2.

The angels had given Sarah, the baby's mother, to understand what had come to pass by instinct, as it were, though she had no conscious knowledge of what precisely had taken place; yet she was perfectly prepared for what Angelica told her the next night, such that it seemed she'd heard it all before.

And so they stayed together for a vigil all night, taking neither tea nor coffee nor any caffeine; but they stayed awake by means of fervent prayer, burning incense before the baby who sat on a small pedestal before their prayer mats. And the baby smiled, delighted, and stayed in that happiness all the night, though Sara gave him none of her milk or any sort of food whatsoever, save water from a bottle.

And so they stayed in that vigil the night long, until dawn when they saw the brilliance in the east; and at that point Sarah went to sleep for two hours, then awoke to find Angelica still with the rosary in her hand. "Have you slept?" asked Sarah. "Yes," said Angelica; "but I dreamt only of a house with closed doors everywhere, so that I knew there was nothing to discover in my dreams; then I awoke to continue on with the prayers of waking life, in the hopes that I would find the open doors there." And so they prayed all the day together, Sarah finally ending the infant's fast and giving him some of her milk.

But nightfall came on in its due, and Sarah went out to see that the new moon had come; it seemed she had known it was the night of the new moon all along, as if she'd stepped out for the express purpose of seeing it there; though it only appeared thus once she had seen it, and said, "There he is." And so she came in and told Angelica that all the signals of the heavens were favorable, and that they should anoint the child and finally give him his baptism (for he had yet to be baptized in any church at all).

They anointed the child's head in the cleanest cannabis oil, then perfumed him in fragrant spices and let the smoke from Angelica's censer enter his nostrils with his shallow breath. They took him out into the streets of the Port-au-Prince slum, and marched with him dangling in Angelica's outstretched arms before her. Men and women looked to the pair as they paraded the baby before them; and the people trembled and felt some awful thing was taking place, and shut their doors and shutters to them, and crossed the street so as not to pass by them, and hurried away as they marched along. All could see he'd been anointed in oil and that his contented face was wide with the delight such as devils feel in deceiving saints and sages; and so while the people had little notion of what exactly was coming to pass before them, they went away from him and hid their faces from his sight by instinct. For the people of Port-au-Prince knew of the wiles of the devil and the wrath of God, and understood that the divine nature was Twin Nature, and that for every sinner in the gardens in the stars there is a saint in the pit of hell, and for every good work of the devil this corresponds to some sin committed by God. And so they hid from him and would not meet the baby's gaze, as Angelica marched forward, the child upheld in front, Sarah in tow.

Presently the three of them reached the butcher's house, who answered in an apron stained with blood and gore; and they asked if he had any live hog or sow that they could purchase. This butcher kept his livestock--pigs and chickens--in his yard out back; and there in the yard every day he slaughtered some portion of them, and sold them in his living room, which he'd converted to a butcher's shop. He was a heavy-set man with a gray mustache and long tresses of wooly black hair reaching down past his ears and alighting on his shoulders. He did not have the same intuition of evil as had the rest of the people who'd seen the parade of three in the street; and so he presently told them he'd sell them some hog flesh if they so desired. But they pressed on and asked for a live pig, lying and saying they were having a party, and wished to roast his flesh for the party absolutely fresh and recently killed. And so he took them out back and showed to them his stock, among the weedy parched ground that never received any water save for the rain. He showed them the pigpen filled with filthy waste and the remnants of their meals, pummeled into the ground by footsteps both human and animal. He asked if they'd like any chicken, or eggs, as he had plenty to sell. But no, said Sarah and Angelica; they wanted a pig, a hog; nothing more. And so he sold them a full grown hog for a good number of gourdes which Sarah had earned at the brothel where she was a whore; and they took the hog back toward Angelica's apartment on a leash, the hog submissive and nervous. Again Angelica held up the child before her as they marched along, Sarah with the hog on his leash behind. And all who saw them knew there was some awful meaning to this sight, some terrible signification that it conveyed; but none knew what this meaning exactly was. The men who saw them put the lapels of their jackets over their mouths, so as not to breathe in the substance of their breath; and the women turned their heads from them; and the children hurried on away from them, around corners or into houses and apartments. The filthy ground, a dark mixture of sewage, dirt and the black cake of poverty, seemed itself to give under their footsteps like a trampoline, so that all the world inclined toward them in their parade, the weight of their steps causing a dent in the fabric of the earth. And Sarah knew these were not the signals of an evil they were committing; for she knew the twin nature of the divine. She knew that what is evil is often good, what is good often evil; and that God is not a Father, Son and Spirit, but a pair of twins, one despised and the other adored, and each according to season either in agony or bliss.

What is honorable is by definition what is desirable, but what we desire the most--that is, when we have that desire of desires, Lust--is found in its dishonor; and the lustful things are desired by us in inverse proportion to how honorable they are. What it means to be foul and ignoble is that such things are undesirable; and yet, as the cycles of lust dictate, there are times when we chase after the ignoble, and glory in the foul, since they are by nature what we want most of all. The good omen is a curse and the unhappy prodigy foretells a boon. To a man on trial for murder, to be intelligent, morally aware and always in control of his emotions become liabilities to him, and should he be portrayed as a village idiot with no consciousness of his actions this points to a favorable verdict. Curses are blessings and blessings condemn. In this way, when one is baptized in hog's blood, this can only mean that God has come near, and that his hand is stretched out to pave the way for the destiny of the saint. On earth we glorify criminals and base people, and throw insults at the saints and curse the godly men. Could it be any different in heaven? For the earth is a heaven itself, and its nature is true to the nature of the heavens. This very world is the afterlife eternal; this earth holds gardens with rivers flowing beneath, wherein immortals recline in perpetual bliss; this very life is the eternal damnation, wherein devils torture the flesh of evildoers. In a world in which there is only irony, in which every true proposition undermines its own foundations, and every lie betrays the absolute truth when twice-removed, we cannot suppose the heavens are any different from this. We cannot suppose anymore that a blessing is truly a blessing, nor a curse anything but the very election of the godly.

The hog did not give his life calmly, but screamed and darted about as it flung blood hither and thither from the gash in its throat, till Angelica brought the knife down straight into the crown, and it pierced the skull and gashed the brain. With a shock and snap the hog left life, and fell down prostrate right at the feet of the babe who would be baptized under the new moon in a basin of its blood.

The next night the baby was ransomed from God and handed over to evil for a price of three thousand dollars, and Sarah smiled to herself in her heart, knowing bereavement had become celebration, loss becoming gain. She knew she'd never see him again, nor get the tiniest measure of news on what would become of him.

Once a foolish man, dying, knowing he'd be nothing after death, gazed up to see the bowed faces of his elderly wife and grown children; and he said, "There is no solution to the riddle of history. Happily, there is a solution to the riddle of life." And with those foolish words the fool expired; and no one comprehended what he meant, and his words were forgotten forever.