Kevin P. Keating 

The Distinguished Precipice

 

-1-

On the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Tom Wentworth is summoned to the principal’s office where in the steely autumn light there awaits an assembly of priests, eleven in all, faded men in high backed chairs, whose arthritic fingers fumble with the books of matches piled high in ashtrays stationed at every corner of the room like bowls of holy water at the entranceways to the school chapel and whose eyes are fixed not to the door but to the branches of the maples and elms that tap and scratch and clatter against the windowpanes like shunned souls trying to claw their way into Paradise.  With a stoicism perfected over long decades, the priests endure the unceasing gusts and gales that come screaming across the lake, small figures gloomy and indistinguishable from the ghosts that inhabit the crumbling warehouses and clapboard shanties that crowd the narrow brick lanes of this neighborhood, ungainly edifices of a dead industrial age transformed by shifting shadows into sculptures of strange shape and contour--giant locusts and ancient armored lizards hunkered down in the swirling coal fire soot and drifting piles of fallen leaves.

Whether from advanced age or the bitter cold, or maybe because they simply haven’t bothered to wear their dentures to this meeting, the circle of wizened men have taken on an appearance of concavity, their faces like hollowed out pumpkins left to rot on porch stoops.  In subdued tones they make oblique references to their colleague, the twelfth member of their group, who for many months has been confined to his sickbed, stricken with the final stages of disease, his withered limbs cruelly mimicking the degeneration of a mind once considered legendary in the annals of the school’s history.

Doctors examine him, they poke and prod with their medieval instruments, make grim diagnoses.  “We don’t expect him to see the first rains of spring, and yet…”  They hover over the bed, write useless prescriptions, but the simple truth is that they are baffled.  How can the old man still be alive?  It’s a case that makes no sense at all.  Of course these physicians aren’t men of letters.  There isn’t a single scholar among them.  They may as well be mechanics tinkering with the engine of a rusty truck, carpenters planing away at a cabinet or bookshelf that has begun to warp and rot.  The priests, on the other hand, are like diligent curators who can easily assess the value of a museum piece, and now, as they sit hunched and shivering in the flat gray chiaroscuro light filtering through the windows of the office, they agree that new measures must be taken.    

“Such suffering.”

“If God would only take him home.”

“We’ve prayed every night to Saint Jude.”

“Under certain circumstances, gentlemen, the tomb can be a most inviting place.”

Their thoughts teeter dangerously close to perdition, and a few of the men breathe a sigh of relief when Tom Wentworth appears at the door.

“Come in,” says the principal.

The boy stands at attention in the center of the room, his head bowed and hands clasped together behind his back like some captive New World heathen brought before a tribunal of inquisitors.

The principal indicates the empty chair.  “Take a seat.”

Tom obeys, but reluctantly, as though the chair is covered in a carpet of red-hot nails. 

“I suppose you know why we have called you here today?”

Tom crosses his legs, uncrosses them, squirms, stares at the tips of his shoes.  A nervous boy.  This is as it should be.  The natural order of things.

“No, sir…”

The priests take long contemplative puffs on their cigarettes and cautious sips of their artificially sweetened coffee.

“Then let me remind you,” says the principal.  “You didn’t pass your biology exam last term and in order to graduate with the rest of your class you will need to…do some additional work.”

Though entirely capable of making stern pronouncements, like a brigadier ordering his ragtag battalion of young recruits to the front lines and certain death, the principal can also address his charges in an oddly solicitous manner, and this is how he speaks to Tom now, his elocution flawless as ever, the greatest of orators, golden-mouthed, honey-tongued as is frequently noted by the multitudes of young mothers who each Sunday morning are so enraptured by the powerful thrust of his sermons and his magnificent descriptions of how they will burn in the lake of fire for all eternity (unless, of course, they atone at once for their grievous sins), that they sometimes shudder and sigh in the pews and then line up outside his confessional, eager to reveal every scandalous detail of their private lives.

