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I know God cherishes my wife and would not use her as a joke against me. But moreover, He would not use me as a cruel joke against her.
And then Death herself, that filthy cunt who spreads her wings all around me, all at once a beautiful but insidious dame, she came and ran her poison through my wife’s veins.
I open the closet and am bathed in the ethereal traces my wife has left behind. Her wedding ring, twinkling in the light of the closet bulb. The way the sunlight danced across her eyes when she would look at me, seeing something no one, even my mother, ever saw. I take the ring into my hardened fist and hold it tight. So tiny there. Sometimes I can feel her nimble fingers explore the creases in my palm. I close my eyes.
Four days.
Four days between the wedding mass and her death. Four days personified as gently strolling poetry, scene after scene of her happiest days passing by like silk in the wind. Behind each simple glory there was a stain of death to be sure, but each stain was behind her joy. That much she was thankful for.
She knew the blip at the end was coming; even before she said “I do” she had been to her MOPP regimen. After our first dance as man and wife she had to sit. Taxed beyond her limits. Stayed on the oxygen tank for the next three songs. Wheelchair bound for the rest to ease her burdens.
She was both alluring and complex. Blonde, warm like dawning sunlight across gold. High cheekbones, emeralds for eyes. She never struggled with people. They loved her. Everyone knows one person like that; the easy magnetism, the pretty girl looks with the ugly girl personality. Genuine. Magic. Approachable and disarming, unintimidating even though, if she so chose, she could be untouchable. Sometimes she would fall quiet as she contemplated a shift in the leaves on trees, but only if it were autumn and the colors rustled just right. It was her favorite season.
She never sang out loud because she said her voice was nasal in tone. When the world has songbirds like Karen Carpenter and Donna Summers, they don’t need crows like me. But she would hum under her breath and stir the heartstrings of angels whose ears were delicate enough to listen. Tuned to her songs fit for God’s reception. Both humble and captivating. Her smile was gummy yet exactly right. Her laugh sounded like it came straight from Rhode Island even though she’d never set foot on the East Coast. Yet it came with a warmth that dulled the percussive edges.
She was perfect and the fact that she would never know it made her more so.
At sixteen her leviathan surfaced. It went into remission when she was seventeen. It came back when she was barely twenty-one. She was called home at twenty-one years, ten months, twelve days and almost one hour.
But no matter how hard her disease tried to hollow out her flesh and leave her empty, her beauty persisted. Yes, her collarbones were more prominent than sins on a murderer; every bone and joint seemed to be lightly painted with skin instead of covered by it. Yes, her shoulder blades became ungainly and withered wings of crudely hewn stone under her flesh. Yes, the cords in her neck constricted and cut deep lines through her throat every time she coughed. Hurt like hell.
She cried so much out of agony. She couldn’t sleep most nights because of her suffering. But her beauty persisted. Her artistry.
Human beings wear their atrocities on their sleeves. One only needs the proper set of eyes to read the fabric, to decipher the horrors committed and woven in. I thank God those same eyes could also see her enchantment, floating like candles on a storm surge, never winking out, never getting so wet as to extinguish, only persisting. Persevering. Her beauty. Her artistry.
It all came from the inside. From a well of calme beauté and understated brilliance that arrived with her from the heavens. Meeting her proved that somewhere there is a God. There must be. It is the only explanation of her. Her beauty. Her artistry.
No ravenous affliction can rot that out. Even though near death, even through actual death, a gorgeous soul will radiate. Through the bitter thorns, through the melancholy, through the wasting.
Hers did.
And those four days, we were married a lifetime.
With her I buried any reason to live. Any compassion. Any withholdings. And that’s okay.
I don’t need them anymore.
16
1030 hours, Wednesday
My business line rings.
I let the machine answer it. I killed that booze in a half hour. Mostly passed out on the couch, empty bottle fallen from my hand and long ago rolled across the wooden floor with a hollow note, I fight to keep my bleary eyes shut as a man whose voice I do not recognize speaks into my machine.
“Hello. This message is for Dick Buckner. I got your email.”
I sit up.
“Mr. Petticoat doesn’t have the balls to try and adjust our arrangement. Nor is he very thorough at hiding his tracks or even checking his rearview mirror to see if he’s being followed while he goes to meet a washed-up cop. Anyways, short and sweet. I—”
I stand up to get the phone as the first runner of color zings down my vision. Big Fry smear. I shake my head violently to stop this but it only sends more runners down in a waterfall. Brown at first, the color of the wood beneath me, whiskey brown next as my stomach revolts. I taste the bile and booze as my vision constricts and I know I’ve vomited everywhere but it’s no good. My knees come alive with pain. I must’ve fallen to them. My face next. The browns sink deep into black waters and my ears ring numb. I can barely breathe and the panic turns the black into a jiggling white. Pinks stream through it and I can hear the rapist from a million miles away talk in a cartoon voice as my brain seizes and melts, drains down my spine and spills out the bottoms of my feet. Then it crawls back up as the pinks turn to reds turn to oranges turn to yellows turn to greens turn to blues and hatred. So much hatred.
Then it all washes away, taking me with it.
I come to on the floor.
I hear the traffic outside. Spring birds. The cold wooden floor beneath me has warmed up considerably. I dread to think how long I’ve been lying here.
