Lion of God: Part I.

“The morning dawn of boyhood with its delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and expectation you had left far behind. With very swift and running feet you passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you. 

Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself.”

— De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

collision.

Monday evening, late August, 2024.  

He is sitting alone on the porch outside a local music studio, waiting for the open mic to start.

Lips unzipped, fumbling a spliff between his fingers. 

I see him sitting there, a single fluorescent porch light hovering behind him like a halo, flesh dissolving beneath the silver glow of our own dark ocean. 

I get out of my car, a filthy little Honda CR-V I’ve named Joan—after Joan of Arc, Joan Didion, Joan Jett, Joan Baez, Joan Crawford, Joni Mitchell, Joan Mitchell, Joan Miró, Joan Bennett, and all the other bad ass Joan’s out there. 

Periodically, I consider changing my legal name to Joan and I’m usually quite proud to have never washed this compact crossover SUV a single day since collecting the title documents almost two years ago. 

I have new feelings about it as I am suddenly very self-conscious upon observing the compelling beauty of this person whom I’ve never met. 

He is tall with blonde hair dyed from a box–I can tell. I can’t see the color of his eyes from this distance, but I can see that he looks oddly strong. 

Let me forget I am human. Let me be an island. 

I walk over awkwardly, smile, say, “hello,” again, awkwardly, and sit down to light a cigarette.

He tells me his name is Airiel. “Like the Little Mermaid,” he says, “but spelled like ‘air,’ you know, like the wind.”

I think immediately of Sylvia’s poem by the same name, Ariel, a Hebrew name meaning “Lion of God,” and an allusion to the air-spirit Ariel, a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who is released from servitude at the end of the play.

Names matter a lot to me. Kaitlyn is an Irish name meaning “pure,” which I continue to find amusing, as purity appears to me a sinister concept, yet not unlike Eve, whose name means “sun falling beneath darkness.”

I smile because I can see the boy written all over this man’s face. Eyes soft and genuine, almost feral. His lashes loosen and depart from their nest like small birds.

Why does this man, who could clearly snap me in half, appear so utterly terrified of me?

We start talking-ish. He is very observant, maybe too observant. Every subtle movement I make seems to register in his body. He seems to be waiting for something to happen. 

I sit with him for a while. Others come to join. We listen as some play their music. 

A pale moon comes with a handful of light.

Now it is time for me to go home. I give him my number. 

“Girls like you are never scared of me. They’re too curious to be scared,” he muses as I type a little painter’s pallet emoji next to my name in his contacts.

What could he mean? Had I forgotten to remove the script, written in red lipstick, from my forehead? 

The banality of a girl like me’s compulsion to swallow food too hot for my mouth.

For the next month we float around each other like this. We bump into one another at parties, drift toward the smoking section together, and talk for hours. 

He never comes on to me. Not once. He appears to me as respectful, curious, and completely uncalibrated to the world around him. 

The high desert seems to pride itself on the density and complexity of its autistic population, so I figure, maybe he is just another fella on the spectrum, and I’m down with that.

I am now ovulating. I text him, “Dinner?”

He replies, “Yes.”

We pick the Indian place in town. I arrive right on time and grab a booth in the back. 

Twenty minutes pass. Now forty. When he finally arrives—(and no, I don’t know why I am waiting past ten minutes, and no, I’m not accepting any questions on the matter at this time)—he is smiling but tense.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” he says, “I don’t know where the time went.”

Looking back, this is the first sign of his struggle to understand the concept of time and to negotiate its passing. This will later become a constant friction between us. He will lose countless jobs because of it, and I will almost lose mine trying to help him manage.

At the table his eyes are darting all around again. 

I take the seat with my back to the wall, leaving his back turned to the room. He is visibly uncomfortable.

“I hate restaurants,” he says.

“We don’t have to stay,” I offer, thinking it is social anxiety, maybe sensory overload.

He is relieved.

I say, “We could go for a walk?”  

We leave and start down the sidewalk. He loosens up as soon as the restaurant is out of sight. 

We pop into a shop to buy some candy. We decide to share a pack of spicy gummy bears.

“I’ve always wanted to try these,” he says with a grin.

He hasn’t told me yet, but he has just been released from prison. Ten years in federal lock-up. His crime? Prescription Fraud and Home Invasion. He has been out for nine months and we are on our first date.

Post-Incarceration Syndrome.

What I had seen in him that night, and for weeks before, were the lingering affects of confinement. I now know the clinical term for this cluster of symptoms: Post-Incarceration Syndrome. An incredibly nefarious and agile affliction of mind, body, and spirit resembling PTSD, though it’s not a formally recognized psychiatric diagnosis. Frankly, I find that appalling.

It is a painfully psychological and deeply visceral experience, uniquely shaped by the culture of prison and manifesting as: anxiety and depression, difficulty adjusting to daily life, social isolation and alienation, substance use disorders, problems with employment and housing, hypervigilance and fear, difficulty trusting others, feelings of hopelessness and despair, and an uneasy relationship with time and autonomy among others. 

The world had opened its doors to my new friend, Airiel, but his nervous system hadn’t yet crossed the threshold. Culturally, we talk about reentry as though it happens in an instant, but the truth is it happens much slower, and the body remembers the cage long after it’s gone.