Are you with me? Have you drifted off, begun gnashing your teeth and looking for something to obsessively clean for the next few hours, because this is where the turn comes, the morning sun stretches its rosy fingers into the lit sky, crests mountain and hill, rolls the golden carpet of day over sparkling sea and fruited plain, over man and woman stilled of need, free of menace, stumbling into the light a little hungover, shading their eyes, like: Not bad. Supposing that thing worked. What, the offering? Yeah. Worked? (Shrugging) I dunno.
And so in fallow years, on battlefields against long odds, on beaches dark with homesick siege forces, in the halls of anxious kings and paranoid queens, inheritance-minded princes, before the hearths of childless mothers, hapless fathers, and on the rafts of enterprising castaways, the fire set to consume the creature’s flesh is a chemical transaction, no more, a currency, an act not of subservience but of control, a way not to honor the gods but to enjoin them. A moment of fraud, for when we purchase something, let us be clear, we do not call this act a sacrifice.
Where is the creature on its Wanderjahr, a hundred shiftless youths behind it? We cannot say. We have lost the creature. The horse now claims the land on which he trespasses for the king, as a wooden horse enters a walled city to claim it for those outside the gates. Do not, as I say, see me as a gatekeeper. See me as the blind man with a riddle at the crossroads. Dispenser of an ambiguous viaticum. We can await the barbarians long enough to become them, because it is always a question of whose bidding we do. And do not say, simply, our own. For is it then the bidding of our hunger, our fear, our lust? Are we not ever in danger of becoming slaves to what we merely can do, conscious procurers for our unconscious natures? Is it not always easier to gratify an appetite than to understand one?
The alternative? I confess I sometimes wonder whether it is not romanticism, or only hope, that leads us to imagine a time when spiritual life was more than ornamental garnish on material, a cult of consciousness, cult from the Latin colere of course (colo, colere, colui, cultus), to cultivate, to till, life spent in radical contemplation of the tidal nuance of a thinking-feeling involvement with all around us, the character, qualities, and rhythms picked out in reflection, so, like a shoreline seen from above, relinquishing shape and pattern on approach, the play of moods and shadings in a bright meadow, say, might evolve ever more complexly in the scrutiny of leaves and blades of grass shaking in the wind, the specific motion of each trembling, the tones in the arrangement of the day as things seek their fleeting equilibria, as branches rustle and petals fall, as the air makes its way through itself immured in the maze of its fluid pressures, bearing the grains of an endless pollination, as the vibrancies set off by stridulating wing or leg contour the static breeze, below the veined crags of mountain, monuments to the gravities that bind our ardor, skirted in tree and shrub running to the silt-swept banks, the plains where snowmelt carves silver fingers into humus and loam, where banyans and mangroves reach out like old hands rung in arthritic knots, berries gather the hidden colors of soil, where deer eat them, where the wolves eat deer, where the humans gather to eat, kill, fuck, and love, to stop and listen, pause within the violence and joy and take some measure of the unaccountable processes of which we are a part, and you might say, How I long to be a gypsy running free in the riot of my heart! through tall grasses to the song of canebrakes, wild in the pleated dirges of a light knit from hay, sewn from straw verdure, the flaxen clothing of the evening, and those plucked frequencies of the day that sum to rapture. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, but — well, don’t blame your mother.
We were quiet a minute. Then Gaby said, “You said something about our souls?”
Wendill laughed. “What do you think is that ludicrous dirigible in your hand?”
And when he said it our eyes went to our hands, which indeed were holding a length of poly curling ribbon, and from there up the line to the pair of Mylar balloons floating four or five feet overhead, balloons hungry, you could tell, for the very heights where they would pop, and on which, indeed looking rather ridiculous, were printed our own smiling faces.
* * *
Pop. Pop. Confetti. A blink. The swollen nighttime luster drifts. Lights return easy to their pinpoints and peel sleepily from the glass. The car recovered, the crack rock smoked, the meth — whatever. Gaby is at the wheel and I can feel her trying with all she has to keep us in the lane. The dashed lines converge at a point beyond the horizon and blink our way home. The road had become, I saw, the line of our lives. The yarn-path not out of the labyrinth maybe, but onward. If we could just follow it, it would keep us in our lives. But it was narrow, very narrow. One deviation and who knew? The highway curves, the macadam thread spinning off its distaff before us, yes, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends, but sometimes you’re stuck on the arc, aren’t you, and Atropos is posed there with her shears. If I could have I might have said, Parents, guardians of the metanarrative, we are the minotaur. Half child, half beast. Bury us in the heart of your maze. Hide the primal insanity of your culture from view. You will know us soon enough. We are the displacements of your wounds. Bundled lies sold off in tranches. Captured carbon shut up below the streets of Knossos. We are howl, destroying all you have given us to claim it fully — and still Gaby clenches, and I clench too, praying to keep on straight through the midnight highway, to find our way home, knowing all the same that if we make it back, we will be too joy-drunk on our improbable escape to remember to change black sails to white, too misted still in the amnesiac dawn of what Little Dionysius sold us to recall that when we got to the central chamber of the labyrinth it was empty, an echoing cavity, those Indian caves. We were the monster or there was none.
There is not much to say about drugs, hard drugs, drugs in combination, except that at some point you cease to exist. This is what you wanted, to sleep, to dream. To see the moment of your greatness flicker — out. That’s it. Take someone else’s word for it. It is unexciting and unnecessary. And that’s the last thing I have to say about drugs. The day will come when we get to rest forever, no need to hasten it.
In the meantime the responsibilities weighing on us all — starting with the responsibility to take one breath after the next — are exhausting. They are also life. The day Gaby leaves we watch cats hunt mice in the overgrown grass behind the house. The crows watch from the field, sheening and idle lords who might be killing a few minutes between meetings. Lethargy in the heat interleaves with desire, tedium with panic. We laugh to keep the sadness at bay. I can feel it at the edges of my mind, waiting for its moment, the knowledge that I will soon be alone, that we are ever being left to ourselves, so that beyond simple aloneness a deeper architecture of loneliness exists, one obscured in the structures of identity and routine we build on top of it but laid bare in those structures’ demolition, a feeling I hadn’t sifted down through the rubble to meet since childhood, a full despair, as when, sent away and on your own for the first time, you see at last the sheer scope of the indifference hidden from you, the world’s indifference, and how nowhere in the background of life hovers the metaphysical ghost of sentient care. It had been years since I’d considered that no one was taking care of me. The notion had no place in adulthood. I’d sloughed it off. But this is what I returned to in the days following Gabrielle’s departure, as I stood in the middle of the field smoking, looking into the trees emptied of mystery, the red berries gone discreetly into shadow, the road beyond where the cars passed at the brisk, uninteresting speed they do, without the sluggish drama of film, the languor of prose. There was no one taking care of me. There wouldn’t be any time soon. And I could fight the metanarrative all I wanted, slip its grasp for an evening, punish it for its tyranny by slowly destroying myself, but in the field that afternoon, among the stalking cats and crows, the rough dry grass and clover, under a sun too richly and heavily summered, dressing my exposed body in its violent cinnamon, it was me and the metanarrative alone. That even ticking beat.