Prodigals (28 page)

And so in fallow years, on battlefields against long odds, on beaches dark with homesick siege forces, in the halls of anxious kings and paranoid queens, inheritance-minded princes, before the hearths of childless mothers, hapless fathers, and on the rafts of enterprising castaways, the fire set to consume the creature's flesh is a chemical transaction, no more, a currency, an act not of subservience but of control, a way not to honor the gods but to enjoin them. A moment of fraud, for when we purchase something, let us be clear, we do not call this act a
sacrifice
.

Where is the creature on its
Wanderjahr
, a hundred shiftless youths behind it? We cannot say. We have lost the creature. The horse now claims the land on which he trespasses for the king, as a wooden horse enters a walled city to claim it for those outside the gates. Do not, as I say, see me as a gatekeeper. See me as the blind man with a riddle at the crossroads. Dispenser of an ambiguous viaticum. We can await the barbarians long enough to become them, because it is always a question of whose bidding we do. And do not say, simply, our own. For is it then the bidding of our hunger, our fear, our lust? Are we not ever in danger of becoming slaves to what we merely can do, conscious procurers for our unconscious natures? Is it not always easier to gratify an appetite than to understand one?

The alternative? I confess I sometimes wonder whether it is not romanticism, or only hope, that leads us to imagine a time when spiritual life was more than ornamental garnish on material, a cult of consciousness, cult from the Latin
colere
of course (
colo
,
colere
,
colui
,
cultus
), to cultivate, to till, life spent in radical contemplation of the tidal nuance of a thinking-feeling involvement with all around us, the character, qualities, and rhythms picked out in reflection, so, like a shoreline seen from above, relinquishing shape and pattern on approach, the play of moods and shadings in a bright meadow, say, might evolve ever more complexly in the scrutiny of leaves and blades of grass shaking in the wind, the specific motion of each trembling, the tones in the arrangement of the day as things seek their fleeting equilibria, as branches rustle and petals fall, as the air makes its way through itself immured in the maze of its fluid pressures, bearing the grains of an endless pollination, as the vibrancies set off by stridulating wing or leg contour the static breeze, below the veined crags of mountain, monuments to the gravities that bind our ardor, skirted in tree and shrub running to the silt-swept banks, the plains where snowmelt carves silver fingers into humus and loam, where banyans and mangroves reach out like old hands rung in arthritic knots, berries gather the hidden colors of soil, where deer eat them, where the wolves eat deer, where the humans gather to eat, kill, fuck, and love, to stop and listen, pause within the violence and joy and take some measure of the unaccountable processes of which we are a part, and you might say, How I long to be a gypsy running free in the riot of my heart!, through tall grasses to the song of canebrakes, wild in the pleated dirges of a light knit from hay, sewn from straw verdure, the flaxen clothing of the evening, and those plucked frequencies of the day that sum to rapture. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, but—well, don't blame your mother.

We were quiet a minute. Then Gaby said, “You said something about our souls?”

Wendill laughed. “What do you think is that ludicrous dirigible in your hand?”

And when he said it our eyes went to our hands, which indeed were holding a length of poly curling ribbon, and from there up the line to the pair of Mylar balloons floating four or five feet overhead, balloons hungry, you could tell, for the very heights where they would pop, and on which, indeed looking rather ridiculous, were printed our own smiling faces.

