SWEANEY'S & THE CONVENT OF THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY

We are in a airy restaurant, Sweaney’s, large atrium, sunny day, a string quartet is playing a melody from the baroque period, a gardener is tending to some ostentatious flowers, which are yet rough enough to live outdoors like wild dogs; the grass resounding vivid green, the white wicker tables and chairs adding to the richly quantifiable atmosphere, I am sitting on a bench, waiting to be seated, I doubt that I will make my turn, I have been told by the very pretty hostess, which surely must have other career prospects and does this merely to keep busy while she masters in the history of the Manchurian dynasty, but I have been told by her, as she whipped away some of her long brown hair from her hazel eyes, that it will be approximately an hour wait. Some of my waiting mates have taken to talking to me, I haven’t the time really, but I accept their charming demands for my short attention span, “this wait is always like waiting for Godot, only the food is so delicious it makes it wholly worth it, and the staff is so nice,” this was an old lady, had probably been coming here for years, to her this must have been the place where she could just hide and say, to herself, “there isn’t a problem in the world, a spring garden swelters all,” something like that, she was a bit bothered by the smoke from my cigarette, I plainly tell you I used the smoke more as a shield to keep these cute people away than from the habit which I did not posses.

From my bench I can see a very good looking waiter, wearing platinum blond hair, white shirt with black bowtie, his blue eyes overwrought with directness and freshness of mind, he is physically lean and gracefully energetic, an Olympian athlete easily, but he is not that, he studying political science at the local university and he has ambitious projects in mind, one which entails his work for a very secretive organization that not unusually hides under the guise of an Non Governmental Organization. An NGO given to hiring good looking types like him that win naturally in the social world. The waiter job is an added cover, the university degree a forgone necessity, his real job at the NGO, Specialist in European Affairs, when he is not being a waiter, a university student, and an employee of the NGO he takes the time to learn languages. So far he has mastered French, German and Greek, he is currently having an interesting time learning Russian, studying a language for him is like when you and I drink a warm glass of milk, it doesn’t taste that good, warm milk that is, but it is tolerable and easily doable.

As you might have guessed I am not here at Sweaney’s to have breakfast, as always my priority is to work for my reader reporting the events that comprise Lies, and so while I would like to try the eggs benedict, a weakness of mine, I am rather urged by having to listen and monitor our man Andre, as is his name, and John, the pudgy forty five year old, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, a green vest, if you can accept that in this not cold morning, he even has a burgundy handkerchief hanging decorously from his breast pocket and corduroy brown pants, and the entire dislocated fashion ensemble is finished off by thick black frame glasses, and somehow it all matches. Our man John has a rough face, it is obvious that he has done some heavy drinking and living in his time, and it is equally obvious that now he serves a more subdued, wise role working for this very secret organization.

John, administers the official look and Andre approaches the table, smiles, they make smallish talk and I slightly hear, “beautifully sculptured…” “wrapped up…” “flying to London soon are you?” “vacation” “will you pay a little service for our Lord?” “Yes, I think I will.” “Charming.” John crumbles up what appears to be a letter that he has been reading, crumbles it up revealing blue ink and rough handwriting, he places a twenty dollar bill on the table that far surpasses the cost of his coffee and croissant, and walks out administering a “have a good trip,” on Andre’s shoulder. Andre greets the warm good bye and quickly goes to clean off the table making sure to recover the crumbled letter and posits it in his waist short white apron pocket.

That night, in his small room, where there is no kitchen, just a bathroom, hardly any furniture, just loads of books about everything political and historical and an inordinate amount of Günter Grass novels. Andre attempts to restore the letter, he uses lemon water, and out come the words, “convent of the holy Virgin Mary” “Mother Superior Adelaide.” “Take to Yorkshire.”

Our boy Andre, knows precisely what to do just from these simple instructions. He searches the Internet quickly, and is pleasantly surprised, though he thinks it a bit sanctimonious that the Convent of the Holy Virgin Mother Mary,” has a web site, with pop up windows that sell holy candles, crosses and saint baseball type cards. He, however, is only interested in its location, it is near the observatory, on one of the pruned mountains that are not more than a couple of hours drive from his current location. It is approximately 8:30 pm on Monday, February 10, 2003. He picks up the phone, his boss from Sweaney’s answers, the greeting is short and Andre speaks, “I have to leave the country, family emergency, my Aunt Claire is dying of cancer, it is of immediate concern to the family that I join her.” Andre’s boss was in love with Andre, there was nothing to it, Andre could come and go as he pleased, and now with a family emergency even more so. Yes, Andre was gay too, but he hadn’t come out of the closet yet.

Andre, got his flashlight and played with the on and off switch a few times to confirm reliability; he methodically calculated the time of his arrival at the Convent of the Holy Mother Maria, at about 2 am, he knew that the Mother Superior would be waiting for him, by the fountain. While he killed some time, comfortably he picked up a book, started reading it, having first made sure to reserve his trip to England.

