The Absurdity of Living

I spend several hours a day looking for a job online and doing vast amounts of cocaine. I do it on the kitchen table hoping that the Celestial Specialty Herbal Tea ad will play on my phone so I can see a woman I have never met and will never meet because in the inauspicious absence of anyone else, she has involuntarily become my dream woman. My reason for living. It is absurd. My life is absurd. I don’t even have a name for her so I call her Tea, which I sometimes I shorten to T. I even buy Celestial Specialty Herbal Tea, though I don’t like tea and it is overpriced, just so I can drink it and think of her in her green pants and yellow sweater, which just so happens to be my favorite color pattern. 

She does several different commercials. She is in a different place in each of them, like at the office, home, a park, and she pours herself a cup of tea and then cups it with both of her pretty hands. As she drinks she is transported to an entirely different place. One of colorful, abundant happiness. It is a death of sorts. An ascension to Heaven. I have also noticed she’s not wearing a wedding ring. I do another line of coke. It is all that keeps me going. Coke and delusions.

I lost my last job because I was late to work. Let me rephrase: I was excessively late to work. It was a colorless warehouse that inspired nothing and no one seemed to notice when I was there so I just kind of showed up when I wanted to. If in the morning I wanted to have an extra cup of coffee, or tea with T, or sit on my porch for a few minutes longer and listen to the prating of birds, or not stress with traffic that day, that is what I did. It seemed to be okay because I often worked overtime. When they took volunteers to work late a few hours to fill some remaining orders, I figured since I was already there, I may as well stay. The company shipped semi-truck parts and parts for Raytheon missiles that were put together in some other warehouse and shipped on to the supplier. It bothered me for a while. That the same part I picked from a shelf to be assembled might be the same disassembled part that some kid picked up from the ground after a drone missile strike killed his entire family. It didn’t seem to bother anyone else but me. It was just another piece of aluminum alloy. Then I guess it kind of just went away and I stopped thinking of orphaned kids and those orders being missile parts. 

No one said anything until 103 days later when some Billy Beancounter I had never met before brought me into an office I had never been in or knew to exist and said of 90 days on the job I was late 44 of them. It was the first time I felt noticed. He wore a polo shirt and had a comb-over meant to conceal male-pattern baldness and he was cleanly shaved. He had one of those dumb black titanium wedding rings to be different, but he was all the same. He was as absurd as a Polish sausage had it put on shoes and a shirt and got a job. He looked like he played golf and I can’t stand most people who play golf. I don’t know why, but they are frequently assholes of some sort, always talking about Tiger Fucking Woods as though it makes them less racist to like him, or their stroke, or that time they played some course I’ve never heard of where they were shooting the best game of their life until – goddamn it, it started to rain or their wife went into labor. Then that woe-is-me half chuckle burp and that whiff of moderate halitosis that sneaks across the room and fingers your nose. Then they go on and on about clubs and drivers and how much they spend on them and I am half sick by the time they ask me if I play.

There were no pictures on his desk. Nothing personal, which is incidentally what he said when he told me they had to let me go. There was no choice in the matter. We don’t tolerate tardiness around here, which was in your employee handbook, he assured me as though I might look it up. The whole way out of the building I was writing a manual on ineffectual supervision and cock-sucking middle managers whose ugly wives are probably at home banging themselves with dildos they got at one of those scintillating Passion Parties, watching gangbang pornography, occasionally thumbing the brown door. When I was a kid they sold Tupperware. They had Tupperware parties and women took off and reapplied the lids of bowls wondering if it would keep their macaroni salad fresh. If it would hold up. Stand the test of time. I think these heathens melted all the Tupperware down and made dildos.

I don’t do coke because I can’t afford it. I do imaginary coke. Piles and piles of it. I wouldn’t do it if I could because I don’t need it. Drugs are pathetic and absurd to me and have always seemed like a stupid thing to do. A weakness for weak people who can’t bear the absurdity of life and find reasonable love and happiness like the rest of us in this glorified egg hunt. They are the rats who never find the cheese. 

Watching addicted people, high or withdrawing, is pathetic and I would just stand there and watch them squirm like they were bereft worms displaced from the comfort of their mud. I had a job at a halfway house once right out of college. I worked nights and monitored the residents who were locked down. They were supposed to be sleeping. I quit that job because it was too absurd. I was supposed to care about them, feel pity for them, but I didn’t. I couldn’t care about anyone that does that to themselves and I think most of them do it because people care and give them excuses and so they go on and on for the attention until they die because death is the ultimate escalation and end-all of attention-seeking behavior. I don’t know where they go when they die. I don’t presume to know. I only know they don’t stay here.

That’s how they were. Those that I knew. They told me I would never make it as a social worker so I needed to find something else. Still I couldn’t escape people on drugs. They are like zombies. They find you. And whenever people talk about legalizing pot, like in Colorado or wherever, I always talk about legalizing coke because it makes them mad when they think I am serious. They say I am absurd and always ask me if I knew anyone who did coke and I say I know plenty of people. Damn good people, too. Then they get really mad. I don’t know anyone who does coke. I just pretend that I do. I make up names when pressed. If they really annoy me, I’ll argue for meth, too. I’ll even use phony Department of Labor statistics to argue my point in terms of the production of the workforce. At least, I argue, it would make people more productive.
 
I am tired of people talking about legalizing pot and their pot culture life just like I’m tired of golfers talking about golf and Tiger Woods. What they smoke, how they smoke it, their vapes, their dealer, their edibles, the medicinal benefits and its non-lethality. Someone once told me that pot cures cancer. I countered with the observation that Bob Marley died of cancer, and the conversation quickly ended. I sit there and just listen to them go on and on, drinking my beer, wishing that I could shrink and slip down inside the bottle and drown. They go on and on about the dispensary and their new bowl, their bong, and I am about half sick by the time they ask me if I smoke. No. I don’t. Then I am ostracized like some kind of alien or blue-footed booby amongst penguins because everyone smokes and everyone has that annoying affected drawl when they do like they are in a Cheech and Chong movie. Everyone smokes and the room smells like a jar of dying skunks and they laugh like they’re retarded about things that aren’t funny at all and I leave for the sake of my brain cells. So if it all comes down to some Twilight thing, some Team Edward or Team whatever the brooding werewolf’s name was, consider me firmly on Team Coke. Now and forever. XOXO. 

