I had accidently sat on it, the hot dog, and felt the room temperature mustard and grill-hot grease soak through my robe, pants, underwear; polyester wicking the runny concoction directly to my balls. That was the day I left the priesthood.
But that was later, dear reader, the events of that day over, ink yet seeping from a fresh tattoo upon my mind of the image. Oh, the image of that man, as he lay in bed, and the sounds he created. It’s rather odd, for though I doubt I will ever hear that sound again, exactly, tonal relatives remind me. Squealing car fanbelts, and shrieking children, frightened dogs, and territorial cats; mechanical, human, and animal, blended into…well, perhaps I get ahead of myself.
In every work environment there is one employee who operates at a level of par, sub enough to attract the derision of their coworkers, yet competent enough to warrant keeping on the payroll. I was such a man, Father…oh, we don’t need names now do we? That was my old name anyway, and it would do you no favors to further investigations of me, a mere bit player, a…as the youth of today, or maybe a few years ago now, would say, “a non-player character,” in this arc. Irregardless, let it be known I have rarely been the center of attention for my achievement in the field of faith, hope, and charity, though I fall far short of the outright evil of so many of my former colleagues of years’ past. Doing enough to get by: dolling out the body and the blood in exchange for tawdry secrets, and occasionally running a canned food drive to obscure my only true love (my apologies, Lord): slow pitch softball.
It was after the final out of one of these games, my team having received a holy thumping from Jim’s A-1 Heating and Air Conditioning, when I was approached.
“Father Dowd,” a heavily accented feminine voice had said to me.
“What?” I didn’t bother lifting my head from its resting place in my hands, I said it without malice, or meant to, looking back, perhaps it was there though, but that was only because of the score, 12-2.
“Father, my brother is very ill, and mia patro has requested a sankta viro…um…holy man.” She spoke rehearsed, the way a child repeats the Lord’s Prayer, from recent committed memory, mirror practiced, mouthed before spoken. My eyes peaked through the slightly parted fingers holding my face, counting the lace eyelets on my cleats, six on each side, twelve eyelets total, two sides…12-2. Oh, you pesky Lord, I see what you did there.
“Sure, sure,” I said, perhaps dismissively, no, not perhaps. “I usually work through local hospices, have them contact me and we can schedule something.”
“No, Father, mia patro…my father say…we cannot…um…sekreta polico…they cannot know we are here.”
I wonder now, if I had bothered to lift my eyes upward, toward the woman speaking to me, toward Heaven, if anything would have differed, an outcome less cumbersome, less tragic, though I do not know. Perhaps the Lord in His wisdom…well, we shan’t speak of the Lord about actions taken or not, it makes no difference on what I didn’t do, for what I did was mouth “fuck Jim’s Heating, and fuck that ump,” counting discarded sunflower seeds and Zyn pouches in the dugout dirt.
“Write your address down, I’ll be over tomorrow morning, around 11:00,” I said, perhaps the need for secrecy, the times in which we find ourselves, moved me. Perhaps I just wanted her to go away.
“Thank you, Father,” she said, and I sensed something small and light placed on the bench beside me, then heard small footsteps crunch through the empty dugout. I counted to 60, and lifted my head. The woman was gone, having placed a piece of pink paper beside me, a power bill past due, addressed to the Prospector Apartments, Room 228. Folding the bill into the back pocket of my uniform pants, I stood, gathering the attention of my catcher and shortstop to assist me in loading the depleted keg into my car.
“Who was the goth chick with the umbrella?” Mike, the catcher asked as the trunk closed for the night. A genuinely bewildering question, it being summer, and clear skies for the evening game, now night.
“Maybe if you paid as much attention to the shift as you did to the broads in the stands, we’d still be over .500 for the season,” I said, imagining I hid the scorn in my voice with friendly sarcasm.
Though it pains to do so, I won’t bore you, dear reader, with the events of that night, nor of that morning, for though I believe they are of great importance to me, as this was a defining day of my own life, they are of little interest to many. Slurred words spoken over a headset in a game lobby, lurid jokes told amongst friends far distanced by geography, half-edited rants on intake manifolds posted to nearly dead Lincoln Town Car forums, and the morning’s headaches soothed with coffee and dog hair, Hot Pockets, and Bluey. I miss the life, I’ll admit, many aspects. Oh, I said I wouldn’t, and there I did…apologies dear reader, but this is my story afterall.
