“Concentrate on what?” Gemma said. “Whatever. I know you will. But before then, you should take me out.”
I had to get away from her.
No, Gemma. I can’t do that. I’m sorry. I have to go.
“You don’t care who gets the light?” she called after me. “Even if it’s Sam?”
I think what’s most interesting about the Seven Deadlies and the Seven Heavenlies is that they all exist in each other. The Seven Sins mingle. The Seven Heavenlies mingle. But they stand on opposite sides of the room, like boys and girls at a sixth-grade dance, and can’t stand to look at each other. I know what I’m talking about.
Some say the Deadlies start with Pride and the Heavenlies with Charity, with Love. It’s true. If we put ourselves above everything else, we fall, we fall into anger and laziness and all the others. Love, nothing is harder than love, nothing wants or asks more from us. Love gives us everything that’s good in us.
Which of the Deadlies is it hardest for me to avoid, and which of the Heavenlies is hardest for me to practice? Of the Sins, I’m angriest. This makes Satan happy. Patience has a tough time.
When will my anger go away? Nothing takes away from it. It’s infinite, but it doesn’t belong to me. It was put into me in a locked garage by a man I might never see again, a man I might not even recognize if he stood right here, but it doesn’t belong to me.
Anger. I know it will leave me the more I love.
I don’t even know what that means, but I know it’s true.
Footnote
GEMMA’S SEEING SAM AGAIN, and Sam looks the same as he did before. He’s careless and smirking, but I have no right to judge. I have to turn away from Gemma, especially when she tries to catch my eye.
I have my blood and the promise of some fate, a fate that includes you. Right? You’re a sure thing, yes?
Negative Space
I JUST WENT INTO the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk, almost to the top. The glass might be five-sixths full. Above the white milk, there’s the empty part of the glass.
Would anyone see the glass as one-sixth empty? If the glass were half full, would a person even find it possible at first glance to see it half empty? I mean, I look at the stuff that’s in the glass, not the blankness of the other, empty part.
Right?
The invisibility of the one-sixth. I can see the edge of the glass, but even if the material is clear and nearly invisible, it’s not negative. It exists. Glass is almost invisible, that’s all. But birds die against windows. They fly right into the pane and crack their little heads. And dogs and people walk into sliding doors.
It’s never funny when a bird dies against a window, but it’s almost always funny when a person walks into a sliding door. Why?
Negative space. The space left inside and outside of the boundaries made by physical objects. This is a tough idea. I’m trying to get my head around it since I just read about it in an article in Architectural Digest.
If I make my arms into a circle, the space inside the circle is negative. It has shape but no substance. The space outside my arms, as marked by my face or any other object, would also have a shape, I guess, though harder to tell. When I stand with my legs apart, there’s a triangle of negative space I make with the ground.
I can train my eyes to see negative space. It’s hard to see it without practice.
Sorry, I have to go back to the glass.
Who would see the glass of milk I have right now as one-sixth empty? Would anyone see the empty space before seeing the filled space? If I poured an alcoholic half a glass of wine, would he only see the part of the glass that didn’t have the wine? Would he see the glass half empty?
Sorry, sorry. I’m thinking.
Is the definition of a pessimist a person who only sees what he hasn’t got but wants? Would an optimist never see the empty space?
Or is there some other detail I’m leaving out? Is it more complicated?
I don’t know. It isn’t always bad to see the empty space, is it? Isn’t it all right to see both, the filled space and the empty space? You could be in either. I have to try and see everything.
Work
A FEW MONTHS AFTER my father died, I finally knew he was gone. The smell of his paints and turpentine once stained the air, stained his skin, my mother’s hair, and my clothes. I grew up in the smell of his real work, and the smell was gone, disappeared. I went to the small room where he painted. There was an easel, a clean canvas, a stool speckled with paint and graffiti, a worktable, and a coffee can with brushes, pencils, and palette knives. I remember the folded easel against the wall, the canvas on the floor next to the easel, and the stool under the table. No rags, no tubes of paint. Diesel fumes from a passing bus came through the window. My father was gone.
My crying, red-nosed mother gave me an early birthday present. A small set of watercolors in an aluminum case and a pad of paper. I didn’t want to open the case of paints, so my mother opened it for me. Inside were eight dishes of dry color, a brush, and an instruction booklet. My mother got a glass of water. She wet the brush and swirled the bristles in the yellow dish. A small pool of colored water formed on the surface. Then she opened the pad of paper and pulled the brush along the first page. When she handed me the brush, I shook my head. “Oh, Erik,” she said. My poor mother. She lost her husband to a car, then she lost me to my first silence.
My father kept a set of miniature fired bricks on a bookshelf in his and my mother’s bedroom. I must have first used the bricks with him, sitting on his lap at a card table or on the floor, but I don’t remember it. One afternoon, I went into the bedroom to find the bricks. I had to stand on the bed to reach the shelf against the wall where the box sat. I had just enough strength to pull the set out, but not nearly enough to hold it. The box fell on my head and burst open. Most of the bricks fell across the mattress, but enough hit the floor to startle my mother.
