Somewhere Only We Know, Part II

Jim stole a glance at his building as he walked off into the night. Flames licked the tan brick walls, smoke billowed from windows, people screamed, the alarm screamed, sirens screamed, people stood and gawked, tenants ran out of his building.  But he just turned his back to it all, to his life, to his past, and walked in some direction down the dirty, brown street.

His loafer-clad feet stepped to the rhythm of some vague, deep-seated nostalgia his brain had conjured from its deepest catacombs.  Old skeletons, with vacant skulls, leered at him in his mind's eye as he walked down nameless streets.  Each skull reprimanded him for its own purposes, but he couldn't look them in the eyes.  He looked ahead instead, down the hall of some musty memory, looking for a door out.  The only light in those mental recesses were flickering torches on walls, burning cobwebs that turned and swung in some rancid, stale breeze from the depths ahead.

Jim, lost in his thoughts, was only vaguely aware of the changing neighborhoods around him.  Some were dirtier and browner than his own, some were nicer, a lighter shade of dull, some lavish.  He passed occasional parks, plenty of store-fronts, crossed an almost endless bridge, and continued until the city ended, the road started to wind, the trees got thicker at road-side, the night deepened, stars became visible, the moon rose, and he found himself, many hours later, far from his burning building and its hideous browns.

In his mind, the catacombs reached their darkest extent, when he found a heavy, stone door.  He pushed, he strained, he manipulated, levered, shoved, coerced it, and it grudgingly opened, inch by inch, and he ran into the blackness behind, which revealed open air, freedom, and escape.

Outside his mind, the eastern sky started to lighten, kind of a sickly, smoggish smear of pale blues, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, but color nonetheless.  As the sun exploded into the sky, it revealed a startling green wood around him and noticed consciously for the first time its fertile smell.  He sagged down in the shade of an elm, not far from the road, and lay down and let sleep take him into a dreamless state of peace.

Crossing Over, Part I

It started as a nagging feeling, deep in the recesses of Mandy's mind, then it felt like her soul were slipping out the bottoms of her feet.  It was a sick feeling she had always associated with missing an important deadline while doing something non-essential.  But she couldn't put her finger on why.  

Gradually but persistently over the course of about an hour, but it felt like days, weeks, months, endless time, she felt like her very life had been sucked out of her body, like the world around her had emptied.  It was almost tangible, like the feeling of leaving a sauna with its thick, pervasive, almost suffocating atmosphere, to a cold, atmosphereless room filled with emptiness.  She felt unbelievably, incredibly alone.  Not just alone, but more alone than anything she had experienced.  She didn't feel lonely exactly but alone--like she was the only person in the world or in the universe.

When the void was complete, she stood there, in the middle of a parking lot on her way to her grey Accord, and just looked off toward the mountains in the distance and stared.  Empty, soulless staring.  She felt a bitter absence, a sense of loss, a deep depression, a sick uneasiness, a disgusting emptiness, a fragile meaningless, all at once.  It astonished her so much that she just froze, didn't move.  She wanted to vomit, to collapse, to die, to suffer, to hide, to disappear.  Hope had fled.  Meaning had evaporated.  She was a body without soul, without life, spirit, meaning, purpose, just an empty void.  And yet, she had her perceptions, she could see the mountains rising above the nearby trees, she could smell the early stages of autumn, she could hear wind pushing through the leaves in the linden next to her, she could feel the sun on her face, coolness of the air on her skin, feel the wind gently blowing her hair, she could think (her thoughts were only of death and despair, but she could think).

Eventually she sat down, then lay down, right there on the asphalt of the parking lot, its gravel poking into her arm and the side of her forehead, her eyes staring blankly at nothing.  She was enveloped in a sense of remorse and despair and sadness--deep, deep sorrow--that she had no capacity to contain.

She wouldn't notice until she stirred again, a couple days later, that there were no sounds of life, no birds, no children, no crickets, no cars, no people, that the leaves on the trees were curling, the weeds shriveling, the grass greying.  

Life as Mandy had known it was over.

