“Green Evolution” by Suzanne Stryk 2010

One day a year, but only one, Smoothie and The Tailor talk about the past. They buy a Proto-burrito and a small Styrofoam cup of refried beans at Proto’s Eateria, and they eat in the back of the bus. They talk about the news, about their paper sales, their regular customers – as much as they can remember. They talk about the look of the new automobiles inside and out. They sing together a little. The Tailor is Smoothie’s oldest living friend.

For over twenty years Smoothie has been bundle captain on the Route 9 bus in Las Almas, New Mexico. He distributes the newspaper bundles to the street vendors, and he troubleshoots for them. He chooses new members of the team whenever that must be done.

His first full day on the job was November 22, 1983.

~

The fare machine tumbled his fifty cents.

“Are you sitting here?” he asked the elderly woman, the sole passenger, because she had rustled mysteriously, had glanced at him in unsettling readiness as he sat down near her in the front of the bus.

“I’m always here,” she answered. She removed her red vinyl shoulder bag from between them: the zipper closed around the nose of a gun barrel. “Bee. Two e’s,” she said. Her chipped nails were painted pale-sky blue. Her shining lipstick was Vaseline. Her damp hand went inside his, weakly gummed and gripped him.

“Where to?” he asked. He actually wanted to know. He wished he had asked differently.

“Going to hell,” she said. “You going?”

One: where she was. Two: who she was. Three: where she was going. Four: what she wanted to know. In thirty seconds she had told him all of that.

The blackening sunspots under her eyes and on her temples were not at all attractive. Her short silver hair and her small ears were severely compressed against her head by a scarf. Her black eyes were gold-flecked. Old leopard are the words that came to his mind. Later, he would write them down. He was a man who wrote things down. Long after, not knowing how they mattered, he would throw them away.

As the bus departed from the Mesilla Valley Mall, the doors made the hydraulic sound he liked on buses, probably because he had that sound in his memory, and it reminded him of how many years he had ignored public transportation. He had owned a car and known people who owned cars. He had rented a house when he had a job, when he was in circulation, had friends and still made new ones.

Bee said, as if to the bus driver, “Lord, look at him,” and he was on the bus alone with her, so he looked at himself reflected in the opposite window. He should rinse his neck and face in a sink. He should slap the dust out of his black jeans, get a belt or rope to hold them up better. He should, he thought, recite the verses of his colorful tee shirt: that would – it always did – make him happy.

Heart-Healthy Nutritious
Supreme Smoothie!
Mineral-Infused Vitamin-Maximized
Supreme Smoothie!
Mouth-Watering Invigorating
Supreme Smoothie!

Out the window beyond them was more of the radiating New Mexico desert heat, the white match-head of afternoon light during the day and the icy wind at night. At Lenox & Elks, a stooped old man boarded, sweatshirt on and hood drawn close around his face. “Firey!” he said to Bee who said, “No lie,” and said, “This here’s Smoothie, our new Captain.”

Now Bee grinned, and the old man bent down to get a close look, and spit-laughed a stinking spray directly at Smoothie. Smoothie thought it must have been that he was funny, that something about him was humorous. He said, “Do you always ride this bus?”

The man’s face retreated a little into his hood. “The bundle bus. Bee’s bus,” he muttered.

Bee said, “Show Smoothie some respect.”

Talking through Bee to Smoothie, the bent man said, “Him? He’s our new Bundle Captain?”

Smoothie said, “I don’t –“

Bee said, “He –“

“Today?” the man asked.

“Today,” she said.

Smoothie knew he could not add to or improve upon this kind of conversation. Once, it would have made him anxious to be talked about or at. In order to be rid of that, at thirty-eight he had been prescribed an anti-anxiety drug. The drug worked so well he was able to tell the unwelcome truth to his family members, to old and new friends at the newspaper production offices where he worked. He found that all of them thought he was a good man right up until the time he was actually an honest man. The drug released him from trying so hard to free others from their curses. It made him turn himself in for his own crimes. It made him run at blind cliffs of self-recognition. When he owed, he knew how much. When he fell, he saw how far. The drug was The Supreme Smoothie. It had taken only three years to sail him from what felt like the center of things to an unassignable destination.

~

Bee said that they were right on time for a call from The Super. When they pulled over at Telshor & Del Rey and stopped in front of the Shell, the pay phone was ringing, and she made him come with her to take the call.

She stretched the steel phone cable so she could stand in a wedge of shade from the building. She listened to The Super, she pushed at the nylon shroud of her scarf and scarf knot; she said back to the person on the other end of the phone line: “I name the day.”

