I had had some trouble after Venezuela—the Church got wind of who I was and didn’t want me poking around all their sacred bits of flesh and snapping photos. What saved me was a bishop in Mexico permitting me to photograph some relics there six months later. The reason he allowed me to was because I happened to know he was screwing two sisters and supporting his children by each of them, which I discovered by fucking Lucia while he was with Mercedes. He issued a pastoral letter about me, saying: “God has been revealing Himself and his Truth to mankind through flawed instruments since Creation, and the Church has always held these messages to be True and superior to the flaws and human failings of those who bear them. The Mystery and the Power of any Holy Relic cannot be tarnished by being photographed or recorded by any man-made technology, and the morality of the photographer is certainly irrelevant. Such pictures can only serve to further evangelize and spread the Word of Christ.” After that, no bishop ever denied me access to anything.
The relics at Lanciano are the granddaddy of Eucharistic miracles. They supposedly date back to 700 AD, when a monk named St. Legontian doubted the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. One morning, at consecration, he was shocked to discover the host change into flesh, and the wine change into blood. The relics were placed into an ivory tabernacle and guarded by the monks. They hardened but they never decayed.
In the seventies, a priest decided to have them tested by science. Dr. Odoardo Linoli, a university professor-at-large and head physician of the United Hospitals at Arezzo did a series of tests, and verified everything with Dr. Ruggero Bertelli from the University of Sienna. They found: the relics are real flesh and blood of human origin; the flesh consists of the muscular tissue of the heart; the blood from both samples is AB positive. They did not find any evidence of preservatives or mummification techniques.
So in 1995 some priest wanted to write a book about the whole thing in English, and hired me to take the pictures. End of story.
Except: my second night there I was in the hotel bar, drinking scotch that was older than I was, when a man in his late forties with flyaway hair approached me. Sometimes I get recognized; there’s a small circle of people around the world who collect the same kind of macabre things I’m into, or sometimes it’s a human rights activist who thinks I’m deplorable, or sometimes it’s someone who thinks they have something I want. I’m always a little bit wary, but this guy was different. There was an air about him—not quite menacing, but it certainly didn’t put me at ease.
I asked him what he wanted, and he said, just like it was nothing, “I want to steal part of the relics of Lanciano.”
I was surprised, to say the least. I’m not known for crime. I’ve broken laws, sure, in terms of smuggling or hunting endangered species, but I’ve never outright stolen anything—I’ve never had to. But it made sense to me immediately—I would have access to the relics in order to photograph them, and anyone who wanted to find out could have known that. I sat back and let him talk.
“I’m not going to tell you my name, nor what I want with the relics.” He had a heavy Eastern European accent I couldn’t place, though I thought it might be Czech. “I don’t need very much of them, so little in fact that no one will ever know.” He took a clear plastic dish like an earplug container out of his pocket, and a metal instrument that looked like it belonged to a dentist. “You will find a way to remove the glass surrounding the relics, and you will scrape the flesh and the blood into this dish. Scrape very lightly—I only need a little of the material—but make sure it is visible to your eye. Don’t gouge the relics—I want you to treat them very reverently, no matter what you believe. Bring me the dish, and your work will be done.”
“Why should I?”
His eyes narrowed and hardened a little. “I know who you are, Mr. Shaw, and I know what kind of thing it is that interests you. You have more money than I could ever hope to provide you with. But I have something to offer you which I do not think you will able to refuse.”
“What’s that?”
“First, a plant of my own creation. I am a geneticist. I have created a plant that is a hybrid of tobacco, marijuana, and coca plants. I believe you will find the effects when ingested most unique and most pleasurable.”
“That sounds great, but you know it’s not nearly enough. Second?”
“Have you heard about the Petr Grabowicz case?”
