19 He is not tempted. He knows, intimately, what pain is. It can be borne. It is really the knowledge of pain that causes genuine suffering and it is this knowledge that substances like the berries address, not any physical phenomena or process.
20 But alongside the physical world runs the world of thought and if you go to it for respite from this place be careful you don’t uncover an even deeper level of grim suffering.
21 He thinks of connection and separation, enhancement and loss, and when he’s done, hours later, he reaches out, grabs a handful of berries, and, apologetically, moves them into his mouth.
* * *
FOR her the question of God, along with all resulting and even antecedent questions, really reduced to the question of whether or not you entered a particular structure on Sundays.
2 Her husband had helped build the church then never again entered it and this troubled her deeply.
3 She had a list of matters requiring worry because she was one of those people. Thing about the list was that, perhaps in conformance with the human capacity for anxiety, its enumerations remained constant. So quite often a worry would disappear, Selena would heal for example, seemingly only to make room for the magical appearance of its replacement.
4 One list mainstay was the soul of her husband. He would counter, always, that attendance anywhere was not a matter of the soul. That her own belief system relied on omnipresence so that he was able to attend to these matters really wherever he found himself. This she found unpersuasive. She was smarter, he knew, than him. Anything he bothered to formulate in this area she could eviscerate almost offhandedly. These logical eviscerations, however, had no effect on his conduct.
5 But more than even faith she was a woman of hope. No amount of empirical evidence could discourage her into defeated silence. So every Sunday morning, once the remnants of the latest truly remarkable arepas had been cleared, she dressed Selena in some of her best, maybe even a subtle dash of makeup, did the same to herself, and renewed her campaign. It went like this. First, she would affect certainty where even minimal success was highly improbable. Something like audibly wondering when he was going to interject some urgency into his preparation as the time for Mass was quickly approaching. When that failed, as it invariably did, she would allow some time to pass then approach again. Expressing concern for his soul she would place her hands on his chest as if she were trying to tactilely caress it.
6 On nothing else would he say no. On this he never actually said no. But Mass would start and it was his absence Selena and her mother would sit next to.
7 The tragedy of all this of course is that he would’ve only had to say yes once provided it was the last time she asked.
* * *
CREATION is often a nebulous process not susceptible to easy categorization at the end of which a prototypical single creator emerges. It is therefore not now being argued that he was the inventor or originator of the Cuban Sandwich. Only that he was one of the first to recognize the brilliance of that item and that he perfected it into its Platonic ideal thereby achieving perhaps Foremost Popularizer status, at least in the New York area. And the first time he did that perfecting was as he waited with increasing nerves for the return of Marybeth.
2 But first here’s the promised more on why Nicole Grunderson’s sudden empathic revelation made her feel “[a]s if a global surveillance of her had suddenly ceased.” Id.
3 Take as example the moments when a loose group of people will coalesce to sing the mind-numbing Happy Birthday song with you as subject and object. Or those initially charged moments when you first hear your voice addressing a group of people. These are generally unpleasant moments, the extent of the unpleasantness determined by certain personality factors etcetera, but nonetheless universal ones. The discomfort stems from the weight of the eyeballs on you but there’s something odd about this fact. If everyone, to themselves, is the center of their universe then why not thrill at the external world’s admittedly brief recognition of that fact? The only conclusion to be logically drawn is that it’s no fun being closely observed, that is, actually being the universal center. And this assertion seems supported by those (the wildly famous for example) who exist in something like the happy birthday situation an extraordinary amount of their time. Let’s say they don’t seem so well-adjusted and leave it at that.
4 Back to Nicole. If like her you take no steps to combat this adolescent self-absorption but instead foster it through your every deed and thought this belief of yours will psychotically extend until on some deep invisible level you begin to believe that others attach a similar level of importance to your every move, in other words that you are being watched like the public speaker and we’ve already established how fun that is. So now you’re this constantly anxious person infinitely concerned with the impressions you’re making which makes you highly unimpressive and you pick up on that so try harder with predictably bad results and those results only compound all the foregoing in a way that’s just the height of unhealthy.
5 Now you see why Nicole’s pathetically low-level insight (the world is full of other people and their trajectories are, objectively speaking, at least as important as hers) and more importantly her actions in response, served as a freeing agent formed in the realization that all eyes were not on her after all; most people’s eyes are on what they need to see that moment. She could relax.
6 Nor is this to say that Nicole changed instantly and dramatically from that moment forward. This is real life not fiction. Just pointing out that it happened.
7 He looked kind of like a forlorn figure. Standing in expectation, ready to press a specially-crafted sandwich but only if a particular customer would walk in. She wasn’t coming and he felt more than foolish standing there mentally retracing his earlier steps in an attempt to determine whether he had betrayed his situation to those around him. As is often the case it wasn’t until he mentally let go of the rope that the door sounded and in walked Marybeth wearing a perfect dress displaying a flower print and comprised of what he could tell, even just visually, was the softest material on earth.
“So sorry,” she said. “Trying to get away all day but I work for a colossally mean woman.”
“It’s okay, I forgot you said you were coming back today.”
But because the words you speak can either bridge distance or create it he quickly added:
“I don’t know why I just said that, I’ve been counting the minutes to this.”
“Me too!”
They smiled.
* * *
NOW a dark nullity in somewhat human form moves slowly, it does not walk, towards immobile him. But the great fear he feels as a result does not compel orderly movement. Instead it inspires such a frenetic extremity of such that the only visible result is a kind of catatonia. The Figure at first appears as if drawn out of carbonized smoke but as it nears the drawing hardens into cognizable human features until what confronts him at last is an over-nine-foot-tall corrosive yet inexplicably attractive being.