“A minor problem I’ve already given too much time to,” said Stephen. “I’d have had it settled by now if the local newspapers weren’t resisting printing my letters. I figure they’re part of the conspiracy, you see. As soon as I get that business straightened out, I promise you I’ll concentrate on getting all the other soldiers out of the Middle East, Matt. As much as I’m against war in general, I know I’ll have to write letters to the Arab papers to get them to knock off this terrorism shit at the same time I’m getting our boys out. Do you know any Arabic, Matt?”
“The language of Arabia? No, I do not know it. There were some auxiliary troops in the eastern army that spoke that tongue.”
“Could you get me in touch with some of them?” asked Stephen.
“That would take some doing,” said Maternus.
“They’re deep in the system?”
“Deeper than you can imagine,” said Maternus.
The three of them agreed to meet again at the coffee shop the following night, and Maternus returned to his work at the school that afternoon, content in the knowledge he had made two new friends in one day, a feat he had not accomplished in the previous eighteen hundred years. On his walk back to his apartment that night he stopped at a Walgreen and purchased a notebook of his own; Boswell relates that Dr. Johnson had advised everyone to keep a diary in order to give precision to one’s thoughts. That evening Maternus wrote in his new journal:
“I have today made the acquaintance of Stephen Kent and Shengli Coleman. They are two unique men. Aristotle advises — and Aquinas seconds his opinion — that all things should be judged by their purpose. If that is true, then Stephen’s purpose is to bring peace to the world and Shen’s is to bring pleasure to all who hear him. Since their purposes are good, it little matters that Stephen might be slightly delusional or that Shen might be vain. They are good men and will make good friends.”
IV
Through Many Lands and Many Peoples
As the angel had shown Maternus on his first day in Aurora, once one knows the street name and the number of any address, one can find any place in a modern city. After consulting a map he found in a phone book, Maternus readily found the Great Blue Heron Coffee Shop after he had completed his work in the school hallways, and arrived at the establishment on Mississippi Avenue at a little after nine-thirty on Friday evening. The place was hard to miss. The sign out front of the coffee shop was indeed fashioned in the shape of a blue heron; Maternus studied it for a time before he entered, but could not see anything ironic in the tall bird with an anthropomorphic smile on its long beak. Being a literalist, he could only see a very contented bird. He could not have appreciated that this sign (and the original coffee shop) was constructed in the optimistic 1950s, when the neighborhood was a semi-rural area on the edge of Denver, and farmers had gathered at the Great Blue Heron every morning to have a cup of joe and two eggs over easy. This is a great country, thought Maternus, a place where even the animals have reason to be happy. He smiled back at the tall, gray-blue bird and wished he knew what pleasant occurrence had elated the jolly creature.
The bird outside was certainly happier than the solemn, artsy types Maternus found inside the coffee shop. Dressed in black from their spiky hair down to their Doc Martins, the shop’s fifty-odd patrons were huddled that evening around seventeen round tables, looking alternately angry and bored while they waited for another reader to climb onto the low stage on the side of the wide room that was farthest from the front door. They were sipping at small cups of the hot beverage Maternus had seen other Americans drink in the early morning. The day had been warm and pleasant; the Roman had heard small children in a half dozen of the yards he had passed on his way to work, and a contented man he had met in the courtyard of his apartment block had told him a fishing story, but the coffeehouse crowd had banished joy from their midst as completely as they had banned colored clothing. Maternus had no trouble locating Stephen Kent, who was seated at a table on the far left-hand side of the stage, for the rumpled man had on a purple and white Rockies cap and a red and white tattersall shirt, both of which marked him as decisively as did his beaming face.
“Shen’s tied for second at 117.5,” Stephen told him as Maternus took the empty chair beside his new friend. (The chairs at Stephen’s table were the only empty ones in the room.)
“I don’t follow your words to their meaning, sir,” confessed the Roman.