You can’t get a job on Indeed selling coke. But I would if I could. If it didn’t mean doing thirty years in prison or getting shot by some dirty white wannabe gangsta kid from the west side of somewhere who knows all the words to every Slim Shady song, sure, I would peddle coke. I would be fucking great at it. Qualify for some hoity-toity all-inclusive conference for top sellers in Bogota, or Nicaragua, or somewhere where they fly us in via a nefarious-looking helicopter, brown with orange stripes, where the trees below look like broccoli in a boiling pot. Sure, I was terrible at selling candy bars for school fundraisers growing up, but I was unmotivated then and I ate half my supply. I don’t do coke, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. I didn’t realize the value of a buck back then. My mom spoiled me. Raised me with a socialist sort of love. But I am motivated now. I’ve got bills to pay and a car that was just repossessed by the bank.

Maybe Pablo Escobar isn’t really dead and he would surprise us and be the special speaker at the banquet since we were all selling his coke, after all, making him billions of dollars while incidentally improving worker productivity all over the world. Maybe he would recognize me as a top seller and give me some kind of fancy badge or plaque and take me on a helicopter tour of Colombia with beautiful women in bikinis and introduce me to his hippos who would have names like Bandito, Grady and Esmeralda, and to his family, too. And maybe we would ride those hippos all around town like a couple of gringos, just the two of us, shooting Uzi machine guns at random things that both pleased and displeased us, doing lines of coke on the hippos backs. But again, Indeed doesn’t have jobs with that kind of opportunity and growth potential. Just more lame warehouse positions, bus driver jobs, sleazy car dealer jobs, and work-at-home scams.

To make matters worse, news broke of a new virus that was killing people in China, then Italy, and now here in the U.S. and all across the world. People were dropping like flies. It happened fast. It began in a small town market where they sold dead and living animals of all sorts. Dogs, cats, bats, rats, monkeys, whatever they could get money from, they sold it. You can eat their spleens, their testicles, their dicks, their ovaries, nothing is off the table and everything is a delicacy in China. The animals were skewered, boiled or skinned alive. Some were magic fertility drugs that would make you live forever, they said. It was absurd. It is apparently culturally insensitive to be critical of such blatant cruelty though, I was informed when my Facebook account was suspended. We don’t understand their customs, to which I retorted that I also didn’t understand the customs of Nazi Germany. So I suppose if I was alive in 1940, I should not have objected to that either, in that being culturally sensitive is supreme. It is not the same, she said. Those were people, these are animals. Therein, our true difference lies.

I have always felt like an anachronism. A time-traveler who got lost. An alien sent to Earth as a punishment for some egregious crime I committed on my home planet. I never understood people who eat meat. Not even when I ate meat. I was displaced and ill-informed, I will say at my trial, if there is to be a trial. Ignorant and desensitized by Ronald McDonald and that fat fuck Grimace. By convenience. I didn’t understand it and I felt like a Nazi officer putting on his uniform, his jackboots, and his little Nazi hat with the polished skull and crossbones insignia, looking all dapper as he sits at the table and eats his strudel and drinks his coffee to prepare for another day of casual mass extermination. But there would at times be a spark of recognition and realization of how cruel and wrong my actions were. What I was contributing to by my indifference and conformity.

Then that spark kindled and became a fire and I burned that invisible uniform and my old self and became someone new at the expense of normalcy. I was a person without an obligation to kill to fit in, for tradition, to appease my family at Thanksgiving, for gluttony, or for the worst reason of all, simple indifference of another creature’s suffering. How did it ever became normal? Rational? Acceptable? When did we accept the absurdity of it? To impassively eat what someone so cruelly kills for us and then to have the audacity to call ourselves animal lovers, or Christians whose entire ethos is one based upon compassion, mercy, peace and love – principles in dire and stark contrast to the practice. There must be an asterisk I missed in the scripture somewhere where the offer of mercy and love doesn’t apply to all. For some, but not others, apparently. There is nothing more absurd to me than indifference and hypocrisy. Or in being victimized by a virus directly linked to eating animals and not recognizing it, not changing because of it after thousands, maybe millions, drop dead like flies in a windowsill. It is a push to evolve, but people will instead march pridefully into extinction because they refuse to change and are afraid to be different than their neighbor or who they were yesterday.

The cause of the virus hadn’t got much attention, outside of animal activists who are mostly ignored anyway, but the origins were quite clear. Pangolins. Cute little pangolins, armored anteaters, which were being sold and consumed at those unsanitary Chinese markets. One thing people as a whole do very well is to dissolve themselves of any culpability like shrewd lawyers, saying it was because they were eating exotic animals, and not the specific ones that God put on this Earth for us to murder and eat. That is, if you believe that God designed animals to be raped, bred, and murdered for exorbitant profits in the sunless and crammed cruelty of factory farms at the expense of basic morality and the environment. Sad as it is, more than 3,500 years ago as part of observing the laws of the Torah, Jews in the desperate and austere world in which they lived, treated their animals much better than we do today. Even though they killed animals, they observed basic principles of mercy and kindness, which we do not. I will not go on with all the previous viruses and pathogenic outbreaks that came directly from farming and slaughtering animals. And I will not even touch on antibacterial resistance, which very well may be the coup de grâce someday. I will leave it alone. This is how I am at a party or one of those cookouts when I sit in a chair and say nothing at all and grin and bear the jokes about me eating leaves and grass. I drown in the absurdity that I am somehow the intolerant one.    

I’ve never met anyone in person who didn’t eat meat, much less one who is female, attractive and single. I don’t know if the Celestial Tea woman is or not. I should pen her a letter in care of the company. Being from Smalltown, Ohio, it has just never happened for me that way. They just do not seem to exist, and if they do they do not go to the places I go, or do the things that I do. Or maybe I unwittingly met some along the way and they never said anything because of the caustic reaction bringing it up invariably solicits, so thus we passed like ships in the night. I’ve dated several women that converted to vegetarianism simply because when we dated they were called to at least think about it as we shared meals at Olive Garden or Pink Cricket or wherever we ate. They changed by their own freewill because they too had a spark at that moment. I put no pressure on them to do so like some drippy encyclopedia salesman or some feckless dope dealer. There was no ultimatum or mewling on my part. No absurd petulance. They each said pretty much the same thing when they came to their decision to forsake the flesh of animals. I just never gave it any thought. 

