Report from a Place of Burning

by George Looney

  And are the burning babies, prophet, some kind of sign? Are they in the scripture as well? DeGreco said.

  The prophet’s face, glowing under the hot lights, had a kind of faraway look. The prophet seemed as if he was no longer confined to that room with DeGreco.

  Signs are signs, detective, whether any one is there to read them or not. Certainly you know that. Isn’t your job all about the reading of signs? Only your signs, detective, are the clumsy signs of man. The signs I seek out are the enigmatic signs God sends us to let us know the time, as scripture says, is nigh. DeGreco was not going to get the prophet to admit to anything. All the prophet would speak of were issues of faith and God’s laws, that much was clear to me. But DeGreco wasn’t ready to give up.

  So you’re saying these burning babies are signs from God? DeGreco said.

  If you’re asking me as a believer in the word of God as put down in the holy scriptures, I’d have to acknowledge the possibility. Can I give you a direct correlation between these babies and the scriptures? No. But I will tell you this, detective. I do not believe the burning of these babies is a manifestation of anything within a man or a woman living on this earth. These little fires burning all over town are a mystery, detective, one you will not solve with your science and your powers of observation and deduction. DeGreco was lost. I could tell he thought the inconsistency he’d led the prophet into meant something, just as I knew he was wrong.

  You’re saying, prophet, you believe God is setting fire to these babies?

  God, or his angels, the prophet said.

  And you think God, or his angels, is killing these babies to provide a sign for someone to read? For you, prophet? Is God killing these babies to send you a message? What is the message, prophet? What is so damned important that these babies have to die horribly in fire to bring it to you?

  The prophet shook his head. You operate from a false premise, detective. You speak of the babies as dying horribly, of them suffering for me. If it is God setting fire to these babies, the fire they burn in is a refining fire, detective, and the babies, they do not suffer God’s fire. It is a kind of ecstasy, detective, a joy they are allowed to know briefly with their bodies but that they get to carry with them into heaven and to keep for all eternity. If God is burning these babies, detective, suffering, believe me, is not part of the deal.

  DeGreco looked over to the mirror. Though he couldn’t see me, I shook my head. Not enough, I was saying. We need him to say something about those arms crossed on the chests, something about the lack of physical evidence of any pain. All the prophet had said so far was he didn’t believe God would make the babies suffer. DeGreco needed to find a way to push the prophet on this, to get him to slip up and say something about the condition of the charred corpses we hadn’t released to the media, something only the person who had burned them could know.

  Have you ever seen a victim of fire? DeGreco said. He knew he didn’t have the prophet yet, I could tell.

  I have seen many things, detective, both in this world and beyond it. There have been, you might recall, photographs published in the newspaper of the babies, though they weren’t particularly clear or detailed photographs.

  Damn, this prophet was good. Getting that on the record allowed him to say anything he might have seemed to know about the condition of the corpses came from seeing those photos in the paper. Though it’s true we only approved a few, and they were photographs that didn’t let you see much in the way of detail, that still gave him reasonable doubt and he knew it.

  Fire, DeGreco said, is not a calm way to die. He wasn’t giving up easy, I’ll give DeGreco that.

  I wouldn’t think so, either, detective, but I’ve seen movies taken during the Vietnam War of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire as a form of ultimate protest, and I seem to remember them sitting there quite calmly as they burned to death. If a monk can stay calm as he burns, with just his faith, then surely, if it is God burning these babies, he can keep them from suffering in the burning, wouldn’t you say?

  So you do believe it’s God setting fire to these babies? DeGreco said.

  Actually, detective, I believe it is the work of angels, carrying out the will of God. And from what I’ve read in the newspaper, which I know can be suspect, everything seems to suggest that the burning of these babies is not a natural phenomenon. All the so-called facts of these cases, looked at objectively, leads to the conclusion that these fires consuming the babies are supernatural in origin. Yes, detective, I believe it is the handiwork of God, not of man.

  DeGreco looked, through the slight tint the mirror gave the room, like a man who had been in one boxing match too many and whose brain had been battered around so much it couldn’t tell him which way was up. He asked the prophet not to leave town without contacting the police first and told him he was free to go, but that he might have more questions for him in the future. The prophet smiled that oily smile of his, and DeGreco showed him out.

  As he left with the prophet, DeGreco looked back at the mirror, and I knew that look was saying, I’m worn out, partner. You stay and keep at it and tomorrow, or maybe the next day, I’ll be back and we’ll start fresh. For now, the look said, I’m done here. The room was empty but for the bright lights the two men had burned under together. Those lights were too much. I had to turn them off.

  Back in the office, the babies in the photographs seemed restless. I couldn’t help but think of all their mothers around town, the empty holes burned in their futures. And I thought of the mother of the fifth victim sitting in the nursery painting fires and humming a lullaby to her baby, who’s beyond the touch of music on his skin. The humming, I heard it so clearly I wondered at what the imagination is capable of. Until I realized I wasn’t imagining the humming of that lullaby. It was me, humming again to the charred babies pinned up around the room. The restless babies. Alone in the office I hummed a lullaby to help them rest.

