The Penitent has not taken his medicine in more than a week. It has been many years since he last endeavored to live his life without the complex cocktail of prescription pills that have helped him become the person that he allows the world to see. This time, he is unsure whether the absence of drugs has had any effect upon him. He feels weak and dizzy and there is a sound in his head like the far-off jingling of keys, but he is aware that he has lost a lot of blood and has barely eaten or drunk for many days. Perhaps the strange colors and shapes in his vision are a direct result of the physical abuses visited upon his body, and not a resurgence of the condition that left him unsure of what was real and what was not. It is taking an effort of will to differentiate between the various men he has taught himself to be. This morning, while ordering a coffee and bagel, he saw tiny scampering beetles erupt from beneath the fingernails of the waitress who served him. She acted as though there was nothing there, even as the tiny dots flooded over her fingers and wrist and scurried over her dark skin. He recoiled in his chair as if struck, tearing open the wounds on his back. A wave of nausea engulfed him and he vomited all over the yellow floor of the diner, spattering the girl’s legs and shoes with a mixture of bile and blood. He stumbled into the snow, reeking of foulness and tasting his own rotting insides. And then his head made a noise like an airplane taking off and he was back in the restaurant, sipping ice water, talking to the waitress about the book she had been reading and listening to her thoughts on what she planned to do when she graduated.
Here, now, the Penitent cannot be sure that he is talking with the right voice. He can hear himself and the conversation he is having with the man who has made him rich, but he knows that the words could be an auditory hallucination, masking the true conversation taking place beneath.
He listens, like an eavesdropper, to the words he is muttering into the telephone.
“There may be hope. If he wakes, the surgeon doubts he will ever be the man he was and his memory may be so incapacitated as to be harmless. He takes comfort in the words. I wish only that it had not been so. I know this is my doing. I was tempted. I went against your instructions and it cost us all something too dear to calculate. I know your pain equals my own. Believe me, I fought to stop this. But I was weak. It was beaten from my disloyal lips. My consciousness floated above as he tore the truth from my bleeding body. We had no choice. You had no choice. With the Lord’s help we can make his sacrifice a thing of beauty. Forgive me . . .”
The Penitent hears someone begin to cough and is surprised to feel wetness upon his own chin. Has the man sprayed blood and phlegm upon him? Or were the words his own? He feels faint as he considers the question. Feels himself falling, tumbling through floor after floor of his own insides like an angel tumbling from heaven; watching the perfect lights of paradise grow faint and the heat of hell begin to cook the tenderized meat upon his back.
He forces himself to stand and realizes he is already upright. There is a candle, burning inches from his face. People are looking at him. He can feel a cool breeze upon his face. He looks at the stone floor and the multicolored lights that shimmer like goldfish upon its hardness. And he sees the blood, the blood he dripped and knelt in as he stooped to take the body of Christ into his mouth.
“Are you hurt, my son?”
And he is falling again, falling for real, tumbling over backward to clatter onto the blood-speckled stone, his stench erupting in his nostrils.
The last thing he sees before the blackness takes him is the faceless child. He sees that tiny, shriveled entity encased in darkness and lace, sucking on the brown nipple of its dead mother in that place of cobwebs, dirt, and rose petals. He sees the child, and sees what he has become.
When he awakes, the Penitent is still sitting in the chair at the foot of Brishen Ayres’s bed. He is still holding his Bible and stroking the soft leather of its spine. The room smells of flowers and surgical wipes. He can taste red wine and there is a crumb of Communion wafer wedged into one of his back molars.
He removes it with his tongue and swallows it, body and soul.