God's Gym

by John Edgar Wideman

  Walt's got a point. No shortage of animals. Plenty critters even without tenderhearted Sheriff Wilson here protecting their rights.

  Damned straight I got a point. Why do you think nature crops them. If not, they'd eat us out of house and home. Then eat each other. So why not pop one when you feel a need to pop one. A kindness, really.

  The others a veteran crew, regulars from the Alibi abiding the presence of an eternal rookie, extra baggage along for the ride, for a joke. No gun, no intention to kill anything would set me apart, if nothing else, from my companions semicircled around John in his grease-monkey coveralls. He's dropped down to one knee beside a gut-shot antelope whose bad dying he's just terminated with a pointblank bullet to the brain from his pistol.

  I remember the ground under John's knee. Ground antelope color, or the antelope the color of ground it had staggered across, barely able to hold up its pronghorned head, slow, faltering steps, neck bowing lower and lower, the antelope weary, maybe ashamed of surrender, of helplessness, aiming for the rifle held by a baggy-looking creature who through the antelope's glazed eyes might have seemed antelope color. Snow everywhere around us but John's knee presses into rocky earth speckled here and there by subtle pinwheel explosions of lichen that cling to mountain turf you'd think would be lifeless buried years under snow and ice.

  John snaps his pistol into its holster, slides the holster into a backpack on the ground next to the antelope, digs out of the pack a sheathed Bowie knife. When it's bare in his fist, I study it. One edge sharp as a razor, half the other edge beveled, saw-toothed. This is how I'll manage. Concentrate on the unfolding details of field-dressing an antelope. Focus my curiosity on each step without asking why or connecting the dots. Like watching a striptease. Or like enjoying Walt's Alibi tall tales, letting him have his fun at my expense, good ole Walt busting my balls, skinning me to entertain the others. Uh-huh. I hear you, Walt, but I'm not Roger. I can laugh as hard and invisibly inside myself as you laugh behind your poker face, old buddy.

  That morning or another in the mountains I remember thinking about how love could make going to sleep each night a long journey, a long separation from the loved one, and how I'd say I'll miss you to her before turning away to my side of the bed. Remember being offered John's pistol and declining. Remember thinking here's this whole bloodthirsty bunch of us and just one skimpy antelope each guy probably outweighs. I remember a wounded animal stumbling and lurching like a drunk, remember being riveted by the unlikelihood of what I was witnessing, a wild creature approaching closer and closer, its body begging, speaking, if the word speak means anything, speaking the sentence Please finish killing me.

  John's got the antelope's spindly hind legs lifted and splayed, gets rid of prick and balls, then wiggles the knife tip under the hide and slices slowly, carefully, from crotch to chest. Sounds like cutting carpet. No, fellas, I don't gasp when John opens the antelope's distended water-balloon belly and yanks out steaming viscera. I'm digging erotic pinks and vivid lavenders, delicate mauves of stretched, moist skin, the smell discharged with a palpable hiss, engulfing me, not in fetid nastiness of bile or vomit but sage perfume, so familiar, pungent, and intimate I've never forgotten it, and that nearly-falling-in-love swoon as close as I came that day to losing my composure.

  I intended to return to this skinning and gutting scene, squeeze more out of it, but between one writing session and the next, while reading Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I encountered, by coincidence, another skinning scene—the torture of a Japanese soldier captured during the Manchurian border war between Russia and Japan in 1939, a graphic description of a man tied down and flayed inch by inch by a Mongolian with a long, thin, curved knife, who prolonged his victim's agony less to extract information than to demonstrate mastery of his instrument, which produced perfectly preserved, empty envelopes of skin while the bloody body still twitched.

  Whatever little chill I hoped to evoke with my antelope butchering scene had been trumped and chumped by the horrible suffering of Murakami's prisoner, his human screams, human blood soaking the ground, the patient, methodical infliction of pain by his executioner. I felt depressed, disappointed, hopelessly outgunned. A tiny razor was lifting my skin.

