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August 2008

The Way of The Heart and of Fury
-Or-
Blame It On The Stars

by Daniel Bachleda

How ridiculous is the fury of man. This is what he thinks leaning against the wall with its peeling paint, once the color of roses, faded now, cracked and brittle. Idly, he nudges a piece of the broken coffee mug with his left toe, ignoring the blood drying in a rusted trail down his shin, onto his foot. It’s his blood, he knows, and not hers. Not hers at all, he reassures himself slightly, like a quick breeze that stirs through the apartment, flitting about all the sharp edges and fractured particles of all the broken things, stirring them all once more—a pale mimicry of the horrid storm recently past—as if in vain hopes he might, with his own wind, bring all the pieces back together again, if only for a moment—that he might know once more how things were before. But the breeze hesitates, then falters, losing force and fading from the tired room altogether. He feels himself sinking, too, with it, fading from the room, disappearing into whatever great abyss formed in the simple act of time’s passing. He still doesn’t know how things have got this way.

He had met her in the summer, when the bold patrician Sun had its back turned, and the mischievous stars whispered to them both, he with his hair perfected for the evening, nice shirt nice shoes, empty cigarette pack in jeans pocket folding under the weight of his movements, and she with skirt on, showing no subtle hint of lubricious skin, but not too much not too much, her hair falling in locks washed and perfumed by the night, her eyes reflecting the meddling illumination of the stars above. She wore small hearts on her shoes, not the kind of hearts that reside in the warm bosoms of women and men, slaving away with monotone purpose to give them the freedom to do both evil and good, not that kind, but rather the kind of hearts drawn by children in throes of mirth and wonder at the universe, a simple symmetrical design, smooth curves with a point between them, creating a depression, another point at the bottom where the two halves meet. Whereas the real heart, the messy one with pumps and chambers and valves, contains only blood, this heart, the child’s heart, contains only all the mystery and awe the universe has to offer men and women, all the tethers and heat, the buoyant wind and the melancholy rain that they have learned identify in a word called love.

This heart, this cornucopia, this reservoir, this symbol has been found inside the notes of one blushing adolescent to another, inside heavy stock paper cards purchased at drug stores, on bright mylar balloons, as signature between lovers on notes of ‘don’t forget to buy eggs’ and such, tattooed on skin in intimate places, on shoes of girls at parties in the night, on cakes and cookies in the form of hand-placed frosting, as sweet candies to hide under the tongue, carved into the soft bark of trees with crude cutting tools, depicted brilliantly albeit ephemerally in fireworks displays—much to the oo’s and aah’s of those gathered below with open faces and cheers and smiles, printed on dainty undergarments worn in warm places, worked into rare metals whose destiny is either to lie on soft black velvet underneath special lighting, or to dangle between luscious breasts—to be grasped delicately between pointer finger and thumb of admiring suitors and asked of, or perhaps even as anklet, jingling just so, musically, with every step, a hint, a sultry perhaps, a playful innuendo, a symbol of what could might can be gained in knowing its bearer.

This heart, this infinite chamber, this incalculable vault has also been depicted by an unsmiling some with an addition in design: a jagged line rending the peaceful symmetry in twain, sharp-edged and tragic, much like all those broken fragments lying upon the dirty wooden floors of his apartment.

When they had met, the hearts on those tiny shoes of hers weren’t like this, these tragic pieces; they were whole, vital, eager, beating. He asked her for a cigarette and she gave him one.

From there it was a journey of dreams and hopes mish-moshed into sentences and paragraphs containing other things—fears, embarrassments, misunderstandings, stammerings, jokes, and sometimes, quietly, even whispered, prayers. They slept on carpets with too little blanketing, on couches with too much music, on cleverly placed chair padding, floor level, in the cold dark, and on expensive mattresses raised a foot and a half into the air, supported both by wooden posts and the miraculous levitation that was their love for one another. It grew by leaps and bounds, steady and strong, like the hearts that push hot blood through the bodies of women and men as they lay in each other’s embrace.

