The World Whispers
Yes. I’m sixteen feet up on the scissor lift. The haze is thick from fires in Utah, though it is October, and dawn. Even the snowy peaks of the Front Range, tipped with rose, are dull in the mirrored skyscrapers of Denver. The dark translucence unfastens my mind, which reminds me of Shiva, the destroyer, which reminds me of Eva. I stand, like some rookie, on a toolbox to reach a brush I’d left on a ledge, but I’m so into Eva and her quality and her absence that I forget I’m on this box, forget I’m not clipped in. I step back to take in the wall, and nothing is there. A power line catches me, but it snaps and spews blinding light across my thigh. The charge blows my hat off, and I’m out before my smoking back hits the asphalt. I can’t see, but smell and hear everything: my smoldering overalls, rasping shouts, Chuck’s burrito breath. The danceable absurdities pouring out of his phone. Dad’s pipe-smoke safety. Eva’s chiming laugh. Her rose bouquet.
Illumination. The transformations of sound to color, to klaxons of red, to matter-of-factness of death, form a pulsing release. Blue life peels and skitters red. No more Eva. No more breathing and touching and knowing. Fine. I don’t want to breathe and touch and know. The merge, the unbeing, goes on, and I luxuriate in nothingness. I’d never realized the triumph of not having to care. I will not care again. I ride uncaring into rose fragrance and song.
Whoa there, big fella. Smoke and roses loop me back to the beginning. Why? Chuck wants his partner back: Stan the Man, who slathers tall mirrors. And Eva wants me doing. She was a strong swimmer. Her long strokes in the pool are pulling me home. Vision returns, but something is wrong. It takes me a sweet eternity to figure it out: this is not eye vision. I watch a crumpled Stan far below, as if I’m a puppeteer returning for this abandoned marionette. Where have I been? This guy has more story in him. Is he up for it?
Eye vision returns gradually, annoyingly. I want the other vision. I want Eva’s eyes. She wore glasses. Built dioramas. Died on an ordinary Wednesday. A sad man asleep at the wheel and two lives gone. Something to do with overwork. Her glasses, her telescopes, shattered.
---
Eva stands in the sea of rosebushes she crammed into our postage-stamp yard. Closes her eyes and breathes deep. “All these ego-tripping trivia tests! I want to know what I don’t know. Impossible, I guess. It’s too big. Immeasurable.”
“Hey, space telescopes are out there measuring the whole universe.”
She laughs and bends to her pruning. “That’s what I need. A pocket Hubble. Maybe Hubble sunglasses. I always want to know what’s beyond—what’s left to do, you know? The future calculation, not the rearview.”
I’m on shovel duty. I should defend Beloved History, so I bounce a clod off her earnest ass. “I like the rearview. But I get it. The expansion, rather than the bang.”
Eva beams at me as if just realizing how useful her garden gnome can be. “Well, you can’t have one without the other.”
A space telescope actually looks deep into the past. I realize that now. It sees the expansion and the bang. Our future calculations turn on what has ever been. Possibilities require absolutes.
---
No diamond for Eva. She wanted a star sapphire ring: gold rays embedded in deep blue. From Thailand. It wasn’t expensive, and she didn’t show it around. She said it helped her focus. It matched the sky and sun of our outdoor wedding in Estes Park—a crystal Colorado day when Long’s Peak crowded the altar: Best Mountain.
She had insisted we live in Park Hill, near Denver’s City Park. So we found an old bungalow with room, barely, for roses. Walked to the park and museum every day. Some of the dioramas at the natural history museum date back a century or more. Most museums are replacing them with virtual-reality whiz-bang, but Denver preserves them: arctic wolves watching caribou, polar bears on ice, grizzlies on tundra, sandhill cranes in prairie grasses. Wolverines, pronghorns, geese. A Jabba-the-Hutt elephant seal. Eva took classes on sprucing up the old classics. Said she saw the future in them. I didn’t get it.
Two years ago, my wife was a florist who longed to be a curator: one who selects, organizes, presents. But she was already doing that— choosing roses for fragrance, books for power, friends for gratitude. Every window or display or diorama she worked on seemed more hopeful afterward. More an expression of what should be.
