Down to the Valley

The light down Hannah’s hall was off.

The amazing thing about Holly Grove is that all of the lights are motion sensitive, so when there is no hall activity for a certain period of time, the lights go off to save electricity. No one had been down Hannah’s hallway for what was probably ten minutes.

Sunday morning has fallen into a routine that never varies. Hannah wears the same outfit, and I wear one of two variations of the same outfit, and we meet in the corridor connecting our two hallways at exactly 10.00, so we can walk to Saint Bridgid’s together. This morning, I had been running late, and it was 10.05 when I stepped out of my room and realised that Hannah was not waiting for me, as she usually was. Had she overslept?

Frowning, I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and started to text her. Just as I was about to hit Send, I heard a door creaking, and the lights in her hallway switched on.

“I have a cold,” she said by way of greeting. Her face was paler than usual, and she looked tired; I wondered if our little dinner party last night had kept her up late. I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask. Besides, I reasoned, Hannah’s been feeling a cold coming on for a few days now; she would have tried to go to bed early. All the same, it wasn’t such a big deal. Hannah has colds all the time, and colds tended to make one irritable, and tired, and pale.

It had rained that night, and the world outside was still damp, the air full of a lingering warmth. “It’s so nice out!” I cried, throwing my arms out and spinning in a circle.

Hannah laughed at me. I shook my head, and pointed up at the sky, which had no traces of rain left in it. The sky was a beautiful shade of summer blue, and the clouds were white and perfect. “See?” I said, “The sky looks beautiful. None of those rainy grays today.”

“Yeah,” Hannah mused, lost in her own thoughts. I entertained her by talking about my high school’s homecoming, which was last night, and plotting out where we would go shopping, making a mental list of things that we needed for the coming week.

Inside Saint Bridgid’s, a guitar was playing, with faint traces of a flute following behind. The chorus was rehearsing. Hannah grinned. “They’re actually going to play music this week!” she cried, “And it’s a song I know!”

The church started to fill up, and soon the chorus members filed out to the front of the church. Last week’s priest, the tall one with the accent difficult for me to understand, came in, and the church erupted into song. I sang along under my breath.

Saint Bridgid’s has an intricate wood structure overhead, with slim beams supporting each other, which I like to look at. The wood gleams in the artificial light in a way that the bricked walls do not, and I often imagine Jesus as the carpenter he would have been when Joseph was alive, working on something as beautiful and intricate as this. When I’m not staring off into space, I look at the cross above the altar, which is a small white one that I find simplistic, especially compared to the altar at my parish back home, or the Felician Motherhouse’s in Livonia. The cross is less like a cross than a shamrock-cross, with a dark, mossy green colouring to it.

I spent a lot of time staring at the cross today, while the lector was reading. He was an old, old man, with a voice that used to be strong but was now weak, and it was hard to understand him, too hard for me to try to listen. I would try to pick up the string of his words, but I would lose him in the midst of his words, tripping over a pronunciation, and by the time I untangled the thread he had wound on, and on, and was finished. So I stared up at the cross, trying to make out the corpse of our Christ, but could see nothing but mossy green. This itched, somewhere I could not reach, but I pushed the feeling away and tried to pay attention to the priest as he did the readings and then began the homily.

The homily was not much better than the lecturer’s words, not because I could not understand, but because I did not want to understand. “Jesus references the word ‘Hell’ three times in today’s scripture,” the priest told us solemnly, looking out over his congregation, “but it is not what you or I would think of as hell. The word ‘hell’ that He uses is a translation of the Hebrew word—” and here I whispered it to myself along with the priest--, “Gehenna. And the Gehenna that He spoke of is not the spiritual place you and I think it to be; it was, very much, a real, physical location.”

My skin started to prickle again, and I couldn’t get it to stop.

“Gehenna means ‘The Valley of Hinnom,’ and it was a place where the old gods had reigned. It had been a place of evil, a place of corruption—a place of human sacrifice.”

I closed my eyes, but found there only images of the dead, of the crumpled white body of an unidentified man at the Ulster Museum, and of his female counterpart in the next room, the black-skinned mummy, her white teeth peeping out over her lips. I remembered the stories of the Aztecs standing at Tenochtitlan, their priests painted black and red and blue, feathers in their black hair, digging into a prisoner’s ribcage and pulling out a steal-beating heart.

“The Jews knew this, and they remembered it, so it was valueless land. And as Jerusalem grew into the city it was at the time of Jesus, Hinnom had become the rubbish dump. But it was not a rubbish dump like ours, black bin, green bin, blue bin, everything in its proper place. Everything was thrown into the waste; dead animals, even unclaimed human bodies. Insects and gnats flew in the air, and there would be, as there often are in such places, fires that never went out, but burned black smoke out into the sky.

“So when Jesus spoke of Gehenna, He was speaking of the Valley of Hinnom. What He was saying was not that sinners would go to the world we think of as Hell today, of fire and brimstone, but that we would go to a forsaken, dead place, and there we would stand, thoroughly alone.”

