I Am God (14 page)

And God.

‘Here I am, Father McKean.’

The voice entered suddenly and without warning. It arrived from the semi-darkness and from a world without peace that he had forgotten for a few moments. Supporting himself on the armrest, he leaned towards the grille. On the other side, in the dim light, a barely glimpsed figure, a shoulder covered in a green fabric.

‘Good day to you. What can I do for you?’

‘Nothing. I think you’re waiting for me.’

These words made him feel uneasy. The voice was hollow but calm, the voice of someone who wasn’t afraid of the abyss he was staring into.

‘Do we know each other?’

‘Very well. Or not at all, if you prefer.’

The unease became a slight sense of dread. The priest found refuge in the only words he could offer him.

‘You’ve entered a confessional. I assume you wish to make confession?’

‘Yes.’

The monosyllable was resolute but nonchalant.

‘Then tell me your sins.’

‘I don’t have any. I’m not looking for absolution because I don’t need it. And anyway I know you wouldn’t give it to me.’

On his side, the priest was stunned by this declaration of futility. From the tone of voice he sensed that it wasn’t mere
presumption but came from something much bigger and more devastating. At any other time, Father Michael McKean might have reacted differently. Now he still had his eyes and ears full of images and sounds of death and the sense of defeat that takes hold after an almost sleepless night.

‘If that’s what you think, then what can I do for you?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to leave you a message.’

‘What kind of message?’

A moment’s silence. But it wasn’t hesitation. He was simply giving him time to clear his mind of any other thoughts.

‘It was me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I blew up the building on the Lower East Side.’

That took Father McKean’s breath away.

The images piled up in his mind. Dust, ambulances, the screams of the wounded, the blood, corpses taken away in sheets, the moans of the survivors, the anguish of those who had lost everything. The statements on television. A whole city, a whole country again transfixed with the fear that was, as someone had said, the only true horseman of the apocalypse. And the indistinct shadow on the other side of that thin barrier claimed to be responsible for all that.

Reason dictated that he take his time and think clearly. There were sick people in the world who liked to assume the guilt for murders and disasters they couldn’t possibly be responsible for.

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘What?’

‘That I’m a fantasist, that there’s nothing to prove what I’m saying is true.’

Michael McKean, a man of reason and a priest by belief,
was nothing at that moment but an animal with all its senses on the alert. And every shred of his ancestral instinct screamed at him that the man on the other side of the confessional was telling the truth.

He needed to breathe for a few moments, before continuing. The other man understood that and respected his silence. When he found his voice again, he appealed to a piety he already knew he wouldn’t find.

‘What do all those deaths, all that pain, mean to you?’

‘Justice. And justice should never create pain. So much of it has been dispensed in the past that it has become an object of worship. Why should this time be different?’

‘What do you mean by justice?’

‘The Red Sea opening and closing. Sodom. Gomorrah. I have many other examples, if you want them.’

The voice was silent for a moment. On his side of the confessional, which at that moment felt like the coldest place in the world, Father McKean would have liked to shout out that these were just stories, that they shouldn’t be taken literally, that …

He held back and missed the opportunity to retaliate. The other man took this as an invitation to continue.

‘Men have had two gospels, one for their souls and one for their lives. One religious and one secular. Both have taught men more or less the same things. Brotherhood, justice, equality. There have been people who have spread them through the world and through time.’

The voice appeared to come from a place much further than the tiny distance separating them. Now it had become a mere breath, sour with disappointment. The kind of disappointment that gives rise not to tears but to anger.

‘But almost nobody has had the strength to live according
to these teachings.’

‘All men are imperfect,’ Father McKean replied. ‘That’s part of nature. How can you not feel compassion? Haven’t you repented what you did?’

‘No. Because I will do it again. And you will be the first to know.’

