God knew that all over the world people were thinking. Old men cried thinking back over their years of lament and mistrust. It wasn''t their fault. God felt that people wanted him. God was a technician. He knew how to scrape away at the world. He could encroach without rupturing. He knew his job.
God didn''t create the world at all, he discovered the world, and had then introduced it to the masses. And now everyone holds him personally responsible. The boy wanted to go out into the snow and be flash frozen, only to be found ten million years later, a mythical beast, a symbol. But a dead one. Once upon a time there was a little boy and a little girl who lived in different places and didn''t know each other. Then they grew up and met each other at a dance club. The boy was attracted to the girl''s curly hair, crossed front teeth and wayward eye. He was soon madly in love with her.
Who are these people? the girl asked when they were together on the dance floor. I don''t know, said the boy. I''ve never met any of them. Tell me a story, said the girl. Well, said the boy, in this story the girl felt that the boy was a walking fashion statement, but, even so, she only spent time with him because she couldn''t seem to get him to go away. What place do we hold in ourselves for God when God comes visiting and our chests expand till it hurts, God crushing the breath out of us till our teeth blow out of our faces like tiny white heat-seeking missiles. We have seen the clouds. The American holidays came upon us like panthers ripping through grass like small cars pulled by wild horses.
The African holidays come upon us like radical memories slipping through the small cracks of love we feel when we see the sun come up the far side of the place where the sun goes down every night. The boy came across the bridge. A crowd was waiting on the other side. He saw people. People he knew. He saw his mom. He saw Mrs. Haversimmel.
Old Lady Rain. Spot. He felt lonely. Step forward, they hissed. They were angry at him. Seeing them made him sad. They were disgusted. Grow up! they told him.
But the boy was asleep again and the people were gone and the morning ravished him and he got dressed and went out to the driveway and stood with his heart bent forward in his chest. The light hurt his eyes. His dad was suddenly there beside him lighting up a cigarette, squinting into the morning. He looked so tired. He needed a shave. The boy turned away into the hurting space and tried to stare at the moment truthfully with no illusions. His dad put the cigarette into his mouth, drew on it deeply. When people talk, the boy told the girl, I hear what they say but something that I want goes beyond, or somehow arrives under the sky of bright, like hearing the secret pantings of a soul whispering a secret message.
Who is god? What is god? If you ask the question wrong, they say you will never get the answer right. Most people already know the answer they want, so it''s easy to get the question right. It''s harder when you really don''t know. The tree had gone strange, the boy told the girl, and when we looked at each other we found we had the same wind on us but a different wind, also, each of us. Because every speck of wind coming down the hill that morning was a different speck of wind yet they all came down the hill together like they were going to a party and not each to its own destiny. I am rising in the wild windy dark. Roll down your window, the boy said. It''s okay, he said.
The girl was afraid. She spent a lot of time playing with the dogs. The dogs were white. The girl had feelings. She tried to slip past them. She tried to slip her feelings into random moments of the alreadyness of her ongoing and uncooperative life, as though they weren''t her moments, but moments that belonged to another person, as though they were on loan to her from the library of moments. The madman had a furnace room at the bottom of the stairs where he kept the lights out all the time. He would pay the girl, he said.
It was the man who looked like a he was in a coma. If you saw him sitting back at the back there, you knew he was waiting. The girl took the job not for the money but just because the man asked her so nicely. She liked the man. His sad eyes. She wanted to say yes to those eyes. The boy''s dad died in October. Christmas dinner that year was baloney and honey.
These are people, the boy told himself. These are people who have been riding route six every night of their life. When the door opened at the front to let people off, the lights came on. It was like daylight. It was like creation. The guys who designed this bus sure knew a thing or two about lights, the boy thought. People on the closed highways were freezing to death in their cars. I was in the rec room today, the girl said.
Did I tell you about that already? I have long wavy hair, she added at the last minute. Then, more languorously: I am a goddess, really, in the looks department. I should send you a picture. Spike is our baby kangaroo and he''s inviting school kids to come out for the festivities and pay him a visit. Thought sheet 4. How could you use the manual to teach this subject to a friend? 5. What other sources of information on the Laws of Driving are you aware of? 6. When you cleaned computers for a living, did you check behind the machines? 7.
Did you remove the dust balls, garbage, etc. which proliferate? They were all laughing and drinking wine. The boy put his coat on and went out the front door and walked to the end of the street. It was his father''s street and his father was with him. The snow was coming down in big, fluffy flakes. It was beautiful. I believe in lying, said the girl, down on white. And, sure, red will arrive.
But lie on your back on the white and let the red ride over you like a lover. The jello seahorses rode the waves of the bed like they were starving. They rode like stallions salivating in the form of a new god. White foam rode over the edges of the boy''s dream like white cum spilling from the hole at the top of a cock, dripping like rain being pushed across a moving windshield. There were amber anchors in the sand. A flotilla of boats rushing suddenly leaving the world deserted and empty. Dripping gobs of humanity ran over the far edges of the earth drifting into the infinite vacuum, sliding beneath the grand waterfall at the far end of the great god''s garden. Someone thought the morning might finally come, the boy told the girl, but Mother said no.
If anyone had a claim to the mountains, it would be Bear, who we saw that summer running over the world like spring water sprung. The boy prayed mightily that the wind would let up, and sometimes, yes, the trees would stop falling and they would gather together in the calm, amid the carnage, shiny-eyed and hungry. The boy''s dog would live long enough to see the river again. I loaded things into my wagon, the boy told the girl, and I pulled it out onto the road. Pa stood on the porch and screamed hisself hoarse, but the wind took his words and tossed them over the house and I never heard a word nor even the sound of his voice, again. I turned once and saw Pa with his mouth open and that''s the last I ever saw of Pa. The smoke from the girl''s cigarette seemed to have a dark purpose. It curled richly around the conversation.
I don''t smoke any more, she said, exhaling smoke, her chest falling like an avalanche. But you make me nervous. She was wearing a party dress over a pair of ratty jeans. Her feet were bare and wiggly. Cigarette? She offered the pack. I don''t smoke, the boy managed. You could start. The girl smiled.
It was a mischievous smile. There was a light dusting the snow on the sidewalk in front of the hotel where the boy was staying in St. John''s. He and the girl were looking o.