Falling Idols

by Brian Hodge

  When the Sisters came for me I was preparing myself in silent contemplation. The Order of Saint Francis had taught me well in this much, at least. I turned around to find they’d quietly filled the doorway, and when Maia laid her cheek to my bare back, the other two turned theirs, to give us our moment alone.

  “We’re of two minds on God,” she’d explained. “Some fear he might really be the creator of everything. In which case, we have no hope at all. Even if there is some lost paradise that was once promised, we’ll never regain it.”

  They led me into the chamber, in the center of eyes and teeth and throats, and naked, I lay down upon the waiting cross.

  “But there’s another way it might be,” she’d said, reminding me then of how the Assyrians had made their demon by taking that malleable form and imprinting it with all the traits they desired in it, until they’d fed it to the point of independence, so that it broke away on its own.

  They lashed my arms to those of the cross; secured my feet as well. The crown of thorns came last. And when they raised the cross upright, and dropped its foot into the waiting hole, all the old devotions came back to me again, and once more I became as one with Father, with Son, and with Holy Ghost.

  Whatever those were.

  “Some of us wonder if religion hasn’t gotten it backwards,” she’d said. “If what the world now calls God was born in the desert out of the needs of people who had to have something bigger than themselves to worship. So it heard them, and asked for more, and they fed it burnt offerings, and the blood of their enemies, and their devotion, and later on they exported it to the rest of the world. But even before then, it was getting stronger, until after enough centuries had passed, they’d all forgotten where that god of theirs came from and thought it’d always been there, and created them instead … and by then, it was ready to feed on them.”

  The Sisters of the Trinity took their places while my weight tugged at the lashes that held me aloft. My every rib stood etched against flesh as I laboured for breath, and now, at long last, the empathy I’d always sought with Christ had come. I was no longer in a Dublin cellar; rather, atop a skull-shaped hill called Golgotha, dying in the hot winds and stinging desert dust.

  “Who better to feed on than those who considered themselves his children?” she’d explained. “They’ve always called themselves his chosen people … but chosen for what? You have to wonder. From the time of the Babylonian exile, to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, right up to the Holocaust … he’s been eating and drinking them all along, like no other people on earth.”

  Salíce stood before me, below, and slowly, reverently, took me into her mouth. Minutes passed, as I writhed upon the cross between the agony of breaths, until it happened anew — the flesh of my wrists splitting layer by layer, the blood freed at last in a gush of transcendence and ecstasy. It trickled first along my arms toward my ribcage, then began to flow heavier, drizzling down into Maia’s wide and waiting mouth. So that none would be wasted, bowls were set beneath my other wrist and my feet.

  I turned my eyes toward the heavens, wide and seeing so very clearly now, like those of the martyr I’d once dreamt of being: Saint Ignatius, in that painting hanging in Greyfriars Abbey. I’d so admired it, always wondering if I could show his sort of courage when the teeth of the carnivores began to close. Perhaps, now, I’d equaled him, even bettered him. Or maybe I’d fallen short by the depth and breadth of the darkest abyss.

  There was no truth but this: I was not the father’s son I’d once been.

  “What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.

  “Don’t forget, he was circumcised. In the temple, when he was eight weeks old. The Holy Foreskin — that’s what you papists call it,” she’d said, with a teasing shake of her head. “You people and your morbid relics.”

  When I looked down the bloody length of my body, I could see that tiny dark scrap in Lilah’s fingers, stolen from its crystal reliquary north of Rome. Still soft and pliable, it was, neither rotted nor gone leathery. Incorruptible.

  But flesh is flesh, and beliefs something else altogether.

  “Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me,” he’d asked, and while I’d never known for sure what impact I might have, perhaps the truth alone would be enough.

  The truth, they’d insisted he said, will set you free.

  Then again, doubt works miracles too.

  Lilah lifted her hand, and touched the foreskin to my flesh, to wet it with my blood, then it disappeared between her teeth.

