1. The Form
The Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God, His Holiness Pope M does not reside in the Apostolic Palace of Rome, but in an austere apartment on the second floor of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, a hotel built in 1996 on the southern edge of Vatican City for the purpose of hosting cardinals visiting Rome for papal conclaves. Pope M chose to remain there after his election out of a sense of monastic propriety: he had lived meagerly all his previous life and found his new role to be enormous enough without needing to reconsider his relationship to worldly comforts by moving, at that late point, into a palace.
After breakfast, when his schedule allows, the pope withdraws to his rooms to read, recite the rosary, prepare for formal audiences, and engage in handwritten personal correspondence from a small wooden desk.
Most nights, the pope settles in to read for an hour before bed (Borges, Davis, Dostoevsky, Ferrante, Hopkins, Laxness, Manzoni) and then sleeps, according to one journalist’s report, “like a log.”
One May night, nearing entrance to this state, Pope M is surprised by a flash of white light and a sound that recalls crystal singing bowls. The light and the sound pass quickly but leave a lingering wake. As the pope begins to examine this experience, he is startled to find in his mind’s eye the image of a form suspended in the ceiling — as if it had been projected by the flash — along with the unusual certainty that it was this form that produced the sound.
Pope M opens his eyes in the dark but finds no presence to draw him to higher alertness. Soon he is sleeping, dreaming of the form as a hanging mask with no features other than an open mouth. He then dreams of a log planed into white boards that fly away at alternating orientations to two different planes, first horizontally and then vertically, to sit in rows and columns there, as these two planes in turn pass over each other to make an endlessly expanding moiré of white crosses. After this he dreams he can see himself sleeping, there in his bed, from the perspective of a distant star.
Outside his window, air moves past the Vatican Obelisk, which was brought from Heliopolis by Caligula to decorate his circus some two thousand years ago. Many early Christians were martyred in this place, including the church’s earliest leader, Saint Peter, on an upside-down cross, though the story is apocryphal.
The next morning, as Pope M returns to his desk after breakfast, he revisits the night’s episode. This time he recalls the form as a series of shapes that phased without appearing to move, like the mind trying to recognize something nameable in the shape of a cloud. Then, with a sensation of a cord being drawn across the velvet surface of his brain, the pope imagines, in vivid detail, a Lhasa Apso wearing the papal triregnum and mantum being carried on the sedia gestatoria. Pope M has a brief, nauseous sense of this image expanding outward from his direct sensory experience into something more firmly organic, beginning to take root in his mind. After a minute spent studying the dog, Pope M shudders back into awareness. He blinks self-consciously, shakes his head, touches his cheeks. He looks around his office and begins to smile as his confusion settles. He wonders if he is suffering from dehydration or lack of exercise. That night, he gets into bed without reading. He was present for the final use of the throne-like sedan chair by John Paul I, the last pope to be carried on men’s shoulders. He ruminates for some time over that earlier pope’s thirty-three-day reign. Then he falls asleep picturing himself as the Lhasa Apso and wonders if, had he been a dog with dog ears, he would have heard something different in that sound of crystal singing bowls the previous night.
The following day, with mild but proactive concern, Pope M institutes a new set of health practices. He begins to stretch for fifteen minutes every morning before breakfast, makes sure to drink a large glass of water every four hours, starts mild strength training, stops drinking wine. After a month the pope feels sharper and more energetic than he has in recent years, and as he carries on his work this episode gradually recedes.
2. The Entity
Then, one afternoon, as Pope M walks down Santa Marta’s back stairs on his way to the papal gardens, his pupils dilate and light rushes in. The form appears again, hovering below him on the landing as if projected on the wall. It then shifts dizzyingly, fluctuating over the pope’s full field of vision. Time warps as the form billows; the pope feels his awareness of the texture of the stairwell and its enclosing walls sharpen, as if he has been studying them closely for a long time. This feeling continues until the form passes over the pope’s entire body.
How nice it would be, he thinks, if God, too, were just “on.”
Tweet
Pope M feels motion-sick and begins to sweat. A discordant, non-repeating melody rings distantly in his mind, the textures of droning bowls and strings played as if bowed by a strong wind. The sounds are not beautiful in any traditional sense, but they carry a beguiling and hypnotic aspect . . . as if angels weren’t associated with harps, with their own luminous voices, but instead with the forceful beating of their wings against marble, wet sand, and clean water . . . as if the heaven they served were deserted, overgrown and in disrepair, filled with birds and earthly gravity but no souls anywhere in sight. The melody plays on and on in Pope M’s mind until the pope comes back to himself enough to take several deep breaths. He returns to his apartment, washes his face and hands, regards his face in the small mirror with a degree of relief. The pope doesn’t believe in angels as figures or in heaven as a physical place, or one inhabited by souls that resemble bodies. Yet these were the images that arrived. The felt sense of fear that these are not his own thoughts returns him to the image of the Lhasa Apso.
The pope remains in his office at Santa Marta instead of resuming his walk to the gardens. He summons his assistant, Father B, and tells him to let his staff know that he is suffering from a migraine and to cancel the rest of his day’s schedule. Father B observes with concern that the pope’s pupils are dilated and that he is visibly flushed.
“Your holiness, should you see the doctor?”
“Yes.”
Within the hour Pope M is visited by his private doctor. The pope describes the optical sensations and distortions of time, and the doctor agrees that these are not inconsistent with certain kinds of migraines. Pope M is given a physical, his blood taken for testing. The physical results reflect his recent better-than-usual health. The bloodwork shows slightly elevated cholesterol, nothing unmanageable or abnormal for a man of 86.
Pope M worries he may be experiencing the symptoms of a neurological disorder. Unsatisfied with the physician’s assessment, he arranges to visit specialists at Gemelli Hospital in Rome the following day. The event is not listed on his schedule and is closely guarded by his personal staff, so as not to draw undue attention within the Vatican. He leaves his chambers via a secret exit and travels to the hospital by car. Wearing his white cassock and mozzetta, Pope M is slid into the white MRI enclosure after removing his rosary, which contains metals. The MRI does not reveal anything notable other than the illuminated image of a healthy 86-year-old brain.
