Chapter Text
A great sign appeared in the sky: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant, and she cried out in pain and agony as she gave birth. Another sign also appeared in the sky: a great red dragon that had seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and threw them to the earth. The dragon stood before the woman, who was about to give birth, so that he could devour the child as soon as it was born.
Revelation 12:1-4
Guy stumbled into the church as the pale sun of the early morning started peeking from behind the field. The door was already open and blinding white rays paved his way towards the altar; specks of dust floated in front of his eyes, between the strong smell of wet cedar wood and old paper. He finally breathed out.
His legs threatened to give in with every step he took, dew clinging to his muscles like timid stems sprouting from the soiled ground. He fell on his knees just before reaching the altar, hands outstretched over the two steps that were keeping him away from elevation.
The charged atmosphere that reigned over the morning masses was gone; the hopeful, mournful presence soothing the creases over the worshippers’ foreheads had collapsed over itself. Even the Holy Ghost had been left suffocating under the heaviness of that roof, a still of the world before everything started crumbling.
Over Guy's back, everything was possessed by light; in front of him, grey shadows still lingered in every corner and crevice of the wood. That morning it would have been his time to dissipate the darkness, to crouch in prayer and let the sun pass through him.
The dusty wood kissed his fingertips as it welcomed a vermilion drop that soon buried itself between the boards, leaving a dark trace. Guy felt something trail down his cheeks and he brushed it away – he was crying red, tears falling on the floor like heavy rain. Spots materialized on the wood, black as the ones of petrol.
Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain–
Guy looked in front of him, and then up, up – the crucifix was still with the uneasiness of a body left hanging, the executioner's neglect. Only a temporary state.
To receive power and wealth–
The polished surface of the cross glinted like it had welcomed someone’s cry. It was naked, ravaged in the aftermath of death. Guy couldn't breathe if not with his mouth open, feeling his lips already slick with warm blood.
And wisdom and strength–
His nails met ashes, scraps of wood – a deep red gape was widening under his white shirt, fresh blood flowing out from between two ribs. It bubbled up Guy's throat as he coughed, but the slit did not close, nor his lips grasped human words.
And honor and glory and praise–
The incoherent mumbling of Guy's mouth matched the low buzz pounding in his ears. His brows twitched in pain, mind only wrapping around disembodied sounds but finding them too clear and true as they scavenged deep in his temples. Yet, he could not speak, even if that was the only way towards the ladder that could have led him upwards.
He who testifies to these things, says–
Yet, he could not explain, even if behind his closed lids he had already seen all with too much clarity.
Yes–
Guy let out a sob, and that time he swore those were human tears, bitter and frail in their abundance. Under his palm, pressed right over the wound on his chest, he could almost feel his heart.
Yes–
Jesus' body couldn’t look back at him; it had already been taken down. The height to which the cross was hanging wouldn’t have provided enough space for his magnificence. There, he could have only lived through men.
Yes–
I am coming soon.
—
Two months before.
Guy had been taught all his life that God's eyes were everywhere and always looking down to him. When his mother said it, a grave expression over her face as she stroked Guy's tear-streaked cheeks, he felt lucky, thinking that among all the people who inhabited Earth he had been the one chosen by God to be nurtured and to make sure his will would have been fulfilled. When, a few years later, he had started reading the Scriptures, he acknowledged that the role he had always thought God had given him was actually what He had assigned to Christ. At times he didn’t even remember his childish pretense, but he had felt guilty ever since.
Shadows danced over the church’s walls as midday approached and the last sliver of sun was cut by the tall windowframes. Guy stood in front of the first row of pews, skimming absentmindedly through the Book of Psalms he had just retrieved from one of the last seats. His fingers traced the rough spine of the book as dust flickered against the light.
Guy's eyes rose as he heard the door twisting on its rusty hinges; expecting for it to be soon opened and for someone to step in, he lowered his head again, uninterested in their company, even if usually, when he found himself alone with someone at church, the other person avoided any kind of interaction with him.
The door kept shrieking, following Guy's fingers while they turned the yellowed pages, from Psalm Ten to Eleven, then Twelve, Thirteen. When Guy thought the door had been opened all the way, his mind almost making up on its own the ticking of shoes over the wooden floor, he spoke without giving it much thought, in his words a chant he had heard more than his morning prayers.
