Our Infinite Sadness

Farewell

           for it is the curse of broken, suffering things
           like us to immolate the world. 
                                                           -- Goddess Bastet                                   

            

Saturday, February 19, 2022
Scottsdale, Arizona

Benjamin David Swan crouched in a sculpted garden, among cholla cacti and succulent, while patiently awaiting sunset. He watched shadows spread through intertwined aloe and primrose branches while the sky ignited to molten copper behind the acacia crossbeams and canvas windscreens of Taliesin West's atrium and sunken amphitheater. Soon the night lizards would rise from burrows with their rippling umber scales to climb the branches and disappear under a billion stars.

Ben tucked his scarlet necktie into his shirt to prevent it from draping the sand— any errant movement would scare the furtively reclusive reptiles— and wondered if he would witness their awakening one last time, before his guests and hosts found him out here and corralled him back into the glorious send-off that had been arranged by his mother and stepfather. He had lived here in Scottsdale, on the outskirts of Phoenix, these past eleven years, and he knew that he might never pass this way again. One last night under Arizona's big sky, and tomorrow he would board a plane to the gloomiest place imaginable, to commence one and a half years of self-imposed privation.

His mother, Dr. Renée Dwyer, had tried to rent the school auditorium for the farewell party. Mount Desert High School was locked up tight for winter break, closed to all extracurricular activity to conserve energy. The event nearly took place without a venue and might well have gone off in Ben's back yard, but as chance or fate would have it, his recently acquired stepfather, Dr. Philbert Constance Dwyer, had familial connections with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and at the last minute Phil had managed to call in a favor and book Taliesin West's Cabaret Theater and Atrium.

Guests were arriving for the soirée by the minute, adding to the din that Ben had fled on arrival. The party steadily spilled out into the facility's spacious manicured grounds, and soon enough it would find him.

Ben spied a diminutive serpentine head peeking over scarlet primrose blooms, and the bright sonoran whiptail, after briefly catching his eye with scales of iridescent glitter, licked the air and skittered under cover. The aloe smelled savory and cold, like freshly chopped cilantro. Ben ducked his head among the thick pale fronds and slowly breathed.

He would miss the austere elegance of this place, each scene a distinct exhibition, an aesthetically pleasing symbiosis of nature and artifice, each manifestation of beauty minimalist and elemental, placed meticulously upon the sands like museum pieces, with deferential space conducive to study and reflection.

Soon enough, this time tomorrow, he would forget how to hold still and listen for distinct, quiet evocations of grandeur, because he would be treading water within the unremitting, sickly green mélange of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula.

The overgrown, cloying temperate jungle of his future home weighed on the body and soul like poured concrete and tasted like mold rotting through the vermiculated doors of a tomb.

The fiery copper sky cast its ebbing heat upon Desert Mountain and cooled to bronze embers. He shook his head with irritation, frozen in repose yet racing against time, certain that he would be called inside momentarily to bid this life farewell. His party. His send-off. Renée and Phil had overdone it to a fault, gross overcompensation, as they were wont to do.

They had been lobbying Ben incessantly for their plan to emigrate to the northeast. New York, skyborne edifice, cave of wonders, Voltaire's Eldorado. They had kept up the harangue without respite from early autumn all the way through the winter holidays, the entire span of their whirlwind courtship, their civil nuptial ceremony, and the months' long ebullient celebration of each other that had followed. Ben's final answer, after months of deliberation, had been to go his own way: he passed on Renée's dream and resolved to spend his last year of life on this earth as a child with his father in Forks, Washington, and leave them to it. To which Renée, undeterred and undiscourageable, had engineered this monstrosity of a going-away party.