I wondered where all these people were who supposedly revered me. I was more than ready to be revered a little, but Stevenson and Father Tom Eliot certainly didn’t qualify for the Christopher Snow Admiration Society.
Although the priest was streaming sweat and panting, he was out to prove he had stamina. He approached in the stooped, hunch-shouldered, rolling lurch of a troll, as if he were on a work-release program from under the bridge to which he was usually committed. This cramped posture allowed him to raise the bat high over his head without cracking it against an overhanging rafter. He wanted to keep it high over his head because he clearly intended to play Babe Ruth with my skull and make my brains squirt out my ears.
Eyeshine or no eyeshine, I was going to have to blast the chubby little guy without delay. I couldn’t scoot backward as fast as he could troll-walk toward me, and although I was a little hysterical—okay, way hysterical—I could figure the odds well enough to know that even the greediest bookie in Vegas wouldn’t cover a bet on my survival. In my panic, hammered by terror and by a dangerously giddy sense of the absurd, I thought that the most humane course of action would be to shoot him in the gonads because he had taken a vow of celibacy, anyway.
Fortunately, I never had the opportunity to prove myself to be the expert marksman that such a perfectly placed shot would have required. I aimed in the general direction of his crotch, and my finger tightened on the trigger. No time to use the laser sighting. Before I could squeeze off a round, something monstrous growled in the passageway behind the priest, and a great dark snarling predator leaped on his back, causing him to scream and drop the baseball bat as he was driven to the attic floor.
For an instant, I was stunned that the Other should be so utterly unlike a rhesus and that it should attack Father Tom, its nurse and champion, rather than tear out my throat. But, of course, the great dark snarling predator was not the Other: It was Orson.
Standing on the priest’s back, the dog bit at the sweat-suit collar. Fabric tore. He was snarling so viciously that I was afraid he’d actually maul Father Tom.
I called him off as I scrambled to my feet. The mutt obeyed at once, without inflicting a wound, not a fraction as bloodthirsty as he’d pretended to be.
The priest made no effort to get up. He lay with his head turned to one side, his face half covered with tousled, sweat-soaked hair. He was breathing hard and sobbing, and after every third or fourth breath, he said bitterly, “You….”
Obviously he knew enough about what was happening at Fort Wyvern and in Moonlight Bay to answer many if not all of my most pressing questions. Yet I didn’t want to talk to him. I couldn’t talk to him.
The Other might not have left the rectory, might still be here in the shadowy cloisters of the attic. Although I didn’t believe that it posed a serious danger to me and Orson, especially not when I had the Glock, I had not seen it and, therefore, couldn’t dismiss it as a threat. I didn’t want to stalk it—or be stalked by it—in this claustrophobic space.
Of course, the Other was merely an excuse to flee.
Those things that I truly feared were the answers Father Tom might give to my questions. I thought I was eager to hear them, but evidently I was not yet prepared for certain truths.
You.
He’d spoken that one word with seething hatred, with uncommonly dark emotion for a man of God but also for a man who was usually kind and gentle. He transformed the simple pronoun into a denunciation and a curse.
You.
Yet I’d done nothing to earn his enmity. I hadn’t given life to the pitiable creatures that he had committed himself to freeing. I hadn’t been a part of the program at Wyvern that had infected his sister and possibly him, as well. Which meant that he hated not me, as a person, but hated me because of who I was.
And who was I?
Who was I if not my mother’s son?
According to Roosevelt Frost—and even Chief Stevenson—there were, indeed, those who revered me because I was my mother’s son, though I’d yet to meet them. For the same lineage, I was hated.
Christopher Nicholas Snow, only child of Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow, whose own mother named her after a flower. Christopher born of Wisteria, come into this too-bright world near the beginning of the Disco Decade. Born in a time of tacky fashion trends and frivolous pursuits, when the country was eagerly winding down a war, and when the worst fear was mere nuclear holocaust.
What could my brilliant and loving mother possibly have done that would make me either revered or reviled?
Sprawled on the attic floor, racked by emotion, Father Tom Eliot knew the answer to that mystery and would almost certainly reveal it when he had regained his composure.
