Considerations of a burgeoning trinity

The hermit in the cave has a funny bone. It is located somewhere between her elbow and her thigh. The funny bone connects the body, mind, and spirit of the hermit at unexpected moments. Some days, it occurs to Hermit that soup is like mind, all salt and broth and herbs swimming together, and she laughs until she is so thirsty she drinks it all down. Some days it occurs to her that sex is like spirit, transcendent and earthy, and she laughs til her thighs ache with wanting. Some days it seem to her that mind is like criticism, architecture and chemistry, sewn together in a complex and terrible quilt, and she laughs until her eyes shoot sparks into the dry forest, where she learns about the danger of mind.

The dangers of mind, body, and spirit coexist in the person of Hermit, who lives in a cave that is always 72 degrees. The cave of Hermit is full of shadows and hieroglyphs, old stories and maps to somewhere else. In one corner, someone has written cogito ergo sum. It is not known who wrote those words; they have been there since before meaning was a consideration. Hermit calls the writer “Anonymous”. Anonymous Bosch is the pseudonym adopted by Hermit when she puts on her widow’s weeds and wanders out of the cave into the blinding sun. There is ambivalence in leaving the cave for Hermit, who believes in cloister but also in compassion, which cannot be practiced alone. And so she prays, alone, and sings, in company, and serves the beans and rice that feed the brains that think the thoughts that write the words that live in the cave that thought built.

In the cave that thought built there are three Hermits who live in a single body. The body of Hermit is strong and brown, the mind of Hermit is calm and wild; the spirit of Hermit is sky, water, fire and air. Hermit thinks herself alone, feels herself in her body: skin, lungs, bowels, hands, the jittering synapses of sensation. Hermit feels her spirit ecstatic, expansionist, empire building across skies and centuries, knocking down the walls of time and reason. Hermit leaves the cave, Hermit goes back home, over and over and over again.

Walter

Walter in high school was not voted most likely to.

Walter in college did not distinguish himself.

Walter as an agent in his father’s insurance agency fell asleep in front of the green blinking data entry screens that measured out his days one blink, then another, then another.

Walter as a fiancée was comforting but not hot.

Walter slept well and drove a 4 door Buick when he was 22.

Walter’s hairline began to recede, slowly, at 27, but never blossomed into full-on male pattern baldness.

At 35, Walter’s wife, Elaine, left him for a slightly younger version of himself. Walter was mystified but not furious about this. They had no children, and Elaine disappeared back into the lake of his undistinguished youth without a ripple.

At 38, Walter went to his neighborhood Whole Foods market, where he bought a pint of black bean, corn and red bell pepper salad. Walking to the men’s room on his way out, he passed the community bulletin board. He read all the ads, in order, from left top to right bottom. At the far right corner, almost expired per the store’s 30 day policy, was an ad for International Cooking Classes, to be held in a home some two miles from the store. Walter pulled the tab with the phone number and stuck it in his wallet, where it stayed for months.

Around Thanksgiving, Walter, reflecting that he was almost 40, divorced, childless and uninterested in himself, found the tab in his wallet and called the number.

“No, no international cooking classes any more. I didn’t get enough people signed up. I’m teaching homeopathics now. You could sign up for that, it’s here at my house,” said the woman, whose name was Reina. No, Walter told her, he didn’t really want to study homeopathics. He wanted to learn to cook. Did she do private cooking lessons?

There was a short silence on the phone, and a brief negotiation about the cost of private lessons.

On the following Thursday, Walter went to Reina’s house. He brought with him an apron and a chef’s hat, both virginal white, and a set of hot mitts. Reina promised to provide the cooking utensils and the food.

That first week they sat at the table looking at cookbooks, identifying utensils by name, defining some basic cooking methods – dry heat, baking, braising, sautee, and so on. Walter took notes.

The second week they met at the Whole Foods in the produce department and they talked produce – quality indicators in different fruits and vegetables, seasonality, local growing patterns. They touched and smelled, they looked at prices and they looked at weather. Walter took notes.

The third week they met at Reina’s house. Walter brought pancetta, walnuts, chard, goat cheese, baguette, wine, beets and olive oil. At 7 p.m., they began.

Deming

At the graduation the handful who were not graduating but attending nonetheless gathered in the handicapped restroom, the first handicapped restroom in the state. Bigger than a standard one person stall, less bustable than a walk-in men’s room. The tallest of them assumed the responsibility of improvising a pipe, which he made with a toilet paper tube and a bit of aluminum foil taken from a chicken parfait, an introductory and ultimately failed offering from Wendy’s, which at that time still had Dave speaking for himself on the commercials, where he played the role of benign protestant mid-western Colonel Sanders, with a dash of the great and powerful Oz thrown in.

The smoke. The tallest. The graduation.  Deming was experiencing a resurgence of sorts, a resurgence surprising for a town that had never had much of a surge in the first place. Deming, New Mexico. A destination in the middle of nowhere, railroad cars filled with iron lungs, one car after another, in the tubercular days of 100 years ago. The sun, the air, the dry hot blue climate sold itself to the bleeding lungs of northeasterners with money and their pale little children, who coughed blood into their handkerchiefs and either died in Deming or did not die in Deming.

