Authors: Darcey Steinke
WALTER HAD FESTOONED St. Paul’s front doors with evergreen garlands and the little statue of the Holy Mother wore a holly wreath around her head. Mary opened the iron side gate; the metal was cold on her fingers and she walked the icy path. Inside, the walls along the corridor were missing chunks of plaster, and Walter’s door was open, his office filled with smoke. He was addicted to incense, the rare variety produced by the Benedictine monks of Prinknash; sometimes his room was as smoky as a rock concert.
“Mary,” he said, looking up from his laptop; the screen’s blue light underlit his face and highlighted his black curly hair. He could be working on his Christmas sermon, but he also frequented a chat room for theologically minded
adherents of S&M. The computer light was the room’s only illumination. His bookshelf, the paintings of St. Paul’s former ministers, and all the other ministerial objects were cloaked in a vaporous gloom. Walter pulled the little chain on his desk lamp and the Jesus shade lit up, incense swirling above.
“Thanks for letting me come. I know it’s busy, with Christmas and everything,” Mary said while laying her coat over the warm radiator and unzipping the baby’s snowsuit. Static from his polar-fleece cap made his hair stand on end.
“Look at the little punk rocker.” Walter laughed. “Can I hold him?”
“If you take off that smoky sweater.” Mary glanced at the cigarette butts in the glass ashtray. “What happened to the patch?”
“It didn’t work; it was like getting the Holy Spirit when you want Jesus.” Walter took the baby onto his lap and kissed the top of his head. There was a tap on the door and Junot, the teenage custodian, stepped into the room. His jeans rode so low on his hips Mary could see Mickey Mouse on his boxers. He was a good-looking kid with olive skin and coffee-colored eyes.
“What needs to be done today, Father?” he asked.
Walter had given up explaining that he was an Episcopal, not a Catholic, priest.
“I have a list here,” he said, passing over a piece of loose-leaf paper. “And I guess you better bring up the crèche. I think it’s tacky, but the Sunday school director wants it out there.”
Junot nodded and retreated down the hallway.
“So do you think I’m crazy?” Mary asked.
Walter looked into her eyes, then glanced at her fingers worrying a Kleenex. She knew he was thinking of last summer when a voice had told her to fill the bathtub with dirt and plant flowers. Or that time in college when she’d been determined a little Yorkie had said her name.
Junot walked past the doorway carrying a plastic camel, the electrical cord wrapped around the animal’s long golden leg. The baby whined and Walter jostled him on his knee.
“Well. So. You have this baby,” he began, “this little creature that came through you but from the Great Beyond, or maybe I should say the Great Before or in any case another plane.” He paused; it was when he gave
spiritual advice that Walter most resembled the stoner he’d been in college. “So that’s disturbing, right?”
Mary nodded. Junot walked past the doorway again, this time carrying plastic sheep, one under each arm. The glass paperweight on Walter’s desk transfixed the baby. Mary knew he thought it was edible.
“So maybe you feel curious about this spiritual plane and you feel you want some contact with it . . .”
Mary nodded. She heard Junot coming down the hallway.
“I mean you probably think God resides out somewhere in the universe, right? So in your mind you need a conduit.”
She did feel a need for some sort of portal. “I guess that’s right, though you make it sound like a
Star Trek
episode.”
Junot, who had overheard what Walter was saying, stuck his head into the doorway. He held a shepherd in a cream-colored robe. “Father, do you think if you step on a crack your soul flies out from your body?”
“Who told you that?”
“My mother,” Junot said. “It happened to her.” Junot lived with his mother in the Smith Street projects. She
was, according to him, in nearly constant contact with the spirit world. She spoke to God in the middle of breakfast, condemning him for her lousy night’s sleep. She prayed on the subway, in the grocery store. When her sister in Puerto Rico was sick, Junot said her prayers were like a form of surveillance.
“Did she get it back?” Mary asked.
“Oh, she has some story about an angel putting her soul back. This was after she’d been through three trials. She had to assist a stranger in need. Help a sick animal. I think she fed a stray cat for that one.”
“And the last one?” Walter asked.
“She had to speak with a flower.”
“She talked to it?” Mary said.
“Yeah, that’s how she knew which night the angel would come.”
