"I have to."
"That's your choice then?" the older man said angrily.
"Not a choice, just an inescapable conclusion of fact."
That administrator looked personally insulted by what Martin had said but then composed himself and put back on his veneer of authority and control. "Very well. You might want to run. I'm going to casually walk back to my office and then inform the police of a most disturbing crime that you confessed to us involving raping children. You had better be gone by the time they arrive to interview me."
... Chapter 2 One man solo scene
The story of how Martin had found himself in the seminary was a strange one. Was there ever a time in his life when he wasn't in the middle of trouble, he asked himself. Well there was that one brief moment. It was just after he had turned 18. He had a little apartment and a nice job. He was studying for the college entrance exam in his free time and he had some semblance of a future. Then he discovered women. One after another he'd find himself in a sexual relationship with someone who very clearly did not care about him one bit but for Martin that was how all of his life had been up to then anyway so he hadn't noticed that it was different than what other people experienced. He'd sort of date, have sex and then get dumped. Then he'd find a new girl and it would all happen all over again. No woman would commit to him so he came to see them as just people who would sometimes have sex with him. There was no thought to building a stable relationship because that wasn't what women wanted, at least not from him.
Then he met her. The evil one. There were times when he'd hold himself back from calling her evil and he'd tell himself that she was just mentally ill but really deep down he only knew her as the evil one whose name must never be uttered ever again. Other than her being sexy he couldn't even think of a reason why he liked her except that he found it interesting that her birthday was on the 31st of her birthday month. The number hung in his mind as the whisper of an echo of a long forgotten dream.
First she seduced him away from his then current girlfriend but not with sex. She lured him away with the prospect that she'd care about him. She'd be interested in him. She'd remember his name, his birthday, where he was from, and everything. She'd said she'd love him. Once he was hers she not only wanted to have sex with Martin but she wanted it all the time, many multiple times a day. She fucked Martin to nearly the point of exhaustion, not that Martin was complaining. Also she couldn't stand being apart from him and started to show up at his work just to be near him. Then she started to ask, then beg, then demand that Martin move in with her and then the plan changed to Martin moving away with her, allegedly so they could get a fresh start and not be near people who would judge them for being together.
Once the evil one had lured him to her, she began to systematically isolate him from everyone that he knew. Martin wasn't like other people who had siblings and parents and old childhood friends to watch their back. Martin had grown up in state's custody and he had no one. The closest things he had to parents were his social worker and his karate sensei from high school. Before long Martin found himself with no job and no apartment and no studies. He was off living with her in the middle of nowhere with no plan for life beyond getting through another day without an outburst or an episode.
Once she had him all to herself that was when the violence started. Martin tried to rationalize it with the fact that she was just a girl and he was a man. He told himself that he could usually stop her from inflicting any real damage to him because he knew how to block after five years of shotokan. He just had to put up with it long enough to get through to her. He would wait out her violent manic state and then she would calm down and apologize. But that calm would not last long and soon the next outburst was due to come. No matter how much he tried to show her that he cared about her and that he was going to be loyal to her no matter what, it didn't matter. She escalated and escalated and escalated. It was anguish. Yet Martin stayed and told himself that he had to be better than her family who had all seemingly abandoned her when they couldn't handle her. He was going to help her get better. No one told him that that was not how mental illness worked. There was no getting better for her. She was only getting worse because Martin was unknowingly enabling her madness.
The night she put a gun next to his head while he was reading Hemingway as a way to still tell himself that he was studying for college was the last straw for him. You can't block a bullet with karate. He had to get the fuck away from her or she was going to kill him. Hitting him was one thing but a gun just brought all this to a-whole-nother level. In order to get away he had to slip away in the middle of the night with only the clothes on his back.
As he was fleeing and the delusion of her charms lifted from his eyes the realization of what his life had become suddenly hit him. He was ruined. She'd ruined his life and he'd been so blind that he allowed her to do it. And now that he was gone she'd start looking for her next victim.
Martin found himself in a homeless shelter occupying bed number 25 with nothing but a copy of Pride and Prejudice to read over and over again while he wondered what he could possibly do with his life. That particular homeless shelter was run by some monks. Well that gave Martin an idea. Why couldn't he be a monk? Surely that would be the last place that the evil one would come looking for him. Martin didn't know anything about religion and he hadn't even been baptized but once he made inquiries there didn't seem to be any barriers for him. But more than a place to hide he could have a future with them. He wasn't asking that much of life. He never expected to get rich, just not struggle anymore. Aside from the religion part, it all made sense.
