The Clay Head Benediction

by Marty Rafter

were doing all right” he says

  “I am doing all right. I just don’t like to have a lot of stuff I need to keep track of”

  “To each his own…” Donald says looking at me a little strangely “Here’s that paper for the company”

  “Oh, good. I will take that over to them. Did everything look fine to you?”

  “Yeah. It's fine. It all looks fine” he says

  “Well, good. I’m glad they could work something out. How is the cat doing?”

  “Yeah, fine.” Donald says “Look, I can’t believe I’m telling you this, especially after looking at how you live, but that girl works on Mondays”

  “I know” I say

  “And she takes her break at 1:30”

  “Ok” I say

  “…a normal man might try to figure out a way to run into her on her break when she actually might want some company instead of just hangin’ around trying to look at ‘er”

  “Oh…I see what you are saying”

  “All right, so if you do bump into her down in the cafeteria, don’t go saying something stupid like ‘Donald said you would be down here’”

  “Do you think I am that stupid, Donald?”

  “Man, yes. I do. But you hooked me up here on this other thing… so no we even”

  “We didn’t need to be even” I say

  “People always need to be even. Now, don’t say you know me, don’t say you knew she’d be on break, don’t do nothing strange”

  “Oh, come on” I say

  “And if it does go right, and it probably won’t, but if it does…don’t try to bring her back here, you can’t bring no woman back to your house where you got a bed and table and that’s it”

  “I have a pretty nice stereo” I say

  “And you need to keep that turned down, too. Not just then, but in general. You play that shit too loud”

  “Did you hear that I am the new super in this building?” I say

  “Well, I ain’t gonna need anything fixed, so that don’t matter”

  “Ok. Well, thanks, Donald” I say extending my hand to him

  He doesn’t shake my hand. As he walks away, he says, “We even. If I need anything else, I’m gonna call the company”

  “Ok” I shout after him. “Either way, thanks”

  I go back into my apartment happier than I had been since they day I spoke to the elephant. Donald is wrong about my place too, I am certain the girl from the museum knows the difference between minimalist and spartan. All of the sudden, I did not feel tired at all. So, I decide to make some heads, and plan on making one really nice one to give to the girl from the museum. Then, as I reach in the desk drawer to get out my clay, I find the small handmade container that I had fashioned for Ben. I pick it up, and gingerly open it. Inside, the head is still just as it was when I made it: the glass eyes, the eyelashes that took forever for look just right, the hair styled into a little fifties milk man buzz cut, the whole thing is perfect, a tiny masterpiece. Then, I decide that I cannot top this rejected sculpture, at least today, so I sit and try to listen to music again, but the head reminds me of Ben, and my missing shoes, and the indulgent day wasted in the bar, and it eats all of my energy away. And the music sounds terrible, just pointless sounds, and outside, it starts to rain. And I imagine all of my forgotten heads languishing unfound in the rain, little kernels of wonder free for anyone, becoming distorted and wasting away forgotten in the sodden preoccupied world outside my window. My mind performs a play for me, where the girl from the museum throws away the head I gave her again and again, and I think about the heads in the library and try not to imagine their fate too. I try to imagine one surviving, and serving as my proxy reading all of the books I am forbidden to read. So, I force myself to remember Emerson and his maxim that the ones opinion of the world is a confession of his character, and so I make myself stop…. Stop being another scared pessimist obsessing over the negative.

  And so, I lay on my bed and put on my earmuffs, and control my breath, and gratefully, concentration comes easily, and the rhythm of my breathing takes me to the grove of trees where I once lived as a tree myself, and there is a wedding there with a bride in a white dress and a man in a tuxedo, and a healthy oak tree as the presider. It is a beautiful ceremony. The music is traditional, but the service is ecumenical with hand fasting, and a Chuppah, and a formal reception of Holy Communion by the couple. And then it is me, the groom. And the girl from the museum is bride, and I can feel my heart swell at the realization of this wonderful possibility, and I know now that I am dreaming and not flying, and I can relax even more because the man from the theatre will not be invited to the reception.

