~~~~~
At his apartment door, Dante turned the key in the lock, and the door swung open. He set the bottles on his rococo-carved dining room table. Dust ground under the bag. He wiped a clean streak with his hand and inspected the feathery lint clinging to his palm.
In the bedroom, his bed was tucked with soft blankets. No lace.
His mother had foisted the furniture, blankets, and velvet curtains covering the tall windows on him years ago, when she had divested herself of her accumulations. No silly doilies had infested her house. She had bought good things, good antiques, good new things, and she kept them nice. She had collected perfect sets of furniture, china, and crystal.
You acquire things, you dust the things, and then you give the things away.
Even furniture and glassware outlive you and your soul on Earth.
At that thought, Dante took one of his mother’s good glasses out of the cabinet, poured himself a double of the whiskey, and downed it. Sunlight crept around the edges of the velvet drapes, but it stayed out.
Why shouldn’t he use his mother’s good crystal glass? He could drink if he wanted to. It meant nothing. He meant nothing.
Yes, he meant nothing. His women meant nothing. Nihilism was the way he liked his life. That old priest should not have offered him anything else. The illusory promise of peace only upset people. It was like offering them a placebo, like those useless Alzheimer’s drugs. The whole Church, religion, the offer of a better life after death or even in this life was based on a disproven, stupid theory.
He downed more liquor to quell the churning thoughts. Liquor and women had always damped the churning, if imbibed in sufficient quantities.
At eight in the morning, he called the hospital to ask the secretaries to schedule his patients with other psychiatrists and cancel his clinic hours for a week.
He told them, “I have something bad.”
The memory is, as it were, the belly of the soul, said St. Augustine.
Alcohol had degraded Dante’s memory every night for the last several years. His soul must be motheaten.
He got drunk alone for the first time since he had moved his mother into the nursing home. His mother’s memory was gone. Her soul was gone. Surely, the ability to love resided in the soul and the memory.
That whole con job, God is Love, was people reassuring themselves that they were loved, because the alternative was too lonely to imagine.
Communion is a kiss, with a mouth-warmed chalice as proxy.
~~~~~
Several days later, in the afternoon, the phone rang.
Drunken, hungover demons besieged Dante. He saw dark sheets slanting across his apartment. Perhaps the whiskey was blinding him. He swung at the shadows but missed, and they returned to plague him.
The phone rang again.
Dante stumbled off the bed. He needed to vomit. He found the phone. “’Allo?”
A woman’s voice asked, “Dante?”
His sister? He rasped, “Theresa?” hoping she might have called, might have worried about him, and might come save him from the bottle.
The small voice from the phone said, “No. It’s Angela. Are you going out tonight?”
Dante almost dropped the receiver. He just wanted to lay on the cold stone floor.
Angela, the raven-haired sister, had called him, though of course he had not given her his number. Of course, his phone numbers were all in the neuroscience department’s directory.
His head hurt so much that he touched it, feeling for broken skull around his temple. He mistook the moisture in his hair for blood at first, but it was clear as water and dripped down his face from his eyes.
“Angela,” he said. “Don’t call me.”
“Crista said she’s not going out tonight because Vidal is home. Just wondering what club you were going to be at, so we might meet, for a drink.”
“I’m not going out tonight,” Dante said. He want to reach through the phone and touch her silken skin.
“Because I’m going to be all alone tonight,” Angela said. “My sister won’t be there. She’s really the good girl of the family, you know. She got married like a nice girl. I’m the one who likes to party.”
His longing for her, to touch her, was like his heart straining to push through his chest, yet even that could not break through the thick, dark curtains around him. “Just leave me alone, Angela.”
He hung up the phone and picked up the whisky bottle.
~~~~~
A week later, the priests and priests-to-be were leaving Mass.
Roman sunlight warmed Dante’s black shirt, but the breeze was cold. He could see Father Sergei up ahead, hunched over, ambling between the ancient stones.
