The Delusionist by Grant Buday

lay the secret of secrets, that God was Otto Preminger in a beret with a cigarette in a holder clenched between his teeth.
    Gilbert skidded to a halt. He turned to Cyril and stated solemnly, as though declaring a long-meditated decision to renounce the world and join a monastery, that he wanted to be a bird.
    Cyril shattered in laughter.
    Gilbert shoved the Bug in gear and drove on. “I am a bird.”
    Cyril spread his arms, the right one out the window feeling the wind, the left reaching into the back seat. They passed a stone church and Gilbert looped the block like a hawk banking to come in behind its prey. As they entered the familiar gloom, Gilbert said, “I’m leaving my soul to science.”
    Cyril envisioned lab-coated doctors dissecting the mist that was Gilbert’s soul.
    They each took an aisle, Gilbert traveling on down the left, Cyril the right, leaving the middle open to a black scarfed woman kneeling at the altar where candles burned on a tiered iron rack like a silent choir of small spirits. A stained glass crucifixion throbbed in the evening sunlight. The cool cement floor chilled Cyril’s bare feet. He envisioned Roman soldiers tramping the hard dry roads of Palestine. Opening his eyes, he saw Christ gazing at him from an alcove. One of Christ’s eyes flickered, as if winking at him, then it rose into the air—Christ’s eye was taking flight! Cyril staggered. Reaching for balance he grabbed the statue’s ankle, hollow plaster instead of solid concrete, and it toppled, grazing his shoulder and striking the cement floor. Christ’s head snapped off at the neck and rocked side to side and then was still, while the moth Cyril had mistaken for an eye flew off toward the candles.
    Cyril woke before dawn. He hadn’t been sleeping so much as awake and dreaming. Now he was shivering and thirsty. He drank from the tap and then went outside and stood listening to the idling machinery of the city. The eastern sky was turning apple green by the time he reached his mother’s. He entered the dark basement and did not turn on the light because he knew that his father was there waiting for him and that in the light he would vanish.
    â€œCyril.”
    â€œDad.”
    â€œI’m glad you’re here.”
    â€œMe too.”
    â€œYou’re grown up.”
    Cyril wanted to say not really, that he was still a child, that they could pick up where they’d left off. His father appeared luminous and yet solid. There was a hiss of gas and the scrape of a rasp-lighter and the welding torch spouted its perfect flame. His dad flipped down his face plate and went to work cutting a door in the darkness. He worked his way slowly up one side and across and then down the other with his blue and gold flame as precise as a knife blade. A doorway dropped open like a drawbridge revealing a field of wheat higher than their heads. His father switched off the torch and turned off the valve then flipped up his face plate and hung it on its nail. He stepped through the door from the darkness to the light. The sky was a deep blue and a breeze combed the wheat.
    â€œDon’t go, dad.”
    â€œCome.”
    They entered the wheat that smelled of wet grain and hot sun.
    â€œHow far?”
    â€œAll the way.”
    Cyril followed. His father was in overalls with the sleeves pushed to mid-forearm. They moved soundlessly, the wheat stalks flowing past, his father singing slowly, quietly, then louder, in a voice deep and resonant as if rising right up out of the land itself, the land he was born in and had returned to, with its winds that blew across thousands of miles of tilled fields and through birch forests, and even though his dad sang no words, only notes, Cyril understood—
    â€œCyril.” The basement light went on, the bare bulb’s brutal glare obliterating the vision to reveal his mother on the stairs in her housecoat.

    He worked on a letter to Connie,