The Space between Atoms 42

 Drew, Terah’s best friend at Grove City, tried to help.  “You only knew Wendy a week really.  How well can you really know someone in a week?”

Deep inside Terah knew the wisdom of this.  Fred his stepfather had been kind to his three new tweenage children.  For about six months he pretended to be happy and carefree, joking and playing with the boys.  Then the mask fell.  Fred was a bitter and suspicious man.  When it was time to leave for college Terah was ready to go although Fred wouldn’t contribute a cent and Terah would be in debt forever.  Yes, he should’ve known a week wasn’t time to really know someone.

He thought he knew Wendy.  Her glances, her words, her laughs all declared she was his.  At the very same time she was meeting Gary on the weekend.  Spending the night in his dorm room at Kent State.  Holding Terah’s hand but holding something else for Gary.  Even after she admitted as much and repented—she was ready to move out of state with him—he didn’t really know her.

How well had Danielle known him?  What can you really know of a professor whose’s on stage when you see him?  People on stage are actors.  And don’t people change over time?  Even though their week together had now become two months, his intimate conversations with Lindsey had ceased.  Indeed, anyone watching would’ve supposed she preferred the company of Hagrid or Vince.  Never at night, of course.  Never at night.

Terah had read a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man that Moby had.  

That night a bier stood in the fire ring.  It was disturbing seeing a human form atop it, even wrapped, as it was, in bedding they could scarcely afford to burn.  Having an uncovered body engulfed in flames, however, would’ve been far more disturbing.

The community gathered.  “‘I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,’” Terah began.  Queequeg stirred.

“You can’t use that—it’s appropriation!” he said.

“I meant no disrespect,” Terah apologized as the fire crackled.  “But it seemed fitting for all of us.”

“But Ellison was writing of his experience as a black man.  You can’t go using it for a white funeral.”

Terah looked to Moby for support.  His entire liturgy was based on the idea of how Dickinsheet was an invisible community.  Moby, however, was staring into the fire.  “I don’t have much to work with here,” Terah explained, thinking back to his days in All Saints.  He’d used prayer books and Bibles for insulation.  “I don’t even know if Cicero was a Christian, Jew, or atheist.  I barely knew him.”

“But the black experience can’t be known by those who haven’t been singled out because of their race.”  Heron supported Queequeg’s interpretation.  Tension began to build as the flames engulfed the dead man.

“Listen, I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean anything by it.  We just had a copy of Ellison that I’d read and the quote stuck with me.”

The remarks Terah had prepared all focused on the invisibility of the homeless.  Instead, he improvised.  The flames licked up the bier and ate Cicero as the community sat largely in silence.  In the morning the task of gathering the bones was left to the chaplain.  Queequeg came to help.  “I wasn’t busting on you last night,” he said, reflective at the scene.

Terah had a phobia about touching anything dead.  Bones—particularly human bones—elicited wild fears that he had to overcome.  He had to reach out his hand and grasp the blackened bones.  A old wooden fruit box had been repurposed as an ossuary.  “Funny thing,” Terah said, gingerly touching a femur, “nobody comes looking for us while we’re alive, but if his bones were found there’d be an investigation.  Suddenly we’d become of interest.  We have to hide after we die more than when we’re alive.”

Queequeg nodded.  “Even as an accountant you’re at the whim of the economy.”  Terah started at the sound of his surname, only to suppress it.  “You lose one job and everything thinks you’ve done something horrible.  It doesn’t make you invisible—it does the opposite.  Maybe it’s changed in the years I’ve been out here, but I simply couldn’t recover.”

So this was the way people came to share their pasts in Dickinsheet.  “That’s true in higher education also.  You get fired your career is gone, even if you were standing up for social justice.”

“We’ve constructed a just society here.  Although, honestly, I find all of this weird.  I mean, we’re all going to die, and we don’t have health care, but Cicero seemed so alive.  And to die with your harpoon in hand…”

“I suppose that’s a deep-seated male fear.  We’re taught to keep it hidden all our lives, then something like this makes it impossible to ignore.”

“A change came over this place when Claresta arrived.”

Terah continued picking bones, but encouraged Queequeg to say more.

“It sounds crazy, but all of us early arrivals saw that girl in the woods.  It was like she was deliberately choosing us.  For a guy rejected by society, that means a lot.  I mean, who doesn’t want to be selected by a woman?”

“But Claresta?”

“I can’t say.  We can talk about life after coming here—Cicero was clear on that point.  Claresta had fled from a bad scene.  I think I can say that much.  We all agreed that we’d be an equal society.    Biology, though, has its own rules.”

“I gather she stayed about a year.”

“That’s right.  I don’t think anything we did drove her away.  She’s an independent sort.  We did wonder what brought her back here after being gone for years, but we can’t ask.”

For the first time in a long while, Terah felt as if he had privileged information.  His prompting had caused her to leave the asylum.  He’d been with her when she was close enough to find her way back here.

The wind began kicking up.  The ashes, some of which were Cicero, gusted up into their faces.  Both men turned their heads and coughed.  “I’m no doctor, but I think we got everything.”  The naked pelvis alone remained in the ash-heap.

“We can’t leave that,” Queequeg said.

Terah trembled, knowing what once nestled in this bone.  Together the two men put it in the box.  The wind became fierce.  Winter was still hidden in it, and it shoved the men as they headed for Cicero’s former home.

The gust grew aggressive.  Heron stepped out, wrapped in his heaviest clothes.  Joining Queequeg and Terah he asked “How secure are these houses?  It sounds like the wind might tear mine apart.”

Queequeg shrugged, casting a wary glance toward a sky swiftly clouding over.  The wind became constant.  “We’d better all shelter inside and find out,” he shouted as the force intensified.  Nature’s fury was about to claim another life.