The Portentous Colors of God

The lines of the dark beach made parallels and perpendiculars; the shoreline, the small ridge the water reached at high tide, and the dikes that jutted out into the shimmering haze, keeping the sand from shifting as the tide moved up or down the coast. The ocean was a wasteland of ingenuous black with the occasional white crest and the seabirds floated silently on its surface near the dikes. Dark clouds masked the sprightly stars, shining like muses, forgotten like soldiers who never got to be heroes, giving the beach a lonely security, a feeling not of hope but of comfortable anesthetic. Bridging the collision of the sand and the water lay a body, nicely dressed, face down, head turned slightly sideways, lifeless and motionless, one arm outstretched, the back of the head black and oozing a combination of blood, brain matter and seawater. 

There was movement on the beach and a figure emerged from the dark underpinnings of an isolated pier. It was a girl. She was shivering, but not from the cold. She walked along the straight dark shadows of tar and oil in the sand that had been pushed there by incoming tides, hugging herself since no one else would. Her teeth chattered, slightly and involuntarily, and her fried, imprecisely cut hair flurried about her face when the salty breezes would arpeggio. She was shrouded in a dark overcoat with her father’s silvery .44 magnum in one of the interior pockets. A single tear ran from her left eye, darkening in color as it picked up messy eyeliner and mascara left over from days before, down her cheek, defiantly clung to her chin as if death were not necessarily imminent, and finally spattered on the upturned collar. She walked silently, accepting, her teeth no longer chattering, tears no longer running; they only waited.

She trudged through the stiff shoreline sand, lost in fitful solitude, not noticing the body until she had almost stumbled over it. She took one step backward, stopped and stared down at the dark mass of flesh and seaweed, studying it for signs of life. When she saw none, she knelt down and touched the skin of the neck. It was then, as she knelt by the corpse, that she saw the hole in the back of its head. She did not scream, she did not gasp, she did not run away. She stared, interested, and moved around the body to sit on the sand next to the blood and black ooze seeping with each exsanguinating draw of the lifeless ocean. The water washed over her feet and legs but she did not move. She began to stroke what was left of the man’s hair.

“What does it feel like to die?” she laughed, small and hopeless, thinking aloud.

The bullet only stings for a few seconds and then nothing.

The girl stared hard at the corpse and then looked around her, stumbling to her feet, backwards, away from the water. But only a few steps. There was no one else. The waves washed against the dikes, a few seabirds fluttered their wings and were silent. She looked at the body.

“You can talk?” Doubtfully.

Of course I can talk.

The corpse was silent and still. She cautiously walked towards it again, this time sitting even closer, as if for warmth. The water was bleeding up her coat, making her cold.

What’s a nice girl like you doing with a gun in her pocket?

This time she was not startled. “Sometimes I think about using it, I guess.” She spoke slowly, testing. “And there’s something about this beach.” Her eyes turned to the pier and then the trees and finally the black loveless ocean. All was correct.

What is it?

Her eyes moved across his fine dark, fitted suit—a banker, or a salesman, maybe a theologian or a liar. “What is what?”

What kind of gun is it. What make. Model. Load capacity. These things matter.

She reached slowly into her pocket. “You’re not a cop are you?” She stared at the oozing hole in his head and then she laughed nervously, moving her foot slightly, out of the blood and ooze. She grasped the handle of the gun and pulled it free of its damp sheath. She gazed at it. It was beautiful. It looked alive. The barrel was a smooth chrome, silvery sparkling blue in the scattered moonlight. The grip was a candy cane pinstriped oak with successively darker shades of brown toward the end until the last stripe, which was black. On the barrel was engraved the name “Warren.”

It’s a Ruger. Nice shape too. Five-inch barrel, Super Blackhawk. That could hold a 270 grain, 1500. Nice piece. They didn’t make that kind of detail though. If I didn’t know better I’d say it looked homemade.

“Are you a collector or something?”

Just an enthusiast. You always carry it with you?

“No,” she lied.

Down to the beach to kill an Arab, huh? That’s a dangerous plaything. You should be careful with it. Besides, I haven’t seen any Arabs.

“Warren was my father,” she said slowly, fingering the trigger. “He left on my fifteenth birthday. When I woke up this was wrapped in a green ribbon next to my hand. There was a letter too. It was the only one he didn’t censor with thick black lines. He always wrote like that. He always, always had something to say. Sometimes he wrote me letters before he left, he would leave them on my bed while I was asleep. But they were all censored, more black lines than words.”

Why did he write like that?

“He said that the letters were from my mother, in heaven. She died in childbirth.”

Was it you?

Glancing up at him through messy dark hair but keeping her head down, “Yeah. She died when I was born. He said the letters were from her. He said that he censored out all the really bad things she wrote about me so that I would always be happy and not know the really bad things. He always called me worthless. He said I killed her.”

She looked down at the gun. Her finger gently caressed the length of the barrel, pulled back the hammer.

With a gun like that you’ll end up worse than me. Bigger hole.

