Saint Ginther

 

The convenience store is a holy site for the wishful and the lucky, famous first across Texas then beyond it. A highway gas station a hundred miles in every direction from any city, on the outskirts of a town the size of a urinal cake, across twenty-three years one woman won the lottery four times buying her tickets across its counter. They grow quiet around here, and cotton. Storefronts downtown are boarded up, the spirits of past modest affluence have left for Dallas or Houston or Austin. Their descendants remain behind and frequent the Times Market owned by Ms. Bae, purchase their coffee and beer there, their cigarettes, their scratch-offs. Not the kind of place anyone would have any reason to know existed, unless something unusual occurred there. 

Three scratch-offs, one lottery draw. Nearly a quarter century between the first and the last. The woman who had mastered luck and brought it down to a human level had been born in Bishop, had left decades before to attend Stanford, a doctorate in applied statistics. She had been exceptional by the town’s standards long before she had become legendary, unmarried, friendly, shy around people she didn’t know, warmer with people she’d grown up among. Her mother had died in the early years of her luck, leaving her father yet another widower in the town’s untended history. Rumors circulated beyond town that she lived in Las Vegas but travelled home several times a year to visit her father and buy more tickets. Since she had come good four times at one store, it was assumed the Times Market was the only place where she worked the lottery. She didn’t own a cell phone nor did she dresss like a lucky person. She drove a Nissan sedan that blended impeccably among traffic or cars parked in a lot beside it. Photographs of the woman were few, all decades old, depicting a young woman with a beehive hairdo outdated even at the time of their taking. No one could blame her for valuing her privacy yet few besides the townspeople felt inspired to honor it. Asked by well-heeled auslanders with cameras and microphones whether they might sit or stand for an interview, they politely declined: they would walk. The woman was one of their own and they were country people, careful to uphold common manners. It was their right to gossip among their own, and they would protect it, serene in their knowledge that finally the larger world sought something from them it couldn’t have. Such was the close nature of relations between woman and town that even after the woman’s father died some years earlier, she continued to visit, make the rounds among locals, helping out in small ways and before leaving purchasing a clutch of tickets second-hand through a friend. It had long ago ceased being possible for her to visit the Town Market without harassment by out-of-towners seeking a better life on the other side of a winning ticket. 

Her generous works were kept private but the town attributed her graciousness to her upbringing and so in a roundabout way paid itself a partial compliment. She bought the town’s one Baptist church a van. She gave money loan-free to the family that ran the Days Inn a mile outside of town. After her father passed, she donated her childhood home to charity. She purchased reams of lotto tickets for others and once bought a Cadillac for the son of one of her father’s close friends. She had no need for mystique because among the few thousand of a small Texas town she had an upstanding reputation. None there begrudged her the better life she’d devised for herself, gaming the numbers in a way no expert analyst could quite yet accurately identify. After her second win she had been investigated by the state and cleared of suspicion of wrongdoing, and almost as a comment on their efforts not long after won ten million dollars off a fifty dollar scratch-off. The investigation may have verified her innocence but it made her famous, and old photographs were found and broadcast on local then national television. Ms. Bae was pleased with the free advertising, but apologetic about the woman’s loss of privacy. In the one interview she granted, brief and conducted while she stood beside a bin of cheap Mexican movie DVDs, clear plastic dispensers of scratch-offs behind her, she expressed amazement at the distances some of her newer customers would travel to purchase tickets, but acknowledged this meant it was no longer a welcoming place for her luckiest customer. If she travelled home, she would have to do so in secret. One couple from Arkansas moved to town and attempted to buy the woman’s childhood home, thinking this would court a winning number. Others filled the rooms of motels, staying for as long as it took them to realize it was more expensive than they could afford, pouring their meager savings into the state of Texas in hopes it would return the favor. 

