To the Artist's Page                To our home page

To Tom Bradley's previous piece     To Tom Bradley's next piece

The Opiates of the Mass

Sam and Polly were the first foreigners to have learned Fuzhou City dialect since the communists kicked the missionaries out. Two years of homilies and Gregorian chant transliterated from the Vulgate into the local street lingo had given them a fair proficiency.

Sam had surrounded himself with native speakers who sometimes followed him around, agonized with curiosity. The most curious one yet was tagging along this morning to help celebrate Easter, and now Polly seemed to be sorry they'd ever picked up the language in the first place.

"This is the underground church, not the Patriotic," she whispered. "They take a big enough chance letting me in every week, much less receiving a bicycle full of the likes of you and your friend here. Why do you suppose the congregation needs a fish store as its front? A little discretion, Sammy."

In the courtyard behind the storefront ecclesia, as the tiny removable placard quietly labeled this secret place, the ancient sacristan was squatting in the shade of a banana tree clipping wicks. He was too polite to gawk at the peculiar trio.

"Take a look at this old janitor guy," said Sam, who was in an obnoxious and godless mood today. "Does this old janitor guy look scared? Of course not. These people've got some guts, dear. They're your heroic non-schismatics. They've managed to keep their chins up, even though your Pope betrayed them by upholding the legitimacy of their rivals' apostolic succession. What was the point of these gallant people's depriving themselves of the epidermis and hemoglobin of Jesus Christ all these decades if John-Paul-John-Paul was going to anoint his infallible crozier with holy oil and f-"

Sam stopped himself short, thinking better of saying the next word in a churchyard. Instead, he took a deep breath and said, "-if he was going to perform the abomination of the Gibeah Benjaminites on them?"

Sam exhaled and bent double to fit through the doorway. To the curious little native who tugged shyly at the tails of his outsized Mao jacket, he murmured, "You're supposed to moisten your pulse-points ever so slightly. This is valid-but-illicit holy water that exists, but isn't supposed to be wet, except it is, anyway."

"That's not holy water," said Polly. "It's baptismal water. And you're not supposed to put your fingers in the font."

"Font my ass," he grunted in street dialect to his sleepy-looking guest. "It's a carp tank in disguise."

Polly also switched to dialect, without meaning to. "If you were going to do this, we should have come last night. There were several infant christenings and we could have fit in less conspicuously." In English, so as not to be rude, she added, "These aren't generic protestants, Sammy. They don't baptize promiscuously in ponds. Adults like her have to go through a period of instruction, and--"

"Oh, her?" Sammy remained in dialect, as rudeness was not a consideration for him. "My little side-kick here? She's already a made-member. Didn't I tell you? Yeah, she already got washed in the Blood of the Lamb, as an infant. Today she's just trying to do her Easter duty. It's the first time since the Great Leap Forward that she's had the courage to come here. She's latched onto me for moral support."

"I've latched onto you," came the tiny voice from behind the billows of his dungarees, "because the party spies will be too busy staring at your red hair and blue eyes to notice me."

"Because of this chick's profession," Sam said, winking, "she's theoretically on the skids with the provincial authorities. But these parishioners are obligated to embrace such a sincere Magdalen, as I keep reminding her. So there's no reason to be scared." He suddenly shifted to a pietistical tone of voice. "See? What did I tell you? Good Father beckons us, all three, to be seated. Let us not keep him waiting. Cover thy head, Jezebel. Let us enter into the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Zorsch."

Whenever he was being sarcastic, just to make sure nobody missed it, he always mispronounced that last word.

The priest, though not thrilled, took this in stride. Sam knew him well and had heard his stories many times. Father had acquired the gift of composure during his thirty-seven years as a prisoner at Qinghai death camp, way out west. He'd administered extreme unction to mad, starving political prisoners, and used his own scant saliva to wash away the original sin of disemboweled, spasming tykes on forced labor teams in the Gobi Desert, and-

The little prostitute's voice started to interrupt, rising up softly from around Sam's knees.

"-was repeatedly beaten senseless with the severed arm of his own altar boy, and forced to have relations with nuns' decapitated corpses, and-"

"Piety brings out the demon in girls like her," whispered Sam. "It'll be all right as long as nobody accidentally rubs an elbow or knee against her."

"Sammy, I'm not sure this is such a good idea," said Polly.

But he had the perfect opportunity to pretend he hadn't heard her; for all the people in the church had paused in their undertakings and cocked their ears in the direction of the fish-emblazoned storefront. Sirens could be heard, a sound that never frightened these people to the point of stopping their singing and praying altogether; but it did give them brief pause whenever it echoed into their secret place of worship.