Father McKean hid his face in his hands. What was happening to him was too much for one man. If this person’s words corresponded to the truth, then this was a test beyond his strength. Or the strength of anyone who wore a priest’s cassock. The voice pressed on. Not fierce now, but soft and persuasive. Full of understanding.

‘In your words during the mass, there was pain. There was compassion. But there was no faith.’

He tried in vain to rebel, not against those words, but against his fear. ‘How can you say that?’

‘I’ll help you regain it, Michael McKean,’ the man continued, as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘I can do that.’

There was another pause. Then the three words that set eternity in motion.

‘I am God.’

In many ways, Joy was the kingdom of almost.

Everything almost worked, was almost shiny, almost new. The roof was almost fine and the paint on the outside walls almost didn’t need retouching. The few permanent employees received their salary almost regularly, the outside helpers almost always forewent theirs. Everything was second-hand, and in that display of the old and worn anything new stood out like the light of a beacon in the distance. But it was also a place where every day, with great difficulty, a new piece of the life raft was built.

As he drove the Batmobile along the unpaved drive towards the house, John Kortighan knew that in the bus with him he had a group of kids to whom life had been a terrible counsellor. Little by little it had devoured their trust, and they had been alone for so long they took solitude for the norm. Each one, with that originality typical of adverse fate, had found his or her own destructive way to go astray, and the indifference of the world had covered their traces.

Now in this place, together, they could try to find themselves, realizing that, logically and not by chance, they had a right to an alternative. And he felt fortunate and grateful to have been chosen to be part of that enterprise.

However hard and desperate it was.

John drove in through the gate and a minute or so later the van crossed the forecourt and pulled up under a canopy. The kids got out and headed for the back door of the kitchen, arguing and joking among themselves. For all of them Sunday was a special day, a day without ghosts.

Jerry Romero expressed everyone’s opinion. ‘Boy, we’re hungry.’

Hendymion Lee, a young man of oriental descent, shrugged his shoulders in reply. ‘So what’s new? You’re always hungry. I’m sure if you were the Pope, they’d have to give communion with slices of salami instead of the host.’

Jerry went up to Hendymion and grabbed his head in an arm lock. ‘If it was up to you, gook, they’d do it with chopsticks.’

They both laughed.

Shalimar Bennett, a black girl with funny spiked hair and the body of a gazelle, joined in the joke. ‘Jerry become Pope? He couldn’t even become a priest. He can’t stand wine. At his first mass he’d get so smashed they’d throw him out.’

John smiled. He lingered in the middle of the forecourt, watching them disappear inside the house. He was not fooled by that relaxed atmosphere. He knew how delicate the balance was, how in each of them memory and temptation were one and the same, until they could be transformed into just a memory. But what he witnessed every day was beautiful – the attempt at rebirth, the construction of a possible future.

Alone, standing in the middle of the forecourt, the sun directly overhead, John Kortighan lifted his eyes to the blue sky and looked at the house.

Joy had been built on the edge of that part of Pelham Bay Park that adjoined the Bronx, on a six-acre property facing the
stretch of sea that wove its way northward like a finger poking into the land. The main building was a two-storey construction in the shape of a square C, built according to the architectural dictates that characterized houses in New England, using mainly wood and dark brick. The free side was open towards the channel and the green coast beyond it, which, by contrast, descended southward like a hand holding back the sea.

There was the entrance, facing the garden, which you reached via a porch in the shape of a half-octagon, lit by large glass doors. On the ground floor were the kitchen and pantry, the dining room, a small infirmary, a library, and the games and TV room. On one of the short sides, two bedrooms with a shared bathroom for those members of staff who, like him, lived permanently at Joy. On the upper floor, the kids’ bedrooms, and in the attic Father McKean’s room.

