Warning: There will be descriptions of gay sexual action in this chapter. Also dancing. If that kind of thing horrifies and offends you, run for your life. If not, welcome aboard! Thanks for getting through the last chapter!

In case you were curious (but you probably weren't), the previous chapters are named after Leonard Cohen songs. And thanks Uni for your encouragement! I so appreciate your appreciation and love your feedback! I try to portray the characters as best as I can. I hope you enjoy this chapter too, because I sure enjoyed writing it!


The object hit the floor silently.

"Look wat we hae here."

"Anderson-" Maxwell started.

Anderson bent over andsnatched up the mystery object from the ground, a small black silk packet.

"Wats in this? Pain killers? That would explain teh off thinken and teh blank pupils!"Anderson murmured, studying it under the moonlight. "Or maybe cocaine? Or is this wee thang where ye kape yer soul? "

"You have truly gone beyond the pale." Maxwell commanded, pulling his shoulders back. " Think of your little ones or at least your own throat before you speak or act further. I order you to give me that object this instant."

"Sae it is yers then!"

"Whose it is irrelevant. I am your master you understand. I exact from you what I like, when I like it."

"Ma master? "The paladin laughed ferociously as he tauntingly fingered and shook the packet. "Aye and Ah'm St. Francis of Assisi! Yer cheeky when yer spooked Maxwell. Why dunna ye quit yerself like a man fer once and confess yer shameful secrets of yer hart tae me. Tell me wats innit then Ah'll think aboot given it back."

"But I am not a man who quits!" Maxwell swung his hand towards Anderson's face and then stepped back.

Anderson froze, He not been struck but something was not right. The priest tapped his face with his fingertips experimentally.

"Where's ma-" Anderson started.

"So now I've gotten your attention." Maxwell dangled Anderson's glasses between two pinched fingers, then nimbly placed the glasses over his own eyes.

In a bizarre reversal, the bishop was bespectacled, and the priest was bare faced. There was now a deep reddish ridge at the crest of Anderson's nose where his glasses had rested.

"Isn't this unusual." Maxwell smiled heinously through Anderson's lenses. "I can see perfectly out of these, yet my vision is unimpaired!"

Anderson shaded his face with one outspread hand.

"I will answer your question if you answer mine. Why wear these ineffectual glasses? Is it that you think they make you appear more approachable? More humane? " Maxwell wet his lips. "And why can you look at me? Are you ashamed? Do you fear to see your image mingled with what you most abhor? Or is it your worry that they may look more handsome on me?"

"Give me ma glasses." Was all the priest said.

"Or you'll what." Maxwell wagged his tongue as he took off the glasses and hid them behind his back. "If its games you love, then play for stakes. Why don't you guess in what hand I hold your glasses in!"

"Why dunnae ye guess wat Ah'm gunna dae tae ye if ye dunnaegive 'em back?" Behind a web of splayed fingers Anderson stared with a liquefying wild, willful look of a starving huntsman, a mean impoverished face splintered through prison bars. "Ah'll give ye a hint. Have ye ever tried tae scream wit a bayonet in yer throat?"

"How absurd! You probably have dozen of pairs of these useless glasses waiting for you at the orphanage. I take this one away and you act as if I have snatched your very eyes from you."

"Its teh principle." Anderson grunted.

"The principle. Take solace in your impeccable illogic. Circle your fingers around your eyes, it will have the same principle. Clearly you are beastly drunk and over excited. Go lie down."

"Ah lie doon? Fat chance. Its nae fun playen matatdor unless the bull fights, but when the bull gits a bit frisky, it becomes a matter of life and death fur fear of cutten a precious finger. But wat does it matter, we'll dae this again. We'll be daen this in another thirty years." Anderson said bitterly.

"Let us not be so pessimistic. In thirty years, one of us will be dead. Preferably you. After all, that is the Iscariot way: Wait and hope someone dies!" Maxwell hissed. "I hold that hope. I suppose you don't. Either outcome, you ensure I lose. If I relent, I am a coward but if I hold my ground, then I am a fool, yes?"

