Ab Absurdo

[Dorian M. Black]

Certain reflexes of the imagination still fire (the wind is God moving His hands) but ultimately they all come to nothing. The world's emphatically literal. Appositely literal, since he's no longer, really, alive.

All good children go to heaven. Somewhere in the crenelations of his brain he knows this deep neural groove endures, but knows too that it was put there and might just as easily not have been. Whoever it was that put God in his head wasn't God, he was sure of it. And yet... here he was.

Blood gossips and thumps in his skull. Dorian had several good reasons for being here tonight. Logical reasons, each one religiously unrelated. But alone in the billowing rain he's not so sure. With the downpour his sense of direction dissolves; he feels it going - then it's gone. Is that the abbey on his left, or the right? The wet road passes under him in many more steps than he would've thought necessary, but still, there's the sandstone ceiling in front of him where the pillars meet overhead (mourners consoling each other, Anton had said in the preliteral days) and as he passes beneath the overhang, he can see the abbey.

With an inner start Dorian realises it's the first time he's asked himself why he's resisting - and in the asking simultaneously answers. The answer's been with him the whole time but given so often it's become like a word made meaningless by repetition. It would seem a laughably poor answer to Malota, or even Viktor. It seems a laughably poor answer to Dorian too, since it's no less absurd than the idea of piling up brownie points for a heaven that doesn't exist.

The blood's making him dizzy. He wonders again how long he's been here, staring at the church, at the burning glow of its open door like a hearth to another world.

A single, sharp pulse of pain drags something out of him.

With no idea how such a thing could be possible he finds himself pitching forward in what feels like slow motion (he has time to equivocate between reason's ditch and the fever's less rational: portal to another dimension) before sudden contact - a terrible flash of pain in his left knee and right shin - brings physics back.

Rockingly back, in fact, with anger and humiliation. At his first convulsive reflex - to get to his feet - the pain sears, yanks a cry from him, a pure sound of himself he hasn't heard since the Brujah, and for a split second he expects to see them standing over him.

Despite the pain he has to think the manoeuvre through. Use your hand to feel where the edge of whatever it is is. Farm tool or carriage part? Some sort of wheel spoke - ah - very well, a carriage, yes that's the the backstep, now grab the the tailboard. There. That's the top. So now you roll, take the weight on your elbows.

A sodden fox trots past, a vision of urgent purpose from tail-tip to snout that hasn't changed since the species arrived. Without God there's only the richness of the accident and it makes no sense to praise accident; still, moments like this display painfully sharp how creatures have the beauty of being undividedly themselves. How long had it been since he'd seen a fox, let alone this close?

Animals were immune to some aspect of Obfuscate. Dorian had his theories. (One of the last things he had, actually.) Within seconds the wet flaxen tail was gone, startled by his undefined presence.

There was no denying the temptation to lie still, close his eyes, go out, go quite out. The ditch smells of waterlogged earth, an unbankruptable freshness, the planet's thrusting monomania for renewal even in the centre of the town. If the human dead weren't dead this is the force they'd feel pushing through eye sockets, ribs, jaws, the upheaving freight of microbes and nitrates. Sorry, can't stop: Life.

Suddenly the rain comes down harder. The downpour's added twenty pounds to his clothes. The ditch bottom's flooded but for a few moments he has no choice but to lie with his right side partially submerged. No idea how he could have gone so wrong. He rolls onto his side, gets up on one elbow, snarling in silence. With a twist he rights himself flush to the iron spokes, and is upright.

*

He gives a laugh - it may as well be hysterical - because the locked backdoor is more solid than he remembers (inches of wood with cast iron straps, fool). His ulna's clearly broken and the instinctive knee-jerk reaction to heal the agony that lances through his shattered fist strips him of the last of his blood. He hated Potence.

Consciousness only lasts a couple of seconds but in that time he suffers a surge of claustrophobia, caught between the broken door and the yawning empty dark. Was this the tunnel to the catacombs? The treasury?

An eternal three seconds of something like mild outrage - then he falls to Torpor.

[Revd Tweedy]

O LORD, look down from heaven, behold, visit, and relieve this thy servant. Look upon him with the eyes of thy mercy, give him comfort and sure confidence in thee, defend him from the danger of the enemy, and keep him in perpetual peace and safety; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The chamber felt small and claustrophobic, even though the vaulted ceiling, at twelve feet, was lost to the flicker of the candles he'd lit. By rights it should have echoed, but so full was it of the bric-a-brac of Abbey life and business, all sounds were muffled. And yet, by some acoustic trick, the hammering of the rain on the streets above penetrated this far, and in the process was transmuted into a low hiss, like some unending sigh.

