The Natural Order of Things (33 page)

The old man hobbles around the corner, his eyes lost in some twilight reverie, but upon spotting the boys, he suddenly straightens up, tucks the cane under his arm, and with a kind of regal bearing, marches toward them. The boys are well aware of his apostasy, but they are unsure if he intends to impart some heretical platitude or reprimand them for their bad behavior. With the ashes and glowing embers of their cigarettes still swirling around their ankles, they address the old man with feigned respect.

“Why, good morning, Father Loomis!”

The old man grunts, turns a quizzical eye to the lavender alliums that have survived the first unforgiving blasts of freezing autumn air. He reaches down, gently removes the partially withered head from its stem and twirls it in front of their eyes.

“You continually ask yourself, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ And this is what I say to you: What is the meaning of this flower I’m holding? What is the meaning of this fly crawling on my sleeve? What is the meaning of this conversation we’re having? All the answers to all the mysteries of this universe and the next can be found in the delicate petals of a flower. But few people comprehend the simplicity of the message. Most people look for answers elsewhere.”

He points to the pained expressions of martyrs on the chapel’s stained glass windows.

“A catalogue of torments,” he says. “Just look at them, the poor misguided souls. The disciples once asked Jesus, ‘Master, when will the Kingdom come?’ And do you know how he replied? Hmmm?”

The boys shake their heads, try to suppress their smiles.

“He said, ‘It will not come by watching for it. The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth … 
but people do not see it
.’ ”

The old man surrenders the flower to the wind and watches it fly apart and vanish.

“Eternal life,” he murmurs, “the resurrection of the flesh.” He looks up as though startled out of a dream. With spittle flying from his lips, he lets out an epiphanic cry: “To die and not be forgotten! That is the best any of us can hope for, gentlemen, the only immortality we shall ever know.”

Ignoring their smirks and snide laughter, the old man lifts his cane and waves it over their heads like a magic wand. Mantled in the soft autumn light, he continues on his
sad, directionless promenade, muttering blasphemies and puzzling oaths. He can no longer control himself. By now this is quite plain to everyone.

That evening, before saying grace and breaking bread, the priests crush an assortment of black and white pills into a fine powder and stir it into his mashed potatoes and gravy. As missionaries sent by the Church to proselytize in remote mountain villages, the Jesuits have borne witness to a thousand unspeakable nightmares, but despite battling rare diseases and risking life and limb, not for medals or glory or honor but to tell the uncomprehending bumpkins and their brood of squalling children that contraceptives are morally suspect and that God wants them to be fruitful and multiply—despite all of this, the priests find that they have no appetite for the old man’s profane banter, and they pray that the medication will temporarily solve the problem until Nature decides upon a permanent solution.

Keeping him in a perpetual drug-induced stupor—this is another thing they do to him, but still it is not the worst thing.

With its anarchy of adjoining corridors and antechambers and quiet galleries, the school is a labyrinth of forked paths that follows a mysterious logic that no one, save perhaps God, can fathom. Even after teaching at the school for nearly fifty years, the old man will sometimes lose his bearings in its funhouse geometries. Tottering along on his wooden cane, he passes through an arched threshold and into a hallway that seems to stretch on and on until it tapers away to a cruciform of ghostly white light. Under the high vaulted ceilings, he wanders like some hapless denizen in a rococo palace swarming with sculptures and mirrors and tapestries. There is a kind of sordidness about the place; it exudes decadence and frivolity.

At last he comes to a spiral staircase and stops to peer over the railing. Somewhere in that gaping darkness, he hears conspiring voices. They speak of a party and make lewd predictions about its outcome. Carefully clinging to a wrought-iron balustrade, the old man descends the twisted helix and makes his way to the basement where the limestone walls are lined not with the skulls of long-deceased Jesuits or with worm-bored coffins smelling of must and decay, but with dozens of shiny new kegs of handcrafted ale recently delivered from the local brewery. There he finds two boys rolling one of the kegs toward a ramp at the back of the building.

“You! I say, you there! What do you think you’re doing?”

