Misty cones of diffuse yellow-white light hung suspended in abyssal silence under widely-spaced lamps frozen at stiff, mute attention along the narrow streets. Far above these neighborhood streetlights, arching above the dark rooftops and unmoving tree branches, the cloudless sky was a perfect black shroud that had been spattered with heaping handfuls of watchful stars, perfect tiny spots of brilliance, hard and unchanging, too cold to twinkle. This whole rural town, like the pale, muted cityglow to the north, was drowned in breathless silence as though it were trapped inside a snowglobe -- only there wasn't any snow.
The advancing sound of regular soft footfalls began to insinuate itself into the slow, cottony inertia of this November morning's quietude. It was a steady trotting pace, and its source soon came into view: an early morning runner out jogging through the magical and pristine world when all reasonable people were home, safe in bed and fast asleep. He came steadily forward with a smooth, controlled tempo, this great bear of a man, his arms freely swinging, white breath puffing, his long, muscular legs carrying him right down the center of the empty street. His physique was brawny but graceful, somehow more suggestive of a dancer than a brute champion. He wore white running shoes and white shorts and a faded maroon Missouri State sweatshirt that had, years ago, featured an enormous bear's head emblazoned across the chest.
The runner's eyes were fixed forward, and his gaze did not wander as he ran. Percival Blake knew his landscape intimately: Gooch Road, Golden Meadows, Paradise Drive, Mesa Drive, Nichols and Firefly, Inman, Butterfield and Foxx, Ballard, and all the rest, Birch and Hickory and Juniper beyond Gregg Road, Crestwood and Pembrook and Paddington to Norton beyond. His feet found a new route through the tangles of this bushy patch of nascent suburbia every morning, but there was no getting lost. It was his landscape and he experienced it like a double exposure, his home, his patch of private sanity hiding in plain sight from the broken world just beyond his skin, a world threatening at every moment now to slip away into unchecked madness, its false idols sculpted from salty sandstone on the shores of a Dead Sea lately called forth to flood a sinful world. The words of a rhyme flashed through his mind in time to his footfalls:
Way down in Zeboiim don't the wind blow cold
Way down south in Zeboiim don't the wind blow cold
Salty statues rise up from the waters
Mobs with pitchforks don't want your daughters
Down in Zeboiim
He was not thinking sharply yet. His thoughts were not tightly focused; in fact, he strove to maintain a deliberately unfocused mind during his morning run. There was no need for that kind of office lucidity. Indeed, he relished this overture to the day before the sharpness and intellectual keenness commenced its preliminary incursions like rosy rising light in the East, tentatively lighting up higher cognitive functions. Plenty of time for that later. His morning jogs were intended to prime the circulation, to enhance and steady his breathing in time to the metronomic pumping of his thick, powerful legs, like a mental stretching exercise to help rouse his brain. He considered this constitutional to be a spiritual yogic practice. Steady on, steady, heart and arteries pulsing with rich, oxygenated blood like a firebox and its attached boiler tubes, arms pumping, legs pumping, driven by continuously cycling piston rods. Running smooth. Perceiving the world as through a biconcave lens where all light beams diverged, out and away, out and away, dimming all. Allowing no preconceptions to take hold and demand particular primacy or salience. Diverting. All ideas and conceptions diverting. This exercise was, as he saw it, a useful method for achieving perspective, or at least reaching outwards for perspective. Nevertheless he found during the last few months, to his irritation, that certain images persisted in intruding on his uncentered awareness as he ran. They would start to coalesce among the unexamined roots of his consciousness, and as they threatened to rise up he would force them back down, repress them. Sometimes he had to pick up his pace and run a little bit faster than he preferred. The extra exertion usually did the trick, and after a block or two he would drop back town to his normal pace and stay there at least for four or five more blocks before it became necessary to repeat the process.
