The Divine Farce (LeapLit)

by Michael S.A. Graziano

In my mind the universe was filled up infinitely with concrete, and at its center was one tiny bubble in which our randomly assorted souls had been entombed.

Surely the most fundamental of questions. Why are we here? What should we do? It is what it is.

I thought of her as Rose because that was the color of her voice. In absolute darkness, lacking any stray photon of actual color, my brain was beginning to invent it. The sound of his voice was hemlock green, and I thought of him as Hemlock or Henry or Mr. Henry Greene. The sound of my own voice was blue. Brother Brian Blue, with a monkish connotation in my mind.

She had a warmth and clarity to her voice, he had an acerbic edge, and I had a reflective depth. Our shades changed depending on the mood, from pale, pastel, delicate, thoughtful, to the fiery brightness of emotional revelation, to the nearly black hue of teeth-gritting rage.

We all three traveled across a vast space of emotion. We couldn’t help it. We were so squeezed side-to-side that our souls squirted out prom...

At first we might have resented physical intrusion, but let a week pass, let a year pass, let moments trickle into moments until the concept of the temporal increment is entirely lost—and psychological barriers dissolve in the lukewarm pear nectar.

The sage became savage. My legs trembled from the pain in my knees. But the world is what it is. You get used to it, as you get used to anything.

The only release from standing that I could ever hope to achieve would be to die, rot, and let my bones fall in a heap on the grid floor.

At the root of jealousy is a fear of abandonment, and we had no possibility of abandonment in that place.

A brilliant organizational trick, it was applied game theory. A person alone—hell. No matter how deeply reflective, no matter how self sufficient—eternal solitude—hell. Two people—as good as hell. Three people, a triangulated complexity, strife and forgiveness, alliance and conflict, a polyphonic piece of music sometimes dreadful in its dissonance, sometimes uplifting in its harmony—heaven.

My optimistic theory was that any three people, crammed together for a long enough time, would eventually find a mutual harmony. The rules of heaven were minimalist. They were elegant.

If I was right, then we would remain here for eternity, our guts engulfing e...

But eternity—that was on a different level of conception. It forced the mind to acquiesce entirely and accept the here, the now, and the comfort, such as it was.

Sage, turn around, we love you. They called me Sage because I rarely talked, and when I did, my phrases came out as non sequiturs like bizarre Confucian sayings.

spasms until she was sitting on the floor, one hand cupped gently around my ankle, the other hand around Henry’s ankle. In this way she held us together, as if she were a telegraph, as if she felt the need to physically hold us in order to transmit her thoughts to us. She would hum, her head resting against my thigh or his. That was her hobby and her obsession.

music—anger and resentment, despair, loyalty, trust, humor, contempt, forgiveness, alliances switching and switching, Rose, Henry, Brian, primary colors, however harsh, however outrageous, as long as the parts fit together into the workings of a larger whole. A tessellation, a giant unity. Love.

Then again, sometimes my soaring philosophy meant nothing to me, and I thought, like Hemlock, it is what it is. It isn’t heaven, it isn’t hell, it’s simply where we are, and it stinks. It stinks literally. It stinks and it hurts. And the people here are driving me crazy.

The hardest part of the wall is through, I blurted out.

His fears seemed to be an expression of conservatism. He was afraid of losing the familiar.

When the hole was a few inches wide and deep enough to put my fist in, it seemed like an obscene thing, like a tumor in reverse. Touching it made me feel ill. We had ruined our world.

The world is not what it is: the world is what you make it.

Light. After eons of darkness. An ectoplasm, an infection of the brain almost like pain, almost like joy. I wanted it to stop.

Three troglodytes. Three grotesques. Three grubs in a pupa. Three fools in a concrete pipe.

The walls rose up fifty feet to the ceiling, an exhilarating generosity of space. My soul expanded beyond the limits of my ugly rubbery body to reach up into that emptiness.

I wondered how many other unhatched people were sealed in the wall, trapped in painted cells, lost in universes of thought.

Whoever these people were, whatever they had passed through to get here, they evidently didn’t appreciate the resources given to them. To live in a room so expansive, and huddle on the floor taking up as little space as possible, to have absolute freedom of movement and not move, made no sense to me. Something was wrong with them.

After the slow ages of nothing, I craved a hideous din. I wanted to take in the world chopped up into sensory fragments and sprayed into my brain through the eyes, ears, and nose.

