(no subject)
From the paper journal of Father Simon Terrence, St. Francis of Assisi, Harlem, NY
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Mrs. Molnar is convinced that nice Mr. Kim at the laundromat has managed to lose our altar cloth. She has been there daily to check on its progress. Mrs. Kim has called me twice to assure me that the altar cloth is not actually lost, but is in fact being cleaned at another facility that specializes in this sort of thing. I have assured her that I trust her and her husband implicitly. I meant to speak to Mrs. Molnar about it this morning, but she discovered that my cat had killed a small mouse and left it in her purse, and was therefore quite unapproachable. I admit I am rather baffled about how my cat accomplished this. I cannot in good conscience hold with superstitious nonsense regarding cats -- and really, she is the most charming companion when she is not away, indulging her baser urges -- but I really begin to wonder if the dear thing might not be possessed. The other day I found her in Sister Angelica's room with the door closed, watching some appalling daytime talk show on her old television. How she managed this when the good Sister has been unable to even turn it on in over six months is baffling to contemplate.
The confessional door is not mendable after all, and Father Christopher has, after much discussion with Joe, given up entirely. He has mentioned that he knows a man who is capable of fixing it, but then said some rather unchristian things regarding his friend's personality, which lead me to wonder if perhaps he was speaking in jest.
I have suddenly realized that I think he was speaking about Santa Claus. How foolish of me. I should have realized, from what he said about his friend's 'pimp style,' which Miguel says means that the gentleman has a flair for dressing well, and not the other thing that I thought it meant. It makes me blush to think about it. Really, I should have expected better from Father Christopher. I will apologize to him in the morning.
Of course Father Christopher was speaking about Santa Claus. The more I think about it, the more certain I am. An old man who can fly. How droll. I had not thought he could be so childlike and charming with his imagination, although he continues to have an unusual way of expressing himself. No doubt I will grow accustomed with time.
At any rate, unless Father Christopher's personal relationship with Santa Claus can be called on for personal favors (I must remember to make this joke tomorrow! It is quite amusing. I'm sure he will laugh) I fear the confessional booth is out of service for a time. Joe has put a sign up, and for the time being, we will perform the sacrament in the second office. Mrs. Molnar has put up a screen, which will serve the needs of privacy. I have again offered Father Christopher the opportunity to take the sacrament if he chooses, or to administer it, but he is firm. I will not press him any further. Though he has only been here a few days, I fear that we are not proving the balm to his spirit that I had hoped we would be. This evening he emerged from the nave with such an expression, I feared that perhaps he had crossed the Rubicon of his calling. Still, he was cordial and seemingly quite content by dinnertime, so it may well have been my imagination. Prayer can sometimes trouble the soul before it soothes it. It reminds me of my younger days.
I am disturbed by the dead mouse. I think I will check the wafers before I retire for the evening, just in case.
---
Monday finds a Catholic church empty, after the ecclesiastic hijinks of the day before. Sated by the weekly rites, filled to bursting with spiritual flesh and blood, the faithful stay away -- and the staff, priestly or passing, rest on their laurels. The stone hall is cold, even under the crucifix's sorrowful protection; in one of the wooden pews, Christopher Rossi stretches himself long across its back, unconscious, seated mimicry to the carved Messiah. Throat collared, black-clad, he sits with eyes closed and face bleak, as austere as any monk in the habit of a shepherd.
Below the carving, under the long and languid line of limbs and crucifix's holy tree, a woman kneels in the nave, head bowed in prayer. She crosses herself, looks up at the Savior, and then stands into the patch of watery sunshine through the high windows paced along those cold walls. Her hair blazes brief, brilliant bronze, and her eyes narrow contemplative leaf-brown in their search of the pews -- ahh. There. She turns and starts up the aisle, trailing fingers almost inaudibly bump-bump-bump over the wooden backs.
