Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 39

Marissa woke as intended to the sound of the unearthly chant: qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis. She sat up on her prayer mat, hands folded across her heart, breathing as she had been taught, sharp intakes of air through the nostrils, pulled down to the bottom of her belly, then harshly expelled. The rushing sound of her breath flowed in and out between the long sustains of the singing. Ten breaths brought her alert. What had been the dream she was just dreaming?—but she was not meant go toward that now.

Quoniam tu solus sanctus. Tu solus Dominus.

Breathing normally now, forgetting even that she breathed, she lowered her hands from her heart and let them lie palms open on her inner thighs, in the cross of her legs on the prayer mat. Her palms were full of heart warmth, as if they cupped warm fluid in the dark. The darkness was not total, though. A weak light flickered in a high corner, partially obscured, casting a horned shadow across the floor and the far wall where it broke on the black felt that sealed the window. She brought her mind to bear on the First Sin, that of the Angels.

— . . . wanting to recall and understand all this in order to make me more ashamed and confound me more, bringing into comparison with the one sin of the Angels my so many sins, and reflecting, while they, for one sin, were cast into Hell, how often I have deserved it for so many. . . .

In doing so,, she concentrated on a point of warmth halfway between her navel and her vulva, as though blowing softly on a coal—this practice belonged to a different discipline yet she believed it might aid this one.

Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis

. . . the sin of the Angels, how they, being created in grace, not wanting to help themselves with their liberty to reverence and obey their Creator and Lord, and thus they were changed from grace to malice, and hurled from Heaven to Hell; and so then . . .

qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostrum

But here Marissa’s mind got stuck on the word hurled, which somehow attached itself to a weakness in her meditation, whispering itself into meaninglessness, tawdry as the hidden iPod on which she’d looped a Gregorian Qui Sedes, setting its timer to rouse her from her idle dreams at midnight, false as the yellow Christmas bulb tucked on top of her tall corner cupboard, which hurled the shape of its fineals across the room like horns. Mocked by her own monkey mind she trembled in frustration, hurled back and repulsed from the meditation even as she continued hopelessly to struggle

to move the feelings more with the will.

The music stopped, but she didn’t notice, and the light was gone too, something had changed, monkey mind was fussing over these changes but she managed to smother it quickly and completely, turning her being into the new thing, whatever it was, or rather, being snatched into it by three points, the one below her navel and the two aching points of her breasts. Across total darkness curved a sliver of light like a shooting star, going down and down, hurled down. O, O, O, she thought, with unutterable sorrow, She is lost. Back in her room, which somehow her being had departed, her hands were fluttering in her lap. Far away in the other realm, among its splintering materials. Lost to me. To herself. Not to herself.

The spark went down a long way into darkness, but it did not go out.