by Gene Logsdon
Fen’s eyes came open. He pushed her away with a cry of fear and surprise, then paused and looked at her. Surely he was dreaming. She on her part looked down on a face so incredibly innocent that she could only smile and bend down to kiss it. With a great shudder, he wrapped his arms around her and screamed as his body convulsed and reached orgasm.
Kadie wrenched herself free, the spell broken as suddenly as it had cast itself upon her. She was on her feet and running for the canoe. Fen had risen to his knees and was shouting after her.
“Wait. Don’t go. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Come back.”
Kadie had pushed off in the canoe now, and was paddling fiercely. Fen ran to the shore, dove in and swam after her. But he was no match for the speed of the canoe and knew he could not swim all the way across the lake. He yelled at her again to come back, which only caused her to paddle harder. “What in the hell is the matter with me,” she was muttering as she tried to put her clothes on and paddle at the same time. “How could I be so goddamned dumb.”
Fen, dog-paddling, watched her fade into the distance, could see her, but barely, beach the canoe across the lake, shove it on a pickup and go speeding away. He swam back to the island, retrieved his clothes and then swam to the farmhouse, holding his clothes up out of the water with one hand. Sobbing, he dressed and made his way back to the seminary. His life, he knew, was changed forever.
CHAPTER 21
Fen went directly to the barn on his return from the lake. Blaze and Gabe would be doing the evening milking. Fen knew he had to talk to someone, and who else could that possibly be in his dilemma.
“You sure timed that right,” Blaze said, as Fen walked into the barn. “We’re about finished.” Then he looked more closely at his comrade. “What’s the matter?”
“Something terrible has happened,” Fen said. Turning away he added. “Or maybe not so terrible.”
What do you mean?”
“I’ve been raped. Sort of.”
Blaze looked at Gabe. Both sprouted wry grins.
“Dammit, it isn’t funny,” Fen said. “I think I’ve been raped.”
Blaze just stared at him, waiting for some indication that Fen was joking. Gabe, more practical, asked: “Who by?”
“Something sort of like a mermaid.”
Normally, Blaze and Gabe would have erupted into laughter at that statement, but Fen’s manner suggested caution.
“Sit down,” said Blaze. He physically propelled Fen to a straw bale behind the stanchioned cows. “What the hell is the matter?
“You’ll think I’ve gone crazy,” Fen said, pleading for understanding. However being found crazy would be, he thought, a blessing. “I keep thinking it might be a dream, but I know it’s not. She was real.”
“She? Get hold of yourself,” Gabe said, finishing the cow he was milking and coming over to sit beside Fen.
Fen started sobbing. Neither of his friends had ever seen him cry. They had never heard him say “dammit” either. Something really serious must have happened.
“You’ll just think I’m nuts,” he said, hopelessly.
“So what’s new,” Blaze said. “Spit it out.”
“I can’t.”
“Look, Fen, men don’t get raped.” Blaze said. Then he looked at Gabe. “Do they?”
Gabe, still suppressing a smile, shrugged. How would he know?
Slowly, haltingly, his eyes cast down, Fen started his story.
“I’ve been going over to the lake a lot, you know.”
“Yeah, we know,” said Blaze. “Been kind of wondering about that, actually.”
“Well, I’ve been going over there to be alone. Just wanted to sit and think a lot.” He could never tell them the darker reasons for his desire to be alone.
“I swim over to the island, maybe fish a little. Watch for wildlife. Sometimes … sometimes I fall asleep. So peaceful there.”
He paused, shook his head, sighed. “Oh, what’s the use. You aren’t going to believe me.”
“Look, if you don’t quit stalling, I’m going to take the milk to the cooler,” Gabe said, losing patience.
“Well, I fell asleep and suddenly I woke up and there was this thing kneeling over me, a woman I tell you, with nothing on.”
“I thought you said it was a mermaid,” Blaze said, his eyes wide with wonder. This was better than any of his fantasies.
“Well, she had legs. Oh, my, you shoulda seen those legs.”
That was too much for Blaze. He could not stop his habitual outburst of laughter.
“So, you have this leggy mermaid attacking you,” Gabe said, humoring him.
“Well, okay, not a mermaid literally,” Fen said. “Like I said, she had legs. And she had breasts. Oh, man. Do mermaids have breasts?” Something that was not fearfulness had slipped into his voice.
“And she … raped you?” Blaze prodded. “She actually—”
“I don’t know,” Fen said. And he really didn’t know. He was not sure if sexual penetration had occurred. All he knew was that the encounter had brought to him a pleasurable release beyond anything he could have imagined. His terror was not in that pleasure, nor in feeling guilt about it, but in knowing, having experienced it, that he could never continue his studies for the priesthood, could never again be the person he had been. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I just know that I came. Boy, did I ever come!”
For all their usual irreverence, Blaze and Gabe were embarrassed. They never talked about sex this way. They would have thought that Fen, of all people, would be the last to break their code of pretending that actual, physical sex was not something to talk about explicitly. Fen must be a case of Too-Much-Kinsey-Report.
