Anthology Complex III by M.B. Julien - HTML preview
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M.B. Julien
Volume 1 - Composition 3
(1:3 / 3 / III)
Part 8
M.B. JULIEN
Chapter 71
1,001 DREAMS
1:3:8:71
THE landscape of history, the portrait of desolation, a thousand and one dreams of liberty. Fireworks illustrate the night sky, creating constellations that contained dyslexic imagery; imagine dyslexia that could be solved if the viewer viewed viewings viewfully.
In Keystone, South Dakota, 82 people watch the summer night as the works soar overhead Mount Rushmore. The works had been designed to imitate the actual memorial, but went further by including the complete design that was missing from the memorial itself. An extra effort to produce a fourth of July that would not soon be forgotten.
In St. Louis, Missouri, 104 people watch the works as they compliment the Gateway Arch. As a gateway to the mind's imagination, ordinary fireworks are suffice to do the job, but even so, the final explosion is that of an arc that opens the door to the mind's expansion.
Imitation is sometimes experimented with and met upon with accuracy, or sometimes it is simply underachieved or overachieved. Replicants may be identified immediately or never at all, stealing identities of the before-cloned.
In Washington, D.C., somewhere between Maryland and Virginia, 95 people watch the works as they spell out the names of important historical figures. Soldiers, presidents, activists. They spell out the names that laid down a foundation and the names that continued it, only leaving out the names that would carry it through its future.
In Black Canyon, Colorado River, somewhere between Arizona and Nevada, 63
people watch the works as they draw images of the American flag, as well as other images that pertain to the nation. They decorate the sky and educate of the land's symbols.
Lost pieces to a jigsaw puzzle may be annoying, but they become horror when a person realizes that the lost piece is gone forever, destroyed, or was never acquired or created in the first place. Text and images go hand in hand, and even though they are still quite useful alone, one added to the other spins a new dimension.
In San Francisco Bay, California, 17 homeless people watch as the works thunder the night sky nearby the Golden Gate Bridge. One of the works resembles the constellation of Iceman, a myth about a man who came to the United States by foot and went from town to town, drifting, and causing mischief against the people, and sometimes even influencing it into their beings.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 249 wealthy people watch as the works light the night sky nearby Independence Hall. While there are no discernible constellations here, what is 1 | 1,001 DREAMS
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obvious is the theme of independence and its importance to the living soul.
What do you seek? Liberty as an individual, or liberty as a people? Does it make a difference? Can a person enter an establishment, and one by one, influence the actions of individuals and groups, for the better or for the worse? And if they do, can mischief be enlightenment; and wisdom, corruption?
In Chicago, Illinois, 91 people watch as the works reflect onto Cloud Gate, seeing mainly pictures that seemed to foretell the future on the structure of yet another arc appearance. The only telling, however, is how unlike an arc is to the circle, never beginning again where it ended.
In Buxton, North Carolina, 78 people watch as the works tower over the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Here, the fireworks reflect not on steel but on the water that the lighthouse shines on. Not so much an arc but more something of a parallel that is never under or overachieved.
It may be that the many types of lines and the many ways to contort them shape our universe. Maybe they even shape the things we can't see, the circumstances like destiny and the emotions like anger.
In Boston, Massachusetts, 86 people watch as the works ignite the Freedom Trail.
How long does a person have to walk until they find what they are looking for? What are some of the things they will have to endure in their journey? What are the sacrifices?
In Savannah, Georgia, 84 people watch from the Bonaventure Cemetery as the works remind them of the ones who have died; fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. On this so called road to free will, will it not end in perish as well? Will the last stop not be met with death and disease?
Death has no favorite sons. Born rich, poor or somewhere inbetween, gain knowledge or stay stupid, a certain skin shade or a certain racial pattern, death finds everyone and takes everyone away just the same. The only difference may be the way each person spent their life.
In Manhattan, New York, 51 people watch as the works embellish a view from the Statue of Liberty. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." There is a fire in every soul, and even in those without a soul there is lurk; someone or something hidden deep inside the mind that awaits an awakening. An entity with no specified name that before now, a person may have only seen in their dreams.
Amidst the celebration, there hangs a painting in one of the halls of the White House building. A painting of John F. Kennedy, eyes downcast, arms folded and a feeling of complete sorrow. “We must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
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Somewhere in a bar, a man drinks and watches as another man appears on a television screen, sporting a blue tie and speaking of things like change, equality and better living standards. “He can't win,” he thinks to himself. He turns to the patron beside him, “You know what they're calling this guy already?” “No, what?,” the patron answers then asks, pretending to be interested. The alcoholic says as he calls for the bartender to order one final drink, “The general who became a politician.”
