Concerning the Response

  “Kevin. . . .” She was crying openly now, the sting of minute, crystalline miracles dropping onto hands he looked down to see were clasped in hers. “Kevin, let me help. Let me go with you. Or stay with you. You DO need me, because I need you. I love you.”

  And there it was. Like an electric jolt. All the hours spent pouring over innocuous words, searching for distilled hints, leading him here. And maybe it was that sense of liberation that gave him resolve, cards on that table that whatever else she did love him, empowering him. And because he loved her, he went back to the house alone.

Concerning the Poem

  Kevin cringed the moment his lips stopped moving. He’d said too much, revealed more than he should have, and Ivy was just looking at him. He started a faltering apology, promise to never bring that up again, then stopped himself. He saw saline gathering at the corner of her eyes. He didn’t know quite what else to say, so much needed to be said. And like relaxing a muscle he let it flow.
  “I was here earlier,” he told her quietly. “The other waitress said you had traded days, so I left, but anyway.” He made the effort to look her in the eyes, but between the rivules cascading down her cheeks and the army of emotion he always battled when he looked at her, he had to focus on the untouched plate of beignets instead. “I. . . . I wanted to ask you to come with me. I needed to. . . . go away. And more than that, I need. . . . I need you.”
  “Kevin –“ was all she got out before he cut her off.
  “But I don’t feel I can do that now. Leave, I mean. Or ask you. I mean, I need to work this out. Because you mean this much to me. I want you to have more than I am.”

Concerning Rilke

  Andrew the waiter appeared as if summoned, bestowing coffee and beignets. “Someone sent these back so you might as well have them.”
  “You’ve been well-trained, Dublin,” Kevin said with the ghost of a social smile.
  “Look, this kind of relates to when we talked earlier,” Ivy told him as Andrew left. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have the words I wanted to say.”
  “It’s okay,” Kevin said, and he meant it.
  “Rilke says you’ll live your way into the answer,” she continued. “Without realizing it.”
  “Nothing like a good German existentialist for hitting the nail.”
  “But it takes living in the question now, and the point is to live in everything. And that’s not something you see, just something you know among everyone’s interpretations. Like, well, like with love. I don’t really have a better example. There’s no destination, you just recognize where you are, and whatever lines other people draw don’t matter.”
  Kevin was silent, not from a lack of words but too many, jostling for a purchase in his mind. Then a sliver of poetry fell into his brain like a shaft of pure sunlight, and maybe he no longer feared but he felt his lips forming the words into quotation. Nerdua.
  “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved:
  “In secret, between the shadow and the soul.
  “I love you as the plant that never blooms,
  “But carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.”

Concerning du Monde

  He wasn’t really expecting Ivy to be there when he went back to Café du Monde. It was like letting the phone ring that one last time, on the off-chance it gets picked up. Hopeless, he knew, and he browbeat himself for indulging, but when anyway.
  And was surprised to find her sitting alone on the terrace, reading a book by the insect-swarmed lamp.
  He stood there, staring at her for an eternity, in amazement, in admiration, in adoration. Then he shook himself and hopped the fence like so many mornings, taking the chair across from her.
  “Hi,” he said sheepishly as she glanced up from her book.
  “Where have you been?” she asked, stealing his words. Her face was concern; not worry, but like God in the Garden at the Fall. As though she knew where, only wanted to hear him say it.
  “I was having. . . . a talk with someone,” he said.
  “You wanna know something?”
  “What?”
  She brushed a lock of hair from her face, twisting in his stomach like winding a clock. “Sometimes the questions are more beautiful than the answers have the capacity to be. Sometimes. . . . sometimes the truth is more complicated than an explanation can clarify.”
  “That’s what he said.” Kevin helped himself to her coffee mug. “I just don’t know how it’s done,” he told the tawny swirls.

