I . . . let’s see, yes: I went to Texas, don’t you know. I’d never been before. To be frank, I cannot be certain if I would have ever ended up in Texas in any other way. That is, I don’t know if I would have ever found myself in Texas later in life, if last week had not happened. When I was a wee one, we were taught that Texas was just a big place where them Mexicans entangled themselves in that dusty red Southern culture, and there were a lot of drugs coming in from, well, them Mexicans from across the border. A couple hundred years ago, this was a place where people were riding around on jackrabbits the size of cattle, and all they ever did for fun was watch the sand blow off the back of a Mexican hooker while the sun stirred a hazy orange across mile after mile of godless dirt. After awhile, enough was enough, and the lone star state was broken up into crumbs and sold off to dirty salesmen who lived with their deaf girlfriends and had deep-rooted gambling addictions. I mean, I’m not saying I believed any of this, but that’s what I was taught. And anyway, as I have said, I was content to let Texas be Texas, and I would be Ryan. For whatever it was (fort) worth (that’s a Texas joke), we’d only stare at each other from opposite ends of the grocery store, pretending not to know each other as we stocked up on kidney beans and canned corn, both on sale that week due to overstocking. And then something unexpected and beautiful and mortifying happened: we had sex. Now, calm down, okay. Although it was a surprise when it initially happened, I felt good about it. I didn’t regret it. I haven’t regretted it yet. When a boy and the second-largest state met, they fell in love. It is something I have a hard time talking about, but I’m going to do it anyway, in a few thousand words or so, to boot.

Over the course of this essay, I will give an alphabetical grade to each state I visited. This story begins in Iowa. Iowa gets a C minus. I went to Iowa because the Reverend Capo saw fit to move his ever-shrinking family there, having previously lived in Texas for a good long time. He’d been given his own church in Iowa, finally, and it made the decision to uproot and move his family from probably the greatest state in the continental U. S. to one that smells like raw oats all the easier. As far as I can tell, his family primarily consists of his wife and three cats; two of them are invisible to me. I never saw them. The third is a nameless, three-legged one who likes to be scratched on the left side of his head, on account of his hind leg having disappeared forever. He limps along like a champ. He’s a dark, affectionate cat that looks like a scurrying cloud of dust. The rest of Reverend Capo’s family were keen enough to stay in the far more superior state of Texas (which, if I must spoil it this early on, gets an A plus). These are two men of varying ages and opinions on the appropriate length of time in between bathing. Both are accepting of most everyone, which may very well be attributed to their upbringing, having been guided for approximately two decades by a whimsical Unitarian Universalist preacher who, perhaps thirty years earlier, sported a reddish white man’s afro, if the pictures hung in his basement are of any indication. (The viewing of said pictures proved to be a pivotal moment in my adult development, but we’ll get in to that later.)

Before I learned any of this, something came first: it was a plane ride. Before that, a story.

Let’s get on with this beast.

Read more…

The briefcase pressed harmlessly against his leg to the rhythm of his strides. The street and the buildings around him were inching by, the sidewalk sliding away under thick black soles. His tie stood firm over his chest, a tiny thread of color in the dense grey of the city. Cars hummed as they moved away from certain locations and toward others. People curled around one another in a chaotic dance; most were silently stoic and unaware of the beauty of their toils.

He had a span of time before he needed to be where he was going: longer than it took to get there. But he wasn’t slowing down. He hadn’t slowed down in so many years, and there seemed no reason to begin that practice now. The world was flying, falling, swimming, sinking, running, tripping, all at once, just as it always had been. And to stop was to give in. To cease motion was to allow all those thoughts and emotions that crawl invisibly along the gutters and up the walls a chance to infect and destroy you, a chance that was seldom squandered. So he moved, swaying one leg in front of the other in a locomotive process so thoroughly exercised that it had become useless to question or alter. So long as there was a direction, it was difficult to find oneself misplaced.

The tiles of the concrete that composed the sidewalk were huge and flat. The gaps between them yawned and screamed for a drop of light, a stream of rain, a pinch of soil. No one listened, but occasionally – by accident or perhaps by some design hitherto unmerited – these desires were answered, and produced a few yellowed sprigs of trampled grass that flailed their dying heads like unknown poets.

Considering himself a man of business even more so with each empty step, he approached the next intersection. He was about to take his place at the back of the mass of people congealing at the crosswalk, when he noticed something he shouldn’t have noticed. Huddling against the corner of the building that marked the end of this block was a homeless man sitting on a box playing a harmonica. The building towered up into the clouds, a monument cast in cold, reflective marble. The bum looked tired, dirty, sad. The box was wooden, composed of small planks of wood nailed together, perhaps some old fruit crate. The harmonica was rusty and pierced the air with a few screeching notes for each second of the daylight slipping by. It was not an unusual sight, altogether. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a single block of the city that did not contain one or two of these wanderers, fiddling away with what musical toys they might have at their disposal, sometimes with a degree of mastery, but other times, such as this, with the perfect blend of ineptitude and lack of proper equipment to produce a sound both ghastly in itself and depressing in its implications.

