Word Made Flesh

26

All along the walk back through the factory and out to the Checker, Gilrein keeps waiting to hear the explosion of orgiastic bloodlust that the mob has been building toward since the prisoners were led into the pit. But the air behind him is void of any sound beyond the muted echo of Oster’s bullhorn announcing something unintelligible.

As he approaches the cab, Gilrein notices someone in the driver’s seat. He takes his gun from his rig and continues to walk, holding the piece down at his side. A few more yards and the face behind the wheel is recognizable. Gilrein leans on the passenger window and waits for an explanation.

When it becomes clear the intruder has no intention of offering the first words, Gilrein says, “I’m sorry, Inspector, I’m off duty.”

He gets a throat-clearing noise in response.

“You’ll have to find another ride,” Gilrein says, more forcefully.

The old priest reaches to the roof and switches on the cab’s dome light, then smiles and opens his mouth as wide as it will part to reveal a hole swollen with white, oozing pustules.

“Jesus,” Gilrein says, recoiling.

Lacazze lifts his hands in the air like a surgeon, or a monk ready to consecrate a wafer. The hands are covered with similar nodules and swollen to the point where the fingers resemble overstuffed sausages.

Gilrein subdues the impulse to bolt away from the cab.

“I need to speak with you,” Lacazze says, the voice phlegmy and choked, as if both his lungs and his larynx were slightly constricted. “It’s about Ceil.”

“What about her?”

The Inspector shakes his head and says, “Not here.”

They stare at each other until, unsure of what else to do, Gilrein takes the keys from his pocket and tosses them through the window, then climbs into the backseat, a passenger in the Checker for the first time since childhood.

Though he left it in the glove box, he finds Ceil’s notebook on the seat next to him, a place near the end of the journal book-marked with the band from a Magdalena cigar.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Lacazze says into the rearview as he starts the cab and rolls out of the lot. “I marked a passage I thought you might find useful.”

The Checker picks up speed down Rome Avenue. And, against what’s left of his better judgment, Gilrein begins to decode the last message from his wife.

Z. Dear Gilrein:

You are sleeping, once again, as I write this, turned on your side, knees hunched up slightly. You’ve kicked the sheets off and I know that in ten minutes you’ll be shivering. As I wrote that last line you let out that noise, that half moan, half sigh that signifies the deepest point of your dreams. I’ll confess now that the noise annoyed me slightly when we first slept together. But lately I’ve come to find it reassuring. Don’t ask me, yet, what I need to be reassured about.

This letter is to be an apology, though I know there is a good chance you will never come to read it. But letters are created as much for the benefit of the writer as for the intended recipient. Maybe more for the writer. And, in any event, once again, I cannot sleep.

Husbands and wives are thought to possess secret knowledge of one another. And in a manner, of course, they do. But the common wisdom will never understand what the long-married know, most viscerally, at times like now, at four o’clock in the morning, when life in the perfect bungalow seems somehow most in jeopardy. And what we know is this: no matter how much we want to give ourselves away, some adamant core refuses to yield, some recalcitrant center will never fully give. And no matter how much we want to receive the Other, in no matter how perfect a totality, our capacity is always wanting.

This has to do with an inherent sense of personal identity, an essential individuality. It also has to do with the inadequacy of human communication. There are things we simply can never convey.

But I need to go back now and try anyway. I need to make the attempt in spite of my knowledge of a predestined failure. I need to talk about that first night. Our first extended parcel of time spent together. When you drove me around this wounded city from eleven o’clock at night until seven o’clock the next morning. As if that initial and unofficial “date” had been a work shift.

On that premier courting, that original wooing, you told me everything a native feels it necessary to impart to the blank émigré. I know it was a two-way conversation, at least at the start, but I gave you back nothing of value that I can recall. You might have thought you were relaying an informal history of your hometown, but the history was transparent. It was a clear laminate. And underneath it I could see, right there from the start, your own personal history, the checkpoints that brought you to our maiden night together.

I was impressed, I will admit, not with the underplayed minutiae you’d accumulated about this bastion of obsolete industry that you have always called home. But more with the unknowing earnestness that was behind every word, as if instead of delineating for me the routes of the old P&Q railroad, you were chanting the sounds that would turn lead into gold. As if instead of running down a not-so-brief synopsis of the lineage of the Quinsigamond Diner, you were descanting new ways to split the atom.

