Preponderance of the small

not really edited--no one's ever read this

file:///Volumes/NO%20NAME/The%Preponderance of the Small

Far off in the dark hills thunder echoed behind his entrance.   Already seated at the bar, comfortably warm and alone, her stare was an icicle reflecting off the long wall of mirrors behind the bar.  His favorite drink, napkin centered, awaited in front of the empty stool beside her. Trying to physically simulate caution and tact,  he sat down quietly beside her. He already suspected something was seriously wrong by her phone call--that she desperately needed to talk; needed someone just to listen.

He kissed her wisely on the close cheek.  Chasing off his falling coat, he arranged it gently on the stool beside her before sitting down.  Their eyes met in a snow flurry.  Ushered in behind a deep sigh, she began speaking in a rush.  Words slipped into a pained whispered landslide of rocks, dust, pebbles and ice shaking free all at once from her imperiled armor of grief.

She first scolded herself with self-mocking nervous laughter about the entwining problems with her daughter and her estranged husband, and their parochial situation together.  She tired convincing herself of their remote insignificance.  Her gaze drifted and scoured the empty room searching for relief in some inanimate object of distraction.  He steadied himself with a sip upon the frozen glass and studied her profile.  Taut lips of granite were chiseled through by the growing tone of anguish hidden in her voice.

After a long pause followed by a deep sigh, she looked dismally into her drink, and then directly into his eyes:  "Actually, you know; I couldn't believe how professional and easy it all was....."

After an awkward longer silence, she exhaled to herself;  'Too easy!"  She froze him with another accusatory glare.  

"Too easy...."  Head down again and running out of air, her sightalking breathwalk cathartic escape of air slackened into a far-off, lilting, almost musical voice.....

"There was a whole group of us all starting out as one.....all of us in the same room.  All of us nervous, but friendly.  All grouped together with the same intent; each of us isolated and alone in our own private worlds of anguish and dread.  No talking; no real heroic moment of truth or strength either. Only an inner clinging to hold oneself together for just a little while longer.  A community feeling, that we were all in it together, each of us knowing firmly inside what we wanted.  A sort of quiet, failed sisterhood, in some weird,  inverse way…."

As her voice trailed off, he looked down at his cocktail glass, swirled its contents, hoping momentarily for a happier story.  Then in one head tilt, he drained the opaque liquid.  Slowly leveling his head again, he caught her gaze and held it, which seemed to strengthen her as she went on.

"But before any of us had any chance to get acquainted, they began conducting a mini-counseling education type presentation, explaining some options to being there. That was the last chance to actually change your mind and get up and leave......And believe me, I thought about it.  I almost left!"

He returned a wan smile with as much encouragement as he could.  She sibilated a staccato tension breaking attempt at a light giggle before continuing on in a deeper, monotone.  And it was as much her own voice, mechanical, drained of all emotion that calmly insulated her, while she carried on with her cold, sing-song story. 

“But no one actually left, you know?  We all stayed.  Sisters; steered together to the slaughter.”  

“Thank God I was first!   Less time to think.  I snapped like an electric robot when they called my last name."

"I already felt a little dizzy from lack of breakfast, when a lady with a clipboard and a friendly sort of smile escorted me to the back room. Then things began to happen rapidly.  It was amazing.  I really didn't know what hit me from that point on.  First, these two good-looking guys in doctor-like shirts both seemed to take hold of me at the same time. It was incredible how polished and suave they were."

"They soothed me over with words--words like I still had some moments of life left.  One of them asked me if I still wanted to go through with it--like a friend.  At the same moment, the other guy was all business--had my arm pinned down in a flash, with a needle  in my vein.  Drugs were already pouring into me while the 'good cop' was telling me slowly how I could still change my mind if I wanted to. "

"I mean it was crazy!  This one guy was leaning me back and fiddling with the drug line in my arm, while the other guy was already down there between my legs, spreading my thighs like he was searching for some hidden fruit in a berry bush or something....pushing and pulling....like it wasn't even part of me down there...."

Although not taking his eyes off her as she spoke, he sat there suspended in a daze within his own vision.  While she stopped momentarily to take a long sip of her drink,  he could clearly see-feel the  erotic memory of her beautiful, white marble thighs.  Just imagining them being hastily yanked , spread open like torpid chicken meat, kneaded and pushed apart as a throw-away wrapper hiding some sweet, seeped into a latent anger within him.  He felt a personal humiliation, a collaborative scar of her body invasion.