"Yer already a coward and a fool Maxwell. Yer teh biggest most hopeless coward and fool Ah've ever laid eyes on. "

"Oh am I? I understand the truth of courage and honor, all things like it. I say to hell with it! Dogs have died of it. The desire is preserve one's own life is no mark of cowardice or folly, it is a sign of intelligence, a sound mind. If a person is ready to slaughter over even something as inconsequential as a pair of spectacles, that does not make him brave, it makes him an imbecile, sick in the head. In the interest of wellness, I suggest we have a exchange Anderson!" Maxwell curled his hands toward himself like a beckoning merchant or a carousing gambler. "What is your's for whats mine, then we can go our separate ways and it will be as if this affair never occured. What say you?"

Anderson looked aside.

"Fetch." The paladin spat as he tossed the packet in the air.

Maxwell caught it in one hand.

"All yours. With my annointment." Maxwell crushed Anderson's spectacles in his fist and then spat a thick glob onto the crumpled remnants. He dumped the remains into Anderson's open palm.

"Son." Anderson sighed, as he gingerly straightened out the tangled mass and wiped them on his coat. The lenses popped out. Ignoring that, the priest fitted the bent empty frames back onto the bridge of his nose. "Ye shouldnae have done that."

"What did you expect? Tit for tat? With me there is only tat, there is no tit. I said I'd return them but I never said in what condition. They say there are no oaths in Hell."

"They also say that deid children dunna cause their fathers sufferen, dunna they?"

"You? Suffer? HA! If you suffer, it whats you deserve! Take solace that you will have dragged many hapless companions in suffering down to that replica of Lukes they surely have made in the Inferno!" Maxwell snickered.

"Ah'll show ye wat sufferen is, ye WRETCH." Anderson shrugged off his coat furiously.

" Oh dear! Your coat is coming off!" Maxwell cried sarcastically, waving his arms about. "I quake in fear! Are you going to smother me to death with your rank and wicked odor?"

"Nay Ah'm gonna tae beat teh liven shite oot of ye. Ye broke ma glasses , Ah'll break yer neck. Ah'll snap yer shriveled limbs intae kindling, Ah'll drain yer sinful blood wit yer whore muther spit innit ,Ah'll carve ye intae portions sae yer pieces will be served up fer yer father teh devil and scattered in every burnen circle!"

"Do you think dismembering me will make me repent my actions-! I shall make a face at you- as I fall dead to the floor! Yes you'd like to kill me, then go ahead and do it, you desperate thug, you stupid ape, you specious mound of waste. If you are as depraved as you claim, depravity demands daring! Won't I be just another drop in your over-flowing blood cup, another head to add to your tower of skulls-!" Maxwell cried as he attempted to dash past Anderson who had assumed a wide goalie's stance and mirrored his every step like children playing tag.

"Stop tryen tae run away ye maggot!" Anderson roared.

"Run away? Why should I, my mortal body has always been too feeble to hold my soul's genius and I give thanks to Jesus Christ that I won't be defiled by your company anymore! You are mistaken! I do not run away, I dance in the ecstasy of anticipation!" Maxwell shouted.

The bishop proceeded to dance.

Anderson stood and watched with his lips curled lopsidedly into a sneer of astonishment . A war was being ravaged on the priest's face between dismay, repulsion and incredulity, which concluded in baffled stalemate as Enrico stepped minutely with the tapping heels of his shoes, revolving in a glittering circuit around him like the posturings of a flamenco dancer, swerving and twisting his sinuous wrists, waist and shoulders like coils of smoke, his glossy hair fluttered behind him like a sleek familiar. The pace of his trot quickened with strong defiant stomps and swift swoops of his arms, until the flamboyant end, Maxwell finished with a flourished hop, one arm like a severe straight bar across his throat, the other raised high above his head as he snapped with castanets like fingers.

"Aye this must end." Anderson finally said.

"Yes. Let us lay this matter to rest, for all time!" Charged from his dance, Enrico slapped at his chest daringly and took long bold strides backwards." Strike hard for when your sword falls my punishment will end, and yours will begin!"

" Wit plazure. Any last words?"

" You son of a bitch!" Maxwell roared, waving an accusing finger. "I hope the dinner chokes you-!"

