Beads draped in doorways fluttered in the heated draft.
Poetry drifted around our feet, pages turning, unmerciful stanzas beckoning.
A furnace roared nearby.
I knew the sound of fire.
Newly made pottery sat out in the halls, glazed and smoking, sacred vessels used to hold cannabis or recently removed organs.
Freshly finished paintings remained tacky to the touch.
A geek could go places where almost no other man could.
The serpent inside his stomach, his head inside the serpent.
I was off on a tangent and yet this was somehow also coming full circle.
The two ends of my life were meeting in the middle.
It wouldn't take long now.
The currents swirled to take on new shapes.
Hollow-eyed women walked past, speckling the floor with trails of red.
Others stepped by all the more stronger for it, shaking their heads, annoyed perhaps, or strident.
They'd done what needed to be done and there were other things to do now.
We stood in the atmosphere of the pulpit, where the belief and lunacy meshed with mash liquor and fable.
It was necessity.
Lala
led me on.
Wooden statues of Irish folk heroes appeared from out of mounds of sawdust.
Faces formed of terra cotta and porcelain stared at us as we walked past.
My father had found a home here–where religion and injury and flesh fused into something both living and dead.
Juba said, "Stop.
Don't go any farther."
"Why?"
He didn't answer.
His eyes were full of worry as he wet his lips.
Juba hesitated in the air, and I could see each beat of his heart through that nutmeg skin.
He grew upset, his blood coursing and his heart pounding heavily in his tissue-thin chest.
His oblong head tipped one way and then the other.
I grinned at him.
"Because you can't go beyond this point?"
"There are limits."
"Sure.
Don't worry.
I'll get it done without you."
"I know that.
I've always known that."
Lala
watched without knowing what she was witnessing.
She said, "There are shadows.
There are bones in the walls."
Nell spread her arms and I dropped inside them, holding on tight enough to break any other woman's back.
But she only squeezed harder, engulfing me in the warm welcome of her soft flesh.
I fell and kept falling into that feathery bed of her body, until the tears came and I could almost believe she was my mother hugging me with all the lost love I'd never known.
"Take care of yourself," she said.
"I will."
Herzburg
shook my hand and I could feel the naked power within him, the wildness, wherever he was.
"You shouldn't have to be alone.
I'll make the effort if you want me to."
"No need for that.
You've got other things to do now.
Go on."
"You're certain?" he asked.
"It'll be all right.
Trust me."
He nodded and stroked his great beard, inspecting me, unable to decide whether I was strong enough or not.
"Do what has to be done."
"Sure."
Lester flicked his tongue into my ear and
Lala
leaned against me for support.
Her discomfort had grown more intense, but she didn't want to stop.
She stared at the passing women with their flattened bellies and said, "All of them wanted out before their right time.
A few weeks, a few months."
"Maybe it's not as bad as that."
”Is he keeping every one of them?"
"Let's go find out."
We were almost there.
I caught a whiff of the old man now, his fear and pride and arrogance.
The raw religion that never did enough to salve his ego.
He wanted an angelic tongue but couldn't afford the price.
We took another corner and walked down a poorly lit hallway.
The women congregated around us, waiting to enter, heading out.
Some seemed relieved, others had a desperate savagery about them.
Hands plucked at my sleeves, fingernails tearing against my neck.
Hard-lined jaws went by, soft chins, frightened eyes, courage in motion.
They wanted something, we all wanted something.
I muttered every verse about vengeance that I knew, and though they sounded hollow and hypocritical they still got my wheels turning.
I entered the Clinic and there he was.
Nicodemus.
My father.
The preacher, the drunk, the killer of my lady.
The man who had incinerated the
carny
and almost everybody in it, who had murdered my love Megan and stolen my son because he hated the abnormal and the blessed, especially me, and who was now forming his own little freak show.
Even here, with his hands up inside a woman's womb, he wore his frock coat and hat.
As he moved I heard two or three flasks knocking together in his pocket, and I didn't smell any whiskey.
Nicodemus had been extremely busy.
He'd picked up a few new skills since I'd seen him last.
I watched him take the fetus, doing the bidding of the Works.
The kid wanted out, I could see that.
Nine months was too long a stretch in a woman's body, inside this place.
The children were more now, different, changed–the umbilical reached into the void and fed them sustenance from the other side of Pandemonium.
I knew more about abortionists than I really wanted to.
