Zig. Hugo PhD Yabner
page in that novel of faces. An unfinished manuscript like Gogol or Kafka. This moment, you understand, was not just me missing out on a proper departure. This was an inability to validate all that before. The man became rhetorical. That lack of a face lying there in the casket. It seemed to wash over all our past facial conversations, swooping down like a flood of banality over those beautiful countenances. The images were replaced by a void where dubious credulity and worship dwelled without hope. Like poems being tossed into a fireplace. Only the emotions they evoked could remain in the reader’s memory, but the grand words that drew them out were now all gone. Just that banal face. The dead face of Mr. Thomas Biddler, tormenting any memory that savagely yearned to validate my respect for the man. I can’t even picture it, Stag. How awful, to have seen something so intricate and magnificent and have it effaced by the very same damn thing.
I hold onto his memory closely. I believe in the memory of what he said. I believe in what that face was capable of. But I will never know it. You understand?
What is the difference between science and faith? The answer?
How much you know.
You see, Stag? I may not know what I saw, but I know that I saw it. It was in the face. But the secret’s dead now, the science forgotten. Now I only have the faith of my memory. The faith that that face was so articulate. He was, when alive, the only man I have ever met capable of conveying essays with eyebrows, haikus with hairlines, philosophy with philtrum, and soliloquies with ear wiggles. And you will be damned sure that that is gospel to me.
“That’s beautiful, Zig. Very romantic.”
What? No, Stag, no. That wasn’t the romance. That was just where I met her. Her.
Geraldine. That was the first time I saw her. At the cemetery. She, too, was coming from a funeral. We met eyes under an old oak, nestled in the nook where two rolling hills converged, she from the west and I from the east.
Oh, what a wonderful beauty, radiating, emitting this comfortable, this intimate… what’s the word? Aura, or whatever those hippies call that thing that follows someone around and predefines them. She had a very intimate one of those. Like a sign that had a giant arrow pointing at her and saying, “This, ladies and gentlemen, all who can see and all who care to see, is the closest thing to a real human being.” If there were ten thousand people on one sidewalk, and you needed to ask for directions, she’d be the one you’d ask. Not because she was plain, quite the opposite. You wanted to talk to this one. Geraldine invited humanity, wanted to taste it all, see it all. But she wasn’t an ambitious cunt, no. Eager, maybe, but not ambitious. She was precious, understanding, almost timid if it weren’t for that passion she pounced on everyone. Downright beautiful. So simply put, it gave new meaning to the word beautiful. She was what the word was meant for, but because we human beings have all gotten so ugly we whore out the word beautiful like we’re starving pimps.
You ever think about that, Stag? How ugly humanity has gotten. And exponentially uglier, too. Where once you could talk up a stranger with no qualms, now everyone’s in a shell. It’s like we’re these ships sailing around an ocean and we’ve lost all our radios. Come in, come in, I say. No signal, damn. We’re all shrieking mayday in that little radio, but the signal’s gone. Technology’s what’s done it, I tell you. It’s made everything immediate, entitled everyone to be a connoisseur. God damn if we all should have been so entitled. So what happens? We satiate our curiosity. In a snap, too. Click, bam. Like that, we can write off some athlete or musician or book or what have you. Hell, we can even write off an entire nation! Based on what? Immediacy. Well, what’s immediacy, really? It’s abridgement. Succinct details. No substance. It’s like looking at a cake and judging the flavor by the icing alone. Ha! Yes. We all just lick that icing off the cake, but we’re starving, malnourished because we never eat any of that substance, any of that bread within the cake. Like that damn kid with the hammer I was talking about, you remember? Beating that square block into the circular hole until it becomes mangled and incapable of being dealt with. Isn’t that it? That we incapacitate that which we choose not to tolerate. Intolerance based on cake icing, on glances. We’re hammering those square blocks. Oh my! Imagine. All of us, like square blocks ourselves, hammered into holes that we don’t fit into because we couldn’t look over the horizon and see the niche that we really could have nestled into. We fuck ourselves over, and by the time our sides are splintered and we don’t resemble ourselves, that’s when we start to debate our happiness.
See this, Stag? All these people are disappearing off the grid into pods, distant pods. Holes they’ve wedged themselves into. No more exploration, only consumption, postulating on second hand information, emulated sources. Just consumption and redirection until we’ve all turned around so many times we’ve spun on our feet like a screw and inserted ourselves, embedded ourselves on the one place we can now never leave. Everyone’s forgetting how to understand and learn from one another. They’re stuck to their spot, stuck in their pods, in their niche. Now it’s all just mingling, like we send out feelers, little tendrils to touch and peck at the other people, to tidy them up in a sentence or memory. Secured in our spot, running networks of these tiny tendrils and never actually making substantial contact, never actually moving. I can see it clearly. Dimly lit pods pulsing, breathing steady with little wires, fiber optics running between each other. All of it so dim, one pod to the next, tangles of thin wires. And all of it spread out over so much dark. It’s all so dark around the pods. What’s in that blackness, between the tangled feelers? What, do you think? Are we shrinking into ourselves, into our pods, and forgetting to cover all the ground between, all the darkness. Infinity is inward, I guess, not outward. So can that maybe mean that we’re doomed to do the shrinking, become more defined selves and forget what touch is? Until what? Until maybe we evolve into not so much separate entities, but new universes. One selfish fuck and all the rest turning themselves into universes. That might be glorious, eh? But why, then, can I only stare at the black in between and regret, watching those lights dwindle, implode on themselves until they’re seemingly nothing, tucked themselves away into their new nano-universes or what have you? I’m un-evolved, eh? Maybe. Maybe it’s sad to hold onto sentimentality, eh? Maybe I just can’t know (put that in italics), know like I used to. Maybe I am dwindling already and haven’t decided to direct my eyes inward. Maybe I’ll eventually see a universe that I can love as much as a touch or shared understanding between two breathing organisms.
But not likely. Not after Geraldine. She was the one pod in all that black that glowed bright, incandescent like a fucking sun blazing in the center of that string of Christmas lights spreading all their feeble feelers. As soon as you fell into her orbit, she had you for good. She taught you how to feel and understand again. How to know the eternity of a single moment. That was my biggest problem with her. The jealousy. Everyone that knew her either loved her or, if they had jaded that emotion, was so fond and intrigued by her that they acted strangely. Some even became scared of themselves after meeting her, if that makes any sense.
But there, under the tree, between the rolling hills, that’s where we met. It was green all around, I tell you. Green coming from so many bygone ages buried below saturates your eyes, as if every grass root has a story to tell, whispered to it from the dead below. It’s the secret to a full lawn, you know? Burying the dead underneath it. My father did that once. Special ordered cadavers to our residence to be buried below like fertilizer. Some neighbors complained about the smell, but he ignored them.
Picturesque it was. She and I, staring for quite some time, tongues sizzling but unable to move or express. No, no. Not love at first sight, but definitely something just as profound. Understanding at first sight. The one knew the other was in pain, in mourning. Yeah, sure, we were in a cemetery, but it was more than just that. The eyes spoke to each other, mine to hers.
We walked together for a bit, the two of us prone to follow the path of the shade from sparse trees around. It was her who spoke first. She looked up at one of the erected statues over someone’s grave and then that voice came out. Voice like a melody. But not any melody, the kind of melody you want to have in your ear during a winter eve, cozy by a fire.
“Strange,” she said. “I used to peruse this very same graveyard and admire all the architecture and statues. They didn’t mean anything then,