He downed the last bit of his margarita while nodding a quick glance toward the bartender, as he was duplicated off in the hazy mirrors.  Her malachite eyes swirled and gyrated as if on gimbals, flashing out the light of the night in angular diamonds. The pale drone of her voice meandered on in direct conflict with his desire just to continue to measure her beauty. 

"And as my consciousness slowly dripped down that tube and out of me, fully anesthetized, I remember, in fastidious detail, this one doctor bringing over and monkeying with this tiny metal suction machine on a wheely-type cart.  An octopus of clear plastic tubing; at one end an ardvarkian elongated tip; at that point it seemed more alive and conscious in a threatening sort of way than I was.  The scoop of rubber gloves across my arms and legs was like the nurse’s voice counting out at the bottom of a river.   My heart pounding to her numbers was really the last thing I actually fully remember…..”

Her voice trailing off imitated her body in becoming smaller, huddling back into a disharmony, as she stared off into her distant memory.  He was the one suddenly starring about the room for some vague sign of support or distraction.  The bartender brought it over in a chilled pitcher before she continued.

“And then it was strange, other than actually becoming ‘un-pregnant’, in a drug-induced dream-like daze, I seemed to see, or somehow just ‘know’ everything that was going on all around me.  For example, I could distinctly hear this gurgling slurp of a sound at my knees.  I swear, I can still remember an awful stench of fresh blood somehow even through the oxygen mask.  A rape of request�"plastic, cotton, and metal utensils was over in a second. Then people were quick and business like, removing gloves and cleaning up.”

“But I remember seeing too.  I remember seeing the glare of white sheets of linen across my half spread knees disappear as sleeping legs were removed from leg stirrups.  And before being placed supine on a stretcher, I clearly saw it.  Covering me back over with a red and white sheet from neck to calf, they placed it down in a corner.  Feeling vacuumed, as they lay my head back, I could see a small, transparent glass jar of me filled with a violet pulp resembling chicken innards…..a gooey, bloodied jelly, probably still tepid, but lifeless at the bottom of the jar…..”

The bartender came over, and without a word, tipped the pitcher, and filled both glasses. 

Jim reached for his wallet, paid, and left a large tip, suddenly feeling less thirsty, and knowing this would be their last order.  Jim was known for doing many good, kind, and understanding things, in addition to always making sure to leave a substantial tip for anyone working a table.  He was always quick to help a neighbor in distress, lend a helping hand or ear to anyone alone, confused, or in distress.  He donated to many good causes, and was always sympathetic to the underdog.  But as she continued with her tale, he sat there, against his own will, somehow unmoved, stale and lifeless; as if her words, after penetrating his ears, fell like dead leaves in a cold, empty wind.

He really liked and respected this woman.  Knowing her now for almost a year, she was one of his best friends.  But as she went on with her painful story, he couldn’t quit grasp the feeling from her lips.  He couldn’t feel what it must be like to have something, a fetus, a baby person in one’s innards; what it also must be like to suddenly have to expel it.  He knew it wasn’t right.  As she continued, he found himself reflecting instead on all the women he had known, and remembered so many failures and mistakes.

“Then, everyone in a fog all around me seemed in a hurry, newly concerned and busy.  Unhooking me, I was already aware of another woman being brought in even as they wheeled me out.  I remember crashing through a 

number of double doors swinging open at my feet; being wheeled wildly, like those monster-popping rides in the dark at the arcade, throughout the hospital.”

“Laid back, strapped in and helpless, I felt like I was tied to the back of a roller coaster.  I think it was some weird concoction of heavy sedatives welded to some super amphetamines; a real speed ball Mickey,  cause it was already at the point that I knew I was actually coming to.”

“Doors continued to clang open above my upturned toes, light blinked, and people hurried while speaking very slowly.  Surely then coming to, but in a delirium, inside a placid pink waiting room, I lay back still.  My cousin was there suddenly holding my hand and cheerfully waking me up.  She really helped me through at that point.  For a moment at least;  until we made it out to the car.”

“Even though, can you believe it?, we thoroughly discussed it beforehand and all, and she assured me she knew how to drive my standard transmission car………..she couldn’t.  As I lay there in the back seat, almost immediately warmly unconscious again, I was jolted awake lurching into the hospital’s ice plant garden.  It was then that I realized that she never had, and had no idea of how to drive a stick shift automobile!”