“We know you’re clever, very bright indeed.”  The principal’s words spill slowly into the room, like the blue cigarette smoke, looping and coiling into helixes of meaning.  “We want you to succeed, want you to distinguish yourself in some way.  We believe this situation requires a quick solution.  So this is our proposal to you.”  He shifts his eyes toward his colleagues.  “We’d like you to see a…tutor who, after a sufficient amount of time, will…” again, a slight shift of his eyes  “…test your ability to analyze and interpret the concepts of Augustine and Aquinas.”

The other priests murmur their consent--“A most excellent idea, very sensible, quite expedient”--though a number of them have serious misgivings, believe Tom too incompetent to serve his dark purpose, and they wonder why the principal doesn’t simply ask the boy clear out his locker and leave the school once and for all.  There are, perhaps, mitigating circumstances. 

Eighteen, everyone will surely agree, is a difficult age, and some of the boys, the more reckless and daring among them, sneak behind the gym to gulp vodka straight from the bottle, wincing like small children forced to swallow bitter and gelatinous medicine, but Tom isn’t a troublemaker, not in the normal sense of the word, never comes to class drunk or high like so many of his classmates, though he once tried marijuana at the homecoming dance only to find that it had no effect other than to give him an inexplicable urge to eat an entire bowl of stale pretzels one at a time with machine-like precision while the other kids looked on and laughed as they would at one of the feces-flinging macaques on Monkey Island at the zoo.  He never smirks at his teachers in a way that suggests he is somehow superior to them, though in truth many of the priests and lay teachers suffer from low morale and feel trapped in the intellectual purgatory of a high school classroom, doomed to repeat the same insipid lesson plans over and over again with no discernible effect on their listless students.

By most accounts Tom is docile, timid, pathetic even.  He arrives at school early each morning and sits alone in a far corner of the cafeteria where he sips hot chocolate (the Jesuits forbid the sale of coffee) and stares at the green cinderblock walls and traces patterns on the cover of his geometry textbook with a lazy finger.  When he slinks through the hallways between classes, the other students, some of them at least, the callous ones, the trust fund kids, snort with contempt and jeer at the clothes he wears, incredible bellbottom pants from the Goodwill and paisley ties unearthed from cardboard boxes at garage sales.  No matter how hard he tries Tom always looks disheveled, his shirts stained with whatever food he has for lunch--a smattering of pizza sauce, a dollop of chili, a dash of mustard.

A woman might be of some assistance in this department, but his mother is no longer in the picture, slipped away in the middle of the night, is nowhere to be found.  His father is a longtime faculty member at the school, a science teacher who earns a very modest salary, barely a living wage, so that Tom is compelled to take a job as a janitorial assistant at a nursing home.  This at least puts a little money in the boy’s pockets, but rather than spend the cash on desperately needed school supplies, he resorts to rummaging through the garbage bins after class, looking for pencils worn down to chewed stubs and tearing out blank pages from notebooks used by his classmates to draw cruel caricatures of their teachers during lectures.

The Jesuits, all of whom have taken vows of poverty, understand the many hardships Tom faces--how can they not?--so if they pity him it isn’t because of the missing buttons on his winter coat or the dangling threads on the cuffs of his shirts; rather, it is because of a shocking incident that occurred several months ago that left them wondering if the rigorous curriculum and strict code of conduct have played more than marginal roles in what they call his “spiritual crisis.” 

Initially, his father wanted to remove the boy from school altogether, admit him to a psychiatric ward where a team of doctors specializing in emotional disorders could pump him full of mood altering drugs--modern science has so many miraculous cures these days--but the Jesuits frowned upon this idea, and not simply because they have a healthy skepticism of modernity, but because they consider themselves experts in the treatment and cure of a benightmared soul.

