This scheme has worked against me as well.
Flip flop the roles and see how it works reversed:
“Why don’t we marry?” I asked Clare, lifting up my bulk on a ninety degree elbow and forearm, casting a critical glance at the gray-green haze that was Clare Mumpy.
“I don’t believe in marriage during war. People get married for the wrong reasons.”
“But you’ll become an American,” I told her.
“Why would I want to be an American,” she asked.
“Everyone wants to be an American.”
“That’s rot. I hate Americans. I want to stay single. I want to keep my options open. Why would I want to tie myself down?”
And she was right. I was galled because I was on the dirty end of the stick, but she understood, in excellent Vandemark fashion, that every choice, no matter how fabulously dense in its evocative hope, however expansive in rich glittering vistas of possibility, is a form of death.
For at the beginning of the race we stand naked and ready to face a world dense with sinuous branches. The hope, that hope, that we can be or do anything is only extinguished by forward momentum, by natural capacities tested or by concomitant failures acknowledged and abandoned, by circumstances or accidents beyond control, and by our own unfailing need to constantly make choices.
By exercising this doggedly persistent impulse we actually destroy the one mechanism we possess to guide our life. We chose our own deaths. We make a choice and guide ourselves down a path that narrows with each fork; and the forks, as we progress, become fewer and far between, until we reach the point of absolute nullity, that infernal spot with no choice inherent in it; a spot that no one can squirm out of…
But for young Langley Vandemark, hat perched jauntily on his broad forehead, wrinkled jacket rakishly thrown over his bulky shoulder, lightly skipping toward a Chock Full O' Nuts truck on the corner of Madison and 42nd, death had been given a decisive knock about the head and neck. And Clare, escaping from my rascally clutches, had shape shifted away from a possible world, and delayed, much to her credit and to my immeasurable shame ---- the impending tick-tock of the maw.
Or shift to the daylight realm and take Rhonda Boule a little before the war. I was twenty-five, she, a tender twenty-one or two. She was one of those marvelously adaptive young women one encountered before the war who does not get much press.
She emigrated from some grid-plan capital city of some spacious Midwestern state, settling down in New York for vague aesthetic and professional motivations. She lived alone, on her own income, frugally but with a certain flashy style.
She decorated her single room Murray Hill apartment with baubles won for her from brawny, brainless beaus on hot summer’s evenings at Coney Island amusement concessions. Stiff maroon animals stuffed with unpliable saw dust sat impassively on a small shelf; a marksmanship trophy stuffed with wax apples rested on the lip of the window sill; a diorama of a bowling alley, decorated with colorfully painted, minature bowlers, the paint, distractingly enough, unevenly applied and skewed during mass production: the bowler’s facial features dripping on a collar, or a flesh colored paint snaking up a sleeve.
Rhonda herself held her firm sturdy, corn fed body upright from mere youthfulness alone. Everything that would eventually sag from weight and persistent gravity was tight and round with a certain solid, symmetrical configuration. She had auburn hair with jet black roots, a shinning button nose that she constantly dulled with granulated white talcum powder. She rouged her half apple cheeks and applied bright primary colored lipstick to her broad honey sweet lips as if it was erotic war paint or she was eros’ medicine man.
Taking a mid-town subway on a summer night (for it was a summer romance, and so all the more heartbreaking in its pathos: it is speckled in my memory with late day hazy humid sunshine beneath the dusty Norway maples of Murry Hill. It is sound tracked by the sudden after work cessation of traffic of bustling mid-town; it is scented by the ozone humid detumesence that follows a brief summer shower.)
Take a look at strapping me in my white summer suit, some kind of profusion of posies in my mitts, striding up the subway steps two at a time, bright floral tie flapping out of my seersucker, light straw hat perched high on my oblong Vandemark pate, joyful because I’m at a fork and I haven’t chosen a path yet, gleeful because I can see my life cleaving in two, forming parallel paths after they separate from a single stubborn point… and I’m dawdling; I am savoring the sensation of my own lassitude.
