The evangelist jumped on the bed and planted his hand over her mouth, but she bit him and screamed even louder.
“What part of ‘sell what you possess and give to the poor’ did you take to mean, ‘Buy a yacht to fuck kids on’? How many little old ladies gave you their social security check and told you they were praying for your boner? You think I drop hurricanes and school shootings on the regular because of gay marriage, but I’m cool with this shit? You feculent cockwomble, what part of thou shalt not diddle little kids did you not underfuckingstand?”
The double doors flew open. Two men in tactical duck-hunting gear stomped in with assault rifles and swept the room with red laser beams. The evangelist jumped off the bed and tried to push them out of the stateroom, but more people crowded in, including an older man in pajamas and his toupee on backwards.
The man with the rug seemed extraordinarily concerned with the other man’s welfare, but when he saw the boy and the girl in the bed, his whole demeanor changed, and he began demanding an explanation from both the evangelist and his grandchildren.
The evangelist was just launching into the sermon of a lifetime to defend his actions, when one of the tactical guys knocked his teeth down his throat with the butt of his rifle. Gala willed her eyes to close, wished herself away and, mercifully, got her wish.
Gala came to her senses falling out of bed. She landed hard on one butt-cheek on the cold concrete floor of her cell. Someone was pounding on the door and her phone was blowing up. Bleary and light-headed and pretty sure she’d peed herself a little, she grabbed her phone and looked at the endless parade of messages.
NOISE COMPLAINT: 3rd notice
NOISE COMPLAINT: 4th notice
NOISE COMPLAINT: 5th notice . . .
5
The next morning, Gala awoke with fleabites all over her legs and an abiding sense of euphoric bliss. She’d slept well, which was almost unthinkable in a strange place, and more, she’d dreamed so many things . . . She tried to recollect them, but it was like trying to hold a spiderweb. She ended up with indistinct strands of gossamer trash, but her usual deep-seated anxiety was sated by whatever brain-movies she’d played for it last night, and for a while at least, she was free to do and be without it roaring at her.
She rolled out of bed, noticing a distressing stain on the sheets . . . Holy shit, did she wet the bed? Was it sex dreams? She’d never, to her knowledge, actually had a wet dream, but she couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed last night. Some golden irony right there, body, she thought, patting herself on the back.
Plenty of sex nightmares, though. In one recurring puberty dream, she was taking a shower after PE with all the other girls, feeling ashamed of her awkward body, when hordes of spiders and cockroaches came boiling up out of the drain.
She was frozen and couldn’t run away as they raced up her legs and took refuge inside her. She could only scream and try to cover herself as her infested body swelled and bulged with hateful bovine breasts and wobbling buttocks blobs.
Suddenly the shower was co-ed and the crowd, obscured by steam and her own tears, hooted and cat-called and she woke up gasping for air. When she tried to talk to Mom, she took it the wrong way, giving her a glass of red wine just like when Gala got her first period, and winking, slurring as she asked whether it was about a boy or a girl.
She paced around her room for a bit, enjoying the space. You couldn’t move freely on Mom’s boat, couldn’t pick up anything without knocking down something else. Mom wrapped herself in clutter like a security blanket, but Mom also once ripped off a big toenail putting on a sock, so you couldn’t begrudge her whatever made it possible for her to function at all.
On her way to the shower, she noticed something was up. Giggling, sideways glances that made her think her tampon string was showing.
Over breakfast—steak tartar drizzled with raw egg yolk, perpetrated by Magda—the others avoided looking at her, leaving her feeling like she’d interrupted something. Galadriel had resigned from the meal in protest, leaving a copy of Diet For A Dead Planet in her place.
Finally, Maryelizabeth asked, “So, dear . . . How did you sleep?”
The others tittered—honest to fuck, she’d never actually heard literal tittering before. Mother Mildred breezed in with a cat under each arm. “Wanda, it’s flea medicine time again, hon. Gala, let’s talk.”