Mother Superior Adelaide had decided not to sleep tonight, she seems a bit uneasy, something not having anything to do with her faith or calling is keeping her tense, she is not in the mood for prayer, she has finished looking over the convents financials and they are healthy; she always knew that she was good at economics, this only proves it beyond doubt. She decides to review her convent’s website, and while she is indifferently reading the statistics on site visits, she is surprised to see two site visits in one day, that has never happened, the site mostly exist to satisfy her craving for technology, it is her hobby, her way to forget the lord’s work for a few hours, here and there, but its usually a hit a week or two, and those are probably accidental, but today there were two hits, she is puzzled, she notices from the stats report that they are local, within the country that is, she looks away from the monitor, wondering the significance of such an avalanche.

Antoinette has printed out the location of the convent of the holy Virgin Mary, she is mapping out the route, she has every intention of going there tonight. Loki, sitting on top of her computer monitor, looks on somehow aware that they are going for a little drive tonight, and he is willing to accept that, he just wants to be near Antoinette, he loves her, Loki cat loves her.

Meanwhile Maria and Habakkuk are trying to figure out something which they could have easily found on the Internet if only either one of them were computer literate. But Habakkuk did not know anything about computers, nor could he relate to technology and he rightly suspected from his vast amounts of awareness that the future, future did not have scientists and computers, more explicitly the future would not have any technology, so Habakkuk was not going to pay attention to a momentary hiccup in the space time continuum. Unfortunately, because of his Luddite attitude he had to use all of his and Maria’s intuition. Habakkuk emphatically, “Are you sure the white orchids are near nuns?” Maria was already irritated by the incessant questioning, “Yes, yes! Yes! I told you already there are nuns, lots of them, all over where the white orchids are, I see them caring for them, see a round fountain, the white orchids are near there, and a church too.” Habakkuk can intuitively surmise that it isn’t a church, by his measure it has to be either a catholic school or a convent, he keeps on channeling intuition and continues to harass Maria a bit so she can clarify her visions, he knows the hour is nearing, he knows whatever must eventuate has to happen tonight. He is hurried for time but to divine the near future you must remain calm, Habakkuk remains unwillingly calm.

Maria eats another doughnut, Habakkuk doesn’t now understand the importance of nutrition, it is late at night, they are sitting the hours in a hotel, he aware that it will come to them and she unaware that this is so damn important, she just likes Habakkuk, she likes being near him; he gets an idea, grabs the phonebook and opens it up to catholic institutions, there, he puts it in front of Maria, she starts to look at it between sugared bites, she doesn’t ask Habakkuk for instructions, she just looks at the pages, he turns them, she, secretly, even from herself, more following his fingers turning the pages, then she innocently holds his hand, “Why is this name in pink?” Her little fingers amounting to a pointer, gently gliding over the letters, “convent of the holy Virgin Mary,” Habakkuk reads the name, and kisses her on the cheeks, remarking in the sweetest of voices, “Maria, the aura of things always changes with events and contacts, this place has something that has recently changed its essence so it hasn’t conformed to the yellow pages standard, it hasn’t been subdued yet by simmering reality.” There were some big words there, “subdued”, “reality” but Maria seemed to understand what he said, she was quietly aware that not only are there colors in words and numbers, but that the tone of a word also spells its meanings, she understood completely well. And she started to cry. “You don’t need me anymore?” she was asking, she was hoping that the Pimp would say that he did need her some more, she wasn’t asking, she was hoping. “Wiping some tears with his lovely fingers, Habakkuk placed his palms on her face, as if covering it, only her eyes visible, her lips up against his palm flesh, “Maria holy Maria, you saved me so many times already, you are my savior, you come to rescue me when I most need you, I take you with me wherever my soul goes, we will see each other again, maybe then I can help you or hold your love, for now we must part.” Maria almost fainted with calm from hearing the melodious words careen through her gut, she stood up, “I love you Habakkuk.” The Pimp, goatee and all, smiled then they walked out together, and he gave her precise instructions of what lies to tell the cops and her parents. He said “it would be difficult for them to comprehend any of these matters, best not to try,” they made it to a police station, he kissed her on the cheek, begged a few minutes before she went in, and as he sped off, she waved her little hand into the darkness.