They drove between cities, pursuing the daylight or running toward night. They ate on the go, made love in rest stops. They gave each other company, but stole glances when the other was unaware. When they laughed, they meant it, and the stars laughed with them. But that laughing, that of those misfit stars, contained a certain tinge to it, a warping of the tone, a dissonance, almost a sardonic twinge, a lingering jealousy, perhaps, but definitely the product of a certain knowledge of the future to come. The stars so old by the time of love’s invention, too old to join in such dance, had only to watch from cold space afar, poking fun of it in company, and perhaps yearning quietly for it in their solitude. The stars loved hated feared love, and meddled with it, experimented, tweaked and stretched it just so in ancient curiosity. And those two, the lovers, so enraptured with one another, were perhaps too distracted to listen for that sign of subtle conspiracy.

Those stars, those jealous twinkling delights, as seen from the eyes of poets and lovers, having let these two lovers develop and enjoy one another in sleep and in waking, now performed their dire experiments here.

It began with simple misunderstandings: misplaced items of temporal importance, forgotten iota, innocent behaviors guilty of bad timing or taste. The malevolence spread from there. She and he began to argue over small things, crises that began to overshadow the initial attraction to one another, problems that threatened the smiles on their faces to fold down inward upon themselves, that promised to wet eyes and cheeks if left unchecked, unresolved.

The stars marveled in their power over love, became drunk with the notion that love was beneath them, pathetic and whimpering amid their glory. They reveled in their ability to create and destroy love with so little true effort. Imagine the effort a star would need to meld those heavy atoms together, just to keep the reaction going. Wrecking love was no atomic fusion, the stars joked to one another. They increased their pressure on the relatively weaker atomic structure of love.

The arguments turned to outright fights: raised voices, red faces, wild eyes. The lovers, when calmed and when calming one another, after the mysterious fury died down, asked one another what was happening, what was going wrong. They looked inside and out, merged new lists of things that must be changed into their sprawling paragraphs of hopes, dreams, fears, embarrassments, and prayers. They tried to map out the dissonance, the unharmonious clamor, tried to pinpoint it, sketch maps of it, demarcating its location in screaming red ink, red like the color of miniature hearts on shoes, so that it might be impossible to ignore it, and only obvious to fix it.

Months passed under the stars’ cruel vigilance, and they, the stars, did their best to hide their work from the Sun, humanity’s only true patron saint, for fear of shame. They, perhaps, knew what they were doing was somehow wrong, somehow against the nature of the universe with its function to perpetuate cycling life. But love they loathed now, that pathetic strength of humankind, that feeble purpose by which humans elect to shape their world and their lives. The stars would take no prisoners. All’s fair in love and war, they would giggle to one another in the cold empty emptiness of space.

The lovers no longer knew which way was up. They fumed and were furious; they called each other out, called each other names. They discovered, in moments of passion and movement, a small desire to cause one another pain, that that other might then know the pain they had given, that they might receive what they were due. That small desire began to grow and magnify. It was not long before he began to throw things around, break them, shatter them in his unending frustration. She would cry or scream at him, in frustration hers, while his ejected objects bounced around the room, denting the walls and scratching the floors, careening back around to cut open soft flesh on his impassioned leg.

Still, in moments of calmness, of doldrums, she and he would ask one another in the quietest and therefore most serious and sincere of voices what was going so terribly terribly wrong. Each said they could no longer understand the other, no longer see what it was that first attracted them together like random spinning molecules that smash together inside the deep furnaces of stars’ interiors. They told one another that they regretted how they couldn’t see this disaster soon enough. They told one another in soft voices that they couldn’t go on anymore. It was in this way that the once brilliant and healthy love became a tired, burdensome thing, a brittle, faded rose-colored paint on the walls of dark and dusty apartments.

