God,

If there is no God/If you are not there

I am just biology

And must engage in numberless indiscretions.

God,

If you are not there and there IS no God,

I must be half-solitary and half-bare,

Even more aloof, irresistably cold

Rather than vacant and starting.

God,

Are you more cloud or temple?

Are you not there

Indiscreet

or Is there a God in the flesh

or seed in a shadow.

God,

If there is no God because you do not care

And biology is soul-less

Then I should be laid on the rocks under water

That drools with red and brown

And be sexed and temporal

Abandoning as much as abandoned

No need for sneakers, just water

and mouths.

For this reason I shriek.

In this temperature I shake.

Scene 20

While in the jaws of quiet, high-strung adoration for his sixteen month old daughter, he ruminates on the near absence of his father from her life.

He had seen her only on two vacations: in Halifax the week of her birth and for three weeks in southeastern Pennsylvania two months later.

Somehow he knew the term “genetic memory” and while he was not certain of it’s meaning, he felt it must describe the information that makes gulls fly south, salmon swim upstream to true love.

He wondered after all the unnatural evolution of humanity if there were still some secrets pass on to successive generations.

In those non-verbal, yet lucid moments of exhaustion just before sleep, he sometimes envisioned things happening. Mostly they were everyday events, but due to the sacred clarity of the scenes which, to his knowledge were foreign to him, they were gravely significant.

Could it be that we have all some vision of our ancestors, episodes, none too trivial, of human history encoded dreadfully to our brains?

Have we differentiated too specifically for any of it to became unravelled to us?

Alone, for once, he lay on the corner of the couch. It is hard and aged, but familiar enough to provide comfort. He wraps a small fleece blanket around his forearms so that they are bound together, something he does when he wants to feel cocooned.

He imagines our happy-haired chimpanzee brothers, that he is actually leaning into the soft-solid chest of one, and that he holds that chimp’s child in his arms.

They are all linked. There is nothing to unravel or communicate in speech so they do not need the mental barrier of language, but only the breath between words, the molecules between fingerpads to be humming electrically.

Scene 19

After each of us has backpacked, solo, across southwestern Europe

After all of us have lived recklessly for a 2 to 228 month period

Once we’ve all carried a sleeping child to their bed when we, ourselves, are half-asleep

Once we’ve all moved in together in Arizona.

When the time comes to change our clothes

and rebuild the trees

and put the continents back together.

Christ will come.

Scene 18

It was just as you were walking into this groundbreaking film that all the hype said you just had to see in theaters to truly appreciate. You were with your friend with whom you’d never been to a movie. Engaging in the very polite, oh, it doesn’t matter, where do you want to sit?, you reached a settlement. A half-row empty before the two of you and you thought of all the films you saw with your father always wanting to sit on the end. And what does your older friend say?

Do you mind if I sit on the end?

No, not at all, you say freaked out so that it takes you extra long to unwrap the scarf from your throat.

And you proceed to see it all and hear it, too.

His thin face, bespectacled, and his long fingers clawing into the popcorn or forming a splitter grip around the lid of his mammoth soda to drink from the straw.

How during each preview he’d give you his thoughts on a movie’s potential. Usually, “that looks good,” or “I’d see that.”

And he had to sit on the end because he drank the soda desperately and usually needed one or more bathroom breaks. Slouched in his chair, you can see him turn to the side and back, dipping slightly his head and whispering “I’ll be right back.” And often you didn’t actually her exactly what he uttered, but you know anyway.

And also because he sometimes would be paged to the hospital for an emergency C-section or because of a baby he’d been following who’s hemoglobin was low. And you will always hear, you suppose, a faint beeping when you are watching anything with the lights out for fear that you will be interrupted. And any time you are interrupted you will see him balancing his popcorn between thigh and armrest, laboring to remove the pager remove his hip, holding it back from his eyes a bit as he got older to read the number that scrolled in black on the green field like the digits of an alarm clock awakening one from a dream before sunlight.

