Sweet Cellophane Candy

Find Hope: Find Life.
There was an old and faded sketch of the sun rising over mountains on the cover of the tract. The subtitle across the bottom read “The Journey into Eternity.”

Governty stared at the thin, clean hand resting on the table next to him, the loose and calm fingers that dropped the pale yellow pamphlet with a flutter and rehearsed grace. There was a nearly imperceptible tremble to his deposit, a slight tremor in the way that the paper fell, a well hidden and not spoken of flicker of doubt in some inner layer of faith.

“You remind me of my first love.” That was all Governty could think to say in response to the well-meaning yet painfully tactless man who had tossed the paper onto the table. And it was true: the bend of the chin and the pale eyebrows that transcended gender, the slow blinking of large eyes nestled deep into a round and smooth face. The blond, thick hair with a hint of curl that often proved unruly.

Governty had met Jayme three days after Jayme's thirty-first birthday; they were two people left alone in the front row of a crowded movie theater, forced to turn their heads up painfully and stare at dismally oversized figures as they moved across the screen. Lopsided giants, disproportionate, uncomfortable and grainy on the widescreen. The movie was no fun, lonely, forgettable, except that they had caught a glance and caught mutual interest like a coveted disease.

The tract seemed to breathe on the table in front of him. Governty stared past it at his blue ballistic nylon duffel bag: indestructible, the advertisement had said. The hand that had dropped the pamphlet leaned eagerly against the table: “Mind if I sit down?”

The faithful and the faithless and two cups of Styrofoam coffee, the roar of engines, the lost and nervous crowds pulling overstuffed luggage and tugging on their children while gripping boarding passes and passports and making their way to security.

“What's your name?” Governty asked, forced into conversation. He expected something prim, outdated, once-angelic but overused in southern evangelical circles. He expected to hate the name.

“Just call me a messenger. Or a prophet. Or even just a friend.”

Very un-Biblical. All the messengers and angels and prophets of old had real names, important names that revealed their identity by the very Hebrew roots that made up their monikers. Elijah: The Lord is My God. Gabriel: Hero of God. Amos: Troubled. Daniel: God is my Judge. Daniel was the best name of them all, important to Governty. If he had a son, he'd name him Daniel and hold his hand as any father who loves his son should do. The world might then know that Governty wanted to believe in God because only God got the final say. Only God could condemn him to hell.

Jayme's mother had been a brash and tactless woman of faith. Persistent illness was a sign of God's condemnation, she believed. A wretched damnation for her only child, then: Jayme was the sickly type, one of those people who dated lovers on Friday nights and snuck off Monday mornings to commit sordid affairs with dermatologists and allergists and personal physicians. If the constant coughing and blue-pale skin weren't so authentic, Governty might really have feared infidelity. Sickness was quiet. Jayme didn't answer the phone, didn't leave the couch that smelled like whatever new scent Lysol had released into a disinfectant aerosol can, didn't speak or write or crawl out from a harem of fleece and wool blankets when there was something awry with white blood cells that Jayme suspected were quiet assassins trying to rush along a premature death.

Jayme might have been crazy, a true hypochondriac, a true mental case of the psychosomantic sort. Or Jayme might just have been sick.

The latter was true, Governty knew. It was a secret held between them, something they never spoke of, not even at the end. They kept it wrapped up and tucked away, as coy as girls in the schoolyard, as bittersweet as the darkest of chocolate: the sweet sweet honey of shared knowledge between loved ones, the gruesome and bitter secret itself. Intimate and yet irrational, Jayme and Governty lived their days, lived their lives, ate chicken soup and drank green tea for health. Governty tucked Jayme into bed every sick evening before heading home; they wanted to get married someday.

“God loves you. God will bless you if you just follow His ways, if you seek Jesus with all your heart. This man died so you could live.”

Governty stared past his unwelcome companion at a Jewish man – Orthodox – who was readjusting his round, wide-brimmed hat on his head while his wife, bonnetted and dark, shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other in order to pick up her toddler son. “Does your God love them?”

The tract-carrier followed Governty's gaze, made a strangled coughing sound, blinked twice as if to sharpen the image. “God loves everyone, and it is a shame that they have not yet chosen to know Jesus.”

“Have you been to the Art Institute in Chicago?” Governty saw the pale flush of relief wash over his tablemate's face.

“Once, many years ago.”

“Chicago, that is where I am flying today. Flying home.”

“Were you married? To your first love, that is.”

“We didn't have a chance to be.” The shadow of an airplane outside the window darkened Governty's face and then passed: the dark mask of grief washing from left to right, earlobe to earlobe. And then the light returned, faint and dim like the uncertain glow of twilight. “Does your God really love me?”

“Yes, of course.” Those slim hands were twitching again. Trembling like the last legs of a false and twisted faith without meaning, without knowledge, without trials, without real life.

“Are you sure?” Governty said each word slowly, gritting his teeth all the while. He kept thinking This is for Jayme, this is for death, this is for the cold stare of sallow eyes and papery skin, protruding ribs and meatless limbs, the face of living death, the shallow pool of fear and the loss of hope. The real journey to eternity was the endless tedium of waiting for death to come. Death was never on time. Too late and too early, all at once.

My one true love's name was Jayme, Governty thought. Jayme with a Y. Jayme with the curly blond hair and the round face and the soft hands. Jayme without parents, orphaned by Mother and Father and all those who should love those to whom they give life. Orphaned by the children at school, the neighbors and the shopkeepers, the clergy and government. Orphaned by everyone, found by Governty.

“My one true love's name was Jayme. Jayme died one year ago tomorrow. Did God love Jayme?”

* * *

It was called Untitled(Portrait of Ross in L.A.). A pile of candy in brightly colored wrappers illuminated by the bright gallery lights. A shiny mountain of sweet and colors against a flat white wall.

“Am I supposed to take one?” Governty asked the gallery supervisor. He felt embarrassed asking.

She smiled and pointed to a small sign posted just to the right of his gaze:

“This installation is an allegorical portrait of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991. Viewers are invited to take a piece of candy and enjoy a sweet in an unexpected place. The generosity inherent in this work has a dark edge – the diminishing amount of candy parallels Ross's languishing body weight prior to his death. Gonzalez-Torres stipulated, however, that the candies should be continually replenished, thus granting perpetual life to a work of art that memorializes a lost loved one.”

He bent down to grab the ruffled edge of the closest candy. It was blue and it cast a transparent illuminated spot on the wall, the same way that diamond rings bounced light across church ceilings during hushed sermons. Governty felt a small packet of paper crush in his pocket as he squatted, and he paused to pull it out.

In one hand a crumpled yellow booklet with a sun and the words eternity, hope, and life. In the other, an unwrapped butterscotch candy.

There would be truth someday and answers. There would be a God of grief and compassion. There would be a Daniel and an ultimate judgment, and a lifetime of uncertainty. But for the moment, the sweetness of life sucked under the tongue like sugar.