The underwear favored by the gently wheezing young ladies at the Deming Women’s Sanitorium was billowy and typically of thin white linen, suitable for the dry hot climate. They would lie, languid and bored, with ribbons in their hair, in their white linen bloomers in the iron lung that would save them and send them back to New York, to Boston, to Connecticut. The ribbons were died in the pretty spring colors of a cooler, wetter climate – periwinkle, saffron, lilac, pale pink peony.

The young ladies lay in their iron lungs thinking of dances, thinking of young men, thinking of meringues.  Some of them are buried in the cemetery in Deming, and they have names like flowers, too. Flowers and gemstones; the young women of the early twentieth century were prone to swooning, dying young, and living to see another day.

One such young woman was raised in the Deming Sanitorium, having been sent there as a seven-year-old. Her name was Daisy – yes, this is true – and her papa had been an entrepreneur, a boastful man prone to self-deception and untimely truthful revelations to shareholders. Daisy’s papa, it is said, was single-handedly responsible for some runs on some banks, helping to trigger the domino effect that revealed certain inconsistencies in banking practices of that last century. In the middle of Daisy’s rest cure, while the mechanical lung pushed and pulled her ambivalent relationship with survival itself, a man with a shovel smashed Daisy’s father’s head in, leaving her an orphan very far away from anyone who knew or cared anything about her. Her mother, having succumbed already some time earlier to the consumption that lay Daisy low, had nothing to offer, and so, Daisy was on her own.

A spot of gothic romance

His eyes met hers. Her eyes met his. Their eyes met. Above their heads, black clouds formed, the winds began to howl and shake. Someone must die.

“In these terrible times, sir, I find it best to speak rarely and gently,” she said, looking back down at her needlework. Her voice was light and firm.

“Yes, indeed, m’lady, I understand that a raised voice would be improvident,” he said, reaching to take the needlepoint from her hands. She resisted only briefly. Pulling the white linen back, he revealed beneath it a letter, open and sitting in her lap. One eyebrow lifting slightly, he took the letter, folded it and slipped it into his cape.

“No need to worry about this, madam,” he said. “I will look after it until it is needed.”

“Yes, of course,” she responded, remaining seated, remaining composed, remaining convinced as ever that someone must die. Now quite certain which of them that might be.

 Outside were the sounds of preparation that had become common over these past few months. Horses and men, the smell of burning hooves as the animals were shod, the excited yells of small boys chasing soldiers and knights-in-training through the muddy streets. Enemies came in all forms in those days: enemies of state, illness, criminals and people made mad by poverty and dirt. The men in the castle held council after council, each beating the drum for his own reason. War. Glory, wealth, religion, property, power.

Who holds a woman’s letter over her head, leaving behind an unspoken threat? This young man has just taken a letter from the most dangerous woman of her place and time. Pity he did not recognize her; they’d met before, in other circumstances. If he had realized from whom he took the letter, the situation in which he eventually found himself might have been avoided altogether.

Hive

I am leaving the hive, you see. It is my head, my head which is filled with the buzzing of bees, which is filled with longing, with honey, the comb, the drive to predict and to reproduce. I am leaving the hive, you see. It is my head, which is filled with honey, which is filled with a strange desire that is sweet and unreproducible. The honeybee has a particular song, you see. It is not the song of the wasp or the hornet. It is not the thin stinging whing of the mosquito, it is not the high whining cry of the child whose wishes have not been granted.

I am leaving the hive, you see, with a longing in my head that makes a buzz, a droning sound that says wings can beat so fast, too fast, so much faster than heartbeats, and the beating of wings can stir the winds, can carry them over oceans, over tides, over deserts and into high mountains, the clouds, the skies.

I am leaving the hive, you see, away from the honey, away from the drone, away from the sagebrush, the leaves and the waves at the wide ocean’s edge and up into the high, the rare mountain air, where breathing is hard but sweet, where breathing captures, raptures, wraps the straining lungs in wishes, in hailing, exhaling. The hive does buzz, does fly, does drive. The hive does predict, does produce, reproduce. Produce, reproduce, encase, contain. I am leaving the hive, you see, and that is enough.

Three dates

1. Rock and a hard place

I am climbing on a rock. I am climbing in Iraq. I am climbing and I rock.

In a crevice in the rock, I find a gun. I find the sacred text and I find the gun.

In a crevice in the rock, I find the sacred text. I find the sacred text and I find the bullets.

As I am climbing on a rock, I hear a ping. A ping not like e-mail, a ping as a bullet hits a rock.

I close my eyes as I am climbing a rock. Both arms pressed against the side, I shuffle up, up, up the crevice wall. I drop the gun. It makes a noise like a tin can home alarm as it bangs against the rock wall. Moments later, the bullets skitter after. Now I have the sacred text, but no gun and no bullet. This is not a good time for me.

