Momentary Sacrifice

 

For several days now I had been conducting a quiet, obscure war. A small war, private, untelevised… not unlike the wars of the mendicants or flagellants; those hungry saints who beat themselves with cords to feel closer to the unnameable.

My battlefield was a chamber of weeds, a sanctuary grown wild with disuse and perhaps mercy. It may once have been a storage shed or the bones of a forgotten greenhouse. But I had made it sacred by the act of tearing.

Each morning: one bill. Always a ten. Jackson's face torn in quadrants, one piece dropped east, one west, one to the wind, one underfoot. The rite was methodical. The sacrilege was exact.

I did it to destroy the root, to disrupt the wormhole in my chest that had twined itself around the desire for accumulation. A fetish, not of worship but of yearning, of obsession, of the silent panic that can wakes me in the night, panting for what I do not yet have.

On the second day, as I stood on the weeds, I looked down at the scrap in my hand, this worn, fibrous rectangle of power, and saw it finally as it was: a piece of paper. An object without essence. A body whose soul I had invented.

I saw then how much of my life I had given to these revenants of value. How many hours I'd sold to preserve the illusion of worth.

And then… everything became transparent: the bill, the chamber, my intentions, my body, even the leaf that fluttered past my shoulder as I stooped to place the second quadrant into the soil.

I began to cry, but not for the money. Not for myself either. It was the kind of weeping that comes when a person understands, for one suspended moment, that everything around them is dying, and they too are dying, and there is no villain in it, only motion.

I thought of the people I loved. How little I had said. How foolishly I had traded time for control and business, affections for assurances, letters for ledgers.

At the third mark, I halted. I made a circle with my finger in the dust. A magic circle but not for summoning. Rather for banishing. To tell the spirit of money, or the echo of my longing for it: Go.

There were no candles, no altar, no knife. Only the final shard of the ten-dollar bill, held like a relic between two trembling fingers, and my voice, raw, trembling, untheatrical:
“I release you.
You are nothing.
You are what I made you
because I forgot the deeper thing.”

And in that moment, not redemption, not transformation, but clarity.
Clarity in the form of weeds.
Clarity in rusted nails.
Clarity in wind and tears and paper,
scattered like autumn prayers across a forgotten chamber where I, a fool of the world, had come to offer what I no longer needed.

