Personae (24 page)

—¡No, you need to explain why it’s not perfectly buoyant! Why your father places you in such constant peril then refuses to clean up his mess. ¿Because who is of greater use to Selena now? ¿Her earthly father who practically clears a jungle on her behalf or her absentee heavenly one?

—¡Enough of you! The globe is as it is and if you listen closely enough you can hear it laughing at my irrelevance. There’s no amount of vocal thought will change what I’m going to do. I know what you’re trying.

—¿Namely?

—So if that’s enough to stop you, consider yourself stopped. If it isn’t and you intend to succeed through force make your move now or leave.

—Manuel—it shook its head. ¿You too? ¿Why is it whenever I’m portrayed it’s like I’m trying to ruin something? ¿Is that my reward? I’m just trying to wake people, people whose idiocy offends me regardless of how comfortable they may be in it. It is I who exalts the eternal verities yet my opponents shamelessly argue that an idyll is being perverted. ¡The truth! Truth like, no one ever complained of nonexistence. ¿How is that a perversion of anything?

—¿Why do you care? I mean, about your bad name.

—Just bodies but every good army needs them. Mine swells daily but it only does so because I treat every prospective recruit like a potential four-star general.

—I’m an army of one, leave me alone.

—It’s not that kind of process but fine, I will. Surely you won’t deny me some parting thoughts however. ¿Why look at yourself and feel repulsed as you so clearly do?

—Not looking at myself, looking at you.

—¿And you don’t see where we mirror? Existence is a curse and something that emerges from the accursed cannot be expected to produce anything save for spiteful enmity and opposition.

—Again you confuse the order of things. It only feels like a curse you’re opposing because you spend it in spiteful enmity.

—No! That’s naïve propaganda. Think of the moaning multitudes who thought that true until they woke from their pleasant dream to find themselves in Hell. Nothing less than your beloved two now move to join the teeming humanity immured in that place.

—No such place. I know because I’ve been there. You’re trying to get me to think like my dimwitted ancestors who openly wondered when the kingdom of God would arrive instead of recognizing it within themselves and exporting it in the form of actions based on Love. If we fail to create it that’s on us along with the consequences of that failure but there’s no place to get sent. Like you, it doesn’t exist.

—Insultingly untrue.

—And as for my two, whoever harms them will think Hell heavenly compared to where I send them.

—The kingdom of God may not be a place in the classic sense but even I concede that it refers to phenomena, like your Love for example, that undoubtedly exist. Naturally then Hell must also have its own actually existing referents. These referents share the same ontological grandeur as Love and you can intuit their great power when you experience states like jealousy or wrath.

—No. They’re mere negations, drawing power only commensurate with how violative they are of the most powerful force we know. You say we’re in a lion’s den. I concede that. It’s an uninteresting fact about the physical world we live in, it doesn’t tell me how to do that living. For that exemplar I don’t have far to look. You say you traffic in spiteful opposition? I reject that emptiness. So you are free to continue to do so but understand that I am one of those you oppose. I stand for what you most despise and your defeat is certain if only because of that fact.

—You can’t truly believe that. I don’t claim to have anything remotely approaching his natural power but I will never submit. If the human history of warfare has taught us anything it’s that there are ways around such a disadvantage. It will always be easier to destroy than construct. Think of that church, so painstakingly built only to be razed in minutes. Everything you build Manuel, including a family, is built using grains of sand.

—Then I’ll build structures of such beauty that continued presence will not be necessary for permanence in the mind’s eye of all who witness it.

It lets out a defeated but smiling exhale.

—You’re certainly free, that word again, to try. Like my opponent I don’t interfere. But know this about this defeat of mine you foretell. Understand that merely latent power, no matter how great, carries no import. ¡He won’t use it, ever! Anything suggesting otherwise is at best human sophistry. You are, all of you, alone. Delivered into evil by a truth unknowable to you yet monstrous in its scope. Beset by a sea of trespasses so searching in vain for a soothing voice in the dark. ¿Searching like a suckling infant and what do you receive in response? Silence. Always that lacerating silence from a nowhere entity that audaciously claims to be everywhere. He can’t be coaxed into so much as an encouraging word yet abject servility is going to be his reward? Think of that as you move to your death because what courses through your veins in those final moments is what controls.

It rises up and it is as if Anger itself stands across from him.

—Unless of course none of that matters because you’ll soon be turning back to go home and pray.

Manuel puts his face in his bloody hands and cries for the first time since he was a child. He is experiencing the pain that comes from the recognition of a weakness that can’t be overcome. When he lifts his face he witnesses the final seconds of a transformation. The eventual new form is hard to predict at first as the Figure shrinks onto all fours.

On the ground it looks as if a forgotten species is being turned inside out that it might be thoroughly examined for the edification of future generations. Then he sees it is a dog. Of all the world’s dogs it is the dog he left heaving its final breaths. Still mortally injured, still heaving, the beast summons what final strength remains and runs at his neck. Best he can do is raise a palm and that does nothing. The dirty teeth look like thorns growing out of his neck and their jaw is locked deathly tight. He cannot locate the canine’s neck to choke its life out and the lack of usable air is putting him in a dreamlike state.

This is how it ends he thinks and a placidity comes over him, a belief (not quite a belief because unlike any sensation he’d ever before experienced) that even though the worst was undoubtedly about to befall him what we call worst is neither bad nor good. Also calm because of exhaustion in the literal sense. He feels then he has nothing more to give and that seems as good a definition of death as any.

