The Only Bad Thing That Ever Happened

 1. 

Feet slung into the air of the living room, bones drunk on equanimity, beer gracefully in hand, God knew something he didn't say. His furry mouth, sweat soaked, the breath like chewed green grapes, and his eyes closed, he would have practically no earthly basis of reason why his life then was to become undone then. Clear-drunk, the high that seems to ease not merely the possibility of damage received, but the fact it had ever been. Warm confidence and purpose in his happy gut, gentle love streaming through his veins, arteries, nerves. Every cell within purged of the trespasses and defilements that he'd been charged with during the centuries and millennia of his strange, agile, balanced and unbalanced existence. 

The Great City steamed in the abbreviated winter, sparsely occupied subways more like runaway dogs unguided in their destinations than transporters of any sort of person at all. 

The television in God's living room played an ad "paid for the supporters of Nathan Rueben," who, at that time, was still a very "controversial" congressman, and then it returned to the late-night film, which on that particular evening was Duke Fogherty's The Rich Man's New Toy. These things were temptation and balm to many insomniacs -- intoxicated, sober, and everywhere inbetween -- throughout the Great City, God one of several dozens. From his beer-heavy seat, he felt the ping of a cigarette craved, but then did not wish to disturb tranquility as it had been wedded to his bones. 

And God would've stayed like that for hours more, but other factors were at play: 

His wife...whose name is here omitted for respect of the time passed...was experiencing life on profoundly different terms. See, in the beginning of this century, America was arriving at a radically shifting period in its already experimental, improvised and routinely hypocritical tradition and legacy. The old America, the one whose fossils sit beneath the soil and within every brick, board and beam, never really suffered shame for its vanity and severe entitlement as it committed massacre, exploitation and certain ruin for all that it perceived as obscuring its destiny to conquest. The new America, dawning in roughly 1960-61, didn't enjoy this ignorance, or at least not without hassles. 

Inbetween, the wife of God found herself being squeezed by the conflict. 

When she snapped from unconsciousness on the night that was to be their final residing under a shared roof, her heart and eyes and soul burned with the meanest fires of impermanence itself. Her body ached, her skin betrayed a dissatisfaction that might sever the head of a king or a president or an emperor if it had been the form of a true knife and not merely the blade of imagination that hides in the necessary anger of our condition. 

A shortglass of iceless whiskey shattered against the wall. 

God curiously observed its amber contents as they caught the light from the ceiling...some few granules embedded in the plaster and glimmering with a modest contentment. 

"Fucker!" 

He turned. 

"Just sit there, you fucker!" 

He sat. 

"Just sit there sucking that SHIT!" She meant it. "You fucking coward! You drunk imbecile piece-of-shit coward! Sit there deaf and dumb while everything sloughs off itself and children die and disease sucks us all into the ground... Why not? You won't miss anything; will you?" He'd live. "They die," she said. "They die...they wail and suffer and they die, while you, MAGNIFICENT you sit there drunk watching television, staring at your hairy gut and your useless balls, you...you rotten piece of shit...." 

God's wasted eyes full of sorrow. He wanted words to say but couldn't manufacture the least dry syllable. He mutely received her accusations. 

"...And this city...this fucking turd too big to be buried, festering corpse of a liar's dream, unholy cunt of a counterfeit democracy... Ridiculous...." On and on like that, the once-detached, once-selfless generosity & concern now beaten beyond repair or comfort, dissolving into the breath of her curses, skating over his incompetent ears.... 

Finally, when a neighbor called the police, finally, when she had wrenched as much of the agony and disgust from her being, finally, when they escorted God from his Brooklyn home another portion of Old America settled, another day precisely on its heels. 

2. 

Some energy of the house oozed through the walls of the house into the boy's bedroom. Vaguely psychic yet any formal language assigned its presence was entirely the synesthesia of his ill-rested, malnourished consciousness. Far away in identity, unbearably close in form. The energy like a kind of self-important pollution; deep below the register of what he could think & feel, like some private knowledge of decay deposited there at birth. 

His diminutive frame turned in the sheets, blanket, neither too cold nor too warm, yet a cocoon of something unwelcoming and repulsive. Hard disease in a weakling body. His eyes didn't part from sleep though a purposeful effort ascended from his hairless face and he muttered protest against a force as large as the night. 

This continued for perhaps an hour, perhaps ten minutes. If he had known the source of this perversion, if he could look into its black, deathly eyes, he may have, without reservation, committed to vote suicide with the most proximal device to hand no matter how crazy. 

