Sitting beside that bloated, crimson body, the tattoos burning my thighs almost to madness, I alone heard the voice of He that sat upon the throne saying, I make all things new.
Signs are signs, with or without faith.
Signs are signs with or without a text to contain them.
Soon it will all be moot. Soon the thousand years will begin, and the deaths of less than a couple of handfuls of babies will pale before the deluge to come, though they died by the fire and by the smoke and by the brimstone which issued out of the mouths of angels.
Behold, I come quickly, St. John says out of my mouth. Blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.
The Widower Dances
On the news tonight, near the end, in the local report, there was talk of a rumor someone pulled a body out of the gorge. The cute reporter, who reminds me a little of Sarah, before the cancer, who was obviously standing on a stone near the scum-covered water in the gorge, reporting from the scene as it were, said someone called in a report, on their cell phone, claiming to have seen a guy in a swimsuit carrying what looked to be a red body, in his arms, out of the gorge.
The red body, the caller said, according to Sarah’s look-alike, looked bloated and was dripping water as the man in the swimsuit carried it towards a gray, beat-up Pontiac parked on the side of the road near the gorge. If it hadn’t been for the condition of the body, the caller said, looking a little embarrassed when interviewed later by the cute reporter, he might have just taken it for two lovers sneaking back out of the gorge after going for a swim. The man in the swimsuit was carrying the red body with a tenderness that suggested a kind of intimacy, the caller said. In fact, just before he put the red body in the trunk of that waiting Pontiac, the caller said, the man kissed what must have been its putrid and bloated lips.
The cute reporter, the camera focused again on her, vestiges of the gorge just visible surrounding her centered face and a bit of her shoulders, said the caller couldn’t be sure about what he reported, since he’d witnessed this while driving by some seventy yards or so from the county road by the gorge where the Pontiac was parked.
Oddly enough, she went on, eighteen years ago, there had been a report, substantiated at the time by a number of witnesses, that a screaming naked man, who had painted his entire body red, had leapt off the old interstate bypass into the gorge. They dragged the gorge for his body, she said, but never found it. There is a story, though it may just be a kind of urban myth, local legend as it were, she said, that they did come up with his hand, ripped off at the wrist, and that yes, it was red. Someone at the local college is said to have put the red hand in preservative and stored the jar away. But when I asked the chair of the Biology Department today, she said, she told me no one has seen the jar with the red hand floating in it for years.
Could it be, she said into the camera, as if she were talking directly to me and not every other person watching the 5:30 local news, that someone today pulled the body of that red diver out of the foul water of the gorge?
The camera cut back to the interview with the caller, which had apparently been done in the caller’s home. The caller seemed to be sitting on a couch and behind him, off to the left, there was a painting. It was a little out of focus, but it looked like it was some four-legged animal on fire and running towards the foreground of the canvas.
What do you think it was you saw? the voice of the cute reporter said, off camera.
I can’t say for sure, the caller said. But there was nothing natural about it, that’s for damn sure.
• • •
After the news, I had to go for a walk. After all, Dali still had not come back and so the walls in my living room were just bare, white walls.
A Pontiac, gray but not beat-up, drove by and in the backseat, looking at herself in a little hand-held mirror, the kind Sarah used to carry in her purse for what she liked to refer to as emergencies, though I never understood what kind of emergency she meant, was Marilyn Monroe.
Once I asked Sarah if by emergency she meant some kind of medical emergency where she’d have to use the little mirror she’d pull out of her purse to check if some victim of some sort of attack or another was still breathing. She looked at me as if she thought I was just trying to be funny and failing, and didn’t answer.
Marilyn was apparently just putting the finishing touches on her pouting lips. All she was wearing, this dead Marilyn Monroe, at least as far as I could tell, was a see-through black negligee of some sort, with what was either black fur or black feathers along the neckline which draped low over her breasts.
Quite fetching, I whispered.
Marilyn looked over to me as the Pontiac went past and pursed her lips as if to blow me a kiss.
• • •
Without planning it or even being aware of it, I made my way to the street with the house in which I knew a baby had burned in its crib, the one Darrel had questioned me on my motives for walking by the night after the baby had burned there. The yellow police tape had long since disappeared. There was nothing to distinguish that tragic house from any other, nothing to mark it as different from the house where Sarah and I had listened to a couple make love.
I needed to talk with Sarah, but I was alone.
As I got close to the house, I looked toward the second floor window, the one I had always assumed to be the window of the baby’s room. I’m still not sure I saw what I think I saw. If I did, what I saw was a naked man, painted red, holding the naked body of a baby in his red hands and dancing with the baby around the room. Though I only saw the apparition a few seconds, it seemed real, and it seemed as though the baby was laughing out loud while the red man grinned and swirled around the room that was filling with smoke and that must have already been filled with music. Out where I was there was no music to dance to, and no reason to dance, as far as I knew.
