On the first of November, despite waking with a hangover from the Halloween party, Marianne Engel headed immediately for the basement. Over the next two days, her last remaining half-finished statue-the terrified lion/monkey-was given legs on which it could stand. When it was completed, she lay down upon a new slab and slept for a dozen hours before throwing herself headlong into a new grotesque. All the while, I was alone upstairs with my memories of the dancing ghosts that I couldn’t have seen.
Her new goblin (a human face on the misshapen body of a bird) took seventy-four hours to complete, before she came upstairs to wash the grime off her body and gorge herself on whatever she could find in the fridge. I expected that she would, as usual, retreat to her bedroom to sleep off her fatigue, but no, she went right back downstairs to stretch herself over another block. After absorbing its stony dreams, she spent another seventy-something hours in the thrall of her fresh suitor. When she was finished, a warty toad with the screaming beak of an eagle had been uncovered.
She returned to her bed for a proper sleep, but after ten hours Marianne Engel was back in the kitchen drinking a pot of coffee and eating a pound of bacon. (When not actively carving, she was allowed meat.) As soon as her plate was clean, she took a few steps towards the basement stairs. “Another one is calling.” When I asked how she would be able to sleep on the stone after so much coffee, she answered that it wouldn’t be necessary. “This one was already talking to me while I was working on the toad.”
Although it was only the second week of November, Marianne Engel was already starting the month’s third new grotesque. The increase in production was unsettling enough, but there was also a change in intensity: she was throwing herself into a frenzy that outdid even the most torrid of the sessions I’d already witnessed. Sweat ran down her body, leaving trails in the stone dust, and she had to open up the massive oak doors to let in the cool autumn air. She never extinguished the hundred red candles that surrounded her, and their crowns of fire responded to the wind like wheat waltzing in the field. With her tools flying around, I could not help but think of a farmer wielding his harvest scythe in a desperate effort to outrace the coming winter.
When this third statue was finished, Marianne Engel immediately embarked on the next.
The hammering had become so insistent that the air of the house seemed empty whenever she put down her tools. Sometimes it-the noise, not the rare silences-even drove me out of the house. I never went far, usually hiding behind the corner of the fortress to watch the parishioners visit St. Romanus. Father Shanahan would stand on the front steps, glad-handing them on their way out, imploring them to come back the following week. They all promised that they would, and most even did.
Shanahan seemed a sincere enough fellow, as far as priests go, although I must admit that I’m hardly an impartial observer. I’ve always felt a strange kind of fascination/revulsion towards men of the cloth: because I despise the institutions for which they stand, I want to despise them as people as well. But all too often I find that I cannot hate the man, only the robe.
I imagine the reader’s natural impulse is to assume my atheism has been cultivated from rough experience: the childhood loss of relatives, a career in pornography, my drug addiction, an accident in which I was burned to a crisp. The assumption would be incorrect.
There is no logical reason to believe in God. There are emotional reasons, certainly, but I cannot have faith that nothing is something simply because it would be reassuring. I can no more believe in God than I can believe an invisible monkey lives in my ass; however, I would believe in both if they could be scientifically proven. This is the crux of the problem for atheists: it is impossible to prove the nonexistence of a thing, and yet theists tend to put the onus on us to prove just that. “An absence of proof is not proof of absence,” they say smugly. Well, true enough. But all it would take is one giant flaming crucifix in the sky, NO MONKEY IN YOUR ASS? seen by everyone in the world at the same time, WHAT ABOUT A SNAKE IN YOUR SPINE? to convince me that God does exist.
Marianne Engel emerged to ask me to pick up some instant coffee. I thought this a strange request, given that the basement had a coffeemaker that used regular grounds, but since it was her money that kept the household running, I could hardly refuse.
As soon as I returned, she yanked the jar out of my hands, grabbed a spoon, and headed back down into her workshop. I thought about it for a few moments, telling myself that she couldn’t possibly…and then peered down from the top step to see that indeed she was.
Between drags on her cigarette she was thrusting the instant coffee into her mouth, chomping at the crystals like a baseball player working over a wad of chewing tobacco, and washing it all down with the brewed coffee in her oversized mug.
The doorbell rang.
If you are like most people, a doorbell rings and you answer it; but for me, it’s more complicated. For me, it is a test of will. What if the visitor is a Girl Scout selling cookies? What if she takes one look at me, wets her pants, and faints? How could I explain an unconscious, urine-soaked Girl Scout on my front porch? For someone who looks the way I do, that’s pretty much an invitation for the good townspeople to light their torches and chase you to the old windmill.
I decided to take my chances and face the challenge, even if it was a Girl Scout. When I opened the door, I saw a middle-aged man and woman, probably husband and wife, in good clothing. The woman pulled back as if she were Nosferatu and I the sun. (Occasionally, I find it enjoyable to cast someone else in the role of monster.) The man instinctively stepped in front of his vampiric wife and shielded her with his arm. Her lips drew up over her teeth.
“Yes?”
“I, ah-we,” the heroic man stuttered, not quite sure of what to make of me, while the woman shrank back farther and smaller. The man, steeling his nerves, blurted, “We wanted to visit the church! That’s all!” Just in case I was as stupid as I was burned, he hitched his thumb in the direction of St. Romanus. “We saw that it’s-ah, ah-closed, and then we saw this place with, you know, all the gargoyles and stuff, like that, like a church has, and-so, you know, we naturally thought that maybe this place is like, ah, ah, ah, affiliated with the church. Or something.” He paused. “Is it?”
“No.”
Marianne Engel was doing something new with her stonework: adorning each emerging statue with a number. The first was 27, the next was 26, the third was 25; she was currently working on number 24.
