Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  A diminished candle fell, toppled slowly to the floor, in front of them. The paraffin kept burning, glowed brighter, against their faces.

  Father Malcolm prayed for the victims of the priest Bernard Lovell. He prayed for the missing twin. He implored that Christ’s mercy restore them from their mutilation.

  Father Malcolm prayed for Bernard Lovell. He prayed for the love that was abused in the dead man’s heart.

  Father Malcolm prayed for James Farrell Malcolm. He offered himself as witness to the man’s character, the soul with neither pride nor envy. He begged that the last cataclysm of perversion not erase a lifetime of obedience to Christ.

  The Siloam sang sweetly, careening among rocks once hidden by the accumulated silt and debris of a half century. Anita opened her eyes. The altar was bright under the candles. The walls of the church seemed to radiate their light rather than reflect it.

  Father Malcolm prayed for Mario, that the anger in him be purged and he be restored to Christ. Father Malcolm prayed for the woman at his side, that the child within reawaken to the mercy of an infinite God.

  Father Malcolm prayed for the bishop, who had angered him by his indifference.

  The Jesuit perceived that, as mediator between earth and heaven, he remained impure. He silently questioned himself.

  How were you angry at His Grace?

  I was enraged by his spiritual blindness.

  You set yourself up as his equal.

  In doing so, I became unworthy.

  Your pride was insulted.

  I felt grievously humiliated.

  Enunciate your fantasies.

  In my sinful pride, I entertained the fantasy that Christ had ordained for me a role among men. I imagined myself sought after by greater men than I. I went so far as to daydream of an audience with the Holy Father in Rome.

  These are infantile fantasies.

  In having them, I became unworthy.

  Anita lowered her head. The lateness of the hour, the absence of Mario, the torment of the priest next to her had changed her sense of events. There was no rush anymore. She was on a kind of bedrock in which life allowed just enough time for the soul to accomplish what it set out to do.

  In the restful atmosphere of the red ambient light, for no reason that she could rationally analyze, she softly began to cry.

  Father Malcolm prayed for his father, in all his inadequacies. Father Malcolm prayed for his mother, the timid, frightened woman who never achieved an identity.

  He prayed for the soul of his dead brother Ian.

  And do you pray unequivocally for your brother lan?

  I revere his memory.

  And yet you hated him.

  For his goodness.

  How could you?

  Faith, grace, even in its smallest whisper, was an intolerable and long struggle for me. For Ian, it was a natural gift.

  These jealousies are infantile.

  I pray unequivocally for Christ’s forgiveness.

  Anita gently wiped her eyes. She had not had a good cry in a long time. Life with Mario was not conducive to that sort of thing.

  “Do not be afraid, Anita,” Father Malcolm said. “Give your heart to God.”

  Father Malcolm prayed for the urban masses, lost in forces they neither controlled nor understood. He prayed for the poor of Golgotha Valley, pawns in the war between good and evil. He continued to silently question himself.

  Is your love for Christ absolute?

  It is.

  Is there no resentment in your heart?

  I have accepted the abandonment of the world.

  Would you do as Christ commanded?

  Suddenly, the voice was no longer his. It was a voice that knew him too well. Father Malcolm sensed a density in the air before him and was afraid to look.

  “Anita,” Father Malcolm said.

  “I’m here, Father.”

  The Jesuit knew he was safe within the confines of the church and its sanctified grounds. Yet he had to mediate between the souls on earth and God in heaven, through the doctrine and implements of the Church. Now he felt the questioner nibbling, nibbling at his consciousness.

  I would do whatsoever Christ commanded.

  Without reservation?

  I would not hold back.

  If Christ commands you to go?

  I would go.

  If Christ commands you to stay?

  I would stay.

  Then deny Him.

  Father Malcolm doubled over in an agony of disbelief. He dared not open his eyes, for he heard vague rustling. The voice waited, not his own voice.

  I—I could not—

  Must you not experience abandonment?

  I am too weak. I am afraid.

