Smoke And Mirrors

V.

The archbishop hunches glaucous blind in the darkness on the edge of St Paul's,

small, birdlike, luminous, humming I/O, I/O, I/O.

It's almost six and the rush-hour traffic in stolen dreams

and expanded memory hustles the pavement below us.

I hand the man my jug.

He takes it, carefully and shuffles back into the waiting cathedral shadows.

When he returns the jug is full once more.

I josh, "Guaranteed holy?"

He traces one word in the frozen dirt: WYSIWYG

and does not smile back.

(Wheezy wig. Whisky whig.)

He coughs grey, milk phlegm,

spits onto the steps.

What I see in the jug: it looks holy enough, but you can't know for sure,

not unless you are yourself a siren or a fetch,

coagulating out of a telecom mouthpiece, riding the bleep,

an invocation, some really Wrong Number; then you can tell

from holy.

I've dumped telephones in buckets of the stuff before now,

watched things begin to form

then bubble and hiss as the water gets to them:

lustrated and asperged, the Final Sanction.

One afternoon

there was a queue of them, trapped on the tape of my ansaphone:

I copied it to floppy and filed it away.

You want it?

Listen, everything's for sale.

The priest needs shaving, and he's got the shakes.

His wine-stained vestments do little to keep him warm.

I give him money.

(Not much. After all,

it's just water, some creatures are so stupid

They'll do you a Savini gunk-dissolve

if you sprinkle them with Perrier

for chrissakes, whining the whole time,

All my evil, my beautiful evil?)

The old priest pockets the coin, gives me

a bag of crumbs as a bonus,

sits on his steps, hugging himself

I feel the need to say something before I leave.

Look, I tell him, it's not your fault.

It's just a multi-user system.

You weren't to know.

If prayers could be networked,

if saintware were up and running,

if you could make your side as reliable as they've made theirs…

"What You See," he mutters desolately

"What You See Is What You Get." He crumbles a communion wafer

throws it down for the pigeons,

makes no attempt to catch even the slowest bird.

Cold wars produce bad losers.

I go home.