Sputterpub's Blog

I overheard a bunch of Mom’s conversations with Ward when we lived at the Santa Maria. She wouldn’t let me swim at night and I couldn’t get too far from them in our rooms. I think I even heard their breakup talk.

I’m not sure it was actual breakup talk, because Ward kept coming around for awhile. He helped us move back into the house and I know he took the three of us out to dinner a few times. But he never acted the same after the night I heard her call him an acolyte, and she didn’t seem to care very much.

Ward was an okay guy. Not brilliant but smart enough, and everyone seemed to like him. He always had a pleasant low-key way about him. He told a joke well. But he wasn’t charismatic. He couldn’t care less about leading.

I heard Mom’s derisive voice before her words. I knew that tone well; it brought a layer of dread into any conversation. She said something about Ward needing to speak his own mind. Apparently he’d been acting like he agreed with some management nonsense from his boss at work, when he really had big objections. She said he should speak up – his job was secure – what did he have to lose? He answered with a no, thanks – if there was one thing he’d learned it was not to show disagreement with superiors. Mom scoffed – “learned!” – and made a comment about how Ward was always looking to a guru. She said men tend to have active role models while women mostly don’t, and that’s hard, but it means that a woman who does make it will be more confident about her ability to decide. Confronted with a new problem, her first approach won’t be to look for the colleagues who have already solved it. I don’t think she meant to be critical so much as observant. But she can be scary. And judging from Ward’s attitude afterward, her words must have cut, twisting in him like acid. He didn’t act as light after that.

Anyway, Mom already had a house, and we were all dreaming about it before we got to move back in. We’d come to realize that we didn’t own it so much as borrow it; we’d live in it for our years, but we were just one family in its history, and it likely had a future as long as its past.

We all visited it nightly while we slept, but Mom’s dream had an extra room. She told me she’d been having the same dream for years before the accident: our house but with a windowless hidden room deep in the interior, a spot she rediscovered just before waking, always regretting that she hadn’t yet furnished or used it, foreknowing that she’d forget it again until the next time she dreamed.

She said it would really bug her, to live in a house with an unused room. She was glad our place didn’t have a formal dining room or other waste of space. And that part of her dream bugged her too; she was always distressed in the dream when she found the room and she was distressed awakening to have had that vision again.

But here’s the corny truth: ever since we moved back into the house and she started writing these little stories… ever since then, she hasn’t had that dream.

Red Cross Disaster Services moved us into a residential hotel. “Efficiency Suites” read the small sign to the right of the office door. Ours was on the third floor: a big living area with a kitchenette in the corner, followed by two bedrooms with a bathroom between them. There were windows along the right wall of the living room, the right and back wall of Mom’s room, the back of the bathroom, and the back of the room I shared with Brian. The right side windows overlooked a patio and black-bottomed pool in a kind of courtyard. Mom never let me swim in the pool at night.

I wasn’t too happy about sharing with Brian. I’ll admit I had even hoped for a big bed. But I was stuck in a twin in a small room with my baby brother, and I should have been grateful at that. If Mom had gone with her original plan to rent out the house, we probably would have been camping in a city park.

As it was I liked some things about the Santa Maria. It was downtown, so when I was allowed out it was no distance to interesting places. The grab bars in the bathroom were so useful they soon looked attractive to me. I’ll admit I even got to like the kitchenette. Because it was just a corner it was easy to get to. Its openness forced us to keep it clean, but that turned out to not be a bad situation. And after I got the plaster cast off, the pool was very handy for the exercises I was supposed to do.

Our space was so tight it was kind of like living on a boat. Or maybe like sleeping on an island after shipwreck, because we kept making trips back to the house to scavenge more clothes or books or whatever we thought we needed.

Which was part of what Mom was after. She likes it when life wakes you up. That’s one of the reasons she got rid of the car. She says living without a car is like keeping a vegan diet or being a little disabled; it makes you conscious about everyday things.

No thanks, I told her after a month in the hotel. I said I was awake enough, with the broken ankle. Even when the plaster came off it was hard to get around and easy to see how much I used to take mobility for granted. But I could live without the car. It was the house I was having nightly dreams about.

So was Brian. So was Mom. We were all dreaming about the house. Mom said maybe houses are more important even than true love. She said little girls dream about the palace as much as the prince, and little boys fight battles over nothing but territory: more house stuff. I even heard her telling her boyfriend Ward that real estate is the only justification for marriage. Ward wanted to get married but Mom didn’t, and I heard her argue that marriage is an advantage if the couple is struggling to survive but a limitation if they already have the creature comforts. She said “creature comforts” really means “house,” because most of us have the food and clothing items. After all, the first thing a couple aims at is a house.

It wasn’t too long after she did the math that Mom got rid of the car. For what it cost in insurance and maintenance, she figured we could rent one when needed. But it turned out that renting one was never convenient. We soon learned to live without a car.

So maybe I should have noticed when she started computing what it cost to stay in the house. I probably should have argued when she made the case for a rental, a residential hotel even. But I was fourteen then and used to ignoring Mom.

