Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “Are you ill?” he’d asked bluntly, not knowing how to broach such an unbroachable subject.

  “Ill, Jamie what a weak word that is, no I am not ill. I have cancer, some would classify that as ill, but I can reassure you there are many, many worlds between those two words.”

  He did not need to ask the next question, for it was answered by the quiet desperation that every pore and fiber of her being spoke of. Clothilde would not have her vintage years, would never be granted freedom in this life. She had been given away to an uncaring, thoughtless man years ago and now some unseen force had seen fit to give her over to a disease that in its monstrous, mindless gluttony would clutch and claw at every cell in her body, until it took the very last breath from her. Clothilde, aged forty-two, would never know another moment of freedom in her life.

  She would live another eighteen months. Brutal, agonizing months. It would be Jamie who stood by her through the worst of it. He who lived this double life—a wife, pregnant for the second time and terrified, at home and an ex-lover dying in Paris. Flying back and forth, exhausted, fleeing grief in two countries. He who held Clothilde’s hand when she wept with pure terror and held her head on the days when her stomach refused to hold so much as a cup of weak tea.

  Jamie who buried his second son while Clothilde took a few more steps towards her own grave. Who watched his wife spiral into a depression so severe he feared for her life. It was he who held Clothilde at the end as she hovered somewhere between the agony of the final stage of cancer and the oblivion of drugs. Jamie, who against doctor’s orders took her from the sterile confines of the hospital and drove her to her beloved Provence, praying the whole way that she would make it through those last few miles. And so, it was he who held her tightly, like father to child, as she watched the last rites of the world she knew, the rise and fall of the summer moon, the burning fire of a red-gold sun in the dewdrop hours. Jamie who heard her last words.

  “Jamie, the colors of my life have been dark, but for one summer I had a rainbow. Thank you, my love, for that season.” She’d held his hand tightly, crying a little as the pain came in waves, rhythmic and unceasing. “I will take care of your babies for you, I promise. Remember, in the beginning and in the end there are only dreams.”

  He had, only minutes later, closed her eyes against a glorious summer morning. Relieved in some small measure that her pain was over and hopeful, in a place very far down, that his baby sons would no longer be alone. Through Clothilde he’d made reparations to the mother who had died so similarly, took care as the man what he could not as the boy.

  One year later, there was another son, a wee fiery-headed scrap of a man who was born before his time but unlike his brothers before him, born breathing. Stuart Gordon Kirkpatrick survived only three weeks and when Jamie laid his third son to rest in a little blue velvet-lined casket he closed the door on hope and happiness and saw his wife do the same. Neither spoke of children again, it was a silent agreement. Another death would finish them both. Colleen took refuge in God, had the marriage annulled by taking Holy Orders and went away to live with the Blessed Sisters of Mercy.

  In a world that had once seemed so limitless with possibility, so wide open with an unending array of adventure, that had seemed so damn—golden, the lights for Jamie, once an incurable optimist, had dimmed considerably.

  “Oh Jamie, I’m so sorry, I’d no idea—about your babies—I—”

  Jamie came round sharply and suddenly to the realization that he had revealed far more than he’d intended to and that Pamela had tear tracks streaming down her face.

  “Sweetheart I’m sorry, I never meant to go on like that. God knows I’ve been drunk and foolish many a time but I’ve never babbled on like this.”

  She disregarded his protest. “Your sons, all three, it seems too cruel to be true. How can you believe in God after He took so much from you?”

  “Because I’m a good Catholic boy at heart,” he said bitterly and then meeting her eyes gave in to the truth. “I’d nothing else left to believe in and there were plenty of dark nights when I cursed him aloud, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life it’s that you’ve got to believe in something, small or big, or you’ll completely lose your hold on living. My sons are with God. So you see if I didn’t believe in Him I’d have gone insane.”

  “Do you still love your wife?”

  The very air stilled around the question, as if the heat itself had an ear and waited for his answer.

