Chapter 17 Section 8

At dawn, the old nun woke up, feeling that every joint in her body was aching.She has maintained the habit since she became a priesthood volunteer: getting up at dawn to pray on her knees on the hard floor.First, she lifts the shade, and outside is God's creation, from tiny green apples to contagious disease.Then she knelt down in a white nightgown.The nightgown had been wrinkled and stiff from countless washes and the scum of the spinner.Sister Irma Edgar's frail body was pale with the world, as if it had been chalked.Both hands are covered with spots and blue veins are raised.Hair cropped short, flaxen gray.Those eyes that once made many young men and women peep in their dreams still glow blue.

She made the sign of the sign of the cross with her hand and whispered the words, Amen, in a harmonious voice.It's an ancient word whose etymology really goes back to ancient Greek and Hebrew.This is a phrase most familiar to ordinary prayers, and if you say it, you will enjoy the right to immunity for three years.If you put your hand in holy water first, and then make the cross on your body, you are entitled to seven years of immunity. Prayer is a practical strategy for gaining a secular advantage in the capital markets of sin and forgiveness. She recited the morning prayer, stood up, walked to the sink, and repeatedly scrubbed her hands with rough brown soap.If the soap is not clean, how can the hands be clean?Throughout her life, the question lingered.But if you use bleach to clean your soap, what do you use to clean the bleach bottle?If you use scouring powder to clean the bleach bottle, how do you clean the box that holds the scouring powder?Germs have personalities, and different items contain all kinds of hidden threats.These questions have been lingering in her mind.

An hour later, wearing a veil and the traditional attire of a nun, she boarded a black van and took the passenger seat.The van left the school zone and headed south, passing a horrific stretch of concrete highway and entering deserted streets of nearly burned-out buildings and souls without owners.The young nun driving the car was named Grace Fay and was dressed in secular clothes.In this monastery, all the nuns wear modest tops and skirts, with the exception of Sister Edgar.She was chartered by the Order to wear obscurely-named traditional clothing—the turban, the belt of the skirt, the sundress and the shirt.She knew that someone had turned up the old accounts of her brandishing big rosary beads and smacking students in the mouth with iron crosses.Back then, things were simpler than they are now.There were many layers of clothes in those days, but life was very simple.Edgar, however, stopped physically punishing students years ago.At that time, she was not too old and could still teach, but the people living nearby had changed, and the skin color of the students became darker.At that time, the anger with a sense of justice had left her soul.How could she hit a child of a different color than hers?

"This wreck needs some work," Grace said. "Do you hear any noise?" "Ask Ismail to take a look." "Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka." "He's an expert." "I can do it myself, I just don't have the tools." "I heard no noise at all," said Edgar. "Ka-ka-ka-ka? Do you hear that?" "Perhaps, my ears will be deaf." "I'll be deaf first, Sister." "Look, there's another angel on the wall." The two women looked around.There are ruins here and there, piled with discarded objects accumulated over the years-household garbage, construction debris, damaged car bodies, rusted car parts.Weeds and small trees grew among the dumped discarded items.Packs of dingoes, occasional hawks and owls.Municipal workers come here regularly to clean up the site.They stood next to the giant land-leveling machines—backhoe loaders and bulldozers clinging to yellow dirt—like infantrymen, wary and fearful in the face of rumbling tanks.But they were gone in no time, and always left behind half-dug dirt pits, discarded equipment, styrofoam cups, and the remains of pepperoni scones.These things entered the sight of the two nuns one by one.Here, pests swarm, plumbing fittings and asbestos-cement slabs fill pits, and old tires pile up in hills covered with deep-rooted vines.As the sun was setting, gunshots were heard from the parapet of the destroyed building.Two nuns sat in the van, looking around.In the distance stands a lone building.It was an abandoned tenement house, one wall was exposed, and the other building that used to be adjoining was gone.That wall is where Ismail Muñoz and his graffiti crew work.Whenever a child dies in a nearby community, they paint an angel with a spray gun to express their memory of the deceased.Angel patterns, some in blue and some in pink, cover almost half of the walls.Below each angel is written the name and age of the child who died, and sometimes there are commemorative texts about the cause of death and family members.The passenger car approached slowly, and Edgar saw that the causes of death were tuberculosis, AIDS, beatings, drive-by shootings, measles, asthma, abandonment of newborns, and abandonment in large garbage trucks, in cars, in Rainy night in Gladberg.

