Even Now

by Richard Leise

Annie Lang

What remains of last night’s moonlight illuminates the area. The earth an hourglass tipped to rest upon its side, consciousness waxing, thoughts waning, Simon’s mind, like sand beneath the shore’s receding surf, lightens in degrees of gentle gradation. A warm breeze hardens the vomit on his shirt. The dirt in his mouth tastes like dirt.

Simon sits up and wipes his mouth with the back of a hand. He makes to spit but there’s a disconnect between desire and dexterity and he just drools. The sky is clear and the moon is huge; it assumes that watery illusion of transparency, as if he can poke a hand straight through. Shadows lengthen. Birds concealed within hidden nests sing, their crazed calls attracting mates, defining territories. Beneath this noise some distant sound, undefined.

Strange, this early morning urgency.

In front of Simon there’s a large pond. Its water holds the fungal aroma of rotten produce. The smell is overwhelming. He’s coming to his senses. Misplace Mallory? Sure. Lose track of time? Absolutely. But forget his phone? Hardly. It takes a minute, but Simon feels the device, flush beneath a thigh, stamped into the soil. He frees it with a finger.

Four bars. Plenty of power. 35137—his password—spells his last name when punched into a calculator and flipped upside down. This is the last thing his father taught him. It’s not that his dad’s a deadbeat. His dad’s a great guy. It’s just that we eventually age to that point when we surpass our fathers’ capacity to impart wisdom. Or, alternately, we come to understand how smart our dads really are, and we can’t do anything but listen.

He fingers the weather app. His screen displays:

Mexico Sunny 61°

Mexico? He doesn’t text much, and, last night, he didn’t do any texting at all. He called Mallory when he got to Oswego, and she wouldn’t have expected him to call back—he checks; he didn’t—because he was going out with his brother, who just finished the semester. But why leave the strip?

He asks his phone how far Mexico, New York, is from SUNY Oswego.

About fifteen miles from Oswego by car. Or, it adds, about fourteen miles as the crow flies.

It hurts to move his head but he does, from side to side. There are no crows. And there isn’t a car. From beyond some hillside some sound. But he doesn’t feel like listening. He considers the pond. Tiny patterns like oil swirl upon the surface of the stagnant water. Only there are no patterns. And nothing swirls. Straight ahead the erasure of choice. A sort of littoral rendered literal. The pattern pelagic and richly textured, unvarying, a horizon made wholly true, a divided sky halved into visible categories. He’s dizzy—the sky seems to rise only to collapse in upon itself—and he’s so thirsty he’s slow to swallow.

Simon forgot to look at the time, but it’s early. From the pond bubbles issue forth as though there’s a fountain beneath the surface. Simon closes his eyes, he tosses a pebble into the pond. He opens his eyes and the bubbles stop. A few moments later bubbles appear in another area. If Simon had not thrown the rock, the bubbles would not be there.

“If the bubbles had not been there,” Simon says, “would I be here?”

The sound of his voice has no effect. There only sound is indiscernible; it arrives as noise, a distraction, from some great distance. That which moves, that which Simon sees, moves silently. The bubbles. The breeze. Arms behind him, feet splayed, there is an animal not far from where he sits, and the creature slides into the pond. The alga thick and green, it moves like folds in a sheet. A snake, the animal’s head moves across the water. The green muck, gossamer thin, parts in tiny rivulets. His phone pulses, emits a cool blue glow. He blinks. When he opens his eyes he can no longer see the snake.

Cattails rise from the shallows. A slow trickle of water feeds into the pond from some unnamed tributary. Here, the water runs black and clear, and water lilies lay upon the surface like bright green teacups. Over there Blue water lily flowers rise erect from leaves alternate and spiral, their girdling vascular bundles in receptacles, bright like the tips of so many candle flames. Water lilies were depicted by Claude Monet. Simon’s mother loved Monet.

He checks his phone. Mallory. She knows he’s still sleeping, she’s heading out for a walk, she hopes he had fun, she’ll call later on, she loves him. Did you talk about your mom?

It’s 5:40.

He isn’t surprised. Pregnant, Mallory is even that much more alive than Simon. Mallory, who, this time last year, would have been in Oswego, and would have prevented him from waking up like a cliché. Mallory, Simon’s fiancé, who declares a definite proximity, an immediate association with beauty—everyone takes a second look—and who is just as cool. Mallory, who transitioned from twenty to thirty, from being an idiot to an adult, like changing t-shirts. Given that his mom recently passed, Mallory has given Simon four months to grieve, to have fun. Then? No questions asked. She expects him to clean up.