They came from nearby towns at first then from Oklahoma and New Mexico. They arrived by bus or car, a trickle of true believers lining up to be blessed by the ATM. A whole town economy flourished from a rumor verified as fact by state investigation. Ms. Bae, her son Tren, her daughter Loula, the waitresses at the Lodestar Cafe or Denny’s, were treated as privileged representatives of cosmic powers channelling through the unremarkable but very real portal of the Town Market: here is where luck grew like weeds or wildflowers. The longer these visitor stayed in town, the longer they loitered within the vicinity of Ms. Bae’s convenience store, they more they breathed it and became it. Powerball, Mega Millions, Pick 3, Daily 4, Cash Five, All or Nothing, payable by annuity or one-time payout. Some, before they stepped in line at the Town Market in the morning, drove by the woman’s childhood home to tear a handful of grass, fill their pockets with it. Others carried photos of her in their purses or wallets. Joan Ginther, patron saint of sudden affluence. All left poorer than they arrived, but contrived explanations for why they had not been graced with good fortune, solid errors on their part which could be righted with a little effort on their part, next time. An unlikely reversal of the common pattern, as if ticks attached themselves to a host body for the privilege of being drained. Having drawn a tick’s-worth of blood into itself, the body shed them, husks brittle and dry, freshly infused with what little they had to offer. Elsewhere Texas’ most famous mystery sips her morning coffee in the modestly-sized kitchen of a home in southwest Las Vegas, on Paradise Drive. 

Halfway across the world, at Lourdes, the infirm and hopeful wait in lines dressed in white cloth robes. They have travelled from across oceans and over clouds to be healed of their maladies, as advertised. Belief has brought them there, to be laid in baths of mountain spring water, which apparently have restored hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, dissolved cancers instantly. The story goes: once there was a country girl who was beset upon by visions of the Virgin Mary and these visions led her to discover a mountain spring. This spring, virgin itself, just as the girl was, proved a healer of anyone who dipped a hand in it, to sip its waters. Within a century or so the legend became an industry for the religion that sold it. The desperate and unwell sought supernatural treatment there and received a bath instead. Some well-known exceptions were cured of their illness, displayed their bodies as evidence: the impossible could happen, look at them. These outliers were hope incarnate and could hardly be doubted. To doubt them would be to give up on oneself.

Disappearer

I have to disappear again, within me a discerning voice is saying. Whenever I hear it, it’s as if I’m overhearing. I’m not the one it’s talking to per se; it’s conversing with itself but I'm the ear. I know: confusing. But maybe you have a similar companion, a voice that rides along within you through your days and nights. Some evenings it keeps me up when I’d rather sleep. Some nights it even wakes me. Then I have to lay awake listening to it sort through its various concerns, deliberating. 

This is what it’s been saying lately: I have to disappear again. Implying I’ve disappeared at least once before, if not many times before. Implying each time I returned from hiding and resumed the course of a life unchanged. 

Hushed. But not purposefully conspiratorial. Casual, unbothered, like a person confiding their most private thoughts at a volume common to a regular speaking voice, drowned out by the loud chaotic conversation of a crowded room. Now that I’m describing it, I can almost remember: of course I’ve heard this before, of course I’ve overheard directives issued between one unseen part of myself and another. It’s true, I’ve been visible for too long, I’ve grown too accustomed to being counted among people of a crowd. If they could hear me, the voice that’s talking and the ear that’s listening, I would try and interject. I’d ask questions. Why? And what would happen if I didn’t? It’s a scary prospect to not know what might transpire if you don’t disappear and soon, as some voice within you suggests. 

It seems in the very nature of voices and ears they’re immune to interventions by their host consciousness. That could be a good thing, I don’t know. It means I always have someone else to listen to, someone secretly myself I don't quite identify with. They talk and talk and listen and listen and usually they’re camouflaged by distraction or my interest in louder, more outward conversations. Just because I’m their privileged audience, doesn’t mean what’s said is accurate or insightful or wise. The voice sometimes seems caught up in playing with phrases, testing slight but semantically expansive variations on simple themes. “The hand that feeds can starve the dog.” “The dog that bites feeds the hand.” Dog and hand and biting and feeding, basic elements of a conceit shuffled until they return to their original cliché, the dog that bites the hand. Listen long enough to that kind of talk, it leaves you feeling like you’re chasing a tail you didn’t know you had in the first place. But there’s the sense that ignoring the voice would invite misfortune. It speaks from a hidden place and weathers many a change undergone by human imagination. It is not holy, nor is it prophetic, of this I’m certain, but don’t ask me how. It’s as mortal as any mole in the ground, tending its tunnels. It’s a fellow traveller to selfhood, not quite its shadow. As you see, the nearer I draw towards it, the more descriptions break down. 

