In early afternoon daze, time can restart in a drowsy way. A time when the drugs of morning unclench before the pain squealing drowns it out. Mmm, quiet in the ward; Emma nurse tells me it is Christmas Eve. The families visit on Christmas after it's all over.
Lately, I did notice even this small conscious time becomes unstuck. I'm changing as the tide goes out. Too late, now, if ever too late. I throw away my sandbox toys, so rich and yet so worthless. All those steps, only to reach this landing. Vanity, vanity, the Preacher sang, which old men do seem to come to, eventually. Ah, pathetic regrets.
Young nurses wipe my ass, and sometimes cheerfully wash me naked, even my old prick and balls, chattering. I try to banter with them, falling-down morphine drunk as I may be. All my life, I tried to be pure. Why? The young nurses don't care about my old balls. They care not who I fucked, or who my children fucked. Maybe they're fucking my grandchildren. But I can't say it doesn't matter.
So little matters now. Earlier, all my life, I tried to be pure. I monitored my purity. I cannot care any more about the dreams and masturbations. I do regret the effort of monitoring them, but they are like sweets I ate, lost almost at once. But there are things I regret. I can't say it. I shall not think about it any more. I still miss Maria.
Let the young nurses have their boyfriends, dramas, ecstasies and heartbreaks. Who cares? But I can't say it doesn't matter. No, it matters.
What is it that hurts so much? Sometimes I wonder where the pain comes from. Father Reilly could not explain. He mentioned Dostoyevsky, but he could not explain. Where is it that I really hurt so? It is not my soul, but it reaches quite deep. Father, I asked him, is this punishment for my sins? What is the morphine, forgiveness? I can see, now, that Father Reilly is just monitoring. So much like the animals, we barely know about life or death. All these superstitions, I am not a Catholic now. There is little of me left. But I can't say it doesn't matter.
The closest I came to the love of God was where I least expected, but I, I could not trust it, had to turn away. Catholics talk of faith, but blindly. Somehow, the bureaucrats who run the Church twist the word into denial, into repression of doubt and free thought. Like the damned Protestants, they worry so much about evil, they deny the miracles around them. I blame them, the cursed whores, but it is I whose faith failed.
Where is my soul? All my life, I have done what Mother and Father taught me, what my church taught me, what my conscience dictated. But where is God? I have tried to pray. I loved my children and enjoyed my wife, and have been adequate. Was I visited by the Holy Spirit? I want it! God, the pain. Why could I not have lived, even just a little, in the light of grace? I would sell my soul to Satan, I would endure eternal damnation, just to live. Oh god, Emma nurse it is time! Emma nurse!
I hated needles before, but now it is peace, comfort of... death, too, of course. Thank you, Emma nurse. I think I will sleep a little.
Now, it is with some surprise that I come on one of my morphine dreams. I catch a glimpse of Lucifer through the door, strolling down the hall. He is flanked by my oncologist on the right hand and my attorney on the left, chatting amiably. The old one is terrifying, the beast you know, half again as tall as a man, beautiful, horned, horrible, deadly. He is white and pure, naked I notice, with a three-foot penis hanging like a sword between his strange muscled legs. And, having renounced Christ, I know I have no will to resist what he shall offer. My lawyer seems to have the forms in hand, and my doctor is ready to sign the necessary certificates. I shall be unable to choose otherwise. I notice, to my surprise, that Father Reilly is following close behind. A kind of ambulance chaser! But I feel listless. They come into my room and stand beside my bed, bickering over the whole thing interminably. It turns out that old Nick is finicky about the details. Father Reilly cannot make up his mind. My lawyer is professionally aggressive, but Satan fusses with transcendent beauty. Suddenly, I laugh, because I know him. He turns to me.
"Where's Santa Claus?" I ask. "If you believe in life and love, you can't sign a contract on Christmas Eve without Santa!"
The beast shimmers like a girl, like anger as he turns to face me, and his cock springs up like the huge blade of a scythe, reaching towards me faster than thought. And glancing down, I see a gaping hole in my chest where it has carved out my heart. He advances on me now, his great hands raised with talons extended, to tear my most private being. The agony in my chest is indeed like the fire of Hell, and all hope is meaningless.
To my surprise, I laugh again, feeling a peculiar merriment in spite of the pain. "In the name of love," I hear myself chuckle, "take me in your claws, Saint Nick. Let's go to your workshop."
