No, this was no hidden portal to the feminine divine, at least insofar as the feminine represents all that is gentle and nurturing. To her credit, however, the Martha Washington Monument is a suitable companion to the marble and granite boner of the (George) Washington Monument, though even Martha would be unable to engulf all 555 feet of that capitol manhood. And while it’s easy to think of the male sex organ as rock hard, it’s more than a little jarring to think of a steel, concrete, and tile vagina. No, in Diablo’s mind, the hidden portal to the feminine divine would be moist and warm, a subterranean grotto surging with water and teaming with moss, and all who entered would exit flushed and smileful. Diablo exited nauseated and depressed, and when he found Doreen he was a cantankerous companion for the remainder of the day.
47 DIABLO’S LIFE WAS a driveway buried in three feet of wet snow, and he had been shoveling it with a dented spatula. One is left to wonder, then, what sudden spring thaw led him to abandon his incessant weeping and hand-wringing and get on with the happy business of participating in evolution. As it turned out, it was the Monday immediately following his visit to the Martha Washington Monument, and he simply . . . ran away—first from work, then from home. As he peeled Billy Pronto’s truck out of the parking lot of his condominium complex that Monday afternoon, it occurred to him that he was running not from his condo, which could hardly be considered something so affectionate as a home anyway, but rather from security in general. High adventure is unsustainable in the midst of stagnant security, and reveries of running away promise a freedom transcendent in its totality, a flee from security and into serendipity.
Of course, there’s more to Diablo’s runaway story than this, but we’ll catch up with the details later. For now, it is enough to note that, more than anything, he was running from the drab. And adulthood, as far as he could see, was drab, a faux-gold-leaf invitation to quiet desperation. The enthusiasm so vital to life seemed to have abandoned everyone past a certain age, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with how many winters they’d seen. No, it had more to do with the consequences of a hidebound culture that guarantees nothing to its members as they age. Adulthood, as it turns out, is an enforced role. The mind becomes overwhelmed with responsibility, financial planning, time management, highly effective habits, and the soul gradually grows rotten with frustration. And this is no neutral fact, Diablo determined as he drove. Frustration is the opposite of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm derives from the Greek éntheos, meaning “having the god within.” Frustration, then, is a spirit gasping in the absence of the divine, and the natural consequence of burying the impulses of the spirit beneath the requirements of personal finance.
Bouncing along in Billy Pronto’s rattletrap, Diablo felt exhilarated, enthused, and as he wiggled the middle stump on his left hand gripping the steering wheel, he was reminded of that fateful day five years ago when he’d last felt this way: uncolonized and free, scot-free, like a shoplifter passing through an automatic door, as if his booty were not a meaningless piece of shrink-wrapped plastic junk, but a key, a sacred key, and the door led not to the asphalt expanse of the parking lot, but to the limitless horizons of freedom.
Diablo pulled onto the limitless horizons of the interstate, wondering how he’d let five years whiz by as if it were all just billboards and ugly scenery on the road to nowhere-in-particular. He dug into his back pocket and pulled out the Joker, now crumpled and faded, and placed it on the dashboard so that it faced him. Thus distracted from the obligations of driving, he studied the design on the card, a cherubic jester dancing on the back of a bee. He had never understood what the bee had to do with anything, but nevertheless vowed the same simple vow he’d made five years prior: to participate in evolution and to do so by surrendering into the whimwinds of synchronicity.
It was no small coincidence, then, that upon glancing back at the berm onto which he’d drifted, he instantly had to swerve to avoid striking a pedestrian. Tires screaking like a demon trying to yodel, Diablo’s world flew at him like a deck of tarot cards sprayed in his face. Helter-skelter he hurled through each stampeding moment, as present as present gets, present enough to notice that the pedestrian failed to flinch, even as the passenger-side mirror sideswiped a plastic gas can clean out of his left hand. Diablo had time to bring the car to a screeching jolting stop, release his seat belt, and get out of the car before the plastic gas can bounced off his roof, spilling its contents everywhere.
Curiously, however, these contents did not include gasoline. This was some kind of a modified gas can, a five-gallon capacity, with a door rigged into one side, containing some basic clothing, some fruit, a couple of sandwiches, and money—lots of money, now fluttering everywhere like the embers of a fallen civilization.
Diablo looked to the owner of this peculiar gas can and saw a young man ambling along, his gait never having faltered. “Synchronicity on the sultry soothe of your day!” the stranger called out in cheerful salutation. Diablo returned a tentative wave. Upon arriving at the car, the stranger set about gathering and repacking his effects, taking no great care to reclaim every banknote, and prattling on about clouds and how if you just open your mind it’s really entirely predictable how they shift their shape and even when, don’t you think?
Diablo glanced at the sky, but his recent adrenal surge permitted little patience for cloud gazing. When he looked back at the stranger, the stranger was studying the surface of an orange as if it were a crystal ball. “Are you okay there?” Diablo asked.
The stranger looked at him, thought for a moment, then replied, very carefully, “I am okay here,” before bursting into an enormous and vigorously nodding smile. “Yes,” he reaffirmed. “I am okay here. Are you okay here?”