She carefully, inaudibly, eased the hammer back into its place and held the gun in her left hand, letting it fall onto her lap. With her right hand, she idly resumed stroking the man’s hair, slowly and methodically taking a few strands between two fingers and, pinching at the base, pulled them up the short but entire length, wringing the blood and salty residue out and rubbing it into the sand by her side.

“What is there, you know, after you die?”

What do you think?

A small crab made its way from the water up to the oozing hole by her leg and began to pick at it, mouthparts and feeding claws moving mechanically. She watched in silence for a moment, somewhat amused, and then flicked it away, back into the water.

“I don’t know. I guess there could be a heaven or something. I always wanted to believe that. I dreamed once that I went to the fortuneteller on the corner of Elysian and Bay Drive, you know the one, and asked her if she could contact my mother. She said it was in the stars and then she took my hand and then we were in this place I had never seen before. Everywhere I looked there was green grass, and rolling hills, and stands of the most beautiful trees. And people. There were thousands of people; I did not recognize any of them, but they all seemed to know me. A wide river ran by my side. It was so nice. And I saw my mother there. She hugged me and held me and she told me all about my life, how it would be.” She paused, a faint, accepting smile illuminating her lips. “How it would end.” She laughed quietly to herself, warm air from her nostrils reacting with the colder air outside, causing puffs of white frost to appear, giving her away. “I guess I was always supposed to believe there was something better. Something to make death sweet, ice cream after the tonsillectomy.”

There’s nothing.

She looked at the moon, radiating white hope that filtered through the dark clouds. It almost seemed to pulsate. She glowered at him through her dark hair. Her shoulders tightened. “How could that be?” She said slowly and very flatly.

Life’s not a luxury. It’s all there is. There’s nothing else.

She looked down again, relaxing her shoulders, setting the gun on the sand next to her so it pointed out at the endless ocean. She moved and leaned over him to look at his face, her coat resting in his blood. The eyes were open and staring and so was the mouth, slightly. It was surprisingly soft when she touched it. It felt like the ruins of Carthage. She had thought the skin would be leathery. She had read that. It must not have been that long. Maybe the salty air was preserving him. The skin of his forehead was pulled tight, anxious; there were no wrinkles. A single pen-sized hole, like the entrance to an abandoned mine, entered just above his left eyebrow. His eyes were a piercing grey, like her father’s. They stared into hers and she could tell he was serious.

Are you afraid of dying?

“No,” she said, looking deep into his dead grey eyes, seeing flashes of green and blue and then a whitewash of black death, a pretty girl with a silver gun on a lonely, deserted beach.

Then why are you trembling?

“I’m not.” She closed her eyes for a moment and swallowed hard. “I’ll stop.”

You are afraid to die. You’re afraid that if there is a heaven, you’ll never see it; if there is a hell, it’s just more of the same; and if death is nothing, then there’s a glimmer of hope in you that makes you afraid of the change.

She pulled away from him, aiming her eyes at the ocean, moist and hollow. Everything was asleep. There was a rainstorm up high in the clouds, and she could see the bottom reaches smearing down across the grey canvas, releasing, motionless but alive. The moon, behind it, made a bright ring around the dark thunderhead. The wind was blowing again, pushing grey sand into the air near the ground, ruffling the man’s hair and coat. But she was not looking at the wind. Lightning scarred the face of the cloud, striking below the storm, illuminating the pier as if it were on fire; the thunder that followed seemed to shake the ground a little. But she was not looking at the storm. And then there was a gentle breeze that brushed her hair reassuringly across her face and she pulled her coat up more tightly around her shoulders.

What are you doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be asleep?

The color drained from her face as she looked at him. Her eyes probed the gaping black spongy hole for some further buried response. 

 She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, slightly worn, off-white envelope tied with a green ribbon. She untied the ribbon carefully and opened the envelope. In it was a piece of folded blue-lined paper, still vibrantly white, but somewhat tattered about the edges. On it was written:

Charlotte,

I want you to have this. Consider it your inheritance. I know I left without ever saying goodbye; God didn’t give me the chance. I’m sorry I wasn’t around to give you the advice a mother should give, to hold you all those times that you cried, to explain how and why things happen, to teach you the things you would need to know to get this far. But I’m so proud of you for making it without me.

But Charlotte, life only gets harder. You shouldn’t trust anyone. They come and go, all of them. Bad things happen to good people at least as often as to the bad. There’s no sense in life. It’s random in its misfortunes. People will use you. It’s inevitable. Pain is human nature, and as long as there are people, there will be pain. There is no hell, Charlotte, that’s worse than the one you’re in right now. People are born first to suffer, and then to die.

But there is hope. There is always hope. You can see me whenever you want to,
Charlotte. You can escape this life you were never meant to have to live. You can transcend the pain, the people, the using and the used, you can be perfect and you can see me again. I will tell you all of the things I wish I had the chance to before, I will hold you in your tears; I will be the mother you always longed to have. It’s easy, Charlotte. It’s the only way to escape. We’ll have such times together, Charlotte. Such times.

