Beatitude

by Louis Gallo

BAYLOR SLOUCHED IN the copious armchair he inherited from his grandmother. He and Laine had reupholstered it some years back with a rich, medieval-looking tapestry. But Baylor vividly recalled its cracked black leather when long ago he snuggled in it with his grandmother as she leafed through McCall’s pattern booklets. He would run his finger along the smooth, engorged veins of her arm. The veins seemed like friendly snakes. Bluish. Not blood at all.

The television blasted silence. But the headphones he wore leaked a plaintive, doleful duduk into his ears. The music of Armenia. He knew nothing about Armenia but assumed it meant old weathered women draped in black, corpses of slain sons, earthquakes, drought, locusts, the marrow of human suffering. Sometimes a drum would join the duduk and, if he allowed himself, Baylor might have easily drifted into a trance. He felt lacquered with warmth, the glow of contentment, he wanted to read another paragraph in the big book he’d started two years earlier. How had Dostoevsky pulled it off? 

He had come downstairs to read a bit more. Seven-year-old Blaire was actually asleep for a change. Sadie, only four, had fallen off an hour before. Laine was in the back bathroom soaking herself in their hot tub. Candles. Musky incense. Almond oil and lotions. A scene from ancient Mesopotamia.

The present moment seemed fraught with history and old time.

The ordeal of getting both children to sleep often consumed an entire night. Blaire would howl about her terrors. She was afraid of fuse boxes. The skull and bones on certain household products. Bad neighborhoods. Points. She swore points swarmed the room and wanted to maim her. Hoisted by the most elemental unit of geometry. She reminded Baylor so much of himself as a child that he comforted her with sacrificial urgency and, amazingly, she had this night fallen asleep in record time.

Baylor was hungry. He would as usual fill a bowl with Dannon coffee yogurt and brown rice cereal from the health food store. That morning he had swallowed a Centrum daily vitamin tablet, a capsule of Coenzyme Q10, another of hydrolyzed collagen, and finally an odorous green pill compacted with twenty pounds of raw broccoli. All to strengthen the heart, knead sinews, fortify bones. For circulation. To pump hefty antioxidants into the plasma. Before bed he would consume a glass of red wine and it would knock him out. Gallo Hearty Burgundy.

He spent much of his time keeping the dread at bay. Ativan to ward off panic so tentacled it could seize and crush every easy-going angel in the brain. A white powder that attached itself to receptors within the limbic system. Magic. The lotus position. Chamomile tea. Deep breaths.  Jogging a mile a day around the track. With luck, the wild geese would be out, honking as they swiveled their periscopic necks to check him out. Once he spotted a blazing red insect scurrying on the boards of the old bridge that spanned a gully. He stooped to examine it. A perfect black band encircled its abdomen. He had never seen such a creature and took it as an omen.

He read another paragraph but soon heard a muffled, distressed ‘mommy.’ Sure enough, a still sleeping Sadie shot through the room like the tiny missile she was. He caught her in mid-stride. 

‘Mommy’s taking her bath,’ he said sternly. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I need Mommy,’ she said, dazed and hollow-eyed.

He scooped her up. ‘You need sleep,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back upstairs. I’ll snuggle you.’

She lay her head on his shoulder and he carried her up, lowered her into a bed littered with a stuffed Blue from “Blue’s Clues,” dozens of beanie babies, a plastic Buzz Lightyear and, inexplicably, the discarded packaging from a set of GE 100-watt light bulbs.

He lay beside her and she began to rub his nose with her palm. Her private ritual. Blaire pinched necks, Sadie rubbed noses. When, sometimes, he lay between them, both nose and neck got the treatment. Primal affection!

It was a comfortable room. Lavender walls. Wooden floors. Mission oak beds—Blaire’s once on the right wall, Sadie’s to the left, but now smashed together at the center because neither girl could bear life without the other. The beds, sumptuous with quilts and spreads and bloated pillows, felt good, even if Baylor was always nearly squeezed off the edge.

He felt the dread trying to make inroads at this moment of modest serenity. Cracks shooting up the walls. A weakened, shaky foundation. The blitz of years. His disintegrating backbone. At the base. Foundation of the chakras. Fuel costs had doubled since last year. The prediction of an ice storm. Baylor despised ice, would not even allow cubes of it in his sodas. The approach of another February, always their worst month. The previous February both girls and Laine came down with a flu so virulent, hospitalization seemed imminent. He had evaded it somehow. The flu vaccine. Concocted from, imagine, chicken eggs. And Laine’s mother had almost died with it as it spiraled into her lungs. The ground veneered with ice, ambulance personnel sliding every which way as they carried her out on a stretcher. Flashing red lights. Foulest of months.

