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CHAPTER 1
There was a website called Helping Hands. The format was questions and answers about spirituality. You could go on there and post a question and other people would post answers.
Deacon asks: Is there more than one Archangel in the bible? Details: I was just wondering because I saw that there were a lot of angels with names but I wanted to know which ones were archangels.
Under the question there was a column where everybody would post their answers.
PeteK answers: Gabriel.
Sara answers: There is only one archangel: Michael.
Jesusismyanchor answers: Michael and Gabriel.
Most of the questions and answers were from Christians, but some other faiths were also occasionally represented.
Belkin looked at the questions for a long time. He couldn't find the right one to answer. The questions piled up meaninglessly.
Hedgehog asks: Why did the Romans hate Christianity?
MyGodisAwesome asks: Do you realize that you don't deserve the blessings you have?
Jpierce asks: Acts 11:9- "What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common." Any thoughts?
Jenny asks: Is it alright to pray to win a basketball game?
It would be his intuition that would tell him which one to answer. An inner knowing. It took a while. Finally, he saw it:
Splendor asks: Why do they call the taking of the communion "Mass?"
Details: I am a faithful Catholic and I strive to uphold the Apostolic Creed to the best of my mortal ability. Just curious about the meaning of the word "mass."
He thought for a couple of seconds, then started typing.
Belkin124 answers: They call it the Mass because after Jesus was crucified, a mass of people rushed forward to the cross and ate him. Now they eat the wafer to remember it.
He leaned back in his chair, satisfied. Now he could allow himself to ask a question. This took a bit more thought. He sat for a while until it came to him and then he typed it all out in one burst.
Belkin124 asks: If God is real, why is there shitting?
Details: It is hateful, violent act! Why does this happen every four days? I resent! Don't say its natural. I WANT TO KNOW WHY COULD GOD MAKE THIS. I mean every weekend church and then pray every night, okay fine. God and Bible and candle. Good. But then in the bathroom- A HORROR! IT COMES OUT LIKE THAT! I AM NOT PROUD OF THAT! WHO COULD LOOK AT IT? I HATE! So then you tell me God? What? How could God do that? That shame?
Also: my wife always lies and plays game with everybody. Her sister is also bich and they are both stealing from me (phone bill and gas card). So how God? What?
The spelling and grammatical errors were intentional. He waited a few minutes for the responses to show up.
Mary answers: Maybe you should worry less about your body and more about your soul. And as for your wife and her sister I don't think that if you are calling her a "bich" that you have very much respect for her.
Samson answers: I have wondered about things like that. Try praying.
Lightofreason answers: You again?
JerryF answers: Do not answer this person's questions. He is a TROLL.
After a few minutes people complained. Still, it took time for the moderators to spot and delete his work. When they deleted his account he would just create a new, higher-numbered Belkin. Belkin123, 124, 125. Belkin had been doing this for years.
Jeffrey asks: Who were the Corinthians?
Belkin125 answers: The Corinthians were goat-herding pedophiles who lived on the Greek island known as Maui. Every one of them was an asshole. When Paul came they listened to him because he was the only man they had ever seen who could cook soup. The reason he is always scolding them in his letters is because whenever the Corinthians gathered in groups of more than four people somebody would end up being crucified. This was both the reason for Paul's interest in them and for his eventual abandonment of them.
Violation notice: Belkin125
The Helping Hands community has flagged one of your posts for violations of the group guidelines. Your account has been suspended. If you feel that this is an error please contact us below.
Roy Belkin called the activity "the Service." It was the central activity of his life. He performed the Service for around two hours each day. By the time he was done he was disoriented and his eyes felt weak. He felt as though the skin on his face had aged. It did not feel good.
There were other things he had to do. Things weren't good in the apartment exactly. At the moment there was too much junk around. He called the accumulation of clutter "the Slow Evil." This was a normal state of affairs. He just couldn't get himself to clean stuff up, generally. In fact, any task at all was difficult. The Slow Evil was a force that never stopped. It was the general deterioration of order.
He was forty-seven years old. Bald, skinny, and pockmarked, he was a man who was likely to be overlooked in most situations. A janitor or a DMV clerk. He had dark, sunken eyes. They did not give him intensity; they gave him a look of anxiety and sleeplessness.
He set up a coffee cup on the shelf by the window. From his bed it was ten feet away. He made some balls out of wet toilet paper and began throwing them at the cup from a seated position on his bed. This wasn't the first time he had made these wet toilet paper balls and he had a name for them: "Thuds." After he had thrown all ten of the Thuds he had made, he collected them from the floor and the cup. He had successfully landed two out of the ten in the coffee cup.
If I can get sixty hits, I will have the power to do the cleaning. Sixty hits. Sixty for power. This was his thinking as he shot the next set of ten. This time he landed three in the cup. After each set he would mark the number of successful shots on a legal pad.
