THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance

by Thomas M. Disch

  A strange expression came over Patrick’s face, and he lifted his hand and pressed his outspread fingers against the breast pocket of his madras shirt. He closed his eyes and took a sharp breath.

  Peter thought his brother must have something caught in his throat and feared he would have to attempt the Heimlich maneuver. He prayed a quick prayer to the god of desperate atheists, and his prayer was answered at once, for Patrick took another, easier breath and opened his eyes.

  “Are you all right?”

  Patrick replied with a weak smile. “All better. It was just… nothing at all.”

  “You know, Patrick, between the two of us there’s no need to be secretive. I mean, I’ve got a vested interest in your good health and vice versa. If you’ve got some kind of heart condition, I should know about it—for my own good.”

  “Honestly, Petey, it’s nothing like that. It’s the skin on my chest. It’s, um, sore.” When Peter continued to give him a questioning look, he elaborated. “I spilled a hot cup of coffee on myself this morning. The skin developed some kind of blister, and sometimes my clothing rubs against it the wrong way and it’s painful. Usually I’m not even aware of it. Okay? Now, about what I was talking about before, I really shouldn’t be saying anything more about it. My tongue got carried away. But there is another matter that I wanted to pick your brain about. If I may?”

  “You can pick what’s there.”

  “It’s about that cult that was having trouble with the tax authorities—the Receptionists? Some name like that?”

  “The Receptivists. What about them?”

  “I was wondering what you might know about them. Do you still get that magazine about all the crank religions and pseudosciences?”

  “Skeptical Inquirer. Oh yes, I’m still an addict. And they have had a couple of articles about Boscage in recent issues.”

  “Boscage is the head of the cult?”

  “Maybe. If he’s still alive. There seems to be some question about that. It’s a very shadowy organization. Not to say flaky. Why do you ask? You know someone involved with them?”

  Patrick nodded. “The son of one of our parishioners. And I can’t say more than that. They approached me in confidence. And I recalled that I’d heard you mention them a while back. So I thought I’d ask you what you remember about them.”

  “Basically, you want to know: Should the kid’s parents be worried?”

  Patrick nodded.

  “Well, they probably should. I hate to have to say so, since I was a fan of Boscage as a writer back in the seventies. But when he got to be a guru, then—” Peter rolled his eyes discreetly and did a sotto voce imitation of the Twilight Zone theme song.

  “What exactly do his followers believe?”

  “You name it, they’ll believe it. I’m not really exaggerating. Boscage had a fertile imagination as an SF writer, and when he went around the bend, he continued to have a fertile imagination.”

  “Then you think he was crazy?”

  “What’s the alternative? Believing he really was abducted by dog-headed aliens in UFOs? Believing his soul has been recycled about once a century ever since the sinking of Atlantis? Believing there has been a conspiracy directed against Adolf Boscage, personally, for the last couple millennia, masterminded by clandestine Albigensian heretics who have infiltrated almost every organization and business Boscage has ever bumped against, including the Boy Scouts? Excuse me if I sound like a secular humanist party pooper, but somehow it is easier for me to believe that Adolf Boscage was crazy than to believe all that.”

  “Of course,” Patrick hastened to agree. “What I meant was, he might simply be a con man. A manipulator. A liar who wasn’t afraid to tell his lies on the grandest scale.”

  “Yes, that’s a possibility. He certainly was a bullshit artist whose bull got out of control, but I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt as to his being sincere. In that way he’s a lot like Philip K. Dick, if you ever read the book he wrote called Valis. Boscage’s followers are another matter. They are scary.”

  “That’s what worries me. I gather there was a civil case against them in California, and the person who was suing them simply disappeared. And in other cases that have been settled out of court, no one will say what was at issue.”

  “From what I’ve read, it usually involved abduction in some form or other. Or people being detained against their wills after they’d gone off to what they thought was a rehab center. In fact, Patrick, it occurs to me that you may be inviting exactly the same kind of legal difficulties with the new project you’re talking about. That wouldn’t be what all this is about, would it?”

  Patrick waved aside the question with a look of annoyance. “No, not at all. What I would be interested in knowing, though, is, what is it that’s behind their success? What makes people join? What do the Receptivists offer that makes their cult different from other fringe groups?”

  “Well, the major difference is that they’re the first cult that’s been able to turn UFO-abduction mythology into an institution, with its own hierarchy and rites and, I gather, even its own heresies now. What it offers newcomers is a more intense version of channeling. According to the accounts of a few people who’ve left the cult, the initiates are put through some kind of boot camp at this ranch in the Mojave Desert, and they’re regressed, under hypnosis, back to their former lives. And they also relive their UFO-abduction experiences, apparently in a highly persuasive way. Some of those who’ve left the cult have suggested that these hypnotic ‘regressions’ have actually been staged, and they claim that they were physically abused in the course of being ‘debriefed.’ Which is the Receptivist term for their channeling process. No one’s been able to prove anything.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” said Patrick, “but what I was really wondering is, whom do they appeal to?”

  Peter laughed aloud. Then blushed.

  “What’s so funny?” Patrick asked with an anticipatory smile.

