Okay, and then that lot started staring at us too, because after all, there we were in mid-fuck. And now they were shocked to see him with me.
I came to my senses and threw my arms around him, pushing his face down into my closet-side shoulder to give him what safety and protection I could. Inside me, he was ten times harder, reacting perversely to the humiliation and fear.
Which was about when Jeff arrived.
“Meg?” He blinked.
“Um, hi,” I said.
The creep’s loud sobs interrupted us. “Paul! I’m sorry! I was just so afraid of losing you! I thought if I was a real man you’d love me! Or at least be too scared to leave me. I didn’t care which!”
At this alarming revelation, Jeff forgot all about me and crouched down in front of the distraught creep. Earnestly he said, “Dude, it’s not okay to make your partner scared of you.”
“Who asked you?” the creep shouted at him. “You’re the one who couldn’t hold on to your woman! Look at her, she’s fucking my man!”
“Um, excuse me, your man is fucking her,” Jeff pointed out.
“She came on to him!” argued the creep. “I saw her looking at him!”
“No fucking way!” Jeff fired right back. “He came on to her! He was all ‘go ahead and look at me’ and shit!”
This would have necessitated more or less immediate breakup if it had actually been as Neanderthal as it sounded, but I could tell he didn’t mean it – he just didn’t want to let this guy win.
Our adversary was equally determined. “Well, he only said that because she was coming on to him.”
“She was not!” Jeff shouted, getting more rhetorically sophisticated by the minute.
“Yes she was!” bellowed the creep.
Was this rational? Was this anything? What the fuck. They were a pair of pre-schoolers with hormones.
Oh god, we all were. Blind and confused, puppets of drives and imperatives that were as far beyond us as the simplest selfunderstanding was beyond a child. With disbelief, I thought, We’re going to get in cars and drive home after this.
And look at the mess we’d be leaving behind. No mommy or daddy to clean it up. No nice teacher to calm us down and talk us through it, or even to give us all a good swat and tell us to snap out of it. I wished there was. Authoritarian psychology made horrible sense to me right now.
I swung off of Paul so we could put ourselves back together and get out of here. For me, it was as easy as letting my dress fall back down. I stood in front of him to shelter him as he bent down for his jeans. It seemed like he was half-crying and trying to suppress it. His face was wet with sweat and tears.
“Are you going to be all right?” I asked him softly.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t even admit that he’d heard. Having shared too much tonight, he was now closing off completely. I couldn’t say I didn’t understand. My poor wild deer.
He and I weren’t finished, but that obviously didn’t matter now. Neither one of us was going to come tonight. I left the walk-in and took Jeff’s arm.
As we turned away, I looked back at my fucked beauty. There was one last flash of the eyes.
I knew that would be all.
The Baptism
Remittance Girl
1870, Annam, French Indochina
The church of Dak Rede was a small wattle-and-plaster affair, perched inconveniently on the crest of a hill, just beyond the reach of the humid clutches of the jungle. Its placement, however, afforded the cool morning and evening breezes so dismally lacking down in the village below.
The young, recently ordained Jesuit priest surveyed his meagre and apathetic congregation with a sigh. Kissing the surplice in his hands, he draped it over his narrow shoulders. There were only five congregants: two he had bribed to attend with a promise of rice, and one was asleep and snoring, even before Father Jean-Michel had intoned the first few words of the Latin mass.
He’d been sent to the Kon Tum highlands of central Annam, to this poor, insignificant village, to bring the word of Christ to these wretched natives, to save their ignorant souls from eternal damnation. But as far as he could tell, they were all – and he included himself in this – already there.
No amount of coaxing would induce the attendees to participate in any of the proscribed responses; he’d given up trying to make them do it. So he simply said them himself. He quickly finished the reading of the gospel and skipped the sermon altogether. Father Jean-Michel didn’t speak Vietnamese and the only person in the village who spoke French with any real fluency was a Chinese apothecary who resolutely refused to attend mass.