Mask

I dashed out of the house and ran to the bus stop, clumsily arranging the thick scarf around my neck.
I had spent the last few hours stressing and obsessing over my attire. The annual office Christmas party was scheduled for today. An email had been sent yesterday, reminding everybody that the party was at the Four Seasons Hotel. We were all required to look “presentable.” The men were required to wear a coat and a tie. The women had to look just elegant enough without going past a certain invisible line. Not too much, not too little. Just enough.
This is where the ordeal started. I pulled out almost every outfit I owned, every last shoe, everything I could find in my closet. My cousin was on the other side of the video phone watching me as I tried on one outfit after another, approving and disapproving my choices with a clear discernment that I simply didn't have. I had no idea how to dress, what to wear and what not to wear. The subtle rules of this masquerade escaped my mind, I had never been privy to these intricate instructions.
I thought of this while I ran to the bus stop early in the morning. Why did I worry so much about what to wear?  Why was it so important to control how I looked, how others saw me? What was the meaning behind the requirement to look presentable? What did it say about me? What did it say about them?
Through a change in clothes, I would disguise my wild and chaotic nature, I would pretend to be in complete control of my own persona, my actions, my thoughts. I could be as normal and as mature as they were, as they seemed to be, as I assumed they were. There I would be, looking like them, wearing the uniform, part of the group. A question wrapped in a lie, a stumbling fish trying to swim over quickly drying mud.
I was gasping and stepping into the bus stop when I was suddenly greeted by the face of a dirty homeless man. He was so blonde and fair, and he was so happy, so happy I thought the sun had come down to say good morning through his wide open eyes.
"Look, look!" he said cheerfully, “A guy just dropped three thousand dollars in cash!"
I looked down at his hand. Between his dirt encrusted fingers there were rolls and rolls of $100 dollar bills, a package of myriad possibilities squeezed to the size of a fist. As I looked at him again, I saw him turn back into a dull, dirty old man. It was the bills that were shining like gold on his fingers.  
I realized he was probably right. To judge by the amount of bills he was holding, there was probably a good three thousand dollars there, or even more. 
"Put that back! Put that back” I told him, realizing suddenly that his appearance and the money didn’t go together, they would clearly stand out like a sore thumb in this mostly empty street.
He was putting himself in danger by boldly showing this treasure he had just found, this anonymous treasure that had just found him through some unknown random process that had now chosen to include me.
There was an obvious disagreement between his attire and such a large amount of money. Gold and rags, riches and dirt, power and weakness. People would stare, they might call the police, they might beat him up, they would accuse him of having stolen it.
“Please!” I asked again. “Put it away, don’t let anybody see it”.
He looked at me, suddenly realizing I was being serious. He sat on the bench and the smile faded from his face while his eyes were fixed on mine.
“I don’t care about the money.”
The tone of his voice had changed. He was no longer a homeless man, he was now a being detached from society, detached from this planet, detached from his mask. He was a kid, a grown kid who saw the world as a giant playground. He was once again shining brightly, he was the man I had seen first before I noticed his costume. The money in his hand turned into a dull plastic object, with no possible value.
Its only value was the adoration a child gives to a toy when he is playing with it, a gift freely given, a gift easily taken away. Only while playing would the toys shine with life, they would then be forgotten and cast away.
I saw him, my eyes wide open. I listened to him very attentively as he started to narrate his story: he once worked as a contractor, he made a lot of money. He used to live in San Diego, big house, two kids, a wife, a dog. His daughter was making good money now.
“Do you have any children?” he asked me.
“No.” I answered while gazing to see if the bus was coming.
“Do you make good money?”
“I make enough, I guess.” I said, while getting myself ready to board the bus that was now stopping next to me.
“Would you like a hundred dollars?” He said with a mischievous smile.
“No, I am ok,” I said, while slowly walking towards the door of the bus.
“Take it!” he said, “Just one bill!”
“No, thank you!” I said while smiling and walking up to the bus.
I sat next to a nicely dressed lady who was texting with her smart phone. I couldn’t help thinking of this man.
There was a clear disagreement between his shiny golden treasure and his dirty appearance. The mask didn't fit the event, the event cast an unflattering shadow on the mask. A man dressed in rags could not be so lucky, could not get so lucky, could not.
I looked down at what I was wearing, the costume I had worn to pass myself off as one of them, the lucky ones. I adjusted my scarf and slid backwards on the seat. I prepared my face for the masquerade that was waiting. One more among many. One more mask to hide a question I couldn't even begin to answer.

