The three sisters nodded simultaneously. They agreed on very little, except for Thomas, and the peculiarities of his nature. Every evening, Thomas came back to the warehouse apartment and collapsed on the couch, his mind frazzled and spent from the input that Manhattan threw at him, the bodies, the walls, the trash, the food. If an object that he stared at seemed peaceful or whole in its nature, like a tree or a watchful baby, then Thomas drew strength from focusing on that object. But more often he felt, through a sort of draining visual empathy, the terrors that gripped Manhattan’s denizens. He read haste and greed in graffiti and in the propped-up ceilings of bodegas. At clubs he gazed at women in slick black dresses, wishing he could fall prey to their magic, sensing instead that they had sad, splintered hearts. At a party once, when he shook the hand of a young man, Thomas felt a conviction in his fingertips that the man would beat his girlfriend that very night.
In the end Thomas had few friends, because he didn’t know how to joke about women or sports or tragedy. It took a back rub from his aunt Mabel—the sister with the strongest hands—and cups of her brandied coffee and several rounds of Sluice before he could fashion into words the strange truths that had assailed him that day.
“I saw a woman in the park today,” said Thomas one night.
The Merchant sisters exchanged glances.
Margaret touched Thomas’s wrist gently. “What was she doing, Thomas?”
“She was sitting on a bench.” Thomas gazed at his cards, threw one on the table. “She was tearing at the cuticles on her thumbs. Tearing and tearing.”
Mary Jude plucked up the card Thomas had cast away. She laid down what she held.
“Sluice,” she said.
“Shoot,” whispered Mabel.
“This woman was bleeding,” said Thomas.
Margaret poured Thomas more coffee. The heat vent in the corner ticked.
“How long did you watch her?” asked Margaret.
“A long time.”
Mary Jude pulled her hair back, clipped it. She faced her nephew, her widow’s peak a black dagger point on her forehead. “That woman isn’t your affair, Thomas.”
“Mary,” warned Margaret, “let him talk.”
Thomas looked at the floor. “She was making herself bleed. She was weeping.”
Mary Jude frowned. She wanted to break her nephew of his obsession with fellow feeling, his penchant for compassion. She wanted him to want whiskey, and girls, and joy.
“Forget that woman, Thomas,” growled Mary Jude.
Thomas smiled sadly at his aunts.
“I can’t,” he said.
Two years later Thomas was in a seminary in Pennsylvania. He’d been baptized a Catholic, and though his aunts had never taken him to church, the warehouse had fostered Thomas’s instinct for contemplation. He’d stared so long and intensely at the furniture of the world—at chairs and people and the sky through the warehouse ceiling—that his mind had asked for more. Thomas explained this as best he could to his confessor and novice master, Father Reese, as they sat in Father Reese’s office.
“You mean,” said Father Reese, “that you’ve discovered Christ at the root of creation?”
Thomas shook his head. “I mean God’s the only thing that can stand me thinking about Him all the time.”
“That sounds prideful,” said the priest.
Thomas shrugged. He was twenty-three years old.
Father Reese, a portly man and an avid golfer, leaned back in his chair. When he raised his eyebrows, his forehead dented.
“What about women?” asked Father Reese. “Can you stand thinking about them?”
Thomas looked into the priest’s eyes. He thought he saw gluttony there, a love of red meat, a keenness for pleasure.
“I’ve been in love,” sighed Thomas. “I’ve been with women.”
The priest smiled. “And?”
“They don’t know enough about their own beauty for me to be in awe of them.” Thomas scratched at a pimple on the back of his neck. The priest’s office smelled like cigarettes.
“Is that right,” said Father Reese.
“None of us knows enough about his own beauty,” said Thomas.
Punk, thought the priest. Snot-nosed punk.
“And who’s going to teach us about our beauty, Thomas? You, by becoming a priest?”
Thomas gazed deeper into the man before him, gazed past the long putts and the London broils, until he saw jealousy in Father Reese’s eyes.
“No,” said Thomas. “I’m not a hero. I just see things.”
“You see things.” Father Reese had large feet. He wiggled his large toes inside his large shoes. “Have you heard the line from Scripture, No one shall see the face of God and live?”
