Category: apocalypse

in conversation with my mind • after reading Piranesi

Dear Matthew,

Your face has returned, without its familiarity. I held your hands six weeks ago, and I felt only the coldest kind of history coursing underneath your marble skin: apathy. Do you wear this stone identity in mourning for your precious statues? A time to weep. Okay. I get it.

Will you yet laugh?

Your body walks these streets – yes, I’ve heard about your pilgrimage. What are you looking for? Your body haunts this city like your years of absence did my mind.

What are you looking for? What have you found?

I’m right here.

I know that you remember all of our adolescent footsteps. Follow them again?

Follow them.

Our first fight draws me to the window even now, and I gaze into that night a decade past:

You, standing under the streetlight with your hands inside your pockets; you, so noncommittal and unwilling to pretend conviction. More than anyone I know, you refused blind certainty. Your attitude was arrogant. It was dismissive. And I admired it. However, it was either me or you, and neither of us understood that. Then, you went away, and now you’re back, but it’s not you, and I’ve heard this one before, I’m sure. Somehow you’ve grown spiritually or something, and you don’t need this world or what it offers. You have your House. You harbor longing for it about as conspicuously as these words I howl:

Come back.

But I don’t think you stand with hands in pockets anymore. That image of you returning to me is proving less than false; it’s history. And the path you’ve already tread is already travelled. Even if you decide tonight to brave another storm, I won’t open the door…I don’t trust your eyes. The day you returned I knew, though I didn’t admit it. We huddled together in your parents’ living room, and you told us about the scientist and the amnesia. The cop. Your eyes lit up when you spoke of her, but that’s not what bothered me most – it was the crack in your choking voice when you spoke of your halls and chambers filled with your stony community. Your fingers fiddled with your favorite wine in front of you. You didn’t drink it at all. You’re full of something I can’t believe (you see, statues have never spoken with me). I haven’t seen you since that night. They say you’re here in the city, but nobody looks like you. Isn’t that ridiculous? I saw you in every passing stranger for years. And now I can’t see you at all. It seems this is becoming my choice as much as it was ever yours. If you dropped by I really wouldn’t open the door, but I can’t keep myself from leaving all the lights on. I can’t stop from hoping that you will come back. And you have come back! – as best as you can – but the House has saturated your mind. That place of immeasurable beauty – your salvation is my despair. Those rooms occupy deep space in you that I will never access.

This is all much too abstract. Here’s all I’m trying to say. Here it is, okay?

Here it is.

I once thought you were dead. And now I kind of wish you’d stayed that way.

Yours,

Zodiac lived in a concrete world. And so did everybody else. His teachers told him, “That’s the thing about concrete.” He asked, “What’s the thing?” And they shrugged because they didn’t actually know. But Zodiac had a feeling. He had a fleeting thought of a feeling. He had the suspicion of a fleeting thought of a feeling forming in his mind: I know. I know the thing about concrete.

So, Zodiac started a concrete pilgrimage. He started touching the concrete buildings and the concrete fence posts. He started looking more closely at the concrete trees and grass and flowers. Something was calling him, and he was pretty sure he knew what it was. I know the thing about concrete, Zodiac whispered to himself as he walked.

It didn’t take long before he attracted a following.

“Zodiac! Hey, Zodiac!” Three kids, a bit younger than himself, trailing him from a few yards back. “Why are you touching that tree?”

Zodiac looked at his hands. Both were splayed out wide against the tree. He could feel the bending, weaving ridges underneath his palms. But something was missing. The heat? Everything was always hot. The concrete made sure of that. Zodiac watched his own fingers arch and unglue themselves from the tree trunk, spiders stretching their legs after a long day in the web.

“Something’s wrong with it,” he said. He took hot hands and stuffed them in his pockets.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked the littlest boy. He was probably four.

“Not sure,” said Zodiac, who was only six himself, and he looked up into the branches weighed down with concrete leaves. The others looked up too, and the little one mumbled, “Not sure…”

It was the four of them for a while after that. Zodiac kept up his walking (it was summer after all, and he had little else to do) and the boys followed close behind. Then, when Zodiac put his hands against a concrete car or a concrete slide or a concrete swing-set, they would wait until he made space for them to place their hands as well. Eye contact. Raised brows. Sudden exclamation. These were the features of their expeditions. Hands against a concrete bicycle: “Lift it here, lift it. Can’t you tell?”

Actually, the littles didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but it was such a rousing adventure they couldn’t help but nod, and Zodiac would grimace so thoughtfully that no one dared ask the question: What is the thing about concrete? What is it, Zodiac?

It wasn’t until he plucked his first peony flower that his ragtag crew started feeling it too.

Nobody had ever picked a flower before.

This is how it happened. Summer was over. Zodiac was in class, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away from a group of peonies outside the window, which was, of course, an absence in the wall more than a thing in itself (glass being an absurdity, an unthought thing). He stared at the flowers all throughout his class as they moved from reading circles to math blasts to sculpture time. Finally, the teacher walked quietly up to Zodiac who was chipping away at his concrete toy house. He was on task (technically) but his eyes were fixed on those flowers outside. The teacher glanced down and followed his gaze out that window. “What do you see – ” she started to say, when Zodiac stood, ran to the window, and jumped out of it.

