He knew at last that this was not a dream. The rope around his neck was real enough, rough and tight, but there was no trapdoor under his feet, no board waiting to drop. He hung in the air in a state he could not name, as if he had been granted immortality—and yet the noose still held him.
Then the view below sent cold through him. The vast dome was less than half his body length above his head, pressing down on his mind until he could not even think to call for help. He knew this dome. It was the Creation ceiling, the painted story of the beginning. He risked a glance at what lay under his floating feet, and the suspicion that had flickered through him was confirmed. He should have been standing where the great stained glass threw sunlight into the nave, a bright place that seemed to belong to another world. Under the dome's weight he felt himself inside an inverted darkness. Still he did not call out. He did not dare move—not his eyes, not a finger. Even the thought he used to persuade himself this was a dream felt dangerous, as if any movement noticed by the air would return his body to gravity.
Below him, the congregation was at worship in the cathedral where he served. The more he told himself it was a dream, the more clearly he heard the organ. He was at the highest point of the church, where no one would look. He was like one of the punished figures in the Genesis fresco: Go, let your guilt be seen.
Before he could make out the shadow that had appeared before him, gravity came back. He fell. Every sin played through his mind in an instant—the affair with a member of the church, helping his brother, a rapist, escape, the boys whose bodies he had used in the confessional, children he had told himself were the purest in the world, the lies to his wife that church work kept him busy while he went looking for women after leaving the church. No! his returning reason screamed. He knew where he would land: at the very center of the cathedral, in the middle of the praying faithful. He did not want his sins displayed.
In the last second he heard his neck break. The pain should have been immediate, but it vanished into something else. What he had to endure now was not the break but the suffocation. And he felt a strange relief—a relief he could not explain—because when he hung there, the worshippers and the organ stopped at once. In the empty cathedral, at its center, he was enduring—and somehow savoring—the horror of the gallows. A silent scream came through his throat. His body began to struggle against the noose that was pulled impossibly tight. He had no time to pray. His body performed begging and misery, jerking and twisting. An erection rose against his will, like what he had done the day before in front of the boy; he had told himself it was love, another way of pouring love into the boy. Uncontrolled, he soiled himself, as if that were the truest shape of his soul. Viscous saliva ran from the corner of his mouth—saliva he had exchanged with a nun's mouth, certain no one knew. He began to weep. Everything before him melted. The Genesis above returned to chaos. The Sistine Madonna facing him melted at the breast, sagging like his wife's dried flesh. He came close to ejaculation and felt no pleasure—only something like his wife's hunger, and no pleasure at all.
Do you remember your sins?
His body went weightless again. He coughed in pain, blood spraying from his mouth, and still he clawed at the noose, trying to pull it from his torn neck. He could not remove it. He did not know who spoke. He wanted to beg for help, but all he could do was drag in air, trying to steady himself after the twenty seconds of suffocation that had felt like death. All right. You have no intention of repenting.
He tried to explain, but it was useless. In the instant he had fallen and the rope had caught, he had bitten off his tongue. Only then did he understand that what had lain at the corner of his mouth was not saliva but his own fouled blood.
Just like her, isn't it? The shadow circled him once more. Didn't you cut out your daughter's tongue so she could never speak of what happened between you?
He felt no pain now. He had already been through a pleasure close to death, and had even spent his last seed for it.
Farewell.
The shadow swirled once, then made a strange dive, as if falling from the sky, and plunged into the Genesis mural. It vanished. The organ sounded again—sacred, hallucinatory. His body sank and returned to the hanging. He struggled again, scratching open the artery in his neck. The familiar organ music broke into wrong, distorted sounds, louder and louder, as if mixed with countless chanted prayers that pierced his eardrums. He understood then: the pain he was enduring was meant to end at the instant those clamoring sounds stopped.
He could only begin to wait for that moment.