After that, after he was caught, he was made to go to Father Gabriel’s office every night and take off his clothes, and the father would examine inside him for any contraband. And later, when things got worse, he would think back to that package of crackers: if only he hadn’t stolen them. If only he hadn’t made things so bad for himself.
His rages began after his evening examinations with Father Gabriel, which soon expanded to include midday ones with Brother Peter. He would have tantrums, throwing himself against the stone walls of the monastery and screaming as loudly as he could, knocking the back of his damaged ugly hand (which, six months later, still hurt sometimes, a deep, insistent pulsing) against the hard, mean corners of the wooden dinner tables, banging the back of his neck, his elbows, his cheeks—all the most painful, tender parts—against the side of his desk. He had them in the day and at night, he couldn’t control them, he would feel them move over him like a fog and let himself relax into them, his body and voice moving in ways that excited and repelled him, for as much as he hurt afterward, he knew it scared the brothers, that they feared his anger and noise and power. They hit him with whatever they could find, they started keeping a belt looped on a nail on the schoolroom wall, they took off their sandals and beat him for so long that the next day he couldn’t even sit, they called him a monster, they wished for his death, they told him they should have left him on the garbage bag. And he was grateful for this, too, for their help exhausting him, because he couldn’t lasso the beast himself and he needed their assistance to make it retreat, to make it walk backward into the cage until it freed itself again.
He started wetting his bed and was made to go visit the father more often, for more examinations, and the more examinations the father gave him, the more he wet the bed. The father began visiting him in his room at night, and so did Brother Peter, and later, Brother Matthew, and he got worse and worse: they made him sleep in his wet nightshirt, they made him wear it during the day. He knew how badly he stank, like urine and blood, and he would scream and rage and howl, interrupting lessons, pushing books off tables so that the brothers would have to start hitting him right away, the lesson abandoned. Sometimes he was hit hard enough so that he lost consciousness, which is what he began to crave: that blackness, where time passed and he wasn’t in it, where things were done to him but he didn’t know it.
Sometimes there were reasons behind his rages, although they were reasons known only to him. He felt so ceaselessly dirty, so soiled, as if inside he was a rotten building, like the condemned church he had been taken to see in one of his rare trips outside the monastery: the beams speckled with mold, the rafters splintered and holey with nests of termites, the triangles of white sky showing immodestly through the ruined rooftop. He had learned in a history lesson about leeches, and how many years ago they had been thought to siphon the unhealthy blood out of a person, sucking the disease foolishly and greedily into their fat wormy bodies, and he had spent his free hour—after classes but before chores—wading in the stream on the edge of the monastery’s property, searching for leeches of his own. And when he couldn’t find any, when he was told there weren’t any in that creek, he screamed and screamed until his voice deserted him, and even then he couldn’t stop, even when his throat felt like it was filling itself with hot blood.
Once he was in his room, and both Father Gabriel and Brother Peter were there, and he was trying not to shout, because he had learned that the quieter he was, the sooner it would end, and he thought he saw, passing outside the doorframe quick as a moth, Brother Luke, and had felt humiliated, although he didn’t know the word for humiliation then. And so the next day he had gone in his free time to Brother Luke’s garden and had snapped off every one of the daffodils’ heads, piling them at the door of Luke’s gardener’s shed, their fluted crowns pointing toward the sky like open beaks.
Later, alone again and moving through his chores, he had been regretful, and sorrow had made his arms heavy, and he had dropped the bucket of water he was lugging from one end of the room to the other, which made him toss himself to the ground and scream with frustration and remorse.
At dinner, he was unable to eat. He looked for Luke, wondering when and how he would be punished, and when he would have to apologize to the brother. But he wasn’t there. In his anxiety, he dropped the metal pitcher of milk, the cold white liquid splattering across the floor, and Brother Pavel, who was next to him, yanked him from the bench and pushed him onto the ground. “Clean it up,” Brother Pavel barked at him, throwing a dishrag at him. “But that’ll be all you’ll eat until Friday.” It was Wednesday. “Now go to your room.” He ran, before the brother changed his mind.