“I mean, that was pretty close,” Diablo tried to clarify. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Everyone is lucky to be alive,” the stranger responded.
Diablo paused, considering. “Can I give you a ride?”
“Can you give me a ride?” the stranger repeated, incredulity stretching his voice. “I cannot tell you that. I speak only for myself. Your capacities are beyond my comprehension. Whether or not you give me a ride is for you to know and for me to discover. I,” he gestured to himself and shook his head emphatically, “I can tell you nothing in that regard.”
“All right.” Diablo smirked, finding the stranger’s bizarre verbiage engaging. “Do you want a ride?”
“I want for nothing,” the stranger immediately answered. “Desire is the root of all unhappiness.”
Diablo thought for a moment. “Then permit me to give you a ride,” he said. There, he thought. That should defeat the incessant decontextualization.
The stranger nodded. “I am honored. What can I call you?”
“You can call me Diablo. What’s your name?”
Grinning like a skinny-dipper, the stranger answered, unmistakably, “Billy Pronto.”
48 AN INCIDENT IS an occurrence. A coincidence is a simultaneous occurrence. Hence, everything that is simultaneously occurring right now is a co-incidence. So, a few words ago when it was right now, it was coincidental that meaningful symbols happened to exist on this page just as you happened to be looking at the page, and that doesn’t begin to capture every other cosmic co-incidence that emerged in that universal moment. However, we will not here develop an index of every happenchance that occurred in the universe back then when it was right now. It is enough to point out that it was—as it always is—quite a coincidence.
Of course, we only glimpse the coincidence when we spot the connection between two simultaneous occurrences. That’s what makes it meaningful, synchronistic. But that does not imply that the coincidence is absent simply because we fail to pay attention. We demonstrate remarkable absentmindedness when we forget that everything else is also always happening at the same time. As it turns out, everything is a coincidence.
Still, Diablo was understandably staggered by this turn of events. “Billy Pronto,” he said after a few
whooshes of traffic. “Christ, from the goddamn tornado. Do you recognize me?”
“Of course,” replied Billy Pronto, latching the side door on his gas can. “You’re the guy with the car.” At that, he crawled into the passenger seat, leaving several hundred dollars in twenties still littered about.
Diablo joined him in the car, and started down the road. “You missed some of your money, you know.”
Billy shook his head. “I miss nothing.” He drummed the side of the gas can. “Which goddamn tornado?”
Diablo proceeded to relay the story of how this very truck was Billy’s, how Billy had given him a ride just outside the jail, how the tornado had whapped the truck off the road, and how Billy had disappeared. He showed Billy his severed middle finger, as if that would suffice as evidence. Billy listened politely, and said he was sorry to hear about the lost finger, but insisted that he didn’t know what Diablo was talking about. Fascinated, Diablo decided to let the matter rest for now. There were other curiosities at hand.
“What’s the story with your gas can, anyway?” Diablo asked.
“It’s a suitcase, actually.”
“It’s a gas can with a door cut into the side of it. Why don’t you get a regular suitcase, or even better, a backpack?”
“No one picks you up if you have a pack on your back nowadays, or a suitcase,” Billy explained. “This gas can is my thumb. With a gas can in my hand, people assume I’m a driver in distress, not a hitchhiker. I can hardly walk five minutes with this in my hand. When I explain that I’m not really out of gas, they usually still give me a lift. It’s much too uncivil for most people to beg off at that point.”
“Why don’t you get your own car? You probably could have bought half a used car with the money you left back there.”
Billy Pronto shrugged. “Resources are easy to come by if you understand the nature of the universe.”
Diablo laughed. “And the nature of the universe would be?”
“You either know it or you don’t. I can’t explain it. It’s right in front of everyone.”
Diablo paused. “So how did you come by all that money that you don’t miss?”
“Roulette, mainly. It’s a matter of attention. The entire universe presents itself to everyone always. Absent distraction by categories, expectations, and the definitions of others, every bit of information you require is at hand.” Billy paused. “You are infinitely more powerful when you realize that you are indistinct from the rest of the universe. It flows through you, it finds a moment of self-awareness within you, and everything that happens anywhere is indistinguishable from you. But you do not know the world as it is, you only know the world as you think it is, as an assemblage of pieces and parts rather than an interconnected infinity where no thing exists apart from everything else. Of course, most people filter the onslaught of perception through various illusions, the most prevalent being their own private control-freak egos, and that prevents them from accessing the information necessary to just know which number the ball lands on. Perceive the harmony that serenades the illusion. That’s all there is to it.”
“Is that why you didn’t react to me almost hitting you?”
Billy shrugged. “Maybe. That’s different.”
“Different?” Diablo asked. “Different how?”
“In time, things become apparent.”
What the heck is that supposed to mean? Diablo might have deemed Billy an acid-addled lunatic with a colossal spiritual conceit if he hadn’t witnessed his calm, if he hadn’t seen the money, and if this wasn’t the same guy who’d given him a ride five years ago. And now that he thought about it, he didn’t look a day older, and was still wearing his correctional officer’s uniform. Like a cartoon character, his clothes seemed as much a part of his presence as his face and his hair. Fascinated and intrigued, Diablo was willing to let the vagaries slide for now. After a while, he spoke again. “Why are you still wearing your jail guard uniform? Didn’t you quit that job five years ago?” Billy yawned. “It is less remarkable than you think.”