Those who live in the area call it the Spirit Wall, partly because of the content of the graffiti and partly because of the general feeling of exclusion.It is a hidden place, free from the social system. "I wish they'd stopped painting angels," Grace said. "The paintings are just awful. The church was built in the 14th century, that's where the angels are. This wall promotes what we are Stuff that has to work hard to change. Ismail should emphasize the positive things like, the houses in the town, the community gardens with flowers and grass. Look, walk around the corner and you'll see people going to work, to school Ordinary people, seeing shops and churches."

"Giant Strength Baptist Church." "What does the name matter? As long as it is a church. There are many churches in this area, and the congregation is decent working class. Ismail wants to have an art wall. These are the people he should praise. Be positive." Edgar snickered.Here, she has a sense of belonging because of the dramatic scenes displayed by these angel images, the terrible death expressed by these angels, and the death faced by the graffiti painter in the process of creation.There is no fire escape and no windows on this memorial wall. The painter must fix one end of the rope to the roof and the other end to himself, and then descend around the rope.They had to work on makeshift scaffolding when the parts to be painted were low.This wall is accompanied by those graffiti painters who died. When Ismail said this, he smiled sadly.

"Also, he painted girls in pink and boys in sky blue. It made me feel uncomfortable," Grace said. They parked their cars in the friary to load food distributions for the poor.The friary was in an old brick house flanked by tenements for board and lodging.Three monks in gray robes and girdles bustle in the vestibule, preparing the day's goods.Grace, Edgar and Brother Mike worked together to move some plastic bags to the car.Mike, a former firefighter, sported a handsome beard and braided ponytail.Seen from the front and from behind, he was a completely different person.When the two nuns arrived, he offered to guide them and play a protective role.However, Edgar immediately declined.She felt that her traditional attire and veil were enough to keep her safe.Outside of the South Bronx, people meeting her might have thought she was an oddity from a bygone era.However, she is a very natural character in this ruin, as is she and these robed monks.To deal with rats and plague, what kind of role is more suitable than them?

Edgar was pleased to see these monks in the street.They visit the disabled, shelter the homeless, and collect food for the hungry.Few men remained in this place, and these monks played an important role.Groups of teenagers roamed the nearby streets, along with armed drug dealers.She didn't know where the others had gone.The men lived with their families after their second or third marriage, hid in cramped houses, slept in refrigerator boxes under the highway, and lay on the grounds of Hart Island. Among the cemeteries. "I'm counting the species of plants," said Brother Mac. "I've got a book to take there."

Grace said, "You just stay out, okay?" "Do people there know me?" "Who knows you? The dogs know you? There's an abandoned dog with rabies, Mike." "I'm a Franciscan, understand? Even a bird would land on my forefinger." "Stay outside," she told him. "There was a girl I saw a lot, maybe twelve years old. I tried to talk to her, but she ran away. I have a feeling she lives in the ruins. Let's go there and ask." "Okay," Grace said. After the goods were loaded, they drove back to the Spirit Wall, finished what Ismail had to do, picked up several members of his staff, and asked them to help distribute the food.Ismail had several groups of people looking for abandoned cars. They patrolled the various boroughs, paying special attention to the quiet streets under the bridge and viaduct.Two nuns acted as his representatives, working in the North Bronx.They provided him with lists detailing the locations of abandoned cars along the Bronx River.It's a prime place to dump vehicles—stolen cars, stolen rides, dismantled cars, cars with stolen gas, cars for stray dogs, you name it.Ismail sent his crew, driving a small flatbed truck with a winch, to find the body and other intact parts.On the cockpit, floor panels and fenders of their car were graffiti paintings of souls in hell.Abandoned cars are transported here, priced by Ismail after acceptance, and then sent to the scrap iron processing plant on the edge of Brooklyn.Sometimes, there are as many as forty or fifty abandoned cars piled up in this place, which is enough to open a museum or a waste sculpture park.Some cars were battered and riddled with bullets, others had no bonnets, others contained bodies wrapped in awnings, and others swarmed with rats in glove boxes.

