Report from a Place of Burning

by George Looney

  • • •

  The person shouting off the edge of that freeway ramp looked to be an old man with long white hair, matted, and a white beard. He was naked and had painted his entire body red. There I was, tied to a fence near a sign that warned of danger, watching a naked man wave his red arms at the sky and shout.

  The first words I could make out were, For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?

  Being as I was only eleven, I had not yet read the Revelation of St. John. It would be years later, when I read the naked man’s words in the Revelation, I would recognize this for the sign it had been. At the time, all I knew was that something was wrong. This guy was naked, yelling off an interstate overpass.

  What the hell? Jack, one of the guards, yelled. Hey old man, are you crazy or what?

  Yeah, the other guard, Ted, added. Go put some pants on. We don’t want to see your red, shriveled johnson.

  I didn’t say anything. Roped to that fence as I was, this scene took on a different sort of feeling for me. Suddenly, looking up at this bony, red body and its waving arms, it was like this was being acted out for me. This means something, I thought.

  • • •

  Every observation is tainted, science tells us. And all our theories, being based upon and tested by observation, are likewise tainted. No observation is independent, since every act of observation, Heisenberg realized, is an intrusive and aggressive act. The very act of observation affects that which is observed by the act of observing it. And in that act of observation, the effect is not one-sided. The thing being observed and the observer are both affected by the observation.

  Anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see, St. John wrote in his Revelation.

  That salve for the eyes is faith, faith in the mystery at the core of our very being. Without that faith, we are blind indeed.

  The other day I read how, after decades of searching, some physicists finally found direct evidence of one of those Chinese boxes within boxes, the tau neutrino. This tau neutrino is supposed to be one of the fundamental building blocks of all matter. As if we haven’t heard that before.

  Signs are signs no matter the nomenclature.

  This is all defined by what physicists call the Standard Model of Particle Physics—their particular book of faith. This holy text says neutrinos are hurtling everywhere all the time at the speed of light. Trillions of them just passed through you. Yet, this scripture says, they have no electrical charge and virtually no mass. So, something exists that almost doesn’t exist. Isn’t that miraculous?

  But wait. What’s the proof? Just what is the nature of this direct evidence? Observation, of course. This is science, after all. So, something that almost doesn’t exist has finally been found by scientists who, wouldn’t you know it, have been looking for it for more than twenty years. Funny how they just happened to find it.

  It’s like those astronomers a little while ago who found invisible tendrils of hydrogen in the huge darknesses between galaxies. One of them actually talked about how finding this invisible matter was sure evidence that the current models of the cosmos were on the right track. Again, we have the discovery, by men and women who have a particular vested interest in finding it, of something that had already been proposed and named, something that was necessary in order for their particular theories to be on the right track. Independent observation? That missing hydrogen was found because it needed to be there, and the need for it to be there exists not in the vast darknesses between the galaxies but in the minds of those who found it. Funny, isn’t it, how if we believe in something hard enough and look for it long enough we find it? Everything comes down to a question of faith, you see. It’s a matter of what we believe in. Or what we’ve heard.

  • • •

  I could hear horns from the highway. And the vague shouts you could tell had come out of cars that were going by without stopping. The shouts that must have been words but which were not recognizable from where we were had that trailing off effect as the cars went by. The horns were doing it too. People were rushing by this naked, old man, painted red, and honking at him and yelling at him but not stopping.

  Finally, we heard what sounded like a car door shutting. Someone had stopped up there. Though we couldn’t hear it, someone was trying to get the old man to come away from the edge of the overpass. The old man was standing on the railing by this time, yelling into the gorge.

  And there went out another horse that was red, the naked, red man shouted. And power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, he shouted, and that they should kill one another.

  • • •

  Faith, as they say, works in mysterious ways. Sometimes, all faith requires is the right element. Maybe cesium. They taught us, in school, that there are some absolutes, some things that remain constant, and most of us cling to that belief. We want there to be certainty. Perhaps we even long for it to be true, because in our hearts we find it impossible to believe in it.

  Our hearts, after all, are anything but models of certainty or stability. As muscles, they practice a rhythm hardly regular. Our heart rate is in constant flux, depending on our activities and even on our thoughts, our desires. The heart, you see, is a relativistic organ, yet it has traditionally been pictured as the center of our natures. Yes, I know science tells us that the brain is the more likely candidate. The brain and the heart have been at odds, haven’t they, for a long time? The mind in conflict with the body is a paradigm present in almost every human culture, often in very different ways, it’s true, but used almost universally to explain human behavior, or to justify it.

  The brain, too, could be said to have its reasons for wanting to believe in certainty, in absolutes, as it’s not particularly stable either. Thought itself is a kind of storm that rages across the gray landscape of the brain, with storm fronts meeting and forming obsessions and forgetfulness, depending on the winds, as it were. And the brain is the one organ that cannot replenish itself. The rest of the body renews itself fully every seven years, we’re told, but the brain doesn’t change with the body. The brain has to cling to what it has because when it loses what it has what’s been lost is lost, and that’s it. The brain wants things to stay as they are.

