I walk and walk. What else am I supposed to do? I’m asking you, if you exist. Anyone? What am I supposed to do?
I’m still bleeding, the stigmata: for what? Four years of blood only I can see. Oh, right, Joan saw my wounds. I forgot. Did she even exist? I mean, did that girl from the train even come up out of the station, out from underground? You would see me. I know you would.
I don’t really care about anything. I write only to you. I don’t read. I hardly think. I’ve given up on silence, on Latin, on the Bible, on rowing, on everything.
Miracles and impossibilities. What about it? What if I bend over to tie my shoe a sane person and stand up completely insane, no idea of who or what or where I am, screaming and howling? Who will be strong enough to calm me down? Who won’t be in harm’s way? Who will put me in the hospital for the rest of my life?
You can’t help me. I’ve lost myself. I’ve lost the way I never had. You’re nowhere to be found. Not yet. And I’m running out of time.
Reduction
TO FIND OUT WHAT I am, what I am supposed to do.
This is it. One purpose. If I didn’t want so much to know why I’m here, on this planet, I would throw myself off the end of the world, out to the shadows.
I’m a hero in search of a disaster. I’m a martyr waiting for my holy death.
Height
I’M TIRED, SICK AND tired, of my size. Why would anyone in the world who’s not a basketball player need to be seven feet tall? Unless you’re Goliath, unless you’re a soldier or a killer. Then, you’d strike fear in your enemies. There’s no guarantee you’d survive the fight, though.
How tall are you? Every day, I have new reason to think you’re an impossibility. I mean, what kind of a woman will want me, all seven feet of me and bleeding? You’re an impossibility because I’m an impossibility.
I don’t know when, a month ago, I ran into Gemma Burns on the street. I almost knocked her down. She looked up at me, and I looked down at her.
“Erik?”
“Gemma.”
“You’re talking.” She took a step or two back, better to see my face. “You’re huge. How tall—?”
“Too tall.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“How do you mean?”
“Look at you. You’re—”
“It’s been a couple of years.”
“We, my family—.” She covered her mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m—. Erik. I’m staring, right? I should stop.”
“It doesn’t help.”
“You’re like a god or something. You’re not even human.”
“Suddenly, the city seems too small.”
“For you maybe.”
“I should go.”
Gemma was shining, too bright, too bright, so I looked straight ahead, up Tenth Avenue, or wherever we were standing. The buildings one after another, infinite.
“I’m sorry, Erik. I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure I’m awake.”
“You’re still too much for me, Gemma.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Too shiny.”
“Now I know this is real. You’re an idiot. Look at you, Erik. Unbelievable.” She shook her head, and held on to her purse, almost hugging it. “I feel sorry for you. I’m serious. You’re always going to be alone. You know that? No one’s good enough for you. Nobody normal anyway. There aren’t any goddesses left. I mean, there are, but not your size.”
I don’t know what came after this. Gemma disappeared, and I woke up somewhere else, some corner far from where I started. I couldn’t do much more than wonder about you.
Are you a goddess seven feet tall waiting for her god? Or are you a girl who will know her husband when she sees him?
Inaction
I WENT TO BUY a gallon of milk and some cereal. How could I have been ready for what happened?
If you were to have asked me before this morning, “What did the man in the garage look like?” I would’ve been totally unable to answer. Tall, short, fat, thin? Blue eyes, brown, green, black? Bald? I don’t know, I don’t know. I only remember the garage and the window and the light; my broken arm; and I didn’t have my belt.
I knew him. As soon as I saw him, one hand on his cart, scanning the cereal, only in profile, I knew him. I knew him. And you know what I did? Not a thing.
I had turned to concrete. I felt nothing for a moment, a long moment, as long as the life I’ve already lived. Then, he turned with his choice—Mini-Wheats, blue box, a splash of milk; I remember Mini-Wheats—and I saw his face. Maybe he’s fifteen years older than me, hard to say, not much more. No sign of gray. No tiredness. The concrete melted, I found my skin, and all I could do, all I felt came to nothing more than a collapse.
Terror.
Thirteen years. I’m almost two and half times the height I was at five, fifty times as strong. I could have killed him with hardly any motion at all. Imagine everything I might have done to him, all the harm. Imagine the blood and broken bone.
Imagine him all chewed up.
Instead. Instead. Instead, instead, instead.
I did nothing. I let him pass. He hardly glanced at me. I was nothing to him.
I let him pass.
So I have to ask myself a question. What happened there? I was a little boy all over again, locked in a garage and helpless. No escape. Even when I recovered, even when I realized I was standing in the cereal aisle, even when I knew I could track him down in the store, knew I could hunt him and kill him, I did nothing. I let him go.
Am I a coward?
All this time I’ve been thinking I would be a hero. I had this idea I would save lives, give up my life willingly. But what did I learn this morning? I can’t confront a criminal. I can’t even go back in time and protect the boy I was, or punish the man who hurt him, hurt me.