In her office, Mildred drew the blinds. She fidgeted and checked her phone as if they were both waiting for someone else to come into the office and take charge. “I didn’t think I’d need to spell out our code of conduct so soon, but we don’t, um . . . we don’t condone onanism.”
“Wait, what? I already told you, I’m an atheist.”
“I thought you said you were an agnostic. Anyway, that’s not the point . . . ”
“Well . . . ” Little snippets of Gala’s dream filtered back to her, tripping up her train of thought. She ran her fingers through her hair, letting the tangles tug her scalp, letting the pain bring her back to the present. Onanism? “Oh wait! I didn’t, you know. Ewwww, God!”
“Everyone heard you . . . ”
Gala blushed so hard, her brain wilted from blood loss. “Okay, I wasn’t going to bother you about that, but what happened was a genuine mystical experience. It wasn’t sexual. I left my body, and I—I think I did something.”
“We heard what you did.” Mother Mildred took off her glasses and furtively licked each lens with the tip of her colorless tongue, then polished them on her habit. Without them, her eyes were the size of raisins. “We believe we can work powerful change here by contemplation and prayer. By pooling our energy as a force for good in the world, we are that gentle butterfly whose fluttering wings help to create a hurricane of positivity in the wider world.”
Gala was quite familiar with the hoary, phony-Zen concept, thanks, but she had her own ideas about how change comes about.
Gala saw herself more as a moth, drawn irresistibly to the false sun of a streetlamp on a moonless night, beating her wings helplessly against it, trying to win her way through to an unattainable day. Though her struggles might only singe her antennae, she could see how she might also fly in the face of a passing truck driver so he crashed into a utility pole, plunging the world into darkness and allowing the unpolluted light of Heaven to shine down on Earth. Call it Gala’s First Law of Punctured Equilibrium.
She didn’t try to explain this to Mildred, nor did she get too detailed about her dream, only admitting that she’d had a regular rarebit-fiend pillow-ripper of a nightmare and she was very sorry, it wouldn’t happen again.
Mother Mildred eyed her warily for a little while, then sprinkled some essential oils on her Tibetan salt lamp, and told her to go help Wanda dose the cats.
So long as she performed her assigned domestic chores and didn’t break the rules, which she now understood were many and various, though unwritten, Gala would have to work pretty hard to get tossed out of Saint Candy’s, which had to keep all its cells occupied to keep its endowment flowing.
She tried to throw herself into the work until she was too exhausted for nocturnal shenanigans. None of the cats would let her pet them and they’d scratched the shit out of her when she gave them flea medicine, and now she was pretty sure she had fleas in her hair.
She took a long shower and put on the softest music in her playlist, so low that she could barely hear it. She took melatonin and a glass of warm milk before falling asleep, and her last conscious thought was, Please, don’t let it happen again.
But it happened again.
6
A sickly old man lay in an eighteen-hole golf-course of a bed under an oxygen tent, swaddled in white eiderdown duvets, propped up on pillows stuffed with feathers of birds that went extinct for the privilege of bearing the heavy head of the shadow-pope.
The horrid, bloated apparition showed no interest in the soccer match playing on the jumbo flat-screen or the tray of pureed veal, foie gras and caviar in its lap, but betrayed some
signs of life when an acolyte brought a cup of tea. Clawing itself out of the sumptuous bedding with tiny stick-bundle hands, he reached for the cup with a manifest greed, sunken eyes eagerly taking in the angelic beauty of the young priest’s face, then his figure as he hurried away.
It was quiet here . . . often too quiet, and the boys knew better than to come inside his tent, which was for their protection, as much as for his own health. But he relished the unique pinnacle of power he’d eked out for himself.
Without all the superfluous duties of ring-kissing, goodwill tours and empty public proclamations, he had found himself holding all the cards he’d ever hungered for. From this former monastery on the edge of the Vatican, he controlled the flow of money and secrets, the dispensation of patronage, and he had been mostly free to wallow in his earthly appetites.