The black shade seemed to have bowed her upper body towards the ground. She cupped the phone to her ear, her other hand to the other ear. Smoothie thought he saw her cower. “Smoothie is his name,” she said into the phone, and, “Well, you will soon enough.” She handed Smoothie the phone. “Say hi.”

“Hi,” said Smoothie.

“Route 9,” said the other person in a tin-bell voice, “a good route.”

Bee took the phone back. She stepped into the light, the silver phone cable and the handset glinting. She hung up, and they returned to the bus. He remembered his mother’s voice, so much like the voice of Bee’s boss. She had been the last of Smoothie’s living relatives to die.

~

A woman in a knee-length paper-thin dress boarded, carrying a water-filled gallon and a cardboard sign. U Buy I Sing U Don’t I Sing.

That steaming sound. Departing.

Bee, who knew her of course, introduced him as Smoothie.

Her sign facedown in her lap, the woman asked, “Is that name the truth?”

Smoothie said she could count on it.

She greeted the old man as “Tailor,” and took the seat next to him, offered him her gallon. She had to punch his arm to keep him from draining it.

“Give a crush,” The Singer said to The Tailor who tightly grasped invisible oars as he puckered up, and they leaned toward one another in their small imaginary boat, and kissed so hard they slurped.

The Singer sang, not nearly loud enough. The Tailor and Bee sang softly with her, “All at once am I several…”

The bus driver probably sang, but in any case, some bass crept in. It could have been the bus driver.

When they were done and the bus was accelerating again, the group seemed to appreciate Bee’s honest assessment of it as unjustifiable songicide. They applauded her, and Smoothie joined them. Bee opened her purse, raised it and swung it in front of her so that it seemed like a small puppet making a bow or curtsey for her. She sat.

“He’ll do,” said The Tailor.

“He might,” said The Singer. “Starts tomorrow?”

Bee said, “That’s the plan.”

Smoothie could not fathom how Bee had chosen him. He looked the part; it was the opportune day; his need seemed the greatest: this is what he later speculated.

He was offered a handshake from The Tailor, and, from Bee a pat on the shoulder, and, from The Singer the gallon, which he refused. She unsuccessfully offered again. She rummaged in her dress pockets, stood up in order to rummage deeper. She hooked what she was fishing for but only fingered it, only looked into the pocket, without withdrawing her hand. “Got it,” she said.

“Good,” said Bee. “Little gift?”

The Tailor leaned forward, gave Bee the on-the-downbeat signal of people in a band.

The Singer offered Smoothie an unwrapped glycerine suppository in silver foil.

The object mattered to her. Its bubble was triple-coated in space-age plastic; its crenelated foil backing was embossed, compounding its mystery and communicating its worth with a holy invocation: EDILGYSAE. Smoothie could see how it mattered. It was cool to the touch, and it smelled of warm silverware drawn from a soapy sink.

He accepted.

It was time to accept.

Now The Tailor asked, “How long?”

“Hard to say,” Smoothie answered. He held the silver-cloaked bullet up to the light. How long have I been homeless? he thought. It had all begun three years ago; he had landed on the streets two months ago, or weeks, or even less. He decided he wouldn’t answer The Tailor until he could remember.

“It found me,” said The Singer. The gray tip of her tongue moistened her lower lip. “It did. It did.” Smoothie could almost imagine the unlikely path; some teenage driver would think how funny that would be as payment for a newspaper; some doctor would offer it with confusing instructions.

Smoothie gave the suppository back, for which she was grateful. It could have traveled to her from galaxies eons away. She held the suppository package near her face and read it wth the dessicated bark of her fingertips, her transfiguring strangeness emerging into full view.

At the Flea Market stop Temp and Tech, dark-skinned twin brothers, Smoothie’s age or a little younger, or fifties, or late fifties, introduced themselves.

~

Tech and Temp were found in the Valley View Elementary dumpster, dead from exposure, on December 7, 2001. In 1989 The Singer’s daughter boarded the bus, told them The Singer had died two days earlier on September 11, from undiagnosed cancer. They had never met her, though they knew of her. She asked for a crush. Her voice, familiar to them all, verged on song. She got off at Telshor & Del Rey. The driver, at sixty-three years of age, would die of stroke on the Route 9, at Roadrunner & Foothills, Veteran’s Day of 2000: a lasting sleep after a drive-thru meal at Proto’s. Bee took her own life on November 22, 1983.

