The Schwarzschild Radius

by Gustavo Florentin

  achel was logged into Yahoo Messenger waiting for Achara to appear. While she waited, she looked through the porn site for anyone who looked like her sister.

  Three-thirty a.m. and no Achara. Rachel was getting worried. She nodded off.

  She awoke from a clouded sleep and reached for the mouse to bring the screen back to life. It was four-twenty in the morning. Achara was calling her online.

  Hi. U there?? Please be there.

  Hi, Rachel scrambled to type. Been waiting 4u.

  Sorry late. Hard to get away. Any news about passport???

  Rachel’s heart sank. Not yet. As soon as I get it, I’ll send it. I promise you.

  I find out how much money I need for bribe officials. It a lot of money.

  How much?

  I need 2000 USD. You have money for me?

  Oh my God, thought Rachel, it might as well be two million.

  Achara, I don’t have that right now. But I’ll get it somehow. I promise.

  Not much time left. They take me away soon. I don’t want them get suspicious to me. They trust me to go buy beer. I save a little money, but only enough for ten minutes of Internet. You have cam?

  No cam either.

  I like to see your face. When I see your face, I pretend I look in the mirror. U r so beautiful.

  Rachel accepted the invite and Achara’s face materialized. She seemed to have aged since last time. Her hair was unwashed and she had a bruise under her right eye.

  Your eye.

  Customer hit me. I fight him back. I always fight back.

  Keep fighting, baby, I’ll get you out of there. Can you go to a relative or friend’s house until I can help you?

  No. Tong knows my relative address. He can send men to get me. Nowhere to hide. You still help me?

  Of course. I don’t want anyone hurting you until I get you out.

  Don’t worry. I’m very strong. But u r my only hope. I have plan to get out, but just need your help. Passport, money. I hate to ask.

  Rachel could see she was losing faith that her own sister would help her.

  I promise you, I will get you out. She didn’t know how she was going to keep that promise, but she’d keep it if it killed her.

  When I see you again?

  Day after tomorrow. Rachel hoped that this would be enough time for the passport to arrive―but had Olivia even applied for it?

  God bless you.

  It was six in the morning when Rachel found it. The blood rushed out of her head as she witnessed Olivia in bed having sex with a forty-year-old man. The scene was uploaded two months ago. And her name was Tia. She watched it all the way through, then she watched it again. She held her cell phone in her hand for a half hour before she could bring herself to hit the speed dial.

  “McKenna.”

  “Detective, this is Rachel Wallen. I found something, but you have to promise me that if it’s not necessary to tell my parents, they won’t be told.”

  “I’ll have to be the judge of that, Rachel. What is it?”

  “I’m sending you a link. It’s a scene. A sex scene. With Olivia. There are other people in it.”

  “You’re sure it’s her?”

  “It’s my sister. She’s wearing the jade pendant I gave her for her birthday last year.”

  “I’ll look into it right now.”

  Rachel buried her face in the pillow. In her tangled mind, she tried to fathom how such a transformation could take place. Then Father Massey’s words came back to her with new meaning.

  The infinite power of human transformation.

  want to thank you for your support, ladies and gentlemen. Together we’ll prevent what happened to Dina Anne Sullivan from ever happening again.” Father Massey stepped down from the podium to vigorous applause. The guests had paid three hundred dollars a plate for this fund raiser. Transcendence House was one of the most popular causes in the city, one that brought politicians of both parties into the same room. The murder of Dina Anne Sullivan three years earlier was one of the few things they could agree on.

  An eleven-year-old girl runs away from her abusive stepfather and seeks refuge in a convent. Instead of taking her in, she is turned over to a city agency which, after a cursory review of the case, sends her back home. One month later, the stepfather rapes and kills her in a drunken rage. The incident mortified the Church and embarrassed social welfare agencies.

  Enter Father Massey, who proposed a bill which would allow the state to underwrite selected religious institutions of all faiths for the specific purpose of taking in, educating, and caring for runaway children under the age of fourteen while their cases are under investigation.

  Such a bill would have been subject to the full force of separation of church and state arguments had it not been for the few pints of blood that Dina gave and the tons of ink which followed. Dina’s Law had just been signed by the Governor, and it meant that a child could seek refuge in one of these institutions and have the cost of their needs covered by the state.

  As Father Massey worked the tables like a bridegroom, the cameras flashed in pursuit. Indeed, to the audience, he was wedded to his unending fight against child abuse. Every politician in New York wanted to be associated in some way with this young, charismatic priest who managed to help illiterate street kids score in the top tenth percentile on their SATs and took hookers off the street and transformed them into IT technicians and computer programmers.

  This dinner at a Long Island VFW raised twenty thousand dollars for new computer equipment for the shelter. The new website had donor items ranging from sponsoring a day’s worth of medical care in the clinic for ten thousand dollars to buying a tank of gas for the outreach vans and uniforms for the intake staff.

  Massey was careful to keep his accounting hound’s tooth clean, showing exactly where each and every dollar went. Donors liked that, and city officials did, too, as it was a trick they had never mastered. Every year, Massey brought in independent auditors to go over the books of Transcendence House, Inc. and made the results available on the Internet. This kind of transparency, along with the results made him command the unquestioned respect of all.

