From the R.M. Dolin novel, "What Is to Be Done"
Read companion poem
Chapter 11: La Marseillaise Redux
Pensively, Jake sits on the edge of darkness too burdened to entertain the possibility of sleep, especially with night being such a heartless warden, abandoning souls to quiet stillness where only the timid tension of thoughts meter the minutes. He’s always been responsible; a man does not spend his life doing the things he’s done without possessing a keen sense of obligation. He’s not opposed to change, after all, a core trait of intellectuals is embracing the new and different. His unsettled tension stems from knowing something must be done but not knowing how to go about it.
“What the hell is a man supposed to do with someone like her?” he reiterates. There’s no answer of course, which is why he sits patiently waiting for La Marseillaise to propel today into his calculus of chaos.
“You would be proud,” he reaffirms to the shadows while gingerly holding Emelia’s phone in his ruminative hand determined to keep his deepest memories at bay. To make today the rare time he doesn’t rise only to fall into the abyss of his personal hell.
The phone was in Emelia’s purse the night Jake drove her frantically to the hospital. He retraces the race down cemetery hill into Santa Fe along Saint Francis, reassuring her everything’s going to be alright. He recalls holding her hand while navigating Saint Michael’s exit, talking about a vacation he’s planning, how it felt helping her through the doors of Saint Vincent’s emergency room and easing her gently into a wheelchair before being forced to let go.
These scenes are deeply burned in the abject starkness of his reoccurring memory. There’s little else in the following days he recalls, except bits and pieces of Padre by his side along with failed attempts to explain the mysterious way God’s invisible hand moves across our lives. He remembers painfully lamenting that his faith was not as strong as Emelia’s, and wishing he at least had a better relationship with Padre. These random details he can recall about those desperate days, but little else.
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