The Living End

by Lisa Samson

  I went back inside, locked up for the night and heated up a cup of warm milk. The porcelain-covered pan my mother used to use comforted me further. And now, Dad’s asleep upstairs in their old room, and Pearly sleeps in ours. The night is quiet and my heart is a silent symphony. I am blessed.

  Joey wrote that years ago, shortly after he graduated from Hopkins with his master’s when we still lived in his parents’ old house on Conking Street.

  I’m not sure why I’ve always resisted Joey’s faith. I abandoned so much of myself the day I married Joey. I left behind so many dreams and desires, so much freedom and, yes, even folly, I suppose. Joey truly knew God and walked with Him. Even I could sense the deep spirituality, the real relationship. But me, I’d only be doing it for Joey, and that smacked of someone who can’t make her own decisions. He made all the decisions for our home. I at least would make all the decisions for my own soul.

  But I’m beginning to see so much more value in the life I led, so much love and harmony. And I experience a great deal of satisfaction that Joey and I “got it right.” How many people can say that? How much greatness would so many gladly trade for a bright warm hearth cared for by the tender hand of a loving spouse? I felt such happiness in his presence. Is it any wonder then, that his death has ravaged me down to the mere state of being, caused me to question why I gave it all up for him, why I lost myself? And will that same love bring me someday to the point where instead of asking why, I can honestly ask, “Why not?” Who would argue against the fact that a life lived for love and in love is a life lived for the greatest purpose of all?

  I never knew how much I grieved him, though. There were times I wanted to ask him something or other about God or Jesus, but I always stopped myself. Joey was like a wrecking ball with ideas. Once you expressed an interest, he came at you with all the intellectual excitement he possessed, and there you’d be, splattered against his enthusiasm and flying up into the air with the force of it. Hey, he convinced me to marry him three weeks after we met. He overwhelmed me so much—not in a bad way, as his excitement always led to something wonderful—but I’m glad he kept this from me. I’m glad he didn’t share his disappointment, or there I’d be, accompanying him to matins or prayers, pretending I cared.

  “Hi, Maida.”

  “Pearly! I was wondering when you were going to call. It’s been weeks.”

  The crocuses bloom now on the hillside. I’m down to three cigarettes a day and jogging two miles. I read a statistic that someone who smokes between one and nine cigarettes a day has only a .03 percent greater chance of getting lung cancer than a nonsmoker. This encourages me. Of course, with my luck …

  I mailed in an application for the Virginia Ten-Miler. I can play “Louie Louie,” “Cat’s in the Cradle,” “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” and “American Pie.” I love the keys of D, G, and A, and the watch is still running. I look at it at least twenty times a day because I’m a little bit dismayed, even though I have yet to fulfill much of the list. However, I can play the guitar to my own lax standards, and I’ve wintered on a mountain. Not to mention having seen my new favorite band, The Goo Goo Dolls. Three down, eight to go.

  I pull Joey’s shirt tightly around my middle. “I’ve been busy, Maida.”

  “Well, I’ve got another stack of mail here for you from all over the country. I recognize some of the names from Joey’s conversations. You want me to send these down too?”

  The boys.

  “No. I’ll be up in two weeks. The cabin lease is up mid-March.”

  “You coming back to Havre de Grace?”

  “Just passing through. I’ll pick up the mail and then head back to the farm.”

  “Well, guess what’s happening with Brock and Shelby?”

  “They back from Egypt?”

  “Oh, yes! They didn’t really go back in time, we found out. They went into a past life regression together.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “What? Find out about your past life?”

  “No, do a simultaneous regression?”

  “If you’re soul mates, I guess so. I mean, you’re going to the same point in time, right? So the other would naturally be there. Right?”

  “I guess. So, did they learn anything while they were in their trances?”

  “Just that they really were soul mates. And it’s made all the difference. Their love is cemented now! Damien’s baby and all!!”

  “Oh, so it is Damien’s!”

  “Well, I think so.”

  I smile. Oh, boy.

  “I’ll bet you and Joey were soul mates.”

  “I’ll bet we were.”

  “Which means it’s just a matter of time before you’re together again.” Her normally forceful voice slips into a silk sheath. “I mean, I’d never met a couple like you all. You were meant to be together for eternity.”

  “Maida? What’s wrong with you? You sound positively drippy.”

  She whispers, “I think I’m in love.”

  “What?!” Oh, my goodness! “With who?”

  “Shrubby Cinquefoil.”

  “Shrubby? How in the world do you know Shrubby Cinquefoil?”

  “He’s living in your house is how.”

  Oh, great. “Let me guess. My cousins.” Probably Cheeta.

  “Yep. Shrubby’s having a hard time of it right now, Pearly. Since I couldn’t get in touch with you, and he needed a place to stay, and with Cheeta’s peculiar brand of persuasion—”

  “Did she threaten to beat you up?”

  “Almost! She’s something! What a pip!”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “Anyway, Shrubby just needed to get away. I found him a job on a friend’s fishing boat and he’s doing better.”

  “Why did he need to get away?”

