Sophia (2 page)

Eli, you say.

I’m Nono, she says.

You stare into her eyes.

I want to play chess today, you say.

I’ll play, says Nono.

Strip chess, says Eli.

Set up the board, she says. Your move.

I have a dream about Tuesday wearing nothing but a magician’s hat.

Come love me, she says. Abracadabra.

We can die out here of hypothermia, I say.

You never want to do anything where you might die, she says.

In the hospital Boom wears a fake mustache with his chemo bald head. There is a fire at the travel agency and the acrobat with HIV is doing somersaults in the graveyard. I feel like Charlie Chaplin I’m so weak in the knees. I am fading in and out of sleep. Thanksgiving was a bust.

There is bliss out there somewhere. Take this, the waitress with the sapphire eyes from the Starlight has entered the confessional. I light a spliff and we chat.

A bear dream visits sometimes, she says.

What is the bear doing?

Catching salmon in the river.

Are you the salmon or the bear in the dream?

I am the river.

Eating is the worst thing you can do to your teeth. Living is the worst thing you can do to your body. The best thing for your health is to never have been born.

I only love the ugly pretty girls. Too much beauty makes me sick. If a woman has no scars she doesn’t interest me. The greater the flaw, the greater the beauty. I grab a stool and listen to the old men place their orders at the Starlight. One can’t eat wheat and the other wants his toast dry. A woman in an eye patch screams for Albert but no one looks up. Maybe there is no one named Albert or maybe Albert is tired of answering her. The girl with the sapphire eyes takes my order. Cup of coffee, black. Two eggs, scrambled. She’s in a short dress, blue, intellectual. Her father owns the place. She steals philosophy from the bookstore and devours men. Her real name is Honeysuckle, but everyone calls her Darling.

Eli, everywhere I go, dirty looks. These people that pray in restaurants before their meals. These people with their ideas about ideas. Asking me for forgiveness? And what are these people’s great sins? Men forget to put the toilet seat down. Women use up all the hot water. All domestic hell breaks loose and they’re pounding my door. Keep a clean heart, I tell them. Whatever that means.

Failure is the most interesting trait. Like the story of the serpent and the two orchard thieves. Sometimes you’re like Texas, Eli, one vast contradiction. Sometimes you’re like nothing at all. In the confessional Tuesday says I am emotionally crippled. How can the lamb diagnose the shepherd? These days this preacher could use a nurse. A morphine drip and a kind bedside manner.

The big moon, Eli. The supermoon. The one you’ve talked about for so long. Only happens once every four hundred
years and now it’s cloudy. Boom calls and says he’s half in heaven and Christ has sky-blue eyes. He says heaven is 72 degrees and has really good Italian food. Let’s head to the bar with the dueling pianos, Eli. Let someone sing that awful, beautiful song by Billy Joel and weep. I feel I could rob a Dairy Queen right now, but I’m too drunk to drive.

Boom will never go fishing on a lake again. He is close to death but cannot die. He has been dying for fifteen years. I was asked to give him ease in his final months but he just keeps on dying.

Seize the day, Eli. Break a leg. Put the pedal to the metal where the rubber meets the road. Pull my chain. Pull a fast one. Pull the wool over my eyes. Put a cork in it. Buy the farm. Bite the dust. Eat my dust. Kick the bucket. Sharp as a tack. Stiff as a board. Sweating blood. Sweating bullets. Happy as a clam. Raining cats and dogs. Buckle up. Buckle down. Play with fire. Go with the flow. Easy come, Eli, easy go.

Things are so bad and then I remember the secular saints: Beethoven, van Gogh, the drummer from Def Leppard.

I am trying to keep to the root of things. There’s spit on the corners of my mouth. I’m reciting Lucky’s speech from
Waiting for Godot
.

It’s OK that you’re going mad, you say, Eli. But can you stop doing it so close to me?

Sports of all sorts, I say. All kinds of dying flying sports.

St. Simon is killed with a saw. At his wedding Jesus turned water into wine. His screams are heard a mile away.

Eli, I find you drunk and stumbling near the fire station.

I can’t make the parade tonight, you say.

The parade was yesterday.

Either way I can’t make it.

