Sophia (7 page)

Do you know why you’re here, Reverend?

A disturbance at Dick Dickerson’s, as I understand it.

There’s six witnesses saying you’re at the scene riding a horse around in a general’s uniform, firing at will.

Allegedly.

A female cop hunches over with a tit half hanging out.

A whole subdivision was burned to the ground, says she.

I believe there was a kidnapping and I was a hero, I say.

I see no heroics here, says the sheriff.

Am I under arrest?

Get out of my office, Maloney. But don’t leave town.

St. Wolf sees blue mountains in his dreams and rides the serpent into the shadows. A bullet strikes his heart but he knows how to fly. Guide me, great magic, he says. The great magic says nothing.

They say there is a man who will chase you like a prophet. He plays the sixty-four black and whites well. I feel him watch me without eyes. There is an island of millions and I am the swallower of millions and the millions swallow me. The dead keep dying but their watchmen go on watching. There is a lady who stands in a harbor and she holds a torch against the night.

What the hell is this all adding up to, you say, Eli.

I’m a reluctant pilgrim in all this, I say. Trying to pull my weight.

Vanity. All is vanity.

I saw that written on a wall somewhere.

I wrote it there.

Darling rides shotgun in the Saab. I am lost in the wilderness of my mind, climbing up the ladder but standing still. I read the gospel in the shade to her in search of a remedy. I hold a dead magnolia blossom like a hand grenade.

As I see it, she says. It can’t go on living if we go on living this way.

I curl Darling’s dark hair around her teeny ears.

Look out at the flowers and squint, I say. It’s as if the sun has blossomed.

Fuck you, she says.

I spend the day on deck getting my body burned red as a schoolgirl’s blush. Down on my hands and knees with no protection whatever—completely nude. I find there is a new blue to the sky or perhaps an old blue newly available to my eyes. And then a night so dark I get erections till dawn.

The Holy Ghost is a white-hot angel as she rides me. Freckles splashed across her face like constellations. Her red lips grasp my dick. I let the horses in my heart run wild.

Al and Hal Malchow seek justice on the Internet for victims of rape wearing Guy Fawkes masks. They read the message boards and know where the pedophiles are. We have a couple cups of hot black coffee down at the Starlight.

Are you happy, Maloney, they ask.

It depends on what your definition of happy is, I say.

Darling’s showing me pictures of a burning mattress. She’s now taking photos of the world around us. Her thoughts have quieted and her eyes are strong.

I want to document things on film, says Darling. Arrest time.

Why?

So she can see what the world was like before she was born.

You went to the doctor?

Yes.

A she, really?

We’re having a girl.

She will be the new Christ child for America.

The chickens are out pecking the yard. The gay couple, Kurt and Courtney, farm organically. Doing their part to save what’s left of the dying world. Lovely friends, they give us eggs.

Why chickens, I say.

We ordered ducks but they sent us chickens, they say.

I see.

But we love the chickens, says Courtney.

Hell, we love everything, says Kurt.

Sheriff at my door, Eli. Big shadow on the floor. I am drunkenly grooming my pubic hair in the shape of a cross in the boat’s tiny bathroom.

Maloney, shouts the sheriff.

You got a warrant, I say.

I got some handcuffs and a .45.

Give me a minute.

Then the sheriff is slamming my bathroom door, fists raging.

I jump out the oval window and swim for it. Steal a jet ski from a random dock and ride through the dying sun on the water. I ditch the machine in a cove, masturbate to my acumen of escape, cum on some poison ivy, and head to town.

Darling sleeps on my chest, her belly growing a person that is half me. I am holed up in her apartment till I plan my next move. She takes her lithium with cinnamon tea.

Why did you come all the way here, says she, dozing.

I’ve found myself in love with you and I’m on the lam.

I’ve decided to have the child in New York, Maloney. And I want you to take me there.

I’ll take you there, baby, I say.

Manhattan bound with my sailboat hitched to the back of our Saab convertible. We breach the Mississippi line, an uncommon family on a strange vacation. Darling dyed her hair jet white and is beginning to show our child in her belly to the world.

Mothers are like oceans, Darling says, and their children are like islands.

Fathers are geology, I say.

