Anthology Complex II by M.B. Julien - HTML preview
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Lynne doesn't mind, so when Sarah sees this she asks her mother if I could stay as well. Lynne and I look at each other and the next thing I know I'm sitting on their floor playing cards with Sarah. If you don't pay attention, you'll often find yourself in a place that you have no idea how you got to.
Lynne had momentarily retired to her room while David and Alondra continued to go back and forth in 2D domination, but ultimately David retained his high score and left Alondra asking for tips.
“What are you guys playing?,” David asks us as he walks over. “Crazy Eights,” Sarah replies. Eventually David and Alondra join us and the game gets a bit more interesting.
A few minutes in Lynne comes back out, without a uniform and without a name tag, but with the same straight face. I'm sure now that she has had a long day.
“What game is that?,” she asks us. “Crazy Eights,” David beats Sarah to the punch. I ask her to sit down and play, but as soon as she goes to sit, Anthony begins to cry and now we truly have a full house.
Lynne tends to Anthony and takes him from his resting place. The very moment she picks him up he stops crying. After a while she is able to get him to laugh, that hysterical laugh I had heard before, and like a virus, it spreads to Lynne and changes her mood.
Pemdas.
I sit there analyzing the image, wondering how simple laughter can be so contagious.
Darkness seems to appeal more to me, even though it is the light that I seek.
Lynne never comes back to us, instead she receives communication that Mary will be coming home late. Though much of the day is gone, Alondra insists on staying, and because I am paired with her indirectly, I too must stay.
As I the teach the younger ones a new game, I notice that Lynne had gone back into her room and then came back out with materials that told me she was in the mood for art.
She sets up the canvas in the kitchen nearby and begins to stare at the whiteness.
When she actually starts painting, she begins with the borders. She paints the corners and the borders a type of sky blue, then begins to paint the actual painting inside of it.
Composition is everywhere. The way we start, the way we end. The order of it all.
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Where we choose to place something, where we choose not to place it. Each piece is meant to be where it is for a specific reason. Or maybe it's not. Maybe you can randomize everything and still express the same idea, just so long as the actual pieces themselves remain what they were before.
I eventually leave the younger ones to see one small island with fruit trees on it, and then ask Lynne what it was she was painting. Her facial expression has changed. Not much, it is still very straight, but enough to see that Anthony and art can affect her very own composition.
“I had this idea a while ago about an old woman who had a bunch of garden islands that were connected together by bridges,” she tells me. She talks about how the old woman had planted the trees and built the bridges herself and starts to talk about all this backstory. I tell her that she's crazy, but that it was a good kind of crazy. “The Bridge Garden Overpass,” that's what she wanted to call it.
Alondra finally leaves, which is also my ticket out and back into my apartment, but as I'm going to my door I hear John coming up the stairs. “Hey buddy,” he says, “you have a minute?”
Once again memory fails me and this time I find myself in Jack's living room. He goes into his bedroom and then comes back out with a pad of paper that he hands to me.
“What do you think, man?” They were some lyrics he was writing. He tells me that he couldn't trust his other friends because they liked every thing that he wrote, that he needed an impartial party to judge his work. As I begin to read, he lights up a cigarette and enters his kitchen.
First Stanza >> her face, fills up the sky / and puts me at peace, blue and white lullaby / shes got clouds and rain and sunlight, in just one eye / and in the other, shades and stills of a distant life
Second Stanza >> vowels change sounds throughout the night / and when i reach for her, shes not in sight / but softly her voice remains, it repeats and it stains / and she guides me through, this troubled life
“the shades of a distant life” seemed to be the working title of the song, and on another page I found guitar tablature to go along with it, a small segment that said “13a > slide to 15a (bend up and back down) > 13a > 11a > 13a > 11a > 8a (vibrato) / 11d > 13d
> 11d > 10d > 13d > 10d > 8d > 10d > 8d (vibrato) / 20a (bend up and back down) > 16a
> 18a (bend up and back down) > 16a (vibrato) > 13a (vibrato) > 16a (vibrato)”
“Who is she?,” I ask. Jack tells me about his daughter and the girlfriend that took her away. He'd written song after song for his daughter but music doesn't seem to replace the empty feeling. “She says I have a drinking problem, man, but that's bullshit. I'm not reckless or anything, you know?” No, I didn't know, but I did have an easy time 150 | ANTHOLOGY COMPLEX, THE
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understanding.
“The song is nice,” I tell him, “it seems like you're going for a 'gone and far away'
type of feeling.” Jack nods his head and agrees, putting out his cigarette. “I think you should change 'repeats' to 'echoes' though, it would be like it's gone but it's still there and has a chance of coming back,” I finish.
Jack pictures it in his mind then nods his head once more. “It echoes and it stains,” he sings aloud. As he is changing the words I ask him if he also sings, and he goes on to tell me about how much he hates his voice.
How many people do you know like this. I've met a good amount of people who hate their own laugh. They hate a certain feature of their face or their own body. You spend days and nights wishing on insecurities, but most of these things, you don't get to pick. I guess you could say these are the things that make you unique, but that's mostly packaged drivel. Spend much of your life desiring perfection, then die and take it to the grave.
Not too long later, Jack tells me to follow him into The Room, and there he shows me his anthology complex. An uncountable amount of records, a musical paradise. I begin to look through them and he tells me that I can borrow whatever I want. Going through them, I realize they are in alphabetical order and that he has just about every genre of music at his disposal.
“A February Star,” “A Hybrid Culture,” “A Prince In Kabul,” “A Silent Icarus,” “A Sweetwater Compromise,” “Alaska, 1867,” “Arbitrary,” “Atlanta Nights.”
As I'm still looking through, Jack lights up another cigarette and then notices that I am currently on “A Urinary Burning.”
“Lost love,” he says, filling the room with smoke, “I pursued and she withdrew, then she pursued and I withdrew, and... And so we danced,” he laughs.
Some of these albums, I recognize. Songs from my youth. Songs from today. Songs even from before both of our time. I suppose, that regardless of the era, we will always have a room that needs to be filled and a song that needs to be sung.
I leave Jack and finally make it home without any interruptions. It's pass midnight, but I guess the day before wasn't entirely lost. I turn on the television and find something to watch, but sooner rather than later my phone begins to ring. Who would be calling at this time in the night.
When I pick up I learn that it is Brandun, calling me to let me know that business would be picking back up soon. “That's great,” I say, and for now the call ends.
I sit back down thinking about how an apartment building, or maybe even an apartment complex, is sometimes really just a small community. I guess for the most part, though, it depends on whether or not the people around you are sociable or not.
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this life, in this cycle, what are the chances they will be born again, or die again, on this same cycle? Is it possible for you to meet someone twice? Someone you knew long ago dies, and later in your same life you come across a replication.
In fiction, this person would almost qualify as a doppelganger; a paranormal double of a living person. It makes you wonder how many times a person like you has lived. It makes you wonder how many other people out there are exactly like you. How many snowfalls fall exactly the same way in the same place over an extended period of time.
The arbitrariness of life.
You wake up, and you are born again. You go to sleep, and you die again. You must sleep because you woke, and you must wake again because you slept.
Around midnight becomes around noon and I find myself wide awake from a good night's rest. The garden islands cross my mind, and this is when my mind begins to fiddle with the idea of painting something myself. Looking at the purple rose in my kitchen, I think about the consequences of painting something for Lynne. How she would react. I like her, maybe a lot, I don't know, but you already know what I mean when I say that I am the rock that propels.
Later in the day, on the news, I hear a term that reminds me of the dream I had last night, and the fact that I had forgotten to write it down. “The Cradle of Civilization,” a reporter says.
Sterling and I had been traveling back to the camp with Gary, Stephanie's brother, after we were able to help him escape from a civilian prison.
During the walk back, the three of us run into a body of water that we hadn't seen before, as if it rose up from underneath the earth to settle here, in this place and time.
Coming out of this water were figures that seemed to be shadowed in darkness, and they walked forth into a neighboring forest.
We followed the dark figures with stealth for a while, until we came across a wide field. There we gazed upon the Lamb and several seals. And we saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and we heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the dark figures saying, “Come and see.” And we saw, and behold a white horse; and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him; and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
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Chapter 66
THE DARK BLUE SETTING SUN
1:2:7:66
SILVIO Parker opens his apartment door to find his children, Sarah and David, sitting on the couch watching cartoons on a cartoon network. As he walks by, he notices that this particular cartoon depicts a cat chasing a mouse all about.
In another room, Lynnette is on the phone speaking to her brother, J.D., who was in another town in another state. What they talk about is of no importance, though you may find what Lynnette had written down in her diary notebook just one hour earlier very interesting. Or not, who knows.
While her first notebook had been humorously titled “Diaria,” this one seems to have no title, perhaps because at this point in her life, there is little humor to be found.
7/21 - The heat is starting to get to me. When will this summer end? I glanced outside my window a few minutes ago and saw Helen walking home with her daughter, and it reminded me that David was finally going to be starting school next month. He's really excited and this will give me so much more time to get more things done. I'm hoping me and Silvio can start over maybe, we are in a really bad place. I'm so tired and it's really the only thing I want anymore. Just to feel safe and content in my own home with my own family. I don't think that's to much to ask for. I read somewhere that irises and tulips symbolize “starting fresh,” so I planted some just around the edge of our building. Maybe it will help... I hope so! If not, I'm sure the neighbors will at least appreciate them... I'm really running out of things to write here. Sometimes I hate that I'm not as easily inspired as I used to be. I used to be able to write pages and pages about a single experience with a butterfly but now that all seems gone. Like I've lost a part of me that I'll never get back.
It's like that dream I keep having, where I'm standing on the top of a cliff looking into the ocean, and once I really start to look, I can see a ship way out there leaving without me. It always makes me think of my mother and how Silvio basically forced her out of our lives. I'm not afraid of change, but sometimes I just feel like some changes are unnecessary. I wish some things could just stay the way they are forever, but I guess I'm old enough to know that that's not how it works. If none of this works I'm not sure what I'll do, I was never good with plans. I'm really not sure if I ever will be.
Silvio opens the door to where Lynnette is and asks her who she's talking to. She tells him that she's talking to J.D. and that she would be out in a moment or two.
The subject of conversation changes and Lynnette begins to tell her brother about a few new paintings she had painted since they last saw each other. Paintings that were, for the time being, located with Emilie.
She tells J.D. about five paintings in total; one depicting a Sun rising over a farm, one 153 | THE DARK BLUE SETTING SUN
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of a woman's face, one of black and white spots, one of a family walking down a beaten path, and the one she didn't get to finish, a painting showing a few wooden houses near a shoreline. There were suppose to be trees behind the houses and a distant blue moon in the background, and on the beach a couple of people walking. This painting has yet to be finished, though she has kept it in the back of mind for quite some time.
Clocks move their hands and a moment or two turns into fifteen minutes and we see Silvio open the door to where Lynnette is once again. She tells Silvio that she's almost done, then Silvio asks her if she called to get the estimate on the car repair. She hesitantly says no, that she forgot, knowing that things were about to go from bad to worse.
Silvio walks over to her and snatches the telephone from her hand and hangs it up.
“What the hell?,” she asks. Silvio doesn't reply. He looks down at the table and sees her diary notebook, then leaves the room, slamming the door behind him.
Lynnette stays in the room for a while and it's not too long before she begins to write again. This time the words are dark, bold, and before the flowers have even begun to grow they are affected.
Sometime later, Silvio opens the door again and tells her to get out of the room, but Lynnette says no. “Stop writing in that damn book and get out here,” he yells. Leave me alone.
They go back and forth for a small while until both stop speaking and Silvio simply stands in the doorway, staring at her. She can feel his eyes, but she doesn't move, she simply keeps writing unaffected.
An unknown amount of time passes by and he finally walks over to her, grabs her notebook and throws it across the room. Lynnette gets up and slaps him across the face, but this slap is nothing compared to the slap that she would receive back. A slap that would bruise a cheekbone and cause damage to a hand. A slap that would echo into the living room for David and Sarah to hear. A slap that would add to the attracting and to the repelling of two children who were in more than just a bad place; two children who were in a setting that was inspired by a true nightmare.
