Informational

Sera

He couldn't have expected to see her again so soon, but there she is, Monday afternoon-ish, standing outside the fence surrounding the church, on the other side of the building from the playground for the day care kids, leaning back with her shoulderblades against the fence.  Smoking, her head tipped back to the sky.  

 

Her hair is pulled back from her face in a ponytail, that emphasizes the buzzed portion of her haircut.  Makes her look, from the right angle, that she might have chopped it off all over - except no, there it is, tangled in the diamonds of the chain link fence. 

She is wearing a short pink dress, with a checkered pattern that looks like gingham from afar, and resolves itself into repeating patterns of tiny eyeballs and airplanes and smiley-faced-skulls and Scottie dogs up close.  A black denim jacket over it, the shoulder yoke covered with silver spikes, the sleeves cut off.  Beneath: fishnets (untorn, today, in a smaller, diamond-patterned weave) and heavy black boots covered with buckles, of course.  The heavy soles and slight heel still lift her a good two and a half inches over her given height and the short skirt just emphasizes the length of her legs. 

Still, there's not even a hint of sideboob, so perhaps this is her idea of appropriate dress for a house of worship.  Maybe she dialed it back for him.  Maybe she just wanted to wear that dress.

And, no make-up today, which makes her seem both prettier and perhaps a bit more plain than she ever could on stage.  A bit tired around the eyes, out in the sunlight on a Monday afternoon.

Of course she's looking for him without looking for him. Feeling for him, the way he warps the Tapestry.   The way it changes when he's close.  Waiting while he finishes counseling a pregnant teen or comforting a grandmother struggling with her granddaughter's drug addiction.  While he balances the books or looks for loopholes or checks on the status of this grant or that funding stream, until he can take a break, or head outside, and look at his street, up and down.

She straightens when she feels his presence.  Exhaling a stream of smoke, looking ready to stub out the remainder of her cigarette.  She's not carrying a bag, but there is a leather folio on the weedy concrete beside her feet. 

Pan

This parish considers itself lucky not only that Father Echeverría all but landed in their laps all those years ago but that he is not a physically small man as are so many men who seek ordination and carry it out. Behind a pulpit any being towers but while administering the Holy Communion and consoling the bereaved before a funeral service and leading an after-school devotional group for at-risk teenage boys he is of a stature and a build that affords immediate respect.

So when strange people hang around the church too long it is not one of the volunteers to whom the secretary appeals to go figure out who they are and what they want but the pastor in residence himself. Like he doesn't have anything better to do.

More like: he knows what meth does to people, knows that drugs run rampant even in a city considering itself as clean as Denver does, knows that even a small woman can become a violent hellion under the influence of a stimulant or in the midst of fix-seeking withdrawal. He thinks he can handle anything that comes at his parish because he can strike down monsters and madmen with wrath hot enough to have come from God's own hand.

When he goes out the back door of the church proper and passes the nursery school he knows it is not a monster or a madman but a Cultist. The Cultist who strolled into his confessional like she sought a new thrill in the form of incensing a clergyman, who held onto his arm after her show and left his jacket smelling of smoke and sweat, crisp and alive in the moment but sour after the air has had at it.

Smoker's luck has him coming up behind her towards the end of her cigarette. He clears his throat to alert her to his presence like she didn't know he was there all along. When she looks over he's beside her, on the other side of the fence, leaned against it with his elbows on the rail so he does not loom over her. He knits his fingers together instead of letting them dangle. He's wearing sunglasses and has a piece of chewing gum in his mouth.

"People are going to start talking," he says by way of greeting, like he thinks he's being funny.

Sera


From behind, he doesn't have that illusion, that she shaved off all that hair last night.  Her ponytail looks like an ordinary ponytail, whipping in the wind, the thick mass of strands breaking through the fencing in a gleaming dark-blond wave over the black denim.

His shadow crosses her shoulder when he reaches his side of the fence.  She turns then, long after she first felt the movement of light that he exudes.  That seems to part the air around and before him even in so ordinary a place, on so ordinary a street. 

She flashes a quick little chaser of a smile, then stubs out the remnants of that cigarette on the fence support.  But she does not drop the cigarette butt on the ground.  If there's a trash can - or, better, a sand-filled bucket - she'll toss it.  Otherwise, after the filter is slipped into a breast pocket once the ember is well and truly out, to be dealt with later. 