After the glasses shattered, I kept dreaming that Eva was building a diorama of our lives together: we’re deep in the garden, between the pinwheels she had sown, huffing the sweetness like college kids bonging their brains out. I’m all about her, but Eva is turned outward from two steps up a ladder, peering through her thick Hubble glasses at the twilight horizon. A raven watches from the blooms. A black dog runs into the yard behind us. Swallows dart overhead. The Eva piecing the diorama together is ten times our size. The crystal glasses she wears are shattered, but she is precise. Then I see through fractured glass what both Evas are watching—a knowing something in the distance. A chestnut foal trying to stand.
---
We breathe from bloom to bloom. Eva pauses to deadhead. The air is smoky, but she takes comfort in Hindu mythology. “The three aspects of Krishna are Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the maintainer; and Shiva, the destroyer.”
“What a show-off.”
“I think Shiva is the spirit of our age.”
“You still want to try for a kid?”
“Yup.”
“You want to bring new life into a world of destruction.”
She smiles tolerantly and disappears into the bushes. “Shiva clears
the way for Brahma. Maybe a creative Brahma time is on the way.”
“She says from her rose-colored world.”
She laughs, but stays hidden. “Shiva is a big deal! He-she also creates.
Seeing the creation is key.”
It all seemed dicey to me, but I’ve read enough history to know
that things are always dicey. In the end, it didn’t influence our decision. Nothing could have stopped us from trying for a child. We were full of creative impulse—until Shiva destroyed. Now every loss, every car accident, every smoky day during fire season reminds me of Shiva. I understand that creation comes out of destruction, can be part of destruction, but, you know—it’s hard to spot. Sometimes I’m too small to try.
---
Christmas is coming, but there’s no comfort or joy. It’s stupidly hot. The back of my head is still sore from the concussion. The docs look at me like I’m a freak, but don’t say much. I’m sure I died on the asphalt that October dawn, but can’t talk about it, and no one asks. Who needs that can of worms? Sometimes the secret keeps me going. I’m afraid to give it away.
The current left a source wound in the thigh and a ground wound in the shoulder. Electrocution is like being microwaved: you’re cooked from the inside out. The flesh burns are tricky but treatable. The internal kabob is harder to deal with—organ damage, mostly. My heart fibrillated, but they teased it back into rhythm the first day. Alkalizing my urine somehow helps the kidneys mend. I drink strange concoctions, to no effect that I can tell—just endless trips to the small room.
Chuck and Kitty Duran bring a basket of holiday nonsense to my hospital room. I mime gratitude. After Eva died, these two had harassed me daily—tromping across the porch with casseroles, coffee table books, and assorted football crapola. Big smiles and bad jokes—then and now.
I have the attention span of a puppy. Try to read but cannot care. All the old interests are gone. History died with Eva. Even the Greeks lost their allure. The blot in the personal story made the species story reek. I’d always been fascinated with origins, with causes and effects, but suddenly it all seemed pointless. Why had I bothered? Human history amounts to a litany of ambitious thugs clawing their way to the top and ruining everything for everybody. Once in a blue moon, a Buddha-like creature breaks through, and we have a little evolutionary burst. But the in-betweening kills the soul.
I have this idea that those who die early feel it coming. It shows up in their work and moods. Amy Winehouse, for instance—the casual references to death, the annoyance at being in the crosshairs, the waves of depression. Eva fought the foreshadowing blues by scanning for dogs. If you’re feeling thin, find a familiar mutt and allow yourself to be thoroughly greeted. You’ll know your place in the world. So we’d walk the neighborhood, looking for connection. Skitch, a big golden, always carried a tennis ball. Molly, a collie mix, stuck with her person, a retired schoolteacher. But if Molly saw Eva and me, she’d run half a block to leap and sing. After the glasses shattered, my solo act was less popular. Molly’s gallop devolved to a saunter as she scanned the street. At least she kept up the collie smile, as if apologizing. Skitch still showed me his ball but always saved it for Eva. Where is she? These mugs provided comfort, but the searching was contagious.
I never understood why Eva wouldn’t keep a dog. It must have been the mortal knowing—a subconscious unwillingness to leave another relationship unfinished. A child would have been something else: an evolving expression of what we were together. Consolation for Shiva.
