Miss Chioux. She’s even friendlier in person.
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
Sunday, June 20, 2021 – Father’s Day – Rio Nuevo, AZ
“Why aren’t you writing?”
Josh asked me that, and this is the price you pay for letting people get close to you: They get pushy. Ask me how I know.
Cleo was planning her assault on yet another lawn sprinkler. I said, “I think she thinks they’re aliens. They hide out most of the time, and then, when they finally evince themselves, they’re ghostly, practically invisible. And if you try to engage them, they spit right in your face.”
“You’d think she’d get bored with them.”
“I hope she never does…”
Miss Cleopatra Chioux is a French Bulldog puppy who is not mine but who lives with me almost all of the time, at least for now. We were walking her at dawn in Erin Groves, a tree-lined subdivision up the block from Rio Nuevo. Why there? Sidewalks – and sprinklers! – and no snakes or scorpions to strike at a bull-headed dog.
We – all of us, me, Josh, Tegan and Miss Chioux – are living on a desert horse property that backs to the New River but fronts to a shopping center with an octoplex cinema and is an easy walk to several nice, orderly subdivisions. In other words, come visit soon, because everything around us will be rolled up and ‘rationalized’ in the blink of an eye. But the land still backs to the river – that would be a desert flood-control channel to you – so there will always be snakes and scorpions there.
“You didn’t answer my question. Why aren’t you writing?”
I smirked. “Not-writing is almost all I ever do.”
“Sell that to Manny Kant. That joke is an antique.”
“It’s not a joke. I only write when I have to. I only write when I can’t not write.” That didn’t seem right, either. “I’m not writing for you or anyone else. I’m writing for me. I tell myself stories I need to hear told. Lately I seem to have no stories, just horrors.”
“An Uncle Wille horror story. Now that’s a funny idea.”
“No story, just horrors – billions of them.”
Josh thought a minute before responding, and I admire him for that. I’ve liked him since Tegan brought him to our old place in Sun City, four years ago this Thanksgiving. Theirs is a love story for the ages – my favorite, You never can tell – and I really have done my best to respect their privacy by not broadcasting their business in Willie stories.
Finally he said, “Why does she keep turning back like that?”
I smiled, proud for Cleo. “She’s making sure those sprinklers back there aren’t following us.”
He laughed at that, but I wasn’t making a joke. Josh is admirable in his doggedness, and Cleo is admirable in her cluelessness. I don’t traffic in deficits, so I don’t care too much what either one of them isn’t. I love them both for what they are.
“So are you talking about the virus?”
That would be the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 if you’re reading this at some distance in time.
“I’m talking about the vaccines.”
He chewed on that for a while, too. I swear the kid’s going to a lawyer someday. His father’s a judge, and Josh has had the kind of eduction most American kids don’t even know exists.
He said, “I read somewhere that the purpose of the virus is the vaccines. That seems crazy, but what doesn’t lately? Hollywood has given us a huge catalog of mad-scientist films, but the one no one mentioned, all last year, was Twelve Monkeys. And yet here we are, one terrifying disclosure after another. Who knows what we’ll have found out a year from now?”
“Dude. I’m just walking the dog.” I smiled, but he just glared at me. “Since you won’t let this go, let me give you an infinite horror that you can indulge right now, without having to wait for the big reveal.”
“I can take it.”
“That’s what you think. Start here: The soul is distinguished from the self in that the soul is held to be undying. The life of your body ends, as it must for every living thing, but your soul endures. If you’re looking for an idea that unites all religions, that might be it.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Not a word of it. I am too good a Jesuit to be a good Catholic. But you believe it – and what if I’m wrong?” I held up my hand to stay disputes. “I’m not quarreling about this. I’m taking your side, for a change. I’m a petitioner for lost souls. Billions of them.”
Josh said nothing, and I can’t imagine what he was thinking. Catholics bear unending guilt already. How much more does anyone need?
“Are there stem cell lines from aborted babies in the vaccines, Josh? They say there aren’t, but we have already established that they’re lying about everything. Regardless, aborted babies are used all through medical research, the same children – all of them younger than me, had they been born – cloned over and over and over again.”
He gulped. You want horrors, you came to the right guy.
“Think about their fathers. Do they even know they have been fathers millions and billions times over? Think about their mothers. They sought convenience and instead they packed purgatory. Are the unheard cries of each dead child echoed by a choir of clones?”
Still nothing, and that’s good. You never thought this way before, either.
“Do we have an undying part, Josh? If we do, does each clone of each of those aborted babies – infinitely cloned, never allowed to live and yet forevermore undead – does each one of them have an undying part? Have we damned ourselves with an infinity of souls?”
Josh said nothing for a long time, and I’m easy that way. Cleo was foraging around in the grass, adding to her catalog of things that she can fit into her mouth that don’t smell like food and can’t be chewed or swallowed.
Finally he said, “So, Willie, why aren’t you writing?”
We laughed at that, but it falls on all of us, doesn’t it?
I said, “I don’t think anyone alive today has any business lecturing the past about morality. We use people as spare parts. Souls or no souls, we are ghouls.”
To Cleo all of this is nothing, and I prize that in her. For every creature but us, yesterday is a dream, tomorrow is a mystery – and immortality is not even a joke. Miss Chioux worships – with everything she has. She propitiates, palliates, mourns and rejoices – but she is unburdened by the foreknowledge of her own inescapable death.
I picked her up to carry her home: She’s not called Cleopatra for nothing.
I said, “It’s Father’s Day for billions of children who never had the chance to live, whose lives consisted of one instant of excruciating pain – replicated infinitely. Are we culpable in that – or just complicit? We are lucky to have been born, but we are each one of us father to the person we would become. Happy Father’s Day, Josh.”
