Clint
grips the silver crucifix which hangs from his neck. His almond hair, usually
kept in a pony tail, falls to his shoulders. A full and dark beard upon a
square chin and a docile face behind a pair of blue eyes. His Hollywood smile
illuminates the world around him.
From the only open register in the supermarket, Clint
watches as the cashier scans and bags his groceries—a mesmerizing symphony of
the mundane. Grab, swipe, beep, and the rustle of a plastic bag to follow. He
looks at the girl behind the counter, at her rhythmic swiping and bagging, and
thinks to himself how beautiful she is. She reminds him of a girl he once
loved, jet black strands parted and draped to the side over an eye lost in a
sea of Mascara. A patch of skin shaved clean above one ear, revealing a floral
bouquet of red and green ink that creeps down the pale skin of her neck. Clint
buries his hands in the pockets of his Dickies and wonders why a girl so beautiful
works in this place.
Clint is a recovering heroin addict. He wears
athletic sweat guards around his wrists to hide the spots where dulled razor
blades once raked through his skin like dry earth, leaving behind tattoos of
raised red flesh. The baggy sleeves of a Vancouver Canucks jersey conceal the caliced
track marks of harsh injections that freckle his arms. Clint is lucky. Most
recovering addicts don’t look like him. Scars can be covered and charm can
deceive. He wears the mask of an every-man—a latex caricature. His suffering is
well hidden. But, like a boy waking from a nightmare, Clint wanders in dimness
and uncertainty. Though the horrors of nighttime reveries have subsided, he still
must navigate a dark room in hopes of finding a light switch.
The girl at the register fascinates Clint unlike any
girl he has seen, though he is not sure why. As he observes her—a portrait of
the enigmatic, who puts Clint’s toothpaste, frozen pizza, and Snickers bar all
in the same bag—he begins to feel the flickering of an interior brightness
absent for years. A light switch worth trying. Oh, to bring light to a life
shrouded in darkness. Clint rests a forearm upon his shopping cart, hunches
slightly, pushes his hair off his ear, and waits for a chance to get the girl’s
attention.
Mansions,
topiaries, big cars and big dreams. Clint’s hometown was a place of affluence
and ambition. But in a mind inundated by the flood waters of depression,
hopelessness and self-loathing were more common bedfellows. Clint inhabited an
oasis, bit his soul roamed a wasteland. Every day he staggered through the
slums of his own sentience, where the alleyways lamented him with dirges, the
daytime sky taunted him with darkness, and the church bells tolled perpetually,
harbingers of his inescapable funeral. Heroin was his escape. Black tar. Venom
through the bite of a needle. A serpent in the Garden, leaving him to wallow in
his newly-realized nakedness.
The pinions of addiction found Clint quickly. Early
attempts to kick were met with withdrawal. War in full brutality raging beneath
his skin. Clint’s body became a prison—an Alcatraz from which his inmost being
could not escape. He was both junky and dealer, receiver and giver of misery,
measured and bottled. Clint’s first attempt to kill himself left a desire for
death all the more. The second time, he
was happy to have lived, happy to have retained the suffering he had come to
believe was deserved. The suffering of watching a promising life and a healthy
body disintegrate into a strung-out and worthless corpse. Of tossing away a
future into a receptacle overflowing with used needles and bloodied rubber
tourniquets. When Clint’s mother, a gentle woman, found her son at the brink of
death, lying in his childhood bedroom after an overdose, she thanked God for
giving her what she had prayed for every day for eight years: an opportunity at
intervention—a chance to save her son’s life. Clint was checked into rehab on
the eve of his thirty-third birthday.
At the
only open aisle in the supermarket, the sounds of gunshots pierce the panes of
Clint’s musings. Three shots. Two back-to-back, a brief pause, and then one
more. Shockwaves radiate across the tile floor. A sound unmistakable. Reality,
fragile, falls to the ground and shatters like fine china. The scanning stops.
The bagging stops. Clint drops for cover, as does the girl at the register.
Solace from an unseen enemy. Somewhere behind him, Clint hears a woman scream.
Not a normal scream. It splashes into Clint’s ears like molten candle wax and
sears his insides. Stillness swallows the supermarket. Clint’s heartbeat pulses
against the silence. Blood sloshing furiously through his temples. A fourth
gunshot, closer than the first three. Clint inhales a trembling breath, tasting
the motionless world around him. It digs its icy thumbs into his trachea and
constricts him. His arms, heavy and dead. Feet molded to the floor as a stone
effigy. A mind lost in the surreal, skipping and scratching like an old CD
player.
For a moment, he questions: surely this cannot
be as it appears. But then Clint sees him—a lone point of motion in a frozen
world. A man. No, not even. A boy, well over six feet tall, thin and with
scrawny arms dangling from underneath a military-grade bulletproof vest. He
wears a backwards orange baseball cap over short blonde hair, and the kind of
camouflage pants typical of a hunter. He strides casually across the front of
the supermarket, as if a mere spectator to the world he is in the midst of
destroying. In his left hand he holds a pistol, his bony pointer finger ready
to again pull back on the trigger. Clint observes that everything about this
boy seems wrong: he’s too young, he’s too skinny, he’s too average. Like a
child playing war, thumbs raised and index fingers extended, running around
yelling bang bang as imaginary foes fall lifeless into heaps on the ground.