Lynnette presses her hand against her cheek that was in throbbing pain, “Fine, you don't want to come out? Then stay in here,” Silvio says as he walks out of the room, and once again, the door slams.
About half an hour later, after lying on the bed and after thinking enough thoughts that would drive anyone else insane, Lynnette gets up and picks up her notebook and goes over to the closet. She places the notebook in a box way in the back of the closet that would also house three other diary notebooks. Maybe she hid them so far away because she didn't want Silvio to read through them, or maybe she didn't want anyone in general to ever find them.
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The thoughts that she'd written down were so private to her that she couldn't bear to have anyone else knowing what was truly inside of her. Growing inside of her. She could never let anyone know that darkness was filling the light, much like a cancer that spreads slowly and indiscriminately.
Stanley Mandelstam, who very seldom does field work, stands in front of a board of suspected criminals. You might say his ability to recognize patterns and his ability to crack codes were handed down to him from God himself, but you may or may not be wrong. Regardless, when Frank Mainor briefly visits the other members of the task force, Stan asks for his attention concerning something he had found after studying what Rock had left behind.
“You see, here, and here,” Stan says as he points to pictures and a piece of paper. A piece of paper which contained several addresses that correlated with several pictures that were taken by Mya and a few others. “It might seem like they are dropping the packages from a random window each time, but they're not,” he finishes.
Stan goes on explain to Frank that the pattern is simply correlated to time. “The packages are brought in, usually from two p.m. to seven p.m., and when the recipient comes for the drop-down, you subtract one from the hour the package arrived and that's the floor the package is stored.”
“Why not just randomize it?,” Frank asks. “That's what I was asking myself, I'm assuming there is some hidden element of communication I'm not seeing that disallows for arbitrariness,” Stan answers.
Frank continues to look over the piece of paper and the pictures and notices that some buildings have more floors than others and that the suspected criminals are constantly switching the times of arrival.
“Ryan and I checked a lot of these addresses and it doesn't look like any of them are still being operated,” Frank says. “Of course,” Stan replies, “they know you have their scent. There's no way that they've completely stopped all operations though. Maybe some, but there have to be others out there still.”
A moment goes by and Stan tells Frank that he had no intentions of busting any of these package buildings; most of the people operating this compartment of the organization are just kids or low-level players. The main reason why Stan notified Frank of this was because he theorized that this was how, on some level, the entire organization worked. That if they are given more information and if the organization is indeed time oriented, they could predict when Omar Robinson will be “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Lieutenant Stoddard, who had recently been promoted and was searching for Frank, finally finds Frank and pulls him aside.
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Stoddard speaks of budget, among many other political aspects, and soon implicates that the Sun will be setting on this operation soon, so they needed to wrap things up and make some arrests. It was clear from the start to Frank that Stoddard only read, wrote and spoke in numbers.
When Frank reunites with Stan, Stan tells him that he also noticed some other things.
“Maybe Terrell hadn't realized it, or maybe he did, but some of the information he provided implicates a couple of cops.” Frank isn't surprised, but for the time being subtly tells Stan that they will suppress these details and not subject any of the other cops to submission.
“Wait, so you're tellin' me some things are tied to fate and other things aren't?,”
Wallice asks Derek. Derek tells Wallace to imagine a pen sitting on a table, and explains that while the pen was destined to be in that exact location, the table was not, that the table was mostly tied to chance.
“Okay, but what does that have to do with a hockey player who has a half-metal brain?,” Wallace asks. “I haven't figured out the metal brain part completely yet but that's not really the point. The point is that he was breaking records and winning championships, but even though, he still decided to retire early because he didn't believe he was suppose to be there. So it's like, his body is from the chance world and the part of his brain that's metal is from the fate world, and even though he's one of the greatest of all time, he was never suppose to be doing those things, so he just walks away and vanishes, and no one ever hears about him ever again,” Derek finishes.
Wallace speaks, “I don't know man, that shit sounds strange... You know what would make a better movie I think? Take your idea but it's a black guy playing football, and there's no metal brain shit or chance and whatever, it's just straight-up. Dude is breaking records and making cash and all that shit. All the cheerleaders are on his dick and shit, like he's a fucking king.”
“Man, that is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard of in my life,” Derek comments. Wallace, “Bro are you kidding? I would rather see some dude make it than watch some sad ass movie about a dude who gets fucked by fate or chance or whatever the fuck you were talking about. People don't want to go to the movies to fuckin' cry.
That's what funerals are for.” Derek, “That shit still sounds stupid.” “Yeah whatever, my movie still make more than yours, believe me on that,” Wallace says.
Moments pass by as the night threatens the Sun, “Did you see Tina come through here?,” Derek asks Wallace. “Yeah, I seen't her just a minute ago, why?” “'Cause she owes me money and I'm about this close to beating her ass.” Wallace laughs, “Beat her ass? I've seen handicapped flies that can take you.” Derek resents. “You ain't beatin' no one's ass,” Wallace says as he cleans the grip of his handgun.
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Cylinders, half-spheres and one-fourthed cubes. The only thing I'm missing is something that would measure up to a prism.
I never particularly liked washing dishes, but I can't complain; I'm also the one who chose to live alone. While scrubbing the three-dimensional shapes, even from deep inside the kitchen I can hear the weatherman speak of a dense fog that has yet to come. I started again to think of weather changes, even beginning to predict them, but as I've said before, I've never been that great at predicting these types of things.
As I walk away I hear the sink utter a large gargle, pipes speaking to me in a language that was all too foreign. It doesn't stay with me for too long, and after I use the bathroom I grab my coat and leave the apartment.
The moment I step outside I feel the Sun's rays. Discernible clouds in the sky. I think about the weatherman and about how he had it all wrong. I could see for miles and there was no fog in sight.
I walk up to my car and for a brief moment I rejoice in my mind, finally returning this piece of past from my presence. Too long into the drive and I find myself at the edge of the city, and unsurprisingly, the first thing I see is a man getting arrested. For what, who knows, but the law enforcer and the possible criminal seemed to be playing their part and the city landscape appeared to be their stage. Tall buildings, people, cars, noise, you could almost suffocate from it.
The scene reminds me of a dream, a dream I had four years ago. Stuck in row 2, block B, solitary confinement took a lot of time getting used to. Worse than the punishment itself was the mental disorder you would suffer from, and the single fact that the people who monitored you would not tell you why you were there. What it was you had done that was so wrong to be here in this space and time.
A priest comes by from time to time, but even he won't shed any light on the subject.
Enough time passes by and you begin to remember a small part of your past, but the remembrance only brings forth more questions. “Back where I use to live, I kept a small journal,” you tell the priest, “it had all my repulsive thoughts in it. Things I wanted to do before I died. Bad things that I wanted to do to other people. To other men, other women, things I craved to do to children, sometimes even to infants. The possessive evil that day by day forced me to think of violating the basic rights of childhood. To rip out the innocence and to stuff it with my being.”
I figured that it was in this grand list of repulsion that I would find my crime. A week later, the priest would come back to me, telling me that he had read every line in the journal, but he would also tell me that I was beyond his help, that I instead needed to see a man who was far more religious than himself. A man who many would call “multi-religious.”
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I make a left turn at the light. The majority of us will spend our lives practicing one religion, and a percentage of that majority will spend its life blindly denying any other religion. The irony you'll find in this is that every religion, every philosophy, every system of thought, they all encourage you to seek knowledge.
It doesn't make sense to me. It's about as smart as believing in one crazy scientific theory and completely rejecting an other crazy scientific theory; you live and die by that one theory, but in all that time you could have studied both of them and in each of them you may have found parts of the truth. Maybe not an objective truth, but at the very least a subjective truth, one that may have curled your life a better path in that complete void of darkness.
I stop at a red light. Next to me, I catch a glimpse of a man picking his nose, but he is none the wiser. Completely oblivious to my extensive existingment. Is that a word?
Anyway, I look at him, wondering if he's real. If he has a family, an occupation, hobbies.
Where he might be coming from, and where he might be going to. I wonder if he suffers from disease, if he's rich or poor, or somewhere in between, if anyone he knows has recently died.
The light turns green and he drives away, leaving all of my questions unanswered. I think to myself, if he had caught me picking my nose, would he give my existence the same respect? Would he see me as a person who has this completely other life separate from his own? Or in me, would he only see flashes of himself? Would he only see me as a person living in his world.
Left turn and I learn that I was wrong. The weatherman was right. I could see the misty fog beginning to settle in now, slowly coming down, but down none the less.
Through the clouds and in the sky I can see a dark blue rising Sun, and as my drive continues, the fog gets more and more dense. What was left of the last snow was losing its golden glow, going from white to dirt to nothing so.
Continue for one mile. On the radio a voice tells me about weather conditions that might impede my daily activities. About a fog that might be thicker than expected. The one day I decide to go more than a hundred feet from my house and this fucking happens.
The stage of life, as I look around, is no longer looking like the stage of life. It's beginning to look more like a stage from a dream and the most expensive effect is the smoke. Right now, if you looked up at the sky, the star that sets in the west would no longer be visible. The prop that struggles to come back, but for the time being is of no use.
I finally get to the parking garage and park the car, existing it and closing the door with authority. Good riddance. I pull the blue tarp over it, hoping to never see it again, and this reminds me of Lynne. Of her asking if she could depend on me.
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I don't have to tell you that your mind takes a longer time to heal than your body. You can't see it, can't touch it, can't hear it, can't taste it, can't smell it, so unlike the physical wound, you can't ever really tell if it's fully healed. Years pass and you think you're fine, you're ready to be normal again, and the very first experience you have after all this mending tells you that your body hadn't quite finished the healing process. This experience and realization, it leaves you hopeless, wondering if who you were, who you used to be, is completely gone forever.
In Lynne's eyes, as bright as she may appear to be, I can sense these things. I'm sure you can too, even though you've never even seen her. I'm sure you've seen it in the eyes of others as well. You're probably nodding your head right now, saying yeah, yeah, even thinking of a person in particular.
For a split second, they show you that psychological fragment, they let you see that darkness inside of them. Sometimes it's an accident, a loss of control, but sometimes it isn't, sometimes it's what they want you to see.
It is often that I'll think of Silvio and the last time I saw him. The nightmare I had right before he actually showed up. Often that I'll think about what may have become of that family in the worst case scenario.
That nightmare came so close to reality that it begs a second look, even a third and maybe a fourth. Not only did it come close to a specific physical location, it came close to a moment in time. The chances of the nightmare occurring right before? I don't even want to do the math.
With these things in mind, I begin to wonder if our location in space, or the place we exist, combined with the current time, if this compound determines which dreams we can unlock and see.
That is to say, if I had instead been living in Nigeria, telling you these stories not now, but a decade ago, would I be telling different stories? That seems to be so. The dreams I have written down now might be inaccessible, locked away and hidden, and could only be discovered by meeting certain parameters. Where you are and when you are in the day more than likely has an impact in what you experience during the night.
I leave the car and make my way to the street, and there I find that the fog had completely settled and was probably as dense as fog could get. The vision that saw for miles could now only see a couple of yards.
People came out of the fog like ghosts. Demons. Ghouls. Devils. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a being that passed by in a flash.
I eventually found the bus stop, but after more than an hour of waiting, someone came by and told me that the buses had stopped running. I should have been able to see that no one was going to be driving in something like this. I could go back to the car, 159 | THE DARK BLUE SETTING SUN
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drive back home, but what are the chances I would make it back home alive.
I didn't bring enough money to stay somewhere for a night, and I couldn't go home. I was basically stranded in what felt to be like a dream, playing my part on an abandoned stage. No longer the master of my fate, and no longer the captain of my soul.
Mary, who had just returned home from what may have been one of the most difficult workdays in recent time, walks into The Room to embark on even more work. Shuffling papers, opening computer files, signing papers, it all came with the life of a determined individual.