Anderson's eyes widened.

Maxwell's blood froze and screamed in his beating veins. The planet sunk away beneath him, as he felt his back tip over the edge of balcony's railing . His arms flapped back and forth like wings but finding nothing solid or tactile to grasp and failing to take flight, he fell backwards into black nothingness. It was too sudden to scream.


When Maxwell "came to" he had he been thrown into some garret? Was he dead? He did not know where he was when a force that took him fast.

The bishop was being pulled back over the balcony's railing like a fisherman might yank a wriggling hooked fish out of the sea. It was Anderson's fisted hands on his shirt, the only tethers keeping his body from being broken into pieces like an over ripened coconut.

Maxwell was pilant, like a near dead man pulled out a mangled wreck, and then suddenly frantic with relief, clambered and scratched up Anderson's arms like a panicking cat, flailing with limbs as gelatinous as a blubbering octopus. Anderson unable to contain Maxwell's thrashings began to sway back and forth like a tree in a tempest. They both collapsed in a heap on the balcony's floor like a noisy wreckage of dilapidated houses. Maxwell splattered out with outspread limbs on Anderson's groaning body, like a toad on a lily pad.

Maxwell had almost accidentally fallen off a balcony to his death only to have Anderson leap after him and snatch him. And now Anderson was prostrate beneath him, that man who had threatened to dismember him seconds earlier- ccontemplating this, Maxwell raised himself up on his elbows. His face flexed into cockeyed cross-eyed perplexity as some irrepressible force bubbled up within him. The young bit his lip bloodlessly white in an effort to suppress it, but whatever it was, it burst forth like the pop of champagne cork. Out of Enrico's mouth came fine spritz of saliva and with it a confused violent plume of laughter like at the bloom of a bird of paradise.

Anderson gazed up blankly. This proved to be Maxwell's undoing. Maxwell whooped with deep and helpless laughter. Watching Maxwell. Anderson's eyes filled and glistened with strange dark mirth. The rest of the priest's face crinkled and crumpled into a toothy ugly friendly smile, a drunk man's grin, as he emitted a gravelly laugh.

The sight of the other'slaughter spurred them to greater laughter. Soon they retched, gagged, wailed, bawled as they disentangled themselves. Anderson propped himself on one knee, honking as he staggered to his feet. Maxwell hooted as he reached and groped Anderson's elbow, using it as a lever to pull himself to his feet. They laughed from where they stood, knocking and colliding into the other's sides.

Maxwell realized he had never laughed so hard in his entire life, his throat was hoarse, his eyes burning slits, his mouth a melon-slice parabola in Grecian comedian 's mask, an ache spread through his abdomen like fire. Yet he could not stop, under some queasy disbelieving euphoria of having narrowly avoided death. Maybe he was drunk with his own survival, and perhaps Anderson was just drunk. But it was as if he and Anderson had killed each other and had become gods who could laugh at themselves on the other side, laugh at everything. They were safe in the knowledge that (at least for now)they were capable of surviving each other's hatred,so they could now succumb to the obscene unholy glee of having been so outrageously stupid and awful.

Gradually their laughter faded, and their smiles too. It was as if all the humor was sucked in and what was left was a terrifying, urgent but obscure vacuum, some terrible involved abstraction involving them with neither wished to contend. The two men stood close, close enough to smell one another, to taste one another's breath. The priest emanated a hot and heady musk of musty bookcases, skin-stripping lye soap, the rusty overworked smell of old machinery, of peppery whiskey breath, a horsey smell of mulch and sweat. Maxwell's scent was like a seamy tantalizing phantom subsisting of the blanketing death smell of cigarettes smoke and pungent reeking of polished shoe leather, the fumes of his nauseating yet irresistible cologne, the fretfully sweet soured wine breath on his lips. But there too was another odor in the air, a taste and tingly quality to it as well that was indefinable, barely papable but significant.