At his staff’s behest, Pope M takes the rest of this day off only to spend it in irate puzzlement. He forces himself to drink even more water than his recent routine has called for, which causes him to need to urinate repeatedly, preventing him from settling into his reading. His strength training has made him capable of completing several push-ups, and he does these vigorously. As his heart pounds in his ears, he weighs with frustration his ability to complete this exercise as a measure of health against his growing uncertainty about his own acuity, even as there are no perceptible signs of its decline. He flexes his old arm and sighs, frowning, but then begins to laugh to himself as he imagines flexing his brain. He imagines it squeezing inside his skull like a sponge and ideas, thoughts, and memories being wrung out — as a purple liquid that floods through his nervous system and pools beneath his skin at the tips of his fingers.
At sunset the obelisk casts its long shadow across Saint Peter’s Square. Pope M contemplates it as he falls asleep. The two thousand years it’s been there, he thinks, are still not close to a million days, but getting closer. Still 270,000 more to go, the lives of the next nine Dalai Lamas, assuming they live out their days without shenanigans or ill health, unlike the ninth through twelfth Dalai Lamas of the 19th century. Deneb, at Cygnus the Swan’s tail, will be the Earth’s polestar around the year 10000. And 3,500 years after that, Vega will take over as the brightest polestar of all. Four million days, give or take, until the obelisk points up at that and Polaris watches from the side like a retired coach. Seven hundred-odd years from now, will the obelisk be returned to Cairo, or whatever name the site of Heliopolis will carry at that point, to cast a shadow across some other courtyard for its next million-day term?
On June 5, 1988, some thirteen thousand days prior, Pope M made a vow to the Virgin of Carmen to never watch television again. But with his concern for his immeasurable condition privately increasing, Pope M requests that a television be brought into his rooms, thinking this could help him feel more connected to the world or show him if what he is experiencing might in some way be generalized.
It takes two days for the Santa Marta staff to procure a 92-inch LED screen, and for a technician to mount it on the wall, connect it to invisible speakers, and configure the relevant software. That night, Pope M sits to watch it, breaking his vow. He works the remote, flipping through menus, reading titles of entertainments he hasn’t heard of. The menu application produces a tone for each of his interactions in the voice of a digital marimba.
The pope finds this irritating — that television should be buried beneath all this, instead of just “on” — and then smiles to himself as he realizes that this type of thinking is affiliated with men his age. This type of thinking, he thinks, also describes the frustration he has heard people express over the ways metaphysical mysteries are wrapped for delivery in containers of doctrine and ritual. How nice it would be, he thinks, if God, too, were just “on.”
As Pope M watches the news, a digital afterimage of two faces begins to emerge, like a datamoshed Francis Bacon painting, talking, kissing, or screaming. These faces overlay the aftermath of a shooting in the United States, a memorial ceremony in Brazil, some kind of revelry in Japan, a sporting event in India, a financial conference in Switzerland, fuel-pipeline protests in Canada, men on horseback holding guns in far eastern Russia, a concert in China attended by ten thousand people, stock footage of the Arctic intercut with a story about a woman in Tunis who self-immolated to bring attention to the urgency of the global climate crisis, public mourning in England related to the death of the recently crowned king, a widely loathed businessman on vacation with a popular Western politician . . . then the moon fading out and in, the stars vanishing and reappearing in new positions, distant comets suddenly accelerating and returning to the solar system, the Sphinx at Giza rolling over playfully as the noses fall off the four Presidents’ busts at Mount Rushmore, then the busts themselves falling off and rolling away toward Easter Island, in order to colonize it and drive the moai onto a reservation . . . Pope M begins muttering, asking the entity what it wants, to give him a sign. He feels pathetic, knows it won’t respond; that this is already what it wants, inasmuch as its presence can be described in terms of desire at all; that it has already given him many signs. He presses his palms to his eyelids and begins to cry. He hears the news return to the shooting in the United States, to an interview with a victim’s relative who says things in English — passionate but inarticulate things — that the pope understands to be common slogans used during instances of this form of tragedy in that country. These victims were visited by something from outside too, the pope thinks.
The afterimage faces multiply and bend, appearing to slide out of the TV and down the wall, as Pope M himself slides out of his chair to the floor. He feels totally exhausted. With his eyes closed he manages to exit the news to the menu screen. Five minutes later the television displays a screensaver and twenty minutes after that it enters sleep mode.
Pope M is, of course, aware of the church’s history of exorcisms, as well as the popular examples of their depiction, epitomized by the 1973 William Friedkin movie and, before that, by the infamous Anna Ecklund case, via her 1936 profile in Time magazine. Just as he is falling asleep he remembers the scene in the movie in which the possessed girl’s head spins around and the devil speaks through her, and the director saying to an interviewer at the time, “All I can tell you is that the way you think I did it is not the way we did it.” Pope M found this statement resonant with the unknowable physics of miracles, which he both believes and disbelieves, and now feels it resonant again with the mystery of this experience. This memory of the interview resolves into the pope wondering if he is being haunted as he falls asleep right there on the floor.
In the morning, Pope M is shaken awake by Father B, with a gentle but urgent touch.
“Your holiness!” Father B repeats as a terrified member of the Casa Marta cleaning staff looks on.
Pope M is surprised to feel a flash of shame, less for being caught asleep on the floor than for having broken his vow to the Virgin of Carmen. Beyond Father B hovers the boundaryless shape of the entity.
“Do you see that?” the pope asks, pointing, as he gets to his feet.
Father B turns to look.
“I see nothing, your holiness, only your apartments.”
The entity billows and images flow out of it enveloping the room like unspooling rolls of film, passing through one another in intricate patterns. They wrap around Father B, becoming a tiger’s mouth, then a long series of faces of people the pope has met but knows he no longer remembers, then a peony blossom, the face of a spider, the water’s rippling surface, the face of William Friedkin, the opening of the MRI machine at Gemelli, and on and on. Father B seems far away and far beneath all of this, but Pope M is aware enough to perceive that Vatican City and the world will soon know that he is not in an ordinary condition.
