THE NEW MARK

The True Story of a Brief Transfiguration

That it occurred on Christmas Day, when revelations are expected but seldom seem to happen, may be the oddest thing about this story. It was four in the afternoon, at my friend’s Mark’s house, as his holiday potluck dinner was winding down. I had retreated to Mark’s small den, where a football game was playing on TV. I’d overeaten. and over-socialized. I sank into the couch. I don’t drink alcohol or use other drugs —mostly because I used to overindulge in them — so I wear out easily at festive gatherings.

Mark drifted in as I sat and watched the game. Then my wife wandered in, then one of Mark’s grown sons. Mark was in his early sixties, the owner of a heating and plumbing business in our small town of Livingston Montana. He moved to Montana from Jersey City, New Jersey in 1990, the same year I’d moved there from New York City. He is an Irish Roman Catholic guy who lets you know it in all sorts of ways, like painting a huge shamrock on his work van and rendering his business’s name in fancy Gaelic script. He has a lilting wise-guy accent, part poet, part gangster. And he’s a storyteller.

I didn’t pay close attention to his story for the first few minutes, until the game broke for half-time and commercials. When I caught up with the story, I’d missed the set-up – all I knew is that it took place on Staten Island, in a bar where Mark had worked in his late teens. The main characters were a couple of crooks. Mark was recounting their scams, their cons, their exploits, their relationships to the regulars at the bar. He nailed each characterization with a physical detail worthy of James Joyce. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve never heard a better storyteller, lyrical, rhythmic, propulsive, yet precise.

I watched him as he flowed and overflowed. I listened, but with my musical inner ear, not the more analytic faculty I use to gather and classify information. Mark spoke in the voice of, or from the consciousness of, his nineteen-year-old self. And then he changed into his nineteen-year-old self. The metamorphosis was swift yet not abrupt, a transfiguration out of scripture. But that is to oversimplify the phenomenon. For what I saw before me, just feet away, was not a younger Mark or a glowing Mark, but a deep translucent overlay of every Mark at every age, with his teenage version at its stable center. He was all the the selves he’d ever been, a composite or Platonic Mark.

There was nothing abstract about the visage before me. It was vivid and it had boundaries, structure, heft — a figure I could sketch or paint. The other people in the room remained unchanged. It was only Mark’s soul that I was seeing. Accompanying the vision were two strong feelings, one physical, one intellectual. The physical feeling was like a strong vibration, a profoundly penetrating bass note deeper than any I’d ever heard or felt, but close to a sensation one might experience at an EDM show. It both shook me and held me fast, as if I’d become of one substance with the couch, even with the earth itself. The intellectual sensation, if one could call it that, was that of knowing, of being certain, that I was perceiving reality at last. I was convinced that my ordinary way of beholding human beings was absurdly superficial, as if until now I’d been seeing them only as photographs, as time-bound snapshots of their current forms rather than complete and ageless creatures.

“I’m having a mystical experience,” I thought. “I’m having what the Apostles talked about when they beheld the illuminated Christ on a mountaintop after the Resurrection.” I decided not to speak my thoughts, just to sit there and let the game play on the TV as Mark continued to unfurl his tale. The New Mark, the one who answered my childhood question about which version of a person goes to heaven (all of them at once, of course, persisted in his spiritualized form for a good twenty minutes after he first appeared. By then, my wife was urging me to go with her to another event we’d promised to attend, but even as I stood up to take my leave, the New Mark remained unchanged. I said goodbye to his being, not his body, though it was there as well, like the dark spot in the middle of a flame. I feared I was sinning in some way by turning my back on such a holy figure, but I was late for something, so I left.

Or part of me left — the part that doesn’t matter — and another me, the real one, remained in place.