Father Sebastian had lived alone for seven years in the rectory of Annunciation Catholic Church as its pastor when Father Mark moved in temporarily. Father Mark, newly ordained, took a job as a hospital chaplain until, in six months, he would fly to Rome and study church law. The two priests seldom encountered each other and when they did, their chats where polite and superficial. Father Sebastian considered this lack of contact ideal since the new priest was outrageously handsome, with large dark eyes and an athlete’s physique. Too much time with him would only combust Father Sebastian’s very flammable attraction.
A month into their cohabitation, Father Sebastian sauntered into the rectory kitchen at six o’clock to brew his morning coffee and found a stranger at the table where the cook chopped vegetables and wrote her grocery lists. A young man in skintight jeans and a T-shirt cut off at the sternum, he was eating ice cream from the carton with a serving spoon. The priest could not guess his age and feared he was an adolescent.
“Who the hell are you?” Father Sebastian asked reaching for the empty coffee pot to wield in case the young man attacked.
“Mark and I fucked all night,” he said nonchalantly, bouncing a crossed leg with an aqua flip flop dangling from the foot.
“Where is Father Mark?”
“Sleeping,” the young man sighed, exasperated, and rolled his eyes. “Finally.”
Withdrawing a clot of ice cream, he licked it salaciously and then jabbed the serving spoon into the container. As he stretched, his yawn swelled into a yowl and the half-shirt lifted, exposing his ribs.
“Say good-bye to Mark for me,” he said, abandoning the carton and spoon, and parading down the hallway to the back door. “Even though he won’t remember me.”
Then he pivoted towards the priest and set his small black eyes on him for the first time.
“Trust me,” he said. “Forgetting me is a mercy.”
It was not lost on the priest that the young man departed knowing the way out.
Father Sebastian’s visit to Father Mark’s bedroom was his first. Not responding to his knocking, Father Sebastian began a retreat to the kitchen when a raspy voice from inside grumbled.
“A moment.”
Eventually Father Mark opened the door only in blue and white striped boxers. Father Sebastian had never seen the priest shirtless. His swollen biceps and broad chest proved he visited the gym with the same frequency as the sick in the hospital. His index fingers rubbed sleep from his eyes.
“About your guest.”
“What guest?” he said, lowering his hands, frowning, confused.
Father Sebastian immediately suspected the new priest would deny everything.
“The young man I stumbled upon in the kitchen just now. He claimed to have spent the night with you.”
“What are you talking about?”
Father Sebastian hoped Father Mark would rub his eyes again but for a more prolonged period, so he could examine thoroughly and unobserved, the magnificent torso. Instead, Father Sebastian kept his eyes locked on the new priest’s irritated expression.
“Listen, Mark, your personal life and preferences are none of my business, but if you bring men here for the night, especially as young as that one, neighbors and parishioners will notice. Trust me, they don’t miss a thing. There will be calls to the bishop and trouble for us both.”
“I was at the hospital until three this morning,” he insisted. “I came home alone and slept alone. Furthermore, even if I liked men that way, which I don’t, I still would be celibate. I keep my promises.”
“How did he know your name?”
“Maybe he’s unstable, and saw me at the hospital, followed me here, and broke in. You know better than I how a priest in a Roman collar can disturb the already unbalanced.”
He put on a convincing show, but Father Sebastian didn’t believe it. Understanding it was futile to argue further, Father Sebastian emoted the same forbearance he offered screaming babies during their baptisms and drunk grooms at the weddings he officiated.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll search for signs of forced entry.”
Before inspecting the rectory, his eyes lingered on Father Mark’s right shoulder, bloated with strength. Predictably, there were no broken windows or jimmied locks anywhere.