Nobody was especially nervous: not the silent acolyte who floated among the plastic flowers and Christmas tree lights, his face more like a medieval saint's than any Sam had seen on a living body; not the ancient lady with translucent skin, four-inch feet, and the golden eyes that still condescended even thirty-eight years after her social-climbing warlord husband was smashed by the Reds, and she was liberated and pensioned as a crippled victim of feudalism; and not even the blackened peasant women who pedaled incredible distances every week to be here.

Unfazed by the distant shrieks of storm troopers in full charge, they had all nevertheless jumped out of their skins the first few times Sam had made an entrance. He had to admit that he bore an uncanny resemblance to the large red-bearded Savior that was scrawled on the rectangle of shelf paper and unrolled above the card-table altar each week, the icon of the Redeemer due back any day now for true Liberation, once and for all.

The parishioners' gasps had brought him back to church a few Sundays, at least. He'd squeezed in and out, every time splintering a couple of the child-sized makeshift pews that were disguised during the week as trestle-supports for fish baskets. Weekly replacements were somehow scrounged in this lumber-poor nation, until the heart-breaking novelty of being mistaken for the Parousia wore thin (a pleasure unavailable in the rival Patriotic Church which had canceled the Second Coming in a display of political canniness), and Sam quit attending mass altogether, except for special occasions like today, when he had a street person in tow, needing to re-establish ties with the Divine.

Sam listened to Polly's pals in the tiny congregation wail their caterwauling version of the Kyrie Eleison, set to a microtonal erhu melody from deepest dynastic times. They belted it out with more sheer decibels than he'd ever heard from a first-world parish ten times superior in number and bulk, with ten thousand times the reason to praise God.

Polly approached the lectern to present today's vernacular reading of the Epistle. In her absence Sam's guest finally felt free to speak her mind. This particular class of Chi-com was often diffident in the presence of quality; but that restraint was lifted with only Sam near. Unfortunately, the service was underway and conversation was supposed to have stopped.

"So," she said, "is Heaven an eternity of feeling like you do just before an orgasm, or during an orgasm, or right after an orgasm?"

"How should I know?" said Sam. "Do I look dead yet? I don't even believe in this horse shit."

"Well, I do," she said, "and I'm just thinking about all the different categories of pleasure which God would most likely choose from."

"Yes, well, I have a feeling it wouldn't be quite so pelvic," said Sam.

"Of course, I know that." She took a deep draw on her black pewter canister pipe. "I mean," she exhaled, "it would probably be all in your head, since your body is down here decomposing, right? But I was thinking in terms of intensity. Like, when you're actually in the middle of a climax, I don't think you could maintain that kind of, um, attitude for a very long time. And the before-orgasm kind of pleasure is too suspenseful. After a while you'd get nervous. Afterglow wouldn't be hard to maintain forever, but I'm not sure it wouldn't get boring and sleepy in a few centuries."

"Look," said Sam. "We're not even supposed to be talking now. This is the Consecration and people are trying to be spiritual and you have to shut up. Why don't you ask my wife these questions?"

"Because she's crouching with those people up front."

"That's not exactly crouching. Don't you remember any of this stuff?"

She shrugged her pointy shoulders. Jangling bells called her attention to the elevated host.

"Do you think it's a taste-bud kind of pleasure in Heaven?" She glanced over at Sam's noodle-fed belly. "Maybe it's the pleasure of being nourished. Or maybe there's a kind of pleasure in Heaven that's too elevated for mere scum like me to imagine. Like all the accumulated pleasure I ever felt in my life wouldn't be enough to tickle a single nose hair on God."

"Do you want to get thrown out of here before you've had a chance to fulfill your Paschal obligation? Just keep talking."

That shut her up, for five seconds anyway.

"The Hell part's no problem to imagine," she said, peering out the window and restuffing her tiny pipe bowl with poppy tar. Then she sneered at the pale lady with the bound feet seated a few trestles up. "That one already had her turn in Heaven. I wonder if God's idea of pleasure is wadding the feet up like pieces of toilet paper."

She presented to Sam her own blackened, splayed feet. "And they say there are no streetwalkers in the People's Republic. I may have stayed away from here till now, but I can kneel a lot longer than any of these holy folks-and on cobblestones, too, not just this cushy asphalt tile."

Sam decided to take the pipe away, again. Maybe a few breaths of unadulterated South China soot would instill a little quietude. After a brief and indecisive wrestle among the mimeographed hymnals, he tried to reason with her.

"See that man depicted on the shelf paper? You should abstain in honor of the day he finished harrowing Hell. He folded his linen neatly, rolled back the rock, and walked around unrecognizable to his best friends, convincing them of his legitimacy by displaying these five holes in his body.

She was unimpressed. "A couple extra holes, so what?"

"Yeah, but nail holes. Like jumbo God-sized tracks."

