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Transubstantiation

By Stephen Woodworth

27 November 2000

M arcus squeezed the ball in his hand until his fingernails dug into its rubber

surface, as if to pump every drop of blood in his body into the little plastic bag

connected to his arm. A white-coated Red Cross matron with flat-topped granny

glasses hurried over to the cot where he lay.

"Whoa! That's enough!" She pulled the needle from his arm and placed a square

of gauze padding over the hole in his arm. "If you could hold that for me a

moment . . . ."

He placed his left hand over the gauze and lifted his right forearm.

"Ah, I knew you were a pro at this!" She sealed and labeled the bag, which now

bulged with burgundy fluid. "Sure filled that one fast." Nudging his fingers off the

gauze, she taped the pad to his arm. "Now, you go ahead and lie here for a few

minutes--"

Marcus sat up and swung his legs off the cot. "I'm okay."

"Are you sure?" She quickened her steps to keep up with him as he stalked

toward the exit. "You know, you shouldn't drive until the dizziness passes."

He smiled at her. "I'm fine, really."

"Well, here." She bustled over to a table and dug some items out of an ice chest

and a paper grocery bag. "At least take these along to fortify you." She handed

him a half-pint carton of orange juice and a little package of chocolate-chip

cookies.

The thought of drinking orange juice again nauseated him, but he accepted the

gifts graciously. "Thanks."

Once outside the clinic, he dropped the juice and cookies in the nearest trash

can, then ripped the tape and gauze off his arm and added them to the garbage.

There wasn't even a scab left on his skin.

He checked his watch: half past three. If traffic wasn't too bad on the Santa

Monica, he could make it to the collection center downtown before they closed.

That would make it four pints today.

He used a different name, of course, but the routine was the same -- the

paperwork, the needle, the bag, the gauze. An hour later, Marcus found himself

back on the street, chucking another helping of juice and cookies into a garbage

can and thinking about dinner.

He'd developed a passion for corned beef sandwiches recently, so he made his

way to a little Jewish deli he'd discovered off Fairfax, stopping at a newsstand on

the way to pick up the most recent papers. It amused Marcus to sit among the

sandwich shop's older patrons and eavesdrop on their kaffeeklatsch, which they

spiced with a sprinkling of Yiddish. He relished the irony, for most people thought

he was a Jew. But he wasn't. He had never been a Jew.

Pausing occasionally to take a bite of his sandwich, he scanned the pertinent

sections of each of the newspapers he'd bought, generally skimming past the

major headlines to survey the smaller, marginal articles. The L.A. Times, the New

York Times, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the National Enquirer, the Weekly

World News. He liked to pick up the London Times or Le Monde, too, when he

could find them, but so few vendors carried them here in the States.

Nothing in the newspapers caught his eye, and he grew despondent. His appetite

gone, he abandoned his half-eaten sandwich, tossed a tip on the table beside the

rumpled papers, and shuffled back out onto the street.

Gray in the day's twilight, the boulevard mirrored his melancholy. The streetlights

hadn't come on yet, and shadows blurred the features of buildings and faces.

Perhaps that was why the young woman strolling past on the opposite sidewalk

looked so much like Julia.

Marcus had long ago become accustomed to these cases of mistaken identity.

He'd met so many people in his life that nearly everyone he saw resembled

someone from his past. After all these years, he believed himself immune to

such self-deceptions, but the acute sense of defeat and desolation he felt that

evening left him vulnerable to the comforting allure of a familiar face --

particularly the face of his first wife.

Though his parked car was in the opposite direction, Marcus moved to parallel

the young woman as she and her female companion made their way up the

street. Hastening his stride to keep her in sight, he gazed with longing at the

ringlets of black hair tied up on the back of her head, at the hands which fluttered

like doves when she spoke, at the full lips which parted in a carefree laugh as she

conversed with her friend. Each facial detail, each gesture so much like Julia's

that, for an instant, Marcus succumbed to the fantasy that this girl was his love

reincarnated, her soul returned to him from the depths of Time's abyss.

Then her blond companion leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially in her

ear, glancing in Marcus's direction. Before Marcus could turn away, the

dark-haired woman peered across the street at him, rolled her eyes, and put a

hand over her mouth as she and her friend exchanged looks of mock horror and

giggled. The reaction shattered Marcus's illusion. She was only a callow American

girl, barely out of her teens, who took him for some pathetic, aging lecher.

His face hot with humiliation, he turned and marched back to his car, muttering

inaudible curses in Latin. Wallowing in an unwelcome tide of nostalgia, he drove

around for more than an hour, vainly searching for a wine shop or liquor store

that carried Cecubo. He finally settled for one of the better Chiantis and returned

to his hotel room to sulk.

With the muffled roar of the planes at LAX in his ears, Marcus consoled himself

as he slouched in his room's sole chair and sucked wine from the bottle. Another

day or two as productive as this one, and he could move on. San Francisco next

-- he hadn't been there in months. Then on to Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, New

York, London, Paris. With any luck, he'd circle the globe again within a year.

He lifted the bottle to eye level and contemplated the dark dregs of the wine as

they swirled inside the green glass. For this is my blood of the new testament,

which is shed for many for the remission of sins. He'd memorized that bit -- in

eight different languages, no less. Sometimes he recited it to himself when he

had trouble urinating in public restrooms.

That night, he had another version of the dream, its most awful incarnation yet.

