To Conquer One Mongol

Cosmo Hinsman

It was the sort of day to do something drastic.

“My wife left me,” Richard John Jerimiah explained to the sweaty, twinkish barista. The cafe they were in—one of those blindingly linoleum midtown joints—was sweltering and crowded; espresso drip, laptop keys, and uncoastered porcelain clicked the unsettling rhythm to which Richard spoke at the barman.

“It has been tough,” he said, elbows resting casual-like on the counter to indicate the barista was welcome to do the same. “Since I got my own place, that is. I was in the guest room before, hoping things’d work out. We would make breakfast next to each other; silently, like always. Now I’m in a studio, ugh—it’s over on Lafayette, above the smelly Chinese store—a really nice room, actually, king bed and exposed brick, but a drag to live there. All alone, you know?”

The barista was making a strange expression, tightening his cheeks, lifting his shoulders, giving quick, single nods to Richard although his eyes were fixed on some point behind Richard’s head. It might’ve had to do with the other customers rudely sliding up beside RJJ, wriggling and worming up to the bar, before RJ signaled them, stern-palmed, to wait for him to finish his story. “Anyway, so that explains the latte with the vanilla pump; my order from before I cut sugar. That’s its whole raison d’etre, to invoke youth, you know? Before her.” The barista’s pencil-thin neck strained to the side as if to break itself, Adam's apple all dry and stubbly. “She was a bitch, that’s for sure. But I loved her. You only really love people in retrospect, do you get that? There was never a moment where I thought, ‘wow, I love her.’ Even at the wedding. But we were quite close. Not just physically, but, like, she knew my bathroom schedule. That connection takes time, and trust, and a sexual element.” He lingered on that phrase, a sexual element, as the twink tugged on his denim apron. “But hey, now you know my favorite drink, so there’s that.” Richy chuckled and the barista managed to arc his taut lips as a response, his smile more of a jagged crack than a crescent. “And now I’m exiled, drinking sugar again. But listen to us. They really got our nuts, eh?”

The barista was not good at his job, or was having a stroke, because he had started to stare into Richard’s mouth, seemingly catatonic, his cheeks tightening into a most subtle scowl, his chest convulsing with quick, bursting breaths. Rich wouldn’t have been surprised if the barista started foaming at the mouth. In fact, he was curious to see it. The barista had also started to wince and look away before Rich snapped his attention back to himself—literally snapped his fingers at the boy. And the whole coffee shop was heating up in a most uncomfortable way as patrons entered behind him, shuffling around and speaking up and letting the saccharine summer air flow up and tickle Rich’s sweaty neck. The barista made no indication that he was uncomfortable—as in, he never said it. But he shook and twitched in an over-caffeinated way, and made sudden, urgent, single word responses: “yep, wife. Mhmm, vanilla. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Cool. Okay.”

But Richy leaned over the cluttered bar top anyway, clattering a tray of pennies, and slapped the kid on his shoulder. “Better days don’t come on their own, my friend. You’ve gotta make ‘em yourself.” The arm was firm. Muscled for sure, but not too muscled, and Richy went back to feel the bicep, pretending to be mindless about it. “Hey, do me a favor?” He said.

The barista bared his teeth, dog-like, and growled, “yup?”

“Go to a doctor. You don’t look well. I mean you look fantastic but… you know.” Then he winked, scraped a few pennies off the counter into his hand, but couldn’t manage to scrape them all, so he left a few scattered around and disappeared onto the hot street.

Down in an underground subway car, where the shiny steel polls were moist with the last guy’s body head and sweat—a revolting reminder that other people are also alive—down where human life itself seemed an abominable inconvenience to the rushing ecosystem of railcars, the metered screech of a car’s acceleration kept articulating the T’s and D’s of that phrase: “it’s the sort of day to do something drastic”.

“Drastic,” Richard J. Jerimiah whispered to himself while leaning, hand across warm pole, over a nubile little thing. A punk-girl he called her, with cropped pixie hair and little patchwork tattoos and glossy lipstick and a sundress cut so high that Jer had to keep his eyes straight-locked on her forehead.

“So that’s why I got the latte. With, you know, I wouldn’t say a pump of vanilla. More like a dribble—I asked for a half pump but it doesn’t really squirt at low velocity—but the dribble is just perfect. You have to try it, I’ll buy you one sometime.”

