Chapter Five: Bellicose, Part Two

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.  And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power.  They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt.  Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god.  They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

            G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995, p.139

In one of the long halls as I was still waiting for you I sat outside the divorce office on a bench listening to a large older woman missing several teeth go on and on to another woman behind a desk, Hispanic and infinitely patient, about how the government was out to get her, and how she had tried so many times to pay her fines.  And that, wouldn’t you know it, somehow the money was getting lost in the mail.

An older southern man who had been sitting next to me, the strangest sight I had yet seen, with a scraggly gray goatee, an eye patch, and glasses, interrupted my eavesdropping.  I didn’t mind.  I couldn’t really pay attention anyway.

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?”  He peered at me with his one eye under the brim of a black baseball cap with no logo.

“What is?”


He grinned at me and motioned in a little wave with his hand.

“This place, all of it.”  Leaning forward on his cane, one gnarled hand cupped over the other as they swallowed the fake wood of the cane’s handle.

“All of this was made by people you know.”  He gave me a strange smile.  “All of it.  Every brick, mortar, and law.  And if tomorrow a bunch of people decided this was all meaningless, well it just would be.  That’s the system.  That’s how it works.  People giving and taking meaning from other people.”  He stopped and muttered something that I couldn’t hear.  I didn’t quite know what to make of this stranger.

My phone rang.  I excused myself for a moment.

“Hello?”  It was you.  I got up and walked past the patient Hispanic woman, whose name was Betty, as she started to deal with some guy in a plaid shirt with a red vest who was having trouble understanding why he needed a court date for the trouble he was in for carrying his unlicensed shotgun in public.  I placed my finger in my ear with my free hand to block out the absurd conversation.  This place can make you hate people if you’re not careful.

“I’m lost.”

Those words sent a knot into my stomach.  We both were always so bad at directions.  I remember we tried to find this little Italian restaurant for an hour and eventually just gave up and went downtown.  We laughed about it forever.  But not now.  But not this.  I had only been inside for twenty minutes and it was killing me.  I think time itself got lost wandering the corridors.  This needed to end soon but it couldn’t without you.

“Ok where are you at?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I hear your car slow down in the background, “looks like I’m at 211th street?”  My heart sunk.

“Yeah that’s way past it, you need to turn around and get to 95th.”  I sounded too harsh.  I softened my voice.  “It’s a little tricky to find because of the one way streets.”

“Ok.  Sorry I’ll be there soon.”  You hung up and the wait began again.  For a minute I hesitated, wondering if I should go sit back down next to the strange southerner with one eye.  Unfortunately I had left my papers there so my decision was made for me.  He wasted no time starting our conversation over.

“You getting a divorce, son?”  Through the shadow of the brim of his hat and the thick black rim of his glasses he glanced down at the papers all amiss from being nervously rustled about before I had walked off to get your call.  His one eye was apparently more than enough.  I was taken aback at how forward he was, how casual.  I felt like some great and tragic secret of mine had just been unearthed.  Yet his voice was strangely tender, as if I was really his son.  For some strange reason it comforted me.
I sat down.

“Um, yeah unfortunately I am.”  I didn’t know what else to say.  It was either that or lie and say I was here for some petty crime, which definitely did not seem like the better option.

“I myself just lost my boy in a car accident.  I’m here to take care of what these morons consider the necessary legalities.”  He stopped and adjusted his hat.  He spoke those words quietly to me, but with force, like he expected them to have body and weight to throw on the gears that made motion in this place and grind them to a halt.  The world melted away.  As if suddenly we were just sitting in a great space, where the labyrinth exhausted itself into a single room, every corridor corroded, coalesced, a furious contortion into openness; and we were set off against the empty space he and I.  No other movement.  No other sound. He was held in a sort of scientific humility; or maybe I should say he held himself like this.  The magnanimous man, who is great in that he knows he is small.  The scientist, who could begin to describe the world by starting with the worm.  Where the last was first. A kingdom of God. In all the movements of the hallways, the massive jurisdictions,  legislation, all the infinite words and jargon, litigation, sophistry, lateralization of clauses, the infinite exterior concatenation which would not hold him, their greatness confluxed on deaf ears.  The only cosmos was his words, his suffered death, his son.  The world would suffer, be impressed with, his ghost.  Be turned around it like its center.  I miss him. He wasn’t cavalier in how he said it, even though it was again so straightforward.  But the thrumming of the lights and the passing of people continued.  I was waiting for a life story but it never came.  Ironically I felt closer to him for that.  I was trying to think of something to say when he looked up at me, and apparently saw that I was struggling.

