“Should I throw myself from the roof?”
Do as I have done, and know peace, says the Voice. But the skull says nothing. It looks at him with the same empty sockets, placid as the ark beneath the rainbow.
* * *
—
There is no way to know if any saint, in the history of sainthood, has vomited as much as Saint Tongue of Flame is currently vomiting. Hagiography is riddled with detailed accounts of sicknesses cured and miracles dispensed, but the barfing of the holy has a less precise reckoning. Still, it is safe to assume that few saints have produced a volume of caramel-toned spume comparable to what Saint Tongue of Flame is currently depositing into the trophy room wastebasket. Half a bottle of Bushmills on a chronically empty stomach can have this effect.
Saint Tongue of Flame’s tongue of flame fills the brushed-steel interior of the wastebasket like a lantern. When he plunges his head inside to make an offering, he can see the pool at the bottom clearly, the brown liquor mingling with a yellowish cloud of phlegm and bile like a barely whisked egg. Here, he knows, is every word he has ever uttered. Every sermon, every prayer. This is all that has ever come from his mouth—a foul-smelling discharge repulsive even to him.
Except once. After the fiasco in the court of Philip IV, tossed drunk and delirious into the kennels by jeering guards, he had, in one sublime moment, managed to compose a single transcendent psalm. The words had come to him too quickly for thought, his whirling mind grabbing syllables and phrases almost at random, selecting for sound over form, music over meaning, until he found himself intoning aloud a perfect quatrain to an audience of rutting mastiffs, its slurred poetry a gleaming web of perfect clarity and perfect mystery. He was sure that if another human ear had been present, that ear would have heard, somewhere behind the words, the Voice calling out in the wilderness, and yet Saint Tongue of Flame knew that the lines were not a product of the tongue of flame, but an exaltation of his own sweetly swimming brain. More gratified and hopeful and drunk than he had ever been, he drifted to sleep on the kennel floor, waking the next day to a dog’s dry tongue rasping at this chin, the previous night’s opus replaced by a spiteful migraine. He tried to recall it in the days that followed, but couldn’t. Like an icicle, the psalm had dropped from his mind, shattered, and melted away.
Now, drunk again, he produces only vomit. So much vomit. How is it possible that there is this much vomit inside him? Another miracle of multiplication, perhaps. The Lord fed multitudes with five barley loaves and two fish. He would fill a wastebasket to tipping with only half a bottle of Bushmills.
Reviled and hated, the Voice repeated. Simply for speaking my name.
But the name hadn’t been the problem. It wasn’t the message, but the messenger. Over the centuries, the Word had spread beyond even the most optimistic expectations. Just not through him, not once because he had uttered it. Saint Tongue of Flame’s stomach heaves. If he had never left the shores of the Volga, the world would be the same. If he dumped the other half of the Bushmills bottle over his head and let the tongue of flame turn him into a fireball, no one in this house, or whatever lies beyond it, would come to know God any less.
* * *
—
Deep in the columbarium, Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate sits, her back against a wall of urns stretching infinitely down the corridor. The vault has no exit that she can find, no secret staircase leading back up to the study or the nursery, no drainage grate revealing starlight or moonlight. When she stirs, the echo is bottomless. When she is still, there is only the dislocated sound of water flowing somewhere else, and the occasional growl of her stomach. Once again, she has forsaken the smug, overbearing company of men, and once again, it has left her imprisoned and alone.
There is a baroque painting of her hanging in the sacristy of Mariatrost Basilica in Graz. It depicts a young Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate in her cell, awaiting execution. In it she is kneeling in a shaft of sunlight from a high window. The chiaroscuro indicative of the period gives her pure white alb an explosive radiance. In her hand: the plate. At her feet: the bones of her predecessors. Under the door: the shadow of the executioner. She wears an expression of pity, but not for herself. It is the bones she pities, the executioner, the world of sin and cruelty she will leave behind.