Ten minutes into the second period, Mary receives a phone call from the hospital, or more specifically, her physician, doctor Rotobnhick.
Mary had visited the hospital sometime before as she was stressed with one of her bodily functions; urination. Her bathroom use had increased and in turn caused her to wonder if there was something wrong with her kidneys.
Doctor Rotobnhick was calling to tell her good news, that her kidneys were fine, but also called to tell her something else, something that may or may not have had a positive reaction. Rotobnhick explains to Mary that she is pregnant, and knowing she had no children, he offers his sensitivity.
Days pass, and like any person who was unprepared for this type of news, she runs through her options. Abortion? Adoption? Adaptation? What she knew, and what couldn't be changed, was the simple fact that she was not ready to take care of someone else. She could barely take care of herself.
A month passes and she finds herself sitting home alone yet again in the room, looking all around it, wondering if it was time to change its interior. To make way for a smaller part of her. The options continue to cycle, over and over, tape to tape and back again, wondering if she was ready for a daughter, or for a son. Her mind storms, and all the while, denial begins to seep into her unconscious brain.
The fog was relentless to anyone trapped by it. For a while I walked, hoping it would let up sooner rather than later. I walked for what seemed to be hours, but I couldn't really be sure of the time until the Sun began to set. What was a mere dense fog became an intense fog. The ghosts stopped, only to be replaced by barely visible street lights and fainted colorful traffic lights. Stage lights, by any means.
The fog effect seemed to cause the combination of the red and yellow traffic lights, leaving me with the memory of an orange rose.
Lynne told me that orange roses were like evening skies and best symbolized desire.
The desire to gain a better understanding of something, or the desire to acquire knowledge about something you don't quite understand.
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foreign every thing is to them. Their surroundings, the culture, the people; the fisheye mechanics grab hold of your mind and distort that reality. You can never truly understand how lost they feel, but somehow they adapt. They learn and they evolve to survive, to learn a strange and foreign language.
A time ago when I was conversing with Jack, I asked him about the calluses he had on his fingers. He tells me he got it from all the playing he did when he first started, and explains that a little pain back then saved him from a lot of pain now. His body adapted to the wire that his fingers had to press against and all the pain from playing soon vanished.
I continued to stare at the orange illusion until up ahead in the distance, I saw another shimmering light. Something that seemed to be between green and yellow. A lime illusion.
As I walked towards it, my head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, and when I got to it, I saw that it was an abandoned building. I gazed back at the immense fog behind me, then decided that it was time to stop for the night.
I entered the building, walking through the hallways looking for a place to sit down.
For a while, I believed I was alone, but after walking far enough, the ghosts that I had seen back out there had turned into physical beings and I found that this was their haunted house.
The fog in here was a dispense fog, definitely more tolerable than the one outside.
Seeing as how this floor was occupied, I went up to the next, only to find that it too had owners.
I walked through the dark hallways peering into each room until I found one that was vacant, and there I had my rest. I sat down, periodically looking out of the window wondering if the fog had gone, trying to stay awake in a place I did not trust. Had it not been for the door that constantly creaked, speaking to me from afar, my goals may not have been met.
Half-way anxious, being in a building I knew nothing about, my thumb would begin to bleed again due to my unconscious picking at it. It's been too long now and I'm guessing it will never heal properly.
The creaking door is opened and I see two young men look inside, and seeing it is only me, they allow themselves in and sit on the opposite side. No words are exchanged.
Instead, they experiment with heroin. They let their ghostly bodies fly, and though neither of them said it to me directly, I could feel them think it, “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.”
The feeling reminds me of a time before, where I spent weeks at a downtown hotel.
All the floors, all the rooms. It reminds me of my solitude, and in turn, my own addiction.
My own obsession. In them I see myself, experimenting not with substances, but with my 161 | THE DARK BLUE SETTING SUN
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own fluid mind.
The following morning I would wake up to look out of the window and find that fog had finally left. Walking through the building, I saw that everyone was gone and the building was my own.
Now I'm on the bus, thinking of yesterday and the time away from home. In my travels I hardly ever stayed in one place for a long time. Dissatisfied, I'd skip around often, but every chance I got I'd stop by a body of water. I'd look out into the vast sea, seeing only as far as my eyes allowed me to, and in uncommon cases throwing rocks into it, attempting to hit the top of the incoming waves.
Were the rocks thrown in vain? Maybe. But even something as simple as this has its complexity. Newton's second law would agree.
The weight of the rock, its shape, what it's made of, the distance from the wave, its height, its incoming speed, these are all complex things that you have to calculate unconsciously. Dealing with uncertainty is one of our most powerful gifts, but sometimes we don't realize a story has an end until we are actually near the end.
Those who mourn are fortunate, they may one day be comforted. Those who can see both the darkness and the light, they may one day operate the dial. Those who are bound and chained, they may one day, in all their unjustified imprisonment, find solace. And in an instant of time, all those who cannot really see might be shown all the depths of reality.
When I got back home I sat down at my desk and stared at the reflection of the Sun on my wooden floor. Enough light to blind you if you stared at it for too long. I sat there reading about a dream where I lived alone on the top of a snowy mountain. Not too far from this reality, it almost seemed to superimpose itself onto this universe. The only notable difference being a wolf that visited me from time to time.
Afterwards, when I got up to leave the room, I saw that the reflection of the Sun had moved, and was now idling in the hallway, still blinding. I wonder, where else does it idle. Just here, or thousands of miles in any direction. Can it idle on words and imprint them into physicality, or will all of our written pages forever remain in the abstract realm, only to exist simply as our minds poured out on paper.
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Chapter 67
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1:2:7:67
SOME eleven storied years ago, I used to have this recurring dream. I'm walking down a night street during what might be considered the windiest night of the year. I'm never sure where I'm headed and have no idea from which I came, but what is clear and ringing is the voice in my head.
The voice, I know I've heard it somewhere before, and it is everything except confusing. The voice tells me that change is the law of life, and that those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. Each time I have the dream, I try to get more out of the voice, but it only has so many words, and before I know it, I wake up before I get to where I'm going.
Today is the first day of spring. I am awake at a time I am usually sleeping, over at Lynne's apartment watching David because his mother and sister were at the hospital.
Sarah had an appointment, I am told.
After beating David over ten times at the video game of his choice, he finally gives up and shuts it off. “I don't know why I can't beat you,” he says to me. I laugh, “You think just because you can beat Alondra that you're the world champion?” He shrugs. I see that he did truly believe he was advanced at the game but was now doubting himself, so I tell him that even though he lost every time, he was getting better at it simply because he was playing someone above his skill level. Something I'd learned at Sid University.
The only problem with this philosophy, and I told Sid this, is that if you enjoy murdering people and want to get better at it, you can't just raise the bar and try to commit a difficult crime. It's not the same as playing chess. If you fuck up even once trying to do something above your talent in something like this, you get caught and end up in prison or on death row. The only people you'll be killing there are guards, visitors and other prisoners.
Sometime after the games, David asks me if I could go home. I tell him that it was my responsibility to watch him, and his reply is that I would only be twenty feet away. It made sense, what was the worst that could happen. Even so, I didn't want to be the blame if something did happen, so I stayed.
I could see that David was a bit irritated by my presence, but the thing is I knew exactly how he felt. You could have had the entire house to yourself, but someone had to come and ruin your plans. I'm beginning to feel like Tao.
I wanted to ask him why he wanted me to leave, but being a kid, I figured I would have an easier time dissecting his actions than attempting to understand his words.
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Among his actions was the need to lock the door to his room, accompanied with the delayed answering to my questions because he had his eyes and mind on something else.
Finally the time came when Lynne and Sarah were back from their hospital visit.
Everything was fine and it was time for the phantom to go back home, twenty feet away.
Towards the afternoon I go to check my mail, and after doing so realize that the Peace Lilies are still dead. It makes me wonder how the spring had not yet rejuvenated them. I enter back into the building and walk towards a pot of flowers. Lynne had already welcomed spring by decorating each of the hallways of the three floors with different types of plants. I suppose her home is still her home.
When I get to the top of the second floor, I see Lynne in the distance kneeling in front of her door, crammed inside her jacket. It wasn't even that cold anymore. Either way, she was kneeling down, staring at two pots of plants she had just placed there, on either sides of her door. Her fascination with design was beyond me. What drives a person to decorate. To color black and white images. To do away with the mundane. In her I see the same repellent formula used by her daughter.
In time, maybe between three or four seconds before she realizes I am there, I wondered what Lynne had done in the past. Her occupation, career, and if she wasn't occupied with a career in the past, I wonder what profession she would take interest in now, or in the future.
Do our professions define us? I have no idea what Jo does for a living. I have no idea if he's bounced around from job to job, trying to find his calling, or just trying to find some way to make money. I have no idea what he said when he was younger and someone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
If, however, in a universe with different dynamics, I learned of his profession, what would that really tell me about him? How much of the identity puzzle is attributed to the profession piece.
Some of us take the jobs we want, the jobs we strived for, and the rest of us take the jobs that are handed to us, regardless of if we want them or not. If this is the case, then the profession piece can be extremely misleading.
Taking a job you don't really care for is one distorter of the identity puzzle, but there are others. Resocialization is basically changing a person's personality by controlling their environment. You'll see this in two of the things that I dwell on often, two things that I've told you a time ago that fascinate me; warfare and prison.
If a man can be resocialized to be an effective soldier, and a prisoner can be resocialized to rejoin the civilized world, then surely, any one of us can be resocialized to adopt a new profession. If this too, is the case, then identity can never be captured into a definite form. We're all just shape-shifters, taking the form of the current year, current 164 | IF 6 WAS 7
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month, current day.
After enough time passes by, you become a new person, or at least part of you becomes a new person, much like how most of the cells in your body died a decade ago and were replaced with new cells. Behaviorally, sociologically, psychologically, genetically, biologically; you are always changing, literally and philosophically. Maybe metaphorically, too.
“It wasn’t you that changed, it was the world around you that changed,” Child Satan says to me in a dream I had five years ago. Just as he's finishing, Child God opens the door to a room that they had both nicknamed. The nickname was not in any sub-mortal language, but appeared to be moreso in symbols; an equal sign, an “O,” a line graph and a polygon within a polygon. There were other symbols, but there just wasn't enough time.
“Where are we?,” I ask the two. Child Satan sits down, “Have you ever wondered what lies beyond the edge of the universe?” “Many times,” I reply. At this point, Child God is removing six letters from one of the four walls; A, E, I, O, U and Y. Something above these letters tell me that they had to do mostly with the engineering of sound and the use of language.
“You would be just as wise to wonder what is hidden on your Earth,” Child Satan continues. “This room we are in now, it is everywhere and is in everything. So as we stand here, we are omnipresent. However, unless you are the occupant of this room, it is unobservable and immeasurable in any way.”
Child Satan doesn't seem to be making any sense to me, but I could see where he was going. A phrase I had heard often before was that “God is in everything,” and what Child Satan was going on about seemed to support this claim, but seeing as how Child Satan also had a hand in this project, one would have to consider that “Satan is in everything”
as well.
By this time Child God had finished setting up his demonstration area, so Child Satan and I joined him in that corner of the room.
Child God picks up a piece of transparent paper and superimposes it over a piece of black paper. “What color is the transparent paper?,” Child God asks me. “It's still transparent,” I reply, wondering if it's a trick question.
“Correct, but does it not appear to be black?,” he asks me. Before I can answer, he moves the transparent paper over to another piece of paper, and this time the color of the paper is white. “And now, the transparent paper appears to be white,” Child God finishes.
“One of the most difficult challenges of the project was creating its framework,”
Child God says to me, “so for the better part of the first millennium, we spent a lot of time developing and creating how the project would fundamentally work.”
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of “cleanslates.” A cleanslate was basically the transparent paper, and depending on the cleanslate's location, it would either have no identity, or no color, or it would appear to have an identity, or a color. However, a cleanslate never actually changes, it is always transparent, despite its illusion of identity.
