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Restart
By
Bryan Stillman
Did he think he would hurt me? Did he think that he could smash the gay out of me? Just because he had me cornered in a dark Divisadero Street apartment building’s open entryway with its four poorly labeled buzzers behind him and not a soul in sight on the nightdark street. Did he think this would end something or begin something? In a fraction of a second, I saw his purposeful blond stubble, his safely masculine crewcut, his light green eyes made vivid by the proximity of the kill.
He was no more than twenty years old. He must of thought I was ancient at forty with my silver flicked hair, wool V-neck sweater and LuckyBrand jeans. He had no idea who stood before him. His intentions weren’t specific, yet they were personal for it was his own death he sought, and like all pursuits of the ego, he looked outward to solve the inward. Was it his ex-Marine, minor league baseball player father who put him here? Was it his bitter, frustrated Mother who grew to resent her entire family for stealing her youth and beauty?
The demon inside of him, full of chomping teeth and organ slicing claws, wasn’t going anywhere but where it was made to go: blood and guts and sidewalks full of pain and death and smeared Benneton colors. He trembled with the force of two thousand years of confusion and misfortune. His anger faltered briefly, his blind desire to rape confused him for he wasn’t supposed to want that under any circumstances, not with me anyway. It all rushed together into his right arm and clenched fist, ready to pound the hated world into something quiet and undisturbing. But he had no idea who stood before him. This blazing youth hadn’t even learned to dance, but his new teacher knew poetry and distant stars.
His mind moved like a raging river: This old guy was a fag and fags wanted to have sex with me and make me one of them. They weren’t really men just girls born into the wrong body. They brought disease and perversity everywhere they went. My daddy used to ride with his army friends around town in cars and talk nice to the fags walking around the Castro. They’d bait ‘em and taunt them, leaving them sitting on the side of the street close to hell. My dad said that his dad was attacked once when he was young and used to tell him all the time how much he hated the queers. Bust ‘em every chance ya get, he said, not knowing that death beget death and ignorance beget ignorance just as surely now as in the days of Avalon when the tender folk sang worshipful tales of their love for the great goddess.
First my hands raised as if to block the blows before moving gracefully into a slow dance, elegant and sophisticated. The air between us became motionless, our breath slowed to still, our energy seamless, settled in our eyes, locking us soul to soul. Only once had I raised the life of a young one into the Awareness and it was profoundly disturbing for rarely can one so young move upwards so quickly without years or even lifetimes of shock.
I showed him early deaths of those who looked like him, different versions of his reflection with experience far from what he knew. I put the film of his ancient cousin into his inside eyes: the young lean blond warrior who loved wrong and spent himself in indulgence and corruption, losing his own life and his family’s honor. His present hands drizzled down like thin white icing, softening the most immediate surface of doughy confusion. I showed him an old version of his mother strangling him in a distant land in an unrecognizable olive skin. His eyes lost their anger and age. A window to his original heart opened and the layers lifted faster. The dance had been called, the meal had been set.
His thoughts shifted: Sleep felt strange tonight. Mother kept changing costumes and speaking in weird voices: “Do you know me?” “Why did you kill me?” “Where is your sword?” The rest feels like cotton candy and swimming in soft deep water with air holes.
My name was Alex before these new skins. My name before was Gwrang or Graine or something I can’t quite grasp. I was strong and always running like a wind warrior. I had the room and the inclination to run faster than the speediest wolf, the fleetest cougar. All the ropes were untied. I knew love and family, the comfort of four walls and a fire within, fresh bread with warm broth and one special friend.
Calls for love always brought representation of the obstacles. The hands with which he meant to hurt were the hands bloodied by the hate and crucial mistakes made since the disappearance of the Capable one. I’d searched for these hands for two thousand years - so they felt. The Capable one wouldn’t know to wake unless threatened...it was said. There was a language no one knew, a password forgotten. The young one’s hands vibrated with new layers and old purpose...could this transformation be made in an apartment entryway on Divisadero St. in San Francisco?
Moving like the mirror of grace, it went between us like no communication he’d known. We were trying to rewind a shooting star just long enough to wish. We turned slowly towards the west, the ocean just a couple of dozen blocks away and dawn still far off. The water dance would wash yet another layer off this child and we’d give ourselves a peace chance.