If these things were all he had seen, this successful businessman would have gone about his way, avoiding eye contact with the homeless man at all costs. But he saw just a little bit more. He saw the upturned hat that lay in front of the man, which had collected a few coins. It was a black pin-striped fedora, that would perhaps be worn by men of some class on less formal social occasions. In fact, this particular brand of fedora was rather expensive. The businessman knew this, because he had purchased it himself not a week ago, and soon afterward it had disappeared.

The crowd began to cross over the road, a shifting tide of black and white. A single businessman stayed behind, letting his anger – almost always kept firmly in check – simmer inside him a bit more freely with each step approaching the wooden crate, its occupant still chirping at his harmonica like a wounded sparrow.

He was within a few feet of the homeless man, arranging in his head a slew of words both polite and insulting to hurl at him while he grabbed the hat and flung its meager contents into the filthy bearded face, when the madness began.

He felt a rushing sensation, as if he had stepped off a cliff. Then pressure, and a dampening of sound, like he had slipped into a column of ocean. The sights around him had slowed and smeared together, slugs dressed in business attire. He tried to move, to look around. And he was moving. But with impossible slowness. His mind was leagues ahead of his body. His thoughts writhed in panic, wildly issuing commands to every muscle.

Then the slowness fell away as he breached some ancient threshold, and all the messages from his brain were at last received. Every limb flailed and contorted, and he fell to the ground in a fit of painful spasms as his body desperately attempted to catch up with his mind. With a strength of will he didn’t know he possessed, he maintained consciousness through these agonizing moments, holding on to whatever was himself until the movements stopped and he was laying face down in the concrete.

With great care, he told his hand to move. He had never been so conscious of the communication between body and mind, but now he could feel it, all the wires running through his skin twitching with heat and energy. His hand responded, running its palm across the stone. It sent messages back, informing his mind that the stone was coarse and hard and warm.

He raised himself to his feet. His body ached. It had almost completely exhausted itself. But he was alive. And he was sane. He had never before given so much attention to these thoughts. But they were strong now, and they filled him with a sense of victory.

As he raised his eyes, he saw the homeless man, still sitting on his box. But so much was different. Lights of different colors were dancing across his visage, now clean cut and vivid with life. The box was curved and elegantly carved out of some dark wood, inscribed with flowing drawings of untold legends. And there was a feeling in the air. The wind was blowing all around him, perhaps even through him, and no longer in a constant stream of cold, but rather in warm gentle pulses that gave the entire atmosphere a steady, patient tempo. And playing to this subtle rhythm was the most beautiful music he had ever heard. Chords rapping around themselves in powerful harmonies, building a rippling lake underneath, with melodies so simple and sweet and unashamed they seemed to walk over this water with the ease of a natural force.

He found himself on the verge of tears, under the assault of these sounds. Soon, searching for their origin, his eyes met with the harmonica, held firmly in a muscular hand, pressed against lips that flowed across its surface like skis over powder. He hadn’t noticed it at first. It was still rusty.

The music began disassembling itself, until everything came to a point, and it was concluded with a final, quiet tone, whispered and self-aware, that in turn dissolved and was no more. But the percussive force of the wind continued.

The harmonica was taken away from the old man’s mouth, and he slowly opened his eyelids, which had been held firmly shut in the grip of emotion, and looked up. The iris of each eye was a deep pink in color, like raw flesh, or new skin. He spoke, each syllable rolling off his tongue like a river-smoothed stone.

“Resolving a chord is giving up.”

The businessman did not move, his arms did not sway at their sides, his feet did not tap with impatience. He could feel that the old man had more to say. His ears were open, his mind already weaving a net to capture what it could from the next set of words. He was suddenly aware of the weight of his briefcase, which he was still gripping like a child would grip the hand of its mother. He dropped it. It bounced once, slightly denting one corner, and was still.

“Resolving a chord is murder.”

The burning, youthful eyes of this ancient human being were fixed steadily on him. The pupils quivered with purpose, with genius, with tragedy.

“But only if you have created something alive.”

The businessman knew it was true. He wanted to cry, and to sing to the lost song. To give birth to its son and heir. But he held back his tears and his voice, not wanting to cry and not knowing how to sing. So he was silent, his face unmoving, pregnant with thought and feeling, but too afraid of their birth pangs to give them substance. The sage spoke again.

“I am letting you see this.”

At these words, the man on the box lifted his arms, until the hands were suspended away from his body, palms open and facing the up. His face was deeply tired and serious. His companion waited, and then, like a humble guest surveying the collections of a richer man, began to cast his gaze about the world like the line of a patient fisherman.

The entire universe was darker and more colorful, every hue deep and sincere. The sky was a roiling tempest of vibration and sentience. There were stars and planets appearing and disappearing, some engaged in combat, gliding toward each other and colliding, emitting soundless bursts of light that refracted in the vapor of hundreds of clouds. It was dusk, and morning, and night.

