Page 266 - What They Did to the Kid

254 Jack Fritscher

puts an indelible mark on my soul during a civil war of politics and
purity?
The faces of Gunn and Karg tell me who will win this time
around.
Oh, I recognize this.
Once again the Germans are coming to get me, like a patient
etherized upon a table, a rubber mask tied over my face, pushing me
back down where words cannot exist.
I will become a simple, honorable man. My profession or career
I do not know. My wife, if any, I do not know, and my children, if
any, I do not know. My home and country I do not know. My friends
I do not know. My happiness I do not know. My sadness. My life.
This litany is late in beginning, oh my God, but I must be free, my
Lord. I am smothering in the security, the safety, the conformity. I
regret it is late. Eleven years of my life on the bittersweet block. How
long, oh Lord, have You hidden Your face from me? Why play coy
with me who have loved You so long?
At chapel I wanted to shout with fear and excitement and warn-
ing. Enormitas conformitatis, the enormity of conformity! I was so
depressed I thought my heart would break. In the mirror, I saw the
saddest boy in the world, betrayed by the only world I had known.
I prayed for clarity as much as purity. Make me clear. Question
myself. Question them. Question everything. This is sin. Sin. This is
Adam’s sin: wanting knowledge of good and evil. All my classmates
were careening toward the priesthood, toward an indelible mark on
their souls, toward something you can’t get out of in this life or the
next.
Run. I wanted to shout, Run. Churchquake. Run.
I could not breathe looking at them sitting in row after row in
chapel, wearing the same black cassocks, singing the same antiphons
of Gregorian chant, itself fading away under the strumming strum-
peting approach of folk music. “Kyrie” versus “Kumbaya.” Our sem-
inary life had once been all so beautiful, so medieval, something in
a book, something in a movie, but it was horrible, awful, the denial
of self and independence. I collapsed before the paradox. Can one
have the talent, morals, health, have all a vocation needs, but not be

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