  The idea was to go national, then world-wide. For this, hundreds of millions would have to be raised, and Father Massey was a born fund-raiser.

  As he drove back to Transcendence House in his ‘99 Honda Civic, Massey thought this had gone well, as had yesterday’s trip to Washington. Gabriella had recorded his subcommittee testimony, and he wanted to review that as soon as possible to critique his performance. Then he needed another media event to keep him in the public eye while the Washington job was being decided. That would be tomorrow’s project.

  In his office at Transcendence House, Massey sat at his laptop inputting his schedule for the next two weeks. Breakfast tomorrow with Cecil Wright, the CEO of Kanga Systems, a microprocessor company. Massey was lobbying for five hundred thousand dollars.

  His research had revealed that Wright was a thirty-two-year-old electrical engineer, graduate of MIT and founder, at twenty-three, of Kanga. His firm went on to develop MPP, massively parallel processors used in supercomputers. He was vegetarian and single. Massey hadn’t been able to identify any activities outside of fly-fishing that the CEO enjoyed.

  What would be appropriate attire? He had located several photos of Wright and he was formally dressed in all of them. In a taped interview, he proved to be a humorless man. Massey debated whether to put on the collar or the Barney’s Fifth Avenue. As a general rule, if you were going to ask for money, wear the collar; if you’re going to ask for power, wear the suit. The collar it was, then.

  After the CEO, it was lunch with Daniel O’Leary, the city comptroller. Just a get-to-know-each-other lunch at Fraunces Tavern. Probably has mayoral aspirations. Massey had to cover himself. He’d use the suit for that one.

  His days were sixteen hours long, and he still couldn’t get everything done. He wondered how men with families accomplished anything at all.

>   Someone knocked. It was five minutes after ten. Lights-out.

  “Come in.”

  Gabriella entered and closed the door. She was fifteen, barefoot with thick black hair down to her waist.

  “I came as soon as I could.”

  “Have a seat,” said the priest, beaming. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” He could feel the girl’s eyes on him.

  She worshipped him. He had rescued her at the age of thirteen from an abusive pimp who happened to be her father. She had come to Transcendence House black-eyed and emaciated from being chained to a basement radiator for three days without food or water. In that time, she had lost enough weight to slip out of her bonds. The first step was to prosecute the father, which they succeeded in doing. She was then handed over to a foster family, where conditions became painfully familiar to her. She reappeared at Father Massey’s door five months ago and dedicated herself entirely to him. She looked things up for him, ironed his clothes, tidied his office.

  “Writing a letter?” she asked.

  “Oh, taking care of a few things.”

  “I wish I could type like that.”

  The priest closed his laptop and now was ready to give the girl his full attention.

  “I got that book you wanted,” said Gabriella, handing him a library copy of The Elements of Fly-Fishing.

  “Ah, exactly what I need. And plenty of pictures too. I’ll dazzle Mr. Wright with my fly-tying.”

  “You like it?”

  “Hey, you’re good. What would I do without my administrator-slash-researcher?”

  “I went to a couple of libraries, but I remembered you wanted something with a lot of pictures.”

  “Good choice. I can always count on you, Gabriella. That’s a great quality.”

  He sat next to her on the couch and took her hand.

  “How did tonight go?” she asked.

  “Outstanding. We raised over twenty thousand dollars and focused media attention on our cause. That’s a mighty combination.”

  “It’s great that the law went through.”

  “Yes. Do you know what it means to make a law? Think of it. You can build a bridge, castle, or cathedral, but nothing changes the course of our lives and of history like creating the laws by which we live. Why are you smiling?”

  “I like it when you talk like that. Sometimes I try to quote you, but I can’t.”

  “You don’t go quoting everything I say, do you?”

  “I mean, no.” She gave him her other hand too. “I’m totally discreet, you know that.”

  “A lot of things go on between us that no one must ever know about.”

  “I know that.”

  “I confide a lot of things to you that others might use against me.”

  “I would never hurt you, Father Evan.”

  The priest held her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth. She wrapped her arms around his neck and redoubled the passion. His hand slid up the girl’s checkered skirt and she responded by unbuttoning her blouse.

  “What do you want me to do for you?” she asked.

  He looked at her and brushed her hair away from her face.

  “You want me to dance for you?”

  He smiled.

  “I’ve got on the new underwear.” She got up off the couch.

  “I’d like that. No, stand over there. Let me get this out of the way.” He removed the print of Guernica from the wall and put it on the floor.

  “No distractions,” he said.

  As the girl began to writhe, the priest’s mind became a tangle of guilt, passion, fantasy, and hard consequence.

  She showed him a devotion that he was incapable of giving to anyone but himself. Aspirants prayed for this kind of dedication, and here he was, receiving it. Why couldn’t he love a woman? Why had it always been children that made him burn? Why was it always thoughts of young girls that accompanied him to bed and awoke him in the morning? And those photos he had collected through the years… He thought they were the most beautiful things in the world, and knowing that it was wrong didn’t change it.