That night, Pope M kneels at the side of the bed and says a rosary the way laypeople do in popular entertainments when entreating God for something, such as a simple reveal of His presence. The pope thinks about the metals in his rosary chain. He imagines the crucifix entering the MRI machine; the nails would first have to be removed from Christ’s hands and feet.
He weeps gently as this image warps in his mind: the arms of the crucifix bending down as if the crosspiece were hinged and Jesus’s arms lowered to his sides, the man still lying on the board but with the nails removed, sliding comfortably into the magnetic chamber. In his sweaty and bloodstained face one can perceive both his deathly repose and the haunting, peaceful quality of his alertness in resurrection. The pope’s vision shifts to the MRI monitors, which show the brain activity of the crucifix itself — the illegible internal logic, thoughts, dreams, and subconscious of that living symbol, a man attached to God through humiliating and painful death — replayed endlessly in mysterious celebration for two thousand years. Is this what is meant by the resurrection? The simple persistence of an image far beyond its context and time, invested with a ponderous weight of hope, for something beyond the death that awaits everyone on this planet, rotating slowly under Polaris, 323 light-years away?
Perhaps in seven hundred years the obelisk will be flung into space like a lance, thinks Pope M, and over billions of days will accelerate miraculously to a speed far beyond that of light, perhaps to pierce an ultradistant black hole, bursting out its other side like a bullet shot through a water balloon, releasing all of that collected, compacted mass back into the universe as sprayed ejecta, which will collide with further galaxies to bless them like holy water from the aspergillum . . . and over time re-collect, re-spin, and re-create new stars, or perhaps the same ones . . . as Nero’s circus was an accretion disk for Vatican City . . . is this what is meant by the resurrection?
Despite his personal distaste, Pope M agrees to the exorcism.
Tweet
These are not my thoughts, the pope thinks with effort, discerning an anxious texture to his own language-thinking, by which he can distinguish it from the entity’s. Though he understands that the entity is not likely organic, made of matter, or in need of breathing, he hears its music as a form of respiration and is nearly overcome by the onset of a surprising feeling of fondness, even pleasure and relief, as he feels able to center himself in its onslaught of information and images for the first time. He beholds it flowing around him without losing himself completely. Soon Pope M returns to himself with a gentle bodily relief, like an angel stepping off a dissipating cloud onto one of heaven’s high pillars, and he sees that only ten minutes have passed during what felt to him like several hours.
At 9:02PM in Rome, 5:02PM in Viedma, Pope M picks up the phone and dials out to Father R.
Father R answers with a cheerful note in his voice, addresses Pope M as your holiness, asks if it isn’t past his bedtime.
The pope responds with an unsteady greeting that his old friend intuits instantly. He asks if there is anything he can do.
“Father, I believe I am being spoken to by a . . . visitor. Like . . . but not . . . an angel,” the pope says, “And I worry that before long I will no longer be able to lead and serve our people.”
“Your holiness,” Father R responds, “I will serve you in any way I can.” Pope M thanks his old friend, addressing him by his first name; Father R returns the intimacy in kind. The two speak for hours, catching up at such length for the first time in seventeen years, and Pope M does not fall asleep until nearly midnight.
After breakfast the next morning, groggy but on schedule, Pope M returns to his desk in Santa Marta to find that his assistant, Father B, has placed several newspapers onto his desk that bear headlines like, “Vatican in Disarray as Pope Hallucinates,” “Pope Has MRI as Mental Health Declines,” and “Pope Rattled by Contact with God.”
Pope M immediately understands that there has been a leak, or that a coup is underway, but feels surprised at his own disinterest and lack of urgency. The articles all report on a statement released by the Vatican the previous evening:
The pope is being treated at Gemelli by Rome’s most highly accomplished doctors. He has received an MRI, indicating the presence of a rare neurological disorder. As this disorder is causing his holiness to lose sleep, his public schedule will be curtailed for the foreseeable future.
The pope finishes reading the articles at a leisurely pace. He leaves his chambers and walks down the back stairwell of Santa Marta, through the Vatican gardens, and into the Apostolic Palace. He takes the elevator to the third floor and turns right, entering the offices of the secretariat of the state from which the Vatican conducts its global business at all hours. He enters the offices of the cardinal secretary, Cardinal L, with whom he is scheduled to discuss a draft of a new encyclical related to duty, dignity, and fraternity within the globalized 21st-century church, but even before he left his apartments he knew this meeting would be preempted. Three other senior cardinals under Cardinal L are already gathered when Pope M enters the office; all four men rise and greet Pope M.
“Your holiness,” Cardinal L says. The five men sit, and Pope M, consciously trying to maintain his center, begins to think about the Vatican obelisk. One of the cardinals jogs a stack of papers, which escape him and scatter across the floor. The pope watches the sheets flutter and fall, tracing the details of each paper flipping through the air like wide bleached leaves, in some cases even reading their text, recognizing the Vatican’s letterhead like the patterns of a bird’s plumage. The sound of the scattering paper returns the sensation of angels’ wings buffeting an empty heaven to his mind. The entity fluctuates beyond the cardinals as the pope slouches and his aged face takes on a stricken expression of fear and awe.
The incident resolves itself after only a few seconds but is fully observed by Cardinal L and the others, all of whom regard the pope with gnomic concern.
“Your holiness,” one of the cardinals repeats. “Were you disturbed?” The pope makes a weak vocalization and a dismissive gesture as he tries to regain control of his face and position himself upright in his chair. The light shifts as the sun passes behind a cloud. The entity billows over Pope M’s perspective, collapsing the cardinals toward the far wall.
At last, after nearly a minute of this, the pope registers the strange expressions of the cardinals and their audible concern and returns to himself, by which time the scattered papers have already been regathered.
Cardinal L insists that the pope let the cardinals into his confidence at once, as something is clearly of concern.
“An entity is making its presence felt to me through visions,” Pope M confesses softly.
