The Gospel of Winter

by Brendan Kiely

  “Excuse me,” I said softly, but James jumped anyway. “Sorry, sorry. I just thought I’d come down.”

  The colors from the screen played over his pale face as he looked at me. He shrugged into himself, collapsing inward, and he took a step back. A zombie hurled an ax at his player, and then another stabbed the leather-jacketed character with a pitchfork. There was another chop, screams, and then James’s player fell down in a bloody heap. The zombie hoard moved in and feasted on the corpse. The screen glazed over in a film of red.

  A small area rug was spread across the floor between us, and neither of us crossed it. “There’s soda in the fridge,” James finally said, pointing to a small brown door beneath the desk.

  The air was cool in the storage basement, and a mug of tea or coffee would have been more appropriate, but I grabbed a can from the minifridge anyway. I leaned against the desk and realized how much taller I was than James. He looked at the screen and shook his head.

  “Well, I guess since you killed me, I could start over. Want to play two-player? I have another controller.” James pressed some buttons and flipped through a series of screens until there were two profile head shots floating on the screen in front of a gray background.

  “The second player is a girl, huh?” I asked. The digital warrior wore a leather jacket like her male counterpart, but hers was black. “I’ll play. What do I do?”

  James dug around in a desk drawer and pulled out the other controller. As he plugged it in, he explained its basic functions, how to kick and punch, how to shoot, how to throw a grenade, and where to look for more once the game started because they were few and far between. He took it all very seriously, and he held the new remote close to his chest as he recited the directions. He seemed proud of himself.

  “Thanks” I said after a minute. “But it’s just a game. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.”

  “Yeah,” James said. “But you have to play it right if you’re going to play.” He stood there in the glow from the projector and the screen, looking like a solemn officiant, and I wondered if this is what I looked like to other kids when I responded to the teachers’ questions, one after another—automatic and lifeless. When I reached for the controller, he stepped back and handed it to me at a full arm’s length, nearly dropping it into my hand.

  “You can just stand back over there,” he said, pointing to the other side of the rug.

  I followed his orders, and the game began. Although we were both a team against the zombies, James killed most of them while I shot erratically across the screen. If I had cared about the game at all, I would have been glad we weren’t playing against each other. He would have slaughtered me, and I could tell he wouldn’t have gotten bored doing it over and over. In fact, because he knew the game so well, I assumed he’d already played it through and beaten it before. He was just going through the motions. Enter zombie; destroy it; pick up ammunition; load; fire; fire; fire. I could understand the comfort it brought, the succinct execution of tasks, one after another indefinitely, that kept him busy enough to not have to think about something else.

  Across the rug, James stood stiffly; only his fingers bounced quickly across the controller. “Hey,” I said to him, “I heard you switched schools.”

  “My mom wanted to move me somewhere else.”

  “No kidding, where?”

  “I don’t know. Just someplace else, I guess. Hey, watch out!” James yelled. I let my player wander too close to a zombie, who bit into my player’s shoulder. “Do a roundhouse!” James shouted. “Do a roundhouse!”

  I fumbled over the buttons and managed to spin my character and boot the zombie away. Then I blew its head off because I was at close range. Its headless body wavered in place. “Yeah,” James whispered. He used the corpse to block an oncoming attack and annihilated the group of oncoming zombies with a grenade. His character pushed forward and marched us deeper into the game.

  “She didn’t like CDA? It’s a good school.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “My mom just thinks I should go somewhere else. I don’t know.”

  Our characters jogged into the middle of a town square with an old stone well in the center. What looked like regular villagers were actually zombies carelessly stumbling through pedestrian motions: yanking on the well chain, although there wasn’t a bucket; picking over apples at a fruit cart that was turned over and crawling with maggots. The zombies turned toward us when James hit one of them from behind. James fired into the windows of some buildings, too, and zombies tumbled out of them.

  “I heard you’re going to Bullington, now. Is that right?” I asked.

  “Come on,” he said. “This is a hard part.”

  “Seriously. Why would she make you go there?”

  “I don’t know. Are you going to play the game?”

  “I think you do,” I said. James glanced at me briefly, then turned back to the game and tried to concentrate even more. “And you’re no longer an altar boy at Most Precious Blood, are you?” I tried to keep my voice from trembling. “You’re not even going there anymore, are you?” James shook his head. “I used to work there too,” I said. “I’m never going back.” James shifted his feet on the carpet and fired at another zombie. I couldn’t feel the buttons beneath my thumbs. I found myself standing right next to him. “James,” I said quietly.

  James stepped back and pointed to the controller I had dropped on the floor on the other side of the rug. “P-Please,” he stammered. “I want to play the game.”

  “Did you tell your mother?” I asked.

  James shook his head at me. “I don’t know.”

  “You did.” I was shrill, and I couldn’t stop it.

  “I just want to play the game,” James whimpered. One of the characters in the video game screamed. “I don’t want to talk. I can’t. I can’t.”

