She gave him an ambiguous expression before leaving.
"I love you and I have to go."
That was it. She was off to Prague and he, as always, held still at home. She took flight because she could not stand the idea of home, that dull process of sedimentation that befalls etiolated and miserable things; staying still was not an option. But he chose to stick it out. As much as it was no longer home, as much as all things he remembered and romanticized had disintegrated, he chose to endure and to continue on. He would refer to the thoughts of Rilke, Kafka, and Neizvestny on the subject of human endurance and artistic creation.
"Be poet enough to deal with it. Only dilettantes and philistines cry foul about the human condition. Lennon said give me a tin can and a stick and I'll make something beautiful from it, because that's what artists do." Despite the rhetoric, her departure hurt him.
When she left, his old enthusiasms waned and novel ones were slow to emerge. He worked and returned home to read, then slumber, awakening, off to work, home, and so on. From his youngest years, he read avidly. Greek philosophy, Roman history, medieval theology, penny novels, mysteries, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Kant, legal theory, Camus, Penthouse: his palette grew more and more extensive as the years passed. Upon her departure, he read everything, some of it for the second time, with one notable exception. Her letters were left unopened, unread, and without reply. Words passed through him without register and were of little comfort. Not much else filled his time apart from the dead tomes and the hours at a job he loathed. He was stuck. He needed to take flight.
"Prague, man. You gotta go to Prague." He stood there emotionless per usual, eyes gazing at some distant ghost, and gave no response. Was he deep in thought? Was he zoning out? Was he bored and on the verge of going comatose? This was the annoying ambiguity of his emotionless visage. After some time, he turned to me and gently shook his head. No. Of course.
"How about Edmonton?" This disturbed him for a second. A look of puzzlement escaped before posturing melancholy could detain it. The thought so perturbed him, he left his desk for the break room. My words, well the thought of going to Edmonton, inspired something in him. It may have been disgust and revulsion, but it roused him nonetheless. That was at least a first step.
He returned from his brief sojourn with a coffee cup with an image of a killer whale leaping out of blue waters, the letter beneath read: Victoria, British Columbia. Okay. That was not as subtle of hint as he liked to believe. Then again, hints should never be too subtle. I made a similar trip to the break room and fetched my rendition of the mug - killer whale and so on with one difference, beneath it read: Vancouver, BC. I filled it halfway with coffee, returned to the desk, and touched it with his. We were heading for the West Coast.
----
The Big One was this mythical earthquake. It was to be the final violent orgasmic encounter Juan de Fuca tectonic plate with the North American Plate. The beauty of the Pacific Coast would be left in ruins. The sprawling metropolis of Vancouver would become a wistful memory, buried under so much rubble. The vibrant and majestic sea to sky landscape would be left forever grey and lifeless. It was going to be the end of everything.
"If you live there, if you choose to live there, you can't possibly talk about it. It's like that apocryphal story about Muhammad Ali in Zaire. He would never, ever, under any circumstances watch George Foreman punch the heavy bag. Foreman was this ungodly puncher, so much so that heavy bags, weighing about 75 lbs would wear out beyond repair in a single training session. Ali, who had to cross through a courtyard in front of the Foreman camp in order to get to his own, never laid an eye on the apocalypse awaiting him. If he was going to fight the man, he couldn't internalize the possibility of being the heavy bag. It was to remain a myth, an unfulfilled reality. That's how people in the West Coast treat the Big One."
The Big One. Yes, the barriers between us and death are tantalizingly flimsy. Imagine if the ground, terra firma, lost its fixity and swayed to the whims of chance. "All that is solid melts into air," so on, so forth. Modern man was constructed to believe in a singular paradoxical truth: he has sovereignty over all things, but remains hopelessly exposed to the whims of tumult and fortune. He may be king. But he'll be dead soon enough. Long live the king, reaper.
Straight down Highway Number One, through the Rockies, down into the Okanagan, and straight out of the Fraser Valley, and nine hours later, there stands the metropolis known so affectionately as Vansterdam. Vancouver. The Big One's estranged love. When will fortune bring the two together in a twisted romantic comedy crescendo? "I love you and I must destroy you." I should tell him there are much worse endings than Prague.
As we sped down Hastings Street, a fading sun slowly descending the western horizon hit us dead on.
"I hate sunsets."
"Why?"
"They've been fucking reified, romanticized beyond the point of nausea."
"So, you don't really hate this sunset, just its representation in our -- how did you put it, again? -- vacuous, money-poisoned collective consciousness."
He looked none impressed.
....