Two nights later, at twelve-fifty in the morning, a frenetic doubt flung Father Sebastian from sleep, his heart rate rapid and his body febrile. It was the same feverish doubt he had suffered during his seminary days when questions about God’s reality, Christ’s divinity, and heaven’s existence plagued him. Doctrine, however, was not doubt’s object this night. Rather it was his conviction that Father Mark had lied about the young man. Perhaps spotting Father Mark at the hospital, an overwhelming fascination had compelled the young man to track the chaplain back to the rectory, and slither inside through some unprotected crevice. Then it dawned on Father Sebastian that he had not checked the basement for a possible way in. Panicked, he kicked off his bedding and scrambled down the staircase from the third floor which he alone occupied.
As he passed the second floor, growls and moans detoured Father Sebastian to Father Mark’s door. Ajar, its light seeped into the corridor. Father Sebastian surreptitiously peered inside through the gap, to witness Father Mark undressed, slouched in an armchair, and his legs splayed. The young man, naked as well, knelt between them, his head bobbing over the new priest’s pelvis. Father Sebastian immediately withdrew and pressed his back against the corridor wall. Father Mark’s grunting triggered an avalanche of excitement within Father Sebastian, and he fantasized about being in the young man’s position. After ejaculating, he softly crept to his room, and decided to wake early to nab the young man before he could leave, specifically to ascertain his exact age.
After sleeping only three hours, Father Sebastian waited in the kitchen presuming the young man would exit through the back door again if he had not already gone. He sipped his second cup of coffee when, surprising him, the door opened, and Father Mark entered the kitchen in his black suit and Roman collar.
“Were you at the hospital?” Father Sebastian asked.
“They called me in at two o’clock to give last rites. The patient died during the anointing, and the wife begged me to stay until her daughter arrived.”
“I woke at ten minutes to one remembering I had skipped the basement when looking for how the intruder could have gotten in. On my way to inspect it I heard sounds from your room.”
“Sounds?”
“Your door was open. The intruder was with you. Do I need to say more? Tell me that at least he is not a teenager.”
“Why accuse me of these horrible things? What kind of sick game are you playing?”
“It’s dangerous enough having sex in a rectory, but if he’s a minor and he tells people, your life is over. Why be so careless?”
Rage contorted the beautiful symmetry of Father Mark’s face, and his hands curdle into fists. Father Sebastian thrillingly awaited the new priest to attack him, slamming a fist against his head. The erotic delirium that had consumed him outside the new priest’s bedroom accosted him again. He promptly took a seat at the small kitchen table to hide his forthcoming erection.
“I’m calling the bishop and reporting this harassment,” Father Mark said. “I won’t spend another day with you.”
“If you bring the bishop into this, I must report what I have seen. Your word against mine. The bishop will be forced to investigate. That can take months, if not a year. He will immediately suspend you as a priest and forbid you to perform any of your duties until he can settle the matter. And, really, who is he more likely to believe? An untested priest ordained only a month, or one of his most reliable, seasoned pastors? Even if the bishop exonerates you, the suspicion remains. I guarantee, even if he finds you innocent, he will cancel your studies in Rome. Your career as a church lawyer will end before it started.”
As Father Mark considered his predicament, the fists dissolved, and along with them, Father Sebastian’s arousal.
“What if I give the bishop an excuse without mentioning you?”
“I’m sorry, Mark. The only way you leave this rectory without the bishop hearing my side is if you tell me the truth.”
The new priest dropped his head, defeated.
“You want the truth?” he eventually said, his head rising and his dark eyes three times larger than normal, as if magnifying glasses hovered before them. “Here it is. You are a deranged, demented son of a bitch and should be as far away from the priesthood as possible.”
The insult did not pain Father Sebastian, but rather encouraged him. He viewed it as proof that the new priest longed to kiss him but could not admit it.
