Falling Idols

and the rest of the Misbegotten, were so much more than I could ever be. Their eyes saw more, their ears heard more, and with their tongues they tasted it, and their feet had walked it, and their minds comprehended it, and they had lived the histories that others only analyzed, and wrongly…

And still they were not gods. They’d have been the first to admit it.

To see them day by day was too hideous a reminder that I was nowhere near their equal … and worse, that I’d never really gotten past that deeply instilled need to believe, but had now been left with only the Void.

“So what did you learn from it?” I’d asked the Sisters, soon as I could, from my bed; asked more than once. They’d look at one another and smile, with something like sadness and pity and even embarrassment for my sake; but for their own sake, with maybe just the tiniest ray of hope. Or maybe I saw that only because I wanted to. And then they’d tell me to rest, just rest, their 2700 years to my thirty-one like quantum mechanics to a dog.

On my own for the first time in my life, I hiked my homeland like a student tourist, my old possessions sharing backpack space with something I thought of as belonging to a newer Patrick Kieran Malone. The knife was large, with a contoured Kraton haft, and a huge killing blade of carbon steel and a sawtoothed upper edge.

I walked an Ireland different from that of the times of the Troubles, when a bomb had left me standing on a new road. Up north there were no more bombs going off, nor bullets flying, the I.R.A. having decided to lay down its arms — for the time being, at least — and I saw that most everyone was caught up in a cautious optimism that people with differing ideas of the same god really could live together after all.

I wondered if, somewhere, in his jealousness, he missed the smoke and blood of those earlier days. But time was on his side. The old blood lusts never die, they just lie dormant.

Saw a bumper sticker while on my way back up to Belfast. Nuke Gay Whales for Christ, it said.

Had to come from America.

“So what did you learn?” I’d asked the Sisters, refusing to give up, and finally Maia sat down on the bed where the marrow in my bones frantically churned out new red blood cells.

“How can I tell you this so you understand it?” she said, and thought awhile. “What’s God really like? Imagine an arrogant and greedy and demented child on a beach, building castles in the sand … only to kick them over out of boredom, leaving what’s left for the waves. Which of course begs one more question:

“Where did the sand come from?”

In Belfast I returned to the church I’d grown up in, and as I entered the sanctuary that quiet afternoon, it smelt the same as it always had, old and sweet with wax and incense. It took me back twenty years, more, the shock of it overwhelming and unexpected. Smells can do that to you. It was here where my family gave thanks for my life being spared on that day of the bomb, where they lit candles for the souls of my friends who’d been killed.

I genuflected before the altar, out of old reflex.

Or maybe it was disguise.

The priest didn’t recognize me at first, but then it had been awhile, a decade of monasticism and nearly another year of heresy in between. Such things leave their mark on a man, and even his blood knows the difference. The priest had already heard that I’d left the order; clasped my hands warmly just the same; would be at least sixty now. He told me how deeply my leaving the Franciscans had hurt my mother, dashing so many of her expectations for me.

“Can’t help that, Father,” I said. “Wasn’t my idea …  but I’ve learnt a brand new doctrine. I just count myself lucky that I learnt it while I’m still a relatively young man.”

I could see that he was puzzled. And I remembered a childhood friend who’d told me, when we were altar boys, how the Father had put his hands on him, and where. I’d not believed him. Nobody had. Everybody knew that God loves little children.

“Gospel of Matthew,” I said. “Remember what Jesus had to say about new doctrines? Comparing them to wine?” The priest nodded, back on familiar ground. “Said you can’t go pouring new wine into old wineskins. It’ll just burst them, and what’ve you got then? Spilt wine and a wineskin that won’t hold anything else.”

From my backpack I took the sleek, dark knife, and when I unsheathed it, the blade seemed to keep on coming.

“Some days,” I confessed, “I do wish that fucking bomb had done me in too.”

*

I don’t know why I killed the priest. Don’t know why I did such a thorough bloody job of it. Or why I killed twelve more in the coming weeks, or how I managed to get away with it for as long as I did. Blessed, I suppose, in my own way.

With that sacrificial blade I opened them, throats and chests and bellies, opened them lengthwise or crossways, and out of each poured their stale old wine. And then I’d have to sit awhile and gaze upon their burst skins, and reflect upon the way they weren’t good for anything else now. This was my main comfort. But I could never get them all.

That, too, was my despair.

So I imagined those beyond my blade, Catholic and Protestant alike, shepherding those even more desperate than I to believe, telling them about an impotent, slaughtered lamb whose history and words had been agreed on by committees. And in his captive name, the eager converts would rise from their watery baptismal graves to go forth and seek to propagate the species.

Over those weeks, I was not a particularly beloved figure in Ireland. Knew it couldn’t be much longer before I was caught. And when at last I grew too tired, too sick at heart to continue, only then did I return to the one place, the one people, that would have me, and they took me in as one of their own.

I knew better, though.

No matter how much blood I’d drunk, it hadn’t made me one of them.

“Hide me,” I asked those voracious and beautiful Sisters of the Trinity. “Hide me where they’ll never find me. Hide me where they never can.”