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Especially the simple, way
(
2061
Reads
)
Posted by
Benjamin
Thursday, October 03, 2002
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It is Sunday, the seventh of July. The commencement of his 27th year on earth. He got to her house around eight, just as the golden light of Chicago was mellowing deeper. She invited him in, they sprawled on the couch. He was buzzing with a thousand thoughts, rumbling them into her belly with his mouth and vocal chords. So many people swirling in his field, tastes of old friendships, conversations with her and her and him and him. He rests there, face buried into her slight paunch, trying to put everything in place. (read on)
What do you want to do?
Dinner?
Sure. What? Where?
Lets walk.
Yeah.
They get up, strap on backpacks, decide against them. They exit out her two flat, hold hands and look around. Just walking next to her, he feels holy, in his palms. A quiet clean lightness, in his arms. A pressing contentment in his chest. They walk along the Chicago streets, taking time on corners and to look down alleyways at all the beautiful trash.
Spent fireworks litter the ground. She kicks at them with her ratty flipflops. She invents a brand new constellation named Swimming Trunks who rules and watches over them.
So I was walking down this street, she says, and I saw this fat man, sitting on those steps. He was filthy. He had sand all over his face and he was holding something and looking at it real closely. I was about to walk over to the other side of the street, but then the thing in his hands started moving. I wanted to see what it was. He was all sweaty and he had these thick glasses on and like sand all over his face, and when I got up to him, I saw that the thing he was holding was this pigeon. It didn't have any feathers, and its wings were only like half formed. He was calling it his Little Chicken in this sappyass tone of voice and I just stopped and stared at him and he didn't even notice me. So now I walk on this side of the street. He was ***** weird.
Patience nods his head, wants to laugh but just smiles, shivers. They find a nice pizza joint and walk inside.
"Just two?" asks the hostess.
Dimly lit corner, if you have one, answers Patience.
"Excuse me?"
Dimly lit corner, he repeats.
She looks puzzled. Kate chuckles. They're shown to a brightly lit, centrally located table. They sit. For the last twenty minutes or so, he's felt like a sandcastle, being erased by the tide. Grain by grain slipping away until he's more or less an indistinct lump, on the inside. When his butt hits the padded chair, the rest of what was leaving him sloshes out to sea.
He realizes with horror that he has nothing at all to say. He makes a few feeble attempts to float, conversationally. She surveys the room with a bright glad pair of eyes.
They discuss the murals. The Brady-Bunch feel of the architecture. They get a cup of crayons from their waiter, Scott the Spaniard, and doodle on the paper tablecloth.
You know Kate, I'm like totally empty right now. I have nothing to say. This isn't a reflection on anything but the fullness of my week.
Just relax, she dismisses, tracing the square ashtray and arranging botanical abstractions in and over and around it.
She talks about people and she talks about her past. Little stories like stones in a wall. She has this way of using two voices, one for guys and one for girls. The guys always sound as if they've been punched in the nose a few too many times, and the girls sound like whiny, sexually repressed librarians. She uses the same voice for her mom as she does the weathergirl. It's her way of critiquing the sexes. Something to the effect of: Women are like cartoon characters that take themselves too seriously; men are dumbasses. He wonders if he transcends these categories, if she does.
They get the eggplant parmesan pizza. Patience nibbles. The heat and the busyness of the city have sapped his appetite. Kate drinks her beer and is quiet for a moment.
So, he says, I just wanted to know if... if it bothers you, my whole God thing... I mean, it's very at the center of my life, and it's something that I talk about all the time... not like preaching, I hope, not like dad... but like all my experiences and stuff. It's something very important to me.
I know.
What does it make you feel? I mean, how do I come across?
She takes a moment to formulate her angles.
I remember, she says, the first time we went out, four years ago. We went to the beach. I asked you to tell me a story and you were the first boy who did. Who told me one. You're the only person since then, too... And then you asked me what I thought of God, and I didn't think much about God, but you got me thinking about it...,
The questions come and go. Every once in a while I try to sit down and figure out what I think about the whole thing. Sometimes I get sort of obsessed to figure it out. Me and Chris will get in these big discussions about it, and he'll try to disprove the existence of God, but after too long I'm like no, you can't do that. You can't do that with words,
I get silly sometimes, too. I get drunk and start thinking about it, and I'll say to myself Okay, if I see a shooting star right now, then God exists. And of course the stars never rain down...
He:
I remember about four years ago, actually, right before I met you, I was sitting on my back porch, and I was reading PensČes by Pascal or maybe one of Schopenhauer's tracts, and I looked up from the page, and I thought the word "God." I could feel the word right in front of me, I could taste all the connotations it carried, most of which had to do with my dad, not only in the psychological sense, the dad-as-God sense, but in the literal sense. All he taught me, all his lectures and opinions and beliefs about the Bible and God this and Jesus that,
So I was looking at this word, and suddenly I felt it burst apart, like a vessel, like a pot that's just gotten pumped full of the flipping sea. It exploded, shattered, right in my face. And when I could look around again, that word, that meaning for "God" now included everything. Everything dynamic and static, every mood, every state of existence was owned and included and encompassed in God,
And my dad, he really pushed me, really kinda hard, to be passionate about God, but at some point my experiences no longer matched up with his beliefs. Of course, we've had our share of wrestling sessions on the matter... but... but what I mean by God isn't something that can be figured out, but that essentially, whether we're conscious of it or not, whether we have a language for it or not, is being experienced all the time by all of us. It's just Life. Holiness. Ordinary Holiness. And the whole point is to access it, you know?
Patience looks down at his plate, feeling the cranks trying to turn more, faster, in his head. He sighs, evokes the emptiness, looks across at her. She says,
I know it's something simple.
It is.
It would have to be. But I still don't know where to place it. I try, I want, but I have a feeling that things will shift into place on their own. There's a lot of questions and a lot of answers and I'm twenty-two and don't think I have room to put them all away just yet.,
But no, it doesn't bother me when you talk about these things. Does it bother you that I don't think the same way?
He's about to say no, then mince that no apart, when he sees in the corner of his eye a procession of waiters and kitchen staff approaching them with a brown lump and a point of light.
The lump is a slice of chocolate torte, the point of light, a candle. They sing him happy birthday, which has got to be the least singable song this side of a hymnal. He studies the hostess the whole time, cause she obviously doesn't want to be doing this. He gets her to smile. The group dissipates back into the restaurant and Kate and Patience share an unembarrassed silence.
Make a wish, she says.
He gets quiet. Doesn't know what to wish for. Something about him and Kate. Something about the things that happen. That they happen on their own. And in a goodish sort of way. Something along those lines. He blows out the candle and picks up his fork.
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