“Why’s that?”
“In time, things become apparent.”
Again with that shit? Irritated, Diablo decided to go on the offensive. “You talk funny, do you know that?”
“I only speak in the present tense.”
“Of course.” Diablo nodded, chuckling. “And how’s that work? I suppose in time, that will become apparent as well?”
“To be precise, I only speak in the omnipresent tense,” Billy explained, his enthusiasm impervious to Diablo’s sarcasm. “The present is not a series of events,” he continued. “It’s one event. There is only one moment, and that moment is right now.”
Diablo fell silent as a vague whoom of déjà vu prickled over him. He didn’t realize Billy Pronto had just pronounced Diablo’s own words from five years ago back to him. But Billy had not paused in his exposition. “Fortunately for you, the present is as patient as a perpetually rising sun. Steadfast it remains, persistently it presents itself to all passersby. The present is here, whether or not you are, and the only mystery is where else there is to be. Here it is, the gift of the moment, the present. To speak of anything else is an exercise in make-believe. I am here. Now. There is no there. There is no then.” Billy gestured with his left hand as he said this, and for the first time, Diablo noticed that Billy Pronto had no middle finger on his left hand, either.
49 UPON DISCOVERING Billy Pronto’s missing digit, Diablo was the second pin in a 7–10 split, and he wasn’t just bowled over, he was flattened by a piratical cannonball. “Your—” Diablo stammered. “You don’t have a middle finger on your left hand.”
“It is impolite to point out the flaws of another,” Billy Pronto replied as he studied his own hand. “And in any event,” he continued, pointing toward Diablo’s hand, “neither do you.”
“I know that!” Diablo yelled, waving his hand and becoming agitated. “I’m the one who told you about it! But why the hell didn’t you mention your finger? That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Everything is a coincidence,” Billy replied.
Diablo snorted. “No sir! Me running into you after five years is a coincidence. You missing the same finger as me is one in a fucking trillion.”
“Well, here we are. One in a fucking trillion. No more unlikely than anything else.”
Diablo looked at him, astounded. “That’s it? That’s your reaction? What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“Stranger things happen.”
“Like what?”
“Like life.”
“Life?” Diablo snorted. “Are you serious?”
“If life is possible,” Billy Pronto replied, “then anything is possible. And no, I’m not remotely serious. Life is neither solemn nor somber.”
“Oh that’s rich.” Diablo shook his head, not knowing whether to bat himself on the head with a mallet or crap in his pants. After a few moments, he asked, “How did you lose your finger, then?”
“The same way as you,” Billy replied.
“Ah, but I thought you said you didn’t remember the tornado.” Diablo was interested to hear Billy try to account for this contradiction.
“Which tornado?”
Diablo took a deep breath before continuing. “Listen. You just said you lost your finger the same way I did. Well, I lost my finger in the tornado that you claim not to remember. How do you know you lost your finger the same way as I did if you don’t remember the tornado?”
“For reasons I cannot fully comprehend,” Billy explained patiently, “I only claim that what happens to me in some way happens to you.”
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?”
“Undivided unity,” Billy said. “Creation is God’s multiple personality, the many faces of Eve, so to speak. Life is the unfolding drama of those personalities engaging one another, most of them unaware that they’re merely shadows cast from the Tree of Life.”
“Fine, sure.” Diablo nodde
d impatiently. “I can agree with that. But how does that account for your finger?”
“Try to appreciate what I say. We’re all of us just the same, reverberations of the same thunderclap, echoes of the same Bang. That Bang delights in spinning fractal iterations of itself, countless vantages and viewpoints, just because it is possible.”
“Yeah, I got that,” Diablo interrupted. “Fractal iterations. We’re all facets of the godhead, subjectivities of the divine objectivity. Everybody understands that Mickey Mouse mysticism. What’s that got to do with your finger?”
Billy Pronto remained silent for several moments before asking, “Everybody understands that we’re all temporary aspects of the eternal impulse?”
“Everybody who’s ever sung ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ understands.”
“What do you mean?”
Diablo’s skeleton was at risk of collapsing upon itself from sheer impatience. Christ, this guy was annoying to talk to. “Life is but a dream!” he bellowed. “Merrily, merrily, merrily, fer cry in’ out loud!”
“Oh, interesting.” Billy Pronto nodded. “Well, nonetheless, I don’t think everybody understands that. I don’t even think you understand that.”
Diablo took a deep breath. “Are you going to explain about your finger?”
“I am,” he replied. “The universe is God’s multiple personality, with an infinity of perspectives in the same space, and here we are, two of those personalities in synchronicity. It happens, literally all the time. The only amazing thing is how rarely we notice it.” Billy Pronto waved his left hand—sans middle finger—at Diablo. “For lack of a better description, we are two personalities of the same underlying event.”
Abruptly, Diablo pulled the car over to the side of the road. “This has been fascinating, Mr. Pronto, but this is as far as I can take you.”
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