by M F Sullivan
“I don’t think I’d know how to live my life if I could.” Still in fair humor, Lavinia laughed the words while she stood to brush her hands free of dog fur. “I don’t know anything about the world—anything at all. Do you know how excited I was to ride the Light Rail? Oh, Ninny, it was so fun! That must be what you feel like all the time. Well…not right now, but you know what I mean.”
Dominia did not respond—could not, until she was pushed by Lavinia’s regret that: “Everybody treats me like I’m made of spun sugar because I didn’t wake until I was grown up—but I know things. I’m not stupid, Ninny.”
“No, Lavinia. You’re not. That’s not why our Father keeps you confined.”
“Oh, I know why he does that. It’s because he wants me to be safe, but—”
“No, Lavinia, please. Please listen to me.” The girl quieted while Dominia, struggling for breath from her position, arched her ruined shoulders to fill her lungs. “I don’t know what you’re going to think of me after this, but I don’t think I’m going to be around much longer. I’d might as well tell you now, and make it fast, since he’ll be here any minute. Probably watching us right now…I’m sorry, Livvy. I haven’t told you the truth. No one has ever told you the truth. Not about yourself, and not about your life. You’re fertile. Our Father doesn’t want you to be out on your own because you’d discover that, or—far worse, in his opinion—you might find a nice, human man and make a child without his knowledge.”
Though the stained-glass windows of the room had been shuttered against the light of day, Lavinia’s eyes seemed to glow as they widened with her sputtering mouth. “How…but—that’s not right, Ninny, he wouldn’t do that. Daddy wouldn’t— I’m not a dog, Ninny. He wouldn’t breed me. Not even if I could get pregnant. But that’s silly. That’s silly, Dominia, and you know that it’s silly. Martyrs can’t get pregnant.”
“He keeps you at home because you bleed every month, right? Other martyrs would know.”
Humiliation, along with horror, lined the girl’s face. “Why would he tell you about my—my illness—”
“It’s not an illness! It’s menstruation, Lavinia.”
“What is—” The girl frowned, her perfect brow furrowing with bafflement. “I know an awful lot of words, Ninny, but I don’t know that one. ‘Month’?”
Sweet Lamb, but the Holy Father had managed to shield her from that. Dominia shouldn’t have been so shocked—the girl never lived a human life, never had a female parent, never read anything that wasn’t in her approved Biblioteca reading list and never spoke to anybody who wasn’t paid by the Hierophant to keep their mouths shut. Yet, for the girl to have been kept in the dark for almost seventy years about a basic fact of her own body—it was so abhorrent it was almost impressive.
“That bleeding means you can have a baby.” At the girl’s visible skepticism, Dominia pressed, “You can, Lavinia. You can, because you weren’t ever a human. You were born a martyr. You’re Cassandra’s daughter.”
The ninety-year-old tumor of the General’s lie dropped from her mouth, and in that instant revealed to her how burdensome its weight had become. She had never realized it—never once felt its creeping mass build until now, free of its pressure, she was confronted with the faded image of Lavinia’s eyes growing big, bigger, her brow furrowing and her mouth uttering, “But I don’t understand,” in a voice so soft the General barely heard it. Not over the thud of blood bearing down on her ears.
Gently, as if trying to talk an eggshell out of breaking, Dominia tried to explain. First, about Benedict. Then, about Dominia’s loneliness. Finally, about Cassandra. She thought about trying to make some excuse, like that the General thought they couldn’t give the baby a good life—but that would have been another lie. Cassandra was a natural mother. Dominia was always the problem, Dominia and her fear and her lying, and so Dominia said, “My heart was broken, and I wanted to break hers, but I couldn’t bear to give her up, or reject her child to her face. Not when she was so lonely and afraid. So desperate for my help. Those vulnerabilities that brought her to me in the first place, those were the reasons I loved her. They were why I wanted to protect her. Yet, I punished her for them. I told our Father about you, and I thought, until recently, that I had made the right decision. But last year, everything fell apart. That was why Cassandra killed herself, you see. She knew. She realized what had been sitting in front of her face for almost a century, and she was destroyed by it. The weight of my lie…what I did…I killed Cassandra, Lavinia. I killed your mother. I took your arms and your legs.”
