Grace by Calvin Baker

Author:Calvin Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media

BOOK III

21

On my return to New York I swore off meat, alcohol, tobacco, and sex in a fit of remorse. But nothing I did put me at rest, or made me feel any better. I even went to see Dr. Glass, but talking about my dreams seemed like a waste of time. My parents I had little to say about. My father because we had barely spoken to each other for as long as I could remember before he died. My mother I had no memory of at all.

I realized it had been more than a year since I had seen my Aunt Isadora, and went for a visit, hoping it might make me feel more grounded. But afterward, when I returned to my apartment, I was met by the same gloom. I realized then there was no need for me to be there. If I was ungrounded, I was also unbound and could do whatever I pleased.

The rhythm of life and sense of possibility in the south attracted me, so when my friend Drew suggested I spend some time down in Farodoro, I decided to make an extended stay of it.

In addition to Drew, it turned out I knew several others in the city. When I settled into my rented apartment, in fact, I soon realized the country was festering with expatriates. Some were there for the exchange rate, others for business; several claimed to be helping the world; but in reality all were taking advantage of the special status those from rich countries received in poor countries, unaware of the hidden cost they paid for the illusion by which the middling was called large, and the large declared great.

The only thing less sufferable were those intelligent enough to be aware of it, yet still happy for their different deals, because without that they would be what they were at home: industrious but second best, or talented but lazy. The natives did not complain. They accepted it as the way the world spins.

Yet nothing could mask the fact it was a place for the lost. Those who had let go the thread of their way, uncertain where they should be headed; what path had brought them here; whether they had it within themselves to push forward again; and, for the worst cases, whether forward was a virtue at all.

The things they saw and told themselves were shared delusions, referring to nothing but the world in front of their eyes; their own egos and insular experiences, subject to no other standard but what they themselves knew. These mirages displacing reality were tokens of the things they sought, but never possessed, which pulled them in ever deeper—not into that country, which they never saw—but into their own fantasies, and delusions of their place in the world, so that reality was left ever further behind.

For the permanently lost among them, those who had no meaningful place in that world, and no place in the one they had left, it was where they

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