She took careful steps and minded herself ’round the scaffolding clenched between their teeth. If they talked too much about someone; if they were deluded – mostly illusions of grandeur and accompanying tricks were to watch out for. The best were like illusionists, standing tall with nothing in presence. Nothing to refute either. There was always the enigmatic fellow who lived in the ugly building on Gloria who knew the perfect black hole to open up for her to jump in. By the time his motion grew tired, he’d grown moss between his knuckles and didn’t know what to do with himself. She wasn’t any more tired now than when she was with him; her motion was quiet and she kept her intimacy. God used to be present, somewhere in a doubtless mind, she still remembers what faith could be in the dark – before there were too many black holes. She couldn’t know it intimately, or in a mist, or in a doubtless mind somewhere. What lacks emotion draws water from a rock, though few could do it. There were moments of lucidity that made way out of the green.
The last boy did lyrical chant and she hardly had to say anything, a few words strung together to get him to speak for at least an hour. Most people with something to say, only need somebody to perk up and pipe down like a dog with a bone. Play pretend. Sometimes they’d chew you up, other times they’d waste you completely. Where was the war they said was coming? they all prepare for something or other, they all want to be good warriors when they can’t be good men. Hope was, in her eyes, the last emotional reserve, only for those who have eyes for hell and present their hearts to war without a body. Without a need to conquer. Without conflict.
A lousy winter morning, oysters, coffee, and amphetamines. You got your rats, winged, worms, wimps, chimps, gimps, back-bending shrimps, musical timps, and cars.
On this particular morning, Sam happened to drop in. Lanky and courteous though he wasn’t really good company, he would soften the blow of early morning and bear the great bore with her. She left a small piece of bread and a few remaining oysters as initial fodder for him. He had game to hunt and would surely slip in a few words on the subject to get it out of the way, having that need that some do to talk about things before doing anything about them. Sam, last standing hematoma of a despondent court of adolescents who judged me venereal in order to keep their sobriety as clean conscience. I laughed a lot with them, most of those laughs were cheap and we were sentimental enough to make the comfortable feelings last but it made the memory cheap and by the time we got twitchy, the comedy had diluted the honesty and most of the good. If you were good to us then that was best; none of us were really good, we just had a lot of shame and very little courage. There was nothing to do that hadn’t been done and you were slick back or braided or maybe entirely shaved to the bone, through your teeth, and there was still a semblance of spirit, at the very least something we all watched float around.
The times were warranted but after a while nothing felt deserved, that is, deserved in that special sense of eating what you cannot have, the satisfaction that remains sealed; where marriage was uncorrupting, trees fruitless and semen seedless.
There was always the piss pot under the bed and the ones who’d be squirming and jittering; you’d have to sprinkle a little piss on their mustaches to drown out the hysteria. It didn’t work for women, we were too used to everything and more so willing to pretend. The ones who knew about the great fact were already over it, made crispy by whatever seraphic light they stared into and then brought out to the cold air to be sold as chicken. Rotating endlessly. He had an Oyster and began immediately digging through pockets for his tobacco pouch. I helped myself to some and observed his weary process. ‘You know after quitting weed’ he disclosed ‘I thought I’d be cured or something like that but the thing is now It’s a depression…a different kind of depression, it’s depression with the energy to be depressed; I feed into it even more.’
‘You’re just too immodest to break a little miracle out of yourself. And it’s winter now, by Spring you’ll be over all this crap.’
‘Well for now I’m walking about with the completely pathetic prospect of being offered some weed.’
I bet the old court would scrub him head to toe in THC if it meant anything for my case. I thought he probably felt something more than a pity that entirely prevented him from running me down.
Why should I be made to feel regret, rendered incomplete? My grandmother, lady that she was, was always the first to remind me that the thing you give knows no other purpose; it can’t be lost, can’t be taken. I was never very close to her and one day she just gave in to that temptation to free it. Whatever was caught was captured for 80 years. For her the early days of the city of Methuselah with its factory workers shuffling benign across red sand, dotting the square with brown hats – tipped, fallen, dented against the wind – the wandering eyes, the river bed, a baby’s head, crooked cursive, uninvited guests with immeasurable presence. Nothing else was worth as much, and none of it was given. She gave her eyes to the city and painted it for many years; she painted horrors, the ones she gave her mind to since her body hadn’t sufficed. Where can the memory rest of those who gave only out of fear? Not in me; and never in winter when the measly want nothing more than a body. Because it is torture that reflects the spirit but the spirit is a eunuch that won’t utter a word, nerveless, sentimental – a hollow nest. When there’s no torture readily available, we forfeit ourselves to seek other ways of being – what we need, we never seem to have and the sublime seems a little death we cannot sublimate. A curled-up little death for those embalmed in the residuals of hard contact, what you sublimate out of fear, and means discipline to those who’ve lost control.
All these things were inside me. Hate, confusion, the man I loved, the one I didn’t, the baby I wanted – the one I didn’t. And it’s like they’re all the same thing. It doesn’t matter now, what I didn’t want. Do you know what that’s like? I can’t keep them but it’s alright for them to leave their mark as long as you can t see it.
Sam ruminated calmly in his place, caught in the fuzz on his lip, his weed, his yellowed teeth, pale, still destined for sensibility, still young, belonging more to the city than to himself. There was something in us being atomized, ridding us of our bearings, and for a firm abiding second, we stopped believing in sacrifice.
