“All alone, it appears,” he mumbled sarcastically, staggering to his feet. As he left the cemetery, Morro Rock was being consumed by the fog – the view slowly vanishing in the spectral dark. Hector, blind drunk, saw nothing.
These ‘parties’ had gone on for some time and he had begun to look forward to each Saturday with a sense of morbid glee. On the following Sunday morning, as he sat reading the sports page, his sister, Martha, as yet unaware of the extremity of his madness, confronted him for the first time.
“You’re only keeping the sadness alive!” she said, clearly frustrated. He jumped to his feet and turned to face her, his intense face flushed with conflicting emotions, overcome by a murderous rage. He had predicted and dreaded her participation in this, his solitary fever.
“Damn this world!” he cried, biting off the words like a man spitting from his mouth the worm in the apple. “I’m holding onto her in the only way I can – through hate!” And he banged his fists upon the table, turning toward the window and looking out upon the gray fog-enshrouded sea. “Because–God help me–I still love her!” He clinched his fists and held them in front of him, trembling, as a man holding for too long a great weight. Then he turned like an automaton and marched out the door, and kept walking, all the way through town, to the dunes and the faithful sea. But he would inevitably end up at the cemetery, ruminating on a death that had yet to happen. These stolen moments at the edge of the immense waters somehow helped to put his recent strange behavior into perspective.
The salty sea air and the pulse of the sea’s great mystery soothed his nerves. He sat down beside a patch of sharp high grasses and listened. No more thinking, he thought with just enough intensity to make himself believe he was in control. Just listen . . . His thoughts poured out in a mad rush. The more he tried to still them the more complex and stubborn they became, as if intent on writing a novel. They went something like this:
Since we have separated all things in our hearts, words have replaced song, each syllable asking why existence? Why anything at all? And never enough words to touch something real or hear the marvelous silence where music begins, as if all things have simply fallen through nothing, while we search desperately for a place to stand. Our intelligence speaks in fragments of a world reaching forever toward perfection along the nameless road of desires, until life seems illusory, dark, lost in the confused interstices of the veiled heart. Lost! Lost! My son, so much the reflection of his mother, is a mirror to my shame, my illusions, my endless stupidity. . . I have transubstantiated her living ghost in stone, making of her life a greater death! And I celebrate her! I celebrate us all!
Although Hector would indeed return to the cemetery for another graveyard binge, Martha’s point had hit home. However, he refused to investigate the unpleasant sensations her ‘truth’ had made. It simply fueled his rage, and focused the dark side of his nature. He wasn’t ready for these kinds of thoughts. Later, however, he was sad with guilt, and in trying to allay this feeling he found himself observing cruel nature – the voracious illusion of beauty and time, time’s bastard children eating one another. In spite of his bitterness, he marveled at the mystery behind creation. And in spite of everything life had taught him, he felt a core benevolence, something divine struggling within things with a creative impulse in which love played the central role, the sad redeemer.
He recalled how he had hefted the stone to the foot of his future grave, and, after making sure he was alone, and with a deep sigh, took a long, satisfying piss on the cool, smooth marble. “You’ll set better now,” he’d laughed, somewhat nervously.
Martha sat on her bed, thinking. Her life had been one of reflection, but now there was an urgency that threatened to overwhelm them; her love, her dreams. She wanted to know what Hector planned to tell the boy when the time came. But most of all she wanted to ease the pain of her sad brother and bring him closer to his son. She had more than once broached the subject with him and received only silence. But the situation was impossible! Since the war he had closed off to life completely, the years piling up like snowfall over a grave. She knew how hard it must have been to allow that unconscionable woman into his heart. Only to have it end like this! But something had to be done! Hector had to be awakened to the love for which he was still responsible. The morning of their recent confrontation was the worst day of her life. For on that day she realized the depths of his feelings and the dangers implicit within them.
The awful truth stood starkly against the day: a headstone for a nonexistent grave, and her lost brother sitting before it – a grim devotee. The town wrote him off as unhinged. Between her sorrow and shame Martha’s efforts were focused on bringing father and son together.
David was beginning to show signs of vague and fearful understanding, for, like every child, he loved his distant and mournful father. Small children know more than they can express – but they know . . . And the knowing, often, as time’s brutality marches forward, becomes a bewildering, hurtful thing...
“You have to get over it, brother.” She cast a soulful, earnest gaze upon him, determined to breach the wall that separated him from himself; then she looked away toward the window, her eyes moist. Hector stood at the other end of the room. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he lowered himself to the floor.
“When I came back from that damn jungle,” he said, as if utterly weary of life. His voice sounded strange in the silent room. Like a cry from deep within a cave, distant and faint in its futility. “When I left there,” he continued with a sigh, “I knew I would never again get over anything.” At this Martha looked up sharply, fully attentive, a pressure rising in her throat.
“Once I saw a North Vietnamese man in Chinese clothes fiercely control a machine gun, ranging his maddening fire from right to left and back again. His face was set, determined and unmindful of his own death. And I knew then that he was a ‘nation’, while we were an invasion hesitantly or recklessly wandering the jungles and dropping napalm haphazardly, as young soldiers, defensive, amazed and confused, watched the progression of a lingering war that seemed to have no real objective.
“The central highlands where we were advancing were at times uncannily silent and strange, at other times stricken with flames, with bombs falling all around us. We walked on, looking in all directions, but with one eye always returning to the sandy earth, where we expected to be sucked away; as if expecting the ground to fall away beneath us.” A long pause – the sea could be heard, ebb and flow, ebb and flow.
“I wish,” she began, her voice cracking. But she could say nothing further. Her shoulders moved gently. He continued sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. After several minutes he slowly rose to his feet and left the room through the kitchen. “I didn’t even think about that other kid. Only Bobby mattered to me,” he muttered in a quavering voice. “And his sudden and complete absence nearly paralyzed me.” He stopped at the door and looked back at his sister with an expression of incomprehensible sorrow and said: “The kid’s leg was gone – I lifted him as if in slow motion, threw him over my shoulder, and got us out of that damn clearing . . . and for that.” But he did not finish his sentence, turned and continued on through the door and out of Martha’s sight. She heard the door to his room close, feeling suddenly exhausted.
I claim this space, he thought, with an intensity of indefinable purpose, in the name of my beautiful insignificant life, my uncertainty and my foolishness . . . imagining the sheets boiled in saffron, the walls singing, the mirror gilded in gold, reflecting the divine. I am alone. And thus the years have passed, with echoes from the deep, like my friends, the great Gray whale whose song ripples in a shimmer of echoes, ever deeper, rising or falling, beyond the image of light and darkness. And this hapless thinking, rising and falling before the brain’s translations splintered by the heart’s wild urges, and manifest like the tides relentless give and take, moonlight and Eros, spirit and flesh, warring in the deep – the human experience a cry