But what I need to focus on, what I need to underline, for myself just as much as for you, is that moment when we made a circuit on the south side, just as dawn was breaking and we were cresting over Nipmuck Hill and you started to point out the spires and turrets that make up the Gothic wonderland of the Jesuit Olympus, the College of St. Ignatius. And you came to tell me, right then, on our first night — were you convinced there would be no others? — the story of your expulsion from the school. What you called, with a heaping of self-drama that I swore you were unaware of, “the Transubstantiation Scandal.”

It’s a different sensation for Lacazze, being in the front seat instead of the back, active rather than passive, choosing direction and speed. He likes driving better than riding, though the silence is a little discomforting, a reminder that he may never hear the rest of the old man’s story. Otto’s Tale. In his honor, the Inspector glides the cab through the downtown banking strip and heads for Gompers Station. Before the night is out, he may even sample a bearclaw.

He begins the long, slow circle around the train yard, even imitating Langer’s quirk of opening the window a crack as the cab passes the chronically flaming trash Dumpsters of the east yard. He looks out on a pack of the more feral tinker kids, huddled around a Dumpster, basking for a moment in its heat. These are the ones who’ve gone fully over to the other side, who’ve abdicated an integration that was never fully offered. Lacazze wonders why so many people in this city deny the existence of the feral tinkers, talk of them with the exasperated weariness of the put-upon scientist denying alien abductions or the flatness of the earth. Here they are in plain sight. Flesh and blood. How can you call them a myth? Someone, he decides, should tell their story.

In the backseat, the passenger shifts with the curve of the road.

Not being a Catholic, I had to intuit the depth of your breach. But as you relayed the story about those weeks preceding your SIN, those awful weeks of lying on your back in the dark, the time that you called (risking making trite the obviously genuine pain), your “spiritual torment,” I started to wish I could relate on an emotional level as well. Because there was just something about your voice in the telling of this story. It had changed somehow, taken on a timbre, a resonance it had not previously had. (Maybe it was just all that bad coffee you had poured from a Thermos bottle shaped like a Menlo cartoon character — I think it was Alice Watzername.)

And eventually you got to the part where you made yourself walk to that basement chapel and attend the Midnight Mass. And I was as transfixed as if I’d been watching the most enthralling horror movie ever lensed. A horror movie played inside the cortex of your own brain that, at some unnoticed point, began to incorporate, exactly and seamlessly, your deepest fears into the plot line. I was walking with you down that endless center aisle as the organ played “Faith of Our Fathers.” And I’d never attended a Mass in my life. I felt you tremble as you came to a stop in front of the Jesuit priest — Father Clement, wasn’t it? — and extended your open palm to receive the wafer. I was sharing your nerve endings as you tried and failed to respond to the priest’s “Body of Christ,” and couldn’t bring yourself to mutter the “Amen.” And your mouth was my mouth when you turned and brought the Host up and past your lips, over your tongue, and secreted it in the left- side gully between the interior cheek and the gums. I will never forget the coldness of the early spring air as you made your way, walking faster with each step, out of the chapel and across the campus, the fear as you reached into your pocket to touch the key to the lab, the key you had gone to ridiculous lengths to obtain and have copied weeks before, still not knowing if you’d go through with it all, and the simultaneous (but different) fear as the bread began to dissolve in your mouth, mixing too quickly with the acidic saliva.

I could hear the terror-making echo of your boots inside the biology lab, feel the agony of the short wait as you turned on the electron microscope and found the glass slide, extracted the Eucharist from your mouth, sick to your stomach now with the finality of your actions, placed the Host onto the slide and secured the slide under the clamps of the scope. I could feel the dry blink of your eyeball as it began making its way toward the enlarging lens. Could hear the sound of the door opening behind you, hear the voice of the security guard, “the toy cop” as you uncharitably called her, demanding to know what you were doing.

Had you ignored her even for an instant you might have gotten a look. Proved to yourself once and for all the fact or the absence of fact regarding molecular conversion and the ways of mystical transformations. But you stood up, as if you’d been questioned by the voice of God itself rather than a minimum-wage security guard. You stood up and she approached the table and immediately caught on to what was happening here. I have to wonder on occasion, when she took the job, could your toy cop ever have known that one night her routine of drunk and disorderlies and parking violators would be disrupted by, of all things, a heretical truth seeker?

As your father was neither alumnus nor contributor to the cause, they managed to kick your doubting ass out the gates and off the Hill inside a week.

And now, I would imagine, you realize the point of this entire diatribe.

There was an awkward pause when you’d finished the story. Less than ten seconds, I would guess. We were parked behind the closed diner at the bottom of the hill and you were looking up at the crosses that capped the turrets of the tallest buildings. I remember your face side-lit by the green neon that rimmed the diner’s marquee. And that is when I laughed.