  Did not Christ experience abandonment in His death agony?

  I am not Christ.

  You are His echo on earth.

  Father Malcolm writhed in pain, holding his head. The mental stress of the paradox was unendurable. Druglike, the red glow of the air permeated his eyes even when the lids were closed.

  Anita opened her eyes. Father Malcolm trembled like a poisoned dog. She wiped his forehead with the handkerchief. He leaned heavily against her.

  In the computer screen, the flux had obliterated the cruciform shape.

  Trembling, teeth chattering, Father Malcolm swayed in Anita’s arms in an agony of disbelieving doubt.

  He who lit the lamp commands you.

  “No—” he murmured aloud.

  “Father—it’s me—Anita—”

  He who brought signs into the valley commands you.

  “No!” Father Malcolm called, vigorously shaking his head.

  You must pass into that shadow of darkness.

  “Never!”

  “Please . . . Father—”

  In a paroxsym of anguish, Father Malcolm doubled up, writhed away from her, unable to open his eyes.

  Do you not believe that Christ will accept you on the other side?

  Father Malcolm covered his ears, as though to stop out the sound. But there was no sound. Anita put her hands on his rigid shoulders, tears in her eyes.

  “Father Malcolm—it is nearly dawn—please end the vigil—”

  Then deny Him.

  “No.”

  Deny Him.

  “Never.”

  Your obedience is false pride. Deny Him.

  “Though my soul know God no longer, I shall not!”

  Suddenly, a rooster crowed deep in the north slopes of Golgotha Valley. It was like a peal of raucous laughter. The echo rebounded in the church, throwing the needle of the sound system back and forth.

  Father Malcolm’s face twitched. He pushed himself feebly from Anita, confused.

  “Father—are you all right?”

  He seemed to focus on her, still disoriented.

  “Yes, I—”

  A second time, the rooster crowed, lusty, virile.

  Father Malcolm looked around the church. It was evenly lit by the imperturbable red lamp. He turned to Anita, surprised at the tears in her eyes.

  “You were almost unconscious,” she admitted.

  A third time the rooster crowed.

  “Unlike Saint Peter, I did not deny Christ,” he said weakly, trying to smile.

  He regained his full awareness.

  “Anita—it was so strangely logical . . . My brain locked on me . . . I couldn’t think . . . All I could do was refuse—”

  “But the vigil is over now.”

  “Yes. I have come through.”

  She watched him carefully as he half knelt, half held himself up from the floor, trying to comprehend what had happened.

  “I was so close—to a presence—and yet I could not think—nothing was coherent—”

  “You had dissociated.”

  “Yes. Perhaps. I did feel dissolved. Afraid. Did I fail?”

  He gazed at her anxiously.

  “Look!” she said. “Look at your church! Let that be your testimony!”

  A glimmer
of golden air stirred at the apse window, the announcement of dawn in Golgotha Valley.

  “Love moves so powerfully,” he said in amazement. “It is absolute. Its commands are absolute.”

  Troubled, he wiped his hands on his cassock and bit his lips.

  “Christ is love,” he said, brows furrowed. “Any movement away from Christ is a motion that contradicts love.”

  He looked into Anita’s blurred eyes.

  “Do you see?” he asked passionately. “Christ is acceptance. Only a man standing outside of Christ can understand the notion of separation. So naturally, I was bound in that paradox!”

  Overjoyed, Father Malcolm hugged Anita.

  “For I am, truly, in Christ. And to deny Him to prove my love to Him—it is a concept that cannot exist in my mind!”

  Anita wiped her own eyes, so contagious was Father Malcolm’s joy.

  “And you, too,” he suggested gently, seeing her face. “You have learned something tonight, too?”

  Father Malcolm thought of his three-day ordeal, the physical deprivation, the unbearable concentration. He had rent apart his own Christian conscience, ruthlessly, his own Grand Inquisitor, and found himself worthy of the immanence that moved like the river in Golgotha Valley. He saw the transformation, like petals blossoming, of the young woman, who by his assistance had found the secret of unabashed sincerity. Father Malcolm felt proud. It was not, he felt, in the circumstances a major sin.

