The auditorium was three-quarters full when the ushers closed the doors.
It was an elderly crowd, with a few earnest young couples scattered around the arena. He counted several wheelchairs, a great many crutches. A woman in a gingham skirt moved down the aisles, stopping here and there to exchange a few words with the audience. She paused at the row in front of John and chatted with a hugely overweight man about his gall bladder troubles. She caught John’s glance and moved toward him; when he did not look away she asked, “Are you here for healing?”
He shook his head in the negative.
“Are you sure? You look like a man with a need.”
He gave her a long, focused look. The woman in the gingham dress tugged at her earlobe, stared a moment longer, then shrugged uneasily and moved away.
The audience hushed as the lights dimmed. A local choir performed a hymn, and then Reverend Belweather took the stage. He was a squat, compactly fat man in a sincere Republican suit. His hair was cut to Marine length; he wore rings on his fingers. He began in a low-key fashion, whispering into the hand mike—you had to strain forward to hear him—but he was good, John thought. He read the crowd well and he was good with his body, with his aggressive strut and upraised palm. He preached to the crowd for forty minutes under the fierce klieg lights, rising to thunderous crescendos of damnation and salvation, the sweat rivering off the slope of his forehead. John closed his eyes and felt the crowd around him as a single, physical thing—an animal, aroused to some terrible confusion of eroticism and fear. The human odor was as physical as heat in the confined space of the auditorium and it beat against him like a pulse. I pity them, John thought. And I hate myself for my pity. And I hate them for provoking it.
Wishing, at the same time, that he could be a part of it. He understood the profound comfort here. To be not alone. But he could not wholly grasp the beatitude beneath this stink of human sweat. He had read too much history. It smelled like Torquemada and his chambers; it smelled like Belsen and the killing fields of Cambodia.
The healing came last. Reverend Belweather called up the afflicted by name or disorder. “God informs me there’s a Michael among us … Michael with a gall bladder!” And the fat man in the forward aisle stood up and ambled toward the stage, shocked into obedience.
Obscure in the shadows, John followed him down.
An experiment.
He stood in this cluster of diseased, dying, and broken individuals and felt a second wave of paralyzing contempt. Contempt for their sheeplike vulnerability; contempt for the man who was shearing them. I hate them, he thought, for cooperating in this … for their stupidity, he thought; because I cannot forgive them for it.
The healing act itself was anticlimactic, a tepid discharge of the tensions that filled the auditorium. A hand on the forehead, the hot breath of blessing, the command to shed those crutches and walk—at least as far as the wings, where the Reverend Belweather’s muscular stage crew redistributed the crutches and wheelchairs as needed. The woman in the gingham dress lingered there, also.
John edged his way to the stage.
Reverend Belweather regarded him with a certain amount of suspicion—this odd bird among the flock—and said, “Quickly, son, what exactly is your ailment?”
“I have a headache,” John said.
Reverend Belweather turned his eyes toward heaven, as much exasperation as prayer in the look. “Dear God,” he said to the microphone, “we join together in begging an end to this young man’s discomfort.” And the hand on the head.
Reverend Belweather’s hand was fleshy and moist. John imagined something pale and unwholesome, a dead thing touching him.
He concentrated for a moment. He could not say why this impulse had overtaken him. Some marriage of cruelty and distaste. One more experiment; there had been many before. But there was no restraining it.
Reverend Belweather yanked his hand away from John’s head as he felt the skin writhing there.
Spontaneous scars and wounds that appear in a religious trance are called “stigmata.” The phenomenon occurs in faiths from Catholicism to Voodoo; an interaction between mind and body triggered by religious ecstasy.
John was able to do it at will.
Reverend Belweather stared with honor at the cross of raised, feverish skin that had formed on John’s forehead.
He managed, “Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” John said. “What matters is that your wife has a radio transmitter built into her hearing aid and that you’re using it to defraud these people. You’re in violation of three federal statutes and you’re committing a sin. You should cancel tomorrow’s performance.”
Reverend Belweather staggered back as if the floor had shifted under his feet. He looked for his stage crew—the big men in the wings. They had already sensed a ripple in the flow and moved forward. “Get him the fuck out of here,” the Reverend Harmon Belweather said, his voice suddenly shrill and petulant. “Just get him the fuck out—now!” But he had clutched the hand-mike to his chest in an involuntary spasm of panic, and the words rang and echoed through the big Tannoy P.A. speakers like an invocation, or a failed and panicky exorcism.
It had been, of course, a stupid and dangerous thing to do. John turned and merged into the crowd of the crippled and the ill as the Reverend Belweather’s henchmen advanced. They were large but slow and they hadn’t had a good look at him; he was out a Tear door and into the cold rain before they realized he was gone.
He arrived back at the motel wet, cold, and rank with amphetamine sweat, but the girl behind the desk smiled at him as he passed; and the smile provoked an old response. He stopped and turned to face her. Eighteen or maybe nineteen years old, broad bones, an aggressive blur of lipstick. And that smile. She returned his look. “318, right?”
His room number. He nodded. “You were here when I checked in.”
“Right, that’s right. I’m on till midnight. Shift’s just about up.”
He watched her eyes and her lips. The smile was tentative but provocative, an offer half made. He surmised that she had allowed guests to come on to her in the past and that she had mixed feelings about it, guilt colored with arousal; that she liked him because he looked a little dangerous coming in hollow-eyed from the rain; that she was scared of him, too, a little.
The possibility was tantalizing. She was a sheep, a goat, an ape, a human animal—but I’m human too, he thought, from the neck down. She shouldn’t have provoked him with that smile. Nobody ever smiled at him. The rain and the tension had disguised some obvious clue to his nature:she doesn’t recognize the devil. Horns and tail don’t show in this light. Reverend Belweather, I am a stronger persuader than you are.
It was as easy as asking. Easy as buying a used Corvette. Look deep into my eyes and see precisely what you want, a tall westbound stranger with no attachments and big hands, see our dovetailed needs. He took her to his room and undressed her in the dark, pronouncing the words she wanted so desperately to hear, disguising himself so that she would not recoil and leave. Dangerous, this eager merging of skin and skin, sudden loss of surface tension; this knocking loose of props inside him until, delirious with orgasm and fatigue, he was no longer sure who or where he was. After a time she stood and dressed in the faint light—the light that comes through motel windows in prairie towns on cold nights after midnight—a glimmer of wet on her thigh, and John was startled by the immediacy of the vision (or was it a symptom of his decline?), the absolute solidity of white shoulder and cascade of hair. A sudden longing radiated through him like a pulse. She turned toward him momentarily and he waited for the revulsion in her eyes, her dawning sense of his alienness, but there was none: only a flicker of curiosity. She smiled. “Who’s Susan?”