After the conversation, Father Sebastian presumed if the young man was still in the rectory, Father Mark would keep him away. Pointless to wait, the priest meandered to his office with hours to waste before he said the eight o’clock mass. Behind his desk, a walnut behemoth the size of a sarcophagus, he ruminated on Father Mark’s impressive ability to deceive. Then a hinge scraped, and the young man marched inside decked in a black mesh tank top tucked into cherry briefs and pearl silk stockings drawn past his kneecaps. He strutted in white high heels, vintage, the type Father Sebastian’s grandmother had worn to weddings and flopped into an armchair opposite the desk.
“Stayed the night, I see,” Father Sebastian said. “I stumbled upon you both around one o’clock. I heard noises and Father Mark’s door was open.”
“Took a peek?” the young man said, lounging diagonally in the chair, draping his legs over an arm. “I told Mark you were a naughty one.”
“How old are you?” Father Sebastian demanded sternly.
“Archangels don’t bother with the trivialities of time.”
“That’s how you see yourself?” the priest sneered. “An Archangel? Dressed that way?”
“What were you expecting? Wings and white robes?”
“Archangels are pure spirit. You look very flesh and blood to me.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of possession?”
“Demons possess people,” Father Sebastian said. “Not archangels.”
“Of course, archangels possess people. But never without introducing ourselves and definitely not without permission. We crave volunteers, not victims.”
“Don’t demons do the same?”
“Leave it to a priest to think he knows more than an archangel,” the young man chortled.
“And do you have a name?”
“Jeremiel,” he said. “Ever heard of me?”
“Afraid not.”
“I don’t get the same publicity as Michael and Gabriel. I rule the righteous souls stuck in the underworld until the Second Coming. Then they all will be released and flutter into Paradise.”
The fingers of a hand twitched and flitted imitating wings, as his hand drifted upwards.
“Well, Catholics believe saved souls go straight to heaven after they die. No need for you.”
“The other archangels would be insulted by your arrogance and ignorance,” he said, amused. “I find it charming.”
“And how did you meet Father Mark?”
“You are not paying attention,” he said, swinging his feet to the floor, and scooting closer to the desk. “People don’t meet archangels. WE APPEAR.”
“Father Mark denies knowing you,” Father Sebastian said bored by the histrionics.
“Whenever we archangels compete our sexual intermingling with humans, we wipe their memory clean. Everyone involved forgets us, both the people we possess and those who have intermingled with us. If we didn’t, they would do nothing but obsess about us, day and night, waiting, yearning, watching for our return, not sleeping, not eating, wasting away. As I told you when we first met, forgetting me is a mercy.”
He rose onto the high heels with ease, floating to his feet, as if being pulled from above with invisible wires.
“Who knows?” he said, suggestively sashaying to the office door. “I could have fucked you plenty with this or some other body, and you remember nothing.”
Father Sebastian would have prevented the young man from going if he had more questions, but he didn’t.
That afternoon, alone in his bedroom, after wiping semen from his stomach and disposing the tissues in the trash, Father Sebastian perused the parking lot beneath his window and unexpectedly caught sight of the young man chatting with Father Mark. In black slacks and a white dress shirt with black tie, the young man looked more a Mormon missionary than street hustler. Father Mark had just ended a jog, sweat blotting his shirt. They conversed with a relaxed familiarity, the young man gesticulating, one hand swiping the air, the other moving in circles. Father Mark tossed back his head. Laughter jostled him. It was clear this was not their first meeting. Father Sebastian dashed down the three flights of stairs, praying they would be in the lot when he arrived, which they were.
“You do know him,” he chided Father Mark.
“Who?” the new priest said, startled by the interruption.
“Him, The intruder.”
Father Mark paused to understand the allegation, then scowled in disbelief.
“Wesley?”
The young man glanced repeatedly as Father Sebastian’s Roman collar.
“Did you break into my house?” Father Mark asked facetiously.
“I don’t think so,” he said, perplexed.
“I’m kidding” Father Mark said, patting the young man’s arm to reassure him. “Father Sebastian met a stranger in our kitchen a couple of days ago. He’s not over it.”
