by Steven Snell
“God’s got yah.”
“And some would say science replaces religion.”
“It consumes it,” Alex adds.
“Religion is the ideal, until science shows up.” I rub my hand down my face. “What do you think science is?”
“… Something to do with systemized knowledge … and proving things false.”
“Yeah … religion has set beliefs –”
“And science has set assumptions.”
“Religion has to save the phenomenon and science has to interpret it, question it.”
“Critique the shit out of it.”
I smile, “Yes, that sounds pretty much like the methodology.”
Alex furrows his temple, “Huh … In order to save religion, we have to change our assumptions, our fundamental approach to civilization, to knowledge, to the universe. … In order to save science, well, we don’t need to save science. Science should constantly be redefining itself after destroying phenomena.”
“That’s probably how it works in theory but not in practice.”
“That’s the problem with anything when humans get involved.”
“They add their subjectivities.”
“Yes, science isn’t some pure pursuit of knowledge. It comes packaged with government loans and corporate sponsorship,” Alex says with a laugh.
“And egos and publishing rights.”
“Science is best when it’s simply taking the place leftover by a dead god.”
“Or gods.”
“Yah, indeed plural.”
“Reason alone could remove god – allowing one to believe in something else once the former thing has been disproven.
Alex takes a drink of his coffee. I drink mine.
Alex, as though thinking out loud says, “How does science change? If an anomaly shows up in scientific research, I guess, simply, the disciplinary boundaries change. Science doesn’t go anywhere because all science is is a method of inquiry.”
“But I doubt it’s ever that clean.”
“No, it probably never is, because egos are involved. People like to hold tight to this dispositions. We have irrational thoughts, so to explain everything in rational terms serves little purpose in a society that rubber-heads traffic accidents on the other side of the median.”
“And the personal lives of actors and singers.”
“Sometimes we do just because we do, because we have, because we can. Purely intellectually sovereign individuals making choices absent of outside influence is a completely retarded thing to hold belief in. And here’s the best part, and this is coming from someone who trades stocks: our entire economic system is based on a pure and intellectually sovereign individual – that’s the whole concept behind free-market theory.”
“The economic status of a country’s wealth is built on something that doesn’t actually exist in practice.”
“Independent people making choices based on informed decisions? Fuck that. Anyone who watches commercials knows that the economy is not designed for rational decision making. It’s pure emotion. Rational commercials would use neutral descriptions of its products –”
“Like PowerPoint slides and pie charts –”
“And bold, italicized, underlined words!”
“I loathe PowerPoint.”
“That’s the perk of being self-employed: no linear models trying to depict complex systems.”
“That’s my life.”
“That blows.”
“I’ll accept that,” I say with a smile and take a sip of my coffee.
“Commercials play into our manufactured fears of smelling bad and not white enough teeth and not green enough lawns. What’s not rational about that?” Alex scoffs with a sense of sarcasm.
Our conversation continues. Alex brings up wife sharing and children sharing and property sharing. How they were good because they ensured state unity. They were rational, if you were the owner of the sharing program, of course. And now sole ownership is bad because it promotes dissension through the control of goods and services; unless you’re the dominant owner, then it’s good. Things we used to do; now we don’t; now we do new things. We’re humans but naked apes, the only difference is that we’re human. He says it again. We’re a blob morphing to our surroundings and sometimes we’re rigid and our surroundings morph to us. We fumble along; we get caught up in trends; we make rational decisions; we don’t think; we do. We think some more. We stop thinking again. But we’re not infinitely malleable. We have thresholds. Sometimes we just say no. We don’t buy the teeth-whitening toothpaste.
We finish our coffees, stand, nod a thank-you to Jacob and then Alex says, “Revelation is an epistemic conclusion where the only thing left is that you’re human.”
“Wow. Come again?”
“You come to conclusions about who you are on the moving train of history.” He air draws a circle with his finger then holds it pointing up. “Knowing, knowing is knowing where we were and where we should go.”
“But not right now.”
“Knowing where to go is never a straight line; the train of history isn’t on rails. Or maybe there are rails but sometimes they get bombed by surface-to-surface missile strikes so we’re on a train rolling down the ditch. We worship stories, but just the sanitized parts. The bits we place on the internet for people to be jealous of. But life is more like speeding over the world in an airplane looking through a telescope. We really only see fragments. We can’t see it all. There’s never enough background detail to put everything into historical context.”
“And sometimes we’re just taking self-shots flexing in the bathroom mirror.”
We laugh. We walk to the front door; I push it open. Alex steps past me. I stuff my hands into my coat pockets. We walk silently. We look. We admire. We think.
Alex looks over to me, “Where are you off to now?”
“Um, I’m figuring home to shower, contemplate my navel and then to sleep.”
“Want to go skiing?”
I raise my eyebrows and shake my head, “Not a chance.”
“You’re such a Debbie Downer.”
“I’ll let you perfect your synchronized swimming routine on your own.”
“I’m telling you it’s great for my skin!” Alex laughs.
We hug and stepping back I ask, “Which way’re you going?”
“This way.”
