It
is said that one can tell a lot about a person: by the type of clothes
not worn, by the smile that didn’t reach the corner
of the mouth, by the way
he or she didn’t walk or sit, by the way she crossed
her legs. But don’t believe any of it. You can look the Antichrist
straight in the face and not know it. It may be someone you saw everyday,
even someone you worked with, someone you shared a bed with. It could
be your neighborhood cop who always smiled but didn’t quite look you straight
in the face. Or the housewife next door with an out-of-synch voice,
tomato-red lips, and skin that was toilet-paper white. Or even the man
of God who baptized you and wiped away the tears when your grandmother
died.
In
July, all Midwestern mornings sweated. They poured saltless water
out of a cloudless sky as if it were raining, then
dared the sun to sizzle, to bake the railroad ties, and finally to pop
the rivets like popcorn. As the train
rushed ahead, droplets of water condensed on the window
to form ribbons of
tears that streamed down, collecting in a watery mirror
that may or may not tell the truth in its reflection.
It
rushed beyond, past passersby that crowded impatiently onto a
wooden platform awaiting the 0800 to St. Louis, and
then past a countryside that dared it to come too close, dared it to brush
against full-foliaged trees laden with sparrows swaying to the mechanical
breeze, dared it to brush against wild sumac springing up brazenly here
and there. And inside, sealed by the metal skin of movement, a man with
deeply set eyes not at peace, sat. And his hair, flamenco-dancer tight,
was swept back in a ponytail of drizzled premature grayness, and he boasted
a full beard that failed to disguise an
inner burden.
His
lips moved to almost silent words, barely audible so the words are
kept private…the knife, an instrument of retribution,
thrusts in and twists
till it meets the resistance of blood-laden organs,
the firmness of spleen and
liver, the grittiness of bone, the throb of great
blood vessels, and then plunges in again, and again. The victim’s
mouth gapes and captures the
scream before it expels into the stale night.
And the soul leaves the
body. And with that, the man’s eyes moistened
and he placed the book, the cover hidden by plain paper, on his lap.
Ten
hours had passed since the train departed and nearly ten hours since the
sun had last set. Now, in this early morning, the sun rose above the
flatness of the fields, the corn knee-high, the winter
wheat not yet plowed under, and stiff telephone poles zipped by like strings
of a harp just plucked. And the humdrum of the journey was occasionally
relieved by a stark warning-whistle as railroad crossings are met and passed…where
cars waited impatiently and necks craned to confirm the coming of a caboose.
It was as if life was too short to permit a few minutes of insignificance
pass.
He
leaned back as memories swirled in concert to the side-to-side staccato
movement of the train. His head pressed back to meet the headrest,
to sense those who had sat here before him, to smell
the mix of men and
women in conflict, to hear the covert whisperings
of life’s struggles captured in the fabric next to him. To experience
what he could not.
A
heavyset man sat across the aisle, accompanied by a polite-looking
woman dressed in a prim-and-proper pink cotton dress
with pure white gloves pulled to the wrists and thick makeup that obscured
her natural skin. The man squirmed with an internal discomfort and
then leaned forward to extend a squat neck, Catholic,Father?”
“I’m
not a priest, I’m a monk, Russian Orthodox.” The response was
syrupy slow, drawn out in the hope the stranger would
not pursue further dialogue.
“Monk?” Me and the wife are Presbyterian. We’ve never been
exposed to other types of religion; we’re not very worldly, you might say.
In fact we’ve never met a real monk before, only seen
‘em from a distance
or on television on one of those religious channels.”
He smiled a pagan
smile from chiseled stern jaw. He had the look
of a person who would not
spare the rod to reach his truth. It was the
face of a man of rigidity, a man
with a look the monk had seen before.
“You
must excuse the brevity of my reply. My mornings are spent
in meditation, even if on a train.” As he spoke,
a frail hand coated his beard
with a thin layer of saliva drawn from a pursed mouth…saliva
from the mouth of a liar.
He leaned back to allow the swirl in his mind to slow,
to allow memories of six months ago to rise to the top, such as a bobber
might surface from the bottom of a lagoon laden with the silt of failed
deeds. He remembered an anger hidden in pores of repression.
An anger that needed to erupt, to bleed out
like a blood boil. And he thought back to that January when life was dormant
with cold, when desperate roots tunneled deep below the frozen earth in
the hope they would yet survive another season. After all, it was
all about survival. It didn’t matter if it was a stray dog chasing
its tail from hunger, or a sunflower seed, frozen hard, but containing
sufficient nutrients to survive until the warmth returns. Or the prostitute
huddled in a darkened alley, not caring if the next man had syphilis or
AIDS, as long as she survived.
