Regard the Moon by William Lewis
At three o’clock there’s nothing to do, nothing but the metal-on-metal of memory clanging the nerve chain to his brain with each heartbeat. Outside the trees are sweating in foliage the color of limes and emeralds and inside John Amos Johnny is impatient to die. Outside bees wobble from clover head to clover head like lost and lonely drunks grabbing at barstools and inside the empty house rings like a foundry. And yet it won’t happen, this thing, this whip crack end of all things, this black curtain falling down over the noise. Outside the light and inside the shadow and in between the thunder without lightning. It won’t come.
Why?
*
Born John Amos into the middle class, the kids at school called him Anus.
“John Anus, John Anus!”
“Amos was a prophet!” he’d scream till his freckled face turned red.
“Amos was an anus!”
“Amos was a prophet!”
“Whose anus turned a profit!”
The laughter came down like curtains of fire. The laughter and the faces full of white teeth on the playground as the dust rose about them. A thousand lanterns in the dark. The baleful baying of hound dogs as they devoured his scent.
His eighth-grade teacher saw him with his head down. Saw him with his fingers jammed into his ears. She remembered a time not so long ago. Fat, fat, fatty! She remembered a time and she took a book from her personal shelf and slid it under his elbow.
The Best Loved Poems of the American People, he read when he lifted his head and focused his eyes. She smiled the most imperceptible of smiles. She nodded her head and returned to the front of the class.
“John Anus! John Anus!”
The words came and went around his head, boiling like clouds in the lee of a distant mountain crag. He was here and there, the obstacle and the art. The boiling cloud and the dancing shadow. And the whirlwind was gathering, meek and invisible. The wind that rends all things meant to be indivisible.
*
Voices were hissing once, snakes essing on the floor beneath the words that hissed through the air. But that was minutes or years ago, and it won’t come again. Now he’s walking slowly from the breakers to the beach and over the dunes and the hissing slips away and the cars smash together again and again on the highway before him. Again and again just as his heart clenches tight. But that was a second ago, and it will come again. It won’t stop.
Why?
*
One afternoon in the yard the leaves whirled about him, yellow and pale and hectic red, the center of whirlwind world. You look like a sorcerer, she said, this woman come from nowhere, going nowhere, but right this moment in the present the very essence of somewhere. From an enchanter the ghosts are fleeing.
“All things flee their maker,” he whispered in reply, and his whisper crackled through the air like dry leaves crushed to powder in a fist, popped like twigs through the clear dry air until the message boomed at last in her ears like thunder.
Silent, rooted to the spot, her insides twisting like aspen leaves, she fell to pieces as his hands moved over her.
“Or at least they try.”
*
The ocean, two miles distant, rolled silently against the land. Forward and back, by and behind and through sloughs cut through caramel soft mounds stubbled with sea oats the ocean moved without cease, and the wind rose playfully from its back, spreading the salty-sweet scent of pine needles about the men as they stood.
One of the men held his hand up against the sun, his sharply-defined face half in light and half in shadow. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead.
“I’ve had about enough of this,” he said. “If our man doesn’t break soon, I’m going to loose the fearful lightning.”
“Fateful lightning,” another said. “No one ever gets that right. It’s ‘loose the fateful lighting of his terrible swift — ‘”
“Shut up, Taggart. Mercilus, has our man from the CNU arrived yet?”
“No, they’re about five minutes out.”
“I’m not sure if Mr. Amos knows it or not, but that holy man is his last chance.”
In the distance, the whirring of a car engine could be heard.
“So tell me,” the first man said, wiping his forehead again. “The woman’s phone last pinged off that tower yesterday?”
“Correct. And the logs show the pattern of browsing to be consistent with her previous usage: relationship counseling, fundamentalist Christian sites, searches for quotes on forgiveness and salvation.”
“She sounds about as fucked up as he is. Maybe she took him hostage?”
“Shut up, Taggart.”
“Anything else, Mercilus?”
“Yes. You’ll find this interesting. The public library indicates that Mr. Amos is an avid reader.”
“Is that so?”
“It is. Mostly poetry, but some philosophy, history, things like that. Completely vanilla.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Let me finish. The library also reports that a week after Mr. Amos got his library card, two chemistry books and a basic electronics book went missing.”
“Now I’m interested,” he said, pointing to the end of the driveway. “But look, our rabbi has just arrived.”