“Don’t drink it,” someone whispered in his ear. “They’re poisoning you.”
The old man fumbled the teacup and it spilled on the spotless duvet cover.
“Who said that?” he rasped. He looked up and saw the burning words on the wall: MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN.
The terrible portent etched itself on his eyes even when he covered them with his hands, but then a blast of furnace-heat shriveled the oxygen tent away and raised blisters on his flesh. A deafening voice shattered the teacup in his hand.
“NOT FEELING SO INFALLIBLE NOW, ARE WE?”
He moved like a wet sack of broken glass, but he moved, scuttling across the bed to cling to the headboard, a Bernini bas-relief of porphyry depicting Jesus casting the money-changers out of the temple. His wildly searching eyes swept the room for the intruder. If he concentrated, he could almost see a grainy phantasm of a tall, thin female form looming at the foot of his bed with her hands planted on her immodest hips, and wings.
“So correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but women can’t be trusted because an old book says one of us tempted man to eat a fruit that made him stop being a dumb animal, but you cross-dressing buzzkills are in charge because God forced Himself on a married virgin and knocked her up to redeem us for being exactly as shitty as He made us. That just kind of blows my mind, honestly.”
The shadow-pope was not so shaken up as she’d expected by her entrance. He was quite prepared to lecture even angels about God’s divine mysteries, and after boldly fluffing his own pillow and taking a bracing sip of sparkling mineral oil, he embarked upon his defense of the mother church as the bride of Christ and the infallible instrument of His divine might. “If you will allow me—”
“I WON’T,” she roared, in a piercing tone that cracked his flat-screen just before Italy scored a winning goal to clinch the European Cup. “I’m not here to fuck with you. I just want to see the phone.”
“The . . . What?”
“The one you use to talk to God. There is one, right? Otherwise, you’re just howling in the wind with the rest of us, hearing what you want to hear. Ever read Julian Jaynes? He said that early humans had a split brain, so thoughts from the right hemisphere were like totally alien voices, and everybody thought it was gods talking to them. He’s been discredited, I think, but you guys go around worshipping your own pricks, and you’re not allowed to even use them . . .
“Anyway . . . where is my head? What’s it look like? Is it like a gold princess phone, or a red blinking phone like Batman has, and when He calls, you go down fireman poles and come out in papal battle-gear, ready for action . . . but you guys aren’t about action, are you? When it rings, do you even answer it? Or is it down in the cellar with all the winged dildos and squicky statues from Pompeii and the proof that everything Jesus said was stolen from a hermetic mushroom-cult on the Dead Sea, and the thought of it ringing makes you shit your nine-hundred thread-count sheets?”
The shadow-pope was still struggling to offer a well-constructed retort to this profane rhetorical onslaught when Gala, sauntering around the chamber, stopped at a particularly ostentatious piece of décor. “What the fuck is this? See, this is what I’m talking about. What the fuck is this shit?”
The shadow-pope explained that she was looking at a gift from the Ottoman Empire, circa 1750. A ship in a bottle large enough to fit a human body, with hull of gold, exquisite rigging of braided silver and platinum and mother-of-pearl sails.
“See, you know those teeming millions of hungry, poor miserable people who hang on your every word about how they’ll get everything they’ve got coming to them in Heaven? It seems like you could feed and clothe and house the fuck out of all those poor suckers, if you just had a damn garage sale, once in a while.”
This wasn’t turning out anything like the shadow-pope had always expected a heavenly visitation would go down. He was beginning to suspect he was entertaining a succubus, so he picked up his very ordinary cordless phone and tried to recall which of the speed-dial buttons would summon an exorcist.
“I’m not getting through to you, am I?” Gala summoned patience, but what was the point? She waved her hand and the room vanished.
The shadow-pope found himself standing on a golden poop-deck beneath masts rigged with gleaming threads and scalloped, opalescent sails.
