Category: Blog Post

Whoever, so as to simplify problems, denies the existence of certain obligations has, in his heart, made a compact with crime.

—Simone Weil, The Need For Roots

How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o how strange. O how funny and strange.

—Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth

The town I found myself in had a surprisingly nice public library where I could spend a couple hours checking my email, reading the newspaper, and browsing through books on local history.

At the back of this library there was a spacious and sunny enclosed porch that jutted out over what might have been either a lake or a swollen river. I could have probably found the answer to that question in one of the local history books, I suppose, but I wasn’t that curious.

Through the big glass windows of this porch I stood and watched as they dragged a body out of the lake or river almost directly beneath me.

I couldn’t tell you where I was if you pasted my mugshot on a wall map that had all of the place names printed in big, black letters. I saw them drag that body out of the water, though. It was hard to miss that. I saw them heave the body from the water and drag it through the tall grass along the bank. You couldn’t really tell what it was other than, unmistakably, a body. The guys who did the dragging were wearing plastic gloves, and there were a lot of guys wearing plastic gloves; it seemed like everybody that was standing around wanted to have a hand in pulling that body from the water.

I watched as they wheeled the shiny black bag away and tucked it inside an ambulance.

It was a small town, that much I know, and every cop, firefighter, and news reporter in town was down there, as well as the usual mob of kids on bikes and old folks out walking dogs.

Later, on the local TV station, I heard the body had been some eighty-eight-year-old woman. I was on the bed in a motel room when I learned this news. They said it appeared the woman had been in the water for quite a long time. They knew her name, and showed a photo of her on the screen, a shot that looked like it might have been from a church directory.

A little fucking town like that and nobody had even reported her missing.

Let me tell you something: if you fall off this planet you can fall for a long time, and much of that time you won’t even feel like you’re falling.

So this is the advice I can offer you today: Hold on.

Gravity is sometimes brutal, but it’s at the very least a sort of connection and binding, and as such is mostly a beautiful thing, and beautiful things are blessings.

That much, at least, I believe.

For fifteen years I’d been waiting for the news that this poor, skinny fucker had turned up dead in a place just like this, but here he was, (barely) living proof that it didn’t require much in the way of cooperation and commitment to simply keep on breathing.

It had probably been at least seven years since I’d last seen him, and he’d lost even more weight, pounds you wouldn’t think he could afford to lose. He seemed to have a permanent case of pneumonia.

He claimed he was installing countertops, this wrecked moron who was probably the most brilliant person I’d ever known. Once upon a time he had been, anyway.

For several weeks I’d harbored the nagging idea that I wanted to see him. At the moment, I felt surprisingly fine –pretty good, really, if not quite like the old days– but looking at him nodding off on the floor of that motel room I knew that I had nonetheless been mistaken. It would be just my luck if the fucker finally kicked in a room registered under my name.

He was sitting maybe three feet from the television, propped up against the foot of one of the beds, making a sort of instinctive, animal effort to watch Sports Center through fluttering eyes. Earlier I’d tried to rouse him to get him to clean his blood off the bathroom sink.

Twenty years he’d been playing with needles and he still made a mess. He was so fucked up he’d either missed the vein or popped it.

I wasn’t nearly as fearless as I’d once been, and was flat on the bed when the first wave rolled over me. I threw up in a plastic garbage pail.

“I’ll bet you never thought you’d feel that way again,” he said.

“This isn’t going to be my life,” I said. “It never was.”

“Of course,” he said. “You were always just an adventurer.” I knew this was him trying to be nasty, the best effort he had in him.

“Who buys this shit and pays for your motel rooms when I’m not around?” I asked.

“There’s always money,” he said. “Or there’s always people with money. I have a place, you know. The motel was your idea.”

I knew he had a place. I also knew I didn’t want to see it.

He had a weird and mysterious knack; no matter where he was –and he had been lots of places– he always seemed to know how to find drugs. Even in a dinky, jerkwater town like this he had his connections.

“Do you remember if there were Tecatos around back when you walked away?” he asked.

“No idea,” I said. “What are they?”

“Mexican junkies,” he said. “I work with a couple of them. They’re always plugged into something, although a lot of what they come up with is actually Fentanyl, and I’m not sure they know the difference.”

