"We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.... Nothing is easier than to admit in words the
truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this
conclusion in mind."
Charles Darwin
Standing in the sun looking in: a chamois, a squeegee, a
bucket of water, white hands always smelling faintly
of soap and vinegar: clean as the giant bald man on the
bottle under the kitchen sink, almost prepped for surgery.
Doctor Sheppard opened the old man's hip, the blood
flow staunched by a quick nurse. Deeper into the flesh
lay bones, a ball eroded by use into a semi-crescent. Three
hours later the meat was held in with steel and plastic.
Years later, living in Milwaukee and considering another
woman through another bay window, the god would
remember with certainty, the same certainty with which
a bull steps wide to avoid shitting his own hocks.
Showers of gold, swans, dolphins, even hoboes,
knights, and clowns as the years get thinner and cooler.
They do what they have to do to survive, no differently
than we. Justification is a game for children and priests.
With memory, the game was suddenly made useless. The
man was less careful, less thorough, allowing a perfunctory
trial: imprisonment and death, so. He moves on, keeping less.
Setting sail was young Darwin's only escape from causing pain.
The whisperings had been heard all over, accepted, hinted at
by his own grandfather, Wallace, Linnaeus. Only Charles was
young and foolish enough to develop the idea, realizing what
it meant and yet held to the path. Writing all night, guts twisting.
The window washer became a vegetarian for a while, but
eventually decided it was all about survival of the fittest.
More burglaries, another killing after all, sixteen crates
of dead finches hit the docks in Cheapside to prove it.
Repelled by Galton, by doctoring, by the pain he was causing
his devout friends, Darwin grew weaker in England. Each of the
four evolution books came forth with an agony of vomiting and
palpitations. Truth is work. In his later years, he wrote on botany.
She woke when the left-handed man pulled her pajamas down.
He put his hand on her mouth. She bit him. He stood, lifted
a metal flashlight and swung until the screaming stopped, until
his arm was tired and there was nothing there but meat.
Doctor Sheppard had slept on the daybed. He struggled on
the beach and lost. Four days later the papers demand his
arrest. There were two trials, ten years in prison, six out.
His mother shot herself seventeen days after his conviction.
At first, the princesses would stiffly struggle home to their
father's beatings, shamed and grievous until the baby was
born glowing, talking sensibly, producing grapes like a
magician's quarters from the king's ears. It was too obvious.
Now there would be no chase, no disguises, no leap from the
dam into an enlightened future. When Sheppard was acquitted,
his ex-father-in-law killed himself with a shotgun. Six months
later, the TV show began. After one hundred and twenty
episodes, the one-armed man was found, unrepentant, calm.