  And in the convulsive rapture of fluids and tissue, in that moment that makes us one with gods, I gave them all they’d asked for, all they needed, all I had to give.

  It was explosive.

  The greatest revelations usually are.

  IX. Descendo ad patrem meum

  “You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.”

  It was Carl Jung said that. My uncle had only borrowed it.

  I nearly bled to death on that night of the divination, the stigmata persistent and reaching for the very core of me. In the weeks that followed, as the Sisters nursed me back to health like a faithful dog they couldn’t bear to have put to sleep, I often fondled an old pewter crucifix while my thoughts turned to the subject of fear.

  Fear the Lord thy God, we were taught since childhood in my family, and how we quaked. How we trembled. How we fell daily to our knees and supplicated for continued mercy.

  I’d long ceased to fear. Fear is for children, no matter what their age. But when fear is no more, that’s still not the end of it, because beyond fear lies despair, and so far, I don’t know if there’s any end to despair at all.

  Once I was well enough to get about again, to stand without dizziness, to walk and run without weakness pitching me toward the nearest chair, I decided I could no longer spend my life with the Sisters of the Trinity. They, and the rest of the Misbegotten, were so much more than I could ever be. Their eyes saw more, their ears heard more, and with their tongues they tasted it, and their feet had walked it, and their minds comprehended it, and they had lived the histories that others only analyzed, and wrongly…

  And still they were not gods. They’d have been the first to admit it.

  To see them day by day was too hideous a reminder that I was nowhere near their equal … and worse, that I’d never really gotten past that deeply instilled need to believe, but had now been left with only the Void.

  “So what did you learn from it?” I’d asked the Sisters, soon as I could, from my bed; asked more than once. They’d look at one another and smile, with something like sadness and pity and even embarrassment for my sake; but for their own sake, with maybe just the tiniest ray of hope. Or maybe I saw that only because I wanted to. And then they’d tell me to rest, just rest, their 2700 years to my thirty-one like quantum mechanics to a dog.

  On my own for the first time in my life, I hiked my homeland like a student tourist, my old possessions sharing backpack space with something I thought of as belonging to a newer Patrick Kieran Malone. The knife was large, with a contoured Kraton haft, and a huge killing blade of carbon steel and a sawtoothed upper edge.

  I walked an Ireland different from that of the times of the Troubles, when a bomb had left me standing on a new road. Up north there were no more bombs going off, nor bullets flying, the I.R.A. having decided to lay down its arms — for the time being, at least — and I saw that most everyone was caught up in a cautious optimism that people with differing ideas of the same god really could live together after all.

  I wondered if, somewhere, in his jealousness, he missed the smoke and blood of those earlier days. But time was on his side. The old blood lusts never die, they just lie dormant.

  Saw a bumper sticker while on my way back up to Belfast. Nuke Gay Whales for Christ, it said.

  Had to come from America.

  “So what did you learn?” I’d asked the Sisters, refusing to give up, a
nd finally Maia sat down on the bed where the marrow in my bones frantically churned out new red blood cells.

  “How can I tell you this so you understand it?” she said, and thought awhile. “What’s God really like? Imagine an arrogant and greedy and demented child on a beach, building castles in the sand … only to kick them over out of boredom, leaving what’s left for the waves. Which of course begs one more question:

  “Where did the sand come from?”

  In Belfast I returned to the church I’d grown up in, and as I entered the sanctuary that quiet afternoon, it smelt the same as it always had, old and sweet with wax and incense. It took me back twenty years, more, the shock of it overwhelming and unexpected. Smells can do that to you. It was here where my family gave thanks for my life being spared on that day of the bomb, where they lit candles for the souls of my friends who’d been killed.

  I genuflected before the altar, out of old reflex.

  Or maybe it was disguise.