“You guys think I’m a terrible sinner? I’m telling you that’s what is really scary about this. Whatever happened, I want it to happen again. I can’t ever be my old self again. Celibacy is bullshit.”
Blaze looked off, out the barn door. Fen was reminding him of the way his own mind had overturned with the notion that men created their gods, thereby changing forever the way he viewed life. So powerful had been that logic to him that it had catapulted him mentally into a strange world of disbelief from which there was no turning back. Fen seemed to have gotten there through sex.
“You understand this never really happened,” Blaze told him, not believing any other conclusion was sane. “You just imagined it.”
“Oh, I wish it were that easy,” Fen said.
“You’ve got to see some kind of psychiatrist,” Gabe said. He had been reading Freud and thought he understood the problem.
“A psychiatrist would just think I was dreaming, like you guys do.”
“Succubus,” Blaze said.
“What?”
“There’s a whole body of literature going back to the Middle Ages about angels or devils in human form hovering over and copulating with monks and nuns and others while they slept,” Blaze said. “The female ones were called succubi. Honest. Come on, I’ll show you.”
After stowing the milk in the cooler, the trio trooped to the library and pored over the book Blaze had pulled from a shelf and blown the dust from. There was a drawing even, of a winged, apparently naked body hovering in the air over a terrified nun on her back in bed. “This is all shit of course,” Blaze said, “but obviously something easy enough to dream. That’s what happened to you, Fen.”
Fen grabbed the book and read, then snapped it shut. “Nope. What happened to me was real. She got into her canoe and paddled away. She was some canoeist. I couldn’t keep up with her, swimming.”
“Oh,” Blaze said. “And then you woke up, right?”
“I swam after her. I saw her get into her pickup and drive away,” Fen said.
“You were chasing her?” Gabe said, a hint of scolding coming into his voice. “You wanted her.”
Fen nodded, and not guiltily. “With every step walking back from the lake, I lost a little more of what I had been,” he said. “Sort of like a snake shedding a skin. I�
��m a new man. It’s horrible to realize this. I’m going to find that girl if it takes me my whole life.”
“You can’t be that crazy,” Gabe said. “You’ve got vows, you know. You’ve promised yourself to the service of God, you know. You don’t have a cent of money, you know.”
“I tell you, something has changed in my mind. It is clear to me that the whole of Church dogma is built on thin air. I don’t give a damn about vows. That’s all stuff made up to keep us in stanchions like cows, to produce for the Order, for the Church.”
“But you gave your word,” Gabe said. “You gotta stand by your word.”
“I’m not the same person that made those promises. And I’m not really disobeying my vows. There is more real chastity in having sex than in trying to deny sex. And when you say I can’t leave because I don’t have any money, isn’t that what the vow of poverty is supposed to be all about?”
Gabe shrugged. Fen had flipped, it was obvious. It was a wonder more of the oblates didn’t. They all took the dogmatic part of religion way too seriously. Didn’t they understand that practical men did not really believe all that institutional dogma stuff literally, for God’s sake. One had to keep religious beliefs alive so that the faithful would not get confused.
Blaze listened to Gabe’s footfalls down the hall. Neither he nor Fen spoke for some time. Fen had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown, Blaze figured, but other than believing that there really was a real woman involved, everything else made sense to him. He knew about masturbating in his sleep, too. Finally he stood up. “I’ve got something I want to show you, Fen. Might help you find your way out of this.” He went to his room and returned with a copy of his “Eleven New Theses, From the Second Coming of Luther.” “Here, tell me tomorrow what you think of this.”
Fen was gone next morning. The only thing missing as far as Blaze could tell was Fen’s guitar and some clothes. There was a note on his desk addressed to Blaze: “Your Theses are correct. Goodbye. I will be over at the farmhouse for awhile. You know I love you guys.”
Prior Robert paced the building in great anxiety, demanding to know, if anyone knew, where Oblate Christopher had gone. Blaze and Gabe thought that for the time being they would just lay low. Fen would probably be back as soon as he got hungry.
Finally the Prior, at the insistence of the rest of the faculty, particularly Abelard and Alexus, called the oblates into the chapel. The Prior himself did not really think it wise to do what he was about to do, but, well, the faculty had spoken. “We have reason to believe that one or more of you know what happened to Oblate Christopher.” He looked directly at Blaze. “I am putting you under your vow of obedience to come forth if you have information bearing on this case.”
This was serious business. Not to obey when “put under the vow” was a grave sin and sacrilege. This was Blaze’s first test of whether he really believed his Eleven New Theses. He stared right back at the Prior. The God of power and might and religious vows and sacrilege was a creation of human minds but not his mind. That forbidding God was not his God. Blaze felt again the freedom that his new concept had given him. To know, deep inside, that dogma was the product of poor dumb sonsabitches who didn’t know any more than he did, oh wow. He merely stared at Robert, his face a blank mask. But for Gabe, being ordered to do something “under” the vow of obedience was an awesome command behind which stood the entire power of the Church to grant or withhold salvation. He stood up. All heads turned toward him. He looked down. He especially did not look at Blaze. He would comply with Robert’s command, but perhaps he could do it in a way that revealed nothing much.
