by Steven Snell
“Why does God, the Omniscient, Omnipotent, Universal Chariot Rider, need a day of recovery after creating the world anyway? What the fuck is with the seventh day? Who wants a lazy god?”
I hear Alex swallow again.
I respond to what might be a rhetorical question. “Maybe it’s less lazy and more standing back in awe of his creation.”
“Narcissist!”
I nod.
Alex continues, “Listen, He teases some girl to eat a piece of fruit that He very well knows – He must know, it’s just hand in glove with the omnipotent thing – He knows she is going to eat it because God knows all – you know, again, all seeing all knowing, or that’s how the story goes. And then after she eats it, which He knows she’s going to do, He kicks her out of His garden. What a mean Bitch!”
Another swallow.
“Now that I’m thinking about it, all that contemporary religion is is a collective editorial board reinterpreting its texts to conform to contemporary society. Except Scientology. That only had one author. It was first draft perfect.”
“Interesting thought,” I suggest.
Alex continues, “Since you can’t say the word of God is or was wrong, you just call it metaphor or reorient its meaning to suit your social or economic agenda. The Bible just needed better editors to highlight some of the logical gaps in plot or meaning.”
“I’m with L. Ron Hubbard. Fuck editors.”
I slide my hand down over my neck. “Did L. Ron Hubbard rest on the seventh day?”
“The whole tired seventh day and rest thing. It’s only a metaphor for relaxation masturbation. Even God needed to get off. How do you think the Nile was created?”
“Hope?”
“One blast of God’s cum. And let there be river valley! I wish my ejaculate could make river valleys. Fuck that whole glacial movement shit. And why do you think God made man first?”
“Because the first draft is always rubbish?”
“Right! The second one is always clearer, more precise and therefore ultimately better. He had to get the bugs out with the prototype so the second draft could spend her life fiddling with and fixing the first attempt. That’s why women have to dress and clean up after men; God’s first draft was ripe with grammatical errors and plot gaps you could drive a truck through. Speaking of driving, get your ass over here!”
“… My energy level is a-bys-mal.”
“Alcohol is a cure-all.”
“I thought that was a beach vacation holiday.”
“Right, where the price of alcohol is included.”
“Okay … I’ll be by in a few.”
“Hit it.”
I push End on my phone, put it in my back pocket, go to my bedroom to get my sweater from off the chair and become another object pushed by Alex the Prime Mover.
30.
I’m lying on Alex’s floor. My umbrella is leaning against the wall beside the front door Alex painted while he was high. It’s a head of an elephant and its trunk is an octopus’s tentacles. The cuffs of my jeans are wet and my socks are off airing out beside my umbrella beside my shoes. Alex is sprawled out on the couch staring at the stationary ceiling fan. The music of Mojave 3 is filling-in the background silence and vocals percolate like an evening roast with our glasses of cheap scotch and honey and hot water and then another one in Alex’s hand and one on the floor beside me.
I say, “There are moist leaves against my naked feet.”
I open and close and open my mouth as if allowing something to enter it.
“I’m moving on an immovable ground. It’s all lies.”
I click my jaw.
“The earth, it has to be a stationary. It’s all messed up … all messed up … How can we admit truth now …?”
I take a deep breath, the scotch anchoring me to the floor.
“How can we admit truth now, if we’ve admitted a contradictory truth in the past? We can’t be moving. The earth crawling through space orbiting the sun at 105 000 km/h. It can’t be. I want the heavens to dance a lyrical solo to a lone piano in darkness, a gleaming dancer floating. I can see her. She’s on stage in the spotlight. Split jete. Switch. An arabesque. Fouette. Second position into retire. On point feeling the stars between her toes above us.”
Alex tilts his head to pour the mellow evening mood into his mouth and holds it and slowly swallows drip by drip savoring that burning yet soft honey taste.
