MASTADONAMUS
A man in the inner city named Ralph bends spoons with his mind. He’s sixty, claims the telekinesis developed recently. If it takes that long, well, maybe I’ll cut out the steaks. He’s no vegan, though, but he cares for some cats. I can’t get more specific, however, for the cats are variable. Solve for felis catus, solve for their retched urine smell. “Do you ever clean their litter box, Ralph?” But he’s too busy concentrating. He newly conceits forks, a code he’s yet to crack.
His apartment hangs on the fourth floor, over a busy street, crowded with honks. Ralph makes no moving plans, “At least I don’t need a swamp cooler,” and shrugs at the rent hikes. I don’t know where he gets the money for it since I’m fairly certain he has no job. He certainly doesn’t dress like one who does, constantly wearing something more fitting an Iroquois chieftain than someone dealing with the public. His means for his lifestyle remain an enigma to me.
For instance, I have no idea how much the four-foot by six-foot poster on his wall costs. Slapped on its gloss, a mix of neon pinks and fluorescent greens depicting a levitating Hindi elephant. “Mastadonamus,” he calls it, and when I point out its lack of fur, he shrugs. “It’s a lot like me,” he says between eye crunch sessions. “Extinct. Mystical.”
“You’re alive, though.”
“So are most extinct things.” He flips a National Geographic over to me. “See?”
“And what page would this be on?”
“Oh never mind.” He waves away his own suggestion. “Wrong issue. It’s in some other one.”
He lights incense and yawns as I cough, choked by the aroma. A particularly long car beep rattles my nerves. I ask for some coffee, and he gets a quizzical look on his face.
“I cheat sometimes.” I rub my burning throat.
“You’re the funniest evangelist ever.” He makes me a sweet tea, something he calls Bengal Spice. Maybe some tiger’s fur fuels it. When I fret aloud about whether he spiked my cup, he flexes an eyebrow.
“I cheat, but not that far,” I say.
“I just think it’s funny that your tongue thinks cinnamon is an opiate.” A cat rubs against his side, but he won’t pet it. In fact, he never shows affection towards these animals he feeds. Like they’re just as much ambiance as the incense.
My cajole for us to leave once he cracks forks elicits a grin from him. Don’t I know that could take another decade? So I say, “Well, do a spoon for me, then we can go.” So he grabs one from the cutlery spread across the picnic cloth next to him, a sheet covered with arabesque patterns of gold and bronze. He consumes a lungful of air, then exhales a hum, and as his body trembles, the metal dutifully bends, pressed forward by an invisible thumb.
I clap, then drag him out.
Cooking with Faith rings the name of the book whose author’s signing we visit. A double-entendre – a writer named Faith slipping simple, positive scriptural wisdom in with her recipes. Her plumpness rivals mine, and her smile, I admit to myself sheepishly, discomforts with its wideness like the grin of a shark. She gives a talk before the autographs, about how God inspired her steak soaked with cranberry juice. “And the Lord blessed me with seven wonderful children….” I sit at four. The number of Ralph’s progeny, if any, remains unknown.
“She’s tame,” he tells me as we step out for, as he puts it, “healing air,” until the initial author table surge dissipates. Mysterious fuzz floats in his bangs, as if he dissected a couch recently. I don’t have the heart to draw his attention to it.
“You prefer something more vulgar.”
“I’m not talking about propriety. She’s controlled, self-disciplined.” An apologetic, “I like her.”
“Where do you get all that from?”
“That practiced smile. That laugh she puts after all her own jokes, a cue for us to giggle along. She commands her crowd. A shepherd….”
His words bristle my cold skin, that he enjoys her fakeness. Is that what he’d become once converted, a salesman? A hollow flash of teeth?
Then he continues, “…a high priestess,” and I laugh, comforted. But I still veto his invite to a hookah bar. I can have a decaf malt at a nearby coffee shop instead.
When I come home, everyone sleeps. The eras of baby wails and whimpers at the door over nightmares have long since passed. Teenagers, all of them, requiring more sleep than sense. I tap my wife’s shoulder to wake her, but her snores continue unabated. Just as well, as she’d just applaud my evangelism without question, when I want her to be angry, to pause if given the choice between me and the Kingdom. Haven’t I been away too long? Don’t I deserve a harangue?
“Would you go to church with me?” I ask Ralph a few days later. His apartment again, the same scent of incense burning. A creature of habit, he maintains his bubble of a universe, a garden of eccentricities.
He pops up an eyebrow at me. “Do you want me to?”
My response catches in my throat, then comes out, “No,” sending my face down in embarrassment. With a single word, I’d forsaken my mission. Now where did we stand?
“Oh.” He picks up a fork. “That’s disappointing”
“I mean, would you have agreed to-“
“No.” A soft head shake that sends his wild gray locks to and thro. “That’s too much of a commitment.”
Anger bursts from my embarrassment. “What was the point of approaching you when you were reading the Koran in that park, then? What’s been the point of these last six months? What,” and I clap my hands against my face, “was the point of making me admit all that, that I, I-“
He turns the fork over and over in his hand, clearly ready to ignore me. “I wasn’t aware I’d signed an invisible contract when I became friends with you.”