“I do not know where Fen, er, Oblate Christopher, is at the moment, but I do know that he has experienced a terrible dream. He thinks it really happened. He has hidden himself away until he can straighten out the confusion in his mind.”
Murmurs filled the chapel. The Very Reverend Lukey whispered to Clutch Pedali, “I told you that the farm crew was headed for trouble.”
“It’s for sure you will never get confused. You can’t think enough to get confused,” Clutch whispered back.
“Do you have any idea where he has hidden himself, as you put it?” the Prior asked Gabe.
Gabe, who from the study of the ins and outs of Canon Law, now knew, like a clever lawyer, how to manipulate the interminable defining exceptions of the Codex and English grammar. He decided that telling where Fen was staying was an undocumented assumption since he did not absolutely know, at this very moment, if Fen really was where he knew he was. “No, Prior.”
Prior Robert began to fear that Oblate Christopher had wandered off into the swamps and sunk in the muck. Or maybe drowned in the river. But he wanted to refrain as long as possible from reporting a missing person to the outside authorities. And to the Provincial. Why was God testing him so? First an oblate almost gets lost in a snowstorm, now maybe another one is lost in the swamp. The oblates were ordered to form a search party and walk the swamp and river banks. Blaze and Gabe drifted apart from the others as soon as possible and when alone, ran back to the barn and rode off for Lake Wassermensch on the Farm Zephyr.
They found Fen at the old farmhouse, sitting on the porch that commanded a clear view of the little island in the lake. If the mystery girl returned, he would spot her.
“When are you coming back to the sem?” Blaze asked. “Robert is sick with worry about you.”
“I’m not coming back. This is my home for the time being.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“Oh, yes I can. Hasse says I can stay here if I work at remodelling the house. He’s even going to supply the building materials and tools.”
“Hasse will do anything for free labor,” Gabe said disgustedly. “Have you told him your story?”
“Yep. And he doesn’t think I’m crazy.”
“He doesn’t?” Gabe looked at Blaze. Hasse would lie in his teeth for free labor.
“He said I was probably the only normal Josephian in the bunch,” Fen said, triumphantly. He paused, enjoying their discomfort. “And he likes your Eleven New Theses too, Blaze.” He nodded toward the farmhouse door where he had hung Blaze’s oeuvre in a picture frame.
Gabe walked over to the door to read the Eleven New Theses.
“What are you going to do for food?” Blaze asked.
“I’m working on that,” Fen said. “Fish in the lake, wild berries in the woods, and thousands of acres of corn roundabout. I will live on cornpone if I have to.”
“What about when winter comes?”
“Mermaid will return before then,” Fen answered confidently. He had already given her a name. “If not I will beg food if I can’t get enough otherwise. That’s what the vow of poverty really means. I will beg. It will give me an excuse to go door to door to look for her.”
“Can we tell Robert where you’re living?”
“Sure. Tell him anything you want.”
“And you aren’t coming back?”
“No way.”
“What if they come to get you? What if they commit you to an asylum?”
Blaze could see that Fen hadn’t thought of that. Fen paused a moment, considering that possibility. Then he smiled. “I think if they can prove I’m crazy they would have to commit the whole Josephian Order.”
Gabe stepped back away from the Eleven Theses, hardly believing what he had read. “Don’t you two understand that you are cutting yourself off from all chance of salvation?” he said sternly.”You know, it’s one thing to joke about our life, but this is serious shit.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” Fen said, softly. “Don’t you see that none of that salvation stuff is true. My salvation is Mermaid.”
Gabe looked at Blaze. “What about you?”
Blaze shrugged. “It’s all a game somebody invented to make fools out of us, but now that I know, I’m not in a hurry to do anything about it. I want to stick around and see how it all plays out. How can life get any more interesting than this?”
Gabe shook his head. Maybe it was that damned mineral water.
Back at the seminary, Gabe and Blaze and Prior Robert held a meeting in the Prior’s office. Fr. Alexus tried to hear through the wall, and Fr. Abelard stopped several times at the doorway with lame questions about Oblate Christopher and what ought to be told to the other oblates. Finally the Prior closed the door. He had never had a serious discussion with Gabe and Blaze before and surprisingly, all three being, at least for the moment, in accord in their anxiety about Fen, he found their company surprisingly agreeable compared to the counsel he usually got from the faculty. After he had listened to the whole unbelievable tale, he asked the two oblates what they thought he should do.
“I think you should just do nothing and be patient,” Blaze said. “Fen is, or was, more conscientious than, well, than some of us, and whatever his problem, I think he’ll come around. You know, Fen really does try to do the right thing.”
“We think that Fen is having sexual difficulties,” said Gabe. “Unlike many of us, he is so honest and conscientious that he tries to follow the letter of the law in these things.”
Prior Robert arched his left eyebrow at Gabe. In any other situation, he would have felt duty-bound to challenge the young man on what exactly he meant by that, but decided now was not the appropriate time.
“Are you sure he will not obey a summons to return here if I really put the pressure on?” he asked.