“It keeps us human,” he nodded at me as he said this, his southern accent catching every word.  “Not knowing what to say in the face of tragedy, I mean.  All of this, this place, is chatter.  Babble for the sake of some desperate meaning in the face of nonsense.”  He gave a sad smile to me, and leaned in like he was about to tell me a secret. “But it doesn’t mean anything, you know?  You say too much of something and it loses its value.  The air just fills up, and there’s nothing left to breathe. You make ten million laws and you’re not human anymore.  It just spreads the pain too thin and too rigid over so many words.  Silence sometimes is just the best thing.  Makes you face yourself, its like in the empty space, you suddenly appear.”

He tapped his cane into the ground once, and rocked back, leaning into the hard bench, his eye shut.  “Kinda makes you appreciate the fact that God was born in a shit-hole.  The simplicity of it all, that you can be truly human still, in a place like that, without all of this legality.”  It was difficult to tell if this was blasphemy or piety.  But he whispered it like a prayer.

My phone rang again before I could really take in what he had just said.  Again it was you.  Thank God you were finally here.  I hung up the phone and muttered some triviality of a condolence about his son, even though I had just received a completely eloquent speech on why speaking too much was a poor choice.  I was an idiot.  But today, I felt, I was entitled.  This was not a good day.

I had told you to meet me in the room I had been sitting next to, but I needed to go to the bathroom first.  Collect myself.  I said goodbye to the man who had been sitting next to me, and excused myself.  With an almost imperceptible reluctance he said goodbye and nodded.

He called after me.

He asked me like a guard would ask, as the inmate walked the ingressing corridor towards extinction.  The needle.  The chair.  The guillotine.  The mob's stones.

“Do you still believe in love, son?”

The strange things this guy kept saying.  I laughed softly to myself, eyebrows furrowed, and turned back around.

Ever so slightly, I nodded.

“I’d like to.”

Who knows if I meant it, it was the only thing that came to my mind to say.  He took in a deep sigh and stared off ahead of him, leaning his chin upon his hands, still clasping the top of his cane.
“I believe in love like I believe in God.”  His eye never left me as he said it.

I thought about it for a second.

“I don’t know what to say to that,” I said back as the execution hallway stretched before me. It was true.  I didn’t.  I didn’t know what he meant.  He just chuckled at me.

           “Good.”



          __________________

     
           I was so tired.

           I awoke reaching for you in the dark one night.  But I turned my head, and I was in an empty room.  My hand felt in its reach only a cold and unused side of the bed. I became embarrassed at how I had forgotten this, even though I knew no one was watching.  I turned back over.  Pretended it was a twitch and a dream.


           -----------------------------



I dreamt last night of the home I grew up in.  My old home.  Again.  The dream was so visceral, so real.  How fitting. To this day that chapter of my life was real, that which shaped my bones and flesh, the poetry which wrote my heart and conjured my soul.  The fulcrum of my world.  Was everything after merely the dream?  How I could only hope for that.



            I dreamt I walked past my parent’s room at night, in the old house through the landing to the stairs past their room’s double doors, that beautiful house I loved, and I heard them laughing to each other happily.  How my heart soared at this.  I walked downstairs, hungry I think, searching for food in the kitchen pantry, assured at their laughter.  Their love was like the foundations and stone and wood and beam of the house.  The lattice of my heart. So I walked on, unthinking.  The world was already founded.  What did I need to trouble myself with it?

            I walked downstairs.

            Suddenly, though, as if I cannot descend the staircase swiftly enough, in the dream it is early morning, and I see my father in the dark of the living room, clutching a photograph of my mother and another man, snuck from the midst of some previous, horrible midday, shadow pouring down his face.  It is that awful morning.  That unforgettable morning.  That day life first collapsed.
I tried to go in to my dad in the dream, like I did in real life, to talk to him.  What’s wrong dad?  I asked.  I knew somehow that I was originally on my way to class.  But in my soul as the words left my lips I knew I wouldn’t go.  All plans were just ash.  Here his darkness anchored me.  The future intercepted my every thought.

As I walked into the living room, in the dream, he is gone and the dark house is empty, and ready for sale.  Not just empty, but that emptiness you feel when you walk into a house, unlived for weeks.  And for some reason my sweet Kalika, she was standing there in my dream. My Kairos.  Kalia.  Kalonice.  Kalokagathia  A love from long before you.  My soul gave her many names that repeated perfection and beauty.  My sweet archetype, she is there, here, in the dream for that moment I feel the love and longing that rapt me for so long.

 I miss you, I say to her in my empty house, in the melancholy dark.

            She smiles at me tenderly.