“Mass is over.”
The door suddenly closed with the dull sound of tamed wood. No one was on the threshold, and Guy's words received no answer.
Guy's eyes jumped to the door, the absence of life materializing as shiver, as a stone falling in the puddle of his chest even before he could blink and take a second look.
He closed the book in his hands and held his breath, searching for a presence, for something human that had entered through that door. He swallowed, a nail scraping at the inside of the volume's cover like at a hangnail, right where the paper glued to the upper corner met the folded dark blue cloth.
A swallow, his throat tight, air hurrying to be breathed out even if all around him there wasn’t enough of it to be breathed in. Guy straightened his back and walked up the two steps that led to the altar, putting the Psalms back where they were before mass. In his ears, a buzz that wasn't coming from his head; his fingers played with the collar of his shirt, an ill masked attempt at loosening it without undoing any button.
It was time to go home. When every inhale cut a deep wound in his throat and everything – the walls, the windows, the cross – began to stare back at him, it was always time to get home, even if the sun had not yet reached its zenith and daylight seemed to be keeping every source of evil at bay. It could have only as much as fire could have lit up a corridor underground – until it extinguished, or until it was extinguished. He had learnt that during daytime even more shadows creeped inside the church in their desperate subjection to the summer sun.
As Guy walked back to his house, as he reached his room upstairs and closed the curtains, the hundreds of eyes glued to his back stuck to him like a second skin; only when he got undressed and ready for the night his shoulders embraced a newfound easiness, muscles relaxing with the premonition that the feeling would have come back, because it always did. Sometimes he even had to wait for the day after for it to fade out completely, clinging so stubbornly to him even after a prayer or a cold shower. He was used to the nausea inducing guilt, to inquisitory stares, to scratching at his cuticles until they were all bloody, but that feeling of being constantly held under scrutiny had materialized only lately, paired up with a conniving tapping sound at the back of his head, like someone knocking on a door that they knew it wouldn’t have been opened. Praying it away only made it worse, those invisible eyes outraged at the thought that Guy was trying to scare them away with that useless mumbling. In his frenzied dreams, that someone had a face and a name, but in the morning they were both too blurry for Guy to remember them.
When Guy was little, his mother always told him not to put his trust in anyone, and so he had grown scared of every person he met, because at the time his body couldn’t process suspicion if not under the name of fear. Growing up, his fear of his surroundings had slowly morphed into reverence; community came first, and every neighbor was sacred. He had long tried to stick to that thought, to not let hatred lead him astray, but when he was in town every look was hard and heavy and judging, people's collars tightened by a faith more tied to a book than to the sky. That’s what Guy had felt on his own skin for all his childhood, what everyone had done with his mother before him and what no one would have ever attempted to do with his father. And, just when Guy thought he was finally unaffected by communal, shared distrust, that was what people had started doing with the stranger who had recently come around town.
In his presence, Guy’s look didn’t have the same pitiful scorn he had seen clear as day in other people’s eyes, but it rather displayed a quiet concern, the same doubts about people’s nature his mother had dangled before his eyes for all his childhood. He hadn’t resented the stranger’s apparent absence of faith, growing suspicious only of the influence it would have had on his own, as if that man was being offered to him as an example of what a life without God looked like – and to Guy’s eyes, it wasn’t bad at all. Men’s lives could go on even without the Father’s hand on their shoulders, that’s what the stranger’s empty seat at church was teaching him every Sunday. In Guy’s ears his silence may have been louder than any Heavenly Call.
The man was in his sixties, but to everyone he seemed like he knew what was going on there since long before Creation. He had started showing up around church on Sunday mornings almost a month before, at first just casually walking up and down the opposite road, slow and silent like he was just taking a morning stroll between the church and the cornfield. He cast piercing glances at the back of every person who entered, like he resented them for having willingly left him behind; when mass finally ended, he was still outside, waiting no one knew who or what for, casting an eerie light all around him. He often vanished before the last person to exit could set their foot on the church’s steps.
