Chapter 15 Isaac Cider stepped back into the squalor. A mild wind began to blow by then ceased and the air became calm. Weave, weaving wind. Down these streets he went, his heart like a lantern in his chest, chosen by sorrow as if by the selfsame force that put the Christless in Jerusalem, on through these days with a dread of mortality, a fear of the end, as if on the verge of remembering something that he could not bear, but what it is dwells within, and could he know his face just beyond his own visage? But he is not to be considered as that is just how he might be invited in. He went into a tiny wooden box of an office and shuffled through the paper and looked at figures talking on the telephone. One nodded to Cider and held up one finger. Cider found an old combination tucked away that he had scrawled on the back of a recite. It went to a storage locker that he kept at a train station. Four years old. He found therein a stamped, two year old letter from his father. It read: So now you’re a philosopher. Welcome to hell. He tossed it away and walked on into the night. There were puddles on the sidewalks from the rains of yesterday and as he strolled by so did his reflection in the puddle, Cider and counter-Cider, on into the slums, through yon alleyways where the drainage wept past and where oil made rainbows on the rock and driftwood lay about with the artifacts and condoms and forsaken children’s toys, where telephone wires ornamented with shoes tied together by the laces went pole on pole against the constellations, past the apartment rises that are like dreams lost in someway, windows barred or with bullet proof shutters, inhabited by the disassociative, generation after generation of the mad and the violent, ignorant of history and reenacting the downfalls found therein, stricken with an unbearable need that only the dark of death may grant, and he went on past a gothic gate that led to an anonymous funeral house, then into the quarters of the dispossessed, but lo, he is not to be looked upon, as it is in just that way by which he is invited in. Leave him be, let him go. He went on. Past this the river flows to sad seas, afloat with the past, a different life dreams. Beyond yonder metal rails where the dead maintain their personal metropolitan, rainworn gravestones chiseled with names and dates which blur with time. Fabled by memory. And ever shall be. Sootblack brick where streetlight shadows make theatrics on the cobbled stone. Old stone walls wrapped in the weathers of the world, fossils riddled in the floor of this once ocean. Tangled vines bent left in this northern hemisphere, pavements riddled by ruin, the gradual cataclysm of poverty. And the story of sorrow was on this place. A young black male in the alleyway crying. The patter of soft feet. Sad children whose fate is the world. A darker shadow, darkening even. A like fate awaits all mortality, the soul’s burden. Faint summer rain. A needle like radio tower against the constellations, precincts perhaps to tribal junkmen. Against the skyline of the city a waxing crescent moon appears and clouds glide by it like ink. The silhouettes of buildings etch against the night to a deeper place, antique purposes lost. This city constructed on no understood design, a mutt of architecture expounding backward through the labors of man in a reverse linear of the disordered and the mad and is there a dead-cart bound outward with a lantern swinging from the gate and a small bell tolling the way and does he peddle his wares to each? A lonely carnival by the dried river plain, a microcosm in the macrocosm, a world without, a world within the world. Corroded warehouses stamp the streets. A crane poised in solitary disregard. He passes by. By a bent stop-sign and stone steps crumbled by weeds where a spider sleeps. Past lamps stoned dark, past oblique houses, entrenchment of the damned. The improbable structures, factories of old stone. The roads run on toward fruitlands. A world well past all imaginings, angry and isolated, this populace deformed or deranged, fugitive from all establishment. A faint soot rain. Sootfall. And the train horn seemed sad past all saying. Voice of sorrow sang. Silence indeed is the rest. Weave, weaver of the world, the weaving wind, it whirled the world and now must wither away. I have seen this kingdom vanish in fear and ashes, waking from the dream while addressing tremendous stadiums, from the eclipse to a night more directionless. How all that I have feared did come to pass. He went on. He saw Jim, his colored skin in the streetlight, leaned against a brick wall, badly hurt. A little later, when he was dead, his skin would become a paler tint. Cider approached him and called his name. “That you, kid?” “Yeah. Take it easy.” He put the man’s arm over his shoulder and helped him along. “They left me like this.” “Let’s get you out of here.” Cider helped him to limp along the cobbled street where mist rose in the humidity. The police cruiser stopped a few feet behind them, and the two pale officers stepped out and slid out their sticks and snickered and stepped forward. “Run, kid.” “No.” “Go.” “C’mon, let’s get you out of here.” “Well now look at what we have here.” Jim tore off as fast as he could and melted into the shadows and both the police officers ran after. The cruiser was parked on the curb with both doors open, the engine still running. Cider stood by himself in the night. He