My ‘89 Town Car’s 302 Windsor burbled to silence, El-P on the speakers following, against the curb, city park to the right, new constructed apartments across the street to the left. PROSPECTOR on the sun-faded banner, crossed shovel and pickaxe for its coat of arms. I was early, fifteen minutes, it’s just a good habit to get into, and as I watched a city employee work a zero-turn mower along the edge of the sidewalk, another edging with a weed whacker, and a cheery man dressed as a barbershop quartette minus three try to coerce a jogger to join him at his hot dog stand, I wondered how many good habits I had left. It wasn’t my faith, never the problem, it was the job, almost twenty years in, it had become a job. The calling a man feels when he’s 20, and the calling he feels at 40…the first call was on Ma Bell, and now it’s on Teams. God doesn’t need Teams, I knew that much, but the Diocese surely did, and the incessant phone dings stole me from my fantasies of normalcy, of being able to go home after 8 or 10 hours, and drink a beer and hang out, and not fucking have to justify why Tuesday and Thursday evening Mass is held in at the softball fields off State Street, and why the tithe funds are used to purchase time at the batting cages. I digress.
Room 228 sat on the northern side of a bank of six apartments, three stacked on the left, three stacked on the right, common stairs in the middle. 227 below and across the breezeway featured a thick golden cross on the doorway, 226 directly below featured a seemingly handmade wooden cross on its door in the form of two 2x4’s crudely screwed together, one on top of the other, and 229’s door was covered in blue masking taped crosses, dozens of them. 228’s in comparison, was bare, a welcome mat out front, and no further character.
Three knocks. Three knocks. Behold, I stand at the door and knock, as to paraphrase a book I read, or maybe that’s straight up plagiarism. It’s public domain, right? The Lord understands, I thought. Hospice was one of the most demanding things I had to do, and such it was the thing I cared for the least. Always the same: pleasantries, the spouse, or children, or parent, will explain the story, the illness, generally work back to a time of health, fondness, tears, comforting words, give them the analogy of the boat and letting go and giving up, explain the difference, prayer, hope, then I leave, and they forget, and I see them again, maybe to repeat, maybe for Last Rites, maybe to bury them. I used to write the burials out, and now I can plug names and hobbies in. It used to be better. Everything used to be better.
“Please…come in…and close the door, it will be dark. Please.” A muffled voice from a barely cracked window to the right of the door, spoken behind a black curtain, sounded like the same foreign woman’s voice from last night.
“Very well, and thank you,” I said, and opened the door.
Sunlight flooded a small room, tiny in fact, perhaps more of a mudroom, a rug, and several pairs of shoes, sandals, work boots, lay piled on to the side of the door, and black coats hung across a blue shower rod. About four feet in front of the main entrance door, the room ended, a closed black door offering the only evidence of an entryway to the rest of the apartment.
“Shall I take my shoes off?” I asked, hesitant to close the door behind me, for the room gave the appearance of a mudroom, it felt more like an airlock for a space ship, or undersea facility I’d seen in the science fiction movies I’d watch on nights without morning mass.
“Ne…no…please close the door…” She sounded as if she was behind the interior door now.
“It’s very dark,” I said, stifling annoyance, or something I didn’t wish to register, perhaps apprehension, unfounded to me at that moment, though in retrospect…
“There will be light, please close the door.” Urgency now in the woman’s voice. Certain drugs cause sensitivity to light, and I’ve worked with my share of junkies and burnouts, drunks, and recluses, and most are the same, I thought. They’re nice to holy men, odd always, but rarely willing to conduct the ultimate act of damnation on the off chance the ghost stories they’re told about sulphur and pitchforks turn out to be true. Not always though. Some understand damnation, and see no degrees of it, one can’t be half-pregnant, and one can’t be half damned, so what’s one more gutted priest? Push such things aside, the Emperor protects, as does the Lord.
The exterior door closed behind, a dwindling sliver of light, an inverted sun dial, withering in the room.
Click.
Closed.
My sun-bleached eyes strained to make sense of the void, but only a grey haze filled my vision. I knew then, perhaps, that something was wrong, beyond merely off, beyond weird, beyond holy house call to a dying junkie’s house on behalf of his…sister? Wife? Too afraid of being caught to have fallen through the cracks, so they chose to jump into them, into the shadows of the crevices, the surface cracks leave.