The long side faced the forecourt, where a second building had been built to house a laboratory for those who opted for more manual activities instead of studying. In back of the laboratory was the vegetable garden, which stretched as far as the western edge of the property, where there was an orchard. Originally the vegetable garden and orchard had been developed as an experiment, with the idea of supplying a distraction for the kids at Joy, allowing them to experience something physical, and at the same time rewarding. In a short time, to everyone’s surprise, the production of fruit and vegetables had grown until the community was almost
self-sufficient
. In fact, when the harvest was particularly good, a group of the kids went down to the market in Union Square to sell their products.

Mrs Carraro appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘What’s this about eating without Father Michael?’

‘He’s been delayed. He has to say the 12.30 mass.’

‘Well, no one will die if we wait a bit. We can’t have Sunday lunch without that man.’

‘All right, colonel.’ John pointed to the inside of the kitchen, from which came the high-pitched echo of the kids’ conversation. ‘But you tell the alligators.’

‘They won’t say a word. I’d like to see them try.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

John watched as she disappeared from the doorway, her face set for battle. Even though Mrs Carraro was greatly outnumbered by the kids, he had no doubt who would prevail. John left the kids to work it out with their cook. She was an apparently gentle and submissive woman but on several occasions had demonstrated how determined she could be. He knew that when she made a decision it was difficult to get her to change her mind, especially if the decision favoured Father McKean.

He turned left and walked slowly along the side of the house, breathing in the air, which had a slight salty taste.

Thinking.

The sun was already hot and the vegetation was starting to explode with that silent green clamour that always surprised the heart and the eyes and knocked down the cold gray walls of winter. He reached the front of the house and set off along the garden path. He walked until all he had in front of him was the shiny tabletop of the sea and the green of the park on the other side of the channel. He stopped with his hands in his pockets and his face lifted to the breeze.

He turned again to look at the house.

Bricks and wood.

Glass and concrete.

Technique and manual work.

All human things.

What was inside those walls, whether of brick or wood, went beyond that. It meant something. And, for the first time in his life, he felt part of that something, regardless of the point of departure and arrival and the unavoidable accidents along the way.

John Kortighan wasn’t a believer. He had never managed to summon up any faith either in man or in God. And consequently not even in himself. But Michael McKean had somehow managed to open a breach in the wall that people had apparently built to keep him out, the wall that he had strengthened on his side in retaliation. God was still a distant, nebulous concept, hidden behind the obvious humanity of His representative. But in a way, even though John had never said this to him, Father McKean wasn’t just saving the kids’ lives, he was also saving his.

On the upper floor, behind the windows that reflected the sky, he glimpsed figures moving. Kids moving around in their rooms. Each had his experience, his fragment of life. Put all together by chance, like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope, they made a vivid fragile image. Like all unstable things, it wasn’t easy to decipher but was
surprisingly
colourful.

He walked back the way he had come, entered the house by the main door and started upstairs. As he climbed, step after step, he let his thoughts wander.

The story of Joy was both very simple and very
complicated
. And as was often the case, its foundation derived from a tragic event, as if some plans needed to be born out of pain in order to find the strength to become reality.

John wasn’t living in the neighbourhood at that time, but he had heard about it from Michael, whose concise account had
been corroborated by a couple of longer conversations with the parish priest of Saint Benedict.

It
was
…

a
Friday
and
they
were
holding
a
funeral.

A
boy
of
seventeen,
Robin
Wheaters,
had
been
found
dead
of
an
overdose
in
a
corner
of
the
park
on
the
other
side
of
the
bridge,
at
the
junction
of
Shore
Road
and
City
Island
Road.
A couple who were jogging had spotted a body lying on the ground, half hidden in the bushes. They had approached and found that he was unconscious but still breathing. The ambulance had rushed him to hospital, but to no avail. Robin had died soon afterwards in the arms of his mother, who had been taken there in a police car, after she had contacted the police to inform them that for some unknown reason her son had been out all night. Nobody in the family had ever had the slightest suspicion that he had been involved with drugs. The cause of death made his appalling end all the more horrifying. The post mortem and the absence of marks on his skin had revealed that in all probability it had been his first time. Fate had decided that there wouldn’t be a second time.

