This was how I thought as I dragged my sorry ass across that lawn, toward that wall, to that window and back to the orderlies’ smoke-sour break room.
38
Sometimes stories come and stop and go
Sometimes stories stop and go and go
Sometimes stories come and stop and come
Sometimes stories stop and stop and stop
Sometimes stories come and come and go
Sometimes Sometimes Sometimes come
Swing an ax at my head, brother Billy, brother Billy
Swing an ax at my head, brother Billy mine
Swing an ax at my head, brother Billy, brother kill me
Swing an ax at my head for I haven’t got the time.
A pistol in the first act and all of that. I could hear the plaintive cries of juvenile crows most of the time in that late summer. I wondered when the cries would mature. Would they one morning be the sounds of adult crows or would the change come in the middle of the caw? Would that adult sound be approached? There it is, there it is, almost, almost there, ahhhh, there it is. However it is, so it is with age. And when do two things that are in fact the same thing converge and negate any notion of their ever having been anything but one thing? When does Cicero become Tully? When does the morning star become the evening star? When does nobody in particular become nobody at all?
If I am to create you, me, them, or you create me, you, them, then you or I have to do something to allow that making, so that there is making, making, almost there, made. As long as an individual is traced out only in repose, in some milieu, its, his, her critical qualities and essential attributes can only be stated but not created. A lesson I learned from god in that story about the first and loveliest, and no doubt overly tended, garden. It was one thing to have A and E (possibly universal and existential statements, respectively) lying about, but finally somebody’s got to fuck up or fuck somebody or fuck the wrong somebody. Then you’ve got yourself a story. Then you’ve got yourself a world.
This whole business of making a story, a story at all, well, it’s the edge of something, isn’t it? Forth and back and back and forth, it’s a constant shuttle movement, ostensibly looking to comply with some logic, someone’s logic, my logic, law, but subverting it the entire time. Like a good little wog. But, eh, don’t listen to an old man. I’m firing semantic blanks or, at least, filling them in. My son would laugh right about here. Or I would. Why do anything? That’s what I keep asking and then I remember I said to my son, or he said to me, that it’s not what you’ve made that will give you peace, that the only thing you get to take with you is having made it. Blah, blah, blah.
Sometimes I think about these things and I am taken back to my childhood. I perceived much of it as boring or painful, but that is growing up, isn’t it? I spent most of my time attempting to pass beneath the worrying radar of my mother. True that one cannot complain about such worry in any concrete way, but it was annoying and, more often than not I feared, a function of her narcissism rather than any real selflessness. Photographs of me then show a youth with red, tired eyes, not quite sullen but numbed eyes, perhaps. Boredom was my worst enemy, but not the kind that sprang from idleness, as I read and wrote quite a bit, but from a nagging lack of engagement with the world outside my thoughts, stricken every day by a tenacious noonday devil who would whisper from my shoulder that I should return to the sad, torpid world, as if I was some hermit who had left it. I ignored the devil then because he seemed too poorly informed and dressed; I had never been allowed to actually join the world. But then I did, first by climbing into it, then by walking into it until it was over my head and lungs, and a world with the world turned out to be as boring as a world without, only with more embarrassing moments and better jokes. The world seemed to me suited to people who smoked cigarettes, for they appeared to create their own weather.
Still 38
Emily was in a wheelchair and that was where she should have been. Still, without being bossy, as that was not her nature, she got to wherever she wanted to go, and I was the one pushing her. She was not faring well and it was clear that her being lost in her head featured a return to her craft, namely, logic, and so she seemed to speak in riddles. As when she said to me while I poured my cup of tea, You would do well to remember Zermelo’s theorem.
I’m certain that’s true, I said to her. And what does that theorem state?
That every set can be well ordered.
Well ordered?
A set is well ordered if every nonempty subset of that set has a least element under the specified ordering.
A least element?
An element that is less than or equal to any other element in a set.
And so it went. I hoped that when dementia settled in on me that I would be as obscure and as interesting as Emily Kuratowski. So it went, until one morning she asked, Are we going? I ask because I am not afraid.
You’re not.
You should not be either. Make it what you want. Make it exactly what you want.
I nodded. Then I will not be afraid either, my friend.
39
The exterior wall in the orderlies’ break room. Turns out it was real after all and I held the ancient key that would open it. Emily Kuratowski sat in her wheelchair beside me, she having confessed to being sent by you to escort me through the door and, well, I might as well stop here. Emily is stopping me here, mainly because she refuses to be called a Virgil and because she, as I, we, simply cannot bring ourselves to play dumb enough to entertain any business about the circles of hell or about eternal torment, punishment, restraint, or whatever bugs and annoys the Christian souls that love to read Dante over and over. We will not pass through limbo or Limbo (is it a place with a proper name?), will not climb up and over any hairy-backed demons, wrestle with she-wolves, chat with Horace and Ovid, take joy in watching the anguish of our evil enemies. Nice poem, is all I’ll say. But hell? Abandon hope, all who think there are gates. We will only acknowledge that there is a door and then realize, rather rightly, that it is not set into that exterior wall but leaned up against it, waiting to be taken home by some simpleminded employee, probably Harley, who no doubt needs a door to hell in his basement, or maybe by Leon, who needs really big doors.
So, why are we standing here? Emily Kuratowski asked. Rather, why are you standing? I’m sitting of course.
Because tomorrow is my birthday, I said.
How old will you be?
Seventy-nine.
A baby.
What will they do to us if they find us in here?
They’ll ask us why we’re here.
What will you tell them?