Chapter X

	The next morning I feel great. My alarm clock rings, and I wake up
laughing. Every detail of last night is running through my mind, instant
replay style.
	"Dick, this is Jude."
	I was totally a deer in the headlights sitting there last night as I
spasmed and pumped semen into this woman who I hated. Right in front of
her boyfriend, and he was oblivious. I tried not to twitch as I
deposited my load inside Aisha while reaching across the table to shake
Dick's hand and say, "Hi, nice to meet you."
	And I thought, you have no idea.
	Later Aisha would tell me that Dick wouldn't think twice about her
sitting in some other guy's lap. She's always been flirty, and Dick is
so confident in himself that he'd never think that she might be cheating
on him.
	"Besides," she told me, "I told him you were gay."
	Dick and his friend sat down at our table, and we made small talk. Me
and Aisha, we just sat there for like a half hour with my limp cock
inside of her. The small talk, asinine conversation about nothing
important, was some of the best I've ever had. We talked so long that
eventually, I started to feel my junk getting hard again.
	This always seemed like a magic trick to me, how one moment I could be
this little limp hanging thing all ugly and sad, and the next moment my
brain is sending my body the go-ahead to start pouring the blood in, and
before you know it I'm shifting uncomfortably in my seat because I'm
bumping her cervix.
	Aisha looked at me, and I gave her a wink. Luckily though, Dick and his
friend, whose name I can't remember now, eventually had to make a run up
to the bar for more beer. As soon as they had our backs to us Aisha was
up off my lap and adjusting her underwear. Me, I was taking the condom
off and wrapping it in a tissue and jamming it in my pocket. I stuffed
myself back in my pants and zipped myself up, and Aisha was back in my
lap. Back where we were before, except this time it was as innocent as
it looked.
	I didn't hang around for long after that. The music and smoke were
starting to get to me, and now that there was no danger of being caught
I was just not getting as much enjoyment out of the situation.
	I laugh again. I only liked Dick when my dick was in Aisha.
	I know I must sound like a horrible person. And maybe I am. But really,
this is my only hang-up I swear. My friends, they all love me, I'm
polite, and I'm responsible. If you want to take someone home to meet
your parents, I'm the guy you want. So one little aspect of my
personality is fucked up. Give me a break. Nobody is perfect. If any of
you out there reading this are without sin ...
	Be my guest.
	Cast the first stone.
	You don't hear me bitching about all of your little sins and
transgressions. Everyone's been an asshole to someone else at some point
in their life. If it wasn't to you then why do you care? Let it go.
	I get into my shower, and the inside is all blue on white. Blue tile on
white caulking. Actually, the white could stand to be a little whiter,
so I make a mental note to put cleaning the grout in my shower on my
mental list of things to do this week.
	The water pouring down over me is just a little too hot, and I start
getting that twitch in my arm again, that annoying muscle spasm that I
was getting under my jacket at the bar last night. Thinking about it, I
guess that if something like this was constant enough, I could see it
warranting the assignment of a patron saint. My eyes are closed, and the
water is running over me, and I start to massage the twitch. I'm rubbing
my arm, and the twitch goes away, only to start again higher up on my
arm. I start rubbing there, but it just moves again.
	This twitch on my arm is like an air bubble under wallpaper. You try to
smoosh it down only to have it pop up a few inches away. I'm desperately
trying to keep the twitch under control, and then I hear someone yell
something at me in Sicilian, except only I hear, "Hey! Knock it off!"
	I look to my bicep, where the twitch has moved, and Lucy, my tattoo is
up there.
	Saint Lucy of Syracuse, patron saint of eye problems.
	I instinctively try to back away from my own arm — this doesn't work, my
foot slips and I'm on the floor of the shower. For a second everything
is light and sound, and then numb. I must have banged my head pretty
hard.
	Lucy yells, "Are you okay?"
	My eyes are closed tight, and I'm covering the back of my head in a
paranoid attempt to prevent any of my brains from leaking out, and I
yell back, "No!"
	I yell back, "I'm not alright."
	She says, "Let me take a look."
	I feel little steps inside my flesh climbing up my arm, to my shoulder,
to my neck, and then it stops. I feel Lucy at the base of my neck. I can
feel little puffs of hot breath on the inside of my flesh, and she says,
"It's nothing, don't worry, you'll be fine." She says, "You're just
going to have a bump there."
	I hear another voice, and I look to see who it is, and Christopher is
calling up to me from my left arm. He's talking in a language I don't
recognize, but understand. I try to remember what language Christopher
would be speaking. Wasn't he from Canaan?
	He says, "You don't need to be afraid of us."
	He says, "We're here to help you, but so far all you've managed to do is
hurt yourself. Don't be so afraid."
	Me, I'm on the floor of my shower with water pouring down over me, and
my tattoos are talking to me. I tell the shower wall, "I'm going crazy."