Around him all the houses were like lonely hulking sepulchers widely spaced along these young streets: gloomy, black, slumbering skulls capped by enormous silvery-white roofs uncognizant of the passing night. They might as well be houses sheltering frightened Jews, maybe, with blood-smeared transoms over massive doors, fearfully sheltering down in place and awaiting the black breath to pass them by. He knew that black breath; he could feel it in his own lungs as he ran, no matter how cold the night. The houses were black mounds centered in silvery-gray plots of an elfin land newly recovered from the surrounding untamed countryside. Civilization unscrolling at its subconscious periphery, expanding, encroaching on wild lands of weeds and small rodents and insect intelligence, of cricket chirps and plantive bird calls, paving over all with straight lines and Euclidian exactitude. The stars above him were hard white points or judgmental eyes; no, they were not white; they had color if you only paused to notice. Dimensionless points, that was how they were seen if they were noticed at all, not roaring, chaotic cauldrons of seething nuclear fusion, squeezing down new heavy elements down lifespans that reduced human history to a meaningless blip. How deceptive the common view. How myopic and egotistical. These blessed, cold, quiet, black nights when the sun's chariot disappeared roaring on the far side of the planet brought the relief of lethargy. Forgetfulness. Narcotic indolence and the blessed stupefaction of the senses pervaded this neighborhood just like all the other tombs of a nation of sleepwalkers who had been uncomfortably jolted from their dreams of dreams. How thankful they were to crawl back into the coffins of the night, to deaden the senses with alcohol and television. He saw it every evening when he came back home: the silver-gray glow of the reassuring sedation. Soma delivery devices. Like cigarettes. Drug delivery devices. The blessed euphamisms by which horrors may be muted and swallowed like tepid tea. Satisfactorily bland, thank you. Night, night.
On he ran, up the rise of low hills, down the far side, through a perfect young American suburb. So clean and uniform and immediately replicable and comfortably forgettable. Expedience unencumbered by charm or character. All practical and formulaic. Cut it out of this corner of America and replace it with any other corner. Unnoticable switcharoo.
The sleepers inside were equally interchangable middleclass workers. Well-fattened and generally satisfied. Their complaints about their bosses were rubberstamp. Many of them were bosses, grousing over the rubberstamp complaints of their subordinates. Day into night into day into night into day into night.
The double exposure. The snowglobe world, and the land of the dead.
White asphalt shining in starlight. Low white curbs holding back a low flood of uniform green-brown winter-dead lawns. Uniform mailboxes on upright posts and basketball hoops overhanging long cement driveways. White propane tanks on the sides of low rolling mounds. A few big red trash bins out curbside in anticipation of the morning's garbage pick-up. Brick facades and white steel garage doors and far-spaced streetlights and young trees tethered to the ground lest the spinning planet fling them all into the oblivion of outer space.
Coming up over a low rise he noticed an unusual lump mounded up by the curbside ahead. His pace slackened and he trotted over to inspect the discovery. His footfalls slowed to a walk, then he stopped. He gazed down into the ruins abandoned there.
A dead cat.
It was dark in color, dark gray or black. It looked like it had been big in life, but it could be that it was bloated. But there was no smell of death, and it would not be long left dead on these streets. Probably it had been killed during the night, he thought. He saw how matted the fur was on its crushed back legs. Yes, now he saw the wetness from the blood. A fairly recent kill. It was dead, though, not still lingering on. It was lucky that way at least.
He straightened up and looked around. The same dead houses he'd been running past. No one stirring. He thought of some child whose pet wouldn't be coming home. He recalled that stabbing pain from his own childhood. Then abruptly he recalled an incident in Bethesda. It had happened near their house. He'd come outside in the early evening to get the newspaper, and he saw the car coming down the street. It was odd because the car was veering steadily across to the left side of the road. He saw the woman behind the wheel of a shiny tan and cream Ford Bronco, probably in her mid-forties, he thought, with her left hand clearly visible directly in front of her face, heel of her palm firmly anchored to the steering wheel as though she were using it as a gunsight. The car whooshed past, coming back to the righthand side of the road, its tail lights vanishing beyond the corner, and then where the car had been he saw the cat. This time, though, it was mercifully already dead.