Concerning the Park

  Pale blue angels loitering about park-benches along the concrete lake shore; pale devils cupping cigarettes against the breeze, faces vanishing in the orange flare. Wan spirits of children staring as unabashed as only the innocent can, led into darkness by the hand of preoccupied parents. Ghostly lovers reclined on blankets spread across the damp grass and beneath the occasional glimpse of Orion flexing dimly on midnight blue. Faded winter captured in a glass of wine caught flashing in a moment of moonlight and revenants in evening supplication. Dew, tears, rain, absolution. Perhaps we stress too much over definition.

Concerning the Response

  Maybe God does move closer to the earth on holy days. Maybe he senses more minds and souls receptive, seeking. Weeping without words. Or maybe he is always close, and we are more in tune. The gap of accessibility shrinks, lessening the reaction time before encounter. Whatever it is, what Kevin saw when he looked into the face of the crucifix was a blending of emotion, a gamut of indescribable pain, sorrow, hurt, and somehow a sense of resolution. Of need and fulfillment; of emptiness and meaning; of water and wine. Of Gethsemane understanding.
  Kevin opened his mouth to speak, maybe protest, like struggling to cry out in a dream. He was as inchoate and mute as when the Ghost reminded him of the one scar among many, shaking, face flushed and wet. Finally the words made it from his throat to his lips. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed, not caring who heard.
  The echo of his boots chased him from the sanctuary, whipping candles, down the saturnine steps and the mindless circle of the park outside.

Concerning the Response

  Maybe God does move closer to the earth on holy days. Maybe he senses more minds and souls receptive, seeking. Weeping without words. Or maybe he is always close, and we are more in tune. The gap of accessibility shrinks, lessening the reaction time before encounter. Whatever it is, what Kevin saw when he looked into the face of the crucifix was a blending of emotion, a gamut of indescribable pain, sorrow, hurt, and somehow a sense of resolution. Of need and fulfillment; of emptiness and meaning; of water and wine. Of Gethsemane understanding.
  Kevin opened his mouth to speak, maybe protest, like struggling to cry out in a dream. He was as inchoate and mute as when the Ghost reminded him of the one scar among many, shaking, face flushed and wet. Finally the words made it from his throat to his lips. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed, not caring who heard.
  The echo of his boots chased him from the sanctuary, whipping candles, down the saturnine steps and the mindless circle of the park outside.

Concerning the Prayer

  Kevin glanced around nervously, making sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “Being God, you should know who I am, so we can forgo the formalities,” he began. His own voice startled him. Damned that he should analyze it now but he felt too plaintive. This was his moment after all. “So you also know what I currently think about you. So. Here’s your chance. Here’s your big moment to change my mind. Go on. I’m open.”
  His eyes dropped to the floor. Silence was reverent without his contribution. “But you never speak, do you. That’s the problem, isn’t it? That you refuse to move a hand in this world, stop all this shit you set in motion? Catch the falling sparrow. You start knocking humanity like Dominos and then you aren’t supposed to be responsible for what your name gets applied to. And I’m supposed to accept that just because you know when the sparrow falls? Where’s the sense in that?
  “Ivy says we’re here to be interconnected. That we require it. So where does that leave me? Did you think of that before you started this? Or are some of us just decided the chamber pot from the start? Is that the question-- is it that you don’t really give a shit, or some of us are just the freaking rejects so you can grade on the curve? Some of us you can slap around, and that’s okay because you’re God and you can do that. Your ineffable plan.”
  His vision was starting to waver with ambivalent tears, struggling to keep them in, struggling to let it out, the desperation to plow ahead stronger than any addictive hunger he had ever felt. Not caring who heard him now – the world had faded away but for a scarred boy and an alabaster representation of a broken, dolorous God.
  “Our needs and wants may not amount to much in your cosmic worldview but they weren't so much to ask for from this end. At least a simple explanation of Why? Why the hell you kept me alive for THIS?! Huh?”
  He raised his eyes to look Christ in his, and a saline film revealed a detail he hadn’t noticed: Christ’s ribs were showing. And not simply that, the artist had sculpted his icon with flesh draped like ragged belts, shorn away and oozing. It was graphic, almost sacrilegious in a church. And Kevin realized his hand was reaching to the scars on his own back.

