Sergio De La Pava - Personae

14 It takes some time to figure it out. He doesn’t want to. The smoldering remains of a dozen bodies. The structure reduced to random beams of carbon.

15 Lightning. Lightning struck a tree that then lit up as it fell blocking the only possible exit to a box containing three sons of diseased whores keeping twelve hostages there. All were consumed alive in the resulting conflagration that must have felt as if Hell itself had risen up through the ground to make an end of everything. Impersonal lightning. The highly flammable nature of wood. No human will involved.

16 He surveys the dead, the charred bodies. And this is where it gets odd because Manuel makes sure not to make a conclusive identification of any of them although if looking down from above you would witness a great suffering as he stands in the vicinity of what appears to be remnants of a woman enveloping a young girl.

17 He must continue the search for Luz and Selena but first he will demonstrate respect for the dead by burying only the hostages. He has little remaining strength so he buries only this woman and girl, careful not to look at their faces.

18 Luz is like him, made of steel. She will not let harm come to all they have.

19 The woman and girl are together and covered by dirt. Manuel says, in words that enter the air then are diluted by it into silence never to be heard by fellow human, that he will continue his search but first he must rest.

20 He lies on the dirt above them, his face and bullet-filled chest down. He says he cannot be blamed for his own death. He cannot resist anymore. A lifetime of resistance. Flesh famously devolves but so can a soul. His is mortally wounded.

21 The blood from his chest enters the dirt and converts it to soil. It is what the universe unapologetically demands and he deliriously accedes. That our very essence must merge with the dead. That life must continuously arise in response only to meet a violent terminus. It is a story years in the telling, billions, and it is a story without end.

* * *

HERE he says Yes, maybe he always says Yes whatever the case they stand, the three of them, in church and when the moment comes for exchanging peace Manuel and Luz hug with Selena sandwiched between He feels this hug not only as real as anything he’s felt but somehow more real Nothing foreign comes through the church door and Mass just ends Back home Man and Luz garden while nearby Selena plays benevolent Queen to a congregation of handcrafted dolls The sun above them warms without scorching and the air smells maybe slightly sweet.

* * *

NOTHING romantically cute happened at the airport. He just watched her airplane shrink from a giant winged god into a tiny metal speck the sky suddenly chose to blot out. He decided he should listen to live music that night and he was certainly the oldest person to have made that decision where he found himself. Raised on endless clave patterns he’d only recently come to appreciate drums and two kinds of guitar and there was a moment where it seemed this latest iteration of Music might finally fuse Heaven and Earth but this was a misconception based on the fact that its greatest practitioners appeared near the outset then were never surpassed.

2 Still this became an incredibly fertile time so that even a band with the limited appeal of the one then playing would create music that still echoes forcefully today. They wrote mostly dark songs depicting seamy NYC life but one that night was exceptional. Built on verses that functioned more like incantatory refrains and plaintive yet defiant guitar they sang that every human being no matter how seemingly inconsequential should at some point have breath expended on its behalf.

3 He felt a weak joy, not so much at the particulars of the song, great as they were, as at the mere fact that it was ever created if that makes any sense. Near the end the singer seemed to grow frustrated with the limits of his words and in an expert reversal of Beethoven’s Ninth expressed the brotherhood of Man more cogently through an electric guitar’s wail that leveled everyone present. The world had shrunk.

4 None of which is to say that when he got home that night he didn’t feel the cruel fact that no one needed to be told of his arrival.

* * *

SURPRISE is the sensation he most experiences upon his return to the living. Until he realizes that his life, at least its continued existence, makes perfect sense. Imprisonment is for the guilty, natural release for the innocent or reformed. He suspects he’ll live forever.

On the away he encounters another soul. Its uniform places it in imminent mortal danger, a truth it seems to intuit on first sight of Manuel so it states in defense that it is unarmed. Man is thinking lightning may have been at direct fault but they were only in its path because of that uniform. He points his blade at the uniform. Then suddenly he flips it in his hand and tosses it handle-first to his opponent as if to say arm yourself if you know what’s good for you because even though I am now unarmed and savagely beaten I remain capable of great wrath. When his opponent reacts by moving toward the blade Manuel begins to close the distance between them. But the opponent doesn’t pick up the blade. He sees what’s coming, turns, and runs away.

Manuel does pick it up. He raises it high over his head. He throws it with all his remaining force but this time when he does so it is into the ground near his feet. To the extent that kind of act ever made any sense it makes none in the name of Selena. The blade sticks out upright, like a cross, and he half expects it to cleave the globe in half. Once loosed all the world’s core of bilious hateful hurt can escape like a geyser. Color the world black, the only way back to the light. Or can he just absorb it all on behalf of its Lights and Selenas? Have it grind his bones into meal and boil his blood until it consumes all his incarcerative flesh. But the blade just sticks out dumbly. More silence, the currency of the world. The emptying nonentity that feeds no one, sustains nothing. He can pull the bullets out of his body and said body will heal its many tears but that dispiriting general quietude will still prevail. He screams just to pierce it, to assert opposition. He falls to his knees and looks skyward. He did not expect to have to make any more decisions. He looks down then slumps forward into indefinition. At any given moment you are either doing something or you are something’s victim. He stands and walks. He must, he decides, continue his search. He knows, he thinks, where to begin.

Come down to the River honey.

Its diaphanous water and it’s diaphanous water can salve your wounds.

Leave me with nothing expect nothing in return.

Nothing leaves, no extinction only transformation.

Then will you come to raise the dead?

Because the rain falls on the living and the dead alike and its cyclic fall is neverending.

Come, down to the River.

No valley so deep it can’t be filled when, in final aggregate, every mountain plus time equals a molehill.

Do you feel how we’re brothers and sisters yet your brother turns away in fear?

How, once impelled, wrath must eat its way out from within to be expelled.

Yet even the loneliest flower is arrayed in hues so beautiful it can out of thorn and thistle the loveliest meadow make.

Come to the River.

The Sun, up and down, up and down, but what if next time it refuse to rise?

The Human Tragicomedy, the spark of life may blaze sequentially but it can also flicker perilously or suddenly extinguish leaving only a dark chill.

Stare, at the abyss, at the speck in your brother’s eye, at infirmity and loss, until your failure to turn away leave you blind as a pillar and blindness is general.