Green slivers open, stained-glass clarity spliced by heavy veils of black. He watches her, the martyred and crowned, with unmoved familiarity: the stark set of expression does not change; the hard line of mouth does not ease. At his throat, the white tab of collar blinks over the bob of a swallow. Black hair, black uniform, black mood, black priest. Father Christopher's gaze drops to those trailing fingers, counts, and closes again.
Leah Canto seats herself with queenly decorum on the pew ahead of his, folds her arm over its top, and rests her chin on her forearm, bared by the pushed-up sleeve of her baggy grey sweatshirt. She blinks at the priest. She doesn't say anything, although a smile is making a play for the wise curve of her mouth.
He submits for a handspan of breaths to that lingering regard, expression still remote. The betrayal of temper jumps its pulse under his jaw. "Stop that," Rossi says at last, baritone abrupt. "I'm busy."
"Yeah, I can tell," Leah teases, her voice a throaty thrill that chimes emptily off the pews, the walls, the Lord who died for our sins. She snugs her chin more firmly against its prop and gives him a good blink. "Love the collar. Really hits my Catholic kink. What are you wearing under it?"
"A kilt," Chris says back, eyes determinedly sealed shut. "I'm exploring my Irish roots. I'm not talking to you. What is it with women and priests?" he adds in rhetorical distraction. "You wouldn't /believe/ the number of women who've--" His voice breaks off, remembering; his mouth thins, folding into a straight, taut line.
Leah says more seriously, "And you've been cleaving to the celibate life, forfending such worldly pleasures as might displease God. He's a jealous bridesmaid, that one." She sighs. She still hasn't looked away, and now the regard is not lingering. It leaps and it leans. It hungers and it grieves. "Don't blame Him," she finishes. "Not when He has you as his presence on Earth, and I've got -- well, you know."
Chris informs irritably, "You sound like a missionary who's been reading too many bad novels. Jehovah's Witness." He tosses the title like an accusation. Pale eyes peel open for it, glittering and glancing at the woman. "You seriously think I'm not calling Amber the /second/ this gig is over?"
"So tell me," is Leah's peaceable response. "Was this gig your idea or the captain's?"
"Hers." Shoulders stir, fabric rasping across the hitch of muscle. Chris's head lift stretches the collar across the line of throat. "His. One PP, I suppose. She volunteered me for it. Still pissed at me," he sighs, rubbing fingertips across the generous span of brow.
"Ah." Leah's blink rides low into downcast lashes over downcast eyes: she studies his knees, say, over the back of the bench. "And here I'd assumed you'd gone into hiding all on your own. Just seal yourself up away from life and yourself, in the name of protecting and serving. Oh, well. Just because you're dead doesn't mean you're omniscient, apparently."
An unpleasant smile curves one side of Rossi's mouth. "You weren't much for being smart when you were alive, either," he says, Brooklyn's accent surfacing under the bland, regionless one donned for cover. His body stretches longer, leaner, extending with deliberate challenge over polished wood. "If you were smarter, you'd still be alive."
Leah allows, "Probably," with gaze narrowed on his face again. Her propping arm's fist is loosely curled, too, but oh, the lazy drawl of alto, serenely unaffected by display of temper and accusation. "Would I have been happy, though? I wasn't going to sacrifice my principles for myself. You know that."
"First rule, Canto. Get out alive." The smile twists, fracturing across; Chris's gaze skims away, unfocused to trail over the empty ranks of pews. Bump-bump-bump. "Screw your principles."
"And give up my eternal soul?" Leah mocks back. "My, you do suck as a priest. Remind me not to take confession from you."
The cop scans back, eyes sharpening. "Screw your soul, too," he says, the edges of his voice scrubbed raw. "You're dead. That's it. Finis. You know what that was? That wasn't martyrdom for some principle. That was fucking suicide."
"Guess I'd better get myself to Hell, then. Bummer."
"Don't let me keep you," Chris grates, and curls his fist under his cheek, face grim. "Know you got a busy schedule. Me and the rest of the living will just struggle along without."
