Fragile (18 page)

So turn away now, turn away. If I am One with this allencompassing One, then I will never be my separate self again, I will never touch the cool and lovely night. And so I turn from such a brilliant nothing, for fear of never being me again, for fear of never having darkness by my side.

The names of all the angels reappear, the inward turning reveals to me the forms of all their faces. They rearrange themselves
before the split of perfect ripeness, before the boiling sun. I turn into a painful lovely room, an overheated vestibule of shadow, which is the world I know and adore. This darkness carves away a lie, a preposterous offense. Still, it is less fearful than the perfect face of God to turn away to blackness for one instant, so I am knocked out of here. Come with me. You don't need to stay.”

“But, I can't,” she says, gripping the railing of the bed and holding on. “They told me I have to stay at least another day or two. They're going to run more tests.”

“You don't need to stay. You can come with me.”

He holds her other hand, the one that is free. He is not forcibly pulling her out of the bed; neither is he letting go. He is telling her more with the pressure of his closed fist that surrounds her weak free hand that it is time to go with him, it is time to touch him once again.

“Rick,” she says, testing. As if saying his name aloud will tell her what the right thing is to do. Holly lifts her head from the pillow to see him more clearly. The room is much the same. The poster of T
HE
A
MAZING
B
ACK
still there, its strange bony tree trunk filled with nerves. Television going. Bag of fluid still injected in her arm, the arm whose wrist is still bandaged and whose hand still grips the railing. The rolling table with styrofoam cups and a plastic pitcher of melted icewater.

“Where are the kids?”

“With Tom.” Her voice snags when she says this other name. “He was kind enough to watch them. I couldn't leave them with my mother.”

And something else she notices for the very first time, sitting on the windowsill that runs along one side of the room. A model of what looks like two different types of sponges. One of the sponges is dense, a cross-section propagated with holes of various shapes and sizes. The second sponge is ethereal and light, with large gaps of air between the filaments of substance that make it up. On the base of the model, she reads the word that tells her what this is: O
STEOPOROSIS
. She feels her head swim, her breathing go ragged. She wants to sink into unconsciousness again.

“Then you can come oblivion in a flood of light. I turned away from the face of God, and now I see these eyes that spin forth rays and spears of light. I recommence in moonlight silver, opaline, and furious. I see shimmerings of rose and backwards scoops of glass as intricate as miracles of held taut pearl.

These are my thoughts, the spontaneous presence of my mind. And now I see that my thoughts are things, existing in and of themselves. My mind creates them and sends them into the world. Each one of them can utterly unleash like certain strange inherent liberating aethers, blue pragmatic as the sea.

Spinning, spinning, they do spin forth their rays and spears of ever-colored light. My mind creates these thoughts and each one is an entity that goes into the world in a spiral motion, spreading aureate and blue. With each thought I unleash in this
realm, I am released from the world of doubt and terrible appearances I once knew. I am unbound from the simple constraints of the physical world.

I abruptly glimpse dense liquid mass of suns that could be held within arms' reach apart. These balls of light are floating, gliding, colored orbs like fire balloons, like tinted suns three yards across, sprouting rays and orbiting basilicas of strange revolving madness. This is the nature of my thoughts, the nature of my mind.

But I am not yet ready for this place of pure thought, where everything I think can come true in an instant. Secretly, I call upon the dim blue shade of the sixth hour of darkness, I call for the captivity of every sundered thing, which is the physical world.

Did he not say that anyone who has no regard for his life on earth, but despises it, preserves his life forever and ever? At last I understand what he meant by this. I bequeath the unbelief by two and two, for two is aught the same as zero. It is less fearful than the eyes that spin forth rays and spears of light to turn away to blackness for one instant, to turn away undone by her own hand, the straps of the bra hang limp astride her collar bones. She exaggerates this slow, restrained unfurling of her self before him. He leans back on the bed and squints his eyes in the late evening haze, and she watches him who watches her. The bra drops to the floor, released. Holly is nothing but pure form now, nothing but a body to enjoy, a supple sure expanse
of feeling, a perfect interface connected to the world. An ache of nameless dilation overwhelms her, emerging from her heart the spear of light is terrible, is rushing past, a whisper out of dust, open-mouthed and trellised with desire. Spear of light impeccable, invincible, in vulgate and refinement. Pound out the beating of my heart, sound out the declaration of the drought, of fierce enormous waves of light unfolding.

