Auguste
Jens Rushing

Who says you can't love a goddess? Well, nobody, really. Nobody says that. When you think about it, you may agree that it's true, goddesses typically being intangible, fictional, or all-powerful, but it is not what we may call an idiom of much currency.

Yet I can tell you that I've held in my hands the firm and jocund buttocks of an immortal born. I've pinched with these very same thumbs and forefingers the apple-y cheeks and pert nipples of a muse, she of the Golden Mount, hurled to earth specifically for my inspiration. How delightful life is!

And the name of my sylvan beauty, my daughter of Zeus - could it be any other than Felicity, merriness, merriment, mirth? She spreads joy in my life as a stone spreads ripples over the flaccid surface of a pond.

* * *

This stop is Lincoln Center; door on the right; step lively, please. You can connect to the blue and the green lines here.

* * *

She first kerplunked into my existence on the day after my dismissal from Happy Paradigm Toy Concern - may they broil in a thousand hells! - where my research was considered too controversial, too dangerous, too outré and too exciting for that staid bastion of mediocrity. Oh, no. Children today are not interested in Jacks in the Box; they do not want to crank the crank until a grinning doll springs forth and shoots poisoned darts into their eyes; they want instant gratification in the form of skateboards, stickos, lollies, gumbos, heffalumps and hooferdills and Haloes 3. My Active Reading System (ARS) kept kids immersed in the world of fiction; if they attempted to set down the book within two hours of opening it, tiny barbed needles would sink into their fingertips; certainly novel, said I; yet two million recalls later and the paradigmatics disagreed, and off I went into the great grey canyons of Empire City, hat in hand.

I might have done any number of things, then. I might have worked as a shoeshine boy for the rest of my life, slaving at the toes of one or another of the paradigmatics who run this cold, cruel world - who made this world cold and cruel when it ought to be a ferocious foaming rapid of happiness, laughter, felicity, and Felicity.

* * *

Lincoln Center! The great phallus of the Empire City corpus, jutting into the sky like Babel of old, indomitable as the human spirit, nuclear as ten thousand suns, sterile as four thousand Chinese eunuchs, oppressive as five hundred Stalins, cheerful as fifteen Henrys the Sixth. My workplace! How I hate it. Punch the clock; there's the line for security, but they know me here; I'm the simpleton janitor; and I get waved through without so much as a token inspection of my bulky duffel bag, which I carry with some difficulty. Just cleaning supplies and the like, boring to look at.

* * *

Directionless and friendless and homeless in the greatest city in the world, feeling down in the dumps, when all I wanted was to share my happiness with the children of America. Thinking about suicide. Thinking about resorting to a bottle or even the white clouds of marihuana to ease my pain. And Felicity finds me and turns me around.

I didn't want to believe she was real at first. My buddy Jim - my ex-buddy Jim - always maintained that she didn't exist, right up until the very day I had to slice him into tiny pieces with a paper-shredder - boy, was he surprised! But Felicity is as real as you or I or any of our thoughts. And our thoughts shape reality. I ask you to regard the shining towers of our pearl of a city. What are they but the products of imagination? They could never have existed without a dreamer or realtor looking at a weedy lot or impoverished tenement dwelling and daring to think, "What can I make of this?" People ought to value imagination more.

But the fact that I even have to argue Felicity's existence is puerile, and testament to the deepening madness of the workaday world.

* * *

Penthouse, please, Elevator-Operator Ernie. His is a dying trade. I squeeze his shoulder and tell him I value and respect him. Thanks, he says. People ought to be nicer to one another, he says.

* * *

Felicity gave me great ideas. I was bursting with creative energy, but the expression of it seemed so futile, when no one values what I have to share. No one's interested. They'd go on treading their treadmills of banality unto death. No, Felicity said, they want to laugh. They've just forgotten how. You must show them. But how? You'll think of a way, she says. I have faith in you.

* * *

Did you see the paper this morning, Ernie asks. Too depressing, I say. People don't want news; they want confirmation of their individual misery. I don't know about that, Ernie says, but I do know that this schmuck the "Prankster" pulled off another of his so-called pranks. The Prankster probably hates that name, I say. He'd probably want to be called Auguste, after the traditional class of clowns: the joker, the anarchist, the fool. By his buffoonery we remember how to laugh; daring to laugh, we rebuke the terror/order that the paradigmatics would ram down our throats; we laugh, and hatred, suffering, and state-sponsored, state-mandated misery are irrelevant and conquered. Sisyphus was an Auguste, I remind him, laughing at his fate, at the horror and absurdity of existence, remembering the primal mirth from which he was spawned.