*   *   *

Pop. Pop. Confetti. A blink. The swollen nighttime luster drifts. Lights return easy to their pinpoints and peel sleepily from the glass. The car recovered, the crack rock smoked, the meth—whatever. Gaby is at the wheel and I can feel her trying with all she has to keep us in the lane. The dashed lines converge at a point beyond the horizon and blink our way home. The road had become, I saw, the line of our lives. The yarn-path not
out
of the labyrinth maybe, but onward. If we could just follow it, it would keep us in our lives. But it was narrow, very narrow. One deviation and who knew? The highway curves, the macadam thread spinning off its distaff before us, yes, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends, but sometimes you're stuck on the arc, aren't you, and Atropos is posed there with her shears. If I could have I might have said, Parents, guardians of the metanarrative,
we
are the minotaur. Half child, half beast. Bury us in the heart of your maze. Hide the primal insanity of your culture from view. You will know us soon enough. We are the displacements of your wounds. Bundled lies sold off in tranches. Captured carbon shut up below the streets of Knossos. We are howl, destroying all you have given us to claim it fully—and
still
Gaby clenches, and I clench too, praying to keep on straight through the midnight highway, to find our way home, knowing all the same that if we make it back, we will be too joy-drunk on our improbable escape to remember to change black sails to white, too misted still in the amnesiac dawn of what Little Dionysius sold us to recall that when we got to the central chamber of the labyrinth it was empty, an echoing cavity, those Indian caves. We were the monster or there was none.

There is not much to say about drugs, hard drugs, drugs in combination, except that at some point you cease to exist. This is what you wanted, to sleep, to dream. To see the moment of your greatness flicker—out. That's it. Take someone else's word for it. It is unexciting and unnecessary. And that's the last thing I have to say about drugs. The day will come when we get to rest forever, no need to hasten it.

In the meantime the responsibilities weighing on us all—starting with the responsibility to take one breath after the next—are exhausting. They are also life. The day Gaby leaves we watch cats hunt mice in the overgrown grass behind the house. The crows watch from the field, sheening and idle lords who might be killing a few minutes between meetings. Lethargy in the heat interleaves with desire, tedium with panic. We laugh to keep the sadness at bay. I can feel it at the edges of my mind, waiting for its moment, the knowledge that I will soon be alone, that we are ever being left to ourselves, so that beyond simple aloneness a deeper architecture of loneliness exists, one obscured in the structures of identity and routine we build on top of it but laid bare in those structures' demolition, a feeling I hadn't sifted down through the rubble to meet since childhood, a full despair, as when, sent away and on your own for the first time, you see at last the sheer scope of the indifference hidden from you, the world's indifference, and how nowhere in the background of life hovers the metaphysical ghost of sentient care. It had been years since I'd considered that no one was taking care of me. The notion had no place in adulthood. I'd sloughed it off. But this is what I returned to in the days following Gabrielle's departure, as I stood in the middle of the field smoking, looking into the trees emptied of mystery, the red berries gone discreetly into shadow, the road beyond where the cars passed at the brisk, uninteresting speed they do, without the sluggish drama of film, the languor of prose. There was no one taking care of me. There wouldn't be any time soon. And I could fight the metanarrative all I wanted, slip its grasp for an evening, punish it for its tyranny by slowly destroying myself, but in the field that afternoon, among the stalking cats and crows, the rough dry grass and clover, under a sun too richly and heavily summered, dressing my exposed body in its violent cinnamon, it was me and the metanarrative alone. That even ticking beat.

You do not get to stop.

You do not really get to stop.

When I went back inside I put on
The Köln Concert
, got a straw broom out of the closet, and swept the house. I sweated. The sweat came in torrents. As Keith built in intensity, departing and returning to his theme, an elaborately toxic water spilled from me. I brought in beer bottles and cans, glasses with crushed lime crescents, viscid residues, the tan remains of onetime ice; I wiped down tables and knocked out ashtrays; I did laundry—clothes, bedding, towels—watered plants, washed dishes, knocked grit from rugs and doormats, took out the trash. Because I am a person I did these things. This is what a person does. You make peace with the melancholy. You invite it in. You say goodbye—to friends, to lovers, to family who are dying. To stray moments of understanding and of being understood. You clean, you shop. You go for runs. Sometimes you cry. Sometimes you want to cry and can't. You are too old, too big, the wrong gender; you have pushed away tears too long. There is a child trembling inside you but that isn't enough. No one cares. No one has time to care. People's lives are shot through with suffering, indignity, and privation you can't imagine. You know this. We all do. And still to say “people” is to refuse to see the child.

Who sees the child?