The Reconstruction, Part I

The scans and comparisons and analyses took years.  Seventeen, to be exact.  The first was almost on a whim--a desperate project for an undergraduate psychology class.  It was a 200 level course and Max needed to come up with a test and a paper.  He was clueless.  He ended up deciding to use what he had ready access to--a radiology lab at the hospital where he spent 20 hours a week earning $10 an hour so he could pay some of his college expenses.  He got permission from his lab supervisor, got appropriate consents, and hooked a friend up to the MRI and conducted a brain scan while he watched a cartoon.  He finished his paper, got a C-, but never stopped his experiments.

Now, seventeen years later, he was putting the finishing touches on the software that could translate brain scans into visual images.  Feed the computer some brain scans, and it produced a still image or video of his thoughts. Some thoughts were visual, some were not.  Cleaning out non-visual noise was the hard part.  But he did it.  Among the many things he discovered in the process was that people think visually usually when their eyes are closed.  Not always true, and it varied from person to person, but sleepers were the best.  Hook up his brain-scanner to a sleeping person, and voila! a video feed from the dark recesses of his brain.

His brain-scanner, which he called Hal, had become safer and smaller to use.  What he had now was something that looked like simple headphones, but which could extract soundless images from a person's head.  Thankfully, Max had no diabolical plans.  Or so he wrote in his journal.  We can be the judges of that.

Barber - Adagio for Strings

Placid sea, swelling foamy crests.  I, on my raft, face the frothy spume lifting me and sliding past me as I head out, some distance from land.  I lie back and let the great liquid mass beneath me lift me gently, then let me down, then lift we again.  Quietly, peacefully, the surge of the deep lifts and lowers my body rhythmically, gently, but powerfully.  My arm covers my closed eyes to lessen the glare of sun through eyelids.  Up, down, up, down.  My skin tingles in warmth, a slight spray occasionally creating a chill as it evaporates from my legs, arms, and head.  Salty air bites at my nostrils.

My smallness comforts me as I submit to the great powers that push under me.  I'm too small to resist, too weak to quell the infinite powers that hold me in their mercy.  Since there's nothing to do in the face of such greatness, there's nothing to do but slide and float along.  I submit freely to its movements, trusting that a lack of trust is no help.

There's nothing in the great swells to comfort me but my own sense of place in the whole.  I am no accident, no floating stick, no aimless sea-bird.  I have the illusion of control, but the reality of choice.  I can fight the waves or move with them, be exhausted or be free.  They can take my life or give me sway.  They can be my gravest enemy or the mode of passage across the ocean.  When they waves claim me, they will take me as I decide to be taken, on my terms, in my manner.

My enemy is not the waves or the power driving them, but the pull of fear that makes me lose sight of the journey and despair to be rescued.  The seas are my death, but also my life.

La valeur d'intensité lumineuse de gris, Part I

At the corner of a wedge-shaped building where two roads connect in the 18th arrondissement of Paris sits a public trash can.  It's a hideous green, bolted to the ground, and a popular subject of photo albums American tourists compile after their brief whirlwind tours of Europe ("Europe in 7 days!").

In this particular one, near the Guy Moquet metro stop, lies a small, nondescript paper bag.  That bag envelopes an object that most people would not believe belongs in a trash can.  Well, that's true; but it's equally true that no person seeing the object is likely to know what it is.  By appearances, it's the approximate size and shape of a Guy Moquet 0,54 Euro stamp.  Small, squarish, thin.  But if a curious person were to handle it, she would discover that it's hard and, if curious enough, that it's in fact virtually unbreakable.


Let's not muse so much on what such a curious person would do, but instead introduce such a curious person to the scene and see exactly what she would do.  Let's call her a good French name--perhaps Anne or Brigitte--no, let's call her Sylvie.  Sylvie is, say, 10 years old, precocious, somewhat small for her age (but not overly), with short, brown, straight hair, wearing jeans and a black pea coat, etc, etc.  She walks past the trash can chewing on the last bits of a pain au chocolat, and tosses a little pastry paper toward the mouth of the can, which serendipitously flutters and lands on the sidewalk.  She picks it up, drops it more carefully in the trash, when she sees the bag just described, reaches in, and removes it.  Let's paint a curious expression on her face as she opens it and pulls out our small object.


