Personae (21 page)

7 Her response to this menu was to assert that it required more explanation than even the transcendent espresso, to which he replied that his kitchen was not comfortable operating at the whim of any customer who chose to walk through the door. Accordingly they’d drastically reduced the available options to force their clientele to voice only their most elemental desires which they then met in whatever manner they saw fit.

8 She said she thought that was insane so he requested and received an opportunity to explain further.

9 A restaurant differs in kind from almost any other business. Viewed a certain way the consumption of food was not just necessary to but also
the
reason
for
our existence. Not surprisingly then all kinds of psychic implications result from the human-to-human provision of food. This in turn makes certain restaurants something like second homes.

10 Answer this then. Would you go into someone’s home and give precise instructions detailing what you wished to eat and drink?

“But don’t you have to tell people what they’re potentially ordering?”

“If they ask, but frankly it’s none of their business.”

“And it’s the same thing every time?”

“No it changes daily, I’m not a savage. Well it changes provided the Jankees haven’t kept me up too late the night before.”

“The what?”

“The New York Yankees. I’m poking fun at an accent I used to have.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you miss the place that caused it?”

“Fewer times.”

“I sure miss my accent. Transylvania caused it.”

“Thought I was picking up some Transylvanian.”

11 They laughed and held a common look a bit longer than usual.

12 Marybeth stood and walked toward the door because the thing she’d said about the coffee break was true and she needed to get back especially in light of some recent pointed comments.

“Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow for lunch and order Sandwich.”

“You’d know better than me.”

“True, I’ll
be
back tomorrow for lunch.”

“On one condition.”

“That?”

“That you leave yourself enough time. Hate to see rushed humanity. Life has sped up too much and it falls on us to slow it down.”

“Deal.”

13 She turned to leave and, somehow, for the first time, he noticed a severe limp, obviously long-term, that made her every step a form of struggle. The door had emitted its usual chime when she opened it and now the dolorous decay of that sound, the sight of her rhythmic exertions, and the shame at what he’d said all combined to form a low-level desolation.

*     *     *

H
E is nearing the light. What began as almost a rumor of light has grown in intensity as he’s drawn near. But this is not a warm, comforting light. This is a harsh airy substance that exposes what until then had only seemed probable.

2 When he gets to the clearing it is the obvious site of an attempted uprising. The bodies are all men, former men. But not the right kind of men for what they tried. No these were men who gathered in a church to pray to an all-knowing God and men like that cannot be ready for what descended on them. Even worse, men like that could and obviously did draw the erroneous conclusion that the people holding them had a clear goal in mind, a goal separable from violence that served as motive and lessened their danger. It was the kind of error that ended lives and the kind of error he never seemed to make.

3 As with all the bodies he encounters he feels first relief then an animalistic welling anger that cries for release. He tamps it down and studies the bodies for information. There are maybe fifteen of them.

4 They have guns and knives but the guns, with the exception of one or two, don’t seem so deadly. He doubts anyway that they can operate theirs like he can his.

5 Then he sees something that promises conflict. Underneath one of the few bodies that evidences any sign of a struggle is a gun. The gun is very telling and will be the reason for the imminent conflict. It is old, previous century model, and has the look, feel, really all five senses, of having been repeatedly transferred from dead to living through multiple generations. This means it was not left there intentionally and is precisely the kind of thing its owner will be returning for.

6 It will be important for him to remember, when those men return, that they are responsible for the many deaths of people who were doing nothing more aggressive than sitting in a church.

7 He hears nature being disturbed about fifty meters away and quickly moves to where he can’t be seen. He soon draws the conclusion that, incredibly, just one person returns. This is the kind of refuse he is dealing with that will allow one man to move alone in the middle of what they like to claim is a military operation. He sees then the reason for the overconfidence. The
guerillero
is holding a very significant piece of killing machinery, as capable of making a bullet rapidly follow another as any such machine in the world.

8 He needs to think well now. In his left hand he holds his gun. It is not a good one but he can still shoot a lentil out of a grasshopper’s grasp with it. His right hand holds the machete. The
guerillero
looks for his gun among his victims.

9 The time for reflection has passed. Silence is required and the gun cannot provide it. He moves into the proper angle, steps forward with his left foot and, just as the degenerate killer looks up, swings his right hand over the top to throw the machete at an unfathomable speed into and through his neck. A small part of the blade comes out the back of his
guerillero
neck as he falls lifeless to the ground inches away from the gun he returned for.

10 When his surroundings fail to react he walks over to the body. At first he is almost sickened at the sight of what he has done. Then he remembers he has rid the world of a pestilent rat. He pulls out the machete without looking then wipes it on the uniform of the
guerillero
. He tells him <<
Nos
vemos
en
el
infierno,
hijueputa,
y
te
hago
lo
mismo>>
then he takes the automatic, straps it over his shoulder, and walks away.