Dante hurried to catch up and stumbled over the cobbles. He was still drunk and his eyes were balls of pain in his head. He pushed though the crowd of men all in black clothes, like his black shadows come to life.
Luigi rolled his eyes, grimacing at Dante’s ruined clothes.
Dante didn’t care. He couldn’t be bothered by such shallow stupidity. He had fought his way back from unconsciousness to confront this man. “Sergei!”
Father Sergei raised his trimmed eyebrows at Dante’s dishevelment. “Are you all right?”
Dante shouted at Father Sergei, “Why did you do it?”
Father Sergei appraised the wreck of man that Dante was, and Sergei wrapped his arm around Dante’s stinking shoulders and led him away, down an open stone corridor, toward his small office.
It was, Dante thought, one of the few times a human being who was wearing clothes had touched him gently in several years.
Father Sergei whispered, “You take care of your patients and your mother, and even the women who leave you have smiles on their pretty faces.” Father Sergei’s hand flourished over Dante’s trampled clothes. “But if anyone even asks you what you are looking for in a class, it nearly destroys you.”
“That’s not what you asked.” The wind blew through the open arches and needled Dante through his shirt. He clutched his chest. He should have worn a coat. Autumn had faded into an early winter while he had been drinking.
“Have you been drinking this whole time?” the old priest asked.
“No.” Dante scrubbed his haphazardly shaved cheek with his hand. “Yes.”
“You must be hungry.”
Dante’s grief welled up. “I don’t want to be a priest.”
“You don’t have to be a priest. I offered it to you, not demanded it. No one demands it.”
Dante could not breathe. “My mother wanted me to be a priest. She said that the Church and her family were all that were important to her. She said that her daughters would give her grandchildren, so she wanted me to go into the Church.”
“That must have been tough on you.” Father Sergei led him up stone steps.
“She wouldn’t even know.” Dante hated that, even if he did take Holy Orders, his mother was so far beyond that she could not understand, not even a little. But he wouldn’t take Holy Orders. He couldn’t.
“But you would know,” Sergei said.
“I’m a psychiatrist,” Dante argued.
“The Church needs men with other vocations besides parish work. Indeed, we are in desperate need of men with counseling credentials.”
“I don’t want to be a priest.”
“You came to us, asking to take seminary classes. You attend Mass and classes every day, except for the past week. You are around here more than the students who insist they desperately want to be priests.” He gestured to Dante’s clerical shirt with its open, Nehru-like collar. “You wear the uniform.”
Dante could not speak. He could not breathe to speak. Everything crushed him. The stone halls of the seminary echoed with their footsteps and the clattering of the crowd of men around them.
The old priest spun Dante into his office and closed the door. The door clanked closed on the ancient stones, and it was qu
iet.
Dante’s knees creaked as he sat in the penitent’s chair. Air leaked into his lungs and he squeezed it back out in a whisper, “I write useless prescriptions for people who are going to get worse until they die. I can’t even help my own mother. I’m just going through the motions.”
His aching head rested on his hands, and his fingers wound into his hair.
Dante said, “If God squashed me into a bloody, drunken smear in the road, some other psychiatrist would watch over them and write useless scrips to dose them with, until they die. A few women would have to find someone else to go home with.”
He couldn’t even remember going home with most of them. He only know what they looked like the next day, when they were sick from a hangover and their make-up was smeared.
“Your sisters care for you,” the old priest said, watching him.
Dante looked back down at the smooth stone floor. “Theresa has her own family. She’s got a third child on the way.”
The priest leaned back in his desk and looked quizzical, kind, and bemused. Dante had often used a calculated counselor’s demeanor in his office and in bars.
Father Sergei asked, “Why don’t you get married? Have kids?”
Dante shook his head. “I try to talk to women, but they see me,” he gestured to his face, his body, “and I’m not going to complain about looking like this. I exercise. The rest is the accident of good genes. But they see this, and they won’t talk to me. They preen and they flirt. Men compete with me. Even my cousin competes. My boss, Vidal, even he competes.”