 

 

-2-

The incident in question took place during biology class on a blustery day last March.  The instructor, Father Todd Loomis, should have responded more quickly, but he was an elderly fellow whose eyesight and hearing, not to mention lucidity, had been in steep decline for some time.  That the poor fellow looked ridiculous as well probably didn’t help matters.  Students never bothered to disguise their immature and malicious laughter.  They called him “Loomis the Balloonis,” claimed that a man didn’t reside within that body but an overactive gene about to burn out like an old fuse, or a giant star exhausting the last of its hydrogen.  A portly fellow, famed for his ability to guzzle ungodly amounts of ale imported from Belgian monasteries, Father Loomis looked like an ancient ziggurat, something that didn’t need to be bathed and powdered and dressed each morning so much as scaled at the appropriate solstice or equinox and upon which propitiations were to made to a pantheon of angry and jealous gods.

“Now then!” said Father Loomis.  His hamburger and beer bloated body waddled into the biology lab that day as if of its own accord, like a great boulder rolling down a winding slope that led to the third circle of hell, a realm of cold and heavy rain reserved for unrepentant gluttons.  Unfortunately, Heaven was too steep an ascent and Father Loomis little more than a corpulent Sisyphus burdened by his great ball of flesh. “Today we will be doing dissection.”  He hummed, whistled, quoted with a chuckle, “Faith is a fine invention when gentlemen can see, but microscopes are prudent in an emergency.”

The boys made vulgar and obnoxious sounds.  They pretended to fart and wheeze and vomit.  Some of them groaned as though with constipation.  Others threw wadded up tissues at their teacher, hoping he might open his mouth to devour them as a bat blindly devours insects in the night.

Absently probing an ear with a plump finger encrusted with waffle batter, Father Loomis frowned and said, “What was it we were doing?  Before you make your first incision, you must…First you must.  Gentleman.  Your animal.   Anesthetize it.  Remember.  Always remember.  They are created creatures…”

Maybe in his confusion he thought he was laboring before the church altar, struggling to recall the priestly arts of transubstantiation, and after reciting the necessary formula--“Introibo ad altare Dei”--he raised each frog by his forefinger and thumb and distributed them to his pupils like wafers newly consecrated on a day of holy obligation. 

First in line was Tom who accepted his frog in an almost reverential manner, perhaps expecting and even hoping for a sense of peace and tranquility to invade his soul, to cleanse his troubled mind, and indeed a great and disturbing calm fell over him, almost as though some ultimate Truth, awful in its lack of humanity and complete absence of purpose, had stalked into the room.  Tom sat perfectly upright on his stool, muttering strange words without sense or meaning. 

The other boys watched his lips move, his eyelids flutter.  They prodded him with their rulers, slapped the back of his head.  “Hey, man.  What the hell.  You flippin’ out, or what?  You on something?  Whatever it is, let us have some.”

Ignoring them, Tom turned his attention to the work at hand, but rather than smother his frog with a chloroform-soaked cotton ball, he reached into his backpack and grabbed his protractor, the one he used in geometry class to draw concentric circles and to make arcs along a plane like a carpenter’s son.  With the sharp point glimmering under the fluorescent lights, he stabbed the back and legs and the soft, pliant skull of his thrashing frog, never flinching at the sharp pop of the spleen and the long, sad wheeze of the evacuating rectum.  From the sounds alone he could identify each organ. 

“Liver! Lung! Ovary!”

The other students recoiled from the viscous, milky fluid that meandered across the surface of the counter and dripped to the floor.  Better to wait for Father Loomis to take charge, to do something, but the old man was oblivious to it all.  Later, when the other priests questioned him about the incident, Father Loomis tugged at the wheel of flesh around his throat and cried, “Idlers!  Those boys are idlers, every last one of them!”

But it was Tom who concerned them most.  After decapitating his frog he raised the sharp point of his protractor high above his head and, running around the lab, stabbed the other frogs, methodically gouging out eyeballs and genitals and tearing off legs.  If Coach Kaliher hadn’t come along and tackled him to the ground, Tom might have turned the weapon on his classmates or even on himself, self-mutilation wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, and as he writhed on the floor with his mirthless laughter ringing through the hallways and out into the rain and wind of that terrible March day, the other boys formed a circle and gave him a spirited ovation.  

 

 

-3-

“We are all confident that you will succeed in your mission.” 