Tears falling upon the tile floor and the fur of the watching collie, the General shut her eyes. “I am so sorry.”
For a time—too long, by Dominia’s reckoning—there was no answer. She was too frightened to behold the girl’s expression. But when that soft voice did reach her to reveal itself full of astonishment, she forced herself to behold its stunned speaker. “Then you would have been my mother, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” admitted the General, whose despair paid no heed to the light of Lavinia’s face, or the way she stepped forward with hope in her smile. “But I failed you.”
“Oh—Ninny. I wish—I wish I could hold you, Ninny, I—” Lips trembling, the girl glanced down at the dog, then gasped as conversation rose from the hall outside the chapel doors. “I think you’re right, Ninny. I shouldn’t be here.”
“No,” Dominia agreed. “But I’m glad you came.”
“Oh—oh.” The fretful girl took another step toward the General, tugging her cloak around her. “I can’t leave you now. I can’t let this happen.”
“You have no choice. You’ll be busy acting in a play that will kill half a planet’s worth of human children.”
“I—it’s only a little cull,” Lavinia defended, almost admitting she was a willing participant in the proposed murder of the firstborn. “Daddy says…Daddy…”
The furrow in the girl’s brow said it all, and Dominia managed to raise both her own.
“The Holy Father says a lot of things, doesn’t he?”
Looking stricken by the notion of their Father’s fallibility, Lavinia glanced around the room and, at last, turned to follow Basil’s loping route to the door. “I don’t understand why he never told me any of this before,” the girl murmured. “Doesn’t he love me? I thought—”
“The Hierophant does love you, I’m sure, in his way. He most loves what gives him power: and you are the most powerful person he has ever known.”
That was certainly the first time Lavinia had heard a thing like that. If any notion of self-empowerment had ever come upon her, nobody on Earth had paid it any heed. The girl cast another reluctant glance for her hanging sister before hurrying away, and it was with an awful lurch as the Princess and the dog slipped through the door that the General caught a glimpse of her Father’s massive frame. But the truth had been disseminated, and he could do nothing.
“I think we will make that your last visitor,” declared her Father, leaning into the chapel. “You do have a way of violating those few privileges you are given, my girl.”
“Don’t you hurt her,” shouted the General. Her Father only chuckled at her outrage.
“Why should I have to, when you have done such a fine job? I’ll see you at your next break, my dear.”
The slam of the shutting door echoed through the chapel but could not compare to the sweet opening of Dominia’s soul. Crucified or not: she had waited too long for this moment. The truth had fermented within her, and now drunkened her to private tears that she, dehydrated, could not afford to weep.
XIII
Suspension of Disbelief
Eight days. Eight nights. A human being, as Cicero had pointed out, seldom made it one day in such a state. Even with respites such as hers, a human being by now would have expired. At the very least, their leg’s necrotic condition would have spread farther up their thigh. No, no. Dominia’s dark flesh ended just above her knee (or below, spatially speakin
g—she’d lost track of up and down long ago). How much longer could she have lasted beyond even her torturous nine days? Without blood, the protein inhabiting her muscles and skin could not long maintain its resistance of tissue death. Every drop of blood was localized in her head, and had been there for a while. That leg looked long, long gone.
It was safe to say the General felt unwell.
