Scars on the Face of God

by Chris Bauer

  Weren’t two minutes went by before the power was suddenly back on, the church still half full of chattering parishioners, some now breathing cheek-filled sighs. Their exit turned orderly until the noise level rose again, a few of them looking up, noticing the same thing I noticed only a moment ago.

  The silver-and-gold-embossed mural of God the Father, which graced the highest point of the domed ceiling, was wearing away before our eyes, losing all color and definition. The few remaining parishioners screamed again in panic. Within seconds, the mural faded into nothingness.

  Father Duncan stared at the empty space in the ceiling, his jaw slack, his face in awe, his head craned while he did a slow pirouette, as if a better angle would give him a different outcome. The last few parishioners stumbled out the exits and into a midafternoon darkness that figured to confuse and frighten them even more. I searched their faces as they left, caught Father doing the same. There was one face I was looking for: Adam’s.

  27

  I followed the quickened footsteps of a frantic Father Duncan as he pushed through the curtained passage in the front of the church, a red velveteen entrance at floor level to the left of and next to the church’s elevated altar. A few steps inside the curtain was an east-west hallway behind the altar, the passage running the width of the building. A left turn led to the sacristy. The door was open.

  Inside, Father was ripping off his vestments, whipping each piece into his armoire, grunting because he couldn’t get them off fast enough. Peeled down to his cassock and panting, he finally noticed me in the doorway.

  “Wump,” he said flatly. His face was pale, his dark hair mussed and forgotten. “It seems the Church’s two thousand years of vigilance”—he moved to a desk, picked up the cradled phone receiver—“may be about to prove its merit.”

  There came a time when a player had to take full stock of his cards. Could be the cards were drawn as the stakes were raised. Or it could be he’d been lying to himself all along, denying he’d ever been in the game, and when he finally studied his cards, he could see with a sudden awareness that he was holding the perfect hand, dealt straight from the dealer’s shuffle. Except for one problem: he wasn’t so sure he wanted the pot, because it was loaded full up with family grocery money and home mortgages, and the proceeds from Sunday’s widows and orphans collection. Still, at some point, his cards needed to be shown.

  I spoke to Father Duncan with the soberest voice I owned. “I can’t say I wouldn’t welcome a change at the top, Father. Not anymore.”

  His finger hesitated above the phone dial as he studied me, almost like he was seeing me for the first time. He jerked his eyes away for a moment as he placed the receiver back onto its cradle. His eyes returned to mine. “You need to explain that comment, Wump.”

  “My wife just learned she’ll die soon,” I told him, “from the same illness that killed my son.” I could feel my teeth grinding, my face changing color. “They never did nothing to deserve their fates, Father. So you explain to me where the Almighty’s goodness is in all this, and why some other supreme being shouldn’t get a shot at running this fucking rodeo.”

  My chest muscles tightened, the veins in my neck cording. A part of me said to take a bite out of the father right here, right now, for backing an entrepreneur who’d lost touch with his creation, and just maybe ought to step down.

  “What I want,” I felt my lips curling in anger, “is a God who cares about the people and things I care about.”

  Father’s face wrinkled in a pained disbelief. “You’re willing to trade the souls of every living creature who’s ever inhabited—and will ever inhabit—this earth for one person’s flesh-and-blood-only existence?” He blinked until his eyes narrowed, his body tensing. “Death is a condition of human life, Wump. Without it, there’s no chance at the everlasting part.”

  “I don’t know if the everlasting part exists, Father, and you don’t either.”

  “Oh, but you are wrong, Wump. There are signs.” His voice was almost pleading. “Miracles. Visions. They’ve hinted at its existence, hinted at an everlasting life which embraces all souls with equal vigor, but with far from equal final treatment. You’ve seen them, experienced them yourself. It’s all we’ve got to go on, and for the rest of the folks out there, for all the people who hope to be with their loved ones forever in an afterlife but who’ve had to live by faith alone with no glimpses of the spirit world, it’s been enough.”

  Tears. I felt them coming, squeezed them back. I wanted to believe him; I wanted this “faith.” But all I knew was what I saw, and what I thought I was, and who I thought I was becoming. “Tell me this,” I choked out, demanding of him, “who was it you saw out there at the end of Stations: Adam or Christ?”