I see beyond the shimmers of my own small incremental thoughts: a sphere that engulfs the heavens with its wide and varied wonders. I see and understand that this astounding sphere of light, incessantly unfurling, is perfect Wisdom. Wide beyond all seeing sphere, as if a sun crouched down, a piece of wonder on a mountainside, deep-sunken and enormous, it bears its weight, its freckled, huge, illuminating weight upon the waves of matchless fivefold light.

But I turn away from this lustrous wide beyond all seeing sphere, I turn away from the open doors of heaven. I am not yet wise enough to be as one with this. If I could bring myself to look upon this glory and give myself up to it, what a heaven I could find. Yet I turn away, for fear of never seeing, never being, never howling into anyone again he notes upon returning from the errands he has run to waste the waning pale remainder of the weekend that she has left every single blessed light in the house on, the upstairs hallway light, the several master bedroom and bathroom lights, the lights in the master bedroom closet, the lights in two of the three unused bedrooms of this wonderful
house they will soon abandon, not to mention several of the lights downstairs, the two old matching lamps in the living room handed down from Tris's grandparents on his mother's side, the half-dozen recessed jar lights with dimmers he installed in the kitchen are on full glare. Even the garish chandelier that looms high above the two-story front foyer is blazing, the one they only use when entertaining party guests. The house is lit like a sinking ocean liner, in the precarious moment before it tips and plunges to its watery grave. And she is nowhere to be found.

He calls to her. His voice rings out and echoes in the towering spaces of the front hallway. “Laura?”

She is not home. She turns the thermostat down to sixty-nine and complains to him about the four hundred dollar electric bill, then leaves the house with every single light on. Not only is she obstinate, she is dumb.

He turns and charges towards the kitchen with the purposeful intent of one who has been wronged. He must turn off all the lights—again. And as he passes through the short corridor that leads to the rear of the house he instinctively glances to his right to catch his reflection in the hallway mirror; but the mirror is gone. She has removed it, along with the photographs of their children and grandchildren that used to hang upon this wall. Packed away—decluttered, no doubt. She has probably gone to take more boxes to the storage unit and the secondhand store. Soon, everything will be gone. Every single thing he has loved in this house, every totem of his life here, packed away and gone. Soon, everything
all at once, every single thing that ever was, and ever is, and ever shall be, all at once. It all comes crashing through me, the wayward Babel-din of hearing all the words that ever have been spoken. I see at once all everything before and here and after, spanning limitless illusion, which is the Day of Reckoning.

In every corner sight unbinds me. Every touch sensation ever felt by me or any other, every voice I heard, and all the multitude of waters. I can see every daughter, uncle, baron, king. Each midnight father, every drop of rain and sheaf of wheat. I hear all dimly spoken tongues of long ago and now and ever after. All honey and nectar, and every baby's shriek unanswered.

All orchards, bark of trees, all sparks of life and colonies, all human beings with their burdens. All host of heavens rolled together as a scroll and every human frailty. I hear all hammering, wretched hollering, all touch of sunshine harlequined and every feeling unprocured.

I see and know all kindness, any witness to the angels' matted wings, and every one I reproached and blasphemed. Any first and second fingers, any blemishes or swarms of smoke, all squabbling and discord, any rattling and any tastes that forge from heel of tongue to tip.

All expressions and damnations I ever saw or knew or felt, from whatever lands they hail, all music strange and misery. All weather in succession, every usury and increase. Every homage to betrothed. Yes, I see this is the Day of Judgement, when all will be revealed.

All salt smell, all varnished wood, all hot milk buckets brandished in the cold of dawn. All abominations unto law, and every ooze of life's first rendering.

All half-heard cries of loathing, any ridges, any roots, all wings stretched up unto the sky. All woodlands sweet stillness. I hear and see and taste these things.