The entire class converged on the open square. A new lens. Watching Zodiac through this frame, they felt the intimate distance of television, and they understood his actions as the actions of one dearly beloved; indeed, for some, his actions were those of a person they might one day become; and for a quiet few, his movements were their very own.

Through the frame:

Zodiac kneels, his knees gentle against the unyielding fabric of his world. He leans forward. A wind ricochets off corners and sharp edges; everything is still. Zodiac lifts a hand, his fingers trembling because he can see something that nobody else can see, and that can really only mean a couple things.

Insanity. Reality.

When his fingers meet the flower, his touch sends tremors through the stem…

And it was at that point that Zodiac’s teacher gasped, “Impossible!!” And as soon as the word had been spoken it was exposed for the fragile sound it was, destroyed by the rising voices of the children as Zodiac stood to his feet with a full wind giving form to his shirt and his hair and the petals flowing from the flower in his hand. Pale and veined with white. Pollen spilling subtle threads of life. Green shining and twisting between his knuckles.

For a second, everyone could see it.

By the time he made it back to the window, though, Zodiac was holding a dull, grey substitute for the real thing, and the teacher was saying words like, hush and, don’t worry about these kinds of things. A few of the kids were crying, but they weren’t sure whether it was because of the flower that had been or now was, and even Zodiac seemed disoriented. He climbed back through the window with the bright sun still in his eyes, the colors of the finished flower in his mind, and darkness on the other side of the frame.

This event was something Zodiac pondered for a long time. He stopped walking. He stopped touching the concrete trees and flowers and buildings and vehicles. Instead, his followers found him most days at the beach, at a place the village people called Tomorrow. It was a vast space, an expanse called water. A concrete desert of sculptured waves, reaching. And Zodiac watching.

The children still flocked to him, however, and even more in number than before. After school and all through the holiday break, boys and girls could be seen, walking in pairs to the water’s edge, and pausing where Zodiac sat squatting upon the concrete sand. The littlest boy was there the most often, and sometimes he would take Zodiac’s hand, and he would sit cross-legged beside him, and he would say, “Not sure?”

And Zodiac would squint and nod and picture the pale, pink peony he had once held in his hand. That’s the thing about concrete, he would think to himself, and he might have stayed there years (some people do) if it weren’t for the littlest boy who one day said:

“Zodiac, are you crying on me?”

And of course it was the ocean spray, liquid and living against the boy’s forehead and eyebrows and lips, anointing. Zodiac leapt and whooped and ran with abandon into the razor waves. Nobody else was watching that time, just the littlest boy and, of course, Zodiac himself, when the lethal concrete disintegrated into the cleansing foam of a holy tide.

Zodiac spun around, and he shouted, “I know what it is! I know what it is!!” and the littlest boy laughed and hopped and clapped his hands, wet now with the water that Zodiac splashed back at him, scooping it with his hands and kicking with his feet.

By dinner that day, all of the children were in the water, and even some of the grown ups, but none of them really understood except for Zodiac and his friend.

“I know the thing about concrete,” Zodiac whispered to the littlest boy one night, a week later, as they lay side by side with their hands behind their heads on the transformed shoreline. Their hair pressed lines of new meaning into their fingertips. Their eyes found old stories in the sky.

“What is?” asked the littlest boy, and he really wasn’t sure. He didn’t know what to expect. Although he could see the water and even some of the flowers, he didn’t know the secret.

“It crumbles,” said Zodiac, and he said it with a knowing pause, like the littlest boy should maybe be confused and ask another question, so the littlest boy said, “What?” and Zodiac said, “Look at the stars.”

Here’s what the littlest boy saw. Maybe this is an answer:

Dust falling like rain in the glare of distant lights. Cracks in the geometry of that dark canvas and piercing white. Static shadows crumbling under the pressure of movement. Lines making pictures making ideas. Unity making a difference making sense. Every star like an aching question. Every soul in the stellar fires. Deep blue, and black and beautiful, thinking and hoping, breathing not choking, not hurting but holding.

Holding.

Sophie stirred her coffee. It was pretty bad.

Behind her, hundreds of the desperate and decaffeinated regulars crashed in and out of the café. Below her, over the railing, she could watch the frantic rat race of central station. She wasn’t really watching though. Her focus had drifted a while ago. She was in that happy place of absentminded wonder. Slow ideas materialized.

Maybe I really should take that train south today. It’s on platform two…

This was exactly the trip she had needed. With any and all Uni prospects having evaporated, by the end of high school she’d been left empty handed. And at first, miserable. But with the blessing of her parents and the well-placed words of a few friends and teachers, Sophie had decided upon a gap year touring Europe, first, then maybe working when she got back home, then…who knows.

Maybe I should drink this coffee. I bought it. But of course it’s disgusting. There’s that. It’s nothing at all compared to the coffee yesterday. That was everything…

She’d been to six different cities all throughout the continent. She’d met dozens of hostel-hopping, likeminded explorers; they’d all made promises to stay in touch, to stay the same, to stay young – promises already gathering dust. And now she was here, in this particular station café, in this particular city, in the final week of the trip.

Maybe I shouldn’t take that train south today after all. Maybe I should go back and find that little gem of a coffee shop buried in those winding cobblestones…

Sophie had six more days and two possible cities to visit. But indecision came knocking. And with indecision came the realization that she didn’t want to make the wrong choice. This felt too much like those wet spring days, several months back. This felt too much like failure. But maybe…

Maybe I would see him again.

