City of Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page A

little.
    He got out and craned his neck up at the flat gray surface that showed the marks of the wooden forms where it had been poured, unlike the limestone fabric of a European cathedral. Still, the building was impressive. He pushed in at a heavy carved wood door, past a rack of pamphlets about ministering to darker-skinned peoples overseas, past a little font where a brown woman in a shawl was dipping her hand in holy water, and then on into the dim nave. The stained-glass windows were dazzling, a lot of blues and reds that really vibrated in the sunlight.
    He slipped into a pew in the cool echoey dimness. There was a kneeling rail in front of him that his long-long-ago childhood Protestant church had never had. And Marlena’s Bible-thumping, tongue-talking, millennarian church probably wouldn’t have had, either. Marlena. Give me that full gospel, he thought. Don’t give me any of that 90 percent gospel, no, sir. Actually the only part of the gospel they seemed interested in was Revelations, all those Mediterranean fever-dreams about pale horsemen and approaching hellfire.
    He settled back and listened to a kind of beating of the air in the vast space. No, it seemed a real sound, small, far-off and agonized, behind a door or a wall. Something in pain. He smelled floor polish and burning wax. An apse near him was blocked off by a rack of flickering candles in red glass. All these sensations seemed to burn his nerves, as if his axons were overcharged. He could even feel his own pulse beating against the inside of this skin. Just hold still for a minute, hold still, he thought.
    Jack Liffey wondered what in hell he was doing there. There was an inkling that maybe he was reaching out to hit the pause button on his life for a few moments. Nothing really religious. Just a whim to commune in some way with that ancient craving to do one’s best in the world or be part of something bigger and grander.
    Then he heard the odd sound again and noticed a number of small people making their way on their knees around the outside aisles, moving from numbered station to station. His spine prickled as if he had blundered in by accident on something extremely private. An old man crabbed sideways on his knees and stopped directly between Jack Liffey and icon No. 9 on the wall. The little man bowed his head and started to weep quietly, his shoulders shuddering. Jack Liffey had an overpowering urge to hug him, comfort him, tell him it would be all right.
    Instead he thought about Marlena. He had let her go without a big scene, graciously, blessing her new union with the big Bible-thumper. But why not? What good would anything else have done? Making a scene wouldn’t have kept her.
    He tried to stand up to go back outside and return to the world but he couldn’t. He kept trying ineffectually. It was like a car with a dying battery, grinding and grinding, getting weaker in that futile way that would leave him stranded, far from home.
    Hey, anyone there ? he called in his head. I really think I’m doing my best here. But, of course, there was no answer.
    Something landed on the back of his bare forearm, and he wondered if the church had flies. He looked down and saw a drop of water. A second teardrop hit and he thought, Shit, not again! He knelt to see what kneeling on that hard bar was like, rested his arms on the pew ahead, and then he wept uncontrollably over the back of the pew for a while. A part of him watched, fascinated, and decided he’d never quite done anything like this before. His previous crises had run to alcoholic blur, but otherwise had been pretty much under his conscious control.
    Jack Liffey had seen it before, parked along this stretch of Fairfax on his way home. It appeared to be some mid-70s boat-sized GM product, Buick or Oldsmobile, but you couldn’t tell because it was completely covered with a blanket of tiny brown teddy bears glued to every surface. There was only an oval left to see out the windshield, and he