Her arithmetic was sound. $2,500 a month in mortgage payment meant $30,000 per year. Almost $10,000 a year in property taxes, about $1,500 a year in utilities including garbage, and roughly $2,500 a year in garden, tree, and upkeep items. That works out to $120 a day just to stay home. Mom figured we could beat that.

And maybe we could have, if we had a big car. Luckily we didn’t have to try. Unluckily we did lose our home. Luckily we got it back again, and in between we had a place to stay. But I found out what it meant to me. A lot.

It was July 17th the night our world changed. Mom and Brian were downstairs watching TV and I was in my room directly above them when there was this big, solid boom and the house shook worse than any earthquake. I swear there was no squeal of brakes or people.

Brian told me later they heard squeals and screeches. From where he and Mom were sitting, the west wall of the living room just punched in at them and suddenly there was a bus almost in their laps and the shriek of tearing metal in their ears. He said he’ll never forget the horrified look on the driver’s face, like a mask of “The Scream” through the unbroken windshield a few feet away.

Mom didn’t say much about her visual impressions from the event. She was politically furious instead.

Our house was built a hundred years ago, at the bottom of a natural slope. When the town began to grow up around it streets were created, and it happened that the city fathers configured the roadways so our house was at the top of an upside-down T. The address was on Lincoln, but Liberty ran over the hill and aimed down at our place like an arrow.

Mom was always afraid some truck would plow into us. She lobbied the city council for a serious speed limit on the hill. They ignored her. She tried to have a warning sign with reflectors installed outside our front yard. They regretfully declined her request, citing budgetary considerations. She nagged at our father while he was still around, to do something, anything, about it (or about any other of Mom’s many passions), but he didn’t.

And I’ll have to admit: I never gave a thought to something running into the house. Until it happened.

D.P.T. arrived. That’s when I first became aware of the Department of Public Transportation. They removed the bus and boarded up the house hole, and they called the Red Cross to help us.

It turns out to be an almost common accident. In the same way that I never noticed how many people use crutches or wheelchairs until I broke my ankle, I guess you have to have a bus run into your house to find out it happens all the time. One city employee told me she’s worked four house breaches in her two years on the job.

The good news was no serious casualties. I fell and broke my ankle but Mom and Brian were untouched. The driver was shook up but not injured. There were six passengers on the bus and one of them broke an arm. They could all walk away from the wreck.

But we couldn’t. It was in our house and we didn’t have anywhere else to go. There was a ragged hole in our living room wall and the TV was gone, along with every item that had been in the big shelf unit. A load-bearing beam had broken, and that caused the upheaval in my room that made me fall and snap a bone.

After you concentrate awhile on the self-awareness, you realize you need other-awareness too. That’s how you begin to figure out life, and figuring it out, appreciating it, seems to be the assignment. You try to connect with someone else. You see that we’re forever trying to connect with someone else, starting with our parents and our siblings. Poor material us, built of protons and electrons, made of millions of tiny particles, nothing ever touching anything else. Matter appears solid; that’s all. If you moved slowly enough, carefully enough, you could no doubt slip your cells through the interstices of this wall…

I ended as a prisoner-of-war. Loot. A prize. Booty. The commander-in-chief got to take me to his chamber. And now to his home. To his death and mine, but of course he won’t listen to me about that. Of course not.

I don’t know why I was selected. I saw one sister dragged away to be murdered on a grave. I watched my mother transformed by her grief into a hellhound. I know my best sister-in-law was carried off like me (and I see that she will live and even be a little happy again). But I was picked to be the leader’s special. Perhaps for my freckles. Perhaps for my friendship.

This man is no brute. He’s a boyish man’s man, and a perfunctory lover. Maybe he’s such a good general because he knows well how to talk to men. He doesn’t know what to say to a woman.

But I’m easy to talk to. I’m perceptive, and I’ve spent much of my life dealing with men like him. So we talked. We talked and he felt better, and finally he began feeling me. He massaged my neck and shoulders. He seemed to excite himself when he cupped one of my breasts and nibbled a nipple, and his hand made ever larger swooping moves in the vicinity of my hips, but someone must have once warned him well away from her loins. He hesitated… and did not touch. And I, a prize-of-war, did not teach. I accommodated, and we had mediocre sex.

He thought it was better than that. Or he liked the talking. He kept me in his cabin all the voyage to his home, and he tried to use my body twice a day.

Now we’ve landed, and I’ve seen his wife, and I’ve seen his cousin who has been here to make the wife happy all these years. We’ve reached his home, where his wife and her lover will kill us both, and I’ve tried to warn him, but he doesn’t heed me. Of course.

Ultimately, what you find out, I think, is that even if you’re self-aware you have no real existence unless you are perceived by another. It is imperative, first, that you attend yourself, and get to know yourself, and keep waking yourself up. But you can’t do it alone. You can’t exist without trying to describe the experience of your existence, and to make that description you need an audience. You need a mirror. You need another perspective.

So the answer, now that we’ve cruised up down and around, is You. You are what mattered most of all.