There was a woman once, books now tell us of her, the quality of her mind and the grave tragedy of her life. She starved herself in solidarity with the suffering of commoners, thinking it would somehow stall the hand of fate, which was always busy, it seemed to her, undoing lives at a far distance from her own comfort. It was not fair, it was not kind. An ecstatic horror, this was, living and breathing. Since she could not control the whims of worldly punishment, she controlled what passed from hand to mouth, food and water. The more malnourished and skinny she became, the more her skull glowed with righteousness. Throughout all that, who knows what the voice in her head was saying. The books tell us she perished and maybe it was a blessing her consciousness didn’t outlast her body, for then it might glean final proof that her death changed nothing the woman and her voice had been most concerned about. Removing herself from living company, nothing was brought back to an even and moral level. The voice, though, survived. Shedding itself of a woman, it endured as a prose style and an ethical meander, losing track of a few core themes in one book so later in another it might once again find them. I mention this because not too infrequently, hearing my own voice within me ramble on about this or that, it seems to catch a rhythm that resembles this woman at her most even-keeled or metaphysically pragmatic. Don’t mistake what I’m describing, she’s in no way within me, nor has her voice leapt bodies like a flea, to ensure further feeding and survival. My suspicion is my voice, and maybe anyone’s voice, is a skilled mimic and entertains itself by striking up small instances of otherness within itself. Anything for the ear that has been assigned to it, anything to confuse the host consciousness cursed with the task of overhearing it. In the case of this starved woman and her voice and its books and of my voice pleasuring itself through the adoption of tones unnatural to it, those of a resolute ascetic sternness, their differences have blended over time until they’ve achieved an ambiguous sameness. I’m at an equal distance from each of them and can affect none of them. For better or worse, I’m their shared habitat, one that can’t withhold nutrients or fair weather from them. And when I pause for a long while to listen, this is what they tell each other: it’s time to disappear again. Me first, the rest of them along with me. 

Head still, body still. Room quiet and expansive as a house around me. I’m listening. I’m in preparation for the beginning of a disappearance. As always, it will take more than hours, well more than a day or two. I’m not so skilled at self-effacement it can happen instantaneously. A wandering mind is a luxury I can’t enjoy when concentrating on achieving incremental, part-by-part removal from collective awareness, beginning first with me, the most immediate surveyor of my present intersubjective fleshiness, this personhood chained to the culture that feeds it. The less cluttered my surroundings, the more cleanly I hear voice and ear conversing. They’re in imitation mode currently, reciting from memory a passage from the long-gone woman’s oeuvre. Familiar. Heard it before. Heard it many times. Each pass through it rendering it differently, variations in phrasing and pauses. But voice to ear, the gist of its descriptions are roughly the same no matter how old I am, regardless who I am or where I am when I'm made to listen.  

Like this. 

The condition in which one person and another find themselves, no matter which people and what condition, are not unlike those of prisoners isolated in separate cells. There are walls between them and they are real. Such is the thickness of the walls that no speaking or even shouting can travel through them without losing clarity of words. So to communicate with one another prisoners must be satisfied with mere tapping, tap-tapping in code through iron or concrete. Without walls there would be no medium through which vibrations might travel, no hard surfaces against which taps might be conjured. The very obstructions that secure their isolation from one another are means of communication. Or, as the woman’s voice had expressed once quite memorably, “Every separation is a link.” On many an occasion while working hard to achieve and maintain a disappearance, I’ve questioned the universality of this sentiment. I’ve wondered whether it was intended to be true in all cases. Between people and their voices, I can see. Between many people and their own unique arrays of strangers and acquaintances, maybe. Maybe, but always? From a wholly disappeared position, when I look around, I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. I see adjoining cells uninterested in their walls, prisoners content to tap their own foreheads. I see these and am unhappy with the implications, phrased often as a single chastened question, Is this me? 

To be a model prisoner, or a troublemaker. To celebrate the appearance of a guard at the door, or to protest their presence with sullenness and a refusal to converse. The door is opened, the cafeteria is waiting. An hour in the yard or in the gym is available for the agreeable. How necessary are walls if simple compliance can lead a person to a room full of faces? Few are trustworthy. Few are honestly smiling. Behind each there is another voice, a covert fellow traveller talking. There is an ear that doesn’t require bending. They are equal to your own predicament, I tell myself, having vanished after long effort into full immersion with my surroundings. It’s me who’s telling this to myself, not a voice within but separate from how I feel and think. Beneath registers of witness or regard, voice and ear have edged near enough to become indistinguishable from the person I am, who rarely knows much for certain and certainly can’t speak for others who can’t see or hear him. Prisoners beyond their cells tend to bring the cells with them and the silences between them are a kind of tapping. Each disappear into themselves at their peril. If they leave, they might never return. If they come back after a long absence, there might not be much to come back to. I would do well to follow their example. Silence in the head affirms this is wisdom: it can be broken.

