Chapter 12

Bonnie fell out of the world. She felt her blood forget her, her heart forget her, her brain forget her, her bones forget her.

Throughout life the body holds on to the soul. Death is a forgetting, and when the body forgets, it loosens its grip, and the soul falls out.

That is the simplicity of death.

It was so dark and so hollow here. There was no noise, no smell, no feel. And yet its hollowness was very, very huge.

Something was chasing her.

“Why am I still awake?”

She answered her own question, and at once: because you expected to be. Death is whatever you expect. If you expect heaven, you get it, or hell, or nothing. And you are also your own judge: you give yourself what you deserve. The fundamentalist creates his own hell, the Catholic his purgatory, the agnostics wander empty plains, muttering to themselves.

As she had died, a cat had come leaping out of the ceiling, Now it was behind her, stalking her. She sensed that it was dangerous. If she refused to believe in it, maybe it would disappear. Maybe it would stop chasing her down the hall to hell.

Torquemada burns, Sartre stalks in gray oblivion, Milton ascends dismal glories, Blake leaps with his demons.

It is all the same to death.

Helpless to change her own deepest beliefs, Bonnie joined her fate to that of the human majority. This was the death she contrived for herself: the big black cat came leaping and snarling toward her. As it got closer it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

She could not scream, not even when its face was the size of the risen moon, and she saw galaxies behind its eyes.

It roared, and she looked down its throat. She did not see a black carnivorous maw, but rather a long corridor, somehow familiar. A woman was walking this way along the familiar green linoleum floor.

Bonnie opened her eyes wide, staring in disbelief at the absolute reality of the linoleum, the glossy green paint halfway up the walls, the jittering fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling.

This was Our Lady of Grace School, circa 1973. “No, please, it can’t be.”

The oncoming nun was a juggernaut of black and white, the whimple framing a face made of prunes and daggers. Bonnie wanted to hide, for she knew who this skeletal creature was.

“Mother Star of the Sea!”

“Exactly, my dear. Come with me.”

“What happened to the cat?”

“Never mind that.”

Bonnie looked at the hand held out to her, the awful hand made of weathered, gnawed bones, glowing inwardly with fire where the marrow should be. “No! Get away from me!”

“Deep in my wound. Lord, hide and shelter me!”

“I hate ‘Soul of My Saviour.’ Don’t sing it to me.”

“Why, Bonnie, I’m dismayed. Our war really ended with ‘Soul of My Saviour.’ Don’t you remember?”

“I don’t!”

“Oh, yes, Bonnie, you do.”

With a rattle of tiles and jangling of fixtures the hall swayed and re-formed itself into the seventh-grade classroom.

“I tried hard,” Mother Star of the Sea snarled. “I’ve been eagerly awaiting my chance to deal with you.

Now, watch this.”

The classroom spun into fuli existence. They were all there, Stacey and Mandy and Patty and Jenette, the whole gum-popping crowd.

Bonnie sat in the next to last desk, Stacey behind her. “Having fun, Bonnie?”

“Shut up, Stacey, Mother will hear you.”

Mother in her glory sat reading, officiating at study hall. Bonnie was enjoying herself and did not want her fun to be ruined by Stacey’s meddling. She fixed the image of Zack Miller in her mind, the image of him sweating over his mop and bucket in the girl’s bathroom just when she happened to be peeing and sort of left the door open and—

“Oh, Bonnie, you’re doing it.”

“Shut up! Mother might hear you!”

“She can’t hear or see.” Then Stacey’s cool, fat hand was reaching around the back of the desk, slipping under the elastic of her skirt, going down to meet her own fingers. “Where is it?” Her whisper seemed to Bonnie to carry across the study hall. Mother SS remained engrossed in her Breviary.

“No! This is a sin!”

“I can make it feel really marvie, ask Ellie and Jill how good I am. I’m the best in the class.”

“Get out of here! This isn’t even youryouryour…” But it was her business, the intimate touch.

“This is a sin!”

“Only for Catholics. I’m a Unitarian, remember. My mom and dad tell me it’s okay if we’re in private.”

“The seventh-grade classroom is private?”

