The Beginning To The End

Part One

Ruby woke up from a short nap startled, she didn't know where she was or how she came to be there. Simple as that, it happens to people all the time, particularly in their forties. They lie down and find themselves in the borderlands of sleep and wakefulness, a cat near their thigh or not, trying to avoid going too far one way or the other, trying to linger just a while in the tender wasteland that is superficial dream, superficial sleep, lingering in the conciousness that serves to protect visions from escaping into the vast darkness of sleep or dissipate in the bright sun bearing down from a bedroom window like a light suddenly turned on in a dimmed room. Awakening to an uncertain time and the smell of burning food in the kitchen, the steady stream of a car alarm outside on the street. The undeclared wars outside have been raging for years yet all that is available to the intellect is a thin stream of thought or an idea of a certain color attached to a pleasing sentiment or some strange mathematical equation which lacks a rational answer.

As Ruby had drifted off for what was supposed to be her usual late afternoon nap, she had been trying to remember and dream a pale spring afternoon, the kind where rain has dictated to the sky a lavendar shade, a shade perfectly suited to memories and the containment of them with the foreground the best green color the mind can endeavor; a green which signifies all that is kept untouched by the purplish light of the dying sun through breaking clouds. A fully saturated light, the kind photographers wait hours on end to capture on film and retain as if they had painted the colors on themselves and were somehow responsible for the glory. Ruby breathed carefully in and out, remembering the sounds of the canyon in late April, just one week after she had married. Quiet sounds of cars passing at 5 pm, tugging their weight up the steep road through the small mountainous town where she'd grown up. A dog was barking intermittently, it echoed against the copper doors of the judicial building just across from the wooden miner's shack she'd called home just weeks before she'd agreed to marry a foreign man. A child was on a swing in the house across the landing of the long, winding stairs which cascaded in tiers through the small mining town like farmlands in mountainous countries in geography books. The little girl whistled a pure and uneven tune. Ruby remembered the sound of birds flocking towards the night in the giant cottonwood trees outside which created the illusion of percussion, of flight. Two lovers walked down the stairs hand in hand, laughing quietly as if not at all. The silence was punctuated by a complex suffering in her soul which she felt at that moment, between her dream and waking, to acutely exist as if it had been retrieved or had returned from a hard journey. She never woke up in the same way again. After that peculiar and inconspicuous moment in time it was as if no one did, or ever would. The world had absolutely changed forever and Ruby lay still, heard the beat of her own heart as her hair scraped out a time signal against her pillow. She opted to stop trying. It was her birthday and there were gifts waiting on the dining room table, her children were on their way home from their foreign school and her husband Sol was wasting his time in an office less than a two kilometers away. He was discussing more plans for business, always more plans, more opportunities with a man who looked like so many others, all of whom had the same sort of plans which inevitably led to immense power and wealth. The two men were just parting at that moment, shaking hands and laughing slightly, deliberately. A horrendous conspiracy of hopeful and entirely anticipated failure animated their laughing faces as they bared their teeth to one another. It was happening all over the city that way, one could almost hear the din of it if it weren't for the constant sound of planes taking off, cars speeding over miles and the constant wind which pelted the Levant from spring to summer.

This is where it seemed to begin but the early chapters of her life impacted her like the percussion of her hair on the pillow and the wings of the birds so long ago, as one day led to another and another and soon it was a collection of years which steadily increased their hold on her mind until the demands of fusion held sway over the usual needs provoked by the demands of life. It was increasingly difficult for her to explain how she managed to be in any particular place at any given time and sometimes, she noticed with a certain embarrassment, she lost her way even though she was walking down her own stairs or driving the familiar roads that led to the second home she had helped her husband's family to build, the one in South Lebanon with a view into the thorn-studded rocky terrain where Jesus Christ himself had once walked, shoulder to shoulder with his disciples. A town that resembled her own town far away because of the hills inside which it rested. It was a house that would have remained unfinished if it had not been for Ruby's steady resolve, the resolve of a Catholic minding the second commandment while remembering the first, reminding her husband as well. Honor thy mother and thy father. She'd forgotten the other eight.

For several months before returning like this to some kind of central theme which she found running through her up-to-then turbulent life, Ruby found herself driving past the scene of a car accident, her own and wondering what had gone wrong that day. But she couldn't find the right place, the exact spot where she had actually seen time standing still for one brilliant moment, the moment she saw the trajectory itself, of her car speeding towards a thin aluminum pole with thin shafts of sunlight emerging from around the edges of what appeared to be a two dimensional object. She had let go of the wheel, given up. Talked herself into a kind of certainty, the certainty called, life passing before one's eyes at the final moment, when that is in all actuality, ludicrous. The moment when one knows intuitively that they should either be there or not be there, that events add up to exactly that particular thing at that particular place in time.