Mercifully, the face of his gluttonous predator would be unknown for another year. 

His name was (and is) Spook McEntyre. He was born in the town of Waffle, New York, to a single-mother who had a good job who had a good job as activities director of the Waffle Senior Citizen Center, and he was at that time in the seventh grade at the Walter Bukowski Middle School even though he was two years older than anyone else in his classes. 

He had either underperformed or barely passed in every last subject, with Science, Gym, and Economics denoting the lowliest of these marks. On those profoundly rare occasions when he scored an 80 or better, the teacher would scrawl a brief note above his name (he'd hardly read it) the red, bloated letters, a foriegn, elaborate language that made him momentarily shrink smaller than usual. 

He made new friends every year (except for fourth grade, when he made no friends at all) and he lost new friends every year, when the inevitable turn to Summer deported all the smarter kids to their respective workcamps or to "the ethical preparation of young adults nearing the conquest of maturity." 

He didn't qualify for either. 

Instead, Spook McEntyre forced himself to sleep later -- when the focus and patience necessary to do that were graspable -- and he ate and ate and ate, pausing to change from one of the seven television channels to another and nothing else. He'd grown at a normal rate until his tenth birthday, when puberty was to invite itself sans formal permission, and everything inward bloomed at an intolerable rate, ony to halt and mildly subside three months later. (Those three months cut into him like a knife that deposited blood into the body.) 

All of this compounded by the absence of a father. All of this like fingers gouging his throat. 

He had taken to leaving his room in the smallest hours of the day, when the unseen sky was a robust shade of blue, going down to the basement of their 3-bedroom house. There were never clothes when he opened the door of the dryer. Only the hollow, definite space of metal that resonated through the damp air. So, he would place one foot inside it, turning carefully at the waist while bringing the other leg into its company before finding that curled purchase his body sung about even as the insect-like agitation of brainwave energy struggled and withered in his mind. In its restriction, the boy would feel the dense oppression of the house elevate tremendously in a regression towards what might as well have been the origin of all things. And he would discover an awesome vacancy that rendered the darkness of the house, the dryer into something words could never describe to satisfaction: and it grew wider, taller, grander still, throbbing, humming at the flowing edges of itself, until he enjoyed relief from all sensory input and excused himself from the dryer. 

In the proper hours of the morning, at breakfast, his mother would coldly study him from the kitchen sink, while he ate cereal, the intensity inside him undiscussed. 

 

3. 

Her right hand pushed into its respective kidney while her left  took casual purchase of the counter, marble sticky with the grease in the air as it spat and floated through the rectangular portal to the kitchen sizzling with the industry and angst of the cook as it leapt up into itself and the sweat and smell and chatter of everyone eating and working in the diner. Three or four on the stools that run the length of the counter with no less than one or two empty spaces between each of them. Another dozen occupying tables and booths talking in serious tones, the sound of it chewing at her ears while she struggled to unearth, to locate a rebound from within that might deliver her though the remaining two hours of her shift. She moved her hand from herself to the counter, arched her shoulders, neck, weakly sighed. Then without missing a beat the man nearest her beckoned from his coffee and eggs that he wanted a refill. She folded her eyes, slightly nodded then made an about-face to the coffee-pot, retrieved it, and poured the man his coffee. 

"Are you new here?" 

She most certainly was not. "I most certainly am not." 

"Sure? You look new." 

While she hardly needed make-up, while her hair showed virtually no sign of her 61 years on this planet, while her figure maintained a positively glorious shape of D-cup breasts and a sexy bulge at her waist beneath her waitress's uniform, she undoubtedly could not be mistaken for "new," whether in age, occupation, or anything else. 

"I come here a lot,"he said. She waited for him to elaborate on this, which he did not. 

So she politely nodded to confirm understanding, then turned again to replace the pot to the giant apparatus that was the coffee-machine. 

"Yeah," the man suddenly continued. "I've been attending this restaurant since 1952." He did not look more than 40 years old, making this seem like a mathematical impossibility. "I practically opened it." 

Again, attempting to be polite, she agreed with what the customer was saying. 

"My brother and I used t' come here after school for burgers and freedom fries. Twin brother. Except he was a minute older than me." The man then slightly wounded. "Not anymore though." 

She was tired, and indeed'd heard a million similar recollections. Yet a spark of joyful compassion would reliably move inside her when people volunteered these things. It was moving then. 

He continued: "He died from a cancer a few years ago. Lung cancer... Yeah. Couldn't have been more than 65 years old..." 

She was unable to suppress her perplexion. 