If life wants to force me to show my hand (and it has that power, it reserves that right, of course), then I can be petulantly playful as I lower my cards. I can savor the dread as fate awaits even the slightest twitch of my globular hands.
She is unstrapping her garter belt and removing her stockings. She is folding her girdle neatly over a wooden chair. Her deflated dress dangles from a wire hanger just over her vanity mirror. She sits perched on her wicker stool, rounded buttocks spilling over the leather confines, forming pleasant roundlets, and brushing her hair repeatedly, fifty strokes for each side of her evenly parted straight hair.
Soon that hair will spread out in wild sprays on the pillow when we make love. I stand behind her running my hands over her pale shoulders, occasionally cupping her prodigious breasts. She squirms, letting out peels of girlish laughter. Her reflective, imitation, immature little girl blue green eyes sparkle at me from the mirror, approving and disapproving in gorgeous simultaneity all of my naughty forays.
I will marry this plump little girl. Her firm baby fat body will incubate as many robust Vandemark’s as eggs she posess and sperm I can implant. And I will don a suit, and ride the subway downtown. And in the gray-green twilight I descend in the elevator and ride the careening subway uptown. And mundanely, she will be there, baby-fat more mature, less firm, surrounded by a brood of children. I will eat and drink, urinate and defecate, age and work, reproduce myself and die.
I let my hand drop from Rhonda’s broad shoulder. It is late at night. I look out the window and see the line of cars stopped at a red light on Madison Avenue. The light turns and the cars surge ahead to the next set of lights that turn red almost immediately.
I finished. I lay on the bed exhausted. Rhonda snuggles up and kisses my lips. Her heavy breasts pressing against my forearm. I can feel dead-weight on my brain for the first time in my twenty-five years. I realized, as those soft hands gropped about my body, that possible worlds were a cruel lie and impossible duty for a man whose vision was not just a keen twenty-twenty, but supernaturally acute --- from that point on I would use all my weight to halt forward progress.
As I rode Rhonda’s elevator down and pushed the sliding door, its rotating plates of glass glittering in the morning sun and stepped heavy footed and certain unto the terra firma of Madison Avenue, I knew that I would never marry that plump, solid, loving, perfectly acceptable girl.
I would never look back (and I did not, until now). The garters would hang limply on the chair, the bra would be slung over the vanity mirror, but some other man would leave a depression in the bed next to Rhonda after he rose to go to work. Some other man would stand stiffly down the aisle as a veiled Rhonda, donned in virginal white, took the somber teary stroll on her father’s arm. She would lock in her future with a certitude I could never dream of; she would never balk at the crossroad when it came. She would make the ontologically sound choice. She was not, after all, a Vandemark.
She reached out and grasped my hand with her sticky paw and with a gentle tug led me away. She pulled me, deftly but with obvious intention, to the landing of the back stairs.
“I know that you play in here,” she pointed without ceremony to the buried trap door beneath the landing.
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve snuck in there when you weren’t around.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s too late. I’ve done it.”
“You shouldn’t get involved in things that are none of your business.”
“I don’t care,” she swung back her hair with vigor, the twisted braid landing on one shoulder, bouncing off and springing to the other. “Why should I care if you scold me?” her cross eye was focused away from me, but her other eye, clear and chocolate brown, was focused sparklingly on my broad face.
“I suppose you shouldn’t,” I said glumly, for I had no way to enforce my strictures. I noticed, as she spoke, that her teeth were pointed at the tips.
With one thin arm she pushed the door and with the other pulled me into the chamber. The crawl space ran along the entire length of the upper landing and was originally used to store the multitude of steamer trunks Mother and Father had lugged about Europe for the three or four years before they conceived offspring.
Eventually, Mother had a servant empty the space, with the idea of using it for storage for her compulsive sewing. The space was emptied, but somehow Mother had never gotten around to storing her overflow of fabric in the hidden chamber. So Langley, a creature that fills a niche to capacity, who expands, as situations demand, to the very contours of a proximal area, skittered into the vacated area.