My eyes could hold his eyes again.

Would he be there? Would he be working today?

Probably not.

What would it look like to stay here and never go home? Drink actual good coffee in an actual café? His café?

Dodge the inevitable forever. Make love and make no decisions about anything else.

Slow feelings on fade-out. Sophie blinked. That thing happened where the blurs became people and checkout counters and chihuahuas and luggage. All the meaningless weight of unfamiliarity. She blinked again. She was tired of this. And she’d never said more than ten words to that barista dude all week, much less made any kind of love. She blinked again.

She didn’t realize she was waving back until it was happening.

And then it was all happening.

Some guy she’d never seen before. Looking nothing like her hunky, hipster barista. But looking at her, really looking. Holding her eyes. Waving at her from the ground floor. Gesturing. Wait a second, his hands promised, just a second. Then he was backpedaling and turning halfway around and finding the escalator.

And then he was sitting on one of those swivel stools next to her along the back railing of a train station’s sorriest excuse for a café.

“Hi.”

Sophie stared at him. Okay, he was cute. He didn’t have that hot factor. But he had something else. He definitely had something else. Ruffled brown hair, a stylish cut with an endearing sense of disarray, fitted t-shirt, arms to match, but gentle hands…and that smile. Like nothing else mattered except the current moment.

“Hi?”

“You were waving at me.”

“Um, you waved at me first.”

He laughed, and Sophie caught her breath. What was happening.

“So, you speak English?”

“Don’t we all?”

He laughed again, the same laugh, full and fresh like summer rain. “But you’re not American. Where is home?”

“I guess I don’t really know. Trying to figure that out. But, I’m sorry…who are you?”

A pause.

“Tate.”

Another pause. Her turn?

“Tate. Okay, Tate. Why’d you wave at me?”

“Why’d you wave back?”

Sophie couldn’t resist a smile. A little one.

“What’s your name?” Tate asked, and it felt like this was it. This was the moment that Sophie could disappear and make him disappear too; she could shut it all down. Make it never happen. The train south was leaving in two hours. Or she could head west after all, on the train in twenty minutes. Either way, she didn’t need to take this guy with her, whether literally or figuratively. No part of her plans required him. She was supposed to take the trip of her lifetime because she could, and then she was supposed to go home, get a little side gig, and apply for more universities. She didn’t need his baggage. In other words, she didn’t need a detour. No more extended backpacking trips. No more hunky baristas. No more cute guys picking her out of the crowd and waving and sitting next to her and keeping her from making a wise decision. Sophie grit her teeth.

She wouldn’t say her name.

She wouldn’t smile back again, and when Tate might try, as he probably would, to order a couple more coffees, one for himself and another for her, she wouldn’t stay. She wouldn’t drink it and laugh as his face puckered against the disappointment. She wouldn’t say, I told you so, and she wouldn’t purse her lips and hold his eyes with her own and let the moment linger. The café wouldn’t slowly empty as the conversation bubbled over into family histories and forgotten dreams and hidden passions, and Tate’s fingers wouldn’t find their way to hers, and his touch wouldn’t radiate from there and through her arms and chest and her very core, making it kinda hard to breathe, and he wouldn’t whisper, this is nice, to which she wouldn’t reply, it could be even better, surprising herself with a burgeoning sense of liberty…

Tate wouldn’t rest his hand at the base of her head, on her neck, her head tilted back and her lips parted open, only a little.

He wouldn’t lean forward.

Sophie wouldn’t either.

And she definitely wouldn’t kiss and tell.

A long, long time ago there was a cloud. Just the one. It floated above the people of the world, back and forth, and the people waved. That was about all the interaction the cloud had with the human people. Or with any kind of people for that matter.

You see, the cloud was alone.

Yes, the cloud was alone and no amount of thin air conjured cartoon people or alien people or other cloud people would change that because those people were imaginary – which most essentially means that they didn’t talk back.

And that was about it for the cloud. And it got to be too much. The floating. The aloneliness.

So, the cloud started to cry. And the human people below watched the tears that they’d never seen before start falling and they started running and shouting at other people to run away! but there were so many people shouting and screaming and shrieking that nobody could understand what anybody was saying and lots of people were sobbing boohoo! and the general cacophony sounded something like, RRAAAAIIIIN!!!! BBOOOO!!

And this went on for a long time. A long, long time.

Until finally, a little boy looked at his dad and then climbed up on top of his shoulders and started waving his hands. First, the people next to him stopped screaming to look and wonder. Then more people stopped. Then more. Eventually, everyone in the world stopped and looked at the boy and he said, “I’m going up there to fix it.” He looked down at his dad, who nodded, and so the little boy kept talking. “I’m bringing my special arrow and my cool bow and I’m going to shoot the heart of the cloud with light. I think that’ll fix it.”

When the boy stopped talking he reached into the bag on his dad’s back and pulled out the bow and arrow he was talking about and so everybody cheered and then his dad said, “Ready?” and the boy said, “Ready.”

And his dad threw him into the sky.

And he sped up past the tears and burst through the first layer of the cloud into a shattering whiteness which stopped his momentum and felt a lot like cotton candy. He slowed to a halt and felt around. He was kind of sitting and kind of leaning on a dense shelf of cloud within the cloud. The whiteness underneath him was solid, and he grabbed a piece and sniffed it and it smelled a lot like cotton candy. The whiteness everywhere else, above and around and beside him, was not solid. It was airy and he wasn’t sure if it would hold his weight, but this being an adventure, he decided to go for it and he jumped. He floated gently downward until he landed on more cushiony cloud material, and from there he started walking. And he took a bite of the cloud stuff in his hand and it tasted a lot like…you guessed it.