The eyes
tightened further from the discomfort of recollection, so tightly that
stars of pain exploded inside his head as embers of past events
failed to die down, but instead, flared anew.
It was there in New York City
that it started, or perhaps, ended. There, where
concrete mountains and ravines of window glass replaced a more natural
landscape…where an artificial landscape was lit, not by the stars of The
Big Dipper or the twinkle of Venus, but rather by reflected neon and the
red burn of cigarettes in forbidden doorways.
It
was there that the crowd surged with anger, not at what was, but at what
is. They pressed ahead, body with body, frosted breath with frosted
breath. They leaned against the chill like a herd
of cattle oblivious of their
destiny, oblivious of the onrush of cars and
the warning of a blinking red
traffic light and the shriek of a policeman’s whistle.
And within, a man taller than the rest stood. He veered abruptly, leaned
as if to fall, and embraced a bearded stranger as they nearly collided.
And in that instant all was gone
and a lesson learned: that a man in black was no different
than any other. For all was gone, the cloth bag once carefully placed
in the inside of a black coat now belonged to someone else. Gone
was life’s sustenances, those
precious items of no value to anyone else. Gone was
the letter of appointment that introduced him, Father Gregroy, to the abbot
of St. Mark’s
mission, an inner city enclave of cloistered monks
brought together in this
special place to repent and be born again. Gone
was the Byzantine cross
of plain wood, the prayer rope worn smooth, and an
old newspaper picture
folded into a star. Not gone, was the memory
of innocence lost.
He
blinked as the spell of concentration was broken by a sudden burst
of words. “We’re going to San Diego to visit
my son, his wife, and our newest granddaughter,” the woman across the aisle
stated, and at the same moment extracted with her white-gloved hand a photograph
from her purse, and brought the glossy print to her lips and imparted a
soft kiss to it.
And then offered it. “Our new granddaughter, Samantha
Jane.”
The
monk accepted the picture and viewed it with interest. The infant
looked overfed with puffy pink cheeks and a crop of
light brown hair that was just beginning to curl.
“Lovely
child, she resembles her grandmother.” He gazed beyond
the photograph, to the woman seated across from him.
His mind digested the mannequin skin, the moist lips, the empty eyes, and
her forced smile.
“Thank
you for the compliment, she’ll be six months old this Friday.”
As
her words drifted to him, he sank back and lifted heavy eyebrows.
Six months, he thought to himself. Six months
ago this new life with the
puffy pink cheeks was brought forth into the world
to bring hope. But six
months also marked the change of a life …his.
He leaned further back to
scud his mind of painful memories, to temper the physical
and mental fatigue that plagued him. As his body shifted to assume
a position of
comfort, a suffusion of sudden brightness struck his
face, and a book
with a cover of plain brown paper nearly fell to his
feet, but saved just
in time with a quick scoop of his hand. It was
a callused hardened hand, a hand not typical of a servant of God.
He
glanced across, an apologetic look, or perhaps, a hasty look of embarrassment.
“Is
that the Good Book you’re reading?” The man with the chiseled
jaw asked, his mannerism a juggernaut of hardness,
his expression a stone-mask of non-compromise.
The
monk had seen men like this before, lived among them, and
escaped from them. He glanced down at the manuscript
to confirm that
it remained unopened. Luckily, it remained innocently
between thigh and
groin. He was an innocent. Born an innocent.
Born of a mother who didn’t
believe she was with child, that the swelling within
her abdomen was an
aberration. And when the infant was born, it
was thrown into the trash bin
with the afterbirth following…thrown into the garbage
like a loaf of moldy
bread, or a discarded bone of pork, and then the infant
covered in a blanket of discarded newspaper. And the headline of
the front page oozed from
the amniotic fluid that still clung to a new flesh.
And the infant cried till its
throat nearly closed, until someone finally kicked
away a sniffing dog and
looked down into the trash.
“Are
you originally from the East, or were you just visiting? I don’t
mean to pry, but a conversation can help pass the
time of day,” the man with
the square jaw asserted.
Deep-set
eyes flicked in response. He wished the man across the aisle
would shut up. He considered moving to another
seat, another compartment,
anywhere but here. If possible, he must rid himself
of this intruder of thoughts; rid himself of a person who hovered, who
peered into a person’s
eyes as if he knew something wasn’t right. He
must rid himself of someone
who analyzed and thought “a man of God traveling alone,
his clothes flimsy
and unGodly untidy, a man reading from a book in a
plain brown cover…a book not unlike the kind received from one of those
mail-order porno
publishers, a book that one would be ashamed to reveal
the cover.”
“Yes,
out East, near Philadelphia,” he answered automatically, not
surprised by the ease of an untrue statement.