Bubbling up from massive fissures in the roads and the sidewalks, and snaking their way through broken windows and shattered brick walls and concrete faces of dilapidated skyscrapers, were giant wildflowers, their stems as thick as trees, their leaves hanging out into space and waving gently with the gusts of wind. The flowers themselves were like explosions frozen in time, their petals syllables of a forgotten language. They shone out in the dim light, worlds of their own, taller than the dying buildings they had intwined themselves against. They filled the air with the taste of nectar, even so many stories below their gleaming stamens as the two men were.

The streets were empty, but they were not cold. The streets were silent, but they were not lonely. Everything seemed dead, and youthful.

He absorbed all this like a man in a dream that creates its own context. It was true. It was right.

He turned back to the sage, who continued to sit on his box with a leisurely determination, his hands in his lap, one holding the harmonica. The stains from its rust were on his fingers.

The businessman wanted to ask a question, but wasn’t sure what to ask, because everything made sense. But he spoke regardless, more to hear the sound of his own voice in this place than to hear an answer.

“Who are you?”

“I am the keeper,” spoke the man with the strange eyes.

“And this place?” asked the businessman.

“I don’t know. It isn’t mine. All I know is that it is worth keeping.”

“What do you mean?”

The sage sighed, looked around his beautiful domain, and began his brief explanation.

“I found this place, much like I let you find it. I have been here for a long time. This place needs a caretaker. Someone to observe it, so that it exists.”

The businessman understood.

“So I became that man,” said the sage, “I became the observer. I don’t know how long I have been here. But I am part of it now, I think. And if I left, if no one were here, then it would live no longer. And I can’t stand that thought. I wouldn’t want to live in your world, the other place, if something like this wasn’t living behind it all. Whether I ever saw it or not, I would need it to be there.”

The businessman knew, and suddenly he knew he needed it too.

“I could leave,” said the sage, “at anytime. An opportunity I will present you with shortly. But I wanted to share it with someone. Just for an instant. This place deserves a fresh set of eyes. Eyes that haven’t been melted into this world like mine. Just look around.”

The visitor looked around once more, charting the ascent of the plants, chasing the fleeting stars with his eyes, tracking the clouds that shifted and flowed, following shadows between buildings. There were mountains, too. Far off in the distance. Purple and snow-capped.

Life was everywhere here, but nothing had yet been born. It was pure and unrefined, like an ore out of the ground. Emotion and thought had not yet been forced into bodies of creatures. They were free to drift on the rhythmic wind, to brood, to be their own atmosphere, their own ambience.

“I don’t know if this is real,” said the sage. “Maybe it is what has been, or is to be, or what really is behind the world we come from. But it makes no difference. Maybe it is only what your mind puts here for you. But even in that case, it is a sort of magic that needs preservation and belief.”

The businessman nodded.

“What I like to think,” continued the old man, his eyes to the ground, “is that maybe, the whole world was like this, once. But it was fought back. The natural state of things was destroyed or repressed, in favor of controlling one’s surroundings rather than being them. And now… now it is just this one spot.” He looked up, and deep into the soul of his visitor. “I can’t let it die.”

The businessman did not know why, but a single tear slid out of his eye and off his cheek. It plummeted to the ground, and destroyed itself on the rock below. But in between, it was a tiny flame, searing through the murk of the air.

“The spot moves,” said the old man. “The entry point. And I move with it. You’d best go, before that happens. Or you may be forced to join me here forever. And I can neither ask that nor allow that of any man.” The sage, his age unplaceable, old only in his words, stood up from the box, his eyes glowing. He was short, but broad-shouldered, and muscular. “Come forward.”

The businessman walked forward, until his feet were planted just before the box.

“Which is more pitiful?” asked the old man. “The bum playing a few broken notes, or the prisoner playing a symphony? Before you leave, my dear friend, I would ask that you pity neither.”

“I will do that for you,” said the businessman.

“Let us hope so,” the guardian replied. “Now, open the box.”

The visitor kneeled down, and placed his hands on either side of the lid. The design on the top of the box was an infinitely complex outline, jagged in some places, smooth in others, twisting and winding around itself until it was lost, then regaining form and structure, only to lose itself again. It was vaguely in the shape of a heart.

“Remember,” said the guardian. “We chose life. This place is our enemy by its very nature. So I want you to feel no pain, no remorse, as you open the box. And I want you to know that nothing is ever destroyed.”

The businessman nodded, and opened the lid.

Flames leapt out from inside, consuming the buildings, the skies, the flowers, the mountains. Everything was burning in columns of tumbling fire. Ash was raining from the heavens. Before the heat and the smoke killed him, he thought he could hear a familiar melody drifting away, slipping through the fire like a fish in its element: calm, untouchable, immortal. Then it was gone, everything was black, the businessman was no more.

And then he was walking. He was crossing the street, his briefcase in hand, a hat firmly on his head that had not left his possession since it was acquired less than a week ago. When he reached his destination, he would remove the hat, and a few coins would clatter to the ground. He would wonder how they got there, shrug and then pick them up, and eventually forget them just before they melted together and dissolved into the darkness of his pocket. But for now he was walking, the dent in his briefcase silently fixing itself, the wet track of a tear on his cheek evaporating in the cold sunlight.