5
Pace found a one-bedroom apartment on the far north side on Balkanski Avenue just off Clark Street, a few blocks from the town of Evanston, Illinois. It was a third floor walk up with two families of Ukrainian immigrants occupying the floors below. He had very little to do with the immediate neighbors other than to greet them on the stairs; Pace never heard any of the Ukrainians speaking English and they kept to themselves. Pace did also. Though ordinarily gregarious, he needed this time alone, to be virtually anonymous in a city whose population took no heed of him nor had need of him. For the first time in his life, Pace felt like a wandering ghost. Nobody was waiting for him and neither, really, was he expecting anyone to come along and tell him what to do. He had not felt so cut off from the rest of the world since he had been kidnapped at the age of ten in N.O. by a crazy boy named Elmer Désespéré; this was different though, because now he was alone.
When he lived in Kathmandu, Pace had half-assedly studied Buddhist texts, but he was then too preoccupied with worldly things to give them proper attention. Sailor and Lula were not churchgoers except for Lula’s short-lived infatuation with the Church of Reason, Redemption and Resistance to God’s Detractors, which ended abruptly after the church’s corrupt preacher, Reverend Goodin Plenty, was gunned down by an unhinged member of the flock in Rock Hill, South Carolina. This incident took place in front of Lula’s eyes and she soon thereafter gave up on organized religion in any form. The assassination of Goodin Plenty occurred during Pace’s forced incarceration by Elmer Désespéré, so he had not known much about it at the time, and Pace had no specific religious instruction thereafter. His subsequent readings of various theories regarding ontology failed to impress him, though he considered the Old Testament of the King James Bible to be the granddaddy of all noir novels, and the New Testament to be the model for what popularly came to be known as science fiction.
Sailor had his own oddball theory about reincarnation that he called “sprinkle bodies,” which Pace thought made about as much sense as anything else. Religion, Pace thought, either made people mean or kind, according to their interpretation of whichever book or teachings laid down the law by which they had decided to abide. He realized, however, that at this crucial point in his life he was in dire need of some kind of guidance, sign or revelation. If it were to come from within, the Up-Down, he had to figure out how to climb on that wave and ride until it or he gave out.
Pace took to taking long walks along the shore of Lake Michigan as well as through the simmering summertime streets. The people he encountered were mostly polite but not particularly outgoing, largely unwilling to engage or be engaged in the sometimes too-often overly friendly and confessional way people are in New Orleans. That was all right with Pace, though; his demands upon and expectations of the human race were rapidly diminishing. His happiest moments came when he sat on his back porch late at night looking out over the alleys and backyards listening to the sounds made by his neighbors in their kitchens, dogs barking and cats whining and wailing. Best of all was when it rained, especially if there was thunder and lightning, which was often spectacular. He loved smelling the rain in the wind and when the rain came Pace could almost forget about the terrible behavior going on all over the world. There had to be a reason to exist, he thought, other than only for the sake of existing. And how did death figure into the equation? Rhoda murdered by ape poachers, Sailor killed in a senseless car wreck, Lula passing at eighty of so-called natural causes. What was natural or unnatural about anyone’s demise? Weren’t all of them threads in an unfinished fabric? Here he was, most certainly in the final quarter of his earthly residence, sitting on a back porch in the midwest having a dialogue with the night and discovering that he was more curious than ever about the purpose of everything, and wondering why thinking about it made him feel so ridiculous.