	I wonder who the patron saint of insane people is. Praying to
Bartholomew and his neurological disorder patronage doesn't seem to be
helping me.
	I wonder this out loud, and Joan of Arc says, "Well, you've got a lot of
choices for that." She starts naming names: "You could go with Benedict
Joseph Labre, Bibiana, Christina, Drogo, Dymphna, Eustochium of Padua,
Fillan ..."
	I stop her and ask how she knows those. I tell her that I don't even
know some of those.
	She just smiles and says, "Because they're my friends."
	I tell her that's not possible because I know for a fact that Saint
Fillian was definitely born, like, almost a thousand years before she
was.
	She says, "No, not when we were alive on earth. I'm talking about in the
Beatific Vision."
	I say, "The what?"
	She says, "Heaven."
	I say, "Oh right right, you guys probably have your own little club up
there, the All Saints Club."
	She says that no, there are no clubs. She says everyone in heaven is
either a heavenly being or a saint. She tells me that even on Earth the
saints led sinful lives. No one on earth was perfect, except for the
Holy Mother and Christ. She tells me that no one can enter heaven with a
soul stained with sin. So then why would there be a special place for
saints if in heaven everyone is a saint?
	I tell her, "Yeah, good point."
	I ask, "But don't you get any perks at all?"
	Lucy says that no, in heaven everyone is equal. If anything, it's more
work being a saint. As long as there are people alive on earth the
saints have a job to do.
	I say, "That' doesn't give me much reason to excel then does it? I mean,
you guys lead lives of abject servitude or got martyred and died
horrible, horrible deaths. If I could just sneak in under the wire, then
why should I bother?"
	Christopher says, "Say that after you've spent a few centuries in
purgatory."
	I say that I always thought purgatory was a cake walk, you know, like
the cold shower before jumping into a pool. It's only temporary, and you
have something to look forward to.
	Joan of Arc says, "Just because you know the fire's going to stop
doesn't make the fire hurt any less."
	I say yeah, yeah, yeah. She would know about that too, wouldn't she? I
feel bad after saying this, though. It must suck to be burned at the
stake for your beliefs, only to be sent to a purifying fire to take care
of any last vestiges of sin that still clung to her soul. Joan says how
even the purest of heart has sin. Even a good person could spend decades
— even centuries — in purgatory for their secret thoughts alone.
	I ask her how long she spent in the purifying fire, and she says, "Oh,
about 15 minutes."
	All of a sudden I don't feel as sorry anymore. I don't have time for
this. This attack on my mental constitution doesn't change the fact that
I still have bills to pay. I have to go to work.


	Later, I'm sitting at work, and all is quiet. These saints, apparitions,
or whatever they are seem to be leaving me alone now. They let me finish
my morning routine without incident, and I've been here for over an
hour, and I haven't heard anything out of them.
	From the moment I walked out the bathroom door and started my day
they've been silent. I've been watching them, paranoid, all morning. But
they haven't even so much as looked at me funny.
	I don't want to go back into to emergency room, and I don't want to see
a psychologist. I'd be declared unfit for work, and that's the last
thing I need after being handed a big project like this. The more and
more I think about it the less I think I'm going crazy anyways. If this
was me doing it, my subconscious, that would mean that I'd only be able
to tell myself things that I already knew. But these saints are telling
me things I don't know. That would mean that they were real, right?
Unless somehow I'm able to keep information from myself.
	The implications of them being real really scares me, though. What would
it mean? For one it would mean that God was real. It would mean there
was an actual entity responsible for the existence of everything, a
perfect consciousness that existed before time that actually created
time itself, but what about before that?
	Who made God?
	I can't grasp the concept of something that simply always was, whether
it be God, or just the matter that makes up the universe. This fact has
made both being a religious man and an atheist uncomfortable choices for
me. The atheist says that the devout man is illogical for believing in a
God that was always there while he himself believes the same thing about
the rocks that the devout man thinks God created.
	I decide to start smaller.
	Okay, so there is a God, and for some reason Gods sent the spirits of
three of his ranking saints to inhabit ... infest me?
	I don't have a good word for this situation because I don't really know
why they're here. Either way that means that God is using Catholic
saints, using them for something. Does that mean that Catholics are
right? Does that mean that Catholicism is the one true religion and all
the stuff my mom told me growing up is true? Or is it just one of the
right answers?
	If I had a tattoo of Buddha, would he be being a jackass to me right
now?
	I guess I could always ask the saints.
	I'm sitting at my desk at work, I haven't gotten any work done all day,
and I'm looking down at the tattoos and wondering if I could get their
attention. Then I decide against it. I can always ask them questions
later if they appear again. Until then these are my tattoos, and I'm not
going to encourage the sort of behavior I've been getting out of them
lately.
	But in light of the fact that I don't seem to be getting any work done
at all, I decide to write some questions down for them.
	Just in case.