Guy had noticed that man on the first Sunday he had been seen there; completely dressed in black against the clear sky and sunny field, he had looked into his eyes like a crow eyeing at the fresh carcass of a deer. When Guy had stepped out, an hour later, he was standing where Guy had last seen him, looking at him from behind the smoke swirls of his cigarette. Guy was only lying to himself when he pretended he hadn’t felt that same look all over him even the Sunday after, and then the one after it. When that uncomfortable tightness melted even through afternoon and night, Guy thought it was just summer’s fault, his body growing unbelievably hot under the thin covers.
They had even crossed each other’s path in the town’s small centre a couple of times, and on another day the man had held the drugstore’s door open for Guy as he was about to make his way in, finding a set of broad shoulders clothed in smoke and earth in front of him instead of the shop’s entrance. Even in the ten to fifteen minutes Guy had spent inside he had felt him staring at him through the door and the shelves, studying every movement of his fingers once he had reached the cash register.
The town was small, the community tight; in a few weeks’ span the voices ran all around town and made their way back to the one who had started them. Guy listened, pretending carelessness, like he didn’t need any confirmation or disproof from other people to shape his own opinion on the new man. He had tried, at first, but ended up getting caught between the tensed up tones of the ones talking about him, words streaked with fearful suspicion.
What Guy heard was reassuring, grounding in the way it had been convincing himself that the man’s stares in his direction were just a trick of the light. The man came from that same town, actually, born and raised; the older people who lived there remembered him from when he was younger, scattered memories of the reckless child of a low profile family who lived at the far end of town. At some point, he had run away, and no one had heard anything from him since then; they saw him around every few months or so, when he came back to visit his parents, but when they both died, a few years later, there was nothing that could keep him there.
No one expected him to come back, Guy had heard some old ladies whisper to each other right before mass started. He thought that the way in which they had said expected sounded way too close to wanted. I wonder where he’s been, someone else said. He shouldn’t have left his parents like that. Guy had then straightened his back in a shiver at the mere thought of them saying the same about him, if he ever went away. He probably wouldn’t have reached the field near his house before changing his mind and turning around.
All the rumors and the groundless theories were before the man, on his fourth Sunday in town, finally set foot inside the church. No one apart from Guy had been there to witness it.
Mass had already ended and Guy was alone, sitting still in his seat, eyes fixed on the cross hung up over the altar or on the wall to which it was hung. He had heard the noise of the door opening and closing behind someone as the last sentences of the morning reading danced on his lips.
The man’s steps had echoed from roof to floor until he reached the row of seats Guy was in. When they turned towards each other, Guy’s eyes widened just a little while the other looked deep in thought, like Guy’s face had awakened some long lost memory. They both went back to the cross hovering over them.
Mass is over, Guy had found himself saying, more as a reflex than because he really thought the man cared for it. As he faced him from up close for the first time he could only think about something he had heard a few days before: I expected him to be older.
It’s the best moment, when it ends, the man had said after a while, his words hanging up in the air, waiting for something to give them meaning.
Everyone always steps out like they’d never even wanted to be there in the first place.
Guy could almost hear him smiling.
One could say I witness the Exodus every Sunday morning.
When Guy felt his eyes on him and turned, he acknowledged that he actually was.
The man walked on, now towards the first row. His presence was cumbersome and uncomfortable, between the four walls of the church, like he was taking up all the space that had only ever been reserved to God. Guy squinted to focus on his figure even from a distance, like keeping track of his movements would have avoided the threat coming off from him.
I've never seen you here.
Guy’s voice had reached the pulpit, and only when it bounced back to him he had realized he should have stayed silent and let the other go away.
I really don't need any more bad memories, kid. I'm sure you understand.
The man had turned towards him, his expression crowned with an unusual curiosity, a form of it Guy had never seen aimed at his direction. It didn’t pin down, dissect and condemn him; after a life of prejudices, Guy thought that it was the only interest other people could have ever shown in him. The man’s eyes scanned him head to toe even as they stayed fixed in one place, invisible fingers trailing up and down his legs and arms more to graze than to hold tight.
But I'll soon find a way to repent myself, don’t worry, he had added then, joining the palms of his hands in the mockery of a prayer. All double-faced jokes and bitter sarcasm, Guy had then sensed something raw and cruel lurking right under, some wrongdoing impossible to be mended and forever caught between flesh and muscle. That had been enough to bring him back to reality.
