He hadn’t slept again. The wretched dream. Over and over, night after night, wandering in an austere dark landscape, listening to haunting whispers. He’d recognized the voices right away: himself as a child, as an adolescent, and as a man, whispering the words to every prayer that he had ever uttered. But, as the dream clearly indicated, the prayers had never come to rest in the sacred ear they were intended for. Instead, they had lost their way and were wandering in the bleak, dark, dead end of the universe, like undelivered mail.
He twirled away from the altar in his stiff white and gold vestments and headed down the three steps towards the altar rail. He knew he could get help if he asked for it. There would be counselling, a new posting perhaps. Things would be tried to rekindle his devotion. And he would be pressured to make a tremendous effort to rediscover God for himself. He would be reminded that prayer was his most powerful tool, that he had only to use it faithfully. He began setting sacred hosts on the quivering extended white tongues of the faithful of St. Alphonsis.
But Jerome Martin was dead certain that he was beyond help. He’d already tried to wring one last bit of devotion out of himself, begging God, every day for months, for guidance. But whenever he closed his eyes in prayer, kneeling alone in the church after it had emptied out, rather than sensing God’s loving presence, all he could think about was how tired he was, how restful it was to close his eyes for a few moments. All he was certain of was that the stale words of his prayers dropped from his lips straight down onto the cold stone floor of the church.
Every night, the dream tormented him, pressing his nose right up against its whispering message. Every night he fled, flying through darkness, breaking through the surface, his eyes popping open to recognize, right there above his bed, splashed with street light, the familiar sloped ceiling of his dingy little room in the rectory of St. Alphonsis parish.
This was precisely how he awoke in the early hours of the first Monday in July, in the summer that he turned forty-six, rising once again into the familiar lonely solitude of the empty hours before dawn. He lay on his back, his long heavy limbs sunken into his sweat-dampened narrow mattress, his eyes tracking across the ceiling. Zigzagging right and zigzagging left, his eyes traced and retraced a jagged crack that resembled a staircase. Then they circled around and around and around over a patch of peeling paint that looked like the head of a bald man with a large round nose. Until recently, these small familiar things had usually helped to anchor him while the bad dream dissipated. But lately, the dream had begun to pursue him beyond the unconscious. He no longer felt safe now that he was awake. He lay in his bed with a racing heart. The voices that he used to leave behind when he awoke now whispered at him from inside the walls of his room.
And so, in the forty-seventh summer of his life, and the twentieth year of his ordination into the priesthood, Jerome Martin lay awake once again in his airless second-floor bedroom, staring at his ceiling, knowing that he had reached an impasse. God had never heard of Jerome Martin.
Through the window just beside his head, he could hear the sharp splash of rain on cement. It was the first respite from the summer heat in days. The heat and humidity had started early this year. Usually it was mid-August before the air grew so gauzy. Trying to sleep in a second-floor bedroom with only one window that faced east was nearly impossible without a fan. He had one, but it was still stored away on the floor in the back of his closet. Fetching it at this hour would only wake the others. After breakfast he could come back upstairs and see to it, since the heat looked like it was here to stay. The fan would be dusty and need a good wiping down and he had just the right worn old hanky ready to be retired from his drawer and reassigned.
The wispy window curtains suddenly lifted off the sill to let a thread of breeze pass beneath them. The delicate ribbon of cool air slid pleasantly down the outside of Jerome’s naked left leg. A dozen more of these and he might be enticed to fall back to sleep. But the curtains sagged back down onto the sill and settled. Out of habit, his hand wandered to the bedside table where he kept an old black sock futilely draped over his clock so that the faint glow from the illuminated face wouldn’t keep him awake. He lifted the sock and confirmed what he already knew. It was 3:05 a.m. Inhaling deeply, he let the sock drop. His arm followed, crash-landing across his brow, forcing his eyes shut. Three long, hot hours stretched out before him. At six, he could get up and prepare for mass.
Thunder rumbled outside. He supposed he could sit up and read. It wouldn’t put him back to sleep again, but it would ease his conscience slightly. Reading could always be considered a positive activity, even when undertaken to avoid something else. When the thunder rumbled again, he half-heartedly propped himself up on his elbows and turned toward the window. Blue reflections of lightning flickered across the walls of his room, lighting up the closed dark door to the hall. If it weren’t for his insistence on keeping the door closed for privacy, there might have been a slight chance of generating a cross-breeze.
On the other side of the door, the hall led to the rooms of Ralph Lauzon and Gerry LeBlanc, two men who slept soundly. Jerome could picture them both: Gerry thrown face down on his bed in a heap, breathing deeply, a child of a man who would scramble into action immediately upon waking; Ralph on his back, spread-eagled over the wide mattress of his pastor’s double bed, his face undistorted, his businessman’s mind still at work down in the wells of sleep.
Still propped up on his elbows, Jerome looked down the length of his long body and kicked the thin cotton sheet loose from his right foot. His poor wilted penis jiggled slightly like an infant limb. Limb of God, he thought, sadly, have mercy on me.
He envied the others their sleep. Like their lives, it came so easily to them. They could exhaust themselves each day with their work; they spent themselves on meetings, telephone calls, appointments, lunches, prayers, mass, errands. For him, though, there was something wrong; there was something desperately wrong with his ability to sleep. For months now, he had been continually paralyzed by exhaustion, day and night, so that even sleep had become a bizarre workload for which he did not have enough energy. He only fell into short periods of unconsciousness after hours of unsettled tossing upon his old lumpy mattress. Once asleep, he travelled all night, always ending up in that mysterious black infinity. And then he woke, exhausted, lonely, and worried about what was happening to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept, undisturbed, through an eight-hour night.
He lay back down and listened to the water trickling from the roof into the eaves that passed just below the window. His large hands rested one above the other in the black hair on his abdomen. The rain was stopping. Evidently the disturbance was only a small cloudburst.
He closed his eyes and saw Ralph’s face pass before him, smooth and unmarred, with its cleanly shaved, darkly shadowed jaw. Then Ralph’s car, glittering black with that fine red line of trim running along the doors and fenders. Ralph was like his car: clean and glossy, good-looking. Uncomfortable, he moved again, seeking a better position. In his memory, he could hear Ralph’s deep masculine voice crooning snippets of tunes from old movies. It was one of several things about Ralph that he admired. He liked the way the man swung his long legs in and out of his car, the way he sported up any staircase two steps at a time, the way he rattled the ice cubes in his highball glass when they ate at the Bishop’s and boomed out “Where the Sam-Hill’ve you been?” to someone he hadn’t seen in a while. Jerome wished he could do those things and tired himself out with the longing to do so. But eventually his envy always reduced him to shame. What kind of a wasted prayer was it to beg, “Dear Father in heaven, make me like another man, make me different than I am?” Where was the vocation in that? Where was the love of God, the gratefulness for the life that had been given to him? In the dark, oppressive heat, Jerome shifted yet again and answered his own question.
His large spatulate fingers began to rove searchingly over his skin.