The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [60]
Tony plays a few notes on his saxophone before he launches into his old narcotic lullaby.
We sway sleepy as the lights dim. All quiet now.
I can see silhouettes in the audience.
Then a racket from stage right. Madre’s heavy footfalls. She appears in black, her face wrinkled-wounded. She grabs me. I let her drag my limp body, content to be a victim to her merciful love.
Barbaro, the only witness to my arrest, hastens to wake the others. He points, panicked, as the curtain falls.
I take my place center stage now. Curtain up, and I extend my arms, crosslike.
Bass line like a heartbeat, and the friends come rushing with Barbaro, too late.
The lights are a blinding wall of white heat. I close my eyes and force my appetite up from my belly and into my head. I will my mind empty of everything but the hunger, press it out through my shoulders, though my muscles and veins. I envision the blood traveling down my arms like a lava flow. My palms feel hot. I tremble, just a little, but when I open my eyes to glance at my hands, no blood flows. I concentrate on my hunger, on the sheer hollowness of my belly, on my arms and hands, but the emptiness won’t hold. Three fish in a bucket.
Go away, fish. No thoughts now. My silver rainbow trout.
Push them out of your mind, Frankka.
I think of my grandmother, weeping in her golden armchair. “Nana,” I whisper faintly.
From the hush of the audience, a sudden heckle. “She’s a fraud!”
I open my eyes, but there’s no one there. Just the glare of bright lights.
“Nothing’s happening!” someone yells.
A mumbling rustle of bodies in the dark.
Then a sound, sharp and abrupt—bpooom.
An unbridled shriek.
The smell of gunfire.
My field of vision, a panning blurred disorientation of lights.
Shouts and footfalls in the aisles. Bpooom.
Magdelena leaps from nowhere, tackles me to the stage.
Just as I hit my head, a child’s screech. “Butt aaassssss!” And another shot echoes through the theater. My foot explodes.
A siren scream. “Emaaanuel!”
All sound out. The world fades to black.
A beating of wings, a searing pain. The skull bird bursts forth and flies, its white wings like a dream of angels.
Lights, hands, movement, pain, sirens, wind, red. Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you. Movement, lights, cloth, eyes, hands, chill. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Lights, questions, hands, pain, movement, needles. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
Chapter 23
DEMEROL
He appears in a dawny coral glow, wears a halo of moonlight.
Hush.
“Who are you?”
He doesn’t answer, holds out his hand, scarred at the wrist, offers me something crimson and pulsing.
I try to focus on his dark legacy.
In his other hand, a sharp paring knife glints in the strange glow. Gently, he takes the knife to my chest. The blade is cold as he cuts me open and places his gift inside me, saying, “Dearest daughter, as I took your heart away, now, you see, I am giving you mine.”
“In self-knowledge,” Catherine of Siena wrote, “you will humble yourself, seeing that, in yourself, you do not even exist.”
He’s gone, just like that. Only the coral glow remains.
I can hear the heart beat faintly, like a faraway train.
I wake woozy to a world of white: white sheets, white walls, white ceiling, white floors, white curtains opening to white skies, white uniformed seraphs in white masks shuffling under white lights. They smell of lilies. It’s like we’re already in heaven but for the other smell. Surely heaven doesn’t smell of lemon disinfectant.
I search my dream mind for the man haloed in silvery light. “Come back,” I whisper, my hands and feet seared in a dull and wanting pain.
He presses his hand to my chest, instantly healing the scar left by the paring knife.
My eyelids are heavy, but I manage to lift them. My foot tended and wrapped, heavy, too. I can feel something around my head, reach to touch the bandage.
Barbaro stands at my bedside. “They have said you must not go,” he tells me. “But in fact we