Kevin McIlvoy
Grateful for his body's productiveness, Mr. Jordan Jabbok took three satisfying morning walks in order to piss a circle around his newly planted blue squill bulbs encircling last season's blue squill plants orbiting his weeping cherry tree sending its large but tender roots under a ring of curved red bricks red-golden now and fringed by high blue larkspur rising from within a circle of squill planted in other seasons, and smelling like strong rat poison when they are in bloom.
The long masterful piss on a daily basis was the expressive performance of the retired ballroom dance instructor.
"This is how you begin?" my restless sister asks. Adept at mocking biblical jargon, she says life permits two choices: "You can ask, 'Why is it so?' or you can say, 'It is so.'"
Certain tales answer the former question.
Certain tales, much smaller, embody the latter. This one is of that kind.
Mr. Jabbok's bladder was in peak condition from two years of battle with the crows enjoying their own dancing in his plot. If you asked, he explained—bragged, really—that his impressive piss-volume had grown with the help of maximum hydration, blood pressure medicine, beets in his morning shakes, bad dreams and long griefs needing discharging, and, of course, intense bladder-release focus.
He reminded you that he had not picked the fight. He was making a refuge for the struggling and the surpassing forms of beauty humans attempt to foster while on their knees in their imperfect gardens. He was making a refuge, which he must defend.
The crows, at first, took only his bulbs out, ripping them from their hiding places at the moment their first roots dug down to taste deeper, fertile darkness. Mr. Jabbok put the bitten ones back in, replaced the others like a man rewarding thieves by bringing them fresh candy in candy samplers.
In the next season, the crows, who could imagine blossoming enigmas far beyond God's imagining, bit off the tender green fingertips of his plants that the crows had located precisely in space and time. They repruned emerging shoots, so that everywhere in the garden were angry, suppurating pimples of dispossession. Any plant that releafed in response to pruning so enraged the crows that they slowly tugged the plant out whole as a worm and juiced the thing—root-tip, root-ball and green hat—in their bills, and guzzled down, and guffawed. They spit the garden's promises in oozy arcs under which they pirouetted on flexed talon tips.
"They have a story that overwhelms Mr. J's story," my sister says who always has an opinion about what a storyteller like me should understand. I call her my demented mentor. She calls me "Mr. Lit."
I keep the peace with her. I ask, "Why is it so?"
My sister never answers or even begins to answer something she believes she has answered. She should move out. I should tell her she is ready to stop living with me when she starts her new job. She has left before—many times. She should leave again. She eternally starts a new job, distinguishes herself as the hardest working and best-loved employee, loses the job, starts another. Seeing this pattern from the outside, you would think you are seeing the whole pattern.
Mr. Jabbok had heard that bears and deer and squirrels and possums and rabbits and even snakes could not tolerate human urine. It turns out, so said wise-sounding amateur naturalists, that the urine humans make is a godlike substance that is the deliquescence of poisons the human body remits in undiluted streams. It hisses and steams and voluptuously glistens and sings as the spellbinding rank scent of healthy human approaches you. If that acid wand touches you, the merest splash leaves a curse-mark from which you will never be released.
The crows were, at first, convinced.
The wisest among them explained that Hell warns, Here demons swim, when comes the sound of unzipping. The crows wept in pathetic shrieks at Mr. Jabbok's piss giving them instruction in the human Frame, the Basic, and the Progression over the garden's Lines of Dance.
Mr. Jabbok thought there was no bird more beautiful than the crow when black rage blackened it, when indignation deepened the bird's velvety blue hue. He could stand in his pissy garden and plant seeds and bulbs and seedlings, and whistle-sing, "PrettybirdprettyBIRDpretty!" and see with his own eyes how their busy, well-groomed heads lolled from agitated boredom.
He understood that the god of Eden had given the crows a thirty-million-year head start in understanding how to sow retribution. He was unsurprised when they stole his paper from his porch and confettied the news over his place of retreat from the world. He was unsurprised when they divebombed the outermost parts of his garden with the shitbags from their nests, defining in no time at all a slick dark corona difficult for a pisser to cross.
They captured other smaller birds and bled them in bright sprays over the battlefield. They tucked one carcass inside another to show him their understanding of repulsive-resplendent design.
They changed the codes of call and the codes of song to make themselves untranslatable to him. They revised the codicils in their contract with the resident hawk, and, as a result, torn-apart, half-alive rabbits and mice crawled over the garden carnage.
The hawk threw down also the head and the feet of a young crow: a sacrifice he apparently required in the negotiations. He crashed the headless torso onto the porch in place of Mr. Jabbok's news.
The crows brought tools from their hiding places: shards of glass that would cut Mr. Jabbok's feet, shiny square shaving blades that would shiv his face, hooks they carved, fins they contrived into serrated knives. They complicated perfectly his stuck-in-the-craw bad situation by quieting absolutely every songbird and singing bug in the woods.
Mr. Jabbok, who understood nature's unalterable cyclic forces better than most, knew the jury perched all around him would not adjourn. He had only turned to the piss cure when he could think of nothing else, he explained again to us, that is, to his loyal troops standing or squatting as we must to join him in his cause.
I signed on because—why not: the whole routine of my too-long life in the year-long days is after-breakfast writing and coffee-drinking and pissing and all-day writing with more black coffee at hand, and after-dinner writing, and writing with beer assistance but more or less writing piss before quitting late and leaving my pages every night with no sense of their use.