Only one ex went back, as far as I know, but I’m not sure. They all might be eating hotdogs, slavered in grease, and wrapped in bacon somewhere. There is no reunions for me to know, and as I lied in bed half asleep, deep in thought, I thought of how bizarre that would be if there were. A reunion of exes at the VFW or somewhere with crate-paper banners and balloons and a discotheque mirror ball and a punch bowl for everyone to mingle around like thirsty timorous gazelles. And me, the fat-old crocodile, the guest-of-honor, whose face was on all the invitations, freshly bathed in mud, basking on the bank, blithely yawning. Occasionally, we might dance, speak of good memories and get awkwardly silent when bad ones arise. The mirror ball spinning. And the DJ, some fat guy who sleeps in tanning beds and smells of coconut oil and hot tub water, surveying the room to determine the atmosphere, so to tell when to inject something more upbeat and when to tone it down a notch or two. And as to honor the code of his profession, he looks for his own score amongst the sad picked-apart remains of another’s. The music he plays would be all the songs of meaning between me and them, and since I had carefully never conflicted songs, they each would be cued for my particular dance with just one lady with no dilemma.

But lost in the profundity and gaiety of my pre-sleep melancholic trance, I dangerously trespassed deeper and deeper into my subconscious and away from that VFW and that discotheque mirror ball and those women-of-matter, and I began to lose control of all thought the way I once did drinking E&J vanilla brandy in Las Vegas before going to the casinos that were like spinning space ships. I walked into another banquet hall next door, the Moose Lodge, where I was among fifty men of all sorts who gathered near the punch bowl, their faces sparkling in the casual rotations of another and even larger mirror ball. And there in a trashy ball gown, standing by the same sort of DJ, was a woman I used to date who was just in the VFW dancing with me to a slow Tom Petty song, tender-like, with respect and decorum.

But here in her reunion, as I presumed this rancid occasion to be, they were playing some dreadful country song that was dulcified with a sickening overabundance of phony Nashville twang, which was immediately followed by an insipid hip-hop song to which the beast who shall remain nameless immediately took her leave of the DJ and danced dirty with some happy-go-lucky blipster disgracing the honor of the Moose Lodge to the vile hoots and hollers of a confederacy of dunces she had as guests, who all but me wore emerald-green jackets, her men-of-matter, who had peppered her infelicitous and fetid existence before me, and some after I would presume because never was she in any danger of becoming a nun. And she looked like a drunk Bachelorette, lasciviously enjoying herself with her tell-tale bulbous red nose and glassy eyes, an obscene and gaudy corsage on her dress that was fat as a baby’s head, while those men whose number were too many to count as they were, like jitterbugging lice on a severely infested head, were happily waiting their turn at her the way wolves around a bloody sheep slaver for a bite. 

I found a glass and dunked it into the punch bowl and drank myself sick, ashamed to share any distinction with these goons who had all soiled her. These wildebeests. Why I didn’t leave, I don’t know. It was as though I couldn’t. It was like I had to drink all the punch in the bowl and stand there and take it. My ears being accosted with her atrocious twangy and illiterate playlist and my nose assailed by the stink of that herd of water buffalo and their pomade and beard grease and skunk pot and vapes. 

And then, as that other citrus-hued DJ, who was bobbing his head to the outro of a godawful Mumford and Sons song like he was sucking the cock of giant ghost, hit the button for our song and she mawkishly looked around for me. But I finished the last of that spiked punch and I fled for the exit, the path to which was littered with paper invitations with her absurd face on them. And in a dark and puddled parking lot of Subarus and Volvos, I was swallowed in a puddle and then woke up. 

I was in my room, my head pounding, in a dire state of bilious rubatosis, which grew increasingly deafening and nauseating. Thump, thump, thump. And as though suffering from delirium tremens, I rushed to the bathroom and purged the memory of it until there was only phlegm that hung from my chapped lips like crystal sequined curtains, and me, penitently on my knees before the indifferent pope toilet, querulously crying out to the plunger, begging for my life and sanity as though they just told me they were having an affair and were on the cusp of abandoning me, betraying me as I orally disemboweled myself, over and over. And there, I could see them at some seedy motel on the rim of the toilet bowl, parked under a neon No Vacancy sign, making out, the tiny things, eating babies.

I had never been so sick in my life and my stomach felt as though it had also left while it had the chance, leaving only the gritty film of its escape on the backs of my teeth like the mucus of a snail on a sidewalk. I was hollow and what remained within me was rapidly melting into a jelly-like goo that jiggled involuntarily. But when the exorcism of my guts was over, I didn’t feel the euphoria of the post-purge I had been accustomed to in the past. There was a dreadful pain in my lungs and they felt like two tin cans shot full of BB holes that were filling with phlegm and goo, too thick to drain, drowning me from within.   

But it wasn’t the dream that made me so violently ill. My body was vexed in a portmanteau condition. My sickness was predetermined and conspiring in me before I even thought to lie down. And the dream’s insalubrious progression was simply an acute physiological response to my body’s escalating illness, which was food poisoning, perhaps. Or maybe God was disciplining me for righteously crowing about my vegetarianism for it is not the way of a Christian to boast. Though I would argue that I don’t feel it was boasting, I am often wrong and I often err as I erred in my observations in that Moose Lodge when I was suddenly one of many, rather than one, the fat docile muddy crocodile, the bachelor rather than the bachelorette, if you will. I apologized to God like I always do when I realize my wrong. Like when I masturbated on the smiling faces of women in JC Penney catalogs as a kid. Or when I stole something of my brothers which was the extent of my theft. God, I began, I am sorry. I must have said that ten million times. So what was once more?

But my lungs felt better and my insides seemed to solidify to a capable and more controlled jell-o and give me some comfort. And as I lay in bed after the Fuji of my bowels belched her last gastric eruct, when the pleasantness of my abstruse introspection of the bizarre banquet hall dream wandered away and was devoured by the predatory jagged-tooth nightmare of a flipped script, I realized I was still unemployed. And how I would pay rent, bills, my student loans, and buy food was a matter of mystery that would certainly not solve itself. Oh, this obscene and absurd world! So back to the internet and on Indeed I went, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, until I found something, the slither of something.

