The Solace of Monsters

by Laurie Blauner

  “I want my story to be on a window someday,” I told him.

  “Me too.” He turned toward me as he scanned the interior. “What’s your name, Child?”

  “Mara. But I haven’t been a Childcloud for quite a while.” I pointed at a large wooden rectangular structure with open maroon curtains near the side wall. There was a chair inside of it. “What’s that?”

  “It’s called a Confessional. It’s where people can tell their stories, good and bad ones,” he said. He smiled, “You confess to God for forgiveness.”

  I ran beside it, peeked inside. “Is He in there?” I inspected the box further. It was a tiny space with a chair and a lattice window covered with a curtain. “I don’t see anyone inside.”

  “Did you want to confess some sins, Mara? You could confess them to me. I relay them to God and appropriate punishments are then meted out to you.”

  “I don’t know,” I answered shyly, my shoe, devoid of several toes, poked over the threshold. “Okay.” I bent down, took up the whole space, plopped down on the chair.

  Father Bill entered the box from another side. I could hear him settle in a chair. I could smell his sweet aftershave although my senses were dulling. Suddenly the curtain between us grew garrulous and fled to the side of the window so only the lattice separated us. Father Bill sat there, not looking in my direction. He was intent on the wall in front of him.

  “Provocative,” I gave him, having nothing else to give, except the money stuffed in my pants pocket.

  “Pro,” he said, “before or for in Greek and Latin. Vocare to call. Provocative, an adjective meaning to call forth or before, to excite or stimulate.”

  I clapped what was left of my hands together. “You are a father! You have dissected the word I gave you. Now maybe you will reassemble it differently. Take some pieces, leave the rest?” I chuckled with my grinding laugh.

  He looked at me strangely. “Anyway, Mara, my child, tell me what troubles you. What has brought you here, to me, in this place, a holy place of God?”

  “I have just come from jail where I understood, for the first time, my father’s rage because everything he loved was taken away from him.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your family, Mara.”

  “He’s trying, desperately, to bring them back. Is that wrong, Father Bill? Wouldn’t you or I, if we had the chance, do the same thing? Wouldn’t we do anything we could to get them back?”

  “There are still many things I wouldn’t do,” he said, nodding behind the strange window.

  “I wouldn’t kill someone,” I declared, “no matter how angry I was.”

  “That’s good, Mara.” His eyes searched the floor in his compartment, his private jail cell. “In God’s eyes that’s very good.”

  “Is it?” I wondered what I would do in Father’s situation. Although I was made of human parts, why wasn’t I human? Was I more than human? I would ask Father Bill sometime. Maybe he would have some answers. “Lately I’m not as sure what I am capable of.”

  “Yes, Mara, I know what you mean.” He was pensive for a few moments then he snapped out of his own thoughts. “But there are basic rules established by God for our moral character and we must attempt to abide by them.” His eyes darted toward the lattice. “Is there anything specific you want to tell me? Something you did to end up in jail?”

  “That was a misunderstanding.”

  He nodded. “I understand. Did you want to tell me the story of your life? How you arrived at the alley where I found you?”

  “I was born recently. I was a Childcloud too briefly, although my size hasn’t changed much. My father was my world then. I wanted to taste the world outside of the small place I knew. I’ve met many people and animals, Gloves, Greg, Berserk the dog, Carl the driver, Theresa, Kat, Peter, Miss Elaina, Misty, Benjie the horrible, and many more people whose names I don’t know. I’ve learned a lot and I’m still learning. I might fall apart before I’ve learned everything I want to know.” At least now I had a story to tell. I couldn’t tell him all of it out of fear he would run from me in horror.

  “What’s the matter with your body, if I can ask, Mara?”

  “I don’t know exactly why I’m coming apart. But Father might be able to fix me.”

  “Well, Mara, my child, He can fix many, many things. We’ll have to see about you. Are you in pain?”

  “Sometimes, but it goes away quickly. My body adapts.”

  “Pain can make you angry. Have you been to a hospital yet?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Well then,” he said.

  Outside, the hospital loomed over one whole block. Inside, the hospital was covered in blackness, according to my failing eyesight and color distortions. Although when the staff neared me, they were dressed in a transcendent white. Father Bill and I sat in a large room full of chairs that faced a desk, like at the church, except that it wasn’t beautiful. A strong fluorescent light hovered over the desk from which people briskly approached and departed. A young woman was glued there, with telephones attached to her ears. In between talking on the phone, she told us to fill out forms and wait, along with the other people already waiting. I looked around, curious. A teenaged boy had an arrow through his shoulder and blood was pooling on the front of his Metallica tee shirt, an elderly woman was holding her dangling arm up with her other hand, a woman was crying as she rocked her swaddled baby, a man held his shirt to one ear, a family of three were huddled together in a corner weeping, a man in a leather jacket held a fist over one of his kidneys and small trickles of blood spurted over his fingers, staining them.

  “Yes, Father Bill, you are right. This is where I belong. It looks like lots of these people will be trying to mend parts of their bodies today,” I told him.