“The back row. She can’t even see this far. Consider us behind a curtain.” The other girls tittered and glanced, and Jenette stared openly, cracking her gum in rhythm to the jiggling of the two desks.

Stacey was terribly good, so good that it was some time before Bonnie became aware of what all the other girls had known from the moment it began to happen.

There was a shadow cast across her desk where no shadow should be. “Mother Star of the Sea!”

The punishment was severe: you may not continue at Our Lady of Grace, no, you will be left forever to your sin and struck down in anathema for your sin. In the eternal agony to follow. God will remember how you did this unattractive thing in study hall.

—But it’s not a sin! This is the twentieth century!

—You go to Our Lady. Therefore it is a sin—

The worst part of the punishment was the first note home, the sheer disgust of parents, the sneering laughter of the despised younger brother.

“In view of the fact that we do not have the budget to provide a psychologist, we simply cannot allow students with these tendencies to attend Our Lady. We would suggest that Bonnie enter PS 1 as soon as possible, and that she take advantage of their counseling program.”

The expulsion lowered her in the estimation of her father, it embittered her mother. It would mean spending the balance of the year in the virtual prison that was PS 1, a girl with a history of the unspeakable, watched constantly by the human raptors who circled those bitter skies.

Bitter Bonnie did a worse thing to her tormentor: “Mother SS was in on it!”

“What’s that?”

“She—she—” Burst into tears, play it for all it’s worth. “Mother taught us how. She does it to herself.

She made me—made me—” Another burst of tears.

Her father stormed over to Our Lady, had a fiery meeting with the principal, Sister Saint Thomas. Poor Mother Star of die Sea. Once she had been principal, had been demoted on some hazy canonical basis.

Now this new cloud.

Bonnie was reinstated. Her first day back, what pleasure, she walked the halls surrounded by a surging pack of girls, while Mother Star of the Sea wept silently, standing against the wall near the chapel. The old lady could not even continue out the year, she who had loved the girls and had such hope for them—

Retirement will be a form of execution, slow but certain. Still, at this moment in time she remains a teacher, will be until the end of the week: she must teach the killing child her music:

“Oh, brother. Mother, not ‘Soul of My Saviour’ again!” ‘Twas on a cold and rainy afternoon in October, dear. You had already destroyed me, but it remained my responsibility to teach you. How I prayed for a miracle. ‘Let her confess,’ I prayed.

“All right now, girls, in the key of G, and briskly, please.” Snick, snick, snick, ruler against the edge of the desk. “Ah-one, ah-two, ah-three!”

“Stop! Who said that? Who said that horrible word! Olay, indeed! You dare to mock Our Lord’s suffering? Who was it? You? Was it you, Stacey Banks? Or you—yes, you, Bonnie, you black-souled beast! Bonnie, that was a sin’. No, don’t put out your hand, dear.” Mother Star of the Sea smiles. “Live with your sin!”

Bonnie can see now, she can see Mother Star of the Sea’s face, and it is the face of despair, so infiltrated by hate that it lives on even though—”You’re dead!”

“So what? So are you. We’re both as dead as doornails.”

“I’m going back! George is going to bring me back!”

“You sinned against me. You destroyed my career and my life with your accusations. I wasn’t the best teacher. God knows, not the best nun. But you destroyed me. Don’t you want to atone for that?”

“George has a machine, he’s taking me back.”

“You, my dear, are falling through nowhere at the rate of ten million light-years a second. No human agency has the power to get you back to your body. You are dead.”

Bonnie tumbled over and over and over through all the terrible deaths of her memory, the death of her mother with the stone weight of the cancer in her stomach starving her crazy and making her throw up at the same time, through me deaths of her own babies interrupted in their amniotic heavens by long steel, then more deaths and more: people burning, drowning, falling, the life being crushed out of them, knives hacking their guts and bullets shattering their thoughts, ruin racing through the body of me world as cheerfully as a capering clown.

Merciful God, does death mean this?

Bonnie realized with a shattering burst of passion that she wanted the hell toward which she was falling.