The dying sun stretched from horizon to horizon in the sky above him, red and

boiling in its final, furious glory. It had swallowed two of its children whole, and

now it licked the Earth with tongues of flame. The crimson glare was brighter

than the blast of a billion hydrogen bombs, yet he did not go blind. A sea of

molten glass that had once been a beach engulfed him, its searing, viscous fluid a

grotesque parody of the evaporated ocean. He clawed toward the sky with his

arm, and beads of glowing glass dripped from his immortal flesh.

Is this it? he wanted to scream. Are you coming back now? But no sound

emerged from his scalded throat. The atmosphere had dissipated eons ago.

Marcus writhed in his sheets and awoke, whimpering.

Five billion years. Two millennia are like the flap of a hummingbird's wings

compared to such a span.

Even then, it wouldn't end. The sun would shrink and shut down, leaving him on

a frozen black rock to watch and wait for every star in the sky to wink out. Only

human arrogance made people believe the Universe would end with their fleeting

existence. The true Apocalypse, he knew, would not come in the year 2000, nor

even in the year 2,000,000; it lay instead across a vast, vacant desert of Time.

Though it was barely three a.m., Marcus clambered out of bed and groped his

way to the bathroom. Flicking on the fluorescent lights, he bent over the basin

and ran cold water over his face, which still burned from the silicate lava in his

dream. He glared at his pallid reflection in the mirror. Here was the ultimate

indignity -- to walk through eternity in a perpetual state of encroaching middle

age. Kingdoms would crumble, galaxies would dim and disperse, but his balding

crown and bloated paunch would remain just as they were, forever.

As soon as he'd shaved and dressed, Marcus drove directly from the hotel to a

newsstand to pick up the morning editions of the daily papers. Even after all

these years, he craved reassurance, needed further evidence that his efforts

were not in vain. With only the dome light of his rented Cadillac to read by, he

passed the hours until dawn hungrily searching every sheet of newsprint. He

found what he was seeking on page three of the Times 's Metro section:

Shopkeeper, Shot Five Times, Survives

Medicine: Doctors call Ramon Torres's recovery remarkable.

By Maria Tanner, Times Staff Writer

Yesterday, he lay in a pool of his own blood with five bullets lodged in his torso. Today, he's sitting up in his hospital bed to

receive a bouquet of flowers and a kiss from his wife Susan.

"Jesus pulled me through," affirms Ramon Torres of Gardena. Torres, 54, was shot five times in the chest during a gang-related

holdup at the downtown liquor store he owns and operates. The doctors who attended him upon his arrival at Memorial Hospital

gave the critically wounded man little chance of survival.

Nevertheless, Torres's condition began to stabilize immediately following a four-hour operation, during which surgeons

removed the slugs from his body, sutured wounds in his lungs and stomach, and replaced the massive quantities of blood he'd

lost before medical assistance arrived at the crime scene. . .

Marcus removed the page containing the article, neatly folded it, and set it on

the passenger seat beside him. The rest of the newspapers he stacked and

carried to the nearest garbage can. With a renewed sense of purpose, he

returned to his car and steered it toward the I-5 Southbound.

By leaving early, he beat most of the rush hour traffic and arrived at the UCI

Medical Center in a little over an hour. If he moved quickly, he could visit most of

Orange County's major hospitals that day.

The donations began as a form of penance. For this is my blood of the new

testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins, the King of the

Jews had said. Marcus had hoped that, if he shed enough of his own blood to

save the masses, perhaps he could expiate the sin that had doomed him to

become a deathless vagrant.

It had seemed a trivial offense at the time. The Nazarene was nothing more than

the leader of an obscure Jewish cult when they brought him into the hall of the

Praetorium. Marcus and his centurions roared with laughter as they made sport

of the impoverished prisoner's pretensions of being a King. The soldiers hung red

draperies on his emaciated shoulders for an imperial cloak and shoved a reed in

his right hand for a scepter.

"And no King should be without a crown," Marcus exclaimed, carrying a circlet of

thorns to where two guards had pushed the prisoner to his knees. "Let this be

your coronation, King of the Jews!"

As he set the mock crown on the Nazarene's head, the condemned man's bony

hand seized Marcus's wrist with disconcerting strength and pressed the flesh of

his palm onto the needle-sharp spines.

Marcus recoiled in pain and surprise and stared in shock at his hand, which had

started to bleed. Rivulets of blood also dripped down the brow of the Nazarene,

who regarded him with a pitying gaze. Enraged, Marcus raised his wounded hand

and struck the prisoner's impudent face.

A hush fell over the crowd in the Praetorium. "Take this King away and crucify

him," Marcus muttered to the guards.

Silent until then, the Nazarene suddenly spoke to him in perfect Latin. "I go

now," he said, his voice grim, almost sad, "but you shall be waiting for me when

I return."

The guards led him away. Deaf to the jeers of the soldiers around him, Marcus

looked down at his hand, and saw the blood from the Nazarene's face mingle

with his own -- a heavier crimson suffusing the thinner, paler plasma. He

watched the merged fluid retreat into the puncture wounds in his palm, which

sealed themselves and vanished without a trace.

Like stigmata in reverse, he thought, several centuries later. It took several

centuries for the concept of "stigmata" to evolve, for the cult of that obscure

Nazarene to conquer the Empire. As the parade of history passed before him,

Marcus witnessed the death of his family, his nation, his language, and his gods.

And he began to have the dream.

Stephen Woodworth - Transubstantiation.pdf

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