Terrarium
His punishment being a foregone conclusion, the rest of his life was house money
His punishment being a foregone conclusion, the rest of his life was house money.
I fired Geoff after I caught him stealing product at the bar we both worked at - house beer, maternal and golden, straight from the tap - and just like that his brief period of good fortune was over. It stands to reason that the blame for his firing rested with neither myself nor him but rather with the management. Hiring a varsity alcoholic to tend bar. Like a house on an ocean cliff we knew it was only a matter of time before Geoff would backslide into the water, and we’d take bets behind his back on what would cause it. I know that seems cruel, and it was. But he was in many ways a distant-future version of myself, and cruelty was one of those things I felt I had to use to mark the difference between us.
The collapsing pillar, so to speak, was a text from Geoff’s buddy informing him that their mutual friend Silky Smooth had washed up just downriver of the Aurora Bridge. Which, well, you know. Geoff was crushed to hear this not just because his friend died, but because he’d thought for years that Silky was already dead. He had distinct memories of attending the funeral in 2022. He and his buddies got so shitfaced that they found themselves awoken by a fenthead under a bridge in Boise, Idaho. Apparently somewhere in the chaos Silky got back up. He’d been kicking around until just then, when he stopped again. To Geoff, he had more or less died twice.
According to Geoff they called him Silky Smooth because his head was so bald you could see your reflection in it.
To be honest I only gave Geoff half of my attention while he was telling me this. A fly was drowning in his glass. Soaking in the stolen beer like a rag. I couldn’t look away. I thought for sure it would fly out again but it didn’t seem to sense danger. Or maybe it was unconcerned with the consequences. Regardless, it swam through the foam in little Olympic figure eights, raking in sugar with its pedipalpi. Luxuriating in the circumstance of its own undoing. Dreaming happily of what it would do with the nutrients on some later date, some certain coming future.
—
My last grandparent died last week. I can’t recall his age and I’m embarrassed to ask my family. When I heard the news it didn’t bother me much. Plenty of time to prepare for it, and I’m at the stage of life where these things seem to start to feel unstoppable. But I'm bothered by the birthday card I sent him a week ago. Off somewhere in the arteries of the USPS, hurtling uselessly through the world to a destination that won't exist when it gets there.
I never saw Geoff again. After I fired him, he slunk off on his stolen bike and I quit my job to go work in hospice, which suits me much better. If you asked whether I liked being a cook I’d tell you no. I’d liked food but hated food prep. I’d liked Geoff but hated our similarity. I’d liked the drugs but I’d loathed them too, maybe more than anything else I’ve ever known. The only thing I’d liked without compromise was my knife. The trancelike state of sharpening; the careful rehabilitation. Geoff always kept his knife poorly maintained. I have distinct memories of watching him having to strain his muscles to slice the pork belly. This is one of those images my mind has sought to preserve for reasons entirely beyond me.
—
If there is one thing I learned working in hospice it is that the body is a prison and perfectly willing to go before the mind. The flesh is deeply undignified. You can get away with hiding this for awhile but we’re all just simultaneously degenerating into mud.
The second thing I learned is that the mind is also a prison.
Also, in hospice there was an omnipresent understanding of Too Late. The things said five years ago have a larger impact than the ones said at the end. They are more important. They get more air to breathe. People wait till the end to say the things they really feel but by that point the check has already been more or less cashed.
I recall my uncle Eric Matthew at my sister's wedding, building up the courage to make peace with my grandfather before he died - they hadn’t spoken since a physical altercation years ago, as part of their deep, embryonic codependence. Uncle Eric was standing in a field of grass, wearing a suit that was way way way too tight. He seemed to bulge out of it like a bullfrog. He was sober, and vibrating like a hunted rabbit. I don’t know if he ever managed to talk to my grandfather, but even if he did, I think it’s unlikely it absolved the more pressing issue of the previous decades between them.
—-
Last June, I was driving my mom to Yellowstone when I suddenly had to piss so bad that the first gas station I saw, I slammed the brakes so hard the seatbelt locked up. I left her there in the parking lot if you can believe it. No place for a mother, it was a rusting shithole. In the can, someone had stolen the glass out of the sink mirror - all that was left was the frame of a wall. My piss was yellow and stung a little bit on the egress. When I finished, I went inside the store to buy some pink Starburst and I saw on the TV that a bison had stumbled into a hot spring and was melting there. They had live helicopter footage and round-the-clock coverage, and cuts to several onlookers expressing varying levels of maudlin shock. As it turns out, this was all happening incredibly near to us. An hour’s distance at most.
When I returned to the car, my mom was talking on her cell. It was my uncle Eric’s voice cracking and sobbing into a hospital receiver. “Karen,” he said to her. “Karen please turn around and come back.” He was going in for a major surgery because alcohol had inflated his liver like a balloon animal. “Karen, who’s gonna hold my hand. Jesus I’m gonna wake up in that room and nobody’s gonna be there.”
My mom considered going back but I put my foot down and drove East towards Yellowstone. There was no possible way we could get back in time for the surgery. Returning would be completely pointless, and the circumstances were out of our hands. Nevertheless I felt that I’d had a hand in something I didn’t understand. Something intangible was at stake I think. But the image on my mind more than anything else was that of the bison melting in the crater. I locked the doors and didn’t take my foot off the gas for the rest of the trip.
Obviously there was little left of the bison by the time we got there. The reporters and crowds had all dispersed, and most of what remained was a smell, along with the bulk of the right haunch still floating in a pool of sulfur. The hot springs themselves were indescribable; national parks have a way of ambushing you with their beauty. Sizes and colors you would never expect to see anywhere but a screen. However, in the end I’m disappointed to say the bison did not move me at all, or at least not nearly as much as I'd hoped, though I still think about it often.
—-
What I am coming to suspect is that there really are cathedrals everywhere and I don’t have the eyes to see them. That there is a kingdom under the kingdom. That God is an arachnid. I don’t like to talk about God, as I don’t know Him, but I think Job was right to suffer and wrongfully satisfied. Job went to hell maybe. I suspect he is still there. Or rather I suspect that there’s nothing marking the difference; I suspect that there is no heaven and no hell, only that one scene from The Irishman where De Niro is sitting in that hospital bed trying to confess his sins to some young nurse and she just smiles politely and walks away and he’s just left lying there in the bed as the camera lingers on him from outside the room and then the movie ends.
That’s all I have to say. Which is perfectly normal. There are long periods of time where there is nothing to say and then something happens and suddenly things feel very important. For instance I don’t feel a need to talk about my girlfriend, who is beautiful in ways I never expected, wiping her makeup off in the other room. Leaning over the bathroom sink in her underwear. She likes leaving the light on when she goes to bed early. Heaven is real for her and when she dies she will find me there curled up at the gates like a dog.
Actually there is one more thing to say. I did see Geoff one more time, hunched over the counter of the Waterwheel Lounge, deep into something brown and already halfway off his barstool. Seeing him there reminded me of some future memory. Something terrible coming for him from further down the line. For better or for worse Geoff had always worn his whole future on his person. We made eye contact for a few seconds, and I’m certain I was recognized. Immediately, I turned around and left. I never returned to that bar. Now it's closed down. What can I say to justify that? It’s something I’m very ashamed of and either way it’s all far too late now. Please accept my confession here.
Rip waterwheel
saw many important mariners games there 😔