Nude Descending an Empire

American Mystic

41 American Mystic I stood with my dad at the edge of the woods. Can you see already that it is night? The forest behind our house humming with moths like an army yet to be summoned. I can’t remember a single word we said, or what constellation of big ideas I might have been bent upon connecting, until one moment when the conversation paused, or turned, and our attention returned, like a breath to the bull’s-eye where we stood, the last blab of pave, the final capillary that dropped down from a tiny feeder road called Pine Cone Circle and joined up eventually with all the rig-swept interstates and big boxes glittering somewhere in the night, each porch-lit address. Above us, a light in the second-story window where my mom must have been up late reading. “This,” he said, and I knew at once that he meant all of it, the black Honda Accord parked a few feet away, as much as the starlight filtering through the lace of poplars and pines that fanned above the driveway; the vast and intricate array of distant, throbbing cities no more or less than the tiny, folded wings of my sister asleep. 42 “This”—he said it only once; a twin engine plane was passing overhead, dragging its tail a red blinking light among the pond of stars— “is the event of God.” And, all at once, I disappeared, and every noun became a verb that fused into a single flame burning absurdly bright and without cause, with the now just uttered awe of pure-impossible-thus-God and we were standing there, one bankless blaze my dad in me, and I in him; in the center, in the heart, in the muscle, in the meat: Never, Never, Nothing, Now. ...