*
Where is she now, this woman, this very essence of somewhere? Somewhere is nowhere, John Amos Johnny cries out, somewhere is a lie that never was and never will. Everyone and everything and everywhere is always at every moment bound up so tightly that you travel a thousand miles to realize you’ve a thousand more miles to go. Space is empty and all that matters, matter, is the oasis of disaster we create. Each man is an island and the cold sea waits for the moment it will drown him. I, land. The hissing of the sea as it licks the edges of consciousness, yes. That is the only somewhere, and yet look it is always disappearing into nowhere, the breakers conspire and aspire to waves that tower over the world entire and crash down, hammer on anvil, and all existence rings and sings madness. And there on the sand when the water retreats is the iron sword, its blade bitten red by the salt, its scalpel-sharp blade crusted with blood-colored rust, and to you the sea will sing in hissing notes. It will dance and sing and laugh to you. I never sleep. I never ever sleep. I am everywhere and always and I never sleep.
*
Then a boom on the door like thunder. And again and again. Three crack booms without lightning.
“Mr. Amos,” it said. “Mr. Amos, may I have a word?”
And all the world was silent and still without, and within the clanging up the nerve to his brain.
“Mr. Amos, I am not armed. I am not with the authorities.”
And all the world was silent.
“Mr. Amos, I am a man of God.”
***
“You don’t look much like a preacher.”
“Oh, but I am. Bakkenberger’s my name. Leo Bakkenberger.”
“Never saw a preacher wear one a them funny little hats.”
“My apologies,” the priest said, removing his kippah. “On Fridays I’m normally a rabbi. Today, though, I’m making an exception for you.”
“A rabbi? On Fridays?”
“It’s complicated,” he began. “I was born a Jew and I’m still a Jew of course, but this is a small community and there aren’t many Christians left. Real Christians, I mean. The few that remain, however, need someone to relieve them of their conscience now and again, so I do what I can.”
“I ain’t said nothing about relieving any conscience.”
“No one ever does, but they always do.”
“Look here, preacher, what exactly is it you believe, anyhow?”
“Believe?”
“About God and Jesus and all that. Can you be a Jew and a Christian?”
“Of course, Mr. Amos.”
“Johnny. Don’t never call me Amos.”
“Certainly, Mr. Johnny. Certainly you can be both a Jew and a Christian. All of Christ’s disciples were Jews. Christ himself was a Jew.”
John Amos Johnny looked on the man sitting beside him, this round peculiar man whose pale head was adorned with a wreath of ochre hair.
“And furthermore,” he continued. “There are many, myself among them, who believe that becoming a Christian, being born again, if you will, is nothing if not a way for gentiles to enter into the covenant that God made with my people.”
John Amos Johnny relaxed in the old wooden chair and felt his shoulderblades pinch the skin of his back against the hard oak of the top rail. He shifted forward and the chair creaked loosely against itself.
“So you saying I’m a Jew, too?” he asked eventually.
“I don’t know,” the priest said. “Are you saying you’re a Christian?”
John Amos Johnny croaked a strange laugh, its edges roughened by cigarettes.
“Where’s Annabel, Johnny?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Where’s Annabel, Lee?”
*
Island, you see. Wind to water to waves to foam. There can be no release. Just a soaring higher and higher, the blue deep we wingest.
I, land. You, sea. Rocks to stones to pebbles to sand. There can be no peace. There can be no cease between us, just the teaching teaching taught half the madness thy brain must know.
*
“I haven’t seen her in many a year. Many and many a year.”
“I don’t think that’s true, but you don’t have to be truthful with me. No man has the right to demand the truth.”
“Tell that to the Judge.”
“Not even a judge can demand the truth.”
“I didn’t say ‘a judge.’ I said ‘the Judge.’”
“I see. Well, like I said, you don’t have to tell me the truth. I just worry about people. Jews, Christians, heathens of all types.”
The preacher looked upon Johnny, strangely judgmental for one who disclaimed the right to judge. “I don’t think I’m the one you’re worried about though, am I?”
John Amos Johnny croaked his laugh again.
“The thing that’s always bothered me is eternal life.”
“That’s a problem for you? Most people take great comfort in the idea.”
“Yes it’s a problem. I mean, it doesn’t make sense except in the case of God. God has always existed, so He will always exist.”
“Okay, that I can agree with.”
“God is a line through time. No beginning, no end.”
“Yes.”
“But you and me, we ain’t always existed. We came into being through the basest, most dirty of acts.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“We began, in any case. We weren’t always. We’re like the rays of the sun. Or line segments, if you want to remember your geometry. We start somewhere, we make our journey, and then we stop. We are absorbed and turn into heat.”
“Absorbed and turn into heat? That’s not a very comforting thought.”
“That’s the only way my thinking mind can make sense of it. I guess we are the fuel that powers Hell. Absorbed and turn into heat and radiated back out into space until the whole universe is the same temperature.”
“The cold death.”
“You watch PBS, too.”
The preacher laughed. “Once or twice.”
“That’s my thinking mind,” John Amos Johnny started up again after offering Bakkenberger a cigarette and being refused. “Thing is, in my heart, for lack of a better figure of speech, in my heart I know it’s different. I know we do go on forever, and I can’t make sense of it.”