Tears glitter like fractured diamonds in Leah's lashes, but don't fall. Her voice hardens instead to sinewy challenge. "Will you? Will /you/, Christopher? This doesn't look like living to me, although I'm sure it's very satisfying for your own soul. And your Amber -- I'm sure she's just the kind of girl to settle down with, take home to Ma, fill up that particular hole in your life. If not her, someone else. Anyone else. And there's always more murder on the streets, so you don't need to worry about /that/. Murder, marriage, and a nice pension at the end of your twenty or twenty-five." She sits up, lifts her chin, spreads her arms in embracing, indicating -- indicting. "Don't need me here to tell you that. Might as well shuffle along. Maybe I'll bother Sabitha next."
"White picket fence, family dinners, little kid to bounce on my knee? Tried that, remember? And you decided to get yourself dead. The fucking /Friends/, Canto. You had to let the fucking--" The dark head jerks, blindly turning the straight slash of mouth into the curled prop of fingers. Black fans sharply across the sallow cheek. Chris breathes.
"I know," Leah whispers but steadily. Her fingers brush through his hair briefly: a curl of breeze, no more. "I know what I did. I know what they did. And I wouldn't change it. It's what had to happen, between that man and me. Between you and me." Now her voice shakes. "Free will doesn't mean much compared to the muzzle of a gun shoved against the side of your head, but you -- I freely chose you. Despite everything, /because/ of everything, I chose you. You heard the words on the tape. You dream about them. You can't get them out of your head. Why do you think that is?"
He leans into that caress despite himself, that brush of imagination, or hope, or yearning. A minute shift, that touches the edges off the hard-set face. "Talk is cheap," he manages at last, hoarse over the shallow currents of grief and rage. "I needed you /alive/, damn you. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Chase the Friends forever? I wasn't /there/."
The fingers withdraw. The woman withdraws. Only her voice stays with him, wrapped 'round in alto comfort while she sits on the pew, facing backwards and studying the far wall behind and above his head. "You said it yourself: you struggle along without. I don't have any magical answers for you. I can't change this. I can't fix it. It's . . ." She shrugs. "If you want to give up, though, I'd understand. You've been through a lot. More than any man should endure."
"Fuck," says the man of God, and drops his head in his hands, weighted back bowed. Temptation on the Mount. The black shoulders shudder on a breath, and subside.
"That, too," supposes a judicious Leah, close to smiling. "Fuck. Drink. Smoke and swear. Live life, Rossi. What other choice do you have, that you could live with in the dark nights of all your days? Just . . . live." She sighs back down to folded over the pew back, and again the breeze fingers his hair. "And remember me, if you would. I'd like that. If I get a vote, anyway."
He makes no reply in that tight, furled knot of body and mind; dark strands stir at that gentle touch, warm and giving. Another shivering breath moves him, and the strong face lifts, slid up and caught behind the mask of fingers. "You playing therapist now?" Rossi mocks, without malice. The pale, cynical gaze focuses just beyond Leah, seeing through her to the serene indifference of the crucified Christ. "All seven stages at one go? You always were ambitious."
Leah shakes her head, fracturing bronze and leaf-brown against crucifix, nave, high holy art and hushed center of faith. "I'm not doing a thing. I'm not really here. Don't shame your Jesuit teachers, now. You're talking to yourself -- though not aloud, I hope," she adds cheerfully. "Not sure how your parish would take to their priest babbling in the church in the middle of the day. You might have to claim divine revelation."
"Great," Rossi says, matching black humor for humor. "I'm going crazy after all. No wonder Magneto keeps wanting to hang out. Or did Dramstadt do something?" Rhetorical question. He straightens, molding his spine to the pew's sloping curve; under the heavy droop of lids, green levels white-braced inquiry at Leah. "So what /is/ the divine revelation?"
