The Motions; An Echelon of Beauty Part 2
**Continuing to try and salvage this thing I wrote in college..
I knew that at any moment I’d fall asleep behind the wheel. My line of mourners had guided me to a long stretch of straight road that traveled through open fields with very few trees and no houses. The road was lined on both sides by two foot deep ditches, and I was surprised to notice that there seemed to be more trash lining the ditch on my right than on my left. I turned the air conditioner off and allowed my window to lower to its limit so that the summer air might give me some sort of clue as to what I was doing. I heard a horn somewhere in the distance ahead of me and I thought of turning on the radio. But I couldn’t tune anything but static so I relinquished its knob.
We arrived at an old cemetery that reminded me of Lovecraft’s Puritan landscapes and the line of cars continued driving past, realizing, without a doubt, that today was no better day than any other to bury a world’s belief system. I stopped, however, to bury my own.
I slowed my 1982 Pontiac onto the broken graveled dirt shoulder and brought it to a stop underneath the intermittent shade of a crab-apple tree. It felt good to open the door and recognize the smell of someone else’s world. An aged farmer in a straw hat drove by in a blue truck with a bed full of soil and I waved to him, observing a despondent nod that I felt compelled to protect. I watched his truck disappear over the crest of a distant and glimmering hill. Before exiting the car, I turned the radio back on. I was still wearing the green and white striped vest that read mcDonalds so I unbuttoned it and tossed it through the open passenger window as I walked across the black gravel trail that surrounded and cut the graveyard into symmetrical halves. Elton John’s Rocket Man was echoing from my car’s stereo, the air absorbing the bass like a high-pass filter sending the telephone-quality music far enough for me to hear as I casually walked through the left half of the graveyard, hands in my pockets, singing with Elton about the good ol’ days I can’t even remember clearly.
I found my sight of mourning, and knelt to a small tombstone no larger than a shoe-box. It’s four top corners had all eroded away and it was cracked, but if there had ever been anything more beautiful than that moss shaded brick with just two initials barely etched into its surface, it had surely been snatched away before man could lay his eyes upon it. I had passed dozens of graves littered with flowers and realized that any among this beautiful stone would only humanize it and make it less of a cornerstone; a cornerstone to these walls of Eden. I placed my left palm over the cool carvings and closed my eyes, picturing this wonderful saint surrounded by a voidened wasteland that was quickly falling the pieces. It whispered,
‘Daylight.’
I cried for my forgotten friend, whose corpse had decomposed without the help of a single worm and without the visitation of a single relative. I was the first being to lay its knees on the moist grass providing shelter from his bones and sought a physical support for the spiritual longing that’s been with me since the life I spent with him.
C.V was barely etched but had been clearly immune to the test of nature, as though any time the rock’s face was worn away they would etch themselves deeper into the shrinking rock. I touched the letters that stood for C. Von Khrise and the spaces were just barely deep enough to bring me back there. Less than five feet below my knees, I could see the widened forehead that years ago protected the only human brain capable of comprehending love, in its most passionate, undying form. In black and white, I helped him wash and disinfect crude silver utensils, as he exposed to me beneath pale flaps what the virus did to the inner-layers of human flesh. Beneath the sores and cracks that were shown to the world, he made it clear just how black the inside was as well.
I came to him as a student, quickly becoming his closest, then his only apprentice. Before I got to know his spirit, he was only a simple genius, one of the only doctors willing to fight at the time. As a role model of the sciences, I followed his path, soaking up every finding and trial in an excitement that could not be paralleled in any of his own behavioral reactions. It seemed as though he knew an idea would fail long the required tools had finished being prepared. I watched, as his notes grew more and more distant from the possibilities of reality until he was writing fantasy tales of spiritual ascension and viral re-animation.
We watched growing numbers of good people surrender inside a tent that smelled of rotten tears. I never got used to that smell, but when I mentioned it to Khrise, he looked at me as though he was going to say something but forgot what it was before he was prepared to speak it. As though the words had been set to disappear into the tip of his tongue but found no tongue to adhere to.
Then, there were the nights his emotions finally broke free of his numb scientific hold. Those nights I held a man whose body was three times as old as mine, a body that had weather the storms of war and proudly displayed a scar that ran perfectly straight along the stretch of his chest; like when grazed by a predatory bullet, Khrise hadn’t even flinched; that body trembling before the naked truth that to comprehend the tools of God is to face a terror from which no man is permitted to return, enveloped by a room of echoing moans and faces no longer recognizable to friends and barely even identifiable as human beings. I tried to console him, whispering desperately that the tears he bled for people he’d never know where the clearest sparks of a miracle I had ever seen. Over time, those brief occurrences became more frequent, until his mouth finally tightened into a silent howl that lasted for days.
