Page 280 - What They Did to the Kid

268 Jack Fritscher

can do anything,” he said. “Solid you are. Solid enough to calm
down.”
“You are,” Annie Laurie said, “the spitting image of Charlie-Pop.
He decided to quit smoking. Period. Cold turkey. He stopped.”
“So indeed I did,” Charlie-Pop said.
“He can do anything,” my mother said. “So can you.”
Somehow Christmas made me feel as turned away as Saint
Joseph searching for a room at an inn. Jack Kennedy was dead. All
connection to Misery was dead. I was dead like a stillborn child
needing aid to breathe and kick and scream. Freedom’s slap was
shocking glorious. I flew up in free-flight. I hung on the edge of the
bed, nobody loves me, sliding out of the bed, nobody loves me, hitting
the floor. Accidentally, I touched myself during the night and the
accident repeated every night two or three times. I felt no guilt. How
strange. After all I’d been told. I would never confess it. Nobody loves
me. Who cares! I felt the wild way the whole world had felt, flown up
in joy, when the war had ended. I was capable of choosing anything.
I had free will. Potency veined sensuously about me in my bed. I
would never go to Confession again.
Pine and mistletoe twisted into sweet peas and myrtle. How
could such a grasp of self be a sin? Had I won some race? In the
mirror, vine leaves twined time-lapse through my hair. Hell did not
open up and swallow me. I loved the world and the world loved
me back. Had those priests lied about grasping yourself? The world
vamped me. I had always gone starved to bed. What else had they
lied about as well? On the streets, billboards, small at a distance,
loomed up large showing how much I needed all the world could
offer. I understood the last temptation of Christ: Satan took Him up
to the parapet and showed Him the whole world and said, “All this
can be Yours if You will fall down and worship me.”
I began to nibble at the world. Tiny bites. Baby steps toward
everything forbidden to a pious seminarian. I had changed movies
like a double-feature. Good-bye, Misery with co-hit, Hello, Life. I
remembered how the panicked priests had turned off the projector
and ripped off the reel of Auntie Mame while all the boys were laugh-
ing at her yelling, “Life is a feast and most poor suckers are starving
to death.”

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