It became a clubhouse, of sorts, for Homer and myself. We would do a proper job of it, incorporating our little fraternal organization. In the way of all children in industrialized societies, there would be a certain documented rigor to our small confederation. A charter would be drafted, the finer points of which would be debated in committee, hashed about the room in gaggles of arguing members, sticking points hammered out, pragmatic compromises made, drafts re-drafted, much in the way of caucuses the world over. Eventually it failed. The final straw with Homer went like this:
“Ah Lang,” Homer would whine, sitting at the makeshift miniature table I had constructed for his fictitious delegation, “you’re makin it too complicated.”
“Mr. Vandemark, if you wish to address the committee I will have to request that you refrain from doing so until the floor is open for questions.”
A stymied Homer would purse his lips and furrowed his brow.
Then the daily procedures would be drafted and enacted. There must be a strict set of procedures adhered to by all member-delegates to insure that all members-delegates are free to participate in the open caucus format without political infighting or factions forming.
“Mr. Vandemark,” I howled with theatrical rage, “the Chair has admonished you for the very last time to remain seated and remain quiet until the chair recognizes you and you take the floor and the stenographer can note your comments for future issues of The Caucus Review.”
“But Lang…”
“Mr. Vandemark, I am close to holding you in contempt of committee!” I waved my gavel threateningly in front of his forlorn face. His eyes were flooded with tears which streamed in silent rivulets down his cheeks. “What’s wrong, Homer?” I lowered my gavel and stooped over Homer’s desk. There was a spreading puddle of yellow urine at my feet.
“I have….” he whimpered, “I had to go to the toilet.”
My time with Mina in the crawlspace proved to be more profitable.
She was a bundle of coordinated energy. Whereas poor Homer shrunk under the pressure of the rigors of the give-and-take of the boardroom, Mina flourished, prospered, and was the perfect foe and devil’s advocate for my vociferous objections, my hand wringing admonishments, my ceaseless haranguing.
“You are out of order, Madam!
“No, you are out of order!” she squealed with delight.
“MADAME! MADAME!”
“MADAME!” she shrieked back, and rushed me, headlong, stopping short of my chair, pulling back my head and landing on my thick lower lip, her salty, pouty lips, sandwiching both soft slivers between mine, inserting her darting tongue into the antechamber of my mouth. My first kiss.
Ever since, I have always associated Eros with a sort of raucous parliamentary procedures.
SIXTEEN
An inventory. Perhaps it is time to move freely on a boom and get a Gods-eye view of things. We can rove freely, if not in space, that deceptively manacled notion (and not what it truly claims it is), than with the mind’s eye, a somewhat less-bounded creation, equally open to caprice and groundedness simultaneously.
I never wanted to eliminate objects from space. For I found when I did a corresponding measure was extracted from me. That awful vacuum, that void left me so calm with nullity I doubled back, cognitively, and found myself once again in the realm of stark-black blank panic.
Panic and loss became intertwined, such intimate bedfellows that they transformed themselves into incestuous twins. And like all incestuous unions, the element of depravity was a mask for a royal impulse --- the destructive desire to maintain the line untainted by traits of barbarism.
A scenario: I was in an empty room. I reached out across the stark white medium for some hand to anchor me. When all I met there was my own dangling expectations the void sucked in, bringing in a rushing torrent of air. The in-drawn breath, the empty room, the vast expanse of blank overhead sky --- and my own open, cracked, blank mind --- yawned.
All around me possible worlds bloomed, mushroomed, decayed and contracted. Each one wanted me to take the plunge down their mutually exclusive pathways. But there was nothing there to choose. All possibility of choice was somehow tainted at the notch of the forking path. I would rather lay down at the cross-roads and allow the world in all its grand calliope to pass me by, or rumble over me, than even take a road less traveled.