She nodded, fists in pockets, in a casual way. Her eyes were sort of dancing between his, focused and expectant, like one of his eyes might suddenly pop out, but she wasn’t sure which.

“But yesterday, and you won’t believe this, I saw my ex-wife with some guy. What a drag; our lawyer hasn’t even finished everything yet. I mean, good for her. We all have to move on, but what the fuck? In my grocery store? I just wanted to… you know. I had these cans of beans, and those things would hurt. But the horrible part was that she ignored me!” His hand whacked the pole in gesticulating over-excitement. It was loud, and the punk winced without closing her eyes. “Damn,” he said. “I wish you could split up locations like possessions. Like, I get the grocery store and she gets the bowling alley or something. So that I don’t have to see her like that.”

“Yeah, that’s crazy,” the punk said. Rich could barely hear her over the scream of subway brakes. She sounded very lethargic and uninterested despite her extremely tense arms—probably on those synthetic cannabinoids that were going around.

“Everything changes, doesn’t it?” He said. “No one’s happy forever. Life is so short in, like, a cosmic way. Think about…” he paused, enthralled by her huge, black pupils, imagining how deep what he was about to say was going to be. How drastic, he thought, to change her little mind. “Think about Genghis Khan. Even this guy, who conquered the Mongols—created the biggest empire in history—even he can’t be remembered forever. Eventually people will die or forget about him; what does that leave for us, the little people? I haven’t conquered a single Mongol, let alone all of them. When’ll they forget me?”

It was a profound thought. She didn’t react (Mongol heritage, possibly) but her agreement was undeniable; he knew from that static face and shifting, oriental eyes that she felt the same anxiety-under-all-things. That the anxiety of her permanence, her death was as strong as his. John was something of a smithy when it came to those unarticulated, subconscious fears. He swayed with the train, leaning further over the punk who sort of vibrated back and forth, scooting over the seat, before he sat down beside her, arms stiff, electing still to protect that drugged little subject from whatever predators might be on this subway—it could be any one of them, he realized—and she curled up, eyes wide, obviously feeling the same cosmic terror that John did.

“I can tell you’re like me,” he said, breathing deep, to reassure her. “It’ll be ok. Let me share something with you: the most terrified I have ever been was the night my wife left. There was a hell of a storm that day, flooding up to your knees around us. There was a big argument and she ended up running out into the storm. I thought she might drown. Or get hit by a car, more likely. And the last thing she said was, ‘I hate you’. What could I do? I called the police; I was so scared. But the next day she came back dry as a whistle, happier than ever, looking timeless, shiny—ten years younger at least.

“It was me. I was the weight on her back that whole time. My mind was always on the short term and she needed a change. It’s ok to hurt people like that, see? People that hold you back. You can’t let life crush you. That’s why I’m here.” He gestured with the remnants of the special latte. “To find something drastic to do. Like that.”

The punk didn’t say anything, possibly in some kind of eyes-open sleep paralysis. But R. John J. wasn’t worried. He knew the face of one fighting inner demons; he saw that crusty smooth-brained tramp’s terrified expression every morning, and he would protect her from whatever might perturb the inner battle. At least, for the duration of the subway ride, which was only about forty more minutes, all the way up to the Long Island Sound where they reluctantly parted ways.

Waves crashed onto a plateau of sand and rocks, pulled by the moon, like a blanket, high up onto the shore. “Sometimes I feel like I wouldn’t exist without other people,” Ricky J. said to Suzie May, throwing an empty, paper coffee cup as hard as he could into the ocean. “I don’t know, maybe those are just the kind of thoughts you have at the beach. Do you ever feel like that?”

Suzie nodded her head. She understood this sentiment to an extremely intimate and enlightened degree. She was seven, and around the height of R.J.Jerimiah’s buttoned naval.

“What are you doing out here?” Ricky asked.

“Collecting seashells.” Her voice squeaked in that prepubescent way Ricky was all too familiar with.

“You want to see something cool?” He said.

“Yeah, okay.” Her words kind of dragged like she couldn’t yet feel how the phrase fit together.

“It’s a cave. It’s just over there.” He pointed to a place where there obviously was no cave. “It’s somewhere I went as a kid. I’ve come back because I need to do something drastic. Do you know what that word means? Drastic?”

