The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven

by Robert Boyczuk

  The sound grew. Through the leaves I saw flashes of whitewater.

  All at once I was out of the forest, standing on a flat rock, overlooking the foot of deafening rapids. Cool spray licked my face and drenched my clothes. To my left, a few metres away, the river abruptly broadened and its course levelled, and the threshing water swirled tranquilly into a series of inviting pools.

  I pulled off my shirt, intent on a long overdue ablution, and took a step towards the edge of the rock to climb down to the nearest pool—then froze. A naked figure rose from where it had been sitting in the pool, its back to me.

  I threw myself on the ground and scuttled back into the bushes, shirt clutched in my hand.

  I was so shocked, at first I thought to run back to camp to tell Kite—then immediately dismissed the idea. That’s what Kite would expect me to do. So after my heart slowed and my breathing became more regular, I edged back towards the pool on my belly, wriggling into a clutch of myrtle bushes, where I might observe the bather unseen.

  It was a young woman.

  Although I’d never seen a naked woman before (except for the few crude renderings of my classmates at San Savio)—and, angled away from me as she was, her slender waist, the curve of her hips and buttocks, and the small prominence of her breasts were unmistakeable. Her skin was dusky and unblemished, her limbs lithe and sinewy, her hair jet black and cropped short in a boyish cut. Around her waist was a finely wrought gold chain that hung from the curve of her hips and glittered in the morning sun. She stood thigh-deep in the pool, leisurely scooping water over herself, slowly running her hands over the sculpted muscles in her arms and legs, luxuriating in the sensation. Until now I’d only ever seen the exaggerated sensuality of Ignatius’s prostitutes, and found it of little interest, thinking it contrived and laboured, anything but arousing. However, watching this woman, believing herself unobserved and thinking only of her own pleasure, I felt an intense arousal unlike I’d ever felt before. The heat rose in my face, and burned in my groin, too, where unbidden an erection pressed urgently into damp earth. When she ran a hand up her leg and slipped it between her thighs, my heart leapt into my throat. For a moment or two her hand lingered there, then she let it fall into the water; but it rose again to her flower and she brushed her fingertips lightly back and forth, barely touching herself. Slowly, then, her touch turned to strokes, her hand slipping in and out with growing urgency. I don’t know how long passed this way; it could have been a minute, it could have been ten. I was stricken, unable to think, unable to breathe, unable to move. When she clenched her buttocks and arched her back, crying out in pleasure, my world seemed to cant sideways.

  I spilled my seed then.

  Not as a boy does in his dreams, but awake, as an adult, for the first time in my life. I shuddered in diminishing waves that matched her own, gasping for breath, then squeezing my eyes shut fearing I would lose consciousness.

  When I opened them, she was there, in the pool, doubled over, her shoulders heaving, her hand still clamped between her thighs. She caught her breath, then stood, withdrawing her hand, unashamedly examining her glistening fingers in the incipient morning light.

  My thighs were sticky; I was horrified at the madness that had possessed me. The Church, if it wavered in other areas, held firm on this: seed was for the propagation of man only. To waste it was a grave moral disorder. I knew I’d committed a sin, a mortal sin, yet she was beautiful beyond words, a perfection of form and physique. I could not take my eyes off her.

  What is it about images like this that catch in our imaginations forever?

  In the intervening years I have been with women I thought I might love, some of whom other men would declare far more beautiful than the young woman I now observed. Never for me. In that moment by the river, this woman’s raw beauty, her unabashed sensuality, was burnt indelibly on my mind; I would not recognize it until much later (and to the detriment of those who had the misfortune to love me more than I could ever love them) but I can now see the pattern of how I have vainly tried to relive the intensity of those feelings—and failed. You may ascribe it to the infatuation of a boy, but if it is, it is one that had stayed with me throughout my life, and pains me still. For the only love that stays with us, the only love that remains sharp and untarnished into our declining years unto death, is the one we can never have. You see, what I did a few moments later forever destroyed that possibility.

  The young woman began singing; as difficult as it was to hear her over the roar of the rapids, I could make out snatches of the Mass we’d been practising the last week, the phrasing and intonation unmistakeable.

  She turned, and I saw that it was Ali.

  I suppose any sensible person would have quietly slipped away in that moment. But I didn’t. I was too astonished—and confused—to move.

  Ali waded out of the water, her body glistening in the light of sun-on, drops of silver dripping from the dark tangle of hair on her pubis. I thought then that she looked up at me; but I think she must have been searching for a handhold, for she disappeared beneath the lip of the rock, then gracefully swung herself up onto the flat stone in front of me. She folded herself onto the ground, sitting cross-legged only a few hand-spans away. I was astonished she hadn’t seen me.

  Leisurely, she wrung water from her hair; I watched as tiny rivulets slid down her shoulders and ran onto her small breasts. One drop hung pendent from her long, dark nipple; she casually flicked it off. Then she lay down to sun herself, her head toward the river.

  Transfixed, I marvelled at her, watching her chest rise and fall, her eyes shut as if asleep. How could I have been so fooled?