Anderson bolt-like eyes blazed eerily with hue of green traffic lights embedded by the crumbling mortar texture of his skin, like noxious suns in constellation of minute scars, pores, and stubble. The creases around his mouth and eyes deepened, his jaw clenched forward the scar on his jaw jagged into his cheek setting his features farther ajar like a picture frame tilted ever so slightly to the right. There was an appallingly determined, fixed, and yet impotent expression on his face, a rusted machine, a petrified titan, a mute ghost withholding a dire prophecy.

Maxwell attempted to keep his own flawlessly skinned face calm and unwavering, although he knew it was no of use. His face was mobile and mercurial in nature, quickly lapsing into thoughtfulness, anger, or pleasure. Currently his heart fluttered, his mouth squirmed and twisted, his forehead furrowed and his eyes sparkled with alarm and wonder. He could not imagine what his face looked like, as he felt discarnate, desolate, incomprehensible. His breast palpitated a giddy sinking painless daze like an onset of horrific accident, or of a highly anticipated consummation.

Maxwell's hand tightened on Anderson's forearm though he hadn't realized he been gripping it until he looked down.

Was that why Anderson was so quiet- because of this unbeknown contact? But what could be understood of such a person? Why had Anderson chosen to rescue him? Was it that militant gut- paternal instinct reacting? Was it that Anderson thought such an ending to their argument unacceptable (the spiritual man detests accidents)? Or was that that the priest loathed to lose another barrier kept him tethered to order or at least the appearance of order?

The balcony now seemed a plateau where only the two of them existed. An age passed since they laughed. The air rolled thick with portentous spirits and movement began to slur weightlessly, with an odd glowing resplendence as if they were submerged underwater. Like the inexplicable but absolutely compulsory motions of a dream actor and implement, Maxwell relaxed his grip and slithered his wry questing fingers up Anderson's thick arm. With an exquisite hesitation let his hovering hand land precariously on the hump of Anderson's shoulder like a lost dove come to perch.

Maxwell's eyes shot open as he remembered, remembered with catatonic hysterical clarity. No! The horrid atmosphere of the years between them had not dissipated. The past had seemed "shadowy" to him. The young man affected disgust about it, but regarded with no distinct acute feeling. The era had been mercifully hazed, its edges weakened with time like sea glass, a delirious and darkened legend inaccessible to his waking mind. Enrico had trained himself not to let these abominations roost in him. Do not think of it, he scolded himself: Do not let yourself be haunted, you shall not live with these nightmares, go away, go away, until that deep and pleasant sense of his success and the faith of his future was restored. Now it was shadowy no longer.

Childhood- that universe of pain! It was as if he had never been a child at all, but some squirming rodent chased to a corner and then stomped to a pulp. In images, like hideous stations of the cross, It had began with his obscure and odious repudiating father and his invisible ill-reputed mother's fornication. The abandonment, then the terrified incomprehension, then the devastating comprehension : I have no mother or father, I am alone, entirely abandoned, they left me. They need not have done so and now they're gone forever

Why had he been called a devil's child? He had been no less diabolical then the other children around him!The other orphans found in him common prey and had railed together to cause him torment, wreck his life's happiness, threaten his sanity. Years subjected to suffocating loneliness andbruising bullying without the dignity of privacy or solitude within the infernal walls of Ferdinand Lukes, each room like a cell of Hell,. And Anderson that alien and over-familiar presence, setting him apart from the other boys with those searing eyes, seeing him differently, like some circling adversary, constantly berating and belittling him. If I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil Maxwell had thought. Knowing had he would only be reviled , Maxwell had hid his heart and better qualities deep away until they became scant, non-existent So absorbed he had been in this demonic play acting, it became impossible to tell the truth, to be simply himself. He had been driven mad with pain.

In the present day, Maxwell would sit at his massive desk, consumed with slow secretive hatred of the other men aroundhim, currents of shuddering heavily loathing oozing through him like pus through a wound, his cup runneth over with bile, his blood turned dark with anger and his eyes boiled with unshedable tears. He would examine the maladies, sins, errors of other men with icy simmering satisfied disdain as a surgeon might examine a removed pickled tumor in a jar, organizing then, ranking them, and then dealing out signatures like the killing blow with his slim onyx black pen in large threshing script. It by this way that Maxwell could destroy many more men than Anderson ever could. Clichéd as it was, the pen was mightier than the sword. Therefore he was mightier than Anderson, but this fact caused him no joy. Regardless of what he did, Anderson was unassailable, like trying to break a brick wall with bare fists. The more he struggled, the more Anderson was invincibly fantastically convinced of things as he saw it. There would never be any recognition of harms done, no remorse, no reciprocity. Furthermore, no matter how men Maxwell destroyed, it could not give him what he wanted. There was so much he wanted- and so little hope...