  I ripped the controller out of his hand and grabbed his arm. “I need to know about this,” I said. James tried to pull his arm away, but he couldn’t get out of my grip. I hunched over him, found his collar in my other hand, and pulled him closer. “You can tell me,” I said. “What did you say? Did anyone talk to Father Dooley? Don’t you get it?” I yelled. In the game, a mob of zombies screamed and squealed, and our two characters shrieked as the monsters surrounded them, stabbing and clawing. With his free arm, James punched me, but it was weak and useless. He tried to kick me.

  “You won’t tell anybody?”

  “No,” he said.

  I grabbed his hair and forced him to look up at me. “Promise me you won’t tell anybody.”

  He kept his eyes closed. “No. I won’t tell anything. I won’t,” he pleaded. “No, no.” I held on as my stomach bottomed out. Sweat poured down around my neck. I could feel his chest through the cotton, against my knuckles. I knew so surely that I could pull James down to his knees. I could do anything I wanted to him, and that sudden knowledge made me want to vomit.

  “No,” he cried again. I let go of him. I blocked the exit and still held him by the arm, so he leaned over and bit my hand. He was free in an instant. He dashed under the desk and tucked himself into a ball beside the minifridge. I wanted to hit him: I wanted to hold him.

  The zombies gorged themselves on our dead avatars, gore splattering across the screen in ugly, too-realistic droplets. James remained under the table as if sheltering himself from the spray of blood. “Please,” I heard myself whining. “I didn’t hurt you. Please. I didn’t mean to.” I nearly choked it out as I listened to myself. “No, no. I’m not like him, James. I’m not him. I’m not.”

  “I won’t talk about it!” James yelled. He sniffled and wiped his cheeks.

  I leaned down against the file cabinet and sat on the floor. The projector flashed above me. A film of red covered the images on the screen again, and the game’s theme music drummed alongside the grotesque munching sounds. James continued to whimper, and soon I was sobbing too. Dust floated th
rough the bright cone of light above me, and I thought of the grit pressing into my knees on the church basement floor, Father Greg’s hand yanking my hair, the smell of dank sweat, the sips of scotch, the burn, a finger with a jagged nail pressed against my lip, the rough moustache scratching at my neck, along my jaw, my ribs squeezed within his massive grip, the cold air prickling the skin on my chest, the edge of the workbench digging, carving a line deep into my back, but how I wouldn’t scream, no I wouldn’t dare fucking scream, not once, not anything more than the hush it took to survive it, and the breaths that came with the long soreness until finally it was gone, and I told myself, I’ve done it, I’ve survived, and if this is what it takes, and this is all it takes, then I can take it all again and I will.

  I was sick. I found my Coke, swigged it to try to settle my stomach, but I felt worse, and I struggled to keep it down. I apologized to James as soon as I could manage it. He watched me from beneath the desk for a long time, until he finally calmed down. “I won’t bother you again,” I said. He nodded. Neither of us moved for a while, and I began to worry about our mothers upstairs. “Will they come down?” I asked.

  “She’ll shout first,” James said. “She scared me once. Now she shouts down first.”

  “That’s good,” I said. I wanted to give him something to prove that I would not bother him again, some kind of token that meant more than anything I could say to him. In a myth, I might be able to find a cup that would bring blood back into his cheeks, or a cloak that would protect him, but in the real world there was nothing but trust, and I could understand why he wouldn’t give that to me.

  When I got up, James stayed under the desk. I steadied myself and chugged the rest of the soda. James hesitated. “Let’s go,” I told him. I picked up the controllers and tossed one to him. “I’ll be the girl again.”

  James pulled himself forward to see the screen from a better angle, but he still remained seated on the floor by the desk. We played through the level again, and I concentrated, tried to play more seriously, tried to work with James’s character so he wouldn’t have to cover for me. We got to the village center again, more quickly this time. I shot at the upstairs windows as soon as we approached the well, and pitched a grenade into it, and the whole thing exploded, bricks flying everywhere.

  “Awesome,” James said quietly. “They would have started crawling out later.”

  “I’m learning,” I said. “But I would suck if you hadn’t explained it.” James smiled. “You’re really good at this game,” I said.

  “I am,” James said. “I know.”

  Cindy called down to us later, and we walked over to the stairs. In front of our mothers, I thanked James for letting me play the game with him, and he waved good-bye to me. As I got up the stairs, Mother glowed. She put her hand on my shoulder and told Cindy she’d be back on Tuesday. I started out into the gallery, and then Mother went back over to Cindy and gave her a hug. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Let’s stop saying thank you to each other and just start doing it,” Cindy said.

  They kissed good-bye, and Mother squeezed her hand and then strode toward me in the doorway.

  “It was a pleasure to see your gallery,” I said. I almost bowed for all the formality. On the way out, we passed the print of the man’s face I had been staring at earlier. When I’d been looking at it before, staring at one cube at a time, the big picture hadn’t been as clear as it was when we were leaving. It was a multilayered mask, and what was left of the flesh was nearly gone, present only as the representation of a face that everyone would recognize, not the real face behind it. Who but a sucker, a dumb shit like me or James, ever revealed that soft, trembling stuff beneath?

  Mother had an air of knowing superiority about her as we walked back to our car. The sun had set while we’d been at the gallery, and Mother seemed excited by the night sky and the orange glow from the faux gaslights along the sidewalk. She looked both ways down the block and clapped her gloved hands together. I watched my breath billow and disappear.