But in reality there had been no shaft of light, no window. She had not knelt, but lay curled and shuddering in the corner, as far from the door as possible, waiting. She does not kneel now in the columbarium either. One leg lies straight before her, the other bent upright at the knee, and it is on this knee that she rests her unsevered wrist, leaving her still-attached hand to dangle at her shin. The plate with her other hand sits in one of the empty alcoves, at home in the company of other dead things. The underground room is full of them, row after row of an incinerated ancestry leading down into the darkness. The masters of this house are here, generations interred in clay and copper vessels, listening to the water run. She wears no look of pity, and indeed feels none, for herself or anyone else. Art gets so many things wrong.
Except for the man at the door, the Voice reminds her. There is always a man at the door.
* * *
—
Yes, the saints are in the parlor, but how? They were not here a moment ago. From what strange matter, then, were they reconstituted? The wood of the coatrack? The aqueous humors of the samovar? The ferny earth?
“Should we pray?” asks Saint Imperious Virgin.
“He hears us, even here, even now,” says Saint Prophet to Some, Apostate to Others. From the velvet settee, Saint Literally Starved to Death, too weak to verbalize, raises a single bendy-straw finger in assent. And so they pray.
They pray for guidance, and safety, and certainty. They pray for revelations, and the wisdom to rightly interpret them. They do not know if this is the correct action, but they have faith. They serve a mystery, the Voice that can’t be heard outside the wordless barrows of the soul. They can only hope they hear it correctly. They fear that it might leave, and that it might stay. They want it to fill them up and drown them out. It is the exaltation of being relentlessly tested, the torment of being inescapably loved.
Soon they will set off into the house. It is possible they will find the others, the saint still vomiting on the floor of the trophy room, the saint wasting away in the columbarium, the saint hanging naked by his ankles from the shower spout, his head just above drowning as he stares into the empty eyes of a floating skull.
Possible, but unlikely. The house is large. There are so many rooms, so many places that the Voice might lead them, and the saints are never able hold themselves together for long.
Andy, Lord of Ruin
I. The Andy Wingham Polemic
Andy Wingham was going to explode.
It was a topic of some debate. Not the exploding itself, of course. One look at Andy, the faint glow that surrounded him, the twitchiness in his face, made it impossible to think that he wouldn’t come apart, and soon. Instead, the dispute, which was slowly consuming our entire town, seemed to center around the consequences of Andy’s imminent fulmination, including the possibility that he might survive, and the danger posed to the rest of us if he did not.
The formal debate was held at the Kingfisher K-12 gymnasium. Everyone came to get a good look at Andy’s curiously luminous skin and listen as authorities discussed his inevitable death sentence. The news of his condition had shocked everyone except us, his friends and colleagues, and the rest of our middle school class. We’d watched him radiate for weeks, trying hopelessly to alert the proper adults. We’d shouted our concerns from the four-square pitch, and over the steamy foil of baked potatoes.
“Andy Wingham’s skin glows in the dark,” we told them, “and he smells like egg farts. It’s unusual. He’s unusual. We, his friends and colleagues, are concerned.”
We meant these as sincere warnings, as pleas for aid and guidance. We’d been a
round sick kids and kids faking sick enough to know the difference, and this was neither. This was something altogether new.
“Andy is emitting an unusual amount of heat for a middle schooler,” we stated clearly for the record. “Please advise.”
But no one listened, or if they did, they listened wrong.
“Be nice,” we were told, or else. “Think of Andy’s feelings,” which was frustrating, because it was Andy’s feelings, along with his health and well-being, that most concerned us. We liked Andy. Or rather, we liked things about him. His ceaseless, bloody campaign against the animal kingdom, for example. Andy was as ruthless a killer of lesser creatures as we’d ever seen, which frightened and thrilled us. His cruelty felt necessary in a world where we controlled so little else, and though we didn’t revel in these small murders as he did, we liked knowing and seeing that they were possible. He had tutored us by day on the inner mysteries of baby sparrows, whose tiny bodies splattered beautifully on asphalt, and by night on the neon utility of fireflies, which could stain that same asphalt in brushstrokes of alien green when caught and crushed and smeared just right. We killed hundreds under his command, skidding them against the pavement until the streaks spelled our names.
