The Moloch

THE MOLOCH

A love letter

I remember a trip Clare and I once took to the islands. We bounced, rattling over glistening white-topped waves located a few miles offshore in my memory’s humming tuning-fork sounds. The thought came to me today with the air snuffing salty this morning and the humidity perfuming the air. A gray sky filtered feeble rays through large cross-slanted windows of her home. I remembered how sunlight once warmed my small puppy Honey as he struggled to learn his footing, a tiger with large foot pads in a black jungle.

My memories come harder now, like small hard hail. We lived in a thatched-roof house my parents bought near a damp wood at the beginning of a brown dirt road. Why do my dreams now start and halt at the beginnings or endings of brown dirt roads?

Honey was given to the vet to be put to sleep. My parents, themselves young then, grew tired of his care. I can close my eyes and feel the softness of his fur. His eyes were silver and as cold as a moon. I wanted to set something on fire then with red matches and a can of green gasoline.

Today I asked Clare if she wanted to walk down to the beach pier after work. She said yes because we still love each other. This has changed over the years into something created by her outside my understanding, like the meaning of all matter we see, have ever seen, will ever see. All those years before at the islands we had walked into the water until the bitter stinging salt hit us waist high. I stopped to feel something grow in my heart.

I threw my head back and raised my arms toward a sun nestled high in a soft blueing sky. I felt my soul burst from my chest like a divine song, a blossoming flower, and then leap into heaven with a reverberating shout, an affirmation, as a small school of flying fish broke through the skin of fluid with a spray of pungent wetness flashing around Clare like princess jewels. Reality is just light measured. Einstein once said this. The calculations vexed him the rest of his life.

Remembering that day I felt myself move toward a burning distant star, pulled on the back of a swimmer through warm water. I burn with fire scars, groan, and am scolded by my companion. "That's a fine example there Paddy for us Irish," my companion Clare says, my lifejacket strap slung over her forehead as she makes slow powerful strokes through coral seas. Clare never forgave me for something that day she will not discuss, a comment about a mother -- a voice heard in Ramah; lamentation and bitter weeping -- Rachel weeping for her children. I gaze out over the star's spreading waves tipped with moonlight. I dream to hide my pain.

The star lights a beginning. It lights an ending. It pierced the cold dark nothing of never knowing. It lights the everything of forevertime. It began as itself. It ends as itself. It burns with ripples forever expanding. It shines forever. And ever. And evermore. I notice its companion star circling like a newly discovered electron. It flashes bright then softly fades in regular time, a test of desire and will, passion and grit. An understanding comes. I close my bending eyes with hope.

I squint with bleak sorrow and stumble toward an icy glinting light. Mine and Clare's vulnerable lives are frozen in dormant dreams of darkness we are fated to anticipate but never allowed to see. We tiptoe to the enveloping waters of insanity and grief, a black hole of self that was gifted us and that we constantly, fumblingly, blindingly measure. It is the final ultimate horror we do not understand and which will never stop. It spreads outward from our most inner self until it fills the universe with a dark humming void. Like the Moloch, a new church opens its rusting back maw with shame to accept the burning sacrifice.

Clare and I sit in church now each Sunday holding hands. I have asked her why we do not marry. She insists we have always been married, ever since she was a girl of five years old. We can just never marry in a church now, she says, one of her white-gloved hands holding one of my brown, gnarled ones. A black-robed choir with pale faces suddenly rustles awake and begins keening until the end of all time, it seems, as if waiting for a messenger to arrive.

Clare and I continue to sit at the end of the pier tonight as the waters grow darker. I gaze toward the horizon and seem to notice a red sailing ship moving toward the south, growing smaller but more urgent as it continues its journey. Did something happen?

Its sails are red with black unknown markings and a red-blazened crew scamper and race wildly along it's deck and among the scaffolding. Did something happen?

A figure in the crow's nest suddenly turns toward Clare and myself and beckons, but I can't tell if he is saluting or gesturing wildly to follow. His eyes blaze like silver coins with black blow flies swarming around them. Did something happen?

Smoke bellows from the open deck with the sailors dancing around it. The black water siding the boat shines a bright orange. Clare notices none of this and nuzzles my neck with her chin. Did something happen?

A small curl of brown hair spills from beneath her purple backward sailor's cap, and there is a small tear on the left shoulder of her pale blue sweatshirt. A thin chain around her neck carries dog tags stamped with the name of her younger brother, a lieutenant who died in the war. Did somebody else die? 

I shudder and Clare mentions it might be cool enough to head back downtown and I agree. I can see she is absorbed with her brother and I remain silent out of respect for a grief that has slowly diminished but will forever darken her spirit, one that was once the brightest I ever knew.

I think to myself that we live in a dream. We are encouraged by brightness. We avoid the dark. We are pursued by the past, as the past has pursued Clare and myself. We move into the future, often stumbling, sometimes blind, always inevitable. We travel with trepidation, with luck, with hope, with fear, mustering strength, gathering the like-minded, avoiding the bad if we are shrewd enough to recognize them. 

We make mistakes, we make corrections, we move on, searching for something we know not what, even while we scarcely know ourselves. We are human, and as far as we know we are the only self-aware intelligence in a space of nothingness too vast to comprehend. It is our blessing; it is our curse.

We set out on our path vaguely sensing only one thing, really; that somewhere in the distance, out beyond a far horizon, just beyond some rising star, there must be an answer waiting for us. If we can just make one more step, draw one more breath, shade our eyes one more time, we will see it, know it, feel it, somehow touch its warmth. And then we are beaten back, outside our will, by the receding crest of our heart's hope and the inevitable forward tide of light's infinity.

I put my arm around Clare's shoulders as we walk back along the dirt road to town and this thought pushes me forward, a strange dirge whispered again and again in a fever dream: "Our Moloch is now gone." I open my eyes, trying to remember the dream. But it dimmed away slowly, as songs do, a shapeless dream where we have become the Aleph, the everywhere, all around me, filling my soul. And then the message arrives.

I was struck, reborn. I was struck, reborn. I was struck and reborn again. Clare and I are in a narrow canoe, the air smelling like flowers, myself rowing through the mist with her sitting alertly in the bow, a yellow hat in her hands, blue ribbons tied in her hair. I bite into a sweet purple plum to keep my mouth from drying and a sphere of rose chrystal suddenly opens around us, singing. "Oh Patrick!... Do we know where we are going?" Clare whispers with wonder, straining to hear soft tinkling coming from lights blinking along the hidden shore. "Do you know how long it will take to get there?"

I think of growing up with Clare in our youth and then afterward. I remembered the laughs and tears, the cutting words and soothing looks, the bitter food and late night sighs, the shared dreams, shaken sorrows and shattering joys, and realized I spent my whole life waiting to give this answer. "Yes," I said boldly, the breeze raising the hairs along my arms. I slid a wooden oar into the silver river and whispered our secret prayer: "We are already here.