Casualties of Forgiveness. Part VI

I imagined Maria in planes above my head. I searched for them like shooting stars. She couldn’t tell me how long she’d be gone.

“Let me come with you,” I pleaded.
“I’m going with my father. I’m meeting my mother. This isn’t the time for us.” “Let me come with you.”
“It’s all too strange. He’s been watching us! And rather than confront it he’s drawn a book and disappeared! I need to get away from this. You, I’m seeing too much of him in you, of you in him, of me in the middle. I need to clear my head.”
“I want to be with you, Maria, please! Let me follow you to Morocco, to Poland, wherever you’re going.”

I knew I was clinging too tight, but I didn’t care. Nagging feeling that I was becoming passionate, assertive, like him.

“You’re just as obsessed,” she said. “I’ve seen you get up at night. I’ve heard pencil scratchings through the wall. A woman learns quick. Art makes a great lover and shitty husband. Art burns pasta and forgets the dishes. Forgets you’re even there.”
“I’m in love with you. It has nothing to do with Rafter. Forget him!”

I never tried to be like Rafter Sousa. At worst I simply came to similar conclusions a moment too late. There was a deep refuge between us, something essential that was the same. If I’d never met him we would’ve been the same man. Instead I come off as a thief, a pathetic other. Sneaking toward his shores. Slipping my emptiness into his sacred waters.

Rafter was a bookish figure in my college dorm. I saw him with entire sections in his hands. We shared classes. We were introduced by the coffee machine and spent endless nights weaving our way through literary theory. He turned toward a newer medium; I lingered in the ruins of an old one. The problems were the same. The search for morality in a web of infinite and arbitary signs. Together we confronted the slow death of langauge. Dug our way toward meanings that slipped unnoticed. Shared double expressos and cigarette burns.

We were allies, idealistic. Our friendship began in some abstract pursuit. But the closer we got to the thing we were chasing the more he pulled away. Always a step ahead. I accused him of going too far, of unclarity, of nonsense at every turn. And then one morning I’d wake up, coffee and cigarette and realize suddenly that I agreed. It happened enough times that I began to resent him, began to challenge him for the sake of finding myself. Wake up every morning with a newly formed thought that someone already had before you. Echo of a more interesting man. After college we stayed close while drifting apart. He fought publishing rights and I fought obscurity. At some point he realized he didn’t need me for what he was after; and through my bitterness and awe I realized the chance to write his comics was nothing but a favour for an old friend.
That’s when Maria entered our lives and became the space between us. She became his muse and editor. Soon after she became his wife and my lover.

“Take care, Luke. Goodbye,” she said. And with a final boarding call she was gone.
My name sounded foreign on her lips. She spoke it so seldom. Luke Jonathan Drake. Two thirds biblical. Not very memorable, not unique. Not like Rafter Sousa.
Bored, lost, I invented ways to pass the time.

There were black flies in my apartment. I named them all Rafter. Rafter. Rafter. Rafter. I followed their buzzing around the room. “It’s not even a fucking name,” I told them. “It’s a support beam. A dead piece of metal used to hold up buildings.”

My sense of otherness was spreading. I weighed every consequence of choice against him. What would Rafter Sousa think of this table? How would Rafter Sousa spend the afternoon? I felt as though he’d stolen an identity from me, a sense of self I had to reclaim.

That night I received a call from his publisher. Rafter was in Italy; D&B wanted him back, wanted his book. They offered me a ticket and a rented car in Italy. They offered me a chance. I couldn’t walk away from the web I was in, no matter how pointless or hurtful. There were still unformed reasons to confront him. I agreed to pursue Rafter Sousa, compell him to publish his graphic novel with a story I’d write. I remembered almost page for page what I’d seen that night with Maria. The publisher was right: the pictures were perfect but the art was incomplete. It begged for words, not just titles and dialogue, but an entire story, a new language.

I snuck back into his studio alone that night. The book was still there. I became convinced that he wanted me to find it. I lingered and drank warm wine. I sat down in his place and began to write a story to the images before me. Certain panels burned into my skull. A family keeping warm by the light of a book on fire. A goddess weeping over the globe she’d assembled. Men in uniform murdering for high ground on a sinking ship. Final panel on 88, the only numbered page, my cameo. Maria naked on top of me, my arms the way I hold her. A black cat and the full moon watching it all at the window. Their own affair.