As he launched with as much vigour as he could muster into the Credo, somewhere, close by, a late-sleeping cockerel woke up and began screeching its existence to the whole village. As the priest invited the worshippers to the table of Christ, in Latin, the chicken was calling out, “Here I am, I’m dinner! Come and get me,” in a language much more familiar to the souls he was attempting, and failing miserably, to save.
He turned, as prescribed, and opened the little doors of the tabernacle, to retrieve the communion implements. He deftly flicked a dead cockroach off the tarnished silver salver, before turning back to place the things on the altar.
To his surprise, he realized that while his back had been turned, his congregation had grown. Three young, almost identical women had slipped into the back of the church and seated themselves in the last pew. Pretty maids all in a row, mused Father Jean-Michel vaguely, as he performed the transubstantiation – changing the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
At the appropriate time, he perfunctorily invited his congregation to take the host, assuming no one was listening, and no one would come up to the altar to receive it.They never did. But to his amazement, the three girls, for what else could he call them, filed up to the front and presented themselves in a line. It took Father Jean-Michel a moment to get over the shock. He quickly took up the plate and went to the rail, unable to take his eyes off the trio. Each wore the same dark silk tunic over white silken pants, each wore their hair in identically long and neatly plaited braids, each looked up at him from under epicanthic-lidded, almond-shaped eyes.
“The body of Christ,” he said, holding a small round wafer out to the first one. She took it in the palm of her hand and placed it on her tongue discreetly, giving him, he was almost positive, a hint of a smile.
“Body of Christ,” he repeated, stepping before the second girl. No – not a girl – for at close range their superficial samenesses evaporated.This one was a little shorter and more rounded of body. In fact, her breasts were remarkably large for a native of the Indochine, where most women possessed boyish, androgynous figures by European standards. Father Jean-Michel gave himself a mental chastisement and held out the host. This girl did not hold up her hands for it, but opened her mouth instead, offering the tip of an impossibly red, betel-stained tongue. Despite his best efforts, the priest’s heart began to race as he placed the wafer on her tongue and watched it disappear into that dark, velvety interior. Her lips closed, shutting him out, and she whispered, “Amen.” The priest shook himself out of his reverie and moved on.
The third was the tallest. He looked into her face, expecting the same lowered eyes as the other two, but this one’s gaze did not waver from his – it pushed back as if having substance and power in its own right. He had the sensation of having something thick, black and viscous forced down his throat.
“Body of Christ,” he managed, after freeing his gaze from her eyes. He stared at her mouth.
The woman’s lips were almost obscenely plump. Like a ripe purple plum, squeezed and split in two along its cleft, they parted to reveal an almost serpentine tongue. It slithered out, curling at the tip like a whore beckoning a client. It required all the willpower the priest had to raise the host and lay it upon that profane altar. His fingers shook as he did and brushed against her open lips.
In that instant, he felt a needle-like sting th
at made him snatch his hand back. Glancing down, he noticed a small drop of blood had budded like a carnal pearl from a tiny wound at the tip of his index finger. Father Jean-Michel returned his gaze to the woman’s mouth, confused. But it had already closed, her luxuriant lips curved into a smile.
Unable to quell a sudden and overpowering vertigo, the priest stepped back, jostling and almost upsetting the altar. “Go . . . go in peace,” he croaked, and stumbled towards the back door of the church.
Every muscle ached, as if he’d been caught like prey in the coils of a boa constrictor. Father Jean-Michel had, like everyone else in Indochina, suffered numerous bouts of fever, but this felt like none he’d ever had before. He groaned pitifully, pulling himself free of his miserable, sweat-soaked sheets. Lethargy dragged at his shoulders and it was only after what felt like a monstrous battle that he managed to sit up and hang his legs over the side of the cot.
It was late afternoon and the rains had started. The murky green light that always accompanied the monsoon storms gave his room and the view of the village beyond his window an underwater quality. Nothing could be done, nothing accomplished until the downpour was over, and Father Jean-Michel granted himself the refuge of curling back up on the mean pallet and retreating into fevered dreams.