“Select members of the audience vote on the performers,” explained Stephen and showed Maternus his ‘voting machine,’ which was really only a cell phone that he wrote text messages on. “Me and nineteen others here tonight get to rate each one. We give a score of up to one hundred and fifty points to every poet, on his style, his eloquence, volume, and on the rest of his poetic stuff. The slam master averages out every vote — actually it’s a kid with a calculator — and the top scorers advance to the next round. Shen’s in the finals with five other grand masters. Like I said, he’s tied for second.”
While he was telling Maternus how the competition worked, a short and powerfully built brown woman in a bright orange dress with green stripes running across it came on the stage from behind a set of heavy curtains. She wore a small cloth cap made from the same material as her eye-popping dress and projected purpose into every movement she made. She grabbed the portable microphone from its stand with the same vigor Hercules had shown when he grabbed Hera’s snakes by their throats and tore them to bloody shreds.
“So I was in the passenger seat of car headed east,” she recited.
“Through the barren Kansas prairie to Kansas City,
“The similarly-named bastion of barbequed pleasure
“In the wastelands of the dismal middle west.”
Maternus glanced at Stephen, who continued to grin with pleasure. The other, black-clad members of the audience shook their heads in approval of the performance.
“My mind is a soup kitchen in which the rich
“Must ladle out to the ragged poor,” the woman continued in full voice.
“Do people enjoy this?” the Roman whispered to Stephen, but the middle-aged man only hissed at him and gestured for Maternus to be quiet.
“One and the other, the hated other, is remembered
“As one and the same in my heart.”
There followed ten more stanzas, the lines of which dealt with racism and reincarnation and why the interstate highway insists on being straight and if it might be over-compensating for its secret urges. Poems, to the ancient Roman’s way of thinking, were like temples; they were built by experts and then worked and reworked until they were as near to perfection as the human mind could make them, before presenting them to world in the vain hope the words would last forever. What the woman was doing on the stage had all the passion of poetry and none of its technique. It had the same subjects as the poetry in the library, but lacked focus. The woman’s words existed only in the moment she said them, but had no aspirations of being remembered ten minutes later, let alone a thousand years from that night. As often happened at the church the angel had directed him toward, Maternus soon felt bored with what he found in the coffeehouse. He had fortunately known much boredom in his previous life, and more during his time in Hell, so the Roman could not be put out of sorts by the merely dull.
“Mr. Worthy told me,” he reminded himself, “these people are not my enemies. He said they were actually good, regardless of how I judge the things that make them happy.”
He had a troubling thought then while he watched the audience absorb the woman’s performance. Perhaps, he thought, dullness was a characteristic of the good, just as chaos is common wherever there is evil. That would explain why he sometimes nodded off during church services, or why a few moments of conversation with the affable Mr. Hamburg gave him an uncontrollable urge to yawn; the church people and his boss were obviously very, very good. If that were true, did that mean Maria and her garden were boring as well? Was Heaven, being the abode of the very be
st souls, necessarily the most wearisome spot in creation? Is that what eternity was going to be like for him? Would Maria discuss the weather and Broncos’ training camp as Mr. Hamburg did, or would she read bad poetry to him every day?
He recognized Cecilia the librarian sitting at a table on the opposite side of the dimly lit room. She was sharing a table with three woman who were approximately her age, who Maternus guessed were the girlfriends she had spoken of on Thursday. They were all dressed in black like the young people around them were. Maternus, however, noted these middle-aged ladies were, in contrast to their neighbors at the other tables, clad in expensive black evening dresses and wore cosmetics and semi-precious jewelry. Cecilia’s friends were looking at the ceiling and the unswept floor while the librarian kept her eyes directed toward the stage and clutched a phone like Stephen’s.
“I see your friend Cecilia is present,” whispered Maternus.
“You gotta be quiet, Matt,” Stephen warned him. “Or else they’re gonna throw you out. And me with you.”