It sounded as though he stood in the presence of a giant. One beyond seeing; and yet he could hear its breath as it watched him.

Which, of course, was entirely true. Watched he was; he was seen.

Amen.

The coat was probably beyond salvaging; he'd removed it, hanging it over the back of a stack of pews in defiance of entropy. The contents of its pockets were arranged neatly on the seat. They had a story to tell - one that was at odds with the body. Tweedy looked at the corpse on the table before him.

The eyes had refused to close; they stared glassily into the gloom overhead. The limbs he'd straightened, aligning bones where he might. He wasn't sure that it mattered. The ribs were not just broken; they were shattered. It was possible, with a lead weight in one's fist, to hit a man hard enough to leave the impressions that his probing fingers found. If you did, you'd likely break your own fingers, and you'd kill him in the process, sure as sixpence. Nobody could survive such a beating.

Well, nobody had.

He lifted the pewter cup in his good hand, his half-fingered left tilting the head a little. The caustic tongue of the ghost on the table would be certain to remark at the blasphemous irony of the situation, if it was not beyond saving. Tweedy had no patience for irony. Those who ministered to the sick seldom did.

DOST thou believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth?
And in Jesus Christ his only-begotten Son our Lord? And that he was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; that he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; that he went down into hell, and also did rise again the third day; that he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; and from thence shall come again at the end of the world, to judge the quick and the dead?

"Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"

The mouth filled, but its tongue had fallen back. A trickle of ichor escaped the pallid lips. Tweedy adjusted his grip, pulling the chin down. The jaw looked dislocated, too. With a wet pop the tongue shifted, spattering blood over his hand. He lifted the cup again.

"Wake up, Mr. Black."

[Dorian M. Black]

It took Dorian a wearying and peculiarly indeterminate time to locate that voice. The rain came down with altered acoustics - clearly, he was inside - and it hit the roof in a hiss that evoked time boiling away to nothing. Eventually, wounds hot, scalp whispering, ribs vociferously against all this moving around nonsense, Dorian blinked awake. His eyes were already open, he realised with offended vanity, but he resolved the quiet chamber and felt a moment's peace in the benign smell of incense, old wood, beeswax.

The sensible thing would have been to reply. He couldn't face it. He was exhausted. He noted that the wounds were throbbing less, and the sharp coagulant copper on his tongue went a long way to explain that; by tomorrow night they'd all be gone. The ribs, even with his cellular speed-knitting, would take a day longer. Physically this was nothing, a scrape. Yet all of Dorian that was not flesh cried out for repose. The Elder had left him with a feeling of cloying contamination. He wanted a bath, a quiet room, a cool bed.

Almost all of which, he noted with reluctant gratitude, he found. He doubted the Reverend had a bath tucked away, but Dorian took meditative refuge in the hard table beneath him, in the delay of interaction as -

Hold. Is this an altar?

He sat up so fast the room spun.

Drearily enlarged in guilt he feels condemnation like a presence in the room with him, imagines it as an idiot child he's been conned into looking after all these years.

Pain rolls him to the edge of himself. He makes an aborted motion to swing one leg over, fails, collapses on the table with a wheezing sound that he would later omit from recall.

The hysteria was back, because, what could be more damning than this? And yet above the fear for the eternal horror-barbeque of hell was a bubbling humour for the context. This too is what he's tired of, the friability of boundaries, the nearness of opposite extremes, the depressing bleedability of grief into laughter, good into evil, tragedy into farce.

Somewhere in this emotional mess he's busy with the problem of getting out of his body. There's a simple but horribly elusive equation if only he can remember it. Elsewhere he's accepting the room's details as the last of itself the world can give him. He tries to resolve Tweedy's face, forces himself to reach calm, but pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and sarcasm is nothing, simply nothing. Yet some people create a space it can't occupy, an alternative dimension where the decision to not feel is held like a pearl in a paperweight beyond reach or harm. Some people he's not one of.

"Good eve, Rev'rend," the rasp is brittle. "Thou art as handsome as ever."

[Revd Tweedy]

Tweedy fixed his one good eye on Black, unblinking. He didn't respond immediately; neither smile nor scowl on that lined face. Stare as long as one might at the man, hunting out disapproval, or a sign that the needling has struck home: that time was wasted. Judgement might lie behind the craggy facade, but an impassive acceptance adorned it.

"Lie still," he said. "I'll have t' splint that knee, and your arm too."

He snatched up a large enameled iron basin, setting it with a clunk on the table at Dorian's feet as the latter collapsed back. Two large pitchers joined it.