~

Tech and Temp carried twelve newspaper bundles on board. They sat atop the two high piles like Rumplestiltskins.

“Our new Bundle Captain,” said Bee.

“He’s ugly, ain’t he?” said Tech.

“Correct,” said Temp.

Tech and Temp received a crush from The Singer, and she forgot herself and gave them another, forgot herself and gave another, longer, to The Tailor. And then there was soft off-key singing, “Can you hear a lark,” and everyone, including Smoothie, singing, “in any other part of town?” And The Singer, fanning herself with her signage, grinned at him.

And Tech said, “Loverly,” and Temp said, “Es verdad.”

Inside him, Smoothie braked. His thoughts pedaled backward – better at that than moving forward – and he counted the crew members: Tech, Temp, The Singer, The Tailor, Bee, the driver, and himself.

His first day on the Route 9 bus. His first day as bundle captain. He asked, “What day is it?”

The bus stopped at Mesa Grande & US 70. A woman with an almost-newborn, those tiny hands reaching out of blankets, stepped up into the bus, glanced at all of them. She stepped off.

Smoothie thought the baby in those rosy blankets had sounded like it might say something. It didn’t have words, but it had emitted a wordsome gurgle. The Tailor looked like 2 AM and The Singer a little before. The brothers, perched side by side atop their bundles, stretched out their legs next to each other, clock hands in the minute-past-midnight position. Their worn khaki pants were the same country club color of marigolds.

“What day is it?” he asked. His first hour ever completely surrounded by the crew. He asked them all, “What day? Tell me.” He was too embarrassed to ask what year, what month.

“Eighty-three – November-twenty-two,” said The Singer as if that was an answer. Her face was crusted with sunspots at her temples and jaws, the same as Bee, as The Tailor, Tech and Temp. The brothers had swept-back white hair and very full identical fu-manchus; they breathed through their blistered mouths, blowing yellowing white moustache hair outward.

Smoothie stared because he wanted to stare. On his meds he acted and, in fact, was like the human a human might think he was. He stared at their lean jaws and slack, squamous necks and heads, and at the unlit jewels of their eyes.

They stared back, baring what teeth they had left. He said, “You call me ugly?”

“We agree on it,” said Tech. Temp nodded, with conviction.

Bee said, “You really are. But –“

Temp said, “Plain fact.”

“Homely,” said The Singer.

The Tailor said, “All your life, I bet,” and seemed to size up Smoothie for a custom ugly suit.

The driver raised his hand, though he had no question. He was pointing at the sign above the windshield: DO NOT TALK TO THE DRIVER WHILE THE BUS IS IN MOTION.

Bee said, “Unanimity,” evidently pleased that her crew could be so accurate. Smoothie remembered a half an hour earlier when she had handled her purse that certain ventriloquist way.

“He’s ‘homely,’ then,” said Tech. “We agree?”

Definitely. The driver might have said it, Smoothie couldn’t be sure.

The driver had stopped the bus at Roadrunner & Morningstar where no one came on but where the fare tumbler loudly chewed the coins, and the inadequate engine hmmphed and huffed under the bus hood.

The doors steamed shut and the STOP sign near the driver retracted like a wing stump or a gill. When the driver’s shrill-sounding wide turn emptied all the brightest light from the bus, Smoothie asked, “Will you tell me what time it is?”

“No,” said the driver. It was him. Or it could have been him.

Bee told The Singer to fan Smoothie, though he doubted if she meant for her to fan so hard, circulating the diesel and gasoline exhaust that perfumed them all.

Smoothie said, “Put that down. And don’t look that way at me: I don’t want a –“ he caught the switch in her expression – “crush. And –“ she was already humming – “no song, okay?” Already, the words were coming, “Are there lilac trees—“

“Is that your whole damn repertoire?” he asked.

A man, unnaturally tall, a spotty thin gray beard furring his chin and neck down to the bottom of his throat, leaned over Smoothie. He had come from nowhere. His shaved head was shiny and smelled of oranges studded with cloves. He kissed Smoothie’s forehead. “Plenty of time. ‘s early.” He did not move. Smoothie could pull away but. Smoothie could wisecrack, he could be rude, but.

The man said, “’s almost one in the afternoon, Captain.” As if Smoothie had been awoken from a pirate nap, his head still far inside his pillow, his closed hands warm under it. As if a dream had placed him on a bus with steam sounds, with a motor coughing and coins clinking and his mother’s singing voice fading.

The gray man had been the last on, but he was the first dropped off with his bundle of newspapers at the westernmost part of town, the stop at Roadrunner & Morningstar.

