by Various
“I didn’t think so.”
“And what do you mean, ‘find it to my liking’?”
“It would have to be a bubble in which all the blasted stars didn’t make such a continuous insupportable din.”
“They don’t make that sort of din in this one, Horacio.”
“You aren’t attuned to it.”
Doctor Vega stood up. “See me tomorrow for a complete checkup. Call in the morning. We’ll clear you a slot. Will you do that?”
“Of course: Why not?”
Don Horacio walked the doctor to the door and let him out, repeating his readiness to submit to an examination and even to a series of medical tests. It amused him that Doctor Vega thought his business proposals would prove in any way tempting. Clearly, as an outright materialist he did not care to look too deeply at the world, or else the fool would not expect to make money from either offshore oil or the sci-fi scenarios of an astrophysical researcher at Boca de Yesca.
* * *
Don Horacio veered toward the kitchen and found Adelaida and Father Casares standing at the butcher block with plates of roast beef and bowls of cold garbanzos. They held glasses of Chilean shiraz with which to wash down this impromptu repast. Adelaida handed Don Horacio her glass and nodded at the plate before her on the block. “These are yours, Señor. We…I didn’t know the doctor had left.” She bowed her head.
“Reinaldo and I will eat in here. You may go.”
“Yes, Señor.” She curtseyed and withdrew.
Reinaldo sipped his wine sans embarrassment and laid the housekeeper’s locket, the sphere only, on the butcher block beside his bowl of chickpeas. “A charming woman, Adelaida, and very devoted to you.”
“An uneducated, sentimental peasant with a streak of illogical religiosity about her.”
“And what do you say about me in my absence?” The young priest’s eyes scintillated with amused mischief.
“‘An educated, sentimental divine with a streak of well-hid rationality to recommend him…if only occasionally.’” Don Horacio nodded at the block. “What are you doing with her locket, Reinaldo?”
“She says it contains a giant squid. She asked me to bless it and give it to you as a talisman: a charm to prevent your suicide.”
“Then you see exactly what I mean: nonsense, sentimentality, and impertinence.”
“All rather more touching than otherwise.”
Don Horacio took a sip of Shiraz, then picked up a fork and speared a piece of the cold rare beef. He felt neither sociable nor hungry, but the only visitor he would have preferred to Father Casares was…well, the ghost of his own father. And so he prepared to be grilled like a teenage thief at a barrio police station:
“Adelaida says you asked her to poison you.”
Don Horacio chewed, swallowed, and stabbed another beef cube. What a travesty of a catechism. After all, this muscular young religious already knew that he, Horacio Gorrión, had no earnest commitment to this life and no belief at all in a subsequent one.
“If she speaks true, Don Horacio, you’ve tempted her to sin out of your own surrender to despair, which some theologians suppose the unforgivable sin because it indicts God as faithless to his Creation.”
Continuing to chew, Don Horacio stared Reinaldo in the eyes…which, however, caused the priest no visible consternation; he candidly returned Don Horacio’s gaze.
“My friend,” Reinaldo said, “why do you wish to die?”
“Have you blessed the locket yet?” Don Horacio countered
The priest shook his head and scooped up the gold ball as if playing a children’s street game: jacks, perhaps.
“Then do so,” Don Horacio told him. “Bless it for Adelaida. She deserves that priestly boon, as meaningless as it no doubt is.”
“‘I bless this locket in the name of the tripartite God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” Reinaldo said in his everyday baritone. “‘May it protect Horacio Gorrión from his bent to sin, whether it manifests as a sin ordinary and venial or as one dreadful and mortal. Amen.’” He reached out and dropped the locket into the breast pocket on Don Horacio’s grey knit jersey.
This blessing agitated Don Horacio, who tossed chickpeas into his mouth like candy and then stalked away from the butcher block and back again.
“Who forgives God’s sins, many of which are more ‘dreadful and mortal’ than any merely human mind can devise? Answer me that.”
“Then give me an example of a sin of God’s,” the priest retorted.
“Wars and rumors of war. The Holocaust. Genocide. The sufferings of innocents in the midst of horrendous upheavals.”
“These cruelties spring from the freewill activities of human beings, Don Horacio. You can’t really attribute them to God.”
“He permits them.”
“He doesn’t initiate them. They aren’t his.”
“Oh, you love your freewill argument. What about floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor strikes? No human being ever initiated a coast-crushing tsunami, or even a tiny whirlwind that destroys a poor family praying for mercy in its mountainside hovel. Justify that to me, Reinaldo.”
“Physical occurrences determined by earth movements, tides, and the astronomical position of the planet. God does not will such things. He beholds them all with sadness, rue, and redemptive love.”
“In your system, there’s no accountability for anyone but fallible human beings. God takes no responsibility for the heinous things that occur, only for the good. So how can I help but dismiss the extravagant claims you make for his omnipotence and the excuses you make for his failures to prevent or at least to ease our suffering?”
“He does ease our suffering, Don Horacio. Listen: I believe that God is a creative force, an artist, and when catastrophes such as massacres, tsunamis, and meteor strikes occur, well, they stand for moments when God’s continuous essaying of creative risk passes briefly out of his control and therefore seems to us ignorant mortals as ‘disasters.’ God doesn’t will these moments, though, he wills something altogether else.”
