“I walked from the wreck till the yards became years, the dirt road a city, until my face became this face & the rain washed the gasoline clean from my fingers. I found a payphone in the heart of the poem & called you collect to say all this knowing it won’t make a difference, only
more. So hello, hi, the blood inside my hands, is now inside the world. Words, the prophets tell us, destroy nothing they can’t rebuild. I did it to hold my father, to free my dog. It’s an old story, Ma, anyone can tell it.”
Sayfa 37Kitabı okudu
A new way of praying with digital Jesus Wilbur Mercer
Rick thought, My god; there’s something worse about my situation than his. Mercer doesn’t have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn’t required to violate his own identity.
Bending, he gently removed his wife’s fingers from the twin handles. He then himself took her place. For the first time in weeks. An impulse: he hadn’t planned it; all at once it had happened.
A landscape of weeds confronted him, a desolation. The air smelled of harsh blossoms; this was the desert, and there was no rain.
A man stood before him, a sorrowful light in his weary, pain-drenched eyes.
“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”
“Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
Chapter 15Kitabı okudu
It Can’t Rain All The Time...
Yağmur yağmaya başlıyor tam o sırada… Şehrin günahını yıkamak için son bir ümitsiz, beyhude çaba sanki…
“I’ve told myself a hundred times that I shouldn’t do this, but I can’t not do it,” she said, looking at me with a million different things dancing in her beautiful eyes. “Stay with me, Lucas. Be with me. I want you. I’ve wanted you for a long time. I know that you can’t stay in the country without a visa, that you squeezed that time to the last second. So, I’ll come with you. I’ll get myself a ticket right now, I—” She shook her head. “I haven’t packed or have anything with me right now but that doesn’t matter. I’ll buy what I need in Spain. You are all I need, Lucas. I want you. I want to go on dates that are not experimental. I want to kiss you under the rain a hundred times more. I want to dance with you in the kitchen every morning. I want to bring you a box of Cronuts when I want to say thank you. And not because we’re friends.”