The old man sucks in his breath and begins to shake with rage. The epic hellfire and brimstone sermon that has been bottled up in his heart for so long now threatens to erupt from his sputtering lips.

“You reprehensible … you impertinent … Do you have any idea who …” His words become small and faint like those of a frightened child who has been abandoned in a wilderness. “That’s strange … I was on my way back to the rectory and …” Massaging his forehead, he offers the boys an apologetic smile. “Where is the rectory, gentlemen? I’ve lived here for so long, but I can’t seem to remember …”

Using tones of quiet cajolery, the boys pretend to comfort the old man. “Follow us, Father Loomis. We’re happy to show you the way.”

Tears well up in his eyes. “Bless you. You’re very kind.”

“It’s our pleasure.”

“I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.”

“No trouble at all, Father. Really”

“It’s no picnic getting old, boys, let me tell you.”

“Oh, we can imagine.”

“I keep having these senior moments … And … Wait a minute, now … Are you certain this is the right way?”

“Of course.”

“But this is a most unusual route.”

“Circuitous. Isn’t that the right word, Father?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A very Latinate word, circuitous. Watch your step now.”

“Please, let go of me.”

The old man tries to break free, but it’s no use. With their powerful hands, the boys take his cane and prod him toward an open door. The closet has the awful dimensions of a sarcophagus; it reeks of tobacco and formaldehyde and the rich, alluvial muck of the nearby river that rises from the sewers and floods the basement after a heavy rain. In the corner there is a mouse nest, a mop, a bucket filled with gray water, an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts.

“Here you are, Father.”

“But you can’t, you shouldn’t …”

“In you go!”

They shove him inside and swing the door shut. He sobs, begs for mercy, hammers on the door until his knuckles are raw and begin to bleed. The boys turn the lock and then return to their thievery.

For the next thirty minutes, the old man listens to them roll kegs toward the ramp, and then all at once, there is silence. The hours pass slowly, and he has the sensation, an uncanny one, that the entire universe is made of the thinnest fabric. The things that seem concrete and imperishable are nothing more than a projection on a screen, flickering images that will soon go dark forever. Trapped within that hideous blackness, the old man grows more and more terrified until, in his panic and delirium, he recognizes the death pangs of consciousness, the final stratum of reality slipping away into oblivion. From his larynx, a scream rises with terrible urgency, but his voice is so ragged and shrill that only a fugitive cry of humiliation escapes his lips and dies long before it ever reaches the staircase.

Early the next morning, compelled to visit the basement to retrieve an untapped keg for the priests’ luncheon, the housekeeper, Ms. Higginson, hears a faint but persistent scratching and opens the closet door to discover a nearly unrecognizable creature curled up in the corner, a cadaverous thing of plutonic origins that, in its madness, drools and quivers and, with trembling fingers, smears its own excrement over the cold, wet stones.

“Why do we cling to our fear? Beyond our fear there is nothing. Nothing at all. We must learn to surrender to the darkness.”

It’s only after the pale specter opens its toothless mouth and speaks in a sibilant whisper that the housekeeper unleashes a terrible howl that rouses the Jesuits from the sweet serenity of sleep.

His own students have done this deplorable thing to him, boys he has mentored for years, but even this isn’t the worst of it.

The priests carry him to the rectory where they force him to stand under a spray of scalding water. Next, they set up a hospital bed in the library because, they feel, it will be easier to keep an eye on him there and because they believe the mere sight of these books will provide him with some comfort in his final days. He was once a great scholar, a polymath with wide-ranging interests—history, science, obscure religious movements. Some of the priests can still remember how, long ago, shortly after his ordination, he dreamed of writing full-time, but the act of writing takes a great deal of self-discipline, and the old man has always preferred to read about things rather than write about them. He once tried his hand at fiction, but the experience left him shaken and consumed with self-doubt. He decided that there were too many books in the world and that it wasn’t for him to add one more to the already insurmountable pile.