  “I will always love Colleen, but in a different manner now than when we were husband and wife. We grieved our sons together, we will always be bound through them and perhaps being their mother, having carried them under her heart, she may have suffered more than I.”

  What he did not add was that Colleen had refused to see Stuart, had turned her face to the hospital wall and said she could not bear to know his face, when it would only be gone from her. He, father of first Michael, then Alexander and finally Stuart had dressed them in christening gowns, wrapping their still wee forms in shrouds of baby Irish lace. In awe, even through his pain, of the perfect peacefulness of their faces. He alone sat by Stuart’s incubator day and night, willing him to live until the nurses begged him to rest before he himself needed a bed in the hospital. He’d been alone when Stuart ceased his struggle; his paltry three weeks having been a valiant fight, as though from the first he’d felt the angels waiting. Near the end, Stuart had opened his eyes, eyes soft and green as springtime and looked, Jamie would swear to his dying day, directly into his father’s eyes.

  “He’s askin’ yer permission to go,” a kind nurse had told him. “I’ve seen it before, they’re wise these ones, moren’ if they’d lived a hundred years, it’s time ye held yer son, Mr. Kirkpatrick. Send him to the angels in yer arms, surely there’s no way he’d rather go.”

  It was the first time he’d held a son living in his arms. He’d been nervous, scared of doing something wrong, of causing him harm or pain. But then Stuart had been placed next to his heart, his head fitting just so into the crook of Jamie’s elbow and he’d let the tears fall as he kissed the tiny wee feet, each toe a thing of wonderment and the silky soft head with its fine fuzz of red curls, as delicate as a spider’s web with the first glow of dawn upon it. And he said the words that broke his heart forever and took away some part of his wholeness as a man.

  “It’s alright, wee man, I can see you’re tired. You’ve put up a fight worthy of ten warriors, no one could ever expect more. You sleep now love, Daddy’s here and he just wants you to have your peace.” He sang to Stuart then, a low and ancient lullaby that spoke of green hills far away, of moonbeam boats that glided through the milky way of dreams and adventures that his son would never know. Stuart Kirkpatrick died that way, secure in his father’s arms, with the warmth of his father’s voice in his ears.

  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke had once said that man’s pain had yet to outlive the garden but Jamie had stopped believing in the garden, had come to see flowers as merely flowers, not a metaphor for some unquenched longing. Here today though, with the heat like a spreading fist gloved in kid leather, he felt a flicker of doubt.

  “Is it enough?” she was asking, moving with the one question, her queen out into an extremely vulnerable position.

  “Is what enough?”

  “This life you lead of books and papers and good manners, is it enough for you?”

  “It has to be,” he replied gently, knowing that in light of what she was asking it was an inadequate, foolish response.

  “Why?” With one word she had opened the board, leaving it clear for his attack, his move. But rather than playing king, he opted for knight errant. He formed the words, lined them neatly up behind his throat, ready to spill them in a steady and mannered flow. But she with the insanity of innocence, bounded on heedless of the realities.

  “I’d give you everything,” she said
, trembling, sun stroking her hair to indigo, hazing her lines. “My heart and soul and everything that goes with it, we could have babies, as many as you wanted, sons and daughters, a house filled with them.” She clung to his hand, her own two shaking violently and freezing cold.

  There was after all it seemed, an agony he had not experienced and it was this.

  He allowed himself a small portion of weakness and with his free hand brushed her face softly, stroking away the tears that had begun to spill. Dear God in heaven but the child meant it, believed it could be.

  “It is not possible,” he said, “I carry the genes that killed my sons. I am a blight that forecludes the chance of a harvest.”

  “But—” she began and he, the scent of strawberries ripe and red in his senses, struck out her words.

  “I cannot love you and you must not love me,” he said gently, firmly and yet unequivocally.

  She leaned forward and kissed him. Simply and softly, honey mixed with the thorns of her mouth, the smell of dust and sun and the taste of something sweetly, verdantly green on her tongue.