Disliking his depiction of me as demanding faith-bleater, I go blunt. “It’s the disappointment part. What gives you the right when you’re not even interested?”
A close of his eyes, a tightened grip on the utensil. “I thought you wanted to share your world with me. Your heart’s not in these public speakers, I can tell.”
He lies correct on that but stays blind to the portion of my being that resides here in this room where perfume covers mold, beads cover doorways. Reside, though, too strong a word. Visitor. Guilty but gleeful, a form of vicariousness even as I refuse to wear his poncho literally or in spirit. My own form of marital affair.
“But,” I struggle out, “my world’s in a church.”
“Well,” a shrug, “I was never going to set foot on alien soil. Your world, after all, not mine. However,” sigh, “it’s the thought that would’ve counted.”
“Thoughts.” A bile-raising word. “Thoughts won’t clean out the cat pee in the carpet, Ralph.”
He takes a breath, exhales, brow furrowed, but no curve to metal. His habits tend to leave me waiting in half hours of silence, waiting for the session to end, a forced meditation. But my patience expires early this time. My weight holds me down on the floor, but not enough. Grunting, huffy, I exit, leaving his door unlocked as he foolishly always wants.
I avoid knocks on his door for a few weeks before I feel an ache for his companionship again. Yet no response to my pounds. I visit the coffee shop, his frequent retreat, but no sign of his silver cataract hair. Flustered, I order a drink, but absent-mindedly, my gaze lingers over the pamphlets and posters taped on the window.
On one of them, undeniably, is a photo of Ralph. We miss you, friend. He was an ever-present regular. The date of his death matches with four days ago. Blood flees from my face. I beg the barista, a café veteran omniscient of her patrons, for details.
A car had collided with his bike. An unremarkable death, no mystery, no exceptionality. Predictable, really. He’d always dismissed traffic laws. If I’d put away my pride sooner, I could’ve driven him to his desired destination that day.
“So awful,” the barista sighs as she wipes down a table. “A truly beautiful person. The estate sale is on Wednesday.” Of course Ralph would ignore a
ny need for a will.
I go in lieu of attending his funeral. Alone, though my wife blesses any purchases. Even with the evangelized gone, she still supports my attendance to him, as if buying his moccasins boosts his salvation chances. At his apartment, the crowd runs scant, and the barista, absent. The cats are gone, likely rehomed. A foal of a girl, with rose-tinted glasses and ten thousand necklaces, buys up most of the belongings. She’s likely his spiritual successor, though odds run against her ever having known Ralph. Likely, he would’ve had it no other way.
I spy Mastadonamus and snatch him off the wall. A couple packages of incense, also taken. Anything more would deny the sourness of our last meet, pretending we were chums until the end. When I get home, embarrassment burns within me, enough not to show the bounty to my family. Instead, I stash my trove in the basement, the room I always promise to organize, to explore and rediscover its contents fully, but never do.
Yet an opportunity does arrive seven years later. All my offspring are freed from the house, and my spouse and I face down a cramped one bedroom to retire in. Despite all my adamant hopes, my weight has only multiplied, and my doctor’s lectures have grown sterner. I stare down at a life highlighted only with lawn mowing and golf meets. The church, once a single world in my solar system, now promises to be my only outing outside of errands. My wife insists otherwise, but I can’t shake the feeling that my life is over, reduced to waiting for a heart attack.
A foolish sentiment, I chuckle to myself as I work on downsizing the basement’s largess. I’d thrive in retirement, surely. Achieve that diet. Achieve that discipline of prayer. I toss into the trash bag a clump of photo albums never filled, of notebooks I’d forgotten to send with the kids to college. Surely, a bit of imagination would cheer my gloom soon enough.
Opening up a plastic bin, I squint at a rolled-up scroll inside. Unfurling, I reunite with Mastadonamus in all his surreal glory. With a bemused sigh, I jettison him into the garbage bag. No room for him where I’d go next.
That left the incense packets. I open up one, breathe in its fumes. An itch in my nose, and an old queasiness. The last I have of Ralph, a form of funeral urn. Surely he deserves remembrance. Surely the days I spent in his company amounted to more than nothing, more than a void. He was the hedonism I never lived through. He was the pagan that I, a religious scribe, wrote Beowulf about a century or so later, an envied mythos.
And yet. And yet not my world, but a repulsive one. One supposedly damned, supposedly useless. But even outside theological limits, a world I could not understand, never would. To do so would to not be me. I could buck our definitions, but I’d lose my identity in the process.
A part of me weeps. Just like I wept in fear of him losing his Ralph, his aura, should he step into my world. Which begged question if my world was worth it. But it is. I love my faith.
I’d wanted him damned. I’d wanted him damned so I could enjoy his eccentricity.
I throw the incense into the trash.
A BARREN FIELD
A terrible frost has folded up your garden
Now it’s a dried mixture meant to be gelatin
But clearly not, feel pride in your failure
There’s very little else you can salvage feeling from
Every tear, saved, placed in a reservoir
But that doesn’t rescue the flowers either