Ismail's payment to the two nuns was sent to the friary to buy food. As the van approached the building, Edgar groped around his waist for the latex gloves tucked into his belt. Grace parked her car and there were no other vehicles nearby that could move.She took out the steel lock covered with polyethylene film, put it on the steering wheel, and inserted the iron rod into the lock sleeve.At the same time, Edgar put on the gloves forcefully, feeling conflicted in his heart and feeling the conflict.Yes, safety, from a scientific point of view, wearing gloves can prevent threats posed by organic matter.But it was also, in a scandalous way, complicit with something she barely understood.Those things include power in the world, and institutions that replace religion with bigotry.These synthetic gloves are cold, filled with fear, doubt and irrational thoughts.Plus, she's masculine, like she's put on ten layers of condoms—yes, safe, and maybe a little confused.However, latex gloves are necessary to do such a thing, to avoid contact with viruses hidden in blood or pus, to avoid contact with very small parasites wrapped in the protein membrane of Soviet socialism.

The two nuns got out of the car and walked towards the building. Illegal residents occupied several floors, and it was unnecessary for Edgar to visit them or find out what their occupations were.They form a destitute community with no heat, no lights, and no running water.They are a nuclear family of toys and pets.The scavengers wandered around at night in sneakers taken off the feet of the dead.She knew their identities by assimilating and digesting the news that filled the streets.Some of them collect junk, some recycle cans, and some hold paper cups and walk through the subway cars.There are women basking on rooftops when the weather is nice, and there are men who, apparently indulged in wanton and dangerous behavior, display a decadent indifference.And of course there were the gods, and she did know for a fact that there was a group of people claiming to have god-given powers who jumped on the top floors of buildings, mumbled, and prayed to heal people's knife wounds. Ismail's office is on the third floor, and the two nuns walked up quickly.From time to time Grace turned her head to look at the elderly nun behind her—it was obviously unnecessary to do so.Edgar felt pain in every moving part of her body, but kept up the speed, her traditional nun's attire rustling in the stairwell. "There are needles on the landing," Grace warned. Beware of needles, avoid needles, these are neat tools used by self-destructive people.Grace couldn't understand why addicts didn't use clean needles.She was furious and felt puzzled.But Edgar thought of the temptation that might bring great danger, of the damage that what looked like a dragonfly's tail could do.If a man knows himself to be useless, only a gamble with death can gratify his vanity. Grace reached out and knocked on the door. "Don't get too close to him," Edgar said. "Who?" "Ismail." "why?" "He's sick." "I saw him three days ago. I'm here, you're not. How do you know he's sick?" "I can feel it." "He's fine, he's doing well," Grace said. "I feel it, some days." "What do you feel?" "AIDS." Grace watched old Edgar carefully, first at the latex gloves the old nun was wearing, then at her face—serious, with glowing eyes.She observed and thought, but said nothing. A child unlocked the door—bolt, deadbolt, steel handle. Standing barefoot on the dusty floor, wearing a pair of worn yellow satin chinos and smoking a large cigar, Ismail looked like an islander basking in carefree bliss. "Hello, what can I bring you?" It seemed to Edgar that, despite his well-informed appearance, he was actually quite young, perhaps only about thirty-five.He has a sparse beard, and if he didn't have rotten teeth in his mouth, his smile would definitely be cuter.Some of his team members sat on found couches or makeshift chairs, smoking and reading comic strips.They were too young for one nun and too big for another.She knew in her heart that he had AIDS. Grace handed him a list of abandoned vehicles they had found in the past two days, including details such as time, location, model, and condition. "You guys are doing a great job. We