The Last Tree

The choppers whirled a few feet away, sending still green oak leaves from their branches. It circled, waiting for confrontation.  It circled, adding swift currents of anxious air. 
This was not the sweet sound of evacuation. It was not civilization coming with dry walls in the midst of a flood. It was the brutal force of empire. It was metal and strength looming from above. It was reinforced steel and bullets. It was brute strength.
There was one more tree left, the rest had been cleared away.  Chopped, roots dug, bark mulched.
I had been there when there was still a small grove of oak trees. It had been a sunny Saturday. Blue. A soft wind that carried summer on its wings. The earth had been covered in a blanket of tan leaves that were hard and brittle and sharp along the edges.
The spirit was still young then. There was still a chance, they thought, to save the grove. A small group had gathered around a guitarist.  He leaned against a tree, eyes closed in concentration, lyrics forming on his lips.
My steps echoed with crunching leaves, adding a bit of unnoticed rhythm.  The leaves, one step closer to the earth. Dust. The trees were a canopy. Late afternoon light sprinkled in like glittering jewels. 
A barefoot man in cutoff jeans walked through the grove holding burning sage.  A thin, button-up shirt, unbuttoned now, exposed his smooth hairless chest.  Skunk and earth.  Smoke looked like genie dreams in the rays of sunlight.  
Close to the sidewalk, a few bicycle  activists distributed bruised apples and oranges collected from the nearby farmer’s market. The small space was alive. Young girls in wide skirts.  Old women with long white hair that had seen this all before, and yet still hoped. 
"We will save it," they claimed.  They would.  They wanted to.
Months later, the university was through with games.  The guitarist, apples, the sage.  All forcibly removed.  The squirrels, birds, they were all gone. The police had built a metal chain link fence around the grove, trapping a few lone tree sitters that had climbed into the thick oak branches as a last resort.
I had almost been one of those girls. I had almost taken my sleeping bag and gone into the night. There could have been moon light, a stolen kiss, but that was a different path. I stayed in my blue carnival house.  Warm, cool-hued and imagining, never regretting a night under the stars that would never be.  
There was a different tree to climb and I listened to him sooth me like water.  Cool.  Tranquil.  His words dripped down my ears.
The fence went up, metal and cold, doing what it was designed to do. The crowds watched, pushed to the other side of the street, their hands clutching the barrier, watching as the chainsaws came. They cut every old oak in the grove.  They turned a home to little pieces, they turned it into dust. 
Just one lone tree remained.  The barefoot activists. Just a few thorns left.
Force was nothing new, force stretched out, trickling into every dark hole.  Fifty years. It was not about war or free speech, it was only trees. Nothing had changed, the eyes of the country still blinked in hazy sleep.
Far worse had been done, more violence stood tall on batons, ready for another skull. 
The police came, the fingernails on the octopus, the lowest level that would squeeze into those holes, bashing the centers with their metal-toed boots. Trained men.  Guns, bullets, gas, masks, batons, handcuffs.  Helicopters. Once again.
There were just a few left. The only animals now remained high in their branches, waiting for the inevitable.  Barefoot, eating granola, waving signs, burning sage.  Surrounded by gas and guns, the tree could offer no protection. Its own death was coming. 
The grove was gone.  Steel bars and cement were no longer a bad dream.  The hard hats were ready.  Plans.  Fiberglass.  The obstacles were cleared and soon it would all be over. Most would forget this ever happened.
I listened to it on the radio, driving early. Bright morning light coming through the windshield.  News of the final standoff. The barefoot people came down. They said they had been assured no charges would be pressed.  The university later denied making that promise.  And the final tree came down. 

