Personae (22 page)

2 So nothing in her twenty-two years had really prepared Nicole Grunderson for the experience of encountering a man who evinced no reaction whatsoever to her appearance. Not that he absorbed her appearance then chose to ignore it; that he literally appeared to detect no difference between her and any other human.

3 She knew enough to not enlist the help of anyone else at the coffee shop on the question of why their employer had had this unprecedented reaction or nonreaction for three months and counting. She also tried in vain to not be offended, finally settling on a strategy whereby he was, willingly or not, placed in a category of people who simply (now?) lack any interest in that area.

4 This was necessary because of the seemingly endless stream of indignities she had suffered since arriving in New York. That something happens so regularly it achieves cliché makes it no less painful for the person experiencing it. So it was with the pain of having your most salient quality weakened perhaps irreparably by a change in location. The sheer teeming multitude of people, a phenomenon that needed to be eyewitnessed to be truly believed. Unless his inattention did not constitute a further indignity because, as appeared to be the case, it was his consistent-without-fail reaction to any such stimuli.

5 All of which made the interaction she’d just witnessed so unsettling. Because wasn’t that their boss, an intimidating boulder of a man, gently thawing into liquid from the heat coming off what to her eyes seemed a rather plain-looking woman?

6 The sight was so odd and unexpected that almost as soon as it disappeared, because the plain woman slowly limped away, Nicole began to doubt her reading of it. And because a conclusion that she had misread had significant appeal due to the above, that likely would have been the anticlimactically tepid end of the affair if not for a look Nicole happened to spot as it moved across her boss’s face.

7 Because Nicole, who was studied in so few areas, was undeniably expert in at least one: the messy mechanics, ramifications, and symptoms of human, okay male, desire. So her expertise flashed diagnostic recognition at the curious combination of anxiety and excitement that comes from a sudden and strong attraction that, justified or not, goes beyond the merely physical. All from that one look.

8 Still, the look and its accurate interpretation were unlikely to result in any tangible conduct if not for a further development, this one occurring exclusively within Nicole.

9 At sight of the look Nicole experienced a sensation sufficiently uncommon to her that it startled her into a deeper realm of human understanding. The uncommon sensation was the skipping of a mental step. Until then her process varied little. When presented with novel data, whatever its form, Nicole processed the information by first straining it through a solipsistic filter. So, for example, someone informing Nicole that they had been diagnosed with a serious illness might mentally note with distaste how quickly the discussion moved into the question of whether she,
Nicole
, might not have the same illness. Yes, that bad.

10 Thus the immediately preceding ballet wherein every movement and gesture between a remarkable man she’d known three months and an undeniably intriguing woman initially interested her only insofar as it reflected on her to herself as interpreted by her.

11 The change, as I’ve said, came after the interaction when she saw the look on his face. It was only then that Nicole began to have the first inklings of an insight central to productive humanity. She looked at his face and saw the soul behind it you could say.

12 She saw a man beginning to suspect the emergence of a feeling he clearly did not want. Her imagination even collaborated to form the image of a long-dormant flower tentatively resuming a return to life. More importantly, the analytic vision wasn’t about her. It didn’t make her attracted to the man or envious of the woman, it didn’t implicate her in that way. She felt simultaneously greatly interested in yet still separate and apart from the interaction she’d witnessed. She understood, if only briefly, that the two people involved were as important as any people in the world, including herself, and that fact gave great import to their interplay.

13 That she could, in a sense, share an invisible insight with a man probably three times her age who’d experienced a vastly different form of life felt almost miraculous at the time. It was a freeing insight too. She felt liberated in a way. As if a global surveillance of her had suddenly ceased (more on this later).

14 The novel feeling seemed to imply concomitant action too. She felt able to discern the existence of need and wanted primarily that it should be filled, not because it was her need but mainly because it wasn’t. And while true that nothing remotely resembling this analysis occurred explicitly it is also true that Nicole Grunderson walked over to where her boss stood and displayed a level of interpersonal skill in no way predictable by her resume to that point.

“That a friend of yours?” she said.

“Sure, go ahead. Wait what?”

“Was she a friend?”

“Who?”

“The lovely woman that just walked out.”

“Oh, no. Just a customer.”

“Just?”

“Why?”

“Because you two had such easy chemistry I thought for sure you were good friends if not more.”

“More? No, listen what am I twice her age? Look, table five wants—”

“I don’t know her age but I know the look on her face.”

“No,” dismissively.

“Okay,” she started to walk away.

“What look?”

15 Taking care to appear as disinterested as possible Nicole indicated carefully, almost forcefully, that
hypothetically
if there were interest on his part he could be assured of its mutuality and this was done very well in a manner that preserved plausible deniability should it ever become necessary and this process extended over time but truth is he attended to at most half of it preoccupied as he was with the thought of what exactly the best sandwich his kitchen had ever produced was.

*     *     *

IT is Nature, really, that assaults Man at every opportunity. Reason is it often feels as if portions of Colombia are almost a parody of natural calamity.

2 An incomplete list might start with torrential rains like the one descending on him now. It is precisely the wrong form for the physical world to take and at the worst possible moment.

3 The almost biblical volume of water may be coming from above but it is undeniably diabolic. It makes continued tracking of his prey nearly impossible. It makes him feel that the world extends no further than his outstretched hand with the resultingly inescapable feeling that he is in a coffin.

