Jonathan Dee - Palladio

The sea snapped and unfurled. A soup made from lentils would be their dinner tonight, the fourth night in a row. Gratitude for this bounty would be a hard sell for his sermon afterwards, and anyway, he had taken that as his subject two nights ago. The important thing was fidelity to a cause, God’s cause: they should glory in their own severance from the wickedness and avarice of the world, glory in all evidence of it, even painful evidence. If you couldn’t move through even this brief life with a sense of purpose, then what were you? One of those surfers, maybe, looking for someone else’s property on which to build your small fire and get stoned.

Of course, words were hollow if Richard himself wasn’t willing to assume a leadership role.

He felt a kind of cramp, an actual hunger pang, under his rib. And in the next moment he decided he would begin a fast, something he hadn’t done for a long time, as a way of refocusing himself, and through himself all of them, on the unseen. He would invite, but not require, his followers to join him. It would be a way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Not that fasting was without its spiritual challenges for him as well. For what he would have to keep secret from them, if the past was any guide, was that the whole experience excited him, in some private and vaguely shameful way. He was not afraid when that point came — the point at which you felt the touch of death. Once he had gone for nineteen days. The others had knelt in a rectangle around him and prayed, sobbing. It was glorious. He could probably match that now, or even do better. But was he really fasting just to purge his mind, or was there some subconscious wish underneath it, the wish to get it all over with, to put behind him the degradations of this life and arrive earlier than scheduled at the feet of a gratified Lord?

This was the sin for which he was constantly examining himself. Lust for death. He decided he would make it the topic of that night’s sermon.

* MESSAGE *

Nobody likes a group of angry do-gooders shouting SAVE THE WORLD. That’s not what this is about. This is a revolution, but it is a joyful revolution. It is a revolution based on a simple idea: Each of us has something inside that is making a noise. UNDERNEATH ALL OF THE LAYERS, theme-first layer and the get-out-of-my-way layer and the keep-your-hands-off-my-stuff layer, a halfway decent person is in there, waiting to be heard. That person isn’t angry. HE JUST WANTS OUT.

THERE IS A GREATNESS WAITING FOR YOU. We are busy, we are distracted, we are cynical, but this greatness waits. Through a speech by Dr King or the story of the Grinch or even a bumper sticker, THIS GREATNESS FINDS YOU IN A moment, unlikely or untimely, and suddenly you find yourself connected to humanity in away that shocks you. And this greatness will hold you up so high and strong that any previous version of YOURSELF SEEMS FLIMSY.

WE HAVE NO RIGHT to say anything about anything other than boots. We’re not ministers or gurus;we’re not philosophers or politicians. We are simply bootmakers who have found something to be true. THAT TRUTH IS SIMPLE: Every single one of us has a chance to do something big with our lives, something bigger than any coach or financial consultant or personal fitness trainer ever told us. And by waking up to this potential, and acting on it, amazing things happen: to other people, to ourselves. This has nothing and EVERYTHING TO DO WITH MAKING BOOTS.

*

WINTER WAS COMING again and nothing was going to stop it. Kay wasn’t sure what month it was, but in the nights lately she had definitely felt the cold. She couldn’t wait for Roger to do something about it. She had always been more sensitive to the elements. One good draft could put her on her back for a week. If he didn’t care about that by now, she wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him to start.

So she went up to the attic to bring down the storm windows; but while she was up there she found some other things, a box of Richard’s old record albums, an accordion file, its edges gnawed away, full of Molly’s old report cards from grade school and even her class pictures. Such a serious face! Her teachers all loved her, they knew that town couldn’t hold her, they knew she would make her mark. Kay sat on the attic floor and went through every piece of paper. This was an important find: something Molly’s own children might want to see. Molly would probably be embarrassed, of course; no mother can stand having her own kids see her as a child. By the time Kay closed the attic’s trapdoor behind her again, it was night. The storm windows were forgotten.

But she wrote a note about them in the diary that she kept in her bedside table drawer, so nothing was really lost. She’d only been keeping a diary for a few years. It started out as a kind of exercise in reminiscence, but before long it ceased reaching any further back into the past than the day on which each entry was written — a list of errands completed, mundane tasks performed, a way of accounting for her time. And each entry ended with a reminder to herself of all that was still left to do.

Of course, it was somewhat nebulous now, the whole idea of the end of the day. She wrote in the diary when she felt the need of it. She had no schedule for going to bed, or for getting up; no sense of finishing the day in the evening, nor of starting a new one in the morning. She would simply come to, with an awareness of some sort of gap in her consciousness, and would see by the sudden change outside the window that she must have fallen asleep for a while. Sometimes this would happen in her own bed, other times in Molly’s or in Richard’s. When she slept in Richard’s bed she tried to imagine what he was doing over in Germany. One thing for sure, though, she couldn’t fall asleep at all anymore if there was anyone else in the bed.

In her diary she had noted that a trip to the pharmacy would be necessary.

She never moved anything in the kids’ rooms, except to clean. It all looked just exactly as it had when they were teenagers. Posters, tapestries thumbtacked to the walls, small photos cut from magazines and stuck to the wallpaper above the desks with Scotch tape that she carefully replaced when it turned brown. It wasn’t for her sake. Maybe they would come back home looking for something in particular, something whose private significance she could never guess. Maybe Richard would come back from Berkeley, where he was a professor now, and his wife, hoping only for some hint, some relic, of the upbringing he had talked so much about, would be stunned to find instead everything kept perfectly intact, for her to see. She might start crying at the sight of it — the habitat of her beloved, when he was just a boy. They were expecting a baby of their own now.

It was night again, and she definitely felt the cold.

Molly too might be sitting somewhere, in her office with the incredible view, daydreaming about her childhood, about time lost; she might be recalling the way her room looked in the morning when she awoke, mourning all that as gone for ever. Imagine the rush of amazement and gratitude when she came home to find that nothing had been lost at all!

“Kay?”

Roger was calling. She sat on the bed in Molly’s room. “Kay?” She sat, calmly. The doorknob rattled and she realized that she must have locked it. After a while he went away. She could hear him leaving, even though his footsteps were always so soft.

She had no ill will left for him. For a long time they had just irritated one another, she remembered, but now something like the opposite was true, they moved through the house, which seemed plenty large enough for both of them now, in their independent orbits, natural, regular, where their paths might intersect once every few hundred years, as in an eclipse. The only habit of his that annoyed her anymore was the way he would turn off the radio. He’d go into a room, and when he’d leave it again she would enter to find the radio had been switched off. There were little radios in every room of the house, except the kids’ rooms. She kept them on the talk stations, all of them tuned to the same one, though she would change her station-allegiance every few weeks. Always talk, though. No music. Music got on her nerves; and there were so many things worth knowing about.