by Chris Martin
~ dowels of weeds poke through cement; a hallway under siege by vines jamming through a partially closed door; wisteria easing itself down from high broken windows, scouting the way in for thicker branches to reclaim ~
“And finally this fragile, blank composure took over. It could go on for days. Even when I went to find something to eat. Outside, walking in the streets, I told myself I didn’t exist and I was free to see people not notice me. I was a ghost drifting behind restaurants, sifting through their garbage. A hungry little angel of death no one ever saw pass by. It was pretty thrilling not existing but being alive to it.
“Finally, it came to this. There was this time, mid-summer, I think, when a few of the boys decided they wanted to make a bomb. They went to find and steal the ingredients. Some of the girls headed out on their own excursion, a concert in the desert or something. I stayed. No one asked me to come, which was fine, because I was deep into this experience any way. I would be the dead presence left behind in the warehouse, is how I thought of these moments alone.
“And soon, as if I called her or she just gravitated to me, there was this girl, a small girl, dirty, and probably not – really and truly – mentally sound, who came back to where we were after months of being away. She’d come and gone before. No one really cared, much less about her.
“Any way, it might have been raining out too. She shuffled in from the far end. She had climbed the stairs to our floor, crossed this enormous space we had taken over, as if she were moving only to keep from falling over. She seemed even more lost than before, in bad shape. Cuts on her forehead, bruises on her neck and jaw. And, I found later, her forearm was swollen, with a bit of bone poking through the skin, as if she tried to protect herself from something heavy. She made her way to this small filthy alcove where I was sitting. She didn’t really acknowledge me, but I got the feeling she knew I was in there.
“I sat there the whole time, even when she laid down next to me. I sensed right away what was going on and it seemed perfectly reasonable to let her die like that. I even allowed myself to get up and pull over some cardboard or a crappy blanket no one was using to cover her up because – and I was very rational about it – she was using me as a vigil. To help her on her way out of here.
“And that’s how that poor body died.”
A palled silence. “What did you do?” Carson’s voice.
Humphrey nods, possibly remembering. “I thought about burying her. I was willing to do it. This creature had come to a place to die, found me there already and just laid down, as though I was the one she’d been looking for to watch over her death. It wasn’t a special event. In fact, it was just very very empty. And very eternal, sitting next to her.
“And I thought, out of the blue: Enough. I've had enough. I thought, if I was able to provide her with non-interference over her death, I could give her every deathly impulse I had and she would take it with her. I gave it to her with a kiss. I bent and covered her mouth with mine and blew. And then kissed her. It was a bleak, mutual compassion.”
Fade up, the photograph of young Humphrey dispensing hate to Carson and his camera, being found.
* * * * *
Part Seven
In which Humphrey explains his experiments in squalor, the priest who led him out of it, and
what their relationship led to; including Father Solano, the development of a devotional
art lend-lease program, and lots of questioning of faith in the monastery