Maternus observed the pale young men and women patrolling the tables and estimated that those seven frail souls would not to be enough to toss a veteran of the August Legion anywhere he did not chose to go. He nonetheless quieted to please his friend.
After the brown woman completed her recitation and was hailed with much applause, whoops of approval, and fists pumped into the air, an excited young white man in a bright pink suit (which several of the crowd said was “ironic”) entered the stage and shouted out a poem he called “The Flower of Myself.”
“Petal upon petal, thrown back to reveal
“The sepal, the glowing navel of life
“The golden mystery of me.”
Went the first verse, after which Maternus stopped listening and again observed the crowd.
What, he mused, could have made these young folk so sad? In the frontier villages of his former life it had been the unfed, unwashed children, the little ones fighting mongrel dogs for scraps of food and the quickly failing elderly sitting alone in their smoky homes, who had been unhappy. People the age of most of the coffeehouse crowd had in those times been said to be entering the prime of life, when whatever adventure and romance was going to offer was yet to come . Adulthood had been the time Aesop said men walked upright on two healthy legs and knew no troubles. In Aurora Maternus was witnessing the obverse of the world he had known: here the children knew not what lay ahead and were joyous in their ignorance, and the old were content to leave their troubles in the past; here it was vigorous adults who were burdened with the world’s woes. Maternus had watched the teachers at his school file out each night into the parking lot, defeated, despairing, dragging their briefcases home to another night of restless sleep, and he had seen the myriads of office workers filing into their cars every morning for their commute into the city to jobs they hated.
“One must have to be a modern person to understand the modern world,” thought the Roman, who could not imagine why anyone could live in Aurora and not be uplifted by the city’s diversions or proud to live in a civilization that could create the technological wonders that made living in the city so effortless. Maternus decided getting at the reason for the young adults’ despair was as obtuse a matter as modern aesthetics; for everything he knew, the poetry he was hearing shouted from the stage was actually quite good, provided one was a modern listener and had an innate appreciation of this sort of thing. There had to be some hidden burden, something terrible he did not yet understand, that made the young adults in the city so unhappy.
After another angry woman did her bit on the stage, Shen appeared from behind the curtains and took the portable microphone in hand, displaying more practiced grace than any of the three reciters Maternus had previously witnessed. Before he began, Shen made a full stop, holding the microphone in his right hand while he surveyed the crowd. Several people in the audience tittered nervously while the poet waited, and Maternus began counting; he reached twenty-two before Shen spoke.
“Rushing of light, more than my sight
“Can stand, more than I can be what I am,
“Man/child, lost in the promised land.”
The Roman looked across the room and noted that Cecilia was leaning forward on her table as she listened intently to Shen’s performance. A silly, timorous smile was on her face.
Desire in the middle-aged, thought Maternus. There must be more of this in Aurora than there was in all of Rome’s empire. No good can come from putting young emotions in old containers. Could this, he mused, this overabundance of sensual feelings be the cause of the adults’ unhappiness?
“Crashing like rain, but not in the main,
“For there is the focus of thought in the brain,
“As we go into the dust.”
Maternus glanced at Stephen and recognized the librarian’s embarrassed smile on his friend’s weathered face. Though Stephen’s head was turned toward the stage, the Roman could tell the man’s eyes strayed into the crowd of listeners. “The eyes follow the throwing hand,” Maternus’s instructors had taught him when he was first mastering the art of throwing the pilum. When he looked at Stephen’s hand, the one holding the cell phone, Maternus saw it was pointed directly across the coffeehouse at the still handsome, if no longer youthful, Cecilia.
He feels for her what she feels for young Shen, thought the Roman, and for once entertained some cruel thoughts about his new homeland. Maternus was not thinking the disparaging approbations of a puritan while he sat in the semi-darkness of the coffeehouse. The notion of Puritanism still lay a millennium and a half in the future when he died; he had simply lived in a world in which it was absurd to desire what one could not possibly have, and he hastily judged Stephen and Cecilia and the millions of amorous souls like them to be fools.
