Thomas M. Disch (6 page)

The Bishop concluded his homily with a tribute to Saint Macanus, who was a pupil of Saint Anthony and one of the Desert Fathers. The Bishop told how the skull of a pagan had spoken to Macanus, revealing secrets concerning the governance of hell, where the Jews were consigned to a deeper pit than the pagans. But deeper than the Jews, the skull revealed, was the place reserved for unregenerate and heretical Christians, closest to where Satan himself, the Archfiend, was bound to a burning gridiron with red-hot chains. As he screamed, he would reach out and seize the damned and press them, like clusters of grapes, into his insatiable maw. Not all of these details derived from the particular revelation of Saint Macanus. The Bishop collated many sources in painting his picture of the afterlife that awaited the Church’s enemies. His aim was not scholarly exactitude but vividness, and when he descended from his pulpit, he felt he had achieved his aim.

In the sacristy, the Bishop dismissed the abbot and the deacons of Notre Dame who had assisted at the Mass and was divested with the aid only of his famulus, Abbé St-Loup, who had acted today as thurifer and as a result still gave off a penetrating odor of frankincense. Abbé St-Loup was a short, plump cleric of fifty-four years notable rather for his skill at beekeeping and viticulture than for his piety. He was also, unfortunately, the Bishop’s half brother, one of many such offspring that the Bishop’s father, Aimeric III, Count of Roquefort, had sired in his headstrong youth outside the bonds of wedlock. Most of these blots on the good name of the family had found places of service in the de Roquefort household or had been shipped off to the Crusades, either to the Holy Land or to Toulouse, where they’d killed infidels and heretics and, such was God’s will, been killed themselves. Of all Aimeric’s bastards, only St-Loup survived, thanks to his having been dedicated to the service of the cross rather than that of the sword. For that reason as well, he had become the particular charge of his ten-years-younger, legitimate half brother, Silvanus, who felt toward him a temperate but implacable detestation that St-Loup answered with a fawning deference and sly insinuations of fraternal affection. He was a thorn in the Bishop’s side but, as so often in such cases, the Bishop could not be quit of him. He was a wound that would not heal for picking at the scab. The Bishop needed to have his half brother about to torment, and by having him about he secured his own misery as well.

“Your Grace was most eloquent today in his homily,” St-Loup declared with a cringe of reverence as he accepted the crozier from the Bishop’s hand and began to remove the enamel pins that secured the seamless fabric of the pallium. Then, lest this seem insufficient: “Your Grace is always eloquent.”

“Never mind my eloquence. Mind the pins!”

“Indeed, Your Grace! The pins—and the pallium! Such a privilege to be allowed to assist in your disrobing when you wear the pallium. I feel almost as though I were touching the garment of our Savior Himself.”

The Bishop was, in fact, somewhat vain concerning the pallium. It was a vestment usually reserved for the use of the Pope and of archbishops. Its wool came from special lambs that had been blessed by His Holiness on the feast day of Saint Agnes, January twenty-first, and then entrusted to the canons of St.

John Lateran and raised by nuns of an order particularly devoted to this task until they were ready to be shorn. In all Europe there were only eight episcopal sees whose bishops were privileged to wear the pallium: Autun, Bamberg, Dol, Lucca, Ostia, Pavia, Verona, and the Bishop’s own diocese of Rodez and Montpellier-le-Vieux. It was a distinction that the Bishop could not help but suppose prefigured further distinctions to come. But to hear Abbé St-Loup speak of it in his tone of oily sycophancy was a defilement, as though the garment’s white wool had been besmirched with excrement.

“Oh, look at this!” the Abbé marveled, holding up the rarest of ±e pins for the Bishop’s closer admiration. “Is this an amethyst? Or is it a chip from very heaven’s dome?”

The man exposed the black stumps of his teeth in a grimace of pious cupidity, and the Bishop, unable to repress his annoyance, swatted at the hand holding the pin as at a fly.