He noticed, immediately adding, "My brother regarded age rather subjectively. A curious fellow. Thomas never did things the way you'd expect them to be done. He'd always say, "You have to live in your own time." He even studded philosophy in school." Quickly explaining, "Back when philos'phy was still primited. Before a certain Smith Corzeff showed us what comes of that. Hmmph." He picked up his fork, cut and speared a piece of fried egg no larger than half a dime. "My name is Gene." 

Again, she nodded, pointed at the tag pinned on her uniform to save herself the breath. 

Then another man, about ten feet down the counter, called out, "Waitress?" Hands moving pavlovian back to the coffee-pot, she snapped from routine as he yelled, "Waitress: would you please stop what you're doing and come here." 

"Hhhhh..." 

His gasoline face as vicious as a razor, contemptuous eyes. "Need a favor," the words almost disembodied. He asked her to raise the volume of the television, which had been addressing the weather a moment before and was now disseminating recent details on the state of Tequistan, and the civil war that raged within its borders. 

Said the television: "Presiden Corzeff, via an intermediary, has made yet another flaccid proposal to the United States regarding its development of nuclear weapons. Quote-- The nation of Tequistan has never, in all of its 85 years of independence from those of its closest neighbors, either issued a single threat to the United States nor acted in violence, save the rarest moments when she had no other options but to react in self-defense; Tequistan has proven herself to be a peaceful ally in the world, [then] so it is with the utmost humility that we proffer the entry of American inspectors to discern any guilt, any wrongful action attributed to our manufacture of nuclear arms deemed in conflict with policies shared by our governments -- end quote." 

"You believe this shit?" said the man 

The waitress, who paid daily attention to the escalating animosity between Tequistan and America, had never, would never, possess consistent feelings regarding nuclear warfare. "I really don't know," she said. 

"It's a lot of fucking horseshit," he said. "That parasite would as soon sell the arms off his own mother before Tequistan was a peaceful nation. How long's that war been going on anyway?" 

"Waitress?" begged Gene from down the counter. 

"Excuse me," she said, then went to him. 

"I'll be needing my bill in a moment, but could you do something for me first?" 

"Yes. Of course." 

"Could I have a smile? I was thinking of my brother Thomas, and I wanted to see you smile." 

She couldn't look at anything. She wanted to cry. 

"Okay," Gene said. "Just the bill, then." 

Dead Husband 

She sat down to the kitchen table to study the boy. He'd spoken less and less in the past week, and the night previous, when she'd stood in his doorway, said, "I love you," then waited for a syrupy-thick ten seconds for him to reply, before switching off the light and closing the door, understanding he wasn't going to...she'd laid in bed distressed by the fact of this, teasing out some strategy should there be some strategy to tease out. 

Now, with the lazy, yellow morning strung between them and the kitchen (the house had been built without a separate dining area) Dorothea McEntyre had a certain epiphany. 

"You know, Spook," she said, "you can talk to me about anything you're thinking about. You don't have to keep things bottled up inside." 

He gravely continued to eat his cereal. 

"Do you like the cereal I bought?  Should I get some more?" Her eyes tempered with strange pity. 

He made a rather audible crunching sound as he scooped spoonful after spoonful of the sugary oats into his blonde face and whatever was left in the bowl drank his milk with him. He looked her coldly in the eye, waited for her to draw the top and bottom of her face together, then sad nothing. He didn't really know what he wanted to say. He undoubtedly wished to accuse her of something, could feel the pressure of it melting and glueing the melted portions together within him, though nevertheless couldn't utter the least beginning of it, not a suggestion, not even a wisecrack. So he continued to eat his cereal, sometimes counting each mouthful, sometimes not. 

Dorothea McEntyre studied her son, weighing the possibility he was an enemy. That he had been adopted and commanded by a power beyond her control and understanding. As if what she considered her motherly rights had been subverted to a cause severely cruel, severely alienating. Dorothea McEntyre's late husband often made her feel a similar way. She remembered him with a curious mixture of lust and erratic contempt, not unknown to drive her from her duties as activities director of the Waffle Senior Citizen Center in order to head across town to the Shooting Range Bar & Grille where she would, with the utmost cultural grace, order and consume one, then two, then three, then four 6 oz. martinis that she did not appear to hurry through yet were gone in scarcely one half hour. And on more than half of these occasions men of one quality and another would offer to pay for the drinks, in some cases with genuine altruism. 