“That can turn your world upside down,” the young man said to Father Sabastian sympathetically. “My apartment was robbed last year. I wasn’t there but even then, it messed with my head for months. I can’t imagine catching someone.”
“I met Wesley at my gym a few days after I arrived here,” Father Mark impatiently explained. “We lift weights together sometimes. I just happened to run into him now.”
“I teach chemistry up the street at Belmont High School,” the young man said, “I cut through the parking lot whenever I walk there or back.”
“Teacher?” Father Sebastian said to the young man. “You can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen yourself”
“I’m twenty-four.”
Father Sebastian had no misgivings. This was the same young man who had been at the kitchen table, had fellated Father Mark, and had claimed to be an archangel. He admired how the two had skillfully coordinated the charade, obviously planning it in advance. Father Sebastian refused to be humiliated further. He decided to play along, made a show of scrutinizing the young man’s face, and then pretended to be mortified.
“Wesley, I apologize,” he said feigning contrition. “I am horribly mistaken. I’m so embarrassed. In my defense, you do resemble him, same build and hair, but I can see you are older. Obviously, as you said, the break-in still haunts me. Please forgive me.”
At this point, Father Mark’s legs, solid, shapely, stippled with small curls of black hair, exerted a magnetic pull upon Father Sebastian. He longed to slather them with his tongue just as this young man had lapped the ice cream when they first met. Miraculously, Father Sebastian’s fortitude kept him concentrating on Father Mark’s eyes, which seemed to dislodge from their sockets and charge Father Sebastian’s own eyes, to devour them and render him blind. Father Sebastian excused himself and outflanked their attack. He headed to his bedroom, where he masturbated yet again, imagining the warm saline taste of Father Mark’s shins.
At nine o’clock that night, after two hours of consoling the distraught mother of a heroin addict, exhausted, Father Sebastian sluggishly entered his room. Every lamp and light fixture burned. The young man was perched like a cathedral gargoyle on the chair near the priest’s bed.
“Good Lord,” Father Sebastian said.
“Not the Good Lord,” he snickered. “Just one of his archangels.”
At first Father Sebastian believed the young man was nude but then noted the pouch of an athletic supporter over his genitals. The priest wrapped the duvet from the bed around the unclad body, but the young man simply tossed it off.
“Covering me won’t save you. Few can resist an archangel and trust me; you are not one.”
“That was quite a performance in the parking lot this afternoon,” Father Sebastian said, collapsing on the edge of his bed.
“Didn’t I explain it all? Didn’t you get it through your thick clerical skull? After I leave, both the people who fuck me and the ones I possess so I can be fucked remember nothing. Once I relinquish the two of them, it is like it never happened.”
Then he pounced upon Father Sebastian, knocking him supine onto the mattress, straddling his hips, forcing the priest’s wrists above his head. He was physically so lithe and impish that Father Sebastian surmised it would be effortless to cast him off, but he failed. It was as if he outweighed the priest by hundreds of pounds. After his third unsuccessful attempt, a strange pressure compressed the coils of Father Sebastian’s brain, erasing first the names of his parents, then if they were dead or alive, and finally if they had existed at all. He did not know if he had siblings or friends. Then the day, month, year, and where he lived on earth vanished from his mind.
“Choose me,” the young man said. “Let me possess you. It is the only way Mark will ever fuck you.”
Two things grew in surety with the brute atop him. First, that he, Father Sebastian, was indeed a priest, someone who absolved sins and changed bread and wine into completely different substances. And second, that this beast was no archangel.
“Answer me,” Father Sebastian seethed. “What will become of you after Christ judges the living and the dead? The poor souls you shepherd will be ushered into glory. Your purpose will be fulfilled. What will you do for the rest of eternity?”
Father Sebastian’s question impelled the creature to release him. He slid from the mound of Father Sebastian’s body and flopped onto the armchair cushion, deflated.
“Only one other person has ever wrestled me and won,” he said. “But he sought a blessing, not a curse.”
