Chapter One: Autumn, and Everything After. Part One

[Part Two]

[Table of Contents]

I see you sitting there.

You see me standing here.

Our arguments are always journeys that go back to the exact same spot.

It was October, and it had been particularly cold that year. And wet. Even for an Oregon fall. I heard someone walking on the street say it was like the vaults of heaven had fractured open. I remember hearing that image when I was a child and my father was reading Genesis to me, the part about Noah and the flood. The vaults of heaven. I was enamored, and I pictured endless celestial oceans interrupted by the occasional star floating amongst the currents as my father’s deep voice rolled over the words. I stopped him mid sentence to ask a question which I think was eminently reasonable, namely if there is water in the sky, are there also sky fish? And I asked this as I glanced out the window as a child, hoping to see a Blue Whale or an Orca slip contentedly through clouds and sky. But this year’s rain had been dark and spare of mirth, and the times were heavy with water. Tonight was little exception.

There we were hidden in our home as the sky yawned and set itself to sleep. Thin red strands of light like great bones of the dying sun fell ever earthward, quiet with grace. The dark, so slowly and with the assuredness of vast practice, began to drink the day. Our words had been long and ascended the floor in monoliths, great shored up ruins. You couldn’t walk about without kicking up some bitter word or snarling paroxysm. These were mountains in the living room, withered stumps of time, the heaping corpses of disastrous argument. They all silently peered up at God with curiosity at their failure, the God who no longer spoke to us but allowed an interruption to his voice, exposing us in the clearings of silence. Giving us over to our endless words. And without God they sought their own strength and fixity. And without God they became puffed up and distorted. The supreme hypocrisy, which made us believe our words thrust our great prayers upward, and that the prayers held the words down and gave them gravity. Importance. But God rendered Himself absent, chose to be unthinkable, to prove us so rightly as fools. Christ nowhere descended from open-standing heavens. Any meaningful cataclysm shied away from us. We were left alone, unnoticed. Small.

Worlds can end in many different ways, it seems. It makes me wonder, sometimes, how many celestial harbingers I perhaps ignored. Maybe the silence was only apparent, our heads like hearts pounding so loud we failed to hear God’s mouth moving. How He must have been speaking, tugging at me, whispering, saying “My Child,” in a voice like a father, “There Is A Darkness Ahead Of You.” Had I looked closer, I’m sure, I shouldn’t be surprised to have seen some angels gathering to listen to our conversation, their ears pressed to the flat of our walls, a few jostling about for more opportune eves to perch upon. Others, content with distant views would sit upon the sun’s fading strands like stairwells, their staring forms leaning out, hushing the room enclosed, all their many eyes gazing down and all their many wings nestled and taught with suspense. And through the walls, muffled, they would have heard noises and words like a choir of closing doors. I remember thinking one time after this moment, that if I could have grown so large and so tall, I could have grabbed the horizon and the frame of the sky to pull it back, to reset our lives. But I was too weak to save us. And at any rate heaven already knew what was going to happen.

October wept.

It began small, our argument. You smelled like smoke, I said, and you admitted you started smoking on breaks at work. It helped relieve some stress, you said, and you liked the moments of quiet, when it was just you and the smoke and the air. How you would just watch the smoke, unfolding and unfolding upwards, lithe and agile, until unfolded, it would disappear. I pictured the smoke rising from your lips like small prayers sent to God. It gave you time to think about things, you said. I should have heard it right there, hiding beneath and between your words, a storehouse of secrets, monstrous and wild, just begging to be drug from their slumber. If I have learned anything, its when a woman who I am involved with says she has been thinking about things, it’s a surefire bad omen for how the rest of our evening will be spent. And oh, how the lightning of possible storms laced your teeth. But I missed it entirely. I was stuck on smoking. You had always hated smokers. When you found out that your mom smoked I remember how disappointed you were, how you came to me and how I told you not to worry, because it was such a little thing. Who were you now?

I was making several fine points about health and the expense of cigarettes, my logic, flawless. My rhetoric, elegant. But you grew impatient, as you should have. No one could make missing the point as ornate as I could. I was a great army of empty words. What about cancer? I asked. I was sure you didn’t even hear me. You probably wanted a smoke right then, as my speech hummed harmlessly in the background of your daydream. At least the rising clouds and the air wouldn’t lecture you, I’m sure you were thinking. Sometimes I get mad at myself now for preaching at you like you couldn’t read. You didn’t need health or financial tips from me, there’s a warning from the Surgeon General on every box, for God’s sake. And you paid for them, you should know how much they are.

Kissing. Kissing is the angle I should have taken, I don’t want to kiss you after you smoke, I could have said. Well, you would have remarked contemplatively, I do love kissing you. Mouthwash, you would have answered with a coy smile, and toothpaste, and everything is all better. And we would not fight about it anymore. And I would have laughed and shook my head at your stubbornness, and you would walk over like you used to, all length and grace, and grab my shirt lightly to pull me in for a kiss. And we would have remained madly in love. A cruel fantasy. My mind always searches for easy exits, but an exit here did not exist. The possible storm roared, and like darkness it rushed toward us.

“There’s someone else,” you said, peering through some tussles of your hair. The words like lightning forked from your tongue. It was a glaring flash and the room became silhouettes. A thousand white lies, a thousand bright lights shining, all flare and clarity. Those late evenings with your friends. The phone calls that would quickly change subject and end as I walked into the room. The hushed distance growing between us.
Oh God.

It was unfair. I wasn’t ready for that. Not that I ever could be, but I was still working on cigarettes. You always said you hated smokers. Who are you?

I breathed in the awful poem of the nothing you spoke after that, every silence in the room stood like a weapon of our own private war. In the silence all the tiny details stood out. I was assaulted by their sheer existence and intricacy, the world shrunk, and the clock, that giant clock you loved, gave quiet metric to an otherwise undifferentiated eternity. That fat faced traitor. It had always been so comforting at night, especially those nights when it rained and you and I stayed up next to it. We would listen in the dark to the percussion of droplets on the windowsills, under fields of blankets and the watchful, stoic thrumming of its iron hands. It made a different sound than most. It didn’t really tock. It went tick-click, tick-click, like it didn’t fully speak clock yet. That was our stupid joke, anyway. Do you remember? But now it was counting off intervals like deserts. A stoic measure between us of the distances we sank from one another. Distant like the sad space of city trees, locked in by iron. In deserts, at least, there would have been hopeful mirages. There was no hope here, though. I cursed the damn lucky people lost in deserts with their fancy mirages.