Author: Brad Zellar

The kind of thing that always happens to me is I’ll go to the store to buy a book on what happened when and I’ll get lost and confused once I get there, forget what I drove out there for, and end up with a book on how to cook things in fifteen minutes, which I certainly don’t need since everything I cook –or, rather, eat– takes less than fifteen minutes to prepare. Most of it doesn’t even involve any preparation at all, unless you consider tearing open a bag of Twizzlers with your teeth a sort of preparation.

But the point I’m trying to make is that I won’t get the book I wanted in the first place –the what-happened-when book– and by the time I get home with the book I didn’t want and don’t need I won’t even remember why I wanted the other book to begin with.

I don’t remember things, I guess you could put it that way. Or: I’m easily confused, or perhaps just plain confused. Which, now that I think of it, was probably why I wanted the what-happened-when book after all.

I also have this problem where I don’t feel like anything. Has that ever happened to you? I mean really don’t feel like anything. I’d even go so far as to say that I don’t feel anything, period, if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t feel like anything, which I suppose might qualify as feeling something.

The day the world ended, God sat quietly alone in a huge room, alternately dozing off and turning the pages of a fat scrapbook. God could remember everything, and this no doubt saddened Him.

Far below Him there were, here and there, people floating in boats and still –many of them, anyway– praying. There were also a number of people, those who had spent years planning and waiting for the end of the world, who were holed up in places where the water and the destruction had not yet arrived. Some of them were high up on mountains or hidden away in caves deep in the earth. Like the people in the boats, these others were given additional time to pray and puzzle over the position in which they found themselves.

It was more and more difficult for any of these survivors to think of this additional time as any kind of blessing, yet still the most desperate –and they were all, of course, desperate– prayed in their terror for survival. They still wanted to live.

The purest among them prayed for forgiveness.

One man, alone in a valley deep in the mountains somewhere, managed to live in ignorance, and then denial, for a number of days. When he finally recognized the seriousness of what had occurred, the man ventured out into the valley, where there was still green grass and patches of bright flowers. And there in the middle of this valley the man eased a kite up into what was left of the sky.

Seeing this –the man in the high grass, staring up with a smile of unmistakable joy on his face at the ragged kite rattling in the wind– God’s heart stirred.

Never quite the bottom, and still rising. That old mystery: buoyancy. The body’s ability to float, the mind similarly gifted.

Emerging in a green world, seemingly intent on growing ever greener. The clear, bright splendor of other blooming and glistening things. The furtive kingdom, underworld, underfoot, moving in the shadows at midnight, creeping in the wet grass.

How much around us is ignorant of all the stuff that hardly matters? What do you care? How much? Show me, please. Catalog your cares. Defend your carelessness.

When the sun goes missing, gets overrun, falls, sinks –what becomes of your heart? Can you see in the dark, sense the things still moving, growing, settling, quietly disappearing? How would you characterize your retreat?

Go ahead, keep it to yourself, hold it all close. You’ll be carried along nonetheless; you’ll go somewhere whether you like it or not.

Older, you start to recognize the obvious and unavoidable things that have been there in you all along. You aren’t what you once were. The seasons startle you like never before. You can’t sleep through the sun.

And every morning you open the closet and confront your stories. Your old shoes –there seem to be more of them by the year– are your most reliable historians, prompts, the scrapbook of who and where you’ve been and what you’ve allowed yourself to love.

And the thing is, it doesn’t make you sad at all anymore, or barely.

He had gone up in his rocket again and again and returned to earth each time with a renewed sense of wonder. Even so, with each return it was harder to come back down. Or, rather, it was harder to be down.

He’d gradually grown accustomed to the feeling of being out of this world, up there where he had such a clear and dazzling view of the planet on which he was such a small and insignificant thing trapped in the strange habit called life; the planet where he was carried along through the days, surrounded on all sides by other moving and breathing things, things in a hurry to get to wherever it was they felt they had to be; harried by distractions and responsibilities and burdens, by the clutter of all the things they built and inhabited and owned and desired.

He felt so free when he was floating above it all, and the perspective also gave him a feeling of joy and gratitude that was harder to come by in the midst of the often pathetic reduction that too often passed itself off as existence.

His rocket was an old and relatively simple contraption, yet difficult to maintain all the same. It was built to carry two, and could not, in fact, fly with only a solitary passenger. Its operation was only possible through the work and cooperation of a duo of committed rocketeers.

As a result there were long and unfortunate stretches in his life when his rocket was grounded, yet even then his dreams were filled with visions of the things he had seen and felt on his many journeys, and there was a kind of bittersweet solace in this.

For years I lived in a rooming house where I shared a bathroom with a giant and a mermaid. The mermaid spent a lot of time in the bathtub. The giant had dodgy hygiene, generally poor social skills, and a full head of bright red hair. There was often discussion around the place as to whether or not he dyed his hair. I found this unlikely, given his otherwise clear indifference to appearance.

The giant often lurched around the house in baggy trousers, slippers, a dirty, sleeveless tee-shirt, and fraying Budweiser suspenders. The mermaid took most of her meals in her room; it was apparently difficult for her to get up and down the stairs without the assistance of her handler, a shiftless, gaunt character who was often incapacitated by alcohol and purported bouts of severe depression. This fellow may or may not have been the mermaid’s boyfriend; I was never entirely clear on this point.

The mermaid made a lot of noise in the bathtub, thrashing around and gurgling.

Besides the giant and the mermaid –who were performers in a third-rate circus that was on indefinite hiatus– there was also a fat little man, obscenely hirsute, who delivered newspapers and wasn’t bashful about his enjoyment of pornography. Our landlady was an imposing woman who spoke very little English. Near as I could tell she was Austrian, and pious to the point of misery.

