To Dust Return
short story #34
“To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.” -Augustine’s Confessions (Book 3, I)
He stood alone by a cocktail table holding a liquor glass with a stiff, cardboardlike bend of the arm. Like some ancient philosopher condemned to imbibe hemlock in front of his detractors at court on account of his incommodious postulations.
He looked around him. The large hall filled with a pulsating softgreen lambency made hazy by the phantom exhalations of smoke machines placed on the ground against the walls. Emulsified in the haze, clusters of faceless silhouettes like empty shadows who’d taken leave of their referents and assumed a life of their own. Their voices loose and gibbering and meaningless as of multiple tongues, like disciples of some antipentecost, possessed by spirits not holy but alcoholic. Over which played the dull and senseless boom of the music, the ground under his feet thudding to the rhythm of the bass — aggressive, dominant, overbearing — as though it were a heartbeat come to abrogate his own.
He sipped from the glass. His features crumpled as he felt the drink slog down his throat, leaving in its wake a malingering trail of prickly bitterness from the back of his tongue to his bowels. Blech. He forced out a cough. And another. The taste still there.
He took up the glass to his face and examined it like some chemist who’d by chance discovered a volatile and potentially harmful substance in his beaker. He looked at the people nearby and saw that they too held the same glass as he, drank the same drink. They too assumed the same grimace of apparent displeasure after each sip. Yet they seemed not to notice, resuming the alcoholic gibberish interspersed with more alcoholic sips.
Perhaps another chance. He drew the glass to his lips but left it hanging there. He sniffed. His eyes watered. He suppressed an incoming cough and abandoned the still full glass on the cocktail table.
“So whose funeral did you come from?”
He turned around. A petite woman, looking up at him with a sly and tight-lipped grin, swirling in her hand her own liquor glass. The neckline of her night dress exposed more than his sensibilities could afford. He jerked his gaze up, keeping the line of sight not lower than her chin. She seemed to have noticed this, as her grin widened.
“Funeral?” he said.
With the same grin she looked him from the bottom up and he followed her gaze. Black leather shoes and black slacks and black belt and dark blue dress shirt. His shoulders drooping and his thighs and hands buckling together he felt as though he were as good as naked. “I …” he said. “These are the only clothes I have.”
“You some sort of lawyer?”
“No.”
“Oh that’s a relief.”
She rolled her eyes and looked up at him grinning, swirling the liquid in her hand. He looked at her face tentatively, waiting. He started to feel warm under the collar and he felt beads of sweat squirm out of his scalp like needles.
She burst out laughing. When he realized that she’d said a joke he too tried to force a guffaw.
“My name’s Ana,” she said.
“Oh. Mine is Thomas.”
“Thomas?”
“Yeah. Like Thomas Aquinas.”
“Who?”
“Thomas Aquinas. The theologian.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Oh.”
“So what do you do?”
“Do?”
“What’s your work?”
“Oh … nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“For the moment I practice no profession.”
“I see. Still single huh?”
“Well I … uh … I …”
“It’s complicated.”
“Indeed. Something like that.”
“Ooh,” she said. “How mysterious.” She took a sip from her glass without breaking eye contact. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, his hands still clasped in front of him. A sort of stiff scarecrow dance. She looked at him, expecting him to say something. An awkward silence. She started to look around her.
He cleared his throat. “I’m still single,” he said.
“What?”
“You asked if I’m still single. Indeed I am.”
She smirked, her eyebrows furrowed, as though she was holding back a laugh. “Alright,” she said. “That’s nice to know.”
Yet another silence ensued. At last she said, “So. I think I’m gonna have to go. I have some friends waiting for me.”
“Oh. Alright. Very well.”
“Well. Glad to have met you, Timmy,” she said.
“Thomas. It’s — ” She seemed not to have heard. She’d already walked away, suffused into the green haze of the club.
Soon he heard not far from him an eruption of absurd, almost inhuman collective laughter. He thought perhaps he might participate in such mirth. He walked to the group from which the laughter came and he stood on tiptoe to see over the shoulders. Gorgonian masks of feverish glee. The sickly sweet, spoiled fruit-smell of alcohol breath. Unconscious hands swirling the liquor glasses. Empty dialogue, trivial nothings.