really like it, we're getting bigger now," Ismail said. Edgar, of course, kept him at a distance.She scanned the group, seven men and four women.Those who engage in graffiti painting are uneducated and petty theft.They spoke English so irregularly, limply, with a lisp, using the wrong suffixes, that she wished to add a clear G to the pronouns they used. "I'm not going to pay you guys today, okay? I have a project in my hand right now and I need funding." "What is it?" Grace asked. Retrovirus in the blood, acronym in the air.Edgar knew what the letters meant: AZidoThymidine (Azidothymidine), Human Immunodeficiency (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (National Security Council).Yes, the KGB is part of this spreading cluster, and this embryonic reality has to be distilled and initialized before it can be seen. "I'm working on plans to have heat and electricity here, and a private cable TV to watch New York Knicks games." Here, in the Wall area, many people believe that the government — the American government — is spreading the virus.Edgar knew in his heart that the KGB was behind this misleading information.The KGB is also responsible for the disease itself, a product of germ warfare.They manufacture the germ and then spread it through a network of hired agents. She had stopped saying these things to Grace.Grace rolls her eyes up when she hears these things, like something out of a science fiction novel. Edgar cast his eyes out the window and saw someone walking among the poplar and ailanthus bushes, which was the most lush area of ​​the ruins.A girl in a baggy sweatshirt and striped trousers is scrounging through the undergrowth, probably looking for something to eat and wear.Edgar saw that the boy was lanky, showing a certain intelligence of wild animals, and there was a certainty in his gestures and movements.She looked sleep-deprived, yet alert, unwashed, yet somehow clean-faced, hungry, and quick.There was something about her that fascinated the nun—a quality of fascination, something approving and life-sustaining. Edgar gestures to Grace as the girl plunges into a maze of scrap cars.Grace went to the window, and the girl's figure flashed again, then disappeared into the ruins beside the low wall of the old firehouse. "Who's that girl?" Grace asked. "Hiding in the ruins, so that no one can see it?" Ismail glanced at his men, and one of them screamed.It was a small young man, wearing paint-stained jeans, with dark skin and a naked upper body. "Esmeralda. No one knows where her mother is." Grace asked, "Can you find that girl and tell Brother Mike?" "That girl runs fast." The others murmured their agreement. "That girl is a fast runner." Several heads popped from the back of the comic book. "Why did her mother leave?" "She was on drugs, you know, people like that can do anything." These streets are full of kids like this, homeless and without schools.Edgar would have liked to take them into a room with a blackboard and load their little brains with rules of spelling and punctuation.She wanted to fill them in with what was in the Baltimore City Catechism Handbook and then have them fill in the blanks, marking true or false, yes or no. "Maybe, her mother will come back," Ismail said. "Her heart is tormented by remorse. In fact, these children may be better off without their parents. Parents will endanger their safety." "Go get her," Grace told Ismail's gang. "She's too young to live on her own. Brother Mac says she's only twelve." "Twelve is not too young," said Ismail. "Among my best graffiti makers, there is a man with a wild style. He is only eleven or twelve years old. His name is Hua Nuo." .I put a rope on him and let him go down and spray very intricate letters." Edgar knew that Ismail had worked as a graffiti painter in his early years and was once a legend in spray painting.About twenty years ago, he became famous as Moonman 157.He told Edgar that subway cars all over the city had his marks on them, and his signature appeared on every subway line.Edgar believed that the carriage was where he began to have sex with the men.He was a teenager then, and he was in those tunnels.She heard this meaning from his words. "When can we get the money?" Grace asked. Ismail stood there coughing, and