  “Mara, we’re in line to be seen, but this is a free city hospital, so it might be a while before a doctor can see you. I might have to go and do some other errands but I’ll be back to see how things are going. Would that be alright with you?” He tilted his dark head away from me.

  “Yes. Anyway, I know the way back to the church.”

  “Don’t worry, Mara, please, just stay here when you’re done and I’ll come back and fetch you.” Father Bill rose, brushing off his pants, and left, combing a hand through his dark hair. I must have fallen asleep or had a memory. It was getting hard to tell the difference. My head knocked against the hard plastic chair.

  I was wearing pink satin pointe shoes and executing a pas de chat, then a glissade, ending with several fouette en tourant. Sergei was playing my prince. He held me in arabesque and turned me. My red gown with sequins flowed near my knees, grew salacious with the rhythm. I had waited too long to be a principal dancer. Sweat caught at my bodice and my tights, then gathered at my tiny tiara. I could see the faces of some of the other girls who couldn’t dance as well. Sergei was near my left hip, and I was allowing the music to guide my body, swaying, jumping, the chaos of notes exciting my arms and legs. Nothing flailed; every inch of my body had its place according to the music and the choreographer.

  Suddenly I landed with all my weight, my foot fracturing. The sound was of a lock opening and then all that pain flooded me. But the dance was beautiful and I wouldn’t spoil it. Sergei glanced at me and knew. I finished the last part of Coppelia in excruciating agony. I wanted to scream, but I tried not to stiffen my gestures, to use the injured foot although I was making the broken bone worse. I collapsed backstage, behind the curtain.

  I awoke with pain in my foot and someone calling my name, “Mara F . . . I can’t read the last name. We’re ready for you,” the nurse in white was loudly announcing.

  Someone led me down long corridors. Again I was sitting on a metal table in a room that was too small for me, and I was full of pain and longing. I had changed into a hospital gown and my clothes were in a pile at my feet. I didn’t want to take what
I needed from others in the way that both Father and Peter did to alleviate it. Some part of Father was inside of me, and I had understood it since jail. Father would have explained, “My darling Mara, we all live in a jail, even if it’s our own body.” The medical lights grew bright and came closer. A man, about Father’s age, with blue eyes and a white jacket lifted my right arm and then let it fall.

  He directed light over my face, my nose, my ear, my jaw. “Open your mouth please.” I did. He was lost inside my mouth for a moment. “When did these necrotic episodes occur?”

  “What?” But I understood him. I knew about medical terms from Father.

  “When did you lose those parts of your mouth, nose, ear, and other areas?”

  He stared into my eyes. “At different times.”

  “Did anything precipitate it?”

  “It was spontaneous.” I was matching his special medical words.

  “I’ve never quite seen anything like this before. It’s degeneration at a cellular level, as if you’ve been patched together and now the structure is coming apart.” He frowned.

  “Why now?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Let me take some blood and tissue samples.” It was a commandment.

  “Okay.”

  He drew out a long needle, held my arm gently at the elbow, then plunged it underneath my skin. I didn’t feel any pain, but his movements made me want to retract my arm.

  “I’m going to call in some colleagues,” he stated as he nodded to a nurse, who left the room.

  He began scraping small bits of skin, fingernails, toenails, hair, moles, and bumps, a piece from my ear, nose, and lips. He wiped liquids from my nose, tongue, and ear for slides. I was afraid I might fall apart in his hands with all of his probing.

  “I’d like to get some bone and organ samples and do a pap and gynecological exam. So we can figure out what’s going on here,” he told me as a phalanx of about ten men and women doctors entered the room. “But for that we need to put you to sleep.” He administered a preoperative antiseptic to different areas on my body that turned my skin yellow.

  I could hardly breathe in the room since the new doctors had fanned around the table, making the room tiny. The first doctor asked me to lie down on the table. I did. Someone wheeled over a table full of instruments I recognized, scalpel, retractor, needle holder, scissors, clamps, curette, probe, pliers. The mask was descending toward my face and then a frozen river inside me thinned, broke, and cracked into pieces that were drowning, floating, bobbing in the cold water under my skin. I sat upright and roared, all my muscles, skin, blood screeched. My nerves felt too close to my surface, like a fusillade, a constant firing. I was exploding. My body rebelled, could not endure another operation. The doctors shuddered and huddled away from me, some escaped out the door. I couldn’t survive another operation even if, with their limited knowledge, they could help me.

  “No,” was all I managed to say before I grabbed two handfuls of their white clothes filled with their body parts and threw what I could against the walls of the room. A red light inside began blinking and screaming.

  I grabbed my clothes and ran out into the corridor and then back to the large waiting room, everyone hurried away from me. Two policemen began to chase me as I ran through the room and exited onto the city streets. I hid behind the dumpster in a familiar alley. I closed my eyes, imagining my cells undividing, shrinking, until there was a miniature version left of me like one of those Russian dolls I had read about, one that was healthy, smaller. When I opened my eyes, the police had passed me by and were long gone.

  I changed into my clothes and tucked the blue, tattered gown into a garbage can. I unearthed my notebook, wrote, Longevity has its advantages as long you aren’t being pursued. Don’t allow life to take small bites out of you. I need a Father contraption for all the swift changes. I need some kind of god to guide me.