  “His last ex-wife brought a lawsuit against him. Claimed he abused her son and sued for his property, which we both know is all he has. He got scared and gave it all to her without a fight. I’m sure it will all go to that cult too.”

  “No!”

  “Of course he didn’t do anything to the child. Not one thing. But Shrubby’s not a fighter.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “So when did you say you’d be here?”

  “March 15.”

  “Okay. Come around lunchtime. Can we at least have a meal together?”

  “Sure, Maida. That would be fine.”

  “I’ll make sure there’s plenty.”

  As if I doubted that.

  Poor Shrubby! I’m so thankful for the marriage I had. I just wish it wasn’t the only thing I had.

  Good-bye, lovely little chalet. Good-bye, grand mountain. Good-bye, winter music.

  Before locking the door, I lay a picture from my album in the back corner of the cabinet over the refrigerator. Joey and me in front of Graceland. The gates, with their musical motif, appear even more tacky out here in the middle of nature.

  Finally, I close the door. My feet crunch down the pathway toward the car. I climb in and drive away.

  I am flying over the plains of South America in a small Cessna. My pilot’s named Juan. A former fighter pilot, utterly bored. He’s seen these ancient figures etched into the landscape of Peru many times. They’ve become commonplace.

  I, on the other hand, cannot keep my mouth from dropping open. We start out low, and I see only tan lines of dried earth. I know they form animals and people and geometric designs etched by aliens, or a race of giants, or who? No one can really say. Joey always wanted us to do this? But why? I’m glad, though, because this takes up much less time than wintering on a mountain or learning to play the guitar.

  “Oh, my gosh! It’s the spider!” I’ve seen pictures of this spider. The type is not indigenous to this area, the books say, but to me, it looks like a regular spider. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday an arachnoid-type scientist discovers a new species around here that looks just like this guy. Or maybe not. I don’t know why I even feel bound to form an opinion on t
his. I know nothing.

  But I love a good mystery. Well, actually, before Joey died I loved reading mysteries, because the author is kind enough to solve it in the end with some parlor scene or a courtroom confessional. Not at all realistic according to Joey, but highly satisfying to me. This mystery, however, unsettles me a bit. And the higher the altitude the more I wonder who did this, and why? What grueling toil! Did some alien race carve some of these lines for spacecraft runways? Or a pre-Flood race of giants experience a large-scale creative urge? Maybe these document the ancient equivalent of a men’s club, a place to get away from your mate, but instead of sitting around smoking cigars, they decided to make really big pictures that would keep them away from home most nights of the week. They probably blamed it all on some god, a deity demanding this of them. If you don’t want fire to come down and consume you and the children, you’d better have supper on the table when I get in from the field, and a kiss on the cheek when I head out the door half an hour later.

  Goodness, this altitude must be scrambling my brain.

  We fly higher, and a canvas of earth and vegetation splays before me as though Jackson Pollock had thrown the forms forth from his bucket. I think of the adage, “Put a monkey in front of a typewriter, and sooner or later he’ll type the Gettysburg Address,” and I wonder if these figures are just some manner of chance. But I doubt that too.

  I don’t know much, and there’s absolutely no doubt about that. Thank you, Joey. Thanks to you I soar above a true mystery.

  The great monkey spirals its tail before me, the torso’s spare underside almost kissing its top side, a singular line contouring its form, then moving on to form stairsteps, stepping across millennia and explanation. We skim the air above this tapestry. A condor, a hummingbird, a man in boots, trapezoids, parallel lines, a lizard with a tail bisected by a southerly highway. I could have only comprehended the mammoth scale of all this by viewing it myself. Yes, this experience is more than seeing. This qualifies as a state-of-being, of sight mingling with event to form … an epiphany! Yes, that’s it. Only I’m not sure what it is yet, but I am part of this! I’m viewing something far bigger than myself at the vantage point from which it was made to be seen.

  My eyes. My eyes. This glorious vision.

  Oh, Joey, you knew. You knew how this would affect me. I want to close my eyes at the ecstasy, experience the thrill alone, but I cannot miss this moment, jealous even of the blinking of my eyelids.

  Juan is still bored.

  “How many times have you seen these?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Too many. Not so special now.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Sí. Sad when nothing makes you wonder.”

  I’d never thought about that before. I wonder about everything. Maybe I need to add an F-U-L to the end of that word, learn to see the marvelous mysteries and happenings that fill this amazing world. Maybe that’s already happening.

  “You ever hear of the Viracocha, ma’am?” Juan asks.

  “No.”

  “Here in Peru, many many thousands of years ago, a stranger walked among the people, a great god. The creator and the civilizer. Some say our ruins were built five or six hundred years ago, and some of them were, but some”—he shakes his head—“they were built around the time of Viracocha.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “He tried to civilize the ancient people, but in the end, although he brought great change, he left us. He was spotted in Mexico.”

  “Before the Flood? The Noah Flood?”

  He shrugs. “I think so. But then I’m Catholic.” His voice lowers. “I’ll tell you something really mysterious. This visitor was a white man with a beautiful beard and flowing white robes. He had something to do with snakes.”