But she didn't buy that either. A slate-grey haze was gathering in the house of God, and the regulars were coughing and glancing over their shoulders. That stinking pacifier of hers had to go out the window. It would be a shame if she had to be defenestrated along with it, when she'd only just entered the fold that week.

One thing was certain: if she was hell-bent on making communion, she'd have to shuffle up the aisle under her own steam, for Sam's whole hefty metabolism recoiled like an albino vampire from the Real Presence. That was why he always sat in the back.

His mom was low-church Episcopalian, and at her liberal knee he'd learned the very definition of the word "symbolism" by coolly contemplating the poetical nicety of the wine and bread. This morning his otherwise rational wife was trembling before a wafer-thin slice of the sole material that put her in divergence with post-seventeenth-century thought. It would be terrifying to approach something that substantial with a head full of attitudes flip as Sam's. He was sure he'd see wads of gristle and scab.

But the little flat-backer hankered after it, and nothing in her background cheapened it dangerously. As the pipe bounced off the window sill and clanked among the wild poinsettias, grey tears of sweat began to flop out from under her double eyelids. Soon she'd be in no shape to sit up straight, much less balance on her knees at the splintery plywood rail, eyes closed, mouth open. She needed something smokeless to fortify her, at least until the Canon was over and her long march to the communion rail could begin.

Then a solution occurred to him-about twelve percent, as a matter of fact.

Sam's doctor had given him a few handfuls of Hungarian blue morphine ampules, in case he got a kidney stone attack out of crawling range of the provincial hospital. Just an occasional half-squirt or so was all he was allowed to self-administer, subcutaneously, and not as a euphoric, but just enough to serve as a muscle relaxant in case a few uric acid crystals got wedged against any especially sensitive bundles of nerve endings.

Not wanting to be the one to introduce yet another vice into her squalid life, he fiddled with the tiny bottles in his lap a long time, making sure the little prostitute got a good look, to see if she'd recognize them, which she did.

"That's smoke you put in your arm," she said admiringly, and began to mourn the absence of an "arm pipe," as the contrivance was termed in her vernacular.

Ah, Chinese, the language of imagism.

He hoped things wouldn't get too sordid, that it wouldn't be necessary to show her how to use the disposable syringes which he'd liberated from the forced AIDS tests for non-Russian foreigners at the municipal gymnasium-and it wasn't necessary. Sam only had to show her how to unwrap everything, and had to demonstrate just once, to prove that these light-weight plastic toys were as effective as the two-pound cast iron spikes she stole from the rag pickers who scavenged out behind the Sanitation Workers' Clinic and rinsed with stringy mucus from the open sewers.

She'd never seen a throw-away needle; as a member of the Flower and Willow Lane work unit, she'd never seen anything disposable but females and prophylactics. But she burrowed under his overhanging gut and removed Sam's belt almost before he could offer it as a tourniquet, and began to take steps toward mollifying herself into a reasonable pew-mate.

This was a fane, a place for inculcating comfy faith; and she looked as though she could use a bedtime story to cling to, an indulgence, before she inevitably nodded off. She plainly had no plans to pay attention to the professional homilist exercising his lungs at the podium now. So Sam decided to step in and murmur to her about the most obvious person to be murmured about in a situation like this.

Instead of poking around for uncollapsed blood vessels with brain-dead junkie tarts, Polly was worshipping three rows up alongside the only clear thinkers in the People's Republic of China: men and women, mostly women, who had the sense to recognize their own history as a perfect illustration of the futility of throwing oneself into the arms of a secular, therefore fallible, savior.

So Sam took his cue from them. He started softly preaching about the creator of the first and only paradise in the history of the oldest, biggest civilization, which is the closest thing to the miraculous ever accomplished by a mortal. After Liberation, this certain person gave one out of every four people on earth a sojourn in Eden, the Seven Good Years. The city parks were admission-free, nobody ever shoved on queues, and the party's materialistic idealism served as a fresh moral force among the youth. Millions of flesh-and-blood Lei Fengs strode around in their cloth shoes doing good things as, for the first time in history, a commie economy was on the rise. Western observers were wetting their pants.

But even Nero had his quinquennium. The Great Helmsman slouched duly into his dotage and frightened off poor Khrushchev with his enthusiasm to nuke America. This left the economy on its own to deal with his senile megalomaniacal dream of overnight industrialization. Mao destroyed paradise just as surely as he'd created it: serpent and God the Father rolled into one chubby little carcass.

"My wife's trestle-mates," Sam was saying, "most of them peasants and lumpen-types like you, have shown the intuitive sense to put their faith in someone who actually claimed to be God, no pussy-footing, no false modesty about it, who offered them literal perfection, manifest to their eyes at least eventually, who promised that he wouldn't die and go away and leave them in the slimy, bloody hands of a Lu Shaoqi or a Lin Biao, but in the stone-cold hands of-hey, wait a minute! Don't forget to get the air bubbles out of the line before you shoot that stuff up."

