Monday, September 26, 2011
Sitting here in this clean office, his books arranged neatly on their shelves, his computer humming on his desk, his phone flashing with messages, he tells me about free will. I look around the white walls, stare at the poster of blue and black Alaska. I’ve never been to Alaska. Maybe I should go. He coughs quietly. I look at him, his grey eyes staring at me. Well? he asks.
Free will? I say. I used to believe in free will. The priests would tell us that free will was a gift from god. But I was baptized into the faith before I was cognizant of my feet, I never chose to join.
You don’t believe in free will? he asks.
I think of the girl in that basement, raped and strangled before she was old enough to bleed. I think of that mad Ranger, beating the windows out with his fists before he was old enough to drink. I think of the men and women, walking barefooted and hungry through the richest city in America before they were old enough to die.
No, I say. I never asked to be born here. And isn’t that the meaning of free will?
He looks at his watch. Time’s up, he says. Will I see you next week?
This morning there was a dead cicada waiting for me at the front door. It disturbed me greatly. The creepy, prehistoric thing. Its eyes bright and red and seeing nothing. And I tried to imagine what it’s like to be a bug. To sleep underground for eighteen years. To wake one night and push yourself into a hot summer night. Your life’s purpose to mate and to be the thing birds most like to eat.
I sit in this dark room staring at a glowing screen and pretend to be connected to the world. Facebook and Twitter and Google+. Cell phones and iPads and Androids. All these ways to communicate, yet we don’t communicate. Before caller ID we would answer the phone when it rang.
If I could speak to you, I suppose I would say that I’m sorry it’s come to this. That I’m sorry it always comes to this. But I remember now what you do, every word you use untrue, and I can hardly blame you. You are my muse, my white goddess. You will destroy me as surely as I will destroy you. This destructive art of creation.
The moon is bright tonight. The birds sleep lightly in the heavy trees and the cicadas scream all night listening for sex. At first light they’ll wake, they’ll sing and eat, drink and fly. The cicadas will still be screaming for they have no time to waste. And I’ll turn to this glowing screen, post a status update, go back to sleep.
for you. you know who you are.
My dreams are all fog and falling, all blood and screaming children. Cars and radios and guns and flashing blue lights. And I never can get my boots on in time. And it’s always night. Or early morning.
That in-between time when nothing is asleep and nothing is awake.
Sometimes I wonder what’s more cruel, the words or the actions? Other times I wonder if I’ve been answering the wrong questions. And I wonder if anything before today even matters. You told me that it did. You told me that everything matters.
But every day I doubt you more.
A year ago today I walked away and you drove away. You went north and I went south. I’m still walking and you’re still driving. Maybe one day we’ll run out of land and make our way back to where we began.
Maybe one day.
My dreams are all fog and falling, all blood and screaming children. Trucks and helmets and machine guns and boots that are always too tight. Lightning on the horizon. Explosions in the clouds. Promising a storm that will never come. Promising a storm that would bring relief from this heat.
Promising. Promising.
Promise me.
I wish I could unlearn these things I’ve learned. I hate all these people. I hate being alone. I feel lazy when I sleep. I feel worthless awake. I hate being drunk. I hate being sober. I love you. If all these trees burned down and we were the only things left standing, I could be happy. I hate you. If all these nations burned to the ground and we were the only things left standing, I would be miserable.
I remember sitting with you, drinking beer and smoking weed. Our feet cool in the water, the curious fish nibbling at our toes. Then the war came and we retreated to our coasts.
I see you in my dreams. The back of your head in the window of a school bus. I drive an unmarked police car and follow you across the city. The road turns to dirt then to mud then to creek then to river. My feet stuck, I wonder at how you keep going. As I watch the yellow bus and you disappear over the horizon with the sun.
It’s like a contest around here. It’s like you all have gotten together to see how many American flags you can buy down at one of the WalMarts. You stick them in your front yard, spaced every three feet, so stifled they can’t even wave in the faint breeze.
At dusk, you pretend to honor the veterans. You set down the Bud Light and hot dog. You remove your hat, put your hand over your heart and close your eyes so you can’t see. You look like you might weep, honoring those who went off to fight so you didn’t have to. A moment of silence before you rip the night open with whistling and sparkling and exploding. And every veteran you honored runs to shelter deep in their dugouts of whiskey and beer and vodka, wishing they had never seen that flag you hang so carelessly.
In the morning, like a brigade of fighting clowns has moved through in the night heading toward Missouri. Colorful cardboard tubes burned into the road. Pink and orange parachutes hanging from trees, the flares burnt out, the leaves burned away.
And when the sun goes down, you’ll wake up and do it all over again. Because this is fucking America! The greatest, most freest, mostest powerful country God has ever blessed the planet with. Until it isn’t. And it isn’t. But light that M-80, blow all these doubts away.
