The Divine Terrier (part 2)

I have peered through a neighborhood demolition in that Wall of Fear called to your attention as Manifest Arrogance.


I rounded the corner beside the City park, worried about muggers and rapists, at my absolute height of alertness. It was after dark and I was alone, armed only with a key chain fanned through my fist like some oriental array of blades sticking out between my fingers. (I'd started carrying them that way after watching community service TV, years ago. I guess I thought I'd ram them into somebody's eyes, or slit a throat or two? ME? Really dumb, but this kind of stuff is unconscious anyway, you know.)


I had several more blocks to cover. There was no moon. My car was not far, in the only space I could find without making myself late. It hadn't been dark yet, then. Now it was, and I saw with concern that the streetlights were all burnt out on this side of town. Nobody around. (That could be good, or could mean I'm the only one stupid enough to be walking here. I have to reach my car.) I paged Bertha, but she wasn't home. Immediately, I felt foolish: What good can her virtual company do, fifty miles away? Besides, could I really condemn her to listen helplessly to my destruction at the hands of some bogeyman in the middle of the night?


I hung up.


That was right before I rounded the bend and turned into a plaster cast of a baby frozen at Pompeii with my toes hanging over the curb. The Hole is right in front of me, takes up the whole block. Blasted all the way through a large tenement, wide open from my side of the street to the next one over ~the one that used to front the porn shops where the drug dealers and whores carried out their business in broad daylight. None of that was there any more ~from what I could see on the other side looking through~ just the Hole.


It was detonated from the other side, because the only rubble I could see ~and there must have been a lot, considering how much concrete's missing~ was piled up on my side. The other side of it began with more Hole, stretched along the street where those shops used to share the wall with that apartment building I was staring through.


All of this astonished me no end. I could plainly see through to the untamed joyousness that lies beyond Manifest Arrogance's reach. It was brighter than I could before even imagine, the sun pouring what appeared to be a liquid kind of light in unexpected tones of gold that bounced from tree to hill to blades of grass, undiminished. ~I could even hear crossing the street to where I stood faint melodies arise wherever those heavenly rays struck solid matter, as if the Earth could not bear such directness without bursting into song. (The entire vision shimmered continuously from these sounds and dripped with radiance that seeped beyond the edges of all the things it revealed to me, leaving behind a ringing and brazen glory that coated everything it encountered like the grease of God.)


How strange to see the innards of what had been dwellings all along the new rim of this sudden destruction! ~Bisected sofas, dangling carpets, a broken child's toy in the grass stories below. There were no other people I could see, so I have no idea what became of the ones who lived there, or even how long before I returned they had gone.


Forgive me. It has taken a few days to regain my ability to articulate. That landscape left me astonished into infancy then bereft of the English language, until right now. Even so, there is nothing I can say now that has not already been said.