Lying quietly in bed, it now occurs to him that writers, like the leaves lighting on the windowpane, are practically infinite in number; they accumulate outside the library, desperate to get in, and threaten to crush humanity under their collective weight. He dreads joining their ranks, an author indistinguishable from a million others, and it is for this reason that he became not only a teacher, but the official keeper of these rare volumes—to bar the door and allow in only the finest works of the human imagination. But if the years have taught him anything, it is that he is a humble servant to these books, not their keeper.

He has no other intimacies, having taken a vow of celibacy when he was barely more than a boy, but he has been perfectly content with a life of the mind, which is rich and varied and full of small wonders. This attitude contrasts markedly from that of his colleagues, many of whom often wonder if they made the correct decision in life. As young seminarians they were taught that the Word of God could be heard most clearly in our love for one another—in a mother’s love for her child, a father’s pride in his son—but the priests had no chance for love of that kind. They were trained to profess their love for their Church, but that wasn’t love, that was neurosis, because no one can love a bureaucracy. Books, the old man soon discovered, were a far superior substitute for coping with loneliness; the trick was to transform his interior monologue into a dialogue in which he conversed at length with the authors of these volumes. But now, because of his failing eyesight, he can no longer peruse the dusty spines that line the walls from floor to ceiling. Losing hope that he will live long enough to read from his favorite books a final time, the old man falls into a deep depression.

The Jesuits send a boy to sit beside his bed, but the boy has no intention of reading to him. He has not come here for that purpose. With eyes that are black and small and stupid, he smirks and asks, “Would you like to see something, Father?” From his book bag he removes a deck of pornographic playing cards and fans them out beside the pillow. “Sinful, isn’t it, Father?”

The old man lifts his head and whispers, “Oh god please help please god help god please …”

“Relax, you rattlebag of bones. It will all be over soon, yes, very soon now.”

Intentionally depriving him of his books—this is another thing they do to him, but still it is not the worst thing.

The afternoon of the Great Blizzard.

His heart beats slowly now, faintly. His breathing is shallow but not labored. From his bed he can gaze out the window and observe the students leaving school for the day. After the long hours spent conjugating Greek and Latin verbs in crowded classrooms, the boys look thin, ashen-faced, glassy-eyed, old men in the making, but now that the day is over and the weekend has finally arrived, they start to bounce back to life, loosen their ties, smile up at the receding sun.

All ignore the vast wall of clouds gathering on the far horizon, tremendous lead-colored things that, from a distance, look like the craggy granite peaks of a vast mountain range. As the cold front gains momentum, the clouds start to wheel wildly across the sky and metamorphose into a hundred phantasmagoric shapes—anvils and chariots and monster movie insects that leap across the lake and decimate the city with their snapping pincers. A rumbling blast of icy air barrels through the bleak canyons of abandoned factories and empty warehouses. Discarded newspapers take flight like mutant bats flapping their gigantic wings before swirling away in a cyclone of sordid celebrity gossip and astrological twaddle. Rows of telephone lines snap one by one, silencing a thousand yammering voices, all of them buying and selling and dissembling with unparalleled expertise. The marble
putti
, prancing impertinently in the nearby fountain, douse the boys with angelic effervescence, but the boys refuse to abandon their benches until the snow explodes from the clouds. Before dashing back into the main building, some of them stop to face the brutal winds, brave soldiers readying themselves for a catastrophe of grand proportions, a nuclear winter maybe. They open their mouths and claim to feel the anger of vibrating molecules on the tips of their tongues and taste the final, unadorned truth of the cosmos in the heavy, white flakes.

With preternatural speed, the snow accumulates into dirty, yellow dunes, turning the neighborhood into a vast urban tundra, a blinding, windswept wasteland that stretches from the lake to the doors of the rectory. Soon the humps of cars parked along the curb are barely visible. There is no sign of the police or paramedics or city snowplows. Inside the library, the lights flicker and then go out altogether, and the room quickly turns cold. The Jesuits build a fire, but within an hour they use up the last of the logs, and once more, the rectory becomes as bitter as the tomb.