“Erik, what are you doing?” She ran into the room and saw the bricks all over the blankets and floor. “Are you all right?” She took me close and looked me over. “You should’ve asked.”
We got to the floor. “Papa loved these bricks,” she said. “They were his, no doubt about it. He didn’t let you play with them alone.” After we collected all the bricks into the box, my mother carried them to my father’s workroom. “You can build in here, Erik. Spread out.”
I worked where my father worked, in the shadow of his table. I built towers. I built forts and castles. A few days went like this before I opened the easel and set up the canvas. I imagined my father at work with his oils while I sat with the hundreds of small red bricks. Hours I spent in that room, day after day. My mother stayed away, letting me work alone in the company of my dead father’s tools. She announced meals to me through the door, and I would answer either by going to the table or not. She brought me snacks of apple slices and raisins. All along, I kept silent.
One morning, my mother knocked on the door to the workroom and let herself inside. “May I join you?” I turned back to the bricks, and my mother sat down. I remember she tied her unbelievable hair behind her head before getting to work. We built a fort. She got through an entire wall and tower by herself. How did she know how? Anyway, we worked side by side in silence together for days, maybe months and years. When we finished, she straightened herself.
“Ooh, this is murder on my back,” she said. “But I think it’s a great fort.”
I swept my arm across it all, an angry little god, destroying it, and pushed the bricks aside. I started again.
Before I began painting the scene of my father’s death, I worried he might get angry. What if he came back to paint his final subject? I must have known he wouldn’t return. I used a new tin of paints my mother had given to me. Instead of the brush the set supplied, I picked one of my father’s brushes from the coffee can. I found a jar on his table and filled it with w
ater. I got to work.
I don’t know how long I built with the bricks in the morning and painted in the afternoon. The painting looked more like a comic strip. I painted my father on his bicycle. I painted the park, as I imagined it, and blue skies with birds flying over the trees. I painted a skinny tree, dying of hunger. My father stopped at the weak tree. He talked to it and held its branches. Once the tree swallowed my father and his bicycle, it stood up fat and tall. I’d finished my first and last canvas.
What else could I do but find my mother and show her my work?
I worried I’d failed when she began to cry.
“Erik,” she said, “talk to me. Won’t you please talk to me?” She kneeled. “I miss Papa, but I miss you more now. Come back to me.” My mother held me hard. I felt her strong arms across my back and her tears on my neck. My poor, poor mother. I tasted the sweat on her skin and felt the heat of her cheek.
I closed my eyes. Shadows came and wings spread. With the wings came the pain and noise.
“Mama,” I said, “do you hear the train coming?”
Courtship
I SOMETIMES MISS MY mother. Since Lincoln the Gentleman divorced his wife to capture my mother, I don’t see much of her, or them. “You don’t need me, really,” she said. “You’re too smart and independent to need anything from me.”
They shower, they cuddle, they eat, they sleep, they walk, they talk. All of it together. Lincoln is good to me, a father. He always has a dollar, always listens. But he loves my mother. She’ll be his true wife, so she comes first, as she should.
For us, since we’ll happen so fast, we’ll court each other after we’re a done deal. Instead of a courtship that ends in marriage, we’ll have a marriage that starts our courtship. We’ll charm each other to keep what we have. We’ll have a movie night once a week, a date night. We’ll flip a coin to decide the theater, and we’ll go after dinner. We’ll get there whenever we get there and see what’s playing next. No matter what the movie is, whether it’s supposed to be good or terrible, we’ll see it. We’re there for the company and to make the best of it. We’re there to turn off our brains and to hold hands in the dark. For two hours, we won’t want to be anywhere else. Then we’ll walk home.
Of course, to make this happen, we have to meet.
Size
MY MOTHER IS RIGHT. I don’t need her much.
I’ve reached 6'9" and 225 pounds, no sign of stopping. I’m sixteen and a half. I’ve outgrown Martin the Irishman, who stopped at 6'5¾" and weighs about fifty pounds less.
You’d think I would play basketball, like Martin, or football. I’ve been recruited and recruited, but I want no part of it. Too violent, too aggressive, and I have no interest in hurting or getting hurt.
I found the perfect sport for me: rowing. After school once, I walked a long way around toward the subway home. A rowing team gliding over the river, perfect union, barely touching water, and I thought, That’s for me. Nothing else but that.
Rowing has made me strong, almost stronger than Jacob, who wrestled with an angel. Or was it a man? Or was it God?
I want to row by myself in a single scull. The water, the oars, God, and me, in motion, inseparable, peaceful.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke
READING THE BIBLE ISN’T easy. It takes me a long time. Especially in the Latin, which is how I’ve been taking it, side by side with English. School Latin and nothing else.
I read every word because every word matters.
Maybe not every word, since I skipped over the genealogy of Jesus in Luke after reading it in Matthew. Mark leaves it out.
Anyway, I read almost every word, but I keep falling asleep. It’s not that I get bored. All the talk of miracles and antichrist and betrayal and torture and death and resurrection, no, I don’t find it boring. It tires me out. Concentrating wears me down.
