From This O, So Dreadful Place
By Dan Delehant
Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
–P. B. Shelley
“The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of critical functions. The hypothalamus controls the four Fs: one, fighting; two, fleeing; three, feeding; and four, fuc— ahh … fornicating.”
I can still recall Javier Gomez’s words as he spoke one afternoon in the professors’ lounge. Javier, or Javy as we all called him, taught Latin American History and Anthropology, and he was holding forth in his quiet and unassuming manner on the mysteries of human consciousness.
“Current studies,” Javy said, “indicate that less than 100,000 years ago, humans—perhaps as few as 5,000 in number—fought and out-thought other competing hominids and emerged out of Africa. This bipedal vanguard was armed with such potent evolutionary weapons as well-developed speech and a burgeoning consciousness, compliments of the Cro-Magnon brain’s nascent neocortex.”
He rhapsodized on the human brain with its collection of nerve assemblages and ganglions that, together, produce that amazing emerging quality called consciousness. He paused, straightening himself to his full five feet, eight inches and flipped a wing of dark hair out of his eyes, then gave what he called a crude, but effective example of an emerging quality: “Neither hydrogen nor oxygen by themselves exhibit the quality of wetness, but when combined as a molecule of H2O, the phenomenon of wetness emerges.”
Around the lounge heads nodded, eyebrows raised.
“Wetness is real—to an extent. Undo the molecule and wetness evaporates,” Javy continued. “And unravel the myriad cerebral combinations that constitute the brain and consciousness disappears. It’s not magic or even mysterious, just devilishly complicated. Wetness and consciousness are but resultant products of electro-chemical molecular constructions.”
Sitting in that faculty lounge, where I was a fellow academic consumed by my own thoughts, beliefs, and doubts, I felt Javy’s words wash over me. They still do, even all these years later, as I have become the beneficiary of dozens of the Cuadernos or notebooks of Javier Gomez. Here is a small entry, shared without his permission, I might add. I would ask, but Javier is no longer available—he died.
Back in my university days, I shared an apartment in Mexico City with a young woman with whom I was hopelessly enamored. I loved and desired her with a relentless passion, but her love and interest in me dwindled. Then, one darkest of days, she told me, “I have been cheating on you, Javy, and it’s eating me up. I feel terrible, but I’m leaving you.”
I could not have predicted my reaction. It came from somewhere deep and primal within my brain. “No! Stop! Don’t tell me anymore,” I pleaded. “I don’t want these truths of yours. Just let me be with your lies. Just don’t go away. Don’t leave me—please.”
My pathetic and forlorn begging bought me but a few more days and nights with her. Then she was gone, and I sunk like a rock to hitherto unknown oceanic depths within. My health suffered, my self-esteem rotted. I dropped out of the university, and I descended into a dark, bathyal trench. Quite appropriately too, for her name was Marianna.
After an avalanche of entreating but ignored letters and unanswered phone calls, and following long dreadful months of a malignant solitude, the oceanic trench spit me back up. To my surprise, I survived. But, to my shame, I would have reveled even in those bittersweet roiling seas of untruth had she stayed. Lo, these many years later, I still ache over the thought of her—the loss of her.
Five years ago, when I heard that she had died, I went off alone and wept like an abandoned child.
I’d met Javier years before, but only through those Cuadernos did I come to truly know him. Without ever giving voice to it, we were secret sharers; we both lived beneath the same dark sun. We lived in the shadow lands of conjured spirit and soul and all the varied chains and fetters and false freedoms. Myself, I’m no research scientist hunting factual truths in micro or macro realms. No, not even close, for I lack the discipline, the training, and the courage. Yet over the years and the many lies I’ve told myself, Javy and I have grown quite close. We have become cohorts, like brothers even.
As with Javy and his lost Marianna, in your own desperation you may prefer the deceptions and lies. You know you should seek and cling to truth, but it can be so bitter and unpalatable. Instead, you ache to rush back to those oh-so-comforting falsehoods. Perhaps, peace comes when you finally stop the incessant queries. I wouldn’t know, for I’ve never been at peace.
I am a restive wreck of a man, perishing beneath a dark cloud of unanswerable questions. And still I retreat from the bloody and horrific front lines of truth.
For all his scientific studies and insight, Javy once confided to me years ago as we shared beers after class that he still whispered prayers to Christ and his Holy Virgin Mother.