Down below I see a man like an elephant. I see his eyes poking out, looking for me, looking for me who is disguised as a rock wall. I am quiet and gray and I try not to push little rocks down the wall to give me away. I try not to hurl the sacred text at the elephant man, with his bulging eyes and his semi-automatic. I push, shove, shimmy up the wall until there is a turn and I am not a straight shot any more, at least for the moment.

I shimmy up and around a corner and come to a mud wall. I run in my gray clothes to the end of the wall and around the corner. It’s been windy all day and the sun is coming down. The city is coated in sand and tinted red with the falling sun. At the end of the street is a scooter with a box strapped onto the back. In the box is a robe, red with gold trim. I grab it and run, through an alley, through another, into a doorway, where I throw off the gray cloak and put on the red robe. My hair is a problem; I wrap it in strips torn from the robe lining. The weather is listening to my prayers. The sun has gone down, the rain has begun. I am safe huddling in a doorway with the dozens of others sitting out the rain, head down, invisible. There is a smell floating over the city – smoke, flesh, sewage, sulphur, ozone, and an occasional smell of cinnamon and orange.

I sleep as it rains, only twenty minutes or so. It is fully dark when I wake; the rain is still coming down but will not last much longer, I think. I pull the red robe over my head and walk into the city streets, where fires spit smoke in the rainy alley ways. I fall in behind a group of men also in red and walk with them in relative anonymity for a few minutes. Then I drop away, another doorway, a few blocks away. This door, I knock on. They open, barely. I hand them the book, and the door is opened.

 

2. First Kiss

 

It’s so hot, it’s so hot it’s like dragging my body through warm, smelly mud. I am dragging my body through this air that is thicker than mud. For what? I am asking myself, sliding in my own sweat in the cheap vinyl seats in the oldest city transit bus, no air conditioning, no radio, no cleaning. The seat is black and greasy, with graffiti in multigenerational layers, with a smell of old bodies and baby vomit. The bus is empty today. I stand up behind the driver even though it is empty. I don’t want to sit on the black greasy seats. I don’t want to touch anything. We stop with jerky regularity; the lights in the bus come on, the doors flap open. The door heaves shut with an asthmatic sigh and we continue. The air in the street is as hot and as thick as the air in the bus. I stink.

The door flaps open. The hot tarmac smell mixes with the patchouli perfume of two girls as they board. They board and they sit, halfway back, then move all the way back, where they can giggle and talk, fast but not loud, where they can share lip gloss and look in their bags of goodies. They have glitter, they call their moms on their cell phones. They are at Stephanie’s house, they say. The bus belches the doors open and shut. I can’t hear you, girl one says. Girl two leans forward and chokes on her own laugh. Wait a minute, she says. I’ll call you back. She hangs up and the two girls fall against each other, stick their sleeves in their mouths and laugh uncontrollably. When they sit up, they tug at each other’s shirts, smooth each other’s hair, laugh a little more, and lean their heads together briefly for a small, almost invisible kiss. The door hisses open, and the girls run out the back, bags swinging, waving bye bye to the bus and to their first, hesitant moment together.

 

3. Biological urges

 

The biologist asked me in a roundabout way about playing a game of scrabble with him at home. Or going to his mother’s house to make gingerbread cookies and zucchini bread for the fundraiser at their church. Jehovah’s Witness, I think. I saw a stack of Watchtowers in the corner behind the love seat, neatly stacked, not falling down or anything, but quite a lot of them. I said yes, of course, I love to bake and I’d be happy to help your mom with her fundraiser.

At first we worked together awkwardly, in her kitchen with my ingredients, mixing flour and eggs and butter and assorted flavorings. Creaming the sugar and egg together. I wore an apron with a picture of a man in a golf cart, swinging his barbecue gear like clubs. We talked about people in the Hamptons that we might all know, but that didn’t go where we thought it might. I tasted the raw dough. Delicious, I said. His mother handed me a towel to wipe my hands. Well, then, I thought, and I brought up ocean life, the octopus, moonlight on still water and recipes for pomegranate jello. This one hit and we exchanged jello recipes, which led into special events and slid rapidly into bridal showers and brides we have known. Here the biologist started sweating lightly, and I could see him in the future 20 years, with his eyebrows grown in thick and tweedy, still nervously mixing the dry ingredients and looking at the box for instructions regarding eggs, butter and vanilla.

After the cookies are in the oven, the biologist talks about his personal research, social behavior in tarantulas and related arachnids. On this he is more fluent, more relaxed, and he forgets himself momentarily and mixes the second batch with ease. He sits smiling at the kitchen table, drawing spider bodies in the flour and then mashing them gone with little balls of dough. He is very happy, and the cookies come out just right.

“Delicious,” I say. His mother says thank you, and we wash the dishes, and I go home quickly, before this lovely domestic scenario becomes a habit. Thank you, I say, and wave bye bye.