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Show Acting Alone Page 343 and beating supposed rhythms together on garbage cans, playing maracas with all the skill of talented amateurs, screeching on harmonicas, and so on. It was an aboriginal groupgrunt the Four Friars in F Major wanted to muster, for they were scared, too: something characteristically mindless and cacophonous to allay everyone's fears, to drown out the apocalypse upstairs with objectified idiot-rhythm. While searching for an unoccupied, five-foot-square patch of mostly dry, or at least un-slimy granite upon which to drop Simone, preferably without any spine-puncturing stalagmites growing up from the floor, Sam and Spikey almost trod upon a trembling, tiny, ancient nun who was all crumpled alone in a corner. She had a huge mahogany or rosewood display case of some kind wedged heavily into her lap, for some inexplicable reason. As he removed the heel of his basketball shoe from her dry, crispy little hand, Sam heard her voice quaver out the following petition, barely audible over the monkish noisemakers that were obviously grinding agonizingly into her nerves, as into Sam's: "Sisters, this is First Friday. Should we pray our Litany of the Sacred Heart, keeping Sister Gorgonia in our minds as she adores the Blessed Sacrament upstairs? And pray also for the canonization of Mother Pudentiana, who was my own personal mentor in this life?" The sisters complied. And, even though Mother Superior tried to maintain an appropriate pace in her recital of the versicular half of the antiphonal prayer, the majority of the women seemed reflexly incapable of not repeating the responsory in time to the friars' lopsidedly syncopated groupgrunt: |