Loki cat got into Antoinette’s car reluctantly, he did not like changing his surroundings, he wasn’t looking forward to this trip, he felt that Lauren was somehow at the other end, his eyes were looking green and hostile, he was mad at Antoinette, he did not know precisely what she was up to, but he knew that she was trying to put her puzzling experiences together in a comfortable structure. She was still dazed by the hut, the explosion of Lauren’s place, even this cat she had with her, she knew she wanted to keep Loki, she felt strangely like a woman around him, but not in a bestial way, rather she felt like a spiritual woman, he had something this cat, something that helped her reveal herself to herself, she opened up around him, she was usually not very aggressive, and now, unbeknownst to Loki, she was speeding away towards this convent, unaware fully of anything, other than the fact that she had gathered, that Lauren was there, being kept there for a spiritual retreat. Antoinette wanted to understand things, Loki just wanted to be near her, he was now in the passengers side of the car, not liking the moving parts all around him, not liking the mechanics, the arbitration noises between shock absorbers, breaking liquid hydraulics, and conditioned accelerating explosions, racketing incessantly disturbing temperatures with 180 degree concatenations so as to make circles through the four wheels. Loki didn’t like any of that, he would prefer to be riding a cloud than this hard edged, I am here on the ground, BMW. Loki was a beautiful sentient being, he would have preferred a Rolls Royce, something that would take the hits for him, equally, Loki knew that here on earth, to go anywhere you had to use these metallic contraptions, and in the universe it was also true that to go anywhere you had to make something go around and around full circle. But Loki wasn’t thinking all of that, instead he was watching Antoinette, the shadows and lights fell on her green dress and her hair, Loki would jump on her shoulders right now, but he feared she needed to concentrate to drive this contraption, he nested himself on the chair as if it were her lap, he felt her, the shadows and lights dazzling his senses with her beauty.

After being thrown into the hard and impossible bed, Lauren lay there for a few minutes, she was still trying to figure out how a group of nuns had tackled and clobbered her, she wouldn’t think it possible, maybe an act of god; but then, laying there in her light pant suit, Loki hated the fact that she never wore dresses, and always wearing light colors, as if saying, “look at me I am clean, no dirt on my white clothes, I am clean,” Some puritan cry obtuse in relationship to Antoinette that was more into the darkness and the moon, her greens were dark greens, often wearing blacks, but not Lauren, Lauren could have easily married Mr. Clean. She got up, and started to feel the walls again, circumventing the room with her athletic body, touching the wall with her nipples, feeling the corners, wondering why she was here, occasionally pausing with her fingers upon some cratering situation, touching it more as if reading brail, as if the walls were ancient constructions of complex hieroglyphics that would, when read by the blind, reveal to her the nature of her plight. But to her the wall felt more like bad cement, bad moldings, a bad finish, her fingers felt paint that had hardened too fast, wrinkles of nasty convergence, this is what Lauren felt, the walls indeed could have revealed to her every nun and priest aura that had slept there, they could have revealed to her the saints which had slept on that bed, these walls had in them all the history of the room, but Detective Lauren had not in her the sensual awareness to feel what she was touching, so she finally turned on the light, and again what she saw was the same yellowing room, with the cross, and a door that was locked, and a bed that was fit for only one of anything.

Lauren leaned against the door, mentally determining if she should break it open, she knew she could, she moved her head, when she heard distinctively the noise from a car horn, a car horn. Now Lauren could imagine that someone had come to rescue her, yes, someone had come to rescue her, she decided not to break the door down, instead in a short spur of happiness she threw herself on the bed, and curled herself into the fetal position so as to retain that good feeling, and equally despising the nuns for not giving their prisoner the use of a nice pillow. Lauren loved pillows.

Car horns are not selective of their audience, they perform a sort of isotropic trouncing dance, which is intended to disturb, to call attention, so their sound passes through the ambient air like a shock wave of horrors tied together so as not to be a menace but rather a menacing warning. Horns stop everything, Mother Superior Adelaide did not flinch, did not alter her mood, did not even allow the horn menace to enter her body, all of her atoms were vibrating at just such a frequency that nothing could get in to bother her. Yet, she moved her tongue, yes I did catch her doing that, maybe because the mouth is such a huge crevice that her atomic shields could not wholly cover the gap, maybe her asshole too was unprotected, but she obviously had a tight one, however her tongue moved, generating some excesses of saliva which she was forced to swallow, even as she kept her lips tightly packed together, the saliva kept on generating itself from the stimuli breeding tongue, and Mother Superior Adelaide must have drank a whole pint of her stuff, creating a perfectly recycled tension.

And there she waited, she waited for the nun on nightly watch to announce the presence, Mother Superior Adelaide was not aware that she was doing just that, she was a creature of habit and protocol, she did not know it, she could not get up until the proper introductions were made, until Nun Cornelia would pound on her door, yelling “Mother Superior Adelaide, there is someone here to see you!” Even as this was happening however Mother Superior Adelaide was not responding, mandating a frustrating repetition “Mother Superior Adelaide! There is someone here to see you.” Mother Superior Adelaide’s round, and almost popping out eyeballs, dilated, “Yes, yes, I will be right there, but who is it?” Nun Cornelia put her fist to her forehead, she knew how much the Mother Superior did not like imperfection, and of course she was adamant about knowing who was calling either by phone or at the door, and now as calumny would have it, Nun Cornelia had yet again made the mistake of not asking the stranger at this strange hour what the matter of business and what identity might they possess. Mother Superior Adelaide had already surmised all that, and in a tone that was quizzing through thin air, “Cornelia, find out who it is and what they want, and have them wait in the library. Thank you!”

The truth was that Mother Superior Adelaide needed the extra time, she didn’t know that she needed it or why, but she did, it was like going to a funeral or getting ready for a date, you needed extra time, just a little extra time for those things that happen in other dimensions.