“Probably another fight. You know how they are.”
But it wasn’t a fight. The regulars—Rider, Dandy, Lefty, Dirty Harry, Poppy, Bigfoot, Indian, Stony, One-Thumb George—and a few of the newer ones were clustered around one of the long tables. She saw Dan standing on the far side of the circle as Dr. Joe bent over Preacher who sat ramrod straight, holding his hands before his face.
“A miracle!” Pilgrim was screeching, dancing and gyrating among the tables of the Big Room. “I always knew Preacher had the power, and now it’s come! It’s a miracle! A fucking miracle!”
Carrie pushed closer.
Preacher was staring at his hands, muttering. “I can see! Praise God, I can see!”
She stepped back and stared at the short strand of gray hair in her hand. It hadn’t come from Augusta. She recognized it now. It was the same length and color as the stray strands Carrie had been trimming from the Virgin a short while ago. It must have stuck to her sleeve downstairs and fallen into the soup as she was adding the ingredients.
A miracle...
She wanted to laugh, she wanted to cry, she wanted to grab Pilgrim’s hands and join him in a whirling dervish.
Oh, Pilgrim, she thought as she hurried back through the kitchen and down to the subcellar. If only you knew how right you are!
Yes, it was a miracle. And Carrie had a feeling it would not be the last.
‡
“Preacher can really see again,” Dan said for the third or fourth time. Evening had come and they were cleaning up the Big Room after dinner. “Not well, mind you. He can recognize his hand in front of his face and not much more, but at least that’s something. He’s been totally blind for forty years.”
Carrie had decided to hold off telling Dan about the piece of the Virgin’s hair in the soup. He’d only go into his Doubting Thomas routine. She’d wait till she had more proof. But she couldn’t resist priming him for the final revelation.
She glanced around to make sure they were out of earshot of the volunteers in the kitchen.
“Do you think it’s a miracle?” she said softly.
Dan didn’t look up as he wiped one of the long tables. “You know what I think about miracles.”
“How do you explain it then?”
“José says it might have been hysterical blindness all along, and now he’s coming out of it. He’s scheduled him for a full eye exam tomorrow.”
“Well, far be it from me to disagree with Doctor Joe.”
Dan stopped in mid wipe and stared at her. “Aw, Carrie. Don’t tell me you think—”
“Yes!” she said in a fierce whisper. “I think a certain someone has announced her presence.”
“Come on, Carrie—”
“You and José believe in your hysterical blindness, if you wish. All I know is that Preacher began to see again within hours of a certain someone’s arrival.”
Dan opened his mouth, then closed it, paused, then shook his head. “Coincidence, Carrie.”
But he didn’t sound terribly convinced.
Carrie couldn’t repress a smile. “We’ll see.”
“We’ll see what?”
“How many ‘coincidences’ it takes to convince you.”
Fruitless Vigil in Tompkins Square
Approximately 1,000 people gathered last night for a candlelight prayer vigil in Tompkins Square Park. Surrounded by knots of curious homeless, many of whom call the park home, the predominantly female crowd prayed to the Virgin Mary in the hope that she would manifest herself in the park.
Sightings of a lone woman, described as “glowing faintly”, and identified as the Blessed Virgin, have been reported with steadily increasing frequency all over the Lower East Side during the past few weeks.
Despite many recitations of the Rosary, no manifestation occurred. Many members of the crowd remained undaunted, however, vowing to return next Sunday evening.
(The New York Post)
SIXTEEN
Manhattan
“Something bothering you, José?”
Dan and Dr. Joe ambled crosstown after splitting a sausage-and-pepper pizza and a pitcher of beer at Nino’s on St. Mark’s and Avenue A. José had been unusually quiet tonight.
“Bothering me? I don’t know. Nothing bad or anything like that, just...I don’t know.”
“That’s the first time you’ve put that many words together in a row all night, and six of them were ‘I don’t know.’ What gives?”
