Two Bullets and a Photo of the Moon
He stared at the picture and it stared right back at him. It was a crisp image; static and glued to the field of space behind it such that the photograph, a 4x6 glossy print of the most ubiquitous hunter ever known to man, the moon, looked like it was softly thrumming, gently pulsing like any other living thing does.
But she was supposed to be dead. She was supposed to have left him alone, the tracking and the following and the presence ceded in her wake. She was supposed to have dropped off years ago, sitting high in the sky all beauty and romantic representation like a wave of hair, but dead all the same. The complexity, knowing that she was, in fact, peeking behind every curtain he sat near, tracking him by day in the sky, hiding behind the sun's glare and and a wispy visage, watching him. Not to mention the night. She was everywhere at night. Absolutely everywhere.
And every time he thought of her, she sailed right back into his heart, via the highway of the eyes and the turnpike of the soul. Like a feedback loop set into a subtly shifting musical pattern; the repetition both defined and distorted itself, the way he saw that image move. And he ultimately loved the slow molasses drone that it created. A languid thick soup of aural rainbow, glowing faintly like the deepest navy/midnight blue, almost black, and a thin sheen of pale desaturated hay colored yellow, warbling as light, stretching as a piece of atmosphere. The whole thing, the back and forth of love and hate and high and low tides of his minds- it was a self fulfilling prophecy of ancient ideas and dusty, dirty prowls. And the way that crystal clear stark and crackling picture shifted in his hand was the same way in which he breathed out the love and sucked in the hate for her. She was there always, staring at him with a dizzying pace, and all the time, he realized that the fact that he acknowledged this acceleration painted him as being exactly designed for this part in life.
That fucking rock. That goddamn whore. Even when covered in clouds outside his window, high- way fucking high up in the silent velvet air- she stared at him from this photo, mocking him with stasis and challenging him with microscopic undulating rhythms that were the exact pace at which something could slowly saw through you in murder but keep you alive long enough to feel it by the friction created. Hold you in place for such a time that you would forever hear the word limbo as a negative, suggesting in the bantham of the evil inherent balanced with the simultaneous gift of life as an ultimate sequestration by way of boredom, or, tension. It wasn’t even a specific length of time that it had been going on, even. “Since 4 Augusts ago I have been watching this thing follow me around town.” It just is. And if it is now, it probably always has been.
He alternated between galactic crashes of rage and swelling tides of apologetic concern and empathy. Up the stairs, into the attic, put on the mask of heat and force and direction. Then back down to the kitchen, sitting indian-legged on the cool tile floor and realizing how lucky he was to be alive. Both were so valid in his feeling for her, neither one really pinpointed anything alone, but in concert, taken into the broader context of the scope of swinging humanity, it painted it out very accurately.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He woke up in a dark theater, cramped in a chair in a back corner of the room, in a rickety red mood, breathing the love and breathing the hate. Staring through the screen and focusing on the air behind it, he adjusted himself in his seat. Tried to focus on the picture. He watched the blacks ebb around the edges of the screen, eventually folding into blues and then lines of white and then small bands of gold. It was a cop movie, and every time there was a scene where a cruiser had its' lights on, the beautiful arcs of color panned out and in through the line of vision, passing bands and winds through his head.
He straightened his posture and tried to relax his arms and his legs, and to try to get a better flow of everything through his person. Make sure all the sounds, all the lights and colors not only entered his mind, but physically pulled down throughout the rest of his body. This kind of movie was perfect for this kind of connection. He locked in, unfolding into a line of communication the micro-world via human life, and thought to her.
He could almost see through her eyes at this point- the amount of time he spent in theaters, in front of television screens, watching electronic billboard displays, staring hard at anything with moving images, colors, swirling lights and flashing scenes. He could get access to her mind via anything, it seemed sometimes. And she always had the same people in her sights. The same port of call with humanity, the same triumvirate of statues of existence, as if those people she looked at were the only load bearing walls in the structure of her sanity and understanding of that world below that she, through her lunar rolls and sways, kept moving and marching, breathing and crying, propelling life through our harried flight through it.
It was him she saw. She saw him as a child, fingers scrabbling against cold, packed sand, fighting against March and its’ breath, as it clumped the sand and hissed at his cheek, as winter’s last baying voice. It made all the metal structures in the sandbox a dangerous vocation for touch, and isolated what was left available to effectively play with- not the digging/scooping seat, not the bright blue sit-and-spin, not the cast iron horses on springs; just the sand itself.
Which was fine with him.
She peered at him through the sun, she looked on from beyond last night and from the future of tonight, she watched, she prayed, and she waited.