She'd speed up and slow down on the autostrat, checking for signs of her collision that day although her hopes diminished that any traces would remain after so much time had passed over the spot, as days went by. Motorscooter riders and deaf old men sullied the sacred pole with urine, this much was certain. How many times had she seen one of them drop their pants in full view and urinate, not caring whether or not a woman was watching or a child or a police officer, the few of them that there were in Beirut, the post war city. The grand expectations that accompany the moral adventure called war, a perilous illusion. Amazing that one of the affects of war is a certain kind of lawlessness that attracts more of the same and more until finally, even the police give up their perusal of events leading to more of the same and more. Just cycling around like that in a futile attempt to just get by, just relieve oneself of the order imposed by chaos. Urinating on poles all around the city, beside the road into bushes, in front of schools.

She'd been having a few problems with civilization. All of it. From the mundane on through to the complex. Everything had taken on a grave significance and her moods swung with the tides of the day. Noisy mornings full of honking and jets and back down into the deep slumbers of the night when she would sit for hours looking out the kitchen window wondering why a red light on the pavement outside looked the same anywhere in the world as it reflected motor oil and human refuse collected in the hands of the wind and dropped down right where anyone could see it. Why was anything like it is? Certainly, it was the reason she held the wheel with just enough pressure to allow it to touch off the cornerstone of an immense garbage truck and send her into the gaping-wide, open infinity of the sunlight behind the aluminum pole. A tiny detail so small that the witnesses that gave their testimony swore by Allah that it was the truck driver who had committed the offense by trying to pass her in a most illegal way. That was true but there was this tiny pressure from her side and she fought to find where she had left that effort.

As she gradually gained something called consciousness, and really, those few seconds were enveloped in a lack of pure reason and thought and what could be called will, Ruby pulled herself out of the car which was bleeding gas and water into the dirt, by ripping the cartilage near her left knee, severing it from it's source as if, had she failed, her leg would have been cut off completely from the rest of her body and she wouldn't have noticed the difference. Nearly a superhuman effort and without pain. Music was still coming out of the radio, Miss Sarajevo, but it had transformed into a kind of nonsense, the way foreign music sounds to the non foreign ear. The way Indian music sounds in the back seat of a taxi cab travelling down the main streets of somewhere called Riyadh. Not even music anymore. It just blaired on through the instants of reawakening like that and she pulled herself into an upright position. Her necklace was hanging from it's torn chains and the windshield was entirely in shards on the ground where she couldn't see them nor piece them together again.

At least two hundred men and not one woman, that she could remember, stood gaping open mouthed at the incident they had just witnessed. Some of her friends passed by in the other direction on the autostrat with their children in their cars, each of them commenting on the sadness of dying in an accident like that, not knowing that it was Ruby in the wreckage. Or that she was alive. Her own children were waiting at the school, getting nervous as they listened to sirens in the distance. All the other children already gone home, some of them already eating a late lunch with busy mothers huddled over them, feeding them by hand like little birds with the false kind of integrity Arab women have when forced to it by their tribal principles. Whatever that may be. Mostly male principles born from the heads of men who were fed in the same manner, like little birds, never questioning the source, the idea of feeding themselves, a kind of dictatorial relationship between what is necessary and what is expected.

A thing much like childbirth itself, one has no choice and what goes into the body, into the child comes out in various ways.

*******************


Her first child had been a somewhat untimely accident. Like most things. A happy one after the finances had been reckoned with, after the abortion clinic had been aborted to protestors outside, after a midwife had been selected to deliver Ruby's first born into the world inside a dingy apartment in the University section of the city in which she and Sol lived when they were very young. A city called Phoenix but no one knows why. To rephrase that, no one including Ruby knows why the word Phoenix should figure into the naming of a city. After all, cities rise up and stay that way, don't they? Just like eggs are fertilized and grow into human beings inside of a woman's uterus. Just like her own first child was scheduled to be born on a hot summer day sometime in June, sometime near the publication of Bonfire of the Vanities, just short of Huey Lewis and the News. A nonsensical kind of relationship between geography and human life. Clot to cradle, clot to cradle, cradle to coffin and then, nothing or something better, something worse, but never, the same thing twice. Like lightning.