Standing in front of the house, that second-floor window was as dark and empty as all the other windows, and I remembered some of the local myths that had sprung up concerning the figure of the red diver. Like the one that said all the burned babies, every one of them, had been fathered by the red diver come out of the dank water of the gorge to lie with local women and give them his seed. That it was his parentage of them that caused them to flame up in their cribs in their sleep, tiny little bursts of a sort of prophecy. Signs of what is to come, perhaps.
If, I said to the house in a whisper, the red diver’s lost body has been found, may that mean an end to this season of burning babies.
Yes, it was a prayer I whispered standing in front of that house. A prayer for the babies, and their parents, that might still go up in flames alone, or not alone, in the middle of the night.
• • •
The dead, it seems, may not be up for visiting tonight. Other than Marilyn, who was on her way elsewhere and only paused to blow me a freshly lipsticked kiss, I’ve been on my own all night. And I haven’t found myself in the past for what seems like months, though it may only be weeks.
Though it’s Sarah I really want to talk to, I’d settle for just hearing Dali’s awful voice singing some Spanish ballad in the living room while he painted Carol’s hands as if they were a religious icon. This house, like my daughters have both said at different times, does seem empty tonight. It’s awful empty, this house, without the dead.
• • •
I was slicing up an apple for a late night snack when I heard Dali singing in the living room. My Spanish isn’t good, but I’ve picked up a little. The ballad he was singing had to do with a deer that housed the spirit of a beautiful woman who had died giving birth. The gods, what gods they were I couldn’t tell but whatever gods they were, had taken pity on this woman. Because of her beauty, of course.
Because of her beauty the gods had let themselves feel her sorrow at having to leave her child alone in the world. The gods found themselves, so th
e song went, weeping for the woman’s pain and loss. Their remedy was a remedy that only a Spanish ballad sung by a dead surrealist would have come up with, gods or no.
The gods put the soul of the woman in a deer, and in that deer the gods let the memories of the woman run on all four thin and graceful legs through the forest near where the wife’s mourning husband raised their daughter alone as best he could.
Translation is a tricky thing, but I think the gist of the song is that the mother, in the form of the deer, befriends the child and in that way is able to watch over her as she grows up. And this mother in the deer is just outside the bedroom, with its windows open for the deer’s sake, when her child, now a woman, gives birth to her grandchild. As the girl child is born, the ballad says, the deer outside folds its legs under its body and places its long neck and chin on the ground and breathes its last breath. The Spanish are still so romantic.
With Dali singing and painting in my living room, I felt a little better. And my mother was with Dali. When she saw me, the last slice of apple in my fingers poised in front of my lips, my mother waved and smiled as she pinched Dali’s left butt cheek. Dali jerked and laughed, throwing his arms, the brush still in his pale right hand, around my mother and kissing her with that Spanish passion of his.
• • •
Sarah, it turned out, the dead Sarah not the Sarah of the past, was waiting for me in bed, wearing the same black negligee Marilyn had had on in the back of that Pontiac. How long she’d been lying there in that see-through number I couldn’t say, but I was glad she was there.
How was your walk? my lovely dead wife asked me, smiling like she knew something she couldn’t wait to tell me.
I reached for her and she put her hands into mine and let me pull her out of the bed and put my arms around her. It was a wonderful night, I told her, for a Moondance, and then we were dancing in the dim light of the full moon coming in through the window.
For a moment I wondered what someone walking by on the street and looking up to the bedroom window would see. Would they see a man with his arms holding nothing at all dancing by himself around this room, or would they see a man holding a woman in a beautiful negligee dancing in a way that made it clear they had done this many times before, that each knew how the other moved as well as they knew their own flesh?
Would what they saw, whichever it was, be enough to shatter their lonely heart, if their heart were lonely?
As we danced, Sarah and I, and she hummed “Moondance” into my ear, I believed the season of burning babies was over, that no more babies would be found charred and smoking in their cribs. The red diver’s children were with their father, I thought, and whoever had torched those innocents was finished with fire.
I danced with my dead wife, and it was perfectly natural.
The Author
George Looney’s books include Hermits in Our Own Flesh: The Epistles of an Anonymous Monk (Oloris Publishing, 2016), Meditations Before the Windows Fail (Lost Horse Press, 2015), the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through (Full/Crescent Press, 2014), Monks Beginning to Waltz (Truman State University Press, 2012), A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), Open Between Us (Turning Point, 2010), The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the 2008 novella Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). He is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect, Translation Editor of Mid-American Review, and Co-Founder of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.
Report from a Place of Burning Page 15