American Spirit: A Novel (28 page)

Matthew stands still in the black, watching what he can in the speedy, twitchy, every-which-way sweep of quiet halogen panic shooting from Tic Tac’s head. Matthew’s brain is certain something’s wrong and that there’s nothing to do now but wait patiently while Modoch is mated by a horny male bear or buffalo, up against a rock or pinned to the ground. The heart is beating too fast to argue thoughts like these racing across the brain:
That’s what you get for wearing shit like a full bison skin; what were we thinking?; what if heaven is a lie?; now we die, and all because Tim ran west when things went south on him in Lower Manhattan.

Modoch remains paused, then finally uses his/the dead bison’s head to nod toward another path to their right; this is apparently the path he wants them to take now. Up the smaller sub path they go, like a drum corps marching roughshod over national park land, pushing forward with what’s left of them after a recession, a war, hashish, corporate magazines, antihistamines and Vicodin, crafts and meditation, high-end whores and dealers, Republican urologists, animal-robe making and hide tanning, and every other slapdash stab at spirituality one can imagine. The battered platoon
of modern living gone wrong finds a small meadow surrounded by a couple of rock wall bluffs that are maybe one story high. The meadow, all told, is small, maybe the size of a studio apartment in New York, or a home office in Los Angeles, or a utility room off the kitchen of any house in any place in this country. Modoch stops and nods with approval; this is the place, apparently. Tim and Tic Tac set into getting ready for something they’ve clearly done before; they pull a fat chunk of a stump over from the edge of the grass and right into the center. Tim aligns the stump and straightens it while Matthew helps Tic Tac empty out a small backpack stuffed with shoplifted stuff that is apparently about to come in handy.

Modoch fixes a gaze on Tim and Tic Tac to provide audience or witness, Tim sort of nods at Matthew, all business, looks at Matthew as if he shouldn’t need to be told to take a seat to fill out a small semicircle of three men being addressed by a negro buffalo on a stump. Modoch speaks like he never does, because, well, he never speaks. But here in the meadow stump conference area, he fires an ad hoc combination of dressing-down of Tim, Matthew, and Tic Tac; a Frankenstein jam of rehab slogans, herbal tea box maxims, snippets of business books, maybe—the kind of buffet folks on planet Earth throw together on nights like this. Modoch bleats and spits like a jazz man feeling the time signature and falling ahead and behind and to the side of it, somehow in perfect meter and time.

“I see you making the same mistake, all of you, all of us.
I see you not being smart enough to know that you don’t know. Thinking the goal is to find yourself instead of forget yourself. All of this thinking is happening but the thinking is upside down. How much food do you think is found by the hawk or osprey who flies upside down, back and shoulders to ground, eyes looking up instead of at the ground? You can’t gain a thing until you give up. You can’t find what you need until you realize you don’t know what you need,” and Modoch is only getting warmed up. Tim looks over at Matthew with arched eyebrows and his chin tucked down into his chest, with this sort of hey-I-told-you-we’re-on-to-something-out-here kind of neighborly look. Daryl Acid/Modoch starts picking up speed now.

“You sit there hoping to one day know it all, but what you should be hoping for is that one day you’ll realize you don’t know much at all. Look around at how many people are looking for ways to avoid feeling pain. And see how much trouble not feeling pain brings; see how much more pain people cause themselves by running from pain in the first place! Running from pain hurts more than feeling pain, almost every time.”

And Matthew sits there nodding like he believes, but suddenly the gray is rather soundly saying:
Ah, so, there’s the catch.
Almost
every time. So how do you know which time is going to hurt like fucking crazy to feel? If we’re talking about almost every time, and not every time, then clearly one can infer that it still pays to run from pain, we just don’t know which time it pays. So, really, what we need is a spiritual awakening
in the form of being able to pinpoint the times it’s worth getting numb on the run. It’s a good argument, this argument to feel pain, but it has a few holes in it.
This is what Matthew’s head does every time help comes along. When someone like Modoch says stuff like this, it looks for holes in the argument. When someone like Tatiana buoys the heart and spirit, the same kind of smart skepticism races along with questions:
Why is she being nice? What’s in it for her? Did she used to be a man? Does she have sex with entire football teams or anything that could hurt me upon discovery? How long until you say you love her and she disappears into the sky forever?

Modoch continues on, “We, as human beings, we have this disease, this virus inside us, that makes us believe we’re not getting what we want. The sooner you stop believing that, the sooner you start realizing how much you have. If people could stop long enough to think about it, they’d realize that if they would’ve gotten what they wanted in life, they would’ve been short-changing themselves half of the time…”

Again, the head races with clauses:
Yes, but which half of the time? The best plan, it seems, is to have one half of an awakening and one half of a realization and become only 50 percent fixed, because it seems in each of these maxims, the bad stuff is working fine half of the time.
And then the head is in such full-speed control of things that it starts revising and editing, interjecting right into Modoch’s diatribe as it’s unrolling from him. But the running commentary and loophole hunting stretches thin and something is about to come
in, some kind of realization, but what, what, what, and why does it terrify the brain and make it race?

“Start taking yourself out of the equation of everything around you. If you’re out of the picture, there’s nobody in your way. Start seeing where the universe takes you instead of being so concerned with where you want to go. We are not so unique, and we are all looking for the same things before we’re gone, so we ask the sky for the truth about why everyone we love is going to die.”

