, more faithful to you than you yourself can be. Speak! Speak! Speak out! And tell me you are listening. Speak and tell me you want to be saved in the name of Jesus who saved you and in the name of God who created you. Speak!”
Looking over the top of the book, he could see her hands relaxing and being placed at her sides by his assistants. The ear-to-ear grimace faded. Her eyes were open but still turned up so far that you felt she was looking into her own eye sockets. The whites of her eyes glistened. There was complete silence. The doctor took her pulse. “She's as cold as ice.” “Okay, okay,” Peter answered the doctor, with a motion of his head, never taking his gaze off Marianne.
Marianne's whole body was limp now. It looked heavy, sodden with fatigue, A faint bluish coloration gave an eerie appearance to her hands, arms, feet, neck, and face. All was still. He heard breathing: his own, his assistants'. Marianne's he could not hear.
The doctor reported a faint pulse. “She's very low, Peter,” he said. Peter held up his hand restraining further comment. The moments ticked by. Her father cleared his throat and brushed his eyes: “It's over, Father?” Peter silenced him with a quick, almost rude shake of his head. He watched, waiting for the slightest change. “If it's going to happen, it's now,” he said half to himself, half-aloud; “Keep watching.”
But with the intolerable strain of silence,
he felt the muscles in his calves, back, and arms relaxing. His grip loosened on his book. His head began to straighten up. The younger priest unfolded his arms. A radio blared in a downstairs apartment. Gradually the silence took over as a welcome blanket wrapping itself around their ears and swaddling the entire room. It gave an uneasy feeling to find oneself getting lost in that silence after the shouting, the discordancy, and the lethal sound of the gurgling voice Marianne had used.
The pain began to ease in Peter's mind. Still gazing at Marianne's face, he thought of Conor in Rome, of Zio—now Paul VI—in New York. And he thought of sleep. He glanced at his watch. It was 9:25 P.M. Mass at Yankee Stadium should almost be finished. This ordeal in the room should also be finished soon. Soon, hopefully, they could all go home and sleep. . . sleep. . . sleep.
Sleep? Through the settling haze of his fatigue, the thought triggered Peter's memory. Hadn't Conor warned him that sleep, sleepiness, the desire to rest, sometimes came as a last trap, usually preceding a last onslaught of the Presence?
But he was a few moments too late. As Conor's phrase lit up like a red signal in his memory: “Moind the sleeperrr, lad. Moind the sleeperrr! Tis all up wid yah, if yeh fergit the sleeperrr!”, it was already upon him.
It was sudden. And yet the Presence seemed as if it had been clutching at him for ages beforehand, already had a hold on the vitals of his being. His body shuddered as he whispered, “Jesus! Jesus!”
The others heard only a groan from him and thought that he had tried to say something without having cleared his throat.
“Okay, Father?” asked the doctor.
Peter gestured wearily with his hand. This fight was all his. The others would be unknowing witnesses.
The Presence was everywhere and nowhere. Peter fought off the instinct to step back or to look around or, most of all, to run far and fast. “Freeze yer moind,” had been Conor's advice. “Freeze it in luv. Shtick there, lad.” But, Holy Jesus! how? The Presence was all over him, inside him, outside him. A total trap of cloying ropes he couldn't see. He heard no word, saw no vision, smelled no odor. But his skin was no longer the protective shell of his mortality. His skin didn't work! It was now a porous interface that let the invisible filth of the Presence ooze in. Worst of all was the silence of it. It was soundless. Suddenly he had been attacked and caught; and he knew his adversary was superior and ruthless, that it had invaded deep into the self he always hid from others and hoped only God did know and would never show him until he was strong enough to bear the sight.