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God, Medusa and the Cheque

Essay on Gods and Men

By Martina IacomiPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
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Photo titled 'Of Gods and Men' by Alex Stoia

“Do I look like a kept woman?”

“Silly goose, of course not,” said Alexander in a low voice, resting on the wooden Tudor chair considered to be the “thinking chair” of their household. “Is that money still troubling you?”

Marva had positioned herself in the center of the living room and was now, in the fashion of a Greek statue, completely still and pensive. Like a soft-bodied cephalopod, the afternoon sun had spread its tentacles into the room, cascading rivers of fire onto Marva’s wild hair, making it of a brighter red than usual. Even there, surrounded by the 21st century high-tech gadgets and pieces of furniture that populated their urban room, she still looked like the gorgon Medusa who boasted an immense array of powers over any beholder, baleful and beneficial powers alike.

In an instant though, she turned on her heel and left the room only to return to the same central spot, as on a podium, with the $20,000 cheque in her hand:

“I’ve never even held a cheque in my life, you know. I mean, I’ve seen them in movies, everybody has, but who uses them here, in Romania? Where would I even cash it? Do I need to go to an American bank or …?”

She started waving the cheque, like an unenthusiastic queen whose hand gesture solely oozes decorum.

It might be of use to mention that Marva was a petite woman of 35, whom people felt it was their duty to protect as if she were 6 and whose words sometimes counted as if she were 106, so this narrator is to be exonerated of the hardship of describing her physical appearance with the utmost accuracy. Perhaps the reader will be more successful in envisioning Marva a nymphet, a maiden who retained an age of innocence in her relationships, but whose peculiar nature enthralled the travelers of her life – the more they listened to her, the more seduced they were and more of a Medusa she became.

In Alexander’s eyes however, the current cheque dilemma turned her into a child again, for the expression on her face, which moments before had been excruciatingly tense and probing, now made room for a touching dose of disheartenment, usually found in the repertoire of children entrusted with a larger than expected dose of reality.

“We’ll figure it out, don’t worry. D’you mean to tell me it’s these technicalities that have got you so upset? Isn’t the larger picture more of an issue here?”

Alexander did not dare look at Marva when asking the question - he knew he had lit the fuse to the emergence of intensity in her eyes, but instead started rocking in his chair, legs crossed, warming the snifter in his hand, and calmly sipping his brandy. He knew without seeing that her eyes were the shade of Kīlauean lava.

“The larger picture, Alex? The larger picture?! Let’s see: single, middle-aged American sapphist sends unexplainable $20,000 gift to her half-her-age, Eastern European pen pal before passing unexpectedly in a horseback riding accident in the middle of a goddamned pandemic - would you say that just about sums it up, the larger picture I mean?”

“It’s a lot to take in, I know, and pretty absurd when laid out like that. Harper must have grown really fond of you this past year you’ve been corresponding. I’m so sorry, Marva…” said Alexander as he stopped rocking his chair.

“Alex, don’t you find it strange that when someone dies, the sympathy etiquette makes is so that you mostly hear ′I’m sorry for your loss′, which is supposed to comfort the relatively small family of the deceased, as opposed to ′I’m so sorry he or she died′, which would be an acknowledgement of what had been taken from all the living? Say the Sistine Chapel is swallowed by flames one day or the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Pietà is beheaded by some radicalized fanatic, would one send sympathy notes to the Italian people or would one cry for these things, as if they were one’s own?”

By all appearances, Marva was calm, but her companion knew that lava, much more viscous than other fluids, could flow slowly, burn deep, and travel far.

“What I find strange is that you’re bottling things up.”

“Or take the deaths of messiahs throughout history,” she continued,” hard to imagine patting the parents on the shoulder and leaving a casserole of sorts at their doorstep. If every man is ′a piece of the continent, a part of the main′, then the loss of every inch of land, of every soul, is a personal loss.”

“Well, I hate to burst your metaphor, M, but people don’t much give a damn about the actual loss of land due to sea level rising. John Donne’s continent will simply be more and more crowded as it literally shrinks.”

Marva reclined her head, articulating a nod in silent approval, then she lay on her living room podium, in Shavasana pose. It was now scorching hot in the room, which Marva hated, and it would have been so easy to just turn on the air conditioning in the hallway, but Alexander decided against it, hoping that the woman he loved would cave to this impossible stimulus, like a Camus character, and finally unleash some of the rage contained by the frail cage bars of her chest.

The stillness of the sounds in the room, sounds which were just lying around, embraced with dust, was swiftly broken by the ringing of Marva’s mobile. As she picked up, Alexander thought he would mimic an interest in a book he had bought from an online giant, the kind who pushes corner libraries out of business, titled The Folly of Thinking with Your Own Head. He gave it a flick-through while in the background he was focusing on Marva’s voice: “Yes, this is 0743-mhm-302… oh, really, I’ve won… how exciting, and I’d have to pay… sure, in order to collect my prize… and you need my personal info as well … what a surprise … say, how about you tell me more of how you got into a life of scamming … What, are we pouting? Hanging up? Yep, they hung up.”