I have believed all my life in Hell, but over the last year, I have begun to see that I cannot believe both in the devil and in God. God no longer feels to me so absent-minded as to lose a single soul. Evil! The terrible stench of wickedness is little more than a fart. We can try to give our souls away, but they belong to God; no hell could ever bind them. Now, in this terrible, heretical belief, it appears I gladly give myself over into Satan's arms.
He is more fearsome than death, the beast. Effortlessly, he disembowels me with his claws, tears out my guts, rips off my balls. Kissing me, he bites through my tongue, pulls away my cheeks, sucks out my eyes and breathes flame into my lungs. His razor teeth cut my sinews, and his great jaws splinter my bones. At first, all thought is replaced by an unimaginable agony. If the pain were sound, it would thunder like the last wave on the beaches of the world, wail like a sea of burning children, echo like the sky falling, but in the end my ears melt away, my body is gone, and there is silence.
I can hear his voice again clearly in the sunlight. He speaks no earthly language. "In what name have you bid me?" he inquires, as if with amusement.
"In the name of love," I answer, somewhat out of breath.
"What, not of Christ? Where is your crucifix to ward me? Where is your dread?" For an instant, I glimpse stigmata on his terrible hands.
"I fear everything, everything. Who doesn't dread the unimaginable power, unknowable and unknown? I do fear God, and the servants of God, and I fear you. But, you see, I have grace for a moment, to set aside all that."
And indeed, it is true. For once, I have grace. I see, I understand at last, at first, for just a second. I chat familiarly with the old one.
"This is a merry time, your glad time," I tell him. "Tonight, old lover, you enter the chimney of every house all across the land, and from the dead center of the ashes of the hearth, you spread gifts for every soul within, because tomorrow is the day of rebirth."
I am dancing with him to wild music. And indeed, he is not terrible now, he is a jolly old man with a long white beard and a red cap, small and spry. My, how his goat's hooves fly, he jigs circles around me.
"Tonight is your night, too," he sings to me, "for tomorrow you die. Tonight is your last present until we meet again."
"And what," I tease, "you will carry my soul to Hell, then? Shall I burn forever?" Suddenly he is gigantic, larger than a mountain, thousands of miles high, and too powerful to resist. I realize that my will is as nothing to him, that his smallest breath could crush me utterly. But I am not afraid. The grace is other than the power. He is beautiful, and I am not who matters.
"Come," I shout in my tiny, tiny voice, "you can hardly dance like that!" But he does, majestically, like a thundercloud or constellation. Then, all at once, he is snowflakes falling about me, and I sit with him in a sled drawn by the reindeer of my childhood, heading north.
---
The lowlands of Florida give way to the lush forests of Georgia. We find the worn base of the Appalachians and follow the crest north across what is left of the Laurentian Shield and on through the late afternoon dusk into the night. We fly neither high nor low across the concept of the earth. I see individual pine-needles on the trees beneath us, while the planet curves away on all sides as if we were a satellite. The scattered lights of Canadian towns wane behind us, and a crescent moon plays for a while over the jagged, barren landscape of the northern Hudson Bay before these give way to the empty Arctic plains. There are few signs of life or death beneath us now.
Eventually, without warning, we dive into one of the jagged cliffs of ice. I feel no fear or disorientation as we slip past the opening of a vast chasm, although the rough lips of ice rush by at incredible speed only a few feet from the sides of the sled. I do become aware of the roar of wind about us, and of the absolute stillness of our flight before. And I feel the cold lay hands of leather and stone on what were once my bones. After a moment, the reindeer land in the middle of a candelabra of the night. Vast ice pillars all about us burn with a pale, blue-black light.
"The elder folk," says my guide, for all the world a jolly old elf. And as I step from the sled, I am aware that there are creatures dancing in a ring around us. What they are, I cannot see clearly. At first they seem like mere heat shimmers, except that they have color and then at times glitter almost too brightly to look at. As I stand on the ice, I begin to make out their forms. There are horses and wolves, birds, snakes, great cats, huge insects, elephants, trees and grass and vegetables, great fish swimming through the air, and squid, and tiny shrimp. Everything, everything alive is there, even humans, although not many, it seems. Even what I take to be dinosaurs, and other creatures too strange ever to have existed, all dancing. They dance with one another so courteously, gracefully and savagely, shifting from form to form in an endless unconsummated courtship (there are never two together alike enough to mate). And I begin to hear their music, too wild and beautiful to bear. The pain of the music reminds me sharply for a second of the pain in that distant ward where I have been dying.
