Lethe

by A. Sparrow

  Chapter 16: The Great Authority

  The wind scours us with grit. Sabonis’ eyes go wide.

  “Well, that was awkward,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her that mad before.

  We stand and stare until Bianca is just a pale smudge high on the ridge.

  Doubt and guilt arise in me for the first time. It’s apparent now that I will not just slip through the cracks here—that I will be held accountable for this excursion.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” says Sabonis.

  We head across the gravel flats towards a bank of pumice and consolidated ash. Boulders of black volcanic glass mark the way, like mileposts.

  Bianca lingers in my mind. Not her threats or remonstrations as much as her jellyfish looks. I still can’t get beyond it. I have trouble thinking of her as human. Would I turn into something similar if I Ascended? Would I shed this preposterous female body at least and have my true male self re-emerge? Or would I be a girl jellyfish like Bianca?

  But maybe that’s how angels were supposed to look. Sabonis won’t let me call her an angel. But that’s what she is. What else could she be?

  I remember my early childhood impressions of angels, stoked by the fake frescoes on the vaulted ceiling of my old church. With their flabby Ruben-esque flesh, it was truly a miracle they could hover as they did. That made no sense to me. I had no such trouble imagining Bianca with wings.

  I wonder how much my abandonment or organized religion contributed to my current predicament. I never took to catechism or church-going. I wonder if my fate here would have been different if I had. Was there such a thing as an express passage into Elysium?

  My atheism started young. Every Sunday my father would slicken my hair with Brylcreem and make me put on a scratchy black wool suit to go to church. Oh, how I hated that suit. The jacket had an unlined collar that felt like a porcupine stole against my neck. It was so excruciatingly uncomfortable and distracting that I couldn't even fade off into the dream worlds that made school bearable. I couldn't even pay attention to mass. If I prayed, it was only for a fire; anything to get us out of mass and get me out of those prickly pants.

  I certainly never paid much attention to the guy in the red bathrobe behind the altar. If the Catholic Church had reverted back to the Latin Mass in those days, I wouldn’t have noticed. I used the missal as a timepiece, thumbing the psalms and homilies in sequence sort of like a prisoner carving notches in his bunk to count the days.

  My eyes would wander to pass the time, which is how I became familiar with those chunky angels. I would stare at the ceilings and walls, losing myself into the statues, the windows, the murals; anything to take my mind off the itching. My visual catechism included Satan tempting Jesus right above our heads on the inside of the biggest vault. The King of the Jews lay on some kind of shaved-off peak watching as two of his Apostles dangled in midair, reaching out their hands to him.

  Everywhere you looked there were stories. Up and down the walls on both sides were statues graphically depicting Jesus' crucifixion in all eight Stations of the Cross, from the Roman soldiers spurring Him on with their lances to the men pounding nails through His palms.

  On a sunny day the Heaven framed by the stained glass windows looked like a South Pacific island, and its residents all wore hundred-watt halos. When it rained it might as well have been New Jersey from what you could make out of the mud-colored panes.

  And there was even horror to be found! Over the vestibule were painted the most grotesque cherubs looking like limbless mutant beach balls with wings. And demons! All over the place. Lurking in corners, peering around window frames.

  If it weren't for the suit, and the fact that everyone was acting so quiet and serious, I might have actually enjoyed it. All that grim sobriety on people's faces disturbed me, though. Obviously these people were being careful not to upset the Great Authority Himself. And if they were worried, what about poor little me who just about peed his pants with fear waiting at the confessional, making up imaginary sins so I wouldn't disappoint the priest with my goodness?

  I never had any doubts He existed back then. Every nook of the church was filled with a mark of this Greater Authority. What fool would spend so much time sculpting and painting all this stuff if it were all just a hoax? And it wasn't just this one church, there were thousands of them. I saw them on TV, in movies, in every little town my parents ever drove me through. A good half of the world was Christian. How could nine hundred million people be wrong?

  It wasn't till later, high school and especially college that the facade began to crack for me. There were many reasons: inconsistencies, a billion people who believed in something entirely different, disease, disasters, the two thousand years of bickering and confusion over what He meant by what He said. All of it chipped away until I was convinced nobody could be in charge of this mess, and the only traveling you did after death was to the bottom of a six-foot hole. It was hard to say which human religion made out the best. As far as I could see, we were all wrong.

  In the absence of church, away from the symbols of Their power I found it ever easier to dismiss the existence of any Great Authority. But then I died. And there Bianca was—like a glistening angelic ghost, sans wings and halo but no less Heavenly.

  So far, it turns out that I was correct in rejecting all earthly religions, but it also happens that my vision of the cosmos was just as misguided as theirs. But Someone or Something was up there. I couldn’t deny that anymore. Someone knew about me, and they had sent someone down specifically to fetch me. Were they simply looking out for my welfare?

  We top the bank of pumice and keep climbing a slant of lava smoothed by millennia of sand blasting. Good thing, or my bare feet would have been all torn up.

  “Nice to know … I’ve got connections here.”

  “Huh? What the fuck you talking about?” says Sabonis.

  “This Pre … whatever … Paxson.”

  Sabonis expels a puff of air. “Kid, this Paxson isn’t some nice auntie asking you over for tea and crumpets,” says Sabonis. “This is a beast that feeds on souls. No shit. It just wants to add you to its collection.”

  “It? How do you know this?” I say.

  “I’ve had beasts of my own after me,” says Sabonis. “I’ve been. I’ve seen.”

  “Been?”

  “Trust me,” he says. “I’ve been.”

  Been what? Been where? But I’m almost afraid to ask. Too much information too fast might make my head explode. So I just accept his words and trudge along the lava ledges behind him.

  A screech rents the air, piercing, inhuman. My spine freezes. Sabonis trips over a rock and lands on his knees.

  “W-what was that?” I say. It sounded like someone or something had just been murdered. Sabonis' eyes are wide and serious. He scans the air as if the scream had come right out of the sky.