11 Except he then hears breathing. It is a labored and dwindling breathing and it fills him with no fear just dread.

12 It is inhuman, the breathing. A bush dog lies heaving on the edge of the clearing. Through its fur he sees an open chest, one that inflates and deflates, the interior organism threatening to spill out.

13 Whether caused by human or fellow animal the injury is irreparable and incapable of being overcome no matter the will involved.

14 He is supposed to take his machete, he has done it before, and end this suffering. This is something that is taken as given.

15 He walks to the dog and places the machete just above the wound. The dog looks at him with just his dim eyes.

16 What’s the delay? Push it down.

17 It is a thought that has occurred to him often but he is not yet the type to have ever painstakingly set it down. The thought is more like an intuition that every living thing has a required allotment of suffering that must be met before allowing its release. Why seek to artificially terminate suffering when it’s the undoubted way of the world? So the danger here is not that the dog is suffering too much but rather that after a life of relative ease it has not suffered enough. Lowering the blade may upset the natural order in a way that has to be repaid.

18 He pulls the blade away and goes back into the jungle in continued pursuit.

*     *     *

H
ER entry may not have felt miraculous but her nearly every moment since had. The world is full of certain people like that and don’t let their relative infrequency detract from this fact’s significance.

2 For it is simply put a
miracle
of this world that someone like Selena ever enters it. The default expression on her face: smile. The wild tempest of her hair with its roiling black curls. The blushed circle of cheek on each side of the perfect nose.

3 But more on the smile is needed. It was a smile could be placed atop a lighthouse to illume troubled seas. One of those smiles that seems to form from the very soul of the person as if an innate palliative substance had excitedly overflowed its excess. A smile, in the final analysis, that seems less a property of the person than that person itself.

4 And if her soul itself were visible you might marvel as well at its flawless beauty. That such generous and optimistic kindness could emanate so consistently from such an adorably chubby package gave lie to the often popular notion that what prevails in this world is dark despair.

5 Understand also that these are not observations made following detailed analysis of a finished product. Rather these are truisms about a person that began to manifest themselves within mere minutes of that person’s birth.

6 —
Acaba
de
nacer
una
sonrisa—
the midwife had said and it was his audition of the feminine form of smile after the preceding harrowing events that began to cheer him.

7 And the world little appreciates how much the heartening the Man felt then was less a product of palpable events then present than it was a form of intuition. Because that’s all intuition is: the temporary release of a person from his restrictive spacetime prison to where he can in some sense experience what
will
be true and how it will make him feel and that amorphous and ineffable insight makes him feel a diluted version of what will later wash over him.

8 Selena often wore miniature versions of what her mother wore. Not in general either, at the same time. The result was as if the same person were being simultaneously viewed from wildly disparate distances.

9 Surround the hardest man in the world with love in this manner and the love is not repelled to die, not when the recipient is eminently aware of his undeserving nature. Instead it burrows in to erode the hard stone from within. And once it comes to the surface and is made tangible in the form of acts in the world it is then eligible to spread like a contagion.

10 For at the continued sight of his wife and daughter Man changed his relation to the world. Where before he’d viewed life as a constant succession of contests for limited resources he instead began to absorb the truth that the world is more our product than it is an unfeeling location for displays of enmity.

11 The soil surrounding their home for instance. Before Selena he viewed it as dirt, something to be brushed away before it could sully the clean. After the change, however, he saw for the first time its life-generating potential. The revelation struck him with the force of lightning and drove him to his hands and knees where in what looked like supplication he would diligently remove by hand the ground’s many stones, twigs, and anything else inhospitable to lively growth.

12 Once cleared the earth was ready for seeding, and meticulous care was employed in selecting and interring just the right combination of seeds which were then tended to in a painstakingly vigorous manner until the result was a colorful bounty of idyllic fruits and vegetables that nourished him, his family, and because the excess was sold at minimal cost, the loose collection of people that formed their community.

13 Nor was this the entirety of his such activities. For he did not altogether abandon his practice of the metallurgic arts, notwithstanding the decided change in the focus of that practice. So from where blades and instruments of blunt force once emerged more than one observer noted the sudden predominance of tools for cultivation and cooking.

14 The contagion part of this is the external effect his internal change had on those around him. The helped are more likely to then help, the fed to feed. A spirit of cooperative harmony is not created then used to animate actions; it is actions that create the spirit.

15 Whatever the source, the spirit permeated the area and one could say it was embodied in the rounded form of Selena who moved through her world like she owned it, laughing and spreading laughter as if such were mankind’s natural state.

16 And because her father once jokingly said it was the only part of his body that didn’t permanently hurt, she often gently rested her head on the spot just above his heart.

*     *     *

THE way at the extremely subatomic level the mere act of observing necessarily and incredibly interacts with the observed so it is true that a woman of great conventional physical attractiveness often does not get an accurate picture of the world and the human nature that populates it. So she’s likely to conclude that men are weirdly solicitous and women mostly mean instead of rightly concluding that
to
her
men are weirdly solicitous etcetera.