Raven Grace Castle and Animal Sanctuary is now hiring! Pay commensurate with experience. Come join us in the most exciting and rewarding job you will ever work. Currently we have fourteen cows, six pigs, three horses, a dozen chickens, two ducks, a peacock, five stray cats and three dogs. Lodging available and recommended as the animals enjoy round the clock attention. Castle serves as a bed and breakfast and accommodates guests from all over the world. Many jobs available. Seeking enthusiastic, vegetarian, animal and people-friendly people to work year round positions.
 
The contact information followed, email and phone number, and I figured I would call in the morning. But as I lied there in bed, I drifted further and further away from sleep, rather than towards it. And my stomach felt as though it was now filled by some vitriolic mush like wet bread and I was still possessed with the unnerving feeling that I had been Thelma and Louised by my life and sanity. So I lied there in contemplation of everything since I was fired from the warehouse job by Mr. Beancounter in his Nike polo golf shirt, to selling coke for Pablo Escobar, to what I imagined that Raven Grace Castle would look like and how those creatures behaved, and what each was named, and how I would get along with such a menagerie of animals, being that I had never before met most of their kind and figured their temperaments would vastly vary. And in contemplation, I lied perfectly still and my entire body ached and even my eyelids felt sore and heavy when I blinked, so I tried not to blink. I tried to keep them shut but they burned like Hades when they were shut and so I thought maybe I was suffering from the flu, or maybe that Chinese virus the President was talking about on TV, the one that was killing people all over the world. And lying there I could not help but to feel that purpose had forsaken me, and something else I hadn’t felt in a long while.

I was lonely.

I could not sleep so I emailed the address on the advertisement and I told them a little about myself in the best way I could, recalling only the fuzzy things and leaving out the broken pieces of myself and my past, all my gutter balls, my lifelong consistency of underachieving. I attached my resume, which wouldn’t help me in that I worked at that halfway house and only a few warehouse jobs since college, but at least it was something. Really, the only proof that I was alive for the past few decades were a string jobs and W2s. I graduated college with a sociology degree and didn’t do anything with it, so the joke amongst my family and friends was that I may as well have gone to art school and had fun. I had a blue period after college when it was time to be responsible and to get a job and to pay back the loans. I had a Nietzsche period that I never shook. A Camus period. A Van Goghish breakdown sometime after that. My melancholy overwhelmed me. It was as though a dark curtain hung between me and happiness because everywhere I saw the absurdity of life, yet I could never say that life was without purpose. I felt certain there was purpose to be had, but that it simply alluded me. I don’t feel that I was significantly depressed, but sorrow draped me like one of those lead aprons they lay across you at the dentist’s office before they scurry out of the room and press the button to snap a picture of your naked teeth.

I was a nihilist for while. I dabbled. God was dead. Then he was alive again. I was one of those liberal indoctrinated hipster sponges in skinny jeans listening to shitty music because no one else liked it who couldn’t believe anything spiritually I couldn’t logically comprehend, though I believed plenty of other things I couldn’t rationalize any better. Like TV. Like an internal combustion engine. Like the internet. Like making a baby. But if I couldn’t put my finger on how God did it, then He didn’t do it. Aliens may have flown to Earth and built the pyramids, but God couldn’t have flooded it. He couldn’t have sent his Son to die on the cross for me. And a case for His existence wasn’t supported at all against my doubt in the cruel and unusual people who worshiped him church to church. Eating hams and lambs on Easter. Killing, killing, killing. Fucking, fucking, fucking. There seemed no virtue in the world. That it existed only in the innocence of a child for a while and the make-believe of Disney movies. It was in all of us until you observe enough of the behavior and attitudes of older people for it to evaporate, and then its either squished out of you in an instant, or extracted with a little pain and blood and put under a pillow like baby teeth, one by one until there is no more. 

That’s how I lost mine. One by one. My mom tried to preserve it for as long as possible, but she took on an impossible task and would have had better luck walking to the moon. I had a high-dose of curiosity and older brothers and there were mischievous kids at school who had been squished rather than extracted. There were Playboys and dirty HBO movies late at night and burgeoning whore girls up the street who french kissed in aluminum sheds and a lack of church. A lack of Jesus for some, but plenty for others. People are selfish with him. They put him in their pocket and refuse to get him out and sprinkle him around. As long as they have him, they don’t care who else doesn’t because it puts them in a private club of sorts. And it is like they have special jackets and a special handshake and all that, and you couldn’t get in unless you forced yourself in because your inclusion fucks with their exclusivity.

I knew that church existed. I saw the huge building with the white cross on top and I went there once in a while, but it was more like a biannual pilgrimage when I was woken and put on the Sunday school bus than a regular thing. That bus was white and blue and it smelled of house paint and crayons and horse hair and rotting apples and candle wax and stale pumpkin bread and hot rubber cement and a thousand stale farts all at once. And church smelled of dog breath and English leather and lilacs and vinegar and varnished wood and new carpet and old money and old people and polyester blouses and hair spray and spider eggs. I remember best, coloring pictures of biblical scenes. John baptizing Jesus. Mary and Joseph in the stable. David slaying Goliath. Jonah being swallowed by the whale. God’s greatest hits. I brought those pictures home and mom hung them on the refrigerator, then after some time they disappeared.

Oh, Jesus! I must be going to die, I’m writing about my childhood. I’m tying it all together the way people do on their deathbed, I would imagine. I’ve never seen anyone on their deathbed and I hope not to. I have managed to avoid that all my life, but I know from books that many find God as they lay dying. I found God when I was a healthy adult on two feet. When I got tired of throwing time away on women and alcohol and wanted something more than a hole the size of a hula hoop in the middle of me that I filled and filled and filled, but that never got filled at all. The women jumped through it like dolphins at Sea World. It was a magic trick of sorts, worthy a Vegas show. Now you see me. Now you don’t. I went to church and I slipped and I slipped and I slipped, but I didn’t slip for a long time, put together a string of several good years, and I thought I was okay, that my Donna Reed was right around the corner, but she wasn’t and I slipped again and found myself in yet another convoluted web. But in that web I saw the spider for the first time whose face was ghastly. He had eight bulging pus-filled eyes and in each was a chamber of Hell as though painted by Dali himself. There was a vile excrescence on his forehead which quivered as though it were a detector of fear. And he smiled and his teeth were like black jagged stalagmites outcropped from bloodstained gums, and in his mouth there were corpses and corpses like those in the pits of concentration camps, and his breath smelled like burnt hair and flesh and everything putrid and foul I can remember all in a potpourri of urine and excrement, but nothing I could ever describe adequately. It smelled like a prosperous infection.