Tom winces as the office, a very precise space, careful, tidy, antiseptic, starts to fill with noxious gasses seeping silently from the old men who groan and shift in their chairs and dab their foreheads with handkerchiefs and take vigorous drags on cigarettes that over the course of the meeting have become flimsy sticks of ash dangling from their lips.

“Thank you,” Tom murmurs, “for giving me this opportunity.” 

The priests smile like gaping jack-o-lanterns. 

Before dismissing his charge with a subtle flick of his wrist, the principal looks Tom in the eye and warns, “You hover on the edge of a precipice, young man.”

Tom nods and backs toward the door with great caution as though fearing the men might suddenly rise to their feet and pelt him with stones.  At the last possible moment, just before leaving the office, he shoots a hand toward an ashtray with the agility of a magician performing a card trick and slips a pack of matches into his pocket.

He has thirty minutes to kill before his appointment with the tutor, so he ambles along the streets of the old neighborhood, pausing for a moment outside the creaking iron gates of the public park to observe the whores and the homeless men who, bravely refusing to accept the Church’s charity, stake out their benches for the night.  A few of them, reeling from drink and shouting nonsense to the phantoms that flit in and out of the shadowlands of their minds, rummage through the garbage bins and stuff newspapers into their ratty coats to insulate them from the lacerating winds.  Tom’s mind whirls with excitement and anticipation.  

At four o’clock he goes to the rectory at 1545 Dickinson, the Ancient Homestead as it’s called, where he knocks three times before the housekeeper, Ms. Higginson,  finally answers.  She’s a tall woman, broad-shouldered, solid, with a complexion as gray as the afternoon sky, an indoor face, unaccustomed to sunshine and fresh air.  Her eyes, small, dark, feral, glimpse from behind heavy curtains and through peepholes and regard students with equal measures of suspicion and contempt.  She looks like one of those sepia tone photographs from his history textbook of nineteenth century washerwomen who pose for the camera, their sleeves rolled up past their elbows, proudly displaying their well developed triceps. 

Each morning from the safety of the classroom he and his classmates watch Ms. Higginson march to the rectory along an invisible yet exact line, her heels going clippity-clop against the slick cobblestones like the shoes on an old packhorse.  Snickering with delight, they invent ever more lurid tales about her: she serves as a kind of madam and on the weekends procures women of every stripe for the priests--short, fat, lean, shaved, bristly, bushy--and, should they request it, several nubile boys from the shanties and tenements that surround the school.  It is well known that the Jesuits have their fetishes.  Others claim to have seen Mr. Campbell, a part-time maintenance man, disappear into the house only to emerge hours later, sweating and disheveled, with an odd look of fulfillment and revulsion in his eyes.

Now Ms. Higginson thrusts her nose at Tom and scowls.  “Wentworth?”  Her voice lashes out at him like a rusty bicycle chain.  Small particles of rust and grit burst from her lips and float through the air.  “You’re late.”

She waves him inside.  Because it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, Tom smells the interior of the rectory before he can actually see it and is reminded of the nursing home on West 95th Street where for three hours a day after school he mops the piss-splattered floors and wipes off trays dripping with pureed vegetables and disposes of medical waste and, since there seems to be no one else who can be bothered with such a menial task, sits in the drab little white rooms with the elderly residents, listening as they struggle to put the ruined battlefield of their memories in some kind of sensible order.  In his back pocket Tom carries a bottle with a skull and crossbones on the label warning about the flammable contents.  As a joke, he sometimes twists off the cap and says, “Open wide.”  They gasp.  Like the formaldehyde that will be used to preserve their bodies, the chemical stings their eyes, and though it smells sharp and oily it fails to disguise the stench of death and decay that forever permeates the home.

“This way, this way,” says Ms. Higginson.  Glowering with impatience, she leads him through a corridor that stretches on and on like the subterranean passageways of a cathedral, and as they pass through pockets of clammy air, Tom half expects the walls to suddenly give way to the skull-lined niches of a catacomb.

“Now then, which subject are you supposed to study?”

            Tom shakes his head.

            “Speak up, please.”

