An Unforgiving Reality, Patrick Sean Lee [elon musk reading list txt] 📗

                       An Unforgiving Reality




    He left Boettcher Mansion through the front door, and stopped on the greystone landing beneath the columned portico, next to a tall, sculpted urn overflowing with ivy, myrtle, and white daisies. Glancing down at it, the man reached over and plucked a single bloom from the foliage, laced the stem through the buttonhole of his lapel, adjusted it carefully, and then continued on.

    Descending the steps, he thought of her smiling at him across the tufted white plain of his bed in the basement last evening. He thought, too, of the inevitability of failure, of corruption, of his personal singularity as he surveyed the speck of Marvin Fuster’s collapsing universe beckoning beyond the weathered steps.

    The sky was mottled and torn, with the tailings of black clouds that were visible beyond the portico. A late afternoon storm had just passed, leaving the city sparkling and cleansed as the black, roilong clouds tumbled eastward onto the plains. A brilliant stab of lightning far away carrying enough energy to power the engine of the city for a month, or awaken a sewn-together corpse. He caught it, deciphered its strength instantaneously. The physics of the lightning he well understood; he knew it better than anyone.

    He was sixty-six, recently an indigent, more recently, incomprehensibly, inconceivably, a genius. One day ignorant and dying of alcoholic poisoning, the next Hawking times infinity with the constitution of a yearling. Whether by the finger of God, an un-remembered blow to the head, or simply the dream of the young woman inside, he didn’t know. Nor was it important, really—at least not anymore. He’d been unmasked by a conclave of red-cloaked butchers and his own wide-eyed guilelessness.

    Maribeth had defied her father and gone to his room close to tears after Marvin left the inquisition in the study with an acid warning never to return...after all, the governor was now certain that this man had tried to bed his daughter...Moments later, after she’d knocked and entered, she helped him with the impossible task of selecting the few volumes he could carry back out onto the streets he had come from empty handed. A small book of poetry written by a woman from California, a novel by Garcia Marquez. Webster’s Medical Dictionary. A copy of De Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince—a favorite he’d explored for hours—at normal reading speed. Four texts on genetics.

    “Put them in here,” she had said, handing him one of her backpacks.

    “It’s PINK.”

    “Well...yes. I have a chartreuse one. Or a lemon-yellow one, if you’d prefer.”

    “Don’t you have a black one?”

    “I’m sorry.”

    They stuffed the books in.

    After this he began to search the closet for those pieces of clothing he’d stolen just hours before she’d found him and taken him home with her in great secrecy. He intended to change into them and leave dressed the way he had arrived two weeks ago. Two weeks. In two more weeks Maribeth Harris would begin her first year of studies at the University of Denver.

    About his old clothes. “I gave them to the Goodwill,” she’d said.

    “But why? They were perfectly good. Brand new,” he’d replied.

    “They smelled of smoke, and they marked the old Marvin.”

    “Oh. Just as well then, I suppose.”

    “Yes. Here, take this shirt. That navy blue sweater there. The beige pants by your right hand.”

    When it was all said and done; when she’d dressed him decently, and made sure he had both shoes and socks on; that his thin, gray hair was brushed back off his forehead, they prepared to say their goodbyes.

    “Where will you go?”

    “I’m not sure.”

    “Back to your old loading dock home? Oh, please say you won’t!”

    “No,” he’d replied with a sad smile. “You mustn’t worry about that. You, my dear child, lifted me out of the ashes. I won’t go back. I’ll find someplace suitable, don’t worry.”

    “I’ll sneak you back in after he calms down.”

    “No.”

    “Will you continue your research somehow?”

    His answer had frightened her, because she knew quite well that despite the facade he'd erected, he was in love with her, and not the woman of a dream.

    “I’m not sure.”

                                            ***

    Twilight. The sun slipped behind the front range of the Rocky Mountains ten miles to the west, sending rose and ruby across the sky. Peaceful, even against the intermittent claps of thunder and the flashes of lightning, so peaceful that Marvin could hear the heels of his shoes tapping on the concrete as he turned west onto the broad, wet sidewalk along Eighth Avenue. He walked thirty feet, and then turned to take a final look at his Camelot. The curtains of the pediment-crowned French doors above the portico were drawn open, just slightly. Maribeth’s face was there, the side of her head holding the folds of material on the right, creating the illusion of a cascading veil. He turned, squinted, smiled up at her. With the fingers of her left hand she waved a tiny goodbye. He raised his hand to wave back, but by the time it reached chest height, the curtains had already begun to fall closed. He lowered the hand, turned, and continued on in a state of absolute melancholy.

    Indeed, he wondered, where would he go? Not back to the dock beneath which he’d lived like a rat for years.