“I fear,” he said in a quiet, almost shamed voice, “that I’m a traitor to my training, my teaching, and all I’ve learned.”
“Perhaps,” I told him, “our brains are more concerned with comforts, than truths. They are more in tune with magical things like the Virgin Mary and less so with stark and unsettling realities.”
Nodding, Javy finished off his glass of beer. “I have to get going. Rosa is making dinner. Come home with me. A good homemade Mexican meal will do your agnostic ass some good—well, figuratively speaking maybe, but maybe not so much literally.”
We both laughed. It turned out to be the best dinner I’d had in a year. My fast-food addicted intestines handled the Michoacán meal just fine.
Cancer brought down life’s curtain on my friend. Two traumatic surgeries did little to alleviate Javy’s pain and, at the end, it was only morphine that gave him peace—morphine and then death. There were no sadder days for me, and Javy’s passing was as dark as when my own loved ones died.
I still recall Rosa sitting in the church pew, one hand wiping tears from her son’s cheeks and the other pinching the black glass beads of her rosary. Her weeping dark eyes cast upwards, entreating her precious Christ on the cross.
The scene brings to mind some lines from Javier’s Cuaderno #50. He wrote of having gone to a “Science and Sin” retreat in the volcanic mountains of Michoacán. He went into a remote little chapel to be alone and pray, but was taken aback to see several others there, also praying. After a short time, a young local woman approached him. “Would it be okay,” she asked, “if I knelt beside you?”
Javier did not die alone as he so feared and often mentioned in his early journal entries. His faithful in every sense of the word esposa Rosa and his adoring son Eladio held his hands as he took his last breaths, releasing him from this O, So Dreadful Place.
“My mother,” Eladio told me at his father’s funeral, “is a human prayer-engine. My father adored her.”
Like Marianna of the Trench, Rosa, too, had been aptly named—but in her case because she was never without her rosary.
It was Eladio who so generously gave me his father’s many Cuadernos, telling me that it made him too sad to read through those notebooks. After the funeral, when Eladio and I were alone, he told me he often wondered whom his father would choose to spend eternity with, should his desperate pipedreams of an afterlife turn out to be real.
“Marianna or Rosa,” he added wistfully. “The thought of it makes me sad for my mother and me, because I think I know the answer.”
Eladio glanced over at the tall stack of his father’s Cuadernos, then looked back at me. “From what I’ve learned so far in my young life, I think both Marianna and my mother, Rosa, got what they wanted out of life—but not so much my father.”
I made a weak attempt to disabuse Eladio, but he laughed and waved me off. “I’m a scientific realist,” he said. “You needn’t be tender with me.”
I felt Javy’s presence just then and knew he was proud that this intelligent and comprehending young man was his son.
One day, out of the blue, Rosa called and invited my wife and me to dinner. “Eladio will be home from college this weekend,” she said, “and he’d be so glad to see you.”
I hadn’t seen either one of them for over a year.
Eladio was now studying physics at Cal Berkeley. At dinner, he confessed to me that he wondered how his father would deal with his son now being a totally “Christopher Hitchens-addicted atheist” (his exact words). I assured him that his father would be beaming with pride regardless of any belief or nonbelief he professed. His mother smiled wordlessly at me, then glanced meaningfully toward an ornate altar in the corner of the room where a two-foot-tall colorful statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe stood, with a rosary and several sets of scapulars on long strings draped about her ceramic shoulders and praying hands.
Rosa then looked at me and smiled that smile that had so enraptured Javy in that tiny Michoacán chapel so many years ago. “I pray for Eladio, just as I pray for my husband. I pray for you and your wife, too. I hope that is okay.”
I thanked her for her prayers and smiled back. My wife, herself a Hitchens-addicted atheist, got up from the table and hugged Rosa, kissing her on the cheek.
“My mother,” said Eladio, “even prays for the soul of Marianna.”
“Who knows,” said Rosa, smiling, “maybe they are together now. I love him so much that I’d be happy for him. And her.”
Dan Delehant‘s stories have appeared in Wild, Weird, Wonderful Inland Empire 25th Anniversary Anthology, Literary Garage Magazine, Dear Booze Magazine, and several others. Dan and his wife, Dora, live in Temescal Valley in Southern California.