So he’d sit at the end to slip out without bothering people, to make a call in the lobby, and return with the verdict; either, we’re going to have to go, or what’d I miss?

You are still cloaked in weary memory when you hear your friend’s phone vibrate against his keys in his coat pocket. He answers it quietly, says “soon,” “okay,” and “goodbye.”

Everything okay? you ask.

To which he responds, “It’s Cynthia.”

You don’t worry too much as the teenaged Cynthia is always involving his wife, a mentor of sorts, in some kind of drama.

It is slightly more alarming when the vibration returns 30 minutes later and he excuses himself to the lobby to talk. When he returns he says,

I’m gonna have to go.

Okay, you assure him. What’s up?

She’s at the hospital. I don’t really know what happened, but she and her boyfriend got in a fight. Jackie’s with her and I’m gonna go stay with her brothers so her mom can get over there.

-Oh no, you think. This keeps getting worse.

Do you want me to come with you? Do you need help? I can stay with the boys so you can go to the hospital.

Every offer is refused.

I want you to stay and see the rest of the movie. This is when it gets really good!

He leaves (the friend, who you forget is two decades your elder,) and you stay to watch the last 45 minutes, wearing plastic-framed 3D glasses, alone in the dark.

When the heroics are finished and the credits roll you stay until everyone else has gone. “I enjoyed it,” you admit, “but it was mostly for the visual stimulation,” you stipulate, “and I don’t think I’d pay 13 bucks to see it again,” you are certain. But you keep all of this to yourself as you are alone except for the middle-aged couple that you see now, standing before the corridor, clearly looking for some specific piece of information in the credits. (“Do they know someone who worked on this?” you wonder.)

You stop in the bathroom and then amble out into the false lights that surround only you and the concession workers. Into the cold, wind, and-

is that rain or snow or what?

you realize you’ve been doing that thing again, that you got over five years ago and thought you’d never need to do again. When you had anxiety and were unimaginably depressed and couldn’t help but have uncomfortable red eyes that looked freezing or allergic, and DEFINITELY awkward. You didn’t think you could control it and eventually when the first good summer came it was gone.

But it’s happened a few times this week and you are just as helpless against it.

At least with this wind there is a reasonable cause for it. You walk the several hundred meters’ distance which you chose to park from the theatre. You open the door and start the car and , just like turning over a record, you start seeing and hearing everything that’s ever happened to you. It is an arterial, pulsing, genetic memory. Because you imagine it as such you can’t help but see a heart stop and turn blue in a museum and an airway close or be emptied or whatever.

You end up weeping on the highway. By the time another song comes on and you reach your apartment the lights are out and everyone is sleeping. You walk into the dark bedroom where your wife is sleeping and hear extra breathing. Knowing it is your son asleep on your pillow, you feel gently around your side of the bed for him.

When your wife startles awake, you ask, “should I take him back?” just to be sure.

After she says “yeah” you scoop him into your arms, like a bride or casualty, and walk down the hall to his bedroom where a small light is on. You pass by his racecar bed, and sit on a folded futon. It has a bed sheet over it because there is no cover on it. It is old, handed down, and you figure someone has had sex or at least ejaculated on it. You hate this, but it is a decent place to sit and read to him and now you want to hold him for a few minutes.

Supporting his skeleton in your lap you lean back and are comfortable. You look at his face and lengthening blond hair and worry. You worry that all the problems you encountered as a teenager that had no solution will come upon him and there will be nothing to do but watch him struggle.

You know that there is no point in the fist-clenching, tongue-biting, unbridled swearing.

Eventually, it is time to put him in his bed. You place his covers over him, kiss the forehead that is sweating (because his mind is racing?,) and leave the room.

Just like putting on a new record you allow yourself to dig up more memory like you are going through pictures or an old notebook with scribble and single sentences.

You decide to stop indulging in whatever this is and try to sleep.

This won’t work, you fear, not yet.

Scene 17

Oh If only

If only I could trick somebody into thinking that my characters were fictional

like you do.

