The Third Step

by William Lobb

  You don’t need churches of fat, sweaty men yelling at you, Frankie, and screaming about Jesus. That was Cora’s journey, not mine, not yours. Just quiet your thoughts and your mind. Let go, let go and join me. I’m looking forward to this next step, Frankie. We should be there, wherever it is, together. You fought everyone and everything, all your life. Let it go. Just once, let it go . . . Everyone has to come to their own understanding of God. Every one of us sees this God thing a little differently.

  Frankie, you are like a man dying of thirst swimming in a clear mountain lake. You’ve been surrounded with everything you ever needed or wanted but you just can’t see it, or you refuse to.”

  As Kim stopped reading, I sat and pondered Pam’s words. I stayed there looking at Pam’s daughter for a long time, and then Kim finally got up to leave. She nervously brushed the dust and dried leaves from her jeans. She stood and looked in my direction, as if she was giving me one last glimpse of her face and her mother’s face. Kim looked back as she climbed into her car, “I hope you find your peace before it is too late.”

  I just thought, “What the fuck is she talking about? I’m dead!” I was deeply saddened to hear that Pam had died. It was apparent to me she had gone to a better place than I had.

  More time passed, countless seasons, as I tried, really tried, to let go. I’d gone numb to the passage of time. The garage finally collapsed into rubble, after fire came up the mountain one dry summer and burned off the brush that had grown over the decades. The Rambler burned, it was now just a rusted and burned out shell, half-buried in the rubble of what was the garage.

  Now, my world was blackened and even more desolate. All I could see around me was burned earth and desolation. What little comfort and joy I took from the memories of that old two-acre lot off Route 94 were now burned out and gone. I had absolutely nothing left but this endless loneliness and time, time that would go on forever.

  For the first time in many, many seasons, a car again pulled into the dirt path that was the driveway. It was a very old woman, dressed neatly in black. Two younger men, still old, maybe seventy, got out to help her. She moved slowly, glacially, using a walker. Slowly, carefully, they moved across the dirt and burned grass that was once the front yard to this home, so many years ago.

  She stood there, this woman, shakily supporting herself on the walker. She began to speak. “Frankie, it’s Kimberly. I’ve come by here over the years, never stopping, hoping I’d feel your presence gone. I still feel it here. It’s darker now, sadder, almost like a dying spirit, a faint and flickering light.

  “Do you remember the letter my mother wrote you all those years ago? She’s been gone sixty years now, Frankie. You’ve been dead ninety-five years, but yet you still haunt this place. I’m the last one who carries your memory. I will die soon, Frankie, and with me all memories of you will die. The last person I spoke to who had any recollection of you was Alexandrine’s youngest daughter. She passed a few years ago. She had a good long life. She was very, very old: over one hundred. Now it’s just you and me, Frankie.

  “What is coming soon, Frankie, is called your last death, your final death. It is when even your memory is gone, when the last person, holding the last memory of you is gone. At my passing, it will be as if you never existed.

  “I ask you Frankie, for the very last time, to consider my mother’s words to you. Do you remember her words, Frankie? Consider them, please, one last time. I’ll not come by this way again. I’ll be gone soon, so please, Frankie, let it go. Remember her words, Frankie.”

  She turned slowly, shuffling the walker and turning as she slowly walked back to the car. I watched the dust rise up and cover her black shoes until they were gray. She walked so slowly that it was as if she barely moved at all. I just sat and thought about her words and dust, the stuff of my bones. Soon, even my memory won’t exist. I have finally become absolutely nothing. What I used to dream of, to become a specter; now the thought of nothingness completely terrified me.

  She turned as she opened the back door of the car. “Consider her words, Frankie, please.”

  I’m not sure if it was weakness, or I just knew my fight was gone, but there was no more resistance left in me. I’ve been fighting for, what seemed to me, like forever. Faded, exhausted, and in final defeat, I knew that my only connection to the world I lived in with such vigor and strength, such madness and loss—all that I had ever been—now only remained in the memory of one very old woman who had never even met me while I was alive.

  The last spark of me on this earth will soon be extinguished.

  I considered her words, Pamela’s last words, this last poem to me from my friend, maybe my closest friend. It is forever etched in my memory. She wanted me to join her, to let go and let the answers come to me.

  Finally, I pondered my crimes. I know they are unforgivable, but is the universe just a balance sheet of good deeds and bad deeds? My crimes were more violent than many, but does that keep me from finding my answers? It seems to me that many, many people have caused more pain to so many more. How does this God weigh my crimes against those who send kids to war for profit, who let people and babies starve, who poison food and water, who sell the drugs that defined and ruined and finally ended my life?

  It doesn’t matter where the journey turns from here. I’ll take with me those first moments of sobriety, of clarity and freedom, like the precious and often elusive gifts they are. I’ll never forget the moment I stopped running, even after sanity had begun to return, and looked deep into Zara for the first time—drinking her, absorbing her like cool water on a brutally hot summer day: not high, not drunk, but amazed, silent and humble, feeling her energy restoring me and quenching my endless thirst.

  Simply realizing at that moment these gifts are here and real, reflected back to me through that beautiful woman’s perfect green eyes. She allowed me to let go and finally be free. She absorbed my anger and my darkness and showed me to not fear the light.

  Could it be this simple, after all this time, all these years? After all this violence, all this rage and anger and confusion, could it be this simple? Can I take the mysterious gift of sobriety that was first given to me in a whorehouse in New Orleans and expand on that now to finally come to an understanding, perhaps even come to peace with the Creator of the universe? Can we now, finally, come to understand each other on our own terms?

  I feel a change. I stop thinking. My mind is calming, like the ocean after a violent storm. It, this thing, these stones, this weight of everything I have carried all my life—the stones I kept to be my very own and no one else’s, like they were a precious gift—I realized now they were the building blocks of my prison. This weight is leaving me in waves now. I feel it flowing out of me, suddenly unstoppable. I feel the coiled-up violet and angry energy of what was my life escaping me now, like boiling steam leaving a kettle. I have to let it escape or I will explode.

  I’m suddenly feeling empty, free and unencumbered. Suddenly light, suddenly free. I see the walls of this prison where I have been since my death collapsing now, crumbling and shattering like glass, exploding into a billion shards. They look like stars, until I am suddenly afloat in the stars.

  All that I’ll take with me now are those moments: the first glimpses of clarity, the first moment I felt the connection to Zara not drunk, not drugged. For the first time, perhaps in all my life I felt sober, not drugged by a chemical or the confused poison of someone else’s God.

  At last, I feel the words. They have weight and mass, meaning. I see the words. They dance before my eyes. I feel connected to the sacred, the truth: my truth, my understanding.

  It’s happening quickly; I hardly have time to say goodbye to Artie. “Come with me, you can do this,” I scream into a roaring cyclone. He looks up, but I’m going, it’s changing. I’m moving, faster, there is silence . . . I’m gone . . .

  p; William Lobb, The Third Step