The cardinals express disbelief and ask if it’s a miracle or a sign from God. After a moment of consideration, the pope says, “No, it is not a sign from God.” His unusual confidence in this response perturbs the cardinals further. An entity?! they ask. But not God?!
“No,” the pope says again, this time with mournful resignation. “Not God.” Cardinal L shakes his head and asks Pope M directly if he believes it is a sign of his deteriorating mental faculties or some emergent form of mental illness. Pope M does not find this line of questioning insulting, as he typically would, and even accepts its mounting practicality. He turns to Father B and nods. “His holiness has already taken steps to rule this question out,” says Father B. “As your eminences are aware from the newspapers, his holiness is in consultation with the neuroscientists at Gemelli and has undergone an MRI. However, the results of these consultations and tests are at odds with the reporting in today’s newspapers. In fact, according to the doctors, his holiness is not experiencing any measurable decline, and his holiness’s symptoms are not consistent with any known disorder.” Cardinal L remains fixed on the pope with unblinking blankness as Father B delivers this report. “How long have you been experiencing the presence of this entity, your holiness?” he asks.
“The presence has become more pronounced this week.”
“So a decline measurable in terms of a week, then.” The two men hold each other’s looks in silence.
“Are you sure it is not God?” one of the other cardinals finally asks again.
“They are inexplicable images and sounds, beheld through a kind of expanded perception, but are not in any sense related to the sacraments,” Pope M says as he turns away from Cardinal L, his deliberate slowness betraying his exhaustion.
“But why must that indicate an entity and not God?” asks the cardinal. Pope M gives a small, dismissive shrug. He knows he does not know how God would communicate, what images God would choose, what meaning they might eventually reveal, the size of the experience in which God would reveal them, how much awe God would invoke, how much notice God would demand. God can surely be small, simple, uninspiring, easy to miss . . . perhaps the most common experience of God, he thinks for the first time with some ruefulness. But could God be playful, or even libertine?
Cardinal L continues to look at the pope with sleepy, sphinxlike seriousness. Pope M sees the gathered cardinals with the bodies of lions beneath their cassocks, disemboweling him for answering their questions incorrectly, then laughing and shrieking as their eagle wings burst forth and fill the room with discarded golden feathers. He sees them crashing through the high windows of the Apostolic Palace out into Vatican City, perching on the obelisk, swooping down to the entrance of the basilica, blocking it forever to any future visitor, forcing them to debase themselves by guessing the answers to cruel, unanswerable questions, then disemboweling them, too.
As he beholds this, Pope M mutters a request that an amendment to the statement be issued, one that states that, per interviews with his doctors, nothing of concern had been found . . . however, his holiness is being visited by an entity.
“An entity, your holiness,” says Cardinal L, unmoved.
“A visitor,” the pope responds.
“A visitor from where, if not God?” asks Cardinal L.
“I don’t know,” the pope says. “From far away.”
“It sounds more like a haunting,” says Cardinal L, with only the corners of his eyes revealing the most modest possible smile.
3. The Exorcism
The international news media covers the story of the pope’s haunting relentlessly. Non-Catholic visitors pour into Vatican City, assembling in the shadow of the obelisk, at the site of the ancient circus. Enthusiasts, fans, and consumers of horror films, metal and adjacent forms of extreme music, alien theories, new-age and astrologically rooted practices, weird science fiction, unexplained natural phenomena, cryptozoology, and conspiracy theories of all stripes are a constant presence, identifiable by the ways they signal these identities through slogans and images printed or embroidered onto their clothes.
Haunted pope memes circulate on the internet and make their way onto merchandise, as if the internet itself produces these material consumables as a by-product of its metabolism of cultural information and events. In one of these, the pope’s white zucchetto takes the place of the UFO from the I Want to Believeimage popularized by The X-Files. Traditional green aliens wearing mitres are captioned Take me to your holy father. Every available photo of the pope is photoshopped to contain every available ghost or supernatural creature from popular media. Mail related to the haunting floods the Vatican from all over the world. Pop culture figures and hosts of nightly shows swarm the idea, joking, theorizing, writing songs; posting online; asking whether the pope should resign; asking whether the pope is now, by right of this direct supernatural experience, in fact better equipped to do the work of being the pope than any pope who has come before; suggesting that the pope is being visited by Christ in a “second coming” signaling the end times, as a joke, then further joking that it would certainly not be a joke if that were the case, joking that the audience should pray together that it isn’t; asking whether there’s any proof.
The pope receives a phone call from the President of the United States. “Goodbye, holy father,” the pope can hear the President saying as he lowers the handset onto its base.
Pope M recalls images from his childhood: walking barefoot until his soles turned black to look at the remnants of the shattered Piedra Movediza; watching dirty water run down the drain of a cast-iron tub. He assumes the President must have had similar experiences, even though he comes from a family with dynastic wealth. Everyone occupying any station lives in a body and was once a child. Pope M’s reservoir of compassion and his generous and respectful attitude toward children, the pillars of his private faith, flow from these inarguable, indivisible realities.
How unusual to be selected twice in this life, he thinks. First for this station, now by this visitor.
Of course, the former was the product of a path he had chosen himself. Already in his youth he was attracted to the architectural experience of worship — stained glass, curved painted ceilings, the altar, the acoustics. Next came the ritual — the ringing of the bells as the chalice is lifted in consecration, the palo santo–scented cakes burning in the thurible, swung three times over coffins at funerals. And then the performance — the cadences of homilies, the humor of priests, the processions, the collar itself. And then, finally, the sense of repetition — the familiarity over the course of many years, the stations of the cross mirroring the stations of the days. Administering to a parish, then to a diocese, then to the global kingdom, his life like a dropped object accelerating to a terminal velocity . . . a simple process of identification, devotion, and a continuous streak of correct action culminating in his election as pope, here in Santa Marta . . . an unimaginable outcome to himself, as a child in the bath.