Danger abounds. Suddenly there is nothing but a world of clouds and snowy hills and whispers. Eli, you must join the quest, your grandfathers are calling you. Take these arrows, take this bow. Your dead brother’s blood will rush in you like the mighty Mississippi.

Why does your heart speak so strangely, you say, Eli.

The dream is marvelous and the terror is great.

Out here on the road my visions are fevered. A legless woman in the street says she’s seen the face of all faces. I have my
collapsible long rifle and scope in my briefcase with the ivory handles. My hair slicked back for effect. When was the last time you saw the devil, I ask the legless woman. What color was his tie?

The paper rose in his lapel was wilting from the monsoon, she says.

And were his eyes dark, I say. Did he touch you?

This legless lady, Eli, she blows a kiss to me.

St. Dietrich plots to assassinate the dictator and fails. He’s hanged and his faithful horse rides off into the hills full of olive trees. The horse lives with a traveling show and one night thieves cut out the ringmaster’s tongue. The sand sings in the dunes and the horse runs forever in the darkness.

Let’s put physics in reverse, Eli. Use an event horizon as a glory hole. Jump the turnstile to the dimension where Boom is still alive. Maybe there’s a world where we are kids playing doctor with the neighborhood girls again. Tiny adventures to please our dirty minds. Our souls age at a cosmic pace.

Out the car window is our wild fantastic country, rolling on. Quick prayer for the Indians. Let them have the sweet rain they’re always dancing for. I drift, reckless as we ride. The old Kentucky roads of my youth under our wheels. The ponies I straddled here, Eli. Have I told you? I had a horse and a princess and an electric city constantly unreachable in my dreams.

I was a ballerina as a girl, Darling says. Heel, toe. Pirouette.

I can see you there in my mind, I say. The delicate rising of your leg to the bar.

There was a peculiar sadness when I danced, she says. There was an elegant sorrow as I vaulted through air.

I long to live with eyes like smoke. The whole sweet science—I see it. History is breath against breath. Puff puff, blow the house down. The falling walls of Jericho. The crumbling towers in lower Manhattan. Dick Dickerson’s house becoming ash. I kiss Darling like a madman, raise my hand to the night, and ask the Lord a question. Where are you, Señor Cloak and Dagger? Hosanna in the highest, if that’s your real name.

Dying is living for me. Our child grows as we fade. Inside Darling’s belly she is the size of a fist. We blaze a straight shot up through the guts of America aiming for the grey girl on her island.

Satan was seen buying a café au lait on Friday the thirteenth in the Year of the Dog. He was wearing a Mexican wrestling mask and a monocle on a gold chain the color of the sun. The lights of the casinos filled his good eye. Our days are numbered, our weeks are fading away.

He is blind, this man I see. He is of indeterminable ethnicity, he wears Hawaiian shirts and smokes a cigar like a woman. Exact replicas of his eyes are tattooed on his eyelids. Red laces on his hobnail boots. Are we to trust this man’s ability to
search and destroy us? Nono has hired him to find you, Eli. She has made him a thermos of soup. He is the copilot of their minivan. His name is Jack Cataract.

These are the years of recklessness and pride. We are the sinners barely comforted by Christ. Let us seek the strong hand of Mister Unknown. Eli, we have driven out the demons of lesser men. We have fought the tough battles on the sixty-four black and white squares. My aging Tonto. My mystical amigo, we ride on.

St. Walter dies in a fire but they say he walked on water. The moon is a Cheshire cat above the palm trees, dancing. Put the lilies in a basket, are his final words.

We have a midnight loiter in the dunes, Darling and I. The American sky is black with expanding stars, one could call it dignity. We are on the threshold to happiness outside the laws of man. Sexual congress with urgency like it’s the end of days. When it’s over she’s got that good light inside once again.

I was a whore and you brought me in, she says. I had all seven sins.

You were a waitress at Starlight when I met you.

I love you deep as an ocean, she says.

High as a mountain, I say.

Blazing up through the Appalachians I feel Nono and Cataract at our backs. Hellhounds on our trail in a brown minivan. I belt out a song from my youth, “Ten Little Indians.” What vibes up here in the north, Eli. The Civil War left a weird suture along the gut of the country.