Smoothie thought he heard Bee say, “No one will pick you up at 7:10,” but he misheard.

Later that evening – promptly at 7:10 – everyone on the bus called out to him, “Grayman!” He boarded.

Grayman was fifty-one. He was as old as he would ever be.

He took Smoothie’s elbows into his hands. He took Smoothie’s forearms, firmly took them, pulling him forward. Grayman’s ears and eyelids and brows and temples were sunburned almost black. For the longest time, he did not let go.

~

At 6:50, before they picked up Grayman, they picked up Tech and Temp at the Flea Market. Tech reported that he and Temp had sold almost fifty. He reported it to Smoothie. Smoothie, flustered, said, “Well. Well.”

“God bless,” muttered Tech.

~

Before them, at Lenox & Elks, The Singer boarded. “Poor sales,” Bee said, not quite loud enough to be heard. “Always, poor sales.” Bee nodded at the facedown sign. “The singing.”

The Singer shared the water bottle and good crushes all around. 6:40

~

Before her, The Tailor – “Good location,” said Bee, “Telshor & Del Rey” – climbed aboard at 6:30. He jingled his change-maker and held up his coin-stained wooly palms, and everyone high-fived him, Smoothie and Bee last.

~

Bee and Smoothie had spent the day at what was his new, his destined location, Loman & Telshor, where she showed him the ropes as she had been shown by her predecessor.

Hardly believing where he was now, Smoothie wondered where he was then.

~

On that same day in ’63, he was nineteen years old and at a job interview for copy reader at the Las Almas Sun-Times.

The interviewer, a very old man, shoulders bowed, back bent, had him sit down. He waited for the young man to settle before telling him the news about The President. He explained he had over forty years in at the Sun-Times. It was done. It did no good to hope it wasn’t. Drawing typed questions from a clean manila folder, the man then tried to interview Smoothie. At that time in his life, Smoothie had a name. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember his full name: the answer to the first interview question. The old man’s eyes and Smoothie’s filled with tears. The two felt as if the bones and muscles and the skin of their faces could not hold. Tears poured into their throats.

“Impossible,” said the interviewer, instantly not a stranger at all.

Smoothie tried. He could not speak.

~

He remembered thinking that the interviewer was right. To be flung from the world as if you were a word crossed through: impossible.

Kevin McIlvoy lives in Asheville, NC. As “mcthebookmechanic.com” he offers mentoring, manuscript editing, and writing workouts. His work has recently appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Graywolf Press published his most recent book, The Complete History of New Mexico and Other Stories.

Read a conversation with Kevin McIlvoy here.

“Earthworks–Polyphemus” by Suzanne Stryk (detail)

You’ve got money problems, my accountant tells me. You’ve got too much money just sitting in the bank doing nothing.

What do you suggest I do?

Retire, fall in love, and buy a vacation home in Tahiti, he says.

So I tell him: Thanks, Dave. I’ll think about it.

Fact is I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it at all. That’s not my life. I’m sixty-one years old and divorced. I live in a one-bedroom apartment on the seventeenth floor of a twenty-floor apartment building in downtown Boston.

My apartment is sixteen hundred square feet, overflowing with antique furniture. The spoils of my marriage. What didn’t fit in my apartment or go with my wife ended up in a storage unit across town.

My front door doesn’t open all the way. That’s because I have three chests of drawers lining the entrance hallway. No room for them anywhere else. I have two armoires in the bedroom. One’s empty and the other isn’t. There’s not really enough space for the antique German king-sized bed in there. I don’t care because I don’t sleep in the bedroom. I sleep on an old sofa I purchased at an estate sale two years ago. It’s paisley and ugly, but it’s comfortable. And that’s what I care about now. Comfort. I sleep with the TV on, the sound off. I usually fall asleep listening to some jazz CDs, something mellow. Cymbal and snare as soft as mouse footsteps over fine paper, liquid piano, distant fade of trumpet, something that makes you think you’re disembodied, underwater, floating.

I made a rule two years ago: No more than four bourbons before bed. Just enough to fall asleep. No hangovers. I don’t need that. Just sleep. Sleep, alone in the dark.

I work at a law office, I do contracts, I work as much as I can. I bill forty, fifty hours a week. I used to be full-partner, now my name’s just on the wall in the waiting room. Younger guys bought me out five years ago. They let me stay on. I don’t make the big decisions and that’s fine with me.

My ex-wife got remarried last year. Her name’s Gayle. His, Ron.