  The Prophet and the Red Diver

  The red diver of the gorge came to me, finally, in a vision. At long last, he that had descended into the pit so long ago rose out of the murky depths of the subconscious, which is surely a manifestation, within each of us, of the pit. In each of us, the fires of hell burn, a carnival of sulphur and regret. We carry God’s torture chamber with us every step of the way. Occasionally, visions manifest themselves as a side effect of this burden of our souls. The red diver dripped, in the vision, having just pulled himself out of the water. He stood on one of the large, flat stones around the gorge teenagers sun on. At first he didn’t know I was there. At first, I didn’t know I was there, though soon it became clear that my perspective in this vision was from my own body, that I was standing on one of the nearby stones.

  The red diver rubbed the ragged wrist where his hand was missing, his body shaking. It may be it was only the cold air against his wet body, or it may be the red diver was crying. Visions are always ambiguous on some level. That which is the point of a vision, though, will be clear. Seeing his ragged, dangling wrist bone, I looked down at my own wrists, both leading to hands, and with this shift of focus became certain that I, my physical body, or rather the representation of it in this vision—was standing not far from where the red diver’s body shook from sorrow or the cold. And once I knew I was there, so did the red diver.

  Someone, it might have been Jung, argued that we are every figure in any dream we dream. We posit ourselves, or different aspects of ourselves, as figures that take on representational value and become versions of who we are or who we wish we were. And dreams are first cousins to visions, one of the differences being that in a vision we are fully aware of our being in the vision and with this knowledge we gain a modicum of control. So, standing on what seemed to be a flat stone alongside the gorge, I knew I was there and that the red diver was also me, and so knew I was there because he knew what I knew. What aspect of me the red diver represented in this vision I still cannot s
ay with certainty.

  The red diver, aware I was standing so close to him, stopped rubbing his wrist covered with ripped flesh and reached inside the wound where his hand should have been as if there were something inside his arm he needed, something valuable he had been storing there. What he pulled out of his wrist was a small white stone. He held his one remaining hand out to me with the stone lying in its palm. It was clear the red diver intended for me to have the white stone. It was clear the stone was some sort of offering.

  When I took the white stone from the red diver’s open palm, my fingers felt the writing on the stone. The red diver’s mouth was moving, but, as if this were a badly dubbed Godzilla movie, the timing of the words wasn’t in synch with the movement of his lips.

  And will give him a white stone, the mistimed voice intoned, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

  I recognized the voice of St. John, his words. Thus the timing, or mistiming. The words of St. John had been placed in the mouth of the red diver, to be uttered to me in this vision in which I chanted the name on the stone, which, as I chanted, shivered its way into a different form, one that seemed, in the vision, oddly human. I chanted this secret name over and over and when I woke found myself saying the name over and over in the dark of my bedroom. This, I know, is my second name. The name I must take on after judgment. The name that is all there is to save me from the burning.

  • • •

  On the news tonight, on the Around the World in Sixty Seconds segment, they said that someone had stolen the skull of Pope Benedict XIII. The Moon Pope, he was called, in part because it is said he was quite mad. Why, you might ask, would someone steal the skull of a mad Pope. Who would do such a thing? you might ask.

  Maybe the skull was taken by someone suffering one of our modern forms of madness and, in the midst of their particular delirium, they reasoned that, since it was the skull of a Pope, a Pope who was mad, if they could scrape the inside of the skull and ingest the scrapings while praying they might be cured of their madness by the residue of a Pope’s madness.

  Or maybe a woman stole the skull who wants only to break it open and breathe an air, a mad air, that has been trapped inside of that skull almost seven hundred years, believing, the woman, that by breathing this ancient breath of blessed madness she might be relieved of the guilt her body has accrued during a life lived in this fallen form of flesh. Desperation, that most common of all modern madnesses, rarely concerns itself with that process most of us would call reasoning. But when reason and madness come together, that, my brethren, is surely Biblical.

  Maybe the man who took it believes the skull of the Moon Pope might, through the power of the madness it retains, be used to call the moon down out of the sky to purify this world of sin and despair. Maybe he will stand on the highest ground in Spain and, in a tortured Latin, chant to the moon, holding the stolen skull of the Pope up to the sky as if to offer it to the moon, to lure the moon down. And when the moon comes down to lick the sunken eye sockets of that bitter skull of a mad Pope, the oceans will rise to cover all the earth, the moon, and the mad man holding a Pope’s skull.

  Or maybe this mad skull of a Pope is in a crate, having been stolen by a woman who is bringing it home with the hope that it may be used to cure this town where babies are going up in flames in their cribs. Maybe she believes the madness still housed in the ancient cavern of the skull will be able to counter what she takes for the madness she believes to be responsible for the deaths of the babies and, joined with the right ceremony, with the proper prayers, the skull can cleanse the town of the stench of these tiny, charred figures of death.

