"Thanks for all the sundries from your garden, and for being so sweet to my mother".
"Mom got pepper home ok"?
"Yes, I packed it for her and she got it".
"She got my sweet long pointy pepper"?
He hadn't dared make a dirty joke to her in months and months...still they walked upon glass around each other, a kind of forgiveness mist which clouded their visions, and the sharper parts of their memories of each other. She had to play along, to a point.
"You have to ruin ever nice thought don't you (or make it better but still...), yes, THAT pepper is in her hands, or her mouth".
He could be depended upon to be subtle and brutally funny in his sparse retorts. He towed the line, even now.
"Well, I hope she enjoys my pepper".
She thought up the most colourful reply she could. "Most likely it will choke her momentarily, and then she'll speak well of it later. If it helps, I stuffed it inside a box of fancy black licorice I bought for her. It helps".
He had then drawn her a picture, in the feeble pencil sketch hands that even a 3 year old could improve upon. Almost disturbing in its stupidity, but coming from his mind, it forced her to laugh loudly and with a crassness which they once enjoyed long ago (he made her laugh in bed like this too, which she still missed on some summer nights and around Christmas). She came back to him. "Your artistic skills are sick as they say and wow, my mother's and my tits combined don't equal the tits you've drawn. Still, you show guts and the placement of the pepper is menacing, and well framed".
She felt that was the verbal equivalent to the supremely ridiculous pencil stick figure of his which depicted (seemingly) her mother, busty for some reason whilst maintaining the stickness of her figure, along with another of his garden peppers, pointing in between the stick figure legs...something about the shadow of the pepper on the stick figure paper kept at her, and made her grow giddy, and trusting, which scared her somewhat.
He replied with "thang", but clearly meant "thanks" (which he himself corrected the very moment it was uttered). She decided to continue with the playful irreverent meanings of the sounds of these words.
"I prefer thang. You have made me laugh, and now I sleep the sleep of drunkards. Thang you too. Slap echo good night on the arse"... Echo was his white pit bull, anxious, loving and masochistic like he was. Loyal, with a smile from ear to ear, and rarely knowing how to be still, or be calm, or be dull. That dog had invaded her dreams on many an occasion and she was convinced Echo was her shamanic familiar in the world of visions.
Quickly again, he did her bidding. "Slapped. Called out your own name. Now sleep". Maybe she'd said too much and he wasn't in the mood for this talk anymore. She thought to herself that this was the final goodnight, but she couldn't resist a nod to Finnegan's Wake - his Bible, his right hand, one of the only places his heart found home.
"Exactly. Sleep oncoming...dream of 32's". 32's were everywhere in the Wake, and in her life for every moment since reading it.
He suddenly switched gears. A photograph of a very substantial symbol of sacred chaos, the arrows neverending. It was resting on his arm, she thought, his skin and hairs framing its mild perfection. This was a symbol that they shared and would always share, even if they never spoke to each other again. One which removed the need for words, or ideas, or destinies.
"Didn't know you had one of those outside your skin [she referenced his only tattoo]...I might get one, one day, didn't your boss [his now business partner, but still "boss"] get you one of these"? She had offered up a photograph of her own of an Eye of Time, which she knew he was gifted from his former boss. She knew he would appreciate this coincidence. "My closest friend just gave one to me for my birthday after we got home from your place...funny".
She and her mother were, in fact, just at his place earlier that day, saying hello. In addition to the obvious completely inappropriate verbal play he enjoyed making about her 72 year old widowed mother, who had kidney failure, but still the sense to know she liked the company of boys more than women, men more than girls, he had always expressed a respect and concern for her mother which couldn't help but touch her occasionally, when she wasn't trying to be so hard.
He kept going, which again took her aback. "Yes. Eye of Time from boss. Have not worn my sacred chaos for some years. Too long".
She couldn't help but second guess every word, and thought was it too long since he had worn it, or was the rope it hung upon too long? Was it indeed what he was talking about, else what was this sacred chaos to him? She really thought she ought to go to sleep, but couldn't resist.
She said the next line too quickly to process the obvious innuendo. "You should wear it. Take it to bed with you".
He didn't disappoint. "It is comforting and warm to the touch".
She maintained her solidarity with the actual idea she was thinking about, but also allowed her reply in the positive to work itself as far into him as she could still manage to. "I know. I agree. Nothing is so comforting as the chaos".
He hit that secret part of her in his overtly quick replies, for two thoughts came back to her. "I'll not remove it again for a while". Then, as if that wasn't enough to jog her memory, tug on that innocent, pure part of her which she knew he revered, even if he couldn't look into its light (or perhaps he revered it because he had to avert his eyes so much), he completed that last real thought with "It's a comfort to have it again".
She didn't say enough back. She didn't have other words. Little tears even formed in her eyes and their hard to reach corners. Everything opened up, and she knew it could, so she allowed it to. She smiled, if only for the past and the eternity that he and she would always share, even if just in their dream worlds, their secret selves talking in a language no one else could hear or understand. Skipping along their 32 rivers, tending them all at once, on the inside. What happens on the outside can never be counted upon.
She knew there was no continuing on this side of things tonight. His final word to her, demanding in a way she allowed him to be, yet said with the acquiescence of someone kneeling at her feet, bound the last knot. "Sleep".
She had to have the last word, and she knew he wouldn't mind. "Am. You too".
As she drifted to sleep, her heart wet with the purest impossible memory, which was too fast for either of them to catch, she cried slightly, thinking how she had planned to take her father to the opera at Lincoln Center in the last years of his life. But money, time, those bastards, she, hadn't allowed it to happen. He loved Italian opera, Madame Butterfly, Tosca especially. Enrico Caruso was his favourite. She would have loved to see her father's face. She thought of this, as she drifted into sleep. Their bedtime conversation now in their lowering lids, and invisible theta trails...
~ M. Lucia
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