The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [28]
I try to remind myself that anyone who was anyone in the ancient world had to make an initiatory descent, but it’s dark down here.
A half mile, but who can gauge distance in the dark? My flashlight is an angel, illuminating round by round the brick and mortar path. What if an earthquake hit right now? What’s to stop the earth’s plates from shifting at this very moment? Shut up, brain. It’s quiet down here. What’s it like to be trapped underground? Buried? When I was a kid—maybe seven or eight—the winter rains came heavy after a drought, in sheets and torrents. Rivers flooded and cliffs turned into landslides from Mendocino to Monterey. On the TV news, a reporter stood in the gusting wind, knee-deep in mud, clinging to her microphone. A little house in Santa Cruz had been washed clear off the mountain and swallowed by the earth. Three children asleep in their shared double bed, missing. Search and rescue crews on the scene and the reporter talking about how maybe the kids are trapped in an air pocket underground. I lay wrapped in a wool blanket on the couch in our living room, listening to that wild pelting rain against the windows, watching the glowing screen for hours, and here’s this sudden hope: The three kids are sleeping soundly and alive in their beautiful little air pocket. I imagined the pocket round, like a bubble, with smooth dark walls. The sky kept dumping on our apartment roof and on the reporter in her yellow raincoat, pouring out of gutters and rushing to turn the mountains back to ocean. When even the reporter had to get out of the storm’s way, I prayed to Our Lady of Perpetual Help to keep my three new stranger-friends safe in their little bed in their dark pocket. I must have fallen asleep before they found the bodies, because it was years before it occurred to me: There are no livable air bubbles under mudslides.
The tunnel angles to the right, seems to narrow again. It’s hard to get a good breath down here. My chest feels tight. Maybe I should turn around. Maybe this is stupid. Maybe it’s all a trick. Maybe they’re going to keep me down here now, study me, stick me with pins. Maybe something in my blood will give them the proof they’re looking for. Irrefutable evidence of—What?—God? God in my blood. The smell of wet dirt. I keep moving forward. Breathe, Frankka. The walls feel like they’re closing in.
Click.
What is it?
Click.
Then a soft light. “You coming, kid?”
Chapter 10
QUICK PRAYER
Martín de Porres
(IF YOU NEED INVISIBILITY)
A.K.A. Martín of Charity
FEAST DAY: November 3
SYMBOLS: a broom, small animals, healing herbs
Martín de Porres, patron saint of social justice, please make the Jesus freaks blind to me.
When two escaped prisoners begged sanctuary in your monastery cell, you had them kneel and pray. When the cops showed up to search the place, they found no sign of the fugitives.
Martín, bastard child of a freed slave, you were apprenticed to become a barber-surgeon—not a bad prospect for a poor fatherless kid—but you wanted only to work for God. At the Dominican Friary of Rosario in Lima, you became a lay servant because the bigoted rules wouldn’t allow you to call yourself a full brother. Black man. But you did your chores without resentment. Saint of the Broom. For nine years you swept and prayed, raised more than $2,000 a week for the poor. Nine years, and at last the racist rules went bent for you. You became a monk, a full brother! Your responsibilities included haircuts and health care. You grew herbs in your cell, healed the sick, founded an orphanage, a hospital, and a veterinary clinic.
When the monastery prior instructed you to set out poison for the mice, you did as you were told, but not without warning the rodents. You crept out into the yard, called your mice friends together, and offered them a deal. “Stay out of the buildings,” you said. “I’ll bring your snacks outside to you each night.” And so you did. Mice and monks lived in harmony.
Oh, Martín, flying brother, you used to rise up in the air as you prayed, emanating supernatural rays of light.