Then she tips her head toward hip, straightening her spine as upright as it will go.  Stealing ever scant tenth of an inch straightening her posture might grant her, just as he leans forward, so as not to loom. 
Lifts a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, blue eyes on his mouth as he makes the quip. 

"I don't mind," she returns, with a kind of equanimity, except for the way her mouth curls around the phrase.  The humor - if its there - is liminal and assured and also bred-in-the-bone true.  She might like it if people talked.    Someone else would finish that phrase with its suggestible twin, if you don't, she does not.  Her feelings are not contingent on his. He can mind if he wants to and it will not bother her.  She still wouldn't mind at all.

She perches her left foot on the kerb framing in the church yard, threading her own fingers lightly throw the fence in a way that puts the ink on her palm and inside her wrists, just over the pulse points, on display.  Glances, up and down the sidewalk, taking in the streetscene, before looking back at him, squinting against the sun. 

"I'd like to talk.  Privately," a lift of her chin indicates the open street.  Anyone could wander by.  "That is, if you have a few minutes to spare."

 Pan

If he minds it has no bearing on his posture. He continues leaning against the fence and he chews but doesn't gnash at his gum and until she steers the conversation towards the purpose of her visit neither does he interrupt. Even without questioning her she can tell he knows she hasn't come here just to admire the view from the lot's back fence.

Behind them the playground is silent. The kids have gone down for a nap or they're inside listening to stories or they've gone home for the day. A few adults mill around the modest parking lot and their conversation stains the distance but doesn't reach their ears in distinct phonemes.

She can't see his eyes behind the dark plastic over his eyes so she can't tell if he's looking back at her when she squints against the glare behind him. With her speech Pan turns his head and then she can feel his gaze come through the lenses. Chewing slows but does not stop.

"Everything alright?" he asks.

And then, regardless of the answer: "We can talk in my office."

 

 Sera

 

"Funny," she returns, though the word remains bare, naked of anything like her usual humor.  There is a razor-wire smile to accompany it.  Thinly formed and close-mouthed.  It reaches, just, her squinting eyes.  "Everything alright.  That's actually something I was going to ask you." 

--
The rest of her answer is an eloquent shrug that has the hem of her dress floating higher and lower against her thighs.  Everything appears to be alright with her.  She is intact, whole, appears even to be sober and awake during daylight.  She has showered recently, the scent of her shampoo and lotion persists beneath the acrid overlay of tobacco smoke. 

He invites her to his office.   And she bends over in a sweeping motion, picks up the folio from the sidewalk and hands it to him across the fence.  Then (so long as it is not topped by spikes or glass or razor wire), she decides to climb it rather than go the long-way-round.  The boots she wears are not particularly suited to the task, but they're the most practical shoes he has seen her wear.  Not that he's likely noticed her feet much; most people look at her and assume that that height she commands is hers and hers alone. 

The fence rattles and pings beneath her weight as she clambers over, short dress or no.  Does not care if passers-by get a glimpse of fishnetted thigh or the curve of her ass, and anyway, there's no one close.  Just him, and he can glance away if he wishes.  She's light-footed and fairly athletic, and makes easy work of it, then jumps down from the top, landing solidly beside the priest, her knees bending to absorb the impact.    Holds out her hand to accept the folio (which is battered and worn, stained by assorted spills - coffee, beer, wine - among other things) back from him as she falls into step beside him as he leads her to his office.  If there's a back way, they might even avoid the disapproving eyes of the abuelitas in the sanctuary. 

 

They are half-way across the church yard when she assays, "You haven't - sensed anything strange, have you?"  A wave of her hand indicates, well.  The city, the horizon, the Tapestry.  She cuts a glance to his profile with the question, absorbs his answer, verbal or otherwise, with a look. Then, the briefest of explanations, given with an indrawn breath and an exhaled sigh, "I had a dream the other night.

 

"Still not sure what to make of it."  She is low-voiced, her resonance a dark, persistent presence at his flank.  There's a certain distance to the words, though, and for all her immediacy, she feels strangely withdrawn,  held back.  " - but I don't think it's good."

 

And is quiet, after that, for the rest of the walk to his office. 

Pan

Razor wire would make an appealing addition to the back fence but the structure is comprised of wood and on a man of Pan's height it only reaches the bottom of his ribcage when he stands upright. One section of the fence has been recently repaired and the grain of the wood does not match the weather-battered majority of the rest of the barrier.

He takes the folio when she hands it to him and stands up straight to give her room to climb over. The older section groans beneath the Cultist's negligible weight but it doesn't threaten to spill her onto the grass and he offers her another hand to find her way to her feet again. Whether she does or does not take it Sera receives the folio without comment.