4 It is rewarding malfeasance this rain by washing away evidentiary knowledge and burying epochal sin into secretive inexistence. It was appalling how often this happened too, the physical world conspiring against human peace in a manner suggestive of a sick joke. He understood that rain had to fall but that it had to fall just then, there, and at that level was not understandable, he thought, without the presence of a malevolent volition. But such was the world.

5 Because what a place this rain fell on too. Already he’s moved through jungle leprosy to evade anacondas and scorpions and surely before long he’ll have to baptismally immerse himself in piranha-filled rivers. All that and more but he keeps moving.

6 He moves until genuine confusion sets in. The possibility grows that any future step will estrange him further from his destination.

7 He knows he should stop, rest until the rain stops. His body is heavy with the desire to stop moving and finally he lets it come to rest under a natural shelter from the storm.

8 His immobility brings on two sensations. He feels now as if his body were collapsing in on itself, ebbing into finality. His lack of forward movement also creates doubt. For the first time he practices asserting that he will fail and what that will engender in his soul. The darkness of that spreads in him and he feels it as if it were true and not hypothesis.

9 If he fails it will be a corporal failure, nothing more. He looks himself over so he can more accurately predict whether his body is going to endure what’s necessary but this is really a performance without an audience because he knows that no matter what he sees or feels he is not going to allow that collection of flesh on bone to quit.

10 What he sees, everywhere on him, is injury. The one he attends to now was caused by a savage spike embedded into his foot then snapped off before he could remove it, its pointed edge starting to come out the top. Problem is by walking kilometers on it his percussive steps have sufficiently buried the spike that it cannot be pulled out just manually.

11 He is looking at the blade of the knife and wishing that what follows could somehow be avoided. It cannot.

12 He pushes the point of the blade into the red and black hole in the bottom of his foot. He almost screams but instead grunts through the branch he’s placed between his teeth.

13 He tears at the flesh that’s seizing the spike until he has almost doubled the opening. Now he reaches in with his left hand and, not bearing to look, begins to pull the spike out; the combination of muscle, bone, and cartilage resisting every millimeter.

14 The sensation is repetitive in its agony. As the spike vacates an area that area wants a return to normalcy so the flesh seeks out component flesh that they may reunite in healing. The sensation then is a form of relief but it is a relief of such confusing severity that it is indistinguishable from agonizing pain quickly running the course of his entire bloodstream.

15 When it is almost entirely out it gets stuck. The spike has frayed open and caught on the ravaged remains of his foot. He lets go of it and looks up. Would it be so bad really if he just absorbed the spike as a new part of his body? He takes an exaggerated inhale then before he can even begin to doubt pulls it out as if in anger.

16 His scream while clearly not animalistic is also not recognizably human. As if the world itself were being wounded to its core and the merger of its physical pain and the suffering that comes with the realization of mortality could only emerge as cosmic guttural plaint.

17 When the scream and its ghostly echolalia finally die away he stares at the spike in his hand. The flesh it tore asunder falls off leaving him to hold the lifeless instrument of puncturing devastation and wonder if it hadn’t better torn into his heart. He uses it to cut off a section of his shirt which he then ties around his foot so tight he emits another though far lesser scream. Then he puts the shoe back on tight as possible and gets fetal.

18 It is in that position that he sees them for the first time. The telltale color of the berries brings immediately to his mind the sight of listless smiles. He recognizes them as the berries the weak people in his village crave. They crave without end so others go into the jungle he now sits in, risking health and sanity, to retrieve then sell them to the cravers in transactions that bear no resemblance to commerce but a more than passing one to planned assaults. They say it’s for pain but few are left who even pretend to believe that and he is on record as having repeatedly said that should he lose an arm and be offered some in response he will use the remaining one to throw them back.

19 He is not tempted. He knows, intimately, what pain is. It can be borne. It is really the knowledge of pain that causes genuine suffering and it is this knowledge that substances like the berries address, not any physical phenomena or process.

20 But alongside the physical world runs the world of thought and if you go to it for respite from this place be careful you don’t uncover an even deeper level of grim suffering.

21 He thinks of connection and separation, enhancement and loss, and when he’s done, hours later, he reaches out, grabs a handful of berries, and, apologetically, moves them into his mouth.

*     *     *

FOR her the question of God, along with all resulting and even antecedent questions, really reduced to the question of whether or not you entered a particular structure on Sundays.

2 Her husband had helped build the church then never again entered it and this troubled her deeply.

3 She had a list of matters requiring worry because she was one of those people. Thing about the list was that, perhaps in conformance with the human capacity for anxiety, its enumerations remained constant. So quite often a worry would disappear, Selena would heal for example, seemingly only to make room for the magical appearance of its replacement.

4 One list mainstay was the soul of her husband. He would counter, always, that attendance anywhere was not a matter of the soul. That her own belief system relied on omnipresence so that he was able to attend to these matters really wherever he found himself. This she found unpersuasive. She was smarter, he knew, than him. Anything he bothered to formulate in this area she could eviscerate almost offhandedly. These logical eviscerations, however, had no effect on his conduct.

5 But more than even faith she was a woman of hope. No amount of empirical evidence could discourage her into defeated silence. So every Sunday morning, once the remnants of the latest truly remarkable
arepas
had been cleared, she dressed Selena in some of her best, maybe even a subtle dash of makeup, did the same to herself, and renewed her campaign. It went like this. First, she would affect certainty where even minimal success was highly improbable. Something like audibly wondering when he was going to interject some urgency into his preparation as the time for Mass was quickly approaching. When that failed, as it invariably did, she would allow some time to pass then approach again. Expressing concern for his soul she would place her hands on his chest as if she were trying to tactilely caress it.