The man had walked towards Guy’s seat once again, this time halting the opposite side. Since the other had made his entrance, Guy had forgotten the words of all his prayers; now he could just have tried to get comfortable in that uneasiness.
I'm Jasper. I don’t think we've met before.
Guy had raised his eyes up to him again, gazing at him under the shadowplay of sun and clouds behind the window. In his eyes, an almost alarmed look, as if he was talking with someone he wasn’t meant to. He opened his mouth slightly even if he had been told a hundred times that he shouldn’t have told his name to strangers. Jasper seemed to know it, and he spoke on his behalf.
You must be Guy. The preacher's son.
Guy had whipped his head up in hearing the unexpected appellative. It had been a while since he had last been called that way. His father had been away for a little over two years, at the time; after having been the town’s preacher since before Guy was even born, every once in a while he was reassigned in a new church and sent up north or down east for some years before coming back home and waiting for another relocation. The first time it had happened, Guy was eleven, and as he and his mother waved him goodbye he thought he was never going to see him again. Looking up at his mom, he knew she was almost hoping for it.
Jasper’s words were a question rewired as an assessment, and Guy would have nodded even if it hadn't been the truth. The other must have detected the shadow of some unwanted memory washing over him, because he just said: Seems like I’ve struck a chord.
In his early childhood, Guy had been untouchable, the miracle child of a house on the verge of collapse. He was a true blessing, a well deserved gift from above. But it didn’t last long, because the town saw and remembered everything, and people talked and talked, and as soon as he had learned how to read and write he had earned for himself the image of the sheltered son of the town’s preacher and the neglected son of a whore. Only Guy himself knew that it was the other way around.
Everyone thought that the too silent, lonely child, an ever present, unsettling look in his big blue eyes, couldn’t have really been the son of the pastor, of the same man who had devoted all his life to serve God. His mother had without a doubt conceived him outside marriage, eloping with some man who had left her before even knowing she was pregnant. Whispers raised as he entered church hand in hand with his mother, because no one wanted their tainted blood to enter and stain that holy place; silence fell only when Guy's father stood behind the altar.
Then, nightmares had hit, and Guy had started to wake his parents up every other night with hallucinated screams. Everyone in town finally received the confirmation they had longed for: the boy had not only seen the devil in his sleep, but he was touched and possessed by it every night. Since then, of his father Guy only remembered the fake smiles he gave him when they were out in public and his resentful looks when they were at home; the hand on his shoulder as Guy helped him during his readings and the whips on his back when they were back in his room, pain heightened by a tenfold if he ever dared to move. His father never said a word, as Guy and his mom cried together in his bed, his back bleeding through his clothes.
Later, as he grew up, fitting in had started looking less like adaptment and more like forcing himself into a too narrow frame, cutting one limb or two in the process. Both the nightmares and the rumors had started to fade out, but his father took the possibilities of relocation he was offered as a way to project his faith away from the cursed family he had once sworn to protect.
Jasper followed Guy's gaze, that in the meantime had gone back to the altar, the pulpit, the cross; he smiled knowingly, and Guy wondered if he, too, had heard all those stories about him. He had never seen someone's hilarity being ever so present in the town’s church. When he was there with his father, he related both of them to sorrow.
Family is a flimsy matter, Jasper had said almost in a whisper. And then, as if he was repeating some teaching that had turned out to be useless, a hint of irony in his voice: It's gone before you learn how to truly appreciate it.
As Guy listened to Jasper’s steps leaving him behind, he had tried to prevent himself from looking at him one last time. From that moment on, he intended to strive far from Jasper like it was his, the face of temptation constellating his prayers. He still didn’t know that he would have soon discovered that human desire could just have paled in comparison.
And out there – Jasper continued briefly, finally gaining Guy's attention – no one will ever forgive us anything.
Guy hadn’t wanted to reveal to Jasper that he knew it far too well, fearing that it would have exposed him to a relentless excommunication by no one other than himself. Jasper had talked like they both already knew everything about one another, like their reputations had already ruined for them the possibility of knowing each other from scratch, even if they were not the one to be blamed for it. For a long, striking moment Guy thought that they were the same; the realization hadn’t felt different from knowing that some people still thought he was one with the devil even after all those years.
So why did you come back?