Edgar backed away to the opposite wall.She knew that she should treat this person with more compassion.However, she is not sentimental in the face of the fatal disease.Death is just an extended form of Ash Wednesday.She hopes that, when she comes to the end of her life, her own five senses feel intact.She could reach out and grasp death, come to know it at last, and allow herself to accept that mysterious process, that which others mistakenly regard as grotesque and unspeakable. People who live in the Wall area like to say that when hell is full, the dead will walk the streets. This is happening, a little earlier than they expected. "Next time I'll have some money," Ismail said. "Actually, these cars don't make money. The margins are thin. I'm looking for opportunities to expand overseas. If you hear that my scrap metal is exported to the North North Korea, don't be surprised." Grace joked about it.However, Edgar would not take such things lightly.She is a nun who experienced the cold war period. She once pasted the anti-radiation film produced by Renault on the wall of her room as a protective measure against possible radioactive dust.That kind of falling dust is very penetrating, and it seems to be pervasive.That's not to say she doesn't think war isn't terrible.Even now, she often imagined the flash of the atomic bomb, the giant letters USSR (Soviet Union) falling in the flash, like statues of the saint Cyril, falling one by one. They went downstairs together and walked to the passenger car, two nuns and five teenagers.They set off to distribute food, starting with the poorest on the list, just outside the Spirit Wall. They took the elevator and then entered the narrow corridor.In every room lived the unknown.The humblest solitary live there, in conditions no one can imagine.According to Sister Grace, this fact proves that God is creative. They talk to two blind women.They live together and share a guide dog. They see a man with epilepsy. They saw sick children, and they saw oxygen cylinders placed on the bedside of sick children. They saw a woman in a wheelchair wearing a T-shirt that read: NYC, FUCK.Grace said she would trade the food they gave her for the dirtiest heroin you could find on the street.Looking at the scene in front of them, they couldn't help burning with anger.Grace gritted her teeth, squinted her pale eyes, and handed the food to the men.A rift arose between them, and a confrontation developed between Sister Grace and the others.Even the woman in the wheelchair said she would not accept the food being handed out. They talk to a man who has cancer.The man leaned over to kiss Sister Edgar's latex-gloved palm, and she backed away quickly, heading for the door of the room. They saw five children in the care of a ten-year-old.The children were huddled together in one bed, with two infants in a crib next to it. They filed in and walked into a passage, and the two nuns separated, one behind the other in the procession.Edgar thought of unbaptized babies in the limbo of hell, of children living in half-hell, of aborted babies who were not yet fully formed, and thought of the splashed fetus forming a cosmic cloud floating on Saturn. in the halo.She also thinks of babies born with no immunity, of bubble children fed by computers, of babies born with drug addiction.She saw such babies often, some as little as three pounds, like little things in folk tales. They handed out the food, and Edgar barely said a word in the process.Grace speaks and counsels people.Edgar just stood there, using black and white seriousness to create an overall consistent atmosphere. They walked down the aisle, three boys and two girls and two nuns forming a whole, a single body with many moving parts, its back sunken from overwork.In the basement of a tenement apartment, they finished the handout.People there pay rent and live in tiny rooms partitioned off with plywood, in conditions worse than prison cells. They saw a whore.Her silicone breasts had leaks and rips, and one day they finally exploded, sending their polymers squirting out into the face of the man who was on top of her.Now, she is unemployed and lives in a cramped room the size of a children's playpen. They saw a man who had his own eye gouged out