Is there another answer? Quick, give me something before I break down completely. I’m enormous, I bleed, and the first time I can right a wrong, I turn into what?
Think, think.
I need an answer. Do you have one?
Maybe I’m not important enough to myself. Maybe once a victim always a victim. Maybe I’m not a vigilante. Maybe I don’t have a thirst for vengeance.
Quarantine
FORTY DAYS. FORTY DAYS the flood covered the earth before Noah could open a window. How that ark must have smelled. Shit, urine, sex, death, rot, birth, blood, saliva, fear, rage, impatience. Salt. All the ocean. So much water.
Forty days and nights Moses spent on the mount without eating or drinking—no water—before receiving the laws on two tablets. We assume he must have been awake the whole time, begging God constantly for revelation. Maybe he slept. Or waited silently, ready to fill His order. He must have lost weight, around fifteen pounds. Twenty? A lean messenger.
Quarantine. I read somewhere, the word quarantine means forty days isolated. Meant to stop the spread of disease. Quarantine: an enforced isolation.
God enforced Christ’s quarantine. What was His disease? The Son of Man endured the desert, tempted by Satan or Lucifer, propped up by angels, hungry.
Where will I serve my quarantine?
I need the park. I need trees, ferns, brush, and a public water fountain. My quarantine near home. I’ll sleep outside.
Will I, like Christ Himself, come out of the wilderness hungry? Or will I eat myself? A knife—. I think I should go empty-handed.
If I stare inward for forty days and nights, barely moving for hours at a time, what will I find? In me, what will I find in me? Or what will find me?
I’ll write and write, still my greatest comfort—.
Wait. This is a fast, a deprivation. Deprivation before revelation, right? I must not bring pens and notebooks. I’ll give up everything. I’ll go empty-handed. I won’t even bring you.
Response<
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LAST WEEK, I WATCHED a man kill a rat with a cinder block. He simply dropped the block on the rat. Not a sound, no squeal, no crack. Next, the bastard picked up the block and dropped it again. No blood, but the rat must have been killed. A crowd of kids, surrounding the fenced-in schoolyard, clinging to chain link, watching a murder. Nothing should die in a schoolyard, not even a rat.
This time, I acted. No agony. No fear. Action.
“Mister.” I called over to the man. He held the rat by its tail, swinging it a little as he crossed the yard. “Hold up.” I walked up to him and took his shoulder. That instant, his arm turned to wood. “Bury your victim,” I said. “Up in the grass. One-handed. I’ll stay with you until you’re done.”
“Why?” A stupid, stupid man to ask a question of a giant. How could he know whether or not I appreciate the taste of human flesh? Stupid but afraid: “I’m sorry.”
“Bury the rat. Once you’re done, I’m going to break off your useless hand to mark the grave.”
And I did.
Salvation
I’VE GONE BACK TO the schoolyard every day for two weeks. Day after day, I walk around the fence. I don’t expect to see anything other than kids yelling their heads off and running around like maniacs.
But I didn’t expect to see a man kill a rat.
The city rat is our enemy, right? Ugly, sick, and vicious. That’s what we think. Albino rats, those white lab rats, they’re okay. They help us get to the bottom of our own brains. They help us sort out our diseases. These good rats go insane for us. They die for us.
City rats? They scavenge. They teach us nothing but fear. They make us angry.
I don’t linger at the school. I don’t pray. I walk around the outside of the yard to do nothing more than mark that spot where the rat died. Ecce rat.
Morbid? You think it’s morbid?
I don’t go to the schoolyard to brood about death. I go to remind myself of something I don’t understand but find awful and sad.
You’re right, though. It’s time I give this up. Or make it into something more.
Quarantine.
My forty days in the park: who will witness me? Who will tell me to pick up and go? The police? A homeless man, a hermit?
What happens to a passerby who comes to the park to die and stumbles across me? There, the passerby will think, but for the grace of God, go I.
I imagine this. Days and nights in the park, fighting devils. Tiny demons, actually. They get caught in my hair and harass my eyes. I breathe them in, sneeze them out. They buzz my ears, like mosquitoes, and mine that vein running over the stone of my ankle. Then they lift away and vanish, but they’ve left their poison. I get sick. I throw up. I’m tired. Lord, how I’m tired.
All these days and nights to swat at demons. To listen for God, wait on God.
Imagine more. Halfway through, I can’t say I’ve been tempted exactly, except by death. Suicide: the worst temptation. Satan’s no fool. He doesn’t even have to show up. The idea comes, inevitably, and twists up and comforts at the same time a sad person, or a person at wits’ end.
Did Christ have to fight the will to die? How sad and angry He must have been. If He’d ended His life, though, more than one prophecy would have fallen down. He couldn’t be allowed to die under the white sun and be buried in a wave of sand. But I could die. I could die and go unmissed.
My mother has Lincoln, so she wants for nothing. All they seem to do is hold on to each other and laugh. No. They walk. I don’t even remember the last time I spoke to either of them alone without the other nearby. What do I do with this? I have both, or I have nothing.
