Chapter 5: Bellicose (The Final Part)

             If you have reached an end, then it is not God.

                             --St. Augustine, de Civitate Dei bk. 12, ch.18.

If there are any indelible truths to life, one is that public restrooms are a terrible place to try and gather your thoughts. 

You try to focus but your eyes keep getting caught by the strange things written on the stalls, some in ink, some scraped by a knife, like they were trying to carve their identities into the very hardware of the system.  The vulgar and the tragic intertwined in some delinquent free form poetry, a patchwork of non-musical jazz without soul or symphony.  There were phone numbers like invitations, racism, strong urges to legalize gay marriage, and strange stick figure pictures that had been scratched over by countless others but obviously had them in awkward sexual positions.  I doubted half of them were even possible, but apparently stick figures are very flexible. 

Next to these was the occasional bible verse, never the verse itself just the number referencing where to find it.  Apparently someone thought these people could use a good dose of Holy Scripture without taking the time to reflect that maybe vandalism wasn’t the best way to get the message across.  Or maybe it was the perfect way.  They were lost in the noise anyway.  It was a pity how they just melted into everything else.  Everybody chose to express themselves here and it was disgusting; or if it was beautiful it had nothing to set itself off from the profane.  These were all choices, contrary, absurd, poignant, and everything in-between, was the same nothing as everything else—fractal opinions just endlessly ramifying up and down the stall, all like claw marks on the inner walls of a prison.  The desperate human spirit.  Carved here.  In some really bizarre way the man with the one eye and the southern drawl was right.  Too many laws suffocate humanity.  Here, humanity at its most base, the place of pissing and defecation, and God knows what, where Christ like all humanity undoubtedly frequented, was the basecamp where mankind ventured out into the law of human judgment.  There was something comforting to know that God Himself was absurdly human before he stood before the courts. 

“I’m alive, but I don’t feel alive,” one scrawl said, desperately inserted, or perhaps overtaken, in between someone who must have thought themselves rebellious just to write Fuck on the wall, and someone who thought “Sara is a whore.”  But one caught my eye, alone and unassuming, beneath the toilet paper.  There is no modern romance, it said.  I think it was from a song.  Or maybe a poem.  I don’t know why I thought it was profound.  The stick figures were, probably unintentionally, telling me the same thing.  There is no modern romance.

I got up, got out of the stall I was hiding in, went over to the sink and splashed water on my face.   Can one baptize themselves? No.  Of course not.  But Christ ventured forth as I was about to.  Through waters, absurdly human, standing before the Sanhedrin.

You were probably here by now, waiting for me in the room that I was dreading to enter.  Good.  You can wait a little bit too.  I looked into the mirror, drying my face off with those terrible unabsorbent paper towels that are always in a public restroom.

“Who are you?”  I whispered to myself, not noticing that a Public Defender had walked in and was washing his hands after he awkwardly decided to balance his suitcase on a small shelf to keep it from touching the floor.  I had that mortified feeling you get when someone walks in and catches you doing something you would otherwise never do in front of another human being.  He just looked at me with a little smile.

“Save that question for when you leave,” he threw his useless paper towel into the wastebasket and started to dry his hands on his suit, “don’t ask that here.”

Finally something that made sense.  But unfortunately for me it didn’t sink in because I was too busy fighting off the urge to tell him I don’t normally talk to myself.

As the door closed behind him, I looked back into the mirror and sighed. 

Here we go.

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Am I a great loop?

I sat in my bed one night and felt my hand on my face.  I was under a tomb of blankets, a crypt of darkness.  And I knew that science would say that what I felt was nerve against nerve, flesh and flesh.  Matter causing matter to sense matter.  So “sense” is too strong perhaps.  Matter caused matter to change.  Was the warmth of my hand the phantom of some physics equation?  The delerium of my heart just some chemistry percolating?  Was I a ghost haunting my own dreams?  Meat musing about itself? The Esperanto of the molecule, meat puppetry. I didn’t want to be forgetful that I was just a lump of clay with no Potter.

And so matter looped upon matter, and matter changed as matter folded upon itself, as my hand met cheek, as my heart met chest.

And in some complex concatenation, cause upon cause in an endless, infinite chain led to me and produced H2O+NaCl.  And a tear ran down my cheek.  But the tear and my sadness was just the lacrimation of eye ducts.  A salt I now breathed.  My pain was just chemicals flexing and fusing.

But what was that name, then.  Pain?  What need did I have of the name if the event was described fully by the physics?  Wasn’t pain equal, convertible with H2O+NaCl?  With the red and iron of my blood effervescing as I heaved in loneliness, in the dark?  The name described nothing.

And if it described something, what was it?  What was the beyond of its horizon, which stretched above the chemical surface, the material substrate?