I tilt my head the other way and say, “I’m this way. Bend your knees; keep your tips up.”
Alex pulls out his phone, smiles and says, “It’s Cathy.”
“Give her a kiss for me.”
“By kiss you mean…?”
“Don’t message me at 2 AM.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t love it!”
“Not when you have a cubicle job.”
“That is the Black Death to me.”
“Bye, mate.”
“Bye, man.
Then we’re off, and I’m walking back to my apartment.
There’s no one last painting.
15.
Work starts.
Work unfolds.
It continues.
I don’t work tomorrow, I think. That is good. It keeps me motivated to work, to not work.
Work ends.
I leave.
I exit the elevator and see Karen exiting an elevator in the bank across from me. She looks over and smiles and I smile back. We’re walking as though we don’t know each, close to each other but a million miles apart to anyone else. I glance to her and she mouths, “Soon?” I subtly nod. She takes out her phone as if to message someone but faces it towards me. I look sideways and nod again and yes I will message you I think to her. We take two different ways out of the foyer and I push open the glass door and down the steps onto the sidewalk and I think I feel like a glass of wine or more.
I get on the train and ride the train and get off the train and down a street and another one and enter the wine merchant down the street from my apartment.
T
he fellow behind the desk looks up over to me and says, “Looking for anything in particular?”
“I’m on a pilgrimage.”
“That’s one of my favourite things. Let me know if you need a guide.”
“Cheers. I will.”
I’m in search of red wine on the rolling hills of the Chianti region of Italy. I peruse the shelves up and down aisles with a map of the Chilean vineyards. I’m a traveller lost in the verdant lands of New Zealand, trekking through the midlands of France with a Let’s Go travel book of California, Oregon, Ontario in search of the perfect bottle of dirt, terra, soil, peat. Another aisle another geography and I search because I believe in the unsuspected truths of the greatest adventures! The Worst Journey in The World on the upper shelves, $45, $57, $103 bottles of wine. I’m not Columbus aboard the Santa Maria, The Clara at the bottom of the ocean and the Pinta pillaging the windswept coasts of Eastern shores. I have no life-preserver, no life-jacket, no PFD. I can only tread water, surviving, needing to remain within view of search and rescue helicopters and I hold my bladder so not to attract sharks. Darwin can search the upper shelves because he’s collected his fossils but I’m forced to put new shellac on a cardboard dingy.
I’ve found a Zinfandel but it’s too intense for my pedestrian tongue. I paddle, deep strokes in the calm waters and come across an island of Cabernet Sauvignon. An old man beverage, an old woman, and tannins that leech away the gums. I raise my anchor and seek another geography, another aisle.
I’m in a field; it’s snowing and where I walk is quickly covered by the freshly fallen flakes. The branches are naked of leaves. Not a bird’s call. Not another purveyor. Searching for something where there’s no bearing to search from. Hop-scotch without the chalk, without pavement. No course. No staff paying attention. No life guard on duty. Alone in a bourgeois world of wine consumption trying to stay under $11 for a bottle and surrounded by scotch.
I roll and swing my legs over the edge of the bed and search with my toes for slippers to slide into but they’re not here, not there, nor is the carpet. Just a mountain of grapes that need stomping. But I don’t stomp. I stand and point my arms in front of me and leap up and pike and dive into the abyss of grapes. I whip-kick my way up and surface and spit juice like a fountain as I roll to my back and float in this vat of grapes, comfort like a womb and something slippery sliding between my ankles and thighs. I take a turtle for a walk. My pace slows, a pace to read the list of processes and production on the back of each bottle of wine. I’m a dandy sundering life into manageable parts. Label upon label and the only thing I know is that Britain would be furious if I don’t return with specimens – earthly things from the exotic to show the merchants paying for my pilgrimage. Sorry, but I did not find a new shipping route to the Far East, but I have a colony of people who showed me their beautiful material wealth and women.
The entrance door opens and a bell dings.
I turn and an older woman with silver hair back in a sophisticated ponytail smiles at the merchant.
I stand in front of a shelf of inexpensive wines and pick a random letter and I slowly walk along the shelf and when I see H I stop.
I’ve found a pinot noir. Classic but fruity. Intelligent and dirty. Lord Bryon turned into soil. I’ll walk in beauty, like the night…. I pay and exit and drift back to my apartment thinking about naked tits in my mouth and message Karen that I’ll be home shortly.
16.
I once thought the Gregorian calendar was a literal representation of reality. I’ll return to this. First, Karen. She doesn’t know me outside of my bedroom. She knows where I live, what colours the walls in my apartment are, the faucet setting for hot water in my shower, the buzzer number to my apartment. She knows lying naked beside me when her husband is working. I talk and she listens. That’s what she knows. She asks and I tell her stories, fragments of some life. Tucked up against me she puts her head on my chest and listens. I fill a void. For her, lying here is about turning thirty and never having lived. The fear of being stuck in some place, some thing, some person. She attracts many, but gave herself to one, except in my apartment. She said ‘I do’ to her husband but moaned ‘again’ to me. Marriage wasn’t for fulfillment. Being laid by one and being loved by another is what she needs. If she were to give a person both parts, she would no longer be Karen but someone that has been defined in relation to someone else, a wife. Giving everything she once told me would be giving up. “I wouldn’t be myself anymore. I’d only be one thing.” I responded that she should think about being alone. It’s okay being single. It’s okay to know yourself alone. “No it’s not,” she answered. “Being alone is for thinkers and I’m an actor.” That’s what she said.