“How does a cleanstate assume an identity?,” I ask the two, “You're basically telling me that the door to this room isn't actually a door, that it's composed of cleanslates that aren't really anything but empty templates, but how did the cleanslates cease to be empty templates and come to steal the identity of a door?”
Child Satan leaves and then comes back with a rolling table. On the rolling table I see two plates, one colored a light shade of gray, the other colored a dark shade of gray. Child Satan tells me that the lighter colored plate has all of the real information, the “source,”
so to speak, and the darker colored plate had a receiver that converted all of the real information from the lighter plate. Child Satan tells me that I lived in the darker plate, and that there were an infinite amount of dark plates in comparison to the only one light plate.
“There is indeed only one light plate,” Child God says, “and on this light plate there are cleanslates that are constantly moving around. The location of the cleanslate on the light plate determines its identity. That is to say, a cleanslate may remain an empty template, or a transparent paper, for a long time until it reaches a region of the light plate that transforms its identity into a door.”
“The cleanslate is not exactly a door because of its location on the light plate,” Child Satan cuts in, “it is a door because of the way the dark plate in question interprets it.
There are many dark plates, and for any given dark plate, there are unique properties attached to it. One dark plate may interpret the location of the cleanslate on the light plate as “A” and convert the signal into a door, while another dark plate interprets the same exact location of that same exact cleanslate as “Y” and converts the signal to a roof. So now, if dark plate six turned out to be dark plate seven, or if dark plate five turned out to be dark plate four, there would be confusion and disarray throughout the entire project.”
Child God then reminds me that the essence of the project is change, transformation.
That as cleanslates continue to move around on the light plate, they change their identity and transform into something else on the many dark plates, such as the transparent paper being moved by him from the black paper to the white paper.
The last thing I ask them before I wake up is, “Is there a finite amount of real information that can be interpreted from the light plate?” Child Satan answers, telling me that the light plate was designed to grow steadily, and that it had an indefinite shape. An indefinite shape meant that there would be times when regions disappeared, preventing the dark-plate-conversion of old information, and when new regions emerged, allowing 166 | IF 6 WAS 7
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the dark plates to convert new information that was otherwise unheard of.
One thing that Child Satan made clear was that all information was never available at any given time, that if a region disappeared, you would have to wait until it re-emerged.
Something like a white space on the far side of eternity.
When Lynne finally realizes that I am walking her way, she gets up and of course smiles, then tells me the name of the flowers that stood beside her door. We talk for a little while, about trivial matters, like the weather and other things, then depart.
I open up my fridge to see there is not much to eat, nothing except a couple of eggs. I cook the eggs, and while doing so I think about vapor. I think about the steam that you sometimes see from cooking, boiling, and how the liquid transformed into gas. Still a form of matter, but in a different state.
I pour some juice into a cup, and now I can't stop thinking about ice cubes and their inevitable transformation from solid into liquid if temperatures are high enough.
Everything goes to Hell and I lose my appetite when I begin to think about microwaves and the state of a plasma. These are all still forms of matter, but different states.
I think about the children and what they said. These simple modes of matter and their transformation are almost metaphors. This concept of transformation is everywhere and in everything. You can turn a thought into a sentence on paper. You can take that same initial thought and turn it into spoken words. Whether it be a thought, a written sentence or spoken words, these are all fundamentally the same product but in a different state, and are interchangeable in any direction.
Thoughts into writing, speech into thoughts, writing into speech. Ice melting into water. Water evaporating into vapor. Give it enough time and it falls back down as rain, returning to its liquid state, just as when you read something you had written long ago, the visible words are turned back into thoughts, to where they initially began. Our brain converts sensory information into items we can process and understand.
Everything around us is constantly changing, transforming, and some are things we can detect with our senses while others are not. Lynne is technically the same person she has always been and always will be, but even she is changing every second of every day, aging constantly perhaps until the day she dies.
Runa rings the doorbell to Kathy's home, and when there is no reply, she rings it a second and a third time. She eventually leaves, wondering where Kathy may have been.
Morning, day, evening or night, she was usually home.
Runa returns the following day and receives the same exact result, but on the third day, a neighbor notices her visit. “Kathy's in the hospital, sweety,” the neighbor tells her.
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hospital, exactly why was unknown, but she made plans to find out.
As the brown moon suspends during changes in the sky, Luna walks into the hospital and finds a nurse who could aid her in finding Cathy. After finding the room, she thanks the nurse for his assistance and then she sits down, placing down her purse alongside the bed.
Kathy had been sleeping for quite some time, so after a brief moment of staring out of the room's window, Runa takes out some reading material to pass by the minutes. The hospital literature, as captivating as it was, couldn't seem to replace the duplicate scene that she was in, and the thoughts of Joe and his being in another hospital on the far side of town.
What does replace the scene, however, were faint words being read across the hall and in the opposing room. “Made as if to strike me. The chaplain quieted them down, then gazed at me for a moment without speaking. I could see tears in his eyes. Then he turned and left the cell. Once he'd gone, I felt calm again. But all this excitement had exhausted me and I dropped heavily on to my sleeping plank. I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the.”
Runa gets up to look out of her doorway, and this is when she sees a younger man who is sitting alone reading to himself. An empty bed beside him, he reads aloud. A strange picture, really.
“Runa?” Runa turns around to find that Kathy had finally waken. Stroke, heart condition, vision loss in one eye, these were the words you would hear had you been in the same room. Of course, Runa is not sure how to handle the situation, and is unsure of how to console her elder friend about her deteriorating health, but she is relieved to see it is Kathy who does most of the talking.
Kathy talks about laying in this strokebed and spending time to think about things.
Mainly her wasted life and the very little she has done to serve God. She talks about some of the things she's learned from Runa, like certain aspects of that foreign religion and alien culture, and how it's given her a different perspective on some of the things she thought she knew so well.
As she's finishing her strokebed sermon, ending on a topic of seeking serenity, a light flashes into the room. It had begun to rain and thunder while the sky was still switching settings.
“I brought you something,” Runa is reminded. She grabs her purse and takes out five items. “They're origami bookmarks.” Kathy takes one and sees that it is a bookmark in the shape of a fish. The others consisted of a moth, an angel, a piece of gold and a raindrop. “They started selling them at my job,” Runa explains. Kathy asks her what others they had, and she begins to list an assortment of designs.
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Later that night, Runa makes her way out of the room to leave for the night, and as she is leaving she glances into the opposing room once again. The younger man was gone, and was replaced by a middle-aged couple and what seemed to be an ill grandfather.
Derek is walking home after a busy day when he feels a raindrop hit the top of his forehead. He realizes that each step produces more and more rainfall, so he attempts to pick up the pace. While doing this, a vehicle pulls up to the side of him, and the driver asks him if he wanted a ride home.
Derek looks at the vehicle, then looks around, and by this time he may as well have been taking a warm shower. Seeing as it was a woman who seemed to care about both animals and people, he took the ride that an off-duty, plain clothed but nicely dressed Mya Jackson offered him.
“You'll catch a cold running out in the rain like that,” Jackson says. Derek doesn't reply. “Are you coming home from after-school?,” Jackson asks. “No.” “Where are you coming from?,” Jackson probes. “Friend's house.” “He lives around here?,” Jackson annoys. “Nah.”
“You like short answers,” Jackson laughs as she makes a left turn. “Well this is a short ride,” Derek replies. Jackson begins to sense a bit of hostility, and not too soon after Derek tells her that they had arrived at his home, only it wasn't his home; they were still a few blocks away from Spider's residence.
Derek says thanks and gets out of the car and begins to run home as the lightning strikes, and at about the same time, sitting on his front steps only a block away, an associate of Omar sees Derek exiting a vehicle that resembled law enforcement.
Derek walks into the apartment building and sits down to watch television. Spider eventually joins him, and Derek begins to tell him a joke that he had heard from Wallace.
“Yo you wanna hear a joke?,” Derek asks Spider. “Yeah what,” Spider replies. “Women's rights.”
Rock, who had been hiding in a town that bordered the city, walked out of his temporary residence to visit a corner store to purchase a carton of cigarettes. He walks in and notices that they don't carry his particular brand. He begins to converse with the clerk about this when a man and his son enter the store.
After a while of browsing, Rock has found all of his items and returns to the checkout, where the man and his son had already been checking out their own items. As he is standing there, waiting his turn, he hears the door to the corner store open, and when he looks to see who it is, he realizes that his assassins had finally found him.
Rock runs through an aisle and at the same time pulls out his handgun. Parallel to this, one of the two assassins takes aim at the man and his son, and without thinking, ends 169 | IF 6 WAS 7
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their lives. Perpendicular to that, the second assassin takes aim and ends the life of the clerk. Adjacent to these two points, Rock looks up and begins shooting at the two assassins.
After shots are exchanged, there is a brief moment of silence. However, one of the assassins gets the idea to attempt to shoot through a gap and through a metal divider. The bullet cuts through and success is found when the knee of Rock becomes badly wounded.
The assassins get up and run towards Rock to finish him off, and while Rock does get a round or two off, it does nothing as they are body shots that were protected by bullet-proof vests. The assassins eject into Rock and eventually leave him where he lies. Eyes are everywhere.
They run out of the corner store and into their vehicle, driving away in the drizzle from a red and silver scene that told the tale of a working man, a family man and an assault man.
A dream may not always be factual and in tune with the real world. Fabrications that we see in movies, misconceptions that we read in books, they enter our minds as truth and follow us into our dreams where they settle as lies.
A teenager watches a courtroom drama that is exaggerated way past what would actually take place in a real courtroom, and later that night dreams of receiving a sentence for a crime he committed, a sentence far worse than any that would be handed out in our world.
This amplifier is played on all of us and on many levels. Sixes and sevens begin to play into your mind, and so they enter everything you do and everything you see. They slip into your subconscious and your subcomposition alike. Sometimes I wonder if it's possible for thoughts to affect reality the same way experiences affect dreams.
For some reason, you have the number thirteen stuck in your head and you can't stop thinking about it, and sooner rather than later it begins to appear not only in your thoughts but in the physical world. You start to see ones and threes and thirty-ones and thirteens and the power of your mind, or whatever you want to call it, is actually changing the world around you. L9? Sh? EZ?
I've heard that certain gene combinations advocate certain mental and physical illnesses. Perhaps if you switch six and seven, the result is mutation.
The phone rings as I'm watching my favorite channel, and before I can say hello a loud voice comes through the receiver. “You order skip to my lou?,” the accent is obnoxious, “You pay order, we send now.” I try to tell the person that I didn't order anything, but they just won't have it.
I eventually put two and two together and figure out that it's a prank call. From that dumbass Tao. He begins to laugh hysterically and tells me about how he just got Tian 170 | IF 6 WAS 7
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with the same joke. Halfway around the world and he still manages to find a way inside my apartment.
Tao gives up the voice and tells me his trip was cut short and that he would be back soon. This gave me about a month or two to pack my things and find somewhere else to live. Maybe I could give Brandin a call and he'd set me up.
After hanging up the phone I decided to keep my plans and visit my parents' home.
On the way there, thankfully, there was no weather that hindered my hopes. What I would see, however, was Mr. Nosleep, walking down the street with Ms. Nosleep. We nodded at eachother as we passed and I couldn't help wondering how they had been.
Their appearance in my world reminded me of the time when I kidnapped a young couple and stored them in one of my rooms. It was quite funny, actually.
I won't bore you with the details, but I basically had them perform in front of me as a sort of entertainment form. I watched them as I forced them to have ordinary sex, and then asked the man to ejaculate on his girlfriend's breasts. When he refused, I didn't push, I simply gave the girlfriend a sewing pin and some wire and told the both of them if he didn't let her stitch close his anus, then I would just kill them both. Suffice to say, they agreed, and after the operation I let them both go.
Actually, no I didn't. I remember drugging them, and then cleanly chopping off the girlfriend's foot and the boyfriend's hand. I had a collection, you see, of women's feet and men's hands, stored in my freezer for as long as I could remember.
You would have to work for more than half of a year to buy bread for everyone to eat.