Only this is a real weapon with real bullets. No expression on the gunman’s
face. Eyes bulging with focus, unreflective of the seemingly entranced mind
behind them. He approaches Clint, who crouches in the aisle between two silver
checkout counters, and lowers the handgun, not at Clint, but at the girl: the
one who hides on the tile floor behind the register. The one who reminds Clint
of a girl he once loved.
That girl’s name was Liz, short for Elizabeth. No one
called her Elizabeth. Clint met her when he was twenty-two years old, and his
mother had finally convinced him to have another try at community college.
Clint was brilliant, but saw formal intellectual exploits such as university
studies as below him. Clint shared a few courses with Liz, and grew to love her
because her personality was as dark as her hair. The two dated for years, never
caring much for the common romantic inseams that tentatively held together the
fabric of most relationships. Both were content just to talk and to be. They
discussed life, death, eternity, and all the other subjects that suddenly beg
importance as adolescence wanes to the confusion of adulthood. They spoke with
the intensity and finesse of sophists, though never taking themselves too
seriously. When Clint began to dabble in experimental heroin use, Liz followed
along. To a pair of happy cynics, addiction all too easily became religion, and
self-preservation and sobriety appeared suppressing cogs in a mechanical and
predictable world.
Clint
arrived home in the dying light of a late August evening. He was twenty-eight
years old. Horizontal beams of a sun at dusk succumbed to the western horizon,
leaving dust and detritus to glow orange and dance a melancholic ballet until
disappearing into the shadows. A steep and creaking staircase brought Clint to
his attic bedroom, which he had chosen for himself in a lifetime prior. A
slender black coat rack stood at the threshold. A stately sentinel with ornate
cast-iron curves. Clint hung his tattered backpack next to Liz’s things, which
were already set delicately upon hooks: a charcoal satchel with gold zippers,
and a checkerboard burette—the one she liked to wear to show the world she was
different. Clint crept playfully towards the bed, where Liz laid face-down. Proximity
showed him she was not sleeping. Glass formed as a razor rested between limp
fingers. Blood, once crimson, now a crusted brown, extended down the blanched
skin of her wrists and into the white cotton sheets. A needle stuck out of her
arm. The syringe was empty. Clint collapsed to the carpet and wept.
Although
he was not the one who slid the hypodermic needle into her vein, nor was he the
one who stilled her beating heart, Clint knew that Liz was dead because of him.
At the
only open register in the supermarket, the memory of Liz, which has haunted
Clint with subtle persistence for years, now hovers over him like a
poltergeist, prodding at his soul and lambasting his senses. Liz is no longer a
blurry, fragmented flashback, a yellowed photograph, or an instant feeling of
nausea elicited by the radio’s playing of her favorite song. There is no longer
any drug, therapy, or self-spoken mantras that can wisp her away into oblivion,
far from the most vulnerable parts of Clint’s slowly recovering psyche. Liz is
present. In the slice of time and space in which Clint stands at the checkout
counter of a small grocery store with a teenage boy pointing a gun at his head,
Liz is present. The bumpy red scars on his arm cry out: here I am! The old
injection marks that dot his arms like brail cry out: here I am! The girl
crouched down behind the counter, who just a few seconds ago was scanning and
bagging groceries with hypnotic body movements, masquerading behind her
eyeliner, calls out: here I am! Here I am, Clint! Ready to die again. Oh
please, don’t let me die again.
Clint
sees the boy in the backwards orange baseball cap point a hand gun towards the
hiding place of the girl who works at the register. Clint does not know this
girl’s name, nor is he sure of anything about her. Since the earliest days of
his heroin addiction, Clint’s path has been paved with the miry and toxic tar
of uncertainty. But now there is something that Clint is sure of: although a
stranger to the girl whose life is mere seconds from its violent end, there is
no one on Earth more important to him. He will not let her die.
Clint
does not consciously choose to erupt from his crouched position on the floor;
he does so as if he had been programmed for this one action since the moment of
conception. The pinnacle of his existence. Now is the acceptable time. Now is
the day of salvation. The moment of redemption is near at hand. Clint crashes
into the shooter with ruthless velocity, sending him staggering backwards.
Clint feels the recoil of the gun against his flesh, and the pulse of the
bullet tearing through his abdomen, on his right side, a few inches above his
belt. Clint and the gunman fall together, tangled in a primal struggle for
life: one wishing to save it, the other to take it away. As the limp weight of
his body pulls him to the linoleum with a force that supersedes gravity, Clint
feels the boy with the backwards orange baseball cap reach for his neck with
clammy, cool fingers. A snap and a break as the shooter’s thumb catches the
metal chain dangling from Clint’s collar-line. His silver crucifix rings as it
hits the floor, separated from the ornate necklace, and comes to rest next to
Clint’s failing body.
