SHORT STORY - The Revelation of Doubt

Someone had set the bird table off balance, propped as it was like a gallows pole against the brick wall of the courtyard.  The disrupted saucer had given up its water and a scattering of nuts and seeds were strewn around the wooden base.  Sister Anne guided the table back upright and fought hard to tame the flock of irritation that took flight through her body.

Despite her increasing age she still experienced these odd moments of febrile anger, indeed almost welcomed them for their potency, this electrolysis of the emotions.  Yet she knew such feelings were being aroused more and more frequently by events of less and less consequence.  She knew it had been the younger ones playing their infernal games again, badminton perhaps or frisbee, that she tolerated with an acidic reluctance to which the whims and liberties of youth always provided the litmus test. 

She scowled upwards at the sky above Tyburn Convent as it stiffened with the rigor mortis of impending rain.  The wind was whipping itself into excited pirouettes in anticipation of a storm, melting into the hum of the traffic from Bayswater Road.  Typically, the tense and vivid quality of the atmosphere before a storm put Sister Anne into a deep fug of melancholia and habitually she confined herself to the chapel to pray, hiding like a frightened little girl beneath a duvet.  But curiously she found herself under no compulsion to do so this day.

Instead she slowly ambled, at the same sedate and floating pace that took her everywhere these days, onto the garden, her habit brushing slightly through the grass which was coarse and balding due to the late summer’s heat.  She tottered around to gaze upon the high walls draped with a cowl of ivy, and the sturdy brick structure of the convent in which she had been living in contemplation for the last fifty years.  Over that period she had seen nuns come and go, find and lose their faith, had heard the tremor of the traffic increase as had the ebb and flow of airplanes that criss-crossed her tarpaulin of sky.

A couple of the newer nuns, barely in their postulancy stage, huddled together beneath the portico of the courtyard cautiously observing Sister Anne as she bimbled without apparent aim across the garden, perhaps scared that her gazing to the heavens was evidence of a long overdue lapse into senility.  Anne threw them a glance as though to disavow them of such suspicions.  To her they seemed like little more than schoolgirls, petty and frivolous, woefully sheltered from any experience of life and hence frequently distracted away from the trials of religious contemplation by games or content to merely giggle their way around the courtyard like a pair of chickens.

To them Sister Anne seemed cantankerous and miserly, a damp flannel wrung dry of any vitality or spirit by decades of largely self-inflicted subjugation to her faith.  She barely ever spoke, except in prayer, and appeared to them, when they passed her in the corridors of the cloister, as though she were being eroded away from the inside by some kind of grief; persevering with her devotion to the Catholic faith as though it were a prison sentence to be served with as much stern magnanimity as she could muster.

The fact that she had given almost her entire adult life to the Benedictine cause was something of a great comfort to Sister Anne, particularly as she had begun to approach her final years, and ailments that once seemed so cursory now increasingly dictated the course of her day.  Lately, she had begun to feel a curious and disconcerting sensation wrap itself around her like the guimpe around her neck, to the point now where it suffused her being with a terrible numbness.  This was the numbness of confusion and what she could only distinguish, to her horror, as being self-doubt.  A parasitical doubting that only seemed to draw nutriment and strength from her rejection of its presence.

Despite her late years, she had initially redoubled her contemplative routines, spending more hours in the chapel at night in solitary prayer, rereading the sacred texts with a more exacting and forensic eye than she had in decades.

Though she might have dismissed them as facile and silly, the younger nuns had the acute perception that youth at times endows, and would whisper to each other whenever they passed her, “there’s poor Sister Anne, she’s approaching death and questioning her faith”; they detected in this doyenne figure a deeply sublimated feud that could only be reconciled with her death and release from the psychological torments that afflicted her, the same way as certain animals discern danger from the atmospheric pressures around them.

Yet Sister Anne knew that as her mind and body began to fail her, what she had for so many years thought would serve as the core pillar of strength to which she could recline gracefully into death, now seemed to her ever more distorted and vague, what was once solid now seemed to be an emulsion of confusion, and to this she could only languish in fear.