Lawmakers will watch closely, waiting for your good intentions to go badly so they can condemn you. When you speak before the judge, don't babble like a crazy person, thinking your words will be heard because they are many. People will honor you, praise you, but they will have no idea what you truly mean. Numbers are everywhere.
I get to the home and walk down into the basement and continue working on a painting I was composing for Lynne. The composition reminds me of Jack, and the time he told me about his favorite effects. Distortion. Reverberation. Vibrato. Treble. Delay.
Compression. Amplification. Resonance. Sustain. “Face the mirrors of your mind,” some words I had seen not long ago on a poster while in his apartment.
I paint away, learning to paint in the process and wondering if this will ever actually be finished. If I won't just end up throwing it out because of a sense of dissatisfaction, or just stop because the purpose becomes lost to me. Like dreaming a recurring dream over and over again without any introduction or end.
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street was the street they lived on. I go back to that dream often, the same way a criminal or a detective goes back to a crime scene, reliving the moments from the wind and the voices or searching for missed clues.
At any given moment in life there will be much that we miss, and if we could capture that moment and go back to it whenever we pleased, when we review it in our later years we might be able to catch hidden elements and experience more than we experienced the first time around, probably because the things we learned in the gap changed us, and so it changed even the experience itself.
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Chapter 68
1947
1:2:7:68
DETECTIVE Wilson walks across the street and onto the property of the thirteen crime scene. Still unsure of how to look at the stage, he sits on a bench in the neighboring abandoned playground and tries to see past his own limits. Though all of the bodies had by now been identified, he was no closer to solving the crime that might plague him for years to come.
As Wilson leaves the stage to continue looking through suspects who were closely related to the drug game, a purple moon could be observed in the sky, and when you looked back down from the sight you would find Bill Freeman sitting on the roof of the abandoned apartment building.
“Snap,” the toothpick says as it is broken in between his fingers. The toothpick says its final words as it is tossed into a nearby box. The desecration of the toothpicks go on for about an hour, then Bill decides to climb down the building and walk towards the abandoned playground.
As he is passing through, he opens up a recycling bin and tosses a few pieces of paper into it as a testament to his hatred for litter and his loyalty to the phrase; “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
As Bill begins to walk back to his vehicle, he hears a pounding coming from the building, so he makes his way back and enters through the dying door. When he peers inside, he sees his latest victim, Rondo Mac, still alive and crawling over another dead body, attempting to break the glass of a weak window.
Hours before, Bill had been driving around looking for those of the drug dealing type.
When he saw that Rondo Mac was a fit for the type, he began to follow him, kept an eye on him, and when the opportunity arose, he made use of the blade.
Bill walks over to the wounded Mac and turns him over onto his backside, then firmly places his hand over his mouth. For a moment, Mac stares at his predator, and slowly his vision fades until he is finally dead.
Bill leaves the building, stepping carefully around bodies in the process, and finally enters his car. In his backseat there are pages upon pages of material he had written, one of them being a manifesto had anything happened to him.
I LEAVE THIS AS A DECLARATION OF INTENT, SO NO ONE WILL BE
CONFUSED. ONE: AUT PAX AUT BELLUM. LATIN. AS A CHILD, MY UNCLE
MADE ME RECITE IT LIKE A PRAYER. “AUT PAX AUT BELLUM.” EITHER
PEACE OR WAR. TWO: BILL FREYMAN IS DEAD. HE DIED WITH THE REST OF
THE WASTE. THREE: IN CERTAIN EXREME SITUATIONS, THE LAW IS
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INADEQUATE. IN ORDER TO SHAME ITS INADEQUACY, IT IS NECCESSARY
TO ACT OUTSIDE THE LAW. TO PURSUE NATURAL JUSTICE. THIS IS NOT
RACISM. THIS IS NOT OPPRESSION. THOSE ARE NOT VALID MOTIVES, THEY
ARE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES. THIS IS PUNISHMENT.
The manifesto was signed, W.F., and remained his most prized piece of writing, but it would never see the light of day. As Freyman begins to drive away, a purple moon could be observed in the sky, and when you looked back down from the sight you would find Freyman packing his things and on his way out, moving permanently to a different town in a different state.
As Freyman takes the last box of his possessions to his car, he notices the new plants that had been placed in his apartment building, and they soon become the last memory of this past home.
The chapters in your life will sometimes smash into eachother, and you'll be unable to tell where one chapter ends and where another one begins. Last night, I had a dream where I went back to 1947. The same clear air, but a different place altogether; a wide animal farm.
I sat atop a small hill, probably about a hundred yards from the farm, and observed the mannerisms of the livestock ahead. After a while, I noticed a brown solitude sheep sitting alone in a corner.
Outside the farm, maybe about fifty yards, there layed a brown horse and a brown goat. They didn't seem to be residents of the farm, but you could tell they wanted to join the society.
A few hours go by and nothing really happens, so I end up falling asleep. When I wake up, I see that I am still in 1947, and when I look out towards the farm, I see the goat and horse approaching the farm. When they get to the fence, the solitude sheep notices them and walks over to them, and it almost seems like they begin to have a discussion.
“We would appreciate it if you could ask your master to take us in,” the goat says to the sheep, “we have been without decent food for days.” That would have been my guess if I had one. “The wildlife out there is harsh, and survival is barely an option,” the horse continues to plead their case.
I guess it was time that I finally realized that there are some with no home, not a nickel to loan. Could it be, really me, pretending that they're not alone. “We will carry our load and do our share, we will do what is asked of us,” the goat says. “You can understand our pain, you are like us, casted away, marooned,” the horse again continues.
The picture reminded me of a widow deeply scarred, somebody's broken heart and a washed-out dream.
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1947. The Sun must have set and risen again, and when I looked out towards the farm once more, I saw that the farm was now empty, and the goat and the horse was again fifty yards away. This is when I got up and began to walk towards them. When I got close enough, I began to notice something strange. With each step, they adopted the form of a humanoid.
First it was feet, then legs, then a body and finally arms and a head, but being a dream, this somehow all felt normal to me. When I reached them, they were in full human form and dressed in sharp suits.
“Did you notice anything strange?,” one of the men asks me. “Something unidentifiable?,” the other man cuts in. I tell them that I hadn't seen anything strange.
“We received reports about something out here; and came to make sure it was safe for the nearby residents,” they both assure. Yeah, and when your hand is on your heart, you're nearly a good laugh, almost a joker.
They ask me to follow them into a car, and after sitting I begin to grow tired, falling asleep once again, but this time when I woke up, I was no longer in 1947.
When I look out of the window, I see that it is still night time. Nine-twelve p.m. to be exact. It was going to be a long night. I'd later raise the blinds to look at the dark sky, but it wasn't as dark as default. Instead, the clouds covered the sky in full so that no stars were visible. This cynical life.
And it came to pass, that in the succeeding hour, I would do away with the dust in my household. It had been ages since I really cleaned.
I started with the bathroom, more specifically the toilet, then went on to the tub and the sink, the cabinet and the walls. I don't mind the dirt in life, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to make way for purity.
The arms dealer, who did wrong before he did right, often spake of purity and the deathbed that he found it on. Twenty-four months passed and he became to me the man who stood at the end of the road and told you how terrible of a life you led.
“It seems as if no matter which time you are in, people are alike all over. The culture may change, the language may change, the things they do for recreation may change, but the basic human behaviors and instincts, they remain the same,” the arms dealer says to me.
By the time he died, the arms dealer had found that purity that prophets often speak of, that sight that so few people see. “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”
He'd say these words, but more importantly, he'd now begun to live by them.
I know I've told you this before, but the mind is a fragile thing. A commercial tells us that a certain toothpaste will do a certain thing, and even if it's mostly bullshit, we buy that product and we use it and it begins to do what is advertised. The placebo effect. Call 175 | 1947
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it what you want.
The arms dealer used the same method. He tells me about how it was so easy to tell someone that they needed a gun. When he got really good, he was able to sell even war, but the time came when the lives he took began to haunt him.
“Humans are destructive. Both men and women, sometimes even children. Life is a cruel joke, and more often that not we are the punchline,” he finishes. He was right,
“Both men and women,” I'm sure somewhere out there, there are Silvias who abuse and manipulate their husbands.
I'm in the living room now, digging into my couch for any garbage I can find. I soon move on to the television and its screen, the windows and their walls. On a section to the far left, in small print, I find the words “brain,” “hopes,” “time,” “high” and “damage.” I can't be sure if I'm the one who wrote them though, Brandyn used to visit all the time.
After cleaning the composition room and the bedroom, I take the two garbage bags that I had filled up and walk through the back door and down to the garbage bin. Still the clouds are covering the sky, I throw the bags into the bin.
I decide to go around and check my mail, and while at first there was nothing unusual, I became a little interested when I saw junk mail that featured the image of Jesus Christ. I throw the other pieces of mail in a wastebasket by the corner, then exit the building and begin to read a quote on the Jesus Junkmail.
“I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves, therefore be as wise as snakes and as harmless as doves.” Wise words, I guess, but in the world I see, the sentence seems more like “I send you forth as wolves in the midst of sheep, therefore be as wise as snakes and appear as harmless as doves.”
The same Jesus told us not to be as the hypocrites are, who pray in synagogues and on the street corners so they may be seen by men. My question is, how many of his followers are willing to give up everything; their possessions, their loved ones, their health, to follow in the footsteps of Christ and live the way he did. To doeth all these things in his name and in his honor, in secret, receiving no worldly reward, but instead suffering until the day of an untimely death.
You have a better chance of seeing a man use his name to instead gain riches, and to see this same man defile the way Christ lived his life with the way he lives his own.
You'll never see him sneer as a wolf, but he will manipulate the sheep, being as wise as a snake allthewhile appearing as harmless as a dove. This pig and this dog, fucking pigdog; much like the arms dealer, he will not realize what he has done until death speaks to him and at the same time shrinks his riches.
The air is nice, so I stay for a while and eventually decide to walk. I pass Chase street and reach Knox avenue. There I turn the Jesus Junkmail to another page and this time 176 | 1947
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find a quote about sheep and children.
"What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?
And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.”
The same Jesus tells us to be as humble as children. As we age, we lose sight, and sometimes along with it our wisdom. The day we regain these things, we might find that the world without children was graced with them once more, and that the first child we would see in this world without procreation would bring all people of all differences joy, because what was lost has been found, and what was lost was humanity.
I walk back into the apartment building and throw the Jesus Junkmail into the trash.
I'm sure he'll understand.
I end up staying up all night being unable sleep, and it was soon that the Sun began to rise. The bright yellow rising Sun, accompanied by that bright yellow setting. I opened the windows as it was nice out, and let the fresh breeze through. Upon doing so I gazed at the early Sun, barely able to remember what I had done the year before.
It reminded me of the Pacific, and how it was often legened that it had no memory. It also reminded me of those people who many times dream the future.
For many things in life, you'll have to take a people's word for it. Where you were born, your given name, your first words, these things people will tell you and you just have to take their word for it. All mediums can be fabricated, as can reality when memory becomes unreliable or nonexistent.
When I first started writing down the dreams, after waking, if I took more than ten seconds to start thinking about what I dreamed, I couldn’t remember it in full detail, if at all. Even though for the most part my memory improved, there were times when it got cut down, messed up, and the ability fluctuated like a wave.
I later learned that my memory efficiency was largely influenced by my mental state.
Improvement, deterioration; longness, shortness.
Opening a random composition notebook, I find a two-dollar bill, seriesed 1984. A low mental state would explain why I had forgotten that I put it there. The same low mental state is the reason why I can't really remember Mariah's face. I try to often, but I can't. Her face has been washed away off the canvas and all that is left are scratchy contour lines.
“You handled it?,” Deion Jennings, otherwise known as Right Hand, asks the two assassins. “It's taken care of,” one of them replies.
“That's good. Good,” Jennings pauses, “I got somethin' else for y'all,” he finishes.
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Jennings looks through a few papers, then talks about how they have a couple of
“youngins” who they're trying to break in. The task at hand was for each assassin to pair with a selected youngin and to assist the selected youngin in murder. “This comes from the top.” The targets, of course, were Derek and Spider, and not one without the other.