Thomas sighed again. He hated semantics. In fact on most days, Thomas hated talking, period.
“I’m not trying to see God’s face,” said Thomas quietly. “I’m trying to see His mind.”
Father Reese snorted. Good luck, kid, he thought.
Thomas graduated seminary when he was twenty-six. He got his master’s in divinity, then did an intern stint at a Brooklyn parish. When he was thirty-two he applied for and received the sole pastoral position at St. Benedict’s on Wall Street. St. Benedict’s was a dark, moody cave of a church, with a red carpet down the center aisle and great stands of white candles back by the doors. Priests traditionally groaned when assigned to St. Benedict’s, but Thomas liked the place for its silent stone walls, and its sparse patronage. Most of his Wall Street neighbors were busy making money and running the world, so Thomas was left with an audience of aging Irishwomen clutching rosaries. This suited Thomas absolutely. He was a mystic, not a missionary, and he preferred a subtle, monkish obedience to and contemplation of the Divine over any heroic work in conversions. Every day at St. Benedict’s was like a quiet, solemn Christmas, and Thomas, at the daily five o’clock Mass, gave sermons on discernment and grace, rather than abortion or politics. When he delivered these sermons, Thomas stared from the altar over the heads of his parishioners to the clean white candles gleaming at the far end of the church. They were a reliable focus point, the candles were, and if enough of them were burning, they gave off a light, pleasing incense. Thomas found that if he stared at these candles intently enough, and took in their scent, good words came out of him.
Thomas’s three aunts took the subway down from Harlem once or twice a week to hear their nephew preach and to wink at him slyly from the pews. Thomas still joined them for Sunday lamb dinners at the warehouse, while on weeknights in the rectory basement he ran the small St. Benedict’s soup kitchen, which served the first fifty mouths that came in off the street. Thomas’s favorite homeless person was a mute woman named Esther. Esther looked to be in her late fifties, and she was missing one front tooth. She was thin, tiny, and given to smiling. She wore a bedraggled pink ribbon in her hair each day, she never missed Thomas’s Mass, and she nibbled ham sandwiches quietly by his side every weeknight between seven and nine o’clock.
So this was Thomas’s life. He passed a decade and a half in delightful peace at St. Benedict’s, reading, praying, feeding the hungry, smiling at Esther. He baptized an occasional baby and said his share of funerals, but mostly he stared at his candles and delivered his sermons and was quietly, reverently happy.
The change came when Thomas was forty-seven. It began on a cool Monday evening in late September. Thomas was delivering his sermon—the one about the vineyard workers that the master hires late in the day—when he noticed a man standing in back by the candles. At least, it seemed to be a man. Beyond the candles was darkness, and Thomas could just make out the hunched shoulders and lowered chin of what looked to be a tall man in a black overcoat. The man stood stock-still, like a hunter or a bodyguard, and he seemed to be listening intently. Thomas also noticed a sharp stench of something oily in the air, but attached no importance to it at the time. The moment that Thomas finished his sermon, the church doors whispered and the man was gone.
The
next day, after lunch, Thomas sat at the rectory kitchen table, staring at the salt and pepper shakers. The Bible lay open before him. This was where Thomas sat and stared daily as he composed his evening sermon. Today, however, Thomas’s focus was broken. The man from the night before, the figure in black, stood in the hallway of Thomas’s mind, a distant but definite figure. Thomas wondered what the man could have wanted, lurking in the shadows like that, leaving before the real ceremony had taken place. Perhaps the man had been homeless and hungry. Perhaps he was a Wall Street trader who’d lost a fortune and needed redemption. Or maybe, Thomas thought, a lover of architecture, come to admire the St. Benedict’s ceiling. Finally, Thomas shook the man from his thoughts, fixed his mind on the Bible.
