Jewelweed by David Rhodes Page A

as another.
    The other problem Blake faced concerned the nature of the god he prayed to. All day long he’d been mostly agreeing with Spinoza, who did not believe the deity was a prayer-listener or prayer-grantor. Moment by moment, Spinoza’s god created the universe and everything in it byrevealing himself through all emerging phenomena. He couldn’t listen in on his creation any more than the law of gravity could fall through space.
    And though Blake mostly agreed with Spinoza, his need for a god of a different nature—a listening, sympathetic, humanlike god—temporarily vetoed this particular teaching. Born out of desperation, Blake’s god was greater than reason, greater than Spinoza, greater than Blake. He could be both a listening god and a god who couldn’t listen. There were no limits to his ability to manifest himself in whatever form his creatures needed him in.
    Blake first began praying for his father. This was fairly effortless. He could easily imagine ways to improve his father’s circumstances, including a better son, a better truck, and a girlfriend. Unsure of the appropriateness of the latter request, however, he decided not to allow that particular imagined good fortune to enter into his communication with the divine, and kept his well-wishing more generalized. He simply thought of his father with a distant fondness, and fervently desired the best for him.
    Next, he prayed for Reverend Winifred Helm. Whatever events the Creator envisioned in his ongoing manifestation of unfolding glory, Winifred Helm deserved to be at the very center of them. Blake was sure of that.
    These two were easy. His father and Winifred Helm already had one foot in heaven as far as Blake was concerned. They were perhaps the last virtuous ones—those whose luminous presence on the earth kept the rest of humanity from cosmic condemnation and eradication. Praying for them felt as natural as praying for peace.
    Then Danielle Workhouse walked into his mind, and Blake’s prayers for her—like those for his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since he was four and could hardly remember—were far more complicated. He loved Danielle Workhouse in an especially soul-devouring way, and because of this he could not honestly pray for her without including himself inside the prayer as a stowaway to her dark ecstatic presence. And it was impossible to imagine God approving of anything that included Blake and Danielle. The two of them together almost ensured the absence of everything a person should pray for. According to Spinoza, God manifested them both, of course, yet it seemed impossible to believe they were divinely intended to be anywhere near each other.
    Danielle. Her name bullied around in his mind, knocking overeverything else and shoving it beyond his awareness. He asked her to leave, but she stayed. The more he insisted, the stronger she became. She wanted his full attention. She wanted him to remember how her body smelled in the morning, with baked steaminess from the night’s rest.
    Soon, Blake found himself still on his knees, but not praying at all. She’d banished his reverential mood. Feeling like a failure, he got off the floor and sat on the bunk. Then, needing a new view, he walked over two steps and sat on the floor with his back against the steel door, staring at eye level with the flusher mounted above the toilet on the other side of the cell.
    Women presented enormous difficulties for Blake, especially in here, where there were none. The distress he suffered through them had a history long before Danielle Workhouse came to embody everything he most wanted and feared from them. He could remember envying other children who lived with their mothers. He’d watched them longingly, wanted to be close to them, marveled at their shapes, the way they moved, the clothes they wore, the sound of their voices, their hair, the way their arms poked out of their sleeves and their feet