I continue, “What makes this worthwhile? Being here? The actual act of being here, gazing up at the stars being. It’s like I just woke, just came out of a coma and opened my eyes to a darkened sky or ceiling or hospital room in a private wing. … But I dreamt, I dreamt of the most wonderful comforts. … Warm wet childhood soil under my feet and I was chasing monarch butterflies through lush fields in central Ontario. And I was shirtless. I was easy and laughing and felt free. … I felt light, the sun on my back and running and even if I didn’t catch that Monarch butterfly, I somehow knew I’d keep smiling. I like these moist leaves,” I say.
I cough and sit up and cough again and sip my no longer hot scotch and honey.
Alex stands and walks to the kitchen and clicks the kettle and returns to the couch and positions his head to look out sideways at the night. Street lights and trees shadowing sidewalks and people milling in the now clear night and the moon an orange light like a god itself sending a signal to a reef bound ship, engines full reverse but that tidal force its destiny and a dog barks and then city white noise quiet.
I look over to Alex. Slow motion. My arm then over my eyes. I say, as slow as words can leave my moving mouth, “I recall a time when I was dancing falling in love with a thousand faces … a thousand voices … and life was under my feet like a ride in a riverboat … and my soul swayed and my head rocked from side to side. … I gazed at my shoes and my laces looped and danced and entwined … I’m waiting for the stars to absorb my falling body from off a planet … I’ve done this over and over again and you’ve always been there and then … I’m levitating as if a great fan is blowing underneath me but there is no sound and …”
“… That’s beautiful.”
“… What?”
“What you said.”
“What did I say?”
Alex smiles.
I extend my arm up to the stationary ceiling fan and let it drop down back beside me. “I want to be the sea and feel all that life living inside of me expanding and contracting with the gravitational pull of the moon. Feel the sun heat my surface, feel birth, feel death. … Be the clouds and rumble with chaos or float and dance with the wind and be rain and snow and tornadoes and …”
Alex takes a drink and leans back staring at where I’m staring.
I take a long, slow inhale through my nose and continue. “I’m a passenger. … Not sure where my ticket is for. … Unsure of where this trip will deposit me. … But I’m not afraid, just uneasy. … We’re all packed with maps in hand, cameras in tow, a satchel under our arms. But not me. … Wait. … F u c k … all I have is a bottle of water and an over-used tooth brush with bent bristles flattened from scrubbing the grout between the shower tiles.”
I lean up and take a sip from my mug and then lie back down and cross my one leg over the other at my ankles. “I’m not searching … I’m not searching. … At least not as I’m aware of it. I’m wandering and looking and viewing … and this just happens to require moving. At now, at this moment, it’s best … it’s best to be inactive, passive, static. I’m an observer…. Maybe not even that.”
I continue and Alex just listens. I sometimes hear Mojave 3 and sometimes outside and sometimes something in me. But it’s good. I’m speaking for myself just as much for Alex, or for anyone else. I float from subject to subject to subject but waiting … waiting … there in the epilogue is Gabriella. A girl from distant conversations over phones and internet, to on couches and beds and park benches and then her reread letters. I speak to the ceiling fan about her and the confusion I brought into my life beca
use of fear or –. I tell Alex how I called her even though I probably shouldn’t have. I tell him and the ceiling fan how I sometimes think about more letters written. I say how weak I am and my worn-out words I say over and over talking in my head to myself about something I don’t know how to define. What is this story? What am I trying to say? What can I teach? What problem must I solve? I talk to her. People aren’t supposed to talk to those they have loved and now only wish the best for. I want to talk to her because I want to, with or without definitions of what they are or mean to one another. I just want to talk to her.
Alex leans up from deep into his couch and takes a long drink from his mug. He settles back with his mug on his chest. “And you will continue to bring drama and ache into your life.”
