"Do I get to see you again?"
"No expectations?"
The woman waited. The next time he called, years later, she helped him in a way that only the future could write between electronic verse and stanza. If there's only one outcome in a series of daily bullshit events, the cumulative outcome has to be equal to the parts. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Love is not a suitable form for division and then deletion.
***
Saturday, July 28, 2006 1 PM
Professor Florian Joseph Rudaski wandered the byways of I-71 just east of West Salem, Ohio. Joe drove his silver 2003 Benz 320 Sedan with ash leather interior as a protective device. He knew where he had to be on September 1, but he had no idea where or why he had driven the back roads and highways of Ohio now.
As long as he was inside his car, cell phone handy he knew he was safe. There will be moments in the near future when he will consider making a 911 call against himself.
Four years ago, Joe had prepared notes for his lawyer for the divorce. He found un mailed letters where he had imagined his name as a river flowing through dreams he never quite realized. He was glad the letter was never sent. Joe would never admit it, but he could be grandiose.
When Joe visited LA in 1996, he looked at the sign on Hollywood Hills and imagined "Florian Joseph Rudaski." After all he had just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Once upon a time the historian dreamed he was a prophet. Perhaps he would be the unanticipated "God of the Lost Life" written on a newly translated pre-Mayan tablet from Site #345. Joe wondered if he could create his own California style religious sect from his angst. Joe's search would have an atypical origin and an unpredictable final act. The signs of it appeared in all his daily acts of grace and failure. Last year he took care of his niece when her mother returned to school. Joe and Juliet flirted; on her 20th birthday, the naked woman danced and pretended she couldn't see Joe. That night the self-aware historian Rudaski wrote about himself as if he were an historical person in a Lolita sequel.
As Joe often explained to his seminar, "every action has several consequences and choice is the means by which the successive action plays out. There are many levels within the overlap of layers that create an entirely new present. Every perceived idea becomes a new way of living. Things, of course, change too fast. Usually, these vulnerable personalities in the scrapper of war show their greatness.
Joe had no idea how his world would change from his unpredictable final act. Joe had always been attracted to younger women. Perhaps that's why he had no children. He had only acted on the urge in places where he knew he was safe. The movie star college professor feared rejection, but he understood his compulsion. It's not that Joe didn't like mature women. He preferred them, but there were some who pushed him over the edge. In High School, the younger daughters of some of his friends had idolized him. He was a football and baseball star. At camp he taught a girl counselor to scuba and his hands trembled at night, but he did not do anything. There was no reason why he couldn't seduce the girl. She obviously wanted him, but Joe didn't like using that special skill to get more than he thought he deserved.
In Vietnam, on leave, in Thailand, he slept with young women for a week. He let go there, because he believed he would not survive the war.
Back in the world, in graduate school, young women satisfied his unease. He married a much younger woman. She didn't want children. He resisted temptation. She divorced him because he was bored by her.
When Joe drove alone in his air conditioned luxury car on this hot July afternoon in 2006 he nurtured bizarre images tied to nightmares. Sometimes, to not be aroused, He thought of the fuck as convoluted vomit and a glaze of semen or feminine lubricant. Sex lived in this group as an intellectual misfit. Rivers and valleys disgorged into feed back mechanism that covered the ground with flora. Nothing was in balance or could be predicted. Wrong preceded right.
Disgusting was ordinary. Incest and exploitation linked itself to the most ordinary of melodies. It would never be acceptable, but it doesn't go away. Even astute politicians rubbed themselves to their perfect Kink motel. Even Congress folded and the Pages lined up to pay their respects.