"So where did it all do wrong?"
"What do you mean?"
"Weren't you Mr. Acadamic-Varsity-Do-Gooder-Extraordinaire? Now you're you."
"There is an art to wasting time - letting the world-progress sweep us along into the dustbin of history."
Pseudo-Benjamin. But, there was more.
"Either you stand for something or you'll fall for anything. Belief has nothing to do with it."
I gave him a quizzical look.
"Like an accountant. An accountant believes in money. Money makes the world go 'round and all that hackneyed bullshit. They don't stand for money. They count it, make it, reposition investment portfolios, funnel funds to offshore accounts. They don't stand for anything. Their actions, their words, their very being mean nothing unless its attached to wealth. Accounting mastered nihilism. It is nihilism at its very height. The Last Man poured into a suit."
I peered over at the newspaper laying in his lap. "Accounting student, 22, decapitated by economist," read a headline.
"But that's flawed," I started. "People are willing to die for money or risk their necks for it. Take for example mercenaries or gangsters. That's the insanity of the thing, of an addiction; you'd rather perish than to be without it. Its a rather radical proposition. How can you say they're not invested in money? How can you be so sure its sheer vanity or appearance? If it's real to them, what else matters? If it's real to them, surely that's their stand, that's their belief, and they've made it mean something for them. What standard can you employ to judge their actions?"
His eyes lit up. He enjoyed disagreement. I suspect, on a odd level, it aroused him.
"What you're saying is money can become a substitution for virtue?"
"I did not say that. I'm saying that some do displace virtue with money and why should we be able to judge them."
"It's not about judgment. It's about an ethic of care. To love money alone is to neglect all else. Everything else is forsaken for it. Environment, culture, education, art, love, trust, friendship, peace, justice, equality, and so on. They're all commodities. They're are subjugated, laying far below the exalted mighty dollar. This is what concerns me as it should concern you. They don't care whether the poor peoples of the world are living worse than slaves, they don't care that mere kilometers from their suburban homes are homeless destitute people who cannot afford even the most austere comforts, they don't care, they just don't care. Money is value. All things are judged to have value according to money. If you have no money, you are of no value. Then you are Bestand. If you do not serve money or obstruct their pursuit of it, you are superfluity. And finally, you can be led to the ovens and they won't blink an eye."
Care. I liked that. I wanted to help him reveal more.
"Noblesse oblige," I said with a mischievous grin. "That'll always mitigate the radical evils you have so breathlessly enumerated. I appreciate your passion. And your point on care is well taken. But the portrait you have painted is stilted. It's nothing but a straw man. Plus, most people are just trying to get by. You can't say that the person buying groceries from Wal-Mart to save enough money for the rent is responsible for genocides in Africa. That extreme butterfly effect employed by the radical left not only is an imprecise analysis of the situation, it alienates those who progressive discourse should be engaging, namely those who don't constantly partake in these debates, the folks just trying to get by, those just trying to live and love and see another day."
He took pause and gazed outside the side window at the bustling lunchtime crowd moving along Blanshard Street. The silence between us lingered for sometime. I turned the car onto Cook Street, heading South towards the Strait and the coastline.
"We become hopelessly entangled in lies when trying to live truth." Then, he let out a resigned sigh. He sprung that nugget on me as we zipped past the outer edge of Beacon Hill park. That was it.
---
Standing there surrounded by the fractured remains of a world torn apart, he dreaded the thought of having to clean it up.
"Aw, shit, this fucking sucks."
Yes, always eloquent and unfailingly precise. He waded through the ruined miscellany in search of her. He believed he could instantly recognize her big blues even through the dust and soot. The question was whether those big blues were still with him and the traumatized world.
---
"I am become Time, destroyer of all worlds."
Nothing could be said, at least nothing that would be heard. The creatures stared dumbly, unmoved by words, numb to any attempt at communication. This was the dustbin and Time stood still at last, finally exhausted, with no distance to travel. So, they stood there agape at the sight before them, absolute negation, entropy rising tantalizingly close to its limit.
"Heat death," he said, as if privy to my inner thoughts. "Our fevered egos could go only so far. Here lies their destined end."
Time no longer dictated matters. Survival is indistinct from a lyrical melancholy, to go on was to go on suffering. To endure was to take on the duties that come with that pain. "Bury the dead and heal the living," was the wisdom gleaned from Lisbon in 1755. The dead was so numerous; they were inseparable from the rubble, from the world left behind. Bury the world and heal, what's left to heal? Time was now a needless thing. And Space? Space was chaos. Chaos was space.