  The priest didn’t recognize me at first, but then it had been awhile, a decade of monasticism and nearly another year of heresy in between. Such things leave their mark on a man, and even his blood knows the difference. The priest had already heard that I’d left the order; clasped my hands warmly just the same; would be at least sixty now. He told me how deeply my leaving the Franciscans had hurt my mother, dashing so many of her expectations for me.

  “Can’t help that, Father,” I said. “Wasn’t my idea … but I’ve learnt a brand new doctrine. I just count myself lucky that I learnt it while I’m still a relatively young man.”

  I could see that he was puzzled. And I remembered a childhood friend who’d told me, when we were altar boys, how the Father had put his hands on him, and where. I’d not believed him. Nobody had. Everybody knew that God loves little children.

  “Gospel of Matthew,” I said. “Remember what Jesus had to say about new doctrines? Comparing them to wine?” The priest nodded, back on familiar ground. “Said you can’t go pouring new wine into old wineskins. It’ll just burst them, and what’ve you got then? Spilt wine and a wineskin that won’t hold anything else.”

  From my backpack I took the sleek, dark knife, and when I unsheathed it, the blade seemed to keep on coming.

  “Some days,” I confessed, “I do wish that fucking bomb had done me in too.”

  *

  I don’t know why I killed the priest. Don’t know why I did such a thorough bloody job of it. Or why I killed twelve more in the coming weeks, or how I managed to get away with it for as long as I did. Blessed, I suppose, in my own way.

  With that sacrificial blade I opened them, throats and chests and bellies, opened them lengthwise or crossways, and out of each poured their stale old wine. And then I’d have to sit awhile and gaze upon their burst skins, and reflect upon the way they weren’t good for anything else now. This was my main comfort. But I could never get them all.

  That, too, was my despair.

  So I imagined those beyond my blade, Catholic and Protestant alike, shepherding those even more desperate than I to believe, telling them about an impotent, slaughtered lamb whose history and words had been agreed on by committees. And in his captive name, the eager converts would rise from their watery baptismal graves to go forth and seek to propagate the species.

  Over those weeks, I was not a particularly beloved figure in Ireland. Knew it couldn’t be much longer before I was caught. And when at last I grew too tired, too sick at heart to continue, only then did I return to the one place, the one people, that would have me, and they took me in as one of their own.

  I knew better, though.

  No matter how much blood I’d drunk, it hadn’t made me one of them.

  “Hide me,” I asked those voracious and beautiful Sisters of the Trinity. “Hide me where they’ll never find me. Hide me where they never can.”

  Of course, they said. Of course we will.

  But Maia wept.

  X. Consummatum est

  And thus finishes this testament of a boy who wanted only to grow up and be a saint.

  There are many who’d say he couldn’t have fallen any farther short of such a lofty goal. After all, there are saints, and there are butchers, and they believe they know the difference.

  But a few — a growing few, perhaps — would say that he achieved his dream all the same. But this depends on your idea of paradise.

  “Think of it this way,” Lilah tells me. “You struck some of the first blows in a coming war. Oh, you’ll be venerated, I don’t have any doubt about that. I’ve seen it before.”

  And now, at the end of all ambition, where too ends the flesh and the blood and the seed of life, I can’t help but thinking of my old hero, obsolete though he may be: Saint Ignatius, on his way to the lions in Rome. Would that he’d had such beautiful mouths to welcome him as I’ll soon have.

  Take me into you, Maia. Take me in, my angel, my deliverer, and I will be with you always … until the end of your world.

  Caress then, these beasts, that they may be my tomb, Ignatius wrote in a final letter, and let nothing be left of my body. Thus my funeral will be a burden to none.

  As for me, I’ll not mind leaving bones, and I hope they keep them around, gnawed and clean, true relics for the inspiration of disciples yet to come.

  Sensible Violence

  You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. Your palms are pressed against the plate glass of the store’s window, a pet store, you never can resist it, taking time out to squat on your haunches and share a few moments with the puppies. With their big feet and fat little bellies, they squirm and trip all over each other trying to get to you, impress you, maybe you’ll take them all home. Show them the world on the other side of the glass.