Earlier, there were reasons to be concerned about possible paths. For the cradle is a far more hazardous container than the coffin. Beginnings bear the stench of inevitability about them, the caressing silence of pure, eternal repose. The cradle is a platform of wrenching growth (for growth has a stench, like the oily smell of burning rubber).
The outstretched chubby arm, grasping a finger in that mock semblance of our simian ancestry, the kicking pliable legs hoisted over the oblong fetal knob that possesses for a human head, the dimpled depression of the fontanel, a crease that imperfectly covers the yet-to-be-sutured skull plates, shifting about hazardously at that joints, without rhyme or reason like some primal continental Pangaea.
I wish I could set the evolutionary life of a man in fast forward. I think few could stomach the hideous display of bulging, popping stretching elongation… the arching upward, the rooting earthwise.
It is a rotating orb, a twisting sphere with two equalized magnetic half-globes which maintain all in an unsteady, tense, equi-pose. And few could stomach the awareness of how easily this tender mechanism can be skewed.
From this, the shadow imploded on itself, and from the collapsed gray pouch emerged little Mina Phillips, my first play companion and shrewd lover. Her father, Franklin Phillips, was a butler in our brownstone for a spell, and then he transmuted, as the Vandermark family fell on hard times, into a handy-man and jack of all trades.
More often than not he brought his little daughter Mina along as he toiled in our house. She would trail along her with her father, making lazy circles around the ladder he had set up in the hall, as he changed an overhead fixture, or sitting on the waxed upstairs gallery floor as he poked his head up a trap door in the ceiling to change some faulty wiring.
She sat on the ground below him, rolling some dung colored marbles along the slick, glistering floor, her prepubescent and knobby knees pressed against the wooden tongue and grooves as if in prayerful supplication. I stepped out from the shadow, a year or two younger than her, but rounder, firmer, already on my blind trajectory toward the unfettered building of cells, block upon merciless block!
“Which one are you?” she lisped. She had a lazy left eye that distractedly turned toward her round button nose.
“What do you mean?”
“Which brother are you?” she clasped a marble in her small hand, and let it drop, abstractly, unto the slick floor. It settled into a dimple in one of the wooden slats all but invisible to the naked eye.
“I’m Langley.” She studied my face with a child like intensity, examining the contours of my body as I stood above her, as if the general impression was more important than the specific instantiation.
“You’re brother is strange,” she lisped.
“Mina, don’t be rude,” her father boomed from above, as if from the cloud shrouded peak of Sinai, his head concealed in a duct. She frowned, and nervously toying with a piece of her brown tangled hair, looked at me again with her one good eye, the other one seeming to focus along the herringbone pattern wall paper that lined the hall.
“Sorry Pappa,” she said without a trace of genuine contrition.
“What’s wrong with your brother? What’s his name?”
“Homer.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Mina,” her father’s voice boomed. Then he momentarily removed his head from the duct, “I told you not to be rude.”
“Yes Pappa. Pappa, can Langley and I go off and play?”
“Yes,” he said, head back in the duct, “just don’t wander off too far.”
She stood up, a head shorter than me, gingham dress falling just below the dimples south of her knees, springy, tawny brown hair falling in unruly waves over her broad, blemishless forehead. A ribbon, placed high atop her head earlier in the day, was making a slow migration southward, barely perched on the nethermost region of her twisted, falling hair.
Then more: a scene change. I am young. I was with Uncle Robeson, father and Homer, on one of our rare, joint Vandemark masculine adventures. We were standing on a high promontory overlooking a bend in the Hudson River. To our backs was the lush summer verdure of the east slope of the Catskills. If I chose to, at that moment, I could have spun around and gazed at the mountains, which I dearly wanted to, rather than looking at that dull stretch of river.
But Uncle had dragged us up to that promontory for a historical lesson. He was trying, by both words and sweeping gestures, by creating imaginary lines of demarcation with a walking stick, to show us the boundaries of the supposed old patroonship of the Vandemark clan. It’s a curious land that surrounded us: rounded lush mountains, steep craggy rocks sopped with moisture and fringed with moss, ferns clumped, clustered around black apertures concealing small caves and crevices.
