Burial of the Dead

SERENITY - I.

I.

Peace falls like rain through trees, the descent of spirits, the ripple click of leaves, the silence that is not silence, the advent of late summer, shadows gone blue.

A concession to place:

The patient named Matthew, who calls himself Levon, sits in a room with three windows and oversees the descent of all that falls away to green water, the crater lake without beginning or end, so deep.

A concession to time:

The patient named Matthew, who calls himself Levon, having read the name, having heard the name, having stolen the name, sits in the room with three windows, at night, balmy summer, late summer, cricket summer, when mosquitoes rise up in a mist and look for blood, sending out sentries, scouts, pilot fish, agents, determined, focused, programmed, genetic, as innocent as soldiers, not so much in need as fully formed, a state of being, their brief reconnaissance, until the bastard finds him and Levon hears the hum about the ear, the light, the sting, the draw, the gorge.

Some nights, heavy with drugs, Levon sits at the desk with the light on thinking of some band of twenty year old cowboys, too young for legal, pounding it like mad men in a bower of mesh and wire in Reno while country girls thick in the hips do that two step with their Jack Spratt rope’em boys, lean as jerky, all the time dreaming (this patient named Matthew who calls himself Levon, who pulls the name over himself like a blanket on a cold night), all the time watching, not seeing the little bastard from stagnant water circle, dive, thrust, parry and perch on alien legs no more than the fiber of translucence, a shadow of dust on his wrist, unmoving, a cone of yellow light. Only then the fat face of his flat thumb presses the winged thing to a kind of nothingness, the way stains are nothing, too diffuse, though present still in an inch of space on his wrist and thumb. He thinks by way of breakdown how some perfect surgeon with the nano-skill of an alien in some perfect future will rebuild atoms, molecules, cells and remake the bug from a grass stain but never guaranty flight, instinct, let alone will. Something else, more easily intuited but hardly known, is necessary for that, and when he tells the doctor this, the doctor says: You may have found your way back, Matthew, though it’s not the way I would have prescribed, being a man of science, as enlightened as Diderot, with my immense and unshakable belief in the perfectibility of happenstance.

A concession to time and place:

Weeks on and the medication takes hold like a rock climber hanging by white fingertips, about to get one leg up, over an impossible edge, hoping wind from the other side won’t throw him down.

Weeks on, one night in a cottage on the hill above the lodge, the fields, the cabins, the cottages, the huts, the infinite lake is summer cool, but only this night and only for one night. News of rain unceasing, floods, earthquakes, rolling triggers throughout Connecticut arrives three weeks late and fills the inmates with the dread they’d reserved once for themselves, for the entertainment of love, the accommodation of loss, the celebrity of death’s neighbor or spouse.

Stella from Bristol, the elfin widow, born of Puritan blood, older than Revolution, pampered, wise, willful, seeks New London on short wave and tells Levon that trouble isn’t relegated to this gated community of crazies, that her children once took the Grand Tour and barely survived an audience with Fuseli when tongues of fire spun like tornadoes through Rome.

Such is the heart of a Romantic, she says, and Levon escorts her to her cottage where she sleeps for two weeks in August.

Levon’s radio, the one he borrowed from Molly, the cook, is silent too. Nothing crackles or deigns to grace the air between Hartford and this clinic, this mountain, this sanitarium, this place where one whose sight has been sullied by crimes or dirty games can hope to have his mind raked clean with the spark of flame in a sea of oxygen.

A concession to memory:

Levon’s crisis: With letter in hand, he left Manny and Punter’s Pond for Hartford. He drove the Chevy. Anger born of betrayal moved him. He couldn’t find the Mick who was hiding or gone. His key worked so he slept in the morgue, dolorous with the scent of formaldehyde, the sheen of decay, the walls and cabinets replete with the shadows of jaws.

Then morning, past dawn, and Greg from Troy woke him with a start, complained bitterly, the new employee having been told whom to hate, so fresh faced and eager to do it SS right, Herr Obergrupenfuhrer, Herr Sturmbanfurher, Herr Motherfucker, and not one chip of compassion in the beady little Herr Himmler eyes with the lenses layered, bisecting everything, sheep and goats, good and bad, white and black, us and them, the living and the dead he pumps with fluids to purchase just enough immortality before the grave for one matinee and two shows of mannequins on parade.

Greg from Troy shouts: Get the fuck out of here, dialing Larry on speed dial, punching intercoms and buttons, turning keys, locking it all up, notifying Officer LaPorta and the Feds, wondering what the drunk might steal from a mortuary’s heart: A hose, a scissors, a scalpel, a spatula, a spade, a milk glass of rouge ?

Where’s Sullivan? Levon asks when Larry from New Haven enters the room and lets it slip, he’s at Cal Stevens’s office, the lawyer, and Greg, hating him for saying it, besides himself with secrets and the failure to keep secrets, fumbles about, complaining about Matthew Wyman and the storms far away that threaten to drown Connecticut.

Then Larry, the moderate, the mezzanine of all seats, the boy in the middle, as calm as the sea in irons when water is saturate with salt, when the equilibrium of wisdom settles like serenity, says: What’s wrong, Matt? Easy, Greg! What’s going on here? What letter are you talking about, Matt?

But Matthew, who calls himself Levon, was gone by then, up the stairs, over white tiles, Persian rugs, through oak wood doors and outside to cower under the insult of too much sun burning off the damp air of the cold jungle, Hartford in April.

A concession to progress:

It’s late summer, not high summer, and the heat is a comfort. Dr. Ley delegates group to his assistant, Claude from Zurich, and Levon, certain of his own election, convinced of his failings, bristles under the healing guidance of one more Calvinist.

A concession to insight:

His mother starved him and now he is a glutton. His mother starved him and now he starves himself. She starved him, and one afternoon in the big chairs on the deck this side of the lodge overlooking the lake he tells Stella his secret of how he was too young for such thoughts, but old enough to think them, unbidden, troublesome, when he placed himself in a world of all sensation without filters or avenues of discriminate entry, saying he watched the girl, who was one year older than himself, who was petite and feminine, who wore the best clothes, having come from construction money, Italian and Irish, when she walked down the corridor at noon, returning from lunch with her friends, the sight of her making him feel small, insignificant, powerless, unable to move or speak, knowing he’d never meet her, wondering what difference it would make if he did, feeling the beginning of a space that can never be filled, pierced with the sweet pain of an arrow dipped in the most profound unknowing, making a broken thing that can never be made whole, the birth of the human within himself. And he knew it would take more than sex or love or bodies becoming one, more than biblical myth, praise, esteem or creature comforts to heal any of this, to return to Eden, to progress to heaven, because there is no cure for the other – another one of God’s little cruelties.