I get away from here, away from all this noise of people. Their lawn mowers and cars and explosions. I go to where the only noise is the birds, the trains, the moon.
Here I sleep for hours, dream vivid dreams, my mind drilling deep. Mining forgotten memories and bringing them to the surface shiny like coal. For years I didn’t remember you, for years I’ve buried you under marijuana and alcohol and internet porn. But here you are, smiling and handing me a piece of gum.
Holding hands and kissing cheeks just before we drop to the ground. Every day I think of you. But you’re only a voice on a telephone far far away. Bright and cheerful you say hello and ask me to leave a message you’ll never answer.
When I return I find the screens torn out and the windows smashed in, all the drawers turned upside down. But it’s been a long time since I’ve had anything to steal.
Prayer flags, once bright and colorful, waving in the backyard. Fading to white under the sun and rain and wind. Showing me how to go on without you. Teaching me that everything under the sun eventually fades to nothing.
Purple sparks dancing at my feet. The last Union Pacific heading east. All the wheat put to sleep. At three in the morning, I’m gasping for breath, a bag of rocks in my chest. The bed vibrates ever so slightly. And she’s standing beside me, glowing red blue green. I explain to her that the bed isn’t hers anymore, tell her that she has moved on. She frowns, red and white light. I ask her if I can please sleep in peace. She tells me she’ll think about it. Explains that they didn’t wait the forty-days and now she can’t find her way away. He’s out there somewhere waiting for her but he won’t be patient forever. I tell her she can wait here if she can wait quietly. She smiles, white on white on white, and my breath finds me again. Mosquitoes buzz in my hair and beard. Birds waking in the trees, singing at their missing sun. Finally asleep, I dream uneven dreams of cats and death and traffic lights. Purple sparks dancing at my feet.
A vulture almost killed me the other day. Doing 80 on 70 and it rose slowly from the side of the road, its wings, as wide as the car, flapping uselessly at the hot dry air. I looked at its red bald head, into its surprised eyes. And an updraft pushed it up and over the car.
Deeper into the interior. These rotting towns an American cancer. Everybody wants to follow the Joads out to that golden coast. I guess nobody reads that book to the end.
I followed the Joads even though I knew well how that story ends. It ended about the same, sans all the death and flooding and killing, and I flew back to from where I came, drunken and broken. Maybe I can take my MFA down to the community college, get a job teaching literature to farm kids. Make them read Steinbeck and Fante. “The streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess and the hot semi-tropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have.â€
Deeper into the interior. Where the wheat turns golden and burns to the ground. Where there are no police, no firefighters. I’ll get a shotgun and a fire extinguisher, email you every other month. Sit on the porch with a bottle of wine, watching the moon rise full and fat into a starry sky. And wait for you to arrive.
That night, standing on the cliff listening to the ocean and smoking a joint, watching the blinking ships moving down the coast, he wonders what it would feel like to fall. To step off the edge and plunge into the traffic below. And he knows that he has come too far. He flicks the roach into the wind, flaring like a dying lightning bug. A last breath of foggy air, he turns and walks away. Back into the city, back to from where he came. He thinks of these places he’s been, these things he’s said and heard and done. And he wants to wander grassy plains, to watch clouds move through the sky like battle groups, to sleep on hills rolling gently towards the nothingness of horizon. Wants to be far from this restless sea, this shifting land, these filthy streets. Never to return. Never to find himself west of the mountains, east of the river again. There are some barriers you were not meant to cross.
This crazy preacher from Oakland—where there is no there. For weeks we laugh about it. Worry on facebook and twitter, plan parties for when all these meddlesome Christians will finally be taken away from us. The day breaks sunny and alive and we look nervously over our shoulders for any sign that we may have been wrong to laugh, that maybe we’d like to be sucked up into heaven too. The appointed hour arrives in the central time-zone, apocalypse taking his time. The sky explodes with lightning and hail like baseballs screams to the ground at the speed of gravity. But we need not be afraid.
The world actually ended forty years ago yesterday. After a physicist at the University of Michigan theorized that he could create a black hole. He couldn’t, but he did unleash a fireball that raced through the air, consuming everything it touched. And there was no god to save us, no god to gather us up, no god to show us to paradise, as we burned away. The earth, now a cold dead thing, orbits the sun as it always has. The sun not knowing or caring that we’re not around to worship it anymore. But the moon. The moon with her full bright face. She misses us terribly, weeps over the empty oceans and scorched plains. And every night when she goes to sleep she dreams of us. In this way we live on. Until the sun finally has enough of that sad noise and expands out to heliopause, swallowing her and us and everything else finally away.