Guy hoped Jasper wouldn’t have given much thought to the fact that he had taken part in the town's deceiving conscience, trusting the stories people had started telling about him since he had shown up there unattended. But Jasper had maybe hoped for it, the way his features had suddenly softened, like it was actually his mother standing in front of him, saying I'm happy you're back, or You shouldn’t have come.
As Jasper was headed towards the door, his words weaved a sweet chant, a heartbreaking song for the ones left to wander alone into the unknown.
Because ‘how can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?’
In his voice, only the bittersweet knowledge that his hometown had actually been the first to force silence over him. For a fleeting moment Guy thought that he had to run away, too, before completely forgetting how to speak. When Jasper marked the last verse, he had already stepped outside, the door about to close behind him.
‘If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.’
—
That night, Guy dreamt again, his eyes held open against his will, his mind abducted and taken up in the Heavens to receive some kind of revelation. The opening of a casket, the lifting of a veil: revealing something that had been previously hidden, unknown to human eyes and impossible to mouth if not in the language of the angels. He already knew the viscous matter of his nightmares, the incorporeal presence lingering in them all night and the fear that it could have been either the devil or God Himself. From that day, however, his nightly visions gained materiality, setting their roots deep inside the fertile soil of Guy’s young body, thorns growing out of it, twisting around his limbs and molding them into shape.
Guy could now touch the inconsistent smoke that surrounded him, tracing the edges between dream and reality, their corners rounded like the curved angle of the knee bending between thigh and calf. It wasn’t a black and white still, a static, distant memory of something that had never happened; now it implied action, movement, skin pressed against skin – but not from Guy. Guy, as he slept, could never move. Hands of leather gripped his wrists, his bare ankles, and everything was a blur the way a heatwave was, the air electric and the body tightening around itself, beads of sweat like a tongue over a cheek. Every night the vision was the same, every twisting and turning of his body a trick of intermittent lights against the black scenery of the mind.
He met Jasper again, after that Sunday; he had grown used to seeing him around, even if during the few weeks that followed it seemed to Guy that he was actually the only person his sight could put into focus, the only clear silhouette in busy roads of faded bodies. Wherever Guy went, Jasper was already there, and when he wasn’t he arrived shortly after, smiling at the unexpected coincidence. Guy changed roads, took shorter and longer routes, but when he was walking alone and turned to look behind him, he wasn’t being followed. Sometimes, when he was in town, Guy found his eyes lingering on every passerby, trying to read into them the looks of the one he was after. When Jasper finally appeared, Guy's gaze withdrew from him always a minute too late. As he approached, Guy acknowledged that he had spent all his morning waiting.
I don't partake, Jasper always said when he showed up to church and Guy asked him why he came in only when mass ended. I just like to watch.
When he heard it, Guy wondered if he had ever seen him from one of the windows, sitting first row next to his mother and wrapping the thin chain of his cross necklace around his fingers to prevent them from scratching at his hangnails just enough to draw blood.
On Sundays Guy did his best to not let his nightmares enter the church with him, keeping at bay the realization that his sleep was getting bad again after more than ten years, and that, in fact, it had never been worse. At first, he hadn’t classified that uneasy feeling as alarming, as it wasn’t nearly as scary and consistent as the one that had enveloped him for the greatest part of his childhood. Then, when nightmares had started to occur every night and to leak through most of his days, he hadn’t told his mother, reminding himself of voices full of disdain repeating over and over that he was letting the devil touch his body and rewire his mind.
Guy had started to think that the sleepless nights of his early life had just been a premonition of something worse that had yet to happen to him. It surely wasn’t human, the tormentor of his nightly sailings; it stood among men, but it belonged underground. It was often silent, with Guy, and he was glad for it because it never made him scream and wake his mother up. The breath of that beast trailing along his neck was his only source of warmth, in those nights, and in the morning Guy realized that, once again, he had been waiting for it to come.
His mind, in an unconscious whim, had dated it all back to when he had met Jasper. The more Guy was letting him in, the more the ever present stare lighting up his nights was the same one he saw inside the church when no one else was there except from them. Guy had soon dismissed that thought, sure that the Book of Revelation had unveiled things that should have stayed unknown to man for a few more years, if not forever. Any kind of mortal intervention in Heavenly matters was unthinkable, so either his dreams were as human and real as Jasper, either they both did not belong to that world.