The winter was gone, and with it replaced by noisy children. They ran all across the park, yelling and screaming as their parents watched on, playing “the tree game.” You had one chaser, and all other individuals were safe as long as they were touching an authorized tree. It was, however, unethical for an individual to stay at any particular tree for too long.
Of course, with any set of rules and regulations, you are bound to run into problems, as we would later see when the chaser and an individual begin to dispute whether the individual made it to the tree before the chaser managed to elect him the new chaser.
Nonetheless, the playing eventually continued as the guardians watched.
“When was graduation?,” Kathy asks Runa as she wheels her along on a path normally used for excising. “Two weeks ago,” she replies. Kathy congratulates her and tells her that she believes she will do a fine job educating children.
The two get to their favorite bench and Kathy tells Runa that she would like to sit, so she helps her out of the wheelchair and the two are added to the list of playground guardians.
“So you're looking into being a teacher assistant, or substitute teacher? To get started I mean,” Kathy asks. Runa lets out a sighful laugh, or a laughful sigh, and Kathy laughs along with her. The two had been able to develop an anti-corrosive relationship, even though the elements that founded it were anything but.
It is possible for social fragments to have counterparts? Is it possible that when one social fragment is alone, it can be more destructive than it is when it's combined with another social fragment from another party? Perhaps a double fragmented yin and yang.
Runa's cellular phone begins to ring and she answers it, and soon excuses herself from Kathy to speak with one of her former classmates. Kathy watches Runa as she walks away, and begins to wonder why such a young person would spend so much time with a boring and old-fashioned older person. Maybe the guilt of injuring Joe was the reason, maybe it wasn't, but what Kathy saw walking away was something that she once had in her own life. Youth, health and the illusion of time. Normally we hold up mirrors to see space, but maybe one day we will figure out how to hold them up to see time.
Runa continues to talk on the phone, walking about, while Kathy watches as kids run to and from the trees. She thinks of Joseph, and tries to remember what he used to be like as a child, what he used to look like. The moment you drive onto the road, you put your life into the hands of all other drivers; the moment you decide to live with others and join 178 | 1947
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society, you give them a part of control, and they control a part of your life, whether these were your intentions or not.
A little while later, the kids stop playing the tree game and decide to instead inhabit the playground set. On the way there, one of the little ones trips and falls onto a platform, then begins to cry on the stage. Another little one runs up to the fallen child and pushes his shoulder, and then runs away. Immediately the fallen child stops crying, gets up, and begins to chase all others.
Kathleen laughs at the child's attempt for attention. He was only just beginning to learn of identity and its many fragments, and deception was as good a place to start as any.
For a while now, Runa continues to talk, and shows no sign of a soon return, so Kathy readjusts her sitting to be more comfortable, then reaches over to grab a bag that contained her medication and some water. She takes two pills and a sip of the water, then closes her eyes, and all that remains is the sound of children, and the memories of her youthful 1947.
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Chapter 69
NORTHERN PLANETS
1:2:7:69
LAST week, I had an unusual dream. Lynne and I had been living in an unfinished cabin out in the woods, talking about several different stones and their unique densities, and how we might find them. What was strange, bizarre almost, as I realized soon after I woke up, was that the dream was silent.
She got up because she needed to use the bathroom, so she went outside and did her business while I waited for her, still studying stones.
It's about four or five minutes in and she's still not back yet, so I get up myself and decide to look out of the window to try and find some planets in the sky. No luck, but this is the time that the ground began to shake.
With each passing second it got more and more violent, so I ran outside to look for Lynne to see if she was all right, but the moment I stepped outside I saw why the ground was moving. Not too far into the distance, a two-hundred year old tree was falling.
In the corner of my eye I can see Lynne returning, and I wave her over to come look at the tree that was in mid-fall. She then begins to run over, and this is when I first notice that both of her feet are real. The quick thought bugged me, mainly because I couldn't figure out why it was weird that she had two real feet.
We watch for a while, until the tree completely falls, then we begin to walk towards it. We walk and we walk, that is, until we realize the tree is gone and that we were now completely lost in the woods, and the fact that it was getting dark didn't help.
After a while it started to feel like we were walking in circles, and at times it seemed like we heard soft piano music, but we couldn't be entirely sure. This could be attributed to memory loss.
“Bridge Garden Islands,” that's what we saw on a sign and we immediately knew that we were no longer traveling in circles. Above the name, we saw an arrow that pointed upwards, so we began to walk forwards. I shit you not, what happened next felt like it was taken straight out of a kid's fairy tale.
All of a sudden two planets begin to form and take shape to our right side, or more specifically, to the north. They have a certain glow to them, but the color is unknowable.
We both decide to follow these planets of the true north, up until we found out that they led us to the beginning of a lake.
Lynne got to the lake before me and kneeled over to wash her face, and again I got sight of her feet. Why were they so strange. They were ordinary human feet.
She looks back and waved for me to join her, and when I get there I too peer into the waters. I notice her reflection, and also notice the fact that her reflection was a lie. The 180 | NORTHERN PLANETS
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color of her long sleeved shirt did not match the color that could be found in the lake's reflection of her, instead, the lake told me that she wore a shade of a certain peach.
The first time I ever spent more than ten minutes with Lynne, she told me that peach colored roses symbolized peace and harmony. I found it funny that I would be reminded of it in this way, considering she and the reflection were not in agreement.
The colors and sounds in dreams, of course, are open to interpretation. They vary from person to person, experience to experience, and any rose, be it black, white, peach or any shade of feces, will have a certain and possibly different meaning depending on the person. How do roselovers such as Lynne find peace and harmony in the trade when a red rose means twenty-seven different things.
We continue to look into the waters, and I'm guessing we must have been somewhere mystical or magical, because we began to see images in it. Gems and potions, but what was most striking was the image of two trees that had begun to fall and fell into eachother, making an “X” shape. Behind these two trees was another cabin, much bigger than ours, and right above it, the same two planets that were in the sky now. We wondered if we could use them to find that cabin.
It's mid-May now, and on the clock it reads 7:21 a.m. The sleeper wakes up in Sanctuary. By now I had finished two things that I set out to do; I finished Rosalynnette and I finished packing the items that could be found in the basement of obsession.
Reality versus fiction, suicide rates by country, quantification of life, the temperatures of both Heaven and Hell, functions and compositions of blood. A desk, a chair, a lamp.
I was now waiting for the owner of some storage units to call me and tell me that my space was ready. I agreed to pay him more if he gave me a helping hand in moving all of these things.
I got up from off a couch that would be staying and walked around for a bit, then came across a book I had received years ago. It was free, and for the most part, it was bad. Then again, a free book is never as good as it sounds.
I walked up the stairs and got something to drink, seeing Mr. Nosleep in the corner of my eye, sitting relaxfully on a couch in the living room. “I can't believe that you can't see that a gesture like this will ruin your life,” he says. “What life?,” I ask him. He laughs, then begins to talk about how there is no light at the end of the tunnel for me. Pretty much in those words.
Many times I've heard writers say that the most important thing in writing is to tell the truth, but what does that even mean? Often I would feel like they were simply reiterating something they heard long before, something that they thought was true themselves, and maybe it is, but I know for a fact that I have met liars who've shown me the light.
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One light that I've had the fortune of seeing, or maybe the unfortune, is knowing and accepting the situation that I am in. Knowing of my inability as a person to connect with others truthfully. Being unable to survive the hopelessness and the despair, unable to ease the sickness that I feel when I look at other human beings.
A lot of us do not understand the situation we've been put in, and sometimes this lack of knowledge and understanding is worse than the actual suffering. Worse than the actual starving, worse than the actual abuse, worse than the actual loneliness, simply because we cannot understand it. A life like this is always followed by “Why?”
I leave Mr. Nosleep in the living room and walk into my own room. The still air reminded me of David for some reason. Or maybe it was actually my little brother that I was thinking about. I couldn't be sure, nor did I have the time to; someone was ringing my doorbell.
The storage unit owner was finally here, and two by two, we began filling his truck.
When we got to The Storage Unit, the one that was to be mine at least for this month, and I actually saw inside of it for the first time, I had a sense of deja vu. Almost as if I had been here before, or as if I knew something about this place already. It was like after you woke up from a dream, and hours later you saw someone that you dreamed about and suddenly that dream comes crashing down.
After we finish, I pay the man and go back home and begin to wrap Rosalynnette with brown paper as Mr. Nosleep watches. Shortly after I went to the bathroom, and like I've done many times before, I stared at my reflection. Of course, Mr. Nosleep was right behind me, making faces and laughing in weird voices. Lakes and mirrors seem to always cause the loss of sense in reality.
By the time I got to the apartment, I could feel my pulse rate increase. When I got to Lynne's door, it doubled. Strangely enough, though, after I knocked the first time, it completely shot down.
I felt as if in a daze, thinking of the time I first saw her over a year ago. The slight limp, the yellow dress, the joke. Don't read too fast now. “What did Claire's dog say after he accidentally drank milk? Meow!”
They say there are realms, hidden in the depths of reality, where you can sense abstract concepts with your brain. Where objects are more than they appear to be.
In this place, you can feel freedom in a man's shoes, and see beauty on a woman's dress. Hear passion from a musician's guitar, smell death from a corpse's rot. Taste life in a peach's bite, and understand sorrow from a writer's pen.
In the same place, I have been told, there are things that cannot be possessed. “Horses have no masters, only riders.” “Money has no owners, only spenders.”
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as she takes Rosalynnette. I walk into her apartment and she can already tell that it's a painting of some sort, and when she opens it, she sees that she is right.
A smile from ear to ear and she doesn't even know that I'm the one who painted it with all my blood, sweat and feces. When she does find out that it was all my work, she buries her head into my chest, and at the same time, Mr. Nosleep appears and sits on her couch. A berserk smerk on his face.
When she asked me what possessed me to do this for her, I told her the truth. It wasn't because I was in love with her, or because I had any feelings for her, but rather because she was the one person who didn't push me to become something I didn't want to be.
She says that she understands completely, and starts telling me about how she noticed that I wasn't the relationship-type person, so she half-backed-off but nonetheless wanted to remain friends. She wasn't about to risk losing a friend like me, like she almost lost before. “What friend?,” Mr. Nosleep laughs in the background, “You're not her friend, she's a fucking experiment to you. A brain to pick.”
She looks over Rosalynnette again, and I tell her that it's suppose to reflect her other paining, White Lights. It was basically a yellow rose during the night-time with a moon in the background.
“Silvio really messed me up,” she says, “but I'm past the point where all I can think about is a nice house and a happy family. I'm learning that I can be fine without having someone to love me.” She laughs, “The very little companionship that I get from you is more than I've ever gotten from anyone else. I'm happy to be alive and I'm happy that I found someone that I actually look forward to being around.”
“Are you done?,” I ask. She pushes my shoulder, then kisses me on the cheek, so I turn to her my other cheek, but I don't think she got it. The time she kissed me on the lips at the gas station was the first time she had ever done that, and was, thank God, the last time. I didn't mind kisses on the cheek, which she would have plenty of to give, but any contact with any orifice on my being was too much.
It was good that she understood, because if she didn't, I'm sure I'd have to kill both her and her children. I'm not sure how I would do it, though. Maybe I would tie them up or something, the only thing I know is that it would have to be a quick and painless death.
I wouldn’t be able to look at them and kill them any other way.
I leave her apartment and then the building with plans to go back to Sanctuary. On my way out, I notice the dead Peace Lilies once again. It really didn't seem like they were ever going to grow back.
The place is Switzerland, in a factory where a man monitors a type of metal that is being structured. The structures take the form of shotgun shells as they are sent to a lower level and land on a conveyor belt.
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They ride along the belt as two women who are talking check through some of them to make sure their form is correct. One of the women picks up one of the shells, whom we will call #18524112, sees that it is fit for duty, and then places it back onto the belt.