“Frogs…”

She sighs.  “Oh, the Jesuits do get strange ideas.  This way.  In here.”  She points to a small library where flames leap inside an enormous hearth.  Mesmerized by the firelight he nearly stumbles into Ms. Higginson.  With more impatience than ever she turns to Tom and snaps,  “Oh!  For now just go the shelves and find a book that interests you.  Any book will do.  I’ll be back in a moment.” 

She disappears into the vast curling gloom of the house, and Tom is left alone to savor the silence of the library and to feel the pleasant warmth of the fire.

 

 

-4-

One volume catches his eye right away.  From its fragile cover he parts a sea of dust.  In the cracked leather binding he sees the faces of saints and sinners, the tormented screams of apostates, the acrimonious scowls of heresiarchs.  Even the title strikes him as slightly monstrous.  Gateway to Gehenna: An Appraisal of the Heterodox Theologies of the Egyptian Monks of Saint Pachomius.  The pages are stiff and brittle like bloodless autumn leaves, and as he turns them they quietly crackle like kindling.  Easily ignitable.  He scans the lines from right to left, a little game he enjoys playing.  From what he can tell, there once lived a man named Thomas the Twin who attributed to Jesus the following words: “Whoever has come to understand the world has found only a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”  Despite its blasphemous connotations the aphorism, argues the author, should be placed above the threshold of every county courthouse and state capitol, but this line of argument Tom finds puzzling.  Surely anyone who would dare put such remarks on the lips of the Savior should be condemned.  But condemned to what?  Tom closes his eyes, dreams of the appropriate punishment. 

In the midst of this sublime meditation he hears a voice, thin as the parchment of an ancient scroll on which is written a history too convoluted for mere words.

“Oh god help me please oh please god help me help.”

He peers into the shadows cast by the dancing firelight.  He breathes deeply then counts backward from ten, hoping to banish from his brain the wretched thing he sees in the far corner of the library, but the vision persists and will not vanish.  With great caution he approaches the cadaverous thing in the far corner of the room.  It squirms in a hospital bed, a fabulous creature with translucent skin that stares blindly up at the ceiling and claws at the air with nails that are jagged and yellow and wholly capable of inflicting serious injury.  An array of freshly cut flowers--marigolds and daffodils, lilies and lavender peonies--surrounds the bed and makes the library smell like a funeral parlor.  Tom trembles.  How did he fail to notice these things before?

“For heaven’s sake!  Why are you just standing there?” 

Ms. Higginson stomps back into the library, carrying a bowl of steaming chicken broth.  She kicks each wheel of the hospital bed with the toe of her shoe, checks the guardrails to make sure they are secure, then places the bowl of soup on the dining tray.  Without ceremony, she shoves a spoon into the old man’s mouth.  He gags, then slurps loudly, his tongue laboring to lap up the thin broth.

“Do you need a reading lamp, Wentworth?  As you can see, Father likes it dark in here.  You do know Father Loomis, don’t you?”

Skeptical that this vaguely aquatic, amphibious creature could be the same person who only last spring taught biology class, Tom takes a step forward and slowly nods his head.

“At first it was inconvenient to move him up and down the stairs.  He used to be such a heavyset man.  Of course now that he’s lost so much weight we can lift him off the bed.  But we think he enjoys being here in the library.  He’s like one of those antique volumes.   He was a great scholar, you know.  Had his ideas been a bit more orthodox he could have taught at any university in the country.  But he preferred to stay here and teach you boys instead.” 

She shakes her head, dips the spoon into the broth. 

“I see you’ve found one of his books.  We’ll take that as a sign.  He wrote it many years ago as a young seminarian.  I never read it myself, but I’m told that in those days his ideas were rather suspect.  It’s out of print now, thank heaven.  The Jesuits believe it’s a book that contains dangerous ideas.  They’d like to locate and destroy any remaining copies.  In fact, they want these shelves searched for any volumes that may have influenced Father Loomis’s work, his sources, references, apocryphal gospels, the teachings of desert mystics.”  She lifts the spoon again.  “Yes, I think this arrangement should work out quite well, don’t you?”