I closed my eyes, and forced myself to think of something else, something different. I told myself God wouldn’t mind if I stopped listening—I had studied the Bible verse, where Jesus tells His followers to cut off their hand, or foot, or gouge out their eye if it leads them to sin, and I knew the discussions that have come from it; I knew already of Origin, who castrated himself to follow Jesus’ words, and later regretted his rash action, and renounced those who would take the Bible so literally. I slipped out of the service, disappearing into my own thoughts, almost missing completely the priest consecrating the bread and the wine, of our standard reply, “Blessed be God forever,” following my mind to safer places.

It was Hannah who brought me back.

I was kneeling, staring off into space, about where the Tabernacle rests, when out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, and the whispering of a winter jacket. I turned, and saw Hannah slipping sideways, falling, her eyes still open blankly.

“Hannah,” I gasped, reaching out for her, thinking to grab her, but she had already fallen, right onto the shoes of the man sitting next to her.

Immediately the woman next to me stepped over me and knelt over me; she may have said, “I’m a nurse,” or perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps that was only what I expected her to say. That’s what one says, isn’t it, when they go to someone lying on the ground?

Get her off of the ground, I wanted to say. Everyone around us was standing, and two men had also come to see what had happened to the girl who had slipped so quietly to the floor. I’m her friend, is she all right? Is she all right?

I peered over the woman’s shoulder. Hannah’s face had gone terribly pale, and her eyes were just open, but her eyes were black and empty. She couldn’t see anything.

Oh, God, I thought; I should be praying, but I don’t know what to pray. I can’t think of anything just now—Oh, God, what do I pray, what do I do? What do I say to You?

Her eyes closed again, and the men and the woman conferred, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Is she all right? Is she all right? We didn’t have any doctors, or know any, I didn’t even know where the nearest hospital was—we were American exchange students, she’d just had a cold, she hadn’t told me she was feeling poorly.

I wanted my Rosary, but was afraid of the disturbance that would cause. Her eyes were open now, still black and empty and sightless.

What was I going to tell her mother?

Hail Mary, I tried, Our Father, but none of the words would follow after. The prayers fell flat in my mind.

“Does anyone have any sweets?” one of the men asked. He was white, maybe fifty at most. The other was younger, thirty, of Asian descent.

Hannah finally moved her head, and opened her eyes, and this time her eyes were hazel, and I felt she was seeing, and registering what she saw. “Let’s get her up,” the woman said, and slowly they got her up, and then escorted her out of the chapel, into the little atrium in front of it. I followed, grabbing our jackets and purses.

Someone got water, and the Asian man handed it to her, along with a little packet of pig-shaped gummies. The white man appeared again, with two kit-kats, and made jokes that made us smile. Hannah was still pale, and she drank her water slowly, the kit-kats just as slowly.

“Do you feel better?” the man asked.

Hannah nodded.

“Where do you live? Where’s your mother and father?”

“They’re not here,” Hannah said, “We’re from Elms Village, we’re Queen’s students.”

“Well, you can’t walk back, that’s for certain. I’ll get my mother, and we’ll drive you back. Ehm—are you two together?” he looked at me for the first time.

I nodded. “We’re friends.”

He went back into the church, and I looked at Hannah. “Do you feel all right?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’m feeling better.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m going to miss the Eucharist,” she said, slowly.

“Do you want me to get it for you? I could try. I don’t know if they’ll just give it to me, if all I have is my hands, but it’s worth a short.”

Hannah held up the kit-kat wrapper. “I’ve eaten.”

I shrugged. “You tell me what you want.”

“I can’t believe I had to faint before the Eucharist.”

“I’m sure God will excuse you. You did faint.”

“You should get into line,” Hannah said, but I didn’t want to leave her.

Mass was over shortly. The priest came out, in a green just lighter than the hideous mossy green cross. I wondered if he would come over to us, and say, “I saw what happened, are you all right?” but he barely glanced at us.

Raymond—that was the man’s name—came back over with his mum, and they led us to their car, and drove us back to Elms. Elms is only a five minute walk, but he dropped us off, and cautioned Hannah to sleep, and rest easy, and eat.

So we sat in the common room, and we watched The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Big Bang Theory all afternoon, and I shopped for both of us and made Hannah chicken soup for lunch and some Wellness Tea. It’ll be dinnertime soon, but I’m not quite hungry yet, even though it’s 7.00 p.m. here. It’s been—an Alfred Hitchcock sort of day, I suppose, one that twists your mind and your stomach.

When Frances suggested I name this blog Scandal in Belfast, I really didn’t think we would have much to create scandal about. But as the days pass, I realise that two Americans abroad can get into a lot of trouble, if they have the mind to do so. We’re already known by the Irish in our building as the “Quirky Americans,” because no one can predict what we’ll do or say next. I like being considered “quirky,” and I actually like not knowing what tomorrow will bring. At the same time, these scares are shaving years off of my life.

I wonder what trouble we’ll get into tomorrow…?