Her smile is a blaze: firebrand of truth, of light, of justice. She places her hand lightly on his brow in benediction and says, soft as the Lamb, "I love you. I love you, Christopher Lucius Rossi. I love you. I love you, and I'll wait for you, and I'll be with you every step of the way." She pulls in a sharp, sure breath and smiles more quietly, humanly. "That's all. That's all any divine revelation ever is. Love."
Chris eyes Leah blankly, a hand curling over the back of the pew before him. "Straight out of Sunday School," he says, accent flat. "That's all you got? A fucking Beatles song? It's been a long time since I was five years old, Canto, and thought the world was sunshine and roses."
Laughing, Leah stands up, silhouetted against the sunshine over the front of the church. (No roses but for the flush of health and life in her cheeks.) "Hey, nothing wrong with an oldie but a goodie," she protests. "Don't go all cynical and grumpy on me, asshole. There's plenty of good in the world. Maybe you should spend more time looking for it. It would at least make you more fun to talk to."
"If I seriously thought you were out of my subconscious, I'd shoot myself through the head," Chris says without charity. He rises, hands shoving into pockets; a sidestep brings him out into the aisle, and he turns his back on Christ and Leah to begin the slow prowl away. "You sound like a goddamn smurf."
"I don't recommend it," Leah lofts after him. "It hurts like a son of a bitch. Messy, too. But you already knew that. See if you can try to stop reliving it, huh? Get more sleep that way."
"Show me how," Rossi tosses over his shoulder, wry. "Got any words of wisdom for /that/, Canto? Some piece of hippie--" He turns on a foot, still moving down the aisle: forward turned to backward, a glance turned towards the altar and the angel of his subconscious.
The altar is empty; the angel is gone. The sun sifts dust-lazed light through the windows, to the floor, silent and still. The only answers are his own echoes, and Wisdom, well, she has left the building.
The baritone voice trails away; a twist of mouth chases it. Father Christopher lifts his chin to the immutable, immaculate crucifix and turns away. Back to the pretense and the shallow shepherding, a black truth in a black lie. The door bangs. The scene ends. Christ blesses the silence, and sleeps.
[Log ends.]
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Mrs. Molnar is convinced that nice Mr. Kim at the laundromat has managed to lose our altar cloth. She has been there daily to check on its progress. Mrs. Kim has called me twice to assure me that the altar cloth is not actually lost, but is in fact being cleaned at another facility that specializes in this sort of thing. I have assured her that I trust her and her husband implicitly. I meant to speak to Mrs. Molnar about it this morning, but she discovered that my cat had killed a small mouse and left it in her purse, and was therefore quite unapproachable. I admit I am rather baffled about how my cat accomplished this. I cannot in good conscience hold with superstitious nonsense regarding cats -- and really, she is the most charming companion when she is not away, indulging her baser urges -- but I really begin to wonder if the dear thing might not be possessed. The other day I found her in Sister Angelica's room with the door closed, watching some appalling daytime talk show on her old television. How she managed this when the good Sister has been unable to even turn it on in over six months is baffling to contemplate.
The confessional door is not mendable after all, and Father Christopher has, after much discussion with Joe, given up entirely. He has mentioned that he knows a man who is capable of fixing it, but then said some rather unchristian things regarding his friend's personality, which lead me to wonder if perhaps he was speaking in jest.
I have suddenly realized that I think he was speaking about Santa Claus. How foolish of me. I should have realized, from what he said about his friend's 'pimp style,' which Miguel says means that the gentleman has a flair for dressing well, and not the other thing that I thought it meant. It makes me blush to think about it. Really, I should have expected better from Father Christopher. I will apologize to him in the morning.
Of course Father Christopher was speaking about Santa Claus. The more I think about it, the more certain I am. An old man who can fly. How droll. I had not thought he could be so childlike and charming with his imagination, although he continues to have an unusual way of expressing himself. No doubt I will grow accustomed with time.
