Father Julius? You know him now—as much as you can know…but that’s different. What can I tell you about what he was like then?
A priest, most said. A holy man, no doubt.
Was he a priest? He prayed a lot, but prayer isn’t ordination. On Loony Island, it was a sort of open question. He didn’t talk about his past with anybody, they said. I guess I know more than most, even if I only got to observe him for a short time.
Trying to think of something priestly he did…he didn’t like the traditional duties of the frock, I’ll say that much. Refused to take confessions, or hold mass, things like that. He was the kind of priest who ran everywhere he went. The kind of priest who wore a patchwork denim robe. He was the kind of priest you might find at the fights down by the dead factories, bobbing around in the middle of a screaming ring of drunken gangsters and factory workers, boxing for bets and knocking younger dudes into the dirt.
Wait. None of that’s priestly.
Here’s the sort of holy man Father Julius was: blessed. Someone drawn to lost causes. Someone who would risk his life for a stranger. He was the sort who’d make dangerous folk scared by placing himself bodily between the weapons they held and the targets they were aiming at. This, more than anything else, made the neighborhood gangsters come to love him. On Loony Island, a man who refuses to fear guns becomes, after a time, a kind of a threat, but a beloved threat. You need to shoot him, see, to maintain credibility—you point your gun, barrel right at his eye. But Julius isn’t interested in your gun. He’s interested in you. He’s looking at you. Spooky shit. These gangsters posed tough, but most of them were kids. Nine times out of ten, they’d tuck the weapon and run.
Of course, that does mean one time out of ten, or whatever, they pulled the trigger. Naturally. It’s impossible to disrespect guns and go unscathed. I heard the stories. He got it once in the shoulder. Twice in the thigh. One bullet grazed his ribs. One clipped the tippy-top of his right ear. And even still, he seemed blessed by some higher power, whatever his denomination might have been. No arteries severed, no organs pierced. Not even a limp. He kept coming back, and the shooters, not understanding the reasons for their failure, faded away. Nobody remembers their names, they’re nothing but shadows in the tales of Julius’s survival. Skeptical? Plenty were. But you’d hear stories about this on the street, or at Ralph’s. There was shame in backing away from a fight, but there was no shame in backing away from Julius. For them, it got so when the pistols came out, they’d hope for him.
So, yes, I guess you’d have to say Julius was a priest, or a holy man, or a guardian angel. Doubtless he served in those capacities right up to the so-called Loony Riot, and even a bit beyond. The night he first arrived on Loony Island he performed a miracle, they say—saved a whole mess of people dying in a fire—and then introduced himself as “Father Julius,” no last name, so Father Julius is what he became. I can’t speak to the miracle of the fire, but I can confirm one miracle.
He cured me of my stutter.
Father Julius has learned that the most important thing about the flickering man is, don’t reach for him—that makes him flicker right out.
There’s no doubt anymore that something is happening; Father Julius has made himself sure on that count. Whether it’s real or just something in his mind, it’s repeating itself. He’s tried timing the flickering man’s appearances but there’s no rhythm to it; this fellow, it seems, is no man of routine.
Julius no longer gives any thought to leaving.
He thinks about nothing else.
It’s been the same psychological process each time over the last hour; the man flickers in, holds, flickers back out. Julius finds himself gripped by the certainty—yes, this is important. Yes, this is the revelation you’ve hoped for. Yes, this is, at last, something of faith that seems actual, physical, real. And then, just as regularly, the certainty—It’s nothing, you fool. You’re as crazy as they say, as crazy as your father was, as pathetic in your thirst for belief as you tell yourself you are in the dark each sleepless night. Then he stands, turns to leave, stops, caught teetering between fear and hope, turns, sits, and waits again. He’s yet to get as far away from the flickering man’s alcove as the abandoned orderly’s station.
It’s the partial invisibility that’s hooked him. Total invisibility is nothing new, of course. Within the city, for example, Loony Island has become, in its way, totally invisible. The third world quarantined within the first is something that with enough practice you can choose not to see: a commuter’s planned fascination with the skyline opposite or a preoccupation with the radio dial as you drive past, an undesirable but unavoidable diminishment of the available infrastructure budget buried on an inner page of the city newspaper’s website. And the neighborhood, invisible already, is itself seemingly populated by people nobody can see. Crimes here go unreported and uninvestigated, deaths pass as unnoticed as the lives that preceded them, scavengers climb out of the neighborhood to stand beside off-ramps holding cardboard signs with overly detailed stories of need, which go studiously unseen by drivers and passengers until the green light frees them from their premeditated blindness, or until the bluebirds arrive in squad cars to chase the mendicants back within their prescribed boundaries.
But this occasional visibility holds a taste of the miraculous. He’s either visible to you or he isn’t. You can’t see him, Father Julius is beginning to suspect, unless both of you truly want him to be seen. Slowly, collaboratively. Sometimes you see him, and it doesn’t occur to you until after: “Hey now, wasn’t there somebody just sitting right over there?” But he’s gone already; a brief shiver-flash of movement evaporated into memory, and almost evaporated from memory. Julius is discovering it still takes effort to believe he’s seen the fellow at all. Yes, that’s it; when he flickers out, he forsakes perception retroactively, leaving ghosts of memory, much like a desired word or phrase perversely deleting itself from consciousness in the moment preceding utterance, leaving nothing behind except, first, the knowledge that a thing exists and was until the previous moment in one’s possession, but now can only be apprehended conceptually; and, second, the unscratchable itch for the thing, the need to speak it aloud, if only to finalize a sentence left purgatorially half-constructed by its absence. Perhaps it isn’t some physical property that he has, Julius theorizes, but rather something he does to you: a physiological matter—manipulation of the eye, of reflected light, retinas, rods, cones, vitreous humor—or else a distortion of the less accessible, the more liminal consciousness, a chemical rearrangement in the hidden folds of cerebellum, a microscopic fiddling in the density of the medulla’s core.
In short, thinks Julius, it’s a mindfuck.
But this effect lessens over time. Doesn’t it? It’s getting easier to see him now. Isn’t it?
Julius waits.
When the man blinks in again, Julius doesn’t even breathe. The man’s hunched over the low table, making a bright green rectangle on a newspaper with a fat crayon, seemingly more concerned with texture than illustration.
The man looks up. He hands the newspaper to the priest. Other than the crayon scrawl, it’s unremarkable. Julius underarms it.
The man’s eyes are terrified. Terrified.
He says something that makes Julius feel as if all the air has gone out of him.
“God talks to me,” he says.
“God talks to me.” Again. More insistent than before.
And then a third time, a horrified whisper: “God talks to me.’
“What does God say?” Julius’s mouth has gone dry.
“To do something bad,” the man—almost a boy—mourns. “Something bad.”
“Do what bad?”
But the flickering man vanishes.
Muttering in numb wonder and puzzlement, looking like the last loony out of the bin, Julius shakes his head as though he’s newly woken, trying to clear his head of a particularly confounding dream. But it’s not a dream, he knows. No, not a dream, but somehow still he’s lost in it. He wanders the room, a man of routine, stumbling, head filled with a new and troubling mystery. What did he say what what did he soy…You’re in far over your head now. This goes well beyond whatever he’s doing to your eyes and brain with his flickering body. Consider what he said. What’s a priest supposed to do with that? An effect one can grow accustomed to with repeated exposure. A hint of God, tailored to your customized beliefs. A question of faith. Just wait for one more look at him and then you’ll go. You need to clear your head; you need to talk to someone about this.
You need to talk to Nettles.