“And you believe all this?” Walter asked.
Junot shrugged and smiled. “I guess,” he said as he walked back down the hall toward the church basement.
The baby’s eyes bulged a little and he spit up a few drops of curdled milk.
“Oh dear,” Walter said, passing him back to Mary and using a Kleenex to wipe off his black pants.
She heard pounding footsteps on the basement stairs, and Junot ran into the office. He was holding the baby Jesus. The plastic baby was no bigger then a football. His legs, arms and head were peach. He had blue eyes, blond hair and wore a tiny white toga. Junot held Jesus up to Walter’s face. “FUCK YOU” was written on the infant’s forehead in black Magic Marker.
On the subway ride back home Mary tried to pray.
Lord Jesus, have mercy on me
, but her words were overwhelmed with the Desitin Ointment she needed to buy for the baby’s rash, the ear thermometer, that weird thing her husband had said about the French actress’s ass. Over her head was a placard poem about how numbers repeated rapaciously into infinity, how apples never lie, how the body at best is a transitory vehicle. A few seats down, a pale man wearing an aviator’s cap began to cough, his hack like syrup at rapid boil.
The baby fell asleep, his body warm as a patch of sunlight against her sweater, his tiny mouth open and his eyelids as fragile as flower petals. Maybe he dreamt of the time before his conception when he’d inhabited every blade of grass. She figured he could read the
consciousness of objects; that’s why the pot of ivy fascinated him, as if each shiny leaf transmuted an idea. He got as much from watching the aura around a lightbulb as the expression on her face. He slept, drooling into the material of the baby carrier, until the thud of the elevator doors jolted him awake.
As she unlocked the front door of her apartment, he arched his back, wrinkled his face up and screamed. Mary pulled off her coat, unbuttoned her blouse and yanked down the flap of her nursing bra. At the scent of her body, the baby agitated his face against her nipple like a baby bird. His tiny features relaxed as he latched on and sucked. The glands high in her breast tingled as her milk came down. Usually her milk was exclusively for the baby, but occasionally the sweet liquid came for flood victims on television and when the homeless man asked her for a quarter. Sometimes she leaked milk when the neighbor’s dog barked or at the memory of how excited her mother got during her favorite TV show. The baby emptied her breast, and so she shifted him, hand cupped around his black hair, and forced his mouth onto her left.
At first she’d read magazines while nursing: articles about endangered albino owls, and how a deaf doctor was
the best surgeon in Soviet Russia. But now any word longer than two syllables exhausted her and made her feel nervous. So she stared out the window at the snow coming down, until the baby’s mouth released her nipple and she burped him against her shoulder, changed his wet diaper and lay him in his bassinet.
She tiptoed out of the room and flung herself down on her bed, listening to the sound of the occasional car tires muted and lovely in the new snow. No matter how tired her muscles felt or how much her head ached, blood raced in her veins. She tried again to pray.
Come, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me
. But the mole above her left eyebrow started to throb. Was it cancerous? She jumped up to check it in the bathroom mirror. Settling down again, she imagined sweeping all her petty thoughts off the end of a dock with a long bristly janitor’s broom, but just when her head felt clear, she thought about the steak and mashed potatoes she wanted to make for dinner, that she needed dental floss and more liquid Tylenol.
The sensation of the baby’s lips on her nipple lingered. Walter would understand; he himself believed in the necessity of physical pleasure. So she dragged her pointer finger over her tongue and slid her hand beneath the waistband
of her underpants. She felt her clit begin to rotate. Only God could infuse something so rudimentary with life. She was made out of cosmic refuse—stardust, smoky vapor—and so occasionally if she concentrated, she could tease down the life force for her own selfish use.
She sank her finger inside herself, and really, though she didn’t mean to brag, she was ridiculously wet and decided therefore to split the universe.
Fuck me
, she said, and then again, but more politely,
Fuck me, please
. There was so much vulgarness inside her; it was beautiful really. But she could be tender too. She planned to ask the Man at the coffee shop about the scar over his right eyebrow and he would tell her that as a little boy he’d fallen onto the ice. And that worked for a while: the little boy falling onto the cold, hard ice, wet blood pooling above his blue eye, a drop or two saturating the snow.