Instead of becoming a monk he eventually found himself in a school called a seminary. He was studying to be a priest. He knew that priests couldn't get married but with the way women had treated him going all the way back to his crazy hippy mom whose plan in life was to rob banks to fund a communist revolution that would topple the government, he could live without a woman or a committed relationship. All he really needed was the occasional piece of pussy on the side to take care of biological needs and he'd focus on just not getting busted for not being an actual religious person who had no business there.
The first semester Martin was in the school he was clearly the most privileged and popular student there. He was always given top marks on all his work no matter how rubbish Martin internally knew it was. He didn't know anything about Jesus beyond what was sort of generally known in the general population but it didn't matter. Seminary wasn't about Jesus anyway. It was about social justice and church finances. It was about learning who was the boss and doing what they told you to do. As long as Martin played along and just agreed with the teachers and administrators, which wasn't hard to do, then he was fine and could do whatever he wanted. If he wanted to go out and party a bit, it was actually encouraged and some of the staff would even give Martin and the other students money to go have a good time. Martin even got lucky and brought a girl back to the dorm one night and even after he got caught it was no big deal. They made it seem like he was doing what he was supposed to be doing. The staff at the school loved to get Martin talking about all the various girls he'd slept with in his life and Martin reveled it telling the stories once he knew it was ok. The seminary was just one big party with booze and girls all the time. There were even rumors that Martin heard of certain parties at the school were drugs would be used but Martin had not seen any evidence of that himself.
Yes being a priest was really the perfect job for Martin and he could almost say this was one of the happiest times of his life. He fit in perfectly and he was accepted just as he was. The universities that were the biggest party schools had nothing on seminary. It was better even than pleasure island from Pinocchio.
And then at the start of second semester a strange thing happened one slow January day when it was too cold and snowy to go outside. Martin was drawn to the dangerous books section of the library, specifically to section 2531 where he found Aquinas one day. He had heard the name mentioned in class a few times as the teachers explained why "Thomism" had to be wrong. Martin was curious and started to read the questions and the answers. And then ... something just hit him. He was confused and his heart felt like it had been struck by lightning. So much of it didn't make sense but like a kind of addiction he couldn't put it down. In order to actually understand Aquinas Martin went and actually opened up the Gospels and started reading. No. What was this? It was all turned around. He was lost in a sea of logic and reason and his mind would not let him rest until he could make some sense of it. He tried to put it out of his mind and not worry about it so he could continue to finally have it easy in life but the questions continued to nag him. After that it wasn't long that he found himself yearning to understand and he actually started for the first time to really pray the liturgy with sincerity. At first it was hard but then one by one the meaning of different prayers was unlocked and he started to understand more and more.
From then on it was night after night with the angelic doctor, the Gospels, and the Divine Office. At first he was doing this privately while still trying to participate in party life atmosphere promoted at the school but little by little he withdrew. Months later to his complete surprise Martin realized something inside of himself one day as he was standing outside of the lecture room. He believed. It was more than that. He knew. He was convinced. The words of Christ rang out in his heart. It was deep. It was radical. It was far beyond the bland veneer of religiosity that others saw in it. One part of his mind was trying to tell him that he shouldn't care about the mad ravings of an itinerant preacher from literally thousands of years ago. His teachers were usually telling him that Jesus was just wrong about everything anyway and he might not even have ever existed in the first place. But somehow Martin knew otherwise. Somehow Martin knew that he himself was the one who was wrong for even trying to dismiss Christ. Jesus was real flesh and blood and more than that he was God. Something about the teachings of Christ and the knowledge of Christ's divinity changed Martin in a way that could never be undone. He could see in himself all his sins, all the ways he had offended God all those times. He knew he needed to stop doing those things. He needed forgiveness. He needed to make himself right before God and Jesus had made a path for him to do it. Martin went to the chapel and for the first time looked up at the hideous new age cross on the wall. There on the cross was the body of Jesus created using sharp disgusting angles that made it difficult for the eye to look at it. Martin fell to his knees and wept bitterly for all the sins he'd committed in his life.