Dizzy with these epiphanies, Enrico moaned to himself as his legs buckled, as if he were being ground down by a enormous screw of unhappiness, being sawed off at the knees little by little by a hot lance. Anderson began to tilt forward, like an gigantic tree might begin to crash to the ground that had begun to dot with glowing rune like patterns.

It was then Anderson's hand gripped Maxwell's waist and redirected the floor to its proper place, like a buoy adjusting itself .Anderson engulfed him in a wolfish hug. The priest's dull creased grey boots bashed and dragged Enrico's glossy pointed black heels backward. They staggered a few raucous steps back together, a barbaric waltz, the last stumblings of a blind demented four legged beast. The priest slammed him against the wall.

Holding him there, Anderson crammed their heads together like two head butting rams and pressed their figures contour to contour, like shards meeting. From this came terrific stormy churning sensation in Maxwell's stomach, whirling streamers and wailing horns like an effusive disaster, Maxwell's blood coursed through him spiked with honey and stings, the air was electric and sultry, and his arousal was sudden, awful and total. Their bodies met like an alchemical equation, two substances creating forth desire.

In the panting silence, Anderson fondled the back of Maxwell's head with a wide hand. Rivulets of silver hair poured through the priests fingers as Maxwell's ponytail came undone. The rest of the young man came undone with it. Enrico's arms wilted down to his sides hanging listlessly like dead vines, his core slackened molten into Anderson's stalwart body seemed to be the only proper place to house his lusts, failures, pains.

We so often seek the ones who sinned against us most to save us, to amend the cruelties themselves inflicted, also hoping they will continue to cause us more pain as if their actions might be revealed to us as another guise of love. More pain can murder pain, on the crux of torture. This defeated surrendering exhaustion Maxwell felt, seemed to be an advent of another growth of power, an orange peeled back with deliberation to reveal its moist delectable flesh, the dry earth cracking to reveal a profusion of rich black wet oil.

With ease, the two men's lips met and seceded in rolling scroll-like swells, withdrawing to breathe then returning to touch.

They kissed.

Like Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes, one kiss multiplied into a fluent dialogue of many, but rather than ameliorating their hunger, it made it sharper, greater. Fuelled with terrible excitement, Maxwell besieged the hot dry skin of Anderson's jawline with licks and kisses. Anderson kissed him ravenously in turn, up his neck, his jaw, his cheeks, his nose, on his trembling eyelids, his forehead, like a father lion tormented whether to wash his cub clean, kiss it, kill it, bite it, like sallow cannibals in black Goya painting, two wounded creatures' frantic soothings one another.

Anderson's tongue caught Enrico's serpentine tongue, and their tongues fenced back and forth into each other's mouths. Anderson opened his mouth wider andtook both sides of Maxwell's slender face so Maxwell could plunge tongue farther in to impale the entrance of his throat. It was if Anderson to gorge himself, have his tongue deep enough to lick his heart. Maxwell's jaw throbbed as he dribbled uncontrollably, Anderson's mouth ,stubbled, chin was soon slick and glistening with the other man's saliva.

While kissing, the older man grabbed hold Maxwell's buckle, unzipped his pants, and shoved a hand down, reached him, maddeningly erect to encircle him fully in a fist and worked his hand furiously. Maxwell gnashed against Anderson's cheek, his face slid down to rest, scalding against Anderson's racing heart to prevent his stuttering moans and whimpers.

Anderson then shoved him back against the wall, and dropped down to his knees.

The young man gasped hoarsely and caved in as if he had been dealt a devastating blow to his core as Anderson aggressively seized him by the hips and began to suck him.

