Free Travesty by John Hawkes Page B

Perhaps it
     has cut short the lives of a few bumpkins as well.
    But this one is not the lever to pry me from my purpose. My clarity is
     genuine, not false, while my dread, as you in your pathetic hope imagine it, does
     not exist. What more can I say? I respect your theory; I respect the fear from which
     you yourself are suffering (though it oppresses me horribly, horribly); perhaps it
     would be better for all concerned if just this once I could find you in the right
     and could hear the shell cracking, so to speak, and all at once find myself overcome
     with fear and so pull to the side of the road, thus ending our journey, and in rain
     and darkness sit sobbing over the wheel. Then I could take Chantal’s place
     back there on the floor and slowly, slowly, you could drive the three of us to Tara.
     In that case you would take to your bed for two days, Chantal would return to her
     riding lessons, I would follow your lead to the asylum that effected your famous
     cure.
    So it would go, if you were in the right. But you
     are not. If I could discover that my clarity is a sham and that I am afraid of death
     and have devised the entirety of our glassy web because of that same fear of death,
     I would give myself happily to sobbing over the wheel and spend the rest of my days
     (after undertaking the cure) in trying to make restitution to you and Chantal. But I
     can make no such discovery, because there is no such discovery for me to make. Of
     course I have my qualms. Who would not? But as for this maniacal dread of death that
     would explain my planning, my determination, my mounting exhilaration as well as my
     need for a couple of companions, witnesses, supporters to accompany me in the final
     flash of panic—well, it is unknown to me, your maniacal dread.
    But let me be honest. Let me admit that it was precisely the fear of
     committing a final and irrevocable act that plagued my childhood, my youth, my early
     manhood, and that drew me with so much conviction and compassion to those grainy,
     tabloidal, photographic renderings of bodies uniquely fixed, but nonetheless fixed,
     in their own deaths. And in those years and as a corollary to my preoccupation with
     the cut string I could not repair, the step I could not retrieve, I was also plagued
     by what I defined as the fear of no response. It is true. I have nothing to hide. In
     those days (needless to say I was then no sensualist) I required recognition from
     girls behind counters, heroes in stone, stray dogs. Let a policeman dip his stick in
     the wrongdirection and I suffered chills in the spine. The frown
     was my
bête noire
. If the world did not respond to me totally,
     immediately, in leaf, street sign, the expression of strangers, then I did not
     exist—or existed only in the misery of youthful loneliness. But to be
     recognized in any way was to be given your selfhood on a plate and to be loved,
     loved, which is what I most demanded. But no more. The heat of those feelings is
     quite gone. I have long since known what it is to be loved. Now, tonight, I want not
     relief but purity.
    But of course I have just now asked you for “one moment of
     genuine response.” So you see how close you have come to the mark.
    I do not know why that figure of speech (the kneeling marksman, the
     drawn bow, the golden arrow) reminds me so insistently of little Pascal. But so it
     does, the great naked hunter calling forth the little child like a voice from the
     shadows. Perhaps little Pascal was destined to become a larger-than-lifesize hunter,
     naked (except for the silver bow, the golden arrow) and stalking his invisible
     victim among the white boulders beneath a vast sky of unchanging blue. At least I
     always saw the grown man in little Pascal. By the time he died, when he was not yet
     three years of age, he had already become a child god, an infant Caesar. Yes, he had
     already attained his true character by the time he died.
    It is a pity that you had