She had gone this long without eating or having the blood of the Lamb before, she thought, maybe. She couldn’t remember. Numbers had become meaningless. How long had she been stuck in the dungeon with René? Maybe not this long. Or maybe longer. Her life was an uncanny blur. Each passing second contributed to the disintegration of her neurons as they self-consumed, dissolved, or were reedited into cancer cells. This alteration of her physical brain reduced her inner life to little more than an uncontrollable chain of abstract images that blossomed without meaning or warning, sometimes grating on her nerves in a physical way and occurring again-again-again-again-again. Those cogent thoughts retained were the same thoughts over and over. Her mind was trapped by itself and cycling into a horrible whirlpool that would not, could not, end so long as she was trapped in this body: this hanging body: this suspended body for which everything was oblivion yet eternal: this prison of form where each minute, each second, peeled off far into the distance of infinity. Each time her fading consciousness found, within the substance of her atrophying muscles, joules enough to control her thoughts, she willed the second of her death that much closer, begging for its shadow as a pastor begged the miracles of the Lamb.
Perhaps God despised her for the crimes she had committed against mankind, her wife, herself. But she had no lingering fear of hell. Hell was not the Void. Not being nothing for all eternity. This was hell. This material compilation of the abstract data of the black hole at the end of being, this place of her Father’s, was a waking tahgmahr. But that may have been a self-possessed notion. Material chauvinism, perhaps. She had to remind herself that she had seen the suffering of the souls hovering in the Very Low Frequency variation of the Void around Jerusalem—all those many unfortunates who had conflated that which was heavenly with that which was substantial and could not, even in death, shake themselves of their delusions. They would rather have felt themselves betrayed by a negligent God than dare connect with the entity on a personal level.
Understandable. Dominia, personally, was terrified of God. The experience of God. The idea of plunging into that highest, unspeakable godhead with her naked soul made the top of her head tingle even now—maybe more than ever—in a kind of spiritual inkling accessible even in these physical chains. To contemplate what the Jewish Abrahamians called “Keter” while in the Void—surely that was to invite a kind of annihilation, for better or for worse. What soul, especially those bound to the VLFs, could bear to realize this mating of the godspark to its source?
This was why the religions of the world employed clerics. Much as martyrs, whether knowingly or not, craved to know that dark aspect of God through the evil works of the Hierophant, so did humans seek God through the intermediaries of priests, imams, and rabbis. The Red Market women who served the Lady likewise could not have been said to seek God directly, for they pursued only the feminine aspect of the divine, and only through the vehicle of the Lady’s avatar. Dominia felt safe with the Lady for that reason. One could argue She was God…ish. Maybe that was the origin of “goddess.” Had she energy, the General might have laughed at that thought, then been spat upon by a hoard of angry feminist historians and etymologists. But what did she care of history, of gender, of politics, of language? She stood on the edge of death and her only thoughts were of God.
There was only one person she knew who had, so far as she could discern, sought with true tenacity that which one might call God. Not her Father’s perverse idea of it. Not society’s, either. The term was often condescendingly accompanied by stereotypical images (man with beard, clouds, harps, angels, snore), yet remained so deep in true meaning that its casual use curdled the blood of those most militant atheists. But somebody she knew had wandered the universe—proven fundamental in rerunning the universe again and again—and in the process had, she suspected, come to intimately know the divine essence propelling the movement of everything. That same seeker was the only entity she had known to intercede in the world. Wretched as she felt, with her hands having been forcefully folded by her bindings for eight days, the General did what most hopeless people do, and prayed.
“Saint Valentinian”—she exhaled and inhaled and laughed in a hollow, hacking sound that caused real agony at the base of her ribs because her lungs were compressed to shapes like little prunes—“I need help.”
The church was so perfectly silent that she heard the distant footsteps of a guard charged to watch the hall since Lavinia’s audacious visit. Somehow bolstered by the quiet, Dominia lifted her head and batted the watering eyes that bulged with the pressure of her skull. When she spoke, her swollen lips felt they might crack, or, to her absurdly working mind, fall off. “I know you’re busy, like you keep saying every time I see you…and I don’t even know what you can do. What the limits of your intercession are. But I—I wish I were dead.”