M.

He had signed it ‘M’. With a period. A deathlike absolute stop. Her moist and hollow eyes traced every letter, wringing each word through each of its empty meanings, like someone who has read them thousands of times before. Between the neatly choreographed ranks of words were the thin blue lines of implication, of menacing weakness, thick and bright, the molecular breakdown of the fibers never broken no matter how sullied or bruised, thicker now, almost worn from overuse.

“I don’t know what to believe.” Tears spattered the scrawled letter and she dropped it. She lifted the gun from the sand by her side with a suddenness that surprised her. She raised it to her head, scraping the barrel up her check, across her eye, and stopped it just above her left eyebrow.

Is this how she told you it would end? Is this how it’s supposed to be?

The hole in his head seemed to smile at her. She flinched, and then shuddered. Her thumb, very steadily, rose from the grip and pulled back the hammer. The sound it made—like fatal car collisions, detonators in the boiler room (the most obvious place) and then, more slowly, like crumbling buildings, flaming pyres leaving nothing but a fine, cremated dust—reverberated up and down the beach. The intelligible sound of significance. Her eyes glassed over.

Do it then. Blow a hole in your goddamned schizoid head. Watch the back of it explode, brains gushing out like bodies, like cattle and picket fences in a flash flood, leaving a hole the size of eternity, the size of a softball.

Her eyes slowly moved down to the back of the man’s head which was no longer smiling, still mingling blood and brain matter with the lazily moving tide water, pushing, then pulling, then pushing again, and then pulling, taking it away and then carnally bringing it back. Her shoulders slumped forward and she stood up. She slid the barrel resentfully away from her brow, down her check, and into her mouth. She pushed it as far as she could take it and then she pushed farther. Her body convulsed as she gagged on the chrome barrel. Her eyes welled with tears and she closed them robotically, her lips sealed around inevitability. She was still gagging, and trembling. She opened her eyes halfway and looked down, into the bleeding hole, her retinas moving, daring, hoping, cautiously studying the boundaries of eternity, playing out possibilities, and then probabilities, matrices of sideways eights with drooling eyes that stared wistfully back into hers.

You killed your mother. You made me watch her die. She was screaming and the doctors put an oxygen mask on her panicked face, and there was blood, so much blood, and the encephalogram looked like the Apennines. She screamed through the hissing oxygen and she sounded so far away, so far away from me. And then came you, pulling out of her like a crimson sword, bloodied and satisfied. An eye for an eye,
Charlotte.  Why are you waiting, Charlotte? Why are you waiting? You’re fucking worthless.

Her eyes slid open and they were red, veins expanding and contracting, pupils dilating involuntarily. She callously wrenched the barrel out of her mouth, the sighting incline on the end causing a small tear in her upper lip. Her hand shook and so did the gun, still dripping blood and saliva and desperation. She pointed it at the corpse’s back where she knew the heart to be and pulled the trigger repeatedly—the firing mechanism pushing the bullet into place, a spark causing a silent explosion, and the missile-like copper careening the five inch length of the barrel at fifteen hundred feet per second and finding its mark with a dull inaudible thud—pulling back the hammer each time with her thumb, and each time the sound was louder and more significant than the first—until after the gun had stopped recoiling. A new pool of blood spread slowly outward from under the torso. Cause and effect; pure science.

“What do you say to that, Warren!” she sobbed. “What do you fucking say to that!”

The corpse was silent and still.

A rolling fog had begun to close on the beach, its whispering fingers snaking out from between the trees that stood between the sand and the highway, beckoning. She walked unsteadily to the pier and stepped onto its wooden frame. Lightning from the out-sea storm illuminated the sky, playing orange and white, death and hope, on the water and the pillars like fire all around her. The gun limply hung in her hand as she moved to the end of the pier. She stared at the eternal black of the ocean, confounding it with her unwavering eyes, feeling it stare back at her, seething, waiting. Her tears fell to the frail plywood frame of mortality on which she stood and mixed with the blood that still pulsed from her lip. She hurled the empty gun, now a dead weight, into the calm, quiet water. It made an insignificant splash. A seabird rose and resettled. The night was still. The moon, which had been half-obscured by the dark storm, seemed suddenly bright.

                                                              * * *

Just before dawn, the winds had changed, the tide had turned, and the fog and clouds had disappeared. The sun made its predictable appearance, lighting the way of the world with a calm grey morning. The seabirds were hunting the fish, which were, naturally, feeding on smaller fish. The dikes were lonely outposts in the grey expanse of the cold air. The water was a blue calm, waves gently lapping against the shore. The lonely beach was empty, save for a body lying at the collision of the water and the sand, half in, half out, face down, one arm extended, with a softball-sized hole in the back of its head, no longer oozing, the skin leathery, with six scattered pen-sized holes in its back. A silvery chrome-barreled .44 magnum had been washed up on the beach during the night, coming to rest inches away from the outstretched hand, wrapped in healthy green seaweed, almost like ribbon.