She also saw him as a man; a person at the edge of really finally paying attention to what his heart was telling him, and she saw him as love. She saw him home from work, furiously confused at the road he was on in his world, the road that led most of his waking time to be focused on staying alive via making a living. She saw him realize that the beautiful flowers of his heart and mind were being trimmed, in a practical, pragmatic sense, trimmed to allow the more beneficial foliage to burst through and take precedence. We would have no more azaleas or geraniums or lotus flowers or yellow roses. In its’ place we would have aloe veras and mullein plants and rose hips and nettles. The beauty and virility of the soil still on display, but the results very different. She watched him have the bark slowly peeled away from him by the working world, only to be replaced by a shellac and a gossamer coating of synthetic sap, a way the society at large can bottle and sell one’s youth and vigor, usurping their dreams and channelling their desire for true expression and love into a manifestation of pragmatic maintenance so that one can endure the world long enough to carve out a little place so that they can begin work on the things that truly matter. Only once they reach those places, they realize that the fire in their heart has been replaced by watery oil and crumbled leaves.
And finally, she watched him now, today. A broken man on the brink of genius, stalking a wild monster in the heavens that works as The One Who Pushes The Swing. Stalking to kill, hunting to steady the ship that is constantly stuck in the choppy waters of his heart, drummed up by the storm in his mind. She watched him plan it out, she watched him draw the pictures and write the stories, she watched him funnel the last remaining desire and true slow burn of the fire of passion into this goal, and she understood completely that while he meant to stop her, while he meant to steady the roar, what he truly intended was to bring them to a place in time where, if this was meant to unfold, they sat down and understood together. He could ask her how she became the Pusher, and how happy she is. They could sit and understand each other. She with the control and the rhythm, and he with the foggy eyes, and in that moment he could, maybe, finally set to a balance. It wasn’t an escape, it was an opening of doors. It was an ushering in
the ultimate love, the love without desire; the love of acceptance and understanding.
As the film ended and the colors dissipated and thinned back to the blacks and grays mingling with fuzzy movements and the pressing push of the river of time, he focused his eyes and stood up, making his way out of the theater, and walking out to the street, where he knew she would be right above him, shouting encouragements and accusations at him for the entirety of his walk home, he prayed to her, and in the same breath, condemned the ground she walked on.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There was a point at which he considered trying to actually plan out his line of attack- to try and direct the melee of these thoughts into a cogent, heralded set of steps, beginning at A. and landing at B. How to do it. How to get her alone surprised? No. How to gain confidence for proximity and then strike as a betrayal? No. Better - How to be unseen. How to evade and reappear. How to get lost and then, quietly, find her. But even this was foolish. He couldn’t possibly be in the realm of thought of secrecy. He’d learned that by now. She even usurped the sun. She was fucking everywhere, always. So? The best method had to be the honest one. Ride right into the bloody twilight, like a dead cowboy on a trail to hell. Just come out and face her, give her the sign, ask her the question and be done with it. At least that way it was certain.
So he bought the bullets, and he made the plan. He set the time in his heart, and he opened the lock on his mind.
He dragged the patio chair and the small patio table in the far corner over to the north side of the roof of the apartment building, and sat down, propping his feet up on the small safety ledge. He sat down the revolver, loaded with the 2 copper-coated slices of lead, sat it down on the table and waited, watching her pass through clouds and rough
patches of stars. She would duck, running out and up and under through the air, eluding the day at her back and chasing the one just past. Soon she would pass through the valleys of the clouds and the tangled jungles of starlight, and then he would tell her. He would rise, float up to her and she down to him, and they would be reborn together, parallelled for eternity and threaded within one another. He would take her hand and promise her, gently screaming at the top of his lungs, and she would hear his sweet words, not minding the fury of the spittle hitting her cheek, and accept the loving violence of his command and direction, holding onto him with all her might, until he let her breathe again.
He looked at the photo in his hands, compared the created image of The One In The Sky to the actual One, and passed his eyes between them, back and forth. Sometimes the picture moved faster than the actual Pusher did, but eventually they caught up to each other. Sometimes he couldn’t tell the difference between the two.
He set the picture on the table and picked up the gun, breathing in slowly through his nose. Looking upward towards the moon, she narrowed her eyes back at him, and floated a twinkle out from those amber-blue/lime green-yellow eyes that hit him in the forehead.
He lifted the revolver and pointed it out at the sky, towards her center, taking dead casual calming aim, and fired. He heard a soft sound of involuntary struggle, a consciously fruitless attempt to hold on to the fire floating out of her orbit, and then the sky went dark and there was a short, viciously loud creak, and then a break. And then the water below her rocked and splashed and gyrated, pumping and swirling, opening a vortex in the middle of the ocean to accept its’ mother, as she gently dropped down into the sea, making no more splash than a baseball thrown into a lake, and the book closed.
The sea rocked no longer, the ocean ceased to beat itself at the window of the shore, the
leaves in the trees stopped blowing for the lack of wind, and the power of the love in the air fizzled and crackled out like a dying candle.
He let out his breath and put the gun against his head, saying a silent prayer for a good journey, and committed himself fully to the cessation of the hunting, the end of being hunted, and a rebirth.