And thus is set the scene of our tale.  Because she is reluctant to throw out such a dense (for dense it is), clean, evidently purposeful object, she stashes it in her pocket, when she starts noticing a change in the world around her.  Being a human and therefore subject to logical fallacies, including but not limited to post hoc ergo propter hoc, she hastily (and accurately) concludes that the small object caused the change in the world around her.

This is the story detailing some of those changes.

Stream of Stress

It's interesting that in the stream of my stress water can begin to pool because of an obstruction and I'm left dallying in the pool, languishing in the moment, unproductive, guilt-ridden, only to discover, after much ado, that what's obstructing the pool is the smallest stone, easily removed by any motion other than the dallying I was engaged in.  And yet I so often float from pool to pool and let those stones ruin everything for a while.

I prefer my stress to be free-flowing, productive, moving, changing, not pooling.

Quandary, Part I

Do you ever have the moment where your best intentions collide with an obligation to do what you intend, but what you intend to do, while originally motivated by altruism, now seeming obligatory, is subsumed within that obligation, and thereby loses its fervor, leaving you guilty AND committed?

Spection, Part I

The angle I chose determined to intersect the one he chose, me bearing in, timing, not expecting a pass, in fact, quite assured that no pass was going to happen, so homing in determinedly to give it a good give, we two alone, except the poor irrelevant dude to my other side, irrelevant because he would never see a pass from the one set in my sights, so I bore in, sprinted in, with a gap to narrow and a hope of connect, as he came in from the side, not far from the baseline, and I came flying in from straight down the middle of the court, me in my silly green sweats and Celtics shirt, not because I was clueless of the effect, but because I had nothing else to wear, no shorts because it had been so long since I played basketball regularly, in fact this was the first one in quite a while, so in those sweats I watched as he jumped, then I jumped, and intersect we did right at the apex, only I was moving perpendicular to him and there was a whole lot of force, how else to explain it, that propelled my cocked arm through the plane of the ball, indeed through his plane, without touching him, and the ball went fiercely into the wood, plated door with an explosion of noise that was only out-done by the explosion of euphoria from my teammates.

Chaos, Part I

Leaning tree like leaning against it without any thought for what it might be I seek and hunger and yearn but never despair of the better things that elude me.  Strive, striven, thought.  Never to digest and immaterial things can't press down with equal force on the delays inherent in trimming beef from fat and nature from space.  Utterly undelectable dinner fragments torment my figment and delay my fears from that which is humble and sortable to that which is greasy and profound.  Never distinguish gibberish from that painless moment of unintuitive desperation where separation and digestion have a two-pronged fang of terror that inhabits and inhibits the heart from more rotund concerns.  Relax and don't dismay the others who think that there's purpose to seeming adjustment and adjustment to lost persons.  Round the head it swarms like bees in a parade seeking lemonade from the shirt of the three year old watcher.  Parade, charade.  Neither one expresses much but both evoke something much more and much less than perfect.  Aye.

Inhabitor, Part I

You may have met me, but surely don't know it.  I'm usually quite plain looking.  Most of those I talk to choose not to look me in the face because it makes it all so much harder.  Some can look me straight in the eyes and see what they're looking for.  Those people are rare.

I am between the living and something better.  I'm alive, but I feel none of the pains, illnesses, or appetites of mortals.  The only sorrow I feel is for the bad choices of others.  I have a unique perspective and that allows me to see what others choose that is going to bring them sorrow and pain.  Even when that sorrow pierces my heart, I have an undercurrent of peace and joy that is unknown in mortals.  I know--I used to be mortal.

I'm free to do as I please because I showed during mortality my commitment to do what's right.  Sometimes I have specific instructions.  Sometimes general.  Usually I just have a sense of where I should go and what I should do.  For me, it's all about the one.  Earth is filled with billions of ones--persons who have needs.  Occasionally the need is such that I need to get involved.

Today's mission is one such example.

Fall

It's late summer but fall in my heart.  I feel like my heart has been spread thin like butter on a piece of cold toast. It, too, has been beaten from cream.  Beaten, then spread.