The old priest’s smile was wry. “And you won that particular competition.”
Dante shook his head. “I didn’t know who she was the first time.”
“And the second?”
“It’s not fair, you know.” Dante had gotten it all: brains, university degrees, looks, build, hair, family money, even height. “I’ve been blessed in every way. It’s not a fair fight.”
The old priest leaned in. A wicked gleam lit his eyes. “Then give it up. Stop competing. Take yourself out of the race. That’s what the Church can do for you. You can study your religion for its own sake. You can still do your research and see patients, for their sake. You would have a place in a world of men who aren’t competing with you for women. You can renounce the world. The Church can be a refuge.”
Dante spread his hands over his face again. His stubble scraped his palms. “I’ve never wanted to be a priest. I’ve always wanted to be doctor, from the time I was a small child.”
“Don’t let a child make your career decisions for you, even the child you once were. You don’t have to be a parish priest and preside over Mass every day. I haven’t celebrated the Mass in, oh Lord, decades. I attend, but I do not celebrate the Mass. You don’t have to do the superstitious mumbo-jumbo.”
Superstitious mumbo-jumbo. As Vidal had said, stupid. As Angela had said, stupid neurotransmitters. “You mean the Christian part?”
“The superstitious things,” Father Sergei said, “that we tell the laity. When I go into Mass every morning, the ritual is performed, and I have a place in it. As for Faith, well, I have an intellectualized view of faith. I have to, considering what I teach about the end of the world. If I believed that Jesus Christ was returning and the End of Days was imminent, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you about embarking on years of study. I wouldn’t go back to the house I share with three other men tonight and drink beer and play poker.” He smiled ruefully. “Of course, as our class has discussed, the end of the world may well be nigh. The Jews are ingathering in Israel. They control Jerusalem. All they have to do is build the Third Temple.”
Debate sparked in Dante’s sore head. “What would you be doing,” Dante asked, “if you thought this was literally the end of the world?”
The old priest shrugged. “I confess regularly, what there is for me to confess, so I think I’m quite safe, personally.” He scratched his white-bristled neck. “I suppose I would be one of those nuts in a sandwich board that reads ‘The End Is Near,’ standing on a street corner, trying to save people. I was in Mexico City in 1985 when that earthquake hit, and when everyone was screaming and running past me up toward the hills, I ran down. I ran into the rubble of the hospital and shoveled it behind me with my hands. Tore the skin off of my hands. The glass. The broken bricks. The steel.” He turned his palms over, but the scars had melted into his rugged, wrinkled skin. “The steel girders were hot from twisting, like a wire you bend back and forth. The Mexican government said that only nine thousand people died, but all those buildings were destroyed. It looked like the firebombing of Dresden. The death toll must have been more than a hundred thousand souls. That’s why I’m a priest, because I run down, toward the rubble.” His dry lips pressed together. “I see that in you. If you knew where the earthquake was, you’d run toward it. You run toward your mother’s illness. You run toward your dying patients. You haven’t abandoned them, like other people would.”
Dante hesitated. Truth weighed on him. “I don’t think I believe in God.”
Father Sergei shrugged. “The novitiates in my classes talk about their personal relationship with Jesus Christ, or the Call, or their experiences with the Holy Spirit. The clinical term is ‘magical thinking,’ isn’t it? It’s certainly wishful thinking, spoken aloud. I don’t have a literal relationship with God. More of a metaphorical one.”
A metaphorical relationship with superstitious mumbo-jumbo was not a good enough reason for Dante to bind himself to the Church. “That’s not enough.”
The priest shrugged. “It’s enough for me. It’s a place in the world. It’s the chance to help without expectations.” He smirked, but kindly. “And winning you over from the secular humanists would be quite a triumph. The Church loves conversions.”
Dante covered his mouth with one hand, afraid to say anything, because giving up the world and running toward the rubble bespoke his own annihilation.