Concerning the Icon

  Up to the front resolutely, passing a scattering of the devout lighting tea candles or on their knees in abased introspection. Ahead was suspended the faded form of a man, hidden by darkness of time, of light, and men. Ahead was the form of responsibility. Here was, in icon, his destiny.
  Polished alabaster, faded, pitted, browned through time and stained by the smoke of the very sacraments of his worship, the crucifix hung over a gilded altar, haloed by a bronze corona like the Bethlehem star had exploded, shimmering in the half-light. Kevin paused before the sculpture, the flickering candles shifting the emotion of the Christ’s face as surely as it had when he’d first hung there.
  The human mind, Kevin reflected, has a curious way of glossing over the shocking, horrible moment it just beheld, burying it as if it cannot exist if it falls outside of the prosaic; you catch ghosts, and weep for reasons you’re not exactly sure of triggered by simple melodies or resonating poetry, but have to force it back into the significance it deserves.
  Maybe a lifetime of excoriation had brought him to a point of a spectator, but even now he looked at this symbol of the most horrifying event in history, an execution practice unparalleled in pain in cruelty, and was amused at its use as scenery, passed by but for pangs of angst or invocation to serenity. It was Good Friday. The one night this horror is hallowed. And here he feels alone.
  And yet, here was the pull of gravity. Here he was drawn from the vestibule’s event horizon to the very singularity where hung the Christ. It was as though every moment in his life was a raindrop spiraling down the pane, slowly gathering into this pool at the end. This is where it all stopped, regardless of the conclusion, here was the fulcrum.

Concerning the Altar

   Not sure why he scaled the steps, pitted with lagoons of water black in the absence of light. Some compulsion yearning in him to see this spiritual Bastille apart from the representation in his father. Perhaps a desire, sunken deep below, for absolution – to have revealed, one way or another, truth. Or maybe validation, the manifestation proven all he had known it was. He didn’t know, couldn’t bring himself to analyze, just watched himself walk in.
  The vestibule passed wordlessly behind, rattling of ancient radiators in the doorway unwieldy before the vastness of the sanctuary before him. Most of the hall was in shadow, spun like puppets from the candles that were tonight’s only light. Some, in clusters, had seduced patrons to kneel before them, Aim-a-Flames clutched reverently in folded hands.
  Kevin felt like an unexpected cough in a library, like any moment now God would notice he was standing there and object. He took a breath and willed himself down the worn carpet of the center aisle, fingertips brushing the chipped walnut pew arms in a ritual many before him had undertaken just as unconsciously, an anchor from the vanishing point spiraling into the presence of God.
  The altar began to melt into a shape from the gyrating shadows, and for a moment he hesitated; he was an intruder in the house of God, coming to bandy words and raise a finger as if he expected an answer. Then a chunk of memory bobbed to the surface: his father, face sclerotic as usual, jerking his arm painfully and screaming about reverence. Kevin clenched his teeth at the image. Screw it. God had a lot he should answer for.

Concerning The Church

  It’s disheartening that when you’ve made up your mind to ask a woman to run away with you, she’s not there to ask.
  The other waitress at Café du Monde had to trade days, she said, and no she had no idea where Ivy was. Neither did the phone rhythmically purring, until Kevin finally hung up in dismay.
  Not really knowing why or to where, maybe because he felt he had nowhere to really go, Kevin started walking down wet pavement and moist air, through the park full of yuppies jogging and walking dogs, and found himself, on Good Friday, as the light was fading into a dark purple bruise, outside of St. Michael's.

