Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
January 13, 2002
The closer I got to Val-de-Mont-Ste-Lac the more I felt like an inflatable bell being inflated by compost gas. The sound of my clothes outstripped the car engine. The sounds were drips of lemon concentrate into white icing, needing to be padded and contracted. The sky was brittlely blue and time was crushed against not-time. This time had no worth. There was no need to take care. The time was damaged and useless. It was cracked. One need but wait for the gleaming little silver beads to justify the long, moldy cord.
I was in the center crossroads of a village of thirty houses, a bakery, and a whitewashed church with crumbling bleached grave markers and a black and white sign reading 'NO SHRUBBERY' in cursive. The hills on either side were green and treed; a narrow gray river licked the roadside. I stopped at the Esso gas station to ask for directions to the monastery but no one came out when I banged the horn. I saw people inside, wavy through old and dirty glass, watching an orange flickering television set. Above the set was a round glass-faced clock that read quarter to ten. No one so much as looked at me.
I got out of the car and looked around the scrubby green and yellow slopes until I saw a spindly streak of road up to a sunken bit of hillside. I got back into the car and drove up.
The car crunched over tarred gray gravel in loopy switchbacks and then drifted neatly between thick cut red blocks of sandstone into a small courtyard. The courtyard was surrounded by unpruned apple trees cuddled up to a big red stone building with crumbling mortar. I parked on crushed yellow grass and sat in the car with the windows cracked open and my music shuffling so that Adrian Belew told the grass that he was a tax evader.
A bobbling shortish man with loose skin and a square nose slipped around the back of the building. His hands were hidden in a rough brown robe. The robe crossed over his chest and was tied at his waist. Underneath I saw a blue and white plaid buttoned shirt and blue jeans worn white at the creases. He took a pack of cigarettes out with one hand and a red plastic lighter with the other. He stuck a filter-tipped cigarette in his mouth. His lighter was the childproof kind with a button you have to press down and then roll the lighter wheel a certain way. His hands were shaky and it took him four tries. It was comfortably lit before he saw me. He coughed once.
I shut off the music and got out of the car. "Can I buy one of those?" I said.
He gave me a cigarette and his lighter. I gave the lighter back and started up my car to use the car lighter.
"I don't mind telling you," he said with a slightly abraded voice, "I don't smoke anymore. Sometimes it can't be helped though."
"I only smoke on special occasions," I said. "I guess today is special."
He dragged away his first smoke and lit another from the stub. "They say," he said, "they say the Pentagon is burning now."
"You're the expert," I said.
He looked at me like he hadn't seen me the first time. "I don't know much about theology," I said hastily.
"Err, yes," he said. "We're all going to need unusual guidance this time. Is that why you're here? Are you from the village?"
"No, no, I'm from Ottawa. I'm looking for someone staying here. Auntie Dynamite."
"Oh! Oh! Oh!"
"Is she here?"
"Oh! Yes! I, yes, come in with me. She's watching CNN with the others."
"Listen, uh, Father..."
"Brother. Brother Matthew."
"What happened to her, to Auntie?"
"I thought you'd be more likely to know. She came to us for... she said she was... She was... Some of us think she's... I hoped that she would... I hoped she would accept that we are with her in her... disaffection. That I am with her -- that we all are of course."
"She can really get between a man and his illusions," I said. "Like Steve Jobs or the Pope."
"Yes, well," he said primly. "We're Anglicans here."
She sat in a little worn wicker chair with a flowery seat. She was holding a worn black leather book. Her little feet wore little black canvas shoes restlessly tapping chipped milk-and-coffee tiles. She was watching planes collide with buildings, as were they all, and soon so was I.
It was death after a lifetime of simulated death. It was picking an apple after a lifetime of frozen concentrates. It was falling in love.
It was so improbable that I needed -- was suffocating without it -- to be present, to verify, to be made real myself, even if, if I were real, I could die.
I envied those who were present because they were being made alive.
It wasn't until late afternoon that we were alone, outside, smoking Brother Matthew's cigarettes with him and looking over the village. I told her Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf was dead and she said she bet Hank never got to fuck his mother.
She stood up and smoothed her black robe, like a bathrobe crossed with a nun's habit, knotted with a paisley scarf. "I look horrible. When are we going?"
"Don't you have to pack?"
"Pack," she said. "Pack what."
"You're not happy here?"
"I want a triple cheeseburger and large fries and large onion rings and a large milkshake and a giant Coke and a pack of Camels and a bottle of tequila. I've got to get out of here. I've got to get out of here!"
She kissed me, and told me to go get the damn car.