“If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
- Lord Byron
Michel, who had painted his life all over the side of a wall from an aerosol spray can, sat naked, strapped to a dentist's chair, and surrounded by four walls as white as Hiroshima had been the instant the atomic bomb made every building in the city look like dead prostitutes – windows and doorways charred with burnt-toast lipstick and mascara. After it made every citizen looking like hotdogs burnt over an open fire.
The Frenchman refused to open his eyes.
He refused to look at the walls and at Samuel, circling, and at Peter who stood by the chair, trying to make his face look as empty as the eyes of a comatose paraplegic. He refused to watch as Samuel slipped on a pair of latex gloves which snapped periods at the end of his sentences as he whispered prayers and paced around the dentist chair.
Peter wondered what would happen to the man in the chair. It all really depended on how Samuel was feeling that day. And whatever it was Samuel was trying to cure the poor bastard of, whether it was exorcising little notes of music from his soul or aerating his heart of watercolors and pastels. Whatever it was that had made the Frenchman, somewhere along the way, break.
Today, Samuel's face was completely calm.
It was Chinese-doll-face smooth, like his latex gloves.
As smooth as the waters of the Sea of Galilee when the lord had stretched out his hands and whispered for peace.
That meant that Michel was going to be very thoroughly purified today. That meant that the walls would be bleached with so many screams that the room would reek of bits and pieces of the Frenchman's dignity for weeks. Peter was pretty sure that if he cupped his hand to those walls at that moment he would be able to hear the thousands of tortured confessions and wails and nail-on-chalkboard screams of so many men and women that had sat in that room before Michel replayed like the sea through a conch shell.
Peter, dressed in resplendent white, a witness of Michel's purification watched as Samuel stopped praying and walked behind his victim. With all the tenderness of a father, Samuel took the Frenchman's head and pressed it to the headrest of the dentist's chair.
“That's it,” he said. “That's it. The less you struggle the easier this will be.”
Humming, he strapped Michel's head to the chair with a leather buckle.
The Frenchman was trembling slightly, all of his muscles strung up like tight-wires above silent audiences. He could have been shivering. To Peter the temperature of the room was the breath of snow angels sighing and he was sure that Michel felt it as well. He was sure that he felt the hoarfrosted cold of breath caught in the lungs of dying men and women, strapped to the same dentist's chair, breathing on his neck. Maybe fifty years ago, people would sit in this chair and have molars removed and little metal picks plucking at their gums, but today people sat in this chair and had humanity removed instead.
“Why are you broken, Michel?” Samuel whispered. “And whatever happened to the 'when in Rome' philosophy? What compelled you to sacrifice yourself like that?”
His eyes closed, the Frenchman said, “I know the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That everything that the Hierarchy stands for is a lie.”
Samuel smiled. “Ah. And who gave you this little piece of wisdom?”
“God.”
“God did. So you're a Joan of Arc now, a John Paul. Why would He want to talk to you? What elevates you above everyone else?”
The Frenchman was silent.
Peter could hear his heart beating like aboriginal drums. Like deep south preachers slapping their hands on bibles at the pulpit. Samuel could hear it, too. He could taste the fear sloshing around in the room.
He hunched his shoulders and whispered into Michel's ear, “Your God is dead.”
“He lives.”
Samuel straightened up and placed his hand comfortingly on Michel's forehead. “I really hate to be the messenger, but your God had his obituary in the papers a couple decades ago. He died with the last protester, the last innovator, the last song, the last painting, the last essay. And then we took his corpse and shaped Him to our standards. Things change, Michel. Fads come in and out of style. You're wearing corduroy in a polyester world. God is our trademark, He belongs to us, and He lives in the soul of the Hierarchy.”
“Your words mean nothing.”
“You're struggling, Michel.”
A smile cracked across the Frenchman's face like a broken eggshell and a handful of words tumbled out like yolk-and-whites vomit:
“You can do nothing to change my mind.”
That was what Samuel wanted to hear. He nodded at Peter and rubbed his hands together, shaking his head, clicking his tongue. Peter, feeling lightheaded already, as if someone had stuffed his lungs with a jar-full of high-altitude oxygen, drew a small bladed hook from his pocket and a roll of adhesive tape.
The hook sneered with piety.
He handed the two items to Samuel and began cranking a lever on the chair, straightening it out so that it was nearly horizontal. The lever made lung cancer rasps.
Michel still had his eyes closed.
Samuel reached down and pried Michel's right eyelid open and taped it to his eyebrow, so that no matter how hard the Frenchman tried, he would not be able to close his eyes. He did the same thing to the left eyelid. As Michel struggled, Samuel recited a scripture like an old woman nursing rosary beads between fingers rubbed raw by soap and grease. He held the hook gently. He held it reverently.
He lowered it to Michel's groin whispering the twenty-third psalm.
Spitting the words from his mouth like whorehouse gasps.
Peter didn't dare look away.