My gaze focuses on the ceiling stipple. “… I know. But it’s who I am …”
Sorry Gabriella. I’m sorry. I should start apologizing to the ones I know I’ve hurt and then say sorrys to the ones I likely will for if my future unfolds like my past, more people will go away. More hurt. I’ll hurt. I’ll hurt and hurt again in the future. It’s the delusion of my inductive days ensuring just enough accuracy for someone to listen as long as I choose to speak. And it’s only because I thought I was learning, but I’m only recognizing all that I can never know. I’m an egotist. I’m lost in an overcomplicated mind built in an overcomplicated world. I’m an undergraduate, defined by a piece of paper in an envelope stuck between two books sitting on my shelf and unsure how to continue being defined or wondering or hoping to lose definition and be content as a self without relation to someone else. I went to school and wrote exams and passed and then continued towards my life of privilege. What am I? I should be satisfied as a verb, not a noun-forming suffix. I carry out actions. I’m not an action. I’m not a worker. I’m not a hiker. I’m not a drinker. I work, I hike, I drink, I fall in love. I fuck up. I’m a mass with enough knowledge to fuck things up and fuck people up and fuck myself up. I know little about a lot. I can question structures that are supposed to guide us – religion or family or love or friends – but I can offer no alternatives to the failed ones and the ones still standing. Nor can I build anything.
“The drama I create is not intentional,” I say.
Alex supine on the couch. He says, “You try too hard.”
I don’t say anything.
“You define yourself by others before you’ve defined yourself.”
I’m still silent.
Alex takes a drink. “You’re attractive to another because you’re a wounded deer a girl can feel an affinity towards. She can heal you, care for you, protect you like a teddy bear.” He takes another drink. “I take men back to their youth when life was easier to comprehend, before they learned techniques of self-analysis and self-destruction. They take some part of me, reengineer me; take what parts suit them and come to define me as something in relation to them.”
“I make them more aware,” I say.
“No you don’t.”
“I do.”
“You don’t. You make them question themselves. People hate questioning themselves.”
“No they don’t.”
“They do. … Tell me about Karen.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked.”
“Why Karen.”
“Just fucking tell me about her.”
“What about her?”
“Just her. Whatever comes to mind.”
“Um, she’s beautiful.”
“That’s it?”
“No. … She’s amazing in bed.”
“Yawners.”
“… We have a good time together.”
“No, no you don’t.”
I look at Alex. “We have a good time in bed together.”
“I’ll give you that. You two fuck well when her husband is off likely fucking someone else.”
“You think so?”
“Absofuckinglutely.”
“Probably.”
“What else, what else can you tell me?”
“… It’s comfortable.”
“For you?”
“For both of us.”
“I don’t believe that you believe this.”
I sit up and turn and lean against the couch Alex is prostrate on. He says, “You think a girl starts liking you because you make them feel sexy, you unconsciously give them the parts of you they think they want, but they never get all of you. You hide away parts. But you’re not perfect. They’re cracks in your edifice. And some see these cracks. … So a girl starts asking you about these parts. Maybe she clearly wants to see these parts. Maybe she wants to share her parts with you too. Maybe she wants full exposure. Then true Shawn comes out and you ball up and fuck off. You,” Alex lifts his arm as if to brush something out of the air, “You give girls … you give them pre-selected parts of you … your mind or your body or something they think they can ground themselves in. You give them predetermined parts. You categorize all of them. One for sex. One for mind. One for emotion. One for play. One for money. One for … for … I don’t know, insert some essence of character and personality here. … You place them within a little wood box that you nail shut and only you know how to wedge it open. We’re not all carpenters, Shawn.”
I turn to look at Alex. He’s staring at the ceiling. I look down into my near empty mug. “Ouch.”
“Oh don’t ouch me. I love you too much for that bullshit.”
I look back to Alex and he’s smiling at the ceiling. He leans over, picks up the bottle of scotch off the floor and passes it to me.
“You’re afraid of something,” he says.
He gets up and walks to the washroom. The light flicks on, he closes the door.
