There was one memory in particular from Jared’s teenage years that formed the basis of his feeling toward nuns. Jared’s first semester in high school was spent at the all-boys St. Leonard’s Catholic Academy. (The irony that Leonard was the patron saint of prisoners was not lost on the students. Their sports teams, officially called the Scarlet Knights, were more commonly known as the Convicts.) Jared hated every minute of it. He hated the uniforms. He hated the religious instruction. He hated the complete and total lack of girls. But most of all, he hated Sister Louisa.
Most of the nuns in the school were caring and well-educated, if a bit dowdy, teachers. Sister Louisa was another story and, like Sister Benedict, a throwback to another era. It wasn’t uncommon for the faculty at St. Leonard’s to use harsh tactics to ensure discipline, the punishment usually taking the form of a yardstick applied with medium force to the transgressing student’s knuckles. But Sister Louisa took it a step farther and a step too far.
Beyond the usual litany of high school crimes—talking or chewing gum in class, failure to do your homework, tardiness—Sister Louisa punished independent thought; she did not like students to ask questions. This was an approach that most schools would consider anathema to teaching history.
When one of Jared’s classmates asked why the Founding Fathers didn’t abolish slavery at the time of the Revolution, Sister Louisa’s answer confounded the entire class.
“Because,” she said, “slavery wasn’t a sin until much later.”
There was a momentary pause, which the Sister quickly filled by going on to the next point in the lesson plan.
“But, Sister Louisa,” another boy interrupted, “how can that be true? How can something be okay one day and a sin the next? Didn’t they know it was wrong?”
When the boy saw the rage in Sister Louisa’s eyes, he pleaded for mercy, but it was too late. She advanced on him with violence and relish, like Hannibal Lecter. Her yardstick missed the boy’s knuckles and caught the side of his face. She would later claim it was an accident, but every student in fourth-period American Studies knew better.
Even though Sister Louisa was summarily dismissed from her post over the incident, Jared begged his parents to let him transfer to public school after Christmas. They complied.
It was this memory that Glio was examining and reexamining as he prepared for his trip to the outside world.
He started slowly, moving down the nerve endings in Jared’s extremities, thinking he would start by wiggling Jared’s toes and tapping Jared’s fingers. He stretched himself to the full limit of his being, found the contact points, and … and …
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Nothing.
Something was wrong.
Glio tried the same with Jared’s other senses. There was no taste. There was no smell. There was no sound. He tried the eyes, but they were shut, and no manner of poking or prodding of Jared’s oculomotor nerve would make his eyelids open.
Glio retreated to the center of the temporal lobe to ponder his predicament. Jared’s brain was still functioning, but barely. As he examined the situation more closely, Glio saw that the medulla oblongata was having trouble communicating with Jared’s lungs, which meant less oxygen was getting to Jared’s blood, which meant less useful blood was getting to Jared’s brain. It was, he knew, the beginning of an irrevocable downward spiral.
Desperate to complete his journey and become Jared, Glio tried to seize total control of Jared’s brain, to force his host back to a state of corporeal animation. He used every weapon in his arsenal, massaging, pounding, electrifying neurons, but it was no use. Though not yet technically dead, Jared Stone was gone.
Glio knew from Jared’s memories what people thought of cancer, what they thought of tumors, what they thought of him. He knew that they couldn’t comprehend the reason for his existence, and he knew that he and those like him were among the most reviled things on Earth. But until that moment, Glio believed with all his metaphorical heart that he existed as a caterpillar, waiting to emerge from his cocoon as something beautiful and new, as Jared. Only now, at the end, did Glio see the tragedy of his life, of all life.
And for the first time, Glio felt sorry. Truly, and horribly, sorry. Maybe if he had become Jared it would have all been okay, but now that he was confronted with the truth, he understood what every tumor comes to understand:
Life—his life, Jared’s life—has no meaning intrinsic to the life itself. It just is. Life, he now saw, is only what you make of it. And even though he knew it was through no fault of his own, Glio had spent his life as a thief and a murderer. The realization was overwhelming.
Glio howled in agony as he retreated into himself.
***
“Mr. Stone?” Sister Benedict gently shook Jared’s shoulder. There was no response. “Mr. Stone?” she said again, shaking a little harder. “Time to wake up. Time for breakfast.” Again, there was no response.
One of the Sister’s young novices, Sister Nadine, was attending to Jared with Sister Benedict. “Go, child,” Sister Benedict said to her, “find the doctor.”
After the young girl left the room, Sister Benedict got down on her knees and prayed.