It was Olsen who sat there on this day of his disappointment, on the bus, damp, the sky hiking up it’s skirts to let water burst forth upon the people below.
Olsen hated the bus, and even more so when it rained. The smells that could hide in the dry of an Arizona day revealed themselves in the wetness. The bus was a kennel long before a cleaning.
He looked past the person in front of him, catching the Fry’s supermarket passing behind her head and off to the right. Sometimes he thought he might strike up a conversation with her, since she waited at the same bus stops, but in the end he asked himself why. What was the point? He couldn’t imagine hanging out with such a woman. She was large and wore pants of a stretchy blue material that bulged around her buttox and thighs. No ring on her finger, and deservedly so. And then he took that thought back. Nobody deserves to live without love.
The fifteenth of March fell upon him like a brute upon an unwary soul. You would think that one could learn the lessons of the past, and certainly YOU might. But Olsen never learned, and knew he never learned, which was all the more vexing.
This time it was a girl. Everyone whispered to him his folly. She is too young. She is too wayward. She is too far away.
He was for the longest time her ghost and genie. For over two years they talked for hours a day on the phone, and he lavished his attentions on her. It did not matter if Democrats were taking over Congress, or if Iran was in masturbation, stoking a nuclear missile and ready to come upon the earth at any moment, spraying destruction.
She presented herself to him, even as Olsen hid and held back. They laughed and cried and he promised things he never thought he would ever promise, and said things he never thought he would say. Foolish things, for what are words? Surely not love. And that too, he promised.
“I will love you like you’ve not been loved,” he said, and attempted to show it by action.
But she had needs greater than distance could accommodate, and he was merely the man in the bottle that she could pick up in a moment of need and use. “I want you inside of me,” she purred against the glass to which his ear was glued.
Earlier that morning when he got off the bus he saw a rainbow dipping its legs over Bell Road. It was a sign that God would never again destroy the earth by flood. That was what the Bible said, and what believers believed. But your heart is not the earth, and it seemed especially evil for God to have such a bright object piercing the clouds, while raining on your head, and destroying the center of your soul.
“Et Tu Brute,” he said, as the brute ripped a medallion off his neck and whispered, “It’s not you, it’s me” in his ear. Ah love. The love of friends, comrades, and family could so easily vanish with just the right inflection in life’s voice. Ah women too, they of the fickle hearts who want it all. The women want fire, and water, and carried in the palm of your hand, and not for warmth or to quench thirst, but to be sure that you can, or that they can prove you can.
Olsen stopped by the supermarket before catching that foul bus home. He picked up potatoes, mayonnaise and mustard. He paid one dollar for a nice green pepper, and half that for some scallions. He placed some sage filled sausage in his basket, next to some small ripe tomatoes and celery hearts. “Mushrooms” he said to himself, placing some in a plastic baggy.
“What will you do on your vacation?” someone had asked him. He was not so sure now. She was gone as quickly as she had come. She wanted him so small as to fit inside her imagination, to be pulled out when the reality of her life, across the country in New Jersey, proved difficult. Her genie, her monk, would be handy during tough moments.
He did things for her. He bought her medicine and helped her file applications. He helped her pay a bill here and there, and listened while she cried. He listened quietly when she shouted at her father on the other side of the door, who stood turning the knob during his drunken midnights. “It won’t always be this way,” he assured her. He told her she could make her own life, but that meant making choices distinctly different from the choices made by those around her. She agreed, as though caught between the frying pan and the mouth, and dangling with her future on a forked world.
But she could not resist her own impulses and her ghost was not enough. Olsen was not enough. “You know how I am, I want it all,” she said to him with a tone so light and genial that he cringed. “I want to come, but…” she said. But she would not come here, now. All that was necessary was a cock crowing, and he would be Jesus, rejected and denied.
Later that night he stood in the doorway as the rain came down hard and steady. He held a bowl of potato salad infused with sausage, scallion, tomato. It was warm and thickly filled his mouth. Shortly Satan would stop bye, and comfort this lesser demon, and urge him not to play at being good or search for things like love. “Oh Olsen, we ought not to want earthly things as keepsakes,” Satan would say, rolling his eyes to the whites, before adding, “Mmmm, is that saffron I taste in this salad?”