Instead of asking the question at the heart of all that had happened this night, I shakily apologized to the sobbing priest. “I’m sorry. I…I shouldn’t have come here. God. Listen. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please.”
What had my mother done?
Don’t ask.
Don’t ask.
If he had started to answer my unspoken question, I would have clamped my hands to my ears.
I called Orson to my side and led him away from the priest, into the maze, proceeding as fast as I dared. The narrow passages twisted and branched until it seemed as though we were not in an attic at all but in a network of catacombs. In places the darkness was nearly blinding; but I’m the child of darkness, never thwarted by it. I brought us quickly to the open trapdoor.
Though Orson had climbed the ladder, he peered at the descending treads with trepidation and hesitated to find his way into the hall below. Even for a four-footed acrobat, going down a steep ladder was immeasurably more difficult than going up.
Because many of the boxes in the attic were large and because bulky furniture was also stored there, I knew that a second trap must exist, and that it must be larger than the first, with an associated sling-and-pulley system for raising and lowering heavy objects to and from the second floor. I didn’t want to search for it, but I wasn’t sure how I could safely climb backward down an attic ladder while carrying a ninety-pound dog.
From the farthest end of the vast room, the priest called out to me—“Christopher”—in a voice heavy with remorse. “Christopher, I’m lost.”
He didn’t mean that he was lost in his own maze. Nothing as simple as that, nothing as hopeful as that.
“Christopher, I’m lost. Forgive me. I’m so lost.”
From elsewhere in the gloom came the child-monkey-not-of-this-world voice that belonged to the Other: struggling toward language, desperate to be understood, charged with longing and loneliness, as bleak as any arctic ice field but also, worse, filled with a reckless hope that would surely never be rewarded.
This plaintive bleat was so unbearable that it drove Orson to try the ladder and may even have given him the balance to succeed. When he was only halfway to the bottom, he leaped over the remaining treads to the hallway floor.
The priest’s journal had almost slipped out from under my belt and into the seat of my pants. As I descended the ladder, the book rubbed painfully against the base of my spine, and when I reached the bottom I clawed it from under my belt and held it in my left hand, as the Glock was still clamped fiercely in my right.
Together, Orson and I raced down through the rectory, past the shrine to the Blessed Virgin, where the guttering candle was extinguished by the draft of our passing. We fled along the lower hall, through the kitchen with its three green digital clocks, out the back door, across the porch, into the night and the fog, as if we were escaping from the House of Usher moments before it collapsed and sank into the deep dank tarn.
We passed the back of the church. Its formidable mass was a tsunami of stone, and while we were in its nightshadow, it seemed about to crest and crash and crush us.
I glanced back twice. The priest was not behind us. Neither was anything else.
Although I half expected my bicycle to be gone or damaged, it was propped against the headstone, where I had left it. No monkey business.
I didn’t pause to say a word to Noah Joseph James. In a world as screwed up as ours, ninety-six years of life didn’t seem as desirable as it had only hours ago.
After pocketing the pistol and tucking the journal inside my shirt, I ran beside my bike along an aisle between rows of graves, swinging aboard it while on the move. Bouncing off the curb into the street, leaning forward over the handlebars, pedaling furiously, I bored like an auger through the fog, leaving a temporary tunnel in the churning mist behind me.
Orson had no interest in the spoor of squirrels. He was as eager as I was to put distance between us and St. Bernadette’s.
We had gone several blocks before I began to realize that escape wasn’t possible. The inevitable dawn restricted me to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, and the madness in St. Bernadette’s rectory was to be found in every corner of the town.
More to the point, I was trying to run away from a threat that could never be escaped even if I could fly to the most remote island or mountaintop in the world. Wherever I went, I would carry with me the thing that I feared: the need to know. I wasn’t frightened merely of the answers that I might receive when I asked questions about my mother. More fundamentally, I was afraid of the questions themselves, because the very nature of them, whether they were eventually answered or not, would change my life forever.
29
From a bench in the park at the corner of Palm Street and Grace Drive, Orson and I studied a sculpture of a steel scimitar balanced on a pair of tumbling dice carved from white marble, which were in turn balanced on a highly polished representation of Earth hewn from blue marble, which itself was perched upon a large mound of bronze cast to resemble a pile of dog poop.