He dreamed of dragons, huge and sinuous, moving through the ebony waters in a river gorge. There were three of them; iridescent scales breached the placid surface here and there, meeting to intertwine before dispersing to pursue their solitary frolics again. The dreams left uncomfortable erotic echoes that coiled like the dragons themselves in the pit of his stomach and groin. The priest rolled over, struggling to purge himself of the after-images, and stared at the wall beside the bed.The paint had peeled back and flaked away to reveal a conspiracy of black mould. In his fevered state, the stains on the wall took on ominous shapes. Someone – the last priest to be posted to the village, Jean-Michel assumed – had scratched the word“merde’’ into the soft, crumbling plaster with a fingernail.
Oh, God, what had he done to deserve this?
What had possessed him to say those things to the Bishop of Rouen? Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? This posting in the deepest of all hells had been his Dantean punishment for remarking that if the Church really cared about its flock, it might consider spending less money on itself and more on the poor.Two months after the quip had been made, he’d found himself struggling up the muddy hill track to the village with a coolie behind him carrying his few possessions. He had been assured that the priest he was replacing would be there to help him settle in, but the Church and the crumbling residence had been abandoned for more than a month.
“Père . . .”
Father Jean-Michel groaned again and rolled over.
“Père!”
He sat up, clutching the damp sheet around him, head spinning, nausea overwhelming him.
His servant, Hai, hovered at the threshold to the priest’s room. “There is a woman asking for you.”
“Really? Oh.”
He felt so ill, the priest considered telling Hai to ask her to come back another time. But in nine months, no one had ever come to see him, no one had ever called him to perform last rites, or officiate at a wedding. How would it play out in the village if, the first time anyone bothered to ask for his help, he sent them away?
“Tell her I will come shortly. Just give me a moment to get dressed.”
He waited until Hai retreated back into the shadow of the hallway, and forced himself to get up. At first his legs felt so weak, he was unsure he could keep himself upright, but he took a few deep breaths and blinked, and stumbled over to where his underclothes and his cassock lay, draped over the back of a chair.
Hai brought tea for the visitor, as Father Jean-Michel hobbled into the reception room. Like everywhere else in the house, it smelled of damp and rot. No matter how thoroughly he tried to air it out. The climate’s corrupting influence was everywhere, and would not be defeated.
His visitor sat on the hard mahogany bench that served as a sofa. It was impossible to see her, for a heavy black veil almost entirely covered her head. She wore a loose, dusty black tunic that exposed only a pair of almost bone-white hands, as if two dead albino spiders had crawled up and died in her lap.
“Madam?” he said, cordially, wincing soundlessly when he lowered his aching bones into the chair opposite hers. The priest nodded his head at Hai, who hovered in the shadows of the room, waiting. “Will you take tea, Madam?”
“No . . . Father. I won’t.” The voice rustled and hissed like dry leaves on a stone path.
Although the rain was still pouring down in sheets, and the room was very dim, Father Jean-Michel looked into the tunnel of the woman’s headscarf, and almost recoiled at the sight. His guest’s face stared out from the surrounding layers.Two shiny black eyes set into a hideous face. Pale skin stretched tautly over her bones in such a way that it was impossible not to think he was looking into the eyes of a cadaver. But the oddest thing was that the woman had a dreadful skin complaint. The skin itself was seamed in such a way as to give her the appearance of having scales instead of human skin. A lipless slit of a mouth smiled at him, revealing a toothless black maw. “Today you met my daughters, I think.”
The woman’s French was accented, but understandable. It was the slurry, rasping sound that was disconcerting. “Ah,” said the priest. “Yes, yes.They came to mass.Your daughters?” Impossible that three such exquisite creatures had come from the womb of this . . . atrocity.
“Indeed. And they have asked me to come to you, and make a petition on their behalf.”