José said, “I don’t know,” then laughed. “I...aw hell, I guess I can tell you: I think two of my AIDS patients have been cured.”
Dan felt an anticipatory tightening in his chest and he wasn’t sure why.
“You’re sure?”
“It’s not just my diagnosis. They were both anemic, both had Kaposi’s when I’d seen them in July. They came in last week and their skin had cleared and their hematocrits were normal. I sent them to Beekman for a full work up. The results came back today.”
“And?”
“They’re clear.”
“Cured?”
Dan saw José’s head nod in the dark. “Yep. They’re now HIV neg. Their peripheral smears are normal, their CD4 cell counts are normal, their skin lesions are gone. Not a single goddamn trace that they were ever exposed to HIV. Hell, they both used to be positive for hepatitis B surface antigen and now even that’s gone.”
José sounded as if he was going to cry.
“But how—?”
“Nothing I did. Just gave them the usual cocktail, and let me tell you, man, they weren’t all that reliable about taking their meds. Fucking miracle, that’s what it is. Medical fucking miracle.”
Dan’s mouth went dry. Talk of miracles did that to him lately. So did talk of people seeing the Virgin Mary in his neighborhood.
“Miracle. You mean like...Preacher?”
“I can’t say much about Preacher. I’ve got no medical records on him from when he was blind, so I can’t say anything about the condition of his retinas when he couldn’t see. All I can say is that his vision has improved steadily until it’s almost twenty-twenty now. But...these two AIDS patients, they were documented cases.”
Dan sensed a certain hesitancy in José.
“I wouldn’t happen to know these two patients, would I?”
José hesitated, then sighed. “Normally I wouldn’t tell you, but they’re going to be in all the medical journals soon, and from then on they’ll be news-show and talk-show commodities, so I guess it’s okay to tell you they’re both regulars at your Loaves and Fishes. You’ll hear their names soon enough.”
Dan stumbled a step.
“Oh my God.”
“Well, you knew some of them had to be HIV positive.”
Dan tried to remember who hadn’t been around lately.
“Dandy and Rider?”
“You guessed it.”
“They had it but they’re cured?”
“Yep. Both with a history of IV drug use, formerly HIV positive, now HIV neg. You figure it out.”
Dan was trying to do just that.
He knew Carrie wouldn’t have to think twice about an explanation when she heard the news: the Virgin did it.
And how was he supposed to counter that? Damned if he wasn’t beginning to think she might be right. First Preacher gets his sight back, then people all over the area start sighting someone they think is the Virgin Mary, and now two of their regulars at St. Joe’s are cured of AIDS.
The accumulated weight of evidence was getting too heavy to brush off as mere coincidence.
He glanced at José and noticed he still looked glum.
“So how come you’re not happy?”
“Because when I gave Rider and Dandy the news they gave me all the credit.”
“So?”
“So I didn’t do anything. And if they go around blabbing that Dr. Martinez can cure AIDS, it’s going to raise a lot of false hopes. And worse, my little clinic is going to be inundated with people looking for a mirac
le.”
A miracle...that word again.
Dan clapped him on the shoulder, trying to lighten him up.
“Who knows. Maybe you’ve got the healing touch.”
“Not funny, Dan. I don’t have the resources to properly treat the people I’m seeing now. If the clinic starts attracting crowds I don’t know what I’ll do.” Suddenly he grinned. “Maybe I’ll direct them all to Saint Joe’s Loaves and Fishes. If they’re looking for a miracle, that’s the place to find it.”
A knot of dread constricted in Dan’s chest, stopping him in his tracks.
“Don’t even kid about that!”
José laughed. “Hey, think about it: It all fits. Preacher regained his sight there, and both Dandy and Rider are regulars. Maybe the cure-all can be found at Loaves and Fishes. Maybe Sister Carrie’s stirring some special magical ingredient into that soup of hers.”
