Reunion by Hugh Fox Read Free Book Online

kinds of little tuggings inside him to go take a look, like there was always one last pot that, if he really saw it, saw what was really there, would irrevocably prove the ancient links between Asia, Europe and the misnamed New World, “all my cousins here in Chicago, I haven’t seen them for twenty years. That’s the hell of being an only child, they’ve got their brothers and sisters, it all hangs together, what do I have but a Past in my head that I can’t go back to … ”
    â€œYou’ve got me, six kids,” said Malinche.
    â€œRight! Richtig! Aber Ich habe zu veil Sehnsucht! Too much ‘longing’!”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œFor where and what I was, I guess,” he answered, confused for a moment, as if the message were that, yes, in his lost Chicago years, Mass and Communion every morning, classes, meditations, reading St. John of the Cross in the evenings, always in a state of perpetual fasting, not really in the Twentieth Century at all but in some sort of desert saint time-warp, like St. Simon Stylites, atop a pillar in the middle of the Negev, he had reached some sort of Zen Center inside himself and everything he’d done had radiated out from there so that.…, “remember that poem by Hopkins, ‘The just man justices, keeps grace, keeps all his goings graces.’ I was like that … ”
    She shrugged her shoulders.
    â€œAll his goings graces … ?”
    â€œI don’t know, I don’t know,” he said and walked on through the armour and arms exhibit which he didn’t relate to at all, thousands of people crowding every square spot, a long line already beginning in the middle of the armour and arms, another sign T HE G ARIBALDI E XHIBIT L INE B EGINS H ERE , going off into some gallery to their right that he didn’t even remember, something new, who knows … turned left and started walking through the Southeast Asian/East Indian stuff, feeling at home with the Sivas and Vishnus, Ganesas, Kalis, Buddhas, more old friends, even during his tortured year at Med School, coming down here every Friday afternoon and just being here, as if he were almost beginning to become again like now, as if he wasn’t 63, a month away from 64, as if Malinche wasn’t his fourth but about to become his first wife, like the kids were all still to be born, still blessed imaginary beings in Time Future, instead of goofball fuckoffs (most of them) in Time Now, that nightly call from Conchita, “Hi, Dad, I was really feeling suicidal today, and I ate ten pounds of caramel corn which isn’t as fattening as steak, but … and the staff down at La Clinca hates my guts, in fact when I confronted the secretary with the fact that she hates my guts, she said ‘Maybe if you had less guts to hate … ’ What does that mean, huh, huh, Dad?”
    The worst of the bunch, spending her days earning lunches at La Clinica, taking her daily dose of Haldol in front of witnesses, just to be sure she took it, the taking of her daily medication (poison) the closest she ever came to anything close to “order,” a “job,” “routine,” the rest of her life a spillover of psychoticconfusion. And he’d only see her once or twice a year for a couple of days each visit…down to Texas … which he hated, except for Austin …
    â€œI think I’ll have the sirloin tips,” said Malinche as the air began to fill with the jumbled smells of sauces and meats, sweets, garlics and meringues and wasn’t that one acrid exclamation mark in the air some sort of burnt shallots + wine sauce combo … ?
    â€œGreat!” he said, stopping for one brief moment in front of a statue of the Buddha with a canopy of cobras over him, the message IF YOU ARE HOLY ENOUGH, EVIL BECOMES GOOD, DANGER BECOMES PROTECTION, he guessed.
    Only how do you get that holy?
    He’d have fish as usual.
    Fish for his