“Arrangement?”

“The Jesuits didn’t explain things to you.  How typical.”  She sighs, wipes the old man’s lips with a napkin and drops the spoon on the tray.  “We’re well aware of your experience at the nursing home, Wentworth, and in lieu of taking another exam you are to…spend some time with Father Loomis.  Perhaps reading to him.  An hour each day.  That is the arrangement.” 

She waits for Tom to give some sign that he understands, and when he finally nods his head, Ms. Higginson stands up, straightens her blouse, and before leaving the room gazes a final time at the old man.  After she is gone, Tom ventures over to the shelves, selects another book, and scans it for suspicious content.  In the bed the old man watches him.  He gurgles and wheezes and marks the long hour with a ghoulish tune: “Please oh god help me god please oh god help me help me please.”

 

 

-5-

As Tom leaves the rectory he sees the maintenance man, Mr. Campbell, hurrying up the walkway with his little boy in hand and wonders if the rumors about Ms. Higginson’s voracious sexual appetite are true.

Though he gives some thought to going home Tom decides to first stop at the corner market where he ambles quietly over to the back shelf and studies the stylized depictions of violence in the latest issue of his favorite comic book.  In a wasted city, not unlike the one in which he lives, dozens of men and women run screaming through the streets, their clothes set ablaze, their faces melting like candle wax.  Behind them a rampaging horde of chortling green goblins with giant webbed feet and oddly defined buttocks leap effortlessly across the cratered landscape, burning the last survivors with massive torches dipped in black pitch. 

Tom places the comic book back on the shelf and lets his eye wander to the other magazines and the decks of novelty playing cards.  Sometimes after school lets out for the day, his classmates burst through the door and rush to the shelves where they push and shove each other, trying to get a turn running their ink-stained fingers across the glossy pages of the magazines.  In order to describe the alien things they see, the boys use words like snatch and pie and box, speak them loud and clear, chanting them over and over like an incantation, oblivious to the little old ladies who shuffle up and down the aisles loading their squeaking carts with jars of pickled herring and hissing their empty threats: “The Jesuits will hear of this, oh, yes, they will!  Such filth!”

Though he has never had the temerity to purchase one of these items, Tom, in his own way, does possess a great deal of courage, everyone senses this about him, teachers and students alike, and while some of them may have been imprudent enough to tease and mock him, most have enough sense to fear him and keep their distance. 

Behind the counter, watching Tom with a leery smile, stands the shop owner who with the dexterity of a gunslinger is ready to reach a practiced hand beneath the cash register. The whole city applauds this stocky, middle-aged man with his perpetual five o’clock shadow and heavy drops of sweat that cascade into a deep crevasse of flesh below his jaw.  Twice this month his store had been robbed, and during the last incident the owner managed to shoot the thief, a teenager from the projects, wounding him in the shoulder.  Had the boy not begged for mercy as he writhed on the sidewalk, drenched in blood and surrounded by the pieces of shattered window that sparkled under the brilliant yellow streetlights, the owner surely would have finished the job, stuffed the barrel of the gun into the kid’s mouth and pulled the trigger.  “The police are of no use to me,” the owner later told reporters.  “I am not a man of the book.  I am a man of the gun.”

Not wishing to test the owner’s patience, Tom grabs a pack of the playing cards and a bottle of lighter fluid.  He puts his money down on the counter.

“This will be all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will be needing a bag?”

“Yes, please.”

The man scratches his belly, squinting as he runs a finger through the dense tangle of hair that sprouts between the buttons.  After bagging the items he watches the boy leave the store, rests his elbows on the counter, and then turns his attention to the newspaper he is reading.

 

 

-6-

When he reaches the park Tom creeps stealthy as a sewer rat toward the circle of wooden benches and slides beside one of the shivering women whose dark hair is buried beneath a bundle of stinking rags and whose malodorous tentacles of piss and madness make him giggle. 