As she surveyed the bulbous black sky, ripe with rain, she thought, as so often she had done in the past, to the 105 Catholics hung, drawn and quartered during the Reformation period on the Tyburn Tree Gallows.  Had they too, in the midst of unimaginable suffering, been faced with a moment of crisis, however fleeting?  A moment where the whole edifice of their devotion and conviction seemed to crumble away and disperse like salt on the breeze?

Their martyred souls seemed to undulate with rhythmic pulses through the ground on which she stood, seemed to saturate the wind that continued to rise and fall in the courtyard.  She closed her eyes and tried to feel anything of their suffering, of their strength that she might perhaps now draw upon as she approached the day when her own faith would be called up for reckoning.

Opening her eyes again she felt the warm breeze through her hair, felt the cool rigidity of the desert grass beneath her, and most reassuring of all, felt beneath the crook of her arm the slow and almost mechanical breathing in and out of the broad chest of her lover.  Together they stared up at the rupturing sky, painted in such contrast with the state of blissful calm that had settled like a mist over their bodies having just made love.  She thought it was almost as though the skies above were a visual echoing of their passion, and would soon subside into an overwhelming stillness, just as the post-orgasmic shivers now chased each other over her body.

“I love you”, she said to him, craning her neck swiftly to stare into his face, flushed with exertion but smiling broadly, as though he were encouraging the rain to fall and douse their sweating bodies.

“I love you too”, he replied in a way that she knew was genuinely felt but nonetheless tinged with distraction, for his mind began to accelerate over ideas and perceptions that he struggled to elucidate to her in words.  This was a reliable effect of the hashish that they had smoked that evening, as the twilight fell upon the Lebanese village to which they had trekked that day.  Anne, her tactile senses amplified, clenched and unclenched her toes in the fine sand, enjoying the myriad degrees of granular coarseness that sluiced between them.

David became suddenly enthused, propping himself up on his elbows and staring out into the starry horizon as though hoping to see a Bedouin caravan of tribesmen come wandering out of the desert sands.  “I’ve just realised something Anne, something that supports everything I’ve been thinking about – the alternative appearances of time, the nature of our consciousness, everything...”

Anne knew that his unusually animated nature was fuelled by the fact that earlier that day, as they set out from their previous village camp they had bumped into David’s university friend Jonathan and his girlfriend Susannah who were undertaking a similar expedition.  They hadn’t quite been able to believe this coincidence and good fortune - they had thought they were currently in Turkey and hadn’t been scheduled to rendezvous with them until Tripoli in a fortnight’s time.  A fortuitous change of travel plans with little time to communicate them had lead to this chance encounter.  Now, as David began to expound his latest rhapsodic train of thought, Anne glanced behind them at Jonathan and Susannah’s tent, the tarpaulin flapping silently in the developing wind.

“Do you remember, a few days ago in the market...in Beirut... I said to you didn’t I, that I thought I saw Jonathan haggling with a bazaar seller?  I had to do a genuine double-tale before realising it wasn’t actually him... I thought it must have been the heat playing tricks with my vision or something.  Do you not see how remarkable that is?  That I should think I saw them only a few days before we actually bump into each other out here in the wilderness?!”

“It must have been a premonition” Anne said.

“A premonition, yes.  Or maybe my unconscious mind was already well-aware that we were going to meet up like this.  Maybe that mistaken sighting was projecting my mind onto reality in a way that only now makes any sense.  Just like we’ve talked about before, what if time isn’t a linear progression such as we experience it consciously?  What if, like Eastern mythology says, time is a vast web that we can only see through one narrow portal, and only occasionally do we get snatched glimpses of transparency through into those other realms of time..?”

“You mean like déjà vu or something?” Anne was happy to toss these contributory ideas like kindling onto David’s steadily roaring fire of ideas.  He was sat up now, odd strands of his long hair glinting in the moon light, and a cosmos of sand particles loosely embedded in the skin of his back and shoulders.