You.

The next day I did a lot of considering. The visions began. Maybe I should have waited for my new skill to settle into focus. Maybe I could have deferred my god-man while I learned. I never saw us clearly; I doubt it.

I met him again the next night, as agreed. He had his hands on me at once. Fast authoritative hands up my back, on my ass, down my belly, between my legs. I had to squirm away, twisting quick, while I tried to pull my mouth from his to talk.

I told him no. I tried to say it again but he pulled my lips into his while he cupped both cheeks of my ass and hauled me against his mounded crotch. His kiss burned my mouth and fuzzed my tongue.

I had to knee his manhood/godhead to get free. He was very angry. I like to think there was disappointment too, but he looked like pure spite and vindictiveness.

He told me I could keep his gift of prophecy. Said something about not taking anything back. No: he made an addition to the gift. He promised I’ll always foretell accurately. But he said no one will ever believe what I say. And of course he was right.

At first what mattered most was matter. You have to think of God as pure divine sublime holy energy. Absolutely immaterial. The problem was that energy can’t perceive itself. It has to become matter to be perceived. So energy converted some of itself into matter. That’s the thing about the Real Thing, you know: it can perceive itself. In that, we are created in God’s image. You have an obligation to be as self-aware as you can, as much as you can. You have an obligation to be awake. Worship is not necessary, but awareness is. Which leads to considerations about death, and time, and saying goodbye. There’s a reason only people say goodbye…

I improved enough in foretelling that I would have seen my own rape coming, except that I avoided looking too closely at myself. I liked seeing my shape in the futures of others, but I didn’t want it all played out for me. Anyway, sometimes the self resists the focus. Then I can only see my future by looking peripherally; there is movement at the edges, gray against black, while the center of my sight is white blankness.

It was near the end of our endless war. After the death of my beloved brother for the crime of my bad brother. The water in our cisterns was polluted, the mortar in our walls was scoured by the thick blades of alien swords. Some dozens of the most favored females, frantic with panic and heated with fear, ran loose worshiping or hiding among the goddesses’ statues.

I was separated from the others in the stampede of grass-damp robes. I made it to my favorite shrine; I remember the cool of the marble through the silk across my stomach and against my thighs as I leaned over and upon the table-like sculpture. My eyes sought the kind darkness of the ground after the hot orange of our burning city. I felt the beginning of mist-like rain on the back of my neck. Then his warmth was upon me.

He never said a word. The depravity of his act, there, on that altar, in that grove, was outrageous beyond language, and I didn’t find any way to express it. He covered my back with the weight of his body, pressing me down, peeling my wet robe up and away from my legs, forcing my thighs apart, wedging his hands between marble and me as he thrust himself incurving into me, into me, around and into me all heat and pressed vigor.

You.

I know you meant what mattered most in some little vignette. You wanted me to tell you a story and then sum it up. A fable would have done nicely. But I went cosmic on you, and I give you here the answer:

You.

The thing is, most folks really don’t want the answer. They want questions. Doug Adams will know that. He’ll give his answer, 42, in hitchhiker’s guides. But he won’t give the question (What’s 6 times 6 plus 6?).

Most folks give answers and want questions.

My father had a hundred children; I understand large families. My siblings were like a city state. We were all fair-skinned and prone to sunburn and we were mostly light-eyed; only seven of us were dark-haired as kids. We were all royal and we were generally mediocre. History only remembers four percent of our names.

I was one of the few dark-haired dark-eyed sisters. I was the only one who competed with my brothers, in foot races and wrestling. I did well, too; I charmed most of the men with my athleticism and my daring. But the womenfolk tended to disapprove of me. Which drove me to be even more athletic and daring. I gravitated to the company of men.

In time I developed a male-type physicality. I didn’t become a nymphomaniac, but I grew comfortable with my body and used it to express my feelings. Sometimes I’d give a complicated hug to a guy I felt close to, and if that led to sex, well, I was okay with it. Most of the time, provided the players were both happy, those complicated hugs led to very good sex, the semi-public kind, fresh and frisky.

But I got in trouble the time I almost seduced a god. He was handsome to the point of perfection, nearly omnipotent, and he made it flatteringly clear how much he wanted me. I can envision him now: short golden curls above a smooth brow, around a chiseled face, piercing eyes, a smile at once warm and wicked, his body nearly hairless, almost perfect, velvet over steel. Big hands, square fingers, clean nails.

Oh yes. He had a way of looking at me across a crowd, when I felt like he and I were alone with a wire stretched taut between us. Thrum. A way of expanding that lovely chest as I approached, so his pectoral muscle became my center of visual orientation.

The night I met him he nearly had me, but I shied away at a critical moment. I let him put his arms around me and pull me to him, and I started to return his kiss, but then I found myself responding too fast and too deep; I pulled back. He coaxed and still I hesitated. Finally I agreed to meet him the following night. I remember his last kiss before we parted, sweet and a little lingering, with his throaty mumble about a gift. I walked away from him unsteady on my legs.