I was surprised for the second time. Of course I knew what he was referring to. Anyone who collects the kinds of things I do pays close attention to the international news. Just a few weeks before arriving in Italy I’d been fishing around near Kassel, Germany, where a man had advertised that he wanted to eat someone, and received a response from another man looking to be eaten. The two met, had sex, then together cooked and ate the one man’s penis—all the while videotaping the spectacle. Then the castrated man was killed—according to his wishes—and his new friend continued to dine on him. The best part was that the cops had a hard time pressing charges at first because the whole thing was consensual, with signatures to prove it. I was trying to buy the dishes and cutlery they’d used, but someone else snatched those up before I could talk to the right people. All I ended up with was a static-ridden copy of the videotape.
But Petr Grabowicz, he was a six-year-old kid who had died three months earlier in Poland. In a little town near the German border called Swinoujscie, a homeless person dressed up as a fairy and walked out onto a pond where the local children were skating. He told them he was the pond fairy, and if they didn’t give him money he would cause the ice to melt so they would fall in. When the kids didn’t buy it, he cut a hole in the ice, grabbed one of the boys from the pond, and drowned him.
“What about it?” I asked the self-proclaimed geneticist. He leaned into me and whispered into my ear. By the time he finished my heart was pounding. I looked at him, and he stared right back at me, expressionless. I finally asked, “So why do you want these relics so badly?”
“I’ve told you not to ask. I don’t approve of your collection, but I think I understand the principle behind it. There was a time in my life when I wanted to use the wonders of the natural world to reveal God to the world. You are using the horrors of humanity to reveal the evil of the world. I’m a man of faith and science—and you are not. I’m doing this only because I believe it’s for the greater good, and that if I am successful even you will come to see the light of true knowledge and redemption.”
The whole heist appealed to my utter love of corruption. I arranged to photograph the relics one-on-one with the head priest of the parish, who balked when I asked him to remove the glass. When I told him I’d arrange for a sizable donation to be given to his parish every year in perpetuity, provided he give me ten minutes alone with the relics, he lifted the case off and left. He came back ten minutes later, to the second. I’m not sure when he figured out I was lying about the money, but I never heard from him again.
The thing is, I didn’t know the guy was going to do this fucked up shit with it. Cloning Christ. Apparently they’ve got four different women pregnant with freaky Christ babies. I knew he was crazy when he mentioned Grabowicz and Cryogenic Stasis Units in the same sentence. But I thought he was just a religious nut who wanted to steal the holy relics so he could eat them or sell them on eBay. Harmless. But when that Internet post went up last October, and everyone was all abuzz, I knew it was him. I knew what I’d done. And I knew everything was going to hell.
I haven’t felt guilty for anything since I was nine years old. And now these dreams. Last night I was being eaten alive by locusts. Night before that I was in Africa, slicing open the distended bellies of starving kids, pulling out smooth gold stones and eating them. What’s so frustrating about it is that I’m totally doing it to myself. I must be. I’ve been to every shrink in New York and some in Europe, but not one of them can make these dreams go away.
So God’s finally won. I believe in you now, you prick. You’ve made my life a living hell and you’ve
sent the dreams to drive me crazy. You want me to kneel down and pray? Fine, I can do that. But don’t think for a second I buy your bullshit about forgiveness and eternal love—there’s no repenting everything I’ve done. You’re just a nasty son of a bitch who’s holding all the cards and wants to see me squirm. But I’m still right about life. I’m still right about all of it.
3.
Magda Wawrzyniec, struggling with the weight of her swollen stomach onto bent knees, her skirt bunching slightly so that varicose veins show in her calves, the blue histories of the strain of her seven pregnancies, now eight, kneels at the prie-dieu before the monstrance and lights a candle for the soul encased inside her. She is praying Hail Marys, thinking of the Virgin and the greatness of what can fill a womb, praying that her own child—a son, she hopes, God’s will be done—will do great things for the Glory of God. She is thankful that she has lived to see 1946, that so many she loves have survived the terrible war, that her husband is alive.
When her prayers finish (she imagines them as flying up to Heaven tied to the feet of doves, like the carrier pigeons her grandfather used to raise), she gets once again to her feet with the help of the railing, and begins her walk home. Just as she opens the church door and feels the cold night search and embrace her, she lurches and her shoes are suddenly wet. Her first thought, upon releasing her font onto the threshold of God’s house, is that this might be a sin, and her second thought is Dear God no please no not now it’s much too soon.
