Sergio De La Pava - Personae

This is how it ends he thinks and a placidity comes over him, a belief (not quite a belief because unlike any sensation he’d ever before experienced) that even though the worst was undoubtedly about to befall him what we call worst is neither bad nor good. Also calm because of exhaustion in the literal sense. He feels then he has nothing more to give and that seems as good a definition of death as any.

Then he remembers why he sits in the jungle, covered in his own blood, struggling with a hellish hound, and questioning the value of continued humanity. He buries his hand into the dog’s gaping wound. Feeling around in the mushy squirm he seizes what has to be a vital organ, it pulsates through his fingers, and pulls as hard as he can. He feels and hears various tensile fibers snap and a sudden fountain of beastly blood leaves his face almost uniformly red. The jaw now releases suddenly and the creature falls to his side and into a lifeless heap.

Manuel collapses into unconsciousness.

When he later awakes to the noise of the rain stopping he almost laughs at the intensity of his now-concluded brain fever. The dog however was real and as severe pain cruelly registers on his neck he spits on its limp remains. Then Man stands through agonized spasms of instability. He anchors his legs to the ground, first tentatively then defiantly. His hand grasps his own neck as he breathes in all the air’s energy.

Then he accelerates back into the chase, certain now of the proper path.

* * *

CHOLERA the doctor said through a shaking head and all who heard the utterance, either then or as it was repeated continually and morbidly, knew from experience precisely what that meant.

2 The sounds of violent human expulsion, the sounds really of life being rejected, grew to a clamor throughout the village.

3 A significant cross needed to be built, she said, then placed above the door to their home. Only God could spare them.

4 He pointed out, he said he had to, that this process she had in mind had a lot in common with superstition and therefore could not be counted as praise for the party being addressed. That this was an Old Testament, therefore unsophisticated and non-Christian, view of God as warrior king full of bloodlust but able to dispense mercy.

5 She said leave the high-level theology to the believers and added that Selena was, in a sense, all they had. That she could bear almost anything but if Selena were to turn blue and be taken that would convert her life into a minute-by-minute inferno and she would not endure it.

6 So it was fear, not logic or anything else, that ruled her troubled moments then. The fear was so great and occlusive that she felt herself converted into a little girl and you only reason with a little girl to a point.

7 He built and installed the cross and whether related or not the sickness passed Selena over and she remained the ruddy optimist her mother could not have lived without.

* * *

CUBAN in reference to the sandwich meant he too was Cuban right? She proposed this inductive assertion in between early bites of what really was a remarkable sandwich only to receive no reaction from her audience. She snapped her fingers near his face.

“Oh, sorry! Cuban? No, bite your tongue. But I know a good sandwich when I see one. And?”

“Truly remarkable. She remarked truly.”

He smiled.

“So where you from then?”

2 He said in detail where he was from and she felt strangely embarrassed when her turn followed and she had to say Wisconsin which just then sounded kind of cartoonish and made up.

3 This was Monday and every lunch that followed that week meant those two and that counter.

4 Polio was the reason for the limp.

5 She was full of all these theories too, this woman. That the U.S. would never actually land on the moon but the pressure to do so would become so great that the Government, it always felt like a capital G with her, would stage a pretend landing in some movie studio. That damn near every physical malady known to man was curable through the proper application of lemon juice and surely he could appreciate the great incentive the pharmaceutical companies had in keeping this fact from being widely disseminated.

6 He laughed so hard at these and other disclosures that more than once he feared she would think he had crossed over into ridicule but no danger of that as he was dealing with one of the world’s great fun people.

7 About himself he said little though not from lack of pressing on her part.

8 One of the many things she said was that he was so “cute, and nice, and harmless.”

9 He responded that “since what you say makes it true at least to you, I’m hoping it will make it true to me” and he said this because there was much harm he wished he’d never done.

10 He told her he thought orchids like the kind found where he was from were a kind of divine apology for the universe’s many harsh elements and she later brought him some which made him feel more than a little weird.

11 Not possible, she said, based on the visual evidence, that he had put that many years into life. And look at herself, which led to a brief detour into the subject of Nicole Grunderson and her like. He said, with a complete absence of flattery intent, that the difference between a woman —one who had lived, suffered, learned, wept, transitorily gained then lost, faced death, bowed from pressure, then been scarred by all that into steel — and a shiny girl was one of the great chasms in life and he’d let her deduce which was preferable. Me? Little more than scar tissue.

12 On the Friday she stayed right through to dinnertime at which point he declared he couldn’t bear even the sight of his own food anymore and so they walked the few blocks to a new Italian restaurant receiving mountainous praise though it turned out undeservedly so.

13 Afterwards she needed to reclaim the many blocks that had accumulated between the disappointing restaurant and her studio apartment not helped by a frigid air that moved in while they ate yet solely through the use of body language and in perfect synchronicity they decided to eschew the many available taxis and walk the space during which walk Marybeth felt completely and utterly protected and she and her protector slowly then quickly drew closer to each other until her really exceptionally lovely hand extended away from her body where he clasped it quickly as if trying to convince himself that his action had been reflexive and not the product of even minimal aforethought then those hands swung rhythmically as if winding the couple to their destination until stopping because they were there where Marybeth wondered aloud if he might not come up and maybe overcome his prejudice against tea but after starting to form assent he suddenly remembered himself and declined in a manner that in no way offended Marybeth who also wasn’t the least bit surprised by a demurral that seemed to inappositely build as the week and their intimacy progressed and also there was the matter of her early rise the next morning for that weekend thing they’d discussed so that from within a hug they agreed to resume whatever this was the following Monday.

14 He stood alone on the sidewalk. It was dark as the city was allowed to get. He stared intently at the window. The light came on. She was safe. He left.

* * *

LORD grant me the strength to decimate into dust your transgressing sons that such sensational cruelty will echo throughout the ages and discourage future transgressors into obedience.

2 This is the kind of illogic Manuel finds escaping his mouth as he grinds himself up the hill in what feels like at most half a body.

3 This is Skull Hill, so named because of the peculiar rock formation at its summit that creates the not just visual impression that a malevolent giant once died there then all but its skull decomposed into the form of a hill.