The process took thirty-five minutes. When it was done, the numbers on the legal pad added up to sixty-two. After he disposed of the Thuds, he rested on his bed and felt the power surging through him. He quickly set to work on the cleaning so as not to waste any of the stored energy. He was successful at cleaning the studio apartment and also doing the dishes that were piled up in the small kitchen alcove.
His apartment was only one large room with an adjoining kitchen and bathroom. Still, it took effort to maintain it. Every day there was another act of maintenance to be performed. Bills, hardware demands, a spilled liquid, cleaning of the bathroom, computer problems, and so on. Usually if Belkin performed one power-building exercise, such as throwing the Thuds into the coffee cup, he could take care of three to five items on his list of tasks.
On this particular day it was time to go shopping. In the top drawer of his dresser was a garment he had made to wear under his shirt. It consisted of a white cloth square with a string affixed to the top corners so that it could be worn around his neck like a one-sided placard. The cloth square was about six by six inches. This inner vestment, called the Shield, was his line of protection against all the horrors of the sidewalk and streets. On the cloth was written a list. Each item was written meticulously, in all capitals, in permanent ink. The list consisted of all the past threats to his safety or mental equilibrium that he had encountered on his trips out of his apartment.
THREATS:
1. APARTMENT FILTH
2. SINGING LADY
3. SKATEBOARD TEENAGER
4. AFRICAN AMERICAN TEENAGER — SHOUTING
5. NEEDY CAT
6. DISGUSTING BIRD
7. DANGEROUS DRIVER — RED TRUCK
8. HOMELESS — MUMBLING
9. HOMELESS — TOUCHING, WANTING
10. TALKING CASHIER
11. HEAT SWEAT
12. "UNMENTIONABLE" PROBLEM
13. LOUD PHONE MAN
14. CRYING PHONE WOMAN
15. FAT STARING MAN WITH GLASSES
14. HOVERING, SCREECHING BIRD
15. AGGRESSIVE INSECT OUTSIDE APARTMENT ENTRANCE
16. CHILDREN ON NEXT DOOR STOOP — WHISPERING
If he was able to include a threat in the list, he would be protected from it — as long as he was wearing the Shield. He would feel the cloth on his skin and have that much safety. He called the general problem of the horrors of the outside world "the Pounding." By scanning the inner world of his feelings, he could tell how bad the Pounding was on a given day. He closed his eyes and went within intuitively. It's a level 8 out there, he concluded. Even though he had just put it on, he glanced under his shirt at the hanging piece of cloth to make sure it was there.
The Shield was a fairly recent development. He had created it a couple of months ago out of desperation. At that time he had reached a point where he simply could not leave the apartment and he had run out of food. The revolting nature of the outside world was simply too much for him. Finally he had created the Shield as a talisman that guarded against the matter, noise, and unwanted personal interaction that pressed in on his psyche from the raw streets. Though the Shield was a new device, Belkin thought it was one of the greatest things he had ever created. He never appeared outside of his building without it.
There was a faint smell of smoke in the building as he took the elevator down to the lobby, but he was too concerned about the task ahead of him to pay much attention to it. Once outside the building he experienced the usual initial shock. People were everywhere, teeming. A shabby man walked by mumbling to himself. The man's hair was matted and expressed deep resignation. Belkin considered listing the man on the Shield when he got home but it wasn't a direct encounter. Cars tore around corners, women carried red, bleating infants, men in suits shouted into cellular telephones, the electronic bus rambled down its tracks with terrible quietness and speed, seagulls visiting from the beach circled overhead carrying out their unclean missions, puddles of water formed in gutters, melting gum sought his shoes, and the walls of the city were covered with posters, each with an illustration or photograph more terrible than the last one, as if advertising general menace.
The shopping trip came off easily. He was right about the Pounding being a level 8; the city was horrible that day, but none of it touched him on the way to the grocery store or while he was getting his things. If he believed in a God, he would have thanked it for the protective power of the Shield. He was still grateful but he knew that the forces of the universe, both the good ones and the bad, were totally impersonal.
CHAPTER 2
Belkin got back to his apartment building forty-five minutes later. Something terrible had happened. Fire trucks were outside. Black smoke was coming out of a window up on the seventh floor. Police were all over the place. There was yellow tape and harsh ushering going on. He didn't get too near the tape or the pushy men. There were three children he had seen in the past on the stoop next door to his building and he ended up standing near them. He touched the vestment beneath his shirt to remind himself that there was very little the children could do to him. He had seen them whispering before on another outing and he had prelisted them on the Shield. Prelisting meant putting down an incident that had not happened yet. He had envisioned the children whispering about him derisively and marked it on the Shield as a preventative measure.
