Chapter 2

The girl left without asking Hance if he or someone else would be her voice teacher, or if her lessons would be at that same time every week.  Her lack of curiosity signified she expected rejection yet invited him to assure her otherwise. He would not oblige. He let her go on her way, offering neither consolation nor encouragement. Never again could he suffer a female’s yearning for something she pretended she did not want. Not after Mary Guaire.

He left the music open on the harpsichord, locked his office and hastened across the common, heedless of the rain that stained the tired brick facades of the surrounding academic halls. The fleck of pain behind his eyes had returned. Within the hour the fleck would bloat, an ontological insect drilling out the matter deep within his head, removing his thoughts, memories, knowledge and awareness, and filling the space with an agony as arduous to ease as to endure.

It couldn’t happen at night, in the privacy of his rooms. That would be too easy. His suffering had to begin in public, in the midst of the most mundane events. Either he put an end to it as quickly as he could, or it surpassed the point where another man would die or go out of his mind. He suffered or he yielded, and the yielding—the way he was compelled to end the torment––was suffering in itself.

He coughed on the fragrance of wet clothes and canvas bookpacks. Not them, he thought as he sensed the clump of students. Young voices shouted a greeting. A stronger, more mature voice called his name. “John!”

Hance, who had been looking at the ground through dripping long hair, pulled up before he collided with Father Dario, who was already holding him by the arm, full of joy and enthusiasm. “We’re bringing food and clothing to the camp the homeless have set up in the woods. Why not come with us?”

Hance backed away from his colleague, courteous but too involved with his predicament to entertain notions of charity. “Alas, social justice doesn’t agree with my schedule.”

“You’re a department chair! You can do whatever you like with your schedule.”

Hance refused to speak in front of the students. Stepping lively, he signaled Dario to follow. “If the department chair goes running off on a whim,” he said in a low voice, “would that not signal to his peers that they too can do as they pleased?”

“It’s not a question of doing what pleases us, though the service of others should always please us. The entire staff should go out there. Can you imagine the message such an action would send to the town?”

“Yes, it would say we have no sense of responsibility to the people who pay us to educate their children—or themselves. The poor will always be with us,” Hance concluded as Dario started a cheery dispute. “I’ll have plenty of other chances to go with you.”

Dario gave up and returned to the students, who had taken shelter in the foyer of little Aquinas Hall, the science building.

Pain and the peculiar faintness of profound hunger brought Hance to the rim of sight and reason. He felt his face had gone the same bleached-wheat color as his hair. He was certain people would stare, as they always stared, wondering what was wrong with him. He relied on his sense of smell and the feel of his surroundings to guide him to the nearest building with a chapel.

The college was run by a centuries-old teaching order of nuns and was originally for women only. Though the college had long been co-educational, the dormitories were still segregated. Hance made his way to the male dorm, where he signed in to indicate the chapel was in use. He told the concierge and the young men making plans over their cell phones that Mass would start in a few minutes, if they wanted to participate. Some of them refused with guilty smiles. A student probably new to the school kept asking, “Mass? Who’s saying Mass?” Hance rarely wore his clerical collar on campus. He felt the symbol of his vocation made some students uncomfortable.

Feeling too ill to be bothered with participants or servers, he proceeded to the chapel, so reeling with nausea he could have been mistaken for a drunkard. He couldn’t be bothered with vestments, either; he would say Mass as he was––in sodden blazer and twills. The unsanctified wine and host were more important. As expected, both were ready for use in the service.

Hance decried the notion that a Roman Catholic priest celebrates Mass. For Hance, Mass was torture, not an occasion of joy. He could think of nothing more blasphemous than a man of his kind leading people in the worship of an un-nameable, unknowable essence whose form and function for ages had been the stuff of scholarly debate among great thinkers, the cause of madness among weaker minds, and the excuse for wars among peoples who could think of no other reason for murdering each other.

Yet he must say Mass day after day, until the end of time, sealed within a pact that no saint, pope, philosopher or Doctor of the Church had had the imagination to include among the torments of Hell. He could never grow accustomed to officiating in English. It was the Latin Mass he remembered; he could say it without the books, the servers, the satin ribbons that marked the appropriate readings. He would have liked to have incense, though­­––incense from a censer swung by a morally unblemished youth whose blood leached the purity of baby roses into his sweat.

The yearning was a momentary delusion. He had reached the Consecration, that part of the Mass where the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. As every priest had done countless of times for more than a thousand years, Hance raised the host and proclaimed, in Latin, “This is my body.” He then raised the chalice, saying, “This is the chalice of my blood of the new and eternal covenant: the mystery of faith which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

With no participants or servers to partake of the Eucharist, Hance had to confront the Communion of the Priest sooner than he preferred:

“Quid retribuam Domino pro omnibus quae retribuit mihi?” How shall I repay the Lord for all he has done for me?

“Calicem salutaris accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo. Laudans invocabo Dominum, et ab inimicis meis salvus ero.” I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord. In praise, I will call upon the Lord and be saved from my enemies.

“Sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam.” May the Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve my soul to life everlasting.

This was what he lived for, what would end his craving for the next twenty-four hours. Not the blood of that poor girl who had auditioned for him. Not the blood of the youthful group who had surrounded Dario on the soggy grounds of the common. This, the Precious Blood, the Blood of the Lamb. The Lamb that he reviled and that reviled him. The Lamb that had let him die not into eternal life with the Lord but into eternal damnation with The Lord.

The Order of Mass called for the priest to drink the Precious Blood with reverence. Hance knew that God knew reverence was the farthest thing from his heart. He managed to get the Blood down, but it always came back on a discreet gag; he had no choice but to silence himself and swallow again.

In the beginning, he had reasoned the wine had disagreed with him because it was an inferior vintage that had become vinegar, but he quickly understood the wine was truly the Blood of the Savior, saving him so he could drink it as punishment per omnia saecula saeculorum­­––forever and ever, world without end.

As soon as he accepted it into himself, the pain in his head gave way to a light that burst with the gut-shuddering violence he likened to the violence of losing himself in a woman––or the sinking of his teeth into the source of innocent blood. There was the same relief, too.

It never lasted though. Nothing good was meant to last, in this world or the next.