This work of art has stood at the center of the park, surrounded by a gently bubbling fountain, for about three years. We’ve sat here many nights, pondering the meaning of this creation, intrigued and edified and challenged—but not particularly enlightened—by it.
Initially we believed that the meaning was clear. The scimitar represents war or death. The tumbling dice represent fate. The blue marble sphere, which is Earth, is a symbol of our lives. Put it all together, and you have a statement about the human condition: We live or die according to the whims of fate, our lives on this world ruled by cold chance. The bronze dog poop at the bottom is a minimalist repetition of the same theme: Life is shit.
Many learned analyses have followed the first. The scimitar, for example, might not be a scimitar at all; it might be a crescent moon. The dice-like forms might be sugar cubes. The blue sphere might not be our nurturing planet—merely a bowling ball. What the various forms symbolize can be interpreted in a virtually infinite number of ways, although it is impossible to conceive of the bronze casting as anything but dog poop.
Seen as a moon, sugar cubes, and a bowling ball, this masterwork may be warning that our highest aspirations (reaching for the moon) cannot be achieved if we punish our bodies and agitate our minds by eating too many sweets or if we sustain lower-back injury by trying too hard to torque the ball when we’re desperate to pick up a seven-ten split. The bronze dog poop, therefore, reveals to us the ultimate consequences of a bad diet combined with obsessive bowling: Life is shit.
Four benches are placed around the broad walkway that encircles the fountain in which the sculpture stands. We have viewed the piece from every perspective.
The park lamps are on a timer, and they are all extinguished at midnight to conserve city funds. The fountain stops bubbling as well. The gently splashing water is conducive to meditation, and we wish that it spritzed all night; although even if I were not an XPer, we would prefer no lamplight. Ambient light is not only sufficient but ideal for the study of this sculpture, and a good thick fog can add immeasurably to your appreciation of the artist’s vision.
Prior to the erection of this monument, a simple bronze statue of Junipero Serra stood on the plinth at the center of the fountain for over a hundred years. He was a Spanish missionary to the Indians of California, two and a half centuries ago: the man who established the network of missions that are now landmark buildings, public treasures, and magnets for history-minded tourists.
Bobby’s parents and a group of like-minded citizens had formed a committee to press for the banishment of the Junipero Serra statue on the grounds that a monument to a religious figure did not belong in a park created and maintained with public funds. Separation of Church and State. The United States Constitution, they said, was clear on this issue.
Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow—“Wissy” to her friends, “Mom” to me—in spite of being a scientist and rationalist, led the opposing committee that wished to preserve the statue of Serra. “When a society erases its past, for whatever reason,” she said, “it cannot have a future.”
Mom lost the debate. Bobby’s folks won.
The night the decision came down, Bobby and I met in the most solemn circumstances of our long friendship, to determine if family honor and the sacred obligations of bloodline required us to conduct a vicious, unrelenting feud—in the manner of the legendary Hatfields and McCoys—until even the most distant cousins had been sent to sleep with the worms and until one or both of us was dead. After consuming enough beer to clear our heads, we decided that it was impossible to conduct a proper feud and still find the time to ride every set of glassy, pumping monoliths that the good sea sent to shore. To say nothing of all the time spent on murder and mayhem that might have been spent ogling girls in bun-floss bikinis.
Now I entered Bobby’s number in the keypad on my phone and pressed send.
I turned the volume up a little so Orson might be able to hear both sides of the conversation. When I realized what I had done, I knew that unconsciously I had accepted the most fantastic possibility of the Wyvern project as proven fact—even though I was still pretending to have my doubts.
Bobby answered on the second ring: “Go away.”
“You asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sitting here in Life Is Shit Park.”
“Do I care?”
“Some really bad stuff has gone down since I saw you.”
“It’s the salsa on those chicken tacos,” he said.
“I can’t talk about it on the phone.”
“Good.”
“I’m worried about you,” I said.
“That’s sweet.”
“You’re in real danger, Bobby.”
“I swear I flossed, Mom.”
Orson chuffed with amusement. The hell he didn’t.
“Are you awake now?” I asked Bobby.
“No.”
“I don’t think you were asleep in the first place.”