After a while though, the walking and the searching and the cotton candy eating all became rather monotonous and the boy realized the cloud was much bigger than he’d ever guessed. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to find the heart, which was where he had hoped to shoot his arrow to begin his invasion of light. In fact, he had begun to suspect the cloud didn’t even have a heart and then that was when it happened. He stepped through a weak spot in the cloud floor below him and he started to fall into the sky.

Back in the cloud, everything had been soft and safe and dry. Now the boy was soaking wet (because the cloud was still crying its lonely tears) and not safe at all (because of the tremendous distance between him and the ground).

But.

He still had his bow and his arrow and now that he was out of the dense and dark whiteness of cloud, he had a plan.

Because above him was the cloud, and above the cloud, peeking through, was the sun. So, all he needed was just…the right…angle…

…and the boy let the arrow fly!

It splattered a few tears in his face as he fell backwards toward the crowd of human people and he could hear them crying RRAAAAIIIIN!!!! BBOOOO!!!! but he couldn’t see because of the cloud tears in his eyes and he could only hope that the arrow was true, that it was flying higher and higher and back through the broken part of the cloud through which he’d fallen and out through the top and perfectly in line with the sun so that the light could explode the darkness and make the cloud less alone…

When the boy opened his eyes, he was still falling.

The cloud was still crying, but not as much.

The sun was still shining, but even more than before.

And the colors were radiant – which most essentially means awesome.

From so far below, the people couldn’t see much. But what they could see was that the cloud was hardly crying at all anymore, so most of them stopped screaming, and they could see a splash of color across the sky, and the shadow of the little boy falling with his bow bending like the colors above.

When his dad caught him with a manly oomph, the little boy laughed and all the human people cheered because although the cloud would maybe indeed continue to feel sad sometimes, it wasn’t alone. The cloud had the sun. The sun had light. And together, they would bring color to the sky.

Oh, and it wasn’t until later that evening, after the little boy had gone to sleep, that some grownup human people sitting around trying to figure it all out, and someone said, “I think we need a new word for the tears that were falling from the sky today, so I made up a word based on what we were all screaming.” Here the grownup paused importantly. “The new word is: rain.” And everybody said ooh and aah because that was a very good new word.

And then somebody else tried to think of something important and succeeded and said, “We also need a new word for the color in the sky! Something to remember this day! Some word that captures the memory…” So, they thought about it for a while, and they all thought very important thoughts, and some people suggested some important names like bowrain and rowbain and bainrow and someone kept shouting, “What about flub?” and no one was really satisfied until the little boy’s dad cleared his throat and everyone one was quiet and he said, “Let’s bring it back to that word we were all screaming today – rain – but then there was that other sound too. What was it?”

And so the colors have been called a rainboo ever since.

The thing about a name is it won’t fit at first. The letters won’t settle around your shoulders until your muscles begin to fill in, until your bones have grown thicker and they can support the serifs of the appellative sounds. You’ll walk around and, at first, the name will slip off your feet; maybe you will even find yourself some years in, choking at the collar of consonants, desperate for release.

Don’t worry.

A name is neither a dinner jacket nor a straight one. It can expand and stretch quite a bit more than you might expect at first. You might not understand it, but time will shape your shoulders to the load. Certainly, the name will change and so will you. Someday, even, it might feel like home.

Benson wouldn’t know until much later the hopes his mother once held for him. As she carried him inside of her own body, she began to take notes. These were the hopes she wanted to write into his life, so she recorded them in the trees and in the stars. Her name was Inertia and she loathed it along with the hippie culture that inspired her parents to create such a burden. She felt categorized, like a lonely toy on a monochrome shelf. A high school dean once told her, in a spineless chuckle, “With a name like that, and with grades like this, it’s terribly uncertain whether you’ll go anywhere at all…”

Maybe she believed those words, maybe not.

They became a false vessel with a flimsy truth.

Inertia took the stumbles of her parents, the addiction and the apathy, and turned it into her engine. Everything about her attitude and aspirations was centered in her drive to be different than her parents. And she aimed Benson in that novel direction from her very first kisses on his tender, baby cheeks.

Once, when Benson was four, he noticed a man shouting at his daughter. From across the playground, Inertia watched her son approach, a teddy bear entering the shadow of a grizzly. At first the man didn’t notice the tug on his T-shirt, and neither did his daughter, whose eyes were glazed with apathy. Inertia thought she couldn’t have been older than five – though she looked like she’d been through three lifetimes of despair – and her rote acceptance of her father’s ridicule confirmed the banality of familial terror. Until she suddenly saw Benson, an interloper undeterred. When she did, when she saw his presence would alter the rules of the exchange, she was frozen in frantic worry.

Then, the beast looked down.

“What do you want?”

Inertia could hear the careful violence in his voice. Bloodlust. Some men crave the hurt. His growl brought her back to the dim memories of her own father, after a festival, when no one was looking.

“I want you to stop yelling at this little girl.”

And the man, for a moment, was transparent; his soul shimmered in confession and he almost knelt before the boy.

“Oh my God,” he whispered.