“And botches it, Reinaldo?”
“No, no, he only briefly loses his grip or focus, with forces so grand that even the slightest misstep leads to catastrophe for the creation that he brought into being with painstaking love. It’s not easy to create, Don Horacio. Nor is it always possible to succeed on one’s first attempt. But God equals God precisely because he doesn’t back away from wreckage in disgust or defeat. He sets in motion webs of artistic redemption that overcome the unforeseen problem and infuse the situation with a fresh and unexpected richness, so that good comes out of evil, beauty out of ruin, love out of despair. And almost always God uses those among us who have survived these rare moments of creative disaster to construct the richness and the redemption that inevitably ensue. You see, Don Horacio, God never abandons any problem.”
“No, from what you’ve just said, he dumps them on us to sort out.” Don Horacio shook his head. “Is this sophistic nonsense your stab at reconciling the existence of evil with that of an all-loving God?”
Reinaldo admitted that his stance on the problem of evil derived in large measure from the work of a British pastor and theologian, W. H. Vanstone. He noted that Vanstone regarded God as an artist—painter, novelist, composer, sculptor, etc.—who met unexpected problems so ingeniously that he poured into every creative act material that “enriched” and “redeemed” each briefly mangled enterprise. Unless the believer accepted this analogy between God and the artist, Reinaldo went on, he or she imputed to each catastrophe, or “outbreak of evil,” to use Vanstone’s terminology, an intent devoid of “all the precariousness and all the poignancy of love.” And Reinaldo could not accede to such a negative formulation of the Deity.
“So you strip him of omnipotence to spare him the charge of cruelty.”
“Sí, Don Horacio, I freely admit it.”
“A diminished Creator? You think that a fair tradeoff?”
“I don’t see him a
s diminished, but as enlarged by his ability to feel with humanity and so to rescue Creation from a motiveless havoc. Often we are the agents who help him, who must help him, effect that rescue. In response to his gift of love, the Christ who died, we become elements of Christ’s body and act in his name, on his behalf, to redeem the calamities large and small that afflict us all as sojourners here.”
The men faced each other holding a second or third glass of red wine. They had shared a meal of sorts, but had not broken bread, and the mystical nature of this convoluted defense of God roiled in Don Horacio’s mind like an indigestible stew. Although he wanted to turn it to use, to convert it into fuel, it oppressed, even nauseated, him.
Adelaida had long since climbed to her bedchamber on the second floor, where Don Horacio no longer visited, and all Infante Sagrado had grown quiet as the ancient Spanish cemetery on the mesa beyond the arroyo separating the interior from the harbor ridge. A maddening itch radiated upward from beneath Don Horacio’s skin, like heat from a stove eye, until he could hardly disguise it. Hence, to suppress his panic, he set his wine glass down and hugged himself. Reinaldo gazed at him with keen alertness and pity and asked if anything were wrong.
“Surely you hear it?”
“What, Don Horacio? The unwonted silence of the city?”
“The pump in the aquarium in the bedroom of my housekeeper.”
Reinaldo snorted good-humoredly. “Your house is too well built for any creature but an owl to hear such a little noise so far away.”
“Well, it’s a large aquarium, with gar and octopi and flounder swimming about in it.”
“Really? Any giant squid?”
“Of course not.” Don Horacio tightened his self-embrace. “Thank you for coming at Adelaida’s nonsensical bidding.”
“Tell me the truth: May I safely leave you this evening?”
“I’m a melancholic skeptic, but not one to stick my head in a noose or to gulp down cyanide. Go in peace, Reinaldo, free of guilt.”
At length, Father Reinaldo Casares—so young to bear the title padre—withdrew and began the long heel-bruising trek down the cobblestone slope to his church and his quarters nearby.
* * *
As soon as the priest had left, Horacio Gorrión dropped to his knees and rubbed his arms with a punishing vigor, as if to brush from them a host of microscopic vermin. The heat and the itch came from within, but their trigger, the impetus for both, originated in the engine-like crosstalk of the stars and in the impact of this incessant celestial jabber on Señor Gorrión’s aging body. Every synapse in his mortal self had a star broadcasting to it, and every star fired its distinct spectral hum into him with a dissonant twang or buzz audible to Don Horacio and if not to him alone, then to him in a way to which every other suffering mortal was deaf.
“I can’t bear it,” he muttered.
But how could anyone bear it?
This star ruckus jangled, purred, droned, hissed, and screeched at such piercingly keen frequencies that he actually feared his head would explode. It also swam sinuously through the conduits of his bloodstream like infinitesimal minnows with razorblades for fins, conjectural fish that at once amplified the star noise and sliced the veins and arteries netting him together: an unbearable double torment.
His skin prickled all over. It verged on erupting. But Señor Gorrión also felt Adelaida’s tiny gold sphere turning in his pocket. The giant squid that his housekeeper fancied shrunken inside it—a notion as whimsically unlikely as the grand unkillable fiction of God—had moved within the thing, had twisted or kinked in response either to the weird rise in the temperature of his blood or to the Big Bang background hiss racketing among his ganglia, if not to these two phenomena at once.