Where it's not thin, it's just plain missing.  It harbors a void that I can't imagine being filled.  I know it will be, but it's hard to believe.  The emptiness gnaws at my soul.  The reminders are everywhere of what was wrenched out so suddenly and forcefully.

And I was but a friend and business partner.  What of his widow?  His young children?  What will they feel in coming days, months, and years?

I never before realized that it's not just about the past and the memories, but the empty future that, during mortality, will be without him.  His mortal chapter has been written.  The final period has been typed.  Next chapter.

This chapter, I pray, is short.

Onion Fever, Part I

She felt desiccated, like an old onion wedge, left in the bottom of the pan after the roast is long eaten.  Dry, forgotten, unwanted, then ground in the garbage disposal during a vigorous scrubbing.  But it's only how she felt. That's what happens when you are stuck alone in a desert canyon, sending text after text before your cell phone dies, with nary an answer, then get up to extricate yourself and fall and chew up your knees, hands, arms on a crumbly bit of sand-paper sandstone.

Other than that, she was doing quite well.  She was 12 miles from nowhere, from some obscure trail-head at the end of a long road whose name she couldn't remember, 20 miles from the closest town (as the vulture flies) of 158.  Heck, she couldn't even remember what national park or monument or whatever she was in, only that Bill Clinton had made it such.

The hike in had been invigorating.  Only everything she valued on the way in--solitude, self-time, remoteness, serenity--were the very things she loathed now.  Waterless, foodless, scraped-up, and with blistery feet, her prospects looked poor.  Rationally, she was not in a good place.  Irrationally, she was even in a worse place. Common sense and reason suggested that she wouldn't survive without some good fortune and a good dose of energy that she utterly lacked.  Her edgy nerves, however, told her that she was all-but-dead.  Neither one was encouraging.

What to do?  Push out the way she had come?  Many, many hours from the best chance at a rescue?  Or go deeper in with some vague hope that there was a closer road or some other person in that direction?  (Oh how she wished she had studied the topo map more carefully before leaving!)  Or should she scale the treacherous face of the rock around her and hope she could see something promising?  That would surely spend her energy and seemed reckless--putting all of her rattlesnake eggs in one Anasazi basket, so to speak.

Ultimately, she decided on a couple things.  First, she would head out the way she came.  Second, she wouldn't do anything until the sun was a bit lower in the sky.  Third, she would abandon her back-pack.  Fourth, she would avoid risking gnawing on any plants en route, hunger and thirst notwithstanding.  Fifth, she would cut up some scraps of cloth to try to cushion her feet from her sandals.  Sixth, she would head out at a steady, purposeful pace and not think about anything but the next step.  That was the plan.  No thinking about the mountain lion tracks she thought she saw earlier.  No worrying about the obnoxious bats already shooting around overhead.  No thinking about food.  Definitely no worrying about water.  No hesitating or out-thinking herself.  No changing her plan.  No panicking because of the coyote poop here and there in the canyon.  No worrying about the heavy clouds moving in from the north (the very direction out).  She would follow her plan, clear her mind of all worry, and just take one step.  Then another.  Then another.  And not stop until . . . well, until there were no more steps.

One hour later, feet freshly protected with strips of a shirt, backpack abandoned, she set out and took her first step, a dried, pathetic onion looking to avoid the bottom of the drain.

Cannon

A dull fog lingers over the water, rolling softly toward me as I stand on the lone dark shore, when a piercing call lifts from the prow of a ship I can only barely detect passing the dock.  It's my son.  My son!  My only son.

His call is a lightness in my heart, an inspiring melody as he hails me.  That voice, still boyish, can penetrate the depths of my being.  He's my purpose, my hope, my longing.  In him my joy resides.

I recognize in his voice despair and longing, a plea implied in its tones.  But he doesn't ask for what he can't and shouldn't.  He only calls my name, seeking some reassurance, some response, some word of encouragement.  It takes all of my determination to turn and walk from that calling voice, withholding the answer I long to call out to him.  I so desire to pierce the fog with my husky voice, "Son!  I'm here!  I love you!  You will soon be back with me!!"

But I don't.  I walk away, trembling, to leave him to complete his journey in the only way he can--alone.