Pregnant freaks were always having miscarriages, premature births and terminations because of what they called a "catastrophic fetal anomaly."
Genetic disorders abounded.
I wasn't only a Talker, but a listener as well.
Maybe I'd sat in on a class somewhere between the blintzes and the how-to-kill-with-your-bare-hands lecture.
First he injected medication directly into the fetus to stop the fetal heart instantly.
He'd already placed the first
laminaria
in, probably the day before.
It was a seaweed about the size of a match stick that absorbs moisture from the body and slowly becomes larger.
It helps to prevent infection.
After it's been placed in, the
laminaria
expands overnight and dilates the cervix in a manner that reduces pain and the risk of perforation.
He'd probably already changed them twice.
Then the amniotic membrane was ruptured and drained.
Contraction of the uterus reduced blood loss.
Release of the fluid enhanced movement of the fetus and placenta into the cervix.
Nicodemus performed a modified D&C using forceps to remove the fetus intact.
Then he took down a jar filled with yellow fluid and pickled the punk.
I understood why he was doing it.
He too was assaulted by memories, full to bursting with them, buoyed and invigorated by them.
He relived the day of my birth in that deadly storm, when my dying mother's legs hung wide open toward his face and he caught me with one hand.
As I slithered into the world, already falling faster than the devil plunging into the pit.
The angles and planes of his face had pretty much dropped in on themselves.
I saw only weakness there in the vapid wrinkles and sagging skin.
I'd thought I would kill my father the first minute I laid eyes on him, but I found myself suddenly wanting to talk.
The woman who'd just had the abortion kept silent, glancing around, unsure of what had brought her here.
Maybe she was in shock, or showing deference to the mammoth history around her.
She began to mewl.
She looked very much like the photos I'd seen of my mother.
S
ymbols are all that count when you finally realize how little a mark you've made despite all your frantic thrashing.
The wind blows it away.
Perhaps Nicodemus had just been trying to kill me the entire time, in his mind and soul, and through the death of his son, the death of himself.
He made no acknowledgment of me but held up the punk and said, "They can't do no
sinnin
' now."
He stared at the little hands and tapped the glass until the fingers wobbled and waved to him.
"But you can," I said.
"Where's your skillet?"
"Don't need it no more."
"You might want to reconsider that."
"
Naw
."
He let out a wracked sigh, shrugging his shoulders and stretching.
I could tell he'd been at it night and day since he arrived.
"And we fight all the rest of our days lookin' for atonement."
"You pathetic bastard."
He pursed his lips, thinking about it some.
"Yup."
The myth that he had once become seemed ten thousand years already gone.
He had shrunken and withered.
He was nothing more than sand and cinder that kept creeping across the face of the earth.
"None of this was necessary."
"All of it was or it wouldn't have been done," he told me.
"Ain't you learned that yet?"
"You should've just let it go."
He perked up and seemed genuinely curious at that.
"Let
go'a
what?
The money?
The ministry?
You
talkin
' about them trifles?
None'a
that was ever mine anyways.
I never held any of it so how's I to let it go?"
"Me then."
"Oh, you.
Well, yup.
I shoulda done that, but a father makes sacrifices.
The Almighty demands that of us, I already done told you.
Ole Abraham laid his boy out on the rock.
He did it for love, and I done the same.
And I saved you from having to make that horrible act of burnt offerings and penance.
I done it for love, and that there's the truth."
"You might have yourself convinced of that but just look down.
Your hands are covered in blood."
And they were.
I knew in my heart of hearts that he hadn't washed them since he'd butchered my lady.
Nicodemus was trying to reach back out for his own legend, and the idea of dried blood flecking off his fingers would be one he couldn't defy.
Juba's death, and Nell's and
Herzburg's
also clung to him along with the scorched ghosts of dozens of others.
He was the one who spoke like someone haunted, not me.
"My hands, my soul, they been cleansed in blood.
It's the road out of perdition.
That's forever been the way of it, since the flood."
Lala
could barely bring herself to raise her voice above a whisper.
"I don't care about any of that.
I want to see her again, one last time.
You had no right to do what you did."
"Mebbe not," My father said, "but we all gotta do what's given us to do.
That's the only duty we got."
"Where's Jonah?" I asked.
"Safe."
"Terrific.
Where?"
"Never mind that.
You can't have him.
He don't want you no more.
None'a
them want any of
youse
no more."