Thomas Centolella

I wanted to give you something for your pain. But not the drug du jour or the kind word this side of cliché. Something you wouldn’t find on a talk show, in a department store or dark alleyway. I wanted to give you something for your pain but I couldn’t imagine what. Frankincense, myrrh—even gold seemed too plain (too plain and too gross). I needed something that wouldn’t have occurred to you or me, or even Nature: a creature more fabulous, more imaginary than you’d find in a rain forest or tapestry or pixel-loaded screen. Some exotic anodyne an alchemist or astrophysicist would be envious of: a chemical reaction, an astral refraction, an out-of-body, out-of-mind, one-of-a-kind transport from your pain, that would last longer than a day, go deeper than the past. I would have founded a whole new religion if I thought that would suffice. As for love—sacred, profane, or both— I wanted to give you something that didn’t arrive with a roll of the dice and was hard to maintain and had a knack for disappointing. I wanted to give you something for your pain that didn’t smack of a sorcerer’s trick, or a poet’s swoon, or a psychiatrist’s quip. Nothing too heavy or spacey or glib. I’d have given you the moon but it’s been done (and besides, its desolate dust and relentless tendency to wane might have only exacerbated your pain). If I could have given you something you could depend on, could always trust without a second thought, I would have. A splendid view, perhaps, or a strain of music. A favorite dish. A familiar tree. A visit from a genie who, in lieu of granting you a wish, would tend subtly to your every need, and never once tire, never complain. But when all was said and done (or hardly said, not nearly done) I was as helpless as you. Could you tell— or were you so overcome your pain was all that mattered? It seemed to me we were a kind of kin: willing the mind its bold suspensions, but the heart, once shattered, never quite matching its old dimensions. And yet you persevered in spite of pain, you knew to hold hope as lightly as you held my hand (a phantom grasp, a clasp that seemed to come from the other side). And your genial smile made it plain: you were pleased by my wish to please. And then you died.

When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here (which really ought to be We are here), and see that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think of those ancient paintings and rock engravings, discovered all over our celestial body, of that one line which begins at whatever point it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing anyone can define—the oldest shape revered by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike, and even accorded a place of honor among the mess of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper. But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm, and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell, and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation. Call it what you will—“God's fingerprint,” “the soul unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”— I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation on our sidereal drift, our existential pain. And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos we thought we had just escaped, one town burning a decade behind us, a millennium before that, and into next week, next year, next whenever. And when the two of us took that winding road an infinity of others had wound down before us and would wind down again, our spirits hushed by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other, wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning?

after Hokusai and Hiroshige I dreamt half my life was spent in wonder, and never suspected. So immersed in the moment I forgot I was ever there. Red-tailed hawk turning resistance into ecstasy. The patrolmen joking with the drunk whose butt seemed glued to the sidewalk. A coral quince blossom in winter, pink as a lover’s present. And tilting my bamboo umbrella against the warm slant of rain, was I not a happy peasant crossing the great bay on a bridge that began who knows when, and will end who knows when?

Whitman thought he could live with animals, they were so placid and self-contained, not one of them dissatisfied. I have lived with animals. They kept me up all night. Not only tom cats on the prowl, and neurotic rats behind my baseboards, scratching out a slim existence. There were cattle next door in the butcher’s pen, great longhorns lowing in the dark. Their numbers had come up and they knew it. I let their rough tongues lick my sorry palm. Nothing else I could do for them, or they for me. Walt can live with the animals. I’ll take these vegetables on parade: string-beans and cabbage heads and pea brains, who negotiate a busy crosswalk and feel brilliant, the smallest act accomplished no mean feat, each one guiding them to other small acts that will add up, in time, to something like steady purpose. They cling to this fate, clutch it along with their brownbag lunches: none of us would choose it, but this is their portion, this moment, then this one, then the next. Little as it is, pitiful as it seems, this is what they were given, and they don’t want to lose it. The gawky and the slow, the motley and the misshapen… What bliss to be walking in their midst as if I were one of them, just ride this gentle wave of idiocy, forget those who profess an interest in my welfare, look passing strangers in the eye for something we might have in common, and be unconcerned if nothing’s there. And now we peek into a dark café, and now we mug at the waitress whose feet are sore, whose smile makes up for the tacky carnations and white uniform makes it easy to mistake her for a nurse, even makes it necessary, given the state of the world. And when the giant with three teeth harangues us to hurry up, what comfort to know he’s a friend, what pleasure to be agreeable, small wonders of acquiescence, like obedient pets. Except animals don’t have our comic hope, witless as it is. They don’t get to wave madly at the waitress, as though conducting a symphony of ecstatic expectations. If I turned and lived with animals I’d only be a creature of habit, I’d go to where the food is and the warmth. But I wouldn’t get to say to my troubled friend, “Your eyes are so beautiful. I could live in them.”