The first week without food will be the worst. Headaches. Nausea. Delirium. Teaching the body to go without.
Fasting is an insult to the body. Proof of our will, right? Still, an insult.
Maybe I should sleep through it all. Hibernate—.
Impossible. Impossible and unwise. What if I sleep through the moment of my death?
Will I end my life in the park? No. No. I want to know why I’ve been put on this earth. What’s a bloodletting? What’s an everlasting flower? A never-ending cruciform? My mother whole? A wooden hand? Whatever else? All this speaks to my destiny, and I can’t die before I know my purpose.
What will happen at the end of the fortieth day if I still don’t have any insight into why I exist, why I suffer, why I’m hungry? What then?
Will I finally have you? Will you appear out of nowhere and lift me up and bring me home? Will you tell me I’m not a hero? Will you tell me to get cleaned up, go to college, and forget everything I’ve thought until now?
“Forget the miracles, Erik. I’m the only thing that’s real.” You’ll turn on the shower and hand me a towel. You’ll take off my clothes. “Love is real. There’s nothing else.”
“But what was the point?”
“Of what, honey?”
“Of any of it. The garage, my father’s death, the headaches, the miracles, the frustration, the loneliness. It can’t have been for nothing.”
“No, not for nothing. But not for any one thing, either. By the time you get out of the shower, your bleeding will be done and everything healed. We’ll get something to eat. You’ll sleep. Then you’ll wake up and our life will begin.”
THORN
I DON’T THINK I have a soul. It was beaten out of me. Maybe it’s gone entirely. Or hovering, half alive, hovering close. Maybe it wants to come back. What if my soul wants to find a way back in? When it’s safe.
That must be painful, a soul returning home. More painful than dying. The sickness. The tearing apart. Ribs and chest. Lifting the heart, unlatching it to find the little case for the soul. That much pain and sickness. The fever. The infection. The blood. All to take back the one thing that will make me better. Make me human and good.
This word: omphalos. Navel, belly button. In other words, the end of the umbilical. The center of us. All knotted up. No more womb food.
Is it possible to disappear into yourself through your belly button? Does light come through skin? Or is it complete darkness? Smell of blood? Something rotten?
I think, think, think, but I can’t figure anything out. The holes in my brain. Something new inside of me, the Drillers.
I’ve lost chess to a hole in my mind. I can no longer play, and I barely remember how the pieces move. The queen in any direction, as far as she can or wants to go, and her useless husband, the king, only one square, north, south, east, or west. It’s the knight, armored and heavy. He can jump over anything and owes it all to his horse. I can’t remember, how does he move? How many squares? An el?
No job. No money. No school. No board games. No chess.
If I’ve forgotten how to play at war, does that mean I’m more peaceful?
I saw a man kill a rat in a schoolyard. The schoolyard where I waited for Mala. Where a goat made of children crushed my finger under its hoof. My schoolyard. He crushed the thing with a cinder block. A rat. The man killed himself. Didn’t he? A rat killing a rat.
That man was a kid once. He might have gone to that school, too. I don’t know, but he went to school somewhere. He was a child, and then he grew up into a man that kills animals in a schoolyard. A self-hating rat. He was a boy once.
He dropped the block, and I had to walk away. I felt sorry for the rat, and kind of sick, so I walked away. I couldn’t stop thinking. It might as well have been a boy, a child, who killed the rat. I might’ve killed the rat. A killer of rats.
Then, a raccoon killed in the street. Right in front of me. Its insides splashed over five feet of road. I saw it. The driver didn’t stop. He must have known what he’d done. But this crime couldn’t hold its own against the driver ten seconds later. His crime? He steered into the dead coon, crushing it. Blood on the tires.
Why would anyone do this? Hate. Rage. That’s a man to loathe
. A man who deserves to be thrown into a pit with hungry raccoons.
I want to punish the second driver. I want to punish the man who killed the rat. I want to punish them all, the cruel and hateful. The liars. The cowards.
Go to the source.
Easy for me to say. All men and women start out as children.
“Where is everybody?”
I felt empty. Almost dead.
“Nobody here but us.” A Guardian laughed.
It all happened fast. Without my knowing.
“We slaughtered the others.”
“What does that mean? Who’s left?”
“We and our Sawmen. The Drillers.”
“The Protector?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Just following orders.”
“The Architect.”
“As ever, the Architect lives.”
“There’s blood and shit all over the ground.”
“War will do that.”
Something terrible and desperate, something brutal, crushes me from the inside. Stones. Laid on top of my heart and lungs. I can hardly breathe. The Architect, the Guardians, they have me under stones.
“The Architect will not kill you.” The Guardian sets another stone. “Rather, he’ll only kill you once.”
Stone after stone after stone.
“Matters are resolving themselves quite nicely. Your mind crumbles little by little, a sandcastle at high tide, if you will.” Another stone. “We break you down, saws, drills, and stones.”
I’m cracking. Even so, I have to think it’s less painful than if my soul were finding its way back in.
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