But he’s right. I have blown it. The situation falls apart in my hands like a mouldy rose. God starts ranting: “The rage of Marcodel released … The triumph of Death … Now is the moment …”
And, panicked, I am fighting to stop thinking: … the canyons of the ear that lies there on its side, have poisoned several of the parks, and yet the hideous thunders …
God has worked himself up to a fever pitch. Cerone’s eyes are pleading with me. All around the grocery, men’s eyes are turning to the picture window across the street, waiting, waiting …
“God,” I shout, “stop this right now!”
He stops. The entire room is a held breath. We are all now waiting, our eyes on nothing, our ears pricking, waiting for the shots.
I take a big swallow. “Look,” I say, “it’s time to come out. Come out to me.”
I hear God crying, fighting for air. “Why should I?”
“Because I’m your friend …”
“Oh yeah.”
“And I love you. I’m your friend and I love you,” and I am and I do, “that’s why.”
Grimly, finally, he answers: “I don’t know you, Samantha.”
“That’s not true, God. That’s not true and you know it isn’t.”
“I don’t even know what you look like.”
“Come out, then, and see.”
“I don’t even know what you look like.”
“You know what I am like.”
He screams, raging, crying: “I don’t even know what you look like!”
I am about to describe myself when I am suddenly as sure as if it were the written thing that if I do, the massacre will begin.
Instead, I say, “If I show you, will you come out?”
And, like a sulky child, he answers: “Show me.”
“Hold on,” I say.
I put the phone on hold and set it down.
“What?” says Cerone.
I am staring at the paper on the butcher block, clicking the pen in and out in my hand. Should I write down what I have beforehand, just in case? Does it matter? When I have fears that I might cease to be …
Somebody calls quietly from further down the deli counter: “He wants her to go out there,” and I realize, with a sense of violation, that someone else has been listening to the call.
“I have to show him my face,” I tell Cerone.
“No,” says Cerone.
“There is no no.”
“There is no, and it’s my no and it’s no,” says Cerone. “Talk to him some more.”
I look up from the paper. “I can’t reach him. He’s gone beyond me. I have to show him my face.”
“No,” says Cerone.
“He’s about to start,” I tell him. “I know him. He’s about to start. Methodically. Calmly. He’s not even upset anymore. I could talk to him when he was upset. He’s calm now—I calmed him down. Now, he’s going to kill them.”
Cerone turns to another plainclothesman. “Get them ready to go in.”
I stand up.
“No,” says Cerone.
“I won’t talk to him anymore.”
I look in his eyes. Damp, worried eyes. He is, I realize, a nice man. Somewhere behind the deli counter, I hear another man murmuring, talking to God, telling him to hold on, to wait for me. Cerone considers, shakes his head: “We’ll talk to him.” Then, apologetically: “Listen, Mrs. Clementine, you’re the A.D.A.’s wife, you know?”
“Yes,” I say, “I know. Believe me, I know whose wife I am. And if I don’t show God my face, he’s going to start—he’s going to start any second.”
We are studying each other—looking into each other’s eyes—trying to find out everything about each other in the space of a second. But I am certain of only one thing: I have nothing more to say to God.
Then someone calls: “Captain, I think she’s right. He’s getting ready to blow.”
Cerone takes a deep breath. Quietly, he says: “Okay. Tell him she’s coming.”
And it happens in a moment. Cerone has me by the elbow, he is marching me outside—mothers’ faces, cars, cops’ faces, guns—all are rushing past me.
“Step out in front of the blue car,” Cerone is telling me. “I’m going to count to one and grab you.”
I feel he is propelling me out there—as if I had not demanded it—against my will. Don’t make me go, I am thinking. We are passing one car after another, and then there is the blue car coming closer and closer and beyond it the open street before the daycare center. We are there.
“I love Arthur,” I say.
“I’ll tell him,” says Cerone.
And then I step out in front of the blue car, and I am standing about twenty yards from the center and the blank-faced picture window, and I am—I feel I am—I am sure I am—eyeball to eyeball with Marcodel.
Later, the reporters will ask me what I was thinking when I stood out there. When I stood out there for that one long moment, when finally, finally, my imagination grasped what I am, what this is, this Samantha, this temporary machine, this eternal consciousness a trigger-pull away from nothing. When, finally, I knew, if he shoots me, I’ll die; if a bullet the size of my thumb tears into me, I will be sod and pavement. No clarity of soul appeared in that moment to manifest its divergence from even the curling of my pubic hair; no billion cells called out their independent lives; no time proclaimed itself an illusion. Only this one moment of Samantha arose with its possibilities for every good thing. That was all. They will ask me what I was thinking, and they will already have asked me the name of my book of poems, and there will be TV cameras and everyone will be waiting to write down what I say, and the simple fact is: I will succumb. I will tell them I was thinking: I’ve got to do this for those kids.
I am thinking: Here I am please don’t kill me God here is my face don’t kill me please God here I am don’t kill me don’t kill me God here’s my face don’t kill me …
And then Cerone grabs me and pulls me back behind the car.