We are far from our comfortable Southern despair now as the city lights approach. Manhattan is a sparkling sickness of an island. Condos made for Euro trash, swimming pools in the sky. Over the bridge, Eli, here we come. I’m your incognito kemosabe, you’re my redneck Virgil. Graveyards on top of graveyards and where the hell do we park this boat?

East Village, but where are the poets and punks? A KFC on the corner and every man a smiling wad of cash. All the starving artists eat well by professionally wringing their hands on the Internet. Everyone is an extraterrestrial here. My poverty
of spirit has returned. Downcast eyes and a desire for prescription painkillers.

Washington Square to hustle the hustlers. The standard players playing five-dollar games. The big guns playing twenty bucks. A couple young Bobby Fischer posers with their mothers eat baloney raw. I buy a joint off a thin black kid named Fuck Face and Darling and I fire up as you collect winnings, Eli. Then I am struck with a vision. Cataract smoking a blunt with the pages of the Book of Revelation. His eyes have never seen a woman or an ocean. Darling watches a skywriter propose marriage in the air. Horrible music plays from horrible cars.

Darling, come closer. We are high on the rooftop where we sleep.

There are four million possible earths out there, I say.

Yes, but also black holes everywhere, she says.

Goldilocks planets, they call them. Not too hot, not too cold.

Darling’s ears are cool to the touch.

Maybe each star is a little bonfire on the beaches of heaven.

She touches my nose. We kiss.

Some kid trapped between the wall up in Queens sings the Bee Gees till he’s found. Women apply lipstick in the reflection of the butcher shop window. A man walks in tap shoes down the street. A girl pukes out of a cab. A dog licks another dog’s
vagina. These are weary days as we walk the streets. Laying low for fear of the fuzz. Wanted posters of us all over town.

Eli, I tuck you in on the boat parked near Union Square. There is a circus, a clown, a dwarf, and his gimps.

Armadillos have the most attractive dreams of any animal, you say, Eli.

I’m thinking of living underground, I say. Where no one would find us. I would drive the trains.

I saw a man once crying down there playing cello, you say, Eli.

To be in the darkness for so long underground as I drive, I say. Then to come up from the tunnel into the light. It’s got to be something like birth.

Yes, says Darling. But wouldn’t the light hurt your eyes?

We’ve taken up residence in St. Thomas Church on Twelfth Street downtown, closed for repairs. Eli, you sleep in the belfry, we put two pews together. The stained glass windows make our faces blue.

St. Zim refuses to spit on a picture of Christ and is beaten to death in a stadium in front of ten thousand people. It is the largest public gathering in the city in some time.

Darling is bundled up like a child in swaddling. She wears a leopard-print hood and a cashmere scarf stolen from a
frazzled heiress. Yes, we go to the jazz club and I commandeer the piano. Kick up my leg and piss my pants while playing “Great Balls of Fire.” These bouncers touch my Darling. There is a row. When the man’s fist collides with my face, it feels as if it were meant to be. Angels from heaven surround me like a Saturday morning cartoon. When I wake up Darling is screaming.

How could you get beat up like that? They could’ve found us.

She slaps me and I’m all question marks.

In New York people rap to themselves as they walk down the street and the florists look at naked pictures on their phones. Love is everywhere and we feel it but we can’t see it. It’s a child’s concept of God. Fill my lungs with the breath of life. Put Christ’s blood in my blood, his flesh in my belly. Let us eat God clean and pick our teeth with His bones.

There are strange beauties everywhere. A whole pack of models stroll down Houston. A woman is a tailor. A man sells European shoes. His ascot is a handsome teal. We drink rum and toast to a fair fucking fine howdy-do.

A toast to all the wars we’ve won and lost, the Englishman says.

To all the deaf people, I say, and the people who’ve been bitten by rattlesnakes or probed by aliens or fondled by their uncle or ever had their wisdom teeth taken out or had appendicitis,
to all the people who died virgins, to all the people who don’t know how to drive stick. Blessed be to God.

Rev. Maloney, drunk as hell, says you, Eli.

Sometimes I feel like we’re soldiers but there’s not a war.

Darling cuts a lime slice for my beer.

I love her.