  “What I saw”—his mouth closed to a straight line, then reopened—“was what he wanted the congregation to see: Adam as Christ. What he is, I’m afraid, is an apprentice charlatan out to create a buzz while padding his resume with visions like these, taking his first steps at learning how to play to an audience. He is, I believe”—Father blessed himself—“the son of the Beast. The false Christ, still in training. And worry as you may, Wump, you, my friend, are not.”

  “How can you be sure about me, Father?” I said, straining, measuring this man from across the room. “Inside me—there’s so much hate, so deep a need for vengeance. Against every person out there who’s ever hurt me or my family. And against him, the Almighty. The Creator, who let this all happen while he ‘rested.’” My teeth clenched, tight enough to tear the hide off a buffalo, or the flesh off a human being.

  “I should have been tossed away like the rest of them, into the river or the sewers! I should have been drowned with all them innocent babies, their bones—my bones—spit up then spread out all over the morgue’s concrete floor, like a dinosaur exhibit!

  “It was me who was the bad seed at the orphanage. Me who was responsible for all them fires—oh, how I enjoyed them fires, Father—and me, who let some defenseless, sad-sack little kid take the blame, for Christ sake.” My words were raspy, and I felt my lips quivering. “With parents who adopted him, then killed him, just to make sure he wasn’t ‘the one.’ Killed him for something I did. The timing of my birth, the devil-book prophecy, the signs are there. They should have killed me, before I had a chance to do the things I did. The things I may be capable of doing. I’m a time bomb, Father, and now that I’m about to lose Viola.” I felt my jaw shaking. “The fuse has been lit.”

  “Wump. Please. Settle down.” Father’s voice—it was soothing, understanding, the tone a priest used with a child whose sins maybe weren’t bad enough to sit him in the corner let alone send him to hell. “You need to ask yourself one important question. If you’re the false Christ, then who, or what, is Adam?”

  “The real thing.”

  Father’s mouth hung open a moment, and I could tell he was straddling a fence in his head, evaluating the whole frigging mess the two of us been exposed to these past few days. His downturned mouth showed he’d reached a verdict.

  “The ‘Second Coming’? No,” he said firmly. “Absolutely not. You’ve got it all wrong, Wump.” He lifted the telephone receiver again, wiped a sweaty palm against his pant leg, then poised his hand above the black-and-white dial.

  “I’ve got it all wrong, Father? Really? So what is it you know about Adam and me that makes you so cocksure?”

  “It’s all about pedigree,” Father said, rotating his thick index finger around the dial, manhandling each number. “Adam’s pedigree matches what was written by the demon himself, and yours…well, yours does not.”

  He shot a quick glance out the crisscrossed panes of the sacristy window, grimaced at a darkness that had fully overtaken the midafternoon. “I’m calling the cardinal. He needs to know what we saw here today. What the whole congregation saw here today.”

  Father lost me. “My what? My ‘pedigree’? What about my pedigree?”

  There was a sound to my left, air rushing pa
st us from an outside draft. It came from the vestibule alcove where a slanted shadow covered a second entrance to the sacristy. The brush of air was followed by a thud, something heavy that had been dropped flat onto the marble floor.

  “Hold on a minute,” Father said sternly into the phone’s mouthpiece.

  Like a chunk of split firewood tossed onto a frozen pond, a large book slid out from the vestibule, rotating as it crossed the floor’s slick, marble surface. Once in the center of the room, friction slowed the book to a stop, one final twist slapping its cover open.

  The pages of the Devil’s Bible flapped themselves in a frenzied blur, Father and me on separate sides of it, until the crinkled paper settled itself. In the shadowy vestibule I now saw the bottom half of a cassock. It was red, not black, making me do double take because of the color. Finally the difference sank in.

  Not black. Cardinal red.

  “Father,” I said, not sure if he was paying attention, “if you want to speak with the cardinal, hang up and turn around.”

  28

  “Thank you for the introduction, Mr. Hozer.”

