Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

I looked through a very expensive telescope in a grocery store parking lot tonight, and saw what's out there.

And it's impressive!

I mean in space.

I saw the craters of the moon in blinding bone white brilliance, rippling in light and I don't know what. But rippling and bone white right into the craters was mostly enough.

I saw Saturn.

This is not a metaphor. This is not about Manuelo and whatever he is doing over there with Catherine in the boot of the boot. Can you imagine what he is doing with her? In Italy! Christ!

(This is all what I felt and wrote while living at the new ranch only a few months and Catherine went off with a Spanish man named Manuelo who she'd met in Paris, where she was visiting during living for a few months in Italy after I moved to Texas, and we were still together, and I felt it, the moment he touched her and I somehow knew it, what had happened, while staring at St. Jude's Chapel's mural, sitting down to coffee and steak and eggs in Dallas, and later found out, and the times matched up, and I fell to writing this all down.)

I tried to give the man anything. Anything. Food, bottles of wine, sushi, my home to stay in. He wanted nothing — the man with the scope.

I want to tell you about the man with the scope. I mean to tell you what is out there around us in space. I want to tell you about her.

Catherine. Her name is like space and what there is unto itself that I saw out there. Last time I told it I showed her all wrong — in the wrong light. Last time, she came back and we went to Puerto Rico. We saw wild horses. We swam in the dark before the moon rose to swim and the water lit up wherever we swam and made glowing dots green on our skins in the dark. We had rode a motorbike all over the island, me driving too fast, as fast as it would go over the wild, bumpy, bare earth to the sea to swim in a bioluminescent bay full of sharks. Her dark hair and pale skin and a vein dark across her unknown heart.

I was held up at gunpoint by a man in Puerto Rico and the man who held me up had tears in his eyes. I made him give me a cigarette after I gave him my money, which wasn't much. I had thought about punching him, since it was just me and him, and he was bleary eyed, leaning against a palm tree on a motorbike, but I just made him light my cigarette. He was so Christian about it. Him crying for robbing me in the dark. He had a great.45. Catherine was back in the room, naked under the sheets. I was six and a half feet tall, searching, white fake Indian cowboy, with the world going two thousand m.p.h. around itself at any given point, and the peyote in my senses for six years so far, as I went cooling through my pants and sky and the world and I made that sonofabitch light my cigarette and he cried and circled me in his hidden drugged pain. For the shame of not carrying his pain without the drugs, maybe he cried. I was still overcoming pancreatitis. (There's more to this story. This was before Texas, after the hospital, before Manuelo.) He had his friends come over from across the street where they'd hid in the dark. Back then I felt if I stared anyone in the eyes they could see my inner self, straight from the peyote, could see I was the real genuine leather. Now I'd be afraid and serious. They tried to translate but I already spoke Spanish. I'm talking about he who robbed me and lit my cig and his friends from across the street. They were so sad when they heard about the pancreatitis. I made the mistake and told the crying robber I didn't want the rest of his cigarettes because I was getting over pancreatitis. They said the word pancreatitis like the last part of the word was titties . I felt so foolish, smoking, as a cop drove past and I signaled I was doing fine.

She won't come back this time. (Catherine. It's been years.)

[I went on my first date after Catherine, and the woman's tooth had broken in half the night before. She kept the date and stuck the tooth, the broken away half, up in her gumline to hold it in there. It was one of her front ones. She kept excusing herself to the bathroom. With dinner served, it kept falling out and she would say, “My tooth. My tooth!” and cover her mouth with her hand and relocate to the bathroom for repair. During the meal, it (her tooth) kept falling out into her creamy pasta and she would search and dig for it with her fork. I took her home by cab after the dinner during which her half (tooth!) kept coming out, remember, and she would return to the bathroom and return to the table. I was embarrassed, but as a man, you know, you can't just leave. You can't just say, “I'm sorry, this isn't working. I am going to go home.” There are certain performances, you know, for everyone, and we aren't all animals, us animals. She tried to get me to kiss her wildly in the cab. I wish I could say I had wildly kissed her. That I had kissed her and gone mad with passion. I kept thinking about Catherine and what I was doing in exchange for losing her. Fink I was. I should have thought, what a girl! So willing and ready to see me she comes with a broken tooth stuck up within the gumline.]

I moved into the ranch house full of a family's things. There's pictures of boys with big ears on a wall. One wall has a cutout of Texas made from yellow wood, with varnished little shelves. On a clothespin glued into a tin of an old heat lamp is a sign made many years ago. It says, Mother my darling Mother my dear… I love you… I love you… each day of the year . There is a candle in a drawer, shaped as an 8. There is a bottle of Norrell perfume in the bathroom and photos of people who came from Mother my darling, Mother my dear, and I am not from this family. I rent this home. The Mother my darling is dead as can be.

Catherine is hard and keeps herself to herself and everyone who sees her sees she is hard but there is something else to Catherine. She has a child inside her — a girl who may have written the sign from the shelf on the wall. She hasn't lost that. She is intact. She can write, too. Have anyone. What a beauty full of brains and a good heart, but I said I would show her this time. Anything went wrong with me, she'd say, “I think it's a good thing,” and then tell me why. She would hold my ear to cool us down. She put up with me being insane in NY, smoking, on nicotine patch systems, chewing drugged gums, running too many miles in all directions snapping on my forehead with my fingers and dressed in the same clothes every day, panicking with visions in NYC. We moved to my family's home in Oregon in the desert. We bought lingerie and had fires. She took to running. Her hardness has kept the child in her alive, maybe, along with her immense beauty, or she isn't hard at all but I made her so with me (first chasing her around before and after classes with the old man in the hat, then when I was with her and cowering in New York in her room, smoking up all night with fear from exhaustion and so in love with her while she just tried to sleep, me talking and moaning and putting it in her with her sleeping, thinking and sensing with my corpus something evil all around in the buzzing city night, me: up, up, up. In love with the old man with the feather in the city with the city in America with America! She and I both working to be true.) Manuelo must see her, now. I wanted to make her pregnant and have a live baby. I once or twice or every time came inside her with hope we might make life without her consent — to carry on the great family. Hers and mine, both.

There was and is a church in the town where I grew up and at the front is a mural in gold squares and blues and reds and greens and it is Jesus with a pierced side bleeding and the blood turns to fire and the fire into wine in a chalice and from the chalice doves appear and fly upwards in rippling white. My parents married in the church. I was baptized in the church and I loved the church and later I became afraid of the church and loved the church as well.