  The fireworks behind my eyes were increasing. My headache made widening circles around my head. I had damaged a wrist bone and a rib felt loose near my chest in my flight from the city hospital, a few blocks away. The hospital was perched over a busy street. I made my way stealthily back along the path I had memorized. I passed a crowd, silent over a hole in the pavement. I passed a man carrying a large stone. I passed a building whose doorway echoed every street sound and whose windows reflected everyone that wandered by. I walked by a park bench with a string of children drooling onto their shirts. I passed a woman, resembling the red-haired woman from jail, who bent over to talk to a man in a car, displaying her sexual components.

  I called to her, but when the woman turned around, it wasn’t the woman I knew. I missed all my familiar people and animals. Some days I needed someone to explain how the world worked.

  “Where’s God?” I demanded loudly in my gravelly voice as I burst through the locked church doors. I was being cheated again. Now the lock and chain were broken and dangling. They looked the same way I felt. “Father Bill?” I called tentatively, “I’m back. I want to meet God since He speaks to you.”

  But no one answered. It didn’t seem right to be in the church alone, without parishioners or Father Bill, unless I was cleaning it. I ambled softly down the aisles toward the podium and cross. Colors from the stained glass windows brushed against my clothes, changing my pale shirt to red, then blue, then green. Stories dappled me as I moved by them.

  Then I saw it. I hadn’t detected it before because I had been losing my sense of smell along with my nose. The unsolved puzzle of a body lay strewn on the floor in front of the podium. At first I believed it was an animal sacrifice I hadn’t learned about yet. Then I saw the decapitated head of a young woman, her eyes still open, resting on a pew. Her long brown tresses hung over the edge of the seat. An arm was left on a towel, a leg lay in a corner, another arm rested on another pew. I couldn’t locate her torso. Using her good, young, fresh body parts raced through my mind for a second. But I didn’t know what to do with them and couldn’t find anyone who could put me back together again without an operation. After a few minutes, the body disgusted me. I bent down to examine an arm.

  I heard footsteps and, searching the room, I saw Father Bill enter from a side door. He was wiping his hands on a towel identical to the one on the floor. His black jacket was open and his white shirt was splattered with blood.

  “I thought I heard a noise,” he said. “Mara, have you heard of transubstantiation?”

  A big, beautiful word. I rose. “Yes, it’s when bread and wine are changed during Mass into the body and blood of Christ.” I wished Father would have enacted that transformation. “Although all we can still see are the bread and the wine.”

  “Yes,” Father Bill answered, “I have sent this truly unhappy young woman to heaven to become an angel. We just can’t see it. All we can see is the body.” He smiled in a distant way as though he was sharing his thoughts with someone else far away. “I’m merely trying to ameliorate a mess that I made.” He peered at the front door. “Did you break my lock?”

  “I’m sorry. I was finished at the hospital.”

  “I told you I’d come for you.” He gazed in my general direction but he didn’t seem angry. “You should have waited for me. The hospital called here looking for you a little while ago. You made a fuss there, Mara. I’m surprised you actually came back here. They said that the samples they examined were abnormal, neither human nor animal.” He looked directly at me. “What are you, Mara?”

  “Why did you kill this girl?” I demanded. “It was a complete waste.” I was yelling, mad at him. Father Bill didn’t make any sense. Now we each knew one another’s secrets.

  “I told you there was something dark deep inside of me.” He pointed to the eviscerated corpse. “I need to clean up now, Mara.”

  “I’ve seen dead bodies before. Have you done this often?”

  “Why? Do we need to step into the Confessional?”<
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  “You’re a carcass of a man. There is nothing inside of you. You’re foul and horrible, a monster.” My agitated arms twirled in the air. My voice and my heart were shaking. I was going to explode again. “You had no right to kill her.”

  “Who is God among us?”

  “Who wants that kind of god?” I mumbled, on the floor, trying to piece the puzzle of the woman back together.

  “You’re making a mess, Mara.” He reached down, toward my arm.

  “I contain women like her.” I was babbling. I tossed his hand away. “I’m a terrible thing, not human, not animal.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.” He patted my shoulder. “I’ll fix it.” He walked over to a closet door and reached inside of it.

  “Consecratory necrophile,” I spat at him. I could see the woman’s bones through her skin. Her blood was obediently coagulating. Every part of her was open and exposed, unraveling precipitously.

  “Unhappy abnormal,” he replied calmly. He swiveled around with an axe raised in his arms. I noticed blood spots freckling the handle and blade. He ran a few feet towards me.

  I stood, pulled his legs with my deformed hand and gripped his arm, which held the axe, with my other. He fell onto the floor on his back. The axe skittered away. I grabbed his axe and lifted it high over the black and white river of him. I didn’t want to end him, but he left me no choice. If I didn’t, he would kill me and continue killing. At least Father had a purpose in his destruction: It was creation. But didn’t Father Bill believe that he was forming spiritual beings? Father Bill had to know that I would slay him rather than let him kill me. He had seen my strength, even though I was growing weaker. He had to know that he could die if he tried to hurt me and failed. I realized that dying was what he wanted. His eyes met mine and he nodded.