An so yesserday I tol my boss … Oh yes this is a good one Bill. Go go tell them what you told him. This is a good one guys, listen to Bill. So I tol him … Oh this will be good. Quiet will you. Let him tell it. So I tol my boss … go to hell. Yup. That’s it. Go to hell, I told him. Laughter. Laughter nigh hysteric. Go to hell? You told him that? And what did he do? You’re a real tough guy huh, Bill. Well he stood der all stunned and I give him a good smirk. And that’s it. Walked outta da office. Walked outta him alright. More laughter yet. Bent bodies. Thighs slapped.
As he listened and beheld the halfhung jaws and dilated eyes as though to facilitate the breaking into laughter it occurred to him that perhaps the hilarity wasn’t provoked by anything in the content of the phrases per se but rather was simply the instinctive, animal outburst set off by the pause at the end of each phrase, the period, the ellipsis. As though what was said could be exchanged with any sound intelligible or otherwise and the arbitrary tittering would still ensue. A sort of pavlovian chorus, hollow laughter by hollow speech evoked.
Not one in the group had payed attention to his presence and before long he’d zoned out of the conversation, the words dissolving into the booming music to produce but senseless shibboleth. He backpedaled a few steps and turned around and walked toward the club’s exit. On his peripheral view he perceived the vigorous movement of two figures kissing passionately on a seat. At a flitting glance he saw they were both men. Against the wall sat a delirious woman with her makeup smeared and bungled like some avantgarde mannequin, her legs sprawled uncomfortably as though she’d leaned on the wall and slithered down in a sort of drunken resignation. She spoke to no one in particular, her eyes fixed on some distant horizon as she raved a kind of baffling distaff homiletic.
He stepped out into a warm summer night, loosening the topmost button of his dress shirt. The pencil of light from the open door projected his shadow elongated ahead of him, as though more anxious to exit than he. Cars parked outside the club all muted by the vespertine semidark to a monotone palette of dark blue. The orange glowing cherry on the cigarette tip of a smoking man leaned against a post, the lone soul in this isolated purlieu. The milky curls of smoke wafting up and fading into the blank night sky like incense to some god unknown.
Thomas stood by the smoking man tentatively. He took a puff from his cigarette and exhaled. “What’s the matter?” he said. “The girls didn’t treat you right in there?”
“What? No. No. I just wanted to get a breath of fresh air is all.”
The man cackled. “Fresh air, you say? Don’t be standing next to me then.”
“Oh don’t worry. I have no problem with smoking.”
“If you say so.”
Thomas watched him. “So you must really like it, huh.”
The man contorted his mouth to the side of his face and let out an exhaust of smoke as he eyed this curious specie of hominoid. Hair gelled and combed to a neat schoolboy sidepart. The beardless babyface of a man in his early twenties. The starched solemn garb of one in his late fifties. If it’d been a costume party taking place back there he’d have guessed him a puritan pastor who’d overdressed for the role. “That’s a new way to bum,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“You wanted one, didn’t you.”
Thomas’s eyes widened. “May I?”
“Why not. Heck.” He took out a crumpled softpack from his pocket and shook out a crooked cigarette onto his palm and handed it to Thomas. He brought out a lighter and ignited it and protecting the flame with his palm he lit the cigarette now dangling from Thomas’s lips. He drew in. He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and doubled his body over and started to cough and gag. He spat to the ground. He coughed some more.
“Wait a minute wait a minute,” said the man. “This your first time to smoke, isn’t it.”
Thomas looked up at him, eyes watery and lips pursed, and nodded. “Goddamn,” the man said.
Thomas brought the cigarette to his face and studied it and took another puff and got into another coughing fit. “God almighty, kid,” said the man. “You don’t have to finish it.”
Thomas tossed the cigarette to the ground, the dispersed ashes glowing then dying on the pavement. His back bent forward and hands resting on his knees his shoulders jerked twice in an abortive retch. At last he wiped the spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Golly,” he said. “You enjoy that?”
“No.”
“What? No?”
The man exhaled the smoke as he laughed, his shoulders shaking, the secondhand tobacco fumes coming out in intermittent puffs like the chimney of a steam engine. “No sir, I don’t.”
“Why do you do it then?”
The man shrugged. “Well. Let’s see. Never thought about it. Curiosity, I suppose.”
“Curiosity.”