Maxwell ran his hands through the priest's hair, his ears, up and down Anderson's neck as if he tried to gain some traction for the overwhelming sensations that assailed him, the riotously wet hot intensity of his inner mouth and throat, the divinely rough texture of his tongue, the texture of the man's thick hirsute lips pulling around his cock. He shuddered and sighed deeply as he watched Anderson's majestically ugly head bobbing up and down between his pale thighs,a grotesquely carnal and a horrendously gorgeous sight . Nor was this like some quick transaction with some stranger of the street, it was not homely or forgettable or despicably amusing . It was real, real, real.

Anderson pulled away. Drawing his hand back, the priest spat on his gloved fingers. Before Maxwell could understand and protest, Anderson had spread his legs apart and was prying and wriggling a finger up his ass, working it farther in and in. Then another.

"UH!" Enrico gawked and spasmed as he shook uncontrollably in a black-out of atrociously delicious pressure that pushed against the very peak of his head. Just a series of tiny ministrations from another man's fingers in such an intimate embarrassing place... how could it cause sucha catastrophe of pleasure, like pain that leaves one without embarrassment or thought? It was as if it was not even experienced through the senses as if he had become pleasure itself, like when a worshipper forgets himself and becomes the substance of God.

When Anderson sucked him at the same time as his fingers writhed in and out, Maxwell yowled and moaned through his teeth. The bishop bucked, he chewed, slobbered into his sleeve to bring himself through unendurable pleasure induced vertigo. It felt so sublime, he feared that his heart and brain might burst, that he might go blind. With shockingly skillful hands and use of his mouth, Anderson would pull back and cease, just allowing Maxwell from teetering over the excruciatingly exquisite cusp, gulp at air, regain a germ of consciousness, then he would begin again. And again. And again.

The timing grew longer and maddeningly apart to protract the ordeal. Maxwell sobbed silently, his flushed face contorted with anguished rapt ectasy like a swooning decadently suffering figure in a Renaissance painting. Tears flowed freely. It was too much, too much. He could support this no longer. It was if he was being drowned or burned, losing consciousness. His limbs were chained and being pulled apart, he was dying delirious prisoner revived by his captors, only to be further tortured. Maybe he was dying. Maybe he had died and Anderson was a punishment for his sins and this was heaven, Lucifer stumbling in upon Eden.

Simultaneously Maxwell looked down and Anderson looked up. They met eye to eye. Between the distance of their joint concentrated stare dwelled solemn reverberations like how a organ's echoes rumble through a cathedral, the encroachment of a grand crescendo. Anderson's green eyes stared from within those silver wire circles like a radiant stained glass in which a scathing morning light pierced and scattered through that moved one with awe and dread and yearning. The darkness around them was God's cupping His hands around the pair to ensure this moment be only between the three of them. the moon superbly complementary to the darkness. The stars suspended in their peaceful self-possessed repose like a crowd of witnessing angels. Poetry invaded Maxwell's dazed mind, that once there was Dante following his emerald eyed love Beatrice to heaven to behold-"," L'Amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle ", the love that moves the sun and other stars."

"ah…. ahhhhhhhh…!" Maxwell called uncontrollably, his eyes and head began to loll back, his body arched up as he yielded, he was moved by the grand, unceasing, splendid movement of all. Through them both pierced a hallowed trembling cry . "ooooooooooooooahhhhhhhhh-"

It did not sound like it came from him. It was an eloquent ecstatic exclamation of a dying saint ascending, the burning pyre turning into a throne of clouds, the ravening flames on his skin becoming the flapping of velvety cherub wings, the din and curses of the crowd made pale out by the beckoning harmonies of angelic choir.

The earth tilted and cracked open, unbound to its' axis. Maxwell's limbs and center glowed and condensed to the black hole, then exploded, disintegrated into sizzling atoms of searing rapture as if he were struck by lightning from within.