Also, Andy’s freeze tag skills were legendary. The way he effortlessly juked and deked and squirmed just out of reach, until at last he was it, and within minutes the school yard was a garden of statues with Andy at its center, walking leisurely among us, the artist admiring his work.
It was weeks before an adult finally noticed the glowing. A tornado warning had forced the entire Kingfisher student body to the school’s basement boiler room, where we all squatted on the heated concrete and tried to take things seriously. When a windblown cottonwood branch speared a nearby junction box, knocking out the grid for the surrounding block and plunging the basement into a subterranean darkness, we filled the room with ghostly hooting and the shrieks and proud curses of the more-developed girls suddenly made to fend off a coordinated tactical strike of grabby hands and nervous lips. Only the girls next to Andy were safe, the snappable elastic of their training bras protected by his sentinel radiance. Dutifully ducked and covered beside the boiler, hands wrapped around thighs and head between knees, Andy was not even aware that the lights had gone out, as all around him a steady harvest-moon glow breathed against the starry sky of the boiler’s pilot lights.
* * *
—
Once adults were involved, things got serious.
It was still tornado season, and the Butler-building walls of the Kingfisher gymnasium groaned under the heaving wind. Before the debate began, in observance of public safety, Andy was placed in one of the school’s steel dumpsters, which the maintenance staff had emptied out and relocated to the gym’s half-court line. The assembled adults, not wishing to overstep their bounds, took their cues from Mr. and Mrs. Wingham, who wandered through the proceedings with baffled embarrassment at having gone so long without noticing their own son’s condition. Now, they could do little more than sit, sip coffee, and let others tell them what was best for their boy.
There were two prevailing theories.
The first was presented by Mr. Ball, the diminutive, sun-shy head of the Kingfisher science department, whom we weren’t meant to have seen smoking shaky-handed cigarettes by the loading dock every fifth period after his separation from Mrs. Ball, who, according to our mothers, was now selling interior design solutions in Iowa. Mr. Ball’s Theory of Disintegration stated, in layman’s terms, that the smallest parts of Andy were threatening to abandon one another, to reject their time-honored bonds and go their separate ways, forfeiting the whole idea of Andy in the process. Offering no evidence and little actual science, Mr. Ball pontificated on the vast microcosmic expanses that separated particles, and the fickle laws of attraction that governed them. The nucleus, according to him, was a country ruled less by scientific edict than by heartbreak and spite. He warned that what we were seeing, the glowing of Andy’s skin and more recently his eyes, which had taken on a light butane-blue flicker, was but the preamble—energy released from a trial separation before the complete and total breakdown of all particle relationships. By Mr. Ball’s reckoning, when Andy exploded—and he would—the result would be a crater and a mist of lonely atoms free at last from the incessant tug of one another.
The opposing theory was presented by Miss Florentine, the art and sometimes music and sometimes but rarely human sexuality teacher, whose interpretation was somewhat rosier. Under the school’s two district championship banners, both won before any of us were born, Miss Florentine announced that Andy’s sunny pallor was not a sign that his body was moving apart, but, rather, that it was moving forward. What we were witnessing, she explained, was a pointed, emergent evolution of the human spirit. An outspoken believer that children are God’s little miracles, that children grow, that children change, Miss Florentine insisted that Andy was becoming something greater and more affirming than the sullen and, let’s be honest, dark-minded boy we all knew. Yes, he would explode. But what else did one expect on the eve of a new era? Andy’s explosion was just one small part of his renewal, rebirth, and reimagination. He was a prophet, she insisted, a messiah born unto mankind, erasing the original sins of Homo sapiens sapiens and delivering something more advanced, and exalted, and even, dare we say, holy? Miss Florentine thought it right that we did.
