Cusp of Heaven Pt. 2

Part One can be read here.

Thomas again.

There was only one place that interested me as a place of small “r” rest:  a cemetery on a bluff overlooking the ocean.  It is backed by redwoods and eucalyptus trees.  There is a small, stone church next to it and a split rail fence around.  Old and precious.  Our first trip there had been in daylight.  The church was locked.  Thomas lingered there while I went to the fence to look at the headstones that marked the final resting place of a select few persons for a hundred years or more.  Some movement drew my eyes up to the naked branches of a long dead tree, where a hawk stretched its wings, but did not take flight.  A near perfect anomaly.  Finding the local inn full one night, we returned to the cemetery, made love on the platform bed at the back of Thomas’s van and, like clockwork, chime on muffled inner chime, were overwhelmed by the impression that the cemetery’s inhabitants had risen up and come out and surrounded us, peeking in the windows for their evening’s entertainment.  Propelled by horror perfectly shared, speechless, we fled.  

I was shocked at Thomas’s admitting to something as unscientific as those few moments, only mildly surprised when he asked me to promise never to return there with anyone else.  Ever.  I could have gone further and sworn that I would never return, alive, under any circumstances.  Deceased, though, I would go back.  I might be a pilgrim, just passing through, but I would not be a stranger there.  

     They are known as restless spirits.  They are not; rather, they are perpetually on the verge and, because they are poised to spring, they do not.  They fill a void oncoming; one in their own shape, color and size; one that has anticipated e’er long those hapless critters meditating upon the cusp.  

The invasion of my dreams began, dreams about friends in strange conveyances.  H. traveled by rail inside a small, brass submarine while I waited for him at the station.  J. appeared wearing a white, linen suit, standing in the window of a bookstore on East 14th Street, his attire so unusual for him that I started and awoke.  D. drove along the tree lined streets of my hometown in a red, wicker roadster.  P. arrived at a party carrying a sumptuous, hand painted shroud, whose appropriateness for him we discussed at length.  Within two weeks of each of the dreams, I was informed by someone then living that their subjects were dead.  The dreams had not been prophetic.  I had merely been advised of events of which I had been unaware.  No mere intellect or arcane knowledge could answer the question, “Why?”  Bizarre intersections of life and life in time out of time and a busted clock that is right twice a day but is nevertheless dead wrong.

And yet. The veils of those conveyances diminished in substance until the last, the shroud, lay upon my knees, under my fingertips.  There had been less and less between traveler and heaven.

“Someone…”

Backed into a corner and no conveyance through the dying, the dead, the soon to be dead and no reason, no science, no secret handshake or sibling-hood to ease my confusion. 

“It’s all your fault,” a lie delivered haphazardly, half teasing to you, a crushing blow that reduced you to blubbering tears.  You told me that your mother had wanted to abort you, that your pre-nascent knowledge of her intention was the seed of small “c” catholic guilt.  Later, still, you told me that you were a fraternal twin and that your brother, far from devoting himself to spiritual matters, was a law man.  This brought me to a screeching internal halt because neither your assumption of ultimate pre-natal guilt nor the consequences of your mother’s threat took into consideration any such fraternity.  

I know that I, too, have succumbed to the natterings of some boogeyman and believed the lie that underlies an awful delusion and sought just punishment for an unknown, unknowable transgression, making me a magnet for retribution that ambushes, baffles, pains and, through some pernicious alchemy, has me playing out behaviors that justify rebukes oncoming.  

“There is nothing you can do,” another vile lie, and, my personal favorite, “What am I good for?” with its dizzying circularity and no strings attached.  Just my lust to know proves, perhaps, the sin of pride, unregeneracy, and betwixt and between, I might get stuck, and stuck, seek rescue.  Would you come?

“Blair!”

“What?!”

Whack!  Head against inside coffin lid.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

And sleeping, dream.

And dreaming, desire to know as myself what happened in the temple in the moments following the rending of that other veil when there was nothing to come between worshippers and God and there were no bells and no rope and no way to pull us back and no provision for high office or wealth or sacrifice or act of contrition and nowhere, then, to hide.  And we have been cowering behind one thing or another ever since, throwing into what we perceive as a breach anything to replace that veil, abdicating our inheritance to one presumptive Moses after another, shunning nearness to God.  What wretchedness must have been contained in that moment.  Wretchedness of the most appalling breadth and depth.  And all, for nothing.    

Thomas didn’t know that I knew that I was a science experiment and that he would take to his hallowed, German grave the fact of our relationship.  I saw no irony in that except when he saw things that I missed, like our reflection in a Haight Street store window, evidence, he remarked, of how perfectly we fit together.  A small but significant breach in his chain mail veil.  Once, driving to Canada, we stopped at a grocery store near Seaside, Oregon, bought steaks and bread and fruit for our supper and drove to a campground, where we built a fire in one of the rustic, stone grills.

“Scheisse!”

“What?”

He nodded toward the hillside.  Parked on the road in the woods above us was a pick up truck with the obligatory and loaded gun rack.  Two men stood nearby, watching us.  If there were anything else to be done, we did not do it.  We prepared and ate our dinner.  We talked.  Although Thomas faced me across the picnic table, his eyes did not stray from those men on the hill and as I watched him watch them, I perceived an incremental alteration in this man who had once argued violently that no matter the instrument or the weather or any deftness of hand, a middle “c” sounded pre-cise-ly the same without the minutest variation in tonality, amen, provided the piano had been properly tuned.

“There…is…only…one…c.”

I saw in his face the rending of the one “c” veil, for if there were only one “c,” there was, too, but one outcome for our predicament and as I urged him to another conclusion, willing a Thomas-mind that would bend on the turns, I talked with measured indifference about one “c” matters.  

Nothing happened.  Thomas, relieved that none of the horrors had come to pass from which he had been determined to save me, did not notice that I shuddered at the variety of torments he had imagined.  

“What if they tied you to a tree?  What if they what if they what if they…?”

None of it had occurred to me. 

It occurs to me that I cannot discover who he is now – a doctor, almost certainly, but nothing else about him over the last twenty years.  Is he the same person he would have been otherwise?  Is it all right for me to be his secret if it means that he is a secret from me?  Hidden behind a veil – nay, behind a more substantial impediment – time, distance, the will to remain unknown.

Have you rent the veil between you and your twin, your secret sharer?  Or between you and the child gone on before you?  Thomas would have cleaved stubbornly to the one “c” rule if he thought it would keep him alive.  He had his own small “c” catholic guilt, having argued with his father and left the room and slammed the door and heard the echo – too resonant – of his father falling down dead behind him.  They had fought, I think, over the inevitability of Thomas’s becoming a doctor, an icon of his father – true copy – and his father’s death sealed the deal when nothing else could.  

String theory:  unanchored strings of something or other are excited by particles of something else.  There, I have it. 

What convinced you that your mother was right that you ought not live?  What am I – are we – good for?  Why, behave?  What, become?  There it is, distracted from true iconography, meant to honor, not to be.  Covering mirrors, stopping clocks.  You were never the homunculus tethered upside down in your mother’s brain any more than Thomas had been meant to stand upright where his father fell.  A new twist on Kinsman Avengers.  

You gave me two things – postmortem gifts in most unusual packaging – when you insisted that I return to California to get your Celtic cross and demanded that your remains, languishing in an urn somewhere, be disposed of immediately.  Now, I know who must be the center of my life and that a new you replaced the old.  I always wondered what Christ had been writing – or re-writing – in the dirt.  I would hate to go to my grave having lived someone else’s life, having failed to bring back the goods for which I had been cast here.  

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  I’ll be back for it.