Did I emerge?  Was that Myself who was crying an Entity?  Did I crawl and burst from blood vessel and vein?  Or was I purely the snap of a neuron?  So I could say “I have never felt so alone.”

But a scientist with some computer could say “Synapse X burst and connected to Y.”  And on and on.

And would we mean the same thing?

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A strange thing happened as I walked from the bathroom through the hall, to that great and dreaded door.  Earlier I had peered into the room designated for family legal matters, though it was clear even through casual glances that the only family matter occurring today was the same reason you and I had shown up.  And the room was full.  So depressingly full.  It was always like this, I had been told.  Everyday.  It wasn’t a large room by any means.  But it was packed with a mass of sad eyed bodies filing paperwork, scribbling furiously to work the last ink drops out of dried pens, standing in molasses lines that seemed frozen to stillness in the morning cold. 

Quiet in the corners with faded toys from a decade past were little boys and girls.  I remember being taken aback that parents would bring their children to this.  It was difficult to tell if the kids even knew what was going on.  Sometimes they would catch your eye with theirs, and you realized they wanted an explanation of what was happening, as if some stranger would tell them what mom and dad were curiously silent about.  From the mass of the crowd I heard the heart breaking voice of a little girl, bored with the meager toys, tugging on the blouse of her mother who was distracted with the telltale clipboard and papers.  “Mommy can you and Daddy take me to the zoo after this?”  The whole room heard this, through their scribbling and morose conversation, and for a moment the whole room almost collapsed under the weight.  What a terrible thing.

I stood outside the same door now, ready to be absorbed into that same line, terrified of it.  I breathed in deeply and pushed the door open, readying myself for a crowd, probably the same crowd still waiting their turns.  The door opened and…a strange thing.  Emptiness.  A Miracle.  There was no one in there waiting save you.  Three employees were at the head of where the line was supposed to form, sipping on coffee and laughing at some of the absurdities they had already witnessed today, probably enjoying the unexpected lull more than anyone.

They say that God works in mysterious ways, and certainly to any outside observer who knew of our divorce this would have been a strange event to call a miracle, no matter how small of one.  I remember hearing afterwards by one of the filing clerks—I don’t remember her name, just the army of cat pictures lining her back window like little watchful sentinels—how the office had never been this empty during the week, and that the whole room had cleared out not five minutes before I walked in and saw you sitting there.  It is fair to say, then, that in that room I witnessed a tiny miracle.  But to this day I find it shameful to call it that, to say its name to anyone other than myself.  Miracle.  I don’t know which part I was more confused about, the fact that, in the moments before I walked into the room the only thing I thought fit to pray for was not reconciliation, but a speedy procession through the labyrinth, or the fact that this, precisely, was what God answered.  Since God had apparently been in a generous mood, I sometimes wonder with pangs of guilt what I would have been given had I in that instant the character to ask for something nobler.  A simple make us whole.  Time heals all wounds, so the saying goes, but sometimes it seems to make others irreparable.  The years often get heavier.  No one tells you that.

The small blessing of an empty room proved itself in the fact that it still took a good half an hour comprised of two different staff members going over the divorce forms, page by page, for the most part simply examining each to make sure our signatures, initials, and dates found their homes among the many sad lines.  It was such a peculiar thing to go through this, to stand there as each page was turned.  To watch your life itemized and divided.  A tremble of nervous laughter would occasionally murmur from our mouths as the attendants would take turns with the same joke, saying we would have to start the process over because we missed a signature here, or a date there.  And of course this was followed by a small smile, the sounds of papers being slid around on laminate countertop to face us so we could sign, and each time we continued on page by page.  I remember noticing, out of the corner of my eye, that you were twirling your hair through the whole process.  It reminded me of when we first started dating.  How strange that we could be the same, and yet so different now, there at the far end of our history.

I suppose this was all incredibly routine to the people helping us, don’t you think?  They did this every hour of every day.  Well.  They were government employees so those days weren’t very long I suppose, and numerous holidays, long weekends, smoke breaks, and the like.  But still you get the point.  How do you tell a story then, and which one is true?  Do I tell the story of how my heart died that day, how it died many times and was haunted by many false resurrections, how that day I left myself behind?  How loneliness loomed up suddenly and we ended in the way that, probably, most catastrophes ended without an ending, the dead not knowing how they died? 