Gone to cat heaven. Is there a great spiritual paw waiting to reach out and snatch away his feline soul? Or is it just another portal to be crossed? Like the Hindus believe. How many days before transmigration? Forty-nine? Something like that. No one here to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead over another cat left dead on the side of the road. They must find their way without a spiritual guide. But a cat must not require the same spiritual guidance that a human being does. How many sins can a cat commit during its life? It's certain to ascend to a higher spiritual plane. For us it's less certain. A human being can rise or fall. In fact maybe the higher you ascend, the more likely you are to fall. What goes up.
Standing there staring at the dead cat in the darkness. He looked up and around. So silent without his running. His breath was coming back. The houses nearby frozen and sealed over like all the others. It's the unspoken thing in microcosm, he thought. The absent hand of God. Where. . . ?
There was no time for that kind of introspection. This was an era of crisis. Immediacy. Take action. Take charge now. We'll worry about everything else later. But now. . . .
He looked back down at the dead animal. What troubled him was the thought that the children whose cat it was might discover this useless relic in the morning when the sun came up. What could be done? He did not relish the thought of hauling off the body himself, although maybe he could stop by in the car. Not that he realy wanted to do that either.
Then he remembered the bulky cellphone in his pocket. It was heavy and always in the way and he never thought to turn it on, but Isabel had wanted him to carry it. He took it from his pocket. Battery probably dead, he thought. But it came on when he held the button down. What's the number for information? he thought. Not 911. It's 411. Answer any question. Help on the way. He punched the number in and shortly was forwarded to county animal control. No one there after hours. Leave a message.
He found a mailbox and read off the address, stressing that they should try to come early before any children were up and about. Maybe they would understand, he thought. But although they might understand, he knew they wouldn't make a special trip. Another dead animal. A low priority call.
He shut the phone off and put it back in his pocket.
Nothing to be done.
He looked to the east. Was there the slightest hint of paling in the sky? No, he didn't think so. It was still too early. But it would not stay early. He should start back for home.
He returned to the center of the road. He pushed his sweaty-cold hair back from his eyes and turned around the way he had come. He made a few rolls of his fists in the air and pumped his legs in place a few times before leaning forward and resuming the run.
His stride was disrupted. It lacked the effortless, unthinking simplicity to which his limbs were accustomed. Ripples had spread across the smoothness of his mind and they began breaking up into more complex patterns. The yoga was over. He was slipping into a daytime kind of awareness. It occurred to him how differently the mind comprehended the world at different hours of the day. Why was that? Perhaps it was connected to hormones. Adrenal flows and ebbs. A mind, or an ego, was itself a spectrum, made for different perceptions depending upon the angle the sun made with the zenith. Strange. To be a continuum of different personalities spread out over the clock, blending into each other so that you did not even notice how many people you truly were. But sometimes you were shocked in a certain way, or you saw things that came at the mind like a prism, breaking up your thinking, redistributing the ego. He was not seeking thoughts, but he felt thoughts beginning to rise and compete for his attention. Morning coming on too soon, maybe squeezing in more time now that would be stolen away at a later hour.
A woman who intentionally runs down cats. What has to happen to a person to make her that way? And it was strange she was a woman. Men are violent. Many more men are in prison than women. Why? The dance of testosterone. Jiggling dancing molecular dance across receptors and synapses. And women give birth and must protect the next generation. Wired in like it or not. Feminism takes no account of molecular biology. Politics. And no matter what neuroses your mother suffers, she remains your mother. The original protector. Protectress. From the threats of the world.
Running. Running on.
The images came back, and he could not repress them any more.
People like birds, spreading their arms, leaping into the sky. Where was the hand of God?
Maybe God was there. Maybe they saw him smiling gently, beckoning, encouraging, dispelling fear, come to me, come to me, before they stepped outside, stepping across the jagged broken glass threshold, putting feet down into an open sky waiting just outside the black smoke and flesh-eating flames of the burning towers.
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