  This voice. I recognized it, and it wasn’t the cardinal’s. I squinted, trying to make out the man’s facial features in the shadowy vestibule. He spoke again.

  “Although I expect to be announced as ‘His Eminence, the Cardinal.’”

  Father Duncan hadn’t turned around yet, instead strained with the phone to his ear while he spoke into the receiver, hard, right through frantic interruptions of the person on the other end who was so loud I could hear him from across the room. “Brother York! Calm down! Stop. Wait—” Father put a hand over his other ear to better hear. “Say it again, slowly.”

  Father Duncan suddenly stiffened. He turned in my direction, let the hand with the phone in it drift down to his side, then glanced at the demon bible on the floor between us. I nodded toward the vestibule. Out stepped Monsignor Fassnacht, his cassock the scarlet red of an ordained cardinal.

  “Let me help you understand, Father Duncan,” the monsignor said. With little effort he slid a tall scepter from a stand in the corner of the sacristy, the scepter’s top end a heavy, hard-angled gold cross. He moved closer to Father, the pole end of the scepter resting lightly on the floor in between each step. Something wasn’t right about his red cassock. The upper half, in the front. It looked to be two shades of red, the second more brown than scarlet, but only in spots—large, misshapen, brownish-red blotches, one of them wide, leading down from the neckline.

  Jesus. The cassock was wet with blood, some of it already caking up.

  “I suspect the Cardinal’s assistant, that faggot Brother York,” Monsignor said to Father, “has lost his stomach over what he’s found in the cardinal’s residence. Am I correct, Father?”

  Terror lit up Father’s wide, coffee-bean eyes. “He told me the Cardinal is dead,” he said, Father swallowing hard. “He said his head was ripped off his body. It took a monster to do something like that.”

  “Let’s be civil now, Father Duncan. Perhaps I was a bit, shall we say”—Monsignor wandered along the wall on my left, taking in the entire sacristy—“overly aggressive with him. But it was only because his snooping, through you, has made me feel more frustrated lately.” He nodded his head, agreeing with himself. “Yes. Frustrated and threatened. It’s like this, Father.

  “My dream of advancing through the religious morass of Church politicos, well, it just never materialized. I’ve been mired in middle management, you could say, ever since they sent me here. But I toed the line, administered to a parish full of blue-collar, sauerkraut immigrants and their descendants for, how long has it been now? Oh my.” His voice rose then fell in mock surprise. “It’s been over thirty years! It took a while—more than half that time—for me to realize the only real currency in this business is, well, currency. Being assigned to a poor parish, one’s advancement opportunities become a bit limited. That is, unless one is presented with a better offer. And I was.”

  Father Duncan kept a half-room distance from Monsignor, whose wandering took him past the long, windowed wall of the sacristy and closer to me. The monsignor stopped, picked up one sacristy trinket after another, examining then discarding them—letter openers, small plaques, a votive candle—returning each item to the polished surface of the credenza, his mouth turned down, looking bored. He lifted a paperweight, round, the size of a baseball but made of clear glass, with the Nativity scene inside. He raised it above his shoulder, faked a toss to the father. Father Duncan, deep in concentration, didn’t flinch. Monsignor lowered the paperweight, let it sit in the palm of his open hand as if presenting it to us, then smiled while he closed his fingers around it. He crushed the glass and the figures inside until the paperweight was reduced to sand that ran through his fingers, onto the floor.

  “Can’t say I’ll miss this place,” Monsignor said. “Can’t say I’ll miss it one fucking bit.” He raised an eyebrow as if he’d surprised himself.

  “‘Fucking,’” he said, his eyes twinkling. “How I’ve come to really enjoy that word, its sound so sharp, its spoken feel so abusive to the teeth and lips, so wonderfully violating, just like the act itself. ‘Fucking!’” he said louder, barking the word’s hard-edged syllables while he passed in front of me. “Considering all the, ahem, fucking I’ve been doing lately, I’ve come to appreciate human behavior when it is at its crudest; how much fun it can be at its most primitive, animalistic level. Which brings me to you, Mr. Hozer.”

