Quest for Sadness
I
ordered my butler to fetch me a shotgun. To this he raised an eyebrow and revealed the trace of a smirk.
"Uh huh."
"Just do it," I said.
He stuck a long green blade between his teeth, even though I had told him not to chew grass in the house. He hooked one thumb under the dirty blue strap of his overalls and used the other to push the Marlboro cap higher up on his forehead. He smelled of Pennzoil and gas-powered gardening tools.
"Winchester or Smith & Wesson?" he asked.
"Something with a kick. Meet me by the west wall and don't tread dirt on the foyer carpet." He was usually careful, but it never hurt to remind him after his morning chores. I took long strides toward the main staircase and had just rested my hand on the banister.
"Hey there," he said.
"What!"
The old coot stood under the archway and stroked his beard.
"Whatcha want the heavy iron for? There ain't nothing in the west wing but breakables."
"The glass," I said. "I am going to shoot the stained glass."
He sunk his hand into his deep pocket and scratched the back of his right calf with the left boot tip.
"The whole wall is gonna be rough there, fella. That there glass is thick as a swamp and stands ninety foot high by seventy across. Took them artists six months of hard labor to install and it won't come down easy."
I flexed my jaw.
"Bring extra rounds."
***
The madness began yesterday on my private six-hole golf course. I was ten feet off the green and chipping for par when the gun went off.
That cocky old swine. He brought a .44 Magnum today instead of the starter pistol.
With a slight frown, I stroked through the ball and landed it in the cup. Touch of backspin. I turned.
"You fired late." He did not respond. He just sat there in the golf cart, feet up, toothless grin, firearm aimed to high north with gray wisps of smoke floating around the mouth of the barrel. My voice was patience. "I told you that the most sensitive point of concentration is needed an inch before contact with the ball. You shot on the follow-through."
"Well of course I did," he said. "By now, you've come to expect it like an old hog waiting on a slop-bell."
"Then we need a new game," I said.
"Looks like it."
I set my seven iron in its holder and crossed my arms. He scratched his temple with the muzzle of the .44.
"Can we think of nothing else?" I said. He leaned over the coffee can he always brought with him and spit a long brown runner into it. He wiped his mouth with a sweaty flannel sleeve and smiled.
"Let's play Antichrist," he said.
"What?"
He nodded at me slowly. The smile stayed.
"You know."
"No, I don't. Explain. You're no Antichrist."
"'Tain't about me," he said. "Every dime-store book of prophecy says the Antichrist comes to glory by age thirty-three. Seems time for y'all to be doing the thinking."
My thirty-third birthday was in two days, and the glint in his eye was constructed of things other than jest.
"You are permanently dismissed," I said. "Be off the grounds by five or I will have you bodily removed. Start packing."
He did not stir.
"I'll call the police right now," I said.
I went nowhere.
He tossed the pistol to me. It cartwheeled through the air and I caught it by the handle.
"Go ahead," he said. "Aim and pull the trigger. Put a slug right between my eyebrows."
I did nothing. He stretched out his legs, crossed them at the ankles, and clasped his hands behind his head.
"Now you must ask yourself why," he said. "Why do you choose not to fire the weapon? Is it because you give a damn about your fellow man? I don't think so. Y'all got more money than God and don't feel nothing for no one. Only way you keep ties with a man is by owning him and you won't pull the trigger 'cause it makes no sense to toss away your property."
"That's ridiculous," I said. "You are my employee, not my property."
"That so? Did you hire me or buy me with purpose? How much does it take to purchase a soul? What's your definition of slavery?"
I had no answer for that. He had been a patient in one of the retirement homes I had sold off. He seemed good with machines so I offered to take him in. His response was,
"Give me back a life and a pair of work pants and I'll do it for free."
I viewed it as a gesture of charity, the start of a strong bond of trust between a pillar of wealth and the salt of the earth. Now I was being forced to view it as something else. I studied him closely, my butler, my handyman, my lone companion who sat in the golf cart, the one who was brought on to expedite my will, he who would do anything for me because I owned him. I got a sudden whisper of fear in the small of my back.
"So, I bargained for your loyalty," I said. "Why is that so wrong?"
His smile vanished.
"Because I'd break the knees of a baby or take a bullet in my side for you. Go on, now admit who
you
are."
"No. You're the one with the problem and there's really no challenge in this. It is too easy to prove that you're wrong."
"Then do it," he said. "Prove me wrong." I hesitated and he went on with words that seemed treasured and rehearsed. "Children of Satan don't feel sadness, friend. They are incapable of any sense of loss. Tell me one thing that makes you feel sorrow for another."
I shifted my stance and crossed my arms.
"Game's too easy. I could lie."
"Why would you lie to me? I'm nobody."
"And I'm not a machine. I feel like everyone else."
"Do ya? When's the last time you shed a tear?"
I had no response, and the fear came to the forefront like a black bird flapping loose in the attic. Weeping was one particular release that helped define the human experience, I knew that, I had certainly read about it, seen it in film, observed it on the news. And though I had never actually come face to face with woe, I just assumed all along that this kind of thing existed in those more connected.
What does sadness feel like? The impact of a difficult moral choice?
You'll never know. It has been fully unlearned and now remains too easy to buy off with your money, more money than God.
I stormed off the golf course. Though it was too early, I retreated to the confines of my second-floor study to fix myself a vodka martini with three anchovy olives.
What am I?
Things I had known about myself were altered in this new tilt of light. Apathy seemed cruel. Lack of emotion seemed evil. Calm, cool, and collected seemed sociopathic. And why did I not just have my butler thrown off the grounds, no more questions asked? He was obviously disturbed.
You knew that from day one. You bought him so you could keep him as property. Now you refuse to let go what you own.