God pulled me from that web and here I am. Unemployed, all alone, no car, in debt, lonely, and sick to my stomach, but free and happy because I am no longer at the mercy of that spider. I no longer have that hole in me and alcohol and loose women get no more of my time. I want nothing, chase nothing, and do nothing besides read and write and hope. I couldn’t be happier because I have given up on all material things, all things that simply don’t matter, and I trust in God with all my soul, I can say with certainty, though still I cannot explain Him. And the feeling of emptiness and the lack of purpose that had just haunted me, fled from me, and all I had was a hunger for purpose and a fulfillment I had not before experienced.

The phone rang and woke me up. It was near my face on the bed and it vibrated on its back until I picked it up and answered. It was early, I must have slept for a few hours and I immediately noticed that I felt fine, so I was happy the illness that ravaged me the night before relented so quickly. It was a lady on the line and she asked me if I was interested in the position at Raven Grace Castle still, and I perked up and tried to make it sound as though I wasn’t sleeping because I wasn’t sure what time it was and so I didn’t want to give the impression that I was an indolent oaf and start off on the wrong foot. Her voice was soft and pleasing and I tried to clear my throat without her hearing me and to use a more stentorian tone that would evoke a propitious impression of my confidence and attitude. But she simply asked me if I was me and if I was still interested in the position and when could I start if hired. I was surprised by the forwardness of her questions and for a moment, due to my lethologica, there was a gap of silence before she mercifully interjected, “Could you come today?”

It was the worst possible question she could have asked me because I had no car and wherever the place was, it had to be reasonably far because I hadn’t heard of it. So I apologized and told her that I had no transportation today, but I assured her that it wouldn’t be a problem in the future, and she cajoled me by responding that she would be happy to send a car to pick me up and asked me to confirm the address on my resume, which I did. “Would 10 am be alright, Mr. Hawthorne?”

“Um. Yeah. Yes. 10 am? That’d be perfect.” It happened so fast. I had no idea what time it was when she called and how long that gave me, but I blindly agreed anyway, feeling confident it was at least an hour away, enough time for me to shower and get dressed and to get something to eat. But then as though reading my mind about what I would eat for breakfast, she said not to worry about breakfast, there would be a meal served at the castle, a vegetarian meal, she added.

“Are you a vegetarian, Mr. Hawthorne?”

“Yeah. Yes, ma’am. Absolutely.”

“Good,” she replied pleased. “That is one of the prerequisites about working at Raven Grace. You must be a vegetarian or we simply cannot employ you. The animals would not allow it.”

I wanted to ask what she meant about the animals not allowing it, but I didn’t. She said she would send the car and to be expecting someone named Charles who would instruct me from there. After she hung up, I checked the time and it was 6:04 am. The elapsed time of the call was 4 minutes, meaning she had called me promptly at 6:00 am, which I thought was most unusual. I thought to go back to sleep, but I wasn’t tired so I showered and looked for my social security card in drawers and drawers of junk, but never found it. And somehow I also had misplaced my wallet which had my license in it, so I was feeling down about my prospects and the impression I would pervade.

I didn’t call anyone about the job. I figured I’d see how it went first, or maybe I knew I didn’t have anyone to call except for my brother in Houston and a few friends. My parents passed years ago and I was at the point in my time where people were making their staggered exits, and the once crowded and lively room of my life was starting to thin out to only a handful of weary-looking people. I am only 43, too young to be concerned about being the last one left, I thought. I had no children. No ex-wives. No extended family to speak of. I began to drift back to sleep in my recliner thinking about my funeral and what a pathetic show that would be. My brother would pay for the minimum job to be done and he and his family would show up, at least, some of them. Others would have reasons.

My death would be an obtrusive one. They would put me in one of those rented mahogany caskets with the polished silver rails, which they would remove me from when the procession was over so I could go into a cardboard box. The funeral home would use fake flowers around me since no one would send any, and some friends from high school might come and be somber and think about their mortality and deaths and what kind of casket they would lie in and how many people would show up for them. No one I ever worked with would come. No ex-girlfriends, for as good as it was when it was, it never ended so well with anyone. We usually hung on too long until it exploded. Then I would be cremated and somewhere outside the crematorium people would drive by and not even notice the billowy black cloud that rose out of the chimney pipe and dissipated into the obscurity of the universe. That was me. My very last moment.

It somehow would have made me feel better if just one person was there. If one person who I dated or loved before my lease expired might have remembered me better than I thought she might, or as I remembered her. Contrary to what I have thus far expressed since I have been collecting these discordant thoughts, there was only one or two people I dated who I still carry any resentment towards. The rest still have some redeemable qualities and if I were to see them, I would be perceptive of those and less of that which bollixed the relationship to its irreparable end. I might, if I were a ghost in that barren funeral parlor, get some pathetic pleasure if one personal story of me was shared by anyone, or if one or two tears might be shed when someone thought of me. It riddled me with immeasurable sorrow to think that the room would be full of dry eyes and zipped lips, that no one would go up to the podium on my behalf and deliver my eulogy. That I never meant that much to anyone. But silence is a eulogy of its own.

The reverend from my old church would say kind words as he does for everyone. It is his duty as a man of God. But it would become obvious that he barely knew me because he would talk all about God and the rest of them and very little about me. He would be saying that I would want everyone to be at peace, to not cry and mope, and to be happy. He would go on and on as though a little me stood there on his shoulder and tugged on his floppy earlobe and whispered into his ear to tell them this and that, when in truth, I would have said none of those things at all. I would have implored someone to cry, to miss me, to talk about what I meant to them.