One spring night, at the end of my street God was lying in wait. A friend and I were sitting in his new sedan like a couple of cops on surveillance, shooting the breeze to pass the time, chatting up the daydreams, the raw deals, all the wouda-coulda-shoulda’s, the latest “Can you believe that?” As well as the little strokes of luck, the so-called triumphs, small and unforeseen, that kept us from cashing it all in. And God, who’s famous for working in mysterious ways and capable of anything, took the form of a woman and a man, each dressed in dark clothes and desperate enough to walk up to the car and open the doors. And God put a gun to the head of my friend— right against the brain stem, where the orders go out not only to the heart and the lungs but to consciousness itself—a cold muzzle aimed at where the oldest urges still have their day: the one that says eat whatever’s at hand, the one that wants only to fuck, the one that will kill if it has to… And God said not to look at him or he’d blow us straight to kingdom come, and God told us to keep our hands to ourselves, as if she weren’t that kind of girl. Suddenly time was nothing, our lives were cheap, the light in the car cold, light from a hospital, light from a morgue. And the moments that followed—if that’s what they were— arrived with a nearly unbearable weight, until we had acquired a center of gravity as great as the planet itself. My friend could hardly speak— he was too busy trying not to die— which made me chatter all the more, as if words, even the most ordinary ones, had the power to return us to our lives. And behind my ad-libbed incantation, my counterspell to fear, the orders still went out: keep beating, keep breathing, you are not permitted to disappear, even as one half of God kept bitching to the other half that we didn’t have hardly no money at all, and the other half barked, “I’m telling you to shut your mouth!” and went on rummaging through the back seat. And no one at all looking out their window, no one coming home or going out… Until two tall neighbors came walking toward us like unsuspecting saviors…  And God grabbed the little we’d been given, the little we still had, and hustled on to the next dark street.

The god in me does not honor the god in you. The god in you murdered me once, and once was more than enough. So the god in me, adept at keeping my nature warm and inspired to love the benign, now prefers the chilly air of indifference, something picked up like a virus from the most vicious of mortals. The god in me regards the god in you as suspect, though sad to say, it wasn’t always so. There were the generous days in the beginning, when every word was made flesh. In the beginning the gods in us were content to let us go on behaving like perfect mortals, which is to say imperfectly, which is to say with our tenderness fully intact: the good kind that let us gladly undress our trepidations, and pleasure our solitude into a blissful oblivion; and the bad kind— invisible woundings no compliment or hot kiss, no confession of the amorous could soothe for long. And then, when the mortals we were had done enough to remind us that to be mortal is to be susceptible to the secret agenda, the cruel caprice, the soft but eviscerating voice— “at the mercy of a nuance”— the god in you decided it was time to act. A dark god, in need of a human sacrifice, smoothly turning your back on the earnest and their pathetic pleas. So the god in me, no stranger to the aberrant and the abhorrent, now has no choice but to respond in kind. A pity, really, since it has been the dream of so many gods to find themselves in some quiet room, the burden of power slipped off and scattered like clothes across the floor, the light of late afternoon a kind of benediction, and everywhere the gratitude for the privilege of feeling almost human.

The pleasure of walking a long time on the mountain without seeing a human being, much less speaking to one. And the pleasure of speaking when one is suddenly there. The upgrade from wary to tolerant to convivial, so unlike two brisk bodies on a busy street for whom a sudden magnetic attraction is a mistake, awkwardness, something to be sorry for. But to loiter, however briefly, in a clearing where two paths intersect in the matrix of chance. To stop here speaking the few words that come to mind. A greeting. Some earnest talk of weather. A little history of the day. To stand there then and say nothing. To slowly look around past each other. Notice the green tang pines exude in the heat and the denser sweat of human effort. To have nothing left to say but not wanting just yet to move on. The tension between you, a gossamer thread. It trembles in the breeze, holding the thin light it transmits. To be held in that line of force, however briefly, as if it were all that mattered. And then to move on. With equal energy, with equal pleasure.

—St. John of the Cross And it won’t be multiple choice, though some of us would prefer it that way. Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on when we should be sticking to the point, if not together. In the evening there shall be implications our fear will change to complications. No cheating, we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure the cost of being true to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested like defendants on trial, cross-examined till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No, in the evening, after the day has refused to testify, we shall be examined on love like students who don’t even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart and not off the top of their heads. And when the evening is over and it’s late, the student body asleep, even the great teachers retired for the night, we shall stay up and run back over the questions, each in our own way: what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now to look back and know we did not fail.

for TNH There are those who will never return to us as we knew them. Who if they return at all visit our sleep, or daydreams, or turn up in the features of total strangers. Or greet us face to face in the middle of some rush hour street, but from a great distance—and not in the full flush of bodies that once wanted nothing more from us than the laying of our hands upon them, as a healer lays hands upon the afflicted. There are those who by their absence are an affliction. I imagine that sometimes in your dark bed you still want to know why. Why the man you were just coming to love, who liked you close as he raced through the city at night, why he had to swerve suddenly. Why he had to end up on an operating table, dead. Why you of all people had to live, to repeat this unanswerable question. I could tell you about a woman good at ritual who, hardly believing in herself, was good at making vows the two of us could believe. Then one day I had to drive her to an early flight. The dawn was blinding. She was off to look for the soul no one else could provide. But was this the way to do it? She didn’t know. She wanted me to tell her. Tears down her face. And I kept driving. I can look back and say: on that day, that’s when I died. Since then, you and I have had a hard time believing anything could bring us back. And yet your brown body breathes new life into a cotton print from the fifties, and picks parsley from the garden for spaghetti carbonara, and cues up Mozart’s French horn solo, and fills up the kitchen with the aroma of sourdough, and gets my body to anticipate the taste of malt as the tops of American beer cans pop: good rituals all, because they waited out our every loss, patient with the slow coming back to our senses, undeterred by our neglect. As if they knew all along how much we would need them.