A police cruiser rolls by.  He knows he can’t stay here for long without arousing suspicion, so he places the playing cards beneath the woman’s shoulders and back and thighs.  He chooses only those cards that showcase women with dark hair and cinnamon skin like the woman on the bench.  Next, he removes the bottle of lighter fluid from the paper bag, tears off the cellophane wrapper along the perforated edge, and using his thumb flicks open the red cap.  He pauses a moment to take in the gratifying smell of chemicals, then he squeezes the sides of the bottle, sending a perfect parabola of fluid arcing across the darkness, dousing the newspapers and rags that cushion the woman as she sleeps.  Tom searches his pockets for the book of matches that he stole from the principal’s office earlier that afternoon. 

The woman raises her head.  “What time is it?”

“It’s late.”

“I have to get back to Zanzibar.”

“Zanzibar?” Tom laughs and hands her the bottle of lighter fluid.

“What’s this?”  She opens her mouth, tries to drink.

“Go back to sleep.”

“Tastes funny.”

“Sleep, rest.”

“A nice gentleman like you.  Maybe you’re looking for a good time.”

“Mmmm.”

“A nice gentleman.”

Tom lifts the matchbook cover, waits for the wind to die down.  Five seconds, ten seconds, twenty.  He is patient.  The woman continues speaking to him, utterly incapable of raising her body, her torso pinned to the bench with a bellyful of gin.  Then the wind vanishes.  Everything is still.  A break in the clouds.  Moonlight, soft and pale blue, spills into the park.  Tom strikes a match, holds the weak flame to the playing cards, the newspapers, to the loose threads dangling from the woman’s ratty overcoat.  Sparks soar heavenward.  Flames lick the sky.  A burnt offering.  The woman screams, begs for mercy.  She rolls off the bench and into a pile of dry leaves.  The wind picks back up, fanning the flames.

Near the corner, a bus screeches to a stop.  Tom runs to catch it.  The driver, mesmerized by the lines in the road and oblivious to the conflagration in the park, stares straight ahead.  Taking a seat near the back, Tom gazes dully at the woman flailing on the ground.  Almost instantly, he is bored and berates himself for not taking Father Loomis’ book from the library because even the most blasphemous books have something useful to teach.

The bus turns.  In the distance the school’s gothic bell tower rises above the rooftops of the neglected houses like a sword that juts violently into the cast-iron sky.  Tom clears his mind.  He enjoys gazing at these streets without having to measure the value of things, but the Jesuits try to place a value on the whole of creation and use words like assessment and evaluation and analysis.  The universe, they believe, must be measured--physically, psychologically, spiritually, morally.  Even Father Loomis, who championed the myriad blasphemies of religious mysticism, abandoned his old beliefs and dedicated the rest of his career to the examination of life under a microscope.  Maybe God, he concluded, can be more readily grasped by employing scientific principles rather than the esoteric philosophies of desert anchorites.  Life had changed him.  

And hadn’t the Jesuits always insisted that it was possible for a young man with one set of ideas to become, as he grew in wisdom, an altogether different kind of man with an entirely new set of ideas?  Maybe so, but Tom suspects that the universe, and the men who inhabit it, are essentially static and hostile to change; that all things are headed toward one ineluctable destiny.  Some people are Creators, others great Defaulters and Destroyers, not unlike the Ancient of Days, who from the skies of a doomed empire once railed, “I will smite your whole territory with frogs, which will come up and go into your house and into your bedroom and into your bed and into the houses of your servants and into your ovens and into your kneading bowls.”  The powers and potentialities of darkness are not to be denied or suppressed.  They, too, are essential parts of this cosmic equation of eternal stasis. 

As he gets off the bus Tom notices the lights blazing inside his house.  It’s his eighteenth birthday, he almost forgot, and his shoulders slump.  He wants only to retreat to his room above the garage where he can sit at his desk and craft a plan for tomorrow’s terrible ordeal, but his father will be waiting at the door; there will be guests, gifts, balloons, a cake.  Marching bravely through the bitter cold Tom recalls the words of scripture and masters a smile of innocence so sublime that he himself is almost convinced of their truth.