I woke up and sat there and wrote on my laptop all about life, not getting anywhere with it, stumbling through, feeling sorry for myself, sad and nostalgic for things past while simultaneously being possessed with the undeniable burden of ellipsism. And though I could name nothing I wanted to live to see, the feeling festered into the poisoned thought of what might have been, or what could yet be. Then I scrolled through Indeed again and hoped to find a backup plan for a job in case the castle didn’t hire me, but I found nothing that interested me, so I shut it off. There was something about teaching English in China. There were jobs in phlebotomy for prospective phlebotomists. There was a job as a “specimen collector,” which I knew to be someone who stands around all day and watches men piss in plastic jars, seals them shut, and puts them in plastic bags. I couldn’t imagine seeing that many dicks.

I should have went on to medical school, or law school, or something where I could have been someone. I tried not to check Facebook or the news, knowing all I would see were raging death tolls and a dreadful harlequinade of attention-seekers. Everyday there were melodramatic people posting videos of themselves in hospitals where they were being treated for the Chinese virus, imploring other people to take it seriously. The same video was made a thousand times over with a new woman in the role. Every day women were becoming Chinese virus celebrities, making the most of the apocalypse, and I wondered if they were making money by how many people fearfully watched their videos, desperate for a clue on how to survive. That’s the way you do it. This is the secret to live. Ads scrolling along the bottom of the screen for tampons and wet wipes and Lysol and affordable car insurance. I doubted some of them even had it. Some of them were fakers because I don’t care what it is, there are always hoaxers. They made videos from home in bed and said they were ordered into quarantine because they were suspected of having the virus. Results were pending, but their symptoms were very real they assured the invisible faces of their audience watching them. It feels like my lungs are plastic bags full of broken glass.

It was like a soap opera, a demented reality show that went on and on. I had quarantined myself after losing the job at the missile-making warehouse, not for fear of the virus, but for lack of a social life and no desire to acquire one. I felt I had seen all there was to offer out there and I wasn’t impressed with the bars, extensions of high school lunch being all segregated by class, the corny festivals named after fruits and vegetables, the lame art walks of water-colored insects, concerts and sports, none of that did much for me. My cabinets were stocked full of beans and rice and other non-perishables. I could survive for a year without leaving the house, but what is the point. I am not one who wishes only to survive just to see and do meaningless things. If there is nothing of meaning left for me, there is nothing left for me at all. I never would have dreamed of my life as it is now when I was eight. But life had hardened me. It had molested and warped me. It is only in contrast to its absurdity that it had turned me into a weirdo with cynical thoughts that I mostly keep to myself. Some that I don’t want to have. Some that amuse me and make me more interesting to myself. It had given me the desire to scream but no mouth.

The car, rather the SUV, came as promised at precisely 10 am and pulled alongside the curb by the Japanese Maple. I saw it first out my living room window. Then it honked its horn to tell me it was here. I couldn’t see the driver because the windows were tinted. It was a new Land Rover, silver, and it glimmered in the morning sun. I fixed my tie, then wondered if I should have worn a tie or if I should have dressed more casually being that from the description provided, the job was mostly farm work. So I hurriedly ditched the tie before leaving and was in a nice pale pink dress shirt, slim gray pants, and light brown faux-leather Italian boots. I felt good about myself. My hair was slicked back with lotion. My neck dabbed lightly with my best aftershave. And my face was not red and blotchy as it had been the prior week or so. I was handsome in certain lights, but odd in others, and my view of myself varied so that I could never really get a feeling either way of exactly what I was or wasn’t.

But here today, on this particular morning, I felt good about myself. My attitude seemed to change as soon as I walked through the door and off the porch and to the car. The sound of my boots on the sidewalk was pleasing. The air was warm and pleasant, fragrant with the bloom of spring flowers. The bees were lively and playful. The sun hid perfectly behind a bright bleached cloud. And there was a soft breeze that played upon my face and hair like my mother’s fingers when I was a child. And whereas I once thought that I should not date someone I was not prepared to loose, or to live in a house I couldn’t accept being burned to the ground, and never work anywhere where there wasn’t somewhere better, and accept that I will die whether I want to or not, I was absolved of the gloom and pessimism that anchored me. I noticed I had forgotten to put on my watch after my shower, but it was okay. And I was okay that I couldn’t find my wallet or my social security card, that I might not be dressed for the job, and that I might not get the job at all. I had no control over what happened, but I had control over how I reacted to whatever did. 

The driver smiled at me and introduced himself as Charles. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He resembled an actor I was sure, whose name escaped me in the lapse of my memory, which seemed to be suddenly more unreliable. As we drove out of town I tried to remember names of streets I had been on and driven past all of my life, but I could not remember any of them. Not even the one on which I lived. And in the lapse of conversation with the driver, who said he has been employed at Raven Grace Castle for the better part of his days, I tried to remember the women I had loved, the friends that I had, the schools I went to, the jobs I worked, the foods I favored, but I could remember none of it. It was as though my memory left with my life and sanity. Was I in the early stages of dementia?

While one might think that this would cause some measure of panic or despair, it did not. The cool of the car and the intoxicating beautiful smell of the new vinyl interior made me want to forget everything and relaxed me so that I felt I had not a care in the world. No mortgage, no student loan debt, no worry for health insurance, no concern of who I would share my life with and if I had exhausted, in all the fallible ways of my eccentricity, all viable options. Was I really just too weird to love? It was the concern that made me sometimes buy Levis and get boring haircuts and plod around art-walks and fairs in hordes of dreadfully boring people and root for certain sports teams and against others, and it vanished. I didn’t care anymore, but not in the manner of bitter obstinacy. I simply didn’t care.

We drove on the highway for what seemed like an hour. Then we took an off road for what felt like thirty more minutes or so, and already I had logistical concerns about the arduous commute. But those were swiftly allayed by my natural fascination and enchantment with the beautiful greenery along the way, and when Charles spoke up to tell me that if offered the position I would be asked to stay in one of the cottages on the grounds which were all of a medieval theme. He added that I would take on a role. 

“A role?”