Dan forced a smile. “Maybe. I’ll have to ask her.”
‡
Carrie held up two zip-lock bags.
“Here they are. The magic ingredients.”
When he’d mentioned José’s remarks to her this morning, she’d smiled and crooked a finger at him, leading him down to the subcellar. It was the first time he’d been down here since he’d carried in the Virgin. After Carrie lit the candles, Dan saw that the Virgin looked different. Her hair was neater, tucked away under her wimple, and those long, grotesque fingernails had been clipped off. The air was suffused with the sweet scent of the fresh flowers that surrounded the bier.
Carrie then reached under her bier and produced these two clear plastic bags.
Dan took them from her and examined them. One contained an ounce or so of a fine, off-white powder; the other was full of a feather-light gray substance that looked for all the world like finely chopped...hair.
He glanced back at Carrie and found her smiling, staring at him, her eyes luminous in the candle glow.
“What are these?” he said, hefting the bags.
“Hers.”
“I don’t get it.”
Carrie reached out and gently touched the bag of fine, gray strands. “This one’s her hair.” She then touched the bag with the powder. “And this is what’s left of her fingernails.”
“Fingernails?”
“I trimmed her nails and filed the cuttings down to powder.”
“Why on earth...?”
Carrie explained about the strand of hair in Preacher’s soup, and how he’d begun to see again almost immediately after.
“But that was coincidence,” Dan said. “It had to be.”
She trapped him with those eyes. “Are you sure?”
“No. I’m not sure. I no longer know what I’m sure of or not sure of. I haven’t been sure of much for a long time, and now I’m not even sure about the things I’ve been sure I couldn’t be sure of.”
Carrie started to laugh.
Dan shook his head. “Sounds like a country-western song, doesn’t it?” Then he too started to laugh.
“Oh, Lord,” Carrie said after a moment. “When was the last time we laughed together?”
“Before Israel.”
Slowly, she sobered. “That seems like so long ago.”
“Doesn’t it.”
Silence hung between them.
“Anyway,” Carrie finally said, “I’ve been dosing the soup with tiny bits of her hair and her ground-up fingernails every day since she arrived.”
Dan couldn’t help making a face. “Carrie!”
“Don’t look at me like that, Dan. If I put in a couple of snippets of hair I mix it with the rosemary. If I use some fingernail, I rub it together with some pepper. Tiny amounts, unnoticeable, completely indistinguishable from the regular spices.”
“But they’re not spices.”
“They are indeed! You can’t deny that things have changed upstairs since the Virgin arrived.”
Dan thought about that and realized she was right. In fact, strange things had been happening at the Loaves and Fishes during the past month or so. Nothing so dramatic as the return of Preacher’s sight, but the place had changed. Nothing that would be apparent to an outsider, but Dan knew things were different.
First off, the mood—the undercurrent of suspicion and paranoia that had prevailed whenever the guests gathered was gone. They no longer sat hunched over their meals, one arm hooked around the plate while the free hand shoveled food into the mouth. They ate more slowly now, and they talked. Instead of arguments over who was hogging the salt or who’d got a bigger serving, Dan had actually heard civil conversation along the tables.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t had to break up a fight in two weeks—a record. The previously demented, paranoid, and generally psychotic guests seemed calmer, more lucid, almost rational. Fewer of them were coming in drunk or high. Rider had stopped talking about finding his old Harley and had even mentioned checking out a Help Wanted sign he’d seen outside a cycle repair shop.
But the biggest change had been in Carrie.
She’d withdrawn from him. It had always seemed to Dan that Carrie had room in her life for God, her order, St. Joe’s Loaves and Fishes, and one other. Dan had been that one other for a while. Now he’d lost her. The Virgin had supplanted him in that remaining spot.
Yet try as he might he could feel no animosity. She was happy. He couldn’t remember seeing her so radiant. His only regret was that he wasn’t the source of that inner light. Part of him wanted to label her as crazy, deranged, psychotic, but then he’d have to find another explanation for the changes upstairs... and the cures.
