How you shine.
What is the curse upon religion that its tenets must always be associate with every kind of extravagance and falsehood.
— Aleister Crowley,
I became aware, more vividly aware than I had ever been, that the secret of life consists in sharing the madness of God.
— John Cowper Powys,
Stick Around, It Gets Worse
You weren’t there when it happened, but you’ve spent so much time imagining what she went through during those final moments that she was aware of the world around her, you feel as though you were. You know the details pieced together by forensics experts analyzing the crime, and these feed you plenty of insight, but you knew her as the experts never could.
Remember the swoop of hair that would mask her left eye, and the way she’d always be pushing it back with two fingers, never three, and how that eye, when revealed, seemed to notice something worthwhile in you that no one else could recognize? Remember the way she would listen to music, sitting with folded legs upon the floor, doing nothing, just
The experts only knew her post-mortem; knew her unconscious, bleeding in the wreckage of her car; knew her clinging to life while her head was undergoing emergency reconstruction; knew her in the morgue’s cold stainless steel drawer. Knew her just enough to tell you that she never once regained consciousness during those last nine hours. Knew her just enough to assure you that even had she lived, she’d never be right again, not the person you married, because the brain damage was just too extensive.
And you?
They didn’t even know you at all. If they did they wouldn’t have tried to make you see her death as merciful.
You’ve lost track of how many times you’ve found yourself right there beside her. She’s driving her customary fifteen miles per hour above the speed limit on the Landry Expressway, and busy with the radio, while notched between her thighs is a tall paper cup of Thai iced coffee, her summer drink of choice. Thinking of work, or getting home, or the way you will feel together later in the night, another joyously fevered coupling to make a complete world between your flesh, just the two of you and nothing and no one else. You’re flattering yourself, naturally, imagining her last thoughts to be of you, but that’s all right. It’s allowed. Something in you, never touched by daylight, needs to ache so much it makes you groan in the still, small hours.
She approaches the overpass and you see it coming from miles away, it feels like, but no matter how loudly you scream warnings it never does any good. How little it would take to change things: A flex of her wrist and she’d be in another lane, and that might be enough. Somebody else would be bearing this burden, and right now you’d gladly wish it on him. But it’s yours, always and forever. It became yours the instant the brick thrown from the overpass smashed through the windshield and pulverized the left side of her head. You wonder, crazily enough, if she just didn’t see it coming because her hair was in the way.
Vandals, a young police officer told you. They’re pulling these stunts all the time, and he doesn’t think they have any real appreciation of the kind of damage they can cause.
The hell they don’t, you thought, didn’t bother saying. They know exactly what can happen, it’s what they’re hungry for, and the only thing that might’ve bothered them was that she didn’t kill anyone else when her car went out of control. Ruining the lives of others, they’ve made this the mission of their own.
At the funeral, family and friends and clergy were brimming with the same big question that, in a moment of weakness, scrawled itself on the front of your brain as soon as you got the phone call:
“God’s will?” you contented yourself with repeating, after hearing the phrase one too many times. “I can’t decide what’s more monstrous: a god who sends little thugs up onto a freeway overpass with bricks to do his dirty work, or the way people believe that a god like that actually exists.”
Their blind trust has never made sense to you, nor the meager delusions to which they cling as proof of being rewarded for their faith. It’s not quite in you to feel smug because you know better, but lately it’s not quite in you to pity them their superstition, either. Mostly it’s disgust that you feel. They call you lost, but that’s just projection, you deduce, because you’re the one who’s comfortable right where you are, realizing there’s no reason for anything that happens, ever. How they hate that, because it grants you a freedom they will never know. A freedom that would paralyze them if they did.
You remember something you read years ago, written by Stephen Crane, and how deep within you resonated the chord it struck:
You take your comfort in the oddest places, don’t you?
*
By autumn, grief has become something permanently affixed to you, like a boil grown too thick to be lanced, drained. It must grow until it bursts, or turns to silently consume you from within. Your friends understand — she truly was everything to you — while you in turn understand their reluctance to be around you these days. You just aren’t that much fun anymore.
She was the last straw, that broke the camel’s heart.
It’s got you thinking — you’ve never really known anyone who’s died of natural causes, have you? Parents and grandparents, plus friends and neighbors and casual lovers, they’ve all left you too early, and in such ghastly ways. Cancers and violence, accidents and congenital defects, aneurysms of the brain and psyche. You’ve heard of people who’ve slipped peacefully away in their sleep, or in their favorite easy chairs, after ripe octogenarian lives, but suspect they must be mythical, in the company of unicorns and mermaids.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think there was a deliberate methodology behind it all, a gradual pattern of calamity spiraling inward until, at last, you’re the only one left to be dealt with. You could be expected to think that, but don’t, because you still keep your wits about you, thank god—
