Holy Light

At Sunday's dawning hooded figures came to La Iglesia Inmaculada Concepción which they called La Conchita for its little dome. Under the church's long shadow beggars in soft voices asked the men of God to give something to the poor. The acolytes said nothing. One of the beggars asked how then they could claim to be holy men. The acolytes unshackled the front door and flung it open and walked in. One checked his watch.

It ticked. As one they looked to the altar. A mass, a shadow, somehow swinging gently on its rope under the little shell of the church over the altar, back and forth. They drew closer.

The shadow wore a cassock and a Roman collar under the rope around his neck, and the shadow was their priest, hanged from the top of the dome and swinging, swinging as the world rotated underneath. From the entry a brief flash of light put the figures in relief. White robes turned. There was no one at the door.

In silence the attendants took a ladder and cut through the rope and the body fell a meter landing slumped over the altarpiece.

Removed in a black coffin from La Iglesia Inmaculada Concep-ción and Mexico City just as dawn's rosy fingers crept across the sky. The death was not reported. Few missed him. There were other priests and other preachers.

—

Mexico City again. On a slow Tuesday afternoon an older man entered David's pawn shop, the bells on the door jingling. The shop was cluttered and spectacular. Various lights and lamps occupied every table and nook, light blending and reflecting and refracting off cutlery and dirty mirrors until the shop was bathed in warm antique sunlight. David was a little hungover.

He met the man's eyes and nodded. The older man nodded back and walked over to David, took out a brown paper package from under his arm, placed it on the desk. David looked at it and the man nodded again and gestured to the package as if to say see for yourself, and David undid the twine and unfolded the paper.

A neatly folded old black cassock. He inspected the cloth and found it well-made and cared for but not exceptional and offered the man a fair price for it. He smiled and accepted the price without further negotiation and David wished he had offered less.

But he shook the man's papery hand anyway and handed him the money and wished him well on his way out. And the older man, one hand on the door, turned back to David and frowned and wished him well too. And then he left. David sighed and put the package under the counter and poured himself some tequila and drank it and sat there and because of the cassock thought about his father who had been a priest. David was a bastard. He had not known him beyond a single dusty photo on his mother's dresser. And David had another glass. And perhaps another. And so on.

A week or so later when going through his stock he pulled out the brown paper package and opened it and unfolded the cassock and inspected it. It smelled of mothballs and mice and dust. He fingered the collar—its white tinged with antique yellow-and inside the collar was stitched a tag scribed with his father's name. And stuffed into a little interior pocket of the jacket was a grainy platinotype of a small and dusty and dark church seen from the door. From the dome came down a rope about 10 meters long and at the end of that rope there was a hanged man.

Surrounded by acolytes robed in white. Dust frozen in the air.

Scrawled under the print on the photopaper were the words yo lo ví / no estuvo in mis manos..

—

Years later. Things were worse. There were more drinking on the curb than at the bartop. A man sitting near one of the drains sweated and raised the bottle to his lips and got a few drops.

He put the bottle down on the curb with the others and then he flicked the cap to see if it could make it all the way all the way across the blacktop and it got about halfway. A car with leering men passed by and flattened the cap. David felt sober drunk and he knew this town and its men and he smiled then frowned. The sun glinted in the bottles. He was out of money and beer. Felt that he could kill someone if he had the reason. And he fingered his father's Roman collar to let himself breathe and brushed the dust off his father's cassock as he wondered about God. And looked at the photo of the hanged priest. Thought about the men who might've hanged him. If they drove cars around Mexico City leering. If they'd known his mother. And so on. Or if his father had strung himself up.

—

And it was night and he walked the dark side of the road where painted whores plied their trade to stumbling pilgrims. But tonight at least he passed them by muttering something not unkind and went around dark sleeping forms and weary hedonists to an alley he could find even drunker than a fish. Snuck through a little door there and into a little room untouched by sunlight or moonlight, a dusty little room with a bed and a desk and hundreds, hundreds, thousands of beer bottles, hung from the ceiling, or stood on the floor, or on little makeshift wall-shelves, each with a wick or a filament inside. With a lighter and with various switches linked to the building's electrical, the ritual longer each week, he replaced wicks and soldered broken wires and hung new bottles and lit them as he went, and as the night passed the room was bathed in unbearable light and warmth and the heaviness of stale beer, and there he laid down on his bed content. There were rags in the doorframe's cracks so the light could not escape. And he slept like that in the middle of the room on his white bed, glowing in the light with his arms spread eagle to the sides and through closed reddened eyelids he looked up at God and slept.

And the drinking got worse. He took a gun from his shop. Made few sales. He wondered about the man who had sold him the cassock years ago. He was paranoid. The drinking got worse. He would take off the cassock at night and then wake up in it in the morning. He kept adding lights to his sanctuary, but it was no longer enough. There was a darkness he could never know. And always in his inner pocket the photo was there, and those words yo lo ví / no estuvo en mis manos. He would find their author. It could only be the man who sold him the cassock, but at last he could not bring himself to go back to his pawn shop and he left it abandoned. He felt they might come for him there, that they might find him and demand the photo from him. He did not know who they were but this was the feeling in his stomach. So he stayed in the light of his sanctuary and ventured out only to buy drink and food at the corner place and the light grew brighter and brighter and brighter but wrapped in that dark terrible cassock it did not burn him. And the drinking got worse. And he might have taken a girl or two to his bed down there under the bright lights but which girls and at what time and in what manner he could not say. And no one could know or see him or those girls when they were down there in the light. Days ran together.

Weeks later dust and grime. Walking along streets he thought he knew which he realized now were false. Images. Noncircadi-an he wandered and regardless of the hour all the actors were the same. The same. All their lives lived for the camera which watched. The same. He was the camera. He was the watcher.

He wasn't in on it. The others all the same, the same. Yo lo ví.

Yo lo ví y no estuvo en mis manos. Years ago, he was peeking through the doors of La Conchita and there he saw the man hanging and the robed men standing around him and flash the camera went lighting up the church's rafters and like that they all turned around and stared at him the acolytes and the hanged man and the hanged man smiled and closed his eyelids over bulging bloodshot eyes. As if they were sharing a little joke. And he stumbled back.

—

Running now back to the alley back to the light it was night and again he was drunk. From beneath the door there was a strip of light and from there and through the keyhole light was escaping the room. It had not been sealed. All wrong. Crept up and put up an eye to the keyhole. Two white-robed men in there looked right at him with the older pawn shop customer in the middle of them staring straight ahead. David pulled back from the keyhole as if struck. Gasping. Grasped for pistol and primed it. Shaking as he brought his eye back up to the keyhole. They were still standing there for him like statues. Waiting for the "action" call.

Well-lit for the third act's climax. Lights everywhere. Falling back and taking out his gun and aiming it through the keyhole right at the center actor's head there was a crack in the night. A man groaned and something fell and shattered and David ran.

Ran back to his shop. Not so drunk now.

David woke up in the cassock in his shop and on his desk was a platinotype taken from outside his room in the alley. And the door was flung open and it was night and there in the room slumped on the mattress among the lights and between the two robed men was the older man shot through the head bleeding.

A dark stain. And David saw it and it was out of his hands. And out beneath the woods on the outskirts of Mexico City by a little creek in a black coffin his father slept and rotted.

Charlie Walsh