Concerning the Apartment

  Sounds of tenement. Somewhere in the building a wailing baby, cutting through the drone of phlegmatic ludicrousness of day-time TV talk shows. He let the door click closed, waiting on the threshold of more than a soured doormat, listening to a woman trying to hush the child, breathing in the stale must and searing Mexican spice, the actinic ammonia of cat urine, the old garbage and city air slithering through cracked windows.
  Then he took the wooden stairs, through the front door and into a another world hallowed by raindrops, and sodden leaves, and fallen insects.

Concerning Packing

   Friday, April the Ninth. Rain was flushing worms from beneath the sidewalk and coldly drowning them in puddles.
  Kevin realized with detached bemusement that he didn’t care about anything in the house enough to take it with him and skipped packing. Changed his mind when he got downstairs and, for reason unclear, grabbed a kitchen knife. Michael Meyers style, still in its cardboard sheath, a condensed homage to the meticulousness of his mother. He looked through the hallway into the living room, where he could see the top of her head and protruding feet asleep on the couch. Despite being close to the flickering gas fireplace, she had an afghan pulled around her shoulders, half draped on the floor.
  Some tentative emotion, a tobacco smoke wisp lingering but for a moment, rippled through his soul like a pebble thrown into a pool. It was an incongruous sense of affection. He had never really felt that he loved his mother; she was a sort of necessary character, background, neither Yin nor Yang, and Love was a word his dictionary couldn’t explain. To be honest, he never felt that he knew her.
  Then the knife felt real in his hand again. His eyes focused on the blade, and with a deliberate movement he slid it beneath his coat and slipped quietly out the door.

Concerning the Rain

  Rain-stirred consciousness, an expanding ringlet moving out away from the shore into infinity from a single droplet of water. Waking to the realization that the gentle scratching was not the liquescence of his mind, but rainwater rolling down the window-pane. Glaring into red alpha-numerics burning his retina. Scarce after four PM.
  He sat up slowly, palm wiping a face waxy and plasticine, and moved to the window to gaze into a brick landscape blurred by waterspots and crowded grey skies.
  How many times had he woken this way? Seventeen years worth of nights, and mornings, and afternoons, each movement blurred into the next until the line where an end became another beginning vanished altogether, leaving just a series of one-act plays. How pathetic it all seemed from this vantage at the threshold of a hangover, where clarity was ironically often its most salient. How long would he remain here, just getting by in empty existence doping up in this bedroom in his parents’ house? Every passing motion an immolation to Hopelessness. Sooner or later it would come to a breaking point; he knew it was just a matter of time. He needed to get the hell out of here before that.
  But Ivy was right. He did need someone. He didn’t want to do it alone, a paradigm shift he recognized with as crystalline certainty as he saw the world through the rain-washed window. Admitting it frightened him, but he knew more surely than he could know anything that he didn’t want to be anywhere without her.

In a land with radio interference. Please stay tuned for the next episode. We should be airing by this time next week!

Concerning the Spared Rod

  When he was younger Kevin once made a mistake and thoughtlessly swore. He couldn’t remember if it were an accident or just something he’d picked up on the street, repeated in a child’s mindless parroting. It didn’t really matter: his father’s retribution was swift. Blasphemy of the Spirit will not be forgiven.
  And Kevin was stretched, shirtless, between the doorposts, and his father read from Isaiah in the Bible over the tumult of Kevin’s tears and wails for forgiveness, for mercy.
  “By His stripes are we healed.”
  By Kevin’s stripes the child is redeemed before his God, and by a brown leather belt are those stripes carved like a painter flinging his brush at the canvas. Above his head, a crucifix looking on with sorrow. Below, welts blossoming on the canvas like red roses, or the thin trickle of blood licking the needle in the crook of the elbow, and the brief grimace of morphine and vein in coitus. Spare the rod, condemn the child.