  Luckily, I had other work, so put Wyoming aside that day, tried to savor the irony of yet another coincidence and console myself with the possibility, whether I liked it or not, that coincidence was becoming my subject, the inevitable subject once you start searching for connections between one word and the next, one step and the next, one breath, one heartbeat, and the next, because sooner or later coincidence intervenes, a spinning universe intersects with another spinning universe, and strangely, one doesn't exactly demolish the other, each seems to go on about its business as if the other doesn't exist, the bumping into each other, the touching are fictions, imaginary accidents that produce consequences a survivor of the collision might call change or loss or birth or death.

  Coincidence (1) the fact or condition of being coincidental, (2) occurrence or existence at the same time, (3) exact correspondence in substance, nature, character, etc., (4) concurrence, (5) blending.

  And further down page 339 of the Oxford Shorter English Dictionary (Volume 1, A-M), where coincidentally my eyes stray,

  Cohabit—to dwell together

  Coinquinate—to soil all over; pollute; defile

  Play in the dictionary all day, but you'll still never write like the great ones, the voice says. But so what, why should I. The point isn't replicating some other writer. The point is expressing myself, being myself. Anyway, who decides, finally, what's good or bad, and hearing myself repeat the pep talk I deliver each time a writer's shadow or my own ineptitude stops me in my tracks, I think, yeah, right, but how can I be sure my bones aren't up in the mountains already, waiting for some spring hiker to boot them deeper into a snowdrift.

  Maybe what seems real is merely a possibility, never more, never more than one possibility among innumerable others. To imagine one life, we let go of others. Bury them like burying the dead. Until coincidence recalls them.

  This morning when I took a break from writing I picked up Tracing, a book of poems that's been sitting around months unopened, and carried it into the bathroom to glance at while I sat on the toilet. I could say this book this morning a coincidence, or say I'm compelled to crack the book this particular morning because it's a gift from a nice person, because it's fragile-looking, probably self-printed, a gray paper cover thin as each of its twenty or so stapled-together pages, read it because writers are hunters, because the author of the poems, Ryoko Sekiguchi, coincidentally, is Japanese like Murakami. The first words of the first poem are The unexpected meeting in the singular suddenly becomes numerous.

  When John phoned to say he'd be in the city the following week and maybe we could hang out, I almost laughed out loud. Only reason I didn't because too much to explain before John could appreciate the joke that wasn't really fanny in the first place, more like bizarre, more like crazy, like poor Molly and her talking license plates. About three years since we'd hooked up, but with all the Wyoming stuff in the air, why not, why wouldn't my best friend from that time and place arrive on my doorstep. Why not one further fanhouse-mirror twist—in addition to seeing me, John intended to catch up with other old friends, mutual friends from Wyoming in town for the same conference he's attending. Did I want to join the whole crew for dinner. He didn't say for old time's sake or say just like in the good ole days but what else would he be thinking, the coincidence of everybody in the same city, same day, the possibility of getting together again, nostalgia, reprieve, the bunch of us performing the neat trick of going back to a place that no longer exists or never existed. Who can resist. The innocent smiles, the hugs and chatter and toasts. My, my. I wanted to laugh out loud and cry and confess everything to my old pal. Explain why meeting would do no good. Why meetings scripted and unscripted, especially the latter, and it's always partly the latter, are as dangerous as they are sad an
d unforgiving, as they are fan and fanny. I couldn't wait to see him. Yeah. Sure. I'll join him and kick back with the others. None of the dead need apply. Yes. Sounds great. After all, unbeknown to myself, I'd been preparing, hadn't I. Warming up. Practicing quick cuts from figure to ground, ground to figure. Like the design printed on my African gourd. Fish flying or birds swimming, or some new winged, amphibious hybrid, at home in water, earth, fire, wind, at home on the range.

  How long will my old buddy wait in the hotel lobby, grinning as if he's enjoying the joke I haven't told him, appearing as pleased with himself as any aging magician who cups in his hands a live, wiggly baby rabbit plucked from an empty top hat, then claps to prove to the audience nothing in his hands after all.

  I think I catch him catch a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye. Swear I see the flicker of his glance light me up a minisecond and his long mouth begin a smile of recognition. I must be mistaken, because when his head turns and he gazes directly at the space I occupy, his glance, then his fixed stare, pass straight through me as if I'm not a few yards away, as if he's daydreaming or remembering a meeting elsewhere with someone else on some other occasion, or as if he's been tricked by some coincidental movement and turns to find no one there.