“Merribell, right?” - Connie asks, pointing to the child to his left.
The child, squeezed in the fold of the mother's arm, bends and roars into the voice.
“No, it's Madeline,” Angela mutters. Connie has known Angela Dunphy throughout her life; he still remembers the seraphic radiance flowing from her face when she first became a privilege of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Now there is no trace of that radiance. Her cheeks and forehead seem dull, like iron, eaten by the Greenhouse Flood, and such a curved spine can be seen more likely in women three times older. - There is Merribell. - Angela raises her free hand and points to her cousin Lorna, balancing twin sister Madeline on her bloated belly. “Interesting,” Connie thinks, “is Lorna Dunphy also giving birth to twins?” Such events, as he heard, are often a family trait.
Touching the sleeve of Angela's shabby blue sweater, the priest speaks to her in a voice that is spread throughout the aisle:
- Have the children of these sacraments of the Definition of Reproductive Potential been honored?
The parishioner moves her tongue a lump of chewing gum from behind the left cheek to the right.
“Y-yes,” she says finally.
Henry Shaw, a pale altar servant with a face blazing with eels, hands a priest a sheet of parchment paper with the seal of the Boston Island Metropolis. At the bottom of the sheet are two signatures, certifying that the birth of these children was legalized by two representatives of the church. Connie immediately recognizes the illegible handwriting of Archbishop Xallibos; below are the loose loops and confident strokes of the brother of James Wolfe, MD - undoubtedly, it was he who took the blood from them.
“Madeline Dunphy,” Connie reads. - Left ovary: three hundred and fifteen rudimentary follicles. Right ovary: three hundred and forty embryonic follicles. " The priest is seized by a fit of despair. The egg content for each of the ovaries should be at least one hundred and eighty thousand. This is a sentence of infertility - without the right to appeal, without the slightest hope of pardon.
With a businesslike attitude that almost turns into impudence, Henry Shaw hands Connie a second sheet of parchment.
“Merribell Dunphy. Left ovary: two hundred and ninety rudimentary follicles. Right ovary: three hundred and ten rudimentary follicles. " For a priest, this is not a surprise. It would hardly have been meaningful if the Lord had refused the opportunity to produce offspring to one twin, endowing it with another. Now Connie can only accept these barren sisters, perform sacred rites over them and secretly pray that the Fourth Lateran Council, when he decided to keep the baptismal procedure in an age of predictable fate and ovarian control, was truly led by the Holy Spirit.
He stretches his arms forward, turning up his withered palms, and freezes in this position. Angela gives him Madeline, crawls under the baby's baptismal clothes and unfastens both pins on the diapers. The marshy smell of fresh urine floats through the Church of Immediate Conception. With a deep sigh, Angela passes a wet diaper through her cousin.
“Bless these waters, Lord,” Connie says, catching a glimpse of the reflection of his ancient face in the baptismal fluid, “so that they can bestow eternal life on these sinners.” - Turning his back to the font, he shows Madeline his flock of more than three hundred Catholics (mostly sixth generation Irish, plus a small number of Portuguese, Italians and Croats) mixed with two dozen recent converts of Korean and Vietnamese descent - the community, united, as he is forced to admit, not so much by religious convictions as by jointly endured deprivations.- O beloved children, since all human beings descend into this world, dwelling in sin, and since they cannot know the goodness of our Lord except by being born again from water, I urge you to appeal to the Lord the Father, so that through this baptism Madeline and Merribell Dunphy was able to gain the kingdom of God!
Connie then turns to his quivering parishioner:
“Angela Dunphy, do you believe that, according to the Lord, these baptized babies, dying before they have time to create any real sin, will be saved?”
Her response “yes” sounds dull and inexpressive.
Like a scribe tucking his pen in an inkwell, Connie dips his thumb into the font.
“Angela Dunphy, name this child of yours.”
- Mmmm Madeline Eileen Dunphy.
“We welcome this sinner, Madeline Eileen Dunphy, who now joins the mystical body of Christ,” Connie draws a plus sign on her child's forehead with a wet thumb, “and mark her with the sign of the Cross of Christ.
Having freed Madeline from her baptismal clothes, Connie focuses on the waters of the font. They are supernaturally calm - as quiet and still as the waters of the Sea of Galilee after the Savior pacified the winds. For many years, the priest could not understand why Christ did not return to the world on the eve of the Greenhouse Flood, did not disperse a pair of hydrocarbons with a wave of his hand, did not put an end to global warming, just winked towards Heaven - however, recently Connie came to the conclusion that divine intervention obeys its rules that exceed human understanding.
He peers into his image reflected in the water. Nothing in it - neither small eyes, nor thin lips, nor bent like a hawk beak, nose - pleases him. He begins to dive; Madeline Dunphy's nape goes under the water ... ears ... cheeks ... mouth ... eyes ...
- No! - cries out Angela.
When the girl's nose is under water, soundless cries break from her lips: air bubbles filled with perplexity and pain.
“Madeline Dunphy,” Connie says in a recitative, holding the child underwater, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Bubbles burst to the surface. Liquid fills the lungs of girls. Her soundless screams cease, but she still continues to struggle.
