by Roman McClay
The body allows the thinking conscious part of the brain very little control on what it does, he knew, and even with the PGC, he was reactive in large part. He was still surprised by how automatic he was; but he was infinitely more aware of this than the average man -who he had long been- who thought it was their conscious mind that responded to loud sounds or jumped when they saw a snake. They had no idea they had no choice in any of that at all. Choice as a corporeal concept was new and limited and not at all the way most things in nature went. Choice to beat the heart or engage in respiration? Yeah, he agreed with nature, that -like most offers of a choice- was a bad idea .
But his heart still beat fast from his ear when he had heard his little girl scream. Even now many seconds passed when his conscious mind knew she was fine, his body’s chems were racing to each outpost, capillaries wide-open, his skin slick with just a hint of sweat. He squeezed her tighter to his core the more his insides unfurled and expanded and sought corners and escape.
Most people would disagree, he thought, but they hadn’t thought it through at all; they didn’t even know the science or the analogies the body brought to bear. If they knew anything and still disagreed that would be just fine, but they were ignorant in all domains and yet thought their opinions were as valid as Nature herself.
“Daddy, it’s my birthday,” she said and giggled and hid her face in his chest. Her grey A-shirt tight about her small breasts and low around her neck; and her grey boxer-briefs -the same as his- swaddling her tiny waist and smooth legs looked like a ribbed center to a white four-petaled flower, each limb a piquant invitation to his buzzing bees of eyes and nose and mouth. He smooched her on the arm closest and then buzzed his lips upon her cheeks.
“I know,” he said, “I already had a battle-plan consisting of pancakes and champagne , and then reconnaissance of our territory.” She listened and nodded firmly in agreement. He turned with her on his hip -she about the size of one quarter of him- and as he walked she looked about and tried to touch things that she now saw from this height.
She saw all manner of things from up here, she noticed, and each time he carried her like this she thought of him as Pegasus , and her Bellophadon , and they -in adventure- set out for Crete to name each island and each sea.
He read her fMRI and saw she was thinking of the winged horse again -or maybe a winged bull, as the data was fuzzy still- at any rate, he said aloud, “sleepest thou, princess of the house of Aiolos ?”
“I am awake Athena, and I have my golden bridle!” she announced erecting her back proudly and raising the chin above his head, with one slim & crème, sinewy arm out in front like a prow, a bowsprit; her hand clutched around that piece of paper she had torn from the journal and only just now revealed.
III. 2015 e.v.
“You cannot regain love from one’s youth, it’s lost; it’s as if,” and here he paused and began the frantic, but short lived search for an analogy, “well, if I had spent more time studying on it I might have a ready and even ornate analogy for you to explain it perfectly.”
“Yes,” she merely nodded after.
“I just think the actors, the people, are two very different people in very different space and time, and that first-love phenomenon cannot be brought back or recaptured. Yet, it is something all either openly or secretly pine for .
“We lust for it with the same wet mouth and dilatated eyes and blood vessels we lean into all our quixotic winds. Our fantasies of immortality, limitless power, and wealth, re-matches with old adversaries, even a boxing match with the old man in his prime; the witticisms of the staircase as they say.
“But they are all impossible; but that one, the one, that we singularity sanction, and by that I mean approve of, singularly approve of in the memetic tableau is first love,” he said and was interrupted by her.
“Approve of?”
“Yeah, well look at the films and songs and on and on that pester us with this conceit. And we personally allow that one to ruminate a bit more over the grazing field of the mind. The others we eschew with a certain chagrin you know?” he smiled a bit and began to think of her, her post-cherub cheeks. And perfect teeth ringing her Roman laugh like the praetorian guard of the colosseum itself. He stopped ruminating and staring before those teeth became the rings of Saturn first seen by Galileo.
“I guess,” she relented.
“You guess?” he asked as his mood turned quickly to one of vex.
“Well it’s just that the one I think about is my kids, I want to go forward to make sure they’re ok, or happy. I go backwards -you know in my mind- to re-live, maybe re-do some things I even fantasize about my next fantasy,” she laughed and looked up at him now. She began to speak again as he was quiet.
“Sometimes when you talk I feel like my life -or the way I think- or what I think about is too small,” she said.
“I remember once,” she said, “back before the move, we lived in a small rural town in a small run-down trailer. Only I didn’t know it was small or run down then, I was 18 or 19 maybe, and we had to drive into the big city because my brother had been arrested there. I had never left the country and I never seen anything like it. Even walking up to the justice center, its columns, and giant panes of glass -anyway, sometimes when you talk, each idea kinda goes on and up and deeper inside like that building did, with all its chambers and courtrooms and it makes me ashamed of my own ideas, the same way I was ashamed of my home after seeing that building.
“It makes me never want to see it and run back into it and never let anyone see me again all at the same time,” she held her hands up to him, as if the explanatory part of her idea were in the hands, the body itself.
He had enough sense to stay quiet and give her room to say more if she wanted.
“As we drove back with my brother that day the car felt so small that I could feel more than my elbows rubbing with his. I felt like my insides, my soul, and its sitting rooms were too cramped now too. It made me want to dig deeper down somehow.