“I don’t know.”

“It means huge. Or important.”

“Daddy said I’m important. But then he says everyone’s important. So I’m not sure.”

“I know what you mean. Come on, I’ll show you something drastic,” JJ said as he took her hand and led her away.

Inside this cave—the kind of limestone igloo that should not exist on Long Island—Johnny J put his palm over lil’ Suz’s head to protect it from protruding rocks. He kneeled down to her level, reached deep in his back pocket, and retrieved a black rectangle. It was so black, like outer space, it made the square section of his hand seem profoundly absent. That is, until the light caught it and Suzie finally realized what it was: a palette, which Johnny unfolded to reveal dark red ink.

He took her hand and pressed it in the dye, a kind of goopy, powdery solution with little bug legs sticking out of it, which oozed, cold, around her fingers. And when he peeled it off, she saw the bloody maroon had penetrated her skin. He found a flat section of the cavern wall on which to place her hand, then he pressed it—his much larger, harrier hand on her’s—so hard that it stretched and hurt her knuckles. “Why do we go through life only caring for the impermanent?” He said. “For money and wealth, when it’s so easy to change the world.”

“Ow,” she complained, pulling on her wrist.

“I feel the same way,” he said.

And when he finally released her, a bloody child-sized print was left on the stone. She rubbed her skin because it stung and because she was worried this goop may have dyed her hand forever.

Johnny pressed his hand in the dye and then to the limestone next to her print. “Life is so fragile,” he said. “The most radical thing you can do is make it look permanent.” Suzy noticed that the dye made sand stick to her fingers.

“Have you ever seen a cave painting?”

“I think so.”

“Yeah, you might’ve seen some on TV or in school. They’re famous because they last so long. Only the best things last long.”  John was really shoving his hand, leveraging his whole body against the wall, veins in his neck and forearm popping, but his eyes fixed back on her. “You wanna know why my wife left me?” He said.

Suzie kept extremely still.           

“She found my journals. I’m something of a documentarian, you see—so she read all these details. About times I doubted us. About times I said she was beautiful when she wasn’t. And some things I had with a guy at the gym, which you wouldn’t get. But the point is it wasn’t the lies that put her off, really, it was everything I never shared all at once. And I think she realized I was never who she wanted. Do you write those kinds of things in your journal?”

Suzie nodded, looking around for the cave exit. “Mrs. Blake says to write down my favorite things. So that, when I go back, I can have them again.”

He released himself from the wall and stepped back, taking a long breath which Suzie felt on her cheek. “You’re fragile. People will hate you for being fragile,” he said. “They abhor weakness; they’ll test you by saying this is how it should be, this is how you should act. Never give in. What’s your name again?”

“Suzie.”

“Never give in, Suzie,” he said. then left.

She only saw Richard John Jerimiah one more time after he abandoned her to wander home over the beach. Three days later, he was on top of a castle. There were sirens and flashing reds and blues and he was yelling, inflated cheeks bursting with frustration. It was all on TV, except reporters couldn’t get a microphone up to him so all his puffing and shouting was mute. He had halted midtown traffic for seventeen minutes before jumping (or slipping, one newscaster speculated) from the crenelations of the old gothic cathedral on Broadway. It was a special moment, a rare cable news death, complete with plume of fleshy bits and a pixelated moire of pink mist. Suzie couldn’t tell her parents she knew him—they wouldn’t have believed her, first of all, but they were also so furious she had snuck out to the beach mid-naptime that she couldn’t reopen that wound by revealing the extra-peculiar occurrence.

Their handprints survived. She knew, to anyone who found them, they signified some playful father-daughter bonding. But for Suzie, the memory of that strange man persisted as a kind of dream. She couldn’t tell anyone the story without some gross adultish misinterpretations, so the memory was like a seed that, buried, found strength and flourished in her mind. It bloomed with advice that no one else gave—do something drastic, crazy even, it’s okay to hurt people who hold you back, if only you do it to be timeless. It took her many many years to identify Richard John Jerimiah as anything but a divine personal shaman, and many more to mention the occurrence to a therapist. But his confidence persisted. Like a demon, it whispered: do something drastic today, it’s okay to hurt people like that. It’s the perfect day to do something drastic.