A Maker

There are very few written accounts of it by our most accomplished practitioners, joy. Joy or simple contentment. From my observations about their words on the matter, it seems these are taken as suspect, evidence of soft-headedness, tender-heartedness, so many indulgences. For the longest while I considered myself among the chastened. Was this me? I was but a humble maker, my name never quite aspiring to be writ among their own. Was I a dim-wit, naive for thinking these were among the more difficult, hard-to-reach corners of shared experience, the rarest, most fugitive of our natural resources? I have met and known people without these reservations. Their resolute faith in the primacy of happiness or joy did not seem to me willful ignorance on their part, unearned. Usually these were people who had felt the full press of fate’s weight upon them. They seemed to me to have every right to employ bitterness as a compass, to navigate the twists and turns of a life. But these people were rare exceptions, they held to a discipline more steadfast than ego could provide. They would not allow their enjoyment of what little was left of them to be taken away, for it seemed even the thieves would not benefit from such deprivation.

As I’ve grown older and subtly more deaf and blinder, I’ve become more inclined to listen to myself on the matter, less awed by ones who exercise authority through dismissiveness or the polishing of harsh absolutes. I have seen pits where the bodies of my fellow travelers have been thrown, decapitated, disemboweled. I have heard the testimonies, first-hand, of children forcibly disrobed and violated by elders they had every right to assume were their protectors. To my surprise I’ve even become immune to the dogmatism of self-styled decadents, the way they require valuation of pleasure above all other concerns, implying whosoever balks at following their lead into the next thrill must be a wallflower, unworthy of serious consideration. These are loud and busy times. Strong poorly-formulated opinions come from every direction, needle-sharp. Any single exposed consciousness first becomes a pin-cushion then an effigy, a comment-doll. The doll a smaller version of ourselves, though we’re the ones holding it. We’re the ones who orchestrate a chill from fence-sitters and passersby, who taste sharp and lasting pain when needle slips into mind. We can’t help ourselves; if handed a needle, we can hardly deny it a resting place in the head or leg or groin or torso.

Of course, of course. Horrors are plentiful as fruits in the produce section of a supermarket. I buy and eat my share. I do so knowing, yes, I’m no different. I feed my health consuming them. Moreover, I’m not so green as to disbelieve these arrived here in organized fashion of their own accord. They were seeded, nurtured, harvested. They were boxed and those boxes were stacked in trucks and in cargo holds of airplanes or ships, were transported from faraway locales to be unpacked by grocers, stacked, arranged in alluring poses that please and tempt the eye. The bright arrays of color, supple diversity of forms... 

Cursed with such a banquet, it’s not enough to attempt a fast, I’ve learned. To selectively starve oneself among abundance harms the abundance not at all. Nor does it cease toxic plentitude from arriving each day, accumulating and proliferating. 

To commit oneself in the opposite direction, then, to gorge oneself. Does that work? I’ve found this option even less useful. A distended abdomen, nausea, long nights of regurgitation: these are usually the outcome.  

Both options have been investigated at length by the more confident wholesale disparagers among my peers, and the efforts have only left them more resentful, more certain in their dim estimations of the herd. They sound uncomfortably similar to the religious fanatics of my youth, who I was raised among. Their view of human nature would seem to align with the rigid logic of original sin: we are damned and unworthy from the outset and must earn our way free from the ugly gravity of our inherent fallenness. More certainty. More pushiness. More reduction of messily contradictory phenomena such as people into concepts, tools for self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. Maybe this is an unfair characterization. Maybe I am illustrating the very habits I am warning myself against perpetuating unconsciously. If that is the case, very well then. I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself counted among the un-flawless. 