Concerning Fire, People and Beignets

  Kevin traded her a clove cigarette when she returned with a plate of pastries and coffee refill, and they sat a few moments sharing the serene silence of warm company. “You don’t look so well,” Ivy finally observed, tapping ash and pushing her glasses back up her nose.
  “Bad dream,” Kevin said, biting into a beignet gingerly. “Didn’t sleep well last night.”
  Ivy was aware of his attempts at coping, but while he never felt judged or condemned by her he was reluctant to allude to it. “Addiction” was another word they didn’t mention much. He wondered sometimes, feeling blasphemous just doing so, if maybe she just didn’t know what to say.
  “Like that’s new,” Ivy responded. Then she added, “Not that I’ve stones to throw. I spent all night dreaming I was reading a magazine. How stupid is that?”
  Kevin smiled. She could always make him smile effortlessly. “I just need to get out of here,” he brooded.
  “So I’ve heard.”
  “I mean it.”
  “You know I would do anything to help you.”
  “You can’t,” he answered, not unkindly. “I wish I had those kinds of problems.”
  “No one can do it on their own, Kevin. Even healthy people, and you know what I mean by that. It’s a structure built into our psychology.” She took a draught of coffee as though it were her wellspring of inspiration. “Look, perhaps you should view it as fire. For all its destructive genius it can be friendly, and that friendliness we depend on. Whether by carbon or electric, we need it to see, to be warm. Maybe we just stress over the definition too much. But that’s why we have people.”
  Kevin stubbed out his cigarette. “Tell that to God.”

Concerning du Monde

   The mid-morning crowd was sparse, a handful of suits sipping espresso absently over newspapers and the occasional college kid with a wan hangover smile. Ivy must have seen him out there in a sea of blank white tables. It wasn’t long before she appeared with a cup of coffee on a tray, sloshed brown stains crawling down the side of the ceramic. She was accompanied by a gangling guy in a green smock.
  “Thank you, how did you know?” Kevin said.
  “You develop a nose for these things,” Ivy replied with a smile that would make angels renounce their vow. “This is Andrew. He’s from Dublin.”
  “Ireland?”
  “Ohio. Like Wendy’s,” Andrew said.
  Ivy explained, “I’m training him.”
  She was thin, petite, face blessed with a cowl of dark hair and green cat eyes. Kevin was in love with her in ways that only the wholly lonely can know, “the deep, unutterable woe which none save exiles feel,” as Aytoun put it. Something he was also unable to express; it wasn’t a language he felt comfortable with, and he was never able to dispel the feeling of undeserving to be around her. Somewhere, he knew that she loved him too. He wasn’t brave enough to probe the how.
  “I’ve a break in about fifteen,” Ivy said. “Have you had breakfast?”
  Kevin gave a look that indicated he wasn’t familiar with the word.
  “That’s what I thought. You look like you could use a beignet.”

Concerning the Cafe

   Café du Monde, but not THAT Café du Monde. The place tried to style itself after the best parts of New Orleans gothic nostalgia, but the point where they truly succeeded was in the vitriolic coffee and immortal atmosphere.
  Kevin went here as frequently as he was able, partly for the coffee, beignet and ambience, but mostly because he knew a waitress. He would never frame it to her in these words, but Ivy remained his haven, lighthouse, the thread that kept him from plummeting absolutely. He was afraid that even this hold was too tenuous, despite her consistent attempts at reassurance. He had few other friends. Mostly his father disapproved of everyone.
  Poorly clad against the wet spring chill this morning, a black pea-coat he’d grabbed on his way from the house over a t-shirt, he stepped over the iron rail and helped himself to an empty table. It was beyond his routine, it had become a sort of intimacy, birthed ideally amid the nostalgia the café attempted to appropriate. They had first met as he had seated himself in her section.
  Mirrored pools of rainwater lingered in low spots in the concrete, floating leaves blown in over the wall before dawn. Kevin emptied a puddle from the peeling metal chair beneath a green awning, clearing as much of the water as he could before he sat.

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