I was living in this place because I was myself a down-on-my-luck Christian who had lost my life savings and my home on an ill-advised business scheme that involved inserting Bible verses in fortune cookies. I’d been roped into this venture by an old Bible college roommate.

We’d had absolutely no idea what we were doing, and had grossly overpaid for a failing and outdated fortune cookie operation in a lousy industrial neighborhood. Things went downhill in a hurry. Further downhill, I should say; there had never actually been anything even remotely resembling an ascent, or even a plateau. No, truth be told, we were plunging from the get-go. Right away we ended up having to spend a good deal of our capital on repairing the machinery, and we never did manage to get the printing press to work. When we finally got around to producing our first batch of cookies we had to type up the fortunes on an electric typewriter, run them off on a copy machine at Kinko’s, and cut them by hand.

Neither of us had the personality for sales, and the Chinese wanted nothing to do with our idea. Even the religious stores and Christian gift shops turned us down cold.

In the midst of this hare-brained disaster my wife filed for divorce and left me for a guy who sold elevators. That’s how it was explained to me, anyway. I suppose somebody has to sell elevators, and I have to imagine they’re expensive as all get out.

My business partner, meanwhile, parted ways with the Lord in spectacular fashion. He started drinking heavily and cracked up his car. He also began to use language I didn’t approve of, stopped showing up at the office, and finally disappeared entirely. I certainly understand that a failing business will try a man’s faith, and wherever he now is, I’m as willing as the Good Lord to forgive my old partner his sins, despite the predicament he left me in.

When I was eventually evicted from my home I realized I didn’t have a penny to my name. I had a yard sale, sold everything I had left with the exception of a small wardrobe, a scrapbook of old photos, and my Bible, which I’d received on my Holy Communion. I found a job at an Auto Mart and moved into the rooming house the same day.

The rooming house was a short walk from my new job, and everyone else I worked with at the place was a foreigner, including the owner. None of them had any interest in being saved, and I learned to keep my mouth shut.

He needed to get rid of some of this shit –the books and magazines, the photographs of his war and the places he’d been and the things he’d seen. He needed to get out from under that story; it kept things too fresh for him, even as what he had actually experienced became more unreal all the time.

It had too long been a comfort to him to be able to say, Here, here is the document, this is my testimony, these are accounts of what my life once was and what it has never come all the way back from. It was a terrible thing –the thing itself, but also these other things that kept him paralyzed in a confusing series of moments and images– and had cost him friends and family.

He couldn’t help himself, though; he would buy each new book as it came out, oddly thrilled to have one more corroboration, another opportunity to retrace those old memories.

He now had literally hundreds of books on the war, thousands of images and accounts at his fingertips, and he had studied the thing backwards and forwards, from every imaginable vantage point, and he still couldn’t quite find whatever it was he had been and what the experience had done to him. It wasn’t –as some people tried to claim– that it was something he couldn’t bring himself to forget, but rather that the continued appearance of these books, films, and television programs somehow seemed to keep alive and acknowledge the one monstrous bit of history that he could call his own.

He would spend hours scrutinizing each picture and frame, looking for familiar faces, recognizable terrain, some piece of information that rang true or jibed somehow with his own experiences. He was looking for the war he recognized, but also for the war he’d missed, looking, ultimately, for any little thing that could make sense of the experience, anything that might somehow explain it all away.

He didn’t want justification. He’d never spent any time looking for that. From the beginning he’d taken it for granted that the thing would never make any sense. He was looking for something that would untangle the things that were all knotted up inside him. It had, though, long since reached a point where he could no longer really explain what he was looking for, or even what he was looking at.

Some of the photographs could still stir up hot, dark things in him, could still leave him blinking in disbelief. He’d been in an ambush north of Saigon with the photographer Henri Huet, who was blown up in a helicopter several years later. They’d been trapped in high saw grass that morning, pinned down by AK-47 fire from the trees. Soldiers were dropping all around him by the dozens, and there was Huet, crawling around in the midst of the carnage, intently shooting away with his camera. For years he’d studied Huet’s images in books, but nothing ever looked even remotely familiar.

That wasn’t my war, he’d think. That wasn’t the way it was. Frozen like that, those paralyzed black-and-white images couldn’t come close to capturing the terrifying jumble and blur and gulping stop-time panic of those moments of ferocious noise and chaos. The silence in the pictures was all wrong; he’d never known a single moment of such mute repose as he saw in photographs of even the most unimaginable horrors. The photos were too condensed; too much was lost in the cropping. For every one image of frozen suffering there were dozens, even hundreds, sprawled outside the frame, and worse, stretching backwards and forwards from that one moment seized from the larger nightmare. And each of those moments, fuzzed out to its furthest and most chaotic borders, had its own raging soundtrack, was blown over with the most fearsome, inconceivable, full shitstorm racket of war.

Still, looking at those pictures got things running in him every time, summoned the old noise in his head and straightened him up wide-eyed and gulping.

After his wife left him he sat around drinking and paging through books, listening to Sonny Rollins drill holes in the air around him. Or he would sit at his window –he lived in a small attic apartment, and had one window– looking out at what was on occasion a busy street. Yet sometimes he would sit there and not see anything moving for what seemed like hours at a time. It made things questionable, big things like consciousness. Was he awake? Was he dreaming? Was he even still alive, even real?

He seldom ate. His appetite was like a very slight shadow that would surprise him from time to time. He suspected that there wasn’t a single one of his neighbors that could have picked him out of a lineup.

Was it too much? Was it too hard? It could be, he supposed. It sometimes was.