In the days that follow, it is books and books alone that make me not want to die. At school there was a class called Poetry Will Save Your Life, which we laughed at a little for its pomposity—because so many other things come first, I suppose, because art is always being asked to apologize for its inutility and superfluity. But I think it's true that poetry will save your life, if for no more than that I found it to be true that week, that literature was the only sort of arrival I could count on, an intimacy that wouldn't desert me, that didn't ask too much or fray fatally in the endless conflict of our competing needs, that permitted—or maybe simply
was
—the passage of experience back through us, our way of ravaging the endless ravishment of life. Heaven too is merely a dream of arrival, which we know from our inability to imagine anything ever happening in heaven.

So stop shortchanging poetry. Stop shortchanging art. Seriously. We're sick of it. Art has nothing to apologize for.

It is sick of apologizing.

*   *   *

A comedy ends in a wedding, they say. A tragedy in death. An epic comes full circle to end where it began, but—oh, endings!—take your time, I say. Come late!

Back on the island, my grandfather is living. I am living. The woods are living. Bumblebees as big as a child's thumb drift among living flowers. The harrumph of a lawn mower coming to life in the distance references the enveloping determination of growth. My aunts, lively in the morning, setting the coffee machine to burble, return from the garden with tomatoes, squash, parsley, chives, leeks, cabbage, zucchini, corn, thyme, rosemary, carrots, and beets, all of which, through the months of spring and early summer, feasting on the rot of soil, have slowly swelled. And if we are to believe Greimasian semiotics, bound up in any sense of
dying
must be
living
, along with the
not-living
,
not-dying
rock of the coast, oil-black here and grained like a pompadour, the roll of seawater, the nescient wind that laps the flag with its fanciful coat of arms, stretches the cupped palms of canvas sails, splits on bird wings, and touches off the texture of the bay.

I sit with my grandfather in the morning. The day is chilly, with dark gray clouds portending to the southwest. My grandfather wears a baseball cap and a windbreaker over his sweater. There is no discerning a body beneath the clothes.

“When we sailed…” It takes him time to get his sentences out. “Sometimes the propeller got … tangled … on seaweed, you know … and I'd—I'd dive down with a knife…”

“Yes,” I say, “and you'd cut the propeller free.”

He nods. “That's right.”

I've heard these stories many times before. He had an Aqua-Lung aboard the boat, which he used for difficult jobs. Often, though, he just went in in his underwear with a snorkel and mask, a six-inch pilot knife, down into the frigid waters of a strange harbor while his family roused themselves in the morning haze off the ocean. At least once he got tangled up, unable to break free beneath the boat, and had to dive back down to find the line gripping him and cut it before he drowned. He had nearly died thinking of his family just above him, humming as they prepared breakfast, so close and yet unable to hear him on the far side of that insuperable medium. Things must not be so different for him now. But he hadn't died that morning, of course, and he hasn't died still. And I take his choice of topic, in its elliptical way, to mean he understands my foolish plan to go after the anchor, the impulse to pit one's vitality against death, our heedless pursuit of what is always slipping beneath the surface. The first examples of writing, we are told, are inventories and accounts, records of the stores in granaries, the numbers in herds, trades, payments.
Bookkeeping
. A desire to keep track of things, to not forget.

I find Ruth in the study staring at an old computer, the monitor of which alone could flatten a corgi, and I knock on the doorframe.

“How do I turn a JPEG into an MP3?” she says.

“Hmm. I don't think you do.”

“Francesca and Malcolm are coming tonight, you know.”

“Yes.” They are Ruth's children, my cousins; soon the house will be teeming with the full extant family. Bill, Ruth's husband, is flying in tomorrow from a work trip in Ireland. All these atoms of diverse energy, divergent lives and convergent genes, called together in these walls to confront the breadth of our mutual and utter incomprehension.

“I need you to take Denise to the ferry,” Ruth says.

“I know, I talked to Denise. For the record, I'm not a big fan of the whole ‘I need you to' formulation.”