by Various
The boy was telling him something, repeating it again and again: "E molto ammalata—é gravamente ammalata. Ha bisogna d'aiuto."
Somehow he understood it. He did not know their language, but he understood it. The grandmother was very sick...she had never been sick with this before. ..she had gotten it from the Cicchinellis in Lerici, or so his mother said...and he—the foreigner—was the one, the only one, who could help—
He tried to release the boy's arm then, but the boy was holding his sleeve.
You will help her, the boy's eyes said. You have helped others. The eyes were like a dozen hands on his sleeve.
He let the boy lead him on.
They took the stone path that ridged the hills, a path that felt as ancient as the Etruscans. They wound their way through the orchards, past lichen-covered walls that disappeared and reappeared like a dream, and finally approached a group of children who were knocking chestnuts from a tree with sticks.
The children stopped and stared at them. Some of them smiled. One—a girl who looked more Teutonic than Mediterranean—began to sing a song, an eerie thing. It sounded like a hymn.
A little boy—her brother perhaps—joined her.
He didn't understand the words of the hymn, and he did not understand why they were singing it. But the singing sent a fire through him.
He must get to the church. He must.
The voice returned then, shrieking, and he staggered. As it was in the beginning, the voice howled, must it forever be? World without end—
The boy was staring at him.
He let him lead him on.
The singing was far behind them when they reached the tall walls of Pozzuoli and passed through. He recognized the tiny village immediately, a dark, damp dungeon of a village. Perhaps he'd even met this boy before. Didn't the boy's eyes say this?
They turned on a cobblestone street, one far too narrow for automobiles, and moved rapidly downhill, past one doorway, one gaping darkness after another, all of the gray walls glowing with red hammers-and-sickles which someone had splashed on hurriedly. So many walls glowing red... They were all communist villages, he remembered; but only Pozzuoli had such walls.
Long before the boy's eyes and gait gave it away, he knew which doorway it was. It was one of the two or three without the glow of red paint nearby, but this was not how he recognized it.
As they neared it, a figure stepped from the doorway, its downturned face a mask of sorrow. It looked down the street, then up—and saw them. The mask fell; the face grew animated; the figure stepped frantically back into the doorway, disappearing.
You must get away, he told himself. Now.
When the doorway was but steps away, he began to hear the moaning from inside, the rasp of lungs sunk in edema, the delirium of pulmonic rupture, the fever, the tachycardia, the toxins of the bacilli. The voice was an ancient one, and it was in horrible pain. It was singing a song of pain a million years old. It was louder than anything he had ever heard, as loud as the terrible Voice that had risen above the tiny shrieks and screams of his dream.
He was supposed to stop the pain. They believed he could; they believed he would.
He closed his eyes, and the prayer came easily.
O Almighty God, giver of health, provider of succour, we entreat thy strength and goodness in behalf of this thy servant—
Nothing was happening. The moans still came. The old woman in the room was still teeming with bacilli. The room was teeming; her relatives and friends were teeming.
—that she may be healed of her infirmities, to thine honour and glory, amen.
Nothing at all was happening, he could do nothing. He could do nothing. He could stare and pray and gesture and pretend all he wanted, and nothing would happen.
He turned then and ran.
Deus ultionum! the voice shrieked faintly, barely audible in his skull.
Tetracycline or streptomycin therapy, another voice murmered inside him.
He did not look back.
When he reached the hotel, he thrust his shaking hands into his pockets and tried to hurry through the lobby with his eyes on the carpet.
A voice stopped him.
"Signor Abramson."
He recognized the name.
It was his.
He stopped and turned to the voice.
A man, dark and slim and effete, was facing him, passport in hand. It was the concierge. And the man did not look at all afraid, or awed, or supplicant. The man looked puzzled.
The concierge looked at him and he looked back.
"You asked me to remind you," the concierge said. His English had a British accent; he had not learned it in an Italian school. To show it off, he added patronizingly, "We are sorry to lose you." He was not particularly sincere. "You will not find another town like ours all that easily, you know." He smiled.
This man, he realized, did not expect miracles from him.
Only the paesani of the village did.
He took the passport with a trembling hand, thanked the man, and proceeded to the elevator. Inside, the pages of the document resisted his fingers.
The passport said he was "David Phillip Abramson." It said that he had been born in Baltimore, Maryland, of the United States of America. It said he was thirty-two years old. It said many things.
He did not believe any of them.
He again searched his belongings. When he again found nothing, he collapsed into the chair on the balcony and stared at the glittering cove.
Some would call it amnesia. Was it that simple?
What of the terror, what of the shrieking voice that filled him without warning?
And the villagers. What had he done that they could expect miracles from him?
Was he a priest? The voice that filled his skull spoke the language of priests. From all evil and sin, from the crafts and assualts of the devil, from thy wrath, from everlasting damnation deliver us. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of sin I shall walk as another (have mercy upon us!) world without end, amen, amanus, a manus tuae fecerunt, dominus regit me, deisdaimonia de profundis!