  “It’s still early enough to get a seat at Oyster Bridge,” she said. “You’re hungry, right?” she continued when we were in the car. “Let’s get some dinner. Let’s go out and celebrate. This is the new us. We’re getting back involved.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “We are.”

  “Aren’t you excited? You take after me more than you think. We’ll be the vanguard. We’ll be the talk of the town.”

  I could just see her twirling a furious diagonal down the stage, flexing her hips, and setting her legs for the leap. Get up there. I knew it must take more than training to get your body up into the air. Your mind has to push you up too; you must have to see yourself rising, and not from your own body’s vantage point but as if your mind’s eye leaves you and watches you from afar, and a distant voice says, Up, up, up, get up there, and you let it take you away.

  It was the power of willing yourself to do something, and I supposed it took the same kind of power to lie to yourself, to redirect memories and push yourself into a different life story. Old Who? Father Nevermind. It was just Mother and me soldiering on, making our way up into that brightness we all want to find.

  After dinner, we were home again, blasting some old eighties music, and Mother asked if I’d ever learned to make a martini. She’d had a few at the restaurant, and I supposed it wasn’t hard, but Mother said it wasn’t about the know-how, it was about the finesse, and we would work on that. I thought about the finesse it took to make it look like I gave a flying fuck. A drink is a drink is a drink, and they all achieve the same end, the same thing that had happened so many nights in our house and that I knew was going to happen again that night. Mother told me to watch while she fixed her next one.

  I made one, following her instructions, and once we both had our drinks I slurped mine slowly, but Mother gulped hers down. She walked away from me and leaned back on the piano. She had the drunkard’s swagger. “I really am going to do it on my own again. We are,” she added when she looked at me.

  I didn’t need another pep talk from Mother. She smiled, though, and I knew I couldn’t get away from this unless I moved on to some other topic she’d prefer. “It’ll be easy. You’re not old and gray yet. I mean, you still look younger than most of the mothers I see around CDA.”

  Mother giggled. “Well, aren’t you kind. You sure know how to say the right thing,” she said. “Who raised you?” She laughed uneasily. She moved away from the piano and sat down on the arm of Old Donovan’s recliner. I stayed quiet and sipped at my drink, leaning against the mantel.

  “I’m not as young as I used to be,” Mother continued. “Men don’t look at me like they once did. It’s something I once had, and now it’s gone, just like that. A man looks at you and you know what he thinks.”

  Mother was lost in her own reverie, and she stared into the empty fireplace as she spoke. I didn’t think it had anything to do with gender. It had to do with being watched, eyes glancing up and down your body, taking it apart, or taking it in piece by piece. Anyone could suffer that kind of moment, could feel the weight of it, could know it, or even want it. It felt good to be wanted sometimes. I didn’t need the gravity of time to teach me that. There were many ways to want someone and to be wanted; there was a spectrum of desire between two people and not all of it had to do with the body.

  Mother was trying to give me advice. She thought she knew loss, and assumed I still didn’t, or couldn’t understand it to the extent she did. How can you trust a person like that, a person who claims a monopoly on victimhood?

  She had me fix her another martini. “Look at me,” she said. “Nobody can say I look sad. I don’t look sad. I’m going to make it.” She became quiet as she sank down into Old Donovan’s chair and the massive padding swelled around her thin frame. Maybe she could smell him, smell his old-man smell, that musty mix of dead skin and arrogance. Soon her head lolled to one side or the other, giving her the effect of a
doll thrown aside after the game was over, and eventually, she stumbled upstairs to bed.

  I cleaned up for a while and then followed her. From behind the closed doors of the master bedroom, I could hear the moaning of her cello suites drifting through the darkness. She listened to it to remember back to when it had been a partner in her life, the times when the music had swelled in the theaters. I knocked on her door. She didn’t respond, but I entered anyway. Faint moonlight reached across the room. The long mirror set into the door to the washroom reflected a shadowy image of the bed, and I didn’t see Mother until her foot moved across the bedspread. She had not climbed under the covers. Instead, she had pulled the edge of the comforter off the floor and rolled it over her so that it hung around her shoulders like a cape. Her thin, stockinged legs were exposed and tucked up against her chest. She hadn’t even kicked off her heels.

  I walked over, took off her shoes, and slumped her into a movable position. In her dead-limbed daze, I was able to get a shoulder underneath hers and lift her as I pulled the sheets down farther. I got her under the covers and tried to look away, even though she didn’t seem to care, because as I moved her down the bed, her skirt bunched and rose up her thigh. I swung her legs up and tucked them under the sheets and blankets as quickly as I could, but I still saw her underwear. Her eyes were unfocused. I probably could have slapped her and she wouldn’t have flinched.

  I stole one of her cigarettes from her bedside table and smoked it as I sat with my back to her. Maybe she would come back to life, if only to yell at me. It was a woman’s cigarette, one of those long, skinny ones, but it didn’t really matter what kind of cigarette I smoked. I could have slipped on high heels for God’s sake: I still would have felt like the man of the house.