This is the sphere of mind unleashed, all ripped into knowing all at once, which is the Day of Judgement. A life I once lived came forth a thousand years ago as if it were one instant. It is a treasure for me to see these scattered fragment lives of mine, impervious to time. They reveal themselves: A desert priest from tribe unknown, an avenger and a slayer. My own mouth battling, the putting out of eyes. The lives reveal themselves: I am a martyr undefiled, a victim of monstrous hammers.

I was once a slave on boarded ships, I was a loping slow apprentice smith. And once I was a child undone by tyranny of parents. I am now a female, now a male. The dead of all the dead and all the living yet to come live on and die with me today. And now the person I have become is shown to me: this is the Day of Reckoning.

Reveal how once I shuffled through a downtown crowd of shoppers, eight years old, my hand in Elmer's hand. Reveal that Elmer feared for me within the landscape of faces all unknown, feared he would lose my hand and lose my little soul, and all the while it was the far distant happiest moment of my life.

Reveal all premonition, all shame and futile regret. The biggest things and every detail of the smallest all at once. Show me
how every thing affects another, how it teaches all at once from every person's thoughts, from every person's humiliation.

Show me how many days and people I have known and how they knew me, by what means. We were connected and even still reveal their wondrous names and all their wishes. Each and every stranger gathered together as one with me through nothing but a glance, our eyes and souls connected. I know and comprehend that every accusation, every clattering predicament, each temptation was a reference to my waking Spirit and my waking Soul.

Now reveal a summer's day when I was twenty-three. My life was far diluted, taken up by radio music and TV shows in black and white, and ballgames Elmer listened to, evenings on the porch. One summer's day a man called on me, phantom image of a man from the office where I worked, who from my dreadful diffidence I forgot. He rings the bell and looks through the venetian blinds that cover the front door. He hopes I answer, he wants to see me to the show. His heart is filled with slow degrees of pain and longing for me, for my body youthful and diaphanous. Still young, it looks so young, dear God, and beautiful, yet I coveted and held it back.

I saw the man from behind the shades and cowered there, resisted. I was ever hollow from lack. I turned away; I kept my vigilance to sacrifice. I turned away and never went to answer the door, and in his disappointment he also turned away and never did return.

I lost through arrogance and spite and shame, reveal it all at once, everything I lost. A courtship with this man, and an infant
never born. Not one, but two that never came. Show me a life with them that never was, with children of my own, a house in a city far away. A life that is not, was, but could have been. Reveal it as a mirror humiliation, destitute. Show me each moment I was vain, and coarse, and callous, and insane. Show me all the ramifying consequence of each and every word, and act, and thought.

Now I hear a cruel word indeliberate but cunning cruel all the same. A night in spring when Dennis was but ten, he came to me and wanted something quite uneventful, insignificant. Only ten he was, dear Lord, how sweet, how beautiful, how wonderful a boy of ten can be. He wanted but for me to walk him to the store for an evening treat, an ice cream cone or candy. Here reveal each consequence, each ramifying judgement on my soul. I say to him in my distraction, irritation, finishing the crossword puzzle: “NO.” The word rings out, and in my anger, for I had had a tiring, difficult day at work, “Get up to your room now and leave me alone.”

Alone I am and ever shall be, dear God. It was not much, but now I see it set an ounce of hardness in his heart, it put in place an inch more distance there between us. He turned away in disappointment. He turned away, and I turned back to what, to something tossed away and gone, some thing. No thing should ever supersede another person.

And in eight short years, in less than that, he was gone for good. A moment there I squandered. There are not many moments in a life, a life is here and gone, and those moments when we are young and with our young are of most consequence.

I had my pleasures, yes, and underneath all this a second mind revealed, the mind of sleep, of night, of consciousness absconding, all tangled up with every thought that dwells within is outside now. All those underneath and age-old awkward human longings are the halo of my Soul, blown up and out into atonement. It is the day, the hour, when all is monolithic, anonymous, laid bare. There is no hiding, no garnishing, no explaining left to do, all is here laid bare. All thoughts both strident known, unknown, despised. All come to fore, all explode before me here.