Consciousness ebbs away from her as her feet slide out from under, as the young priest with the mole on his cheek comes rushing out to answer what she realizes now are her screams. When she wakes up in the hospital they tell her it has been three days (impossible), that the baby is small and weak but expected, miraculously, to live, that she cannot have any more children. Her eyes flutter and she whimpers and they reassure her again that the baby is going to be fine (thank God), was born in the church, baptized Maciej Magnus, and given last rites.
She lets herself go under again, praising God, sending up a prayer of thanksgiving carried by six of the most beautiful doves, hallelujah, hallelujah.
Maciej’s father is considerably older than his wife. He was born in 1882 and apprenticed as a baker at fourteen, waking well before the sun and rolling dough to the rhythms of the rosary, saying the prayers in Latin for twelve hours each day. He has married twice and fathered fourteen children. His first family, his child bride and their six beautiful children, were knocked out by a bout of scarlet fever that he himself barely survived. Magda had saved him from his misery, and now, walking to bring her and the babe home from the hospital at last, he marvels at what a man can experience in sixty-odd years. Glory be to God.
His face is deeply creased, and his eyes widen with wonder as he reaches out for this son, who he knows will be his last and who almost did not exist at all. His forearms are marked with burn scars from years with the oven, and holding the sleeping Maciej, he marvels at how pale and soft his son seems, as though he could knead him into a pretzel or a bagel or a hot cross bun, as though there were no bones or blood inside him, just soft, doughy flesh. His eyes are just two tiny raisins and yet Tomas sees something of himself there, like looking at a memory of a reflection in a dusty mirror.
Magda looks pale and tired and frail, and for a moment so much like his first wife Agnes that he cannot speak. When the moment passes he says “Magda, thank you for our son. Thank you for Maciej.” Magda smiles at him, and when their eyes meet he knows she will come through.
When Magda dies seven years later Tomas puts his fist through the drywall of their small two-bedroom apartment. This breaks his hand and he is unable to work at the bakery for a month. Sitting at his mother’s funeral, Maciej thinks about his father’s swollen hand and his mother’s hands, how she used to run them through his hair when she put him to bed at night, and how now she cannot move them at all. He believes his mother still exists, in every way, but he does not understand why her spirit can no longer work to move her body. His father cannot move his right hand and his mother cannot move her right hand— the symptoms are the same but the causes are totally different. He makes a note to ask Father Krzysztof about this. He thinks about Christ and the Glory of the Resurrection. He will receive Confirmation this month.
Maciej is not sitting with the rest of his family at this solemn occasion. He has been an altar boy for a year now. This is something Magda was very proud of, beaming when she told the other mothers in their building and telling him that he was a good son when they were talking softly alone together. The family, and Father Krzysztof, thought it would honour Magda for Maciej to serve this role at her funeral mass. His robe is scarlet, with a white cassock over top, but he is careful to use the black sleeve of the shirt he is wearing underneath when he wipes away his tears.
Tomas’s hand does not heal well, and as the month wears on things are getting tighter around the house: tone of voice, eyes, belts. Maciej’s closest sibling is eight years older, and they are the only two children still living at home. Tomas is old and his hand does not heal and money is scarce, and so after two months Tomas goes to live with his eldest son and his wife, and the sister goes to live with her older sister and her husband, married three months before Magda died, but no one can take in a child of Maciej’s age and appetite, and so he is sent to live with Father Krzysztof and the priests in the church where he was born. When he leaves, Tomas lets tears stand in his eyes because he is sad to be separated from his son, but there is pride on his face because Maciej will honour God and this will honour their family.
