Chapter XLI
XLI
and it’s been so long since he’s seen his father’s church that he feels what he always feels when revisiting a childhood haunt, that combination of offense that the place had the temerity to keep existing without him, and awareness that the place has hoarded part of him and only by returning can he reunite with that lost fragment,
and crossing the mewling floorboards, his senses are flushed with memory, the sickly sweetness of the narthex and its vases of dying flowers, the lambent mystery of the frosted-glass door stenciled with CRYING ROOM, the red-carpeted nave Bagger processioned up and down hundreds of times as an acolyte, his candlelighter unsteady, the guttering wick, all those faces anticipating his failure,
and the caramel varnish of the pews hasn’t changed, nor have the merlot pull-apart men of the stained glass windows, nor have the ancient light fixtures hanging from above, each holding a quartet of bulbs that are the spitting image of shrapnel shells, the clues to his ultimate demise hinted at way back then,
and then he’s up the altar steps and scuffing his iron-heeled boots across the gray blotches of wax on the carpet, dropped there each time he mishandled the candlelighter and glanced up to find crucified Christ looking disillusioned, and the Bishop, just below the cross, looking sad, and making Bagger, the son, sad too,
and now Bagger wonders if the sadness had less to do with Sunday fuckups and more to do with his lockstep march toward a redundant future, he was baptized here, he’d be married here, he’d be mourned here, but not for too long, another acolyte was already donning the surplice,
and lying on the altar is the very red leather Bible that Bagger carried with him to France, so Bagger, still the acolyte, pulls back the front cover, and the broken spine flops the book open to the section of images that, as a boy, Bagger preferred to the flavorless text, one image in particular,
and it’s a painting by Raphael called Solly Madonna, depicting the Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus on her lap, his arms too stubby, thighs like drumsticks, belly distended, weird little naked penis, and the head of a balding old man, a depiction young Bagger found unsettling, and so he always focused on Mary, the placid, patient, half-closed eyes, rosebud lips, center-parted copper hair, skin so white it looked as if lit from within,
and the blue cape,
and the red dress,
and all at once Bagger can’t breathe, for he does know her, he’s always known her, she’s been present in a way his original mother never was, she’s been with him always, always, always, the tender half his father lost the instant Bagger was born, and Bagger feels his wearied knees give and folds himself over the altar so as not to fall,
and it’s here, inches from the Bible, that Bagger notices small dark circles on Solly Madonna, something pushing from behind the image, and Bagger drags a hand up to turn one page, two pages, ten, a hundred, until he finds three black holes drilled through the book’s back cover, which means Jerry had, in fact, shot Bagger while he fled across No Man’s Land with the angel,
and that means Bagger would have died but for the Bible that stayed the bullets, which is to say, the father who stayed the bullets, as the Bishop had forced the Bible into his unappreciative son’s hands the last time they saw each other, Solly Madonna the sacrificial lamb as surely as Bagger’s mother, their lives relinquished all so Bagger, a petty swindler, could keep on swindling, he wasn’t worth it then and isn’t worth it now,
and Bagger puts his hands over his face and feels the most surprising thing, tears from his right eye, and though it’s the only eye he’s got left, it’s capable of everything a son needs, it all makes sense now, his lack of faith never mattered, there might not be a God or a Jesus or a Mary, but there was a Bishop Bagger, and all this time, it’s him that Bagger has been saving, from the cold, lonely frights of his wavering belief, from the straying of his flock, from the cold, salty waters that pulled him under with a barbed-wire grip,
and a sob breaks from Bagger’s chest, and other sobs come pell-mell after it, a jailbreak, he’s wailing now, tears raining like bullets and softening the charred holes in the red leather,
and the angel’s voice comes from behind and above, “Each of the others wanted something particular from the person they imagined me to be,” and sounding every bit as human as Bagger, she asks, “But what do you want?,”
and Bagger doesn’t have to think, “All I wanted was to protect you,” he gasps through sobs, “like he protected me,”
and when he’s emptied of tears, he turns toward the narthex and sees the angel standing there, and is unsurprised to find that she is six stories tall, halo like Saturn’s rings, dress the red curtain of a theater, knees at balcony level, and he’s also unsurprised that she holds a massive medieval sword, the tip stabbed into a pew, the polished blade, the hilt of obsidian, the pommel bright as the moon, if not an actual moon,
and, of course, the church isn’t large, never was, yet the angel hasn’t crashed through the roof, the roof is gone, the church walls simply go up and up, and though it’s hard for Bagger to say for sure in the night-sky dark, the plaster, brick, and wood appear to twist and twine into a towering jungle canopy, the stained glass redispersed into the glimmering beaks, claws, and scales of unspecified jungle life-forms,