#18524112 is now placed into a crate that contains many other shotgun shells and then the crate is hammered shut by a nearby man. The crates are then delivered to be shipped across the waters, and of course are checked before they are put on the ship.
After they arrive onto the ship, they sail the Atlantic until they reach the Americas.
They arrive and land in the United States of America, where they are then distributed.
Along the line, a couple of corrupted cops manage to get their hands on #18524112 and its siblings. It's not too long until a member of Umar's organization does business with the officers of the law and obtain the ammunition.
Fast forward, and we find two assassins and their pupils, Kendrick and Elliot, loading guns. Elliot is given a handgun while Kendrick is given a shotgun along with #18524112.
They finish and go their separate ways.
Elliot and his teacher drive to a property not too far from where they were, as they were told they could find Spider there, doing some of the organization's daily tasks. With murder on their mind, they talk along the way, planning against wildcards. When they finally get there, they find that Spider had not yet arrived, and it only made sense to wait.
It wasn't that Spider was late, but more so that the pair was early. About fifteen minutes early to a four o'clock arrival time.
Spider, on the other hand, was at home preparing to leave. Finding his clothes, wondering where Derek was, eating something quick before he finally left. When he did decide to leave, the moment he opened his apartment building's front door, a man would run up to him. He didn't know it yet, he probably never would, but he had dodged a terrible misfortune.
“Get the fuck down,” the man yells. Another officer appears as the yelling police officer handcuffs Spider for the murder of a fellow cop. Clark Winston had finally got his man.
They walk Spider over to the black and white, “I can't wait to bring you in,” the unnamed officer says, smiling. Winston most likely wouldn't take part in the beating that Spider was about to receive, but he was able to find consolation in knowing that Spider would no longer be on the street, and that he would now finally be able to face the wife of the deceased.
On the other side of this story is Kendrick and his own teacher. The assassin tells his pupil to ride shotgun as they walk towards their vehicle, and several minutes later they arrive at the drug dealing lanes. There they find Derrick so they pull up next to him.
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seen this man before and knew that he worked with Omar, but he didn't know who he was or what exactly he did for Omar, so when the assassin tells him that Omar wanted the three of them to pick up a new order, he got in the car and went with them not really questioning anything.
Eventually they enter an alley in a strange place, but it isn't the strange place that gets Derek's attention; what makes Derek a bit suspicious is seeing Kendrick's hand shake, and Ken's attempt to stop the shaking every so often. That seemingly feel began to cloud his thoughts.
Once Derek saw that they were on a property that didn't have anyone anywhere, he figured it out, so he opens the car door and jumps out, and after a little bit of rolling he begins to run. Kendrick and his teacher stop the car to chase after.
They run and they run, but for Derek, getting out of a place like this doesn't appear to be possible. Knowing that he can't run forever, he tries to hide in a small structure at the end of the dusty road, hoping his killers won't see him. Moments pass, Ken and his teacher feel as if they are lost, and Derek prays for his life.
“Did you check around there?,” the teacher asks. “Yeah man that shit is empty, I don't even think he came this way,” Derek overhears the two as he hides. He then hears them walk by, and for a while they have no intention of checking the small structure, but that while comes to an end when the teacher knocks on it, then checks inside of it.
“Come on out,” the teacher says as Ken runs up to them. Derek, confused, begins to ask all types of questions as he stays hidden inside the structure, but he gets no answers.
Instead, the teacher drags him out onto his feet, then looks at Kendrick. “We don't got all day youngin, do your business and let's get outta here,” he says.
Ken looks at Derek as his 12 gauge faces the ground. Being forced into a corner and trapped, this is what they both felt like.
Ken raises his arm and Derek stares down the barrel of the shotgun. “What did I do wrong?,” Derek's voice cracks as he pleads. “Tell me what I did wrong,” those are the last words of a drug dealer.
Kendrick wipes his red eyes, then pulls the trigger as the shotgun is aimed at Derek's chest. Derek falls onto the ground and lays flat out, still awake but losing blood. “You got one more of those in there,” the teacher says.
Kendrick takes aim once more, and Derek once again stares at the barrel as
#18524112 waits to be fired. Ken fires, and for the first time in what would be a long career, commits homicide.
The two pick up the body and place it into the structure that Derek had attempted to hide in before, and then go back to their vehicle and drive off.
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in the distance but unable to be captured by any human sight.
Back down below lies the lifeless body of a young man who probably never had a chance. Flip coins, play cards, roll dice, it's all the same. At the end of the day, there will always be factors you couldn't control, factors you didn't even consider. Factors that you saw, but mistook for something else.
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Chapter 70
A LITTLE FEATHER
1:2:7:70
DEREK'S deceased body buried into infrastructure otherwise ondiscovered for days.
“Y'all seen Derek?,” Wallace asks his friends around the area Derek was stationed.
Obviously, no one had seen him.
Omar was displeased upon hearing that one, but not the other, was murdered. Spyder learning of Derek's downfall was not going to be a pretty picture, and of course he would later figure out that the chances of he himself not being a target as well were very slim.
Omar sends a couple of men back to Derek's deathsite and has them bury the body six feet under, but whether or not they dig that deep and that well remains to be seen.
Back at the police station, Stan continues his decryption as the phone begins to ring.
Mya answers it and receives intel that one named “Spider” had been apprehended and was being questioned. Mya tells them to hold on to him as she looks up at the board of suspected criminals, more specifically, a picture of Spider.
Mya relays the information to Frank, who relays it to Tim, and the three of them make plans to speak to Spider, however, on her way there she is interrupted by detective Richards, who tells her that the lieutenant was looking for her.
She goes into Stoddard's office and presents herself, and this is when Stoddard tells her that unfortunately, she was to be removed from the task force and to go back to working as a detective in homicide.
Mya, much like a former Omar, was displeased in hearing this news and begins to question her lieutenant, something she would learn to never do again as Stoddard begins to tell her that she was just a number to the people who ran the city. “Affirmative action,”
he says. He tells her that the only reason she was promoted was because “they didn't have enough female detectives in the department.” Mya leaves his office, and from then on, much like most of the other employees, she recognized what type of leader Stoddard was.
Mya returns back to Stan's location and sits quietly, thinking about how her career was only loosely what she expected. After a while Stan asks her why she was being so idle, but she only nods her head, and then gets up to leave. Her appetite was finally beginning to develop.
“I didn't kill no one,” Spider says. “What do you mean you didn't kill anyone, we have you dead to rights,” Tim says as Frank observes Spider's black eye. “Forensics, DNA motherfucker. D, N, A.”
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information that we need on a stand and we are willing to work with you, even if you did kill a cop.”
“Nah, I didn't kill no one,” Spider insists. “You like that bruised eye so much you want another one?,” Tim asks. “We know about Omar, your whole crew, and he's not going to be able to get you out of this one, trust me.”
“I want some fucking food, I haven't eaten shit since I've been here,” Spider says.
“We don't feed cop killers,” Tim replies. Tim and Frank leave the room for a bit and talk about how much they need Spider's testimony. “Everything we have is circumstantial at best, and it doesn't help that it's from a criminal source,” Frank says.
A moment later Tim and Frank head back into Spider's room once again to question him, and once again failing in the process. They simply did not know that it wouldn't be their words that encouraged Spider to testify.
“You know your pops did everything he could to get you to not be a smoker,” the corner store owner laughs as he hands Rock a carton of cigarettes. “Every time I saw him he'd talk about how stubborn you were.”
Rock adjusts his knee brace as he sits at the edge of a chair, staring at the wall almost blankly. He gets up for a moment to walk, but is bothered by a slight limp and sits back down. Once the lieutenant of a solid organization, now its main after-prey.
The owner hands him a lighter, which he takes, but has no interest in thanking him for his hospitality. In fact, it would be impossible for anyone to be able to tell what Rock was interested in now, what exactly it was that was going on in his mind.
The owner leaves the room at the back of the corner store and returns to his employment, finally leaving Terrell alone. For some time, Terrell simply sits, mostly thinking about the other victims from the red and silver scene. The families that would shed so many tears. He wondered, was his tattoo of a basketball a misbranding?
Four or five bullets is probably enough to kill most living things, but mavericks are often stubborn people and pay no regard to what others want. In retrospect, Rock died, but really, when you step back and look at the big picture, Rock will never die.
“I'm coming back in a few weeks,” Tao tells me. He asks me if I could pick him up from the airport, and how else could I answer besides positively. I hang up the phone and realize the day was fast approaching. I had to find a way out of here.
The same feeling of fear reminded me of the night terror I had two nights before.
Probably the only dream that I had ever waken up from with a toothache.
It's night time and I'm in a desert, digging a hole into the ground with an old shovel.
The more I dig and the deeper I get, the more soiled the shovel becomes with blood. It's not until I hit a skeleton that I understand that I had been digging for my younger brother.
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I unearth him and take him back to sea-level, but I am completely unprepared when I find David there, standing just before the grave. He is mangled, from top to bottom, and even though his eyes are open he appears to have no life. Some of his fingers had been removed and his lower face was covered in bandage. Bondage had begun to take his feet, and they too were mutilated, one foot missing one half. His forehead had a marking upon it, of what seemed to be a spade, and his hair was gone and only stood behind him.
Waking up after this, I knew exactly why I dreamt it. Perhaps you do as well. David, who is not far off from the age my brother was when he died, is smothered by the guardians around him. Smothered by his mother, who seeks only to protect him.
Smothered by his father, who seeks only to visit him.
I couldn't save my brother, and I don't think I really care to save David, he's kind of mean anyway, but dreams have a way to telling us how we really feel. What we're really thinking. Maybe I think David is in danger, physically and mentally, and maybe I believe he will meet the same fate as my brother of dying at a young age. The thought almost makes you grind your teeth.
There's no way of making sure he will be safe, that he will live a long and prosperous life, but even so I find David to be on my mind often these days, and the subject is always his own welfare. His need, much like mine, to be away.
As we all know, there is only one way to combat smothering, and that is to give a person their own space. In this particular case, their own Stasis. Sanctuary. Asylum.
I sat in Lynne's living room as she got us both something to drink. David. Sarah.
David. Sarah. They were both at school, finishing up the school-year. When she sits down she begins to tell me about how happy she was that the winter was gone. I suppose someone her size did get cold very easily.
After a while she starts to talk about Father's Day, and how it was only three Sundays away. She of course brings up Silvio. Even though he was an abusive husband to her, he was almost a decent father to his kids. The problem was, Lynne tells me, was that he had so many sides that she couldn't dare to roll the dice. My words.
“What do you usually do for your dad?,” the question catches me off guard. A year before but in the same place, I may have told her that I got him a watch, but I was getting used to her. “Cancer,” the answer just as well catches her off guard.
She eventually understands that I was saying he had passed away, and like any other person, tells me she's sorry. “Your mother?,” she asks. She clearly didn't learn the first time. “Suicide,” I say casually. It takes her a bit longer this time, to decipher whether I was joking or not, but eventually she realizes that I wasn't.
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him. And obviously, you've met Emily.” I wanted to hear more about the war, but I guess she wouldn't have known too much herself, and the subject probably wasn't the best conversation.
Before he went on his deathbed, but after finding out about his cancer, he told me to always take the time to look back on life. The advice was wasted on me and would have been better going into his own ears rather than coming out of his mouth. Maybe then, my mother wouldn't have felt so under-appreciated. Then again it's her own damn fault for not being able to comprehend that the voices in her head were not real.
Commercials come back on and I finish my drink, then I finally ask. “What do you think about taking Sarah and David to my home for the weekend? I mean the one you saw that one time.” The problem with extremely nice people is that they sometimes don't realize when you're trying to do something nice for them. They get so caught up in trying to please everyone that they forget they themselves even exist.
“We couldn't do that,” she says. Why? Probably because she thinks it would be too intrusive on their part. Live your quiet little life and try not to bother anyone too much, because that's when every thing gets fucked. “We are a bit much,” she laughs, masking her insecurities.
“It would just be for the weekend,” I say. It started to look like she was getting uncomfortable, a little late in her reply. When she again refused, I didn't push. I told her to think about it, that I thought it might be something nice for David and Sarah.