“Like a miller. A cooper. Plowman. Or a falconer. Only the falconer is not as it seems. Not what you might imagine, for there is no hunting or killing of any sort, of course. The falcons hunt for honeycombs. Honey is a delicacy at Raven Grace, used in many things.” His voice was soothing. I think that it was probably the most soothing voice I have ever heard. My curiosity to his origin was no more and he was simply Charles the driver. “It isn’t all medieval though, if that’s not your cup of tea. We play baseball most evenings, when the weather permits, and sometimes when it doesn’t. Rain games are fun, too. In the winter we ice skate and play what we call hockey,” he chuckled, “but no one who knows hockey would accuse any of us of being any good. It’s an effort in trying not to get hurt and an exorcise in laughter. You play?” 

“Yes,” I answered enthusiastically. “Both. I’m an avid baseball fan. And I love to ice skate and to play hockey.”

When we pulled into the long graveled lane I got a sniff of the sweet smell of wild lavender and yarrow and the deep green of the surrounding forestry, the coolness of which soothed by aching lungs. I knew right away that it was the place I wanted to be in that I was suddenly no longer plagued by the aphonic onism through which I had lived most of my life. But I had every intention to be reserved in the interview and not give my enthusiasm away. I wanted to get paid as much as I could so that I could manage my life back home. The mortgage. The car payment. Insurance. So on and so forth. My responsibilities.

The castle was enormous and beautiful and the aforementioned cottages were in a tiny village-like space behind it, which was intersected with cobblestone streets and hemlock and river birch trees and wildflowers that butterflies and bees danced upon. There was a hedge maze and stone statues of angels and wildflowers in such abundance and variety it would take someone more than the summer season to chart and identify them all. Flowers whose vibrant colors and genus I knew not the likes of. I stood there by the SUV waiting to walk across a drawbridge to the castle where my interview was to be. Identifying things and categorizing them seemed not the way here. The way was only to appreciate what is. Charles chuckled at my rapt enchantment and assured me that it is how everyone reacts the first time, even him, so long ago. It was like the vibrant and colorful place where the Celestial Specialty Herbal Tea woman goes when she cups her pretty hands around that teacup and sips.

There was a moat and the water flowed and rippled around large scattered boulders that were like islands, each their own, and atop one lay the nude, still, beautiful body of Cassiopeia’s daughter, Andromeda, as though she were sunbathing or sacrificially waiting for the beast Cetus. There was a statue of Poseidon, sculpted from rock, further down, jutting up out of the stream, and colorful birds were perched on his raised arm which looked like it would strike at any moment. They were also on the fork of the trident in his other, indifferent to his wrath. Flowers on the banks bloomed, Narcissist, who drowned in love with his own reflection. There was Perseus in a nearby garden facing the moat with flowering vines around his legs holding the head of Medusa triumphantly. Whether he had slain, Cetus, the beast, was unclear. It was a profusion of worldly thought and mythology which I knew meant much more than I yet understood. A collection that must have taken a fortune and years to collect. The rippling water made a pleasing sound as though to sing to Andromeda, but it obeyed Poseidon and it flowed subserviently to him, to his knees where it pooled and regrouped.

The drawbridge was dark wood, as was the door, and there was a large knocker which was the head of some sort of crazed goat-like man with messy pewter hair and discordant eyes who was biting a large ring. It became quickly obvious to me that there was nothing about the castle that was without purpose. I met the woman I spoke with on the phone, Mrs. Jennings, and she walked me into the banquet hall that was wondrous with thirty foot walls, and high on them there were a series of stained-glass windows of biblical stories I knew well, and dark wood and gold lacquered panels where fine paintings of all sizes, periods, moods, and styles were inset. I was particularly taken by one and she noticed me staring at it. It was as though I couldn’t look away.

“It’s by Arnold Böcklin, called The Plague. Rather grim, considering. But it does provide some contrast.” 

“What year?” I inquired.

“1898.”

“And this one?” It was a dark long rectangular painting with a tunnel on top and people seeming to be carried up to the tunnel by angels.

“Mmm,” she smiled. “One of my personal favorites. That is Ascent to Heaven by Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch artist during his time. Painted around the year 1510. It is quite amazing what they envisioned it to be like. How the mind imagines such incredible things. Would you like to sit and talk for a moment?”

“Yes. My apologies. I am just so taken by this room. By everything. Everything is just like I – ”

“No reason to apologize,” she replied politely. She was a very neat and tidy woman and she had a kind, forthcoming, and caring demeanor. “You can have the job if you’d like it.”

I turned and looked at her as though I didn’t quite hear her. I heard her, but I didn’t understand. I walked over to where she sat at the head of the large dining table and sat in the chair beside her, astonished by it all. “But you haven’t asked me a single question. Or for my ID, or done a background check, or a drug test.”

“But I don’t need to Mr. Hawthorne. Do I?”

She was a very patient woman for I must have sat there for several minutes before I spoke, prisms of light streaming in through those biblical stained-glass windows which gave the room such a wonderful collage of color. Moses from where I sat and a whiskey-colored beam of light flowing from his brown face onto the table, spilling onto my hand which moved slowly like a lethargic spider. I looked around the room again. There was Peter from the boat watching Jesus walk on water, Judas kissing Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, David slaying Goliath, Jonah swallowed by the Whale, and John the Baptist baptizing Jesus. And in the back of my mind I recognized the coloring. They were colored just as I had colored the same pictures in Sunday school which my mom hung on our refrigerator.

“My God! Am I dreaming?” I murmured. 

She smiled as though she had expected the question. She knew all things because she was all-knowing. “No, Mr. Hawthorne. You are home. You made it. And we are happy to have you. But we have a job for you. Your job is to be the falconer. Currently, Mr. Bridges is the falconer and he will train you before he moves on. He has accepted a position elsewhere, I am pleased to say, though we don’t want to lose him. We don’t want to lose anyone, but we aren’t in the practice of restricting freedom. He has been here since we began, so he is very knowledgeable. It is a very detail-oriented job, but one that I think you will love and do exceptionally well at. You will stay in the falconer’s cottage with Mr. Bridges and his wife, Sara, until they move on in three weeks. By then, you will be properly trained. This is the busy season for your job and it is one of great importance as honey is a commodity we highly value. You will see.”

“What about the animals?”