But was this experience with the entity any less unimaginable? Another thing, one he didn’t choose or prepare for, transforming his life again. Emerging from nowhere, disconnected from everything, illuminating and stirring his mind, returning him to the clarity of his aging body and to an awareness of the passage of time, filling him with a new view onto this, his one life, but also a crestfallenness in the confirmation of what he always knew to be rationally true, that what would ultimately reveal itself to him would not be the conceptual entity that the structure and global community of his life had imagined and hoped for — that it would be something else entirely, unrelated to God. This terrible presence shattered the familiar comfort of no presence at all, the symbolic emptiness, the holiness of waiting . . . terrible in no small part to Pope M because he knows he won’t likely live long enough to ever understand it.
Is it because he is the pope? Does this visitor have an intention related to his calling? He feels that the answer is no, that his position in this role is merely incidental.
He spends the rest of the afternoon and evening before bed searching the internet for any accounts that resemble his own — but finds none. Meanwhile, throughout the world, public opinion continues to calcify.
“Why not simply try an exorcism?” comments one news host. “The Vatican has powerful exorcists at its disposal,” notes another.
Dining together one night, Cardinal L breaks the silence.
“Your holiness,” he says.
Pope M waits impassively without responding.
“We believe,” Cardinal L presses on, “that it would be of global interest for you to receive the sacramental — ”
The pope’s visitor billows in the darkness over the table like a manta ray.
“ — that it would be restorative to the global flock, to see you, holy father, engaged with the full power of our traditional mechanisms for dealing with such things as have been troubling you.”
The pope responds that it is no longer troubling.
“As have been disturbing you, then.”
The pope responds that it is no longer disturbing, either.
“Your holiness, these are avoidant semantics,” Cardinal L says with some exasperation.
“Your eminence,” Pope M responds. The visitor’s music emanates from a projected void far above. The pope hears the music through vibrations at the base of his spine; he nods to it slowly, but in time. The faces of the cardinals ripple, as if glimpsed beneath the surface of dark water.
“Your holiness,” says Cardinal L again after a lengthy pause.
“Your eminence,” Pope M responds again, turning his attention upward. The visitor has no center or face to meet, but the pope can feel it beholding him. He closes his eyes. There is no obvious opinion or meaning present, only images in a continuous stream, an awareness of its presence, and, only very occasionally now, of its nonpresence and the sense that sometimes it goes somewhere else. Five minutes pass in silence. A Vatican aide clears the dishes.
“Your holiness, respectfully,” Cardinal L says finally. “Please allow us to schedule the sacramental.”
“That . . . jester,” Pope M mutters through gritted teeth, squeezing his water glass. His contempt for Cardinal A, the Vatican’s so-called head exorcist, is well-known in this company.
“Your holiness, respectfully,” Cardinal L repeats. “We can’t know if it’s really your holiness speaking right now.”
Cardinal A is tolerated at the Vatican for providing a novel therapy to those rare members of the global flock who are both far enough astray to require it and receptive enough to receive it. But he is also widely viewed by his fellow cardinals as an egomaniac corrupted by his own minor celebrity and obsessed with its cultivation. He has a reputation for being overly willing to engage with language and theater that suggest that the church’s ontology can and does include a literal concept of demons that manifest through observable supernatural acts here in the natural world, such as the defiance of gravity and the body’s impossible self-contortions, as in the William Friedkin movie. Cardinal A’s boasts about having performed “over a hundred thousand exorcisms” and his self-identification as “the pope’s exorcist” render him all the more ludicrous to his colleagues. These men hoped all their lives to see even the smallest manifestation of supernatural presence, and some even worked to free themselves from this need for confirmation, and then continued in a life of acceptance beyond doubt, waiting for nothing, understanding that God’s purview is the universe and not mankind on this planet, that matter behaves consistently even at unimaginably far distances, and that God’s manifestations may yet — paradoxically — remain possible. In the presence of such demon talk by Cardinal A, Cardinal L had once pretended to fall asleep and then apologized profusely when pretending to start awake as a means of obliquely changing the subject. For his part, Cardinal A is willfully oblivious to or contemptuous of his colleagues’ perspectives.
Upon receipt of his task from the offices of the cardinal secretary, Cardinal A sees for himself a path into history. He will rid the pope of his visitor and, failing that, he will preside over a recorded attempt to do so, which will be enough. He thrills at the change in meaning to his self-given title.
Pope M doesn’t wonder whether he doubts Cardinal A unnecessarily. He thinks of the global flock, whose members wait for the same confirmation as the cardinals, praying for it, running slow laps around the rosary and the calendar until they collapse and receive last rites — the vast majority of them without the benefit of glorified global travel, freedom from concern over worldly needs, and safety in the knowledge of their own purpose and role within the global church, all of which Cardinal A enjoys with great profligacy. Naturally, thinks the pope, the rest of the universe will continue to seethe with activity long after everyone is gone. Yet here is this mountebank with his vain performance, pretending to serve as a grounding reassurance of the seriousness with which the church treats the Satanic. Pope M firmly believes that the much-larger mystery of salvation can only be undermined by the church’s acknowledgment of unrelated supernatural occurrences, such as the notion of a person being visited by demons. But in the end, the cardinals deem it important enough that the pope employ the pope’s exorcist, both to make clear how seriously the Vatican takes this ritual and to take advantage of the public perception of Cardinal A, which the Vatican ultimately views as a valuable brand asset. So, despite his personal distaste, Pope M agrees to the exorcism.
To prepare, he schedules a second MRI. Again at Gemelli, parts of Pope M’s brain light up as he listens to music. This process reminds him of the visitor in a way that makes him smile . . . and as if on cue, the words the doctors speak begin to hang in the air and their constituent letters flutter to the floor like leaves, assembled to perform esoteric little plays within plays within plays. The pope is smiling, even enjoying this, as his doctors look on.
“Your holiness?” asks an MRI technician.
In the pope’s vision, thousands of letterforms are collected on the linoleum floor of the hospital room. They look up at him inquisitively and expectantly, as if he were viewing the crowds in the circus from St. Peter’s Balcony. Letterforms rain down from the air, filling the room like sand in an hourglass.
The pope’s personal doctor shakes his head. The MRI technician observes the patient with a sad expression and pursed lips.