To the matter of whether he'd sensed anything strange: he turns towards her and lifts his eyebrows above the frames of his sunglasses. He does not speak but she answers as if he had.

The field leads to the playground and the back ends of both buildings. Were they to continue past the playground to take the sidewalk through the front door they would come upon the dispersing gaggle of parishioners but Pan leads her along a less-beaten trod to a set of steps and a locked back door. He feeds it a key and holds open the door for her.

They emerge in the administrative office which houses numerous paintings of Biblical stories and two desks, upon both of which sit vases of aging Mother's Day flowers, glass Virgin Mary candles, and antiquated computers. The staff are not in and the lights above their desks have been extinguished.

When she came into his office last time the door led into the auditorium stood open, as he'd promised. With the staff gone for the day the door into both the main corridor and the office are closed and after he shuts and locks the back door he removes his sunglasses and folds an earpiece into the gate of his shirt and unlocks the door to his office. On the other side of the room is the door to the auditorium, shut. Soon he shuts the door back to the reception office.

Pan crosses the room to the lone windowsill and drops the vinyl blinds before flicking on a desk lamp. It isn't necessary. Though he emits no actual light the impression that his being gives off is enough for anyone in his presence to sit with the notion that the space around them has been illuminated.

Unlike the night she came to and abandoned Confession, he chooses to sit on the windowsill. His back rattles the blinds as he leans back, resting his arms low across his midsection and one ankle atop the other. Today he's dressed in black jeans and a black short-sleeved work shirt, black cowboy boots. She can see a small black pager on his right hip.

"Tell me about this dream," he says.

 

 Sera

 

Sera takes the hand he offers.  Of course she does.  Grips his hand with her smaller one as she pulls herself upright.  There are calluses there, though not the same sort of calluses he might have.  More on the pads of her fingers than on the palm. 

The folio, received back, she tucks against her flank, her palm against the scarred leather, her long fingers tucked beneath and around its smooth spine. 

There's silence, then.  She follows him around back, the steps and the locked door.  Pads quiet in his wake through the administrative offices, glancing around at the deeply ordinary surroundings, the flowers, the bible pictures on the walls, the aging computers gathering dust, the nick-knacks and gew-gaws that people scatter around to mark the space as their own and themselves as interesting. 

Inside the office, he takes a seat.  Or perhaps a half-hitched seat on the windowsill.  She stands just inside the locked door, watching as he lowers the blinds and flicks on the desk lamp.  Then stands to move.  To walk around the office in a slightly restive prowl until she reaches his desk.  Sets the folio down on the surface and pulls herself up to sit on the blotter, tucking her feet beneath her Indian style.

For the first half of the story. 

"I was walking around in this apocalyptic world.  Everything was grey, covered in drifting ashes.  Even the light was gray; the sky, the horizon.  It was all featureless, except for the fine gray dust on the ground.  I was barefoot. 

"The first thing I saw with any color was a ... street sign, with the number 12.  Past it was an empty lot.  Somehow, there was more structure now - broken bricks, splinted concrete, still gray, still covered in dust the same color as the sky.  I could see where I'd been, there were footprints behind me, but no wind, or movement of any kind to disturb them."

A deep breath, a flicker of her eyes back up toward him.  She uncurls her legs, picks up the folio.  Slides off the desk, and starts circling back toward him.  Finishing the story as she circles the room, opening the folio, paging through until she finds the right page.  A recent one. The most recently filled, there's nothing since.

Continuing the story, " - so, there was this girl there, young.  Fifteen or sixteen maybe, she was asking for help.  Asking me for help.  Then something changed; it got, colder, the air coalesced and a stranger walked out - an older man.  He took the girl and led her away and they disappeared into the mist."

By now, Sera has sauntered her way back around the room, and is standing by the windowsill where the priest, in his dark, workmanlike clothing, sits.  The folio is open; her drawing it not skilled, but her notes on the page opposite are well-detailed. 

She tapes a black painted nail against the page to draw his attention to a line twice underlined, written over in bold.  It reads:

Come with me.  And we will unmake the whole world.

Beneath it, a brief sketch of a girl, poorly done again.  What is important, though, is that her eyes are empty.  Ghost-white, and no longer laden with tears. 

"That's what he said to her."

 

Pan

 

His desk is a mess. The surface has just enough room to sit and scratch out a quick card or handwritten letter but he has made no space for a computer and what space would be for it is lost beneath piles of books and opened mail. Unopened mail sits in a metal bucket on the corner opposite the lamp.