“Jeremiel,” Father Mark barked from the doorway, in his black suit and Roman collar. “What have I told you? If he finds out about you, he will destroy you, He wants nothing more than for you to disobey God, and fall. That is the kind of priest he is.”
The young man cackled with a hysterical falsetto and sprinted past Father Mark into the corridor, his bare soles slapping the terrazzo floor as he ran, the crazed descant trailing him. Stunned by the exodus, Father Mark blinked repeatedly, and once it registered that the young man had fled, chased him. Father Sebastian sat up and pressed his hands to his face as his brain uncongealed, as the facts of his life flooded back. Outside, beneath the bedroom window, the young man’s shrieks, yelps, and howls echoed from the parking lot below.
“He’s too fast,” Father Mark said huffing in the doorframe. “I can’t catch him dressed this way. The hospital had called. I had to go. Jeremiel promised to stay in my bed until I got back, but I knew he would look for you. I never wanted you to know out about him.”
“You talk like this was our first meeting.”
“It isn’t?”
“Mark, we have talked about him before.”
“No, we haven’t.”
“Three days ago, I found him in the kitchen. He confessed to sleeping with you. I knocked on your door to confront you.”
“That never happened.”
“This morning, I mentioned stumbling upon you both together last night.”
“You never said a word.,” Father Mark said, utterly mystified.
For the first time, Father Sebastian was becoming convinced that the new priest never had faked his past ignorance.
“And then I caught you with him in the parking lot this afternoon. You called him Wesley.”
“Who is Wesley?”
Father Sebastian was not shocked by Jeremiel’s duplicity. Yes, the creature admitted to robbing people’s memories after he used them, but the beast had concealed how he also stole aspects of their lives while he had them in his clutches. Pitying how Father Mark’s recollection had been so perverted, Father Sebastian approached and raised his hand to stroke his cheek.
“Get hold of yourself,” Father Mark snarled, swatting away the hand. “Do you think after fucking an archangel a monster like you can offer me anything?”
“Jeremiel is no archangel and, after tonight, you will never see him again. And soon, he will be nothing to you. You will sense something is lost, but never understanding what it is. Instead, tomorrow night this time, you will start doing to me everything you did to that demon. It won’t satisfy you. You will loathe me more than you do now, but you won’t stop. Meanwhile, because I conquered him, I will remember everything. It will do me no good. If I ever try to explain what you have endured, you will think I’m psychotic.”
One of Father Mark’s hands seized Father Sebastian’s throat.
“This is the only way I will ever touch you,” he hissed.
It was impossible for Father Sebastian to pry the fingers from his neck no matter how fiercely he clawed them, just as he had failed to buck Jeremiel from his body moments ago.
“First thing in the morning I’m insisting the bishop transfer me out of this hell hole,” Father Mark said, finally releasing his grip,
Father Mark stormed out as Father Sebastian coughed and caught his breath. The announcement did not worry him. He knew Father Mark would forget the plan when the time came for him to place the call. The priest was more preoccupied with the welts on his throat he examined in his medicine cabinet mirror. They would ripen into bruises overnight. His Roman collar would hide them the next day, but what would he tell Father Mark tomorrow night when, as Father Sebastian foretold, the new priest inevitably would unbutton Father Sebastian’s cleric shirt, remove the collar, and initiate their carnal escapades. The black and blue striations would be revealed. They would disconcert Father Mark who would have no idea he was the perpetrator.
Father Sebastian would fabricate an explanation. The crazed intruder had broken in again, strangled Father Sebastian, but fled before murdering him. Father Mark would remember there once had been an intruder and recall Father Sebastian’s accusations, even though by that time he would have forgiven him. More importantly, Father Mark would again have no idea the intruder was his beloved Jeremiel, now forever lost in the fissures of his thoughts. He would not question Father Sebastian’s story, but in his desperation, the new priest would merely kiss each vestige of pain blossoming on his throat, and so begin their affair.