After all, lying came naturally.
His entire life was a lie, so one small untruth mattered
little. For he was an
infant born of trash bin, a brother to the alley rats,
a cousin to a stray dog
sniffing around, and a godchild to the homeless soul
that found him.
“Visiting
kin, are you? Are you going all the way to California?”
The
monk remained silent.
“Want
to read a newspaper?” the man persisted. “It’s the Times.”
Their thoughts collided, as if each knew of a dark
secret of the other. “Damn shame…excuse the language…a shame about
all those murders in New York, all those unfortunate women. And the front
pages full of it for days, of women butchered like animals domed to a slaughter
house. And their tongues ripped out, their eyeballs pushed back into their
brain like someone used their thumb to squash a bug, and all those cuts
over their body, almost surgical, like a scalpel was used. Gotta
be a some type of maniac. The kind that rises out of the sewer every
year or so.”
“Amen,”
the wife responded. All this time, she had kept quiet and to
herself. And her submissiveness was apparent.
For she was a good wife that knew her place. A wife that shielded
her pent-up feelings in the name of being a “good wife.” A wife who understood
her place, but resented it. A wife who suffered in silence, who wished
somehow it would end…one way or another.
“Were
you at some type of religious place back East, perhaps in New York?”
The inquisition continued.
“Yes,
at the inner city mission of St. Mark, a refuge for the poor and
the homeless, for those who have lost their soul and
wish to return to God’s
grace.”
“Well,
I’ll be darned, I know the place well, my friend…I mean Father.
I’m a cop. I spent fifteen years at Precinct
Five, right down the street and
to the south, and then I moved to midtown, to Precinct
Ten. My old lady,
here, she worried a bunch and wanted me to have a
less stressful precinct.
You know, a precinct where all you have to worry about
is unleashed dogs
and women in short skirts littering the streets with
their half-smoked
Virginia Slims. Sure is a small world, ain’t
it? Us meeting this way.”
The
wife shuddered and shrank back into the cave of her seat, afraid
she might be drawn into the conversation. She shivered
of anxiety, even though the rays of the sun cut blades of warmth through
her window.
“Been
a monk long, Father?”
“All
my life. I was born a monk.”
The
policeman’s brows arched. “All your life? I know that feeling.
I
feel like I’ve been a cop all my life too,” he chuckled.
And as he spoke, his eyes met his wife’s and their glances passed through
each other as if no one were there.
The monk’s eyes teared as the past reentered
his mind, past events that had become a shawl of memory wrapped about stooped
shoulders, covering his
body as a second skin. He remembered: a boy, small
for age, frail, but already tested by the world. A youth raised not
in the city, but in the remoteness of a nearby mountain retreat.
A place where one road led in, and the same road led out. Where the
sign of St. Andrew’s Monastery swung to the breeze of an ill wind that
took source from the mountain-top and never reached the bottom of the valley
below. Where monks told him of his past: that the newspapers had
labeled him the “garbage-can baby,” that his picture was in the tabloids—a
newborn swaddled in a newspaper, scalp tainted red of discarded tomato
sauce, hair of tossed-out spaghetti, and a mouth that gaped of a captured
cry. And then an infant sent to foster home after foster home, and
the colic so severe that no one could tolerate the crying or the explosive
bowel movements, and the tantrums that never ceased. And the years passed
without a mother, without someone to hold him when he was feverish and
ill, and finally, taken to this monastery…to a place of strictness, of
rigidity of purpose. And to be raised amongst them. Men in
black who spoke to themselves, who seemed not to walk, but floated.
And whose eyes are always sullen. And here to be raised. A
boy in black, then a youth in
black, and finally, a man in black.
“Are
you okay Father?” the man asked. “You seem to be lost in thought,
your mind far away. I know the state myself. And I’ve seen
it
in many a person. Excuse me, I didn’t mean it the
way it sounded, just
spouting off. Right Pricilla?” He glanced
at his wife and placed his hand
upon hers’. “She’s just the best wife Father,
never gave me any heat when
things weren’t just right, and she’s not bad in a
woman’s way either.” He
winked and she blushed a repressed pink.
The
monk studied the couple. The man, outgoing, inquisitive, and the
woman, withdrawn and tightly coiled like a taut rubber
band ready to snap. He had seen couples such as these come to St.
Andrew to visit their spiritual father, to be cleansed of hostility, and
to leave with purity…till the next time. And he observed as Father Henry,
the abbot, listened to them, and then nodded as if he understood life outside
the sanctuary of the monastery. And he remembered as the abbot glanced
back into the darkness of a nearby hallway, where a young man in black
sat unnoticed, where that young man listened to sinners pour forth their
confession of sin. But what the abbot did not know was, that this
young man in black, recorded the sanctified confessions on paper; that
this young man was driven by a dark compulsion
to place the forbidden thoughts in permanency,
to hoard the unspeakable in the chamber of his pen.