In the dance, I am now with an antelope leaping into a crow on the wind to a lion to a lily to a thing like a rat with tentacles caressing the air about my lungs. I change myself too, first an old man, then an infant, a 30-year-old, an adolescent. Small changes, but great to me. Every detail, each tiny detail of my life comes back to me, almost more real than when it happened, as we dance. I do not want to die, I want to live. There is a love here so fierce and hot, all around me, it is no wonder that the ice itself burns.
"So," I inquire into the thinness of the air, "what toys do they make for the children?" Just as my words are not spoken in a language, so the answer is carried to me soundlessly in a throbbing well below the threshold of human hearing.
And I see then how the decorated presents placed at the foot of a tree are empty things placed at an altar, that by great magic may be filled with happiness and dreams. I perceive that the dance around me and the fierce, wild love awash on the air is a part of what fills them, to ease our littleness and give us hope. Of course the little children can often drink most deeply, with untaught thirst. But I myself have received that gift so many times over the years, long after I knew better than to believe in it.
I am filled now with a wild happiness and love stronger and deeper than I ever thought could be, and I know that I have received a gift greater than I had any reason to deserve. "You have given me life," I say, "and now I can die."
But the dance only becomes wilder, and I hear laughter all around me, happier than human laughter could be, and much sadder. Far off at the other end of the chasm, a bright light springs up through a whirlwind of figures. Like a flowing cornucopia, they rush towards me, bearing above them a bright figure. I find myself wondering if it is not Christ. It could be no other.
Like a hurricane the flow of the light bears down on me, and I see that the figure is a woman. And again I hear the great soundless voice telling me, "You have not finished your dance yet, never think that all gifts have been opened." And I realize that the woman before me is Maria.
Forty-five years ago, I left Maria, because it was impure, because I was uncomfortable, because love is not practical or controllable, because I was terrified. In her arms, the masks slipped, and I could feel the love of God. I married quickly, without passion, and thought my loss a bargain. When I heard Maria had died of cancer several years later, I said it was God's will. Hating God and my cowardice, I longed for her always.
She is naked, like myself, even bodiless. She is more beautiful than I ever saw her, more female than I guessed in my wildest dreams. She is wanting and giving, need and lust and the shyest touch of lips to soft skin. Without the slightest thought, I reach for her hand and we flow together. It is no longer necessary to search for words, to try to explain all the complicated things. She knows me all, and I know her all.
Suddenly I am afraid. How could this be a morphine dream? I do know her all, every detail of her life, each memory as sharp as my own. How could I know a woman's sensations in sex? How could I know so clearly the thousands of petty apprehensions and ambitions so different from my own? Suddenly I feel at the very edge of a terrible cliff, teetering. The bottom is unknowably far down, and there is absolutely nothing to hold onto.
But the dance has not ceased around us, and in the thunder of the music, my balance returns. Suddenly the drop is not fearful; it is only the road behind. We take off our fear like clothes, and are dancing now in the same manner as the others. No longer are the transformations minor. I find myself a snail, an eagle, dead leaves on a milkweed in the winter wind, a fire on the floor of the sea. She is a hyena, sunlight on the waves, seven geese in the late fall sky, a hayloft, flowers, a vampire, the soft belly of an infant.
I become aware that our dance is not like that of the others. Like sex, it is building, heightening, drinking in the love around us and throwing off light. I realize that indeed, it is sex, we are rising towards something like orgasm. How can that be, we have no bodies here, we have not seen each other in 40 years, since she died. But it is. And it is right, as our love was always right.
To burn in Hell for all eternity, the sisters did warn me, but they never spoke of the light you give off. Brighter than mortal eyes could ever bear, we loved. God, that it could be for all eternity, but that was not the gift. Instead, we were given that our light was wrapped with others in the wild music that night, and spread over the whole world.
I died, I suppose, in peace on Christmas morn, as is not uncommon, and passed from being. My ghost here lingers a little, to haunt the righteous and bear witness that not everything they teach arose out of fear and greed.
---
"Deum nemo vidit umquam. Si diligamus invicem, Deus in nobis manet, et charitas eius in nobis perfecta est...." 1 Ioannes 4:12
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