“No. That is not what God does. Good people often die young and bad people often live to old age.”
“Where is the justice in that?” Donna demanded.
“Justice is each person getting his or her due. Every mortal will die, so avoiding death entirely would be unjust for humans, right?”
“But how is a gentle priest due a violent death?” she insisted.
“He followed Christ, did he not? At the moment of Christ’s birth – Christmas Day – it was known he must die, must be crucified. How is it wrong that the follower of a young martyr be martyred young?”
Donna was stunned by that response. Doctor Gross also seemed caught off-guard. He didn’t scribble notes, or open his mouth to respond, but only stared straight ahead.
“Are you a Christian, Gary?” Azrael asked.
“I’m Jewish.”
“Still, you know Psalm 23-”
“‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ Of course.”
“And what’s a shepherd? A husbandman, right?”
Azrael went on. “He tends his sheep, he leads them to good pastures and clean water. He guards them through the valley of the shadow of death.”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why does he guard them?”
“So the wolves won’t kill them?”
“Yes, so the wolves won’t kill them. Does that mean they never die? Does he keep them into ripe old age so that they can pass away in their sleep?”
“It’s a metaphor. You can’t stretch it too far.”
“He keeps the wolves from killing them at the wrong time so he can kill them at the right time. Part of husbandry is slaughter. He chooses when the sheep will live, when they will be sheared, when they will mate, and when they will die. Could any shepherd be a good shepherd if he didn’t cull his herd, didn’t keep them from overgrazing the land and starving themselves out?
And he kills them in their prime, when they’ll provide the best meat.”
“The good shepherd is a Christian metaphor.”
“The psalms are Jewish. Why is it so hard for you to believe that God chooses the time and place and means of human death? Would you rather that he not choose?
That he not know, not plan? That he leave you to the wolves and the shadow of death and so either be incapable or unwilling to save you?”
“Look, we’ve strayed from the point.”
“No, this is the point. To understand me, you need to understand that the actions of the divine are incomprehensible and unconscionable to the mortal. That which God not only may do but must do – orchestrate the deaths of all humans – is inexcusable when done by a human. So, too, that which a human shepherd not only may do but must do – slaughter the creatures in his charge – would be inconceivable to the sheep. You fear and denounce only because you don’t want to recognize that humans aren’t the top of the food chain.”
Doctor Gross stared, perplexed, speechless.
“Let’s get to the regression,” Donna said, impatient.
“I’m tired of all this talk of death. I’m tired of Keith McFarland and Derek Billings and the Angel of Death. I want to hear more about William Dance. I want to see that boy standing next to his bike in front of the yellow house.”
“Yes,” agreed Doctor Gross, shaking his head to clear it. “Yes. William, you remember your place of bliss?
That’s where we’re headed. I want you to relax. Lean back in the bed.”
“What other choice do I have?”
“Yes. Well, get as comfortable as possible. Take three deep breaths: one… two… three… Good. Take another breath…”
What it was that smoked at the end of the stick was not advertised. If you asked, they called it meat. It had small bones – leg bones and otherwise – and was cheap. Everybody ate them so they couldn’t have been too bad.
He ate. It wasn’t too bad. He had paid a thousand pesos and gotten change. He sat there on his heels. The old men across the dusty road laughed in their circle. They were smoking cigars as black as dog turds. They hadn’t gotten all the feathers off the head, which was hidden beneath a place where the plumes were charred together. Hungry, he pulled the burned parts off and chewed gently around the crow’s eye. Darkness. That was what they gave to him after killing Billings. Darkness. Reason enough for the sane prisoner to go insane. A cell with no windows, no light, only a steel bed and a stainless steel toilet without a seat and a slot through which came anything that came for him. Solitary. It was the greatest punishment a prisoner could receive.
Short of death.
Azra sat in the darkness. They had even put a rubber flange on the outside base of the door to prevent light from seeping through. He had saved a crust of bread from one meal and let it harden on the floor overnight so that he could wedge it beneath the door, lifting the flange and letting a little light in. Now, in the glow that came around the crust of bread, he could see his dim little space, cement and steel and nothing else. His breath condensed on the walls, steel dappled in cold sweat.
With each passing moment, his humanity sank deeper into him, from bone and blood to spirit and soul. He was trapped in this body, in this tiny room, in this darkness. He was at the mercy of his skin he inhabited and its limits.
He had sat beside the door and thought about gnashing his own wrist open and bleeding out through the crack. That would be a kind of ritual escape, extending part of his vitality out the door. But ritual was no longer important. He needed real escape.
What of semen? If it ventured beyond and found an egg, a part of him would have escaped this trap. No wonder those on death row were in so great a hurry to marry, to gain conjugal visitation rights. In that sudden thought, the whole fetid weight of reproduction and sexual desire and mortal fear poured through him.
“Do you think it is natural to have these feelings? Do you think God wants humans to have these feelings when they kill?”
Fuck, yeah, was all he could think. Fuck, yeah. It was not the sort of response worthy of an angel, but neither was his soul any longer worthy of an angel.
An angel. That’s what he needed. If he were truly human now, there would be an angel assigned him, a guardian. Not all humans who heard voices were schizophrenic. Some were prophets and shamans and artists. All humans would hear the divine voices if only they quieted the raging of their hearts and minds and listened with their souls. What better, quieter place?
He pulled his knees up toward his chest, drew a deep breath, and let the air sluice from his nostrils. His ribs slouched inward like the tines of a folding umbrella. He emptied himself of the panic and pain of the last weeks, the mental torments of a mind once infinite that found itself not just finite but imprisoned, coerced, controlled. He drew another breath and let it go, imagining those heavy pollutants drifting out of him. A third breath, but the air was stale. It was all pollutants.
He closed his eyes. Even the bread-light of the door was gone now. His mind seemed a shadowy blue thing hovering before him. Its convoluted surface peeled slowly back like the cracked outside of a road apple. The pocketed wetness within sprayed upward and outward – outward no farther than the cell walls, but upward, upward, propelling the ceiling higher, the ceiling and the cells above it higher until the whole column of building broke free and rocketed into the sky. It, too, was black in an imagined nighttime, and the building cross-section dropped away behind the thrust of that bursting mind.
There, at last – no limits – the flesh torn asunder like some Gnostic nightmare, the spirit flung outward into infinity to find its eternal angel guide. Here in the endless centuries, a guide: some Gabriel, some Uriel, or if not a friend, an adversary, an accuser, a Satan. At least with such there would be a divine measure upon which to form up the coiling putrescence of humanity.
He waited, blown wide open, consciousness as raw as a wound. He waited. The inspiration and suspiration of the old metallic air no longer mattered. The fleshy ache of skin and muscle and fat pressed between steel and bone was gone. There was only the vulnerability of his seeking, hoping soul.