  They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, St. John wrote in his Revelation.

  The unchanging perfection the angels speak of that awaits us after judgment is something the brain longs for, fearful as it is of loss.

  One of those absolutes we were all taught in school was the speed of light. A good deal of modern physics and the models of the universe all depend on that. It’s a boundary that makes a lot of “knowledge” possible. Things depend on that limit. But now, it turns out, the speed of light may be no less constant than, and just as relativistic as, the beating of our hearts.

  In an experiment recently, a pulse of light traveled so quickly through a chamber filled with cesium vapor that it left the chamber before it finished entering the chamber. This, of course, would not be possible if the light pulse could only travel at what’s always been known as the speed of light. The speed of light, meaning there’s only one speed: the speed. But now we have to speak of a speed of light, a norm as it were. The speed that light, left to its own devices, will normally travel at.

  Maybe cesium excites light. Maybe it terrifies light. Our hearts are said to race when we are excited or terrified. Maybe light is the heart of being, of existence.

  Even the scientists who set up the experiment can’t explain the phenomenon.

  Signs are signs with or without acknowledgement.

  • • •

  And then the man painted red dove off the overpass. I saw the arms of a man in a suit reach out over the edge of the overpass, grabbing at the air where the naked old man had been standing, and then I watched his fiery body fall into the gorge, getting smaller until his body
hit damp rock at the bottom of the gorge. This was near the end of summer, and there’d been a drought for several months.

  His body kind of flopped a little as it hit, as if it wasn’t ready yet to stop moving, as if it could convince the stone to move aside so it could continue to fall, or as if it intended to just fall through the stone itself.

  My guards had looked away before the body hit, and the man in the suit had his hands over his face. I alone saw the body hit the rock. I alone watched it slide under what remained of the foul water. I alone knew this meant something, though it would be years before I knew what it meant.

  By then, Jack would be dead, the victim of a car wreck. Ted would be in prison, having raped and murdered a thirteen year old girl in the gorge when he was twenty-four. He drove her out to the gorge where he tore her clothes off and sodomized her before crushing her skull with a rock. When they found the girl’s body, her right hand had been cut off and shoved into her vagina, clutching three rocks.

  There are signs everywhere, though sometimes it takes us years to recognize them. And some we’d rather not think of.

  • • •

  It was a long time before I understood the naked old man’s ruddy dive into the gorge was a sign. It took the violence of the lives of the kids I grew up with to let me see the signs that are around us, the signs I needed to learn to read.

  It’s the old problem of observation at work. Why do you think the beasts around the throne St. John saw were full of eyes? Before and behind, he wrote. And within.

  I remember trying to tell the story of that old man’s naked plunge into the gorge to the artist who tattooed my thigh a few years ago. This was in one of those places downtown with the front windows pasted over with hundreds of photographs of different body parts covered with designs done by the artists who work in the shop. The photos are all close-ups, though you can usually tell where on the body the tattoo is by the particular curve of the flesh the tattoo only partly covers.

  The artist already thought I was strange, because of what I’d asked him to place on my thigh. It was an ornate design of Hebrew letters, though he didn’t know what it said. He was writing the letters on my thigh and I was telling him about the old man, how his whole body had been this scarlet red and how it had been like the air was on fire when he leapt through it into the gorge.

  When I told him what the man had said just before he dove off the overpass, the artist said it sounded like something out of the Bible. He’d never read the Revelation of St. John. Even if he’d known the words he was tattooing on my thigh, he wouldn’t have understood what they meant.

  Had I told him that what he was tattooing on my flesh was King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, what would he have thought? Would he have thought I was crazy? Would he have thought I was a fanatic? Would he have thought I was a man who could leap from an overpass into a hollow place in the earth? Would he have known I am a sign? Would he have known I’m what’s inevitable?

  I am what must come.

  The Widower the Dead Visit

  I’m not so far gone as some believe.

  My daughters worry about me living alone. Dad, they say, you shouldn’t be alone. They’ve talked about sharing me. Every couple of months sending me to the other’s place, like a time-share. But I won’t leave this house. This is where Sarah and I lived, where I took care of her as she died, and it wouldn’t be right to leave her now.

  My daughters, when they visit, complain about what a mess the place is and always spend some time cleaning up. I figure that’s enough of a maid service. Carol, the oldest, is always telling me it’s not healthy, my staying here alone.

  Dad, she says, you can’t really take care of this house, and you don’t need all this space. She always starts off with what she must think are the practical considerations, but she doesn’t stop there. Dad, don’t you think it’d be better for you to get away from the memories in this place? She’s of course thinking what hovers in the rooms of this house are bad memories, memories of my last wife’s slow death from the cancer that burned through her body like those fires on the news every summer out west.