Or should I speak of how the truculent universe of the labyrinth preferred to retain us as its secret, left to itself to fade away as a single instance among a vast ocean of public statistics?  Of how the full publicly recognizable statement of my grief was a neat stack of stapled papers, passing quietly from hand to hand in triplicate in a manila envelope with a red colored tag?  Of how there was, somewhere, a bare patch in what was a pristine spot of forest, cleared of its timber, now cleaned and sliced and pressed and bleached so that we could declare our enmity?  Was this truly only the story of how a document with an absurdly long barcode number got filed, about how it was transferred to the nameless cat-picture woman after I left that day, about how she filed it while simultaneously wondering what she should get from the vending machine, and about how months later I received an unassuming slip of paper in the mail telling me everything had gone perfectly and I was, as summer’s first marches came, officially alone? I somehow knew all of this was true.  My bellicose tragedy was suddenly a census form: Caucasian male, 24, divorced.  Derrick is dead.  Long live file 7879025.

Or another story: I saw the black of the beginning, the great spark of cosmos.  God spoke.  The cosmogeny progressed.  The infinite outward race of light and heat.  Luminescent spandrels of ardor between darknesses, of earth between energies.  Molecules diagonalized and cacophonized and split and sundered.  Eigenvectors played and improvised in magisterial analogy, the sempiternal resounding in echo after echo, form after form. Diaphanous and ethereal creation chorused.  Coalesced.  Nothing, then something, then quark and lepton and muon and tauon and strings; and I was rock and ocean, then cell and ape.  Your heart was dripping pitch and made of wood, our form unearthed from the landscape as the eons marched.  Then love; then war.  Pink and purple nebula, then star and system solar, then planet, land and water: clouds of effervescent silver divided like cells splitting, fanning into infinity, compounding in multiplication, and then again into math beyond mind.   Waters became wet and the land thirsty.  The continents carved themselves from the spaces of sea.  I first looked into your eyes.

Vegetation launched itself toward God.  Upward.  Ever upward.  All from the evening, a murmur in the excretion of the void.  We kissed.  Next and beneath waterfall and fauna, one another with our fingers laced amongst the grass, and in love.  Trees sprouted. Then man came. And machine.  And we fell in love.  And machines took the trees and cut them; they bit the brown bark and sliced it; they bent it into perfect sheets.  And eons of creatures, great and colossal died and fed the earth.  They melted under boundless pressures, immense and chaotic.  The continents and water ground them into chemicals.  Their bones and bulk swallowed by wet and dust and rock. And we became married. They became petrol.  All their strife and personality, teeth and frenzy, all their struggle and love, appetite and instinct, fed into oil.  And the oil became ink.  And then language blossomed and ink became its guardian.  Life, then language, then law.  And the ink was sent to a stamp factory.  And we became unhappy.  And the factory refined and distributed it, and a truck running on oil brought the stamps abroad, and to here, this place of corridors.

And our distances grew.

I saw our lives like movie reels projecting upon this planet earth, paper thin illusions of light playing upon the material surfaces of blood and stone.  Silhouettes gliding effortless upon some more true solidity. So buoyant and aloof. Was there a need for creation? An infinite, unbreakable law that led to us?  To our perfect love.  To its shattering.  To its husk.

Our kiss.  Our quiescence. 

And here we were.  The ink from eons brought by trucks was placed in a storeroom, and the storeroom was visited by a lady who owned too many cats and distributed to her coworkers.  Coworkers patiently attending to us.  Isn’t this a strange story? The dinosaurs died so we could write our divorce papers.  No, that wasn’t fair.  They gave us our marriage certificate too.  What useful creatures.  The whole of the universe stood us here, as if history was tilted just slightly toward our current position.  We were a small knot that tied together the strands of eons.  And was this story any less true than the one where our hearts broke, where our worlds ended?  Was it truly pain, or merely the blindness of nature?  Was Nietzsche right, did everything merely meet, kiss, and depart?  Were we tragic, or merely the world worlding?

“Done.”  The clerk smiled politely at us as she notarized it with the strong click-thump of her stamp.  That damned microcosmos.

“That’s it?” 

I was like the victim of a nuclear blast, still standing alertly erect in fear and wonder.  The system and efficiency here were trying to prune the wildness of my heart, just like the trees outside the courthouse.  Only I was a clutch of timber ablaze, standing like a giant candle burning for the dead.  My heart was screaming, but all that was outward was anesthetic.

“Yes, that’s it, all done.”  She smiled again.  We began to turn to leave.  But before I could fully come to realize how odd a thing it is for such a monumental change to have just occurred whose only immediately visible cue was the thumping of a stamp, the clerk beckoned us back.  I secretly prepared myself for the part where they cut off my right hand, or fileted the souls of my feet.  Jokes on them though, I thought, I’m left handed.

“Just one more thing,” she said with the same small smile, and with no visible instrument of torture.

“Did we forget another signature?”  I asked.