At any rate, unless Father Christopher's personal relationship with Santa Claus can be called on for personal favors (I must remember to make this joke tomorrow! It is quite amusing. I'm sure he will laugh) I fear the confessional booth is out of service for a time. Joe has put a sign up, and for the time being, we will perform the sacrament in the second office. Mrs. Molnar has put up a screen, which will serve the needs of privacy. I have again offered Father Christopher the opportunity to take the sacrament if he chooses, or to administer it, but he is firm. I will not press him any further. Though he has only been here a few days, I fear that we are not proving the balm to his spirit that I had hoped we would be. This evening he emerged from the nave with such an expression, I feared that perhaps he had crossed the Rubicon of his calling. Still, he was cordial and seemingly quite content by dinnertime, so it may well have been my imagination. Prayer can sometimes trouble the soul before it soothes it. It reminds me of my younger days.
I am disturbed by the dead mouse. I think I will check the wafers before I retire for the evening, just in case.
---
Monday finds a Catholic church empty, after the ecclesiastic hijinks of the day before. Sated by the weekly rites, filled to bursting with spiritual flesh and blood, the faithful stay away -- and the staff, priestly or passing, rest on their laurels. The stone hall is cold, even under the crucifix's sorrowful protection; in one of the wooden pews, Christopher Rossi stretches himself long across its back, unconscious, seated mimicry to the carved Messiah. Throat collared, black-clad, he sits with eyes closed and face bleak, as austere as any monk in the habit of a shepherd.
Below the carving, under the long and languid line of limbs and crucifix's holy tree, a woman kneels in the nave, head bowed in prayer. She crosses herself, looks up at the Savior, and then stands into the patch of watery sunshine through the high windows paced along those cold walls. Her hair blazes brief, brilliant bronze, and her eyes narrow contemplative leaf-brown in their search of the pews -- ahh. There. She turns and starts up the aisle, trailing fingers almost inaudibly bump-bump-bump over the wooden backs.
Green slivers open, stained-glass clarity spliced by heavy veils of black. He watches her, the martyred and crowned, with unmoved familiarity: the stark set of expression does not change; the hard line of mouth does not ease. At his throat, the white tab of collar blinks over the bob of a swallow. Black hair, black uniform, black mood, black priest. Father Christopher's gaze drops to those trailing fingers, counts, and closes again.
Leah Canto seats herself with queenly decorum on the pew ahead of his, folds her arm over its top, and rests her chin on her forearm, bared by the pushed-up sleeve of her baggy grey sweatshirt. She blinks at the priest. She doesn't say anything, although a smile is making a play for the wise curve of her mouth.
He submits for a handspan of breaths to that lingering regard, expression still remote. The betrayal of temper jumps its pulse under his jaw. "Stop that," Rossi says at last, baritone abrupt. "I'm busy."
"Yeah, I can tell," Leah teases, her voice a throaty thrill that chimes emptily off the pews, the walls, the Lord who died for our sins. She snugs her chin more firmly against its prop and gives him a good blink. "Love the collar. Really hits my Catholic kink. What are you wearing under it?"
"A kilt," Chris says back, eyes determinedly sealed shut. "I'm exploring my Irish roots. I'm not talking to you. What is it with women and priests?" he adds in rhetorical distraction. "You wouldn't /believe/ the number of women who've--" His voice breaks off, remembering; his mouth thins, folding into a straight, taut line.
Leah says more seriously, "And you've been cleaving to the celibate life, forfending such worldly pleasures as might displease God. He's a jealous bridesmaid, that one." She sighs. She still hasn't looked away, and now the regard is not lingering. It leaps and it leans. It hungers and it grieves. "Don't blame Him," she finishes. "Not when He has you as his presence on Earth, and I've got -- well, you know."
Chris informs irritably, "You sound like a missionary who's been reading too many bad novels. Jehovah's Witness." He tosses the title like an accusation. Pale eyes peel open for it, glittering and glancing at the woman. "You seriously think I'm not calling Amber the /second/ this gig is over?"
"So tell me," is Leah's peaceable response. "Was this gig your idea or the captain's?"
