Work Text:
Commercials, trailers, opening credits. Now picture this:
SCENE ONE:
An orphan in tall grass. Knuckles are scuffed. Trousers stained dirt-red. There is a carved quality to his frame that suggests a long hunger. Already he is almost as tall as a man, but his youth is betrayed by the roundness of his dark eyes and the tense clench of his jaw.
“Come here,” says Ivan Niebeski. More than used to the wild hounds that prowl his lands, Ivan is careful as he crouches and extends his palm to the child. Ivan is a good man. Ivan is a dutiful Christian. But the pagans whisper, sometimes. And sometimes the whispers float through Ivan’s fields as he works. And so Ivan knows about the creatures whose existence long predate even the very first Church-brick laid in the region.
“Child, aren’t you hungry?” Ivan tries again. “Don’t you understand me?”
The boy stares back, mute, eyes as glossy as a crow’s.
What were they again, the creatures? Ivan can’t remember the name. Half animal, half human. Born for war. At home Ivan Niebeski has a wife and a new child. More than anything, he loves them, and so he wants to live, and so he extends his hand. It’s only when Ivan resigns himself to his trek home that he senses the boy trailing behind him, silent if not for long grasses, whistling like blades in the moonlight.
SCENE TWO:
“To live is to to suffer,” recites Father Niko. Father Niko’s thick crucifix, a gift from the Director, glints magpie violet under the stained glass. As do the jeweled rings heavy around his fingers as he lifts his hands towards the vaulted roof. “A full life is a life of piety. The cessation of suffering is merciful. The cessation of suffering comes only in the Kingom of God–”
Jardani Jovonovich is no longer a child. At mass, his eyes stray from Father Niko to the ceramic Christ hanging behind him. The lord’s skin is a gentle ivory from which his stigmata bloom like unfurling poppies. There is an erotic component to His glazed parted mouth, the girlish length of His hair, His heavy-lashed and down-cast gaze. The urge to put Him out of His misery pulls sort of wantonly through Jardani’s young body. He folds his hands in his lap. Wasn’t it unfair that someone so beautiful should suffer?
Jardani poses this question to his sister Katia, sitting next to him on the pews.
“Huh?” Katia whispers back, wrinkling her nose. “How should I know anything about that?”
“Father Niko says death is the reward for a virtuous life.”
“Well the Christ’s not dead, is he,” says Katia. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be–” she jerks her chin towards the chancel. “You know. Up there. Alive.”
The unfairness of it strikes Jardani in the gut. It must show on his face because Katia softened.
“He is suffering for us all,” Katia whispers.“Be thankful.”
“I am,” Jardani protests. He can’t explain it to Katia. He wants to be of service. He wants to show his gratitude.
“The real problem is that you need to cut your hair,” sniffs Katia. “It just bothers you because he looks like you. I can even do it for you–in exchange, you teach me your knife trick.”
Mass ends. At the end of the month, the Director had swept through the village again. Katia, along with two of the older Zubarevich children, was gone.
It’s Jardani who replaces Katia in the kitchen, assisting Mama Boski in the preparation of a dinner stew. Jardani watches her left hand tighten around the neck of her bird. A struggle follows between man and bird and following a vertiginous chop, the chicken head separates from the neck.
“Now you,” says Mama Boski, wiping her brow with her apron.
Jardani copies, neat and bloodless.
“You’ve got quite the gift,” praises Mama Boski. “Who knows, maybe they’ll let you stay, hm?”
SCENE THREE :
Observing the dead boy, Jardani finds himself thinking about that chicken again. The boy’s cooling skin is the shade of plucked fowl. His frozen face is pimpled and scared. In the center of his forehead, a trim hole where Jardani had aimed his gun.
Later Jardani will mash his fists to the pew and his forehead to his fists, and in this Church, this Christ flickers orange. The cessation of suffering is merciful, Jardani recites. The cessation of suffering–
SCENE FOUR:
Jardani Jovonovich stalks through the city with a broken nose and a Glock strapped to his ribs. In New York City, in the center of the world, there were never any open fields, any running rivers, no endless beauty. And then the end of the century had rolled through like an ecstatic revival and the Americans had been poisoned by paranoia. Jardani finds the claustrophobia reassuring. It was easy to lie to Americans because paranoiacs believed in anything and no one. The Baba Yaga stalks through the city with a Glock, a Beretta and bullets between his ribs. In a way, foreigners understood this ugly city better than anyone.
Miraculously, a cafe door cracks open. “Why don’t you come in?” says the angel. The tag on her apron said Helen.
SCENE FIVE:
He who should seek salvation must change three things, John had once read. His home, his name, and his deeds. In America, it was easy to believe in anything. Everything felt real.
Helen opened the cafe door. The street smelled like steamed sugar and Jardani wanted to be burdened by her. He wanted to rest his cheek on her open palm. He wanted her to look at him like this forever: honeyed and merciful.
“Thank you,” Jardani says. He brushes a hand down his jacket, concealing his gun. “I’m John.”
SCENE SIX :
He wanted to be deserving of her. When Helen died John ended. He felt a dense grief, the crushing sound of a flock of crows beating their wings at once. It was so unbearable that a piece of him fled and would stay marooned forever, watching from above.
Then, there was the dog.
SCENE SEVEN:
John was blind with grief. He could only do what his hurt body knew. His body knew three things: how to suffer, how to kill, and how to mourn.
John starts a war against the High Table.
“I didn’t mean to,” says John.
“Oh Jonathan,” Winston says. “Did you think you had a choice?”
SCENE EIGHT:
John understands, of course, that he is just the catalyst. The world was changing faster than ever, faster than their safe underworld, with its arcane rules and outdated systems tracked in black and white chalk. They were being chased out of the shadows.
Ridiculous things happen and John survives them all. Somewhere along the way it seemed like John’s own myth had surpassed him, so he stops looking back. Trudging forward, John flies through Milan, Berlin, Tokyo, Casablanca, airports and landings blurred together.
While John waits to die, he writes letters in his head. He writes them as he throws himself through glass windows and curtains of bullets. John breaks his jaw, breaks his ribs. Loses some friends, some foes, some family. He addresses some letters to God and some to Helen. John smashes through a car, and then another, and then a sixth, all in the span of a week. God help me, he thinks after the seventh, limping to his feet. What did I ever do to deserve this?
In the end, John’s impossible chase ends in Paris. Six minutes to sunrise and John crunches down twelve sets of stone stairs and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. But up ahead looms the Sacre-Coeur, terrible and sacred, and past that Helen was waiting too. John summons what is left of his strength and rises to his feet to meet them.