All semblances of thought and memories were swept back like flimsy gauze to reveal a void. Flooding that void was a galaxy of light and a Noah-like destroying cascade of perfect bliss. The whole of time spun and whirled into white infinity, history was torn to shreds like a false document with the jubilant angry angels. He flew over the depths of the darkness and primordial waters, walked in the groves of Eden, ran through the parted sea, squeezed through the needle's eye, danced wildly with King David in the streets of Jerusalem, was crowned and crucified, spanned the entire circumference of existence , then became the circumference, he was at every instant everywhere eternally man, land and beasts spheres and worlds all made as a single hair or a grain of sand or breath was always so and never lost, at the first morning of creation to the terrible wonderful final day. It was if he had entered into and inhabited the laughter of the holy ghost.


Maxwell cracked open his heavy eyes. He half lay on the ground, his back slightly propped against the wall, and his half-naked legs spread out like broken stilts in front of him.

Anderson had disappeared. He was alone.

And drenched. Drops of sweat ran down Maxwell's neck, one pursuing the other. The young man's entire body trembled and radiated with sensation, several times he jolted and twitched. He fell forward to rest on his hands and knees like a lashed servant. Drool trickled from his mouth as he gasped like a fish. He felt as if he had adrift at sea for eons, mangled like flotsam in the tide and washed ashore.

The bishop managed to rise on one knee, feeling his way up the wall. His entire bottom half was pulverized numb and each small movement made his groin throb. It was if steam were rising from the juncture of his crotch, from every pore, from his lips where Anderson had touched. He zipped his pants up delicately, and laboriously, holding his side like a person shot, stumbled inside, bumping through the veins of darkened hallways, until he swung open his door and fell in to the entrance of his office, both arms outspread and head bowed, like a man crucified as his hands grabbed the doorway to support himself. He looked up, eyes were sunken and enormous, like a fugitive caught under inescapable spot light, the emperor suddenly stabbed in the bath, the husband who discovers his wife making love to his dearest friend in their conjugal bed.

The room was bright, crowded with his constituents with callac lily shaped flukes of champagne in their hands. They stood in arrangements of twos threes and fours like a crowd of pretty and malevolent flamingos. In the midst of this gathering, he saw Renaldo standing there, banal, melancholic, unassuming as an old terrier. How, he thought, how could he forget that they would all be waiting for him for an "impromptu" post-event celebration?

There was stifling deadening silence among the cool and curious stares. No, he would not permit them the satisfaction of seeing him uncouth or abashed.

Maxwell straightened up and adjusted his collar with a swift jerk. He cleared his throat and assumed an disdainful appraising look that he had mastered years ago, and stared back, watching those before him shrink into postures of deference, like cowed currs.

"A spectacular evening... Heaven has special care of us all... that he brings his noble friends and kinsmen together, to task their love and to grace his happiness. Honor him, for I am him! Where are the smiles on your faces?" Maxwell announced. He barely heard his own words, as if they were uttered by someone else and muffled through a stuffy tunnel. "My applause?"

And like that, the room burst into applause, and Maxwell entered.


"Since my last confession I have committed this mortal sin." Enrico Maxwell finished his story , white and expressionless as porcelain.

You were speechless, startled. This was not what I was expecting you thought dumbly.

"And you haven't-" You whispered. "Committed this sin before?"

"I have with other men."

"How many times."

There was the sound of a resentful ashamed swallow.

"I have lost count"

"Then you must- cease all this behavior at once ... and you must avoid that priest you spoke of, as he tempts you to hatred or worse."You croaked. "Can you do this?"

Maxwell only shook his head.

"Don't you understand... the wrong you've done child?" You stammered. "I do not wish to refuse you absolution but God cannot forgive an uncontrite sinner-"

"I cannot promise not to offend Him. I know I shall fail, but I ask God's pardon all the same."

"But you cannot ask for God's pardon that way-"

"One can desire the end without desiring the means can't they?" Enrico said quietly.

"God tells us we should forgive our brother 77 times 7 times- " You urged . "Better to sin 77 times and repent, than sin once unrepentantly. To be in a state of grace, you must repent sincerely. "

"Yes and so I can go away and sin again, come back and confess to FOOLS like you!" The bishop hissed loudly, dragging his fingers into his scalp. "Yes. There is no other way. We are Catholics are damned by our surety!"

Before you could answer, the man stepped out and slammed the door so hard it made the booth shake.

And that was how it all began.