"You can stay if you need," his voice rumbled, the burr softening it. He leaned back into the young man's vision. "It'll be a while afore you can walk on that again."

His fingers fumbled at the man's shirt, removing the remaining studs. "Lie still," he said again, the maimed hand heavy on Dorian's chest, "these are worth something." The studs joined the small array of possessions on the pew behind him. "This ain't," he added, taking hold of one of the cuffs and ripping the sleeve open easily.

Scent can be the key that unlocks memory's doors. The renewed waft of the filth that the man had crawled through finally broke through the impassive mask. The priest's face darkened as his fingers tested the break in Dorian's arm. Dead flesh: the man had taken a beating, but his body didn't bruise.

"Who did this, lad?"

[Dorian M. Black]

"Of course they're worth something," Dorian snapped. "That's silver."

Apparently, a lifetime of surgically manhandling others does nothing to prepare you for being manhandled in turn.

With another queasy effort he shies away from the Reverend's touch, in careful increments gets his weight rearranged. The pain hierarchy's established; he knows what to favour, where pressure can be borne. Still the room spins for a moment. Pain rolls him back, blackens his vision. This more than anything has Dorian eventually submit, head hot and confused. There'd been a danger of collapse into something when he felt the care in those hands, but it passed.

"It could be any number of inanimate objects that did this. Why ask who? In fact, let us say that I was... gored by a bull. Or a gunshot. Either will do."

Talking was burdensome, but he could live with the rasp if no one else was to hear it. Once the ribs healed and cleared off the wretched lung, the perforations would close. Dorian assumed the Reverend had splint material to hand.

"Can you find the seat of fracture? On the long bones, just ignore the ribs," he said tiredly. "Tibula and fibula. The left's an oblique. Haemorrhaging and effusion irrelevant, as I imagine you've noticed; any crude method will do. Just ensure that the fragments... eject through the hours. If you'd apply enough pressure below the splint to encourage them up rather than down, I'd be much obliged. The soles of the feet are frustratingly sensitive to shrapnel evacuation."

He forced calm into his tone, failed, and masked the blasted tremor with a cough that he immediately regretted.

"A tourniquet will suffice, but ring it stronger than advised, then elevate a half foot."

He stared up at the empty space. The church had a strange amphitheatre hush to it now, devoid of service.

He wished he could delay this nonsense of regeneration. Post-mortem, it was the clumsy thraldom of the vampiric body to renewal. If only it would wait long enough for him to contact Taylor and have the man pull out the shards, then they wouldn't need puncture the pleural cavity, let alone the layers of skin above. It hurt, unsurprisingly, and was a slow process. There had to be some aggravated chemical that could halt it systemically...

The body gets on with things while consciousness prattles. Were this his patient he'd simply open them up and tweezer out the pieces, but he didn't think the Reverend would want to perform invasive surgery on his as-yet-unconfirmed altar.

It was a pleasant thought, though.

"I'd also appreciate it if you could you expose the ends. Use the screws to - ah - look... you've already lined up all the contents of my pocket."

A long pause. "How convenient."

A dark look slid towards the Reverend.

[Revd Tweedy]

"Don't play your word games, Mr. Black." The priest turned, lifted the fifth and final tin cup from the line and slapped it down with a metallic clink on the surface by Dorian's head. "This'll hurt. That's for after."

Taking up one of the candles, he stepped into the darkness. The halo of light went with him: past a thick round stone pillar. The ceiling was too low, though. Couple that with the wooden clatter as Tweedy pulled the back of a rickety old Windsor chair apart - the reverend wasn't given to casual vandalism.

A shock of reorientation: this wasn't the Abbey. They were... beneath it?

The cloying scent from the cup called out to him. Tweedy loomed back into view again, laying the wooden rods either side of Dorian's shattered knee.

"Someone with a fist big as this," he held up his own, "gave you a beatin' that'd kill a man. A'ter it, not afore, you put on your coat to come see me. Or that lot wouldn't still be in your pockets." He shifted his head minutely, nodding in the direction of the conveniently assembled items.

"I'm not lookin' for your confession, Dorian." The voice was gentle. "Maybe I can help, or maybe I can just set your bones. You won't know lest you try. You just think you know."

[Dorian M. Black]

Dorian's face when he turned showed a reflex fear that he'd to be called to account, smothered quickly in a snarl.

"There's nothing to help," he snapped. Then laughed, abruptly, with genuine spontaneity, but it's an ugly sound.