I took a step back from Homer, Father and Uncle. The small knotty hill was bordered by a wall of deciduous trees; the low hanging leaves were drenched with water from a recent shower. I stepped through the veil of moisture. I was wet from tip to toe; the leaves brushed my torso, my loins, and I felt a marvelous shudder of absolute release, as if my body, on contact with wet wondrous moisture had released a hidden packet of energy.
The leaves of a silver maple shifted into vision: its pointed speared tips contained a single drop of shinning fluid – thick, sweet, with the texture of honey. The underside was a dusty white, powdery, dry, the veins a deeper blue-green ridged and ringed with a pale halo. And it was not a single leaf but a multitude --- a thousand shimmering in the wind, dripping, drooping, pulsing over my head --- the black trunks negative patches in the sway of candied lime green.
And then me! I could have stood there a moment or an eternity, but I had to continue, the blood was warm and demanded motion; and eyes were liquid, even when encased in a film of gel, and bones were solid, statuesque, but required a jangle of forward momentum, a step or a leap.
Take a step deeper: move into hyper focus: here is a black ant perched precariously on the end-most leaf of a fern; his tri-bulbed body reaching out in the air, front legs grasping skyward for an alternate perch. Langley Vandemark fingers, massive digits, facilitated his endeavor and pinches him with surprising delicacy: he is on a stripped, nubby twig now, a twig that arches downward into the ripe litter of brush, that was his primary goal. I have provided the necessary link in an incomplete chain. He is saved.
Focus out again: separate some more strands from the dense visual clutter: a creeping vine has sent out a tendril from its thick mat of spiky lozenge green shoots. The arm graces outward, hopeful of a perch on a neighboring elm; it dangles in the air, an expectant dendrite in mid-pose, until sweet Langley paws, massive but deft, guide them lateral wise to an innocent elm twig.
Langley as a boy yet Langley already larger than life. My path in this mythological woodland home, an ancestral lie by repeated usage, is a testimony to the adage that repetition creates its own verisimilitude.
Truth is a worn groove created by our very wake. My presence creates a tangle of signification in the world, in this woodland. A projection of mind and body so entwined they form one shadow. A union of world with Langley that the very leaves seem to flicker not from the flowing moist Catskill air trapped in gorges and canyons but from my gliding bulk.
I reached a small meadow. It slanted downward to a rocky crag; the crag formed one of those ubiquitous Catskill rock outcroppings, a broken, jagged, hideous pile of stone thrust haphazardly skyward.
Overhead was motion and light: a crack and peel. The late summer sky milky haze was ripped in half by a streak of lightening, and then, following hard upon, a rumble of thunder.
The landscape became confused, distorted. The distant hills suddenly were distinct, while close objects slid out of focus. A steady warm rain beat incessantly down; another peel, another flash of lightening, a distant twinkle, a rattle, and knocking as if pins were falling.
I, Langley Vandemark, in sound mind and body rounded the bulk of the black rock. In a notch on the blind side of the jumble the sound of thunder was deafening, the light flashes came in blinding, rapid pulses… stepping back a moment I saw the first and only legitimate vision in my entire life:
A tight knot of small gnarled men stood stooped around bowling pins and miniature, pearl bright bowling balls. They wore seventeenth century pantaloons, doublets, peaked caps with ornate and drooping feathers, small shinning swords, kid gloves tucked rakishly into fantastically wide rawhide belts.