Tuesday has run away with a jam band called The String Cheese Incident. She is selling something named heady goo balls in the parking lot. She loves a man named Marlin, a roadie.

I’m in the high mountains, she says, where earth meets sky.

Do you remember the restaurant we used to go to? The one with the stuffed polar bear?

What about it?

It blew up.

The white roses outside the lady chapel are wilting from too much rain. Boom calls and says he has a good view of a robin nesting outside his window. He watches the mother vomit food into the baby’s mouth. Sometimes Boom says he can only smell. On his worst days, he says, olfactory is all he’s got. Then
his senses will come rushing back strangely. I can feed him a peppermint and he can hear again. I can play him Beethoven and his skin will tingle. But the sound of a sneeze can put him in a coma for days. A full episode of
Wheel of Fortune
is a miracle. He is hoping in the spring he will see a baby robin fly.

Eli, let’s spend the better part of the afternoon drinking gin and playing chess. Two lost gentlemen seeking the daily fluff. We are on your back porch overlooking the cotton when two Canadians land a balloon in the field. They have champagne. We toast that they are still alive after their rough landing. We toast that you are Eli and I am Maloney. We toast that everyone alive is still alive.

St. Sebastian is tied to a tree and archers shoot him full of arrows. He is buried, rises from the dead, heals a woman. Then is beaten to death by an emperor and left in a ditch.

Pretty good story if it were true, you say, Eli.

There’s no truth anymore, I say. The truth died in 1865.

Darling pours me black coffee at the Starlight. She thinks I should spend more time on the water. That is where I am happy.

Have you ever been to Greenwich Village, she says. That’s where all the poets lived.

Once. Long ago, I say. Before the Lord got me.

Eli, I want to sail around the horns and never quite arrive at a final destination. We can visit islands so remote they don’t have names. Live among natives. Yet as we age the possibilities grow less endless. The windows of opportunity don’t slam, they shut quietly in the dark. We’re always another cup of coffee away from the end. I’ll be damned if my adventures are spent sitting in this boat. We are out floating in space, the earth our ship. Riding round the big star. There is too much chattering about the end and not enough shutting up about the now. Out on the sea, Eli, me and you and the ones we love. We could leave the harbor with a little push.

Eli, we snort heroin and go to the bookstore. You ask for art books. I want abstract art, you say. I only like art that is abstract. I give you a book. Is this art, you ask. I don’t know, I say. This is fantastic, you say. This is fantastic! I show you another book and you ask, Is
this
art? And I say, I don’t know. And you say, This is fantastic! The girl at the counter (the one with nice breasts) says, You might like Dalí. Dalí was a pornographer, you say and throw the book in her face. On the ride home you say sometimes I remind you of a panther.

Tuesday overdosed during the fifth encore of the Red Rocks show. I pick her up at the airport and she looks clear after her hospital stay. The wizards are at the back of the cotton field throwing the football. The Rebels lose to Bama.

Eli, can you clear the hospital room? Boom and I need to speak.

What do you want done in your absence, I ask him.

I want you to take my saddle off the wall and strap my bones to my pony and set her free, Boom says.

OK.

I was happy in my life, he says, there was a lot of pain but I enjoyed that, too.

I know, I say.

There are reports of Satan in the physical world, Eli. A cub scout saw eerie boot prints near the roller skating rink.

Was there a smell of patchouli and blood, I ask the scout.

It was exactly that odor, sir.

Never cross your heart and hope to die, I say. Always step on a crack. You can never break your mother’s back.

I carry this here pink foot of a rabbit for luck and good graces, he says.

I give him fifty bucks and send him on his way.

Eli, Nono found your bike in a ditch.

She’s a very sexy woman, you say.

She’s sixty-five years old, I say.

She’s an artist, you say.

Are you sleeping with her?

Maybe I am and maybe I am.

St. Juan is scourged and pressed to death with weights. His brothers, Felix and Philip, are beheaded. Their mother, too, with the same sword.

Boom dies on a Friday, like Christ. We send him off in the following way: I hire the Confederate drummer boy from the local Civil War reenactors group, he plays light taps throughout. I give a reading from the Holy Bible. Valley of the shadow, etc. We strap Boom to the pony. I give the Eucharist. Weed brownies as the body, moonshine as the blood. I shoot a pearlhandled pistol in the air. Eli, you slap the pony and it runs toward the moon.

