Come with Me

by Ronald Malfi

No one thinks when they first meet a person that there is some cosmic clock counting down the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds until you will stop knowing each other.

Beyond the windows, I could see what looked like a hawk wheeling against a sky the color of bone.

I can still hear you saying it, over and over, like a curse or maybe a prayer: Come with me.

something about this thick file unsettled me on a more basic level, stirring into alertness that distant, reptilian part of my brain. The part adept at recognizing danger.

This opened up a passageway in my mind, one in which other-Aaron functioned as a sort of de facto guide, my personal Virgil, and together we wound through the spiral of your past, and I could smell the scorched brimstone of your obsession as both other-Aaron and I pursued some non-specific figure into the black.

“Fear,” he said. “Used to be something like this happened, it was an anomaly. It didn’t fit in with the fabric of the world, and so people could afford to be horrified not only by the violence and terror of it, but by the sheer absurdity, the impossibility of it. That kid in Texas takes potshots from the university observation deck, kills over a dozen people, and the country is petrified not just by horror but by disbelief. That was in the sixties. Back then, something like that, people could watch it and still not relate to it. Something like that would never happen to them, right? But now, it’s like every week there’s something on the news. People are no longer exempt. It’s no longer an absurdity. So what do they do? They try to erase it from the public consciousness as quickly as possible. None of us are just spectators anymore. We’ve all got a stake in the game.”

Poplars scraped the gunmetal sky, their shaggy conical bodies powdered in marrow-hued grime. Mailboxes jutted at crooked angles from both sides of the road, their hulls peppered with buckshot, their misshapen aluminum doors gaping mouth-like in shock. There was a sizeable deer carcass in the middle of the roadway, its white-tufted belly split down the middle, its guts a glistening, viscous decoupage smeared along the ash-powdered blacktop. It hummed with flies. As I cut a wide berth around the carcass, I saw that the deer’s head had been lobbed off. Cleanly. Someone had made off with a roadkill trophy.

There is a word in Japanese, yugen, that has no English equivalent. In Japanese, it is the awareness that the universe transmits a profound and mysterious beauty that can only be understood by the man or woman engaged in the comparable beauty of human suffering.