When the nights are clear, starlit and deep, and quiet, they remind you of Destry for some reason. He had never been out of the state, rarely out of the county, before he got a ground floor job with an electronics firm and moved away. The friends that he hasn’t seen in at least 20 years say that he’s become a millionaire and travels all over the world. In other words, Destry gave up everything.
By the night of the stag party, he hadn’t had much left to lose. His high school sweetheart/wife, had just left him. His best friend was getting married. The three that made it to the wee hours of the morning with him engaged Destry in a game of penny ante dealer’s choice so quiet and tense it could have been a match between Wyatt Earp and the Clantons.
The guy who was in charge of the entertainment had brought in a battered, untrackable copy of “Deepthroat” and it was unwatchable; everybody settled—maybe gratefully—for a late night showing of “Forbidden Planet” on the tube. The honoree had already gone home. It didn’t help that the bride to be could have been the twin of Anne Francis.
Destry threw his cards down in a way that said the game was over. Nobody argued. These events contain an underlying sadness that has a general kinship with the humor at a wake.
He said, “What makes a beautiful girl who could have done something valuable with her life settle for next to nothing?”
His friends didn’t dare say, “Like who?” It had become Destry’s party.
On the chance that he was talking about Anne Francis, you say, “’Forbidden Planet’ is a classic of its kind. Its story line is based on one of Shakespeare’s plays.”
When you’ve stayed sober all night by being totally out of the mood to get drunk, you get into a weird kind of momentum, and you either dispute everything or accept everything. The guys look wearily to Destry, but he just smiles. He says, “You know that girl that works in photo? The blonde?”
“Sure.”
‘What do you think? Beautiful, huh?”
“Gorgeous.”
“She was a year behind me in school. She started to hang out with my sister after I graduated. Sis used to pass me notes from her. Now she’s pregnant. The guy plays guitar for a bar band.”
“There’s something about musicians.”
“She could’ve been anything: a model—maybe even a movie star.”
“Not everybody’s raised to value those things, Destry. But everybody counts.”
“You write, don’t you? Don’t you want to be famous?”
“No. But I want people to read what I write.”
“I look at people, what they’re capable of, and I always expect that their ablities will take them places, but they never seem to. Like I’m in competition with everybody else, you know. I want to succeed before you do. Nobody’s ever said I’m any great shakes, but I expect things of myself.”
Destry’s losses are uncountable, and irretrievable. He can’t afford to lose anymore. “Go for it, Destry.”
“It’s such a big world. It makes you feel small and weak. Like you gotta get some kind of power to hang on to the things in life that are yours.” He gets up and turns to the window and takes the two steps to it and stands looking out into the night. His friends sit immobile peering quietly into a dark universe of their own. Destry says, “Sometimes I feel like 'The (Incredible) Shrinking Man,' melting down to nothing in front of all those stars. But I can’t accept it like he can.”
He passes quietly past you on his way to bed. Everybody waves at nobody and nothing in particular, and the two sitting across from each other shuffle a deck and begin to play hearts without talking. You bring down a fist lightly on the table as a gesture of good night and get up and head for the front door.
Outside, the night is darker than usual and the canopy seems more vast but glittering like a layer of shale encrusted with diamonds. Not everyone was meant to be bigger than life, but the only shortcoming in this world is to think small…
“God’s silver tapestry spread across the night—and in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite: I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature.
That existence begins and ends is man’s conception, not nature’s.
And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away, and in their place came…acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation .. it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too.
Yes! Smaller than the smallest…I meant something, too! To God there is no zero.
I still exist!”
Noe.
No comments:
Post a Comment