St-Loup yelped as the point of the gold pin penetrated the soft heel of his hand. A gout of blood formed where the skin was pierced, and before the Bishop could back away from him, the gout swelled to the size of a small grape and dropped down across the pallium, where it formed a slantwise red mark like a virgule just below the Bishop’s pectoral cross.

“Clod!” the Bishop screamed in dismay, for he knew, at the first sight of the stain on the wool, that it was indelible, that some faint trace of St-Loup’s blood would always remain upon the pallium, which itself was irreplaceable and inalienable—almost, in a way, the Bishop’s second skin, for whoever received the pallium knew that he was destined to be buried in it.

Even to lend it to another cleric, howsoever high his office, was not permitted. And now the Bishop’s pallium had been soiled forever by this oafish prelate’s mongrel blood.

The Bishop grasped hold of his crozier and struck Abbé St-Loup across the face. The gilded and bejeweled shepherd’s crook made a formidable weapon.

The Abbé covered his face with his hands and fell to his knees, begging forgiveness. The Bishop struck him again, slamming the bottom end of the staff into the small of his back.

“Mercy, my lord!” the Abbé gasped.

Not by any impulse of mercy but from a sudden, searing pain that spread across his own chest, the Bishop desisted. Now it was his turn to gasp, and to fall to his knees. But of whom could he beg for mercy? What instrument had dealt this terrible pain? He tore at the vestments that wrapped him, layer upon precious layer, trying to discover the source of his suffering and to assuage it. He dropped the crozier, cast off his miter, clawed at the golden chain from which his pectoral cross hung pendant, but he no more had the power to remove the chain than if he’d been a blackamoor trying to tear off his fetters.

The pain was unbearable. It was as though he were being flayed alive. As though the single enameled pin that had pierced the Abbé’s flesh were now puncturing his—not once but infinitely many times.

The Abbé, still prostrated on the stony floor, saw the Bishop’s paroxysms with such astonishment that he forgot, at first, to be fearful. “My lord?” he ventured timidly.

But the Bishop had become quite oblivious of him. It almost seemed—but this was a terrible thought—that he had been possessed. The Abbé scrambled to his feet and backed toward the heavy oak door of the sacristy.

The Bishop summoned up the strength to command: “Leave me!”

The Abbé left with no more persuasion.

The pain continued, but with some abatement, so that the Bishop was able to remove his pectoral cross and to slip the pallium from his shoulders. But with the folds of the pallium bunched about his knees, he found it impossible to untangle himself from chasuble, tunicle, alb. He collapsed to the floor with his arms spread across his chest, his fingers clutching his shoulders, as though to protect himself from his invisible torturer.

But the torturer continued his work and even became, for an instant, visible—if not to the Bishop’s physical senses (for he’d pressed his eyes tight-closed), then to some other organ of apprehension.

The man was a scrawnier St-Loup, the same gray-tufted beard, the same tonsure, but strangely dressed, with a curious device of wires and glass mounted on his nose and ears. He smiled at the Bishop and spoke in a strange language, which the Bishop nevertheless understood: “Good timing, Damon. We’re almost done with the outline. I’ll show you where we are.”

The man put aside the instrument of torture and held up a speculum of incredible rarity and precision. Slanting its silvery face, he showed the Bishop his own naked, bleeding torso—and rising from it, yet intrinsic with it, a face of smoke, the face of hell itself, dim but undeniable.

“What do you say to that, Damon?”

“It’s Satan,” the Bishop whispered.

“You bet your fuckin’ ass it’s Satan.”

The Bishop turned away his face from the smiling, demonic visage in the speculum, closed his eyes, and found himself once more on the sacristy floor.

The vision of hell had vanished and, with it, the worst of the pain.

He knew what had happened. Hell had claimed him for its own. His sins were to be punished, as he’d always feared they would be. Perhaps not at once.

Perhaps he might be spared some hours or days. But the yoke had been placed on his shoulders, the collar was about his neck.

“Hello,” said the answering machine in a voice that could have been anybody’s. “You’ve reached 555-0023. Sorry there’s no one home. If you would like to leave a message, wait for the beep.”