  And the bride and I are turned and presented to our audience of trees and they all erupt in joyous swaying. So, she and I walk to a small wooden box, and kneel together, and turning a single key, we unlatch the lid, and lift it open, and from it flies a dozen white doves, and the trees sway even more grandly. Then the hawk, the uninvited guest of the groom, retrieves one of the doves from the air, and flies it to his nest lined with medical letters, and proceeds to prepare it with unrestrained zeal, but my bride does not see. She only notices the little bits of down that float gently from the sky, and she turns her face up like a child catching a snow flake and opens her mouth. A tiny feather from the departed dove lands gracefully on her tongue. She turns to spit it out, and the hawk moves to edge of the nest and cocks his head to the side, and looks at me fiercely with his accusatory eyes, and I am awake.

  Outside my window, the rain continues. A steady, determined late October rain, but I get dressed to go out anyway. I lace my new shoes, put on my coat, and take the umbrella out of my closet, and then I walk out into the weather. It is a long walk, and I have a bit of difficulty in the dark, but ultimately, I manage to find the stand of pines. By the time I get there, the rain has slowed a bit, and in the near total darkness, I check the earth for signs of the dove feathers, but I find nothing. Then I try to search out the head. I find the tree where I had left it, and dig around the base searching for the head, but I cannot find it. So, I conclude that I must have been mistaken about the specific tree, and instead move to another tree, and search around the base of it. I repeat this process around nearly every tree in the grove, and by the time I am finally done, my pants are ruined, and it is nearly dawn. The head is missing.

  I am so excited that someone had finally found the head, and even more, had taken it home, that I nearly begin to cry. Then for good measure, I sit on the soaking ground and wait until the light fully comes, and check around every tree again. Still, I do not find the head. The morning chill makes my soaking clothing feel like unnecessary cast, and I notice that I have started to shake. So, I decide to jog home from the park in an attempt to regain some of my body heat. I am halfway down the trail before I realize that I have left my umbrella, and return on tired legs to retrieve it. I search for a while and cannot locate it until I notice something black laying alongside a small patch of bushes at the edge of the pine grove. I walk over to retrieve my umbrella, and instead discover a pair of shoes. My shoes, that is to say, my old shoes, soaking wet and covered in mud, and tucked neatly behind them, my umbrella. I look at the little collection of my personal objects, and feel a flood of relief wash over me. If my shoes are here, I reason, the likelihood that I wandered anywhere truly strange in my fugue is pretty low. Also, I seem to instinctively gravitate to this space by the bushes to hide things. I consider saving the shoes, but they are too damaged by the weather to wear or donate, so I leave them behind, and jog home with just my umbrella.

  When I get back to my building, I enter through the backdoor and go to the basement where I take a long time cleaning off my shoes as not to track any mud up the stairs. Then I remember the head. If I was in the grove, and left my shoes there, I may have also moved the head. The hawk that intrudes on my dreams could have directed me to do that, and worse still steered my
ship to destroy even more of my creations. The whole idea makes me feel awful, and I am dejected as I climb the stairs to my apartment, but my brooding is interrupted by a happy diversion, a note under my door that says “clogged toilet 4D. Please rush!” My first sincere duty as building superintendent begins with a return trip to the basement to retrieve a plunger, and I walk back up the stairs to apartment 4D. When I knock on the door, I am met by a thin blank faced student.

  “You left a note under my door about a toilet” I say, holding up the plunger

  “Oh shit, dude. I thought you would never come” He says and invites me into the apartment. The place is a mess and the air reeks of marijuana. There is another young man sitting on the couch letting the glow of the television reflect off of his face.

  “The guy is here to fix the toilet” The first man says to the second, and I greet the man on the couch.

  The man on the couch says to me, “oh, I’m sorry about this dude, but we didn’t know what to do. It just wouldn’t flush, and I couldn’t find a plunger, and then Craig, flushes it again, and...”

  The other man, presumably Craig, says “luckily neither of us has had to take a shit since. “

  And the man on the couch says, “can always piss in the sink, you know what I mean”

  I agreed that I knew what he meant,