Mysterious

It was a mistake. A blind mistake. How she got there, I don’t know. How I found her, even more mysterious. Mysterious. Mis tear ious. I don’t know.
Where was I? Let's see… One of those corporate coffee houses with Jan and Tyler. Jan is a dude. I guess the name is Swedish or something… well it doesn’t matter because Jan never saw her, never even made it to the parking garage.
I didn’t have anything. At the corporate coffee house I mean. Jan had a black coffee and some marbled pound cake and Tyler had an Americano. I don’t even know what that is, but I heard the girl call it; “Tyler, Americano” and he took it from her. I guess I did have something. I ate one of those packets of raw sugar. My stomach. It was hurting, had been hurting all day. Well… there is a reason for that.
My dog Ludwig is 12 years old. He’s got arthritis and all kinds of problems. The vet prescribes this medicine for all the pain. I really haven’t been sleeping well lately. Every time I close my eyes I see this weird skinny little man glowing and dancing. It’s like in that KE$HA video, only for real and I hear all this noise like poker cards in bicycle spokes or locust during monsoon.
I had this big presentation to give yesterday in front of the whole department and I really needed to get some shut eye. Some honest to god sleep. So I took one of Ludwig’s pills and slept like an angel all night. Woke up, dressed for work, ate my Pop Tart and started throwing up. It was seriously bad. I had to call in and go back to bed. Jan gave the presentation. It looks like he might get a promotion. Whatever.
So my stomach was still hurting the next day at the corporate coffee house. I didn’t need any of that swill anyway. I was going home. Only guys who are up for a promotion need to tank up on caffeine and head back to the office. That was Jan’s plan I think.
Tyler’s just a perv. He orders coffee with a fancy name, flirts with some girl in line, makes eye contact with her while he’s sitting at the table with us, and when she’s on her way out, he also happens to be on his way out, holding the door for her. He takes her back to the office and gets her panties down around her ankles in the elevator. Then, after they exchange phone numbers and she leaves, he goes into the security office to watch the surveillance video with Rodney, the night watchman. I’ve been invited to have a look a few times.
It doesn’t exactly get old because he keeps a sort of score card upon which various depraved acts are outlined and wait for a tally mark. In this way things are kept interesting and new acts are always being dreamed up. The standards are there of course, doggie style, a blow job, anal shenanigans… but things are now more subtle. For example the goal might be to get a woman to say a particular word or phrase while he works that coffee buzz off on her ass, or he might get her to play a role like pretending to be his boss.
I have to say that it usually works out for him. You’d think that most girls would tell him to bug off. It's his looks. That’s the problem. Its why they go along with it, and it’s why these elevator escapades are the only way he can get off anymore, because as a good looking guy he’s had enough vanilla sex to last him five normal guy life times.
Jan, by the way, knows nothing about all this. It would freak him out. He’s a vanilla kind of guy. And me, I’m just not good looking.
But none of this has anything to do with it…
So Tyler left first with this tall Asian American chic in a short orange dress and gladiator sandals. Seriously, the Greeks would have been proud of her. Then Jan talked for a while about his girl, Dora, and then begged me to go see his acupuncturist about my stomach. Of course he doesn’t know about the dog’s pill. Then he wiped the cake crumbs from his ample lip with the recycled paper napkin and announced that he was heading back to the office.
I guess my car was on the third floor. I hate parking structures, ever since I was a kid. Nothing good happens in parking structures. Your fingers get smashed in the car door, you get mugged, or if you’re a chick you get raped, or you can’t remember where you parked and you get lost. Nothing good.
That’s what I got. Lost I mean. Because I was on the fifth floor wandering around and around under the flickering yellow lights. I kept pushing the lock unlock button on my key chain, but I couldn’t hear the alarm disarming. I was convinced my car had been stolen.
I walked into the farthest end of the garage and pressed the little button again and heard a weird thud. Then a muffled voice started screaming and the thud was repeated. Again and again like someone was pounding on a car. I guess it was adrenaline, because suddenly I was Mighty Mouse flying towards the sounds of distress.
Within moments I had tracked down the source, an old yellow Dodge Dart. The trunk of an old yellow Dodge Dart to be precise. Someone was inside pounding and screaming away.
“Are you okay?” I called to the mysterious prisoner. A stupid question perhaps.
“Get me out of here. Please!” came the muffled cry.
“I’m trying. I will. Just hang on. I’ll call the police.” I said taking out my cell.
“No! No police. They take too long anyway. Just get me out.”
The trunk could only be opened with a key. This was an old car. I tried wrapping my arm in a jacket and breaking the drivers side window. I saw that in a movie once. Inside I looked for a trunk release lever or a spare key under the visor. Nothing.
Finally I returned to the trunk.
“I’m going to get some help. Some tools or something. I’ll be right back.”
“Hurry. Please hurry. They could come back.” The mysterious captive implored.
I looked around the garage and sprinted for the elevator. Before I could get there a young Latino got off and headed for a black Cadillac Escalade.
“Hey man, I need a hand!” I called. “You got any tools? There’s somebody locked in a trunk out here.”
I think his name was Hector and what he had was a crowbar. He accompanied me back to the DART and we got to work prying the trunk open.
When it finally opened this cute little blonde leaped out into my arms.
“Thank you so much! Oh thank you.”
I held her for a full minute before she was collected enough to release me and thank Hector with a handshake.
“Okay. Well, thank you very much. There’s no way that I can repay you really, except maybe money.” She turned and ducked into the trunk and dipped her hand into a big black duffel bag that had been her bedfellow. Out came two stacks of hundreds.
“Here we go.” She said handing us each a stack before she tried unsuccessfully to close the trunk. When it wouldn’t close. She grabbed the duffel bag out and tossed it through the broken window. “So my advice would be: don’t spend it right away or all at once. They aren’t marked so don’t worry too much, and enjoy!”
She smiled at us as she brushed the broken glass off of the driver's seat with her sweater and dug a key out of her jeans.
“Thanks again. Really.” She said it warmly and got behind the wheel. She closed the door and started the engine up.
Hector and I moved out from behind the car. She pulled out of the parking spot and said to us out of the broken window:
“I’d skeedaddle if I were you, before anyone else shows up on the scene.”
Then she waved and was gone.
It was a mistake. A blind mistake that led me to her. How she got there, I don’t know. How I found her, even more mysterious. Mysterious. Miss tear ious.
I don’t know. I haven’t spent any of the money. All I can think about is her. The way she felt pressed into my arms for those two or three minutes before she came back to her senses...
I could maybe hire a private eye to try and find her. I think I saw something like that in a movie too. I could maybe go to a strip club and blow a hundred bucks or two and forget about that cute little smile. I don’t know.
Why I feel this way… it's…mysterious. I don’t know.