I knew instantly who these trolls were: the shrunken gnomic likenesses of Hendrik Hudson’s crew. They had set the old man adrift in the Hudson Bay after a bloodless mutiny and as a Sleepy Hollow type punishment were turned to worm-elf-men, doomed forever to play repeated games of spirited nine-pins in the moist peaks of the Catskill Mountains. The thunder was the rattle of the pins; the flashes of light, the friction of the collision. Their eyes were pointed pin pricks of bright yellow, with their ears sloped backward toward the base of their tight skulls. They did not notice me, or if they did they seemed disinclined to care. They were intent on playing their game. Occasionally a score keeping argument would erupt, but I couldn’t hear their words, which was a garbled elfin dialect of stutters and clicks. Only once did one of the creatures look at me. He shot me a glare of recognition and uncanny precognition but nothing tangible. It was a look that I gave meaning to in retrospect.
As a vision they were stubbornly resistant: they did not shimmer or waver; they held firm static control; vertical and horizontal lines were unfaltering and clear. Finally I had to walk away. As visions go, they seemed more real than even my hulking flesh and bone.
Pull out again. Clare and I are underneath my black umbrella. Lunch time is over, but we dawdle near shop windows looking at towels, kitchenette sets, toiletries, domestic utensils that sit primly atop lace doilies, separated from us by a thin partition of retail glass. I pull her to me sideways by her slim tapered waist. She bumps against me, and leans her tussled head into by broad built collarbone, taut as a drawn bow.
FIFTEEN
Clare and I walked hand and hand around Bloomsbury. In the shadow of the British Museum I halted our foreword progress and kissed her. She turned up her puckered face to meet mine. She was not as fastidious any longer about plucking her eyebrows. When our heads parted I could see the individual hair follicles poking through her green-yellow dermis. She ran her hand through my hair and examined the claw marks on my forehead.
She was just about to say something but the wind gusted and her little skirt lifted as if levitating on a thermal. I helped her push it down along the row of its even pleats.
It was raining, and the lunchtime Bloomsbury crowd had sprouted uniformly black and gray umbrellas. They bobbed like glistening mushrooms. There were so many on the street it gave the illusion that were sliding and swaying rather than moving from point A to point B. A mushroom up and mushroom down; a gray and black series of carefree dots sliding about in the drenching rain, getting nowhere.
Clare and I ducked into an eatery. We hung our rain coats on the hooks by the wall. We sat by the window and watched the long streaks of water spill down the glass. I watched her smoke cigarettes. She smoked one and then extinguished it, yellow finger and yellow butt joined silently, momentarily, and then departing. She smoked another. She looked out the window with distraction. A pasty faced boy brought me a plate of mashed potatoes and peas smothered in a greasy sauce. Little red sausages rested on the perimeter of the brownish pool.
Clare shifted in her chair and sighed. I had bought her a new blouse to add some splash to her frumpy wardrobe. It was scarlet with miniature white-rose florets stitched around the collar and sleeves. A larger rose, somewhat deflated already from being pressed against the lip of a desk during long hours of office labor, was stitched just below her heart.
Her exhaustion was reaching an apogee. Dark rings, and encircling ringlets, fringed her drooping eyelids. All those perimeter, premature lines on her young face had assumed a deeper etch. Wet tangled hair hung limply from her scalp in a high cap, covering those endlessly fascinating pointed ears. I dropped my spoonful of brown English mash, reached out, gently touching the tips of her ears by brushing aside a clumped lock until it fringed the ear like a border mat. She smiled thinly at me.
The moors were a dark sea, and I wrapped my cape around my squared shoulders, pulled my cap down over my beetled brow, and stepped deeper into that gloom… hoping against all odds that the driving pelting rain, the cold brutally sheering wind, would somehow destroy that part of my soul that refused to surrender, that malignant growth that had grown so fearsome in its state of advanced decay it had dovetailed and given me wholesome, super numinous strength.
I felt it inside myself, a perfect black orb, shinning, metallic, attracting and repelling the world of objects, and the collision of ideas and sensations inside of my head were rankly abused by its infernal attractions, drawing all that came into its path, into the unwholesome encumbrance of its pull.