This was a guy who’d changed the direction of my life, and there were a lot of good, enduring things that I’d learned from him, along, of course, with the things that weren’t so good. There was a time when he’d had a real gift for discovering interesting things, in a place where that wasn’t so easy to do, and I’d once admired him more than anyone I knew.

I don’t know what happened to him, beyond the obvious things that had happened to him. I’d long since lost interest in trying to figure it out.

I think the last thing he said to me before he nodded off was, “Remember what you said to me that one time?”

“I don’t suppose I do,” I said.

I slept, which had been what I was really after, and when I woke up he was gone. I honestly can’t recall the last time I felt such a huge sense of relief.

How strange.

Do you see how much that poor creature has in its hands?

And yet you’ve never known anyone with emptier arms.

Look Closely: This Picture Is A Metaphor

Is anybody alive out there? Would you care to show yourselves or produce some general murmur to announce your presence?

This darkness is oppressive, and surely more blinding than light. I can’t see you, and I have no true way of knowing that you exist. Thankfully, however, my presumption apparently knows no bounds. I’m willing to presume all manner of foolish and seriously misguided things. This trait, I suppose, is a sort of protective delusion. I’m not sure, frankly, that I could live without it, or at least without some equally pathetic variant of it.

There are, I’ll admit, occasionally spells in which I like to imagine you –and first, of course, I have to imagine you, which is no small feat– huddled out there in a great, or even a rather modest, sea of bodies, pressed together in the darkness or even just scattered sort of randomly about, and holding aloft cigarette lighters in mass –or minor, or whatever the opposite of mass would be– tribute to my non-existent gifts.

I shout things like, “Hello, Minneapolis!” Or, “How’s everybody doing out there tonight?” Typical things, really, but I’ll also sometimes find myself yelling more atypical things along the lines of, “What am I doing, and why am I doing it?” Or, even more ridiculously, “How am I doing? Does my hair look okay?” Or: “Is there really any reason at all that I should carry on with this nonsense?”

And I can tell you emphatically that as blinding as the darkness can be, the silence is positively deafening. It’s unnerving, to be completely honest with you (as if, of course, such a thing were even remotely possible), and some nights it just flat out makes me keen myself red-faced and hoarse.

I wish I could say that this was somehow cathartic.

I began by telling him how dissatisfied I was with the idea that life must be a lesser thing than we were capable of imagining it to be. I had the feeling that the same thing happened to nearly everybody I knew and whom I did not know. No sooner was their youth, with the little force and impetus characteristic of youth, done, and they stopped growing. At the very moment that one felt that now was the time to gather oneself together, to use one’s whole strength, to take control, to be an adult, in fact, they seemed content to swap the darling wish of their hearts for innumerable little wishes.

—Katherine Mansfield, from her journal

Come and get these memories.

—Martha and the Vandellas

There was a culvert down there that would take you right back into the mountain. In the spring, or whenever it rained, the thing would rush with run-off water that would fill the little creek and turn it for a time into a roaring, dirty river. During dry spells, however, you could walk ankle-deep in clear water way back into the cool darkness of the culvert, right into the belly of the mountain. A normal-sized man wouldn’t even have to stoop.

When everything started to go to hell and the men came across the fields in their black helmets and set fire to farm houses and barns, the people who lived in the little villages that were spread out across the countryside packed up their most essential possessions and took up residence in the mountain culvert.

Eventually the villagers established an elaborate community in the culvert, and started excavating further into the mountain on all sides. They set up partitions and built elaborate housing warrens for individual families and tribes. At one end the essential flow of water into the culvert was walled off with stones and diverted away from what were now the crowded apartments of refugees.

After a time the culvert community, strained by overpopulation, began to expand further and further, until there were a handful of anonymous villages strung out deep within the mountain. These subterranean hamlets eventually developed their own languages and cultures, and became in time bitter rivals. Malnourishment and an assortment of related dementias led to escalating violence that was every bit the equal of the hostilities that had driven the culvert dwellers underground in the first place. There were constant eruptions of new conflicts, and eventually full-scale war, which was a savage, bloody, and hand-to-hand affair in such close quarters.

They said when they finally went in there with the bulldozers they found the bodies stacked like cordwood, and there wasn’t one soul left breathing.

The darkness is only light

That has not yet reached us….

—Charles Wright, “Tattoos”

I knew if I waited long enough light would eventually come through that hole, and so I waited.

I waited a long time.