“Mind Graffiti” by Andrew Gretes

THE WORLD WAS GLITCHY. Mount Rushmore lost one head (Teddy) and sprouted another (Ulysses). The Big Dipper was upside down, spilled. Birds forgot how to chirp. Thousands of residents in Kansas reported falling asleep with brown eyes and waking with blue eyes. As one notable astronomer consoled us: “The laws of physics have a case of the hiccups, nothing more.” Pedestrians spontaneously vaporizing was the exception, not the rule.

According to an emergency investigation, an estimated 5 percent of Earthly matter was out of focus-a permanent blur-as if stuck in mid-teleportation. You had to see it to believe it. My landlady was a gingerbread outline of sand-colored static. But her vocal cords worked just fine.

“342,” (she always called me by my condo number), “let me get this straight-you want me to call a guy to fix the light in your fridge?”

“Is this a bad time?”

God had dementia. That was one interpretation. Max’s interpretation. Max was my god-brother. As infants, we wept in the same baptismal font, our parents circling us with candles and incense and olive oil. Three decades later, Max was the guy I texted every day. My cellular confidant. There’s something about wading together in a vat of exfoliated sin that creates a lasting bond.

As for the world’s hiccups, there was no loss of interpretations. Pundits used words like “rapture” and “intramural apocalypse” and “SASS” (Sudden Atomic Superposition Syndrome). Catholics posited a spiritual boiling point: a threshold of the soul where humans evaporate and transcend the state of matter we call “flesh.” The guy who fixed the light in my fridge blamed everything on time travel. “Mark my words,” he said, “some schmuck backflipped 130 years, tried to abort Hitler, and fucked everything up.”

I had my own problems. After five years of marriage, my wife called it quits. She said, “Fin,” as if love was a silent movie. No fore­play of shouting matches, broken dishes, schlepping a pillow and dramatically declaring one’s intent to sleep in the wilderness of the living room, et cetera. No angry sex. Apparently, my wife had been consulting a therapist for nearly a year, paying a stranger to rehearse our separation without me. When opening night came, her tear ducts were bankrupt.

Max set me straight. He was good at that. He said my wife and I were on different emotional calendars. He drew a rectangle, no ruler, incredibly straight. Max was talented. He divided the rectangle into twelve months. Inside June, Max drew a heart wearing sunglasses. Inside December, Max drew a heart wearing a scarf. I knew the sunglasses-wearing heart was mine because the organ had a thought bubble with a question mark. I knew the scarf-wearing heart was my wife’s because the organ had a speech bubble that was inflated with three letters: F-I-N.

Max said, “She did winter without you.”

Long before Max took out a loan for optometry school, I was Max’s first patient. “Mental astigmatism,” that’s what Max called my condition. I was a heavy squinter. Nothing made sense. I was the coyote; meaning was the roadrunner.

“Look, your wife has ADHD. What could be more incompatible than monogamy and ADHD?”

“Uh.”

“Look, love is a hybrid of skydiving and playing chicken. Inevitably, one lover gets scared and pops open the parachute.”

“Uh.”

“Look, you were on different emotional calendars.”

“Ah.”

If I had to define friendship, I could do it in two words: “symbiotic optometry.” Friendship is an eye exam. Is that better? How about that? What about that?

As for my wife, she texted sporadically, her words spotless and antiseptic. Our exchanges could have inspired a new art movement. Transactional Dada.

“Sent papers.”

“Oh.”

“K.”

“Boy.”

I started having a recurring dream about a vending machine that kidnaps my wife and steals her identity.

In short, I needed closure.

“Max, I need closure.”

“The world might be ending soon. Will that do?”

“I’m going to throw my wedding ring in an active volcano.”

“Yes.” Max was an affirmer. “Hawaii?”

“Sicily.”

The flight was twelve hours, two stops. Being a pious god-brother, Max bought a ticket, too. It wasn’t cheap. Everyone was going everywhere. Sure, neglect was rampant, but no one dared neglect their bucket list. At longitude 37 degrees west, Max elaborated on his diagnosis of God having dementia. Max was wearing headphones. I was piddling with the seat in front of me, struggling to slip a magazine into the mesh pouch of a polyurethane marsupial.

Max said, “Do you remember mind-graffiti?”

Mind-graffiti was the name we gave to defacing our brains, slipping into someone else’s noggin and doodling on its slimy, pink canvas. Max and I spent most of fifth grade as mental delinquents. Max would sit behind my desk and whisper, “Eiffel Tower,” and I’d marvel as a cartoon of the Eiffel Tower was spray-painted on the walls of my hippocampus. Naturally, I’d return the favor, passing a note that read, “Whatever you do, don’t think about sucking your mother’s toes,” and then Max would shriek.

I said, “Sure, it’s the reason I suck at geometry.”

“I don’t think we learned geometry in fifth grade.”

“That’s my point.”

“What if God was a cosmic brain, and every atom in the universe was a strain of God’s thoughts?”