  “‘s’cuse, not to be intruding or nothing, but I’s needing to ask you something, okay, mind if I conversate with you a second?”

  Money. He’ll want money, it’s as good as predestined. When you squatted down to watch the pups he was nowhere in sight, and you’d checked, too. You’re less a target for beggars when you’re moving and they know that, that it’s easier to pretend you don’t hear them, that your ears shut down in midstride.

  “Basically I’s wondering if you could spare like a couple dollars so I could get something to eat, you know, I wouldn’t ask but I ain’t had nothing to eat for a couple days now—”

  He talks with his hands always in motion to make you feel his urgency, feel his hunger, and you wonder if you should tell him to calm down, quit flailing so much and he’ll conserve more calories. He tells you how your donation will enable him to go back up the street a couple blocks to the Dairy Queen on the corner, alleviate his hunger with a double cheeseburger and fries.

  “I’m not giving you the money,” you tell him, “but if you’re hungry I’ll take you to buy it.”

  “I heard that, let’s go,” his willingness immediate, without the outrage that comes when they only want the cash, then you’re walking up the street, not looking as though you naturally belong together but are something odder, buddy cops maybe, and he’s just come in from undercover work, the reason he’s dressed the way he is, wearing that dirty sweatshirt with the hood fraying around the edge. He probably really needs the meal, unless he only dresses the part, although some don’t even bother, wearing two hundred dollar warmup suits and pricey new sneakers, as robust as marble statues come to life, with their hands out, telling you about all the meals they’ve missed.

  “Got a head for business, must have,” he says about you, “be wanting to eyeball where your money goes.”

  “Well, it is mine,” you say, then with a glance back at the pet store: “People eat dogs sometimes. Not here, but…”

  “Get hungry enough, yeah, I can see that, my stomach gets to growling too loud, I’d eat me a Benji-burger too.”

  “It’s wrong, eating dogs, no matter where they do it,” and he nods along with you, sharing a soft spot for man’s b
est friend. Or maybe he’ll agree with anything as long as food is coming, so you don’t mention the T-shirt that you own with the wolf’s head in the center, between two slogans: SAVE THE WOLF above, then underneath, PREDATORS KEEP THE BALANCE.

  It’s midmorning and the Dairy Queen isn’t busy and the young woman with the dreadlocks behind the counter has no smiles for you or your new best friend, looking at him as if she’s seen him too many times before, and you along with him.

  “So you let that fool shame you into buying his breakfast for him,” she says when you order, resenting it and why not, she’s the one with the job and the grocery bills.

  “No, no shame. My family’s Norwegian, we didn’t do slavery.”

  “Well, so nice to see someone with a clear conscience for a change,” she says, very unimpressed. “He want anything to drink?”

  You turn to check, but your undercover cop pal is off in the corner, clowning with another just like him who’s rattling a newspaper.

  “Give him a Hi-C,” you decide, “keep him from getting scurvy for a few more days.”

  A corner of her mouth tics, as though tugged by a marionette string, you’ve almost made her laugh, or laugh for another reason instead of at you, at liberal Caucasian guilt too pervasive to be assuaged by pushing a nervous dollar or two away from your body before remembering somewhere else you have to be.

  He trots into the restroom before the food is ready, is still there when it’s up, so you carry it to a table and wait, checking to see how ignored you are. You unwrap the burger and peel the bun back on its ligaments of cheese, exposing thick goo, mostly bright primary colors, unnatural, like a squashed animal in a subversive children’s book.

  When he emerges from the restroom you’ve been guarding his food for a couple of minutes, as you rise he showers you with gratitude and the mingled fumes of malt liquor and tooth decay.

  “God bless you, God bless you,” he says, overdoing it, you’re embarrassed, and when you leave him you return to the place where he found you, to finish your time with the puppies, who once again compete for your affections. Seems like everybody’s glad to see you today.