Was he a doctor? The terms—the diagnoses, prognoses, prophylactica and contraindications for the inhabitants of this village—rose to his tongue with the ease of schooling. Intussusception, hypertrophic pyleric stenosis, necrotica indicating avascularization of the site.
A doctor who promised miracles was a charlatan. Was he this?
Was he some religious zealot affecting a medical lexicon to enchant these villagers and convert them—along with thousands of others—to his monomaniacal creed?
He remained in the chair until after the sun had set. It was the dying twilight—the darkness blinding him and letting the terror flicker behind his eyes without mercy—that finally drove him inside to the sanctuary of artificial light.
And it was inside that he realized he wasn't hungry, that he had, in fact, felt no hunger all day.
He should have been hungry and was not. He was human, wasn't he? Why wasn't he hungry?
The explanation came slowly, and he resisted it.
You do not need food.
He turned on all three lights—the overhead and the two lamps. But the light was not enough—not at all. He opened the door into the corridor to let more light in.
You cannot leave the door open like that.
He closed it.
He laid down on the bed carefully, closed his eyes, and invited the tide of darkness behind them.
He did not invite it from fatigue. He did not need sleep, he knew. As he did not need food.
He invited it as he would have a revelation, or a giving-up, or a drug—although, as he also knew, no drug would have had an effect on him.
They are falling, all of them, down through the longest, bluest sky, toward a horizon lit by fire that licks at their heels like the tongues of many-headed dogs guarding kingdoms below. They are falling, they have been falling, they will fall, and a Voice as broad as the sky, as loud as the hearts o
f stars, is screaming with the wrath of eons. This Voice, this Other, fills the sky with a light hotter than all the licking tongues below, and as they fall, falling forever, the Voice changes, changes horribly, becomes the voice of a woman giving birth to a taloned, kicking reptile larger than she...the voice of a man with a glass rod—anointed with holy water—inserted in his organ and then shattered...the voice of a child raped on horseback by a blind soldier who can only stare... the voice of a father whose sons are holding him down, cutting his tongue from his throat with a blade of obsidian that flickers like fire.
He is the one who is falling, and this should not be. He is the one—the only one of them—who is sorry. It should not have happened, this he knows. He had never before shown signs of such perversity—never. And he had always loved the Voice. It was their stronger peer, the one who had led them, only he, who deserved this.
"Culpa sua!" he shrieks. "Culpa sua!"
"Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds," he shrieks "that abundance of forgiveness may wash over me!"
"Canst thou send lightning," he screams, "that they may go, that they may say: Thou are forgiven!"
He shrieks many things, as he falls. There is time for all of them, but no one hears it. His screams of remorse, of repentance, are as feeble as the feathers the wind tears from his wings now, as faint as the ring of light fading from his brow, as insignificant as his teeth (which are lengthening now), as his pale skin (which is turning black), as the flapping leather of his new wings, tail, and face.
He awoke with a shriek that echoed in the room like the voice of a beast.
Stumbling to his feet, he rushed to the mirror, raised his hands, and touched his face.
It was not leathery. It was not black. The teeth were not unusually long. The gaunt white face with the blue blue eyes looked back at him.
It was, yes, a face that one could expect miracles from. It was—
He recognized it then—this face. He understood what it was. And as he did, as the beauty of it came to him, he felt for a moment what he had so long wanted to feel.
But with the beauty came the pain, the memory of who he was, and he had to stop it. The memory, the pain, should not be, and so he shut them out again like jaws closing.
The water disappeared from his eyes. The feelings went away.
A few moments later he could not remember what the feelings had been like.
He searched the room again and soon found what he needed: a pin lodged in the corner of one of the drawers.
Pressing as hard as he could—teeth clenched against the sudden, absurdly sharp pain of it—he drew the pin along the side of his arm.
He had not pressed hard enough. The pain had prevented it.
He repeated it and found that the pain had changed in kind. It no longer prevented him from pressing hard.
Blood had appeared liberally along the line. He drew it again, over the first, and when he was through, repeated the act once more.
The arm was aflame now. He had managed to gouge out a narrow gulley running twelve or so inches.
It was what he needed.
He stepped to the table, placed the pin on it, and took a deep breath.
Staring at the red line, he concentrated.
He concentrated for a long time.
Nothing happened. The pain was a throb now, different, less intense. The blood had stopped oozing, yes, but this meant nothing—merely the work of the clotting agent, the fibrinogen. The blood and pain did not interest him anyway; only the gulley in his arm—the marred flesh—did.
When he tried to concentrate again, he found he could not.
He moved to the bed, lay down carefully, and closed his eyes.
The arm burned like a bush on fire.
He tried to imagine the most beautiful landscape he could. He saw the greenest trees, the whitest cataracts, the bluest skies—
—and opened his eyes frantically when dark figures began to fall through that sky.