Karen brushes her hair off her cheek and rolls, placing her breasts against me. I rest my hand on her lower back. She puts her chin on my chest. “It’s Thursday evening. It’s never Thursday evening.”
I smile to her and then look at the ceiling. I glide my fingers up her back, up her neck and trace parts of her body. “And?”
“And, I don’t know. It’s Thursday. It feels different. It feels … nice. It feels like change, but not drastic. Growth maybe. Maybe we’re changing.”
I stop moving my hand. “Maybe, but it’s just a day. You’re here because your husband’s work schedule changed this week, not ours. You weren’t here yesterday. Just today. And that so happens to be Thursday, not Wednesday or Monday. It’s more a change in timing than growth. … Maybe it’s just semantics.”
She frowns. “You think too much.” She wanders my chest with her finger, down to my stomach and follows the line of hair back up. “What’s semantics?”
I pull my arm out from under her and stand and walk to my chest of drawers and push Play on the CD player. I feel her looking at me. The music starts. “This okay?”
She smiles. “Yes.”
I lie back down beside her and wrap my arm under her head and my hand under her breast and pull her in and she lifts her leg and rests it on my stomach.
“You’ll always be you to me no matter what we call each other, no matter the day of week, even when you begin to hate me eventually.”
“I won’t ever hate you.”
“Yes you will. And I’ll always be that person you slept with when your husband worked too much and it doesn’t matter what you call it. That’s semantics.”
Karen hesitates to speak and then says nothing, maybe thinking, maybe waiting for me to add something. Her hand on my chest, the ceiling fan breathing down on us. “Do you like me?”
I drag my finger along her thigh.
“You to me or who you are?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I don’t know you. … Do we know each other?”
“Don’t we?”
I exhale. “I like that you lay naked with me, that we lay naked together. I like the comfort we have when we take off our clothes. … Our clothes are some kind of barrier. We’re tribal when we’re naked. I like that. … I like how you try to remain unaffected by me when you first arrive here. Then you take off your bra and underwear and you’re you. When you’re striped you’re more you.” I pause for a moment. “Yes, naked, that’s what I know. I find an honesty in that. An honesty that might be unique.”
I pull her leg tighter to me and continue tracking my fingers up and down her brown skin. She doesn’t say anything and I continue.
I tell her that she wouldn’t want me, the whole me. That I couldn’t give her whatever it was she wanted, whatever she had silently constructed me to be in her mind. I couldn’t be that. It’s safer if we remain as we are. She once spoke of being friends but that’s not possible. Our relationship was founded on something else and to be friends and to have sex moved us from what we are to what she should have in a relationship. We couldn’t be a relationship. She’s in one of those. “I like you but that’s the extent of it. We can’t hang out. We can’t go to movies. You have someone in your life that is supposed to fulfill those functi
ons, do those things with you.” These things I’ve told her before.
I say that maybe I fulfill some niche, something incomplete, that is my appeal to her. I’m different. I say I’m downtown and she’s from the suburbs. “I don’t live that far way,” she replies. I meant that as a metaphor; she took it literally.
I smile.
“I’m what you keep hidden in your walk-in closet. I will either mess up your marriage into an explosion of arbitration or keep you fulfilled and nurtured on some primal level until something changes, something else, someone else, some other day of the week.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“It’s not odd, though.”
She looks up at me. “What?”
“What we’re doing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Polygamy is not abnormal, monogamy is. Neither is wrong, I guess.”
“That sounds academic.”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve stopped that kind of thinking.”
“A year ago?” I say with a laugh.
“You should stop too. It feels like forever ago.”
“Then I haven’t changed at all.”
“… Go on.”
“With what?”
“Polygamy.”
I adjust my groin against her thigh. “Polygamy, monogamy, both serve a purpose, in their way, what we’re doing is not wrong.”
She smiles. “Good. I hope not.”
“It depends on your frame of reference really. One perpetuates a gene pool, the other a lineage. Blame Darwin.”
“No more academic talk.”
“Okay … but FYI though, at this stage I’m indifferent to both. But you and I aren’t here to reproduce – at least not that I’m aware of!”
She laughs and pushes me. “Definitely not!”
“Good.”
“Now, stop thinking.” She shifts and sits up over me, on top of me. I look up at her. She bites her lower lip. She rocks slightly, back, forth. A mischievous grin shapes her mouth. She squeezes my chest. Back and forth again. She pulls her hair over her shoulder. She leans forward and pushes her tongue into my mouth. Her hands on the headboard, her weight into me, her breasts are a brush painting my chest, her pubic hair against mine, her heat against me as she takes me and guides me in. She leans forward and whispers in my ear, “I want to feel you cum in me.”