“Well, we all do our part to take care of them, but no one is specifically assigned to the task. They practically take care of themselves. There is never a lack of volunteers to feed, water and play with them. There are children as well, both who visit and who live here, and they do enjoy the animals, but mind the peacock. He can be rather cantankerous. Of course you will be expected to wear the uniform at all times, the period clothing for the guests. You’ll find those in your room in a wardrobe. Once the Bridges leave, the cottage will be yours to decorate as you wish, of course. We try to stay in the period, but there are anachronisms such as books, TV, electricity and indoor plumbing. It is a very lovely cottage. I think you are going to like it.”

“Wait. You mean I stay here?”

“Yes. Of course. That is, unless you do not want the job.”

“But what does it pay?” I asked staring at those stained-glass windows.

“Pay is a rather simple, paltry concept and it is dull to talk about. Nothing costs here. So there is no real pay. Would you like a beer?”

I laughed a little at the idea being so foreign to me.

“No Pay? Yes,” I replied, still looking at those windows. It was the first interview in which I was offered a beer. She called for someone and asked for two beers and right away a young woman in a brown floral dress brought them on a tray. One for myself and one for Mrs. Jennings. God, her face looked familiar, but like Charles, I couldn’t place her. I got up with the beer and walked to the large picture windows around the glass door which led out to a dining patio. From the dining hall window, I got a good look at the labyrinth, and there were two children, two young boys, running wildly through it like pinballs and I felt the pleasure a father might feel watching his own children as I watched them, though they of course were not my own. I had never seen them before. There was a woman standing there in a cream-colored dress as though she were lost, their mother, I presumed. After a moment or two of observation, I could see she was playfully chasing after them, laughing with them. She was thin and beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I knew her, without knowing her at all. I could see her, even if I had no eyes. It appeared that my peripatetic days were over. I had surrendered them. I had found my dream job.

I turned to Mrs. Jennings and shook my head emphatically. “I’ll take it.”

She smiled and appeared not surprised, but pleased by my response. It seemed that she was withholding some great secret from me in the way she looked at me. Like it was in her pocket. She knew I was looking at the woman and when I looked back to the labyrinth the woman was looking up at me. She smiled and held her hand up and greeted me with her palm like a costume Indian says, How, and I held my palm up back at her, kept it still, and smiled until she looked away. I have always been one to feel inhibited by life, by living in the construct of someone else’s agreed upon world and cruel evolution, disconnected from other people, but here that feeling did not exist and I was no longer plagued by my maladaptation and resulting liberosis.

I was overwhelmed by the sonder of the residents and guests alike, and soon I had integrated myself so that nothing or no one was foreign to me and the malapropos thoughts that raged deep inside of me from the conflict of living in a very absurd and obscene world that I did not belong, were washed from me. I lived in a world of evil, filled with animal eaters and baby killers and staunch war mongers and prideful sinners of the worst sort, none of whom accepted any culpability or recognized in themselves sin. Even after the virus cleared, as it will, it would not change those who survive. They will be again themselves, one collective, destructive, parasitic disease with the commonality of conformity and death. They will continue to kill, kill, kill and negligently rely upon dirty immoral companies and apathetic farmers and desperate migrants to murder animals by the millions with gross efficiency and no regard to the suffering or plight of the living creature, stuffing them with soy and corn, filling them with antibiotics, slicing their throats, chopping them apart, separating them, portioning them, packaging them, cooking them, and selling them through a drive-thru window so that rotting pieces of meat could fill their stomachs and digest into shit. I can think of no more humiliating or disgraceful act that can be perpetrated against humanity and decency than that, other than a mother or father killing their own baby, born or unborn.

I might have been angry had I known it was a virus that took me like a thief in the night. That I died because backwards and ignorant people in China cruelly slaughtered and ate pangolins because of the magic in their scales. That I hadn’t some grand or noble death worthy of distinction, if there ever is such a thing. Even some lingering illness where I would have had time to say my goodbyes to whoever there was to say goodbye to. To have penned a letter to someone. Wrote a book about it. Expressed myself in such a way that maybe someone at sometime would have read it and understood my existence a little better. Appreciated my perspective or hated it. Reacted somehow in someway, nonetheless. 

But it didn’t matter, really. It didn’t matter that I died all alone, was probably not found for days, and, because of the quarantine, that there would be no service at all, no eulogy or tears, no one would gather, and that I became that plume of black smoke from the crematory’s chimney that no one noticed. The only thing that mattered is that I, at last, was given a reprieve from the absurdity of life and I was somewhere that I wanted to be. It is as simple as this. Heaven is the place where you belong. Hell is the place where you do not. There is no more.

I played baseball, I learned everything of hawks and falcons there was to know from Frank Bridges, who was a wise and benevolent man. I became a painter, wrote a book, then another, began to read everything I meant to read living, and learned the art of patience. And when the sun was setting in the field of rye where I stood like a scarecrow waiting for my falcon to return to me, she came. We had only shared smiles and brief hellos and goodbyes. We had shared community meals, fed and took care of the pigs and cows together a few times. I had played with her kids, but we had never talked for the simple pleasure to speak to each other exclusively. The sunset showered her, her russet-colored hair and big brown root beer eyes. She was in a white dress and strode out to me, smiling benignly. And like the first time we met, she held up her palm and I held up mine and then she stood there in front of me, evening bugs spraying from the field and away from us like the sparks of a sparkler.

“Hi. I came to ask if you’d like to have some tea this evening with me – when the kids go to bed.” She was the spinstress and the tailor and she made the clothes everyone wore and the costumes for all the plays and festivals. I know that I have never seen a more beautiful woman. Not Gal Gadot. Not Audrey Hepburn. Not Claudia Cardinale. Not even the Celestial Seasonings Herbal Tea woman, who was a distant memory. This was me with my hands cupped on my own cup of tea. This was my peace. My wonderful piece of colorful heaven.

“Tea is fine. But I would prefer wine.”

She smiled with all of the sun within her. “Me as well. I do have many bottles.”

“For what purpose?” I joked.

“For an occasion.”

“Well, I would like to be an occasion.” I grinned. And just then the falcon returned and landed on my arm as he always did with a large dripping comb of honey which I quickly put in the canvas sack and tied shut.

“Where does he get the honey,” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He just does.” Then we slowly walked back to the village and everything else that was to be, ever so blissfully was.