The house is so sublime and still.  I get a powerful, indescribable emotion, as if I existed in that moment in time, knowing all that I know now; knowing that the silent house will disappear and that my family will go their own way.  That for the next ten years no matter what I do I will in a very profound sense not know who I am anymore.  I feel it in the way only dreams can make you feel.  Where your body is not flesh but feeling.

I know that this is the first disappearance of many.  That I will fall in love again.  That I will be denied.
All of this I know in that moment as if I was then, standing in the sad silence of my beloved home, empty and now just a house, on the cusp of all that is to follow.  Standing on the limen between heaven and earth.  It is horrible and beautiful.  Sublime and terrifying.  Like a moment viewed from eternity—all the instants stemming from this, all its implications and tragedies and consequences present, in this before, this moment, with the emotions only dreams can conjure.  All the pathways, the traces of time stretching forth, root and branch and trunk, but inflected in the immediate intuition I had, a puncture in time.  Nonlinear.  Abrupt.

            My whole body was a fire, and the flame was that emotion.  It was a great, knowing melancholy.  That is the only way I know how to describe it.
            It is just Kalia, and the still shadows of the house, and myself, waiting to explode outward into all the times and distances pregnant in that moment.  I saw a shadow of myself walk out the door for the first day of school.  But he disappeared as a phantom of my mother took his photo.  I saw my first kiss on the couch when my parents were out.  The endless hours of my friends and I in my room, evading sleep with laughter.  Leaving like smoke and drafts through the vents of the house, breathing as if they also knew; they verged on their last gasps as our creatures.

For a second, I thought about running away.  Outside.  Anywhere.

            Into the night and its mysterious distances.

            If I get away maybe I could stay in the dream, I thought for a second.

            But I don’t.  I know, somehow, as I stand here that this is the last time I stood in my house.  I know if I leave I will not be able to come back, like Adam east of Eden.

            So I hesitate.  Savor the moment within the place, my place forever lost, restored only in sleep and its depths.  I see the moon flooding in through the great window nook in the kitchen.  I feel the cool tile beneath my feet.  The smoothness of the counter I felt everyday as I grew up.  The sensation that met me in the mornings before my cereal.  In the evenings as I drank a last glass of water before bed.

            Goodnight my son, said my parents, both.  Goodnight my daughter, they said as my sister walked up the stairs.  Goodnight, before we scattered before the wind.

            I miss you, I say again to Kalia as if I didn’t emphasize it enough a moment before.  I don’t know why she was in this dream.  She wasn’t there when it actually happened.  But in this dream I couldn’t focus on anything but her.  She was so beautiful.  Her shimmering hair.  Her lips.  Our laughter together.  It was like the weight of all the sorrow I felt was carving her shape from the shadows, making her surface and soft skin and beautiful tender smile.  Conjuring her from the aloneness of me standing in the house.  She was like some female messiah.  As if the only way I could flee, under the stars and outside, was if I kissed her and grabbed her hand, leading her along unknown paths with me.  Or if she led me away.  Her hair, her gorgeous lips, her bright, beautiful eyes illuminating the dark behind me.

            The urge was so strong, I can remember if I concentrate so very hard, to tell her again that I missed her.  That I loved her, so much more than anything.  She was the house; the sorrow; she was all my friends absent; my family broken; my identity obscured.    The potential of my past renewed.

            A beautiful symbol.  My subconscious is a poet.  I still haven’t shaken the feeling I awoke with from that dream, it was so powerful.  I’ve had variations of this dream many times, but not so powerful as this.  Never like this.

            The dream is about to end.  I know it.

            The house of my father, my mother, groans under its immanent dismissal.

            Kalia and I are standing there still, looking at each other as if in love.  The beams and glass begin to pull away, as if in some silent hurricane stripping the house.  We stand there unperturbed.  She is smiling at me, her green eyes sparkling in the moonlight.

            I miss you.  I said.

            We both know this moment is soon over.  In the still starlight the tile is torn from counters, the world shivers and shakes around us.  I see a family of shadows on the porch carving pumpkins and putting in candles.  But it evanesces; the mirage mixes with the storm.  The garage is pulled into the heavens toward the moon.  I want to try and hold on to it, to not let it pass.  

            Beyond, in the silver of the moon’s gaze, the world blurs.

            Why does everything have to end, I said, to pass?  I spoke as one who existed ten years before but with the weight of everything ten years after.  The walls of my room upstairs wrench into the night, all the phantoms of my youth uprooted, hooked by some great, incorrigible force.  We knew how this ends.

            She finally spoke as she kisses me.  Her hand running through my hair.

            It is a song, she says.  All of it.

            I awake.