Chamelea
by D.H. Robbins -- excerpt
Backstory:
The Reverend Thomas Barragan, had left Iowa two months before, after baptizing a miscreant teen-aged boy until he drowned. He has justified his act through the knowledge that the boy had impregnated Regina, his daughter, and forced her to leave. As the boy died by the Reverend’s hand, Thomas felt an oceanic feeling of his own soul being nurtured by the one departing from his victim.
This feeling has grown into a craving.
Now, having moved to New York City with a new identity as Reverend Thomas Deavers, he has taken up residence in a slimy hotel in the Lower East Side’s Two Bridges District, where he is building his church from an old tenement building. He also remembers his departed wife, Jillian, as whom he likes to dress to satisfy another of his cravings--to be a woman.
Here is the excerpt (1,300 words):
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Thomas’ hotel room was squalid. The stench of alley garbage wafted through the open window that looked out onto a featureless brick wall about six feet away. The open window also ushered in the crush of heat and humidity along with the incessant tempest of traffic and police sirens. Still, it was a little cleaner and slightly larger than most of those rooms he had stayed in over the past two months since leaving his former self behind in Iowa.
The table fan on the pinewood dresser creaked erratically as it pivoted on its iron pedestal, as it stirred up the stillness of the settling evening heat. The terry cloth bedspread looked as though it had come from a thrift shop, yet the bed was surprisingly soft. Thomas lay down upon it, took his bronze and amethyst medallion from his pants pocket and turned it before his eyes.
As he flicked and rotated the amulet he wondered once again why he chose New York City instead of returning to his home in Ballycannough, County Laois, Ireland. Back there, through the swirling color of the amethyst, he imagined the blessed scent of the lavender surrounding his thatch-roofed homestead of his childhood. And Mother. But it was nothing but a vision. He blithely reasoned that though he definitely would have preferred his ancestral home, he was already known there as a Barragan, from a founding family of Barragans. For his purposes, he needed the protection of the plain sight anonymity that could only be found in a city like New York. He gazed into the amulet and meditated away from the stress of his day and the gloomy world he had chosen.
He soon reached the point where he could no longer help himself. His meditation drew up his inner desire with another flaming migraine and the urge to vomit. Held by the lure, he slipped from the bed, snatched up a photo of his departed wife, Jillian, from the bureau and rushed into the squalid bathroom to make himself over as her.
After throwing up, and still coughing, he leaned the photo against the mirror, nearly flaked away to its bare slate backing. He reached into the shadows beneath the sink and pulled out Jillian’s wig and his valise of makeup. He started with the lipstick. The ritual of its application soothed him into the transition from what he hated into the one thing he truly loved. During the day he was the Reverend Thomas Deavers, a man cast in the image of his god. Yet even in the light of the day, the little urges to become the woman he yearned to be gnawed tenderly into his desire. The darkness of night was reserved for her—for Camille—the name that Mother had given to him nearly 40 years before.
Thomas still didn't know what it was about making himself over as a woman that comforted him so. Even if he had wanted to suppress his desire to be a woman in favor of playing his genetic role as a man, he could not. The need to be a girl had been deeply indwelled in him since he was 6 years old, when Mother had begun to mold the daughter she would have preferred from the innocence of her six-year-old son. Making himself over felt like the loving embrace Mother had saved for her child.
His thoughts drifted into the remembrance of his liberation of John Bass nearly three months back. Thomas knew his god had delivered the boy to him after John had found a fool’s solace through the imposter, Jesus. He came crawling, pleading for redemption from the sins of his life, in particular the dumb burden of guilt he bore from the defiling of Regina, making her pregnant. Thomas was angered more by the prospect of his daughter bringing another tortured life into the world. John deserved liberation, Thomas made sure of that. On his journey to New York after feigning his own suicide, he deposited John’s sodden corpse in a woodland near Cedar Rapids.
His remembrance of John’s liberation only led him to crave a release of sublime energy for his own soul to nurture the god within him. He brushed a flake of mascara from his cheek, then went to the bedroom to begin to dress as his deceased wife.
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Street business was scant at 11:45 p.m. and Willard, the night clerk, took his deep sleep seriously. His incessant snoring was softened through the Plexiglas window, now half-covered by a grimy shade. If there had been any traffic at all, it would have been the girls and their Johns sauntering quietly by, as Willard was irritated into surliness when awakened. The girls were on the honor system, anyway, as they would slip the five-dollar-an-hour room money through the window slot.
Tonight the lobby was quiet and lit only by a few dirty bulbs in the ceiling and the dim blue glow from the broadcast of the “The Steve Allen Show.” Ishmael was huddled fetal-like in his putrid, fishy stink within a loose cocoon of rags. The TV audio flowed thinly above the silence. Allen was conducting his “Man on the Street” interview routine, alternating among fellow comics: Tom Poston, Don Knotts, Tim Conway, Louis Nye and Bill Dana. Ishmael’s occasional laughter had been expressed more as abrupt, stunted yawns, as he had anxiously bobbed his head up and down.
But now Ishmael’s focus concentrated on something closer—the swaying of an amethyst that seemed to bleach out all else around him but its purple radiance. His own stench was softened by the scent of lavender. Thomas stood behind him, dressed as Jillian—a willowy woman with short auburn hair. He was barefoot and wore his dead wife’s pink silk blouse. If he had not been standing in the low gloom, one might, through a squint, have judged his womanly looks as curiously on the debit side of ordinary.
Thomas gently swung the medallion before Ishmael’s puffy eyes. “God is with you, Ishmael,” he murmured soothingly in a husky whisper. “Stare into God’s light. He has come to claim you, because He loves you. Stare into God's light. See only this, and nothing else.”
From the television, Don Knotts stared in pop-eyed wonder at the audience, and pointed at himself. “Who, me?” he blurted nervously. The audience laughed through the softened audio.
“Who, meee?” Ishmael parroted in a crusty whisper.
“God wants you to come to him,” Thomas whispered close to Ishmael’s withered ear.
“God, I be here,” Ishmael murmured. His flabby, pustulated lips bloomed into a faint smile. “Waiting fer you.”
“Then close your eyes, Ishmael. Sleep now so God’s love may embrace you.”
“God—love,” Ishmael said in release as he trembled into a deepening trance.
“Hold in your breath and feel the kiss of God,” Thomas said as he gently covered Ishmael’s mouth and nose with a bandana. It felt to Ishmael like a soft cloud, maybe an angel’s kiss.
Jillian’s wig shifted out of place as Thomas leaned closer and lightly pinched Ishmael’s thick nostrils shut and held them closed. Soon he sensed the satisfying grate of the derelict’s spirit as it cut into his psyche. It seeped throughout him, then eased into a warm oceanic sensation as it found its home in his soul. Staring down, mesmerized by the lifeless bundle of clothing on the couch, Thomas was overcome by how natural it had felt for him to liberate a soul to cultivate his own. He reached into the skirt pocket and pulled out his vial of lavender. He smeared some drops on Ishmaels’s forehead with his index finger. “Blessings, dear heart,” he whispered, as he brushed a tickling strand of Jillian’s wig hair from his cheek. “And may you find your own god.”
He stuffed the bandanna and the vial back into the skirt pocket and then tiptoed up the stairs toward his first full night’s sleep in weeks.