Michael Bible: Sophia

Of course.

You drink sixteen and put them on my tab while I’m asleep. We play chess in the morning and go over your openings. You’re in good shape to beat some ass, Eli. We are in America and you will be the greatest.

St. Margaret is of noble birth. A rookie executioner’s first blow slices her shoulder rather than her neck. Wounded, she runs. Ten additional blows are required to complete the execution. A wolf licks the blood from the road and stalks the body all the way to the graveyard where he smells the freshly dug earth and runs away.

News from back home. Finger stabbed Dick Dickerson at the pawnshop over the price of a sword. Dick Dickerson saw a woman needed cash.

I’ll give you two hundred for it, says Dick Dickerson to the woman.

That sword is worth at least a thousand, says Finger.

Finger, why don’t you go do some stocking, says Dick Dickerson.

Well, I need the money, says the woman.

I’ll buy it off you for five hundred, says Finger.

You’re fired, says Dick Dickerson.

Finger stabs him and walks out.

At least that’s how Finger tells it.

There is a voice mail from a man with the U.S. Embassy. Something is wrong with Tuesday. I call back.

Tell it straight, I say.

We’re working it out, he says.

What happened? Where is she?

She’s in India. Sick.

What kind of sick?

We don’t know. They’re putting holy candles on her.

Holy candles are the best you got?

Best we got.

There are good people in the world and a few bad, but the bad ones get all the coverage, Eli. This is Hollywood. We listen to Sunday church music on the radio. I climb a palm tree and watch the sunset and Tuesday is in some country with no God. The seasons are grinding away and the Holy Ghost is bored. I’m hoping for a miracle or at least a woman with a nice ass to cross the road.

Eli, get your body as ready as your mind. The tournament money is keeping us alive. You drink beer during and wear shades like the poker players on TV. I hold your hat and cigs.

In L.A., there is sad beautiful Hollywood light everywhere. Everyone desperate for something to happen. The pools and drugs. All the cliques inside of clichés. People complaining about how perfect it is. Yoga. Soy iced coffee. Massage and marijuana. The celebrities are boring. The homeless are boring. I love it all, Eli. Great America, ho!

Eli, you’ve won first place and we hold the trophy high. This newspaperman wants to do a story on you.

Eli, what is your overall strategy?

To kill the king.

What do you say to all those kids out there who want to be a chess champion like you?

Kill the king.

Back on the train out the window fireworks bloom from the little towns as we cross through the night, Fourth of July. Look at the lemon groves and the kids playing soccer. The Buckville, Texas, train station is an art deco palace with red stained glass windows. High-back leather chairs in the main waiting room. Birds fly in, sometimes stopping by your chair. A finch on your lap as you wait for the train, maybe you are drinking a martini.

There is a man who claims he’s Cherokee. He walks with a stick with a skull on it. He’s like Bruce Springsteen when he talks. He has that look of fear.

What do you say there, mister, he says.

I’m here with my friend playing some chess.

Chess, he says. That’s all?

Yeah, I say. What do you do?

I find people, he says. I search and I find them.

St. Anne is bound with chains to the stake by her ankles, knees, waist, chest, and neck. She is burned slowly. She does not scream. There is music in her ears from a small boy practicing his flute on a roof in the distance. His mother would not let him go to the execution until he finished his scales.

There is an announcement that a man has offered to entertain the children in the observation car. He is a fat man in a car mechanic’s shirt. He’s a special effects makeup guy or he wants to become one some day. He paints big gashes and scars.

I was a PA on the movie Gremlins , he says to the children.

What’s a PA, says a kid.

Gremlins was a very important movie, the man says.

Can you make it look like I killed myself, says a little girl.

Her dress is Wedgewood blue.

A Buddhist monk and a black French Messianic Jew in the dining car. I say, We’re like the beginning of a joke. Miles out the window. Miles and miles. No one laughs.

It should be required of every young man and woman of America to travel terrestrially across our great country. Forests to desert to plains to mountains to coast. Night comes quicker out here in the Badlands. One sweet girl in the observation car reads a book I’ve read. I want to talk to her but she gets up before I can sit down. I change my shirt. Have a fantasy about her. We meet. I have a hotel room in New Orleans. Order room service, then get dirty in the shower with her. She has short hair and glasses. A tiny white scar below her mouth. I fall asleep and dream of Darling dressed as the Statue of Liberty.

The special effects makeup man is having a heart attack. They call for a doctor. Then they call for a doctor or a nurse. They call for the defibrillator. We back up to the last station and an ambulance comes. The man is on the stretcher. The sky is van Gogh chrome yellow. He smiles trying to reassure us, this makeup man, but he grabs his chest.

The man is dying, says the girl in the Wedgewood dress.

A woman is doing a crossword puzzle and asks, What is the word for “orange” in Spanish?

Gremlins , says the dying man. Was a very important movie.

There is a pregnant woman. She asks other passengers to watch her kids while she smokes. Down in the café car she has a Miller Lite at two in the morning. We are the only two idiots awake.

My husband left me, she says. I’m looking for a strong man with hot hands.

I see.

Hot hands to hold me while I sleep.

I will pray for those hot hands to find you, I say.

What if those hands are yours?

They’re not.

The rain’s stopped, Eli. I’m in a fog of fantasy. When there is nothing left to do there is memory. All the books read and everyone asleep you can stare out the window and have memories. A woman came in the bookstore I worked at years ago and asked for books on Kenya. She was going on safari. We talked for a while about her son who was a Rhodes scholar and her husband who was an architect. I found her a book and wished her good luck on her trip. That was twenty-five years ago, Eli. I imagine sometimes what her safari was like. I picture her wearing a pith helmet in a jeep watching a lion sleep. Or her eating cantaloupe in a garden served by black men in white uniforms. The sounds of lions killing elephants in the night. I think of her making love to a stranger for the first time in her life and sometimes the stranger is me.

I ask the waitress in the dining car about the white wine. We discuss cork versus twist off. I listen to a sad song on my headphones and dream of a sad movie about two brothers who love the same girl. My belly is full and the green farms go on forever.

They can’t get the fire started to kill St. Rowland. He sees this as a miracle. Heaven above will wait for me, he thinks. My prayers are answered. A guard strikes him in the head and kills him instantly. His body is burned anyway.

We finally make New Orleans. All gloom and jazz. New Orleans is the only place left that you can listen to jazz without feeling silly. A coffee shop, Eli, late afternoon. A doctor reads his case files aloud. What disease are you trying to cure?

He shrugs.

All of them, he says.

The day drags on and the place fills up with mysterious people with painted faces. Newlyweds down from Baton Rouge for the weekend to do some shopping mingle among the whores.