by John Rechy
I close my eyes. I try to sleep. But I cant. Because when I close my eyes, that recurrent nightmare I had had as a very little boy comes again: And Im being crushed by wooden stones, over which theres a thin, flimsy veil. I try to push them away. But even when I open my eyes, the stones keep crushing me, the veil melting like wax over my face.
Finally it was gone.
Sleep is coming—not that slow entering into a state of momentary beinglessness. No. It was as if for a long, long time I struggle to open an enormous black door—beyond which I shut myself at last in sleep.
Wide awake suddenly, I opened my eyes.
I saw three cockroaches crawling on my arm.
And in the flickering light of the movie, I looked down on a man squatting before me on the floor, his hungry hot hands on my thighs, his moist lips glued to the opening of my pants.
The first church I telephoned was St Patrick’s. “I cant see you,” said the priest, “not until morning, we’re closed now.” And he hung up. I called St Louis Cathedral. “I cant see you—of course not—I get these calls all the time.” A third one—and I said hurriedly: “Dont hang up, Father. Ive got to talk to someone!” And he listened only a few moments. “You must be drunk,” he said angrily, and he hung up. And I called The Church of Eternal Succor, and I called other churches—and they all said: “No.” “Go to sleep.” “Come tomorrow to the confessional.” (Where life doesnt roar so loudly—in whispers, it can be listened to. . . .) “Some time else.” “When we are open.” One even said: “God bless you,” before he hung up.
And I was experiencing that only Death, which is the symbolic death of the soul. It’s the death of the soul, not of the body—it’s that which creates ghosts, and in those moments I felt myself becoming a ghost, drained of all that makes this journey to achieve some kind of salvation bearable under the universal sentence of death. And the body becomes cold because the heart and the soul, about to give up, are screaming for sustenance—from any source, even a remote voice on a telephone—and they drain the body in order to support themselves for that one last moment before the horror comes stifling out that already-dying spark.
And I was thinking that although there is no God, never was a God, and never will be One—considering the world He made, it is possible to understand Him—or that part of Him that had forbidden Knowing, because—Christ!—at that moment I longed for innocence more than for anything else, and I would have thrown away all the frantic knowing for a return to a state of Grace—which is only the state of, idiot-like, Not Knowing.
I called one more church. St Vincent de Paul.
And a priest who sounded very young answered, and he didnt hang up and he was the one I had tried to reach, I knew, and he spoke to me and spoke—and I can remember only one thing he said—and the rest doesnt matter because all I had wanted was to hear a voice from a childhood in the wind. . . . And what I do remember that priest saying is merely this:
“I know,” he said. “Yes, I know.”
And I returned to El Paso.
Here, by another window, I’ll look back on the world and I’ll try to understand. . . . But, perhaps, mysteriously, it’s all beyond reasons. Perhaps it’s as futile as trying to capture the wind.
And it’s windy here now.
No matter how you close the windows or pull the curtains or try to hide from it or shelter yourself from it, it’s there. It’s impossible to escape the Wind. You can still hear it shrieking. You always know it’s there. Waiting.
And I know it will wait patiently for me, ineluctably, when inevitably I’ll leave this city again.
And what has been found?
Nothing.
A circle which winds around, without beginning, without end.
The clouds are storming angrily across the orange-gray sky. They rush at each other as if to battle. You know how it is in Texas each year before spring. One moment theres the stunning awareness that soon spring is coming, with the yellow-green clusters of leaves budding on the skeleton trees, hinting of a potential revival—soon, soon.
And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself.
And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window—remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up—and thinking:
It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven?