Rob paused at the door, a formidable mass that divided the universe from his world. He looked up at the carved inscription on the enormous slabs, DEUS CARITAS EST, worn but still discernable over the centuries that divided the men who carved them and the man who now stood at the threshold. Including the ancient cathedral’s intricately-etched doors as a centerpiece to the design was the architect’s idea and would give the home a certain panache that no other could boast. Apparently, architects use French words when costs border on astronomic. Rob imagined the Sicilians and their dangling cigarettes unhinging the doors under a Mediterranean sun, the oversized truck on impossibly narrow hairpins winding amongst olive trees down to the harbor, the transatlantic journey and the crashing waves with no end, the longshoreman and their unions and cranes, another overland haul to the west coast, another harbor, another boat, the vast Pacific. Hawaii. This custom-crafted mansion on the cliffs, perched above heaven. The dream, however cliché, realized. Yet…
The doors had taken 10 men to manage them even with their weight supported with the crane. His family had moved in days before, the doors delayed somewhere along the way but the house otherwise complete. Rob had been away on business the day the crane arrived, he was always away, but he’d written the check that proved it had been there, he always wrote the checks. It was red and yellow, like the “Snort” from Are You My Mother, Niki’s favorite book at the time. “The Snort came over,” Niki had announced, the excitement of Christmas in his eyes as he sprinted toward his Dad. Rob could still imagine the swirling blurs of the entryway all around, his slippery loafers spinning in checked circles on the marble floor, the weightless innocence gripped between his thumbs and fingers as he held the boy up, up, around and around, secure in the Almightiness of his father but so too free and alive and in flight. He wished now with what little he had left to be returned to that magical moment, the rules of time and space to be fractured in this singular exception. He would trade it all in, the infinity windows over the mirror of heaven, the RS-3, the subtle nutty turn of Macallan Lalique single malt three or four seconds after the first draw, the orange glow of the Sun on the rolling cobalt that nightly devoured her. If only he could have a second chance at it all, perhaps find a different path that would lead to a parallel universe in which the men on either side of the threshold were closer the same. Maybe then Rebecca would be on the other side, the little boy with bouncing curls would be starting his sprint now, readying to leap into hands that knew not of amber tar and the gauge size of needles, hands that were still Almighty and could lift up and spin the muck of the world off as a shaking dog does water, squeaking loafers turning circles on a marble floor, grime and filth splattered on the blurry walls all around.
A lifetime separated the Snort from this arrival. The cobalt mirror had been churned to slop by the winds, its indigo glow long faded to black. There would be no bouncing curls nor welcoming queen. The castle had fallen into darker times, and he who cast the shadow now stood at the threshold. Entering always required a pause, a breath, a transmigration from the man he had become to the man he once was, the man he still was through the lone eyes of the last to lose faith. The doorway was a portal now as it was then, a literal wall that divided the world of sin and that of atonement, mere mortals from God.
God. Rob had looked it up once. God is love. That’s what the inscription meant. His eyes fell back to the latch as his hand withdrew from his front pocket, the stubs of his dirtied fingers fumbling at the keys, the jangle of metal on metal familiar, comforting. God and love. How laughable to pair the two as equals, blind faith and this feeling beneath his breast bone that singularly made him a better man, that ebbed every time his thoughts turned to the one purity that remained. Here, now, the warm waters of happiness and pride swirled around his dry bones and replenished them, flooded them even, with all they had ever longed for. The lock’s embrace of the key felt exact and true, the latch’s click miraculous and undeserved. He turned the knob and the door swung inwards without effort, the marble entryway aglow in the moonlight that spilled in. He breathed in deliberately, sipping at the coolness as a sober man does his first drink after so very long. The transmigration complete, Rob stepped into his home.
He closed the massive door with more force than was needed, hoping to disturb the silence enough to wake Niki or his wife from their slumber. Already he sensed a solitude that was too great to shoulder, and even the sharp tongue of a deserted Puerto Rican was better than the alternative. The cushion of air between the impeccably crafted doorframe and the cathedral’s wooden slabs softened the blow, emitting a muted hush like a vacuum-sealed space station. Rob’s loafers traipsed across the white marble, leaving the dust of Ohio as evidence. He rested his attaché case on the table where a vase used to house sunflowers and made his way to the embrace of the sectional couch in the living room, stepping down once then again onto the acacia floor. His anonymous arrival was just as well. This nausea could no longer stomach the spinning, and his wife deserved her sleep, God bless her, after all he’d done to disrupt her world.