Maciej is thirteen years old and kneeling in the church in handed-down pants that are shiny and thin at the knees, and he is contemplating the Crucified Christ. He has sinned. He has, once, cheated on the German homework that Father Krzysztof insists he do. He has tried a cigarette he found while sweeping the church, smoked it in the lot behind the rectory. And twice in the past week he has given in to the flurry in his chest and the sweat in his palms and abused himself. These acts weigh upon him gravely, and he knows he must confess them. He gazes at Christ on the cross, the Face twisted with suffering, the Wounds bleeding, the Agony. How Christ suffered and died for the sins of Man, so that all might be redeemed. He thinks: How much of that suffering am I personally responsible for? And the answer comes to him as though his guardian angel whispered it in his ear: all of it. Maciej gasps as he realizes the fundamental truth of this: even had Maciej been the only human being to ever live, Christ in His love would still have come down and suffered and died, for Maciej alone. Because it could have happened that way, it is as though it did happen that way. Maciej begins to weep.
Father Krzysztof smiles and places his hand on Maciej’s shoulder. “I’m not sending you away, my little Francis, I am sending you to somewhere, to education, to a greater understanding of Creation.” My little Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi, is what Father Krzysztof has taken to calling Maciej, whose interest in the natural world, in how birds fly and animals run and how plants grow, whose interest in science has always been as unwavering as his faith. Maciej who always beamed when he learned of natural phenomena mirroring Revelation— the sand dollar, pale fragile discs with five holes to represent the five wounds of Christ; the Easter Lily; the Passion Orchid, again with five bleeding, wounded tips; the Crucifix catfish, Arius proops, in whose skulls men saw depictions of the crucified Christ, whose very bone structure contained a thorn from Christ’s crown and the shape of a Roman soldier’s shield, whose otoliths, small skull bones used for balance and discerning gravity, rattled in the dried skull to represent the dice used to gamble for Christ’s clothes.
Maciej does not want to leave the church, his home, does not want to leave Poland. But he is obedient. “Will I become a priest or a scientist?” he asks Father Krzysztof, whom he wants to make proud. “How will I choose?”
The Academy looms up from the German countryside like a blister, all glass and steel and chrome among rolling hills of
tall grasses and wildflowers Maciej recognizes and knows well, both by their Latin names and for their symbolic relation to the Virgin Mary: eglantine and honeysuckle, aphananthe and gromwell, peonies and Job’s tears. It is 1962 and the tenth anniversary of the International Academy for the Advancement of Science. Only fifteen boys are selected each year, and Maciej is the only student from Poland, and the only Catholic. He stands at the gate with his single battered suitcase, a gift from Father Krzysztof, containing his few clothes, a wooden crucifix that had belonged to his mother, and his hardcover copy of the Lives of the Saints. He presses the suitcase to his nose and tries to smell the church vestibule, the dust of the rectory, the liquid wax of the devotional candles, the thick incense of ritual. He smells only leather.
In his first year he takes the school-wide prize in genetics, for cross-pollinating a lady’s slipper orchid and a weeping birch. He names his creation Cypripedium betula, and is it regarded as a small miracle, since no one, anywhere, has ever successfully bred a flower and a tree before. It should not strictly have been possible, but his proofs are incontestable and the resulting plant so beautiful that when it germinates, they plant seedlings all around the campus, and Maciej notices a new measure of respect in the eyes of his teachers. A third-year student, Hermann, goes out of his way to break ranks and congratulate Maciej on his achievement. His hand is warm and large as he pumps Maciej’s arm and tells him, “At this rate, you will be famous before you even graduate.”
“That isn’t what I want,” Maciej tells Hermann. “All is naught but for the Glory of God.”
By his second year, Maciej is bored with most of his fellow students. They sit around the laboratories, dissecting cabbits and squittens that seem overly simplistic to Maciej. Why would anyone try to genetically merge a cat and a rabbit, he writes to Father Krzysztof, let alone a squirrel? I fear many of my colleagues merely wish to create abominations: they foresee a world of square trees and seedless watermelons, acid-free tomatoes and strawberries reddened with genes from shrimp. The study of genetics could be so much more, could bring us closer to what we were in Eden. I feel so alone here.
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