theMystery.doc

by Matt McIntosh

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  And not much is known of his life-subsequent. (That sounds like me.) But we know that Friar Diego returned to Spain, where he lived a very modest life, tending to the sick and poor, preaching at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Toledo, and though he did not know how to read or write, his skills as an orator were widely known. And though he did not seek renown, the reputation of his virtue and charitable spirit spread far and fast and made him famous among the Catholics of Spain. The pope had even heard of him.

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  The 19th century Kazakh prophet Abai rebuked his fellow Kazakhs bitterly, for he saw that they were preoccupied with one thing alone: “to own as much livestock as possible and thus gain honor and respect.”

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  I know just what he means.

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  Abai asked: “How come that we speak no ill of the dead but find no worthy people among the living?”

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  Tell me about it.

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  Abai is a dead saint now. But he was once alive. I could get on a plane and take a train or a Jeep or a camel—I really don’t know how to get there—but I can transport myself to the place where he was born and lived; I can stand in the place where he stood, I can watch the sun rise and fall where he saw it rise and fall. The stars have shifted. But only slightly.

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  The seasons return again and again to tell us that the circle takes no notice of our brief lives, or quick declines.

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  So let’s send a message to the circle.

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  Let’s fill it with meaningless lines.

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  Nietzsche was born a man. He hoped to become a Superman. The philosopher Emil Cioran was born a Romanian. He hoped to become a Frenchman. I was born with a predisposition to abuse painkillers. I wished I was a Pharmacist.

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  My wife and I reside in a little house in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. We wouldn’t be able to afford it, but Kay, our friend and surrogate godmother who owns the house, pays the bills and gives us cheap rent. She spends most of her time in her house in Mexico, just a few miles south of the California border, but keeps a room in this one for when she comes up to see family and friends; a week or so every few months. She is sixty-four years old, blond and bubbly, was a cheerleader in high school. She was married to her high school sweetheart, a poet, a rebel, a university professor, but he died of cancer very young. Age forty-four, I think.

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  ( ‌)

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  After her husband died Kay spent a year traveling around the world with her son, who was eighteen at the time. Then she bought the house in Mexico. She met an Englishman there, a retired British naval officer and engineer, a tall, broad-chested man, full of spirit, and they lived together in her house for a few years. But she wanted adventure, she wanted to dance the cha-cha and sing and flirt and make love, and as time went on all he ever wanted to do was tend to his garden during the day and sit around drinking gin and smoking cigarettes at night, bitching and moaning no matter the time—expecting to be tended to and waited on hand and foot. He was a bore and a real stuffed shirt, and she decided at last to end it. But on the morning of the day she was going to break the news, she found him in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at the floor, his face red as a beet.

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  What’s wrong, Jeff? she said. He raised his eyes to her, but could not speak. Neither could he raise himself to his feet. He just sat there. She called an ambulance, but an hour later the ambulance still had not come. So she went next door to the two gay Frenchmen and they came and helped shuffle Jeff to the car, lifting his feet for him one at a time as they made their way down the front walk to the car. Then they set him in the passenger seat, strapped him in. Kay drove him back across the border, to a hospital in San Diego.

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  He never came home. He’d had a stroke, and at last count has had three more since. The last one, just a few days ago, has left him totally blind. Kay drives across the border to visit him at his convalescent home each day. It is an hour drive each way if the wait at the border isn’t long. She has been doing this for seven years. She’ll keep making the trip until one of them dies.

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  REQUIEM AETERNAM DONA EIS DOMINE ET LUX PERPETUA LUCEAT EIS

  [eternal rest grant them, o lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them]

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  When I was fourteen years old I dreamt that I was riding a train through a dark night made bright by brilliant streaks of perpetually shooting stars. I was seated in a carriage, and the sliding glass doors were shut, and the curtains closed. On their knees before me were two beautiful angels, one blond, one brown, in flowing white robes, their large, round breasts exposed, their broad wings intermingling; the feathers dusting my thighs. I: submerged in this warm, heavenly jelly: I. They kissed me until I came on their lips. I woke. I got out of bed. I went to the window. I lifted it up. I stuck my head out.

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  Five years later at the Antwerp Central Station, my girlfriend—a few hours by that point my ex—and I boarded an empty train for the Channel, and a boat to ferry us back to England. We sat in the rear car, all alone. It was late at night / early in the morning. She was sad and exhausted. She put her bag beneath a bench seat, and lay down. She fell right to sleep, and as the train ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunked through the dark, I sat slouching in the seat across from hers, watching her sleep. I had told her that when we got back to London I didn’t want to share a room with her. I didn’t want to be her quote unquote “man” anymore. But now, on the train, I wished I hadn't been so cruel to her. I wished I hadn’t broken her heart. At least I could have waited until we were back home in London. We were on a train, after all, in the middle of the night; there was no one around, and I was horny.

