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He thought about Masada. It was a lie, a manipulative half-truth deployed to instill a protective self-destruction into the marrow of children. Nowhere near as brilliant as the cryptic Sephardim's ancestors who had swallowed themselves so that their descendants might one day uncover the taste and cherish it again, anew. Was he like Esther, pretending to be whatever his king needed him to be so that he could get close, close enough to beg or plead or pull? Every metaphor that got drawn up about Hannibal made him out to be the Devil, but the devils Will knew from his childhood stories were arguments; evil is banal and Job's pious suffering a game of ante-up between two friendless assholes who happen to meet again on Job's front lawn, Cain just a dazed loser in a deceptively negotiated bet.
Omnipotent, omniscient, or all-good? You can only choose two and never the last one.
Will watched the Dragon's wings unfurl, and his mind skittered briefly back to Florence. He'd never felt welcome in a church and Hannibal's heart granted him permission to be there, to descend and play at archetypes belonging to a tradition that wasn't his own. Satan and Satan’s ally, shifting through the shadows in their own private underworld.
In the police cruiser he'd told Hannibal it'd been strange to go to Lithuania. He'd expected the country to feel heavy with the emptiness of Jewish ghosts. It felt good to turn the prisoner into an art object. Maybe one of the dead would come by and admire it.
"Do you keep a copy of The Sunflower in your new home?" Hannibal had asked. He began prying a long time ago in his pointy round-about way after Will had split an apple with Zeller at a September crime scene. They'd had one honey stick between them and Zeller had been trying to pop it open with his teeth when Bev approached with a chunk of round challah wrapped in foil and pulled a honey bear out of her bag.
Underneath all the poking and prodding, the cruelty had always been laced with a line of unspoken inquiry about the formation of Will's morality. He was a good man, but a good Jewish man built himself on entirely different foundations than a good Christian one. Hannibal had always been wanting to get underneath and take a peek. Will had occasionally found himself grasped by and entangled with the perception of Hannibal alone in his house in Wolf Trap, ostensibly feeding Will’s dogs but especially cataloging each tell: a plastic dreidel mixed in a junk drawer with bits and bobs of lure, a simple menorah shoved in the back of a cupboard, matzo ball soup mix and a tarnished kiddush cup, a cheap polyester yarmulke with some kid’s bat mitzvah date printed on it, a Hebrew naming certificate stuffed in a folder alongside packets of correspondence between some great aunt or other and Yad Vashem, a wrinkled yellowing tallit smooshed behind undershirts in a dresser drawer. On Will’s bookshelf, the copy of The Sunflower. No mezuzah to speak of, certainly no ketubah except his internal promise to each of his dogs.
So that every Christmas card from Hannibal during his stint in Chilton’s grip became a kind of noxious pithy reminder that Will had confided in Hannibal a little bit too much. His own discomforting memories of the back-of-the-classroom consolation holiday art projects at each new public school, blue and yellow paint instead of red and green. Each reform synagogue Sunday school classroom his dad had tried to find for him throughout their endless moves, the way the other children made space for him with the same generous ignorance as they did for kids fresh in from the USSR whose relieved relocated parents were upstairs getting social services.
Probably if Will managed to get himself and Hannibal off the cliff, they'd survive and Hannibal would say something horrible and crass: consider Jonah and the whale.
"It's not a decoration." Will had said as they drove the long and winding road, and per usual when he thought of the book his tummy rumbled with the eagerness of illicit flirtation.
Even in the moment when he forgave Hannibal, Will was certain Hannibal understood he was already dropping his forgiveness. Playing at the possibilities and limits there in the catacombs, hidden in the dimness from everything but their own mutual bullshit. The Sunflower. A good Jewish man doesn't forgive evil; he withholds his forgiveness as a kind of sacred vengeance. He does this out of respect for God, sure -- whoever God is conceptually on any given day -- but mostly out of respect for himself, with God and calendar as cover. Forgiveness being a particular surrender of dignity best reserved for the thinnest slice of year between the poles of two holidays, brisk and formal amongst neighbors and community members who need to get over it to get out into the field together again. Nothing spoils a harvest like a holdover.
There'd been that first Yom Kippur when Hannibal had mistaken Will's loss of appetite for fasting and invited Will to let Hannibal cook for him to break it. Already Hannibal had wanted in, with so few bottles of wine poured between them. Cruel or keen Will had already agreed to eat at Bev's with Zeller, ritual trumping the social friction between the three of them. "I'm blowing the shofar," Zeller had come by and joked then. He'd laid a hand on Will's shoulder and squeezed, and Will had watched observantly from a sideways gaze as a series of the tiniest expressions flickered across Hannibal's face.
His face was open now and yearning. Like any living devil, Hannibal was a kind of long-time-no-see companion. Special to Will, they could both see that now. Let him be the Devil himself and see what old alliances flickered up. Will knew Hannibal’s capacity for violence, and Hannibal’s capacity for violence knew Will. Dolarhyde was a fool to have gone and gotten himself slithered up between them.
What to make of Dolarhyde and the dragon on his back? Exorcism had only ever existed outside of Will's non-halachic worldview. You just destroy things that don’t work for you and get on with it.
There'd been so much talk about Dante and his Inferno, the Greeks. Here now there was only blood and Will's forgiveness. He picked it up and ran with it. Forgiveness slicing open, thinning the veil between him and his fickle god.
A mongoose or Isaac or Lilith.
His dad had always taken him out fishing or hiking on Yom Kippur out of respect for the memory of Will's mother. Good to be out under the open sky when atonement is involved.