There was a time not long ago when some fight remained. The ego is the last to leave. What is it Rumi said? “Ego is a veil that separates humans from God?” Rob felt no closer to God, though any remnant of self was long ago dissolved, crushed to a fine white powder and then cooked to a boil, plunged to such depths to be buried forever. Back then, the two would clash in any and all things, from preschools to credit card bills to her inability to grant him the most simple of requests after he afforded her such luxury. A 6 pack of beer! And she with her black Range Rover and spa treatments, $1000 lunches with whispering friends, extended weekends in Paris in the corporate jet. All the while with Rob submerged in the trenches, nails nibbled to the nubs, risking hundreds of millions on a single hunch, voicemails and emails piling up, nervous clients reacting to the countless ripples cast from every pebble that falls from the tickertape across the bottom of FoxNews or Marketwatch. How could she ever know this stress, this sacrifice? Was a 6 pack of beer awaiting his return from such battlefields too disruptive to her busy schedule of nail paintings and dress fittings and mimosa sippings to warrant her attention? The vitriol they spat upon one another still dirtied these walls, splattered stains coloring this potential monument with a complete erosion of love. Then again, for love to have eroded implies its existence. And Rob knew that too was just another of the many lies that littered their pasts.
The will had expired. No self remained as fuel. And the wells of vitriol had run dry. The walls would remain white, only echoes and emptiness. Ego’s veil had lifted, and all that remained were the inseparable man and his God.
Unless, of course, God wasn’t love at all but, instead, empty. The substance of fog as it burns from the hills, a cloudless sky so pale and intense it has lost even its blue. The infinite void of space before the Big Bang, darkness without light, the despair of one’s soul without the lifeline of hope. This was the God Rob had found after ego’s dissolution. An omnipresent God, there was no shaking Him. A patient God, He waited up late, always there when the medicine wore off, refusing to leave even when the medicine was peaking, beating, pulsing through his arteries and filtering out through the tiny spaces in his capillaries into the sponge of his sinful body. He was here now, was here all around. Rob collapsed into the comfort of the down-stuffed cushions, lifting the weight of his legs onto the ottoman in a final commitment of effort.
Rob was allowed a single breath before the thoughts rushed in. A single inspiration of arrival, an exhalation of release. And then there was a magical and forgotten space in which all was right in the world. But biology is tenacious. And nature abhors a vacuum.
It always began with a sniffle. Unconscious and automatic, he would hear it as if from far away, feel the contraction of the muscles in his chest and only then realize it was his chest that was flexing, his lungs that sniffed in with such force and his nostrils that now flared. It was as if some tiny Rob lived within the recesses of his nasal cavity that sensed a subtle increase in secretions, felt them traveling downward toward gravity’s pull, and decided then to snort them back in while the big Rob was unaware. How many tiny Rob’s lived within him, he considered. And was he so sure that the big Rob was really in charge?
Rob’s body stood up from the couch. A grunt within the silence. Shuffling loafers across waxed wood, up one stair and then another. His arm reached forward and his fingers gripped the handle. The piercing light from the naked bulb like arrows in his eyes. There it was, on the top shelf amongst the yogurts with fruits on their bottoms and plums, centered and squared, a 6-pack of Lite beer from Miller. God bless her. The circle of gold around his finger. The cool kiss of frigid glass. The sliding swoosh from the cardboard sleeve. Maybe a beer would take the edge off, grant sleep without the need to re-up.
The quiet hush of his weight as it displaced the air within the cushions. Rob didn’t bother to lift his legs up this time. There wasn’t much left. He raised the glass to his lips and took a breath. That fleeting peace was gone now, rabid thoughts in its place. He rested the bottle on the glass coffee table and watched as a ring of moisture grew around its base, counted the tiny glistening freckles of water that coalesced on the brown glass. Rob considered their appearance, contemplated why they formed and how did they get there. Clearly the moisture didn’t move through the beer bottle’s glass, impermeable and solid. It must come from the air, then, water within it all. He looked at the space between these walls, the air that rushed in torrents through his nose and out through his mouth, the same air that gave Niki life, his first breath in that bright room, his rhythmed breaths upstairs, asleep now in such peace. There is water in this air, suspended unseen and all around. How could it be, the existence of something invisible to the eye that comes out when the right force beckons it?
Rob felt he was approaching something important, but lacked the will to follow the trail. He watched as his thoughts hopped from one to the next, hopeful each cool bottle that chased the last would keep him one step ahead of the rabbit. He felt himself yawn. And then the first ant crawled from its hiding place in the hair beneath the pits of his arms. Soon it would multiply and the bastards would swarm and immerse his entire body in a prickly dis-ease, every nerve raw and on fire. After that, the real pain would begin.
The score in Ohio was too steep. That’s what landed him on the floor of the Porsche, the stick shift in his gut. It wasn’t the first time, and Rob knew it wouldn’t be the last. He had learned to appreciate the little things, the quiet moments before the dragon showed up and demanded his payment. Each arrival home, every smile, even another push at Niki’s door that would crack open and let the miracle spill out, a mere mortal glimpsing at angels asleep in heaven. Rob knew well how this game would end. The line grows thin in these final moments. Death and the dragon Rob chased breathed of the same fire.