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  Incidentally, her name was “Angela.”

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  Matthew McIntosh a grandi à Federal Way, une banlieue sud de Seattle (état de Washington), où se déroule l’action de son roman WELL (Le Seuil). Il vit maintenant à Seattle avec sa femme.

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  One night, soon after I’d returned from London, I met a man on the adjoining patios behind my friend Adam’s apartment, where I was staying the night. I don’t know where Adam was. This man was visiting the single mother who lived next door; she worked, I think, at an old folks’ home. Or some kind of hospital.

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  She’d sent the kids away and this man had just finished ‌ taking a postcoital nap. He was a small-boned black guy with a thin mustache. Surprisingly, he was a die-hard fan of the hair metal bands of the ’80s and loved to sing their songs. We smoked his crack cocaine together, and he asked for requests. He knew each word to every shitty glam song I could come up with, and would sing them in a loud and beautiful high-vibrato gospel-inflected voice. That’s amazing! I’d say.

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  Thanks, he’d reply.

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  He sang and we talked and talked and talked and he sang and we laughed together and told jokes and smoked his rocks and when they were all gone he asked me for a bowl of weed to top it all off and I said, Sorry man, I don’t have any left, I smoked the last of it before I came outside, and he said, Come on, man, don’t lie, and I said, I’m not lying, and he said, You gotta have at least one bowl left, come on, brother, let’s smoke it together, I shared with you now you should share with me, it’s only right, and I said,

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  Sorry brother, I ain’t got a thing.

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  He just shook his head, like he couldn’t understand.

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  I said goodnight and went back inside. Drew the curtain, locked the door, sat down on Adam’s couch, and smoked the rest of my weed:::alone::::

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  That ain’
t like a saint.

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  One morning in 1562, nearly a hundred years after the death of Friar Diego, Don Carlos, the lunatic son of the Spanish king Felipe II, fell down a flight of stairs. He was taken to his bed. At times he cursed and raved like a man possessed. At other times he appeared to be unable to speak or move. We scientists believe today that he had suffered a cerebral vascular hemorrhage. That’s when a vessel in your brain goes:

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  POP!

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  The official story states that the king’s most trusted doctor ordered a phlebotomy/ trepanation to let the diseased blood out. They cut the prince’s scalp open, bled him, and then sewed the head back up. Don Carlos did not recover. Instead (if I may move into the present tense) he closes his eyes; falls into a coma; and begins to briskly waste away.

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  More doctors, more surgeons, more scientists are called. Magicians are called. Mystics. Soothsayers and diviners and astrologers are called. Potions are administered, spells cast, ancient rites performed, secret words intoned, ancient hymns proclaimed…but the prince does not wake.

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  Then the king summons the Franciscans of Alcalá to come and pray for his son. They arrive bearing the ninety-nine-year-old cadaver of Friar Diego, which they’ve been keeping in a box. They take the dead friar out and lay him in the bed beside the sleeping prince. (I know, gross, right?) The next morning, when the nurse goes in to check on him, the prince is crawling along the floor counting the tiles. A MIRACLE! This is how Diego, at long last, was elevated to saint.

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  Unfortunately, the prince died anyway. And the moral is: just because a prince is counting tiles doesn’t mean he’s better.

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  My wife and I visited Kay down in Mexico, and one day we went with her to meet Jeff in the home. He is a large man, with a giant head and big floppy ears, a face mottled with an elaborate network of red and purple lines, veins underneath shiny, rubbery skin. He lacks control over his body, but I can imagine him as he once was, a big, robust man, a powerful creature, bitching and moaning most forcefully. I helped her put him in his wheelchair, and we wheeled him outside to the courtyard to get some fresh air. The air in the home was extremely stale. Kay pulled out a pack of cigarettes and gave him one. She would only let him have one per day; or one per visit I should say. I don’t remember the brand, but it was English and had a fancy sideways lion for a logo. I had quit a while before and was both on the patch and chewing the nicotine gum, but out of respect I had a smoke with him.