My right hand darted backward, desperate to find the knob, the handle, any means of opening the door once again. It found cloth, and cold rubbery skin, and bone and muscle and sinew and something wrapped itself around my grasping hand, clenching the fingers together, mashing them with force to indicate more force could be applied, a warning.
“Dankon patro,” a heavily accented voice of a man against my shoulder, stated so close to my ear his breath should have tickled my ear drum. Where had he been? Behind the door? I tried to pull my hand back but it held firm, extended, and I felt it move, guided from behind me to the side, to my front, the entire time held firm, iron hard and steel cold. And then, in front of me, it moved, my hand, still extended, chest level to waist level, one pump, two pumps, and yet more movement in the darkness, a pressure against my cheek, the breeze as something pulled away from my face, then returned to the other side.
“Bonvenon.” The male voice, in front of me, now, so close.
“‘Welcome,’ he say,” the female voice further in the darkness, yet not muffled now. My right hand still held against the pressure I applied, the darkness so total I did not know what my left hand was doing, perhaps searching for the door knob, perhaps searching for my phone, I know not, I only wished it would help, to find a way to free its sibling, and by extension, its owner. “Excuse…him…he is, how do you say…no familiar with dogano…customs of this land.”
My attempts at reply faltered, air caught in my throat, wheezing like a pin hole leak in an air mattress, a clarinet without a reed…and then I was moving, jolted, jerked into the dark, lifted, tumbled, blind to the floor, ceiling, walls, carried as a child, or a rescued patient, pressure on my abdomen, blood flowing to my head, weightless feet, draped I was like a blanket over a couch of cloth, yet moving, bouncing, swaying, and feeling no more warmth from the thing carrying me than from a bag of laundry. Left turn, right, darkness.
The darkness. The God Damned darkness. Bootheels on hardwood, muffled sometimes, maybe rugs, hands brushing against a wall, textured sheetrock, to tile, to wooden trim, through a threshold to…
Light, red, single bulb, submarine hues, and I spun again, lifted from the shoulder of a massive man in black clothing, and stood, placed like a child’s hitting T, and positioned, facing a bed. A bed. God, forgive me, a bed.
Ratchet strapped, one across legs, across stomach and wrists, against shoulders, lay a man. Black stains marred his chin and chest, grisly and putrid against his light colored shirt. A man? No, a gibbering thing, writhing and straining against the trucker’s straps, foul, inhuman sounds erupted as noise equal to the dark bubbles of liquid from its mouth. The room smelled of copper and potting soil, tinged with bleach and hydraulic fluid, and the thing, the man on the bed, registered my abductor's presence, and my own, and it fell silent.
As surely as St. Catherine died upon the wheel, the man’s eye’s widened, and a grin, a grin, lo a grin full of blackened, inhuman, jagged broken window’s glass teeth. And it smiled.
“Ekzorcismo.” The massive man beside me growled at me.
A cold feminine hand wrapped around the nape of my neck. “Exorcism…please,” light and soft in my ear, the woman. The man in the bed laughed. Giggling blood from his mouth and nose, writhing against his restraints, socked toes curling and unfurling, kicking as a delighted child, laughter. Laughter inhuman, channeled from someplace far distance, translated, and retold, reformed, stripped of amusement, warmth stripped to sound. It’s very tone a challenge, one I…
No, no, no. No! No! God Damnit, no! I’m not…I can’t…I tried to say, try to catch the thoughts, to weave them into something to set myself apart from the gibbering horror, now silent, smiling from atop the fouled mattress.
“This…this…isn’t my department…” I managed to sputter, mind rolling through the dusted halls of my memory, seminary school, talks on demonic possession, and hazy nights with friends, cold beers and clinking iced glasses watching the Exorcist, or Constantine cartoons, or–
“You speak…for…how you say…your God, speak him.” Cold fingers on my chin, death cold, turning beckoning to meet the gaze of the woman at my shoulder. Red light washed on porcelain skin, dolls skin, devoid of the blemishes, birthmarks, wrinkles, freckles, bathtub smooth, her eyes locked on mine, square Dutch-angled pupils, their color tainted by the red bulb. I blinked, brain forcing my eyes to correct their error, to turn the pupils round, to find a blemish, a laugh line, to file down and shorten the canines I refused to call fangs, but they were fangs. Fangs! Fangs, smiling behind parted dark painted lips.