  Monsignor turned, stepped in closer to me. No way was I gonna move. Not gonna cringe one bit for this bastard. He sidled up and breathed into my face, and at this distance I smelled how sour his old-man breath was. Bad as decaying flowers on a gravesite after an animal’s pissed on them.

  “Lovable old Wump. What a wonderful name. ‘Wump.’ How perfectly it matches your personality and your mastery of some of the cruder elements of the English language.” He sneered at me. “How stupid you are, Wump. It seems you need a lesson. About old books, and about translations of old scriptures. About how every word written, back when the written word was newer, meant something, and should never be overlooked. Last century the parishioners of this filthy, run-down tannery town, and apparently its clergy, too”—Monsignor chuckled—“had misconstrued a message. The message delivered by a very handsome angel whose only sin was his pride, and who fell from God’s grace because of it.” The monsignor suddenly turned, pointed the scepter at Father like a teacher in a classroom. “Father Duncan! Explain it to him like you were wont to do earlier. Explain what you meant by ‘pedigree.’”

  My fingers coiled into fists; something Father didn’t miss. “Wump, don’t do anything rash—”

  “Duncan! Quit the bickering,” Monsignor warned. “I’m not here to harm old Wump. I’m here to…Well, let’s be honest about this. I’m here to harm you, you meddling fool. Now explain it to him!”

  Father Duncan moved in front of his vestment armoire, stayed focused on Monsignor.

  “‘Avowed to him,’” Father said without looking at me. “The words he is talking about, which appear in the Devil’s Bible—this phrase follows the declaration of how the false Christ will be a firstborn child; the ‘first from two virgins.’ It was misinterpreted by the few who had seen it, and when passed word of mouth from generation to generation, the phrase would have rarely been mentioned. Church dignitaries, New Testament scholars, and this parish’s overly zealous monsignor from the last century, who forced his God-fearing flock to adhere to the same misinterpretation, making them destroy all firstborn sons from virgin relationships or face being shunned—they all got it wrong, too.”

  “Very good, Father,” Monsignor said. “Now explain its significance.”

  “‘Avowed to him,’” Father repeated. “Not simply to mean reverent followers of God, or those avowed practitioners of the Faith, but rather to mean clerics, or those who have taken the religious vows of celibacy, obedience, poverty. Specifically, the false Christ child woul
d be the product of the ultimate transgression: carnal union between priest and nun.”

  Monsignor Fassnacht closed his eyes like he was listening to a melody, the cocky bastard relishing the moment—“Yes, oh yessss!”—and me, I was on red alert, my pulse quickening. This place, it was about to explode. I could sense it. Could sense an undercurrent, could feel the violence. In him. In me.

  His eyes reopened, dreamy and relaxed. “And that, Father Duncan, is where I came in. Enter the unfulfilled cleric. Someone willing to forgo the vague promise of a joyful afterlife for the guarantee of a really great here and now. My prayers to God all those years…who’d have thought I’d hear from the competition instead? And with a better deal. Ha!”

  Monsignor suddenly slapped the head of the scepter down hard against the top of the credenza as if the two of us had fallen asleep in class. He swept the scepter’s crucifixed end across the flat surface, sending books and pens and other paperweights scattering. “He’s really misunderstood, mind you. I’m speaking of Lucifer, the fallen angel, of course. The poor malcontent’s just looking for some equal time. So I agreed to do something for him. Something simple. I agreed to talk the very young, very impressionable, and deliciously dark and sexy Sister Magdalena into thinking she could be the next virgin mother of Christ. And after I did what was asked, Lucifer, honest chap that he is, made the first installment on what he agreed to do for me.”

  Monsignor grabbed the inside of his thigh, up near his crotch. “Bulked me up like a steer on hormones,” he said, shaking his package, “so all the women will crave me. But I had to agree to one other thing as well, of course: I had to let him take the inaugural spin behind the wheel of my new ‘Caddy’”—he grabbed his crotch again—“while he fired the first salvo at Sister Magdalena. After all, this is the proclamation, right? Then lo and behold, a star was born. And as long as I follow the rest of the script, I get Lucifer’s second installment on the deal: the Papacy, Father! Or at least a promiscuous equivalency of it! So tell me, Wump, you sorry old bugger, you…”