“They are indeed!  You can’t deny that things have changed upstairs since the Virgin arrived.”

Dan thought about that and realized she was right.  In fact, strange things had been happening at the Loaves and Fishes during the past month or so.  Nothing so dramatic as the return of Preacher’s sight, but the place had changed.  Nothing that would be apparent to an outsider, but Dan knew things were different.

First off, the mood—the undercurrent of suspicion and paranoia that had prevailed whenever the guests gathered was gone.  They no longer sat hunched over their meals, one arm hooked around the plate while the free hand shoveled food into the mouth.  They ate more slowly now, and they talked.  Instead of arguments over who was hogging the salt or who’d got a bigger serving, Dan had actually heard civil conversation along the tables.

Come to think of it, he hadn’t had to break up a fight in two weeks—a record.  The previously demented, paranoid, and generally psychotic guests seemed calmer, more lucid, almost rational.  Fewer of them were coming in drunk or high.  Rider had stopped talking about finding his old Harley and had even mentioned checking out a Help Wanted sign he’d seen outside a cycle repair shop.

But the biggest change had been in Carrie.

She’d withdrawn from him.  It had always seemed to Dan that Carrie had room in her life for God, her order, St. Joe’s Loaves and Fishes, and one other.  Dan had been that one other for a while.  Now he’d lost her.  The Virgin had supplanted him in that remaining spot.

Yet try as he might he could feel no animosity.  She was happy.  He couldn’t remember seeing her so radiant.  His only regret was that he wasn’t the source of that inner light.  Part of him wanted to label her as crazy, deranged, psychotic, but then he’d have to find another explanation for the changes upstairs... and the cures.

He stepped past her to stare down at the prone, waxy figure.  She looked so much neater, so much more...attractive with her hair fixed and her nails trimmed.

“You think she’s responsible.”

“I know she is.”

Dan’s gaze roamed past the flickering candles to the flower-stuffed vases that rimmed the far side and clustered at the head and foot of the makeshift bier.

“You’ve done a wonderful job with her.  But how do you keep sneaking off with all these flowers?  Aren’t you afraid one of these trips somebody in the church is going to catch you and ask you what you’re up to?”

“One of what trips?  I haven’t borrowed any flowers from the church since she arrived.”

Dan turned back to the flowers—mums, daffodils, gardenias, gladiolus, their stalks were straight and tall, their blossoms full and unwrinkled—then looked at Carrie again.

“But these are...”

“The same ones I brought down the first day.”  Her smile was blinding.  “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Dan continued to stare into those bright, wide, guileless eyes, looking for some hint of deception, but he found none.  Suddenly he wished for a chair.  His knees felt rubbery.  He needed to sit down.

“My God, Carrie.”

“No.  Just His mother.”

That wasn’t what he needed to hear.  Things like this didn’t happen in the real world, at least not in Dan’s real world.  God stayed in His heaven and watched His creations make the best of things down here while priests like Dan acted as go-betweens.  There was no part in the script for His mother—especially not in the subcellar of a Lower East Side church.

“Is it her, Carrie?  Can it really be her?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding, beaming, unhindered by the vaguest trace of doubt.  “It’s her.  Can’t you feel it?”

The only thing Dan could feel right now was an uneasy chill seeping into his soul.

“What have we done, Carrie?  What have we done?”

AIDS Cures Linked To Virgin Mary

A prayer vigil outside St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on the Lower East Side last night attracted over two thousand people.  Many of those attending proclaimed the recent well-publicized AIDS cures as miracles related to the sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the area during the past month.  When asked about the connection, Fr. Daniel Fitzpatrick, associate pastor of St. Joseph’s, responded, “The Church has not verified the figure that has been sighted as actually representing the Virgin Mary, and certainly there is no established link between the figure and the AIDS cures.  Therefore I would strongly caution anyone with AIDS from abandoning their current therapy and coming down here looking for a miracle cure.  You might find just the opposite.”

(N. Y. Daily

News)

CDC to Begin Epidemiological

Study on Lower East Side

(Atlanta, AP) The Center for Disease Control has announced it will begin a limited epidemiological study of the five cases of AIDS reported cured of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  A spokesman for the Center said...

(The New York

Times)

Paraiso

“Are these all the clippings?” Arthur Crenshaw asked as he reread the Times article for the third time.

“The latest batch,” Emilio said.

Arthur slipped the rest of the clippings back into the manila envelope but held onto the Times and Daily News pieces.   For a moment he stared through the glass at the Pacific, glistening in the early afternoon sun, then glanced to his right where Charlie lay.

He’d turned the great room into a miniature medical facility: a state-of-the-art AIDS clinic with round-the-clock nursing, a medical consultant with an international reputation in infectious diseases, and a patient census of one.

All to no avail.

Charlie was fading fast.  He’d received maximum doses of the standard AIDS medications, including triple therapy, and had even undergone a course of a new and promising drug that was still in the experimental stages.  Nothing worked.  Apparently he’d picked up a particularly virulent strain of the virus and had ignored the symptoms in the early stages.  Only scant vestiges of Charlie’s immune system had remained by the time he’d started treatment.  On his last visit, Dr. Lamberson would not commit to how much time he thought Charlie had, but he said the prognosis was very grave indeed.  Ordinarily Lamberson would have laughed at the thought of a house call, but with what Arthur was paying him, he came when called.  He’d just brought Charlie through a severe bout of pneumocystis pneumonia and said another would certainly kill him.

Charlie was sleeping now.  His hospital bed had been wheeled closer to the glass wall so he could read in the sunlight, and he’d dozed off after a few pages.  He had no strength, no stamina, and the pounds were melting from his frame like butter.  And he was so pale.  Arthur had begun insisting on colored sheets so that he could look at his son without feeling he was being absorbed into the mattress.

Charlie, Charlie, Arthur thought as he stared at him.  If only you’d listened!  Dear boy, you never meant to hurt anyone.  You don’t deserve this.  Please don’t die, not until I can work up the courage to tell you I understand, that for a while I...I was like you.  Almost like you.

I had been back in the sixties, in the hedonistic dens behind the Victorian facades of Haight Ashbury.  Arthur had been looking for himself, trying anything—drugs, and sex.  All kinds of sex.  For a year he had lived in a commune where group sex was a nightly ritual.  Every combination was tried—men and women together, women with women, and...men with men.  He had tried it for a while, even enjoyed it for a while, but as time went on, he realized it wasn’t for him.

Been there, done that, as the expression went.

But he’d never considered it as a lifestyle.  Yet the memories haunted him.  What if someone from those days stepped forward with stories of young Artie Crenshaw having sex with other men?