"Hers." Shoulders stir, fabric rasping across the hitch of muscle. Chris's head lift stretches the collar across the line of throat. "His. One PP, I suppose. She volunteered me for it. Still pissed at me," he sighs, rubbing fingertips across the generous span of brow.
"Ah." Leah's blink rides low into downcast lashes over downcast eyes: she studies his knees, say, over the back of the bench. "And here I'd assumed you'd gone into hiding all on your own. Just seal yourself up away from life and yourself, in the name of protecting and serving. Oh, well. Just because you're dead doesn't mean you're omniscient, apparently."
An unpleasant smile curves one side of Rossi's mouth. "You weren't much for being smart when you were alive, either," he says, Brooklyn's accent surfacing under the bland, regionless one donned for cover. His body stretches longer, leaner, extending with deliberate challenge over polished wood. "If you were smarter, you'd still be alive."
Leah allows, "Probably," with gaze narrowed on his face again. Her propping arm's fist is loosely curled, too, but oh, the lazy drawl of alto, serenely unaffected by display of temper and accusation. "Would I have been happy, though? I wasn't going to sacrifice my principles for myself. You know that."
"First rule, Canto. Get out alive." The smile twists, fracturing across; Chris's gaze skims away, unfocused to trail over the empty ranks of pews. Bump-bump-bump. "Screw your principles."
"And give up my eternal soul?" Leah mocks back. "My, you do suck as a priest. Remind me not to take confession from you."
The cop scans back, eyes sharpening. "Screw your soul, too," he says, the edges of his voice scrubbed raw. "You're dead. That's it. Finis. You know what that was? That wasn't martyrdom for some principle. That was fucking suicide."
"Guess I'd better get myself to Hell, then. Bummer."
"Don't let me keep you," Chris grates, and curls his fist under his cheek, face grim. "Know you got a busy schedule. Me and the rest of the living will just struggle along without."
Tears glitter like fractured diamonds in Leah's lashes, but don't fall. Her voice hardens instead to sinewy challenge. "Will you? Will /you/, Christopher? This doesn't look like living to me, although I'm sure it's very satisfying for your own soul. And your Amber -- I'm sure she's just the kind of girl to settle down with, take home to Ma, fill up that particular hole in your life. If not her, someone else. Anyone else. And there's always more murder on the streets, so you don't need to worry about /that/. Murder, marriage, and a nice pension at the end of your twenty or twenty-five." She sits up, lifts her chin, spreads her arms in embracing, indicating -- indicting. "Don't need me here to tell you that. Might as well shuffle along. Maybe I'll bother Sabitha next."
"White picket fence, family dinners, little kid to bounce on my knee? Tried that, remember? And you decided to get yourself dead. The fucking /Friends/, Canto. You had to let the fucking--" The dark head jerks, blindly turning the straight slash of mouth into the curled prop of fingers. Black fans sharply across the sallow cheek. Chris breathes.
"I know," Leah whispers but steadily. Her fingers brush through his hair briefly: a curl of breeze, no more. "I know what I did. I know what they did. And I wouldn't change it. It's what had to happen, between that man and me. Between you and me." Now her voice shakes. "Free will doesn't mean much compared to the muzzle of a gun shoved against the side of your head, but you -- I freely chose you. Despite everything, /because/ of everything, I chose you. You heard the words on the tape. You dream about them. You can't get them out of your head. Why do you think that is?"
He leans into that caress despite himself, that brush of imagination, or hope, or yearning. A minute shift, that touches the edges off the hard-set face. "Talk is cheap," he manages at last, hoarse over the shallow currents of grief and rage. "I needed you /alive/, damn you. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Chase the Friends forever? I wasn't /there/."
The fingers withdraw. The woman withdraws. Only her voice stays with him, wrapped 'round in alto comfort while she sits on the pew, facing backwards and studying the far wall behind and above his head. "You said it yourself: you struggle along without. I don't have any magical answers for you. I can't change this. I can't fix it. It's . . ." She shrugs. "If you want to give up, though, I'd understand. You've been through a lot. More than any man should endure."
