Paromita’s Reviews > Telephone > Status Update

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.