But she never accepted, and she never regretted turning them down. The drinks were a kind of gesture to her gone husband (whose death she was unaware of during the first year of his absence). Having a stranger cover the cost of that alcohol, in Dorothea McEntyre's mind, would be about as decent (or indecent) as letting the stranger sleep in his grave. 

Her son poured another bowl of cereal. 

Dorothea McEntyre didn't see any point in this ridiculous silent treatment, nor could she precisely recall how much money she'd drawn out of the bank the week before (left in her purse) she opened his bedroom door one day to discover the window open, his backpack and some of his clothes missing, and nothing else to suggest he had no intention of returning. 

  To the Sea 5. 

No physician nor priest nor diviner of any tradition whatsoever would illustrate from without the absolute center of her memory. Wouldn't draw its outline to a stranger's understanding. She alone held said memory; not Prophet; not politician; not even God, whose ring she wore. 

The people in the diner knew this, whether keen or inexcusably stupid, they knew what resided in her belonged to her. 

Even as they issued pithy requests, spoiled on an empty nihilism, denizens of the Great City, people of every sex, class, generation echoed with the truth that souls never, have never gone to any body other than those suits of calcium, plasma, flesh which their formers have assembled upon them; memory obeys gravity as well. 

See her moving, down a sidewalk from the diner, away from the ineffable hostility and neediness of its patrons and their crowded filth and this ridiculous war and every lame piece of advice, every hollow declaration, every wasted moment of their lives. 

She was moving with a sense of purpose that itself was opening the channel of something dearly crucial to human hearts and the vessels that accommodate them. Something time alone can endure the inferno of. Something so pure its finish cannot be overtaken. 

Memories of him from 2 and one-fifth decades before, of a cup of coffee on Gilbert Avenue, his beard quite trim and his eyes a matching brown, conversation of her well-being, jokes about problems 50 Million miles away; God...she thought...I've met God and here we are making plans.... Then later dinner, earthly wine that went to her lips, as sweetly careful as his mouth would prove sweetly carefully in her room, experienced fingers that manipulated pleasure from her body, the glorious torture of ecstasy.... 

Nothing was tedious in those days. They were never formally married nor did she desire such a union: She knew where she allowed God to enter, he would enter. She gave him purchase and entry to the unreachable distance inside her, and he swam that heavenly river with an inscrutable agility, the dew of her flesh and her soul upon him, wet, viscous, grateful. 

And they had many years together, years to love, to sleep, to dream. Years when God became profoundly accustomed of his increasing invisibility on Earth. 

Years without blemish until that unlikely airplane came from the Atlantic, harbinger of a revelation that was waiting for so long. 

  To the Sea 

No physician nor priest nor diviner of any tradition whatsoever would illustrate from without the absolute center of her memory. Wouldn't draw its outline to a stranger's understanding. She alone held said memory; not Prophet; not politician; not even God, whose ring she wore. 

The people in the diner knew this, whether keen or inexcusably stupid, they knew what resided in her belonged to her. 

Even as they issued pithy requests, spoiled on an empty nihilism, denizens of the Great City, people of every sex, class, generation echoed with the truth that souls never, have never gone to any body other than those suits of calcium, plasma, flesh which their formers have assembled upon them; memory obeys gravity as well. 

See her moving, down a sidewalk from the diner, away from the ineffable hostility and neediness of its patrons and their crowded filth and this ridiculous war and every lame piece of advice, every hollow declaration, every wasted moment of their lives. 

She was moving with a sense of purpose that itself was opening the channel of something dearly crucial to human hearts and the vessels that accommodate them. Something time alone can endure the inferno of. Something so pure its finish cannot be overtaken. 

Memories of him from 2 and one-fifth decades before, of a cup of coffee on Gilbert Avenue, his beard quite trim and his eyes a matching brown, conversation of her well-being, jokes about problems 50 Million miles away; God...she thought...I've met God and here we are making plans.... Then later dinner, earthly wine that went to her lips, as sweetly careful as his mouth would prove sweetly carefully in her room, experienced fingers that manipulated pleasure from her body, the glorious torture of ecstasy.... 

Nothing was tedious in those days. They were never formally married nor did she desire such a union: She knew where she allowed God to enter, he would enter. She gave him purchase and entry to the unreachable distance inside her, and he swam that heavenly river with an inscrutable agility, the dew of her flesh and her soul upon him, wet, viscous, grateful. 

And they had many years together, years to love, to sleep, to dream. Years when God became profoundly accustomed of his increasing invisibility on Earth. 

Years without blemish until that unlikely airplane came from the Atlantic, harbinger of a revelation that was waiting for so long. 

****