and Bagger has to squint, the angel’s face is hard to see way up there, for once she exudes no light,
and Bagger asks, “Was that you? At Mons?” and the angel replies, “Mons is a fairy tale. None of you understand time. What does it matter which nations win which wars? Future wars will reverse all gains. God is on no one’s side,”
and it’s foolish to do anything but fall to his knees and beg for grace, but maybe it’s being back in the church, maybe it’s the mystery of the jungle beyond, but Bagger asks, “How can you say that? There’s right and there’s wrong,” and to this, the angel raises an eyebrow the size of a howitzer and replies, “You ask me that? You, who has never cared for anyone?,”
and the ghost congregation chuckles, and Bagger, angry now, demands, “How many times did I save you? Three? Four? I risked my life. Over and over I risked it!,” and the angel retorts with a temper this time, “You wanted to save who you saw. The same as the others. None of it was for the good of anyone but yourselves,”
and though Bagger wants to make the angel tell him about Arno’s impending death, as foretold by Rochambeau, and how to avoid it, indignation pulses inside his empty socket, “My father used to talk about the Destroying Angel,” he says, and he stomps the kneeler bar of the closest pew, snapping it off, “He said the Destroying Angel could kill thousands with the flick of the sword,” his father loved that word, flick, he’d pair it with a flick of his finger to illustrate the ease of mass murder, and Bagger javelins the kneeler bar at a window,
and the stained glass shatters into kaleidoscopes, and vines flop through the breach, vines that seem to thread through his veins, did Bagger weave the jungle, or did the jungle weave Bagger, and he looks up at the angel and demands, “So why don’t you do what Veck asked? Stop messing around and wipe us out?,”
and the sword, all fifty feet of it, turns in the angel’s fist, a minute gesture that nonetheless grinds a pew to splinters, a pew Bagger’s father used to varnish on his bloody knees, which must mean Bagger’s getting to her, good, maybe she will end this endless nightmare, but instead the angel asks, with aggravating patience, “How did your father say the end would come?,”
and the old man might as well be back at his pulpit, the answer springs automatic from of Bagger, “A divine plague,”
and the angel responds with nothing, her eyes two boulders dangling over Bagger’s grape head, and Bagger recalls his father inserting silences like this to make his guilty audience squirm, but being aware of the tactic doesn’t make Bagger less susceptible to it, and after a few seconds, his own squirming begins,
and the reason is the flu, the one army leaders insist is contained to neutral Spain, though the letters doughboys get from home paint a darker picture, one of churches, ballrooms, barracks, and gymnasiums full of sufferers writhing on cots beside nurses whose white masks cover the only helpful tool they have, their pretty, sympathetic faces, and of undertakers sneezing sawdust from so many coffins being built, and of cemeterians pink-handed from covering corpses with ice, where’s the quicklime when you need it,
and the ice freezes Bagger, too, there’s no known origin of the plague, the plague on track to kill more people than any silly war,
and here’s a thought to scare off sleep, imagine this, a squadron of angels soaring over Bois de Fays in an attack formation called Revelations, what if this angel was midwifing the missile to end all missiles when she was shot down, and that by saving the angel, Bagger has only ensured the resumption of her mission, the end of humankind, and if that’s true, it begs a question, the only question left, probably the only question that ought to be asked of a visitor like her,
and so Bagger asks it, “Why?,”
and the angel’s cunning grin is so paradoxical to her former modesty that Bagger’s blood goes gelid, the old church a polar tundra beneath the sultry swamp, and as he cradles his goose-bumped arms, the angel vanishes, but for only a blink, then she’s back and says, “I have returned,” and to his confusion she laughs as you laugh at a dog that doesn’t recognize its master in a new hat, and says, “I told you that you have no understanding of time. I have been gone for sixty thousand years,”
and Bagger only stares, unable to grapple with a declaration so mad, and the angel says, “It has been approved. I am allowed to show you why. But I warn you, once we begin, we must see it through. There will be no going back. No chances to look away. What you will witness will haunt you until your final moments. You will regret wanting to know. And yet, when I ask you if you truly want to be shown, you will say, ‘Show me.’ No human has ever been able to leave a box unopened. So I ask it, Would you like to be shown?,”
and Bagger believes there is nothing in life, possibly in death as well, that he loathes so much as doing what’s expected of him, and his every particle galvanizes to reply a resounding no, do not open the box, do not pluck the fruit, do not look back at Sodom, until he accepts that he shares his ancestors’ blood and recrudesces with their ills, which leaves nothing but to look up into the jungle, defeated and doomed, but at least aware of it, which has to count for something,
and he says, just as the angel predicted, “Show me,”