- No! You are welcome! Do not!
A whole minute passes, marked by the rhythmic shuffling of the feet of the parishioners and the half-strangled sobs of the mother. Second minute ... third ... finally, the body stops twitching; now it's just a shell that is no longer a haven for Madeleine Dunphy's indestructible soul.
- No!
The sacrament of Ultimate Baptism, as Connie knows, is based on both logic and history. Even now, he can still literally quote the introduction to the “Message on the Rights of the Free” of the Fourth Lateran Council:
“Throughout his youth, the Holy Mother, our Church tirelessly defended the Rights of the Born. Then, as the monstrous institution of abortion began to spread throughout Western Europe and North America, she took over the protection of the Rights of the Unborn. Now, at the dawn of a new era, approaching the Church and its ministers, she must make even greater efforts to spread the gift of eternal life, standing up for the Rights of the Undead through the Dogma on Positive Fertility ... ”
The following sentence always made Connie stop. She stopped him when he was still a seminarian. She stops him and now:
“In view of the foregoing, this Council declares that at times such as those in which we live, when God chose to punish our race through the Greenhouse Flood and its attendant deprivations, society cannot commit a greater crime against the future than wasting food on those its members who are naturally incapable of reproduction. ”
Exactly. Undoubtedly. Nevertheless, Connie had never once performed the ceremony of Final Baptism without a sense of anxiety.
He looks around his flock. Valerie, the “little girl” - the teacher in the kindergarten, where his nephew goes - looks like she is ready to burst into tears. Kai Sang frowns. Theresa Curtoni shudders all over. Michael Hines groans softly. Stephen O'Rourke and his wife make faces as if in pain.
“Thank you, O our most gracious Father,” Connie takes the corpse out from under the water, “that you deigned to restore this child to eternal life and accepted it into His bosom!” - Putting a soaked lump of flesh on the altar , he leans toward Lorna Dunphy and puts his hand on Meribell's forehead. “Angela Dunphy, name this child of yours.”
“Mm-merribell Sh-shobeyn ...” With a short snake hiss, Angela snat
ches Merribell from her cousin's hands and presses the child to her chest. - Merribell Shobei Dunphy!
The priest takes a step forward, stroking a piece of reddish hair, breaking through the child's skull.
“We welcome this sinner ...”
Angela spins around and, not ceasing to obscure her child with her body, jumps from an elevation into the aisle - the very aisle in which Connie hopes to someday see her walking in anticipation of the sacrament of Eligible Monogamy.
- Stop it! - shouts Connie.
- Angela! Squeals Lorna.
- Where to ?! Yells the altar servant.
For a woman who recently gave birth to twins, Angela moves surprisingly lively; she headlong rushes past the dumbfounded parishioners and rushes straight through the narthex.
- I beg you! - Connie conjures her.
But she is already running out the door, taking with her her unsuccessful rescue daughter to the swarming streets of Boston Island.
At eighteen seventeen Eastern Standard Time, Stephen's ability to give birth to children reaches its weekly peak. This is indicated to him by the dial on his wrist, which buzzes like an agitated hornet, while Stephen rubs his teeth with soda powder. “Look! The sperm counter says, reminding Steven of his inevitable duty. - Look! Look! Find us an egg soon! ”
Stephen freezes, not reaching his mouth, and without wasting time even rinsing his mouth, hurriedly passes into the bedroom.
Kate lies on a crushed mattress; she smokes a cigarette without a filter, holding her evening portion of Erbutus rum with ice on her stomach. Baby Malcolm sat on his mother from above, clutching toothless gums to her left nipple. Her gaze is fixed on the far wall, where, framed by cracked rough stucco, there is a TV screen showing, as usual on Sundays, the night broadcast “Let these kids come.” Archbishop Xallibos, sitting in the middle of the television studio , fills the whole room, which is furnished in imitation of the kindergarten: soft toys, board games, brightly colored letters of the alphabet. Preschoolers crawl along the Falstaff's body of the prelate, slide down his legs, hang on their hands, as if it is a kind of piece of equipment for a playground.
“Do you know that with a single act of masturbation in more than a few seconds more than four hundred million children die?” Xallibos asks from the screen. - Jesus in the gospel of St. Andrew said: "Masturbation is a murder."
Stephen coughs uncertainly.
- Darling, you do not want to happen ...
His wife brings an index finger to her compressed lips. Even when she silenced her, she still seemed beautiful to Stephen. These huge eyes and high cheekbones, this graceful swan neck ...
- Shhh!
“Please check,” says Stephen, swallowing soda.
Kate raises his thin wrist to his eyes and looks at the ovulation meter.
“Not earlier than three days later.” Maybe in four.
- A curse!
He loves her so much! He wants her so unbearably - now no less than when they had only just been granted the sacrament of Eligible Monogamy. Spousal talk is, of course, good; but when you adore your wife so much, when you crave to understand her above all others, you need to speak with her in the language of the flesh too.