She waited for the beep, which seemed to take forever, and then she said, “Petey, hello, are you there, this is your mother.”

She gave him more than ample time to pick up and then, when he refused to, she continued: “Well, whether you’re there or not, I hope you’re all right. I had another little episode today, but I’m fine now. There were chicken tenders for dinner, and I always like that, but the cook here doesn’t know how to make a cake and I swear she uses Crisco to make the frosting. This was not really my idea, calling up, but if I refuse to call, that goes on my record and I get the third degree from my counselor. ‘Why aren’t you using your phone privileges, Mrs. Bryce? Are you angry with anyone?’ As though I had anything to get angry
about!
Anyhow. Your brother came out to the cemetery and found me there, and I remember there was something I told him about your father, and now I can’t remember what. But something you’d want to know, too.

He’s a priest. Well, of course, you’d know that, wouldn’t you? What are you? I know what you
look
like, because the nurse, who’s sitting on the other side of the ward at this minute, knitting, pointed you out in the picture on my dresser, the one with just the two of us, and I’ve got to say, you ought to lose some
weight
. Your brother is much trimmer, and he’s your twin. I do remember some things. I mean, about the two of you. But mostly back when you were little. Or even teenagers. I remember, vaguely, that you used to fight. I guess with boys that’s inevitable. And you would always get the worst of it.

Which is funny when you think that it’s your brother who became the priest. Is this machine still recording me? Anyhow, this should satisfy the nurse about my mental equilibrium. For tonight, anyhow. Oh, it just came to me, isn’t that always the way. It was about your father— not Paul, your real father. And I’ve told you already, haven’t I? I never told your brother, but I did tell you. Years ago, when we got drunk, after Grandpa McCarthy’s funeral. You should have seen the look on your brother’s face when I told him today. I didn’t say who it was, only that it wasn’t Paul. And he didn’t say a thing, but I had a feeling that he was pleased. You were, weren’t you? I mean, whb would want Paul Bryce for their father? Not that the alternative is so much better, I guess. In fact, that was what was at the back of my mind just now, when I agreed to have the nurse dial your number. I can remember his face, sort of. Not bad looking, but no Clark Gable either. I remember he wore a cassock sometimes. But then I
also
remember him wearing one of my dresses.

It’s like watching Geraldo on TV, some of the strange people nowadays. Then, too—only then people didn’t talk about it on TV. They didn’t talk about it at all. Anyhow, I can’t for the life of me remember his name. But I think I told you. So you would know and I don’t, which certainly is a peculiar situation.

We could go on Geraldo, as a team. Anyhow. It’s nice talking to your machine.

I always feel we’ve got this special bond, your machine and me.

“Bye.”

His mother was always so much friendlier and more interesting when she talked to his machine than when she had him on the line that Peter Bryce rarely picked up the phone when she called in the evenings. He’d even taken to recording her different messages on the answering machine on another tape as a kind of keepsake. Possibly he might play it at her memorial service, assuming there was one, and that he’d be attending it, which lately had come to seem a more and more unwarranted assumption.

After she’d hung up, he rewound the tape and poured himself another rum and Coke so as not to waste the last half of the can, his third of the evening. There was just enough Bacardi left in the second halfpint bottle.

Then he replayed the answering machine tape and used his Walkman to add tonight’s message to the anthology of her other messages. Tonight’s was surely one of her finest, especially the suggestion that
he
was the only one who could reveal her dark secret, her Alzheimer’s having wiped the slate of
her

memory clean. Neat.

He wondered if elderly lifers in penitentiaries came down with Alzheimer’s and had to ask guards or cellmates what they’d done to be there.

He also wondered, as he had other times, if his mother was quite as fuzzy-headed as she made herself out to be. Sometimes she just seemed devious.

Of course, it was possible she was both fuzzy-headed
and
devious. Devious could become a habit, like drinking, that a person maintained in a variety of circumstances. Richard III was devious and physically challenged, so why not devious with Alzheimer’s? Peter was devious himself, and as he approached the end of his rum and Coke he had a genuine brainstorm of deviousness.