“Our trailer never looked the same to me again,” she paused again and pulled the hood of her jacket over her head as the rain finally fell slightly outside.
“I never quiet look the same to myself after we talk like this,” she looked at him and the street lamp painted a white stripe across her cowled face; she looked like a tribal avatar in some 18th century newspaper drawing of an Apache. She was vulnerable and strong both.
“Will you teach my kids, well, just talk to them about stuff. Anything really, just, I just think they’ll get bigger by listening to you and maybe never have to be surprised by their smallness later,” she said .
He just nodded and smiled in the way that actually turned his mouth corners down somehow.
His entire body began to heave, the blood and pus and mucus all sloshed around against the catacombs of internal walls. He felt his hat a coxcomb thing on his head and he pawed at it. His eyes ached and began to fill with sea water. He was upside down, his flooded basement of a head, his feet grasping for somewhere above to reach to and go. But he stood still and let himself cry; she was unfairly made small by the world. Unlike him, he thought, who deserved to be laid low because of his haughty designs of grandeur ; but she had never even approached the arrogance he made an outpost of. And yet the world crushed her with the same malice as it hammered him. It taught her the same lesson as it tried out on him, regardless of her humility and his lack of it.
And this hurt him more inside that he could explain. She deserved to be left alone; deserved her illusions.
He had asked for it from the cosmos; he deserved his rebuke. But not her.
“Things that should wound me and make me pause, do not,” he began, “it’s how I’ve earned the reputation for being callous and even sociopathic. But things that other people take for granted, feel nothing for, or miss the point of entirely, those things make me feel sad enough to give up on this whole life. All anyone sees in me is the hate; the hatred I’m filled with. But they miss the t
hing I hate most: injustice.
“I hate injustice and if you miss that about me, you’ve missed it all. If you can’t see how much my insides are wrought up by the way people ruin other people for no reason at all, just ‘cause they can, man, the way this world ruins people for fun, well, if you can’t see that as the thing that makes me break down into my constituent parts and bleed and blubber all over my clothes, then brother, you’ve not heard one word,” he said as his words cracking at the end vibrated the face and let the tears rivulet down each cheek and hang, then drop from the jaw on his black shirt and absorb into the shadow of it all.
“I’ve heard all your words,” she said and almost patted his arm, but when she looked at him he was so large and in so much pain, his face so twisted and wet, that she thought he might break from just her touch, and with all that mass, she might die in the avalanche of a broken man.
“The thing is,” he hesitated, “is that nobody with any wisdom helps the young with their first love; they don’t tell them to cherish it, protect it, keep it safe by eschewing other people or temptations. They instead say, well, you’ll have many loves or everyone is part of your journey , or hardly anyone stays with their first . I mean, we are told by our elders to treat cavalierly the one thing that will make us happy in life.
“I know girls can have many loves, but men cannot. Men are more sensitive than you. In that way. It’s like the way women are with kids; what if people said, well, sure you love these two kids of yours but if they die you can get new ones ? You’d lose your mind at a horrid statement like that. But men are told that they are to just take some other man’s leftovers, in a few years, we all exchange girlfriends, swap them around until we find one we like.
“It’s wrong, and yet the tribal elders give us no wisdom, they are all libertines and ex-hippes and baby boomers or Gen X whores and so-called realists who do not even believe in love anymore; romance is really needed, it’s not some ancillary thing; a true realist would acknowledge that. A realist would know.
“I mean, I had a girl and I threw it away for nothing, and all because nobody told me that I’d only ever be happy with a her and she would only ever be happy with me if she had no other temptations, and she never knew that anything better existed. See, women have all these options now, and it makes them want to trade you in for someone better, and the problem is not that this hurts -although it hurts deeply- it’s that she will never be happy chasing the greener grass, because there is always someone better .
“Your trailer was fine until you saw a big modern building, and that is what crushes people. It ain’t poverty, or the flaws of your man, it’s the option for something richer or whatever, the manifold and unending choices are what ruin us.
“But if you listen to our parents or society they tell you choices are what make life so goddamn great. But in real life choices are dangerous, and it makes us throw good things away chasing better, better shit. But nobody wise is in charge, so the young learn to be wasteful and shallow and it ruins their lives. The same way they are told to eat poison like diet Coke and watch TV all day, it makes them miserable and yet their parents are like evil fools who offer no wisdom at all.
“My father could read up on this and figure this shit out, he could warn his son, he could warn his grandson about the dangers, but no; he watches TV and stays stupid and yet thinks he’s a man. A real man guides his progeny with wisdom hard sought and hard gained. But my father is lazy, just like my brother, and they are ruining that boy. He’s a lazy, malingering bellend with a body full of Ritalin because nobody played with him when he was young -his mom was like 100 years old when they got him so they overprotect him- and schools won’t let boys be boys” he paused, to clarify, “that’s my nephew.”
She wished she could be his girl , she thought at first, but then she realized that she wished she could be his mama and teach him the wise things he needed to know. He was a broken man, and although she had never heard anyone, especially a man, speak like this, she could tell, deep in her expanding ante-rooms inside, that he was right. Modern life crushed love, and he was right, she would not want any more or any other children but the first and only ones she had . If men felt this way about women, the way she felt about her kids, then she understood why they all seemed so ruined, and why a deep man, a man with so much love inside him, was so poisoned and so sick.