I go into the office most weekends. I take extended lunches. I go to a nice seafood restaurant nearby. There’s a waitress there: Holly. She’s pretty. Working her way through Northeastern as a communications major. She’s blond and tall and has a perfect figure. Perfect. I leave her big tips. Sometimes thirty or forty percent. She flirts a little, she doesn’t need to flirt, but she still does.

I don’t want to come off as the dirty old man. So I don’t ask her many questions. I don’t want to know she has a boyfriend. I pretend to read the Wall Street Journal. I pretend to care about the world while I eat. She works every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday at lunch. Friday evenings at dinner. I take lunch late and say I want to sit near the window, so I can sit in her section. I pretend to look out the window. I can see her reflection in the glass as she cleans off the tables behind me.

What do you do? she asks me one Saturday afternoon as I pay my bill.

I’m a lawyer, I tell her. I tell her my son works at my firm. I tell her: He’s taking the whole show over in a couple of years. That’s when I’ll retire to Florida with my wife, Gayle. He’s hard at work back at the office right now. Works right through lunch most days. He’s more ambitious than I am. He’s about your age, I say. I’ll bring him in here to eat with me next time.

She smiles and blushes and tries to change the subject. I never forget that smile. I think about it when I’m half asleep in the morning, when it’s still dark out and the room is silent and I might fall back asleep.

Truth is, my son Jeremy never worked for me. Last time I saw him he loaded what he called his life into the back of his friend’s car. He gave his mother a kiss and a hug. She was crying in the front yard, telling him not to leave. Then he got into the car and he drove off with his friend. I watched all of it from his bedroom window. Then Gayle turned and looked up at me. I knew she would leave too. I punched him in the face earlier that day. He told us he was gay. He told us he was moving to California. He told us that he never had a chance to live a gay life and that’s what he wanted to do in California.

That day was the third time I punched him.

The other times. Once when he was fifteen and he came home with a pierced ear. The second time we were walking in the park near our house. I told him about hard work, about getting into the right schools, and what it takes to be a success. He was seventeen years old and he told me he never wanted to be like me. He called me a loser.

That’s it. He left and never came back. He stayed in touch with his mother through e-mail.

I think about that stuff now and it makes me want to drink. My doctor tells me I can’t drink as much I used to and he tells me to cut back. Something wrong with my liver. So, I don’t think about that stuff.

Not thinking is a habit. It’s a way of looking at my life. Sometimes I look at myself as I lie on my sofa at night, trying to sleep. A rumpled-up blanket covers my legs. I look down at my legs and I think they might not even be there. From this view it wouldn’t make a difference. Same view, legs or no legs. I think: that’s how people with no legs get by, that’s how they don’t go crazy. They look down and from a certain view their legs might as well be there.

So, you take another drink and close your eyes and you fall asleep thinking you’re a whole person again. I’ll bet that’s how it works.

~

One evening, I’m working late at the office and Gayle calls and says that Jeremy was in a car accident. Her voice is shaking and electrified. Jeremy is in the hospital, in critical condition. That’s all she knows. She’s on her way to the airport with Ron. So, that night I pack and I get on a plane and fly to L.A.

I drink on the plane. I sit there and I try not to think. I can’t sleep. It’s early in the morning. Pure black outside. A dull roar – the steel-grinding sound of turbines – crushes everything inside.

I start to remember. It’s almost ten years ago now and Jeremy tells me he’s gay. He sort of teeters there for a while after the blow, like he’s numb. I’m standing there, fists clinched. He’s standing there trying to re-focus. I think: He’s going to lunge at you and then you’re going to push him against the wall and get him in the stomach. I look at him. He just stands there. I think he might fall over. He doesn’t. He never looks at me. He never lunges at me. He just looks stunned and then walks out of the room and goes upstairs and shuts his door and packs. I go fix myself a drink and try to think about a case I’m working on. No good. I hate him at that point. I want him to hate himself. I wonder if he does. I wonder if that would make me happy. I think so. I fix another drink. I’m drinking alone in my study, doors closed, and then I want to kill myself for hating him the way I do.

Now I’m on a plane. I think about that day. All of us in a big house behind closed doors. That was my fault. I shake my head and mutter something to myself. The guy in the seat next to me hears it. I don’t care.

The flight attendant walks by. I order another drink.

~

I get to L.A. and take a taxi straight to the hospital. I find the I.C.U. on the hospital directory. I wait in line in front of the reception desk. Ron sees me. He’s been waiting there for me. He hugs me. I don’t hug him back, not really. I only put my arms around him in a perfunctory sort of way. Gayle’s in the bathroom, he says. She’ll be out here in a minute. We’ve been expecting you for some time. Christ, I’m so sorry about this. Thanks, Ron, I say.