When Shen had completed his reading — a moment the crowd celebrated with another round of hoots and clapping — Stephen and the other select nineteen cast their votes on the cell phones.
“I always give Shen the full one hundred and fifty points,” Stephen whispered in confidence to Maternus. “That way, when the scores are averaged out, he gets a little bit higher. It’s not cheating. I do it ‘cause there’s usually a hater or two among the voters.”
“I wager Miss Cecilia does something similar for him,” said the Roman and pointed at other side of the stage, where the librarian was enthusiastically punching her evaluation onto her cell phone.
“Who knows,” said Stephen, doing his characteristically poor job of feigning disinterest in the subject of Cecilia. “I can’t keep track of what everybody does.”
Shen joined them at the table, out of breath and eager to hear how well others thought he had performed. He naturally expected Stephen and Maternus to say he had done exceedingly well, which Stephen quickly did; the Roman, not wishing to be impolite, told Shen he had displayed great energy and obeyed the forms of his art. The poet thankfully did not have time to delve further into what Maternus thought of his performance, because a round young man in a black beret appeared at the microphone to announce the winners.
“In third place tonight,” said the man in a beret, “you know her as a long-time favorite here at the Great Blue Heron, the mistress of the freed meter, the goddess of the good word — Blue Tone!”
The first brown woman Maternus had seen perform, the one in the striking orange and green outfit, bounded onto the low stage and collected a check for twenty dollars and an odd plastic statue of a man rolling a ball. The young woman thanked her parents, her friends, and “all the little people who made this possible,” which made the previously glum audience laugh, since they — unlike Maternus — understood she was speaking in jest.
“Coming in second at 116.6 points,” said the announcer, “is another perennial favorite — the sultan of syntax, the prince of poesy — our own Shen Coleman!”
Shen hopped onto the stage to get a check for forty dollars and another statuette that was slightly larger than the one the brown w
oman had been given. Shen was so expert at the behavior these presentation events demanded that he did not betray his grave disappointment at coming in second. Back at the table with Stephen and Maternus he continued to smile while others congratulated him and examined his trophy, the whole of which had been dipped in gilt paint. Maternus had difficulty reading the inscription below the trophy’s small statuette of another man rolling a large ball. It said, “Second Place, Front Range Premier Bowling Tourney, 1975.”
“Poetry is also called bowling in English?” he asked Shen.
“They recycle trophies here,” said Shen. “It’s meant to be ironic.”
“Many things are,” said Maternus.
“The grand prize winner is” —continued the announcer on stage, accompanying his words with many gesticulations of his small hands—” the high priestess of the prairies, Big Mama Ad-Verse!”
A white woman charged onto the stage dressed in a loose-fitting, striped outfit much like the one the black poetess had worn. Her hair was teased into a frizzy coif that also bore a striking resemblance to a black woman’s Afro, and she spoke the breezy slang of the urban streets. She apparently was someone Maternus had arrived too late to see perform.
“A big shout out to my brothers and sisters for keeping it real!” she exclaimed, and held aloft the largest of the recycled bowling trophies in her moment of triumph.
“Her real name is Elaine Buckman,” whispered Shen to Maternus, his voice barbed with scorn. “Her husband owns a sports bar over in LoDo. She’s the big published poet, so she wins all the local awards.”
“What do you mean when you say she is ‘published?’” asked the Roman.
“She’s got a book of her poems in print,” shrugged Shen. “Some tiny house up in Boulder, and I bet her husband paid for it. Like any true poetry lover would pay real money to buy her work.”
“Do not you and the other poets here have books of your own?” asked Maternus, which caused both Stephen and Shen to grumble into their coffee cups. The subject was clearly a difficult one to broach in their company.
Hell Can Wait Page 7