You have entered the hundred chapter garden.
In which we found Eldon worrying about the water inlet. Then the past called.
Like petrol in a puddle
Something is terribly wrong with the world. Or with me. That phone cannot ring. It was Puddy's. It was alive in the very beginning. But it died too soon. Back then I could access the pictures, her voice, her life, the images that hurt. The unbearable videos. Decades have passed since. And now the music she chose as her ringtone washes over the garden and floods me. I am on all fours on the platform, on the planks I use to cover the concrete basin, underneath the steel water inlet, and I stare at the little dome temple that is the center of my plot, my garden, while the piano fills my head with impossible poison. Enough to mess me up. To dissolve me. Rising levels of malignant wet molecules that lock into place and alter my state from living soft tissue to rigid flesh. I turn to stone. Then begin crumbling under the weight of the simple melody. I become volatile and evaporate.
How achingly beautiful pianos were. Those two exploring hands find my heart and squeeze it. The dead lump in my chest regains a pulse. How have I lived without?
I hated sad music. Puddy always found songs that pulled my legs from under me. She knew the keys to my tender bits. And her face is with me, fresh as a flower. Unchanged. Too close. Too alive.
What was a wound long healed, a faded scar, is sliced open by what cannot be. Electronics do not last this long. Their parts do not age well. Their damage doesn't heal from within. And there is no power. My solar array died twenty years back. Now greener than ever, covered with a thick crust of sand and clay. And the sound is big. Has substance. It sounds like when the wireless speaker amplified the chords, as it did back then in the first years. Widening the spectrum of my hurt to all registers. It is that speaker. I am going insane. This is not real. I wipe my wet face in anger.
But whoever is calling is insistent. Almost the whole three-minute song plays until silence returns with a sudden cut chord. Emptiness descends abruptly. Gravity is switched back on. And then I wait. It is all I am capable of. Unable to move or respond. Will it ring again? Will it? Do I want it to ring?
Of course, I do. And it shouldn't. Not a single drop must be added to what I feel. My heart will burst.
Nothing happens. But still, I wait. Every fiber of my being stays on high alert. On the lookout for shards of evidence, for proof it really happened.
The question stays with me all day, disrupting everything I do. I dare not look, enter, or even get close to the shrine. The holy place I created for my wife and daughter, now unsettles me. Built to encapsulate the pain, to hold what couldn't be held. Giving it a place outside myself. As close by as I could bear. Now again too close.
All has returned.
Puddy and June. Unchanged by time. They visit me. And I am not ready to receive them. To let them in. I will break.
I cannot break again. I just can't. I go at my chores with twice the effort. Pretending nothing has changed. I force myself to do the garden round. To prepare food and even eat it. To cut firewood to size. To check my sauerkraut and other ferments. But can't remember what I checked. I postpone all thoughts until dusk, and I grab the binoculars unthinkingly. To do my daily session of birding.
I sit with the thing on my lap and am finally able to think. To feel the distance of the years gain some solidity again. It was a glitch of my aging brain. And I forgive myself.
"Eldon R.G. Mercer it is okay to lose a marble now and then. You knew that could happen, and now it did."
My voices feel flat and contrived. Fake self-deception. And they know it. Have they ever been this quiet? I feel so empty. No one here but me.
And then I observe the newcomers building a nest in the northeast top corner. I don't know their names, so I make them up. From the fragments Puddy has left in me.
"A degree in ornithology? Isn't that something with birds?"
I say my first question to her out loud.
"Yes, that's what I want," she says.
Inner voices are different. I look at the dome. I doubt. "You can doubt, Eldon Rosy Garland Mercer," she says, "but I will study the winged ones. Not even you will stop me from finding out about the birds."
She kisses me. On my temple, then cups my nose and mouth with her warm hand. Silencing my too smart returns. Back then, I got an instant hard-on. That moment she acquired my soul. I owed her my life from that gesture on. She didn't know yet. What she'd done to me, she did to many. She impacted people. She had magic. In her voice. In her words. In her hands. In her not doing. In her not saying. Holding back what others wanted from her. She gave unexpectedly. She still does. Today she gives me tears. Not stingy at all.
The high quality glasses I use to look at the birds are hers. Of all I have with me in this space, it is the most complex object still functioning.
My strictly limited, hard edged bit of the world that has become all of me. My thirty-foot walls. My one-acre world. Shared with Swiftlings, Parafinches, Wallpeckers, Bluewhilers, Freegees, obnoxious Frooks, solitary Baitmen, Loneloners (the rabbits of the sky), otherworldly Spirebeeks, and yes, six fat-assed, lower-cased ducks. None of them prisoners, or displaced.
The newly arrived are building. Straw and clay resembling grey noodles. No singing, just labour. The feathers shine like oil on water. Like petrol in a puddle.
Rainbowpuddlers? I am not sure yet. Naming is serious business. I keep observing. They touch beaks each time one of them returns to the build and finds the other. There's a blue shimmer on their dark snoozing nozzles. Almost metallic. And one of them has a turquoise dot. A third eye highlight on the forehead. Is that the male? Their quickness is on a wholly different scale of time.
Evening song begins. To the left of me. I swing around with my double-barrel lens. Almost immediately, I spot her. High up in the big fig. Fierce and proud. A dull brown appearance is fooling the world all day until she sets down up there just before sunset. Telling them. Us.
Day is ending.
Day is done.
Listen now.
To hear the one.
Her phrasing infinitely more nuanced. She has a minute before the choir will drown her in a short burst of comments, cynical remarks and envious imitations. Then they shut up, one by one. By now, their numbers have increased to hundreds. They live here. Like me. But unlike me, they can go as they like, take off. See what lies beyond.
I am ready for bed. I long to sleep. I am good at sleeping and all that comes with. Taking flight in me. To visit and be visited. I say goodbye and do my round.
As I pass the temple grounds, the circle path, I can feel it coming. I am no longer surprised by predicting what happens the next instant. I stop and turn toward the dome. I nod. Sigh deeply. Surrender.
And then it rings again.
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