The groans of my soul sing a morose tune, sorrow mixed with joy, pain mixed with peace, empathy mixed with forbearance.  My legs almost fail me in my journey away.  I almost turn.  My heart reaches out for strength, my will magnified in purposeful determination.

It's almost done.  The act is almost done.  The purpose is almost fulfilled.  My will is soon done through my son.  Oh, that it could be any other way!  Oh, that I could do this myself!  That I could give my life to comfort him and give him rest!

I stagger forward, shoulders bent under the weight of his burden.  I collapse in gravity and in hope.

My son!

Clair de Lune

From Yvelines, an ode to Paul, who stands in the looming calm of the sad and beautiful moonlight, the same moonlight where the disillusioned revelers have lost faith in their false happiness.  How can the moon, the same moon that makes the birds dream in the trees and the fountains of hardened man sob in the ecstasy of despair, impress him with morose longing for his own soul, and that of another?  The flowers of evil inspire him to that empty life where the quiet peace of the moon ambiguously casts its rays on the souls of the damned and the innocents of nature.  The melody pulls and pushes, a finer tribute to the sadder life, and I'm left apart.

Somewhere Only We Know, Part I

Jim sat in a tortured room of all browns--brown walls, brown floors, brown furniture, and brown light--his mind lost in the gloom of the woods of his youth, where browns and greens combined with yellows and shifting lights.  Dead wood, living wood; living life, dying memories.

Jim wasn't his real name--at least, it didn't have to be.  He had a name, but it didn't matter at that stage what it was or should be, only that he had one.  Up close it didn't matter.  Far away it didn't matter.  The living boxes piled around him, above, below, on all sides; and they were equally filled with him, or other hims, in an outward radius, filling the immensity of space.  Or at least of his world.  Or his city.  All of which was one and the same.  And he was in the center of it all.

But he wasn't even there.  His mind explored those woods, where nothing else mattered, in the woods or out, in his mind or out.  He little cared which was right and which was wrong, let alone understood anything as nuanced as fiction and reality.  Was he a young boy in the woods dreaming of his adulthood in a brown box in a brown city, or was he an adult dreaming of exploring the woods of his youth?  Which was better?  Was it better to be in the future looking back at those woods, or was it better to be in those woods dreaming of such a brown future?

Jim sat, estranged from his own world, from his own self, from his own feelings.  And yet he felt he was going somewhere, that there was some purpose, unlike some character in some disgusting existentialist play.  He was not trapped in a room, but free in the woods.  Wasn't he?  Wasn't he free to leave his room and his dreams?  Wasn't he free to explore both his memory and his brown city?  Exits were everywhere.  Even his confines were an exit from his thoughts.

As he slid between moments, played time-travel with his life, Jim was kidnapped into one of them with the force of an alarm.  An actual alarm, ringing, screaming through his brown building.  He grabbed his shoes and, without looking back, ran out the door, down the stairs, out of the building, and into the brown night.

The Impossible Dream, Part I

Mr. Patterson's angular white melon face destroyed the impossibility of my dreams.

The colorless, long, top-heavy thing was leering down at me, framed in a crooked top-hat, cruelly encouraging me with that odious sneer.  His face was like a lower-case g on an old Smith Corona, round at the top, with a sagging mouth and chin rounding out the bottom.  He said something, the lower portion of his head wagging back and forth, sucking in air and blowing out words like some kind of freakish sea cucumber.

While his huge black boot pinned my chest and his sea cucumber serenely and grotesquely lectured me, I kicked and screamed and writhed and spat and vented and squirmed and seethed and thrashed.  I eventually gave up, not due to a lack of will, but to an utter physical exhaustion.  My limbs failed me, my head sagged back on the cold rock floor, my eyes relaxed into an unfocused stare somewhere just beyond his hideous head.  But my mind still rebelled.  I refused to understand him.  His words held no meaning--they were as foreign as his pale, oceanic, unwelcome face.

I don't know how long the lecture over my prostrate form lasted and I remember almost nothing of what was said.  But what I did hear, though a short phrase, has haunted me in the two decades since.  And as of this morning, I'm willing to do something about it.