Page 210 - What They Did to the Kid

198 Jack Fritscher

I could see stern priests coming to take me away tied to a chair,
carried on their shoulders, bleeding from a punch in the face. Soon
enough they’d be stashing me in the loony bin between Rainforth
and Dryden and Dempsey, in one of those special loony bins for
wayward priests we heard whispers about.
It was weird how the core of me dried up, midway through
March, into the spring when life is supposed to bloom. Somehow
the buoyant balloon of my life deflated and clung to my face like
the gas mask of the doctor who had circumcised me as a child.
Somehow I went dead emotionally. I was paralyzed. Totally unable
to feel. Only fit to curl up and ask why. I stood outside my body
and myself and my soul and my mind. I was a question mark left
over after everything had been said and nothing had been explained
by mystics writing about the dark night of the soul. I committed
my entire being to my vocation, but God in His immense silence
said nothing. Would I never be able to sink the whole of myself into
whatever this mysterious vocation was? I became a spectator of the
movie of my life, watching the daily rushes unreel. I could only
compare this to Christ’s agony in the garden when He sweat blood
and begged His Father to reveal the secret reason for such despair
and isolation and fear.
I crashed flat on the bed in my own room, trying to breathe, too
panicked for tears.
I lay on the bed.
I stood across the room watching this happening to me.
I cursed because I wasn’t insane. This is what I got for pushing
God for fast answers. A goddam cut-rate break down. Step right up,
folks. I could feel the Librium. Father Sean O’Malley, redhead from
the Society of Jesus, fresh out of Dublin, had liberated me with Lib-
rium. Lovely Librium, caught knock-knock, in my chest. Damn cap-
sules. Lovely capsules. Damn freckled, flat-top Jesuit! Lovely Jesuit.
All I could think of was Annie Laurie saying that the first day she
held me, newborn in the hospital, the vegetable man’s horse crashed
into my father’s car parked out front and ruined it and made a great
noise and made me cry. On that day of my birth, for little reason
I cried. My poor parents would never understand this. Suddenly, I
was stone.

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