  She felt to him as fragile a dream as the Elysian fields, all the pleasures of Paradise and none of the pain. Here was water to slake his thirst, here a salve to pull the fever from his bones. She kissed as though it were innate to her, as if she had always known kissing his particular mouth.

  Long ago, for reasons of sanity or insanity, he’d sought Reason with its fine and careful lines, its rules and evenly spaced stairs, its well-insulated walls and tightly sealed roof. Passion, with its unbounded field and dark wood was rejected as too dangerous, as limitless, unwalled, unroofed and unstable. To taste was to know addiction with one draught, to be unable, ever, to quit oneself of the flavor and need. To discover, perhaps, that there was a God, to kiss his face and find it angry.

  There was, however, nothing of anger to be found here. She felt, in his arms, as natural and essential as air and light. All silken youth, she took his very breath and twisted it, laced it with pain and laughter and gave it back to him filled with life. The taste of it in his mouth was terrifying. Still he followed her to the ground in a natural progression, as water will always find earth.

  Her blouse was open to the waist, fragile folds of it falling away like petals from a bruised flower. Her flesh swelled and warmed under his hand, breath tightening and muscles quivering. Ready for him, denying him nothing. Seeking to place all the comfort her body could offer within his grasp. He bowed his head with a reverence he’d never known before, resting his face for a moment in the lovely valley created by her young, high breasts.

  He took a deep breath, his senses drowning, struggling to surface. Springtime and youth in all its bitter green. The dew of dawn bright mornings stirring the dull roots of pain. Grief, long dammed, broke through desire in horrible, choking waves.

  She made no exclamations, expressed no surprise, merely cradled him to her breast and made soft, soothing noises, as if she were the mother his had not known how to be. How long he lay there he never knew. How long does it take a man’s soul to fall in upon itself, to break and shatter into innumerable pieces and begin the first tentative steps toward re-birth?

  As the ebb and flow of exhaustion at last calmed the wrenching pull of his grief he noted somewhat fuzzily that evening had begun its encroach, damping the trees and water with shadow. Small birds, liveried in feathered blue, twittered down towards sleep. He pulled himself with great reluctance from the sticky warmth of Pamela’s embrace, covering her gently with the crumpled delphiniums of her blouse. The fracture of parting was physically painful, every cell protesting. He knew his grief had imbedded her within him as a sexual joining would not have done. Blood of my blood and cursed by it, he thought bleakly.

  “Jamie?”

  He could have wept anew at the unspoken questions that one utterance contained. He forced himself to look up, to see her, to meet the hope that burned hotly in her face.

  “I cannot,” was all he said, knowing full well he’d go to the grave seeing her stricken look.

  “I see,” she said with a calm finality, as if indeed she’d always suspected it would come to this between them. She did her buttons up, smoothed the delicate material, unconsciously raveling that which had become so swiftly unraveled between them. Pulling the threads of her torn dignity about her protectively.

  “I cannot play moth to your star, Jamie,” she said finally, a shadow of something akin to pity in her eyes. “You can’t continue to hold me in your hands if you refuse to hold me in your heart.”

  “Does that mean you won’t be coming back to Belfast?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I suppose it’s my turn to see,” he said the words costing him far more than he’d anticipated, “you’d best take care, the kind of fire your Casey will take you into will burn a moth until it can’t even recognize itself.”

  The face that turned to him in the dusk was pale but composed.

  “It’s a very cold world, makes a fire appealing, wouldn’t you say?”

  She went to her horse, swung up lightly, a flicker of heat in the waning sun.

  “I’m sorry, Jamie.”

  “Don’t be.”

  The horse tossed its head, cantering sideways, impatient to be gone from this garden. “Sorry,” she continued without contrition, “that you are so afraid of living again, a quick death my father used to say is infinitely preferable to one that takes a lifetime.”

  The horse took the reins then, and, in a glimmer, they were gone, girl and beast melted away like myth, like life.

  And that, he supposed, was checkmate. Or from the Arabic, shah-matte, meaning ‘the king is dead.’

  And the heavens reject not:

  The desire of the moth for the star,

  Of the night for the morrow,

  The devotion to something afar

  From the sphere of our sorrow.