When I asked her about it, she said, “My Three Masters recently told me that I had only twenty-seven hearts remaining. This is the countdown.”
I waited until I saw the participants in Father Shanahan’s Thursday night Bible study class start to shuffle out. It was time to head over to St. Romanus and complain about the parishioners who mistook the fortress for some sort of Christian outreach program.
I walked up the church’s front steps, looked left and right, and went through the front door. My steps echoed, but Shanahan-standing in the middle of the pews, looking up at the windows-didn’t seem to notice. He was in deep contemplation of a stained-glass representation of Christ on the crucifix. It was strange to see someone observing such a thing at night, because there was no light to stream in and make Jesus look all shiny and superior.
He was unaware of my presence until I spoke, offering him the proverbial penny for his thoughts. My wretched voice startled him, as did my plasticked face when he turned, but he regained his composure promptly. With a quick laugh he suggested that, for once, he might even be able to offer full value on that penny.
“Strange how one can look at this every day”-he said, indicating the Christ-“and still find something new. The four arms of the cross represent the four elements of the Earth, of course, but see how Christ is pinned to it, with His arms outstretched and His feet together? It forms a triangle, and three is the number of God. The Holy Trinity. Three days of the resurrection. Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. You get the idea. So four meets three, Earth meets Heaven. Which is perfect, of course, for is not Jesus the Son of both God and Man?”
He adjusted his glasses, and chuckled a bit. “You caught me in a bit of a fancy, I’m afraid. Can I help you?”
“I live next door.”
“Yes, I’ve seen you.”
“I’m an atheist.”
“Well, God believes in you,” he said. “May I offer you a cup of tea?”
He indicated his room tucked away behind the pulpit and, for some reason, I decided to follow him. Two chairs sat in front of his desk, obviously for couples who thought that a bit of the good word might help their troubled marriages. On his desk, beside a Bible, was a picture of him with his arm slung across the shoulder of another man. Next to them was a woman, quite pretty, and what appeared to be her teenaged son. The woman’s head was tilted towards her husband but her gaze was steadfastly focused upon Father Shanahan, who looked somewhat uncomfortable in his white collar. When I asked whether these were his brother and his sister-in-law, Shanahan seemed surprised that I could place them so quickly. “Do we look that much alike, my brother and I?”
“His wife is an attractive woman,” I said.
Father Shanahan cleared his throat as he poured some water into his electric kettle. “Yes. But then again, so’s Marianne.”
“You’ve met her.”
“She knows her Bible, even better than I do, but she always declines my invitations to attend Mass. Says the problem with most Christians is that they show up at church once a week to pray that God’s will be done-and when it is, they complain.” He placed two cups on the desk, as well as a small pitcher of milk. “Can’t say that I entirely disagree with her.”
He sat down in front of me and adjusted his glasses once again, even though they were already sitting correctly. I expected he would make some small talk, so it was surprising when he said, “Is it possible to take off your mask during our conversation?”
The way he asked made it clear that he was not intimidated by the mask, but simply curious about my appearance. I explained that my rehabilitation required it to remain on at all times. He nodded understandingly, but I could see just a hint of disappointment across his features. I suggested that I could take it off for a moment, if he really wanted to see what was beneath. He nodded that he would like that, yes.
When I removed the mask, he leaned forward to take a closer look. He scratched behind his ears and moved side to side so that he could inspect me from all angles. When he was finished, I asked, “Do I look like you hoped?”
“I had no expectations. I considered studying medicine before I entered the seminary. I still have subscriptions to some journals.”
The moment of his career decision came, he explained while pouring the tea, when he learned that emergency room doctors were taught to consider incoming heart attack victims as already dead. It’s a method to cope: if the patient lives the doctor can believe that he has brought someone back but if the patient “remains” dead, the doctor knows that it wasn’t anything he did wrong.
“But only God has the power over life and death,” Father Shanahan said. “While a doctor can extend a man’s physical life, a priest might help him achieve life everlasting.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“It’s a job requirement.”
“Let me ask you a question. Is it possible to believe in souls without believing in God?”
“For some, perhaps.” Shanahan took a sip from his cup. “But not for me.”
Number 24 was finished. Number 23 was finished. Number 22 was finished. It was the last week of November, and Marianne Engel finally returned upstairs. She seemed to have reached the limits of how long a body could go without a proper meal or the comfort of a real bed.
I’m not much of a cook, but I forced a meal on her and made damn sure that it was thick with calories. Even though she was obviously done in, all the caffeine and nicotine left her in a state of manic exhaustion. She bounced on her seat, her eyes unfocused, and dropped her utensils often. When the meal was finished, she tried to stand but found herself physically unable. “Can you help?”
I put my stair-climbing practice to good use and did my best to steady her from behind, half pushing her up the steps. When we reached the washroom, I opened the faucets and she sat down heavily in the tub. There was no point in putting the plug into the drain until we rinsed away the top layer of filth, so I helped her scoop water over her body. When she was finally clean enough to be properly bathed, we filled the tub.
I sat beside the tub, working her skin. Large black bags had taken residence under her eyes. I washed the stone chips from the thick tangle of her hair, which now hung like vines that someone had forgotten to water. The worst change was simply the weight she had lost: certainly ten pounds, maybe twenty. It did not look good on her because it had come off too fast, in exactly the worst way. I vowed that I would make her start eating better, more. Daily.
The cleaning reinvigorated her enough that she could walk unaided to her bedroom. As soon as she was in the sheets I turned to leave, thinking she would drop immediately into sleep. She surprised me when she called me back.
“Mainz. The marketplace. Don’t you want to know who?”