Like certain species of mushroom or plankton, it seems some people give off light; light that requires a consistently dark environment to be rendered visible. What evolutionary purpose does it serve? The attraction of mates? Protection from predators? Is it selfish if it’s written into genetic awareness that giving off light ensures a longer life and a more diverse, numerous family line? It’s what they know by habit, isn’t necessarily even something they consciously will or choose. They survive not by singling out or punishing others, though this is not to say many of their kind are not ruinous. Some release ruination into the world like spores, as if it were the most natural thing, as if it were written into their cells, an expression of evolutionary fitness no less elementary and clever than bio-luminescence. To take root in their vicinity is to suffer a temperament helpless before the demands of its own greediness. Ignoring them is no reliable tactic for surviving them. Though it might be for a time. Hiding is not full-proof either. Unsatisfied with themselves, often they will come looking. 

Dolls, fruit, bio-luminescent mushrooms. The round of forms and transformations that drive the issue bring me no closer to the main point, which I have held onto, kept to myself, thinking secrecy would protect me. Now that I’m free and present and held in confidence by the passing moment, it seems I’ve forgotten what once had seemed of such importance I had no choice but to express it. Take this, maybe, as a comment on the value of expressiveness in general. It is not what is said about what is done, so much as what is done in lieu of saying. Talkers such as myself have for the longest while flattered themselves with the presumption that utterance was akin to action. I think here of certain people who have made a place for small kindnesses without need for commentary. The commentary would have called attention to the kindness instead of how it had brought together, briefly, two people who could have easily continued along on separate ways without witnessing a part of themselves in the other. Witnessing this, appreciating it, both are honored by a gesture of modest decency. It is less important they describe the exchange than they carry it along through the next moment. 

Now and then I have forgotten to count myself among them. In my foolishness, in my enthusiasm at coining yet another fine phrase, I mistook self-inflation for an honest measure of my size and suffered, as I should have, a string of embarrassments as a result; when I caught sight of the shadow beneath me and was ashamed: how shamelessly it aspired to be larger than what it purportedly cared for. Every youth should be allowed its indiscretions. Embarrassment was useful, it served me well. But since youth is over I’ve found it equally useful to set it aside. My instincts have been educated; behaviors are somewhat clairvoyant; before potential mistakes can reach me, now I can anticipate them, sidestep them not with grace or pride but with observant carefulness. These mistakes arrive equally from the past as from the future. I apologize for indiscretions by not committing them. The rest is given over to common life, like rotting banana peels and used coffee grounds to a compost pile. Something unforeseen might grow from it, months from now. If it does, it would be improper for me to take credit. Consider me a man without a mouth who can still muster a disarming smile. What I lack lays the foundation for what I can offer. This being the defining quality of a maker who blends himself into an upwelling of lasting or impermanent forms through self-effacement. It’s not the name I have, or the name I could become, but the distance between the name and what transpires beneath the ice of its fixedness. It’s my hope one day children will take their parents out on it for a skate. The ice is firm, the flow below now solid. Here is a safe place to carve curlicues from movement and free play. What’s a name worth if it can’t provide that? 

This last transformation has brought me back, I see, to my original point. The underrepresented dangers of joy and contentment, even among the comfortably embittered. Is it the case what a maker gives must inevitably be taken from others? If I made myself, then, what does that make me? To come good on what I have borrowed, to ensure foremost it has been borrowed and not stolen. Is it skillfully made? Does it unsettle expectations? Does it please the mind? Does it break confidence in the mind’s make-believe sovereignty? Does it move it to be less than certain? Does it move it beyond what it aspires to control and account for, towards a generosity that frightens it slightly for leaving it at the foot of others slightly more vulnerable and informed than it was before? Who would come along, if it did? Who would pick it up? Would they be a person of quality, trustworthy? They wouldn’t know until they were taken in hand and carried along. Until they felt with a certain helplessness what kind of purpose they were put towards. What they brought into the lives of others, as servants of their whims or tools. This is if they are lucky and are picked up at all. The rest will be abandoned where they are waiting. Half-fearful at who might come along and admire them, the remainder fearful of who might not come along, leaving them to question whether they are worthy of being noticed or ignored. Joy is not caring. Contentment is freedom from not wondering why it would matter. There is a difference between the two, rendered subtle so it can later become obvious, then once discerned, available to be forgotten once again, returned to its native subtlety. Like grass given meaning by its near vicinity to a headstone. Mowed by groundskeepers, it sheds its symbolism and takes flight briefly, then lands elsewhere where its brethren lay equally shredded. One blade keeps another company, drying in the sun. Crickets nearby sing without knowing.