Consolation Miracle

Consolation Miracle

59 Consolation Miracle Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. —García Márquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” In the pewless church of San Juan Chamula, a neo-Catholic Tzotzil Indian wrings a chicken’s neck. Through piñoned air, stars from tourist flashbulbs die, reflecting in each reddened eye, in the mirrors statuary cling to inside their plateglass boxes. A mother fills a shot glass with fire. Others offer up their moonshine swelling in goat bladders, the slender throats of Coke bottles, as if gods too thirsted for the real thing. The slightest angle of a satellite dish sends me to Florida, where the sleepless claim the stars talk too much. They stumble to their own worn Virgin Mary whose eyes, they swear, bleed. Florida: rising with its dead even as it sinks into the glade. Or there, a continent away, the heavenly gait of Bigfoot in the famous Super 8, voiced over by a cryptozoologist who all but laughs at the zipper-lined torso. Bigfoot trails out of California into my living room, a miracle in the muddled middle ground of the event horizon, in the swell between each seismic wave 60 where time carries itself like Bigfoot: heavy, awkward, a touch too real to be real. And the miracle cleaners make everything disappear into far too-floral scents. Miracle-starved, out of sleep or the lack of it, I keep watching, not to see Bigfoot but to be Bigfoot, to traipse through screens, and the countless peering eyes, the brilliant nebulae bleeding. Yeti, pray you come again, you Sasquatch. Video our world for your religions. Memorize all these pleasure bulbs, these satellites, our eyes, our stars. Look: how we turn each other on tonight, one at a time. ...