Dragonflies dip and skim the water. Hovering, rising and falling, suspended on air, movements impossible, such great mystery, the poised stillness of a common misunderstanding. A log crests the water, that place where, come mid-morning, turtles bask in the sunlight. A frog rises to the surface; the morning’s queer light makes black spectral points of its rounded eyes. The frog sinks beneath the murk. Directly across the water a heron. Sleek and graceful, it’s impossible to determine if the bird is awake or sleeping. Tall grasses shape-shift in the breeze, and petals from some nearby tree fall upon the water’s surface. Such simple cause and effect. Simon is shaky; he’s almost sick. He closes his eyes and the visage remains. Not as it had been, but how it continues. The distant sound assumes no other form.

A mosquito bites his arm. The pest draws blood. Slowly, very slowly, Simon moves his finger several inches forward, and from side to side, about once a second. That time can move both fast and slow? Amazing. Simon brushes the insect. He had not intended to injure the bug. The bug dies. Squashed, its guts, mixed with his blood, smear across his arm. There is much more blood than Simon expected. In color closer to black, to crimson, the blood, like the petals of a dead geranium, stiffens. This wouldn’t have happened had Simon been wearing his long-sleeved shirt. He had used that for a pillow.

He steadies himself and slides on his sneakers. He ties their laces. He grabs his shirt. The sun is rising and he knows where he is. At least in relation to where he was. Even were he feeling fine fifteen miles is too far to walk, but he’s not concerned. It’s not as though he woke up in some field in southwest Virginia. He’s in a park. A sign warns off fishermen. Not far there’s a playscape. Nearby is downtown Mexico. A community. The day’s already warm. At arm’s length ten-thousand gnats swarm in their patterned purgatory.

It’s the same way with Mallory. Their future. The intimacy of shared uncertainty. The appreciation that there is more of Mallory not so much to discover, or understand, but simply parts of her that he will never expose. Aspects not so much defining her personality but rather elements of herself that he, as her lover and friend, is incapable of helping her realize. If he were to hurt her he could deliver unto her these truths, answer for her those questions forever unasked. But of this he isn’t capable. To gain life’s true purchase it’s often that understanding demands too much currency. He can only wonder what bearing a child will bring.

There are dots, but he doesn’t have the pen by which to connect them. Forgetting last night, Simon works to recall the past half hour. Waking up. Sitting up. He can’t remember throwing up. But it’s a good thing that he did. Otherwise he’d feel worse. And, standing, he feels a little bit better. Four months. It’s not a long time. It’s a very long time. Simon turns. And he makes for what looks like a path. He walks in the direction of the sound.

Edging the park there’s a cornfield. In time he hears a tractor humming. Silky tassels rise high overhead. A plane’s chemtrails erode a seam in the sky. A set of tire tracks cuts through the corn, huge rocks, alien and marquise, erupt from the earth. A broken pocket mirror reflects nothing. The ground is so dry it has cracked and fissured. Even now, the heat seems to fall to flatten. Simon feels his steps in his teeth. Off to the side a dead sparrow. Ants crawl in and out of a cavity, driven by a purpose he’s unable to discern. Then again, it’s impossible to follow the path of any one ant, so great is their mass. Simon opens his eyes wide and the ants no longer look like ants; it appears as though the sparrow is shimmering. How pretty. But this is just an illusion. He can just as easily notice the dead bird, how its body, stiffened, pushes against itself in the way of rigor mortis. There’s his mom. There’s Mallory.

Simon’s phone pings. It will be his brother. He’ll wait. This is part of the adventure. He doesn’t want four months. But he won’t wish his life away, either. He’s close though. To something. And that’s enough for now.

He’s now near enough to recognize the sound as notes, and the notes as music, and to understand that he had waded through the flotsam of a song dissipating into nothingness to inhabit a space where waves align to inform melody and for him to hear within melody the arrangement of 25 or 6 to 4. When he crests a low rise he sees a high school and upon its football field a marching band and he tries to remember the past; he works to erase his understanding of song, of melody, to hear only sound’s pure, strange, beauty.

He rests within the shade beneath a tree, and listens. A single key is pressed and four notes are freed. He hears how the slightest sound builds in range to the most powerful. Octave and fifth relationships one to the other each tone, each assonant sound, and Simon observes how in composition the solitary siren note stretches, stretching, bending, breaking, streaking now, lost now, music no more fettered to gravity than Simon’s mind and how neither sound nor thought is contained but for the depth of darkness held in the corner of the oak’s grand canopy.

And oh, how beauty is ordered toward beauty. And how he who finds it must be both God and Man.

---

Richard Leise recently accepted The Perry Morgan Fellowship in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. While completing a MFA, he has a novel out on submission and is completing a collection of short stories. His work has been accepted by several publications.