I don’t ask Ron how Jeremy is. I don’t want to know. Then I see Gayle. I look at her face.

Now I know. I see it. It comes to me as she walks towards me, unspoken.

~

Gayle wants to go with me back to Jeremy’s room. We walk down a long corridor and finally get to his room and she makes right for him. I just stand there in the doorway. I can’t bring myself to walk into that room. Gayle starts talking to him, crying. He’s unconscious. Tubes are running over him. His neck is in a brace. His head and face are bandaged. I can’t even tell that it’s him. Even his legs are bandaged.

There’s a shrill sound filling the room. It’s like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep… Except really fast. I know that’s the sound of an E.K.G.

I walk across the room to the window. I get to the window. It looks out over L.A. It’s morning. The whole town is gross and brown and greasy looking. The traffic is bad and I can see cars jammed up on the streets below. I see all these people crawling around down there like filthy little bugs. I think that if the window could open, I could hear them yelling at each other in ugly voices.

I lean forward and put my forehead on the windowpane and it feels cool and clean. When I look down, I see all those little bug-people walking around down there in the streets. It looks horrible and chaotic. After a few seconds a helicopter flies over the hospital. I look up at it. It’s a little solitary shape moving fast through that big yellow L.A. sky. The sky that’s the color of pee and almost makes me sick to look at it. I just stand there, watching it go until I can’t see it anymore.

Pretty soon, Gayle notices the E.K.G. and says she’s going to find the doctor or somebody to try to get his heartbeat under control.

Now Gayle is gone. She’s off down the hall looking for the doctor.

I take a good look at him. I walk over to his bed. My lips move and I hear my own voice and I say, Hey there, kiddo. Those stupid words tumble from my mouth like words spoken in a foreign language I’m not very good at. He’s still. No response. He didn’t hear me. Thank God.

I listen… All I hear is, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep…

I sit down on his bed, right there, right next to him. I see his arm there beside him. I touch his arm with the backs of two fingers. Skin I haven’t touched in years. Then I put my hand on his arm. Then I hear it: Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep…beep… beep… beep…beep…beep…beep… Of course it startles me. I take my hand away and then I hear that beep, beep, beep, beep sound real fast again.

I’m scared, more scared than I’ve ever been in my whole life. And I’m thinking that if he would just give me that again, just one last time, that’s all I will ever ask for, from anyone. Do it for me, just one last time. That’s all I’ll ever need.

So, I put my hand down on his arm again, on his forearm there, like I did the first time. I listen. Then, after a few seconds, beep, beep, beep, beep…beep… beep…beep…beep…beep… Just like before, the sound like tides. Wow, I think to myself.

Just listen to that. Wow.

Marc Larock received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his M.Phil. in philosophy from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.  He teaches philosophy at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Read an interview with Marc here.

“Facts of Life” by Suzanne Stryk

“…During a summer storm of three or four days of chilling rain, flocks leave the nesting grounds and may fly hundreds of miles until they encounter favorable weather. After the storm, they return in small groups to the nests. In their absence, the young survive without food, becoming torpid: cold, motionless, and barely breathing. Lower metabolism prevents starvation, thus allowing the young to be raised through alternating periods of plenty and shortage.”  ~National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds Western Region

 

“When your mother dies,” Matthew said, “Your molecular structure breaks down and is rearranged. When it’s over, you literally become a different person.”

Matthew is my love. I don’t know what else to call him. He endured the deaths of my father and mother, a year apart, and in between, Zoe’s murder. It was as though a hole opened up in the universe and sucked them all away.

Rather, I should say, Matthew endured my family. And me. My father refused to acknowledge him, and made snide comments about Jews. My mother adored him, but of course, my mother loved everyone. In grief, I became insane.

“Now you will truly be an orphan,” my therapist said, “a real orphan because your parents are dead and dying. And you will cast off your family.”

Cast off my family?

“Your family is the embodiment of evil.” Pam tilted her head, examining me as if  for self-inflicted burns, cigarettes crushed out on my belly. “I see you standing on the porch of a burning cabin. You can go back in and rescue everyone. Or you can save yourself. You’ll be lucky to escape with your car keys.” Pam wore a silly purple beret and jaunty scarf. She didn’t care what other people thought about her. “Have you read the Old Testament? You must cleave unto your lover.” That shut me up. Pam quoting the  Old Testament. Sucked as I was into the tarpit of my family, it seemed logical I should jettison Matthew. If I increased my losses to the highest possible level, I wouldn’t have to feel anything at all. It was like pressing on a bruise on my wrist to ease the throbbing in my skull.