The pope is silent, his old eyes gaping as the vision piles to the ceiling. The doctors observe the pope’s slightly dilated pupils and raised heart rate but cannot determine an obvious cause. Again the MRI shows nothing.
The exorcism takes place in the pope’s apartments. Pope M agrees to have the ritual observed by Cardinal L and his staff and, if appropriate, televised at a slight delay. The pope’s idea is that this will remove some of the mystery from exorcism and ground its rituals in a new contemporary understanding related to the body and to faith rather than the ridiculous displays people imagine that often constitute the appearance of possession.
Cardinal A performs the ritual with stony seriousness. The broadcast is streamed globally by more than a billion viewers.
The pope remains alert throughout and does his best to remain solemn. He is aware that if he is seen laughing, or disregarding or disrespecting Cardinal A, or otherwise being carried away by his visitor during the moment, this would ratify Cardinal A’s position and sow immediate global chaos. He succeeds in this effort, though twice during the ceremony a strange look falls across his face, one that close observers of the video pause on, debate, and share images of for years to come in a manner similar to the famous photograph of what is purported to be the Loch Ness monster.
Cardinal A looks at the pope with obvious anxiety in his face when the ritual is complete. Pope M looks into his eyes and thanks him, and feels himself extending his forgiveness.
“Did it work, your holiness?” asks Father B, the pope’s assistant, after Cardinal A and his retinue, Cardinal L and his staff, and the Vatican’s regular support and production staff have all departed.
“Yes,” responds the pope, scoping his answer to his private goals — to have completed this exercise, to have provided this material as education to the world — rather than to the intent of the question being asked.
The visitor remains present, unmoved, oblivious to whatever it was the ritual was intended to communicate to it, if anything. Its music played throughout the entire experience, audible only to the pope.
4. The Simulacrum
Pope M’s schedule remains truncated for several months following the exorcism. During that time, the Vatican coordinates a careful campaign to demonstrate the exorcism’s success, sharing intimate details about the pope’s schedule and life; here he is in his apartments praying, here he is laughing in meetings. Eventually the pope is returned to the public eye, or at least a simulacrum of the pope. As the visitor comes to claim more and more of Pope M’s waking attention, causing him to drift into his own interests, Cardinal L devises a solution: There will be an impersonator employing complex daily makeup and prosthetics. Under his control, a simulacrum pope will be fielded each day.
For decades Father R has been a parish priest in the diocese of Viedma, in line to become an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Bahía Blanca, but he is brought to Rome to play the role owing to his close personal relationship with Pope M as well as his general physical resemblance to the pope in stature and voice, though the pope is fifteen years his senior. To prepare for the role Father R receives three rigorous months of coaching on the pope’s physical manner and style of speech, a series of surgeries to alter his appearance and the register of his voice, and an extensive regimen of hypnosis. He agrees that in Viedma it should be announced that he has deserted the faith and disappeared. Who can say no to the request to help a friend in need, much less to serve the higher power as a steward? So he enters into this new vocation with the absolute confidence of the cardinals.
As a simulacrum pope, Father R is a secret guarded closely by the cardinal secretary and his senior staff; only six people know of the scheme. For this reason, Father R also lives in Casa Marta, in the pope’s chambers, as the pope’s roommate. The pope, for his part, has been moved deeper into the apartment, and privacy protocols around how and when the apartment is cleaned and otherwise staffed and visited are strictly enforced under the pretext of supporting the pope’s long-term recovery after his successful exorcism and aiding his return to the perfect health of a man many years younger.
All of this coincides with Pope M’s loss of desire to leave the rooms and his preference to remain there in constant communion with the visitor. He begins to draw and watch movies, and with his vast swaths of uninterrupted private time gets into the habit of watching up to four each day, in three- or four-hour blocks after breakfast and at night before bed. When the daily schedule allows, Father R sometimes joins the viewing, still always wearing his prosthetics. Viewed from the television, the men look like twins.
One night, after they watch Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which they both find moving, Father R asks Pope M if the visitor is present. By the pope’s request, in the privacy of these moments he and the pope continue to address each other by their first names, rather than their honorifics or titles, as they did when the pope had first called to discuss the occurrence they now both live within.
The pope confirms the visitor’s presence and watches it spread over and inside the walls, in what the pope has come to view as a form of watchful repose. “What do you believe it to be?” Father R asks him.
“I don’t know,” the pope responds.
“Memorizing the encyclicals — ” begins Father R, and the pope immediately understands that Father R is beginning to ask him if his concept of God has changed.
“If it’s to be understood as a haunting,” the pope interrupts, “it’s certainly not a religious haunting.”
“The most powerful religious figure in the world has a supernatural visitor,” says his friend, “and with the powers of the entire kingdom of God behind him, is powerless to deal with it, except on his own terms, as an old man.”
“Is it supernatural? More miraculous or supernatural than what we just watched?” he asks.
Father R sniffs. He adjusts his glasses automatically, as a tic, though they do not need adjustment; he is used to their sliding down the nose of his normal face. This, to the pope, is a tell — perhaps the only one.
“Why me,” jokes Father R, gesturing around the room, then at his own disguised, highly altered face. The pope laughs a slight old laugh.
“Preservation and maintenance require veils and scaffolding,” says the pope, miming the removal of a mask.
The priest nods. “Though we don’t own the building, in this case,” the pope says. “And yet we must prevent it from crumbling.”
“And yet as we do, we can’t stop birds from making nests in the mouths of the gargoyles,” says Father R.
The pope opens his mouth and pulls a face, mimes with his hand a bird flying in. Father R laughs.
“And we try to make it as safe as we can to walk below until we can reopen for normal business.”
The priest nods. They sit in silence for some time.
The two men get up to begin the process of going to bed. They brush their teeth together, sharing the mirror, their eyes sleepily tracing each other’s identical faces.
They sleep in the same room. The cardinals requested this setup so Father R could mimic the pope even in his sleep — as the holy father’s unconscious mind must surely also attend to a great deal of business, this too is expected of Father R. Both men still pray a silent rosary with their backs to each other and complete this task simultaneously.