She looked at her own soul, looked closely at it, and thought she must never, ever look anywhere but at that one flickering dot because it was something, after all, something in this horrible black hollowness. Its light was so very cold. But it was not nothing, not like what she was falling through.

She wanted to atone. Poor Mother Star of the Sea!

“So, children, that is why C. S. Lewis described hell as tiny. The souls within it are so concentrated on themselves, to the exclusion of God and all else, that the whole of Satan’s Lair could fit in a single crumb of the coal on Father Flaherty’s cigar.”

“Yes, Mother Star of the Sea.” (Olay)

“Who said that? I’m getting awfully bored by your olays, Bonnie. Please, haven’t you done enough?” In the eye, a tear.

“Olay!”

“You impudent little—go stand in the hall.”

Confessional, Our Lady of Grace Parish; “Bless me. Father, for I have sinned. I—am—Mother Star of the Sea’s—lover, Another nail in an already sealed coffin. Just for the fun of it.”

“Whaa-a-at! Who’s this? What’d you just say?”

“Even though she’s been caught, she still won’t stop. Father, she—she—”

“Yes, my dear, pray to Our Lord for guidance.”

That was the end of Mother Star of the Sea, right then, that day. Pack your two black bags and off you go.

No more music class, no more “Soul of Our Saviour.”

“You wretched girl, you not only got me retired, I was anathematized by the Order. How I suffered! I didn’t have anything to eat!”

“You were strict. You were mean.”

“Not as mean as you! You ruined my life. All I did was make your palms sting. Because of you I did sm.

Yes, I sinned. By my own lights, I sinned. I got mad at their refusal to listen to reason, and I did break my vows. I spent the last four years of my life working in a Woolworth’s and going to the movies on Sunday. In my bitterness I denied the Church, I denied the Risen Lord, and I did it because of the cloud your accusations had spread over my life. Now I’m here, because I cannot believe that my denials weren’t sins.” Her long, thin fingers came forth, skillful narrow things that twined in Bonnie’s hair and slipped coldly behind her ears. “I’d really like a vacation. Now you’ve come, I get one.”

The cat surrounded them like a shadow, its flanks seething, its eyes everywhere, in their hearts, in the most secret places of their souls.

Mother Star of the Sea’s soul shivered and shifted, becoming a cloud of hot needles that swirled about Bonnie’s head. “I’ve got to get free,” the needles whispered and hissed. “Just for one delicious, precious second!”

“But you’re here for the long pull, aren’t you?”

“You’d deny me my respite? You don’t know what this is like!”

“I’m going to be leaving soon. Just passing through.”

“You’ve been here a million years already. The world’s gone. It ended. The sun blew up thousands of years ago!” She rasped and swirled, crazed by her passion to escape. “Hell is being condemned to time for all eternity. It never ends and it is never pleasant. Of the two of us, you committed me greater sin, and you must pay the greater price.”

Bonnie tried to back away. George had told her this would be like sleep! How arrogant of him, how absurd.

It is not what the mind thinks that creates the afterlife, but what the unconscious believes.

And the unconscious never lies.

“George, where are you? George!”

Mother Star of the Sea reappeared out of the snickering, jabbing swarm of needles. “Yes, George, I want my vacation and I want it now!”

As if behind the screen of the cat’s eyes Bonnie saw George tinkering in the lab. “Hurry, hurry.”

“Oh, yes, George, I’ve got my valise packed. Ah, what fun!” The electric wind of George’s device shattered into the nothingness, negating for a moment the whole primacy of death.

Somebody was carried back into Bonnie’s body on that wind. But it wasn’t Bonnie. No, Bonnie went down deeper, to a charming place centered by a certain gingerbread cottage with a particularly vile stove inside. Yes, indeed. Hansel and Gretel aren’t the only ones to have visited there.

It was somebody else who reinhabited her body, fitting into the glimmers and flickers between the nerves where the soul is hidden. She came to do the will of her tremendous master.

The cat had a use for her. Just for a little while, she would slip through the weave of life, doing the bidding of the gods.

It was not Bonnie who returned to that lovely body on the lab table. No, it was Mother Star of the Sea, of course. And she had not come back for fun.