I don't know about all that, Ernie says after a while, but I do know that this Prankster snuck into a banquet hall where the Rotarians were having their annual awards ceremony, and under the tables he hid one hundred feral chimpanzees in one hundred individual time-release cages, rigged to release the chimps precisely when the mayor was giving the key of the city to Mr. Clement Ramrod, Congregationalist, philanthropist, philologist, beekeeper.

No greater paradigmatic than Mr. Ramrod, I say, and no animal more comic than the chimp.

Ernie chuckles. Yeah, he agrees, but forty-six people were hospitalized for bites, and the rest are under quarantine until they get rabies shots, and at least three women, including Mrs. Ramrod, are in post-traumatic counseling after glimpsing simian genitalia.

We could learn a lot from chimps, I say.

Maybe, says Ernie. Here we are at the penthouse. Have a good one.

* * *

That was Felicity's idea. She's so wonderfully creative. After all these years she can still surprise me. What does that mean, when spouses say that of one another? Only that we are astounded at the richness another human being can possess, so much deeper and greater than our own - or so we think.

* * *

The penthouse, the glans of the Lincoln Center phallus, the three glass-walled floors that serve as the nerve center of Empire City's financial industry. Here the secret sorcerers of the dollar pull man-sized levers and tie hundreds of strings around each finger; by the slightest twitch they cause earthquakes in Japan, Turkey, India, hurricanes in Cayenne and Fort Worth, mass suicides in Boston, Berlin, Bangalore. What that power requires!

Your soul, for starters. That's how you can spot a young paradigmatic. Shiny shoes, pressed suit, hair as reflective and resonant as obsidian, eyes bright, burning, and consumptive as stars, and within the skin, nothing but meat and bones and diverse sacs of lymph.

Yet the enemies' cathedral is still a cathedral of sorts, and as always I am transfixed by a mystic experience. Head cocked, dumbstruck, wondering at the numbers scurrying in their billions, centipedal, beneath the brushed-steel surfaces of the computer banks, each one chittering the incontrovertible rule of law like monks at a rosary. Hail, Mammon, full of dough…

People forget how much there is to the world. Money is hardly the root of all evil. Seriousness is. Self-seriousness leads to self-worship and a lack of consideration for others, from whence all harm springs. When was the last time any of these fellows gave anyone else a squeeze of the shoulder? Stop, look around, and be grateful for one another. I proselytize and risk falling into that very vice. Sorry. Auguste would not have that.

To business! I tell the young paradigmatic that I need to do some maintenance in the mainframe room, the refrigerated sanctum sanctorum of this tabernacle, a small room happily located in the geometric center of this penthouse. I enter. I am alone, with naught a peeping security camera to bother me. I unpack my bag. You might mistake the contents for a complicated cleaning tool, or perhaps a soldering iron.

* * *

Unscrew, fit, twist, rescrew, insert, solder, crank, splice, set the clock, and we're good to go!

* * *

I have a terrible stomachache, so I knock off early. I can't wait to see Felicity. She'll be so proud. Instead I go to the building opposite Lincoln Center and drink or pretend to drink a cup of coffee for the next forty-four minutes. By now the streets are jam-packed with people jam-packed into their luxury or economy coffins-on-wheels. So glad I take public transit! Believe in it.

I go out into the square. Commuters, paradigmatics one and all, honk viciously at me, the bugling of angry elk, and I bugle back happily. Freaking madman, someone shouts, and I wave. Any minute now.

The sound of breaking glass carries all the way down to the square. I'm already looking up, but soon other necks are bent with mine as we behold a circumferential shattering, like a water balloon bursting before a strobe light. The glass walls of the penthouse spray shards outward, and the people of the square take shelter. I remain in the open, mouth gaping to receive this benediction of the absurd. A hundred stories above, the swelling rubber wall of my gift must be sluicing the young paradigmatics through the wire anti-suicide grating surrounding the penthouse; they fall like fleshy snow. Glass pelts pedestrians, and I can't stop laughing, for above, the face of my beloved is revealed. A rubber ball, four hundred feet across, has inflated within the mainframe room of the penthouse, and now sits neatly atop the Center, the wreckage of the tower wrapped around it like a tattered bathrobe. The face of Felicity: yellow as the sun, no features beyond two small black eyes and a gigantic face-wide grin, entreating all passersby to have a nice day. I love you, Felicity! I love America! We were cowboys once!