Have you ever caught that moment when the sunset becomes the smoggy dusk?

As suddenly as he had repented, the man took a step towards Benson and raised his fist. Thirty feet away, Inertia raised hers as well, gripping a baseball. It was an old trick her mother had taught her: carry a weapon that seems like a toy. In a single, practiced motion she arched her back, whipped her arm forward, and released, already running towards her son.

As the ball traveled below the monkey bars, Benson turned to look for his mother. She would never forget the whisper in his eyes, and it took a long time for her to see his perspective. He had something special, even as a kid.

It was conviction. It was faith. It was courage.

And the ball shattered the man’s nose.

Inertia leapt towards Benson and lifted him into her arms. Bending, she picked up the baseball. Then, she walked assuredly back towards the car across the grass as the giant behind her toppled and bled and blubbered tepid curses. His daughter stood stunned and Benson couldn’t help but wonder what she was going to do.

That kind of thing continued to happen and the colors continued to change. Inertia and Benson lived in a compact house – she would never use the word small. And the color? Cookies and cream. As a boy, he wondered if he might scoop a chunk off the siding during the summer months. He never did try it though; even as the other homes melted around neighborhood, their house stood as solid and bright as freshly fallen snow. Inertia watered the flowers, mowed the lawn, and trimmed the trees. She taught Benson everything. She gave him everything, from hugs to kisses.

Was it cold chance, then, that brought him to a bridge, in the rain? Was it destiny?

•••

“What’s your name, son?” Words in the mist, carried by a whisper shrouded in something. Anticipation? Dread?

“I’m not a kid.”

“You’re younger than me, I can see that much even without my eyes. Your voice is bent. Soft and full of struggle.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know you.”

Benson kept his hands in his pockets. It felt like the man sitting in the rain in front of him was also beside him and above and behind. Indeed, it wasn’t surprise that Benson felt at this revelation. It was a deep fulfillment of expectation, one he couldn’t grasp; had he been fearing this encounter, or longing for it?

The man began to rise as he spoke. “I know you. You wait tables at Lenny’s.”

“I need to pay for school.”

“I know you’re young, but you’re a little old for studying. I know that too.” Now the man was standing and Benson could see his full height, framed by exploding rain drops on a tattered jacket. “Most seem to stop earlier than you.”

“I’m going back to fix something I broke a long time ago.”

“Well, that’s what I’ve been waiting for. Do you see this flood of great waters from the sky? I don’t sit in this for nothing. I have a proposition.”

•••

Benson couldn’t see out the window of his mom’s Buick, but the laughter reverberated around the vehicle like arrows trembling after impact. Sitting in his seat, he couldn’t tell whether the sounds were giggles or guffaws – he felt defensive out of habit. Inertia turned and looked at her little boy.

“Are you ready? You still have about ten minutes before the bell rings.”

“They’re really loud.”

“So are you, at least at home. Don’t be nervous, you can just be yourself.”

“I’m only a little nervous. But not about them. I’m nervous about me.”

(Who will I become?)

Outside the air felt foreign and the laughter could have been a different language. In different corners of the schoolyard Benson could see the subcultures. Sitting on the cracked steps, gathered beneath a tattered basketball net, jumping rope in the sunshine.

(Who will I become?)

The thought wouldn’t let him go as he walked toward the double doors.

You see, the thing about a name is it won’t fit at first.

The letters won’t settle around your shoulders until your muscles begin to fill in.

Until your bones have grown thicker.

Benson was every different version of himself over the years, but the name settled well. By the time he met the man in the rain, he knew the ways to hurt and to be hurt.

(Who will I become?)

DRIVER 1

The music bounces in syncopation with the shocks. It’s the kind of van that would give even a joey motion sickness, and really no one should be driving it, much less a distracted father trying to do the right thing for once.

But he’s trying to do the right thing for once.

That’s, of course, why he’s clattering up the road to the hardware store. And at first, of course, like in the first four minutes of the trip, he takes a wrong turn, so he’s coming at the destination from a totally unfamiliar angle. So says the onboard navigation, and that’s another tick up in the blood pressure, and another reason to turn around.

But he doesn’t because he’s trying to do the right thing. For once.

When he finally pulls into the lot, the two kids in the back are sick of the car and who could blame ‘em? Their flustered father takes a second to lean back and rest his head, and it’s just the briefest infinity; he breathes in and out, and he is making a little “o” with his lips, like his wife taught him, and breathing in through the nose. It’s not enough to stop time, but he feels a little better, and then he leans forward and opens the door and helps the kids out and heads across the parking lot, a case study in trepidation.

And by the way, he inquires, does anyone see the entrance?

DRIVER 2

Every delivery has been botched.

First stop of the day: fragile package accepted reluctantly and dropped immediately by inept neighbor.

Second stop: a sudden tumble on icy steps and a bruised tailbone in return.

Third stop: ferocious dog.

And now he’s here, stuck in traffic and late for stop number four and getting later for everything else.

It’s not like this is new. Most days go wrong for this champ. Most days feel like a heavy dose of fumes straight to the lungs, followed by coughing, disorientation, regret, and more coughing. Coming home after hours of road rage will do that to a person, and so it has done it to him. Plus, it doesn’t help that his landlady refuses to maintain the plumbing and his boss is threatening termination and his gambling habit is approaching rock bottom.

He’s a tough guy, but c’mon, a man can only take so much.

I’m entitled, he thinks, to at least a bit of indignation.

DRIVER 1 AGAIN

Okay, he found the doors.

And it’s a colossal structure, a warehouse brimming with metal shapes he doesn’t understand. He’s roaming aisles with the boys and talking too much to try to lighten the mood. The sweet thing is, the little guys don’t even seem to care that this fifteen minute trip has taken forty five already, and they must really like labyrinths because they’re gawking at the towering shelves of hardware as if they might set up shop and stay a while. And maybe that’s all they need to do. Whatever happens now, he thinks, I should remember this moment. They’re having a good time. That’s what we came for. I should remember this.

I should be here for this.

DRIVER 1 AND DRIVER 2

Here’s the part where they meet. But let’s take our time.

After circling through the aisles dozens upon dozens of times, the boys are exhausted, and their father is hysterical, but they have all the materials they need for the project. Now, they just need…to…leave.

Of course, paying is an affair, and before they walk out the doors into the sweet sweet sunshine they check in with four different representatives to make sure that they have: a) paid the right amount, and b) paid in advance of pickup, and c) paid anything at all, and d) waited for the appropriate amount of excruciating minutes. Indeed, they have.

Meanwhile, traffic is equally lethargic around the corner; the second key driver in this anecdote is sweating and swearing. Bad news is brewing.

It all comes to a head when the minivan pulls out of the parking lot, into the flow of traffic, and directly in front of the delivery truck.

THE KIDS / OPTION 1

At first, they think it’s pretty funny that the silly man is standing outside their car. The younger boy noticed him getting out of the delivery truck behind them, and he tried to wave as the stranger marched to Daddy’s window.

It doesn’t take long, though, before they realize this isn’t silly. Far from it. The man is yelling, and Daddy is gesturing, and then the man spits against the glass. Then three things happen:

1. The father and older brother shout, /HEY!/ in ineffectual unison.
2. The man moves to the front of the car, slipping a hammer from his belt.
3. The hammer slams against the windshield.

And everything just short of reality splinters as the children watch the slow motion lines expand within the glass and they feel the cracks warp their minds.

Something has happened: the impossible.

The man with the hammer, once a strange and distant parallel, has played the interloper. And more! His violent interference has marked him the enemy. He stands beyond the broken windshield, a hostile silhouette, and bids the hero make his move. It is the cliché climax. It’s exactly like the stories that Daddy tells at bedtime. It’s the promise repeated throughout the centuries. It’s the sword against the dragon. It’s the heel against the snake.

And it’s also a choice. It’s always been a choice.

It is the apocalyptic intersection in which constantly find ourselves, ready or not. Promises met or unfulfilled: it depends on a choice.

That’s why tonight, at bedtime, there will be nothing to say.

Because there will be nothing to tell.

Because the hero basked in the crackling indecision splashing through the new mosaic of his windshield, and then he opted for inaction.

The kids noticed that. What else can be said?

THE KIDS / OPTION 2

Or maybe something might be said after all.

Maybe the hammer struck the glass even as their father opened the door. The splintering gathered momentum as he stepped, decisively, around his door and toward the enemy, and the children strained to see through the blur of the windshield.

Archetypes of ancient heroes assembled in two nascent minds. A collective of the very best; David. Esther. Frodo. Harry. Names that met with giants. Names that set their imaginations skyward. They whipped a glance at one another, and their eyes voiced every hope. They believed before they saw.

And this is what they saw:

Their dad, fully turned to face the opposition, his form sure and strangely taller than they could remember, taller than any giant.

Their dad, his hand held up, and light bursting with the cracks toward the shadow.

Their dad.

Maybe there would be something to tell at bedtime after all.

Nowhere held as much meaning for him as this church. And never was it more significant than it was now, in its lonely reverence.

He used to come more regularly, when his grandfather had also come more regularly; he could still easily recall the childhood pranks he’d pulled with the other churchgoing children – throwing bits of paper into Mrs. Jones’ hair, for example. Or the time he and a friend had deliberately spread mud down the center aisle only to find they’d accidentally spread something else. Good times. The memories settled the turmoil of his churning spirit, and he smiled as he leaned back, basking for a moment in his melancholy.

All around him, the church mirrored his mood, and the candlelit stone rippled in shadow. The pews seemed to breathe, creaking, humming in repose, dust rising and settling with every wooden exhale. Alive. Anything might come alive if you sit still long enough. At least, as alive as you expect.

And that’s the question, isn’t it? Does reverence beget meaning? Or the other way around?

He held a finger to the pulse beating between the pages of music nearly five hundred years old; the ink seemed to almost swell with the tide of life all around him.

These walls: brother’s wedding, daughter’s baptism, grandfather’s funeral. For generations of his family, this building had meant sanctuary and refuge; and for billions across the planet, places like this had offered meaning in the vast wilderness of human activity. At least, so it seemed.

He closed the hymnal and set it back in its proper space. He glanced at the essay on the bench beside him. It didn’t belong, with its 21st century font, printed straight out of a copy paste flurry toward the end of his work day, and its stapled unity that guaranteed so much with so little. He felt himself recede into his mind and registered a hand, his own, brushing the papers farther away; of course, the instinct was simply superstitious. Ideas don’t hurt you if they get too close. Do they?

