Divine Leap or Panic Attack

~ If everything happens for a reason,
~ If I can believe my own mind and heart,
~ If God comes when and where you least expect him,
~ Then Maybe I Truly Am On the Brink of a Divine Leap.
 
Otherwise, I was just undergoing a garden variety panic attack.  At 10 am just as the Art Institute was opening, I arrived there, eager to be among other real live people with real live lives. I needed the museum’s pigment-preserving lighting, which seems so much more natural than the transient light outside.  I came because if I remained outdoors by myself another minute, the sky and lake, the blistering wind, cars racing past—all of it might dissolve at any second.  Here the hushed echoes from stately wing to stately wing, the parade of sculptures and august paintings in the philanthropic air, offer a calculated, temporary peace.  A time outside of time, with uniformed, walkie-talkie-wearing guards at every outpost.

[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

After taking in several famous paintings—A giant pink mother and her fleshy baby; dusky women bathing behind a bank of ferns; a bowl of pears; a crucifixion in the abstract—I sat on a comfortable bench in the vast area near the coat check. Another man, working a laptap, kept staring at me sidelong, projecting an irritable menace. A pair of almost identical looking old ladies asked a guard how to find the cafeteria—and did she know if English muffins were available? Supporting each other by the elbow, the frail, bent-over ladies doddered away, arguing with surprising volume and vehemence about an exhibit of Holocaust sculptures. The sneering man on the bench with me, like most of the clientèle at Sammy’s, was wearing theatrical make-up. Glittery waves of green rose from his eyelids. His big, sardonic mouth was Hi-Lighter pink. 

Several minutes later, I wandered through the Medieval Devotional Artwork. The armor, blackened like relics, made me gape.  But the diptychs and triptychs soothed my nerves. I stared at the liturgical objects, a bejeweled, gold monstrance here, an incense burner there, unmoved—by which I mean I finally felt solid.

Before long, though, much of that strength started to dissipate.  Back outside, I wound up at the Hard Rock Café, exhausted, oddly redeemed and chastened. I drank two beers, listened to the music and wondered if I should go back to the hotel. Carlos and Maggie have probably checked out by now.  They’ve probably moved to Linden Street already.  So I’ll go there.

Of course.  I’ll go there.  Right after the making my rounds donut blessing—half a day late.

(Click here to read the next episode.)