January. Anshu Das drops by my hospital room on a too-warm day, looking dapper in butter yellow with his salt-and-pepper beard and ready smile. He lives down the street, near the park, in a compact Edwardian place with a carriage house converted to a one-car garage. In the cool garage, he keeps two things pristine: a red Vespa, which he rides to work eight months of the year, and an AWD Union-Jack Mini Cooper. “I always want to know I can escape.” Eva and I would talk with him in his driveway. I usually bailed early, but Eva always stayed to sop up Anshu’s stories from the Gita and Hindu mythology.
Anshu owns Citizen Jewelers on Capitol Hill. Our first conversation, years ago, was about Eva’s sapphire, which he had scored for us. “A seed truth,” he said, turning to me. “Precious.” He told us he admires the gold on the Capitol dome as he Vespas and Minis to work. We learned that his appreciation has a broader scope. He sees all that is precious. “Bijou” is how he describes his cottage, which is artfully framed within a manicured garden. Anshu lives in a world of setting, luster, chroma. You can see it in his walk, in the way he swings a cricket bat.
Today he looks thinner, radiant. He asks personal questions, but I can’t say much. I tell him about the toolbox dive, then run out of things to say. He ascribes my escapade to dharma. “Eva’s universal answer,” I say as if I know enough about it to call anyone’s bluff. He beams and says the word isn’t entirely translatable, but he thinks it means something like “duty that sustains cosmic order, that makes all possible.” I can’t dismiss this because his Bhagavad Gita had saved me two years ago. He had been so attentive after Eva died that I gave him her too-thick Gita. It was far more commentary than source, and I hadn’t seen the point. But Anshu promptly returned with a simple version of the sacred text. Small. Not scary. Not so much swami ’splaining. So I finally read it, as Eva had always wanted. Tried to honor it, for her. Set thy heart upon thy work.
Anshu carries a worn cricket bag—the keeper of relics. When I ask about it, he ignores me and points to the ragged horizon framed in the hospital window. “Do you see Mount Evans? Once I climbed a ridge up there and peeped over the top. I was face-to-face with a mountain goat! A magnificent old billy with big shoulders, one foot away. I froze. So did he. But I was ready to retreat. He was not. He just stared at me, saying, ‘Give way, or I will butt you all the way back to Kolkata.’ I gave way. The strength in those black eyes!”
His eyes are black and shining. “I’ve hiked about half the Continental Divide Trail. The highest part. I climbed the fourteeners until they were overrun with tourists. Then I climbed unnamed mountains, which have no registries to sign. I love to be a nameless man on a nameless mountain!”
“Do you always hike alone?”
He collapses into a chair. “Sometimes my sister, Gayathri, comes up from San Diego.”
“What’s the next adventure?”
He kneels and organizes the cricket bag until I stop expecting a reply. He smiles up at me. “I have been thinking about moving to San Diego. Gayathri is a nurse at Blessings Hospital, and sometimes she has several days off at a time. I’ve had a glorious mountain life. If I am permitted, I will have a glorious ocean life. I might learn to sail. I can see Gaya and me skimming along the coast through sunlight and sea spray. I dreamt of it. Precious!”
He smiles into the middle distance. “Gaya is precious; the most adaptable person I know. You can see her changing her mind—changing the course of her whole life—as she receives new information. When she was nine, she fell from a banyan and broke her right arm, which was dominant. She would not rest until she could do everything left- handed. Even her penmanship became fluid. When her arm healed, she would not go back. Then she learned to write Hindi for our grandmother. She’s ...”
“Protean.”
“That sounds impressive.”
I wave a weary arm. “Proteus was a shape-shifter. He could tell the future but would rather escape—change into a lion or boar—than spill prophecy. Finding and holding him was the trick.”
“That sounds like Gaya.”
Anshu stands and stretches. I wish he’d leave so I can get after the Sandman, but he needs to talk. “Darwin said that it’s not the strongest or most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change. Adaptation is a kind of superpower, I think.”
I only have energy for nodding. Anshu laughs childishly. “Gayathri is every day, all the time, adapting. She is a protean ideal, my friend!”
Beaming like the sun, framed against Mount Evans and a spotless sky, Anshu looks through me. I want to give everything to those eyes. He waits patiently for me to form the words. “I—died.”
The eyes give everything back. “Yes. I know.”
“Anshu, what the fuck? Why am I here? Where am I going?”