Again,
the silence was broken by the incessant voice. “I have noticed
your hands Father. They are kind of rough for
a man of the church, aren’t
they?” The tone of the inquisition was increasingly
confrontational. “Not
only rough, but strong—strong in the fingers and especially
the thumbs—and even your wrist is muscular with every tendon outlined like
out of an
anatomy book.
There
was no reply.
“I kind
of pride myself on analyzing hands. I guess it’s the cop in me.
I can tell by just a quick look or even a handshake.
You know—a violinist,
palms soft, but fingers lean and muscular and the
fingernails worn down to where it hurts. Or take for example a skilled
laborer, like a carpenter. When
shake his hand you can feel slivers of wood just beneath
the skin, you can feel little bubbles of irritation and if you squeeze
too hard, you can feel the wince. But my favorite: hands with
fingernails coated with polish two or
three times over, color that almost fluoresces, even
during the daytime. And fingernails that are long and scalpel-sharp,
sharp enough to peel away flesh. And fingers, even the thumbs, decorated
with cheap rings of yellow and
red stones that reflect the night like cats’
eyes.
“And
those hands, who do they belong to?”
“Why
I’m surprised you don’t know Father. To a prostitute of course.”
Following
that statement, the wife cringed as if she had a sudden stomach cramp.
Their eyes met, the monk’s and hers’, and in that brief moment, he understood.
He had seen eyes like that before.
“How
did you like the Big Apple, Father? It’s quite a place, isn’t
it?”
The
words floated across to him like a leaf prematurely blown from
a branch. The deep-set eyes crept further back
into a tomb of private thoughts, to when the man in the crowd fell against
him, and his hands groped in thievery. And back to the mission of
an inner city where a willowy branch met the top of his hand, and then
the palm, and the Elder mumbled a prayer as the young man’s tears refused
to rise up.
“It
served a purpose,” the monk replied. “May I see your newspaper
for a moment?”
He
studied the headlines as if they were printed in dimensional
script: Madman Strikes Again, Sixth Victim Discovered.
His eyes lifted.
"I have a feeling that the murders will stop for awhile,”
he whispered, then folded the newspaper in half, and handed it back.
Their hands touched, for an instant, and each felt the others’ resolve.
“Is
that statement a holy revelation, or are you speculating like an ordinary
person, Father?”
“Merely
speculating.”
“I see.
You may be right. I have the same feeling myself.” Upon completion,
his hand reached for his wife’s gloved-hand and a gentle squeeze was given.
“Pardon
me, I must excuse myself to the restroom,” the monk stated.
And as he attempted to rise from the cramped quarters,
the book with the
plain cover fell from his lap, spun into the aisle,
and landed against the policeman’s leg in a semi-open position.
Instinctively
the monk’s hand reached down, a sudden automatic movement—much as a slap
of the hand against bare skin to discourage a fly, or a scratch of the
ankle for an unanticipated itch. “Allow me, Father,” the policeman stated
with firmness as his fingers grasped the half-open book, quickly, as if
he were drawing
his revolver against an assailant.
“Damn,
Father—excuse the language—this isn’t the Good Book.”
The
wife’s eyes awakened, saucer-big, animated in a way that seemed
inappropriate for the situation. She seized the book
with unexpected ferocity,
thumbed through the pages with dancing fingers, and
occasionally stopped to lip certain passages as if she had memorized a
speech, or better yet, a lie.
“You’re
the author, aren’t you? You’re Zachary Kiva, the mystery
writer everyone talks about. You’re the author of
all those best sellers, the
person the public can only speculate about:
speculate if you’re a recluse or perhaps a criminal on deaths’ row awaiting
the gas chamber. Or maybe just
a….”
“Damn Pricilla,
you mean this person isn’t a religious man, but some
type of writer of mystery stories,” the husband blurted.
“And me, like a dumb-ass, always thinking like a cop. And my mind
churning like a mix-master, and me thinking that he’s mixed up in those
murders. That he’s a serial killer masquerading as a man of God.
Can you ask for a more perfect cover-up?”
The
monk’s face lifted, followed by his eyes. He stared at the two
people that chance had brought before him.
He was certain. The killings
would not cease, but rather change from one place
to another. And across
the aisle, the woman who had embraced his book, scanned
through the pages
with white gloves removed and what had been hidden,
now revealed: the razor-sharp fingernails, the rings with cheap stones
on each finger, the powerful thumbs, and an anger within.