  I thought I might inch back experimentally, to see if sounds of the river would be sufficient to cover my movement. But just as I was about to do so, she cupped her hand over her pubis and began to pleasure herself again.

  I am ashamed to admit it, but I became hard instantly.

  She rolled over onto her stomach, her hands beneath her now, her hips rising and falling, rising and falling. Her legs were apart, her toes curled hard against the stone; from my vantage I saw first one finger sliding into the pink folds of her labia, then two, while with her other hand she caressed her clitoris in a slow, circular motion.

  A madness possessed me; without volition I was on my feet and atop Ali. I heard her gasp as I grabbed her wrists and pinioned her arms. Then I took her from behind, as the boys had done to me at San Savio.

  There are times too traumatic for ordinary memory to process; when this happens, it is not uncommon for people to say their memory went blank. Sometimes, it turns out these memories are not wholly gone, but are suppressed, pushed so far away from consciousness that they manifest only as shapeless ghosts that haunt dreams.

  My memory, however, reacts differently. I have never wholly blanked out. Instead, my mind tears apart memory, shreds it, as if it is trying to make it a jumble of disconnected and incomprehensible moments that elude meaning. If it didn’t, I am sure guilt would consume me and become unbearable. This was one of those times. As clearly as every detail of Ali bathing in the river had been burned into my mind, I have little recollection of my greatest shame.

  I raped her. That I know.

  The rest is fragments. A flash of her struggling beneath me pointlessly, my madness giving me pitiless strength. The cold metal links of her gold chain pressed between belly and back. Of me lying next to her, spent, as she wept into her hands. The blows she rained down on my head and shoulders with her fists and then a branch (when had she picked up that branch?), while I sat hunched over on bare buttocks, breeches at my ankles, head on my knees. There are disconnected moments of her expressions, too, of astonishment, of shock and anger. Of the revulsion etched in every line of her face as she screamed at me. But the sharpest spike of memory is that of her standing over me, sometime later, dressed again as a boy, her cheeks flushed, her eyes flashing hatred. “Pull up your pants,” I remember her saying, and that drew me back, as if out of a dream;
memory snapped back into place.

  I did as she asked and stood, but my self-loathing wouldn’t allow me to meet her gaze.

  She punched me in the face, and I staggered backwards; a second blow felled me.

  I lay on my back, and she stared down at me, murder in her eyes. I’d have welcomed death, too, only she didn’t strike again. “You won’t tell.” Not a question, a demand, Ali squatting next to me, the tip of her dirk pressed against my throat.

  I shook my head, at first thinking she meant what had happened, then realizing she meant about her being a girl. A woman.

  “I know why you won’t sing.” This was her threat: she would expose me if I exposed her. But I would have sooner cut out my own tongue than said anything.

  The walk from the river back to the camp is clear in my memory; conjuring it in my mind’s eye, I see how it would have been beautiful had my disgrace not coated everything with a grey pallor. I resolved then and there, in the way boys are wont to do, to make things right, no matter what it might take. Yet by the time we reached camp I realized how naive I was being. I was no longer part of the world of boys, a world in which everything can be fixed—or forgiven. I had done murder and done rape, and had no hope of absolution, in Heaven, or here on earth.

  Ali would hate me always.

  Entering the world of adulthood, I knew despair.

  Second Assumption

  I own what I did.

  Some men might blame a sin such as mine on possession. I will not. Yes, I believe in Satan. But I do not believe he, or any of his demons, were in me that day. At least no more than they are in any of us on any day. Still, I cannot explain my act other than to say I was possessed. I did not understand the darkness that moved me, yet I knew it to be part of me. I also knew that no matter what I might do, no mater how hard I prayed, the darkness would always be there, coiled inside me, waiting. That I could harbour such a thing frightened me.

  I must have looked a mess when we returned to camp. One of my eyes had swollen shut, and I bled from several unstaunched cuts on my head. My nose throbbed relentlessly, and a strand of bloody snot ran down my lip whenever I snuffled.

  Kite merely glanced at us, as if we’d just returned from a morning stroll, then turned his attention back to dividing the hard rounds of bread that had become our morning staple. Lark gaped, but had the good sense to snap his mouth shut and busy himself with other things.

  I did not break my fast, nor join that morning’s sparring, and Kite let me be.

  The day’s march passed in a haze. I conducted no singing. When we halted for lunch, I gave my portion to Lark.

  I tried to find guidance in the Good Book that afternoon, but failed.

  It’s no secret that a literal reading of The Bible quickly reveals its contradictory and often vexing nature. Indeed, I have often heard the uneducated bend a passage to serve their own selfish ends. This, however, is born of an ignorance (a willful one in the unscrupulous) of our doctrine. It is not for us, the laity, to interpret God’s word. It is the purview of the Church. The Catholic faith holds that the Word of God is manifest in the Holy Scriptures; but it also holds that interpreting the Word has been entrusted to the episcopate—so named the Magisterium—whose teachings on faith and morality are infallible, as promised by Christ. Thus, the Bishops interpret God’s word for us.

  Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

  I did not need the Magisterium to interpret this passage. God spoke plainly. I had sinned against myself as much as I had sinned against Ali. Turning memories like pages, I searched passages from both Testaments, and found few that spoke to what I had done. The only one that seemed apropos was from Deuteronomy, and it was one my teachers had never brought to our attention: If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. At first I thought the passage admonished me to take Ali as my wife. This I would have done in a heartbeat. But Ali had no father, and I had no shekels. And the passage also contained the proviso, “and they are found.” What I supposed was meant by this was that once it was common knowledge a woman had been defiled, her prospects of securing a husband diminished, and so the rapist was duty-bound to take her as wife. Only, we had not been found. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that this exception had been put there for the woman’s sake. As odious as was my first trespass, trying to force her to marry me—when she might find a better, more-deserving husband—would be tantamount to committing a second unforgivable violation.

  No more verses spoke directly of my sin, although there was no lack of passages about the sin of lust. James was perhaps the most apt. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

  I understood this, and felt it to be true in my heart.

  However, many of the verses that dealt with sins of the flesh only confused me, like Matthew’s admonition: But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. We’d been reminded of this passage several times at San Savio, and it was easy to see what Matthew meant by this and why the Priests, in a school brimming with pubescent boys, returned to it time and time again. But having now reached physical maturity, I could not comprehend how a man could act contrary to his nature—a nature God had given him. If sin be a thought, then I could not see how any man could avoid Hell.

  In all this, I wondered about Kite, too, for the Bible seemed clear on his sin: If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.

  How could the Magisterium interpret this otherwise? Yet Kite and Ignatius had not been put to death. They’d only been excommunicated. And as light as my punishment of fifty shekels had seemed, by the same measure theirs seemed overly harsh—and both were, by my reckoning, good men otherwise. I counted myself lucky to have known them.

  Warnings and reproofs spun round and round in my head until I was dizzy and sickened, and still I had no better understanding of what I should do, nor if there was any possibility of redemption—in God’s eyes or in Ali’s.

  When I recovered my senses, my back was pressed uncomfortably against a large rock; Kite loomed over me. Behind him, Lark stirred our small, dented pot, while Ali cut potatoes in her palm. The smell of stew swirled around me.

  My confusion must have been apparent, because Kite said, “You fainted when I set your nose.”

  Kite had waited until the swelling subsided a bit. The last thing I remembered was his cold palms pressing against the sides of my deformed nose, and an intense flash of pain, like someone had smashed me between the eyes with a hammer.

  Kite cupped my chin to examine his handiwork. “It’ll never be fully straight again, but near enough.” He let my head drop. “Shame,” he said. “Such a pretty face. . . .”

  Lark scooped some broth into a cup and brought it over to me. My stomach rumbled and my mouth watered. I glanced over at Ali, but she kept her eyes resolutely fixed on her potatoes. I waved away the stew.

  Lark’s round face creased with concern. “You haven’t eaten all day. You’ve got to eat, Thomas.”

  “Leave him be,” Kite said. “He’ll eat when he’s hungry enough.” Then he walked away.

  Lark leaned and whispered to me, “Ali caught you. You’d have hit your head on that rock if he hadn’t.” He hovered for a moment, as if waiting for a response. “I never seen anyone move that fast.”

  I said nothing, and a moment later he, too, retreated to the evening’s repast.

  Gently, I touched my nose—and a new universe of stars exploded in my vision. I nearly fainted again.

/>   When the pain had subsided to a tolerable level, I tested my nose once more, infinitely more careful this time. I felt around its gross contours. It had swollen up, almost as large as when it had been freshly broken, but was nowhere near as deformed. I crawled over to my bedroll and lay down, my back to the others. That night was a sleepless, pain-filled misery, and I remember little of the next day’s march. I barely had the energy to drag myself after our small company. Exhaustion and hunger muddled my thoughts.

  That night I slept like the dead.

  On the third day, I collapsed.

  Since the river, I’d neither eaten nor drunk.

  Through a fog I recall Kite crouching over me, trying to force water between my lips. “I don’t know what you’ve done, boy,” he said, “or what you think you’ve done, but you cannot atone for it if you’re dead.” Behind him, Ali glared.

  I pushed the water listlessly with my tongue; it trickled from the corners of my mouth.

  I wavered in and out of consciousness, plagued by a recurring dream. In it, an ever-changing monster pursued me. At times it was insectoid, with a chitinous skin and snapping mandibles; at others it was like a stone giant, massive and raging. Sometimes it was utter darkness cloaked in human form. These, and a hundred other shapes. Always, though, it pursued me, and I fled, filled with terror. And always it would impale me, crush me in a stony fist, drown me in darkness. Each time, as I died, there would be Ali, at a distance, watching, her small sword drawn, a shield on her arm. She could save me, I knew. Despite my agony, I could not bring myself to call to her.

  I woke in the depth of the night, more or less sensible. Ali hovered over me. She stuck a cup of cold broth under my nose. “Drink.”

  “Wh . . . why?” My voice rasped, barely audible.

  “You’ll do me no good dead.”

  She tipped the cup, and I let the broth trickle down my throat.