My sister, who did not join us, who says it is best that she should be unnamed in this tale, agrees with me that I was a perfect fit for the crusade, like a chain smoker wearing a suit of smoke.
My sister has opinions. "Quit philosophizing." "Quit decorating." "Quit reading Poe!" she demands, by which she means I should read her Poe-lite hero, Stephen King.
Mr. Jabbok had seemed nonplussed when I first walked the hundred yards out of our woods and waved to him, and, without further greeting, entrained myself to his singular task. The human duty of guarding a green being has nothing to do with who asks, who answers.
It is so.
Is it so?
We do not live unless we are planted, do not give to the earth until we are given.
Aren't you writing a story everyone reads when you respond to the inescapable pressure and unzip and spray as we do: in a design that contention and communion have defined. Aren't you? The weeping cherry tree casting petals, the squill and the larkspur and cosmos, the prolific black-eyed Susans, even the butterflies and bees and wasps and ants and the tree frogs in the hardwoods surrounding me and the old pisser and our troops—all smell like piss and crow shit.
The crows smell like bulb spoilation and human urine. If you listen closely, you hear them calling out the same thing as the old pisser when they fly down, dig, eat, leave, return.
Amen is what they're saying.
I joined the dance there in that one place calling to me because my writing life had made me a devastated and undeterred gardener-gladiator. I stood under the storm in a state of wonder.
I witnessed in Mr. Jabbok's militarized garden the yellow rain and yellow snow the shade of that marvelous Penn tennis ball color called ITF Yellow. I understood the color.
Sixty-nine years ago, when I was teaching my sister to walk—I was the ten-year-old designated babysitter—she somehow associated holding a tennis ball with walking. If I gave her the ball, she would stand, start walking, holding it slightly before her, gazing self-hypnotically at that yellow sphere marked with the pale white moebius stripe. She would throw it down—stop walking—make me fetch—walk.
For an inappropriately long time she would not walk for anyone without her companion whom we named "ITF" of course.
Her walking with her magic friend: those days gave me such laughing-out-loud joy. At all points when I remember that period in her life and ours, greater joy arrives, and it has broken open more room in me for welcoming the magic hour and the magic object held forth as a projection of holy possibility in a world that has lost all sense of the sublime.
I was not at all surprised to find myself—a piss-poor breadwinner, a piss-rich example of a grown human—a warrior in a piss war.
As a writer I've recognized that more gold appears in sunsets now. Last pulses of light branch and bear red-gold leaves that tremble as they fall. Over nearby cities the fog that doesn't quickly lift spreads dirty-lightbulb gold dust over parked cars, over dog walkers and their dogs, children and their school backpacks.
I've prayed on the kneelers I've made out of sentence-flotsam I ripped from poorly constructed sentence-boats rowed by gods alone with their gods. All christs of all kinds and religions, I've learned, are piss-christs. The nimbus of language they swim in lifts them toward a heaven smelling like all things tortured, crucified, buried, resurrected glorious. I've learned that stories should end by adding something that will result in a sense of honest fullness. I've learned that stories should end by subtracting something that will result in a sense of honest emptiness. I've lost the gist of how stories should begin.
I believe I will eventually write a story with my sister as the central figure. She reads my few published works, knows them well, likes to remind me that she reads more books and bigger books by far than I, likes telling me her ideas for what needs to be written that no one seems to write.
Her proposed narratives consistently include her own story of winning self-understanding. She has convinced me—during this, her fifth post-AA period—that if your entire adult life is claimed by addiction, addiction looks to everyone you know (mostly addicts—are you convinced you are not one?) like the story of your life. Every day of her failing efforts against her addiction, she insists, has given her more insight into her weaknesses and strengths, her last and first assumptions. I think that is true. I'm not sure, but I think it is so.
There is something weirdly right, she says, about the fact that she will never kick and stay kicked. That "success story" would, after all, mean losing her way. And there is something right in the fact that no one but her can recognize her real story. And there is something wrong in the fact that she could deliver Mr. Lit her story, and I could want to write about anything else ever.
I have tried so hard to not write her story, to not let it overwhelm the other stories I have in mind or have underway. Now that she has become permanently resident in my life and now that I'm old enough I can die and can be certain that my meager offerings as a writer die with me, I should feel free to write her story, shouldn't I?
It is so.
But. Dear Sister.
Dear Sister, is it so?
Do you see that holding your story before me leads me nowhere? Do you see that holding your story before me is the only way I can gaze into the world and stagger crazily around in the failing gardens?
Mr. Jabbok's story ended as you would expect. New human friends enriched his life to the end. He lost the final battles in his war with the crows, and he lost the war, and what remained when he died were his neighbors, his loyal piss-companions who saw to it that his ashes were spread as he wished, where he wished.
"Make a truce," were his final benevolent words. He had spoken from deep in his bed, and was hard to understand.
Perhaps he had said, "Take a piss."
I have told my sister about the brief evening wake ceremony in Mr. Jabbok's wrecked, quiet garden. I have reassured her we will both be fine if she stays longer, though I know she has already taken that for granted.
I have described for her how shapes lumbered, shivered, swayed out of the ground and came through the woods and toward us during the ceremony—opalescing fog-devils that the wind spun out of the groundcover spume and the creeping air.
"That's how you end a story?" she asked, as she always asks.