That heart, that distended bauble, that infected cyst, that gangrenous cavern became a weight heavier upon the souls of innocent confused frustrated lovers than all the worlds of the universe.

And now here he was, slumped unnaturally against those sagging dented walls, amid all the broken hopes dreams yearnings that took the forms of jagged pieces of smashed coffee mugs, of shattered mirrors, of spider-webbed picture frames, of splintered wooden chairs, of rended expensive mattresses, of overturned bookshelves, of mangled typewriter keys, of torn canvases, and of jagged little red hearts, broken and spread by slight breezes over an old scratched wood-paneled floor.

She was gone, would stay gone. Everything was now gone; there was nothing left to mourn but empty space and echoes in places where once furniture and smiling girl smiling boy were.

The stars had done their deed. Neither lover ever knew the exact magnitude of the terrible influence that wrecked their happiness. Neither lover ever knew that it was the unremitting malevolence, product of selfish jealousy, of the stars, the stars that celebrated that fine but far away moment of their meeting, that twinkled in ceremonious decoration in the dark sky during the birth of their day together.

He stood in the hall a moment longer, eyes passing over the shards and fragments, cheeks wet with regret and fury, useless fury, a boundless and yet feeble thing burning inside him in the form of a giant red question mark. His fury can do nothing to change things, so thereby and subconsciously he begins the transmutation of his fury into something else, a smoldering, a sadness deeper than the reaches of black empty space, a fantastic wound in the earth of his soul, left gaping and painful on the terrain of his mind. He would patch up this hole with forgetting. He would move on. So would she. They would both pave over this abyss, run new earth upon its cap, turn it and water it, plant new growths to bloom there among all the hopes and the dreams and the embarrassments and the quiet prayers. There is no other way to go, no other way to keep on going but up like this, in layers, the patched topography marking the tragic evidence of the guilty stars’ tampering from above. He closed the door for the last time gently, trying not to listen to it echo through the dark apartment. He turned and went down the stairs and out into the sun. It was summer again.

The Sun, by now—the Earth being closest now to its gaze—like any truly good parent, realized the unsettlement of two of its beloved children that had arisen over the winter, realized the epic pain, traced its source not to the inability of people to truly communicate, not to the inability of people to find happiness with one another; nor did that tearful trail lead to any fault of its children in either education or empathy. Indeed, that path traced not down inside its children’s bosom, not down into that messy furious heart, but up, and outward, into cold space, all the way to the guilty countenances of its compatriots, its fellows, its companions, the stars all around. They could not hide this from it, and they felt epic, starborn shame, the deep shame of those who know time since its infancy, the great shame only the gods of men could feel.

The Sun accused its equals, those dastardly comrades, finally realizing the wicked answer to its own question—that of pondering why the Love Experiment could not seem to thrive and blossom across the universe—called them out and pointed at the mess on his warm wet planet, as if scolding a puppy, holding its nose in errant urine. It berated them for their pettiness. It slated them for their slander. It felt such great solar sadness. The universe had betrayed it, them, all of them together, and it had betrayed the purpose it had been given when this whole thing started: that they were supposed to bring love into being, not to suppress its flowering, to mangle it with savage starry fingers, to smother it beneath heavy cosmic feet. It, too, felt shamed.

And the Sun, primordial nurturer guardian admirer of such life that could should will create love, enacted its punishment upon an immature and jealous universe. Slowly, with patience only stars can know, it relinquished its nurturing form, giving up, too, like all tired and worn lovers, growing darker, growing in bulk and gravity, swallowing that warm wet planet in its dejection and dismay, taking back what it had created, protecting like a mother father the virtue of love from an unkind and petty universe, growing larger still, as though to announce to all its terrible purpose, a gesture to imply the proper shame due, and there it hesitated, its posture sad and beautiful, before giving up its last breath and falling in on itself, falling into darkness. This was how stars learned how to cry.