  “Snakes?” Satan was a snake, right? Oh, Joey, where are you when I need you?

  “Sí.”

  “That’s odd. Are snakes bad things to these ancient civilizations, like in the Bible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Who was this Viracocha? Immediately I think of Christ. Did he appear to these people before the Flood? Did he seek to bring them to God?

  When the plane lands I deposit beneath the seat a photo of Joey and me on our trip to Nantucket. The Atlantic is gray, the sky matches, and our smiles warm the composition snapped by a mother walking her two-month-old baby in a battered stroller. I’m sure there’s an entry about her somewhere in Joey’s writings. Large, small, in-between, Joey saw the whole world as worthy of his honor. So much beauty. So much art.

  I’m reading in Joey’s Bible tonight about a snake that the Israelites lifted up on a pole. All who were afflicted by a great plague could look upon the bronze reptile and be healed. So snakes aren’t all bad then, are they? Well.

  Once again, this white god Viracocha stands at the front of my mind as I climb toward an ancient temple in Bolivia. My guide is more knowledgeable than the pilot. I hired him for this very reason. He is a priest. Or used to be, until he fell in love with a woman named Consuela Maria, a very large ex-prostitute whose soul Jorge sought to save from the oven of a mission down in Mexico City. She runs the guide service and offered me dinner, and because Joey would have said yes, I did too. It is easy to see why Jorge left the priesthood for her. Saucy yet kind. Impertinent yet giving. Arms as big as my thighs. A Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt bridges the great chasm between her ten-gallon breasts. She broadcasts softness and welcome.

  “You stay with us. Cheap and clean,” she said. “We take good care of you.”

  So I packed up my bags, checked out of the flea-bitten inn where I had been staying, and walked a block down the dusty street and into a charming little home. Plain and clean, with lots of flowers growing, smooth tiles underfoot.

  Jorge and I venture toward the temple area of a town that once stood on the shores of Lake Titicaca but now sits in ruin twelve miles away, the lake having “relocated” during “some cataclysmic event” according to the guidebook.

  “Many have dated this temple to as late as the 1500s. But look at this stonework. This is the work of the Viracochas.”

  There’s that name again. Only he’s talking of a people, not a person. Interesting.

  The wall beside me is a crazy quilt of stones, some many times taller than myself and Jorge, obviously weighing many tons. My fingers drift over the surface of the mammoth stones, seek out the seams where the great rocks fit together more perfectly than a set of spoons. How could anyone do this? Suddenly the plains of Peru seem almost infinite when compared to this precision, this ancient feat of engineering. Again, I meld with something far larger than myself, something I can touch, something real, warmed by the sun, smoothed by gritty winds of centuries, perhaps millennia, if Jorge’s hunches are true.

  I close my eyes, inching along as I drag my hand across the wall. I stop and tell Jorge what the pilot said regarding the ancient lore.

  “How do you deal with this? The tales of this white god?” I ask. “As a former priest. You still believe in God, don’t you?”

  “More than I ever have. In Mexico they call him Quetzalcoatl. But more than anything, God is gracious, and this is true. Does it seem so impossible He sent prophets to help His creation?”

  “Well, no. But does the Bible mention any of this?”

  “No. But then, the Bible around this time period is limited to the Middle East. We can’t assume God only dealt with people in that region, can we?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. How do you reconcile all of this, then? With your own faith?”

  “There’s nothing to reconcile. I simply trust in God, Mrs. Laurel. He is who He is regardless of what I believe. I don’t have to fully understand Him to love Him.”

  “But don’t you doubt?”

  He shrugs. “At times. But what honest man does not admit to this? True, there are many mysteries in life. If it causes you to seek out the one true God, then I am glad. Honestly, mostly people make me doubt. Their cruelty, their selfishness. My own
cruelty and selfishness. Not mysteries like this. This just further confirms the fact that nothing happens by accident.”

  I doubted he could ever be cruel. “My husband used to say, ‘The supposed jewels in the crown of God’s creation are the greatest cause of atheism.’ ”

  “I have to agree.”

  I reach into my knapsack and pull out a photo of Joey writing at his typewriter, typing, most likely, a small tale swollen with meaning and filled with a childlike trust. I kiss his face. We climb down into the ruins of the temple, a large rectangular hole in the pavement, steps leading down amid the six-foot-high walls that lend it the air of a large swimming pool. A stone pillar towers in the middle. The white god himself, Jorge tells me. I lay the picture at his feet wondering if he was Christ, or a prophet or the devil.

  “Did he come before the Flood?” I ask, running my fingers along the stonework.

  “Some say yes. I would agree. Now you’ll see ruins with typical stonework, nothing so miraculous as this. All the pyramids over here. All the lore. Very much like Egypt.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “There’s even a Babel legend over here.”

  “As in the Tower of Babel?”

  “Sí. Where God scattered the people because they began to know too much. He confused their language.”

  Good. A Bible story I actually knew. “It’s almost too much to comprehend.”