Help Less

--The phone rings you awake at 4am.
Cough syrup sleep, that slight cold that comes back from Colorado with you.

--The cold that last night made you stick a thermometer in your mouth, something you found amnogst all the meds left by your first ex for your son. The lesson of your most recent sickness: check your temp.
It didn't work, that thermometer.
When you call her, your first ex, and ask her why, speaking around that thermometer that for three minutes will not climb above 93, she says it is not intended to be put in the mouth.

Jesusgod, you say, spitting it into your hand, where then?

Where is supposed to go and where has it been?

--The phone rings a little after four in the deep morning.

And that part of your mind, that part that you kind of hate because it thinks too often, it’s already solving the riddle: who is this, calling me at four in the morning?

Before the second ring, it is making a list.
A, whose emails get more desperate. Whose new husband either has flown the coop or been kicked from it. Who writes as she has for years, as she did with the last husband, as she will with the next, that she needs a place to run to, though she’ll never make that flight, though she is always welcome.

Or the good ex wife, returning at two in the morning from a bad date.

Or J, in LA, who doesn’t know your son is with you and like late night chats.

Your brain is making a list of possible callers before the phone rings again.

And you don’t always approve of this always thinking side of your brain. It should be asleep. But now, all of it, all of you is awake, and the person, she doesn’t say hello, she says: I’m sorry.

None of the above. Somebody other, but you would have gotten to her.

--Last night, it was a cat. Screaming. In rhythm, every six or seven seconds. And your brain telling you, Help the cat.

The other side of it saying, The cat can't be helped. Please, please don't try. Please sleep.

Coming all the way awake. Realizing, that's not a cat. That's your son, his breathing that ends in a high pitched snore.

And I thought of Beirut, the way the cats there screamed through the nights, males fighting and wanting fights and females raped. And all the cats you helped in Beirut, that one winter sickness that wiped them out, the kittens AJ had taught you to save, the hordes of them in her yard half grown, and healthy, and, for whatever it means, happy.

Dying runny eyed. Highly fevered. Beyond the help of anything. Beyond comfort.

The way no life is saved, but only death postponed, only suffering checked for the moment.
The best doctors, those that help you go into quietly.

--This four am, it's the real phone really ringing.

She’s crying. She says, You’re the only person I know who is completely at ease with being miserable.

And you think, Is that what am I?

And she she says, Would you please say something profound?

And you’ve got nothing. You speak through your cough, through your phlegm, these things that prove your limits, and you see the world for what it is.

You see the fragile of every life.

Everyone you love, fragile. Everyone you hate, the same. You make them into fields, into flowers in fields, the faces of men you’ve struck in bar fights and women you’ve fucked and friends who’ve stopped being friends and men who've struck you and women who did likewise and all the people around them and through that great chain of connection, everybody, every thinking thing, in fact, it goes in the field.

Waiting on flood, on fire, on ice storm, on virus.

You couldn’t feel more helpless.

--You think of that old blasphemy, If I were God.

And?

What would you do? Where would you begin?

The things you hate about the nature of the world, how could they be undone and the world still exist?

Do not get me wrong. I’m not endorsing it, but that doesn’t mean I know how to reform it.

But there is nothing to do but take away all the feelings, one by one, leaving only mild pleasure, only satisfaction. That eternal drug sleep. That forever soma.

But your conditioning as a human, it tells you to reject that. It tells you that is the same as death. All the creatures of the world caught in drug sleeps, it is the same as all of them caught in easy black.

Which is death.

If I were God, I’d clap my hands and the world would be between them.
That Assisted Suicide.
That Mercy Killing.

And as much as I believe in it, I could not do it to a planet on which live the few I love.
So then, how much do I really believe in the validity of That Kind of End?

--It doesn’t matter. I’m not God.
God’s not even God.

When a girl calls you at four am, and she needs something, what do you have to give, ever?

Your son, he sleeps. Your head, it aches. The medicine is rolling around in you. Your muscles, they want you to yawn, they want you to stretch, this sickly night when you’ve got nothing, when you need more air, more warmth.

This person out there in it, turning to you, and what do you have?

--You ask her to talk about her night. You try to hear in it the secret behind her unhappiness. What you think you hear, it is that she feels lonely, like the real lonely of the real truth of all our existences alone.

The lonely that follows those ugly moments of real perception when you see the limit of every connection.

This is what she is saying, maybe, though not that way. Maybe that's what she means. Maybe you read her, or anything, right.

The best you can do, you say it back to her, you try to show her that you understand, because in being understood there is perhaps some solace.

What little things we have to offer. What little things I have to give.

She’s telling you it’s ok, she’s telling you go back to sleep.

Over the telephone, through the dark, from wherever she is, whatever part of the night is around her, whatever corner of the world she breathes in.

Say something profound, she tells you to start the conversation.

And you, not God, not anybody really, just another fucking flower in the field, what have you got for her?

What have you ever solved with your words? With your lips. Your fists. Your penis. Your talk and your action, your promises of body and breath.

The way every solution is temporary.