“No, no.  Its not that.”  She paused.  “Its just,” –she examined us in earnest, pale blue eyes unblinking, traveling between us—“well, I do this so often.  I just wanted to say its nice to see you two act so civil towards each other in this process.  We just get so many who aren’t.”

We nodded sheepishly at her odd compliment, thinking her done.  Yes, civil.  Thats exactly what we were.  It had nothing to do with the fact that we just wanted this whole affair bleeping done with as soon as bleeping possible.  Yes, yes.  We are the epitome of human decency.  We were the Geneva Convention: yes, you can certainly still kill each other, but please, lets be civil about the whole affair.  Let us go.  God, let it be finished. 

But she added one last thing, which I will never forget.

“Its just that, that’s the way it should be.”  She nodded like a mother nods.  Like my mother. “I mean, you loved each other once.”

You loved each other once. 

I’m not sure what it was exactly about her saying that.  I guess I knew all along you didn’t love me anymore.  I mean, we were getting a divorce after all, I’m not quite sure what other clues I needed.  But to hear someone else say it, to hear the past tense aloud from a third party.  One with a notary stamp no less.  I would have preferred the knife.  I was already on fire but I had hoped getting everything over and done with would finally be like walking into the cool velvet dark of the evening sky, plunging into its silk lattice of stars.  Into the vaulted sky of oceans I daydreamed of as my father read scripture to me all those years ago. But those damned words tore the skin of the night to its four corners by white, unforgiving daylight.  Heaven’s vaults stood open, empty.  I felt my skin grow hot, my face red.

  They say the Greek word for truth literally means to un-bury, to un-cover and unveil.  In that moment, then, as I burned, I was truth, and all my clever shadows started to corrode away.  A slow hum of sorrow began to gasp for its freedom.  What was that feeling?  I was not loved.  No.  What a bitter clench in my heart. Tears welled up in my eyes and I turned quickly to manage my way back through the labyrinth to the outside.  I remembered that moment when I stared through your lover, and the universe also began to leap away.  It began to leap away now, of its own accord. Get, out.  I screamed inside.  Go now.  I did everything to choke them down.  The papers passed hands.  The story of the felled tree, the compressed paper, the printed law, became true.  The universe lurched around the axis of the notary stamp. I clenched my fist.  Took a breath.  Cursed at myself.  I was that candled tree burning for the dead, but now, detonated by my own heat, I exploded, disappearing into the beacon of my own fiery wreckage.  It was like a theological disappearance, you know.  Like the Lord’s Supper.  I felt my heart falling in its fire, and after falling it would be transubstantiated into spreading waves of earth and heat, and after its waves had swelled and broken and passed over and under and on, they would turn back to look at their dead, and simply cool as they pushed outwards toward the air.

We walked out of the room, unspeaking.

I remember reading an account of a bunch of young firefighters who died in a horrible forest fire as they ran up a hill to try and escape it as the blaze ran out of control.  A few survivors said it roared like all of nature was the throat of some great animal.  The physician who went in with the rescue crew the night the men were burned told the author of their account that, after many of the bodies had fallen while running, most of them had risen again, taken a few steps, and fallen again, this time like pilgrims in prayer, facing the top of the hill.  And that, the evidence, then, is beyond bewilderment and pain there remained some firm intention to continue doing forever the last thing that they hoped to do on earth before each passed into flame. Far from their whole lives passing before them in review as the conflagration ran its course, everything actually became smaller on its way to becoming eternal.  The smallness of a thought, the unbearable lightness of one single movement that resists completion and so is restarted. My own small passing over into eternity began in our last words, and in this living death I felt the marked repetition over and over again as each step took me not closer towards anything, but farther and farther away from you.

Do you remember those last words we spoke to each other that day?  Beneath and between the whispered curses at my self, a small glimpse of our eyes caught in the hallway right before the entrance where daylight overtook the neon glow.  There was an awkward hesitation as you stopped but wanted to continue, beckoned by a clandestine breeze of cool morning air which crept into the building as a man left through the doors, carrying the promise of far away places and calling you to the bright outside and beyond.  And so we stood there for an imperceptible moment, with no normal time keeping pace with the slowness of our shock.  There we were in that small infinity, our arms hanging at our sides, and our eyes becoming the eyes of strangers, as if the notary’s stamp was magic and began to take hold.  The world walked between us.

“Well,” you stammered, “Ill see you later.”

I actually laughed.

“No you wont.” 

Im not sure why, but you looked hurt at that, and I felt sad for saying it and hurting you.  In my mind I had pictured a more elegant ending, our departures from one another riding the swells of violins or something grand like that.  But I just watched as you turned from me and disappeared into the brightness of the day outside, until I could only see the side of a tree against the light flooding through the door windows, its leaves falling like feathers. But I thought I could still smell your perfume.

At least for a moment.