That very night, though, the man appeared again. He slipped inside the church just before the gospel, and stood in the shadows. Thomas paused in his preaching, got a bead on the man’s proportions. The stranger was over six feet tall, and again wearing the black overcoat. From the cut of the man’s torso and the quick way he’d entered the church, Thomas figured him to be young, perhaps in his early thirties. More disturbing, though, was the acrid, burnt smell that seemed to have come into the church with the man, a smell that overpowered the fragrance of the candles. Thomas had a lifetime of experience gazing into the heart of things: he could predict the weather with a knack that alarmed even him, and, on his hospital visits, he knew at a glance how many hours left on earth this or that cancer patient had. But now, as Thomas stood before the altar, he’d never been so jolted by the smell, the aura, of another human being. The stench was clearly emanating from the man in black.
“And—and Christ will reach you where you live,” stammered Thomas, trying to return to his sermon. “He’ll work with whatever circumstances you find yourself in. . . .”
Thomas paused again, tried to breathe only through his mouth. The smell was noxious, unrelenting. It was a bitter, dark smell, not like garbage or dung or an unwashed person, but like acid-soaked wood that had been torched and charred and was polluting the air around it. Thomas stared at his parishioners. Esther sat in the front pew, smiling at him. Esther, Thomas thought, Esther who plugs her nose at the smell of tuna fish or even burned toast. She seemed to smell nothing tonight, and when Thomas checked other faces in his small crowd, they were at peace too.
Thomas was amazed. He fought his way through his sermon, and when he’d finished, the man in black vanished once again. When the doors of St. Benedict’s clicked shut, Thomas took a gulp of air, and coughed.
“Guuh? Gunh?” From her pew Esther grunted and frowned up at the priest. She knew something was wrong.
Thomas breathed in and out. The bitter stench was gone. There were only the candles.
“I’m fine.” The priest wiped his forehead, cleared his throat. “I’m fine.”
It began happening nightly. The man in black and his terrible odor would arrive just before the gospel and leave just after the sermon. The man stood always in darkness, and Thomas realized after a few nights that his parishioners were oblivious to the man’s presence. Despite the putrid air the faithful in the pews never turned up their noses or tried to spy out the source of the poison. After the first few Masses the man in black attended, Thomas asked Esther and his aunts casually whether they’d smelled anything funky in the air.
“You know,” he chatted, “like a burnt smell? Like maybe the vents are failing?”
The women shook their heads no, but Mabel Merchant studied her nephew carefully. She was the sister most sensitive to intrigue and shady goings-on. Every year, around Easter, Thomas found one pure gold coin in the collection plate and knew without asking that his aunt Mabel had slipped him some treasure. He knew now, meeting her eyes, that she sensed a mystery afoot, but when he held his tongue, Mabel nodded softly and turned away. Thomas wanted to confide in his aunt, but he was honestly frightened. How could a man radiate a filthy, bitter essence that only a priest could smell? Why would the man materialize only for the gospel and for Thomas’s sermon and then melt away again?
Thomas pondered all of this in his heart as he sat in his kitchen and stared at his salt and pepper shakers. He began to wonder very practically whether a demon hadn’t taken up house in his church. Or maybe it’s an angel, Thomas hoped. Maybe it’s Gabriel or Michael and they just smell nasty to mortals and no one knows it. Whatever the visitor in black was, though, Thomas knew that it was no ordinary man. He knew only—through the gifted empathy that had become almost a muscle—that the visitor was male, and deeply troubled, and capable of an immense concentration of mind. For, as the man in black stood in the shadows and Thomas delivered his sermons, the priest felt power drain out of himself toward the man. Normally, Thomas hoped his words might be a fuel of sorts for his parishioners, a boost to their humors, an option of grace and kindness. But, for Thomas, facing the man in black was like rapture, or a duel to the death. The man seemed to be listening to Thomas with a palpable greed, a forward incline of the head, a voracious ear for truth. Thomas grew physically conscious of the words leaving his mouth, of their becoming a vapor that the man in black sucked into his lungs and took away from St. Benedict’s. Each night, when the man left, Thomas all but collapsed on the altar. He closed his eyes, felt sweat on his forehead. His fingers shook on the chalice.
“Are you sick?” asked Margaret Merchant.
“Have you puked?” said Mary Jude.
Esther made grunting sounds, clung to Thomas’s arm.
Margaret touched her nephew’s cheek. “What’s gotten into you?”