My voice had no blue tint left. It had no richness, no thought, no reflection. It was a thin, characterless voice, merely a sound. I had lost not only Rose and Henry but myself too.

I had helped to knock a hole in heaven. I had walked away from it much too eagerly, and now I felt more sad for it than for me. I felt sad it was over, as if our triangulated love was a thing with a soul, and now it was dead, and only the valueless components were left, hopelessly scattered.

Maybe, if I sat absolutely still, they would come and find me. Maybe.

He's gonna turn into one of the sad people

Rose, singing Rose, where are you? Where is your gruesome sense of humor? Where is that warm and nectar-wet hand that you used to curl around my ankle? Henry? My Henry Hemlock Greene? Where is your pestiferous sarcasm and your quarter-squats and your lectures on exercise? Where is your emotional fragility that we tried to protect?

Why did I want to leave a world of minimalist perfection, to explore something unknown?

I was not a sage anymore. I was no longer the deep thinker of a group of three. I was alone, I was a nothing, I was a stomach.

I felt a certain disquieting fellowship with them from long proximity, but I said to them, Not yet. My voice came out in a scratchy whisper. I’m not yet ready to give up, you guys.

I had lost all sense of wonder at the gumbo of bodies

A wild statement

Drinking splashes of that tepid, rusty water felt like life itself flowing into my stomach and dispersing into my brain. It was joy and absolution. It was anointment. I had become a member of the multitude in spirit, in emotion, in greed, and now finally in satisfaction.

I told myself that I had not so much lost two companions as gained a billion. I tried hard to feel the warmth of universal inclusion. From many, one. From strife, love. A tessellation. A motet of uncountable voices.

A never-ending labyrinth of caves. An exponential branching of paths. An infinite topology that could never be remembered, never retraced. A biscuit economy. Grace by rusty water. The strong, deep, fundamental obsessions of the crowd: hunger, thirst, rage, joy, despair. The honesty of anonymity. The honest stench of piss and shit. The exhibitionism of naked bodies and raw emotions.

I never stopped looking for Henry and Rose. Of all the people I encountered, all the faces I stared at in curiosity or hope, all the bodies I stumbled up against, none lifted me, none made me happy, none were as important to me as Henry and Rose, who were only faces in my mind now, remembrances. They were no better than anyone else, no more lovely than the thousand other people I saw every moment, no less filthy, but all the same they were themselves, they were special because I knew them, because I had spent enough time pressed up against them to absorb a little part of their odor and skin and blood and emotion, because they were after all my friends. I wanted them. I wanted, sometimes, to go back home. The more I searched, the less hope I had.

The rules of the divine game resulted in a certain isolation of the soul.

I’d feel paradoxically full in the stomach, empty in my heart, tired, alone, content, whole, hollow, broken and repaired, cheated and lucky, useless and essential to the cosmic pattern. On that ambivalent mood, as fascinating as a pillow, my mind would ease into sleep.

I sat up, took the half biscuit out of my mouth, and handed it to her.

“Do you still want a biscuit?” I asked, pulling one out of my mouth and handing it to him. He took it and we sat side by side chewing. “I haven’t had a friend in a long time,” he admitted. After a while we got up and went separate ways.

biological truths of food, water, sex, and sleep? I tried. I tried to be content. I tried not to feel nauseous about the failures of other people, to draw my satisfaction from the strength of my own muscles and bones.

I’d take a break from the perpetual fight, sit down, lean back against a wall, and wonder what else, what else is in the world? What else is worth doing?

The bats had a strange and exhilarating effect on me. They made me feel connected to the light bulbs dotted across the ceiling. It was as if their flight carried threads of imagination up and down that stitched me to a mystery.

We were so driven by hunger and thirst, and so isolated from each other by the constant mixing of the crowd, and so numbed by the repetition of caverns and food troughs and rusty water pipes and perpetual battle, and so gratified at each orgiastic meal, that we had lost all our capacity for imagination. For vision.

If death hands you rancid shit strewn with human hair, make an escape ladder. Is that a variant of the adage?

With my hand spread out on the bumpy surface, I felt as if I were touching the belly of a pregnant woman. A new possibility lay hidden here. But I didn’t know which side was inside and which was out. Was I the obstetrician or the baby?

Is it possible to be alone when other people are pressed against you skin to skin?