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The muscle of the heart unravels in one piece, she says, I’ve seen it happen before, she says, once a long time ago I saw a man, this crazy-looking old man, his hair all matted down his back in one crusty knot, I’m telling you, crazy, he’s talking to himself, standing there by the side of the road just outside Cotati, she says, and I know that’s how this is gonna sound to you, too, but I swear, I saw him reach one dirty hand right into the center of his split chest and grab at the top of his heart and pull and pull until it came tearing out of him like a ripcord, like an opened airlock, his body ballooning out and away into the corn-blue sky, his right hand lying there twitching like roadkill on the ground, holding onto the meat of his heart as the rest of him lifted up and up, she says, and Christ, it was awful, all that red spilling into the asphalt, I couldn’t barely look away, she says, but the worst part is what I’m thinking, the whole time I’m watching this poor crazy old man turn inside out and eclipse the sun, held down on Earth only scarcely by the beating wet root of himself, she says, the whole time I’m thinking: Goddamn, that is one big heart.
Ambidexterity is a sin. Right or left, it’s up to you, but you’ll never get anything you really want unless you feel around for it in the dark for a little while first. Think about it like this: If God were in a burning building and He had ten seconds to decide between saving Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit from a falling timber I think we both know which one He’s choosing. Nothing wrong with it. It’s the natural order, the ancient way of things, like how the mother sow knows it’s better for everybody if she just eats the runt herself: there just has to be one hand you trust more than the other. There just has to be a favorite thumb.
And we’re sitting starboard on the patio of the Highland Dell, mosquitoes dropping into our hair like confetti, the big-boned German waitress waddling over to see if you’d like another hefeweizen, you nodding your head yes — maybe you’ll drink it, or maybe you won’t, maybe the red-orange ripples licking over the surface of the water are the hand of a saint come down from Heaven and this is the only way our limited human consciousness is capable of perceiving it, maybe the lone kayaker cutting a wake downstream is Jesus the way it looks like he’s floating in mid-air, maybe we’re already dead and we’re trapped in purgatory together because you’re not religious and I’m a compulsive liar and we both had too much premarital sex — or maybe it’s just the sunset, and the weightless feeling of your hand in mine, and the glimmer off the river catching my eye and radiating like the sound of a five-bell alarm directly into the center of my brain that makes it so when the waitress asks if we’re ready to order, I completely forget what I was going to say.
