Lost monk. Living in the middle of the city without purpose, form, or love. “I can’t pull my life together”, is what he said to himself over and over, while trying to figure out a way to make it all come together. Each morning he traveled into the core of the city on the public bus, and each night he came home the same way, always alone, without detour. Had he been a man of little faith or bolder character he would have long ago killed himself. In his room he had a small sword. It was given to him- along with a pewter goblet- by his sister, who forever remained confused as to what sort of thing might be useful to her brother on his birthday. She was about five centuries and one continent too late, but it might have served him well in the middle ages.
Sometimes on break he looked out the window at the city’s core, and the Westward Ho building. That building sat odd in the middle of the new, and he imagined that a devoloper with vision could take that property and turn it into something unusual. He didn’t know what the building was being used for now, accept that he saw the occasional person in wheelchair rolling themselves out the front doors. Maybe it was some kind of low income residence.
Once he caused it to rain after he had been dreaming of the storms they had back east, and which were woefully lacking here in the desert. He was at home and stepped out onto the porch and visualized the Valley covered with water, and saw himself dancing in the rain. Within moments the sky opened up, the rain came down, and all his neighbors opened their doors and windows. It was only rain, but when you lacked water, it was a miracle and people wanted to experience it.
The job was wicked boring. He worked at a newspaper taking calls from customers who would literally die if they did not get their paper, or some section of the paper- like their comics. No really, they would quite simply keel over and drop dead from boredom or lack of anything. Old people. They come to rely on distractions in place of people, because people go. All those people you began your life with go. All those people you loved, or thought loved you, well they moved on, or died, and left you here in Phoenix to find your life’s meaning in the timely delivery of your comics.
The hardest thing, once arriving at work, was to stay there, and not simply get up and walk. Take the elevator down to the lobby and out into the open air, and put one foot in front of the next till he had reached the coast back east.
Once there he would take off his socks, and lay back on the Carolina beach, and watch the ocean roll in from Europe. He would smell the cool, slightly pungent water air, and breath deeply. Out of the ocean a goddess would arrive and fall at his feet. “I love you and have waited forever for you to come back,” she would say. “But you have no feet,” he would say back to the mermaid, wondering about the merits of being loved by a woman with no vagina, or feet.
Every few mornings while standing on 7th Avenue and Bell, a Jehovah’s Witness would appear and attempt to convince him, without exactly admitting to it, that of all the Christians in the world, only the Jehovahs had it all figured out. The monk and the woman had a running debate about hell, and whether the hell mentioned in the Bible represented eternal damnation. She seemed to suggest that such was not the case, and that a merciful God would not in fact let you suffer forever in such a place, but rather, that you would cease to exist. The monk wondered if that was a variance worth arguing a over. Eternal suffering or non-existence; same difference, peut-etre.
Occasionally he glanced down to see if she had on a wedding ring, imagining that any day now she would pop from her car married. For a while they even debated whether God should be called Jehovah. The name of God seemed really important to her. Each time she appeared she would say, “Hey David, how are you?” and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that his name was not in fact David. Somewhere down the road he planned to make some great theological point about the unimportance of names and he would bolster this by revealing his correct name and asking her if that rendered everything she had said to him invalid. He tended to feel that God did not really care what you called him, so long as you paid attention to him.
“The love you bring won’t mean a thing, unless you sing,” sang Travis over the speakers of the monk’s mp3 player. Each day he sat on the bus listening to music and watching people get on and off. An attractive woman would get on and sit across from him. They would briefly make eye contact, then her stop would come, and off she went. Sometimes he wished he was older, or younger, or altogether different so that he would be caught off guard by someone’s attraction to him. That wishing well was filled with more copper pennies than water.
“I don’t care if you have no drivers to bring me my paper. You missed delivery this morning and I want a driver to come out and bring me a replacement,” said the woman from Kirby Retirement Village. He told her this would not be possible, that all the drivers had gone home for the day (maybe they were at Subway getting a toasted tuna sandwich or at a strip club in Scottsdale), but that he would credit her account. “I do apologize,” he said, his mind drifting across the faces of his coworkers, then up into the air, and out the window. His mind was gone. Only his voice and body remained. “No, you HAVE to bring me a paper. Let me talk to your supervisor,” said the woman. She too would no doubt die from lack of newspaper; whether she would die figuratively or literally remained to be seen, but she was huffing and puffing on the other end of the phone, breathing heavy, like literal death had stopped in for brunch. He transferred her to the non-supervisor on the help desk.
He wanted something to drink, but not the soda sitting there on the desk. He ran his hand over it and turned it into water, and sipped. Parlor tricks. All the power or magic in the universe is useless if it does not create love. His power was particularly worthless. One can only go so far with the ability to cause water to come. Perhaps if he was in Africa he might be a God. He thought of that, going to Africa and making it rain, but he knew that was not the problem there. There was always enough food in the world, and nearly every famine in Africa had at its core a set of circumstances largely manmade. Water was not really the problem, for anyone. Men were the problem. Love was the problem.
He spent hours of his time each night talking to a woman from across the country. She had no idea what he looked like, but each night they talked, sometimes for hours on end about nothing in particular. It was one of those things that something inside him told him might be foolish, and it was interesting to him that people could connect sight unseen, and then, sight seen, probably disconnect; it was inevitable in a world where people were looking for gods and goddesses, and all one could do was turn soda into water, instead of water into wine, or solitude into love.
