The Sculptor

stroking between his legs while she pleasured herself with her other—the warmth of her bare breasts against his skin indescribably magical in its consolation to him.

“A mother’s love,” she would whisper over and over. “A mother’s love.”

This too was a secret just between them—a secret with dire consequences for their whole family if revealed.

When he was a little older the baths and the beatings stopped, but his mother would still crawl naked into bed with him at night. She would stroke his penis longer, until the boy named Christian “blew his load” as his friends at school called it. And when he was older still, just before his father sent him off to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Christian’s mother began putting his penis between her legs, instructing him with her hands and her body how to make love to her.

“A mother’s love,” was all she would say. “A mother’s love.”

And so the boy named Christian wrestled with his mother’s love for a long time—never told his father, never told anyone. What made it even more difficult for him was that he was so very bright. He understood what it meant when his counselor in elementary school said he tested at the “genius” level. He understood every single thing his teachers at Phillips threw at him, even the technology behind the patents his father had developed for his booming software company. Yes, all that kind of stuff came easily to the boy, to the young man named Christian. But the one thing he could never wrap his mind around was his mother’s love.

That is until he read Slumbering in the Stone.

The Sculptor, however, would argue that it all began with his return to St. Bartholomew’s. It was a week after his mother’s funeral, on the very same day the eighteen-year-old Christian spoke with his father’s lawyer—a kind old gentleman who would facilitate the sale of his father’s software company and make The Sculptor a millionaire many times over. It was then that the lawyer explained to him the details of the accident and about his mother’s affair at the country club with a tennis pro named Damon Manzera—a once promising young player whose career was cut short by injury, and who the lawyer said was only a few years older than Christian himself. Thus, it was after his meeting with the lawyer that the young man named Christian wandered without thinking back to St. Bartholomew’s, searching like a zombie in the fog for something to guide him.

And so it was that—even though he was nowhere near to understanding the bigger picture of it all quite yet—the young man who would one day become The Sculptor had his first awakening before the Pieta, standing there gazing down at Michelangelo’s masterpiece as he had done in his mother’s arms so many times, so many years ago. However, it was not the statue itself, but the plaque at its base that—like a chisel to a block of marble—cracked Christian’s mind with the understanding of why fate had brought him there that day.

Dedicated in memory of Filomena Manzera

Manzera. Damon Manzera.

Yes, how many times had the boy named Christian sat in that very same church with his mother, listening to Father Bonetti assure the congregation that our time in this world served some greater purpose of which together we all played a part, that all of mankind’s lives were intertwined, that “Everything was connected.” And after some poking around, the young man named Christian learned that the family who had bestowed upon St. Bartholomew’s their gift of the Pieta was in fact the same family who had bestowed upon the world the tennis pro Damon Manzera—the tennis pro who had killed his mother and turned his father into a vegetable.

And just as the young man named Christian understood that fate had brought his mother and the tennis pro together at the country club in some divine connection to the Pieta—a divine connection that had to do with him, with a mother’s love for her son—the young man named Christian also understood that fate had now brought him and the tennis pro together, too.

Oh yes. Christian understood all too well what he had to do next.

And so, after he finished up at Phillips Exeter, between visiting his father at the care facility and going full time to nursing school, the young man named Christian began building up his body—first at the gym, then in the cellar of his parents’ home—all the while his mind focused clearly on the duality of his purpose: the caring for his father and his revenge on Damon Manzera. And after the former was safely back at home, for years Christian followed the latter, learning his movements and waiting patiently for a sign from fate that it was time.

Ironically, it all came together so quickly in the end. Damon Manzera, who was still teaching tennis at the country club—and who himself had become quite the drinker after a failed marriage—had moved back temporarily with his parents on Love Lane, where he spent many a warm summer evening in the backyard drinking beer and swimming in the Manzera’s in-ground pool. If Damon Manzera ever thought about his former mistress, if he ever felt guilty about the part he played in her death, he gave no sign of it to Christian, who for four years had spied on him nearly every day with his binoculars.

And so, with the permission of fate, the young man named Christian snuck into the Manzeras’ backyard through the woods, hopping the high stone wall just after dark and waiting among the trees until Damon Manzera was good and drunk. He did not yet have the night vision goggles or the tranquilizer rifle that he would later use on Tommy Campbell; he did not even have to wrestle the tennis pro under control as he had done when he dragged poor Michael Wenick down the drainpipe. No, for the young man who would soon become The Sculptor, his first murder was somewhat anticlimactic; and in the end he simply lifted the unconscious Manzera off his lounge chair and drowned him with no more effort than it would have taken him to wash the dishes.

Christian was able to hop from the diving board and into the woods without leaving even a single footprint on the cement. When in the weeks that followed it became apparent that he had actually gotten away with his murder of Damon Manzera, the young man named Christian began to feel empty. Yes, the man who was to become The Sculptor wanted to kill again; he wanted to kill more Damon Manzeras—so much so that he actually got an erection when he thought about it.

Indeed, for all his intellect, for all his self-awareness, the young man named Christian never quite understood why—when he was younger, when he was away at Phillips Exeter—he had never shown much interest in girls. He would not get hard when he looked at them in class and would certainly not “jerk off” like his classmates did to the pornographic pictures that were so often passed around. True, sometimes he found his hands absently wandering to his groin late at night when he thought about his mother, but the only time he really got hard was when he thought about his male classmates, when he would see them with their shirts off or coming out of the shower stalls, upon which Christian would quickly avert his eyes so as not to become aroused in front of them.

There was only one other boy at Phillips that Christian knew felt the same way—an “experienced” boy who took Christian under his wing, and with whom he would sometimes sneak away to places hidden; places where they could kiss and be naked against each other; places where they could take each other’s penises in their mouths, or insert them in each other’s behinds. With the death of Christian’s mother, however, all that stopped; and long after Christian moved back to Rhode Island, the young man struggled with his desire for male company and the guilt that somehow his homosexuality had contributed to both his mother’s death and his father’s vegetative state.

Yet with the murder of Damon Manzera, Christian found himself getting hard when he thought about that, too; and thus he understood that fate had directed him to channel his desire into something much more productive. He began fantasizing, began researching and experimenting with different methods. The idea of epinephrine had appealed to him from the beginning because he knew it would mimic his heart-pounding revelation before the Pieta at St. Bartholomew’s. And when he was ready, when he finally succeeded in producing a highly concentrated solution of the drug himself, the young man named Christian set about finding a proper candidate.

Gabriel Banford was always to have been the first victim of this new method. Christian had followed him for weeks after spotting him at Series X and planned on waiting for him in the dark of his bedroom. But on the evening that he should have killed him, when he stumbled upon Banford’s copy of Slumbering in the Stone, when fate directed him right then and there to flip to the chapter on the Pieta, the man who would from that day forward call himself The Sculptor wept under the weight of his divine revelation—a revelation that surpassed the one at St. Bartholomew’s. Yes, through this woman Catherine Hildebrant’s analysis of Michelangelo’s Holy Mother and Son—her brilliant articulation of what she called that “parallel trinity” as embodied in the artist’s portrayal of the Virgin herself—the boy, the young man