All the Splendor
BUT CONSIDER: THE UNSPOKEN SPACE BETWEEN EACH STEP, THE NEAR-ENTIRETY OF THE CONTINUOUS WHICH IS NOT PART OF THE DISCRETE, THOSE MOMENTS WITH ONE FOOT ON THE GROUND AND THE OTHER ALOFT
The glory of God, a second sun, burned just above the hills. It was midday. He paused then, and scanned the range occupying something like his attention. The path he followed would skirt one of its members, dive between two others, and (hopefully) deposit him on the other side in a single unchipped piece. The muted tones of dying leaves and the hills’ scrubgrass; the dirt packed to a dusty cement by fellow travelers, his predecessors; a gentle breeze sounded by the rustling of what foliage still remained—these sensory blandnesses smeared his attention like grease over a lens. Above and before him rose the hills, husks of a vertical supremacy long ago worn down by the same inexorable and inexhaustible force binding man to earth. He had stopped as the path curved – behind him and to the left it stretched – and he found himself staring over the bend, exactly away from both where he had come and where he would continue, staring just over the crest of the hills.
It was cooler and still the sky withheld. In the water line, a breath of wind swept the hair off her shoulders and the flitting motion in his peripheral vision drew his gaze. He lived a whole lifetime before the wind died. He saw her face light up his nights, her stride quicken his own, her neck’s somehow-fluid ivory column twist and flex and follow his every move. Ten feet: it could have been ten thousand or one in that moment—all time ebbing out toward infinity, all space collapsing to meaninglessness, the Absolute distended horribly, beautifully. But the line moved and the vision died. He did his best not to stare as she walked back his way. Passing him, she stumbled and her face distorted itself in panic – she was especially beautiful then, he thought perversely and with the clarity that comes only when a thought knows its own ugliness – as legs tangled, bodies swayed, water sloshed, and she tumbled into him, looking into his dusty face and seeing God-knows-what. And water had spilled – they were each soaked at the thighs – but it took another gust and the accompanying chill for them to notice. They sat at his asthenic heater and shivered that cold night, the first. This was fall.
While walking, he often felt a poison seeping up through his legs, a tingling at each joint. What would have been tedium, banality, ennui a generation ago – restlessness in the suffocating plush of ease – had become a noxious sedative, something like a heavy metal. The toxin accumulating, scaling the food chain and crippling those winners at its apex, augmenting their joy-in-being to abject, disoriented horror—he felt it corroding his nervous system, his volition. Legs trembling and lead rising to his brainstem, he would count his steps, count the steps propelling him further along the path and thus no further into despair. He would stare at his feet, stare at his feet traveling alone, stare at the near-wretched condition of his boots, stare at their flapping tongues and creased toes, stare at all these moving parts of a moving whole. He would stare and count and his near-paralysis would subside and he would walk yet further.
But consider: the unspoken space between each step, the near-entirety of the continuous which is not part of the discrete, those moments with one foot on the ground and the other aloft. But also consider: the passivity of night. Waves crashed upon him in the interregnum between consciousness and sleep, plunging him under icy water. Roiled in merciless surf, bobbing down and up like a child’s submarine toy, gasping salty air, now water, now air, now dust, a mouthful – he slept on his stomach, always – and he was awake: wide, obscenely awake in the barren night. Blood pounded under his temples. Every noise elicited a response.
A wool blanket tearing faintly at her chapped hands, his hands clasping hers, their bodies braided not first by love but animal necessity. This was winter. The river frozen black, reflecting the sky’s ashen nothingness, the cold biting up through rubber soles and patched socks and traveling right to the core. Coils on his heater a dull orange, the only light in his room on those nights.
Dmitri brought a stew, and when they went to return the pot, a hacking widow’s rasp forbade them entry.
He sat beside the road, sipping from his scummy metal water bottle, and tried to gauge a river flowing between the path and the hills. Its lazy flow did not inspire confidence, and he had enough water left to be selective. A good river, rushing clear and cold—the mental image pricked his bladder. He turned away from the water and opened his fly, the urge to reverse-face prompted by vivid imaginings of urine seeping through soil and roots and rocks and, driven by his directing it irresponsibly waters-ward, blooming a pale yellow cloud in the river, poisoning him and those who would follow. Bodies falling amidst dust, their origin and destination. Bodies subjected to rot and putrefaction and all the horrors of decay, leaving at the end of it all only polished ivory. He turned away from the river toward the bend and, as his stream tumbled through his last few inches of piping, he saw figures in the distance.
They arose. The air vaguely florid and just short of cold, she asked if he would come for a walk. This was spring. The buds of crooked elms and sprawling oaks in the park looked fragile as crystal in the piercing, coruscant sunlight. The sun still hung low; she was an early riser, loving the freshness and the peace and the way the birds sang only for her. And why wouldn’t they. She seemed surprised to have dragged him out, glancing over occasionally, checking that he was still alongside her so profoundly early. He caught one of these glances and thought it not altogether fair.
They were alone in the park, amidst the weedy expanse stretching down toward the trash-strewn river’s edge and the poorly-maintained playground and the worse-maintained amphitheater. Still a place, the park, where children would play on sunny or cloudy or windy days, massed, shouting – sources of swirling, kaleidoscopic chaos once they left school. Sources of amusement and frustration and responsibility and a vague hope and a vaguer sinking dread, driving his gaze to the dirty water. Silhouettes there, glancing back at them from the wretched beach—they were not alone in the park. He looked at her, saw her scrutinizing the nubile crowns of oak ringing their sad gray-green circle for something she had not seen since her youth, though neither he nor she knew what. A voice called out and she started. He, still watching her, started too. Despite the warming air, despite its stillness, their gaits quickened and their shoulders curved as if fighting a biting wind. Hey stop, and the shadows broke into a run and beat them to the exit and planted themselves before them. And he stepped forward and spoke and groaned and swore – knees, torso, face to ground and the sharp crescendo of metal gliding into place as the sun reflected off her palm-out hand, dispersing all darkness.