Thomas set his jaw, answered no one. He almost did feel sick and nauseous. He began preparing his sermons with the man in black in mind. They were severe, loud, apocalyptic sermons that the stranger seemed to call out of him, as if Thomas’s decades of watchfulness and gentleness had been one extended gathering of strength for the battle that had now arrived.
“There is no favoritism with God,” Thomas preached. “All moments are equal in the eyes of the Lord.” The priest stared past the candles at his single, shadowy target. “If God has filled your life with joy, or chosen to show you His dark side, it’s of no consequence to your actions, either way. Saint Paul instructs us to pray that we don’t become articulate in evil matters. But if we do grow familiar with evil, and we understand it, we’re no less obligated to speak against it. To live beyond it.”
When Thomas spoke this way, his parishioners fidgeted. Esther worried her pink ribbon around on her thumb, and several regulars stopped showing up. Nobody seemed to want to hear about evil, but Thomas couldn’t help himself. The smell of the man in black was drastic and otherworldly, and judging by the fine cut of the man’s overcoat, it had nothing to do with poor personal hygiene. It had to do with evil, Thomas thought. As he stood on his altar and spoke to the figure beyond the candles, Thomas’s knees quivered slightly beneath his robes. Somehow, he knew that the man’s bitter smell was the scent of a rank and blistered soul. Beneath the man’s coat and kempt appearance lay some monstrous violence, some hatred or grudge or some aberrant sexual appetite. Perhaps the man wasn’t even aware of his own fetidness. But, for reasons he himself couldn’t fathom, Thomas would have bet the bank that the man was carrying a gun.
“We’re worried about you,” said the Merchant triplets. They had Thomas at the warehouse for Sunday lamb and Sluice, but he picked at his food and played his cards wrong.
“You’ve lost weight, Thomas,” said Margaret.
“Yeah,” growled Mary Jude, “and your sermons are getting psycho.”
Mabel raised her hand. Her sisters went quiet.
“Thomas,” said Mabel. “What is the matter?”
Thomas stared out the window at the October moon.
“There’s someone I have to help,” he said.
“Who?” said the sisters.
Thomas shook his head. “I have to do it alone. I’m the only one who can . . . speak to him.”
Mary Jude slapped the table. “Him who, dammit?�
��
Thomas met his aunt Mabel’s eyes.
“Him,” whispered Thomas.
The confrontation happened months later, on a Saturday night, in the dead of winter. Thomas was in the two-doored, closeted room at the rear of St. Benedict’s, hearing Confessions. In his chamber of the closet Thomas sat on a small stool, listening through a grille to the sins of his kneeling parishioners. It was early in January of the new millennium, and the invisible voices through the grille pondered how they should repent, what resolutions they might pursue. Thomas generally closed his eyes when he heard Confessions. He enjoyed the oaken smell and the darkness, but he was embarrassed by the physical intimacy of the closet. It often seemed to Thomas that the person inches away from him through the wall was naked, in the changing room of some very important clothing store or else in the solitary-confinement box of a prison. Thomas could hear every sigh and every sob with a proximity that, despite his office, made him feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. His strongest natural faculty, his vision, was denied him, and Thomas had to reach across the darkness with other, faultier senses. So, even on a good evening, Thomas disliked hearing Confessions. But it was with pure dread one night that Thomas heard the click of the door in the chamber opposite his. This dread prickled over his skin, stirring goose bumps, for coming through the grille now was a familiar, scalded smell.
“You know who this is?” said a low voice.
Thomas shuddered, crossed himself, covered his nose with a handkerchief. “Yes.”
“How do you know?”
Thomas’s mind raced. He’d thought there’d been a pact between him and the figure in black, an unspoken agreement that whatever this creature wanted from Thomas, it would get it by keeping its quiet distance beyond the candles and listening to Thomas’s sermons.
“I just know,” said Thomas.
The stranger sniffled fiercely. “You’re wondering why I’ve come to you now. After all this time.”
Thomas’s heart pounded. He sensed, correctly, that the pews outside the closet were empty. It was nine o’clock, and the hearing of Confessions had technically ended. But there would be no sending this creature away. Thomas drew a breath, opened his eyes to the dark wall between him and the stranger.
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