“Yeah. I just got to wondering why people liked it so much. I gagged on my first cig. Like you. But then I was thinking I was just doing it wrong, seeing that people could go through packs of it in a day. So I tried a second one. Gagged again. Then I thought maybe I’ll start to like the third one. And before you knowed it I got hooked. Couldn’t stop it anymore. And so. That’s custom for you.”
“A habit.”
“What?”
“A habit. An acquired disposition to perform an act after its frequent repetition. That’s Aristotle.”
The man looked at him through a curtain of smoke and grinned. “Well look here. A philosopher, are you?”
He averted his gaze to the ground. “Me?” he said. “No no … I’ve done some readings, that’s all.”
“Uh huh.”
The man finished his cigarette and threw the butt to the ground and extinguished it with his shoe. He nodded and stepped into his car and left.
Thomas continued standing there, looking up at the night sky as though in that vast blackboard he’d find traced out by the constellations some answer to his soul’s inquietude. Instead the night remained starless and void, a cruel tabula rasa. If indeed the destiny of man was fixed by the stars then no astral augury could have been more terrible than this.
He heard a violent ruckus from indoors. The thudding of the music stopped abruptly. Fixtures fallen over, glass bursting on the ground. Shouts of women, grunts of men. Calls for security, someone’s broken in and messed up the party. Then a frenzied voice on the defensive. A voice he knew and had not forgotten and perhaps never will, try as he might. And it called out his name, Thomas, Thomas.
He watched the guards push the intruder out of the door and onto the curb. He staggered erect and dusted himself with his hands and straightened his clothes. Thomas looked at him, hardly breathing. An ill-chosen sports shirt with the collar gone awry, black formal slacks, a ragged pair of sneakers. Without the brown habit it was as though he contemplated an entirely different man. Like an angel unwinged.
“Lucas,” he whispered.
This man turned around. He cocked his neck forward and squinted his eyes to see better in the darkness. He widened his eyes and extended his arms slowly and drew closer. “Thomas,” he said. “My brother.” He embraced him.
“I’ve spent the past two days looking for you,” Lucas said. “As soon as Brother Victor told me I went out and sought you, my brother.”
“He shouldn’t have let you.”
“He didn’t.”
“What?”
Lucas grinned. “I snuck out.”
Thomas’s eyes widened, his jaw slackened. “You shouldn’t have,” he said.
“I knew I had to talk to you. If you’d just give me a chance I — ”
“I’ve already decided.”
“But why, Thomas?
“It wasn’t for me. I made a mistake.”
“A mistake? My brother, I … I can’t believe I’m hearing this. This from the same mouth that convinced me six years ago that it was worth it to give it all.”
Thomas looked away. “That was back then,” he said. “The Sion has turned into a Calvary. It’s become too difficult. A terrenal hell. I wasn’t happy anymore. I had to get out of there.”
Lucas placed his hands on Thomas’s shoulders. “Look at me. Please. Look at me. Remember what you said? Either within those walls or out of it, you’ll never be happy if what you seek is to avoid difficulty. Remember that? The life of comfort, the life of do as you please … that’s the life of a slave. It’s the vows that made us free, that enabled us to say no to the things that pulled as down. You said that, that the vows were like the bird’s wings — an added weight in appearance, but …”
“Only with it can the bird fly.”
Lucas smiled sadly. His eyes had become glazed and it became more difficult to talk for the tears accumulating in his throat. “Tell me, then, Thomas. What happened?”
Thomas shook his head. He couldn’t look him in the face. “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t believe it after all.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“You can come back. Thomas, you know it.
“No.” Their eyes met now. “No. I’ve thought it through. There’s no other remedy. I’ve picked this path and I’m not turning back. I’m sorry.”
Lucas shook his head sadly. “It’s not me you offend.”
Thomas drew closer and placed his hands on his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. “Goodbye, my brother.”
Thomas was stood alone again on the sidewalk, contemplating the empty night. Halfbaked maledictions on his lips, heart filled with bitterness. That sad piercing visage of his brother forever engraved in his memory. He thought if there was any moment apposite to a sign in the firmament, some word or gesture, then this would be it. Lo, there was nothing there. My god my god why hast thou forsaken me.
Behind him a stoned man ran out of the club clutching the rails of the stairs and when he’d barely reached the sidewalk he lurched and doubled over and his neck gave a chickenlike jerk and he vomited. “Geezus chrise,” he said, before tumbling over into his own vomit. An acrid cloying smell filled the air.