5. Therapy
Three years later, Father R walks into what has become the pope’s drawing studio. Large sheets of paper containing illuminations of various scenes and effects the pope was shown by the visitor are pinned to the walls. The room, an interior chamber on the floor with no external windows, is no larger than a service closet and is brightly lit by several overhead LED strip lights. Painting materials are piled on a craft table and a drafting table sits against a wall. A stretched square canvas with heavy blue underpainting sits on two paint cans taking up half of one wall, opposite a floor-to-ceiling mirror of equal size. Most of the painted space depicts Veronica’s hands holding a bloody, sweaty rag, while in the background a tiny silhouette of Jesus no bigger than a key continues to bear the cross toward his execution. No visible impression of Jesus’s face appears in the rag. Pope M gestures in acknowledgment to Father R, but continues to stare at a drawing on the wall through the mirror for some time. By this point the pope wears only a simple white cassock and has long ceased grooming his hair and beard.
“Goodbye, holy father,” the pope can hear the President saying as he lowers the handset onto its base.
Tweet
Father R is dressed in the typical white daily garb and wears his prosthetics. The two men do not resemble each other anymore, though only they know this. No one other than Father R has seen the pope in years; three of the cardinals who conspired to form this arrangement have since died. Addressing the pope as your holiness, Father R confirms that an appointment with a psychedelic therapist has been procured. The pope smiles and says, “Thank you, your holiness,” and both men laugh. They briefly dance, facing each other as mirror images, a choreography Pope M developed as an exercise and began practicing with his friend several months earlier.
The office of the psychedelic therapist is paneled in mahogany and decorated with a single potted palm in an elaborate ceramic container resembling a squid, as well as a large semi-abstract painting that depicts a grid of receding gray spheres. Though he was once one of the most famous and recognizable people in the world, the pope now looks like an anonymous old painter. He sits on the therapist’s leather couch wearing a loose gray linen shirt, matching pants with a drawstring, and leather sandals. The visitor is present.
The pope consumes three grams of psychedelic mushrooms, and as he does not speak, the therapist also remains quiet. Two hours into the session the therapist plays Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka’s 2012 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations at a low volume, causing the pope to weep and wonder why he didn’t listen to music more often during the many years prior to the visitor’s arrival. He feels the visitor’s attention pass over his body as an awareness of his entire skin, as though he were being vacuum-sealed in a sausage casing and then electrocuted. By this late point the pope no longer finds these images and sensations disturbing or distracting; his language has been dissolved, vision clouded with dancing fragments, and ears filled with strange music many, many times. Now, he finds, it’s what’s already in the world that’s moving him to distraction and disturbance. He considers Bach, whose kingdom overlaps with his own but also transcends it. There is no evidence that Bach (1665–1750) interacted with any of the popes who served during his lifetime: Innocent XII (1691–1700), Clement XI (1700–1721), Innocent XIII (1721–1724), Benedict XIII (1724–1730), Clement XII (1730–1740), Benedict XIV (1740–1758). Did they hear his music and know how far it would travel? How did all these men fail to introduce themselves to this rare genius beyond time who walked among them? How ironic that they were so focused, perhaps, on Jesus — who did not walk among them, who had passed them by long ago — that they would all miss this other kind of savior who was alive in their day.
The pope drinks water. He enjoys the effects of the psilocybin and finds its expressions to be similar to simpler forms of the visitor’s. He is also aware that by this point his mind has been so soaked in the visitor’s material that the images and associations produced by the drug seem to rhyme with or reimagine versions of things he has already been shown. Though the physical experience the drug produces is distinct, the pope can’t be sure that anything crossing his mind would not have done so anyway. But he does feel a plain and overwhelming feeling of love and gratitude for his friend, Father R.
The next day, the pope is reading Erowid. He finds an account of a mushroom experience in which the writer describes the mushroom as an earthly conduit for an alien or astral intelligence that compelled him to cultivate and then consume the mushroom to establish contact. The writer compares the sensation of information flowing from the intelligence into his brain to holding a tin cup under Niagara Falls. The writer also describes the intelligence as an interdimensional demon, wielding this torrent of knowledge as a form of torture for its own pleasure, and expresses a deep horror at the hideous expanse of the demon as a form, and at its clear desire to distort perception and cause madness toward its own nefarious ends. The user observes his own mushroom grow with disgust and destroys it. The feeling of horror took a week to fade, but the desire to interact with the mushroom again took hold about a year later, despite how utterly nightmarish he had found the experience at the time.
The pope celebrates his 91st birthday with Father R in his studio. They talk at length about when they were young, as they did on the phone years earlier, when this experience was still nascent for them both.
Father R is wearing the full papal regalia; the pope is wearing a black sweatsuit. Late at night, Father R asks the pope about his experience with the therapist, and the pope shrugs.
“I’ve been thinking that we should return the obelisk in the square to Cairo,” is all he says.
6. The Departure
Months later, the pope is sitting in his studio, letting his mind wander across his work, increasingly distracted by his inability to behold the visitor. His stomach drops in shock and disbelief: after almost five years of daily contact, returning to the visitor as a source of inspiration and mystery, a direct touch with something outside, he realizes that the visitor has departed. The pope sits dumbstruck with this realization for twenty minutes, looking at the now-ordinary things around him. He begins to panic, and then to cry. In the end, this interaction with some further reality meant more to him than being entrusted with an entire global community’s metaphysics, with systems of ritual and behavior, with mechanisms of governance and power. All of that was so much less personal, and ultimately so much less real, than whatever it was that had passed through him and his rooms and then finally, with equal lack of explanation, disappeared.
Three long days pass for Pope M. He remains in his studio but feels unmoored and disconnected from his work, the source of his inspiration gone. He knew that the work wasn’t terribly important or interesting, let alone skillful; that it was potentially interesting as a narrow historical curiosity due to its being created by a pope, just as the American President George W. Bush’s paintings were interesting because they were produced by the architect of the war on terror, after his failures spooled out and out, tarnishing the new century, his paintings functioning as objects of focus for that broader, diffuse disgust much more so than as paintings in and of themselves. The pope also knows that his inspiration was not related to his papacy or his life, but to his encounter with the visitor, and that he has not progressed far enough in any mode of creative practice to capture the visitor in any kind of adequate way. It had been a nonreligious haunting, or perhaps a religious experience unto itself.