What could I do, when everything that came within my grasp eventually found its way into that orbit? What could I do, when my orbit, by necessity of its telos and design, bent and forged those objects until they were something else? My dilemma was not mere solipsism but something far graver in its scope. My mind took from the world and did not reflect itself --- took from the world through a process of hideous distillation, just what it wanted, and that was all. And even then, it was not enough. It needed to fashion the materials until they were indistinguishable from itself.
I did not so much walk out into the moors as the moors walked out into me. Every blade of grass, every granule of gray distinctless English soil struggled in a pitched battle to enter my already crowded psyche. I was crammed to the hilt with experience. Experience sought me out as if my mind had no sensory portals, but was an open funnel. I found myself running over the undulating hills. The rain, a vaporous hail of mist that fell up and down simultaneously was both a soothing tonic and an elixir of excitation.
I would crest a hill, but my legs were unready for the landing, and I would rise, upward, and before I could adjust to it, the hill would descend, and my legs would topple beneath me, and I would stumble free-fall, legs unready for a drop. Then the process repeated itself until I became giddy with the expectation of my own loss of kinetic control.
I ploughed through an oblong puddle of thick mud which pleasantly coated my hands and face. I rolled through it, only to see my way out on the other side to a thorny patch of nettles.
My water logged cape tore and ripped as I struggled to break free of the dense bramble. I rolled again, but instead of freeing myself of the nettles I seemed only to land more deeply in the briar. I could feel my skin rip; I could hear the sound of rip, as if I were being torn along an already existing suture line.
But it was not effective, I broke free, and I was running once again, my cape still on my back, but cut to ribbons, streams of delicious blood pouring down from cuts along my hair line, my neck, my chest, and the ubiquitous rain, drenching, bogging down my run, halting me as if it were quicksilver.
I ran. I ran faster. I drew off reserves I did not know I had. I calculated that I could continue north well into Scotland and perhaps I would just run out of calories… my body would burn fat, then muscle, until nothing was left and I literally fell apart into a distilled jelly that was a running human form one second and then, the next, a shapeless mass, a puddle just beneath the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall.
But I stopped. The swirl of wind and rain, so fearsome, circled around me as if I were the nexus of its concerted action, as if the snug egg of my small human habitation was somehow dreadfully important to the functioning of Nature.
When I cleared my mind of warring thoughts, and I did, I allowed them to just fall away as if I had removed a heavy suit of mail, my discipline dissolved, it was over and the tempest just disintegrated. One moment it was a black swirl of water and wind, the next, complete, deflated silence.
The rolling pitch of the moors stretched out before me, and I could have wept at their utter, stupid simplicity. They were in my mind’s eye --- they were out there, but I could not discern the difference nor did I care. The clouds peeled away at the horizon. The rip slid from the earth up the meridian of the sky and each star twinkled in understated luminosity…
When I heard the wolfhounds I didn’t believe my ears. I cocked my head from side to side to catch subtle variations in their movement. It was too good to be true --- too cinematic in its scope. To have one’s bodily essence shredded by creatures who mirror one’s own undeveloped grainy soul was perfection consummated. It was a honeymoon for my empty soul, a soul that pushed and bubbled against my hulking full, extended body. I could feel that soul essence butting against my ribs, ineffectually pushing on my spine, slouching around my pelvis like a ghostly fetus. Time for a final reckoning.
I could hear them. They surrounded me in the gully. They knew I was there. They could smell me. Any direction I moved I would encounter them. I wanted this awful consummation. For I knew, intuitively, that if I survived this encounter I was doomed. Eternally --- gothically doomed.
I stripped nude. I wanted to give the beasts a sporting chance.
Naked, hulking, absurdly large, all out of proportion to the surrounding scale of nature. I stepped off the small precipice. Red eyes, snarled teeth, a low hiss, the ragged claw over soft homo sapien skin, and the musky odor of hides, dog-breath and warm dripping saliva. I was end over end, jaws in an arm, a leg, back neck… but my integrity was maintained. Almost immediately the venture had failed. All that was broken was my heart. Naked, ripped, yet essentially whole; I wept like a babe.