Then he remembers why he sits in the jungle, covered in his own blood, struggling with a hellish hound, and questioning the value of continued humanity. He buries his hand into the dog’s gaping wound. Feeling around in the mushy squirm he seizes what has to be a vital organ, it pulsates through his fingers, and pulls as hard as he can. He feels and hears various tensile fibers snap and a sudden fountain of beastly blood leaves his face almost uniformly red. The jaw now releases suddenly and the creature falls to his side and into a lifeless heap.

Manuel collapses into unconsciousness.

When he later awakes to the noise of the rain stopping he almost laughs at the intensity of his now-concluded brain fever. The dog however was real and as severe pain cruelly registers on his neck he spits on its limp remains. Then Man stands through agonized spasms of instability. He anchors his legs to the ground, first tentatively then defiantly. His hand grasps his own neck as he breathes in all the air’s energy.

Then he accelerates back into the chase, certain now of the proper path.

*     *     *

CHOLERA the doctor said through a shaking head and all who heard the utterance, either then or as it was repeated continually and morbidly, knew from experience precisely what that meant.

2 The sounds of violent human expulsion, the sounds really of life being rejected, grew to a clamor throughout the village.

3 A significant cross needed to be built, she said, then placed above the door to their home. Only God could spare them.

4 He pointed out, he said he had to, that this process she had in mind had a lot in common with superstition and therefore could not be counted as praise for the party being addressed. That this was an Old Testament, therefore unsophisticated and non-Christian, view of God as warrior king full of bloodlust but able to dispense mercy.

5 She said leave the high-level theology to the believers and added that Selena was, in a sense, all they had. That she could bear almost anything but if Selena were to turn blue and be taken that would convert her life into a minute-by-minute inferno and she would not endure it.

6 So it was fear, not logic or anything else, that ruled her troubled moments then. The fear was so great and occlusive that she felt herself converted into a little girl and you only reason with a little girl to a point.

7 He built and installed the cross and whether related or not the sickness passed Selena over and she remained the ruddy optimist her mother could not have lived without.

*     *     *

CUBAN in reference to the sandwich meant he too was Cuban right? She proposed this inductive assertion in between early bites of what really was a remarkable sandwich only to receive no reaction from her audience. She snapped her fingers near his face.

“Oh, sorry! Cuban? No, bite your tongue. But I know a good sandwich when I see one. And?”

“Truly remarkable. She remarked truly.”

He smiled.

“So where you from then?”

2 He said in detail where he was from and she felt strangely embarrassed when her turn followed and she had to say Wisconsin which just then sounded kind of cartoonish and made up.

3 This was Monday and every lunch that followed that week meant those two and that counter.

4 Polio was the reason for the limp.

5 She was full of all these theories too, this woman. That the U.S. would never actually land on the moon but the pressure to do so would become so great that the Government, it always felt like a capital G with her, would stage a pretend landing in some movie studio. That damn near every physical malady known to man was curable through the proper application of lemon juice and surely he could appreciate the great incentive the pharmaceutical companies had in keeping this fact from being widely disseminated.

6 He laughed so hard at these and other disclosures that more than once he feared she would think he had crossed over into ridicule but no danger of that as he was dealing with one of the world’s great fun people.

7 About himself he said little though not from lack of pressing on her part.

8 One of the many things she said was that he was so “cute, and nice, and harmless.”

9 He responded that “since what you say makes it true at least to you, I’m hoping it will make it true to me” and he said this because there was much harm he wished he’d never done.

10 He told her he thought orchids like the kind found where he was from were a kind of divine apology for the universe’s many harsh elements and she later brought him some which made him feel more than a little weird.

11 Not possible, she said, based on the visual evidence, that he had put that many years into life. And look at herself, which led to a brief detour into the subject of Nicole Grunderson and her like. He said, with a complete absence of flattery intent, that the difference between a
woman
—one who had lived, suffered, learned, wept, transitorily gained then lost, faced death, bowed from pressure, then been scarred by all that into steel—and a shiny
girl
was one of the great chasms in life and he’d let her deduce which was preferable. Me? Little more than scar tissue.

12 On the Friday she stayed right through to dinnertime at which point he declared he couldn’t bear even the sight of his own food anymore and so they walked the few blocks to a new Italian restaurant receiving mountainous praise though it turned out undeservedly so.

13 Afterwards she needed to reclaim the many blocks that had accumulated between the disappointing restaurant and her studio apartment not helped by a frigid air that moved in while they ate yet solely through the use of body language and in perfect synchronicity they decided to eschew the many available taxis and walk the space during which walk Marybeth felt completely and utterly protected and she and her protector slowly then quickly drew closer to each other until her really exceptionally lovely hand extended away from her body where he clasped it quickly as if trying to convince himself that his action had been reflexive and not the product of even minimal aforethought then those hands swung rhythmically as if winding the couple to their destination until stopping because they were there where Marybeth wondered aloud if he might not come up and maybe overcome his prejudice against tea but after starting to form assent he suddenly remembered himself and declined in a manner that in no way offended Marybeth who also wasn’t the least bit surprised by a demurral that seemed to inappositely build as the week and their intimacy progressed and also there was the matter of her early rise the next morning for that weekend thing they’d discussed so that from within a hug they agreed to resume whatever this was the following Monday.

14 He stood alone on the sidewalk. It was dark as the city was allowed to get. He stared intently at the window. The light came on. She was safe. He left.