“Please tell me,” Roger whispered to Artaud, “that it is not true you are on the verge of reconverting to Christianity! The rumors are flying.”
Artaud turned to face Roger. “The Christianity of most people,” he replied, rather nastily, “is their conformist, vulgar appetites and social conformity extended into the supernatural. If you’re asking me if I’ll convert to that, the answer is no!
“I don’t give a damn about the Ten Commandments or going to Heaven or Hell. My life has been hell. I refuse to idolize Christ or trick the Father into thinking I love Him. Nobody loves the Father, because we are commanded to love Him. As far as my life is concerned, God can confess His sins.”
Roger and Louis burst into rapturous laughter at this. Artaud looked at them in disgust. He started to walk away.
“What sins?” I asked quickly, putting out a hand.
He turned to me and relaxed a little, apparently seeing I was sincere. I waited as he paused, seeing him reach up out of habit to shove back his hair and then stop, as if remembering it had been cut short. Then he lowered himself into the pew behind me, rested his arm on the back of it and crossed one leg over the other. I turned around to look at him.
“Why is existence couched in such a lie?” he asked. “One thing is red, and another is blue. I make a decision and it is different than feeling love; I feel love and it affects me as love, not as pain... Why are we fragmented? Why must we say and think only one thought at once, not two thoughts, all thoughts, at once? And why do I feel pain especially?”
I raised my eyebrows, stumped. It took me a moment to think about this. “Pain,” I managed, attempting to answer only his last question, “is…a signal from the body that the mind’s life is threatened.”
“Why do I always feel pain!” he flared. “What is chronic pain telling me about my mind’s life?”
He stared past me then, his face contorted, his jaw set, his eyes flashing. His fingers gripped the back of the pew, his other arm sliding back and forth against his stomach in agitation. After a few minutes the tight lines of his face blurred, and when he looked back at me the corners of his mouth lifted a little. “Now do you understand?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I am always in pain, some kind of pain,” he said softly. With his elbow on the back of the pew he leaned his forehead into his hand, staring again with that wild incomprehension, the eye of a fish torn out of the river and thrown onto the alien shore. “I take opium to dull the pain, but drugs cloud my senses. I was first given opium in laudanum form by a doctor at the sanitarium my parents chose for me. To fix their ‘troubled’ son.” And his face jolted up from his hand, those eyes stabbing mine. “Do you take opium, Weidmann?” he demanded.
My heart was pounding. “No.”
“Don’t start!” He rested his head against his fist and closed his eyes. “Don’t. Don’t take it even once. Even if you feel you need it.”
He was silent again. I could see his unspoken cries twisting through the flesh of his face for though his lips did not move his jaw did, and his skin did, and his muscles, and as always, his eyes flashed when he opened them again. I just sat there and stared at him, wrenched apart with pity for this man. When he finally opened his eyes and looked at me again, I felt he was probing me, searching for any sign of pretense, suspicious of my sympathy, and I fought not to resist. I thrust away my embarrassment and allowed myself to gaze right back into his eyes. At length he lowered them. We sat some more. When he raised his eyes again, his expression was kind.