He stepped past her to stare down at the prone, waxy figure. She looked so much neater, so much more...attractive with her hair fixed and her nails trimmed.
“You think she’s responsible.”
“I know she is.”
Dan’s gaze roamed past the flickering candles to the flower-stuffed vases that rimmed the far side and clustered at the head and foot of the makeshift bier.
“You’ve done a wonderful job with her. But how do you keep sneaking off with all these flowers? Aren’t you afraid one of these trips somebody in the church is going to catch you and ask you what you’re up to?”
“One of what trips? I haven’t borrowed any flowers from the church since she arrived.”
Dan turned back to the flowers—mums, daffodils, gardenias, gladiolus, their stalks were straight and tall, their blossoms full and unwrinkled—then looked at Carrie again.
“But these are...”
“The same ones I brought down the first day.” Her smile was blinding. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Dan continued to stare into those bright, wide, guileless eyes, looking for some hint of deception, but he found none. Suddenly he wished for a chair. His knees felt rubbery. He needed to sit down.
“My God, Carrie.”
“No. Just His mother.”
That wasn’t what he needed to hear. Things like this didn’t happen in the real world, at least not in Dan’s real world. God stayed in His heaven and watched His creations make the best of things down here while priests like Dan acted as go-betweens. There was no part in the script for His mother—especially not in the subcellar of a Lower East Side church.
“Is it her, Carrie? Can it really be her?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, beaming, unhindered by the vaguest trace of doubt. “It’s her. Can’t you feel it?”
The only thing Dan could feel right now was an uneasy chill seeping into his soul.
“What have we done, Carrie? What have we done?”
AIDS Cures Linked To Virgin Mary
A prayer vigil outside St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on the Lower East Side last night attracted over two thousand people. Many of those attending proclaimed the recent well-publicized AIDS cures as miracles related to the sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the area during the past month. When asked about the connection, Fr. Daniel Fitzpatrick, associate pastor of St. Joseph’s, responded, “The Church has not
verified the figure that has been sighted as actually representing the Virgin Mary, and certainly there is no established link between the figure and the AIDS cures. Therefore I would strongly caution anyone with AIDS from abandoning their current therapy and coming down here looking for a miracle cure. You might find just the opposite.”
(N. Y. Daily News)
CDC to Begin Epidemiological
Study on Lower East Side
(Atlanta, AP) The Center for Disease Control has announced it will begin a limited epidemiological study of the five cases of AIDS reported cured of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A spokesman for the Center said...
(The New York Times)
Paraiso
“Are these all the clippings?” Arthur Crenshaw asked as he reread the Times article for the third time.
“The latest batch,” Emilio said.
Arthur slipped the rest of the clippings back into the manila envelope but held onto the Times and Daily News pieces. For a moment he stared through the glass at the Pacific, glistening in the early afternoon sun, then glanced to his right where Charlie lay.
He’d turned the great room into a miniature medical facility: a state-of-the-art AIDS clinic with round-the-clock nursing, a medical consultant with an international reputation in infectious diseases, and a patient census of one.
All to no avail.
Charlie was fading fast. He’d received maximum doses of the standard AIDS medications, including triple therapy, and had even undergone a course of a new and promising drug that was still in the experimental stages. Nothing worked. Apparently he’d picked up a particularly virulent strain of the virus and had ignored the symptoms in the early stages. Only scant vestiges of Charlie’s immune system had remained by the time he’d started treatment. On his last visit, Dr. Lamberson would not commit to how much time he thought Charlie had, but he said the prognosis was very grave indeed. Ordinarily Lamberson would have laughed at the thought of a house call, but with what Arthur was paying him, he came when called. He’d just brought Charlie through a severe bout of pneumocystis pneumonia and said another would certainly kill him.
Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set Page 20