"Don't fool yourself. Morality, meaning, truth, the terms are embarrassments. They're bloated old aunts who should shuffle off and die. The prerequisite for intellectuals now is the acknowledgement of the absurdity of the intellectual life. Philosophy is to politics what boxing is to total war. The most refined justice system on the planet is underwritten by force. If the law goes all there is left is violence. The law's just the violence of the weak majority. We're all the children of Achilles. You know this, you more than anyone. And - argh! Mafficking fuck."

He's used to the body as a thing separate violently into its constituent parts. Still, this time it was his body, a blunt testament to the defilements he'd suffered. A farcical testament, if he let himself see it that way. Naturally some torturers giggle while they work: the body's dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the victim's personality counts for nothing and it has in it one of the roots of comedy: the spirit's subservience to the flesh.

He lapsed into angry silence while the leg was splint.

"What couldst thee possibly do? Talk of feelings will not help."

[Revd Tweedy]

"An someone beats you this bad, think you're justified in feelin' sorry for yoursel'. Watch it, almost done." Tweedy pulled the makeshift bandage around Black's calf tighter.

"Arm next," he said, shifting around the plinth.

"And you're doing eno' a' that for the both of us. So no need a' fear that I'll pity thee. Hold still."

The pain was as excruciating as the leg. Worse, perhaps, because he had to resist scrabbling to pry the priest's grip loose with his free hand.

"An I agreed with you - I wouldn't be here if I did - then if it don't matter if you don't, it can't matter if you do.

"World is a frightening place, Dorian. I know it. So it's full clever to be in fear of friendship; 'cause if things can be better, it makes how they are right now worse. I'll ha' to bind this one. Then we'll wash the muck off."

He laid out strips of bandage.

"But instead a' you tellin' me what I can't do, why don't you tell me what happened? Worse case you'll be able to say tol' ya so a'ter. Sure that'll make you feel better at least."

[Dorian M. Black]

He realised he should have spent the interlude steeling his nerve, because pain rose up so fast from soles through knees belly chest and there it was filling the back of his throat and the space behind his brain so he couldn't talk, no room for anything.

When the room returned everything had acquired a new throb, some sort of blood noise bothering not just his ears but his teeth as well.

"I enjoy our conversations."

Dorian closed his eyes. Inhaling to speak was a succession of cattle-wire shocks and dull bites in the bones, but he wanted every spare effort for it. The irony was not lost on him. Speaking was just so much better at making the time pass than the empty silence.

"Any man who ever said that confidence of the outcome guarantees satisfaction to those four words was sorely mistaken." He swallowed, tried to speak through the rasp. "I thank you for the offer, though. There's only so long you can shelter in the hope that words help before intelligence evicts you of it. If explanations worked, I wouldn't be here."

The looming darkness above was now just a pure phenomenon, nothing to do with him. That was the final relationship with the universe; you found solace only in the things that offer none.

Whatever's trying to form Dorian doesn't want it. He can feel it as an unwelcome press in his chest. Naturally: the flesh was of this world whereas the current that connected them came from whatever was beyond this world, flowed through them and back to its mysterious source. He'd stopped being surprised that he thought in these terms. They were ludicrous and inevitable.

"But I have a related topic. Quite related, actually. Love turns out to be the thing in life everyone's waiting for, the place for the fuoco to rage. What do you think of it? You're a priest, you're almost obliged to love everything."

"An alternative would have been to step slightly to one side of it, this remarkable phenomenon of being in love, to walk it among the world like a pet panther in a diamond collar. But everyone insists on doing the opposite. You have to be there. You have to feel it. It's not Good love otherwise. It's a Bad type of love. Very fussy terminology."

"I'd known someone once, who'd been furnished superficially with enough precocious cynicism. But more compellingly they were cursed with a sense of entitlement - not to wealth or power but to epic experience - and the sort of elitism that in the end asked what, if people like them weren't going to wreck themselves on it, was the point of love?"

[Revd Tweedy]

"Hn."

Tweedy gave him a long, measuring look as he spoke, before finishing binding the splints.

"Here, Dorian." He picked up the last tin cup; with his other hand, helped him to a sitting position. Waited to make sure both hands were wrapped around it: Black's fingers trembling in a tell-tale spasm.

"The 'ard thing 'bout being a priest isn't offerin' love," he said, eventually. "It's feeling it. Knowin' that you are loved, unconditionally." He tipped his head toward the room, the world above, the wider universe. "It's a hard thing to manage. 'Ard to even believe, at times. Days are, I can't begin to imagine what it takes to love this place." He shrugged.

"So this someone. What happened to this... kindred spirit?"