Sera, small as she is, can sit easily on the blotter without worrying about toppling anything. Even if not easily, then without worrying. It's only stuff.

Now that she speaks to him of deep and personal things she can see the reason for men putting grilles between the penitent and the priest. Though he holds himself as unhindered as a hitchhiker resting between rides his gaze lies on her the entire time she speaks. Doesn't traipse away from her or over her but rather tracks her face. He doesn't pry but she has to feel that if she lied he would know.

He glimpses the folio without touching it. A frown marks his brow once, brief, and then he rubs his lower jaw in pensive thoughtlessness.

At the end of her story, after the last sketch, he asks, "Have you ever dreamt like this before?"

Not of this, the subject.

Like this, as if it were a portent.

 

Sera

 

The restlessness was portal and physical and immediate - native to her body and to her being, rather than some prickling reaction to the unshifting weight of his gaze on her throughout the story.  She does not mind being seen.  She wouldn't keep dressing like that if she minded people watching her, and she seems entirely comfortable with his scrutiny throughout her telling.  Perhaps she even revels in it., in the directness of his stare - in being seen - almost as much as she revels in touch.

 

That is, until the tale is told and he asks his question.  Her eyes snap up to his face; first his mouth, then his eyes, then cut sharply away, to a serene and dusty icon of Mary, Mother of God, framed on the wall across the room. 

"Yes," she returns after a long and sharply delineated moment.  Her pulse is visible in her throat, and a band of tendon pulls taut in her jaw.  That yes is closed rather than open.  There are explanations, of course.  Her Tradition plays with the very substance of time itself.  There are explanations, but this is not one of them.  "All my life."
 

Or rather: for as much of it as she remembers.  

 

Pan

Symbols of faith litter the place but on no wall does she see hung relics of an education. He has not hung any degrees from any colleges on the walls and that can either mean he is a humble man who feels no need to boast of his accomplishments, or he is as rough as his hands and skin suggest he is. That he did not study psychology or theology or any of the things the world thinks a man needs to minister to people. But his bookshelves are pushed full of textbooks and professional publications whose spines have been cracked and where they do not fit in orderly rows along the shelves they have been stacked on their backs, on the floor, wherever they will fit.

Yet he has accumulated enough experience that when he asks his questions they do not languish with an air of experimentation. His years of trial and error are behind him. He does not wear his serenity like a bracelet to be snapped every time he suffers an errant thought, something external he can remove at the end of the day. He all but exudes it now. That's something she felt the first night and the second night and feels again now.

He pauses, like he's absorbing one answer before seeking another.

"Since before you opened your eyes?"

 

 Sera

 

She has her own sort of serenity; or perhaps there is another, better word for it.  That sweeping physical confidence that lives and breathes in her, the raw willingness to live precisely in the moment she inhabits, and inside the physical frame in which she inhabits that moment, at every given fraction of every given second. 

That is not gone, now, though it is eclipsed.  Displaced and made mock of by his own far more settled ease-of-place.  She crosses her arms, not low and loose as he did earlier, but tight and higher on her ribs, just beneath her breasts. 

"I think so."  This answer is provisional, is experimental - it is neither a lie nor the truth.  She does think so, but doubt creeps in at the edges of those thoughts.  She cannot be sure.  "I was a kid.  I don't know."  

 

She has not looked back at him.  Her response is to him in her periphery.  He has a sharply articulated view of her profile.  The angle of her jaw.  The undulant motion  of her throat as she swallows.  

Then a sharp look winging back to him, all at once.  The shift to aggression is instinctive and inborn, is fight-or-fuck, and never flight.  "Does it fucking matter?"
 

Pan

 

As a dock does not shrink back from harder waves than the ones to which it has grown accustomed neither does he shrink back from that sharp turn in her words. This isn't the first time harsh language has been thrown in here. Teenage boys make up a good portion of the outreach clientele this place seeks to save. Teenage boys and pregnant women, addicts, people who have fallen through the cracks because the system thinks they never should have been here to begin with.

His own voice sounds as though it could be loud if he let it, like he used to be able to curse and fight with the best of them. His hands are not smooth.

So Pan watches Sera and other than uncrossing his ankles so that both of his feet are flat on the floor again he doesn't move.

"Yeah," he says. "It does."

A beat, and then, "In the dream, were you afraid?"