He must use safer images, he told himself.
He saw a woman. The most sensual, tantalizing of women. Her breasts as white as living marble. Her shoulders the gold of untouched beaches. The hair of her mons veneris as blond as the down on her arms... those arms so svelte, perfect, unmarred, as she moved toward him like a gazelle in slow motion, her breasts rising, her nostrils flaring—
He saw himself then, his own body, his own arms—both of them perfect, unmarred.
He looked at his arm.
Nothing changed.
He saw a hundred men and women then, naked, emaciated, all with gulleys down their arms, all in a shower together, all trying desperately to claw their way out through the cement walls with only their fingernails, as the gases began to steam through the shower heads.
But he saved them. He stopped history and saved them. He dissipated the gas, he crumbled the walls, he let the fragrance of ponderosas and jasmine and honeysuckle stream through the shower heads instead, and with a caress of his eyes, his eyes alone, he smoothed their hunger away, he smoothed the skin on their arms until it was perfect, unmarred, unscarred.
It was a miracle. He was a man of miracles, his face a face one could expect miracles from.
He looked at his arm.
Even the shower—a vision that had left him trembling—had not been enough.
When he had tried everything— every dream, every scene, every miracle of arms and scars that he could think of—he did not bother to look at his arm. He did not need to. He simply let go, and wept.
The weeping did not tire him at all.
His eyes did not close.
At dawn he found himself rising from the chair with the mildest of hopes.
He had failed to heal himself, yes.
But perhaps that only meant he could not heal himself. Perhaps he could heal only other flesh, and only if in the proper frame of mind.
He left the hotel by the back entrance, a small door that opened onto the gravel of Via San Giuseppe, the road that wound forever through the olive groves high on the hills.
He walked for an hour. He walked past four quiet villettas and their black iron gates, past the stench of a cesspool foolishly sunk in rocky ground, past convent walls topped with shards of glass, past two damp shanties, past olive grove after grove, past dirt roads that led nowhere, and ancient crumbling walls, and dozens of flying grasshopperlike insects that looked more like mantises—and that were not, he decided, large enough for his purpose.
As he rounded one curve, he met a grove whose trees were stunted near the road, letting the sunlight reach it in a long, wide swath.
It was there that he saw the lizard.
It was still early, and the sunlight still cool. The lizard shouldn't have been there. But it was.
The animal was green, soft and oddly pretty. "Una creatura d'Assissi," as these people would call it.
It was lethargic with the coolness of morning.
He leaned down slowly and gathered up a handful of pebbles. He would not, he knew, be able to hit it with a single stone.
He took aim.
He did not release them.
He could feel eyes on him.
He looked around, but he found no one. Still, he could feel the eyes.
Is this right? the eyes asked. To kill in order to test it?
It is only a lizard, he answered. As a death it's a forgivable one, is it not?
And how else will I know?
He threw them as hard and straight as he could, and even before they struck, he knew which stone it would be.
It was almost perfectly white, and when it struck the lizard's skull, it caved it in.
The body slid from the rock and began to twist on the ground.
A tiny scream had sounded in his head, he realized. The voice of something dying, something falling—
—falling because of something done—
—falling because—
Again he stopped it. Again he shut it out.
He felt water in his eye
s and blinked it away quickly.
He looked at the lizard. It was no longer twitching.
He went to it. knelt down and picked it up. It was warm in his palm.
Please.
He stared at the small body. He held his breath again.
Please, God, let it move.
I sound like a child, he said to himself. I sound just like a child. I can't help it, he answered.
He prayed again.
Please, God, let it move.
He had expected no answer, and there was none. The word "God" did not reverberate. The body in his palm did not twitch. It was cooler, stiffer now.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and made himself see a lizard with blinking, living eyes, its heart pounding in its scaly chest like a little fist.
He kept his eyes closed. Nothing was stirring in his hand.
Perhaps if he let whatever image wanted to come, come. Perhaps if he didn't force it.
A legless lizard, flaming and falling, loomed suddenly in his head, and he struck at it reflexively, driving it away. It came again, and he struck out again, and again, the night yawning below, the flames flickering far below as he flew high above the horror, high in the light, loved by the voice of light.
When the vision ended, he was trembling. The body was cold in his hand.
I must control the images. I must not allow that to happen again.
He forced himself to see a lizard with a rainbow in its eyes, the rainbow healing it as it moved.
He forced himself to see a lizard fetus, curled, not yet free of its leathery egg, a thing therefore perfect, the lids closed, the head smooth and beautiful....
He made himself see a lizard with a man's face—the man he imagined to be his brother. But the vision wouldn't hold. He had no brother. The memories that said he did were lies....
He placed the little body on its back on the rock, the white belly revealed like the inside of a child's arm, and found himself muttering childish things to "God," things which embarrassed him as soon as they were uttered.
