Page 70 - WTP VOl. X #3

Unto Thee (continued from page 56)
for as long as she could, but like radiation there was
a definitive window of exposure before the damage was permanent. She had listed off his open wounds— the recent death of his mother, the difficult relation- ship with his remaining family, his failure to get into medical school despite trying so hard—as if they were old, faded scars from a deep past he clung to as an excuse to treat her so poorly. She couldn’t be held accountable for the shitty twists of his life anymore she declared, never once during the conversation crying or showing any emotion other than an almost righteous indignation, as if she were correcting some great injustice.
He had stayed in the apartment after she had moved out, waiting for the lease to expire. The bedroom wall remained blank and he found that he would lose himself in it at times, staring at the emptiness, lost
in the nothingness between emotions and thoughts, disconnecting in the wall’s dullness. There had been an anesthetizingly similar element in his mother’s final hospital room a few years prior. The walls there had been a pale yellow, vaguely reminiscent of a color born in the 1970s. Some of the hours he’d spent in her room, especially during the days she was mostly unconscious, he’d stared at the wall. It had a flat, fea- turelessness to it that made him appreciate hospital minimalism.
It wasn’t all that surprising really that he found him- self once again at a similar wall, away from the pain and heat and smell of the ditch, of wet, slippery rot. This was the only kind of protection that seemed available when it all became too much. If he couldn’t physically find one, he would conjure it up in his mind, an almost Zen-like escape into the comfort of sparsity.
A sound tore him from that special nowhere, bring- ing Jerome back to the ditch. The scattering of stars cast along the navy sky twinkled, commiserating.
At first he didn’t see the Jesus statue and thought that it had left, or that the illusion had passed, but then there was the sound again, a low muttering ac- companied by a soft drumming. He glanced around, barely moving his head, and saw the Jesus statue sitting on the ground with its knees hugged to its chest, hunched forward. It drew in the ground with a stick as it slowly rocked back and forth, speaking quietly to itself. You broke Jesus, Jerome thought and laughed, despite it all.
Toxic.
It still stung like cold metal. Once inserted, that particular barb had stayed put; it would cause too much damage to try and pry it loose. Worse, Jerome had since started to suspect others agreed with Sasha’s diagnosis, they just used different language: he was pessimistic, negative, miserable. Just the night before, Priyanka had asked him to stop being such a rigid fucking prick. His entire friendship with her seemed based on a mutual desire to hurt each other, which seemed further proof that Sasha had been right.
“Hey man,” Jerome said weakly. “You uh—you shoot- ing blanks tonight? What’s up?”
The Jesus statue did not respond. It was talking to itself in an argumentative, hushed tone.
With great difficulty, Jerome sat up. “I think we... should get out...of this ditch.”
There was no reply.
“Think you can just carry me up to the road?” He imagined a random person driving home from work and seeing a 15-foot wooden Jesus emerge from
a ditch carrying an American tourist. What would their reaction be? What was the right reaction? Was there a person out there who would shrug and ac- cept it as easily and forgetfully as any other every- day occurrence?
Focus! His mind so desperately wanted to wander elsewhere.
“So that’s a no? Or it don’t matter, cause you aren’t real? A drunk hallucination? Or a pain hallucination? Man, maybe if I had actually gone to med school I’d know.” Actually, I’d still be in med school and not here.
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