“This girl’s own grandmother spoke of me like I was temporary, she said the next one , quote the next one , as if I was just one in a line of men for her 18-year-old grandchild. It was sad, man. And my girl was embarrassed and all, she was a good girl, but she had been raised this way too, that we are all disposable, like we’re just interchangeable and love is just some goddamn game. But it ain’t, it’s the most serious thing in the world, and we treat it like shit at our peril. Men are crazy about women, and they are going to turn into monsters over this shit. I mean look at me,” he grimaced in the self-awareness of how mad, how damaged, how dangerous he was.
She looked at him and saw it, and she knew he was not wrong. She had read a letter he wanted to send to his brother and had let her read it first; asked her for her opinion. It had struck her as sad, and true, and that he had lived a life of pain in each of his most vulnerable relationships with friends who had died, a father he no longer admired and a brother he felt was no help to him at all; a brother who had nothing to offer him in a time of need.
And this man needed so little, he just needed a world where men still believed in manhood, and brothers banded together for common cause; and where what he said mattered, where a man could be listened to even if disagreed with. But people did not ever want to talk to him; they found him too volatile, too much work; people liked easy relationships to go with their easy work and easy 1-2-3 lives where they never had to break a sweat at all. He, she surmised, was an ancient man in a modern world, where money and status and frivolous wants were what were chased after by men who should have known better, but did not, and by men who refused to teach their sons the meaning of being a man.
She looked down at the letter penned to this man’s brother again and re-read it, searching for something she might be able to help with, although she knew that she could not:
“ I don’t know that, little man; I never yet saw him kneel”
-Stubb [Moby Dick]
I’ve heard three confessions before tonight; the first was from my friend Todd, a man now dead, a man who befriended me at age 15, a man killed at age 40 by the police when he went Berzerker in custody, and they had to put him down like a dog. I don’t blame them, he was 250lbs of doom coming straight at them from -and back again to- Hell.
He -Todd- once confessed that he’d give it all back, everything he had had -and he had come from wealth and had plenty of things going for him- but that he’d give it all back for one moment’s peace . I remember the words exactly, the location, the mise-en-scène . I can go there any time and re-live it as it happened; it is that fresh although it was over 25 years ago. He was a big alpha male with brains and magnanimity and loyalty, but he was incapable of living in the modern world. He was my true big brother, he stood up for me. Many times, in ways that still blow my mind. And it made me want to -and I did- stand up for him.
But, he was not wrong about his fate, he in fact gave it all up for his moment’s peace .
The second confession came a few years after by my friend Jason, who later joined me in the oilpatch. He had tears in his eyes, shit, he had tears in his beard, so lachrymose was he. He confessed that he didn’t feel all that smart , that is a direct quote. I remember the exact; well, everything. I can go there any time I wish; but I rarely wish too because it wounds me so much to hear it, to see it, to feel it again. To see a man so broken by his weakness. That weakness is all of ours I believe; and I feel weak when I go there again.
Third was out father, Travis, yours and mine, and it was years later, I was 26, and he confessed that in all his years -decades- of enforcing law upon his brothers in the
wide world that he felt he hadn’t contributed to the Good of that world. Maybe, he said, locking people up wasn’t the best way to spend a life . Again, that is a direct quote. Nothing from that moment escapes my recall, although -like the others- to recollect it gives me no pleasure at all. I felt his pain then and now too as I revisit it. I think he knew that the Air Force was shit, the country was too; but what else does a working-class redneck like him -like me- have, if not our country? So, we pretend it loves us too.
And here, here we have a fourth confession now. My brother, nearly swallowed up by his own chair, in the shadow of his wife and his younger brother, darkened in the corner of the room, tells me that he thinks, he suspects, he may in fact be a shallow man . And I reflexively do what I did in each of the three earlier confessions. I, in my priestly manner, assured the man that no, he wasn’t, that no, he shouldn’t feel that way .
It’s a fumbling on my part; a panic almost. In each case, I feared each second of silence after their trenchant self-analysis -with Todd even predicting what would be gained and what would be exchanged for it- I feared that my silence would confirm their suspicions. I felt I was in charge of allaying their fears. And I worry about friends, fathers, brethren; I felt their pain in my heart too. So, I say what isn’t true, but, rather, what balms. But it’s a lie because Todd couldn’t gain peace until he was dead, so he knew he’d have to give it, quote all up , and Jason was and is a stupid man; cruelly just smart enough to know it.
And our father did waste his life locking up men for crimes he didn’t even care about -and that is a subtle distinction you may not get; but if he had cared about drug laws and enforced his own principles of law then his life would have not been frivolous, but he didn’t even care. He is like you, Travis, a Pharisee , he only cares about the written law, what Draco has written down. He thinks not of the rubric, the good, of justice that lives behind laws, the numinous, the spirit that breathes up in the day & night sky, the right and wrong in our blood and our brains. No, he -like you- cares only for what society thinks is law .