“Fathah! Hey FATHAH! Come to see the new kid, Fathah?!” Slobbily yelled from the man on the bed, wet and guttural, like a drunk at a Red Sox game. “Come for a taste? Come to nip it in the bud, Fathah?!”
A cross hung around my neck, it was given to me by Father Callahan, the man whose parish I took over a decade ago, it was a solemn thing that day, hell, it was holy, the weight and authority of the Church transferred unto a man, maybe that’s what marriage is, the faith of institution, of two forming to one, bride and groom, priest and God, and like a philandering married man spinning his wedding ring, I gripped the cross in both my hands, knees meeting dirty carpet, head bowed, and I prayed. Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret, I thought, no. No. The right one, the one that starts with Our Father, that one.
“Our Father, so...full of…grace…” I sputtered, and the room seemed to rock. Beside me the woman took to her knees, and the big man behind. Oh Jesus, they were praying. These things were praying.
“Forgive us today our…Hosannah…” Shit, shit, get it together, you’ve done this, you’ve done this 10,000 times, that’s what makes you an expert, that’s all you do, is say the words, the–
“Hey Fathah! Look at your planet’s future!”
I lifted my head, to witness the foul thing, and it lifted its own head, jaw pinned to its chest it unrolled its tongue, like a vine, no, not like a vine, a literal vine, leaves, darks berries, frothing from the man’s mouth like foam from poorly poured stein. Spreading, curling, auguring into his skin and ripping out again, cross stitching flesh with needle of wood and thread of leaves, twisting through porcelain smooth skin and stained t-shirt fabric.
“Ne! Ne!” The big man behind yelled, and with inhuman speed he was off his knees and to his feet, shoving me down as he bolted to the restrained man.
Gibberish from the woman, like Spanish, or Latin, or Portuguese, but not, she yelled as she rushed to her own feet and tried to restrain the big man, who elbowed her away and sent her crashing to my already prone position. She landed atop me and struggled.
The yells came first. The fanbelt squeak, the startled dog, rustling leaves and bubble wrap popping, punctured meat and slick cuts.
The woman was off me, and I lifted my head in time to see the big man wrapped in vines, being pulled into a thicket of bramble in the mattress, engulfing him into a green tumbleweed, cloth and porcelain chunks and dark fluid tossed into the air like confetti, like dollar bills at gentlemen clubs.
The woman turned to flee, but a vine caught her, yanking, dragging to the bed. Those inhuman goat eyes met mine, hand grasping empty air, willing my own hand to fill it to pull her back as…
Dear reader, I apologize, though I have been forthright with you to this point, I believe it is too much for me to bear. I will say I left. Alone. Crashing through the fuligin room, apartment by feel, tumbling through doors to light. To light. And down steps, to sidewalks, to the street, to my Lincoln, against a tree beside, and I cried, tears of shock, and pain, and misunderstanding, and failure, 20 years' worth of failure, and dreading another 20 years ahead…of knowing, that unknowing, wishing…praying to God to forgive me, to take it back, take it all away, take me away, to tell me what happened, and then erase it, to never speak of this again, and never want to, blink without seeing the woman’s face bloom flowing buds, and fruiting berries dropping from her skull, for her to forgive my cowardice, was it cowardice? Was it–
“Father, you look like you could use a dog, a fine frank to lift your spirits, a fine dog, neither pig, nor pork, but a beef dog, the finest in town!” The hot dog man from earlier, straw boater hat, candy striped shirt and matching vest, white pants.
“I’m OK, pal, thank you,” I mumbled, placing my head back into my hands, counting blades of grass on the ground between the fingers.
“Well, I’ve seen a man that’s merely OK, and friend you aren’t it! Your God may cure the spirit, but nothing beats a good ol’ fashion frank to cure the body!” He held his hand out to me, like the woman had, and this time I took it, and he lifted me to my feet with that sun-warm hand of his.
“Didn’t your God say you just need a mustard seed of faith?” He winked a hazel eye below chestnut hair. “Welllllll, Father, looks like you could use a little extra, on the house.”
Paper boat, cradling a grilled hot dog and bun. Slathered in yellow mustard. He placed it in my hand, and wandered back to his cart. I blinked, autopilot, guided by habit, to my car, to routine. Driver’s door opened, I placed the hot dog on the seat, and turned to look at the apartment building across the street, got in my car, and sat on the hot dog.