 

Sera

 

And somehow, that is all it takes.  He tells her it matters, and she exhales, long and slow and fine.  There's control in that breath, a deliberate choice to deflate her lungs before she fills them again.  Her long arms uncross and her spine decompresses from the rictus-sharp posture she took on when she wheeled on him. 

He can read it all in her face and the frame of her narrow body: the decision to trust him, or perhaps merely the realization that, in some way, she already does. 

"Then yeah," nodding, her arms empty and loose, her eyes crawling away from him, over the disordered array of books packed into his bookshelves.  She swallows, there is still the hollow center of the admission, of the things-she-does-not-know, but: "I'm pretty sure it happened before any of this.   That has to be why they sent me away from school.  I mean, it could've been the pot or the making out with Katie O'Connor in the sacristy, but - "

Her shoulders rise and they fall, a trace of spare humor creases the lines around her eyes.  Sometimes the memories return intact and entire and so vivid that she could breathe them in and absorb them and reintegrate them into her living memory so entirely it is as if they never disappeared, as if they were always lurking behind a strange gray curtain. 

Then she's quiet, considering his question, turning it over in her mind's eye and memory.  She works her way through it all aloud. 

 

"I was - troubled, at first, by the destruction all around me.  Then, concerned, by the crying girl and the mounds of ash.  When the man showed up, when that mist was washing over my skin, then yeah. 

"I was afraid.

"The girl's eyes.  The way they changed.  Before they disappeared, she turned around, and the last thing I heard was her voice.  A phoenix can only rise from ashes.

"It sounded more like a threat than a promise."  

 

 Sera

 

There's something unsettled about her, in that spare moment.  Removed and calculated about that inventory she has made of the memories, which suits her ill.  She looks away from him, quiet, back to that icon of Mary on the wall.  It should be dull in the limited light of that incandescent bulb of the desk lamp. 

"I was intellectualizing that, Pan."  She remarks, still in that removed way a moment later.  Still looking away from him, her features all in profile.   "I was frightened.  Very fucking frightened."

Pan

"Maybe that was the point."

Not the most comforting thing a person could hear after confessing to negative emotion but he doesn't say it to be nasty. Doesn't even say it to offer perspective. She's a Willworker. She has perspective. But he says it anyway because words can ground when the mind goes too far off. Because he wants to share his thoughts with her instead of sitting beside her as stoic and unmoving as the men of their pasts, the ones who helped but only from the other side of a desk.

In the wake of his speech he sighs, the sound deep but not infinitely so, and he reaches out to rest a hand on her shoulder. He does not grasp but the heat and the strength of his hand is a tangible thing.

Humans need the warmth of other things to survive. They shrivel and die without it.

"Thank you for telling me," he says before he takes his hand off her shoulder. "I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you. We'll figure it out, though."

 

Sera

 

 She breathes out a short, uninflected breath that stands in for an ironic sublingual laugh.  There's no real humor, but the acknowledgment of his statement is real enough.  He could not have imagined she wanted comfort from him, anyway.  Or rather, not the sort of comfort his parishioners usually seek from him. 

He offers something like it anyway, a moment later; not pious words and platitudes, but the warmth of his hand on her shoulder. 

Oh, her response is thoughtless and instinctual; is the animal heart of the magic she practices, the transcendentalism of sensation.  She curves her shoulder up into the heat of his hand and cants her head down, brushes the apex of her cheek against his rough knuckles.  Her mouth is half-parted, just above the first joints of his index and middle fingers, and if she had not remembered what he was and who he was and why he was in just that moment - if he had not spoken - she would have opened her mouth and scraped her teeth against his skin. 

But he does speak.   Thank you for telling me.
 
His voice rumbles, a depth and rhythm to it, a song underneath, the textured piece of his accent, and she arrests that instinctive yearning toward contact, shrugging her shoulder out of his grasp even as he lets her go and pulls back his hand to his side. 

"Don't worry, Padre."  She's turning around to face him fully, tucking her hands into the pockets of her jacket, the folio cinched neatly against her side.  A sharp little shake of her head sends her long curls bouncing.  She presses her lips together, seams them closed over her sharp white teeth. Then favors him with a quick, assured, close-mouthed smile, some hint of her customary swagger tucked in and around the gesture.  "I was expecting questions, not answers from you tonight. 

"So I guess it was sort of informational, yeah?  Something's coming, and I thought you should know.  I'll let you know if anything else,"  dark brows rise expressively.  " - hits me."

She's already on her way to the door.  She can see herself out.