It ate at me all afternoon. It was an unsolvable round-about.
You have enough money to buy off sadness. Enough to purchase souls.
Wide-eyed in the dark, I stared out through my bay windows and searched for feelings of pity about anything. There were none. I did not give a damn about the homeless, not one shred of grief for the starving, not a single crumb of ache for any of the damned living outside of my isolated world.
What am I?
I was going to find out. I was going to scratch up some kind of humanity from deep within. I was determined to prove the accusation false.
***
Those lovely, massive windows.
I aimed high and the first shot back-kicked my shoulder so hard I almost fell on my ass. The large face of the Virgin Mary shattered into a thousand sharp glass raindrops, most of which landed outside on the grass. Others smashed the marble floor before me, skidding and spinning. Morning sun stabbed through the ugly void and the glare lanced off the steel barrel as I cocked another round into the chamber.
My butler followed as I moved behind the display of Persian vases. He was laughing. I went back on my heels, steadied myself against the wall, aimed low at the wide reproduction of The Last Supper and let the buckshot fly.
The second
thwack
of gunfire seemed louder than the first, but it did less damage. In somewhat of a rage, I grabbed the other shotgun and pumped five successive explosions at the stained glass mural, bursting it out at the bottom in thick sprays of calico shrapnel.
The entire middle section caved and we both dove for cover.
A huge chunk that was most of a thirty-foot version of the fourteen Stations of the Cross toppled inward. I sneaked up a peak and saw it crash down on my antique Ford, mint condition, museum quality. It crushed the roof, blew out the windows, and flattened the tires in a roar of destruction.
Smoke churned in the air and spare tinkles of leftover falling glass mixed with the faint calls of birds outside. I got up and approached the wall that was now no more than a vacancy with jagged edges. My shoes crunched in the glass, my gun dangled down toward the floor.
It was still there.
In the bottom left corner was the little treasure, originally hidden within the larger piece. I had spotted it a day after installation, I do not miss much. It was a tiny, nearly microscopic picture of a woman's head made with fragments. Below it and barely legible without a magnifying glass stood the letters, "Mama, R.I.P."
I brought up my gun and blasted that little piece of history into oblivion. I turned to my butler.
"Clean up the glass, get an exterminator, tell the security company it was a false alarm and make arrangements with a local contractor to temporarily patch the wall until the stained glass can be replaced. Now, you will excuse me. I have a phone call to make."
***
I was convinced his reaction would make me feel regret. The artist. The one who custom-made the stained glass wall piece by piece and spent the next half year of his life installing it.
When I told him of the senseless act there was dead silence.
"Why?" he said.
"I wanted to destroy a piece of your art. And I felt the need to obliterate the testament to your mother. How dare you include that within something I own. She will never rest the same."
"So, why call?" he said. "You want your money back or something?"
"No, I want you to fight for your mother's memory! I took it, and it can't be replaced."
He laughed.
"I'll buy her a park bench or plant her a tree, asshole."
He hung up. I stared at the phone, listened to the silence, then the dial tone.
Art meant nothing; it was merely a way to get paid. The authenticity of memorial was illusory; blind ritual, dumb obligation. The importance of the matriarchal matrix was a mirage and the mother was ultimately meaningless; she performed her function and was easily erased. This was going to be even harder than I had thought.
I told my butler to bring me a deer.
***
I watched.
He drove it onto the south grounds in a horse trailer, ignoring the car path and rolling straight onto the open lawn before the hedge gauntlet. Even through the expansive pantry window I was close enough to hear the animal bucking and kicking within its mud-stained steel prison. Locked in the dark. Frantic.
Don't fret, love. You'll be set free soon enough.
Bowlegged, my butler ambled out of the pickup and went around back to lift the drift pin that held shut the trailer doors.
They blew open.
Headstrong and frenzied, the deer galloped upon the smooth metal bed, slipped and banged down its proud white chest on the tailboard. It jerked up then and lunged out to the grass. Like a statue it froze there.
I raised my Nextel.
"Leave us," I said into it.
The transmission must have been loud on the unit hooked to my butler's belt, for it broke the spell cast over the deer. It bolted and my butler shook his head before driving off. He did not specifically understand and I did not need him to. Yet. All he had to know was that he was shielded if he had attained the animal illegally. Simple fact: through political contribution I supplied the police most of their radar devices, firearms, and computer equipment. It kept me well protected.
But there would be no protection for the animal-thing. The south lawn's forty acres were fenced in, it would not get far.
I palmed the leather grip of my Proline compound bow and ventured out into the sunshine. There were birds in the warm breeze, squirrels in the trees, beings of beauty, God's creatures.
Lower than you on the food chain. Insignificant in the vast scheme of things.
Were they? I thought I had formed an alliance with anything that lived or breathed. Or was that all inbred by the mass media, inserted, incubated, and sculpted over a lifetime in order to form a false system of values? Was I conditioned? Had a mental parasite with an exterior of high morals eclipsed my true being?
I was going to find out. Though my butler was required to provide me bi-weekly instruction on various styles of weaponry, I had always shot at targets. As far as I knew I was against killing for sport.
Really?
The only way to know for sure was to do it. To become involved in the act and gauge my responses. To hope the (power of God) execution brought on feelings of remorse.
Like a traumatized dog that pawed up to lick the boot of the one who kicked it, the deer had circled back to its original point of release. It stood about thirty feet away now with a sheen of nervous sweat blanketing its soft fur. Slowly, I reached and slipped an arrow from under the hood of my bow-mounted quiver.
It was an XX75 tipped with razorback 5, needle-sharp point amidst a cluster of five steel arrowheads all arranged in a circular pinwheel. Straight on, it looked a bit odd.