  But it was enough.

  Impulsively, he bent forward and kissed her forehead. Anita blushed. She squeezed his forearm.

  A second time, slower, his shadow crossing over her face, he kissed her delicately where the black hair swept up from her forehead.

  She smiled gently, passing her hand across his cheek.

  A tremor passed through him. She felt it and put her hands against his chest to comfort him, to look at his face, and felt the wild erratic pounding of his heart.

  Suddenly she understood. She, for whom bodily expression of gratitude and affection had long ago ceased to be a matter of shyness, suddenly realized that the same gesture had unlocked something unstable in the priest. She became frightened. Not for herself, but for him.

  Even you could be an agent of the Antichrist for him, Mario had teased.

  “Anita—” he choked, warning her, pleading with her against his own nature.

  “Don’t be frightened, Father.”

  But the words had a horrible second meaning that intoxicated the already disoriented priest.

  In his arms was woman, archetype of earthly happiness, analogue to his own desperate loneliness. The same that had lain against his chest on the balcony over the sultry Potomac at night. Father Malcolm’s hot-running blood had a sudden wisdom of its own, a knowledge that repudiated all his years of discretion and training.

  Anita instantly understood what was happening. She tried to push him gently away, but his embrace grew incredibly strong.

  “Father—no—no—”

  In his nostrils was the warm feminine scent, breaking down all barriers. His skin grew warm, feverish, as he breathed faster, and felt himself changing, needing, metamorphosing below the waist.

  His right hand pressed under her shirt even as he held her, and it sought her breast. Anita arched her back, pushing away at him, but he could not be denied. His mouth clumsily pressed at hers, his hands pinned her head, his tongue penetrated her lips.

  Anita violently tore from his face, her brain reeling with fear for him, desperately aware that she had unknowingly exploded something in his nature.

  And something far more disturbing: in that touch of rough tongue on hers, a hot and passionate thrill that ran through her body like an electric current.

  Anita stumbled from his grasping embrace and saw the church behind him filled with a blood-red light. She quickly looked up at the altar lamp. It flickered over their heads, dying, and suddenly was black and cold. Father Malcolm also stared at it, shocked out of his delirium, white-faced and hollow-eyed.

  “Oh—Anita—” he roared in disbelief. “He has made you his whore!”

  She pulled herself away, circled behind the altar. The Jesuit, fumbling frantically, reached for the altar to pull himself up. Instead, the altar linen came down in his hands, and the tabernacle toppled and crashed, sending the chalice and silver paten careening over the floor.

  “Oh—dear God—no!” he bellowed, cradling the fallen linens.

  Anita kept circling away, further into the apse.

  “Anita!”

  Father Malcolm grabbed the silver wick by the altar. He slammed a chair in front of the altar and tried to mount it, but some force made the pole weave wildly in his arms, and only an oily smoke drifted down over the Jesuit.

  “ANITA!”

  Father Malcolm suddenly whirled as though thrown, sending the silver wick end-over-end into the south wall.

  “LIGHT THE LAMP!” he roared, doubled over in pain.

  Cautiously, Anita stepped onto the chair. She brought matches from her shirt pocket, where the buttons had been torn by Father Malcolm. She struck a match. A long, deliberate breath behind her blew it out.

  Very slowly, she turned.

  “Don’t turn around!” Father Malcolm called.

  She struck a second match and quickly inserted it into the lamp. Behind her, she heard heavy motions, as of a hairy body, and the stinking splash of volumes of urine at the door.

  “By the Blood of the Savior, Jesus Christ, by the intercession of Mary, Mother of God, by the apostles and saints of heaven, we abjure thee and thy foul horror to the deepest pits of hell—”

  Father Malcolm’s voice broke off abruptly.

  Anita held the flame steady. The bright cone of light seemed to run around the lip of the oil basin spout like tiny mice. Then it caught. Warmth spread upward against her face, unpleasantly. The flame held, sickly yellow, exuding a stinking incense.