    Please say you won’t…

    No. I promise…

    The blocks fell away behind him. He was headed north, away from the Capitol Hill neighborhood in the direction of the old industrial district automatically, without thinking, like a bird setting off south in flight in late autumn. He stopped inside the Civic Center Park a mile away from the Governor's Mansion, and rested himself on one of the stone benches near the Greek amphitheater. The laces of his shoes had been drawn too tight, and so he laid the heavy pack down beside him, bent over, and loosened them. He laughed.

    As smart as I’ve gotten, my feet still hurt when I walk too far. My stomach still growls when I get hungry.

    Failure still hurts as much as ever…

    No, I won’t have a drink. All of this is just a tiny backwash. I’ll succeed and go back to her.

    I don’t need it. I promised.

    He glanced at the frontline of skyscrapers across the park on the other side of Fifteenth Street a hundred paces away.

    I’m hungry, though. Very hungry.

    Marvin reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. A present from Maribeth; one of so many. Inside, five twenty-dollar bills—pocket change for her—lay ready and waiting to be spent on any necessity or whim. He counted the bills twice. As he fingered them he shifted his eyes to the left, then the right—an old habit of fear revisiting. He was alone in the park.

                                              ***

    “Are you okay?”

    Marvin lay on his side, curled up in a ball beside the bench. His left arm was moving slowly, up and down across the shadows on the cement, as though it possessed a detached life of its own. On hearing the sound of the voice he rolled over and looked up. She knelt at his shoeless feet. The midmorning sun directly behind her head seemed to be resting in the split of the boughs of an elm, and its light threw a corona of gold outward, like a halo. He was certain he had died, and that this creature was an angel stretching forth her hand to help him home. How he had gotten there he had no idea, or when, or from where he had come. His head ached. Of course, the discomfort of dying.

    “You’re soaking wet,” she said, touching his forehead. “You’re bleeding, too. My God, what happened?”

    “Are you an angel?”

    “WHAT?”

    He made an effort to sit up, but it was impossible. The weight of an ocean seemed to lie on his chest. “I’m dead, right?”

    She laughed with measured relief. “No, not unless the dead can talk. Do you know where you are?”

    She moved from his feet the length his body, closer to his face, as she spoke, and Marvin could plainly see that she really was an angel. Her hair was deep auburn silk, not unlike pictures he had seen of these beings sent from the throne of God. Longer, though, rendered in more vibrant colors. She pushed it back behind her delicate ears as she drew closer yet to inspect the wound. Marvin moved his head a quarter turn, because the gash was nearer the temple than the center of his face. The faint smell of sweet perfume hit him when his nose passed the palm of her hand, as though she held a bouquet of flowers. The ocean covering his chest roared upward over his head.

    “It’s not too bad. Not deep,” Maribeth said finally. She leaned back and studied him for a moment to see if he would convulse suddenly, or utter another unintelligible remark. When he did neither, when his eyes blinked, she offered him her hands. He took hold of them. They felt delicate and satiny inside the leather of his own, and after she pulled him with surprising ease to a sitting position he held on much longer than he knew he should, but not longer than he would have liked. The blood inside him rushed upward into his face. Marvin felt as if it would explode through his cheeks, and out of the tips of his ears, and he was secretly ashamed, because he realized she must see his heart hammering like a heated piston inside his chest.

    “Where am I?” he asked almost out of breath.

    “You’re in the park. Just lie still, I’m going to call an ambulance. You’re probably going to need medi…”

    “No! I mean, don’t! I’ll be okay.” No cops after what he'd just done. He glanced around as his head began to clear, taking his bearings, reconstructing the last hour. A couple sat sixty feet away beneath a tree, unaware or uncaring of his presence. Here and there others ambled along the paths winding through the colorful beds of flowers, in and out of the half mile-square park sitting in the skirts of the city.

    “Just help me up onto this bench here.”

    Maribeth leaned into his body wrapping both arms around him at his sunken chest. He was emaciated. Hollow. With only a little effort she managed to raise him to his feet and then onto the bench.

    “Why are you so wet?” she asked.

    “It’s a long story. But, if you aren’t an angel…you aren’t are you?”

    Maribeth laughed, which made her face even smoother, the ivory of her skin finer. She answered him. “Maybe.”

    “Either way,” he said, hesitating, “I am…can I trust you?” Marvin brought his spindly fingers to her arms again and gazed with apprehension and astonishment into her eyes.

    “Yes, you can trust me.”

    “I’m nuts, I guess, and I’m scared out of my skin. I…see things! I’ve had this dream that’s always there when I wake up. Always, as if I’m still asleep when I’m not. And there are numbers I don’t understand that pop up in front of me, like…like patterns, or fields of colors spread out across a plain that stretches to a horizon a million miles away. An endless plain! Jesus Christ. And yet…” He snapped his head to the right and looked south, thinking he would see billows of smoke from the building he'd just burned down, two blocks away. The blue sky stretched unbroken.

    “I started a fire. I didn’t mean to…well, yes I did.

    “The goddam’ fire sprinklers! I’d forgotten all about them, but