  “Because of the answer that came to me the moment you asked the question. The Receptivists’ main appeal is to the same kind of people who were fans of Boscage’s SF—sexually dysfunctional males between the ages of fourteen and thirty-four. The kind of eternal teenager who joins the Marines to prove his manhood and then fucks it all up. Like me, you might say. I’d have been a perfect candidate back in the days when I was still trying to be Mr. Universe. I was a Boscage fan, after all, right up to the point where he went off the deep end. Even then, I kept reading the books. He’s a very subversive writer, the way he can inveigle you into sharing his weirdest paranoid fantasies. I hope that answers your question, because I honestly can’t come up with much more off the top of my head.”

  This was a polite lie, since the most salient feature of the Receptivists’ appeal was their peculiar attitude toward homosexuality, a subject that Peter and Patrick, by a tacit understanding, always avoided when speaking with each other. In the summer they’d turned fifteen, they had done things together they ought not to have. Peter had discussed these matters with his psychotherapist, back twenty years ago when he’d felt he’d needed psychotherapy, and since that time he considered the whole thing a closed matter, water under the bridge. He assumed that Patrick felt the same way about it.

  A closed matter but also a potential minefield, since they’d never, even when they’d been doing what they’d done, ever discussed it. It was simply too embarrassing, and anyhow, what was there one could say?

  Patrick solved the momentary awkwardness by pushing his chair back from the table and getting to his feet. “You’ll have to excuse me a moment, Petey. My bowels have been in a peculiar state all this last week.”

  Patrick was in the bathroom for fully five minutes, and when he came back, the two bounteous plates of meatballs and spaghetti had arrived at the table, and the brothers were able to concentrate on the serious business of eating.

  10

  Bing Anker was seething with rage. It felt good. He was asham
ed of himself, of course—rage is an ugly emotion—but then he was used to feeling ashamed of himself, whereas he was not used to the rage, except in its most repressed and inaccessible forms, when it would curdle into depression or self-loathing. This rage was directed at someone who deserved it, someone he could imagine himself strangling to death with a rope. He’d actually done just that, in fact, at the suggestion of his therapist, Caroline Kean. Not strangled anyone literally, but imagined it, with a real piece of rope in his hands and his own calf substituting for the neck of his desired victim. There was still a rope burn there to bear witness to the strength of his feelings.

  “There,” Dr. Kean had said at the close of their session. “Now, don’t you feel a lot better to have let go of that?”

  He’d agreed that he felt a lot better, since he didn’t like to say anything to contradict Dr. Kean, who was a jewel among therapists—supportive, nonjudgmental, appreciative of his least little joke, and best of all, that name! Of course, it wasn’t spelled the same way as the author of the Nancy Drew books, but it was a homophone, and that was enough for Bing. Anyhow, he wasn’t lying, he did feel better. Only he had not “let go” of his rage. Not while it was still so fresh and exhilarating. He felt he could walk down the street and break the windshield of every car he passed. With just a whack of his ball-peen hammer it would be Smash to the Olds! Smash to the Toyota! Smash to the Cadillac Fleetwood coupe!

  Not that he’d ever do anything so wasteful and adolescent. What satisfaction could be gained from mere vandalism? That was the problem with rage. It flailed about at everything in sight, whereas if it were focused and directed it could be as precise as a bullet. So here he was, feeling almost preternaturally focused and directed, by the white marble statue of cute little Bernardino of Siena that greeted the faithful on their way from the parking lot into the church that bore his name. He was a very garden elf of a saint, three feet high, in a monkish robe cut along distinctly Empire lines.

  Bing checked to see if anyone could see him and then, having already peeled off the paper backing, he stuck a SILENCE = DEATH sticker atop little Bernardino’s tonsured pate. In its own small way it felt quite as satisfactory as smashing a windshield.

  Bing entered the church by its wheelchair-accessible side entrance, and stood for a little while lost in admiration. This was the Chartres of suburbia, the Notre Dame of Middle America, the Mont-St-Michel of fifties Catholicism when the spirit of the nation and of the Church were at their most congruent. Everywhere there was blond wood in softly rounded shapes. The ribs of the ceiling looked like the ailerons of some vast fifties coffee table. The stations of the cross were bland, tan bas-reliefs with stylized figures pantomiming the most decorous distress. And the Christ who was suspended on the blond crucifix above the simple slab of altar was the most epicene of saviors, with an upper body that had never been to a gym or done a lick of work in its life. No nipples and no underarm hair, which seemed to be standard omissions in liturgical art, but this Jesus had even had his navel stylized out of existence, which, if you gave the matter any thought, amounted to heresy. It was hard to believe that there’d ever been a time like the High Renaissance when painters and sculptors had given Jesus a cock and balls. What would Michelangelo have thought if he could have seen St. Bernardine’s? Would he have wanted to put it to the torch? Or would he only have laughed?

