My Ivory Tower

I watch the life of ice, shaped by movement, knobbly and bulbous, like bark over the red Virginia dirt. Light catches just right and I notice the stillness. Underneath the glass skin, little tadpoles of water squirm their way through isolated channels, spermatic. Finding their gravities, dropping and racing and converging in sequitured paths. The dry air crosses my hands like the ebbing tide.

The glass is still and yet alive. I am alive and yet still. Withheld from the simple love of seeing something lovely and responding with my body rather than a garish voice, jaundiced teeth. I’m sitting at the edge of the wilderness, a year in the waiting. Waiting for a voice.

Or something.

On Facetime with my fiance, I start in a sullen drone about this or that situation at work or with my work or what I saw on the news when avoiding work, glancing from her piqued expression to the asymmetrical movie posters above and beyond me on the wall, periodically amending my aversiveness with an apology for my rant and all around “letting out some steam.”

She stares at me. She stares through me.

“Sounds like you’re angry.”

I spend dense, tornado-funnel time staring at, through, the dead trees that form the border between my brick quadplex and the obnoxious housing complex lining the adjacent street. I sit, my computer work before me, mulling longer than I ever have before. Some might say—as a mid-class white guy in my mid-twenties—this discomfort rises from my underdeveloped conscience, finally catching up to my head-knowledge about world suffering, violence, scions and aristocrats etc. Probably. But I sit, I mull, I work myself livid in church—epitomized in a mid-service bathroom break—and my fiancé talks me down.

In May, I lived with some of my friends in a house on a main route in town. Nonstop traffic. I would sit on our porch, watching as a bedless pick-up, a tasseled Harley (subwoofing BigXthaPlug), and a baby-blue Vespa jockeyed for lanes and flexed Virginia’s fast-and-loose DOT verdict on vehicle customization.

We were playing mini golf on the Steam Deck at nine at night when death passed over our doorstep, the sound of tons of steel rolling like a river stone down the street. Sheered metal and silence.

Huddled around the doorjamb, we find an F-150 across the lane, staggered on its remaining lame wheels, tailgate collapsed, engine fan in the gutter. Thirty feet down the road, a now-hatchless hatchback lies in the intersection, warm streetlight and cold headlights clashing in the dark and fresh dust, seconds after disaster.

Unembodied, a scream.

My buddies fly without a thought to check on the truck driver. Death’s ice swells my feet. Staring, I realize I’m staring. I throw on my treadless Crocs while breathing child-like prayers. God help them; help me.

I wade through our front lawn, red and blue lightning crafting a barricade as neighbors usher bruised bodies from the wreckage. Our grossly overgrown, budding grass tickles that bulging bone on my ankle. I shift from one foot to the other, pace the sidewalk as my friends jog over to the hatchback a world away. Too many people helping now.

Close calls litter the hide of the night’s hours: arrow shaft and scar tissue and a firefighter sweeping debris like French fries off a lunchroom floor. The shadow of death populated by gawking passerby, slinking out of their house to add carnage to their Snapchat Story. Vultures, I think. No one dead, but everyone around me a walking corpse.

Me: still-born in calamity.

I check the news and text my friends about the news and read punchy essays about the news and mull over the news like I have something generous and breathtaking to say about it and work myself livid about the news until my fiancé says:

“You’re angry.”

She looks at my hands, the spilled ink on the thumb, the sliced bit on my pointer from my clumsy knife work while slicing celery, the alligator skin on the knuckles.

“What happened here?”

I haven’t stopped moving for a year.

In one of his hilarious satires, Mark Twain drops a 19th-century American Capitalist into 6th-century England, who, predictably, turns a pious hermit who hadn’t stopped bowing for thirty years into a shirt-making machine¹.

In a system that profits off my anger, I feel deprived of a meaningful way forward. Perpetual motion can feel like death.

I care and hurt for/with those who hurt, hold hope to its contract, stab the bottom line with my bowed finger, pinning it to that carrion-cluttered street with substance, with words. With prayers. With words.

Am I wallowing in the carnage?

This morning, I read about the prophet Isaiah waltzing around ancient 8^th-century Israel, stark naked for three years at the whim of the Lord. And I can’t even love my neighbor.

1. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. (Penguin Classics, 1972), 205.