“That’s a lot of thinking.”

“What if God ages? I mean, the sun ages, right? Why not God? Maybe to God, human years are like dog years? So eventually-“

“13.7 billion years eventually.”

“Eventually, God gets a little forgetful, confused. You know, fuzzy about the details.”

“Uh, Max, what does this have to do with mind-graffiti?”

“What if the universe is a canvas, and the only thing holding the paint on the canvas is God?”

And just like that, I was in the fifth grade all over again. Max had infiltrated my noggin. He spray-painted an image of an endless clump of congealed noodles, salted with tiny light bulbs: God as a body-less, blinking brain. The mural twinkled with sacred blasphemy­-God’s brain pickled inside my brain–unsustainable, obviously. One by one, the light bulbs in the mural went black. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could renovate.

We landed in the city of Catania at sunrise. South of the Alps, Mount Erna is supposedly the highest peak in Italy. Hard to verify. Overnight, Etna had transformed into a monolithic blur, as if the mountain had been deemed inappropriate and subject to censorship. I strode down the airport concourse in the direction of the nearest Italian man with a uniform. I said, “Yesterday?!”

He waved his hands like an exasperated sorcerer. “Ieri!”

Max pulled out his translation app. “Yesterday.”

Mount Etna had shifted out of focus as Max and I were flying over the Strait of Gibraltar. The clearest trace of the volcano was the heat escaping from its chimney. 10,800 feet high, we could make out a smudge of gray.

Outside the airport, surrounded by a language with too many vowels, jet-lagged, body pre-gaming for a panic attack, I thought of my wife. These were the symptoms that generally preceded memories of my wife. I fumbled with the ring in my pocket, tracing the letters and numbers on the inner band. My wife’s initials and the date of our marriage were engraved like a headstone. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. The story that came to mind was one of my father-in-law’s favorites. At two years old, my wife asked her father what he did for a living. Her father, a psychologist, said, “I help people with their thoughts and emotions.” My wife paused. “You only do two things?” Her father edited his answer: “I help people with their thoughts, emotions, and actions.” My wife paused. “So you help people wipe their tears and tie their shoes?” Even at age two, my wife could slice open words and extract their meaning. l missed her scalpel.

Max picked up the slack. He said, “Fuck it,” and hailed us a cab. Well, it wasn’t really a cab. More like an elderly do-gooder in a Jeep. An Italian grandmother drove us to the base of the mountain and informed us in broken English that she knew what was wrong with the world. Photons had developed cataracts.

Liliana–that was her name–she dropped us off at a wooden cross that was garlanded with white and pink oleander. It was a road­ side memorial to a recently vaporized tourist. Encouraged, Max and I marched on. Mount Etna loomed indistinctly in the distance.

A ring-bearer and a pathologically loyal friend on a mission to shove a gold booger up a geological nosebleed–it was hard not to think of Lord of the Rings.

We kept bumping into rocks. The closer we got, the more it felt like we were hiking up a pillar of fog. Max broke the silence. He said, “Look, maybe it wasn’t anyone’s fault?”

“I demand fault.”

“Not yours, not Julie’s,” (Julie was my wife), “not- “

“Fault, fault, fault.”

“Maybe God simply forgot you two were married?”

“Jesus.” My hands flailed. I took up the mantle of the exasperated sorcerer. “Don’t you understand–that wasn’t God’s to forget!”

Cue the torrential downpour. I don’t remember it being overcast when we landed, but the sky suddenly went from noon to midnight, and it showered like in the days of Noah. Lightning followed. Negative charges sought positive charges. Each bolt was a manifestation of equilibrium. Max and I slipped and fell into a gully of rain­ water. One thing led to another. Before I could joke that at least the water pressure in Sicily was quite good, I realized we were drowning. The fact that tears are counterproductive when drowning didn’t stop me from crying.

The mind is condescending when death is nigh. It takes your hand and treats you like a child, leading you through a funhouse of denial, looking for a door that death can’t unlock. Somewhere along the way–hard to say where, it smelled Like my amygdala–I stumbled on a figure crouched with a can of spray paint. I said to myself, “What a prick-I can’t believe someone is defacing my brain as I’m drowning.” But as I got closer, I realized it was me. I was coloring in a picture of a ring. I was making endless circles in the air, arm gyrating, wrist squirming. The last thing I remember before Max pulled me out of the water and saved my life was dropping the can: disarming myself.

Max and I lay on our stomachs for hours, clinging to lumpy handles of basalt rock. It was the second time my god-brother and I had escaped a bowl of water together. We hacked. We spat. We prayed. I don’t know what sin washed out of us, but when the sun returned and we saw the world again, everything looked so clingy and tenuous, as if the Earth had lost its biggest sponsor.

I didn’t even check my pockets. I knew the ring was gone. Besides, there was too much to do. Every atom called out to me, “Paint me, restore me, preserve me.” For the first time in my life, I sympathized with God.