  That’s better, she heard a different voice utter. That’s better.

  Anita turned slowly.

  The church was still. Father Malcolm lay quiet, trembling, on the floor below. In the thermovision screen sat the likeness of a goat in bishop’s miter, bloodied head cocked, and a tilted black crucifix against the savage knees.

  A deep rumble of contented laughter echoed and rebounded throughout the Church of Eternal Sorrows.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Cambridge Municipal Hospital was ill-lit by sloped skylights partially blocked by dirt and debris from the frosty night and the rainy morning. Mario sat on a bed in the eighth ward, wearing a white cotton robe, idly riffling through an old Sunday New York Times. From time to time footsteps came to the ward, then receded. How long had he been in this room, he wondered. Two days? Three? After the debacle in the lecture hall, time had ceased to exist as a calculable entity.

  Outside it was raining. A vicious, thudding rain. The patient in the adjacent bed, a paunchy gentleman with extraordinarily pink skin, kept moaning and rubbing a shaven chest soon due for the surgeon’s scalpel.

  Mario turned over the pages of the science section. Two graduate students at MIT had replicated the retinal fibers of a newt’s eye. A mathematician at Berkeley had refined the model for the emission of energy from astronomical black holes. A Marxist historian of science had proved that Darwin’s theory of evolution reflected the class needs of a Victorian society.

  Mario dazedly studied the articles, seeking clues to the ages of the men involved. Of late, he had become obsessed with the ages of those making their marks. Mario was now pushing past the moment when the best scientists hit their peak. Golgotha Falls was his watershed. It could still be his watershed, he felt, if only he could sort out what had taken place in that lecture hall.

  A man in a business suit came into the room. It was Professor Hendricks of the physics department.

  “Mario, how are you feeling?” Hendricks said.

  Mario attempted a smile, gestured toward a blue plastic chair at the bedside. Hendricks,
a handsome man in his early fifties, lean, with white at his temples, sat down stiffly.

  “Okay, I guess, Professor,” Mario said.

  By the way Hendricks had recoiled on seeing him, Mario figured he was still pale as a sheet. The man in the adjacent bed groaned. Hendricks leaned forward.

  “You gave us one hell of a scare, Mario,” he said. “What happened?”

  Mario folded the science section of the newspaper, laid it on the tiny cabinet near the wall. He turned back to the intelligent gray eyes of the physicist Hendricks and folded his hands on his stomach.

  “What do you think happened?” Mario asked.

  “You’ve got me. The lecture hall was in pandemonium. I thought you had an epileptic fit.”

  “I mean, what did you see? On the screen?”

  Hendricks looked at Mario, puzzled.

  “Same thing as everyone else.”

  “What? Tell me, Professor Hendricks. It’s important.”

  Hendricks rubbed his chin. It was a gesture of embarrassment. Mario waited impatiently.

  “Well, there were some pictures of a naked woman—your companion, somebody said—some lizards—and a godawful piece of film —a wild horse stomping some helpless bastard to death. Jesus, it was terrible . . .” Hendricks gazed levelly at Mario.

  “What the hell got into you? Pulling a stunt like that after all you’d put into the project.”

  Instead of answering, Mario leaned back against the doubled pillows.

  “Are you sure that’s what you saw?” he asked after a long while.

  “Of course I’m sure, no mistaking something like that.”

  “Would you sign an affidavit to that effect?”

  “What?”

  “If I needed it, would you sign an affidavit?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  Mario relaxed a bit more. Color was coming slowly into his cheeks. Hendricks did not know if it was health or a fever.

  “Do you remember who else was in the audience?”

  Hendricks shrugged.

  “Some of the physics faculty.”

  “Wasn’t there some function just before the lecture?”

  “Right. The Bollington Prize. Sure. There’d be a roster of names. A list of invited guests. Most of them stayed around to hear you.”

  “I need that list,” Mario said. “I need affidavits from all of them.”