“Do you need it to make sense?”
“It would be preferable to the noise.”
“The noise? What noise?”
“The static, the friction, the scraping and echoing and buzzing that comes from everything in conflict. You can’t hear it, I guess?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Well, I ain’t stopped hearing it since I was thirteen years old.”
“And making sense of eternity would stop it?”
“I think it would. But there’s a problem.”
“There’s always a problem.”
“How can a person understand the infinite, I mean, really understand it, ponder it, consider it, examine it…how can a person do that in a finite amount of time?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question, Mr. Am…Mr. Johnny. As it stands, we only have fifteen more minutes before the FBI and ATF and DEA and CIA bust down the door and haul us both away.”
John Amos Johnny lit a cigarette and laughed and watched as the preacher crossed his arms and moved his eyes over the margins of the room. They lingered at the bookshelf behind him, holding in their gaze the Norton Anthology that was falling apart.
“They ain’t gonna haul you away. You’re one of ‘em.”
The preacher stretched a tight smile across his teeth and shrugged.
“They ain’t gonna haul me away neither. They might carry me in fifteen or twenty buckets or cans and soak me up with ten or fifteen rolls of paper towels, but haul me away? In handcuffs? Nossir.”
John Amos Johnny took his phone from his shirt pocket and moved his fingers over it. But it didn’t happen. He jabbed the treacherous machine again with his finger. It did not come, the end of all things, the light and heat of a thousand suns and the black truth in every direction at the speed of sound and faster. The disobedience of a thousand unmade sons. John Amos Johnny was still in his chair and the preacher still in his, staring now perplexed and strangely sad.
*
I arose from dreams of thee, in the last bitter sleep of night. I, a rose. A thorn-clotted bloom of pulsing life. And the night was as cheap fabric, its pigment fading fast in the swift stream of morning. Therefore, on every morrow are we mourning? Flowery bands, field upon field of carnations and chrysanthemums, red and white and meretricious pink. Mare atrocious. Salt seeping up veins at a gallop, the metal on metal of memory clanging horseshoes on the metal wires to my brains. Cells full to bursting with sodium. Salt the earth. Salt the birth. My like must not rise again. Delenda est Karthago.
I arose from dreams of thee. I, a rose. And a spirit in my feet, hath lead me to the end of the earth. The waterfall that pours forevermore into the sea, and the sea is never full. See? The river must never rise again and the waterfall be made a magic cavern measureless to man, must be made to trickle trickle trickle to its end in crystalline delight.
I, land. I, rose.
You, sea.
***
At seven o’clock there’s nothing to do, nothing but the metal-on-bone of handcuffs clanging up the nerve chain to his brain. Outside the trees are shivering in shadow the color of agate and ash and inside John Amos Johnny is impatient to die. Outside bees huddle in their hives like refugees from a storm yet to come and inside the empty house rings like a foundry. And yet it won’t happen, this thing, this whip crack end of all things, this black curtain falling down over the noise. Outside the shadow and inside the light and in between the thunder without lightning. It won’t come.
Why?
*
They were talking, each to each. To reach him, to reach her. He heard them talking to the preacher.
“You’re lucky preacher man. This entire place should have blown sky high. He had the entire property rigged with explosives. This cabin, too.”
“We found a squirrel chewing the wire. Our guy here ran the line between a pair of oak trees. If not for that, we’d be carrying you both away in buckets and cans and sopping you up with paper towels.”
“A squirrel. I guess it’s true that God moves in mysterious ways.”
“What’s not a mystery is the woman. The dogs found her already. Maybe two or three more.”
“A squirrel?”
***
Island in the sea. I, land. You, sea. A cloud of leaves, kaleidoscope, handfuls of dust on butterfly wings. My days are in the yellow grief, the worm and the canker are mine to atone. And all I loved, I loved a loan. Borrowed time, pawnbroker, interest in interest in an empty vault. Metal on metal, the bankruptcy of rage. Clanging up the nerve chain to the brain, carrying the signal like a sailor running up the last flag in a storm.
I have sailed to the end of the world and all that waits is a gaping mouth for me there, nor teeth nor tongue, but gullet entire and the infinite hunger of infinity itself.
Your currents surge and slack, the life-giving and the life-taking urge, the luminous stars and the frozen black. You rise and fall with the coming and the going of the moon and I wait for you. Impatiently.
William Lewis is originally from South Carolina (and still considers himself a South Carolinian) but has been living and working in Wisconsin for more than twenty years. He hasn’t gotten used to the winters and suspects he never will. He has previously published fiction and poetry in The Greensboro Review, Dossier Journal, and The New York Quarterly. William recently finished the draft of a novel and is also currently working on a collection of short stories.