"Fuck," says the man of God, and drops his head in his hands, weighted back bowed. Temptation on the Mount. The black shoulders shudder on a breath, and subside.
"That, too," supposes a judicious Leah, close to smiling. "Fuck. Drink. Smoke and swear. Live life, Rossi. What other choice do you have, that you could live with in the dark nights of all your days? Just . . . live." She sighs back down to folded over the pew back, and again the breeze fingers his hair. "And remember me, if you would. I'd like that. If I get a vote, anyway."
He makes no reply in that tight, furled knot of body and mind; dark strands stir at that gentle touch, warm and giving. Another shivering breath moves him, and the strong face lifts, slid up and caught behind the mask of fingers. "You playing therapist now?" Rossi mocks, without malice. The pale, cynical gaze focuses just beyond Leah, seeing through her to the serene indifference of the crucified Christ. "All seven stages at one go? You always were ambitious."
Leah shakes her head, fracturing bronze and leaf-brown against crucifix, nave, high holy art and hushed center of faith. "I'm not doing a thing. I'm not really here. Don't shame your Jesuit teachers, now. You're talking to yourself -- though not aloud, I hope," she adds cheerfully. "Not sure how your parish would take to their priest babbling in the church in the middle of the day. You might have to claim divine revelation."
"Great," Rossi says, matching black humor for humor. "I'm going crazy after all. No wonder Magneto keeps wanting to hang out. Or did Dramstadt do something?" Rhetorical question. He straightens, molding his spine to the pew's sloping curve; under the heavy droop of lids, green levels white-braced inquiry at Leah. "So what /is/ the divine revelation?"
Her smile is a blaze: firebrand of truth, of light, of justice. She places her hand lightly on his brow in benediction and says, soft as the Lamb, "I love you. I love you, Christopher Lucius Rossi. I love you. I love you, and I'll wait for you, and I'll be with you every step of the way." She pulls in a sharp, sure breath and smiles more quietly, humanly. "That's all. That's all any divine revelation ever is. Love."
Chris eyes Leah blankly, a hand curling over the back of the pew before him. "Straight out of Sunday School," he says, accent flat. "That's all you got? A fucking Beatles song? It's been a long time since I was five years old, Canto, and thought the world was sunshine and roses."
Laughing, Leah stands up, silhouetted against the sunshine over the front of the church. (No roses but for the flush of health and life in her cheeks.) "Hey, nothing wrong with an oldie but a goodie," she protests. "Don't go all cynical and grumpy on me, asshole. There's plenty of good in the world. Maybe you should spend more time looking for it. It would at least make you more fun to talk to."
"If I seriously thought you were out of my subconscious, I'd shoot myself through the head," Chris says without charity. He rises, hands shoving into pockets; a sidestep brings him out into the aisle, and he turns his back on Christ and Leah to begin the slow prowl away. "You sound like a goddamn smurf."
"I don't recommend it," Leah lofts after him. "It hurts like a son of a bitch. Messy, too. But you already knew that. See if you can try to stop reliving it, huh? Get more sleep that way."
"Show me how," Rossi tosses over his shoulder, wry. "Got any words of wisdom for /that/, Canto? Some piece of hippie--" He turns on a foot, still moving down the aisle: forward turned to backward, a glance turned towards the altar and the angel of his subconscious.
The altar is empty; the angel is gone. The sun sifts dust-lazed light through the windows, to the floor, silent and still. The only answers are his own echoes, and Wisdom, well, she has left the building.
The baritone voice trails away; a twist of mouth chases it. Father Christopher lifts his chin to the immutable, immaculate crucifix and turns away. Back to the pretense and the shallow shepherding, a black truth in a black lie. The door bangs. The scene ends. Christ blesses the silence, and sleeps.
[Log ends.]