The tape in his ancient Walkman (which against all odds, still worked) reversed directions.  A technological marvel, along with all the others. The Armenian’s duduk sounded like a human voice fraught with distress and beseeching, shadows wailing in the orthodox church. Shamans chanting around a fire. Baylor’s stomach started to squirm. He would take a Tagamet, even if too frequent use lowered sperm count. 

Laine, naked in the bath, flashed into his mind.

Sadie’s little hand fell flat across his face. He might be able to slip out of the bed and return to Dostoevsky. Not that Dostoevsky meant anything to him. Another feeble project. Finish the big book before you die. Finish one, start another. It never ended. Nothing ever ended. Nor began, for that matter.

He listened to the tick of Sadie’s bird clock mounted on one of the walls. At every hour a different bird chirped. The late-night creatures were muted and soothing. Doves. Baylor resisted the easy beatitude of lying next to his children. Dear little Sadie, dear little Blaire—so different, yet constructed of almost identical chromosomes, enzymes, hormones, blood and specks of nucleic acids. The dread had no chance to waylay him. Yet he heard it thrashing outside the house like a furious whirlwind. He felt warm and drowsy. No ice. He might have fallen asleep himself but instead crept out of the room and down the stairs and returned to his armchair.

One of the chimneys was crumbling, like the base of his spine. Suppose termites burrowed under the foundation again? How could they pay a utility bill higher than the original mortgage itself? Would they survive? Would Vesuvius erupt? Would the angel of death, a green gas, seep through cracks under the doors? What if the power died for a week as it had during the previous ice storm? How keep the girls warm? How had he wound up in a place saturated with the formaldehyde of ice?

He got up and fixed himself a glass of wine and drank it straightaway. Another kind of warmth. Liquid silk permeating the entrails. He flipped through channels. A commercial for the perfect omelet maker. Sealy mattresses. Subaru Outback’s. What Exxon does to improve the environment. Kellog’s Lucky Charms. An ancient rerun of “Gilligan’s Island.”

Laine drifted into the room in her flannel pajamas. He dropped the book. Flat on the floor planks. Thud. 

She collapsed into his lap and raised her legs against his chest. Her bountiful red hair smelled like a meadow of herbs. Rosemary. Mint. Sweet olive. Tea tree oil. 

‘How are the monkeys?’ she mumbled. Obligatory question, she, so tired it required effort.

‘Well,’ he said, burying his nose into her hair, ‘both down at the moment. And I have yet to finish the page I started an hour ago. Once I got Blaire asleep, the other one stirred. Now I guess they’re both grazing in dreamland.’

‘They’ll be back,’ she laughed. 

And he laughed. Yes, they would be back. And the house might collapse. And February might kill them all. And they might go broke and wind up on the street. And ice might enshroud them for eternity—or at least a few thousand years, like that Ice Man embalmed in a glacier. A shaman. Little pouch of herbs attached to his belt. 

His grandmother’s spongy veins had pulsed with life.

‘We’re in Armenia,’ Baylor laughed.

‘Oh?’ said Laine.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Armenia doesn’t exist.’

‘Dostoevsky says—’

‘Dostoevsky is dead.’

‘That fellow is coming tomorrow to look at the foundation.’

‘Hmmmm,’ she moaned.

‘This is nice. I’ve been in this armchair all my life.’

‘Let’s go to bed.’

‘Bet those monkeys make their way in before the night’s over.’

‘Yep,’ she said. ‘We love those monkeys.’

‘Yes we do. The monkeys. All that innocence, like angel food cake.’ 

‘We’ll cuddle and be warm and nothing bad will ever happen?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘We hate February?’

‘February—’

‘—doesn’t exist.’

And thus they ascended the stairs still again, to upper sanctums, where they could burrow beneath patchwork quilts and comforters. Where babies would waddle in, disoriented and lonely, terrified of the dark, squeeze between them and rub noses and pinch necks, the beautiful extremities of flesh. Where for an iota of eternity they could wind limbs around each other and drift away to the drumming of ice pellets on an old tin roof.  

oOo  

Seven volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Archaeology, Scherzo Furiant, Crash, Clearing the Attic, Ghostly Demarcation & The Pandemic Papers, Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? and Leeway & Advent. His work appears in Best Short Fiction 2020. A novella, “The Art Deco Lung,” appears in Storylandia. National Public Radio aired a reading and discussion of his poetry on its “With Good Reason” series (December 2020). His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fictive Dream, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth,  Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include The Hymn of the Mardi Gras Flambeau, The Truth Changes, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions of the Twentieth Century. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of NEA grants for fiction and Poets in the Schools. He is now Professor Emeritus at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. He is a native of New Orleans.