Personae (20 page)

The reclusiveness gave rise to rumors: that she had retired because of impending motherhood, that she had specifically not ruled out studio recording because she was recording in her home studio what would prove to be the seminal performances of the complete Beethoven piano variations, or that a violent interruption had placed her on a surprising trajectory distinct from music.

This last rumor gained credence when in 2002 the NYPD’s police academy received a most unique cadet to be sure. Remarkably this fact remained largely unnoticed until Detective Helen Tame began solving several high-profile, and in many cases seemingly intractable, homicides.

Nonetheless her silence, at least for public consumption, persisted through stunning arrest after stunning arrest.

Yesterday Helen Tame responded to what appeared to be a routine death in a Manhattan apartment. The NYPD has not commented on why Dr. Tame was left alone at the location but she was found dead on a sofa there late last night. The cause of death is tentatively being listed as carbon monoxide poisoning. Details of any funeral services for Ms. Tame have not been released.

She is survived by no one.

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Functio
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Postscrip
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 Withou
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Intent

ENERGEIAS: or Why Today the Sun May Not Rise in the East, Set in the West

W
HICH is why someone seeking to encounter fewer people should generally go left in such situations. What this Man truly seeks is harder to define, even for him. He knows only that going right, away from the dropping sun, takes him to the place where the bad people are. He knows more too. He knows the bad people, all of them, are going to regret that what little remains of their lives has intersected with his remainder in this way.

2 A giant boulder rolling down a hill will appear menacing and as if nothing can stop it. But if an equal or greater rock comes along only one of them can occupy a given space at a given time.

3 And this is true as well of these people in this place at this time. That they cannot coexist together in harmony but rather that one must instead destroy the other.

4 So this Man walks to where they are. He walks barefoot, guided by the sun, his right arm ending in a blade and swinging like a pendulum. He walks through living then dead vegetation and he knows the destruction he carries there will be terrible and swift.

*     *     *

I
N the time before this he had been one of the first to bring water to his village. Back then
un
pueblo
was just another way of saying a collection of people congregated near a river. The necessity of water and mankind’s inability to provide it mechanically and widely left vast expanses of Colombian earth free of human activity.

2 The first insight was wells. A process in truth well known to even that collection of people but remember that even the greatest knowledge must defer to spirited action. He took action.

3 He dragged others with him, some coming almost involuntarily, others unable to resist the magnetic pull of his will paired with his frightening physical strength, and in unison they worked. Armed with no machine greater than the human body, they dug. They dug and soil was displaced and water rose in response and when quickly thereafter his dissatisfaction with this new convenience rose they formed irrigatory canals that ultimately gave every home in the village its own private store of the freshest almost to the point of invisibility water the world had seen to that point.

4 And during this time it was true that probably the most complex thought that arose in his mind as he afflicted his body with the harshest possible abuse was that he wanted water so the globe must yield it to him.

*     *     *

W
E’RE going to go ahead and call this the heyday of the New York City coffee shop only without doing anything coarse like resorting to statistics or dates. This was way before the country started scrutinizing its coffee so the default result was an abysmal tan liquid that did honor to no one. His idea was to play up his Colombian heritage (even his wildly-uneducated-in-these-matters clientele understood vaguely what that word meant with respect to coffee) to confer the shine of expertise on his new shop. But this was no mere marketing gambit as he ground the beans himself (unheard of then) and those beans (only dark-roasted to avoid sowing unnecessary confusion) came exclusively from Colombia. The result was uncommon artistry, especially in the nascent espresso field.

2 Aside from the coffee the rest of the shop was paradigmatic. Waist-high metal columns rose from the floor near an impermeable countertop to end in fully rotatable and cushioned circles. Translucent plastic top hats covered exorbitant slices of pound cake and giant perilously stacked nuts comprised of dough.

3 Most of all a place like this tends to collect familiar faces in usual spots. The faces don’t start familiar but repetition makes them so. The repetition is due to this: lonely people, even ones who wouldn’t self-identify as such, can long to hear other people and interact with them regardless of the level of that interaction.

4 Back then wasn’t like now. Television had maybe four legitimate channels. You couldn’t as skillfully simulate company, and Silence, despite its far greater incidence, had a more powerful potential to sting.

5 His coffee shop, with its lack of any repelling pretense coupled with a genuine palpable warmth, seemed to draw a disproportionately high number of these people. Over time it drew him more and more as well so that he often ignored more pressing matters at one of his other business concerns in favor of a newspaper, his corner booth, and an occasional cursory glance at receipts.

6 And during one of these times he stepped behind the cash register to strike its typewriter-type keys and watched generally then intently as Marybeth entered the shop for the first time, sat on its most isolated stool, and wondered aloud what was supposed to make Colombian coffee so great anyway.

*     *     *

T
HE trail of dead is long but Man must follow it to its bloodiest point. He knows the deranged mind of the rebel and how it explains the ghastly discards he keeps encountering as he tracks them in pursuit.

2 The rebels will take everyone like they did here but as they retreat into the jungle like suddenly-lit vermin they will deem some of their civilian captives not worth the effort needed to remain their captors and those bodies will litter the ground like routine road markers.