She allowed her head to drop back against the wood of the cross and gritted her teeth. Her eyes shut to a phosphene mandala of pain. “I wish I never have to live again. If it has to be like this…if this is what life is—why was I ever born? Why am I worth nothing more to you, or my Father, or anyone else, than any other tool? I’m as much a person to you sons of bitches as the hammers that made this cross. Is this nothing to you? Is this suffering nothing to you? I understand what I’ve done—all that I’ve done. I know I’m a horrible person who deserves to suffer, but please, please, let it end!”
You would accept eternal failure to save the pains of one last day?
Astonished to hear any voice not her own—let alone this choir reverberating from within her degraded auditory cortex and broken Broca’s area—the General allowed her blurring eyes to open. Nearly blind as she was with the pressure of the blood in her skull, the Lady was as clear as ever. Perhaps clearer. More real and substantial than reality—though there was a wrongness to Her that the General only recognized as She began to make Her way down the aisle. Halfway, Dominia twigged to the problem. The Lady walked, though this was, ostensibly, reality. With each step, the goddess gained an inch of height, until, before the General, She towered the twelve feet necessary to stand above the head of the hanging woman.
“I heard if you walked it meant the end of the world.”
It does. You seem surprised that your prayers were answered.
Before the goddess, the General needn’t struggle to organize her thoughts. Her mind was sharper than ever, as if she’d eaten and slept and bathed and engaged in about a decade of cognitive behavioral therapy. Happiest of all, she could speak without pain. “Surprised to have them answered by you, maybe.”
The magician and We are closely allied. You and the magician are closely allied. You are closely allied with Us. We have come to help you, as you asked. If you truly wish to put an end to all of this, We can take you now: but this will all occur again, and this iteration will be rendered obsolete.
And another iteration would take its place. She felt all the sicker at the thought. “I can’t go through all this again, knowing it or not.”
Then We will give you a far more valuable gift.
With Miki Soto’s head, the Lady bent to place a kiss upon Dominia’s aching lips. In what could only be described as a miracle, she felt not her death, but the death of all pain, as if agony was a skin that shed on the Lady’s contact. The General’s actual physical condition had not improved. Her leg was still dead—so dead that it required amputation at this point—and her body was still bound, but she had no sense of it. This was not a matter of numbness, or endorphins. It was as though the General observed herself from outside her own body; and as she copped to that sensation, she sat upon the nearest pew.
Watching her own swinging body, meeting the gaze of her own helpless, blood-filled eyes.
“Are you sure I’m not already dead?” asked Dominia of the Lady. The entity sat, in normal scale, directly to her left. Did they speak in words, or Words? What was the difference?
You are no more dead than any martyr whose martyring is not yet complete. Look: here comes your Father.
As the Lady said. The doors opened and, per usual, in strolled the Hierophant for his anticipated mocking session. He said something unintelligible. Only as she focused in on him did his words clear themselves. Presently, he dragged over the ladder with the assurance that, “I suppose you’ll want to know Lavinia is in good order. Be relieved, she is.”
“Is this my soul I’m in?” Dominia’s nose was a sharp closed parenthesis that abruptly ended the world: the hallmark of her missing eye.
It is always your soul that you are “in.” Reality is the hologram cast by the projector of the black hole, said the Lady, eyes never leaving the crucifix. The travel of the soul through this space is less akin to the movement of ghosts through physical space, and more akin to the result of a physical entity navigating a holographic field. This experience of bilocation is more likely to happen when one is asleep than at any other time, due to the wave flight of consciousness from the low-activity, low-frequency electromagnetic field state of the brain before rapid eye movement begins. But such a phenomenon is also likely to happen in meditation, as well as instances of great physical trauma or duress. There are many who follow Us who use the term “astral projection” to refer to such a phenomenon, but that term more appropriately describes reality, yes? It is all a series of projections produced by the mind.
The General could not think to respond, fascinated as she was by the experience of being outside her body in so distinct and lucid a way. While the Lady spoke, Dominia rose and walked straight up to her climbing Father. Remarkably, she was poised just below him, yet he noticed nothing. She asked of the Lady, “Can I go anywhere this way?”