“Precisely.  We have glimpses like that all the time but never really pay them much heed.  How many other chances do we get given on a day-to-day basis, to see the true nature of things, the true nature of time?”

“Maybe it’s happening right now..?”

“Most definitely.  Maybe the past, the future and the present are all here right now in each and every moment; everything that has and will ever happen all occurring in this vast gigantic instant moment of simultaneity.  Only we have to be mentally equipped to register it as a progression of moments along a scale of time.  Maybe only in times of real experience, where our minds are released, however temporarily, from the shackles of waking experience do we get salient clues as to the true nature of things, the true pattern that is shaping our lives.”

The enormous expanse of the Arabian sky, saturated with stars and almost concave in shape, such that it appeared to be almost revealing the very curvature of the earth, was no match for her love for David.  For he had liberated her from her strict religious upbringing in provincial England, and her upper-middle class missionary parents.  Together they were refugees on the run from social norms and expectations in search of some higher truth, a purer calling in life, however illusory and however ambitious.

It was his deranged rants such as these that she found especially endearing about him; the vaults to this thinking being unlocked by the curlicues of hashish smoke.  “What if it’s only at fractional moments of physicality that our psychology can decipher those hidden meanings to time, to truth, to life?  Psychosomatic frequencies that only at certain times are we ever tuned into.”

“Like what?”

“Like sex, obviously - the moment of orgasm being a moment of profound and ecstatic liberation, physically and mentally, from the strictures of our routine consciousness.  It might quickly subside but it’s there, if only we are able to grasp and hold onto it.  Violence as well... the act of violence is, whether perpetrator or victim, perhaps a moment of real transcendence.  Dreaming is obviously a prime example.  Our dreams allow our minds free reign over the landscape of our psychology, there are no barriers to the truth, we only ascribe surreality when we reflect on them from the comfort of our waking reality which we believe to be rational.

But I’m sure there must be others...times of extreme physical exertion perhaps, moments of sheer clarity, moments of wonder, religious experiences, out-of-body experiences.  These perhaps all serve to reveal gaps in the mental brickwork and through them we can glimpse the true nature of the universe.”

“I think I get it”, said Anne, responding in kind to David’s almost frenzied state, his chest heaving as he struggled to maintain the revelation to which he clearly believed himself witness.  “But who or what is using our waking reality to hide the truth from us.  Why the deception?”

“I’ve no idea... maybe all these moments are small clues offered to us by some higher deity of which we can have no real comprehension.  Some higher force is opening these brief windows to us and allowing the sunlight through, only if we fail to register or acknowledge them, they are shut as quickly as they are opened.  Maybe only a minority ever realise it, ever really grasp at this higher law and appreciate it manifesting itself in this way, through our physical impulses.  The majority go through life entirely unaware or maybe staring at the sunlight so fixedly that they end up blind to it.”

As David reached this point in his rant, Anne became aware of the bilious clouds overhead seeming to almost resemble a surging whirlpool as they sought to unleash a thunderstorm from the fathomless depths.

“Maybe that is the truth after all?  Our reality as we see it is just illusory, a series of clues that always go unacknowledged.  Coincidences and tricks of the mind are set in place like characters waiting in the wings of a stage play, awaiting the point at which they can take centre stage... only they never do... until suddenly your attention is fixed on them... I can see now...it all seems suddenly so clear to me... I can see the truth of it all... and if I’m wrong then LET GOD HIMSELF STRIKE ME DOWN....!”

As his last words rang out they became harmonised by the sudden cymbal-clashing of the clouds.  Anne began to realise that David’s whole body had stiffened, as though all his muscles had succumbed to cramping, he arched back in a seizure, his hair draping into the sand and his chin aimed into the air like an archer’s bow.  His body seemed to be shocked by a succession of violent spasms, as though he were rudely shaken by a pair of invisible hands, before he then collapsed against the ground and was still, with an expression that could only be registered as complete serenity.

As Anne recalled, then as now, the sky ceased its trembling and the rain fell at last.