3 He has violated his own rule and taken a pair of shoes from one of the bodies. They cover his feet and soon become red from his blood but with their protection he now moves twice as fast.

4 That means he comes upon the bodies twice as fast as well and each time his breathing tightens intolerably until he can be sure the body is not a woman or a girl.

5 This is a woman but not his. Her neck vivisected by a wide red smile.
Esta
es
la
diferencia
con
estos
malparidos
, he thought. The difference is that while true that he was a man of violent sin he knew this and it often made him sad. He didn’t revel in it.

6 The rebels represent a new iteration of human evil. There is nothing to them beyond it. No boundaries either, nothing they respect. On the contrary they seem to delight in a pointed inversion of a long-established moral taxonomy that protected groups like clergy, women, children. Anything that sought to create order out of entropic chaos was suddenly attractive target.

7 So they could march into
a
church
on a Sunday morning, leave substantial dead including many of the above, and exit with a kidnapped congregation.

8 He has trouble understanding this.

9 But they will not be getting him in a confused or conflicted state. He is going to give them the only thing they understand, savage destruction, and even alone he is excessively capable. There will be no deliberative caution either. He has yet to see a female rebel so women are safe; otherwise anybody crossing his path is going to be blotted from existence and let God sort them out afterwards. He steps over the latest body and continues.

*     *     *

B
IRTH is less the opposite of death than it is its cleverest symbol.

2 For the seven months they knew what was coming he wanted nothing more than a daughter. He followed all the wildly unscientific procedures required. At his insistence, they chose only a girl’s name. But when the moment actually approached he wanted only that his wife should survive what was imminent, the concept of a child no longer existed.

3 The desire to be responsible for adding to the world only a female made perfect sense to him. Women, all of them, were beautiful. Every woman and all of that woman.

4 He’d often looked at a woman’s hands for example and been amazed. The same structure that in him and others exuded such brutality quickened his blood in excitement when on a woman.

5 Beyond that, the physical, was the capacity of their souls.

6 His woman’s screams filled the same house his father had decades earlier built for his birth and all he could think to do was bring and heat water. The midwife had helped birth half the village by then and she gave him orders more to keep him busy than out of any genuine need.

7 The moment, when it came, was more terrible than he’d even imagined and the preceding hours had given rise to some truly gruesome imaginings. The very real possibility back then that new life would cause death created an almost visible aura of potential horror. The screams of his woman intensified until they were indistinguishable from those heard on a descent into Hell. Also the violent emergence of a bloodied human form was not miraculous. For him it had become incidental to the larger insight she brought: our entry, like our death, must be violent to befit a strenuously combated interruption of Nothingness.

*     *     *

H
E said “I’d explain it to you but I fear you’d start your own coffee shop and steal my few, if loyal, customers.”

“Sorry,” she laughed. “Didn’t realize. Just that coffee’s coffee isn’t it?”

“What do you do? I mean when you’re not making wholly inaccurate declarations.”

“I work at the flower shop across the street,” she pointed.

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean aren’t all flowers pretty much the same?”

“You cannot be serious.”

“I can but I’m not.”

“Comparing flowers, in their infinite variety, to coffee?”

“Let’s do this then,” he started carefully measuring out grounds for an espresso. “Drink this, on the house therefore no risk, then we’ll continue our debate.” She smiled and it was one of the great ones.

2 He started by ensuring that the particulars of the shot he was about to pull were precisely calibrated to produce the desired effect. There was only one legitimate way, regrettably long forgotten or ignored since: one ounce of water (these are not approximations) through eight ounces of single-bean coffee at 200 degrees Fahrenheit and most importantly pulled for exactly twenty-two seconds. He put the result in front of her.

“Not a very generous sample is it?”

“That’s intentional neophyte. Drink. Slowly.”

3 She drank it, slowly, her pinky extending naturally. She looked up, her chin rising only slightly.

“I don’t know what to think of that.”

“Perfect.”

“It’s slightly confusing.”

4 He smiled and she repaid him with another great one. Then she said:

“Wait. It’s great, I love it. Just needed time.”

“See?”

“Explain.”

“What am I explaining?”

“Why it’s so great. Remember I thought coffee was coffee.”

“Right. Well there’s two explanations: a highly technical one implicating the precise particulars of Colombian climate, soil, and other factors; and the other just reducing to the fact that life is a lot more tolerable with a craft.”

“There you speak truth.”

5 She drank the rest and nodded yes.

“Makes you wonder how many other things there are like that, doesn’t it sir?”

“You mean?”

“That are susceptible to great enhancement through human craft but sadly remain unexploited. As for you, I hope your craft’s not businessman.”

“Really? Because?”

“Because my craft is assembling flowers artfully and I came in here with the intention of spending money on food during my very brief
coffee
break only now I realize that said break is almost over and our profitless-to-you conversation consumed just about all of it.”

“I see. There’s more than one form of profit though.”

“Can I see what you offer so I can get a leg up on my next visit?”

6 He handed her two clean laminated menus. One dealt exclusively with coffees and all their possible permutations. It was extensive and wordy and took on almost novelistic qualities. The other one looked like this: