The Parable of Perfect Silence

Today I woke and believed in nothing. A grief at once intimate and unfelt, like the death of a good friend’s dog. Tired of the mind reaching back in the past for rescue I praise the day. I don’t mean merely some mythical, isolate instant like the mindless mindfulness specialist who at the terminal cancer convention (not that it was called that) exhorted the new year’s crop of slaughters (ditto) to “taste” the day, this one unreplicable instant of being alive. (The chicken glistened.) Nor do I mean a day devoid of past and future as craved that great craze of minds and times Fernando Pessoa, who wanted not “the present” but reality itself, things in their thingness rather than the time that measures them. Time is in the table at which I sit and in the words I type. In the red-checked shirt my father’s mother used to wear when she was gardening and which I kept because it held her smell (though it does no longer) there is still plenty of time. Two murderers keep their minds alive while they wait to die. They talk through slots in their doors of whatever mercy or misery the magazine has ordained for the day — the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, say, ten signs that a relationship is on the rocks. When their communion flags, as communions will, they rekindle it with personal revelations, philosophical digressions, humor. This is a true story, one of them says sometimes by way of preface, as if that gave the moment more gravity, asked of the listener a different attention, at once resisted and reinforced an order wherein every hour has its sound, every day its grace, and every death is by design. “Love is possible for anyone,” I hear the TV talk-show host say, which is true in the way most things in this life are true, which is to say, false, unless and until the nullifying, catalyzing death is felt. Love is possible for anyone because it is equally impossible for everyone. To be is to be confronted with a void, a blankness, a blackness that both appeals and appalls. Once known — known by the void, I mean — one has three choices. Walk away, and unlearn the instinct of awe. Walk along, and learn to believe that awe asks nothing of you. Are you with me, love? (For love read faith.) Naked once and after a rat, my father cried, “Die, vermin, die!” banging the broomstick over and over on the floor so incorrigibly dirty it might as well have been the earth itself. This is my mother’s story, though I was there, I’m told, and no small part of the pandemonium. We were five souls crammed into one life, and so incorrigibly poor — or was that fear? — we all slept in one room and shared one great big chester drawers, as we called it, and not with irony but in earnest ignorance, just as like meant lack, as in “How much do you like bein’ done with your chemo?” and just as I and every other child I knew, before we tucked into our lemon meringue pie, solemnly wiped the calf slobbers off. Ah, local color, peasant levity, the language fuming and steaming rich as the mist of rot that rises off the compost heap (“kitchen midden,” you might hear an old Scot still say). When do we first know? That there’s a world to which we’ve been, not oblivious, exactly, but so inside we couldn’t see it, who now see nothing else? Heaven is over. Or hell. Did you forget the rat? It thumps and thrashes like a poltergeist inside the chest of drawers but somehow, though my father is fast, and though his rage is becoming real, every drawer he opens is empty. What happens when we die, every child of every father eventually asks. What happens when we don’t is the better question. To kill a wasp on water is the peak of speed. My brother who is other has a mind of lead. I with my stinging griefs watch from away. How can it be there are no adults left? What matters here is timing, not time. His hand is high and white above the blue. A wasp is also atom and urge, hover and touch. Even wings are not a clean distinction. Down comes the slap like a rifle shot. What vengeance can there be on blank necessity? My brother who is other has a way. His hand is high and white. And then it’s not. Once when my father’s mother’s health was failing and she found it more and more difficult to tend to the tiny family plot at Champion, Texas, which is less town than time at this point, a blink of old buildings and older longings the rare driver flashes past, I took it upon myself to salt the graves as I must have read somewhere would work for unwanted growths. As indeed it did. In the months after, every Sunday when we spoke, she thanked me for the blankness, the blackness, (my words, of course) this new ease I had allowed her mind. Until one day leaning over with flowers the leached earth opened and my eighty-year-old grandmother tumbled right down among the bones of the woman from whom she’d first emerged. To see that image you have to be that sky. It has to happen in you, that crushing calling viewless blue that is so deeply in you that it is not you. “O, Law’, honey, I like to died.” You don’t climb out of poverty so much as carry it with you. Some shell themselves with wealth. Some get and spend, get and spend, skimming existence like a Jesus lizard. But for those whose souls have known true want — whose souls perhaps are true want — money remains, in some sense, permanently inert, like an erotic thought that flashes through a eunuch’s brain. In 1980 my father bought his first airplane, a scream-proof four-seater we crammed five inside, which he considerately slammed into a sorghum field alone. Unkillable, he killed the next ten years with work and wives, then bought another, and brought it down in the solitary fire that was his aspect and atmosphere. Homes, schemes, thirty years of savings plowed into a sign company (!) that did not, it turned out, exist. A hole is hard to carry. People ask if I believe in God and the verb is tedious to me. Not wrong, not offensive, not intrusive, not embarrassing. Tedious. Today I saw a hawk land on Elizabeth’s chimney. It sat with its bone frown and banker’s breast above the proud houses of Hamden. Are you with me? Then see, too, a lump of animate ash rising from the flue (or so it seems) to be a pigeon fluttering dumbly down next to that implacable raptor, suddening a world of strange relations wherein there is no need for fear, or far, or meat. There was a man made of airplane parts, one of which was always missing. He wandered the hospital grounds in search of a rudder, an aileron, or some other fragment that would let him fly from this place where he was not meant to be. There was a woman who emitted invective ceaselessly, dispassionately, an obscenity machine. One timid gentleman saved Saran wrap for five full years and every night wrought an ever-more-solid ball with which, it turned out, he planned to bash the skull of the first soul he saw the dawn God blessed his weapon. (A success story, alas.) Another man with anvil hands sat six months of nights in faith that there would come occasion of darkness, unguardedness, and vision sufficient to rip from its socket one of my father’s bright blue eyes. (Ditto.) My father moved among them like a father. He attended and pacified, he instructed and consoled. Late to the trade, he worked too much, and trusted his heart, no doubt, more than he should, but was, by all accounts, at this one thing, and despite the end, good. For love read faith into these lines that so obviously lack it. For love let words turn to life in the way life turns to world under the observer’s eye, the swirl of particles with their waves and entanglements, their chance and havoc, resolving into some one thing: a raptor on a rooftop, say. No power on earth can make it stay. But is it lost or released into formlessness when we look away? To be is to believe that the man or woman who inscribed with an idiosyncratic but demanding calligraphy Fuck da money—Trust no one on the rough blanket of the residential motel where my father spent the last two years of his rough residential life intended the note of defiant, self-conscious (da!) humor that left my father, whom I had not seen in years, and I, whom years had seen grow sere, far even from myself, erupting in laughter until we cried. Before my good friend’s good dog died ten times a day she pressed her forehead to his “to confirm the world and her place in it.” Now she won’t even say his name. Strange how the things that burn worst in one heart one must keep silent to keep. Ten to one you thought of men. The murderers, I mean. But no. This is a true story. There is another cell, you see, in which a woman I have known since childhood, and since childhood have known to be suspended on a wire of time but nimble-witted nonetheless, lies on the cold stone floor. She is even more naked than they have made her. She has killed no one not even herself. Punishment, perhaps, or some contagion of fate, finds her here, her hair shorn, both wrists wrapped, her eyes open, pondering the parable of perfect silence. Remember, he said,memory is a poor man’s prison. Make to have and to love one live infinitive