Adelaida’s squid—the largest known invertebrate on the planet, with eyes the size of basketballs—wanted out. It would boil in the drops of sea water in its diminutive amniotic sac, that is, the locket, until it burst from its prison, its eight arms and two tentacles inflating like slender balloons, filling all the space around him with murderous appendages, a Lovecraftian horror in his own house, bereft of the sea and thus instinctually enraged and venomous. Señor Gorrión could not let that happen. He would roll the locket, hard, into the palm of his hand and carry it, willy-nilly, to the Bay of Pirates, to fling its encapsulated, ready-to-materialize fish-beast into waters saltily akin to those that had nurtured it.
Cautiously, like a small boy needing to move his bowels but averse to doing so just yet, he angled toward a window looking out on la Calle de los Piratas. Here his fingers separated the ivory-yellow blinds, and he peeked through this slit at a strip of the world that he had unequivocally renounced. At one of the switchbacks on this slope—near a streetlamp like a pumpkin atop a harpoon—Reinaldo steadied the arm of a black-clad old woman clutching a shopping basket and guided her up some rickety wooden steps perpendicular to the cobblestone ramp. The sight of the descending street, the houses fronting it in tiers, and the basalt-colored waters of the bay heightened Señor Gorrión’s agoraphobia, and like an executioner dropping a guillotine blade, he released the blinds, snapping them shut.
Adelaida’s locket rolled against his chest again. It leapt in his pocket. It said to him, over the clamor of the stars: Don Horacio, run.
He removed his shoes. He peeled off his socks. His feet resembled two pale bony fish. It astonished him that he could walk on them, but he did…toward the same door at which he had bid goodbye to Reinaldo but through which he had not stepped since the morning of his sister Sabiduría’s funeral. Barefoot, he gripped the open door on both its sides, leaning toward it like a skydiver in a small aircraft, at once sweating and trembling. His skin crawled with an invisible scroll of fire, as if burning off a lamina of lighter fluid, while the stars’ overlapping arias turned ever more dogged and cacophonous. These, indeed, pitilessly plagued and badgered him:
Run, Don Horacio: run.
As he had done during Doctor Vega’s visit, he screamed. But this time he also launched himself through the doorway and pelted down the switchbacking street at an all-out, precipitous tilt, his mouth open and his scream resounding up and down the harbor ridge without break or any lapse in intensity. As some mentally handicapped children do, he held his hands at shoulder height, where they flopped like thalidomide appendages as his thin legs pumped and his heels and toes bruised, split open, and bled.
Father Casares saw him go plummeting past, but could not intercede without abandoning the widow Elisenda, whereas other appalled witnesses along his descent supposed him a raving drunk—a common enough sight on the harbor at that hour—or a soul shoved from the edge of lunacy into its brightest and ghastliest phase.
Señor Gorrión ran as he screamed: he screamed as he ran…past the houses of long-avoided neighbors, past the office of the unlicensed dentist who had perhaps filled his cavities with a quasar-transmitting metal, past a wall on which someone had chalked the mysterious legend ojos de un perro azul (“eyes of a blue dog”), past coconut palms, weird bromeliads, and rampant waterfalls of bougainvillea, and, finally, past a pair of teenage sweethearts who clung to each other even harder at the sight of such a dismaying human projectile, rude testimony to the precariousness of both love and sanity.
In any event, no one attempted to halt him in his plunge or to deflect him from his headlong course. His wired mind—indeed, his entire body—had drained of all awareness but that of the star scourge both above and within him and the lapping salt water ahead. Even so, he extracted Adelaida’s gold sphere from his pocket with one flipper-like hand and prepared to catapult it into the bay. Patience itself, the sea waited to receive both the cargo-laden locket and the hollow Horacio Gorrión.
Copyright © 2009 Steven Utley and Michael Bishop
Books by Steven Utley
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Custer’s Last Jump (with Howard Waldrop)
Ghost Seas
The Impatient Ape
The Beasts of Love
Where or When
POETRY
Career Moves of the Gods
Books by Michael Bishop
URBAN NUCLEUS
A Little Knowledge
Catacomb Years
Under Heaven’s Bridge (with Ian Watson)
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees
Stolen Faces
Transfigurations
Eyes of Fire
No Enemy But time
Who Made Stevie Crye?
Ancient of Days
Philip K Dick is Dead, Alas
Unicorn Mountain
Count Geiger’s Blues
Brittle Innings
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beneath the Shattered Moons and The White Otters of Childhood
Blooded on Arachne
One Winter in Eden
Close Encounters With the Deity
Emphatically Not SF, Almost
At the City Limits of Fate
Blue Kansas Sky
Brighten to Incandescence
As Philip Lawson
WILL KEATS
Would It Kill You to Smile?
Muskrat Courage
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In which a young girl named Mallow leaves the country for the city, meets a number of Winds, Cats, and handsome folk, sees something dreadful, and engages, much against her will, in Politicks of the most muddled kind.