He didn’t want to. He couldn’t. Everyone Dante knew would be derisive, his colleagues, his friends, even his sisters. He despised giving up everything to be a priest, that metaphorical self-immolation to obtain a metaphorical relationship.
Yet, he craved to burn away the callous man that screwed different women every night, who could not even stay with them for a whole night unless he was passed out, drunk.
The seminary had opened to him, even when he couldn’t give himself completely, yet.
Sergei was asking too much, to ask for all of Dante. He couldn’t burn himself up like that.
There wasn’t enough of him left after all that was gone.
Yet, as he was now, no one would visit him when he was incapacitated from Alzheimer’s Disease, which might be only thirty years away, or twenty.
That loneliness terrified him.
He could recreate himself, if he burned away the part of him that slept with married women, that drank to blackout every night, that couldn’t be alone and yet could not connect.
“Yes,” Dante said.
Relief smothered him. He wanted to belong. He wanted to be a part of something instead of lonely and wandering.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ll be a Jesuit.”
~~~~~
Father Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi is a main character in RABID: A Novel, coming soon from Malachite Publishing for ereaders and in bookstores.
~~~~~
“[In RABID: A Novel] Kenyon pulls together all the beauty and terror found in religion and all the beauty and terror found in science to create a fictional space where every person seeks light, whether at the lab bench, or at the church altar, or both. We all of us are seekers and sinners; we, the devout and the damned, are all the same.”
-Barbara J. King, Bookslut
“[A] solid good read by novelist TK Kenyon, a gifted writer who has crafted a book of such mystery that you find yourself, at midnight, on the edge of your seat, asking, ‘What's next? What's next?’”
r /> - Thom Jones, Award-Winning author of:
The Pugilist at Rest, Cold Snap, Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine
~~~~~
TK Kenyon
TK Kenyon is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, novelist, award-winning short story writer, pharmaceutical industry regulatory consultant, technical writer, molecular virologist, neuroscientist, minivan-driving mom, happy wife, cat slave, surfer, scuba diver, gourmet chef, mostly vegetarian, chocolatier, gardener, capsaicin addict, caffeine junkie, Apache and Scot descendant, native Arizonan, Connectikite, nouveau feminist, political moderate with extremist tendencies, radical atheist, Buddhist-curious, occasional UU, Tamil Ayer Brahmin Hindu by marriage, ex-actress, grown-up child beauty queen, PhD, MFA, BS (in so many ways), ASU Sun Devil, Iowa Hawkeye, UPenn Quaker, and always looking for something interesting to do.
What To Eat When You Eat Out GLUTEN-FREE (60 Chain Restaurants)
American Stories: 7 Award-Winning Short Stories by TK Kenyon
Jitterbugging with The Bomb: Stories about WWII by TK Kenyon
Rabid: A Novel by TK Kenyon– Coming Soon
Callous: A Novel by TK Kenyon– Coming Soon
Homepage at: https://tkkenyon.com/
Blog at: https://tkkenyon.blogspot.com/
Celiac Maniac Blog: https://celiac-maniac.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @TKKenyon.
Back to Table of Contents
Review This Ebook
Review this ebook and get free stuff! If you liked this ebook, please review it on your ebook retailer’s website. Email Malachite Publishing with (1) a link to the review and (2) your email address, and we’ll email you a gift certificate for a free short ebook for the e-reader of your choice. Reviews don’t have to be long. One sentence is fine.
If you didn’t like this ebook, please email the same email address and include (1) a short synopsis (1 sentence is fine) and (2) your email address, and we’ll send you the exact same coupon for a story that we hope you’ll enjoy more.
If you found a mistake or typo in this ebook, you may be a winner! Email the author at Email a Typo to Malachite Publishing and describe the typo and where it is (any sort of marker: the sentence with the typo, chapter and paragraph number, etc.) The first person to report each typo or mistake will receive a free ebook for their e-reader of choice.