My face throbs. Anshu represses a laugh. “There is only one reliable
kind of prophecy, Stanhope: the self-fulfilling kind. Who do you think you are? That’s you. The world whispers, so listen. Imagine the dharma that approaches and prepare a welcome.”
His charity unclenches my heart. A nurse stops at the open door and stares. He glances at her sheepishly. She’s not amused. “Anshu Das?”
He laughs as he makes for the door. “They have my cricket bat downstairs.”
“You tried to bring a cricket bat into a hospital?”
“That is a story for next time. The healing of Stanhope Ellis must
proceed apace!”
I’m presented with an aluminum cane, with which I lurch through
bustling halls. I drift for days, dreaming of sea spray, keeping an eye out for Anshu. But he never returns. Instead, Chuck appears on a grey afternoon, looking eager in a pumpkin-orange Broncos cap with blue trim. He fumbles with the bed controls. Cranks me vertical. Wonders about the fried Stanhope Ellis. The replacement stiff is squirrelly, he says. Will his anchor, the straight man, the unclipped-in, toolbox-diving rook, rejoin the circus?
UpChuck has been a patient, skyward partner. We’ve worked hard, scrubbing hot, wobbling landscapes. For two years, the flexing, tweaking labor, the prospects, the jokey work talk kept me going. On big jobs, we’d plant our feet wide and wave long, water-fed poles in slo-mo, like raggedy-ass Kabuki warriors. I razzed Chuck relentlessly about his Broncos gear. “Chuckles!” I’d shout, poling sloppy lather. He would lean into whatever I called him, vamping and drenching my bib overalls. We lived for afternoon breezes off the foothills.
---
After the glasses shattered, I couldn’t face the book and flower shop. It had been a comfort, but now it was the opposite—a pit of memory so deep that I could only go there to die. I considered that. But I was chickenshit in the end. Once I started staying away, I couldn’t stop. All the time Eva and I had logged there now repelled me. The teamwork was everything. I couldn’t be worthy by myself. Good people wanted to lease the space, but my heart wasn’t in it. I sold the building and stock for a song, as is, to the good people. Then I needed work—not distraction, but immersion. I stashed Eva’s sapphire in my bibs and took the window-washing job Chuck dangled. Bless Chuck for that. He pulled me up-up-up. Every day.
Evenings and weekends, I’d walk the neighborhood, fix up the house, binge on Star Trek. Eva was a serious Trekker. Voyager was her favorite. She loved the idea of being distantly flung across the galaxy and working her way home. Always the future, even when pretzeled, and home. The thought of her back-trekking fueled long to-do lists. I remodeled compulsively, remembering every detail of her arm-waving plans. No additions, just upgrades of existing space. All the things she wanted. As if a new bathroom or granite countertop would tractor-beam Eva back to me. I finished the basement, replaced the floors, installed efficient windows. Set toilets, tiled walls, hung doors. But I couldn’t face the rose garden. Refused to learn what Eva knew. Needed to leave that hole in my understanding so she’d come back to fill it. I hired a kid to water, and the bushes grew wild until a few of Eva’s friends quietly trespassed, restoring order. But as all was completed, the property became more echo than substance. It was all for Eva. Too flanged out for me. Too empty.
Anshu’s father died just before Eva. Then, a few months later, his mom. So we haunted the park and museum, talking about death and life. I stopped myself from asking about reincarnation. It would have sounded hollow, as if I was grasping at straws—which I was. But Anshu understood. He smiled and said beautiful things about the rhythm of time. It was pure poetry. I was so shell-shocked that I retained nothing of it, but I’ll never forget how it made me feel. It was as comforting as a rose bouquet.
---
Chuck waits expectantly at my bedside. Am I up for more up-up-up? I can feel Anshu’s idea of cosmic duty inflating into a life preserver. Meaning is everywhere implied in Eva’s rose dharma. Okay. I survived for a reason. Set thy heart upon thy work. What work? I don’t know what, but I know where. The white peaks are majestic, but dulling, flattened by dark translucence. I’ve been lost—no, found—in Anshu’s sailing dream. The song is there.
I tell my partner that I can’t wait for Strike Three. “I’ll try the coast.” He grabs my shoulders and slams my bullet head into his chest. This surprises us both, and we blink a lot. A week later, he brings a realtor by. A month later, he helps me pack.