  Only Shelley could answer Shelley:

  I can give not what men call love.

  From the Greek ‘katholicos’ meaning universal and ‘kyriakon’ meaning ‘belonging to the Lord’ and ‘ekklesia’ meaning ‘assembly’ came the Church, the Holy Mother Church founded upon the rock of Peter, Her hem wetted by the receding tides of paganism. Bound on earth by Christ’s gathering of his disciples in His last days, bound in Heaven by Divine Law. The formation of given over to a simple fisherman, who was to become the shepherd and feed the sheep of the Son of God, the Son of Man.

  Peter, keeper of the keys of heaven, denier of Christ, walker on water, a doubter and defender of the first order, a member of the elite circle who walked with Christ on earth. And saw Him shoulder to shoulder with Moses and Elijah after his death. Crucified and buried in Rome, the city that was to become the epicenter of the world’s largest religious community on earth. The first Bishop of Rome, the pope.

  Grounded in the theology of Paul—madman, zealot, wandering missionary, tentmaker, lover of Timothy, scourged and jailed repeatedly, crushed in the crux of Judaism and Christianity. A Jew for the Jews, a Christian for the Christians, all things to all men in order to be their savior. Speaking in the tongue of men and angels, he preserved the faith through desolation, frustration and personal darkness. He was the writer of some of the tenderest and most passionate love letters in the history of humanity, words written to his flock, his children, known for all time as the Epistles of Paul.

  Rival of Peter, he would meet his end in Rome, beheaded and hoping with his last breath to be reunited with his Christ on the road beyond the grave.

  The Church was proclaimed as the presence of the Body of Christ on earth. Christ’s own humanity would allow all of mankind to be taken fully into the heart and mystery of redemption. All part of The Plan, one no human, struggling in darkness and childlike naïveté could fully understand, for to be taken into the heart of God, to see His face, was to surely die. />
  Small pockets of Christianity began to establish themselves across Asia Minor, the seeds of faith scattered along the trade routes, the coasts, rivers and roads of the Empire’s far-flung interests. From Jerusalem to Damascus, southward, following the scent of spices and sand, into Arabia. Across the burning wastes of Syria into the imperial splendor of ancient Egypt. Across the Adriatic over the Alps men followed the cross and brought the word of the Son of God to all who would hear. To Spain and Gaul and to an island on the edge of oblivion called Britain.

  The old religions still existed but their flames were dying low. Judaism, decimated by persecution, taxes and a series of revolts in which Jews sought to recover their homeland and their freedom, gathered about Her huddled and frightened masses, their numbers sadly diminished and poured what fire was left into the pens and scrolls of old men.

  In Egypt, they still worshipped their pantheon of sacred creatures. But by the end of the fourth century Isis, Osiris, Ra and the rest would be spirits of memory, not divinity and terrible deeds.

  Christianity was the first equal opportunity religion. It cared not for a man’s class, nation, nor the circumstance of his birth. All men were inheritors of Christ’s salvation. To the downtrodden, the cripple, the maimed, the bereaved it was a promise of a better world, beyond the one that had shown them little more than squalid misery. All men were equal in Christ’s eyes, all men capable of holding God within.

  With ritual and spectacle, borrowing from pagan rites, Jewish ethics and the metaphysics and philosophy of the Greeks the church gave poetry where before there had only been prose, color to bleakness, light to darkness.

  Jesus the Jewish man was abandoned. In his place was created the risen Christ, the god divorced from Judaism and made palatable even to the mouths of anti-Semites. The separation of the cloth of Christianity from the fabric of Judaism was done by a succession of tailors, some infinitely skilled, others who understood little more than hacking and tearing. Paul, Christ’s own disciple, made the first cut, many others would follow until the Christian would scorn the idea that Judaism was his rightful mother. Centuries later under the hand of pale-faced fanatics, named Cromwell and Luther, Christianity would move back again toward the aesthetics and stricture of Jewish law and call itself Protestantism.