Sometimes the words rise up off the page and dissolve, and sometimes the pages stick together with honey. I always smell flowers when I read.
Some languages are considered dead, like Kwadi, Esuma, Chorotega, Thracian, Etruscan, Assan, Mahican, and Beothuk. Experts say languages die every day, maybe tens of them.
Some nearly died. Irish came pretty close to the coffin. And others are kind of dead: Aramaic, Sanskrit, and Latin, which show up in various ways, though no one uses them day to day. I wouldn’t recognize Aramaic if it bit me.
Latin, deadish, centuries of bad breath and coughing, still serves the one book almost nobody on earth can seem to avoid, whether you visit a motel or live in the jungle, the book that may be the most alive: the Bible.
et respondens angelus dixit ei ego sum Gabrihel
intrate per angustam portam quia lata porta et spatiosa via quae ducit ad perditionem et multi sunt qui intrant per eam
exinde coepit Iesus ostendere discipulis suis quia oporteret eum ire Hierosolymam et multa pati a senioribus et scribis et principibus sacerdotum et occidi et tertia die resurgere
et perducunt illum in Golgotha locum quod est interpretatum Calvariae locus
Gabriel, the messenger angel.
Jesus describes the narrow gate of heaven and the wide gate of hell.
Jesus foretells His death and resurrection.
The Place of a Skull.
The Place of a Skull, where men and a god ended crucified. Crucified. I can’t even wrap my pea brain around this. Nailed to a rough cross and left to hang until dead. Bleeding and broken and thirsty and hungry. What kind of mind thinks of this?
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Who were they? Did they even exist? They couldn’t have been the only people writing about Jesus. Why are they here and not others? Why aren’t there six or twelve or twenty-four Gospels? Why no Gospel written by a woman? Or a sixteen-year-old boy? Jesus went about His Father’s work when He was twelve, Luke says. By Father, he meant God.
Those first three Gospels, all miracles, disease, suffering, dirt, blindness, devils, blood, anger—so much anger—weakness, and mockery. Not much in the way of peace.
The miracles come again and again, like arrows. Arrow after arrow after arrow at His enemies.
The stories and parables, His stones.
Parable and Blood
“THE BUILDER AND THE OX”
A man in a town decided to build a stone house with the help of an ox. He quarried the fieldstone by himself. Imagine the geometry of the work: the parallel planes of sky and field; two arcs, the blade of a shovel and its cut in the dirt; a coiled rope; a taut rope; the oblong muscles in his grinding jaw and the shape of each creaking tooth; the slope of his back; a triangle, the arches of his feet and the center of his skull its vertices; the iron globe of his heart.
The town said, “Why would you do this by yourself? So much work when you can have a house put up in a day with our help?”
“What can I say?” the builder said. “A voice told me this is the house I have to build and the way I have to build it.”
The town went away dissatisfied with the answer, grumbling to itself, but it left the builder alone with his work.
The builder devised a wooden staging to go up with each story. He built a treadmill on the staging for the ox to work lifting the stones into place. Early on, he tried to catch a falling stone and lost two fingers of his right hand, cracked and pulped as if between a giant’s molars. He suffered little else other than a broken toe, caught beneath the hoof of his sidestepping ox.
One year from the first sight of buried rock, the man and his ox set the final stone. The rest of the town turned out to witness the end of his solitary work. The ox turned the wheel; the ropes snapped and quivered; stones rubbed.
His work ended here.
The man skimmed mortar from the edge of his trowel with his thumbnail. The town watched him rub the flat blade. A single handclap sounded. This collision of hands, like a collision of flint, threw a spark. Another man cau
ght fire and went up in applause. Each clap was a flying, popping ember; fire consumed the crowd. An ovation blazed.
The town celebrated and grew hungry. Once unyoked, the tireless ox was slaughtered on the staging, its meat roasted and divided among the people. The builder himself requested a portion from the blackened shoulder. He sweat ox blood as he ate. The blood stained his temples and ears.
I’m glad I don’t have to explain this. I take my lead from Jesus. He never explained His parables.
I’m bleeding. It stains my temples and ears.
As far as I know, this is my last miracle. Nothing else.
John
JESUS WEEPS FOR LAZARUS. Out of His sadness, out of His love, and with all the power of God behind Him, He raises Lazarus from the dead. He calls a man dead four days out of his grave. This more than anything else gives Jesus His enemies. No one likes a show-off. The cross was a matter of time.
What’s the lesson? Did sadness and love allow Him to be nailed up? Or did anger and revulsion force the hammering?
ecce homo: Behold the man.
mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos ut et vos diligatis invicem
This means, in my translation of a translation, “I’m giving you an order, okay? Right now, a new one. Love each other. Love each other like I’ve loved you.”
Yes. I’ll try. I will always try, even if it makes me sad, gives me headaches. Even if it crucifies me. I have to remind myself, the crucifixion might be a relief.
You see? Sometimes I think I’ve given up on you. Can you feel this? Maybe I lied to myself about you. I ask myself over and over again, What’s her name? What’s her name?
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