The Eye Doctor

I was alone in the optometry office. The room was dimly lit and the professional equipment had an eerie quiet in the soft darkness. The various instruments were big and black and they protruded from the ceiling. Small orange lights blinked on and off and I felt like the waiting captive in a strange film. I studied the big E glowing softly on the wall, I stared at the vertical line and the three parallel lines that touched it, creating the shape I recognized as a letter, an English letter. In this room, in this context, it would be the first in a series of letters that would determine my ability to see and my subsequent prescription strength. I sat on a small black padded chair, it swiveled, and as the minutes turned into longer chunks, first 5, then 10, then 15, I swiveled softly on the smooth linoleum floor. On my right was the doctor’s desk. It was mostly bare except for an oversized model of the human eye and a Plexiglas brochure holder which had information about LASIK eye surgery. I picked up the large eye and held it in my hands. Slowly, I pulled of plastic pieces off, each new layer revealed another hidden section, the cornea, the retina, the iris, everything was there, exposed. Long ago, they had done dissections and cut into the mystery of sight. This was the eye wrapped up in an easy to understand package, easily labeled parts and functions. The eye, glorious in its wonder…I see…the orange blinking, the E, the darkness, the desk. How strange…
I looked at the clock again…time passed slowly in the small room. I heard the doctor’s voice out in the lobby. "Yes, those lenses will be great on him, lots of little boys like that style!" Her voice was booming, it was large enough to fill a small theatre. It was the authoritative voice that screamed for attention. Hidden beneath her obvious words, there was another audio track, it shouted with unformed words and syllables, but the point could not be missed, mixed up with her speech was the mantra, "listen to me…I know everything, I am important."
When the doctor had wrapped up her suggestions to the mother and son and quickly checked-in with the receptionist, she finally entered the exam room. She shook my hand firmly and seated herself on a little round chair next to the desk. Before asking me my medical history or checking my eyes, she launched into a history about LASIK eye surgery. She thought I would be a perfect candidate. She recited the entire history and assured me that it would be the best thing for me. She told me about her days in optometry school and how she met the people who invented LASIK and what her role would be in the surgery. She spared no detail, and I nodded my head obediently to each of her points when she paused to take a breath.
She spoke at length, but I had lost interest in her words and I studied her face as she talked and my occasional eye contact gave the impression I was listening. Her face…the crow’s feet around her eyes revealed she had reached middle age. Her eyelids were just a bit droopy and they covered some of her upper eye. I wondered if her eyelashes were real or fake, they were very thick and black and long. I studied them for I while, I looked at their shape and the way they fit within the context of her face, I decided they were real. Her thin lips were moving, she had a thin layer of pink lipstick which made me notice one side of her mouth was slightly lower than the other. Around her face was a pile of carefully curled and hairsprayed hair that reminded me of movie stars from the late 70s and early 80s. Covering her naked body was a professional dark blue pants suit, over her naked chest was a white shirt with thin black stripes. She had a string of pearls around her neck and two small pearl studs in her ears. I looked down at her hand, her wedding ring held a large diamond…I wondered about the husband that gave it to her. There were two seconds of silence, and then she asked if LASIK would be something I might be interested in. "Sure, but I’m unemployed at the moment, so $5,000 for the surgery isn't something I have right now."
"Oh," she said, just slightly disappointed. After hearing that, she got on with the exam. "Well, maybe LASIK is something you could consider in the future. I highly recommend it."