She ignored him, rolled up her gaudy sleeve and displayed her stigmata as proof of something Sam had never doubted. "I thought we weren't supposed to talk," she said.

"We're not. My wife's pew-mates believe in someone who didn't require a mausoleum to contain the tissues he left behind, his head lit up bright yellow from within like a latex jack- o'-lantern, but who, on the contrary, even made special, more or less unprecedented arrangements for his body to vanish and go someplace far, far away, so that no matter how bad his executors and successors and administrators fucked up, no matter how many millions of people got burned, tortured, maimed and killed in factional power struggles and other forms of holy and just warfare, you always had the sneaking suspicion that he might return and fix things up and kick you in the butt. Here, flip the reservoir like this, see? That's why it's made of transparent plastic--so you can see the bubbles. Just relax! I'll give it back to you!

"The Helmsman/Savior whom my wife's pew-mates buy into cleverly harnesses the power of your own imagination with his claims to perfection, and you do most of the work for him. He's as nearly perfect as your dreamy, faithful brain can make him out to be. And the sky's the limit, because there's no visible competition. You can do the In-Tourist shtick and schlep yourself over to Moscow on the train and see the embalming job they did on Lenin; you can go down to the People's Republic of Vietnam and check out the seams around Ho Chih Minh's hairline: but where can you go to find a rival for somebody who was shrewd enough to fix it so he can't be seen except in your head?

"The guy had class," continued Sam, again directing her gaze up at the picture behind the card table altar. "He never said a single overtly political thing, but just sniffed off the whole question with his 'render unto Caesar' line. Yet he carried out a profound coup on the imagination, as indicated by the presence of Polly's pals and the priest and the acolyte, all bearing the lumps, bumps and extra holes of past purges.

"No, I'm not being an old woman. Do you want to get bubbles in your head and die like a sap? And this junk's pharmaceutical. You don't need to filter it, for Christ's sake! Is this the first time you ever heard the good news?"

She naturally thought he was referring to the good news of pre-filtered Hungarian blue morphine in convenient snap-top ampules.

"Of course not," she said, momentarily forgetting the needle in her indignation at being accused of ignorance in such essential matters. She was expert enough in the opiates of the mass. "But we see arm-smoke and arm-pipes only on special occasions at my dan wei," she said, "Like when major cadres roll through Flower and Willow Lane with slumming on their minds. They call it 'linking with the masses.' High-tone girls up in Qingdao and Dalian smell nicer, and their skin is smoother and whiter, but they don't push back and don't like to get even the tiniest bit rough."

"Yeah?" said Sam. He stared down a couple of indignant parishioners. "Sounds to me like they've been trained in the phony imitation-geisha style."

"That's exactly right," she marveled, gazing at him with almost as much admiration as she had at the ampules. "You big-noses really know your vice and corruption, don't you?"

When she looked back down at her forearm, she couldn't believe the point had entered, so accustomed she was to the blunt repeaters of the street. The one-time-only shaft seemed to rattle from side to side, to click against the edges of the permanently enlarged skin pore that she'd excavated as a conduit to blow the blue smoke into the crotch of her elbow.

Before consummating this union, she tantalized herself with a few seconds' delay. She held her thumb cocked like a pistol hammer over the syringe and looked up at the ceiling in anticipation.

She said, "Those imperialist Japanese swine disemboweled my mother and father in Stalin Square. They caused me to wind up like I am, like most pretty orphan girls. And now their weakling style of partying procures me influential customers. Chubby neo-Dengist bureaucrats, most of them."

She slammed the plunger home, then pumped it a few times to rinse the line with some of her own blood. Her eyes suddenly went dim over junk-sucked cheeks, and her body started to seep between the splinters of the trestle. She seemed pretty intent on taking a nap against Sam's right love-handle, apparently assuming the giant American would stick around and nudge her when the time came.

"Not so much," he said, fighting the urge to slide out and leave her to bonk her head on the pew. He punched her gently but firmly. "You have to be awake to take the Eucharist. It's almost your turn."

She tugged at his sleeve and moaned, "You may not know it, big brother, but Jesus is in your head. And you're trying to put him in mine. That's where he'll eventually have to be if I'm going up to Heaven without my body. But in the meantime, I want him inside me, here."

She rubbed her belly and lower abdomen. She looked sadly toward the front of the fish store, then down at her rubbery legs.

Father reached out his hand and beckoned this small soul toward home. She started to nod off. The priest sighed and made moves toward replacing the remaining hosts in his pyx.

Sam decided to swallow his horror and approach the macabre card table with its goblet full of gore. He grabbed a knobby little elbow and proceeded slowly up the aisle, his other hand around her shoulder.

"Here we go, little sister," he whispered.

To the top of this page