because it contained a five-pointed star, a symbol of a demon.Edgar learned in the course of talking to the man that he popped the eye out, then cut the tendon connecting the eyeball with a knife, then threw the eyeball into a communal toilet outside his cubicle, draining the water. washed away.She talked to him in English, and none of them could understand his language, but she could understand him. At the door of the building, Grace let everyone out of the car.At this time, a large bus pulled over and stopped.What is going on?Do you believe?It was a brightly colored tour bus with a message in the narrow space above the windshield: South Bronx Surreal Tours.Grace felt short of breath.About thirty Europeans, with cameras slung over their shoulders, moved hesitantly and stepped onto the sidewalk, seeing wooden shops and closed factories.Their eyes shift from the close-up to the mid-range, and they see the abandoned tenement building across the street. Almost in a rage, Grace stuck her head out of the van and yelled, "This isn't surrealism, it's real, real! The bus you're in is the surrealism, and you're the surrealism." !" A monk came on a bicycle that was falling apart, and the tourists watched him plod along.They heard Grace yelling and saw an old black man in a yellow beanie approaching.He was selling electric paper toy windmills with brightly colored weather vanes attached to sticks.Tourists saw the Ailanthus grove, the mountains of abandoned cars, and the six-story wall with streamers painted on top of the angel pattern. Grace yelled: "Brussels is surreal! Milan is surreal! It's real here! The Bronx is real!" A tourist bought a paper toy windmill and returned to the bus.Grace drove off, still muttering.In Europe, nuns wear a millinery hat shaped like a cantilevered beach house.That's surreal.Not far from the Spirit Wall, there was a traffic jam.The two nuns waited in the car and saw children walking home from school eating coconut popsicles.There are two tables on the sidewalk, one with free condoms and the other with free syringe needles. "Even if he's gay, it doesn't mean he has AIDS." Sister Edgar said nothing. "Well, AIDS is rampant here. However, Ismail is a smart man, be careful and pay attention to safety." Sister Edgar looked out the window. There was a commotion all around them, the limp honking of horns, the sirens of police cars, the deafening blaring of fire truck sirens. "Sister, I sometimes wonder how you've put up with all of this," Grace said, "you've gained some peace and tranquility and could have lived away from the big cities and done some pioneering work for the Order I wish I could sit in the rose garden with mysteries in hand and old Pepper curled up at my feet.” Old Pepper was the pet cat kept by the Abbess outside the city. "You can have a picnic by the pond." Edgar smiled wryly as the thing floated near her roof.She doesn't aspire to a life far away from the big city.Here, right here, in her soul's own home, she saw the real world.What about herself?She sees herself as a vulnerable child who must face the real fears of the streets in order to clear the shadow of destruction that lingers deep within her.Where else in the world could Ismael Muñoz fulfill her calling but that brave, crazy wall? At this time, Grace got out of the car, got out of the restraint of the seat belt, and ran on the street.The car door opened, and Edgar immediately understood what was going on.She turned and saw the girl, Esmeralda, running towards the Spirit Wall, half a block from Grace.Grace, wearing heavy shoes and a scruffy skirt, made her way through the car.She followed the girl around a street corner.The tourist bus was stuck in that position, and the tourists watched the two figures galloping.Edgar saw that the heads of those people turned in one direction at the same time, and the paper toy windmill on the window whirled. All the hustle and bustle gathered in the gloomy sky. She felt that she understood the tourists.They have labored to come here, not to visit museums, not to enjoy the sunset, but to see the ruins and bombed areas, and bring back memories of pain and war in their hearts.A block and a half away, ambulances roared to the scene.She saw workers billowing smoke, prying open subway