“Finally,” another little repressed, self-conscious giggle broke through her icicle eyes before she resumed.  “There I am, womb-opened and drugged up to the pharmacies top shelf, and I’ve got to shove Julia over and drive home myself!  Trying to manipulate those 40 some twisting miles back home was like riding a slippery loose banshee across unborn generations of split blood.  It felt like centuries; everything was pink and red and exploding stars.”

“And then!,  by the time we got home, I guess I was hanging on so hard with every breath of strength I had inside me, that when I tried to pull the car up to the sidewalk in front of my house finally, I just fell out in front of the apartment.  I just spread-eagled onto the curb!”

“And of course, all the neighbors were out in front, and seeing me on the sidewalk, with this blood spattered midsection, they were aghast.  Betty started yelling for someone to call 911, while they all tried to help me into my apartment.  It was a nightmare!”

A long, heavy silence fell between them; so deep, it seemed to draw the rest of the bar into it.  Daring to bridge the gulf, he tried fathoming her eyes. She looked away and bit a nail.  He suddenly felt the immenseness of time and being, of final death and nonbeing all wrapped up together closing in from the prison wall of mirrors all around them.  She sat vacant and spent too, as if telling her tale had drained her as much as the ordeal itself.  The weight of grim premeditation filled their silence with an awkward remorse.  

He tried to say something friendly or consoling, but couldn’t get the sound out of his throat.  She pushed her half-filled glass disgustedly to the further end of the bar.  Then piercing a stare almost through him, she choked up:

“And it was just that I loved you so much, Jim, that, well; ….I think I really wanted that child after all…..”

Her voice beginning to crack, looking down again with a flashing veneer of wet eyes:

“….But you seemed so mixed up and confused about us from the very beginning, that, that I just had to make the final decision on my own.  I don’t know; I didn’t even want to burden you with any of it…..taking me there….worrying about my health, and feeling guilty the whole time…..the whole bummer.  So I didn’t call you for days, so you wouldn’t know.  I just took care of it by myself, and hoped you’d understand.  Hoped at least, that way you wouldn’t get as depressed about it all as I am.”

Head bowed and quiet, she seemed finally more at peace.  Wrapped and embraced in the soft down of her hoody woolen Sheppard’s sweater, she appeared so gentle, soft, beautiful, and vulnerable.  How could anyone even consider refusing the miracle of life with one such as her?

And then she declared, almost as a postage stamp applied in haste at the end to get the message delivered, shaking her head;

“But I, I really couldn’t consider it either.  The timing was all wrong.  So many things still seem to be complicating my life as it already is…..”

He just sat there when she had finished, dumbstruck, glazed over.  No more sips of booze diluted the message.  Cemented over, he was a frozen function supported in lifeless, stagnant time.  He felt isolated, cold, and floating; like the smooth obsidian lagoon surrounding the twinkling night lights outside the saloon’s back window.   He was left with only the dread of himself as a dead mass in space.  He could barely look at her.  The innate power of woman overwhelmed, filling in the vacuum left from impossibly conflicted emotions.  

What shamed him the most though was his total lack of real empathetic feeling.  A profound numbness of the damned crushed any feelings of sadness, relief, grief or pain.  He couldn’t conjure any sensation of sympathy, neither for her, nor within himself.  Instead, his mind groped somewhere with symbols of right and wrong, sin and repentance.  He felt only as if something had happened to him, rather than through, or even because e of him.  He knew he had played a major part in a decision for death, and then wasn’t even there to help her through it.  Their lives, initially transecting like magnets were repelled now by their own creation. 

They….she, had just made a decision.  And that’s all it had come to�"a “decision”.  All, far too easy, like she said.  Just like so many images in the disposable culture, even the taking or bequeathing of a nescient life could be reduced to just another dispassionate decision by the consumer.  And yet, he also knew that by just his gender, he inherited an incipient illicit gratitude that it ultimately hadn’t been his choice to make.

Little more was said by either of them.  They took up their jackets from the bar stools and left the bar amidst a miraculous infinite distance between them in silence.  Walking outside, the rain and thunder had drained down a steep funnel from the mountains and washed faces agleam with great power and confusion.  Far off in the distant heavens, lightning flashes forged life anew in fire, shadows and chaos.