Sol was studying the building of buildings at the state university there and Ruby was trying to study photography. Between night shifts at a coffee shop and obstetrical visits. Between fights with Sol and bouts of incredible loneliness. Her father died then, on his own birthday, just a short while before her daughter was visible to the naked eye which was a sadness that could not be ammended save for the short visits he paid to Ruby in her dreams. Her mother used to tell her about MJ as he was called by the other miners, that Ruby was "the apple of his eye" and "that happened before you were a twinkle." A kind of tribal time frame that was clear to anyone from that part of the country in Ruby's part of the world. A world that defined all places by the first letter of their respective names: New Guinea, New Hampshire, New South Wales, Newfoundland. Paris, Polynesia, Prague. Liberia, Lebanon, Libya. The way she was taught to recognize things of a certain order, by their first letters. The way she thought everyone learned anything of any importance and only, in two languages, Spanish and English. The Ottoman Empire was mentioned exactly once in her eleventh grade history course and then, no more. It was as if it had never even happened at all. At least to Ruby or, least of all, to Ruby.

She had taken measures to insure the birth of her daughter at a given time by ingesting grape Kool Aid laced with exactly four fluid ounces of castor oil. An old wive's tale this and on the second go after horrendous dry heaves between the spoonfuls she forced Sol to ladle into her mouth, Ruby finally went into a three day labor of love. She was on a tight schedule and was paying for the delivery with coins she had saved from waiting tables at the coffee shop and had she gone a couple more days, she and Sol would have been forced to pay for a real delivery, the hospital kind. She walked up and down the streets of Phoenix in order to dilate her cervix just like the midwife and all the books had told her to do. She went shopping as the time grew nearer at her favorite five & dime and when the most powerful contraction hit her there between her pelvis and the Toblerone, the midwife slipped her into an employee's restroom and shoved her hand between Ruby's legs to check out the progress of "things". Time to go home. Time to deliver what it was that had to be delivered.

Ruby's sister was waiting, staring contentedly at the small color TV Ruby had received from her parents a couple years before on her seventeenth birthday. Days of Our Lives still running strong like sands through the hourglass. When Ruby entered through the living room door with her Jewish midwife in tow, Ann knew it was time to get down to business. Ann was all business. She was a nurse who made it her personal duty to attend homebirths as if she was a pioneer out on the range. It was a matter of principle but this time it was her kid sister, a bit more than principle. And she didn't trust the midwife to do what would be needed to be done and that would be, prevent catastrophe. As it turned out, Ruby wasn't quite ready so instead the midwife asked her if she wanted an enema to which Ruby replied, "I guess so." The two women laid her out on the floor between the bathroom and the delivery room (where the baby had been conceived) and inserted the bottle of Fleets without incident. Ruby got up with incredible difficulty and made her way into the bathroom and evacuated her distended bowels already sore from the ill-advised castor oil and returned to her own bed to rest before the triathalon's final heat. Ingrid, the midwife, studied Ruby's face hard and felt she'd have plenty of time to sew a little skull cap for the baby and perhaps, have a bite to eat with Ruby's sister, get some of her self confidence back from the woman who obviously knew more than she did about pioneer living. Ann had made that perfectly clear months ago at the restaurant where the three of them had met to discuss the plans, the emergency equipment and the like, eat whole grain muffins.

Ruby tried to go to sleep but it was no use. The pain just kept interupting her every time she closed her eyes long enough to relax. She could hear laughter in the other room. Everyone had been called and arrived one after another. Her midwife had been only partially certified so that required an advanced practitioner to be present. Then a medical student asked if she could attend. Ruby asked her sister-in-law who was married to Sol's brother to be her labor coach knowing that Sol was somehow ill-prepared for such a thing even though he had often watched his grandfather deliver animals of their load. Ruby's mother had arrived and was sleeping in the adjoining bedroom, too old to get too excited about anything anymore prior to resting-up a bit first. In all, ten people were present to participate in some way, in the birth of yet another human being. It was years later when Ruby had herself graduated from nursing school that she recognized the face of the medical student on the neurological floor where she was working and exclaimed, "You were there! Remember me?" To which the doctor replied, "I think so." How one person can forget what is important to another is one of the mysteries of life. Ruby thought to herself about all the stories along the way that mattered She seldom forgot any of them. Or maybe it was that the connections she recognized along the way were too deeply ingrained because of the way she noticed things slightly out of the ordinary. Perhaps she too had forgotten the ordinary stories all along, the way a car bumps into another and you assume what you assume about it due to the distance you are standing away from it when you see it.

The End

Those who have reached this conclusion have done so for free and the joke is on all of us. Life is an elaborate illusion in which there are many conclusions proposed. Why me? Well,I don't know, why not? It is the final last line which renders everything simple, everything that could be said in a book or in a life, why not? We'll never really know until we touch base with a moment in time. A moment in the chaotic universe that we can call our own. Some call it death and others, call it life.

The problem is with the story and the life, it can stop on a dime. Even though you'd like it to go on just a little further.