  For Bing’s present purpose St. Bernardine’s was as empty as could be hoped. There was one old lady saying a rosary in the pew nearest the altar, and one confessional in use. Not much of a turnout for a Saturday afternoon by comparison to what Bing remembered from his grade school days at Our Lady of Mercy, but perhaps people didn’t sin as much here in the suburbs as they did in the city. While he waited for the present penitent to be absolved, Bing made a reverent circuit of the side aisles and the vestibule looking for good places to put the five other SILENCE = DEATH stickers he’d brought with him. One went on the tenth station of the cross, in which Christ’s clothes are torn from his body, a second on the holy water font beside the center aisle, a third on a metal collection canister labeled FOR THE HOMELESS AND HUNGRY, and a fourth as a diadem upon the crown of the Infant of Prague. There was no time to affix the fifth, for the confessional had become free.

  Bing entered it and knelt, and waited for the panel to slide open. When it did, he said, at ordinary conversational volume, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been quite a while since my last confession.”

  And he knew from the first syllable of the priest’s hushed response—“Just how a long a time, my son?”—that it was him, his target, his sitting duck.

  “Years and years… Father Pat.”

  There was a longish silence while Father Pat tried to identify the voice on the other side of the screen that veiled confessor and penitent from each other’s sight. When he could not, he shifted out of sacramental mode and said, “I think you have the advantage of me.”

  “You don’t want to hear my confession?” Bing parried.

  “If you feel a sincere repentance and are resolved to sin no more, then I will hear your confession. That is what I’m here for—not to speak with you on a first-name basis. Within the confessional I am the same as any other priest.”

  “The way all cats are the same color in the dark? Excuse me, that’s probably not an appropriate remark. As I said, it’s been a while, and I’ve got a little rusty. So, where to begin? There’s a lot of territory to cover. Some of the sins you’re already familiar with, though that was a while ago, and you probably hear so many confessions that all the different sinners’ sins must get muddled up. Though I do like to think that mine were special.”

  “You need not confess any sin that has already been absolved,” the priest said coldly. “And try to keep your voice lower. The confessional is not soundproof.”

  “Oh dear, I always do that. I’m a little hard of hearing myself, and in a restaurant I will gradually keep raising my own decibel level until I sound like a PA system. If I whisper, like this, can you hear me?”

  “Not very well. Try to speak softly. And to begin your confession, tell me—what is the particular sin that brings you here today? There is usually one sin for which we feel a special remorse, and that would be a good place to begin.”

  “Right! The sin that brings me here is anger. I’m not usually an angry kind of person, almost the opposite, at least in terms of my personal life. I don’t have that much to be angry about. Although I have friends who say that’s my denial, and denial isn’t just a river in Africa.”

  “Anger is not a sin in itself. Did it lead you to some sinful action?”

  “It isn’t a sin in itself, is it? I mean, sometimes it can be justifiable. Sometimes you read of things in the paper that can just get you furious for a good reason. I mean, I’ve seen you on the TV news, talking about abortion, and you certainly came across as angry.”

  “Even Our Lord was known to express anger at times.”

  “Yes!” Bing exulted. “With the scribes and Pharisees! And the moneychangers in the Temple! You see, I haven’t forgotten it all. So, where was I? The newspaper. About a week ago there was a story about this priest in Massachusetts, a Father Porter, who sexually molested an enormous number of altar boys. It had been going on for decades, and it only came out just lately, I suppose because people used to be too ashamed to talk about such things, but now with Geraldo and Sally Jessy Raphaël, shame doesn’t control people the same way. We can realize that we were victims, and that the shame belongs with the blame. So, after I read that news story, and the ones that followed it, I began to be obsessed. I wanted to do something. I wanted to wreak vengeance.”

  There was a significant silence. At last the priest said, with lawyer-like caution, “Scandals of this sort are a source of pain to everyone who loves the Church. But I’m sure this priest…”

  “Father Porter,” Bing said helpfully.

  “I’m sure that he is going through quite enough suffering right now without
your needing to add to it yourself.”

  “Did you know that he’s living here in Minnesota now? And that he went through another harem of altar boys while he was an assistant pastor in Bemidji? And that was after the Church had sent him off for treatment to their own special pedophilia center in New Mexico. So the Church knew what he was doing.”

  “I’ve read these allegations and speculations in the paper as well. And they are distressing, surely. But how does this matter affect you, directly?”

  “That’s a good question, Father. And the answer is, yes, very directly.”

  “Did you know the man when he served in Bemidji? I say ‘man’ advisedly, for he’s left the priesthood, you know. He’s married and has four children of his own.”

  “No, I didn’t know him. But I had a somewhat similar experience myself. When I was an altar boy.”

  “Similar in what way? Be more specific.”

  “Well, in terms of oral sex, I think there were five times that he blew me. How often I did the same for him I really couldn’t say. For about a month it was almost every day. A few times he was wearing his vestments, and that was hot. In terms of anal sex, he never cared much for that, either way, though sometimes when I was blowing him, he’d wiggle his fingers up my ass. I don’t know if that counts as a separate sin or not.”

  The priest had no reply.

  Bing let the silence lengthen, and then, since there was nothing to be gained by further pussyfooting, he said, “Is it all starting to come back, Father Pat?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by continuing this discussion. Obviously, you did not come here to confess.”

  “For goodness sakes, what would you call what I’ve just been doing if not confessing!”

  “I’d say you were playing a game of cat and mouse.”