Calvin Baker - Grace

After hanging up, I went out to the kitchen, where I found Sylvie standing next to the sink motionless.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she replied.

“It looked—”

“It is kayotsarga pose,” she said. “I was practicing non-attachment.”

I took up a knife to start chopping vegetables for dinner.

“I can do it.” She pushed me aside, taking up the knife.

“What is wrong?”

“You’re going back?” she asked. “You should just leave now and get it over with, instead of drawing it out, letting us get more attached.”

“Who said I was going?”

“I overheard your conversation.”

“I agreed to go skiing. I thought you enjoyed skiing.”

“I don’t want to go back to the States.”

“Don’t you have to at some point? We can’t hide down here forever.”

“Who is hiding? Maybe it started that way, but now it is living. It is choosing a different way of being.”

“We’ll figure it out,” I said, but she would not be put off.

“We could be happy,” she argued. “But New York does not make sense to me anymore. People there live too asymmetrically. The only important thing is work. I do not want that anymore.”

“You want?”

“A family.”

“We can do that anywhere.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too soon for this kind of talk. We’re not going to have it. If we were having it, though, I would say everything there is so competitive, and I could never find myself in the middle of it. I was always suffocating. See, it provokes all my insecurities.”

“That is why you left?”

“No, I can handle my insecurities. It is because we will end up doing things we do not like, only to support a lifestyle and values which are not how I want to raise my children.”

“You think should have a family together?” I probed.

“Maybe,” she said. “That’s not what I said, though.”

“Why don’t we just go on the trip, and decide the rest later?”

“I don’t want to grow closer until I know how I feel.”

“That’s a little bit complicated. About where to live or whether to have a family?”

“I know I want a family.”

“So do I.” It came out before I knew what I was saying. Before I knew it was what I had wanted to say. I felt exposed, but also a feeling of contentment I could no more explain than a leaf could explain why it loves the sun. I wanted that as I wanted my next breath — to keep multiplying until time commanded me stop.

“Do you know what you are saying?”

“I think so.”

“You should be certain. You know, I was not looking for anything, except minding my own business in the middle of nowhere, until here you show up, and made me fall all in love.”

“Is that what I did?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am happy,” I said.

“Me too. I think. But I don’t know if we can be equal to making something together, or even whether you are careless or not.”

“That’s fair,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, I will consider anything you say.”

“Let me know when it is not something you consider, and it just is.”

I nodded. I felt linked to her, like a golden chain uniting my past and future. The feeling, poor, dumb Adam must have had that made him listen to his woman instead of his god; instinct that whispered this is what was truly available of life.

What Eve, that defiant queen, knew when she woke him from slumber— Eat this, Adam. There’s suffering all around this menagerie. We’re going to suffer, too. See the lion. See the lamb. Wise up, baby. It’s just me and you. To hell with Yahweh. We can create ourselves —was, if the price was to suffer and toil and try to create, and fail, and try again, sometimes to win, but always to die, then that is what it meant to be human and alive.

God knew it to be the same.

It was dark and we had gone to the roof to grill, but a gusting wind made it difficult, and by the time our meager fire was finally lit the sky was already crowded with stars.

“Look how many constellations you can still see in the city.”

“You can’t see any in New York.”

“Look, there is Taurus, and there is Orion, the hunter, and those are his two dogs. The big one, Canis Major, was a present from Zeus to one of his lovers. There is the boat Argo . Over there is the clock. They all used to have a meaning to people. Their whole lives written across the sky.”

“Isn’t it sad, for us it’s just balls of burning gas, and no more than that?”

“They still mean something. Maybe just beauty.”

“Beauty is not enough. I want meaning, Harper Roland. A whole life of it.”

“Yes,” I said, turning the vegetables on the flames, and looking up. “Taurus, the bull, was the form Zeus transformed himself into when he was courting a mortal woman so exceptional she made even the gods love her. That’s you. She was charmed by the bull, and accepted one day when he offered her a ride on his back; then Zeus stood and spirited her off to his cave.”

“What a brute. Is that you?”

“No. The hunter, Orion, sprang to her aid. He’s more ancient than Zeus, and was called Gilgamesh in the first writings, before they were lost in the fog and meaning of a different time. But all stories are still written on the sky. Maybe he was the first person ever to lose his way, or go his own way, and have to wrestle the world for his soul, to return to where he belonged. But stronger, wiser. And when he returned he was the first hero. That is more ancient than any god we know.”

“That’s nice. But I don’t want either of us to lose our way again. And the only way for that is if you stay with me.”

She looked over to me with unguarded eyes, and my hand reached out to her before I had thought about it and embraced her and pulled her closer to me and that was the whole truth.

“Wow, look, Mommy, the whole world,” a child in the seat ahead of me exclaimed, as he stared at the earth from above for the first time. The barren Andes stretched up, otherworldly and jagged in the evening sun. Nothing else stirred or seemed alive in the firmament around us, as the plane taxied through the gloaming.

I disembarked, and hurried to catch my connection. As I rounded the corner from security a stoop-shouldered old woman stopped me with her eyes.

“You are not traveling alone,” she said enigmatically.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“There is an energy traveling with you, protecting you.”

“Thank you,” I said, lost. “You see such things?”

She looked at me mysteriously again before smiling and moving away, as I made my way to the next gate. I was still perplexed, but pleased for her blessing as I embarked again, the mountains quickly invisible and the lights of the city rapidly fading.

I awoke in the gray early morning, banking through snow clouds over New York. Ours was the first flight to land that day, so the customs line was empty when I made my way through, only to be stopped by the Homeland agent who examined my papers.

“This passport is full.” He scowled his disapproval. “I shouldn’t stamp it.” His display was meant to provoke uncertainty. I knew he would let me pass.

“I’ll get a new one first thing tomorrow,” I said, performing my part in the drama, as I waited for his foul morning mood to pass. At length he went through a great kabuki of mercy, before relenting, and stamping on top of another stamp. “Next time I won’t.”

My suitcase was the only one on the carousel when I reached baggage claim, and I moved efficiently through the automatic doors, past the people holding flowers and signs for whomever they had gotten up so early to greet.