I laughed at the story of the Transubstantiation Scandal.

And I have always hated myself slightly but consistently for that burst of laughter. That it ended immediately made it somehow worse.

I have always wondered why, in the wake of my laugh, in the face of my fierce insensitivity and disrespect in the moment after you had just confessed to me the event that clearly altered your life in a profound way, you ever wanted to see me again. And how you ever could have married me. And now, tonight, sitting here in the bedroom of the perfect bungalow, the answer comes to me in an instant, in the way that conversion came to Saul on the road to Damascus.

As I watch you shift in the bed now, naked and rolled toward me, as I watch your mouth fall open, making your face appear so much younger, appear close to childlike, I understand everything: You wanted me even more after I laughed at your story. Because you wanted to know how someone lives completely devoid of any kind of faith. Without that relentless burden that had chewed at you for so long. Gnawed away, day and night, at your liver and your soul.

That might not have been much to go on, but it made you need me in a persistent way. And at the risk of sounding like a romance novel, a love grew out of it. We do not choose our motivations. They choose us.

Except for the occasional sound of a page being turned or the body shifting slightly, Lacazze could easily forget that Gilrein is in the backseat.

How did Langer do it? How did the old man focus on his narrative and drive at the same time? How was he able to maneuver the taxi through its routes while his brain was fully immersed in another world?

The Inspector knows that the cab must come to a stop in order for him to finally tell his own story. The distractions of the passing city are just too great. He can’t inhabit the past and the present at the same time. The strain would be unbearable. Perhaps this is another symptom of the Grippe, an effect no one talks about because there are so many others that are more dramatic.

There is simply so much to see on the street tonight. And all of it appears so vibrant. Almost hyperreal. Even the scrap yards up on Cornell Hill. Even the deserted section of the Vacuum. Everything has a vibration tonight. Everything seems to be calling out for attention, sending a warning that means I am significant, I am an integral part of the picture.

But it isn’t until he finds himself steering the hack past the Yusupov Garden Room, then cross-cutting alleys until he’s passing the Hotel Adrianople, that Lacazze understands there has been an underlying plan to his journey, a system born of his subconscious or the strictures of karma. Either way, he’s been taking himself and his passenger on a haphazard, sometimes backward tour, a memorial parade that retraces a historic procession, a trip that once led, in the end, to the Rome Avenue Raid.

And now I think, my love, that you were instinctively correct. My laugh was born not out of insensitivity to another’s tradition (though, of course, there was that). Not out of a moment of social stupidity (though there was certainly a degree of that). My laugh came for the exact reason you sensed at the beginning: because I could not understand the meaning of your need. I could not understand how a seemingly intelligent young man could have so much vested in such an illogical and obviously symbolic ritual. I could not understand that it went beyond ritual, that it was attached to the center of how we view and then live our lives, of how we view the reason for our existence. And ultimately and simply, of how we define and deal with the agents of good. And maybe more important, of evil.

I was laughing at a young man who had wanted, more desperately than I could imagine or understand, to believe that there was purpose and order and meaning beyond himself, beyond his own making.

Please try to understand this, Gilrein: I was laughing because, whether I knew it or not, I was terrified.

It has taken me the span of our marriage to realize this. The truth is unalterable. I laughed out of fear. Tonight’s epiphany says that my intellect could be boundless and it still would not be enough. I can reject Mystery, but that will never negate Mystery. You have converted me with your presence, Gilrein. I am still an atheist as I know you to understand that term. But I am less and less an egotist. By the time you wake up, I’ll be humbled to my core.

Now I find that as a philosopher, I am a coward. As a linguist, I am made blind and deaf by my own ego and pride. And as a cop, I am sinfully envious of the criminal.

I loved you because in the end, you could not be a monster even when you thought you needed to be a monster. I have loved you because you have given me, without a price, the perfect life in the bungalow, where Mystery came to live, where improbable and fragile hope could be born to the sad accompaniment of a perfect-voiced torch diva.

My mentor believes that language creates reality.

My mentor now calls his Methodology “The Final Criticism.”

My mentor could not be a bigger asshole if he practiced on Saturdays.

I have so much to tell you, Gilrein. There is so much I don’t know. But so much that I suspect. I am tempted to wake you right now. But I’m already late to meet the Inspector. Yet another hot tip regarding the Tung. So I’m off to Hotel Adrianople. You sleep now and we will talk forever when I return. As Imogene would say,

We will talk until

Every story has been told.