grates.She felt that she should chant a quick prayer, an act of hope, and three years of absolution.Yet, she's just there watching and waiting.At this time, people's heads and torsos began to emerge from the ground, and those figures gradually became clear.Those people came to the ground, opened their mouths, and breathed desperately. A short circuit in the wires caused the subway fire. Edgar saw in the rearview mirror of the passenger car that some tourists got out of the car and moved slowly along the street, and some posed for pictures.Some schoolchildren approached, showing little interest in the people—they often heard gunshots outside their windows at night, and death alternated between the street and the TV.What she did know, though, was that an old woman who still ate fish on Fridays was starting to feel powerless, far inferior to Sister Grace in that regard.Grace is a fighter, a fighter for human worth; Edgar is basically a lowly FBI agent working to uphold the dignity of a set of laws and prohibitions. Edgar had the heart of a raven, small and stubborn. She heard the honking of police cars in the traffic jam and saw a hundred or so subway passengers emerge from the tunnel, accompanied by workers in glowing vests.He saw the group of tourists snapping the shutter, and he couldn't help but think back to his trip to Rome many years ago.She went there to study, to seek spiritual renewal.She dangled under the great vault, and searched the catacombs and the crypts of the churches.This was what she had in mind when she saw the passengers come out of the underground onto the street: she was standing in the underground chapel of a Franciscan church, her eyes completely drawn to the pile of skeletons, Confused by the behavior of the soldiers.Their flesh once adorned those metatarsals, femurs and skulls.In alcoves and caves, there are many skulls piled up.She remembered harboring a grudge, thinking that the dead would crawl out of the ground to lash out and beat the living as punishment for their crimes—and yes, death would triumph. But does she still believe it now? After a while, Grace moved slowly and returned to the driver's seat, feeling sullen in his heart and blushing on his face. "Nearly caught her. After we ran into the area with the most trees, I was disturbed, actually startled. I couldn't believe my eyes. I saw a real live bat. See The only flying mammal on Earth," she said, making ironic gestures with her fingers. "They're spinning out of big pits filled with red bags. Those bags are medical waste, laboratory waste." "I don't want to hear that." "And hundreds of rats, pale, with flat bellies and stiff bodies. They're like baseball cards, you flip them over." "The traffic is moving," Edgar said. “你想过这个问题没有，医生把病人的肢体锯下来以后，那些东西是怎么处理的？它们最后被运到灵墙这里。要么倾入一个大坑里掩埋，要么扔进垃圾焚化炉里烧掉。” “开车吧。” “埃斯梅拉尔达就躲在那些灌木丛和废车堆里。我觉得，她很可能住在车上。” “她不会出事儿的。” “她会出事儿的。” “她可以照料自己。” “迟早有一天。”格雷斯说。 “她行动敏捷，受到保佑，不会有事儿的。” 格雷斯看了她一眼，发动了汽车，又看了她一眼，听着发动机动了几下，没有说话。埃德加遇事从不持乐观态度。也许，正是这一点让格雷斯心里有些感到不安。 那天夜里，勉强睡了一阵之后，埃德加又看见了那些地铁乘客，其中有成年男子，育龄妇女。他们被人从烟熏火燎的隧道中救出来，在狭窄的通道中摸索前行，顺着升降梯到了街面上。在长着萤光色翅膀的没有面孔的天使的引导下，父亲和母亲失散之后重新相聚，抓着对方的衬衣，深情相拥。 几个星期之后，埃德加在去餐厅的路上取了一份《时代》周刊，看到上面有一张大幅彩色照片：一个白发女人坐在导演椅上，背景是美国空军轰炸机的饱经风霜的机翼。她认出了那个人，克拉拉·萨克斯，因为她能够辨识一切，因为有人低声告诉她人们的名字，因为她在修道院覆盖着尘土的走廊里，在散发着铅笔和作文本气味的学校库房里，感觉到信息引起的振动，因为她知道，在神父的香炉飘出的青烟中，浮动着某种隐晦的知识，因为她能够从陈旧地板发出的咯吱响声中，从衣服的气味中，从湿润的男士骆驼绒外套中，把握事物的轮廓，因为她将消息、谣传和灾难全都吸进了修女服装和面纱的极其清洁的棉花纤维中。 所有的联系保持完整。那个女人与当地的一个男人结了婚。那个男人是国际象棋教练，辅导埃德加原来教过的一个学生。那个男孩的脖子上系着歪斜的领带，名叫马修·阿洛伊修斯·谢，常常把手指头咬得显出粉红的肉色，是她教过的比较聪明的学生之一。 她懂得许多东西，其中包括国际象棋。她深谙斯拉夫人惯用的各种隐秘伎俩，了解那些圈套和策略。她知道，博比·菲施尔1972年大战鲍里斯·斯帕斯基时，把他牙齿中填补的材料全都取了出来——她完全理解那样的做法。这样，克格勃就无法向他的磨牙中的填补混合物发射电波，对他进行控制。 她把那本杂志放进保存在衣柜里的那些旧的影迷杂志上面——多年之前，她不再喜欢影星，不再阅读那些杂志了。 怀疑和非真实构成的信仰。那种信仰用放射性，用阿尔法粒子的力量，用构成它们的无所不知的系统，用无穷无尽的紧密联系，取代了上帝。 那天晚上，她在她房间的洗涤槽里，先用消毒剂清洗了钢丝棉块，然后用钢丝棉块擦洗了刷子，每一根鬃毛都不放过。不过，她没有用去污力更强的消毒剂来清洗最先使用的消毒剂。她没有那样做的原因在于，那种倒退是无限的。那种倒退是无限的，因为它被称为无限的。你可以看到，恐惧是如何散播，是如何超越事物的咄咄逼人的挤压，进入文字对自身产生作用的更高层面的空间的。 她清洗之后，开始祈祷。 她在清洗时就作了虔诚的简单祈祷。那种恳求被称为突然叫出的声音，携带的赦罪符是以天数——而不是以年数——来计算的。 她祈祷，冥想。 她上床以后，辗转反侧，想到了埃斯梅拉尔达。他们发现她好几次，但是没能抓住她，格雷斯、那些修道士还有伊斯梅尔手下的人都无功而返。现在，埃德加觉得，埃斯梅拉尔达的安全可能会出问题。 她以愉悦之心接受她接触的每一点知识，即便这样的知识带有不安因素也没有什么不妥。可是，她这次感觉到的不良预示让她深为震惊。她感觉到，灵墙那里有什么东西，有一种慢慢挪动、处于混乱状态的危险。它蜷伏在那里，那个小女孩常常沿着弯曲的小路，在汽车车身、抛弃的肢体之间穿行，在数英亩宽的垃圾场地上穿行。 仁慈的圣母，为我们祈祷吧。三百天。