Status Updates From Telephone

I took a knee and examined the tracks of what I thought was a kit fox. Maybe she was God. God had to be somewhere, why not lost in that desert? That would explain a lot.

If there was a God, he or she was no good at its job. Apparently there was just too much to do, listening to the prayers of all those who actually mattered, the faithful, the pious, the deluded, the stupid.

I realized that I still loved my wife, and yet here I was, having left her all alone. All alone. So that I might do something good? So that I might in some way redeem myself? I hated the notion of redemption. But here I was in the world, in this world. I would do something.

“It’s easy enough to become alone in the world. Even without living way out here like I do.”

My daughter came to me in every nighttime dream, and I anticipated the self-loathing and guilt that would come years later when one night she would fail to appear, or rather, I would fail to conjure or summon her.

Ink on folded paper was always better than an email, perhaps better than a voice on a phone or in person. The scratching of strange symbols on leaves, marks that could be just as easily meaningless as much as they could offer meaning, like the mysterious microfossils that I had touted as geologic clues to deep and covered history and future fortune.

I thought about work, about how the importance of it had faded through the years. What did I ever think I would learn or discover? Did I ever believe it mattered? And I thought about Hilary Gill. I imagined that one might see her work through to publication. That was what one might do.

That night I called home and received a report on my daughter’s deterioration. It was apparently going well. Irony and humor were something I understood to be a human way of handling tragedy, but I wondered if it was to be experienced alone, whether it was normal to find the funny in misery without an audience. I decided it didn’t matter.

As my daughter moved ever closer to losing her voice..., beautiful until life became what life becomes, my voice too changed, as inevitably, as necessarily. Logic is a harsh master. However, another quite undeveloped voice remained constant, stabile, even resolute. That voice had no timbre, no volume, no depth, no resonance, was a voice scratched out across small paper in blue ink, an unwavering plea for aid.

So it is with the indecency, harm, and evil we inflict on each other, prejudice, neglect, torture, and slavery. Like glaciers, they are not unique to any one part of Earth. Like ice, it is both mineral and rock.

The way we treat each other changes at a pace that in all other arenas of human experience we would find intolerable. We might call the pace slow or unhurried or, most accurately, glacial.

Semesters came and went so quickly, so innocuously, that they felt like nothing until they were counted, and then the sum was decades. I never saw old coming.

A sadness came over me. My daughter would continue to teach me even as I was losing her, and yet there was so little I could offer her. My job had been to prepare her for life. Now, with what was coming, it made no sense to even consider preparing her for death.

Dreams were not important; it was the reconstruction of dreams that was always significant. Therein one could find a window, a clue or a vein, longing, fear, and guilt.

When moments are weighted, the most insignificant details become meaningful.

I thought of how we take for granted that the space of the world and the time in which that space exists and in which our immediate experience is located are really the only space and time that matter. Yet somehow I believed, like all others, that moments are causally connected, tied together and moving influence in only one direction.

“You kill yourself because you don’t live in this world.”

I wanted to cache moments and freeze them for parceling out over the balance of my so-called life.

I could feel myself slipping, from what to where I had no idea. To say that I felt lost is inaccurate only because it is stated with real ignorance of my feelings. Every time I felt that self-indulgent self-pity, I reminded myself for whom death had come, would be coming. My sadness didn’t mean a thing, my pain was meaningless, and so I had no idea what to feel or what to do.

People are wont to speak of people as fighters in the face of terminal illness, and maybe they are, but terminal without hope is terminal. Without hope. There is nothing to fight. It is like fighting time. Don Quixote. Would that my daughter could have clawed her way back or that I could have rescued her, but no such thing was possible.

I didn’t care that Hilary Gill might have been seen as pissing away her six years of tenure clock. I didn’t care that she, for whatever reasons, had sabotaged herself. I cared only that a scientist down the hall from me was making good work. Fuck clocks.

Daniel regained his footing. “So, you think there are enough black faculty on this campus?”
“There should be more,” I said. “I don’t disagree with you. But I don’t have time to attend your party so I can feel good about myself. I really am a nerd who crawls around in caves. Maybe that’s why I have a job here. I don’t know.”

I wanted to tell her that even in grief there had to be a diversity of form, just like with living organisms, but I didn’t. Thinking about analogous bullshit was my way of dealing with stress, and there was no need for me to make things worse by airing any of it.

Selfishly, I saw my world as illusionary, fragile, existing only because others allowed it to exist. I realized that I was ever awaiting such a moment of loss, that I was, in fact, daily resigned to death but had never resigned to life.