Father Jean-Michel nodded, still unable to stop himself from staring into the shadowed ruin of her face. “A petition? Of course, I would be happy to accommodate you in any way I can, Madam. If I can,” he added, remembering when a parishioner had asked him to bless his pigs for luck. “What can I do for them?”
“They want to be baptized.”
The priest was shocked into silence for some moments. My God, he thought, perhaps all my efforts to bring the Gospel to this place of spiritual emptiness had finally borne fruit. Then he remembered the morning’s mass. “Baptized? But they took communion this morning. They acted as if . . .” He hesitated a moment. “One is not supposed to take communion without first undergoing conversion, and being baptized,” he said. The words came out quickly, like an outrage or an admonishment. This wasn’t the way to attract people to the faith, he thought. “Well, it’s not usual,” he added, in a softer tone.
An uncanny, bubbling noise emerged from the old woman sitting opposite and her small, black frame twitched. It took Jean-Michel a moment to realize she was laughing. “Forgive them, Father. In everything my daughters are impulsive and over-eager. It was youthful exuberance, and not a lack of respect.”
“And you, Madam, are you a Christian?”
“No.”
“I would be honoured if you would allow me to perform the sacrament of baptism for you as well.”
Again the little black form shook, and the bubbling returned. “No-no. I am far too old for all that.”
“But for that very reason, Madam. Baptism would ensure your place in God’s everlasting kingdom. It is never too late.”
With the sound of clicking bones, the heavily covered woman got to her feet. “Oh, it is far too late for me, Priest. A different kingdom awaits me. “The finality in her words would tolerate no argument. She shuffled on small, hidden feet to the entrance, opened the door before Hai could reach it for her, and stepped out into the torrential rain.
“I do not like that lady, Father.”
“A baptism,” the priest said, clasping his hands together, his illness and fever forgotten. “Three baptisms in fact! This is wonderful. Wonderful!”
“Père?”
“I shall . . . I think . . .” Father Jean-Michel paced around the reception room in a high state of excitement. Suddenly he stopped and tilted his head towards the ceiling. “Oh, thank
you. Thank you, Lord! You won’t be sorry. I’ll bring your Gospels to this wilderness yet!”
“Père!”
The priest glanced at Hai with annoyance. “What? What? Can’t you see? This is the beginning of everything.And in this place . . . I shall honour the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. Not in a mean little font like they do in Rouen, but like St. John did, in the river. I will baptize these women in the river!”
Hai shrugged. “Take care, mon Père. I do not like that woman.”
It brought the priest to a halt. “What do you mean you don’t like her? How ridiculous! What’s the matter with you?”
Shrugging again, Hai collected the teapot and the cups neatly back onto the tray, and picked it up. “She’s ugly . . . very ugly.”
“And so you don’t like her! Typical of the outrageous ignorance and lack of Christian compassion among your countrymen. The poor woman is obviously suffering from an illness. That’s no reason to dislike her.”
The servant lowered his head and shuffled towards the scullery with the tea tray. “Inside herself, she is very ugly.”
“One should not paint others with one’s own sins, Hai,” called the priest. “After all, God has forgiven you the sin of sodomy.”
By the following Saturday, Father Jean-Michel had ensured that everything was prepared. He had sent word to the daughters through the apothecary in the village that they should meet him by the bank of the river at nine o’clock in the morning, and that they should bring towels and dress in white. At first the old Chinaman had refused, but the priest had nagged and bullied and nagged again until the apothecary had finally relented, for a twenty Piastre bribe.
“And tell the rest of the village,” Father Jean-Michel had said, “they can come and witness the sacrament if they want to. Perhaps if they see it, they won’t be so reluctant to participate.”
The day dawned humid and overcast, but the weather could not dampen the priest’s spirits. He performed his own ablutions and devotions, taking his special white cassock out of mothballs and slipping it over his naked body. He would go to the river barefoot, as John the Baptist had done.
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