“That’s not how evolution works,” Mr. Ball said from behind a stern bulwark of middle school science.
“That’s not how it used to work,” said Miss Florentine.
Mr. Ball was unmoved. The simple fact was that Andy represented a threat, not only to himself but to the community as well. Imagine, he said to the assembled parents, some of whom were polite enough to look earnestly concerned, what would happen if Andy’s antisocial particles weren’t content with only pulling him apart. The law of conservation of matter clearly stated that Andy’s rebellious quarks and gluons could be neither created nor destroyed. Did we really want them hanging around, fraternizing with other atoms in ways that might eventually mean the dismantling of our schools? The disintegration of our homes? The sudden poofy evaporation of our children? Is that what we wanted?
That is in no way what I want, parents muttered in a sudden outbreak of consensus, and neither does my spouse. No reasonable, good-hearted American parent would want that, was the general feeling.
Nonsense, Miss Florentine said. Anyone with eyes could see that Andy was a thundering miracle of nature. He was doing what we should all be doing, what we had been doing for millions of years before our environments became too agreeable and our hearts too complacent to even consider becoming something more. And now that one of us was finally returning to that grand mission of human improvement, where were we putting him? Was he not, at this very moment, in a dumpster? Was this scion of humanity not currently ankle-deep in sack-lunch juice and notebook-paper fringe? How had this group of, yes, reasonable and, yes, good-hearted and, gosh darn it, yes, American! parents allowed this to happen? Had we gone insane? What were we, a community of lunatics?
Parents squirmed at this. They wondered openly if the dumpster had at least been hosed down first, for heaven’s sake. Before taking her seat, Miss Florentine asked politely if we wanted to bring the forward momentum of all humanity to a screeching halt, at which point it became fairly clear that no one knew what they wanted.
In response, Mr. Ball told them what science wanted: to bombard Andy with neutrons and antiprotons behind barriers of tungsten and lead, to watch him fall apart and fly to pieces, and study him. Miss Florentine, on the other hand, expressed her simple desire to see Andy emerge from his incandescent chrysalis, to marvel at his intricacies, to kneel at the foot of his superiority, and ooh, and aah, and study him.
We sat with our mothers’ hands over our ears as the discourse began to shift from the erudite language of science and theology to our more recognizable school y
ard dialects. Andy’s parents sat glazed, opening their mouths only to sip more coffee. But we, Andy’s friends and colleagues, weren’t paying attention to any of it. We were watching the dumpster, the way its lid occasionally rose like an eyebrow to reveal our friend, his blue eyes piercing the darkness of the bin like the headlights of an oncoming something, a barreling something, a something that could not be halted, or slowed, or made to give way.
* * *
—
Andy was eventually relocated to the tennis courts in Parish Park. The nets were taken down and the chain-link fences covered over with aluminum foil, which Mr. Ball insisted would protect both the park and the surrounding neighborhood from whatever Andy might be emitting. The foil had the added benefit of shielding Andy from view, and we were forbidden from seeing him, except for one day, when both Mr. Ball and Miss Florentine, acting as Andy’s unofficial and still-feuding interim guardians, agreed that the boy’s morale, which had been visibly circling the drain even after he’d been let out of the dumpster, was potentially affecting his condition for the worse. A week after his incarceration, they appeared at our front doors just before dinner, asking our parents if they would, in the interest of science and/or the betterment of the human species, allow their children to be taken to Parish Park, where, under the best protection available, we would be permitted to play with one Andrew Leon Wingham for no more than three-quarters of an hour.
Nothing was sugarcoated. Both teachers made it perfectly clear that the playdate involved no small amount of risk, that Andy’s condition was believed to be highly unstable.
We knew our parents were mere moments from a chain of phone calls. Panicked voices could already be heard saying, What do the two of you think? We’re not letting ours go. Sure, it breaks our hearts to think of that poor kid, all alone and probably not even being fed properly, but rules are rules, a school night’s a school night, and so on until all involved felt absolved and sensible in their parenting.
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover Page 12