*
Cast your memory back, let the shell of denial crack open, remember. Remember how it was with you as a child. How vulnerable and weak you were.
No thinking. Estelle sick, and soon thereafter dead. School a nightmare because the meaner kids sensed your weakness after what Max had done (or did they sense your *own* sense of having consented?). Sweet sister Una away at school with the Swiss to be finished and turned into a stranger. A stranger! And so the boys in the schoolyard said, What are you a coward? No. So you went out with them. Then when you backed down they used force. It is like some clerks' compulsion to tidiness, the bully's need to take weakness and make it weaker, as though trying to blot it out like a clerical error in God's copybook. Sad mean fools. Cast your memory back, recall how it was.
Jorge's life: blessed but so bad-feeling. Yet even the suffering came as if wrapped in God's own cotton wool -- joy itself never that far away. To suffer at all, first you have had this gift: existence. And memory is a form it takes.
They ragged you and harassed you first at school, they scented blood. Pretty boy for a greaser. Leave me alone, won't you leave me alone? Am I supposed to hit you? I don't want to hit you.
You looked soft because that's what you were. You were not the hard person you are now. You hadn't been taught to hit others to win their respect. None of that in the garden. It had been assumed that violence was a perversion.
One afternoon the two worst bullies dragged you through the weeds. There was the shack where the caretaker's son lived. The caretaker's son. Now the caretaker's son had been maybe a bit brain damaged from the war, everybody said, some invisible headwound, but that was only the start, it got much worse, he became abandoned by his friends because he couldn't find a way to do things in balance. For instance, if you lie then lie in a hesitant way so as to be believed. But he didn't lie at all. His wife said he'd lost the knack to make love with passion but not overmuch passion, not insistent, now he couldn't find the sweet spot before it bothered her. He tried so hard that she grew irritated. His emotions were not a show. When they were there they just came out -- in honesty, in fact. He'd become a bit of a Christian, the type that people find so boring.
So soon after his father refused to see him, his wife left him. One two. Then he moved into the shack in the woods, squatting on the campus land that hadn't been reclaimed yet. The place was a garden if you looked at it that way. To the shack of the caretaker's son the 2 boys dragged their prey. They pushed then dragged you through the weeds. Jorge, they took you by the shack. And you let them.
Memory does not take you to a different place, it is not an exotic locale, it is right here. All of this is here -- it is both in you and itself is you. You excavate your own present self and find, to your surprise, the past. Still living, still in fact occurring, and still in need of resolution.
They fed you with dope, which just made you feel sleepy and congested, dull and useless. Then they gave you something else and you began to hallucinate. Even the pounding felt like a hallucination. And it was like having a weakness tying you at every articulate point, at every edge. Your tongue, your throat, your brain. The parts of your body all felt depressed by a single weight. Then the things happened to you that were like what your uncle had done and the desolating thought began to hit you that you were somehow willing it on. You lay collapsed in the weeds when the caretaker's son came home. Hardly a person at all. A worm and not a man. Somehow cocooned by joy. Existing, still existing.
Now as for the caretaker's son. His dog had 3 legs. Sometimes she stood as though balancing on the missing leg. As though it was there. She was a stray, wouldn't leave, clung to her chosen master, whose name Kyle sounded like a bark. She would cross a street to follow and follow. Shouldn't have. You're not really mine. That same day a car hit her leg and drove away. From that point we were inseparable.
It was said that some boys had tried to stone the dog. (The weak hitting the weaker, our planet's Darwinian zone, place of God's abandonment, neither "here" nor "there".) When the stone hit, the dog didn't even whimper but master fell down -- 50 feet away. There was a bruise on master's belly, one on his hip, transferred, taken on. The boys dropped their stones and ran away. The caretaker's son, Kyle, he lay in front of the hut. Dog ran up and licked him, crying, Hey what's up? Hey what's up?
I love you, darling. You are my human.
*
It's not the victims barred from heaven. But for their abuser perhaps no hope? At least little hope. The "holiness of the heart's affections", you'd better cling to that. Hold fast to it with what soul you have.
The whole idea of Darwin just disintegrates when 2 hands touch. It's not scientific but just so.
*
A year or 2 later -- as experiences transfer from person to person, shifting meaning ever so slightly -- you lay where the caretaker's son once was sprawled. There were stains on your pants. Blood and shame. Your self-esteem felt squeezed like a tadpole, between fingers, till it burst. I am a worm and not a man. The one thing I know. A comforting misery. Both at once.
When the caretaker's son got back from his job -- he subbed as a bagger of groceries -- the first thing he did, he stumbled and fell down. Tripped on the stranger. Oh yeah, I remember this. He went into his shack, then the crippled dog bounced out. Bounced. Licked with fervor. You might say you were me almost, Kyle said. He poured his last bottle of sparkling water on the boy's face. A bare teen, it seemed.
I love you, Jorge said. No I mean, I really appreciate this.
Yes, said the caretaker's son. I am affirmed, that's good.
One grows ugly, trashy, bald, smelly, now fat, misshapen, stupid, feet planted wrong. The essence shines out now without superficial things covering me up. I am quite good. At least I'm adequate now.
Now to the meal. The sacred meal. Inside the shack, the caretaker's son opened the soup can, Italian wedding. Bless this lovely container we share, all food is good that you provide -- and now enough of these lovely mushy words. While the caretaker's son "cooked", you leaned on the recycled bean bag with the showy gash. There was an ornate decaled skateboard on the floor with a picture of Jesus on it. The 3-legged dog lay on her towel and licked herself. The hot plate became hot. Sacred meal. Fellowship. The holiness of the heart's affections. We slopped food on the skateboard's face -- that was the kind of meal it was. And the caretaker's son was exactly the sort of person you would instinctively have ignored or looked down on, he was gross and misshapen, a soul irreversibly scarred. For that very reason, this man was part of the cotton joy that wrapped our suffering. It was a wonderful feast and even the dog sat "agape" as an apostle would have said. Cast your memory back. Remember.
*