The phone sounded like the twill of a metal bird. Her husband calling from the office to tell her HE wanted to come home but that THEY wanted him to go out to another Christmas party. The baby shifted in the bassinet, and Mary closed her eyes and went directly to the babysitter’s thin teenage body entwined with her boyfriend’s thin teenage body, as they fucked crazily on the couch. And
for a while that was okay, the scent of Coca-Cola and sweat as their flat stomachs and sharp hips collided. But then it wasn’t enough and it was time for the father to walk over to the couch, lower his pants and offer the babysitter his cock.
This worked immediately; a sweet sting infused her flesh. But just as quickly the water began to leak out of the drain. And she tried frantically to inhabit each of them, father, babysitter, boyfriend. Each had characteristics as mysterious as the holy trinity. She decided to kick the babysitter out. But it was too late. She was the babysitter, the unbabysitter, the ur-babysitter, the ghost in the babysitter. She tensed her pelvis and a swarm of butterflies careened up her spine. The vibrations entered her like radio waves, her bones felt molten and she was a twig pitched out into the universe. And that WAS IT: Her sex twitched and she felt the lobes of her brain open like a flower and she was inside of a wave, made from torn-up flower petals. Broken petals filling her mouth as she swung open the car door and staggered away from the crash. Flames jumping from the engine, her head banged up and spacey, her pelvis tipped and aching as if she actually had gotten fucked. Blood beat inside her ear and as the impact
dissipated, her sadness swelled. Nothing had changed. Sure, the snow under the car tires had degenerated into slush, but that had more to do with decay than divinity and it was infuriating, really, having to wait so long for him to come.
WHEN MARY WOKE at two A.M. her husband was still not home. The baby slept pressed against her breast like a puppy in a litter, and she was afraid if she slept again she’d smother him with her hair. She heard this had happened in Utah, a baby choked by sucking a clump of his mother’s hair; she heard too that a father had forgotten his baby in a car seat and that the baby, in the heat of the sealed car, had died. She heard that a helicopter blade had decapitated a baby, and that a grandmother on a ferryboat had lost her grip and her tiny granddaughter had disappeared into the boat’s churning water.
The baby whimpered and agitated his mouth. She carried him to the front room, sat on the blue chair and helped him latch on to her nipple. Objects in the dark
glinted, as if mica chips ran through everything. Her lucidity was terrifying; she wanted her consciousness to break down into softer parts. So she ran through all the car games she’d played as a kid. Telling the baby how first she would ask a silly question and then her mother would ask an even sillier one:
Can I eat my hat for lunch? Are your underpants made of ice cream? Did you like your butterfly sandwich?
And then the other game where her mother would give her a choice between two things:
Would you rather be a dog or a cat? Would you rather be a cheese sandwich or a toasted cheese sandwich?
The phone started its electronic purr and for some reason she thought of an image from her childhood: President Kennedy’s wounded head, not scary now, just soft and sad. After the beep her husband said,
These jokers are keeping me out all night
. Muffled shouts, a girl said something in French and then her husband again:
If I can get a cab, I’ll be home soon, if not, I’ll have to take the subway
. And it was in the silence after the tape rolled back as she set the baby in his bassinet that a flash of light came from a source behind her. She turned and saw the sparks hovering again but this time in the corner of the bedroom.
She walked closer; each diorama showed a different
scene. A porcelain lamp, a fluorescent panel, each smaller than a pea but so particular, as if her eyes were as powerful as microscopes. A chrome lamp showed a woman cutting the fingernails of a small child, and an oak tree was silhouetted by a streetlight. She stepped closer and saw the expression on the face of an old man reading a newspaper.
Outside half-hearted flurries swirled down over the sidewalk. She’d decided to put the baby into the carrier and walk down to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Flakes collected on the shoulders of her coat, and the cold bit into her bare hands. Since the very first week of her pregnancy all her senses had been elevated. She was like a wolf, able to smell cigarette smoke from half a block away and warm Chinese food from the restaurant on Court Street. Her vision was sharper too; she could make out every nuance of the rotting leaves between the grates of the gutter. Static snow flew around, and it was so quiet she could hear her own footfalls and so looked down at her boots making patterns in the fine layer of sidewalk snow.