0.92; FAT
Death is as inevitable as springtime. Every windblown seed bears its own destruction written in telomeres and the ticking of a metabolic clock. Nothing in the world is forever—to be forever is to be timeless, and timelessness is stasis. Only in the tension between the first spark and the last crumbling ash could ambition ever be said to flourish.
He moves, our ragged man, like someone whose joints have been restrung by the crafts circle at a halfway house. Walks down the street avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk without conscious effort. The black burbling sealer between the squares has come unstrung through winter’s harsh tutelage and lurks now for the unwary toe, the poorly balanced, the vestibularly challenged. Air is bracing, wind whistles the last song of ice and misery being banished by the northward-creeping sun, but still the danger is not quite over. Already flowers bloom like madness in a lover’s eyes, but then, the colors almost always run from the green ground toward the blue sky in these Pacific Northwest climes.
So our man lurches a bit before straightening himself with a self-conscious glance to see who might be mocking. Only the uncaring birds observe, but their minds are so narrow and violent that they carry no space that he might inhabit any longer than receding threat would have it. A suspicious, resentful cat might have been more in keeping with the mood of the moment, but then, the mood was his and so was the moment.
This, then, is his progress. Never quite stumbling, never quite wrong, but never quite right. Someone watching with more intent than the fluttering sparrows and the scornful jays might wonder what they saw. The curious might make a list such as this:
The curious might then put their pen away, heedless of a smear of ink across the web of one thumb, and wander off in search of a nonfat double latte. A moment of early spring crispness in the air, and the ragged man forgotten, just like any other random stranger of little note and less importance.
He himself is incurious. Not a maker of lists, not any more, though in his time he was a great one. Once. Now he progresses down the sidewalk, a shuddering limping pass through a neighborhood that might once have been his, that might once have hosted his dreaming.
*
This is the ragged man’s dream, from a time before:
A house, wrapped in a sepia European light, as if a Flemish Old Master had spilled his paint box across the evening sky. The halls are unreasonably long and narrow, architectural arteriosclerosis, so that the visitor must shuffle almost sideways to pass from one throbbing chamber to the next. Electricity drips from the sockets and fixtures to pool in sly, blue vaguenesses at the corners of his vision.
Memory persists even so.
Once they ran laughing through these halls, when the walls were wider and the floors gleamed with bright promise. Once they sat in companionable silence in the large kitchen with the dangling pots as tomatoes gave their all in steaming agony for a dinner (n)ever to be forgotten. Once they climbed up to the roof and lay their backs upon the day-warmed composite shingles and watched shooting stars, counting wishes like horses in a morning field.
He walks slowly onto a porch that has somehow morphed to the dimensions of a subway station, complete with screeching rails and crackling announcements in some incomprehensible tongue. Commuters in their hundreds lounge on rocking chairs and swings, each wearing clothing he might have once owned.
Such a dangerous word, “once.”
They smile, these men and women, their faces moving in unison as if controlled by a single set of invisible wires. Inside the house, a kettle shrieks. Or perhaps a child. He turns to go back, and finds the door sealed against him, nothing but siding where a moment before the entrance had stood. Peeling paint testifies to the age of this imprisonment of his memories. The windows, too, when he looks, are blank with wood.
Sealed, all sealed. He pounds the wall a while, amiable commuters nodding in rhythm to his fists, but no one comes. No one comes at all.
*
The ragged man finally reaches a bench in the shade of a maple tree. He sits down. The metal slats are cold through the rough wool of his pants. The back of the bench is not designed to accommodate the curvature of the human spine, any more than the world is designed to accommodate the curvature of the human heart.
He feels the small gaps in his support, cracks much larger than the sidewalk and as unavoidable as sin or sleep. Empty air gapes, a gulf between his thighs and the grass below, behind his ribs opening up onto the Little League ball field where aluminum bats ring like a blow to the head and a frustrated coach has to remind children of boundless energy to run, run, run.
Once, the ragged man used to run. His blood still does. At that thought, he extends his left arm, rolls up the flopping sleeve of the rust-colored Old Navy sweater with his right hand, and studies the scars on his veins.
They are small, readily mistaken for freckles or the last gasp of some stray pimple decades after the lusty springtime of its fellows. They do not feel knotty or rough to the touch. At most, tiny lacunae in the sagging continuity of his skin, cousins to the little tags that erupt across the yoke of his shoulders, at which he picks in the shower when the self-conscious grooming becomes too much and he must not bloody his fingernails any further.
Flaws, tiny flaws visible to the discerning eye and the desperate mind.
Each scar marks an entry point, a violation, the bloody thrust of a needle laying bare his secrets and opening the plumbing of his heart to gloved hands and tingling drugs. He remembers CT scans, with their hot flush of the veins, the loosening of the bowels, the sexual thrill wrapped in the embarrassing, embracing cold of sterile rooms and beige plastic machines far bigger and more capable than he will ever be again. Scars on the skin, scars on the veins, so when he goes back, as he must like a child to terror, they hurt him ever more looking for some unused portal.
He tries to make a map of the scars, his idle mind seeking patterns as anyone might do in the rifting of clouds or the arrangement of stars in the night sky. Pareidola? No, that is the seeking of faces. Just pattern recognition, the same mild obsession that must solve the sequence of tiles in a strange bathroom or work out the handedness of the mason who built a fireplace. The human mind, unwilling to let chaos be chaos, must bring form from the void. How else to explain dreams?
Still, they are a map. Not of space, but time, a chart of the paths of pain through the hours and days of suffering. Even now, the ragged man can point to the scars one by one and name the procedure, the incident, the emergency that engendered the medical intervention in question. Sometimes he can remember the nurse, the IV therapist, the phlebotomist. Their faces are another kind of map, stretching from the countries of kindness to the swamps of indifference. (It seemed the women always liked him more when he was not crying.)
The ragged man studies this map, draws in memory like a net full of fish. Each individual thought slips away to flop silver-scaled on the decks of imagination, but still the mass is present, ever present, a weight across his back.
The first time he had tissue taken away and understood what it was he gave up was in a doctor’s office in southeast Portland. A mole upon his neck, longtime irritation to shirt collars and sweaty days. Another in the middle of his back, that attracted needle-teethed fish to nip when he swam in rivers and oceans. The doctor used an electric wand—no needles in his life back then—and he’d thoughtlessly set his heels against the pedestal of the exam table, so that the circuit closed when she touched him, and he kicked the medical assistant.
After brief confusion and a short colloquy on electrical grounding, she’d resumed her work. Sparky, sharp moments later, two tiny pieces of him lay on cotton in a tray. Black heads, pink and tender roots, and the faint scent of burning meat. He looked, his hand raised to touch his neck, until shooed away by the doctor, then he mourned. For years after, he regretted not asking for the moles in a little jar. Flesh of his flesh, discarded for vanity and convenience. He felt foolish to mourn them. That was only the beginning, of loss and of grief, but it was enough for the time.
The cold park bench brings the ragged man back to the present. The pattern of his IV scars becomes once more a drunkard’s walk of skin spots, as if it were his liver failing instead of his whole body. He stares up at the wispy cirrus clouds, like spider webs entrapping souls lately fled toward heaven, and tries to tell God he is still not ready.
God, as is His wont, gives no sign of having heard.
*
Fat floats, and when we have enough of it, carries us with it. Fat stores vitamins and poisons and everything needful and needless between, much like memory itself. Fat makes the delightful curves of a woman, and the sad middle-aged gut of a man. Fat is carved away by the knife of disease, until what remains is a stark, uncompromising warning for all good citizens to turn away.