“Pretty neat, huh?” Gala strolled round the shadow-pope as he stared flabbergasted, waiting for him to realize where they were. “Bet you didn’t know what was inside that tacky ship in a bottle, did you? Inside the cargo hold is a whole mess of ships in bottles, each about the size of an Old English 800 forty-ouncer . . . and inside the holds of those ships, there’re even more bottles, each with a ship about the size of a June bug. That’s where we are right now . . . on a ship in a bottle in a ship in a bottle in a ship in a bottle.
“Think about that for a second. All those artisans working to make this ridiculous thing, going blind fitting the tiniest ships with little sails and shit, getting their hands chopped off for the slightest mistake, putting those ships in tiny bottles, then those bottles in little ships, then those ships in bottles . . . all to make this ugly-ass thing you never bothered to even look inside. It’s a pretty apt metaphor for your whole operation.
“So I gotta figure, if you’re special enough to have God’s ear, if you’re more than just the hod-boss of an international pedophile ring, you’ll get sprung out of here faster than I can say, ‘Amen.’”
The shadow-pope decided he’d had quite enough of this, and realizing he was still holding the phone, he began stabbing buttons, but he could not get a signal, and the disrespectful angel was gone, and his stomach began to grumble, and he wracked his brains for the secret prayer of extreme urgency that he was instructed in when he first became pope, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember the words.
***
The actual papal apartments were a lot less tacky than the shadow-pope’s swinging bachelor pad, but it still felt like a poverty-porn act, somehow even more offensive. The humble twin bed beside a nightstand piled with dog-eared copies of St. Augustine and Origen and Nietzsche and letters from faithful followers all around the world looked like a temporary installation in a Vegas art gallery, made the Pope look like a weeping hood ornament on an out-of-control limousine.
He was sitting at a desk in his library and reading letters, tears streaming down his face, when Gala manifested before him. “So, how does this work? When you say yes and the shadow-pope says no, do you guys just arm-wrestle, or what? Because you’re supposed to be the good cop, and the other guy was a useless shit, so I had to do away with him. Are you really a nice guy?”
The Pope looked about him for some context in which to place this cranky young American tourist whose scornful words somehow burst forth in his brain as if in his native tongue. If he was not as predisposed as his predecessor to accept a divine visitation as his due, he had also come to believe that world events were building towards a crisis of such proportions that God, sooner or later, would have to step in.
But there were a lot of simpler explanations than divine intervention for this woman in ripped leggings and a Bad Brains T-shirt be
rating him in the small hours of the morning. All the lights on his security console glowed green. No intruder had been detected. He asked her what she would have him do.
“I don’t know . . . Do a miracle. A good one. If he listens to anyone, it’s you guys, right? You have all those giant antenna-penises pointed at Heaven, so get on the horn and ask for something people actually need. Make manna rain down where people are hungry. Hoogy-doogy the weather so nobody freezes to death on the street tonight. Cure some diseases. Curse some bad guys. Just once, do something good?”
The Pope shook his beleaguered head, pressing his temples. Was this some diabolical test? With genuine sorrow wilting his voice, every word an apology, he told her that if she was sent from above, she would know as well as he that this was simply not how it was done. The age of miracles had passed, and—
“Okay, I get it. Whatever. Let’s try an easy one. Let women be priests. Stop picking on gay and trans folks. Stop pretending it’s God’s grand design every time a bomb falls on an orphanage, but it’s the end of the fucking world when a woman has to get an abortion. Any one of those, coming from you, would be an acceptable miracle. Just do it.”
Again, the Pope vacillated and agonized before explaining that this was simply not how it was—
“Okay, I’ve heard enough. Let’s go. Maybe the next guy will listen to me.”
The Pope hid his eyes from a flash of blinding light. When it subsided, he beheld Gala as an angel as depicted in so many Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation; a cold, androgynous giant with glittering wings that unfurled to span the width of the papal apartment.
Before the Pope could react, Gala took him in her arms like a swaddled babe and launched herself from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, smashing through the french doors and rocketing up into the sky like a shoulder-fired Stinger missile.
The Flying None Page 3