There were four and what looked to be a pullcart stacked high with belongings. He clumsily searched for her steel among his effects. Glancing up, he saw their strides were human and capable—from this distance, he could tell nothing more. In the pack, his searching hand rested upon the metal, ominously cold in the cramped heat. He had planned to eat lunch here, the calm and God over the mountains nourishing him, but he slung his pack back over his rounded shoulders and continued down the road toward the group, she in his pocket held tightly.
Fifty paces, and they were just as opaque. A hundred, and a baritone voice called out, the greeting metrical and short of friendly. Two hundred, and he could see faces, men’s, women’s, hard. Two hundred and fifty, and they met at the center of the path. Approaching, his hand squeezed tighter in his pocket. His nails dug into his palm. The dorsal tendons of his wrist spasmed in protest. But then he saw her—a woman who could have been his grandmother, a woman with knobby joints and liver-spotted arms and eyes clouded over like ice covering turbid water, a woman riding with the bags in the pullcart as if she were luggage herself. His hand spilled from his pocket gratefully, but owing to some cramp or fluke of his pocket’s fabric, the knife spilled out with it and clattered on the hard-packed dirt.
The big man pulling the cart set down his load and laughed.
They ate in silence, spoons from can to mouth to can and back again, fast but never sloppy. All but the old woman faced away from the sun, glad for the rest for their eyes and the warmth on their necks, but she, eating sparingly, sat with her milky eyes set on the brightness, not soaking but searching. Her head craned upwards and a hawk, soaring high in peripatetic circles, followed her sight as the other five watched it fly. Ah, the big man spoke to him, like us! He goes where the winds take him and they find him all he needs.
Yes, like you.
The temperature rose and rose. There were few pleasant days. The blacktop shimmered, eddies formed and swirled and vortexed over the many cracks, the trees called for mercy, the crabgrass gave up and crisped. The beach grew cleaner merely because there was more of it, cracked and exposed beside a brown, staid river. Nights were festive; men and women gave days to sleep and nights to the remainder, and thus exploded a beautiful chaos. Even she no longer rose early; even she lazed away in hibernative rest. They draped thick, yellow-white sheets over their windows and ran a fan and escaped to Paolo-with-the-air- conditioner’s on the worst days, those when the air grew so humid you could feel water collecting in your lungs, drowning you in slow torture; those when succumbing to sleep seemed tantamount to chaining yourself to a boulder and throwing yourself into the sea. In the evenings, they would rise, soaked, and join the nascent cacophony half-muffled by their improvised shades. In the same darkness that in winter stripped the streets of human spirit, that wiped every trace of consciousness from the blacktop, the streets now flowed with rejoicing in everything regained and everything not yet lost, with God and Man and Truth and Beauty, with everything the jealous sun would sear away come morning.
The water bittered. One night she retired early and woke up in chills at noon. He left, stumbled through the pounding heat, gathered water, and returned, washing her forehead and holding her pallid hands. Her eyes were far, and he whispered to her until they closed and she passed into quaking, violent sleep. He knelt beside the bed, stroking her cheekbones. As the sun set and the streets swelled with noise, he slept in the posture of one before an altar.
He woke to movement—day again, and light shone into the room in dusty rays. Stumbling to his feet, he heard her moan and reached to hold her and he smelled it before he saw it; it was awful, the horror of knowing exactly what one will see. The tall post of sunlight entering between their shades connected two pools in the sheets, one black-red and one yellow-red, and a sob of pain ripped from her throat and she evacuated again, the expectation and the sound worse than all the rest, all else background to those life-negating horrors. He sunk a rag, clean, in water and lifted it to her lips, but she would not drink; she tasted it and turned away. Please, please, and there was only so far her head could turn, and he wrung the cloth into her mouth and willed her to swallow.
At night, the fan sang softly and her eyes returned. She drank and he moved to wash her and she let him. The room smelled of death.
In the next day’s torrid heat, she faded and he convinced, begged Paolo to let him use it. Six men to carry it and guard it. He installed it by himself in the fetid room, watched the cool air flow over her body, watched her eyes open, relieved, unclamped. And, with a terrible whine, the power dropped. The din of fans and air conditioners ceased in an instant, the whole block’s noise fleeing like a breeze. He watched her writhe, watched her face screw up as an infant’s, watched sweat bead on her forehead and run in rivulets down her brow and over her jawline and down the side of her neck. She spoke none, but gasped and panted and he came near. And then: nothing. She expired. In gold-flecked blades of light, he cradled her amidst her filth.
This was summer.
He finished eating and rose, offering his empty can to the big man. No, the man motioned to the pullcart, we’re set. He shrugged and put it in his own pack. While he wrestled the lumpy canvas back onto his shoulders, the man spoke again. It’s no less broken where you’re headed.
So they say.
He walked on past the pullcart and heard the old woman speak for the first time. You are not Abraham, said she. What God has taken, he will keep.
His stride unbroken, he walked further, the sun behind him lighting his hair ablaze. One two three four five six seven. The glory of God still burning above the hills.