Jorge: The Other World

*

So that other world people talk about -- it's not other -- it's right here -- I can kick it like a stone. It kicks right back. It's not a hypothesis or something you have to visualize. Here it is.

You know that guy who fell or was pushed off my ship? I saw him on the street just yesterday. But I don't care too much about him. I mean -- if transcendence is available -- then I'm going to focus on what is important. The one who has spread it between visible things --that One just has my heart. In awe -- speechless. So that's why I bump into things.

*

Jorge would wake from dreams and know he had just been there. In that "other" world that made the mesh of this one. And how he knew wasn't that the dreams gave him access -- no, not at all -- dreams were shallow tokens mostly -- but they just didn't have all the blocks and careful denials that waking life put up -- as if to prevent itself from feeling the closeness to heaven that simply was -- that pervaded this "closed" world of ours.

It wasn't "other", people just wished it to be.

*

Looking back at my childhood I'd thought of it as a Garden of Orthodoxy but that was wrong -- anyway thinking wasn't the mose of access to it -- although thinking took place there. It was more a matter of releasing breath -- thanksgiving and gratitude its open door. This was a door that had no frame.

People willed the door to be closed. A question of simplification. Easier to live and not to wonder.

*

Jorge stood at the door to the noisy gym. An odd kind of worship happened inside there, comparatively involute, very intense but somewhat futile. In the back corner -- where they stowed the free weights for die hards -- the Zen warrior lifted and lifted his million billion ziggity thousand kilograms of transcendent pain -- grunting with the sublimity of the effort -- and up the heavy structure went. Iron in the air, lifted with praise and joy. Nearby, the Nazi's wife on her treadmill sorrowing. . Everywhere half-naked models and ancient near-dead beings toggled past each other without touching. There were scenes of terrible blood on all the TVs. When J tried to move through the corridor a hand touched his shoulder -- the hand was "ice cold" like a Coke. He turned to face his dead godmom, his beloved stepmother -- Estelle.

Whispering.

You must believe me, boy, I am so sorry. I didn't have a clue what he was doing to you.

Not knowing something is the worst of the involuntary sins and those sins are the worst anyway, the worst of all, not knowing, with no way to repair -- there is nothing you can do. Except to have listened -- except to wait. To say: no matter how happy I am I must be missing something important to have. Then to look around.

Dying to rectify the injustice.

Jorge, I didn't look around. I didn't notice what was there.

And I can't seem to shake this off. The feeling of no way to fix this now.

*

A philosophical question: where does the "other" world touch this one? Surely they touch within this feeling of queasiness, of vertigo and unease. Wrongness swirling through the halls. Jorge felt the familiar bottomless clamp seize him and take him utterly. It reached from the bottom of the bowels up to the heart then the head. There was an elevator falling through space that had no floor. He fell in cartwheels or cornrows -- like poor Quasimodo -- yet he didn't move.

You must say something. You must try to speak.

Estelle, he said. You did nothing wrong. I loved you and still do. Estelle, he said.

I was just the way I was, Estelle. All he did, that man, was to bring it to the surface. It was there already. You were a perfect mom. I had no complaints.

Estelle.

Estelle, he said. Dry throat trying to speak. Air that wouldn't come into the lungs. Estelle, he said. He turned to say more but she wasn't there. She was dead of course, had been for many years. What remained hanging in the sterile air was perhaps nothing but unresolved guilt, first hers, now his.

He continued his trajectory now into the lockers. The college boys strutting -- their pubic furs held aloft like a flag -- shuffling behind them the old warriors aching inside every step, their balls clacking when they walked -- ancient memories condensed in the steam -- loose ugly hairs crawling on the floor -- history everywhere, clogging everything. The room almost unbearably concentrated -- and in the very near the ever so near distance, the sound of the water falling -- stroking the air like a giant guitar.

*