  She removed her panties now, and every time she was naked before him, he was as paralyzed as though he had been impaled by a stake. In such moments, he would give up all that he had, and could ever hope for, in exchange for those thighs. Others might think that it was he who had power over her, but he knew the truth.

  Father Massey’s hand groped behind the library shelf and threw a switch. The video camera began to roll.

  areful getting back to bed,” said Massey when they were done.

  She stood up on her toes and kissed his cheek. She had already turned to leave when he pulled her back for one last kiss.

  Father Massey stood looking at the door as though following her beyond the room. He put the poster back on its nail and contemplated the bombardment, the twisted figures, the wailing that was Guernica. It was an image that evoked Dante’s Inferno.

  He thought about where he had gone wrong.

  He had been born into a broken family. His father was an interstate truck driver who was on the road eight months out of the year. His mother had two men on the side. At an early age, he learned to deal with solitude―a gift that would assist him later. With his father away, and his mother entertaining in the next room, young Evan had to care for his three brothers and sisters. A natural organizer, he planned the meals, distributed the household tasks, and scheduled all TV programming. Indeed, his first attraction was to the military, but his nature required immediate results and four years was too long.

  He enrolled in Suffolk Community College in Long Island, majoring in pre-engineering. Evan was fascinated by cathedrals and the endurance of the artisans that labored over generations to build them.

  After getting his associate’s degree, he landed a construction job through a friend making good union scale wages. It would be a good job, he thought, until he could decide on what he was going to do.

  Whatever he did, he did well. Massey enjoyed working with mortar and wood, although he hid his aversion to the simple men who did this kind of labor―the sort of men he looked upon with contempt in the trailer park he grew up in.

  He had always been drawn to the great mission of helping the downtrodden and became a Claretion.

  The Claretions’ special emphasis on outreach to youth and social justice appealed to Massey. As a lay volunteer, he could assist in the many worldwide missions without going through the rigors of seminary.

  He began by working in a soup kitchen in the inner city in New York. He tired quickly of this and searched for a greater challenge.

  After a few months, he saw an ad in the paper for a passage to India via freighter. This was the adventure he was waiting for. He told his superiors that he wished to serve in India and would be in a position to do much good there. They told him that he was free to go, but that the Order couldn’t sanction the trip. They wished him luck.

  Massey signed up immediately and was off. So it was that he found the village of Krupal in northern India.

  Now he contemplated the second half of that story, the half that was not in the video shown to all who come to Transcendence House.

  It was all true. Twenty-two-old-year-old Massey had saved a people, had altered the course of thousands of lives for the better. And for this, the villagers were grateful. They addressed him as Baba. They declared May 27th Evan Massey Day, the anniversary of the completion of the reservoir. But it didn’t end there.

  Massey stayed in the village for twelve more months following the end of the project. He asked that a house be constructed for him, which the villagers gladly did with the finest materials available. There were people to wash his clothes, which now consisted of dhotis made of fine cotton and silk. There was someone to clean his house, to cut his hair, to clean the dirt from under his fingernails. Women were assigned the task of bathing Massey.

  No whim of his was too trivial. He needed fresh-cut roses in his living room every morning, and so a boy was given
the job of running to another village six kilometers away to fetch them. Massey decided that he wanted satellite TV, and the people spent their hard-earned cash to satisfy him.

  He requested a weekly stipend. Small at first, the stipend became a tax, and the tax was raised to support his interminable purchases, which included film and beer.

  Playing the role of village counselor, he mediated disputes and imposed judgments which the villagers accepted. And like any bureaucrat, Evan Massey was subject to lobbying. Fathers began to offer the services of their daughters.

  Among the villagers, it became a mark of status to have a daughter obtain an “audience” with Baba. Then the daughters started getting younger and younger. Before long, Massey was sleeping with eleven-year-olds. He began filming the girls, then watched the videos incessantly, reliving each conquest.

  He still chaired town meetings where he could hold forth, but his audience had changed. While before he was beloved by all, now he was worshipped by some and despised by many.

  The end came when accounts of his excesses spread to the surrounding villages and police came looking for him. Massey fled like a common thief.

  Returning to America, he found no breathless crowds cheering him. Unemployed with only a two-year degree, he took a job as a waiter in an upscale restaurant. Now he catered to the whims of others. He practiced phrases like, “Will there be anything else, sir?” and “You’re right, ma’am. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

  The daily humiliation crushed him, and he couldn’t stop yearning for the approval of the crowds chanting his name. That past praise was now a recurring slur that was with him at every turn. He who had given life, who had designed and set things into motion, now scraped bread crumbs off fine linen tablecloths under the glare of a headwaiter.

  One night, the news ran a story about a burnt-out church in the South Bronx that was slated for demolition. Many residents were protesting because it was said that several miracles had occurred as a result of the intervention of St. Cecilia, after whom the church was named. St. Cecilia was condemned to death by beheading and had survived three ax blows from her executioner. Whenever there was a critical injury in the violent neighborhood, relatives would pray in the ruins of the church. Like the saint, it had been condemned, but somehow refused to die. It breathed life into the victims for whom prayers were said within its walls.