MY FATHER’S BUSINESS
M.C. GARDNER
Finished—the monogram of a monomaniac—the damn thing was done! The Gnostics had long languished in the dust bin of history but their theological obscurities would at last secure a tenure for which I might have sold my soul.
I gathered my papers, acknowledged a seminary student of my acquaintance and made my way to the south exit of the Library. Something was amiss. I slowed my pace. A piece of paper slipped from my fingers and floated to the floor. I turned in retrieval and briefly surveyed those seated in the lounge. He was there, again. Too old to be a student and far too disheveled to be of faculty unknown—this was the third evening I had spied him. He sat with neither note nor bluebook. The hair on my neck began to rise—he was staring straight at me!
I drove about the city for an undetermined time. Except for the University, Durham had long retired for the evening. At last I made my way home. I gathered my thoughts—first the fire, then the single malt. I didn’t know what had unnerved me. The library was warm and dry. It wouldn’t be the first time a homeless man had sought refuge—but why this homeless man? The third sighting—was it curse or charm? My hand began to tremble and the ice cubes shake. There was a knock on the door. At 11:59—the final second of the post meridian—it could only be he— curiosity trumped fear and I allowed him entry.
His moved from the doorway to the invitation of the hearth. He extended reaching fingers to the intensity of flame. His manner was solemn, befitting a past fraught with peril and perhaps a future that was no less grave. I gestured him to the sofa and comported myself to the uneasy comfort of the adjacent easy chair. We shared, for a time, an odd quietude, I thought he might speak but his forbearance chastened anticipation in a tenacity of silence. A log shifted in the fire. A blaze of crimson shot upward and was swallowed by the sky. Without preliminary or prelude he quickly turned from the agitation in the flames.
“The press has not been genial.”
I might have ventured a reply if his statement hadn’t left me in a want of speech. I covered the twitch in my right hand with the fingers of my left.
“Few among man’s millions have purported kind regard. Those that so profess are a scurvy lot as unseemly in their manners as they are suspect in their hygiene. I’ve yet to find one with whom I’d willing break the burnt toast of eternity. You’ve allowed me entry and discerned I mean no harm. My reputation allowed you to bar the door. You rightly sense my diffidence.”
This last was, again, rhetorical–I acknowledged the assertion in silence.
“In the Book of Job, I’m malignantly accused of mischief against a fond old man. The suggested rascality extends to burning crops, slaughtering cows, and percolating boils on the crest of his brow. In point of fact, I’ve never met the man! Job might have reaped the whirlwind but it was not I who sowed it—but I’ve been damned no less persuasively. Damn damnation! If there were heat in Hell I would have no need of this worm-eaten apparel. Look at this coat. Have you ever seen a more threadbare attempt to keep the elements at bay? Would that I was that dignified dandy of yore—Prince of Darkness, indeed!”
He reached for the decanter that I had earlier set before him. He hesitated to confirm a permission that I granted assuredly, withal. He poured a sampling of my beloved Glenharren and luxuriated in the smoky peat rising from its vapors. He roiled the Scotch in rueful contemplation and then abruptly swallowed. A quick combustion of air burned his throat and left him abashed and almost gagging. I marveled that he was not a more accomplished drinker.
“You’ve written quite a bit about my father. He’s not the Demiurge of whom your Gnostics complained. However, being God he’s maintains a high opinion of himself—he is, one might aver, recalcitrant and adamantine! I told him as much and he kicked me ass over teakettle into the great void.
At this juncture I wondered to what end his monologue was leading. Even before the Gnostics had deflated my Christian pretense (heaven had always seemed the most delusional of fancies)—yet here sat the harbinger of Hell! He assayed, more successfully, another swallow of the scotch and then again filled the snifter to the point of overflowing. It was clear that sipping whiskey was a notion with which he was unfamiliar.
“Then there that Abraham-Isaac rumpus—tell me my lad and whisper your clue. Would you skewer a grandson of yours for proof of his father’s devotion to you? No, you’re quite right—Isaac had a brother—call him Ishmael—that camel-jockey was also Abraham’s seed—sired in the dusky loins of Hagar. Abraham is father to both the Arab and the Jew—now there was a grand idea for you—the world’s premiere siblings clashing over an empire the size of a walnut. Isaac was spared the knife so that he and his Semite brethren could blow themselves to paradise well into the twenty-first century.”
My heart sank as he experienced difficulty in resettling his glass. Fathers asking sons to take a bullet or a blade had put me in a melancholy funk. I noted that my hand had stilled. It was then that I understood his reliance on the rhetorical. There was no need of dialogue. He was conscious of my thoughts before I spoke them. And now, he’d run to a hidden corner of his own:
“I had a brother. Had, I say though my sensitivity of time allows no likelihood of closure. He could speak my thoughts before their formulation. He imbued each night with the sainted certainty of dawn. My brother was a sun. He warmed without encumbrance and cooled without deployment of the shade.
An ancient army nailed him to a tree…”
In an apocalypse of silence I heard the renting nails and saw Golgotha in his gaze. His eyes glistened but not from burnings consequent of beverage. The walls spun about us. When they stilled we had joined the desolation on what was called the Hill of skulls.
An execution was in progress. Three men were laid on lumber. Two were lashed with line and the third was splayed and stapled like a butterfly. The sky that noon had darkened as the scaffolding was raised and I wondered if light would again succeed in finding day.
The blood that stained the timbers was gathered in a bowl and would later course in currents flooding all the world. A lance concluded the condemnation so the Sabbath could begin. It was then that I heard a whisper more defiant than an end:
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sachthanei…”
My companion closed his eyes in anguish. In an instant we returned to the rooms from which we came and it was easy to perceive that he would now not long remain.
“To lose a twin is lose half one’s soul. That forfeiture is fruit once given in a garden. Good and evil are the twins that have been sundered. Man becomes the one or the other simply by the definitions he employs. On the meridian of time there is no A or PM. Man is abysmally alone—just as Father is alone—there is no kinship when each decides the nature of eternity—and no god or devil can make it otherwise.”
He stopped abruptly. The wind had stirred a snowy blanket from off the shoulder of a sleeping sycamore. He listened, rapt—as if to admonitions beyond mortal divination. He pretended surprise at the hour’s beckon and implied apologies of which he made no offer. The measure of our silence belied its brevity. It returns on mares of night whenever I imagine what the wind had whispered—whenever I envision the admonitions it detailed. He stood and walked briskly to the door. He hesitated at the threshold. He looked longingly toward the hearth and I saw a flame reflected in the icy blackness of his eye.
“I must be about my Father’s business.”
He opened the door. The wind lifted his hair in a caprice of twisting shadow. Midnight chimed. He disappeared in winter.