Alex Connors

Hands clasped, neck bent — Pope John Paul II sits in prayer on Eddie’s wall beside the bleeding heart of Jesus. I call it the bleeding heart of Jesus and Eddie calls me a Yankee. This is not correct. Jesus’s heart is sacred, not bleeding, I learn. The red, plastic candle below Jesus’s sacred heart is always on, glowing like a hurt, swollen finger. There is no switch to turn it off, no cord to unplug, no fuse to remove. The picture frame is fully embedded in the wall. Eddie is proud to say that Jesus will only come down — forced from the plaster with crowbars or wrecking balls — when the house does. 

Michael and I are visiting Eddie from America. When we landed at Dublin Airport, Michael forgot his passport in the seatback pocket of the plane, and for forty-five minutes we were stranded on the jet bridge while the airport security told us there was nothing we could do — we couldn't enter the country nor go back to ours. It seemed very likely, for those forty-five minutes, that we were going to be Irish-American-nowhere-nothing citizens for the rest of our lives. Left with nothing to do but lick the dust from our complimentary peanut bags while we watch the planes take off, back and forth, from Dublin to Boston forever. People would look at me and Michael as they got off their planes, smile and pray quietly, under their breath, to never be like us. 

Michael also forgot that today is Sunday and wore his Misfits sweatshirt with a big, white, blaring skull on the back. I can feel everyone at Mass staring at us. When it’s time to take communion, I forget to stand, put the Eucharist in my pocket, forget to dip when I get back into the pew — I imagine the Pope on Eddie’s wall lighting up each time like a game of Operation, a buzzer in heaven going off every time I hit the sides. 

In January of 2001, I was in fifth grade, learning about the cardinal directions while hearing about Cardinal Law on the TV. To this day, when I hear his name, I think, Never Eat Soggy Waffles, and I don’t but still remember the boys from St. Joseph’s Parish and the piece of land that the archdiocese sold to Boston College to help with legal costs. And I don’t know. Who knows what is still happening, you know.

Eddie’s picture of Pope John Paul II lights up when you plug it in to the wall, but it’s been there so long that the lightbulb has been pulled from the Pope’s hand, crept down to the bottom of the frame where the Pope’s robe hits the floor. 

The coffee table of Eddie’s house is empty except for a rosary in a crystal dish that I always mistake for a bowl of M&Ms. But Eddie doesn’t believe in God, he says. God has never done much — he went out to the store for milk one night and never came back.