She smiled at Alexander and put the phone back into her large, silk, pajama pocket same an Old West gunfighter would blow away smoke from the barrel and return the pistol to its holster. “Scammers,” she said playfully, “the pandemic has turned them into full time clerks”, then she crawled on her belly, like a soldier in trenches, dragging herself to the nearest credenza from where she pulled a small black notebook and started jotting something down.

“What’s that you’re writing?” asked Alexander.

“These guys helped me remember a Freudian joke: ′Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke his famous words? ′ asks someone. ′Yes, this is the place, but he never spoke those words′ answers the other person. You see Alex, even things that do not exist have a series of properties. Like God in a way.”

“Oh, I remember, that’s your God-notebook, where you only muse over God, I mean. Will you read us something?”

“Better yet,” replied Marva, “I think I have an entry from the very day I first talked to Harper online, let’s see…There, March 2020.

The scourge of the virus is passed among cabinet members, prefects, and doctors like a blooded cloth to be taken to sea – no one’s hands remain untainted of fault, responsibility, or small victories. This blood does not wash. We hope for a treatment, we pray. But who do we pray to? Who is this Father that watches Its children call It with failing organs, that inspires back the breath of life that It had, not long ago, breathed into them? Is God not a Judas Itself, betraying the object of Its love and interest with a kiss, to death? And how wonderful is Man the Believer, who in his perishability forces God to miss him and recreate him, over and over again!

I’ve met this lady online today. As she presents herself to be a sort of psychic, I’ve asked her what she believes the nature of God is, amid this pandemic. So, I said to her, do you believe:

a) God is interventionist, like an economic policy,

b) God is non-invasive, like mechanical ventilation without the endotracheal tube, or

c) neither of the above, but an Inconceivable, Unnamable, Impenetrable Entity and all we know or pretend to know of It is fake, like fake news in a campaign where stakes are high?

The reason I believe Harper is authentic is that she thought long and hard and finally answered that she hadn’t the slightest clue. “

Alexander was used to Marva’s prosecuting stances, he had witnessed many a trial led by her, with him as the accused more than once, so God was a most welcomed variation. As was he accustomed to Marva switching from being a skeptical existentialist to a devout believer in a way only she could pull off, just like she could go from nymphet to gorgon in a wink. But bringing the subject back to Harper, now that was dense with risk, possibly cathartic.

Marva closed the notebook using the $20, 000 cheque as bookmark.

“M, what are you going to do with the money,” asked Alexander, “maybe something to honor Harper?”

“Ah, the money. Tell you what I’d like to do with the money: I’d like to take the cheque, send it back to the States, have Harper not write it, have the horse she was riding not rear out of control, or have her altogether avoid the stables, and be working at the university instead, in a world free of biological threats... Hey, what’s that smell?”

Marva got up and went to the living room window, sniffing the air. The downstairs neighbors were boiling a chicken and the nauseating smell, spread like teargas, activated a perverse reminder that she and Alex were very much alive.

“Same with that chicken: I’d rather it rose from that kettle, I’d rather its body parts came together, its kidneys and liver and heart, I’d rather its feathers went back, dry and smooth, I’d rather its eyes were alive again. I’d rather the chicken be with its chickens, away from here!”

A long pause followed.

“Not to mention the money makes me so uncomfortable,” she continued. “Was it a gift, what for, am I this pitiful Balkan woman stereotype whom she felt to pay for companionship? You know what? Never mind. Nothing makes sense and if it did, it would be unnervingly offensive.”

Quite composedly and with a posture that insinuated she wanted to be alone, Marva left for the kitchen, where she spent the rest of the afternoon and the first evening hours. At around 5 she called her mother for a moussaka recipe, which expanded into a long argument over the mistakes the latter had made in Marva’s upbringing.

At half past six she invited Behemoth, the family cat, into the kitchen and served him a tuna file, a dinner throughout which she sang him her favorite Michel Sardou song from start to finish. At the end, she kissed him on the forehead and said: “God and Men are quite unfair in their choices, best you not depend on them.”

At 7 she went back into the living room and turned on the TV.

Her eyes caught the image of a dissident on the news, drawing a heart from inside a glass cage for his wife.

Her eyes moved in nystagmus. A long tinnitus ensued.

On the other side of the wall, Alexander heard a plaintive, high-pitched raptor shriek and felt the ground shaking as from a sudden release of energy in the lithosphere. And like this narrator, he knew that only a couple of feet away, many things were being broken, many burned and many petrified.

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