  Sarah was quite a bit younger, and everyone, me included, was sure she’d bury me. In fact, my daughters took a while to warm up to Sarah because of the age difference. It wasn’t that they had any resentment about my remarrying. Their mother had been my first wife. We had married young, right out of high school, and she’d gotten pregnant with Carol in the first few months. By the time Carol’s sister came along, it was becoming clear the two of us should never have gotten married. When Chrissy was two, I moved out. So they’d had plenty of time to recover from their mother and I being apart. Not to mention my second wife. No, it was just the age thing. Sarah was sixteen years younger than me, and . . .

  • • •

  . . . Sarah’s in the shower. I can hear the sound of the water in the pipes. Tonight we’re going out to celebrate my retiring. The guys down at the Heinz plant took me out to lunch and we had a few drinks I’m still feeling the effects of. Thinking about Sarah in the shower is too much. My clothes are off before I get to the bedroom and I just throw them at the bed. The pants miss and end up on the floor. Sarah won’t be happy when she sees that, but she won’t see it for a while.

  She’s been waiting for me. Come on in, she says, the water’s fine.

  It’s not the water I’m interested in getting in, I tell her. She laughs and pulls me in to the shower with her and starts soaping me up, getting a lather going in my chest hair and then moving the bar of soap down my body. God, she’s so beautiful, and her hands feel so good . . .

  • • •

  . . . Sometimes it happens. It’s not memory exactly. When I remember something it’s different. It’s in the past and I’m not. But sometimes, just briefly, I’m in the past. I know the doctors would explain it away as some trick of the brain, the result of the Alzheimer’s, but what do they really know. They’ve never experienced it. It’s no trick. Sometimes I’m in the past for a while, and then I’m back. If I told my daughters about this, they’d probably have me committed. But I’m not crazy, and there’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing. I’m not living in the past. Just visiting now and then. And never for long.

  • • •

  I walk a lot. It keeps me in pretty good shape for a man my age. Sarah always said I had the body of a man twenty years younger than I was, which meant, she said, that being with her I was sleeping with a woman who was really a couple of years older. My walking isn’t a vanity, though. I do it to keep my diabetes under control. It’s a twice a day ritual, has been for over twenty years. I even have a treadmill in the bedroom. If it’s raining I use the treadmill, which is facing one of the picture windows so I can watch the trees shrugging in the wind and bending under the rain while I walk. In the winter, I use the treadmill a lot, and watch birds walking over the snow, little dark flickers in the glare of white.

  Sarah used to walk with me in the evenings. Mornings, I’d have to leave her lying in bed. She was not a morning person. But walking with her in the evenings was wonderful . . .

  • • •

  . . . We’re both a little damp. My arm makes a little sucking sound on her back when I shift a little. Her hand is twirling patterns slowly in my chest hair. My right hand caresses the skin of her upper arm and my left caresses the thigh she’s thrown over my lower stomach. The red on her chest and around the base of her neck is starting to fade.

  What do you think started the fire? Sarah asks me. In just a few minutes, I’m going to pull her on top of me and let her slip me inside her again.

  Earlier, on the news, we watched the report on the fire at the Heinz plant, where I used to work. The reporter was standing outside the plant, and behind him you could see the firefighters still spraying down the brick buildings, smoke still drifting out of the windows. There were workers standing around too, watching the smoke and the
water, no doubt wondering what it would mean for them.

  A breeze blows across our damp bodies from the open window. A few weeks ago, we’d been out walking, later than usual. We’d waited because it had been a particularly hot and humid day, and we thought it’d be nicer to walk in the dark after it had cooled down a bit.

  We’d been spying on people, in the houses where lights were on. We’d seen people watching television and sitting at tables writing or playing cards. The people writing were writing letters to sons or daughters in jail, or lovers they were arranging to meet in hotel rooms in other cities, or letters of resignation from jobs they’d managed to stomach for thirty years but couldn’t take one more day of. Those playing cards were keeping score in games that had been going on for months or even years. Or someone was losing everything.

  It was in front of one of the houses already gone dark we heard it. We had to stop and listen hard to be sure what we were hearing, but after a few minutes it was unmistakable. The hushed sounds of two bodies moving atop sheets, and the faint moans that grew a little louder as we stood there. We held one another and listened to the couple somewhere in that dark house. Someone was doing something right, that’s what the woman’s moans were saying. Then, there was a distinctively male voice, almost a hoarse whisper but louder and more insistent, and then the dark house was quiet.

  Do you think anyone heard us? I ask. Sarah laughs and rolls over on top of me . . .

  • • •

  . . . I’m not as alone as my daughters think. Though I can’t tell them. They worry about this house having too many memories for me, but memories are only one thing this house contains. There are the times I’m actually in the past, and there are of course the memories of the past, but there’s something else. There’s the dead.

  Since Sarah died, I’ve been visited by familiar dead, and dead people I never met when they were alive. And it’s not just in the house. Out walking, I’m visited too.