Just enough to get him through the night. 30% should put him right. It was decided. He was nowhere near as bad off as he was in Ohio, having taken far too long to have scored. The ants had coalesced into a black mass in Ohio, had drilled down through his skin and had wrenched at his intestines, drenching him in his own sweat and filling his being with the sheer terror of a fast-approaching cliff wall with no hands on the wheel. He had shat his pants in the Porsche, trailed vomit out of the window, horizontal streaks at speeds that could not deliver him back to the hotel fast enough. He had been sloppy in his desperation, pulling over in a moment of panic and getting his fix right there on the side of the road. Cheerleaders and school kids, Rob? How could one allow oneself to sink to such a contemptible state? He imagined Niki’s cherub face pressed against the sun-baked glass as the school bus slowed before passing, his virgin eyes bearing witness to the horrors of man. He hadn’t anticipated the score to be so steep. And that single miscalculation nearly delivered him a final answer to the question that in him festered, as it does all men who have walked this Earth.
Rob’s hand fumbled in his pockets, the anxiety quickly ebbing. His fingers found the bag, then the lighter, the syringe with its dirty needle still attached. A second arrival, an exhalation, this release longer than the first. He had grabbed a spoon with his last beer, sensing then what he knew now. There was only one way to stay ahead of the rabbit, close enough to the dragon but not so close to be burned by his fire.
He measured out the white powder more carefully this time, almost counting the tiny grains on the metal spoon. The purple and yellow rings of metal on fire. The boiling bubbles rising up from somewhere unseen. The shrinking of the liquid through the needle’s tiny mouth. The backflow of blood, laminar flow, waves of red like mushrooming clouds formed in fast-forward on some blessed mountaintop, and then all in reverse. The delivery home, a return to normal, life sheds its black cloak and is livable once again.
Rob lifted himself from the couch, fighting every urge to stay put and ride out the night. A single impetus filled his being, ignited him like a raging fire that drives the turbines that move all of humanity. The shuffle of loafers on each step, kicking forward and then lifting. The arcing stairway curved around the entryway in its ascent, shining white marble falling away. An outstretched arm, an ugly hand on a spotless door. A crack that slowly grows, the incandescent glow from the hall spilling in. Its triangular blade casts Niki’s face alight. Radiant, beautiful, unsullied, tranquil, abundant, serene, perfect. Rob felt his chest swell with all of these things, instantly pressing all of the nastiness that lived within him through his pores and out of his body. It dripped now down his skin and coalesced in a pool around his feet. He stood within it for as long as his legs would allow, feeling his knees buckle once and then again, falling asleep as he leaned on the doorway in moments between the ecstasy. He would not push beyond the threshold, could not pollute this sacred purity with his wretched and soaking soul. Nor could he move away. And so he stood there for what Rob hoped would stretch to an eternity.
The dragon would soon be in control, and Rob’s vision flashed in a terror of Niki waking up to find his father’s swollen and pale mass huddled lifeless on the floor, a heap in the doorway between his bed and the world. Rob gathered all of the good that remained within to will his body to leave that magical moment and walk away from the light. His shuffling loafers through the hall, dry again having sucked the puddle back through their soles. It is only a transient cleansing the presence of angels allows.
His hand on a second door, this one less clean. A push, a passing through, an approach. His shadow now blocked the wedge of light spilling in through the hall, blanketed his wife in a now-welcome darkness. The filtered light of a waning moon in the west trickled in through the white cotton drapes, dancing skirts in an ocean’s breeze. This, another of the countless battles, he hot at night and she skinny and heatless. She had left the window open anticipating his arrival, despite her chill. An angel still, even when starved of love and strangled from her girlhood dreams of family, happiness. He lifted the duvet and covered her naked shoulders, ignoring the urge to lay a kiss upon her cheek that would say sorry in a way his words could not.
But she would not want a kiss. She would only want to be left alone. It’s a tiresome grind, filling the days with nail paintings and dress fittings and mimosa sippings in the tireless endeavor of chasing dragons away.
Rob walked over to the window and latched it tightly. The long white skirts ceased in their dance and now hung limp in the window. A thousand tiny moons reflected in the undulating sea below, lighting a path that led away from this room, away from this window, to some far away promise beyond the horizon’s curve. Everywhere else, a million more reflections of space and its infinite blackness, the sea a mirror of heaven sprawled below like a carpet. Tom moved from the window to the opposite side of their shared bed, not bothering to peel back the sheet. And then he collapsed in a heap, grateful to have navigated through another day.