A few days later, the school-year was getting closer to ending and I again found myself in Lynne's apartment. She had indeed thought it over and during the day told me that she changed her mind. Really that it was Sarah who changed her mind. Nonetheless, I guess she put her insecurities aside for the time being and trusted me. Trusted that I didn’t feel like she was intruding.
I really didn't feel that she was intruding at all, at least not as much as Tao. That illusion that spun atop her head and told her that she wasn't wanted anywhere or by anyone, it was beginning to fade. I knew deep down she wanted to do it, it was just a matter of getting her out of that shell. The one that I put her in after I kicked her out of my apartment.
“But I have to ask, are you absolutely sure?,” she says. Gaining the trust of someone after they have been mistreated for years isn't an easy thing to do. If there was an award for it, I should be considered a candidate. Or at least get an honorable mention.
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time he used the estate to make extra cash by allowing guests to rent the home.
Friday eventually came along and I entered the passenger side of Lynne's car and she drove us to our destination. Along the way, David continually kicked the back of my seat and every so often his mother would tell him to stop, but it was of no use as he would eventually start up again.
The one thing I remember about that drive, other then the kicking, was the fact that we never hit a red light. It was simply green the whole way through.
We get to the house and out of the car, walk towards the front door. I find the key and unlock it, then let them in. As I go to enter myself, I notice the mat on the floor. “Your home is your home.” There's no way it could possibly be real, but still they are words I have not yet forgotten.
After we're in, I tell them all to go through the house and to take any room that they like best. As Sarah and David begin to run, I yell out telling them any room besides the basement, but I'm not sure if they heard. Lynne stands there, then asks me what's wrong with the basement. I tell her that I have dead bodies buried just underneath the boards, and that by now it's most likely haunted. She nods her head and walks away, touring the home.
Truth is it was alright for them to go to the basement, I had already moved every thing out, but something told me that something still wasn't right about it. Like there was some kind of bad luck down there that would possess anyone who saw it.
I follow Lynne around as she explores the house, and all she can really say is that everything is breathtaking. I didn't see it, though. All I really saw was an excess. I didn't believe that any family, especially one the size of four, needed a house this big. I resent the idea and I resent the home itself. I resent owning it and I resent ever having to be in it.
If it weren't for sentiment and nostalgia, I would have sold it long ago.
Night falls and everyone gets ready for bed; Lynne sleeps with Sarah, and David, maybe for the first time in his life, sleeps alone in his own room. I got down into the basement and slept on the couch, after placing a composition notebook under it.
I am somewhat startled in the middle of the night when I wake up and find Lynne sitting with her back against the couch. “I don't understand you.” That's what she says when she sees that I am awake. I really didn't know what to say to that, so I just didn't say anything. Man, I just wanted to go to fucking sleep.
Oppression is everywhere. When you oppress people you disassemble their dreams.
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without purpose, one desires to be happy.
Oppression is what causes even the most pure of heart to fall to dark things. Violence, racism, self-harm, armed with enough oppression you can do just about anything. What happens when the oppressed, for the first time, are no longer oppressed? How do they make sense of the world without oppression.
We ended up watching old sitcoms for the rest of the night until we both fell asleep. It was a bit strange to say the least.
On Saturday, everyone woke up before the novelist, and when I did finally wake up, I went down under to record my dream. At about noon we all went to a nearby department store. Like the kids they were they asked for half of the things they saw, but Lynne had the good heart to not spoil them.
She did buy them a few things, and she got herself some materials to garden as she had plans to bring life to my parents' home, things like zinnia seeds and tulip bulbs, and as for me, I left with a few packets of pens and some plain post-it notes.
When we got back home, Sarah and Lynne spent a lot of time in the backyard, and David, in his room. After a while I went to go check up on him and found him going through some old boxes in a closet. I asked him what he was looking for and he says
“Nothing.”
At the same time he pulled out an item and looked at it in wonder, then asked me what it was. It was a dreamcatcher, one my mother said she bought at a local mall. I was too old then to sleep with teddy bears, nightlights or dreamcatchers; by that time I had already met Kid Nosleep, and the first thing he taught me was to embrace the nightmares.
I explained to David what it was, and what its function was, then told him that he could have it. To my surprise he took it and placed it on the bed behind him, then started going through the box again. The next thing he took out was a small telescope, and began to peer through the objective lens. “Flip it around,” I'd say. After looking through it correctly, he went around the house staring at objects, and I knew it was only a matter of time until he understood what telescopes were really meant for.
After he spent his time with the telescope, he put that aside on the bed as well, then went through a different box. There he found a book, one containing several children's tales, mostly about mammals and reptiles. As he sat down to read, he asked me to leave the room, so I left and he closed the door behind me.
Leaving the room I could hear Lynne and Sarah still in the backyard. When I got to them I saw that they were spying on the neighbors. Swimming in their swimming pool, having all the fun in the world. I wondered why my parents never had a swimming pool built into our own house, it only seemed reasonable.
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Besides spying on the neighbors with them, I also saw that Sarah had written her name into a patch of dirt, but that it was spelled “Sara.” All this time, and I had been pronouncing her name wrong.
On Sunday, I woke up before everyone else, but only because I had never really slept.
Once again, in an attempt to tire myself I walked a long distance through the wealthy neighborhood, a place where I believe I'll never belong. Something like a tale of two halves.
It's the human condition to suffer, wherever and whenever you are. No matter how rich, how poor, how sad, how happy, suffering hides in us all at any level, at any plane of existence. A poor man doesn't become rich and eradicate his suffering, just as a rich man doesn't become poor and find misery.
When I came back to the home, I saw that Lynne was awake and had begun the process of life-giving. For a while I watched her from a distance as she gardened, seeing a metaphor of overcoming adversity. It seemed like she had finally developed that green thumb.
Watching her, I thought of all the enslaved people I've seen in my dreams, and how some of them were born into imprisonment and knew nothing but chains and cages.
Lynne, similar to these people, was like a caged bird, whose sole consolation in life was to fly. Taking away a person's individuality, this is the cardinal sin.
After they take away your identity, you might find yourself using your own tears to plant the few flowers you have left. For some people, those seeds might take decades to grow, for others, only years. Some will grow straight and others crooked, but nonetheless they will grow.
After the years have passed, others will find those flowers that you had sown, and many people will tell you to get rid of them, but it will be impossible. You'll find that trying to forget everything you've seen and heard is like asking a flower to revert back to a seed; it just doesn't work that way.
They'll continue to urge you to cut down the flowers, or to at least stop watering them and let them die. And there will be times when the flowers themselves bring you torment, and you'll wish you had never sown them in the first place, wanting to go back to a simpler time when chains and cages kept you in place so you didn't wander off into the wilderness to find yourself lost.
Then the day will come, you'll find your way out of the wilderness and back to your flowers, and you will see that they had fully grown, and were now actually beginning to produce their own seeds. If ignorance is bliss, then knowledge is a sad salvation.
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efforts were mostly in vain. You can save someone today, but they'll surely find trouble tomorrow. That's almost what life is, trouble, year after year. With this, I realized that the effect I sought was far from me, gone from me.
Sure, I knew I had done something kind, but I didn't feel anything. I guess I wasn't surprised, though. Sometimes you just have to draw out the emotion in others, so you can see it on their face, and then at least you can visualize what you can't feel. The people I kill, the look on their faces explain why life is to be so precious.
That's almost the language of insanity itself. If anything I've said has made any sense to you during this one sided discourse, then you might want to take the time to re-evaluate your mind, because someone I knew long ago once said that only crazy can understand crazy.
On Monday, I was back at home, sitting on my favorite couch watching my favorite television set. During the evening I received two phone calls. One from Tao, telling me that he would be back next week, and one from a mortuary, asking me to come down and possibly identify a relative.
I went down the next day and told them my name, and about the call I had received the day before. I was later passed on to a woman who took me down a hall and into a dimly lit room. It wasn't too long until we arrived to the structure that the corpse had been sleeping on, and when she uncovered the face, I saw that it was one of my uncles.
I positively IDed him and then asked her how he died. She told me that it was a heart attack, a quiet one alone at his home. I wanted to laugh, but instead I asked why they needed my confirmation. “It's just a precaution,” she says. The next question I would have asked was how they were able to get a hold of me, but I didn't want to make this seem as if it were an annoyance to me.
Later she would tell me that I was the only one who picked up when they called for assistance from a long list. After this, I asked her if she would mind if I touched the body.
She said she wouldn't, then left the room.
Once she was out of sight, I put my hand on his face and felt the same cold that I've felt before. He was now completely gone from this world, and all I could wonder about was the type of life he had led. Is it your past that eventually defines you?
Looking over his face, he tells me that we are always alone. Physically and mentally.
We can be surrounded by people but it doesn't make a difference, it's just something we will never be able to escape. Matrimony, soulmatry, unity, call it whatever you want, the fact is they are just illusions and life is ultimately a funny looking one-seated car.
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apartment, but something reminded me about the storage unit. Something reminded me about Asylum.
I got off the bus and walked out late into the dark, changing plans, and deciding to instead visit Asylum, the small space that would now shelter my reclusivity.
It was a windy summer night, with sadly dancing trees, and after a long while of walking I realized that I had misjudged the distance that I had to walk. Many more steps than I anticipated, and I probably wasn't even halfway there.
The wind continued to blow, almost seeming to get stronger as the minutes passed by.
Once I saw that the Moon had begun to reflect off the rear windshields of parked cars, I knew that time was no longer on my side, and that my appointment with Ms. Nosleep at Asylum would be met with tardy.
It was no bother, really, my only intention was to decode a dream about a homeless man who left behind a piece of cardboard for me, and I assumed it wouldn't take too long.
I would have gotten there sooner, but as the Moon disappeared behind the dense and quickly racing clouds, I came across a stray cat. I noticed it before it noticed me, but when it did finally catch sight of me, it froze. We stared at each other for a while, probably pondering what the other was thinking, or where the other was going.
“There must be some kind of way out of here,” said the balladeer to the cat. The cat doesn't reply, but simply begins to walk off. I watched as it walked away, and as it turned into an alley and vanished into the dark night.
If a person walks in the night, and they stumble, was it because the light was not in them, or was it simply because their vision had not yet adjusted?
Once the cat was gone, I soon after began to wonder how I had gotten here, to such an apathetic and wasteful existence. “How did I get here?,” that's what I asked myself as I looked back on what was behind me.
It seems that from time to time, one often wonders how it is they ended up where they currently are. They try to pinpoint the exact time when every thing changed, but the point eludes them. The past becomes a blur, and the mind, it's scrambled. And toiling in strife, one simply can't help it but to look back on a misspent life.
I eventually looked back up from off the ground and continued to stand there for what was a long a while and I thought about the distance I still had to travel, and I thought even more about an Asylum that long before brought me here, but sooner rather than later, I began to walk again, and found that the wind was still here and was now blowing against me.
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then forth and then back again. It wasn't too long from then that I found myself thinking more deeply about the past.
I thought about all the things I had missed in life, all the things I had missed because my mind was always somewhere else, and about how now, the only thing that made me even begin to feel was a sort of morbidity. A sort of laughing sickness, that echoed on and on, and forever into eternity.
- - -
A single year in anyone's life, when written down, is a story that will last forever. It's a novel that captured a certain time and place that could be revisited, a time and place that was filled with the pages of inner-peace and the pages of burdening-strife. With the chapters of prolific freedom and the chapters of relentless captivity. Indents of joy and indents of pain.
And foremost, when one's experiences is embodied in words, it becomes a key that is designed to unlock the faded memories of a distant past. A key to remembering certain people and their tales, certain places and their atmospheres, certain events and their importance. A key to remembering times of triumph over adversity, moments of downfall by oppression, and accounts of apathy from disease.
And finally, when one writes down the year, they leave behind a book, a green light, for a stranger who might be in the same story. And in those paragraphs, there is no doubt that they will find at least these two things; a way to knowledge, and a key that liberates a human being from the circumstances that enslave them in life.
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