I am, I guess, in shock. I am in a daze and my eyes feel as if they have been propped open with crowbars as Cerone marches me back past the startled gazes of the policemen crouching everywhere.
Within seconds, the bright summer sun is extinguished—we are in the grocery again—and I am standing in front of the phone. I stare wildly at the phone. I stare wildly at Cerone. Cerone’s face and his collar are drenched with sweat.
“Lady,” he says, “you’ve got balls.”
“Let’s not discuss it,” I say and pick up the phone.
I start to speak and then I glance down and see the pen is still in my hand. And suddenly it all breaks loose, breaks loose in its completeness, irresistible.
The phone to my ear, without saying a word, I begin scribbling on the legal pad as fast as I can.
“Captain,” someone calls, “He’s not saying anything.”
“What the hell are you writing?” Cerone asks me.
Helpless, I laugh.
Someone shouts: “Captain!”
Everyone—me included—glances up at the front of the store. Across the street, we see two women peeking cautiously out of the day care center. Then, they step onto the sidewalk and all at once, they are followed by a swarm of toddlers in bright summer clothes. Chubby little boys and girls with inquisitive faces are everywhere and their legs are rising and falling clop-clop in a drunken march as they waddle into the sunlight. I hear the cries of women nearby, and men’s shouts of thanksgiving. Then, policemen are rushing forward to drag the babies out of the line of fire. I am glad.
I continue writing:
The great beast falls
And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted
To the holocaust skies
Extend their arms to catch
The fragments of his body’s empire.
Ceremonies will begin at noon
To obscure the faded thrill
Of his falling and falling,
But still, we see:
T
his eye, this shattered eye
Has sprinkled on the grass,
Yet nothing is in fragments that we knew,
And where his phallus fell
There grows a naked tree—
How we scrambled to the top like monkeys!
Brimstone vapors pluming from the gaping lips
And curling through the canyons of the ear
That lies there on its side
Have poisoned several of the parks,
And yet the phlegmatic thunders
Of the legs falling and the arms falling
And the trunk severed at last by the vaginal incisors
Falling and falling
Did not make of our lake a fire:
We still are diving there as we did once,
Naked and white and clean of hair,
Nor have we forgotten the old men’s stories
Of the child who drowned in the sludge at the bottom,
Nor have we ceased our seeking him,
Skimming over the bass-woven underweeds
As we watch ourselves from the tops of the branches,
Hearing the splashing and the laughter and the cries
Carried from where we play to where we play
On the bare bosom of the old spring breezes.
It does not seem very long, and I cannot tell yet whether or not it is good. All of them seem good at first, but most of them end up buried in the drawer. At any rate, I am free of it. I am done scribbling by the time God comes out—a tall, fat man in a gray sweatshirt stained with grease. A long face with the jaw hanging open stupidly as the cops frisk and handcuff him. Sad, idiotic eyes searching for me over the top of a car, before they push him face down onto the hood.
They would not let me talk with God before they processed him, except to assure him I’d be with him later, which I did. He nodded dumbly, dazed. I don’t think he knew who I was.
After the press and a lot of thankful parents blessing me, the cops drive me back to Manhattan, and I ask them to drop me off at the Plaza so I can walk home. They tell me they have been trying to reach Arthur and have finally caught up with him in Brooklyn somewhere and he is on his way which I am glad of because I figure I have a solid two hours of hysterical tears coming to me.
I walk under the canopy of trees beside Central Park, giving my purse a Lanskyesque check every now and again to make sure my poem is still in it. I have just reached the museum when I see a cab pull up in front of our apartment building and Arthur gets out. I cannot make out his face where I am, but I can tell from his gestures that he is harried and frazzled—he is worried about me. I cup my hands to my mouth and give him a rebel yell.
Arthur turns, sees me—and runs out in front of a downtown bus, three crazed cab drivers and a stretch limo. They miss him: this is my lucky day. I am running as fast as I can past the museum toward him, already gearing up for my well-earned tears.
Then Arthur is on my side of the street and he is running toward me calling my name and I am running toward him, past the fountain, with my arms out and then—
Then—when we are about fifteen steps away from one another, a drop of water from the fountain flies twirling into the air between us, and I see it as it catches the sun, and I feel my body wash into it and I feel Arthur’s body wash into it, too, and for a second, for a second in that drop of water spinning and flashing in the sun, there is nothing at all but the solid flow of my body into his and his into mine and ours into the body of everything, the solid, flowing, fleshly mass of everything forever. Just for a second, not even a second, except that there is no time, no time or space, just matter, matter forever, matter in love with itself, matter in love with itself eternally, and even when it is over, even though it is over in the very instant of infinity in which it began, I embrace my husband, finally, not in tears, but with a surge of crystal, pristine, perfect faith, thinking:
Come to me, come to me, Arthur. Come to me, all of you—all my darlings. I am Samantha Clementine, and it is going to be all right.
Trust me.
Trust me.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Andrew Klavan
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2352-8
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Andrew Klavan, Darling Clementine
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