Sitting in the dentist's chair, whispering quietly, Michel – with his eyes bulging from his face, unable to blink – looked like a horse with a splintered leg bone and a shotgun pressed lightly to the base of it's skull. Peter realized the man was praying. Praying to the dead god. The god that Samuel and the Hierarchy had buried between the pages of history like a pressed blossom. Whether he was praying for mercy or for salvation, Peter was pretty sure that the words stumbling from his lips wouldn't make it past the ceiling. It would remain trapped there – a housefly struggling in a wispy spiderweb – and join all of the other screams and prayers held fast in the walls like mice with kinked spines trapped in mousetraps.
The spiderweb was the lattice pane dividing priest from sinner in a confessional.
Samuel's hook was positioned above Michel's sex organ. His smile was thin.
He said, “My friend, you're wrong. The human mind is as weak a newborn infant. I can break it, I can mold it, I can destroy it. And remember,” Samuel said, “God smiles upon me.”
He began castrating the Frenchman.
The walls accepted the man's screams graciously.
***
His irises had been blue.
It was as if someone had taken a pair of scissors, cut little pieces of the sky out, and pasted them to the Frenchman's eyes like a child gluing magazine cut-outs onto a collage.
They were exquisitely vibrant.
They were two violins in an empty concert hall, sobbing together like mothers sitting on porch steps, watching as the coffins of their war-hero sons were unloaded from trucks, the pine still green and fresh.
They had bled only a few tears.
Sitting on his bed, Peter stared at his hands and tried to forget Michel, the Frenchman, who had died screaming prayers that would never make it to heaven. He tried to forget the smugness of the room, how Samuel snipped Michel's faith out of him like a surgeon removing cancerous polyps. He to think of better times, if there had been any.
He thought of wrapping his hands around Samuel's neck and squeezing.
Peter knew, no matter how many times Samuel had said it while wiping Michel's blood on his robes like fingerpaint, that the Frenchman had not wasted his life. He had not sacrificed it for nothing.
Peter would keep him alive.
Peter would spread his ideas, carry his prayers.
He had to.
On his lap was a notebook. The binding and pages were warped and wavy and looked like a length of corrugated tin roof. It was made of cheap leather that crackled when he opened it and the smell of tobacco clung to it as if someone had used it as a surface to build cigarettes on. It smelled like bus stops and military uniforms. It felt like the skin of old men and women crumpled up inside iron lungs.
In it, he had stored his soul.
Little snapshots and wisps of feelings or candlelit impressions were written down inside of it in cramped handwriting. There were poems and paragraphs and sentences long enough to loop around his neck a couple times and then attach to the the limb of a tree. He knew that owning the notebook – much less writing in it – was an abomination in the sight of God and the Hierarchy, but the words printed on it's pages had screamed to be written. They had cried to be pulled out of his bloodstream, his heart, his head like rotting teeth. The pen was a pair of tweezers, or an exorcist's cross, and a chemotherapy shot all in one. Words purged the dirt. It cleaned the blood – the sin – from the wool-polyester blend of his soul.
He knew he was suffering from a spiritual gingivitis.
And he could imagine what Samuel would do to him if the thought police found the notebook.
It would be him in the dentist's chair, instead of the Frenchman.
And Samuel wouldn't just remove one or two teeth, he would remove the whole mouthful. And then each of Peter's fingers, and then his eyes, and then he would slit his throat and –
Peter shuddered and shook his head.
Death in the dentist's chair or on the operating table was inevitable. So thinking about it, loitering around it, toying with the ways, the methods, the tools would take the thrill out of seeing Death sitting in the corner of the torture room, hugged by the white walls, with his legs crossed and his bleached bone grin stretched out like a Botox smile. It was a fact: Samuel would eventually be holding his intestines like spaghetti noodles or dissecting his brain like a mechanic taking apart the engine of a tired car looking for the problem. Looking for the reason the machine had failed.
Why are you broken, Peter?
Peter cracked open the notebook.
It breathed out cigarette smoke.
His fingers jerking at the slightest noise, Peter uncapped his pen, turned to a blank page, and stared at his wall. The wallpaper was limp and hung to the plaster like a large dress on the bony shoulders of an anorexic woman.
Peter wrote at the top of the page:
A prayer from the Frenchman
And then he wrote:
Today I saw what a human
looks like on the inside.
All those fingers and toes and
facial expressions are controlled by
the puppet strings of
dreams.
The clock on the wall dropped ticks like notes tied to bricks crashing through living room windows. Peter blinked and the Frenchman's face reappeared in his mind. Except his blue eyes were no longer pierced with pain and damnation and Samuel's words. Now, they were closed and slack and peaceful and his face was the picture of calm. In a way, Peter wished that he was with the Frenchman, wherever he was. He wished that he could have a conversation with him, listen to him, be with him.
But the Frenchman was long gone.
He had shovelfuls of earth in his mouth.
His eyes weren't calm and peaceful, they were prismatic with the scriptures that Samuel had whispered, the lies he had force-fed him until his stomach was bloated with them, and the indignation of the walls of the torture room. They reflected his last words which had been:
I have sinned.
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