The fair comes to town with its psychedelic lights and expensive corn dogs. Dick Dickerson, the mayor, is a bald man who owns a pawnshop. He’s a loudmouth in love with Tuesday. A prideful atheist, he hands out the ribbons in the ugly dog contest. We ride the Ferris wheel up to the highest point and drink from the whiskey pint and the whole town smiles below us.

The sun is pouring down those sweet UV rays. Tuesday is leaving for Bangkok tomorrow. We go to a bar. She bends over in tight jeans to put a quarter in the jukebox.

She’s a keeper, says the bartender.

She’s so much better than me, I say.

They all are, he says. Trick is never let ’em know it.

We visit Boom’s grave.

Why are you wearing two watches, Eli?

This one is on our time, this one is on Hollywood time.

You didn’t really answer the question.

In Rome thirty-nine saints are forced into a freezing lake but after three days they still show signs of life. Unable to be killed by freezing, they are burned, their ashes thrown into the air.

What’s the point of these saint stories, you say, Eli.

I’m trying to find a way to die with honor.

How ’bout trying to live with honor?

One thing at a time, I say. One thing at a time.

Tuesday calls from Thailand.

There are many wild dogs, she says.

Have you found any truth?

I have orgasms when I touch my belly button.

When are you coming home?

I have no home.

I thought you might say that.

The man at the pharmacy wears a ponytail and a Ghostbusters T-shirt. We get Xanax for the fear and Oxy for the existential pain and some gin to add a bit of flash. Then to the Starlight with the pink flamingo wallpaper for BLTs, then to the harbor. Eli, with Boom gone you sleep on my boat.

How does it all end, Maloney?

Good night, Eli. I have no answers.

Eli, we must go to the south side of town to find my missing bandmate, Finger. The people in this filthy squat wear
flea collars, it’s that bad. Finger is freegan, which means he doesn’t care for money. He rides comically large bikes and has a homemade sailboat tattoo over his heart. I find him on the floor, flies on his face. We take him to the boat.

Don’t you have anywhere to go, I ask.

Somewhere maybe, he says, someplace.

I give Finger some heat from my bottle of gin.

My mother died in a city by the mountains, he says. I never wanted to sleep under a roof.

The Holy Ghost visits my sleep. She tells me a story. It is a story about gold bricks and blow jobs. I wake up drunk at the Starlight.

You were talking in your sleep, says Darling.

An angel in the wild, I say.

You’re high.

Will you come to my boat?

No, she says.

I’m sorry, I say. A very sorry saint.

Eli, let’s ride your new motorbike and sidecar out to the countryside. There are foggy pastures where we cruise. A barefoot man rides a horse bareback. A teenager does a doughnut on a four-wheeler. Whole fields of white cotton grow. We go to Wise Jane’s. A former Delta debutante turned intellectual redneck. She once slow danced with Matthew Barney and he gave her a piece of the Berlin Wall. We take golf carts to the lunar surface, a patch of sand in the middle of
the cotton field. We howl at the moon and say wild toasts and confess sins. Eli, you are screaming at the huge moon like a banshee.

St. Lucy’s eyes are gouged out. But she regains her sight. Then is beheaded.

When do they get saint status, you say, Eli.

I don’t remember, I say. Pass the wine.

I’ve been putting tiny ships into bottles. You cannot know the ancient secret of the ship bottlers. Don’t touch. View it on the mantle as the mystery it is. Out the window the carnival truck leaves town. We eat astronaut ice cream from the children’s museum.

You’re a son of a bitch, Maloney.

What’s that you say?

You heard me.

Lord, you give us tornadoes and purple sunrises. We praise your beautifully illogical ways. You performed great miracles long ago and nothing since. Why such confusion? We love you, wonderful idiotic Lord.

Eli, I counsel a woman who resembles Sigourney Weaver in the movie
Aliens
. I’m drunk at the session.

Are you saying your prayers at night, I ask.

My mother told me I should quit the prayers and do yoga, she says.

Yoga, I burp. There should be a jihad on yoga.

Finger gets a job at the pawnshop. One night he is sitting behind the counter reading
Lolita
and Dick Dickerson comes in and slaps him with his antique cane.