After decades without drinking or smoking, I wanted to drink and smoke. I’ve never done heroin, but that sounded fine too.

If not heroin, throw myself off a cliff.

“Want anything to take the edge off?” Pam asked.  Sweet words. But I knew from long experience that I wouldn’t simply ease the edge.

“I’d take one, then the whole damn bottle, and then crave more,” I said. “But if you give me an IV I can lead around on a leash, with just the right dose trickling in? I’ll take that.”

Instead, I walked for miles in the Olympic National Park. I walked so far and so fast my collie and golden retriever couldn’t keep up.  I walked until I reached an altered state. Adrenalin or endorphins or exhaustion kicked in, or the sun streaked through the trees to illuminate a single fire-singed stump, turning it blue and black, and at the same moment, a Pileated woodpecker made its “high clear series of piping calls” overhead.

My toenails bruised and turned blood dark, like those of a marathon runner.

Dad died first.  Matthew and I left Manhattan and returned to the Pacific Northwest. It was a long dark spring, or so I remember: rain without ceasing. We were shipwrecked in our cabin, death and darkness folded around us. Sometimes, I wanted to be even more alone, in a tiny space, like a baby’s crib. I wanted to move into our guest cottage, called Eagle Cottage because bald eagles perch overhead. I wanted a cell-like bed separate from all others, to be attached to that bed by a slender chain, floating away from time.

Yet I could not sleep unless Matthew wrapped himself around me, holding me tightly, forming a womb, and even that was not enough. I never lost awareness of my mother, a few miles away. After sixty years of marriage, she slept alone in her own cell-like basement room in the hospice. I wanted to fashion a pouch, like those in which newborns are swaddled, clutched to the chests of their fathers or mothers. I would carry my shrunken little mother twenty-four hours a day, singing to her in her own dying days.

Every dawn, I awakened to a heavy fist of dread striking my heart. I dreaded visiting Mother, and then felt guilty for my dread. I dreaded her actual death. I was sad about my sisters, and how estranged we had become. I fantasized the lovely sisters again united, singing perfect four-part harmony. This happened, briefly, at my father’s memorial down on the shore. After the guests left, the siblings sat on the grey stone sea wall Dad had built by hand. It was dusk. We sang every song we remembered, someone starting one up and the rest picking it up, on and on, until the moon rose red over the horizon.

And then the next morning, the calls and texts and emails began, the awful things this person said, or that.

Sometimes I woke with renewed energy to take action, to quit feeling sorry for myself. I wanted to accept death as a natural, even healthy part of life. I wanted to accept death as beautiful, a way of prayer, a simple cessation of heartbeat and breath. I did not have to die because Dad died, because Mom was dying. Yet the child, alone, without parents, does die. If she can’t find sustenance or shelter, she dies.

When Matthew and I were in Manhattan, I taught a class on addiction, weight and body image. It was nice to be around teenagers. The women, girls, really, were beautiful and brilliant. It was difficult to understand how they could hate their bodies, want to hurt themselves, cut into their flesh, as most did, but Manhattan is filled with ambition, and even the very young are driven to accomplish by thirty what others, in other parts of the country, the Northwest for example, might be content to achieve in a lifetime.

Two days before Matthew and I were to return to Portland, one of the young woman called. She begged me to attend a “ladies tea,” as she called it, in my honor. I had already begun to push the students from my mind, my way of protecting myself from loss. “I can’t,” I said. “I have too much to do. I like clean departures.”

Zoe insisted. Sweet Zoe was spectacularly beautiful, a gifted singer and piano player, on scholarship to Manhattan School of Music. She had a glow about her, the same glow my mother had, but she also had a craziness I couldn’t quite put my finger on, perhaps only my own madness when I was nineteen.

“We want to celebrate your Kirieness,” Zoe said.

And so the dozen women from the class gathered in Zoe’s studio apartment. Everyone dressed up, and perched along two facing couches, and on chairs, chatting about this and that. I was staring out the window at a brick wall, thinking about Matthew and my dead father and my dying mother, and then, as if from nowhere, as if from far away, I heard Zoe say “I trade sex for groceries.”

She needed groceries to feed her child, her scholarship didn’t cover food. Or child care.