I do not listen to “roots music”

But I am now unable to form emotional bonds to new music just like the neuroscientist who used to know my wife insisted I would.

Therefore I only listen to music that is firmly rooted. There is no pleasure of discovery and certainly no enlightenment though I swear I have disciplined myself in remaining open minded.

I could kill him for pointing it out like I could smash the things in which I can no longer detect beauty.

I can learn to identify which plants may be edible

We can shutup about poets and “get a real job.”

Or maybe get a tan and take a nap.

Scene 16

After finally watching the film, released two years before, he cannot help but ponder the importance of leaving a record, a letter, a photograph. He remembers times when he himself unsettled the dust in the wings just offstage in his high school auditorium and shivered under the enormity of the act.

On such evenings he had returned to the half-vacated childhood home and stayed up too late because of the need to sentimentalize with a different movie. The need is the same, but the object of the sentiment has changed or been changed and it is ironic.

He reconsiders his budget, his need/want continuum and how many books he should have and how long he should be allowed to keep the ones he still has not read.

On the bus he was carried across the state and he thought it was some huge coming of age. In the notebook he wrote about himself to romanticize his disappointment.

Months before his dad had told him, pulling out of a parking lot that he understood. He wanted what was best for him but hated the thought of being without him.

These years later the young man is reminded of that and thinks of all the times he saw his father pause, while driving, to breathe and form a gentle sentence. All the things he was sure of and all the things that seemed melodramatic at the time.

He remembers the day his trumpet was bought. For two years he had played his uncle’s old instrument and for some months his parents had been planning to get him one of his own. Initially his dad insisted that there would be a contract. That the boy must “repay” them in the form of hours spent practicing. Nothing concrete had been agreed to, or rather, imposed on him.

After the final selection was made and the brass-in-case was in the back seat of the car his dad stopped. With a long index finger to his lower lip he began (staring forward):

There are no strings with this...

W-what do you mean? The boy asked, knowing full well that this was not a string instrument.

This is a gift. It is yours because I love you. You don’t have to practice, though you should. You don’t have to earn it and you are not indebted to me.

This last part was said while dropping the long index finger to the bottom curve of the steering wheel and turning his head slightly to the side to look at his son. His eyes were blue enough to be called pretty and twinkling beneath a moistened gaze.

The boy, no more than ten, understood that there was something profound happening to his father, but had no idea where it was coming from.

A young father himself, he now wonders what exactly motivated this concession. Was it the same love that moved God to part the clouds, drop a dove and boom “This is my son whom I love. Be careful with him?”

He will not ask for and receive clarity over this. It will not be known to him. He will not steal the show again. Instead he will pause in the driver’s seat of an automobile that he despises and puzzle at how to speak to his son.

Scene 15

Open Letter To A Friend

You wouldn’t believe what I heard today.

After a day of considering the greatness of Neil Young and the end of the line of Buckley .

I spoke, quite naked, with an old man who kept insisting “No, aging isn’t for sissies.” He went on and on. Not only did I not have the heart to cut him off, (“I really should be going,” ) but I didn’t really want to. He had, it seemed, some things he needed to say.

Benign tremors, he explained, were what prevented him from solving the code on the keypad into the 18+ section of the men’s locker room. It was after he mentioned his shaking that I began to notice it. Toweling off, he needed many tries to dry the small of his back.

I indulged every vague piece of information with a question that would give him the opening to tell me what he needed to. After about twenty minutes on the effects of aging, he stunned me.

“What I’m getting at in all this is... I’ve got a yearning for a young woman. I will never be able to have one again. And that’s hard to deal with.”

There he was before me. Leonard Cohen. But older. Perhaps heavier. Aching the way we all do. He was having difficulty looping his briefs around his right foot. He struggled because of the tremors and I had great compassion because of that. For a moment I almost asked if I could help him, but thought better of it.

Nothing good can come out of asking an old man if he wants help with his underwear.