Modoch is right about all of this stuff. It’s all true, and Matthew sits feeling at least like his suspicions about living have been confirmed. The gray races through a sermon of its own inside of the head, and it reaffirms everything Matthew has spent years thinking:
We love people who will fade back to helpless, hunched infants in front of us or disappear in a flash too fast for us to have ever really gotten started on life with them, much less had the time to say good-bye. Some of the people closest to us, our only witnesses in what we’ve done with ourselves, just as we’re theirs—they’re gone after a phone call you had no way of realizing would be the last; and it was trivial and brief and rushed for what now will always be the dumbest reason to have rushed to get off the call. We get acquainted with doctors being calm, congenial men comforting us with a smile when we’re young enough to still heal, and we come to know them as the somber men who confirm for us that this, what’s going wrong inside us, is what time does to all of us. You feel loss, you catch on to what time does with all of
this devouring of us, so you try to create more life around you. Fuck time and death, you’ll start creating more life than death takes in your time. One day there’s a marriage, one day there’s the terrifying and heady news that you’re now going to be three instead of two, after months of vibrant, radiant, beautiful swelling, there’s the visit to the same doctor who has given you nothing but good news, but today the tiny heart on the blue-and-gray screen has stopped beating. The woman with the gel and wand who has been gliding over the slicked belly of life and chance and change is quiet now, because there’s nothing to say that hasn’t been fucking said in that instant when you all saw it still instead of beating and did the fucking math. And that was the day Kristin got a pass to do whatever might make her feel better about these days, and maybe that’s the moment the whole marriage starts falling to pieces, the moment two people are silently giving each other permission to get as far away from a marriage as they need to, whether it’s forever or for a one-night stand. And there’s a giant world outside, but there’s a little path called day-to-day life that most of us never stray from long enough to see the world for more than a week or two at a time. There are sudden suicides that were never supposed to happen in your little circle, and that day on the calendar can suddenly be seen coming from a mile away every year, same fucking day every year, tattooed forever on the inside of you. You take refuge in pets, and then there are pets that you love more than you thought you could, and the years go by fast, and suddenly you’re standing there watching as they don’t die quickly from the injection like the vet assured you they would.
And you stand there feeling like once again you’re screwing up the bigger plan that something up there must have, trying to snuff this innocent thing out quietly and quickly because of what happened inside of its liver, heart, and kidneys; because they said there would be only painful weeks left anyway; weeks of more breakdown and bad cell division, bleeding, dehydration; you couldn’t stand seeing the pain, the blood coming up again, and innocent eyes full of confusion and so you said yes. You think you’re being strong again, you agree, you bring her in, one quick little tiny sting and then it’s off to sleep in heaven, if animals can get in. The paw is shaved, the little sting happens, you put her favorite toy down next to the cold, clear, thin hose full of a drip of who knows, the hose that has no idea what it’s really doing today, the tube you keep second-guessing. But, go, just go, just go, just do this, fuck, nobody’s ever going to explain it, do it, do it, do it. And suddenly she’s full of life again, looking at you like you’ve made yet another mistake on this planet, how the fuck did this happen, how does any of it happen, cats, dogs, babies, parents, all turned to fucking angels living in a place you aren’t even sure you believe in.

The truth inside of the head is done having its way with Matthew, and has darted off. Tic Tac snaps out of his haze, too, snaps out of sitting cross-legged on the ground, eyes dreamy, mouth open, looking up at Modoch like a six-year-old watching television. He’s up, and in a flash he darts off into the woods. Tim seems fine with this, deep in thought about these things Modoch is saying; Modoch seems fine with the situation as well; Matthew is there wrought by the
feelings and truth that have run roughshod right over him. Nobody is too concerned with Tic Tac darting off into dark savage woods on some cue that only he seems to have heard. Modoch carries on toward the big finish.

“… We ask that you watch over us in battle—the battle we fight within ourselves for no reason. The battle that will bring no gain or peace, no expansion or preservation, no spoils, but only pain and suffering by our own hand. And we ask you to give us a sign, Great Spirit, that you hear us humbly asking for strength and humility.”

And just then, right at that line, as soon as Modoch says it, a giant streak of white fire shoots through the sky, right up into the ink-and-ashes black sea of it, right up from behind the rock bluff, which is about thirty yards behind Modoch and his preaching stump. Then another huge white streak of fire into the night, then another. Then what appears to be a paper sack on fire comes tumbling down the face of the rock bluff and falls to rest about halfway down the rock face and smolders rather anticlimactically. And then the sound of Tic Tac way off in the dark distance, “Motherfucker, ouch! Fuck!”

Modoch confirms the Great Spirit’s fiery dispatches into the night behind him, “Our moment of silence is our humble thanks for your reply, Great Spirit!”

In return, from a distance, one can hear the muttering of a much more earthly reply. “That was me saying that, motherfucker!”

Modoch’s head bows in silence. Tim’s head bows in silence.
Matthew’s head bows in silence. The three men start to shudder in silent lurches that give way and explode into laughter. The kind of laughter one remembers from being seven and eight and laughing with one’s still-young mother so loudly, so uncontrollably, back when you got tears from laughing, and back when the laughter was so undeniable that an overworked and under-rested dad joined in—all of you, angels and equals and together forever and ever no matter what. If you’ve laughed hard enough with someone you love, or especially with someone you don’t, it feels like there’s hope for something taking you up and out of yourself; out of that head where things always have to turn bad; out of that heart that seems to scan life’s horizon to find a way to be broken; out of that idea that life always has to include this idea that someone is against you.

Just then, on the bluff behind them, the smoldering sack catches, a small orange flame forms, grows a bit, and suddenly becomes a softball-sized fist of steady white-hot fire and hiss, turns night to midday all around it, and stays there burning white and then hot-blue, for at least thirty-five minutes. Matthew looks into the light, looks at Modoch and Tim, then back into the light. Not one of the three of them has an explanation for this.