Now, pause here – briefly. Keep our friend in your mind’s eye, but travel with me into the words on the pew and into the barren sprawl of the 1960’s Wild West. Imagine heat. Imagine sweltering, ancient heat drifting across the land and scorpions and skeletons in the sand. It’s called Death Valley for a reason.

If you listen closely, the burning wind sounds like a scream. Maybe you wonder at first if your mind is playing tricks, but then you see a huddle of desperation standing at a yawning hole.

Water bubbles up in frothy rage.

The absence of the wind coats everything with a sticky helplessness.

A pile of diving equipment organized for rescue.

A scattered collection of more equipment like litter.

The sun gazes impassively.

A pregnant woman sits like crumpled paper at the mouth of oblivion, discarded.

Four men gather just past the edge, clumped around a fifth in isolated agony.

All of this, and more, offered in precise aphorism; I’ll stop and let you read the original. Go find the essay on morality. Listen, and come back to sit with our contemplative at the church. Go. Watch for the widow at the boiling well.

John looked again at the article as if it had been calling, and in a way it had: he could still hear the cries of that diver, gone down into the depths so far he came back with but pieces of his mind.

And the widow’s man didn’t come back at all…

The scene was dreadful. No wonder it provided shape for a morality untethered from the absolute. No wonder it gutted meaning. Well. For some people.

He turned his eyes back to the fresco at the front of the church, the one he’d come to see. Jesus. His hands were open – in supplication and invitation – they reached out to the man through the air, through the collective breath of the prayerful held over centuries. To those penitent seekers (like the little band of the desperate at the widow’s pit and like our contemplative, like all the suffering sinners and saints of this earth, like predator and prey alike) he seemed to say what they’ve always said he did: “Come.”

And this word, streaming forth across the stony tiles, from a painting in a common church, seemed to settle contagiously upon the man – not necessarily that he would be safe in such company, but saved.

That he would be saved for something, that pain is fertile soil, that things matter.

Does reverence beget meaning? Or the other way around? The stories in the text beside him supported the former: those who expect things to come alive begin to see those same things breathe. Those who revere the sacred thus /make/ the sacred what it is. In other words, nothing really means anything more than what we say it does. And why? Well, because there’s too much suffering. We shouldn’t pretend, they say, to know what’s good when there’s so much bad. The woman’s husband drowned in hellish waters before he met their child for God’s sake! Or maybe not his sake. Whether he let it happen or made it happen or couldn’t stop it from happening, it’s just another tragic example of the gaping absence in the skies. So, stay grounded. Don’t pretend the horizon means anything or that your preferences amount to some kind of Truth.

John sighed and glanced at the document beside him. He thumbed through the pages from a cautious distance. The argument frustrated because it resonated. In little ways…in so many little ways, except…

Except it was an unimaginative story. It was a narrative that failed to match the depth of mystery in the universe which calls us to imagine a story of more dimension than we can measure: a story that can account for the hope and agony, the beauty and ugliness of rescue through the waters of hell.

That was the difference for him, and it’s why he stood to leave and left the papers on the pew and walked out toward a world of things that matter. A world of things moving in a direction, following a narrative as deep and mysterious as reality.

“Come,” was the glorious alternative to the essay’s grieving, “Stay.”

I man the turnstiles, and I’ve seen them come and go.

Usually, they walk in slowly, and I have enough time after hearing the outer door open to put away my writing and stand at attention. Sometimes, they’re trying to move in, sometimes they’re trying to move out. Sometimes, they’re just trying to pay the boss, and I take the money.

Butterflies. There’s a little of that each time, before the man or woman comes into view. They walk through the entry way, open the interior office door, and descend a handful of carpeted steps. As they do, they turn the corner and come to the counter.

And every single time, they cower in the fear of insignificance, even as they battle for the God-given right to be noticed.

When I stop working here – when I’m no longer guarding the turnstiles but instead walking through, on my own way out, I’m sure this will be the most important thing I learned: to be faceless is oblivion, and to be known is everything we’ve ever dreamed.

Mel eased onto a stool at the counter and assured me I’d heard of him.

“Yeah, been here my whole life, building walls. You gotta use plaster or the whole flipping thing will fall down, or at least get bent outta shape. Ya know why they use dry-wall?”

I didn’t.

“It’s easier to put up! It’s cheaper and faster too! Put it up and in fifteen minutes it’s ready to get a splash of paint. Nah, that’s not even a bit of how it’s supposed to be done, not even a whiff of sense.”

I agreed. He didn’t notice.

“Now listen here, you listen here, young man you don’t remember the war do ya? Now, I wasn’t old enough to participate in that cluster, but I went to Korea, in the navy. Didn’t fire a gun or kill nobody, but I typed. My mama told us boys we all three needed to learn to type. And so we did. You see, my grandparents all came over in boats and they weren’t looking for nothing fancy, nothing to blow up neither. They just wanted a plot of land, a little piece to call home. My mama taught us boys that too, and I haven’t made big money, but I’m okay, I’ve always just been looking to set up my own little home, like my grandfathers and grandmothers. So, go and learn how to type, she says…”

Mel’s hands were historical, and his fingers were chiseled stone. He may have spent his time in the navy typing, but he’d been in construction here in town for the last forty years. I glanced quickly at the fragility of my own hands on the desk behind the counter and winced.