A
light rain trickled down the windshield and a caliginous mist hung thick in the
headlights the day Clint’s mother dropped him off at the rehab clinic. The
building itself was far from the medieval stronghold Clint had visualized, with
steep roofs, gothic spires, and rusting weathervanes. It instead appeared to be
quite new. Stucco siding and pastel pink paint, like a restored remnant of a
Spanish-American mission. Clint’s mother pulled her Toyota to the
porte-cochere. Silence as the rain ceased. A few feet away, an automatic glass
door slid open, revealing a tiny little woman in a navy blue veil and a
knee-length skirt. She hobbled toward them through a sort of ethereal glow:
fluorescent interior lighting wrestling with the outside gloom. Clint felt a
hand on his shoulder. It was his mother. She had dropped in his lap a small
velvet bag, green like the surface of a poker table, and with thin golden draw
strings.
Go
ahead, open it.
What
is it?
You’ll
see.
Clint
loosened the top of the bag, turned it upside down, and let the contents fall
into his opened palm. A crucifix. Silver, and much larger than the kind someone
might wear under a shirt. Pinned to the cross, a small featureless corpus.
Clint feigned a smile.
Thanks.
Do you
know what it is?
Yeah,
it’s a cross.
A crucifix,
yes.
A
crucifix.
Do you
know why I’m giving it to you?
I
don’t know.
It’s a
symbol.
A
symbol?
Yes.
Of
what?
A
short pause as his mother thought of how to best answer.
New
life.
Clint
looked at the metallic Jesus hanging by his hands and struggled to see life of
any kind. His mother persisted.
Jesus
showed us that we need to die before we can rise, and that our rising brings
new life.
Years
of Sunday school teachers droning from one Bible story to the next. He had
heard this all before, from Church ladies who wore their faith like
jewelry—gaudy and external, slid into a bureau-top box by Sunday evening, along
with all sorts of other things seldom-used.
The
little woman in the veil smiled as she tapped politely on Clint’s window and
waved a brittle arm with unreciprocated enthusiasm. Clint clenched the
crucifix. It felt cold in his hand.
At the
only open register in the supermarket, Clint is lying in a growing volume of
his own blood. He covers the wound in his side with the sleeve of his hockey
jersey, and slides a free arm above his head on the purple-brown tile floor to
grab the fallen crucifix. He is vaguely aware of the commotion around him.
Through his muffled sense of hearing, the concerned footsteps and murmurings of
people milling around, stupefied by the bedlam that has come and gone from
their lives over the past ninety seconds. As Clint lays turned over on his
side, he begins to shiver. A man’s voice tells him not to move, that help is on
the way. But Clint knows that he is beyond help. He is dying, and for some
reason, that feels okay. From the floor, Clint cannot see the girl who hides
behind the register. He cannot see her mysterious eyes, her dark hair, or the
tattoo that creeps down her neck. But he knows she is there, and he knows that
she is alive because of him. Clint does not know exactly why he has done what he
has, but he understands that it was right. Beyond his clouding vision, the
environment begins to shrink away, slipping into a vacuum of obscurity. Only
the silver crucifix remains—a final focal point, separated from its
tightly-linked chain. With his thumb, Clint smears the featureless Jesus with
his own blood. He sees the hands stretched in death, and the price that was
paid through those wounds. And he understands: new life.
Presently,
Clint becomes a posthumous witness to the scene. He sees himself stretched out on
the floor in front of the only open register in the supermarket, his almond
hair, usually kept in a pony tail, bunched around his shoulders. He sees the silver
cross tight in his palm and the faintest origins of a peaceful smile on his
face. He sees the boy who killed him, restrained by two men. He knows this boy.
Not in life, but he knows him now. He knows his name, his age. He knows his
joys and his sorrows. Especially his sorrows. He knows his father who assaulted
him. His mother who neglected him. His girlfriend who left him. The media that
would give him the attention he desired, but had never known. Clint sees the
gun on the floor—the one that had fired the bullet that ripped through him. He
sees two more bullets in the clip: the one that was meant for the girl, still
hiding behind the counter, and the one that was meant for the boy to put
through the roof of his own mouth. And finally, he sees the girl. The beautiful
girl who works in a place like this because she is a single mother trying to
support both a daughter and a heroin addiction. Her name is Elizabeth, and
that’s what people call her. He sees her death from an overdose at the age of
twenty-five, the death that will no longer occur because her life has been
saved. In less than an hour, she will know about Clint—about his addiction and
his recovery, and about how he gave his life to save her, even though he didn’t
know her. She will know that he rose from the death of addiction into a life of
peace. And this knowledge—the reality of this resurrection—will bring her hope.
Qualify
not a man by how he lives, for it is by how he ends that he is known. The one
who believed he deserved death now has life forever. The one wandering in the
darkness has finally found a light switch, no longer a slave to his nightmares.
Oh, to bring new life to that which was dead.
Oh, to bring light to a life shrouded in darkness.