The children's parents were just inside the door of their building, doing something with hand tools. The mother and father must have been landlords or apartment managers. As for the children, they were really barely even human yet, in the single digits, he observed. There were two boys and one girl. They were sitting on the stoop watching the fire- and policemen.
"Hi," one of the boys said to Belkin.
"Hi," said the girl next to the boy, also addressing Belkin.
Belkin nearly dropped the bag of groceries. He turned to answer, knowing that if he ignored them, it was bound to encourage more curiosity, more interaction. "What's going on here?" Belkin asked. He didn't want to know the answer but he thought if he initiated the talk he would catch the children off guard and prevent them from getting the upper hand.
"Something happened," said the girl.
"Do you know what happened?"
The girl just stared at Belkin. Then she leaned over and started whispering in the ear of one of the boys. All three children began laughing.
"Hey! No whispering!" Belkin said. "That's on my list! I've prelisted that!"
The children's father looked out from inside the hall. Belkin tried to smile at him.
A passerby stopped next to Belkin as if he had flagged her down. He pointedly looked away from her. The woman was flustered and red around the ears. She wore pricey glasses and had a fashionably weeping hairdo. She whined.
"Well, there was a fire," she said to Belkin.
"I would rather not hear any more about it," he responded.
"There's a burned man," she went on.
Belkin ground his teeth.
"The fire was contained. But they say there is somebody dead up there, and detectives are sifting through ashes looking for devices. They think it might be torch-crime."
Belkin quickly got away from her. People who wanted to talk were often drawn to him, though he didn't want to hear about anything. Their words sought his vacuum. Now he was standing closer to his building, looking for a way past the gauntlet of people watching the numerous police officers and firemen. As he stood there, a man walked up to him. Belkin wanted to scream. Why was everybody bothering him?
"Do you live in this building?"
The man had jowly dog flesh. He weighed 230 pounds. His eyes sunk into his face like big bluish marbles dropped into a pudding. His lower lip protruded soggily, a defeated second nose.
"No."
"That's not what I heard," the man said.
"What do you want?"
"I'm Detective Bud Morpello. I'd like to ask you a question."
"What is it?"
"Come to the Mobile Crime Unit over here."
Belkin followed him. The detective walked very slowly. They got into what looked like a converted recreational vehicle that was filled with computers and bulletin boards. The detective sat down in a folding chair that had another chair across from it. Belkin set his groceries down on the floor next to him and sat down. An assistant to the detective wrote his name and contact information on a clipboard and scurried off to one of the computers.
"Do you know what happened?" Detective Bud Morpello asked Belkin.
"No."
"There was a fire."
Belkin said nothing. The two of them stared at each other for a long time. The Mobile Crime Unit was crowded and people fought their way around Belkin and the detective, elbowing each other and shouting. It was becoming clear to Belkin that the man he was talking to was a moron.
"What do you want?" Belkin repeated.
"The fire was arson. There have been three other arsons in the neighborhood. It was the same arsonist," Morpello said. His face registered no emotion, conveyed no significance.
"And? And?!" Belkin said, raising his voice in exasperation.
"A man was killed. A man in an apartment. His name was Frank Relpher. Did you know him?"
"No!"
"He was the maintenance man in the building. He was killed."
"I didn't know him. I have seen a man walking around in overalls with a tool belt on from time to time."
"So you knew him?"
"No."
"How did you know he was killed?"
"What?"
"You said he was killed. How did you know?" Morpello asked.
"I didn't say that."
Detective Morpello stared at Belkin. His face was rubbery. Belkin felt if he reached out and pinched Morpello's cheek, he could simply pull and stretch the flesh of it six or seven inches from the man's skull and Morpello would just sit there and continue staring.
"Did you know him?" Morpello asked.
"No."
"This isn't going anywhere, Mr. Belking."
"Is that my fault?"
"I'll ask the questions here."
"Go ahead."
"All right, Belking. Let's start with this one. Where were you an hour ago?"
"I was leaving my apartment to go shopping."
Morpello stared listlessly. "Where were you two hours ago?"
"I was in my apartment."
"Where were you three hours ago?"
"I was in my apartment! What is it that you want?"
"Where were you four hours ago?"
"Goddamn it!"
At that moment a harried-looking man tapped on Morpello's shoulder and spoke close to his ear. "Sir, we have the person of significance."
The harried man made a gesture with his chin toward the door of the Mobile Crime Unit. In the doorway was a slender woman wearing a long white dress. She had stringy blonde hair and large wet eyes that were somewhat doleful and sullen. When Belkin looked at her he forgot Morpello, forgot the fire, forgot everything except for her lightness. She seemed to float in the muddle around her like a paper lantern adrift in a swamp.
"All right, Mr. Belking. I've got to ask somebody else a question. I'll talk to you later. Don't take any vacations," Morpello said. "And take this. Call me if you remember anything."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Whispering Bodies"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Jesse Michaels.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