He kept listening to these new channels: Stop being so angry. She said this often. It wasn’t because I knew how, it was for my future she said. My mother prepared warriors in my village and was thought both frightening and clever. I met the King by chance while he toured the elf country before it all went to fire and chaos. His red hair fascinated me and the time I spent with him showed me his lack of vanity and his disregard for the reality around him. I flew through the countryside and the vast airspace with the power of hawk flight when the warning needed delivering. The King laughed and called for his Jester. The Queen screamed for him to listen but he wouldn’t and the fires engulfed us all. I heard the lead warrior calling my name though how did he know me? I was in a white tunnel and it went on and on, and now it was the lead Warrior warning me, yelling for me to return to him, to return to the flying men who needed me.
My hands touched his, bringing our palms into the oldest dance of all. Now we were one long history of war and religion and family and the earth’s very loud amusement. We were parents, brothers, sisters, lovers, and now we were about to raise the only one who could save us all. It was his murderous impulses, his bad training that provoked me.
Would it be enough to answer the question of where the Capable One was hidden? Did he know that he was the key to my own transformation? His urge to kill his pain and frustration through me was the key for stopping him, as powerful an equation as any found in the natural world. Now I entered him, I took his softness and swallowed it. The Capable One had risen and he was in me.
The violence froze and full details from our pasts occurred in mere seconds. One taste of another showed us lifetimes of full bellies and fine wines, of broken spirits and pathetic endings. But we saw things and much of it was grim. The Capable One was cloaked in all that he had known, for his grief had drove him under like a corpse double-buried. He had known love so great, desire so worldly, that when it went away, his fury and pain shattered every work of glass within earshot, his heart bled screams brought every sleeping beast and fairy to attention. Our dance this evening of chase and pursuit and retreat were nothing in light of this knowledge. We neither hated nor loved one another for we barely saw what we really were, where we’d been, and who we’d known. What was before this evening was but a moment in a happening that began long ago.
There was nothing that would satisfy or delay him now. He asked where there was war still. There wasn’t less warring, I told him, but far more and the reasons were the same as always: land and resources and religion, pick your order. He put his thoughts into my head so he didn’t have to waste his breath. “The same over and over again, the repetitive madness that has plagued mankind for centuries. If they don’t know by now...” He didn’t finish his thoughts for he had lost interest. He didn’t need to hear it to know it. He only had to open the ears that were his that had always listened as far and wide as he desired.
The Capable One had already known youth and folly, age and reason, grief and death. He had known the softness of a loving heart and the quickening of pulsing flesh. He knew the tremors that liquid madness caused and he knew the demons that slipped in from the smoke and the powder so popular amongst those impatient with the mundane nature of their daily existence. He knew the potency of a lie and the agony of betrayal. He knew the similarity and the difference between a man and a woman’s love. He knew God like no other for he had been chosen long ago. He was no different than any other man and yet because of the Awareness, he was no longer the same.
His thrills were over as were his tears. Swiftly and with no warning, he waved his hand across my heart and the very air in front of me altered. Something had been taken from me? My eyes fell back into my head and I saw nothing. I felt something leave me, lift out of me, steal away from my essence. The softest breath imaginable seemed to blow across my face and my sight was restored. His face was no larger than mine but it looked like the face of a God: compassionate and wise and all seeing but human and clearly ready to adventure. How could I have ever thought that I could hurt this man? His gentleness alone could crush me.
“Can you hear the thousands sigh their relief? They will be walking hand in hand through the neighborhoods within moments. Everywhere, every country, every village, they will walk and they will rejoice for their first and second greatest fears will have been erased. Never will violence touch their lives again, and they will never be alone.”
I knew not of what he spoke but I felt that we were no longer alone. People were walking down the stairs within the apartment building before us. Divisadero St. was no longer dark and empty outside. I heard crying that held no trace of sadness only joy. The fear was long gone and there was only love for us. He’d brought me back from the darkness without knowing that it had been his path set years and years before. We could touch our palms now and feel the same humanness that we both carried. We could marvel at how deluded our bodies had been to think that we’d ever been separate. Those made by the same creator are never separate except through the eyes of madness.
I was ready to begin what the Capable One had set in motion. I was ready to restart the human mind, to play it out once again on different terms, ones far more compelling and fair. The memory of man would start over. Today. Books and histories would remain though we’d have to read and watch them; we wouldn’t actually know them. The new guidelines for human interaction wouldn’t include violence or unequal distribution of land and resources. All Gods were actually one God and people would worship to their heart’s content but know no desire to convince another of their rightness. No human would allow another to starve, abundance was shared, and respect given based purely on sharing the same human experience.
As we walked out onto Divisadero Street and turned towards the Castro, we were no longer attacker and pursuer. We were inseparable and
distinct surrounded by others just like us, like a field of golden California poppies, like rays of light from just one sun.
Copyright © 2006 Bryan Stillman
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