stood there. He stood there for a long time. And then he gradually stepped to the cruiser and looked into the driver’s space. Completely foreign to him. He weighed consequences in his mind then ignored the results. He very slowly got in and sat down in the seat behind the steering wheel. He waited, he thought, then he eased his left arm out and took the handle and slammed shut the door. He slammed shut the other door. The inside of the cruiser was like a shuttle. Dark with meters that were lit up blue along with an assortment of various switches and knobs. He eased himself into the seat and moved the gear-shift out of neutral and stepped heavily on the gas and drove off in the cruiser. The radio hissed and said, car 7, car 7. He sped through the predawn dark with the tires slick against the road. He drove it high up in the hills. He stopped the car at the lip of the drop where below was the river. He opened the door and got out and pulled the switch for the hood and heard the latch open and then stepped over to it and ran his fingers to find the catch and lifted it and fitted the pole into the hole so to keep up the hood. He took out his knife and felt down into the engine and cut the cord of the .43 plug and the back tires of the cruiser began to spin fast. He un-propped the pole that supported the hood and set it back and let the hood fall from his grip and it slammed shut and he took a few steps back and watched the police cruiser as the back tires spun on the ground and sprayed up leaves and gravel and dirt until the mounting potential energy gave way and the entire car shot fast off the cliff in a kinetic crash and sped downward through nighttime space and fishtailed headlong into the water. The spinning back tires splashed up a crystal clear geyser of victory unto the very stars so that the drops gleamed not separate but amid them and all the years of repressed rage and hatred burst from his soul in that glorious ejaculation and it rained down sensational and cleansing upon him. The cruiser bubbled with water then sank. The sun is rising on the western world. Cider fled. He made his way to his treehouse first through the storm drains and tunnels and gutters until it took him at last to a stream that he followed all the way, hugging himself tightly to the liquid mud wall just below the bank. Just as he was about to pick his way up and walk to his house, a young black boy who lived near by whispered to him. “Shh,” said the boy. “They’re right there looking for you.” Cider smiled at him and raised his hand then turned and made his way back along. In the noontime of the spring day weeks later the wind brushed by and within the tiny treehouse the dust that had settled blew about once more and the corpse lay on the mattress with dried blood all around from veins that had been sliced into vertically at the wrists. How these things come to be. The grand sum of misery. A butterfly flew in from the window to settle on the blood that had crusted on the floorboards then fluttered outside to land on a yellow flower, the yellow butterfly wings replica to the flower, as if grown from it. In time a pair of ambulance workers wrapped the corpse in a sheet and lifted it onto a stretcher and carried it away. The little black boy stepped into the yard after that. “Shoo,” he said. “Ole Cider ain’t dead.” Isaac Cider had watched these happenings and remained long afterward. He came out of the woods around the other side of the house. Cider thought for hours. I am your most humble and unfortunate servant is. Cider. All is quiet. Like the silence of God. He felt his luck run out all at once. The very void that awaits surely all. Here I am. I was not afraid. He decided then that the rightness in life was to be found in the living of it and it was just such living that he should now get to. And so he quit that place and he went. “I’m gone,” he said. He left that place and he left everything he knew. Each day to start again or so he wished. He hid all of his possessions in a location where in his lifetime they could not be discovered. He took nothing with him, and he had for a time piece only the beating human heart within. Suffering is characteristic of God’s love. He longed to know the true God before He had created anything. Miles out of town he got a ride. He got in and as the car moved down the road he looked in the review mirror to see what was fading from view behind him. All souls are stressed with agitations and passion. In the dark woods by the river is the huntsman and in the lashing of the trees and the tessellated cities. His work is all where and his dogs do not tire. I have seen him, ravenous and wild and his eyes insane and hungry for souls. Fly away. Victory, beloved brethren, ye steadfast and always abounding forasmuch as ye can. Everything needs itself, the reoccurrence of history, the joy in agony. This shall be again. And again. If ever you needed one instant over, if ever you desired this selfsame happiness, hour, moment, then the need was for all of it to return, all the enormous and unbelievably small of your life, as all things are bound, connected, spiraled together, all things are in love, and so must return, all the despair and the joy that is greater than the soul’s agony. That is how much you loved, O you everlasting friend, loved for alltime. O break, heart. Return joy. Return.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 07:54:09 +0000