I didn’t know Zoe had a child.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I lost custody. See, when I was eleven, this guy talked me into going to his apartment, and then he raped me. When he was done, he threw, like a hundred dollars on me. On my body.”

“How awful.” My heart went out to her, this beautiful smart young girl, her life shredded. When I was the age Zoe was now, in art school and working as a model, the same thing happened, and the guy threw a few dollars on a chair. This is all I’m worth? I remember thinking that.

Zoe said the man became her pimp. And she was on a yacht one day, and the client left for a moment. She felt something beneath the bed, poked with her high heel, and she saw the body of a woman shoved underneath. Still in her heels, Zoe ran for her life across the dock.

I wondered if this was how I sounded, too, at her age, when I tried to tell my sisters or my friends what had happened. Zoe cried a little, but the tears fell straight down onto her beautiful dress, as if beyond her bidding.

Then Zoe laughed. “I escaped,” she said. “I’m alive. I’m starting over.” She would regain custody of her little girl. She would finish school, support her family. Relieved, we all laughed too, a glitter of sound across the darkening room. Zoe poured chamomile tea into fragile cups, passed around trays of lemon cupcakes.

“Violence changes the brain chemistry,” I told the young women. “Experiencing it, I mean.” I cannot help talking like a professor. It’s better than feeling. “Talking about these experiences with each other lessens the pain,” I said.

“I’m going to be a therapist,” Zoe said. “Like you. I’ll do music therapy with young girls who’ve been damaged. And help them live.”

A week after our gathering, when I was already back west, the story was all over the news. Zoe met a man who was once a client. She met him in a hotel room where they’d often met before. She thought he was in love with her.  He was a law student, and maybe he would help her with college, with her daughter. It seemed he wanted to tie her to the bed, or tried to. Zoe ran, actually made it to the door, and then he shot her in the back.

“I’m hysterical,” I told Matthew. “I’m so sorry. I should know better.”

Matthew disagreed about what I was, what I should be sorry for. “Hysteria is deep healing,” he said. “The more deeply you cry, turn yourself inside out, the deeper the healing.”  He said grief is like being hit by napalm, immolated and melted. Or boiled to a grinning skeleton of bone.

“I would rather light myself on fire than continue to cry like this.” I put my hand over my belly as if protecting an embryo. “If my molecular structure changes now, what will I be when it’s over?”

“It’s never over,” Matthew said. His parents had died decades before. I’d always felt sorry for him, but now I envied him.

“Was it like this for you?” I asked. “Did you feel like this?” Every day, I asked him that.

As our mother embarked on what the hospice nurse called “active dying,” we four sisters gathered a final time. We sat around our mother’s narrow cot and sang every song we knew, the songs she taught us. We folded our coats into pillows, and slept on the floor, breathing ragged as she did. When she stopped breathing, she looked like herself again. Her folded-up body straightened out. She was beautiful, like concentrated sweetness.

I howled like a baby, a pierced animal.

“I’m not sure I’m coming back this time,” I told Matthew.

“I know,” Matthew said. He reached over and touched my knee. “I’m not sure either. Let’s just go ahead for now.”

When I was attacked, I left my body. I saw the event, but I was outside it, looking down from near the ceiling. I never returned to that body. That girl was dead. I developed the head, the brain, and even some of the credentials to help others. I did help others. I didn’t save Zoe, but I’m sure I helped a few people.

That day, when Matthew touched my knee so lightly, I re-entered my body. Just as the assault took place at a specific time and place, on a specific day, to a specific body no longer mine, so I returned to my new body, this rejiggered constellation of molecules, almost with a thud. It was as if a screen or shroud lifted all at once. Below the cabin, the high tide lapped on the grey stones of the shoreline, and in the Douglas fir and madrona clung small clusters of golden crowned kinglets, bushtits, creepers, and nuthatches with their tumbling chatter, their tinkling descending warble. I shook my head and looked around at the waxing gibbous moon, the turquoise water. The moss was freshly green in the cold spring rain. I wanted to pet it. I wanted to lie down in it and roll around. I wanted to pray to it. I wanted to learn its name.

Kirie Pedersen has work forthcoming or published in Quiddity, Wisconsin Review, Eclipse, RiverSedge, Utne Reader, Folly Magazine, Eclipse, Women NetWork, Alcoholism the National Journal, Northwest People, Caper Literary Journal, Laurel Review, Teachers and Writers, Regeneration (Rodale Press), Glossolalia, Avatar Review, Chaffee Review, Black Boot, Eleven Eleven, Folly Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an M.A in fiction writing and literature and blogs at www.kiriepedersen.com