I sit up and move to the chair and shift it so I can look out at the night, the trees, their dark outlines dark against the dark night sky. I sit down.
It starts in my chest and then my arms feel weak and then my head does something off and that odd sensation of my body contemplating rejection or acceptance. I breathe deeply. I close my eyes. My head hurts. My throat is sore. I try to clear it. I close my eyes tighter. I see images. First abstract shapes of light, then lines, then a wave over me. I’m driving in a car and the windows are open and the air and the rushing. I’m driving faster and faster and then the wind ceases and I’m rushing over asphalt without sound or sensation, the speed of sound a mute button and my fatigued body and flushed cheeks as if sexually spent and then the night sky drips like an espresso into a demi-tasse cup overflowing into a dark saucer out over into the carpet below and the grinder clicks on. This random moment of emptiness. A sense of longing or hopelessness, maybe a mix of the two, a crude concoction.
The toilet flushes. Taps are turned on. Off.
I lack communications because it’s easier to say less than to justify what you’ve said. It’s easier to be numb than to love, to hurt, to be hurt. But I’m not Bambi or The Little Engine That Could… I am Sam, Sam I am. That’s all I am.
31.
“I’m sitting here cuddling a steaming cup of very ordinary drip. I feel lost … directionless. It’s like … I don’t have a home, nothing anchoring me, and yet,” she takes a long breath, “yet nothing setting me free.”
Silence. Then she speaks again.
“I explore the wilderness of my mind hoping to find some vague recollection of my former self … but do I want to? Am I not content with just the passage of time? … I’m not. I’m not, Shawn. I’ve learned things, gained knowledge … likely forgotten most of it. I’m making a mockery of my life by desperately wishing for it to stand still until I know what to do with it.”
Cynthia’s on the other end of the phone. She tells me she’s looking out into a cloud from her fifth story apartment. She tells me she feels embryonic. Not safe, but enclosed.
I say, “I think I share your sentiment. … Life is confusing and disheartening and … and difficult when I don’t feel anchored to something. But another part of me hates attachment, commitment to
anything. … Perhaps that’s why I rushed through my teens and now rushing through my twenties; I’m unsure of any career direction, even though the notion of a career both disturbs me and gives me hope that I can connect with something, to be something. But somehow a part of me thinks it’s not commitment I fear but settling. … I don’t want to be mediocre; I don’t want to be average. There’s nothing worse than being ordinary –”
“Except for being ordinary and thinking you’re exceptional.”
“Exactly.”
“Controversial, loved or hated. Somebody that matters, does something worthwhile. But yet nothing appeals to me.”
I picture Cynthia at her kitchen table still wearing what she goes to bed in, underwear and a T-shirt, drinking her ordinary cup of coffee. She says, “I just don’t want to fade into the furniture.”
“Be something.”
“Yah, be a star. Still a world to get famous in and Paris Hilton has me beat. Fucking cunt.”
“Ha!”
I get up and put a disc in the CD player and push Play. I say, “Life in this wilderness of disposable dusters and three-ply toilet paper.”
“What is happiness in this … this place? It’s as though emotion is a forest and I’m trying to run through it but I’m not running in a straight line. I’m running around in emotion but never finding a way out. I’m running in fucking loops in the Boreal Forest and not taking in any of its oxygen. I’m not even breathing. How far do you have to run into a forest before you start leaving it?”
“Half way.”
“Half way. I think life makes more sense to me when I’m unsettled, perhaps free, or free-er. Before or after half way. Or lost. … I don’t know anymore. I just want to be painted again and drink prosecco on the edge of the pool with my toes in the water.”
Cynthia goes quiet and takes a sip of her very ordinary drip. I walk to my stereo and turn in up.
She asks, “Damien Rice?”
“Good hearing.”
“I have a skill or two.”
“You do.”
“He’s perfect.”
“He is.”
“You just made my ordinary cup of coffee less so.”