Why him? Why anyone? There hadn’t been nearly enough time.
The pope feels a bodily desire to be done, as if his skeleton and muscles themselves have begun to bark: That will be enough.
That week, Father R presides over an official papal mass in Manaus, by which time he has been acting as the pope for five years without suspicion. But suddenly he is beheld, through the prosthetics, across the years, nearly four thousand miles from Viedma.
“Father R,” says one of his old parishioners.
He recognizes the old man at once. His name is Juan Nascimento. “Juan, my son,” says Father R, breaking character for the first time. A look of horror and revulsion passes across Nascimento’s face, and he turns away.
Two weeks later, Nascimento’s account appears in Meia Hora, the Brazilian tabloid, suggesting that the pope has been switched. Cardinal L’s offices register the story, but it gains no traction at the Vatican or in the public mind. Nascimento is shamed into silence by his family, caused to doubt what he knew he saw, and stops speaking of it. He later falls into a terrible depression.
In Casa Marta the pope haunts Father R. No longer employed by his visitor, he sits for long periods of time in his studio, rewatches movies, distractedly pages through magazines, and suffers from headaches. Father R’s prosthetics are now very advanced, to mimic what computers have modeled a shrinking old Pope M would look like. And perhaps he would have looked that way, though he does not, and Father R now finds himself as a simulacrum of an entirely imagined pope, just as he himself is in perfect health beneath all the layers.
“Father,” the pope says one day.
“Your holiness,” says Father R, sighing and bowing deeply, immediately understanding the request.
Still wearing his prosthetics as always, Father R spends the better part of four hours grooming the pope, cutting his hair and beard, cleaning his hands and feet, dressing him in his proper attire: the white cassock, the white mozzetta, the white zucchetto, the red leather outdoor shoes.
Pope M leaves Casa Marta for the first time in years to walk in the papal gardens. He looks up at the sky through the leaves of the garden’s trees, then at the roofs of the buildings — the radio building, the art gallery, the academy of sciences, the outer walls of Vatican City.
Cardinal L sees Pope M from a distance and recognizes him instantly. He walks quickly to intercept the old pope, returned suddenly to the world. “Your holiness,” he says, with wide eyes and real, deep reverence. Pope M smiles at his old colleague. “Your eminence,” he says. “I would like to address the people.”
“Your holiness,” Cardinal L says, taking in the noticeable extent of the drift between Father R’s display and the present reality of the pope’s body, “you know that will not be possible.”
Pope M continues to smile, then lets out a gasp as a look of overwhelming sadness passes across his face. He begins to lose his vision and balance and falls forward. Cardinal L, an old man himself, is unable to catch him.
Father R is sitting in the pope’s studio, per their arrangement, waiting for the pope’s return. But it is Cardinal L who finds him there; he is only the third person to set foot in that converted closet since the former pope himself had secretly outfitted it. Cardinal L doesn’t so much as glance around at the former pope’s work and delivers the news of his sudden death in the garden to Father R with an attitude of relieved grievance, but also unmistakably one of awe. “I can continue,” says Father R.
Cardinal L looks at him impassively.
“You wish to take over . . . in this capacity?” asks Cardinal L, gesturing around the studio.
Father R looks around. His life as a priest was driven by a practical desire to help others, who, like himself, did not choose to be born into their bodies, at their times, under their conditions. He looks sadly at the former pope’s incomplete painting of Veronica and begins to weep at the news of the death of his friend and the end of this moment. He sees his life opening suddenly before him once again. He shakes his head.
“Forgive me, your eminence,” he says, in Pope M’s soft voice, and begins to cry harder, as if hearing his friend speaking through him.
Cardinal L exits, and in his offices arranges for Pope M’s immediate cremation, which he oversees within the hour. The other remaining cardinal who knew of Father R’s role appears in Casa Marta to help Father R remove and destroy the prosthetics. Meanwhile, Father R weeps alone in Pope M’s room for the entire day. The next morning, he leaves Casa Marta, again as himself, never to return; he is temporarily housed in the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace as arrangements are made.
Soon, Father R and Cardinal L agree that he will leave Vatican City, and Rome, to live out his days in secret retirement in Paris. After he departs the Vatican, Cardinal L oversees the destruction of the former pope’s artwork and the return of the studio space to its standard function as a large storage closet.
Finally, Cardinal L issues a public announcement of the pope’s death, in which the cremation and closed-casket arrangements are described as in keeping with Pope M’s strictest private wishes. He begins the process of calling the sacred college of cardinals to Rome to elect another pope; they start to arrive at Casa Marta later that day.
Father R lives in Paris for nine years before Cardinal L’s death, at which point he knows he is free to return to Argentina. His life in the city had been calm and gentle, walking, reading, drinking wine, giving away money to anyone who asked. In the privacy of his apartment, he maintained much the same routine as he had with Pope M: watching movies, saying the rosary now as a form of meditation practice, but he does not otherwise continue practicing what had been his faith.
After making the arrangements himself, he takes the train to Charles de Gaulle in order to observe the people and the receding city one last time. As he falls asleep on the flight to Buenos Aires, he finds himself picturing the obelisk being sent back to Cairo. He imagines it being conveyed through various shipping procedures, sees the container ship bearing it crash in a canal and the obelisk shatter. Then he sees it reassembled in Cairo, its voyage completed, where it will stand for another thousand years. He imagines he can see himself from the impossible perspective of the pope’s visitor, flying through the void of space to Deneb and then from there on to Vega.
After landing, Father R makes his way to the Terminal de Ómnibus de Retiro, where he spends a great deal of time getting himself into a new set of gradually procured prosthetics, once more reapplying the makeup. Then, instead of continuing to Viedma, with an appearance indistinguishable in the mirror from that of his deceased friend, he boards the bus to Tandil, and the world is soon made to contemplate reports of the first new resurrection in more than two thousand years.
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!