His mother was the widowed sister of Barry Lovito, a lawyer of Italian extraction who practised in Manhattan but had chosen to continue living in Country Club. He was a rich man, unmarried and a workaholic, who had fought hard all his life to reach his position at the top of the heap. And had been so successful that the heap was now almost entirely his.

When his brother-in-law had died, his typically Italian sense of family had led him to take his sister and nephew into his house. The woman wasn’t in good health, suffering from all kinds of psychosomatic symptoms, and the loss of her husband certainly hadn’t improved her physical or mental condition. As for Robin, he was a sensitive, melancholy,
suggestible boy. Left very much to his own devices, he had fallen into bad company, as often happens when solitude is forced on a person.

In church they were both there, the uncle and the mother. Counsellor Lovito was wearing an impeccably cut dark suit that marked him out in the middle of everyone as a wealthy person. His jaws were clenched and he kept his eyes fixed in front of him, out of grief and maybe also a sense of guilt. For him, the boy had been the son he had never had and, after a life spent chasing after success, was starting to miss. When his brother-in-law had died, he had deluded himself into thinking that he might be able to take his place, not realizing that the first duty of a parent is to be there.

The woman’s face was gaunt with grief. It was clear from her hollow red eyes that she had no more tears in her, and from her expression that she was not only burying her son but also any desire to carry on living. She followed the coffin out of the church, leaning on her brother for support, her thin body in a black pant suit that suddenly seemed to have become a couple of sizes too big.

Father McKean was at the back of the church, surrounded by a group of teenagers, many of whom had been friends of Robin. He had followed the service with that sense of

As Barry Lovito came out of the church, he turned his head and saw him in the middle of all those kids. His glance had lingered longer than might have been expected on the figure of Father Michael McKean. Then he had turned away and, still supporting his sister, had continued his sad progress to the car.

Three days later, Father McKean saw him again,
accompanied
by the parish priest. After the ritual introductions, Paul left them alone. It was obvious the lawyer had come to talk
to him, although he had no idea why. McKean had been at Saint Benedict for just under a year and had exchanged only greetings with him up until that moment. As if reading his mind, the lawyer hastened to satisfy his curiosity.

‘I know you’re wondering why I’m here. And especially what I’ve come to say. I’ll only take a moment.’

He started walking slowly towards the priests’ house.

‘I’ve just acquired a property, up near the park. It’s a big house, with a decent plot of land. Six acres, more or less. The kind of place that can house up to thirty people. With a view of the sea and the coast.’

Father McKean must have looked bewildered, because a half-smile appeared on Lovito’s face. He made a reassuring gesture with his hand.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not trying to sell it to you.’

Lovito reflected for a moment, uncertain whether to
continue
with this preamble. Then he decided it wasn’t necessary.

‘I’d like that house to become the base for a community where kids with the same problems as my nephew can find help and comfort. It isn’t easy, but I’d like at least to try. I know it won’t bring Robin back, but maybe it’ll give me a few hours of sleep without nightmares.’

Lovito turned his head away. They both knew perfectly well that both things were impossible.

‘Anyway that’s my problem.’

The lawyer paused, took off his dark glasses, and turned to face Father McKean full on, with the resolute air of a man who is not afraid to say or do anything.

Or to admit his own guilt.

‘Father McKean, I’m a practical man and, whatever my motive, the result is the only thing that counts, the only thing that lasts. It’s my wish that this community shouldn’t
be just a dream but become reality. And I want you to take charge of it.’

‘Me? Why me?’

‘I’ve been checking you out. And what I’ve learned has confirmed what I’d already guessed as soon as I saw you in the middle of those kids. Apart from all your other qualifications, I know you have a great influence on the young, and a great ability to communicate with them.’

The priest looked at him as if he was looking into the future. The lawyer, a man who had learned to know men, understood. And, being a lawyer, he hastened to forestall any possible objection.