“Will anyone deny that the most red-hot of the sectors of Hell is reserved for those who violate the rights of the non-conceived?” - Xallibos asks, jokingly hiding his hand from an angel-like child. “Will anyone argue that contraception, casual sexual intercourse and sexually doom doom those who allow them to irrevocably travel to the Abode of Eternal Torment?”
“Pussy, I want to ask you something,” says Stephen.
- Shhh ...
- Here is this young woman who was at the liturgy this morning - well, who then ran away ...
“She was crippled by the fact that she had twins,” Kate sucks out the remaining rum. Pieces of ice clink, hitting each other. “If there was only one child, she would probably have done it.”
“Uh, yes, of course,” says Stephen, pointing to the baby Malcolm. “But imagine if you had a baby ...”
“Heaven is forever, Stephen,” Kate says, filling her mouth with ice. - Yes, and Hell is not for a shorter period. - She chews; her molars crunch the ice with a crunch. Droplets of water tinted with rum flow down from her lips. “Better hurry to church.”
- See you again, friends! Xallibos says through a growing crescendo of musical theme. On his knee sits a three-year-old Korean boy; the archbishop throws him up, pretending to be a horse. - And let these babies come!
On the way to the front door, Stephen passes through a cramped and smelly living room, playing the role of a nursery. Everything is quiet here, everything is in order. All fourteen babies - one for each year that has passed since Kate's first menstruation - have a sound sleep. Nine-year-old Roger looks like he's a product of the coincidence of the cycles of Stephen and Kate: the boy has steven blond curly hair and green eyes that attract attention. No matter how difficult it is for him, Stephen tries not to treat Roger in a special way - no walks alone to the frog pond, no extra sweets for Christmas. A good stepfather does not allow himself to reveal his addictions.
Stephen pulls on patched galoshes, gloves with torn fingers and a tattered jacket. Leaving the house slowly, he joins a handful of sullen pedestrians weaving along Winthrop Street. The fog is thickening, drizzle is constantly drizzling - the echoes of the Flood. Pushed by pregnant women, dozens of battered black-top strollers sullenly creak on the asphalt. The sidewalks belong to the girls; they go flock after flock, chirping and flopping through puddles, flaunting their swollen bellies, like Olympic medals.
At the door of the Church of Immediate Conception, eaten by two decades of wind and drizzle, stands a plaster Madonna. There was an indefinite expression on her face, somewhere in between the smile and the smirk. Stephen climbs the steps, enters the narthex, takes off his gloves and, having dipped his fingertips into the nearest bowl, the air overshadows the cross.
Each city, Stephen explains to his students at Cardinal Doherty High School, has his own personality. Extravert Rio, pessimistic Prague, paranoid New York. What about Boston Island? What kind of psyche does Pup [6] and the surrounding reefs have? Schizoid, Stephen tells them. Chopped up This Boston, who fought slavery and kept fire under the smelter of America, was at the same time the same Boston, who slaughtered the Pecot Indians and sent witch hunters to Salem.
However, here, now - which side of the city comes to the surface? Bright, Stephen decides, painting for himself hundreds of souls directed to Heaven that daily come from the countless wounds of Boston, floating up like bubbles that have so recently fallen from Madeline Dunphy's lips.
Blessing the name of the Blessed Virgin, he goes down the concrete steps down to the copulatory. Hundreds of votive candles permeate the darkness. The brackish aroma of nascent immortality fills the air. From a far corner, the CD player grunts “Apostolic Succession” with their famous interpretation of “Ave Maria”.
The Sacrament of Fornication always reminded Stephen of a student ball - girls stand in a row along one side of the room, boys along the other, in the middle, the couple move in a circle. Now he takes a place in the men's line, takes off his jacket, shirt, trousers, underwear, hangs them on the nearest hooks. Peering into the twilight, he meets with his eyes the former teacher of Roger from kindergarten, Valerie Galloger. She is a strong woman in her thirties, with her shining red hair falling to her hips. They head towards each other with a decisive step, following the path between the mattresses, until they meet over a quagmire teeming with wriggling soul makers.
“You're Roger Malkenny's stepfather, aren't you?” - the ovulating teacher asks.
“Even father, very likely.” Stephen O'Rourke. And you are Miss Galloger, right?
- Call me Valerie.
“And you, Stephen.”
He looks around, with immeasurable relief, noting that he does not recognize anyone here. Stephen knows that sooner or later he will see a familiar young face in the copulation - a tho
ught that always makes him tremble. How will he be able to talk about the Boston Massacre to a boy who recently saw him behind a child-bearing act? How can he intelligibly present the Battle of Lexington to the girl whose egg he was trying to breathe life the previous evening?
About ten minutes, he and Valerie have a casual conversation. Mostly Steven speaks, as it should be. In the event that the coming sacrament is fruitful, the resulting child will want to learn more about the handful of men with whom his mother was connected during the fateful ovulation. (Beatrice, Claude, Tommy, Laura, Yolanda, Willy and others always got Kate, asking her the facts about their likely producers.) Stephen tells Valerie how the students gave him a birthday party. He describes her his collection of stones. He mentions his art of setting traps on an exceptionally elusive species of rat living in the Charleston Ward.
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