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  We sat around a table, beneath a sun umbrella. Jeff spoke with a slurred voice, and thick English accent. He sat with his head hung low, chin to chest. He would slowly and shakily draw his cigarette to his lips, the ash growing ever longer. From time to time, Kay would take the cigarette from between his fingers, tap it on the ashtray, then give it back. Snot dripped steadily from Jeff’s nostrils, and don’t think it disrespectful of me to mention that he had shit his diaper and I could smell it. It’s just a fact of life. Submerged beneath the frozen aspect of his face were two large, gray, sorrowful eyes. And behind the eyes, a mind that still, from time to time (Kay assured us), worked like a finely tuned clock.

  Sorrow would fall across his face like the shadow of a dark cloud. One moment his head would be raised, bright eyes looking out at us, lips forming a stilted smile, as Kay would remind him of things they had done together, adventures they’d embarked upon, trips taken—Remember the Orient Express, Jeff?—Remember the Maldives?—Remember when you stole the orchid from the public garden in Honolulu?

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  (Oh, I was so mad! He stole it right out of the public park! He wrapped the roots in a damp handkerchief and put it in his carry-on bag, I was so angry! I was furious! I wouldn’t talk to him the whole trip back! But he didn’t care! He just had to have that flower! He had to plant it in our garden, he already knew the spot just as soon as he saw it! It’s still there, to this day! It’s been blooming every season for twelve years! I’m glad I have it now, but then…Oh, I was livid! Remember, Jeff? I wouldn’t speak to you for days! Remember?)

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  Yethdahling, he would slur, smiling—

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  but then the cloud would descend again and his eyes would grow dim, his gray gaze fade, his head droop slowly, until he was hunched over looking down again into his lap…and who knew where he was then? Kay would smile and look embarrassed.

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  He’s still down there in that hospital as we speak. One day they will carry him away on a gurney—

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  out of the room he shares with a revolving cast of vegetables and wilting flowers, down the hall, quietly so as to not disrupt the other patients, a white sheet pulled up over him, and out through the swinging doors, past the small rectangular sign stuck into the front lawn which announces in unadorned all caps that that sterile wide-hallwayed old folks’ home just south of San Diego, which smells of ammonia and where his death certificate will one day say he died, is to be known to you and I (and to all others who pass it by) as the:

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  “CASTLE MANOR”

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  —and lift him up into the awaiting

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  “CABULANCE.”

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  (That being what I saw painted on an awaiting van’s side.)

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  From: “WILLIAM ” < w@ .com>

  To: , , , , , , , , , ,

  CC:

  Date: Mar 2005 10:14:10 -0800

  Subject: Margaret Woods

  Rebecca and I were very lucky that our scheduled appointment in Spokane was yesterday. It put us in one of the best hospitals in the country for premature babies. We were expecting that we would get a second opinion, go out to lunch, maybe the mall and then back to Moses Lake. As it turned out, Rebecca was admitted, lost all of her fluid, the baby’s heartrate dipped a few times, so they decided to deliver. As you can see, the images that I snapped after I had them turn on the light are pretty amazing. She is two pounds and her lungs seem better today than they did last night. Now our concern in having her heart make the transition from the way that it pumps inside the whomb to the way that it pumps outside the womb.

  Thank you for your concern and prayers,

  You may call us at 509-

  WILLIAM

  If the attachments didn’t work, let me know.

  VIII

  Yesterday (though weeks (though months (no, years ago) ago) ago by now) I watched via the Internet the beheading of a middle-aged American man in Iraq. My mind does not seem to have wanted to properly retain the memory, so for the following account I’ve had to rely on news reports to remind me of what, as soon as I had seen, I very quickly forgot.

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  There were five masked men, each dressed in black from head to toe, only the skin of their arms and hands showing. They stood before a black banner with white Arabic writing on it. (I would have thought there were at least ten of them, and I don’t remember the banner.) The American was sitting on the ground, facing forward, in front of the masked men. (I would have said that he was kneeling.) The American’s hands were tied behind his back. He wore an orange jumpsuit. Four of the men behind him held assault rifles, while a fifth, in the center, read aloud from a sheet of paper. The American was blindfolded. (I don’t remember him being blindfolded. And I don’t remember a word the man behind him said. But) Suddenly—(did he drop the paper?)—it happened very quickly—Suddenly the reader lunged at the prisoner!

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  He crouched down behind,

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  crooked his forearm around the man’s bare forehead,

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wrenching the head back, exposing the neck.

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  And with a large knife, began sawing:::::::::::::::

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  LIBERA EAS DE ORE LEONIS NE ABSORBEAT EAS TARTARUS NE CADANT IN OBSCURUM