He kept talking as I hid my delicate fingers, smiling and nodding, just keeping beat to the melody of the conversation he was writing. His hair was whiter than the early spring clouds floating outside, and it was thin, but combed and styled to perfection. He’d been to Scandinavia and the Balkans and Budapest. His sleek jacket fit shoulders that slumped unwillingly. His wedding ring rested loosely in gold as he joked about the tyranny of his marriage.

“I better not make any decisions here before I talk to my wife. Son, are you married? Do you know what I’m talking about? An old man’s feet rest on shaky ground.”

“I am,” I said. “And I’ve felt the tremors myself.”

He laughed with gusto at perhaps the only sentence I was able to complete during his visit. But I could tell he loved his wife with the confidence and sincerity of decades hand in hand. He wouldn’t stop bringing her up, and twenty minutes later, I saw them driving together down the road outside my office window.

“I spent two weeks cleaning the muck out of the bilge, oil from the pipes, grime, cigarette butts, and then they walk by a group of us getting coffee and ask, ‘Anyone here who can type?’ Well, you know I raised my hand for sure, and next thing I know, I’m working in the office, just a job, like you got here. Then, next thing I know, the captain’s yeoman goes on leave, and I step up to the plate. Nobody gave me any after that for the rest of my stay in the service. I didn’t make much money then, haven’t made much since. Didn’t shoot nobody though.”

Mel kept talking, and I couldn’t help but wonder. I’m just the gatekeeper, but they all stop to talk. They walk in for business and spend most of the time in communion. Not everyone stays twenty minutes like Mel did, but they all crave an instance of connection.

Recognition.

And their faces betray their half-hearted postures at maintaining distance.

Mel’s face spoke of experience. His stories were compelling, his voice commanding. He maintained eye contact, and I was completely aware of my youth in his presence. And I disagreed with him throughout most of our conversation as it drifted between politics, social commentary, and storage unit pricing. I disagreed with his contempt for the other.

But in watching his eyes, I could tell he was deeper than his skin, his political, religious, and cultural views. His eyes danced with his opinions, and to reject that dance would be to wholly deny his person.

Oh, I know. You might say that that’s exactly what he did himself in the space of twenty seconds when he ridiculed billions for their faith and accused every immigrant of rape and murder. He denied them their humanity.

But I’m not about to throw Mel out with his dirty bath water.

He sat with me for less than half an hour, and he proved his inner juxtaposition of this and that. We’re all made up of dissonance. We’re trying to balance the chaos. Mel’s been trying for sixty years longer than I have, and yes, in some places I’m sure he’s settled like warped concrete. Maybe he wishes he hadn’t.

But in other places he’s still reaching for heaven. We all are; those we love and those we misunderstand. Maybe that’s what I should have said when he took a breath, but instead I held mine.

“Yeah, well that’s my story.” He sighed.

I couldn’t figure out whether he was getting ready to leave or set up camp. He paused and rose to his feet.

I thanked him for coming into the office, and I let him know his reservation would be ready when it came time.

“Alright,” he said.

“Alright,” I said, and he left.

Fill a bottle with water and dirt. Shake it. Watch it settle.

My mind is that vessel.

I am thrust daily into disequilibrium, and so are you. Our heads spinning globes, tossing waves within a torrent of thought. So.

I try to find a place to sit and let the dirt settle in the water. The ideas prostrate themselves like gasping sailors stranded on the sand. The thoughts recede with the tide. Just. Be.

All the wisdom in the world seems to find its source in simple presence. If God is anywhere, he’s in the whisper. Haven’t you noticed?

It takes a while, and I keep forgetting how. Can I get a minute? That’s usually the first step. I crave someplace lonely and holy. The thoughts swirl, and ideas are illuminated in flashing revelations, only to be drowned again. It takes time before frenzy retreats…and it never disappears.

So, I’m sitting in a cafe listening to a lush explosion of rock. Or I’m kneeling at a stream listening to the celebration of birds. Or I’m in my room, in the dark, listening to nothing at all. And the flow of thoughts continues, unabated; the experience is observation not obsession. That’s the second step.

Everything is spiritual. Notice it.

The touch of my hand against her cheek, not divorced from the rhythm of my spirit against hers. Not different. The same. So, everything is spiritual.

Or not?

Is everything only matter? And, if so, does anything even matter?

I return to the experience of her. In our closeness, I see clearly and breathe freely. She sits next to me, and her presence shatters my anxiety: I am physical and spiritual, one and the same. The shape of her head, resting against mine reminds me that I care. What gave rise to this awareness in me, and to care that I care, why?

There is so much that I question.

I recently went for a drive. A sunny, highway meandering. My children fell asleep in the back, my wife next to me, and I fought my demons. It was stuffy in the car, and I wanted to escape into the golden air outside. Likewise, my brain couldn’t seem to escape the tangle of suffocating thoughts. Until.

I looked at her in the passenger seat. Asleep. Alive. Our unconscious breathing in that darkness astounds me. I glanced at the boys in the back. They were completely at rest, the drone of the engine had done its good work.

I returned my eyes to the windshield, and I was healed. I don’t know how it works. Shake your head, and let the thoughts swirl. Watch the questions settle and the water calm.

For me, that day, it was a simple thing: I saw my family at peace, trusting me to drive them, trusting their bodies to carry them. Implicit faith. I began to observe my breathing and not my brain. It doesn’t seem like I’m in very much control of either one. Okay.

I guess that’s where I’m at now. My thoughts and feelings are traitors. I turn to You.