For Brad (1)

Inside of Brad is a place which endures long after the bombs have gone off and the world has ended, full of clean rain and vicious and unending dust.  I can never tell if the bombs are always going off, or if they did only once, or if they never have at all. 

And maybe there’s no difference, between the world having ended or being about to end, except that it would have to exist in a single present moment to accomplish both.  Meaning that inside Brad, it is the constant terror of the ended world; the moment of the flash hitting the kitchen windows, just before they melt into dull-tipped bullets of exploded glass, scorching the lace curtains which made my wedding dress and burning my shadow into the wall. 

While I’ve never once met anyone here before, Grady approaches from behind me, his alligator shoes making a glassy crunch over the sand on the floor in Denton.  He has prism glasses on, and he’s blowing bubbles from a pink plastic bottle of solution, through a blue plastic wand, the handle of which is an ornate medieval crown, pressed flat and flexible.  His suit is the dark red velvet of a body’s insides, and the white flash quality of the sky frozen in time is what makes his movements into gloss and shadow. 

“Have you made love in every world yet?” he asks me, as if it was something we had bet one another we would do. 

“I can’t,” I argue with him, my arms crossing.  “If I even tried, I’d be creating just as many where I never did.”

I can see his eyes roll even behind his glasses, a slight gesture that means he wasn’t trying to argue with me, but is secretly glad I want to anyway.  He blows a string of bubbles, pink and blue and green in the radiance inside Denton. 

“Mija, you don’t get it,” he says to me, trying to catch them again on his wand.  “Reality splinters into all possible variations of all possible things.”

“I know that,” I Interrupt him, and he puts his bubbles on the floor to light a brown cigarillo that is usually some brand I don’t recognize, but I can tell today by its tip, is certainly a Black & Mild from the liquor store in the bayou.

“Si, si,” he agrees.  “But the reason we have this reality is just for that - so all is possible.”

“Well,”I tell him, waiting for a mushroom cloud to bloom in the prism of his glasses, “Yipee, I guess.”

He sits on the broken fireplace hearth, the bricks dusting his velvet with gray chalk. 

“It’s possible so we can choose!” he grins at me, raising his arms like I should have known better.  “We change worlds to inhabit the choice in them.  I have come here today so we move into the world possible where I have come here today, to tell you all we do is founded on the basis of choice.  In a moment, you’re going to choose how you react, and move us to a whole new world.”

I balk him easily, and automatically. 

“That’s bullshit,” I tell him.  “Do you think I chose to be in hell all that time?”

He drags long on his cigarillo, and exhales, his black eyes thoughtful.

“There’s no Hell, Bebe,” he dares me.  “There’s just a series of choices you made, which perpetuate the perception of it’s existence for you.”

“Tell that to Matthew,” I challenge him, and he rises, his voice getting louder to exclaim.

“But I did!” he laughs.  “Matthew already knows all that, and told you so.  He told you plain enough to write it on your walls!  He said Hell is other people!”

“That’s not what he meant,” I sigh.

“That’s what he said,” Grady corrects me, his eyes twinkling with the mischief of the broker of the Gods, which are all us.  He lets the smoke curl around him in the light spilling in from the window.

“If you wanted to leave Hell, Evelin, you just had to choose another world, where the shit that gets pushed around there isn’t true anymore.  To put…” he considers.  “To put your many-seeing eye on a prize you really want, and go there.”

“Like that everyone here is basically good and not trying to fuck with me,” I remember, and he nods.  “But then what about all these terrible places?  What about seeing a world where Adam doesn’t exist or Brad is dead or you kill yourself?”

He shrugs, and crosses his ankles in his new shoes.  I wonder briefly for a moment why I’m not having this conversation with the philosopher of him, and why he’s stayed the consummate professional, but he answers that question for me.

“You might react to this moment with fear.  With hesitation.  With distrust.  That’s true.  You might even react with hate.  We go to those worlds, sometimes.  But… you love me.  You move toward love.  I’m the gate to anywhere in the world.  Which way is your love, Evelin?”

He holds his arms out to his sides, so I can appraise him, and I point to him.

“Over there,” I say, my voice quiet. 

“Then come get your love,” he says, his tone serious.  “Give me the world you’re in.  Tell me what it’s like there.”

I hold my face against the velvet lapel of his jacket, thinking about what he’s said. 

“I hate when you just drop in to explain shit to me,” I tell him, and he doesn’t answer me.  We sway in the heat slowly, like we’re being rocked in a light breeze, and he smells my hair. 

“I go to fear places a lot,” I admit to him, and he nods into my shoulder. 

“Oui.  But no world is so bad when you’ve walked this far into love, just to find me.”