  Of course, it’s possible whoever stole the mad Pope’s skull is not interested in madness at all, but in death.

  In those days, St. John wrote, shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

  Maybe the thief believes the skull can offer some power over death, can chase death off, make it whimper and curl up in a fetal position and forget what it is.

  What might not be contained, after all, in the skull of a long-dead Pope, especially one like Pedro Martini de Luna, who believed he was a second Noah? Alive, and Pope, Pedro had been known to stand naked on the parapets of his family’s castle on an island just off the coast of Spain and, having shed the miter and the robes that defined him not as a man but as Pope, raise his fists to the night sky yelling at the moon in a voice some who heard it claim was not his voice at all. They say it was deeper and full of a foreign sound. And some say the moon, it yelled back at Pedro. That Pedro and the moon would go on like that for hours, yelling in what seemed to be a kind of guttural Latin back and forth.

  It is said, too, that Pedro’s naked flesh was scarred in ways that echoed the scars men of science, looking through contraptions of steel and ground glass, were saying they saw on the moon. One woman, a maid-servant who had been with the mad Pope more years than anyone else, believed the arguments Pedro had with the moon were the typical troubles between a father and son.

  Some say that, on nights the moon is full and rises large and orange over the walls of the castle Pedro was finally banished to, stripped of his name and title, if you listen you might still hear the faint echoes of Pedro and the moon screaming a demented Latin at one another.

  • • •

  What might the skull of a Pope who argued with the moon in Latin have to say to death? Could such a skull, with the echoes of the body and all its sins and the memory of the miter’s weight upon it, understand the nature of death in ways other skulls cannot? Could a Pope’s skull recognize signs of the coming of the end of things more readily than a living Pope? How much memory of the flesh can bone carry forward? And, after centuries, is there even one Latin word left the skull hums as wind passes through it? Is it a blessing or a curse, that one remaining word, if it’s there at all? Was the skull stolen by a woman or a man, or is the disappearance of this skull that might act as a sort of Geiger counter for the end of things a sign?

  If I had the skull of the Moon Pope in my hands, what would it have to say about the embrace of Bracha Genossar and her daughter, Ariela McCary, found swaying in a kind of dance with death under a ceiling beam in the family room? With the right music, their bodies, held together by arms stiff with rigor mortis, could have been said to move with a kind of grace both undeniable and mysterious. Let down from their posed last dance, the paramedics had to break their arms to pry the two women apart.

  Would the skull say it was not one another they had embraced, but that figure that danced all their lives with both women, held between them by all four of the women’s arms, that figure whose name is the loneliest and longest single syllable of all?

  Would the skull of the mad Pope just grin at the boy in Helena, Montana whose heart was pierced by a pencil, who felt the pencil go in but said it didn’t hurt and yelled for his mother, telling her he was going to die. The pencil stuck in his chest throbbed with his pulse as if directing some ghostly orchestra playing some long funeral dirge.

  Though the orchestra of the dead played perfectly for him, the boy didn’t die. Maybe the skull of the Moon Pope who went by Pedro would sing a hymn with that ghost orchestra to the rhythm of that throbbing pencil in the chest of a boy on his birthday in Montana.

  The skull, wherever it is, isn’t asking for anything.

  • • •

  Skulls, whether the skulls of Popes or of men who have made their flesh into signs the church all but ignores, are empty cages of bone. To hold such a thing in one’s hands and place a kiss upon the ridge of bone over the teeth is a ceremony of loss. The taste of loss is the taste of dust on bone, or the taste of the damp and rotted remnants of skin floating loose in dark water around the gash of a mouth.

  Yes, I kissed the corpse of the red diver in the gorge. And this was no dream, no vision. The vision just let me
know it was time for me to go to the gorge and dive in and dance with the lost body of the red diver.

  It was I, the only one who witnessed the fall in its entirety so many years ago, tied to that fence, I who, swimming, the vision running in my memory, the murky and foul water that fills each year the gorge, bumped into something swollen and stiff and floating, one hand ripped off so long ago. After I had brought the body back up and laid him out on a rock to dry, I swear a thin, bluish smoke began to gather and drift up out of the wound that should have been a hand.

  And the smoke of the incense, St. John wrote, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand.

  And that thin scrawl of blue smoke caught in a wind and pointed to where the sun was half-obscured by some cloud whose shadow draped itself over the landscape in the direction of town. The coming storm, I thought. Whatever gases had waited inside the body of the red diver all those years in the foul water of the gorge had no more wait left in them. The scrawl of blue smoke rose up, leaving the red and rotted flesh behind, and curled and twisted itself into a name. The name my finger first felt on the white stone in the hand of the dream-corpse of the red diver. The name I believed was the name that, uttered, would save me from the time of despair after the judgment.

  And then the smoke took on the figure of a lamb, whose bleating sounded like the sound, in my nightmares, of the flesh of a five-month-old baby burning, layer after layer of skin letting go the gases that wait just below them.

  And then the smoke was no more than the faint residue of the ash of the lamb burned in sacrifice and sifted over the earth.