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Chapter 72
THALIA MELPOMENE
1:3:8:72
I still remember when the first screw in my head went loose. Twenty-something and in a room much like this one; textbooks everywhere, college papers waiting to be written and countless nights spent studying.
Today, I realize I haven't come too far from that place as I sit in this storage unit sifting through the old card collections that first told me I might suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Counting them every chance I got to make sure none of them were missing. Making sure they were in their proper order, ranked possibly from most rarest to most common or by best condition to worst condition.
These two rooms, much like identical twins, are very difficult to tell apart. The only thing I feel that actually does set them apart is the fact that I have chosen this asylum completely of my own free will, and the other, I felt I had been forced to inherit, even if I truly wasn't.
I finish with the cards and place them back in their box and then begin counting the money for my second payment of this place. After, I go to the door of the unit and catch a slight glimpse of Satan, who is in Hell and is counting his residents. When I lift up the door, the Sun's powerful rays hit me, and then take me to a time before the war.
Years and years ago, I had a dream where I was still green and just started military training. I'm sitting in my designated area of the room and in comes an idiot who is carrying more bags than he can handle. He looks around, then begins to walk towards me and tells me that he too was designated this area, and then he goes on to ask me if he could have the top bunk bed. I didn't mind, not really, so I said yes.
Naturally, this is how I first met Tao, and for the next year we went through military training that would prepare us for a war that had not yet started.
In the field of psychology, or as a psychoanalysis, sometimes a few personality traits are mixed and combined to form a personality marker. One popular marker is titled “the dark triad;” narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy all neatly packaged into one human being. The best way to describe, in depth, a person like this? Well he came up to us shortly after Tao's arrival, and with a smug look on his face says “Name's Harvey, people call me Harper, but I prefer Harven.”
We both heard about him before we got to the camp and were reluctant to introducing ourselves, but with a person like this, you really have no choice. After the introduction he went back to his designated area, and when he took off his shirt we knew that we had talked to the Harper we had heard so many stories about. A peace symbol burned and scarred over the entire surface of his back, there was no doubt.
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The next day we were all lined up as the lieutenant on-sight, Conway, addressed us.
“The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard,” he tells us.
He sees the look of confusion on our eyes, and instead of explaining himself, he chooses a soldier at random to do the explaining for him. Four people attempt to explain the message, but none of them satisfy Conway, not until he hears what Harper has to say.
“It's simple, sir. Even those who survive the war will come back dead. There is no reason to hold on to your scabbard because it will be the last time you draw your blade.”
I make my way through the parking lot and notice that Tao's car is present. I almost forgot that he was currently unemployed.
Passing pots of flowers I open the door to my apartment and head towards the room that houses my composition notebooks. There I sit to write down the dream I had the night prior. I may have finished if it wasn't for the fact that I had been writing on the notebook's final page. Another eddition to the family.
Instead of finishing, I place my thumb on the side of the notebook and allow it to flip through the many pages, and eventually I land on a random dream.
Reading about two definitive masks, I am led to question whether or not it is possible for a single action to be completely free of reason and motive. Take, for example, an individual who suffers from Tourette's syndrome. Some of their actions, even some of the things they say, they almost appear to be random, seemingly taking the appearance of superficiality, but even we know that beneath it all there are reasons to their behavior.
But then you take something like a sports cap, an inanimate object, and you observe the way it reacts to its environment. The electrons that revolve about, do they have a reason or a motive for their actions. We move up to a different plane of existence and substitute the electron for the human being, then wonder if we ourselves can possess more reason and motive than a mere electron.
Imagine all the inanimate matter in the universe and all the processes that occur every second, even every millisecond. One might like to think that even if it's not detectable by our own senses, there is infact a human-like reasoning and maybe even a deep motive that might imply some kind of consciousness in the things that appear to be “dead.”
The other way to look at it, of course, is to say that we are more like the electron than the electron is like us, and all we really do is display the illusion of reason and motive.
“You don't have enough hate in your heart,” I say to my partner, after he begins to show signs of weakness. I lift my happy theater mask up to the top of my head and try to convince him that what he's doing is the only way to make a difference.
“Don't get philosophical with me, man,” he replies. This is when we hear police sirens above us that spoke of a town-wide search.
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My partner begins to speak, “You know what they do with people like us? It doesn't matter if our intentions are good, once they catch us they'll crucify us.”
As the sirens died, I knew that we were beginning to drift apart and any future I saw would have to be put on hold. There was now becoming a division between us, and while I did not know it then, I would become the impenitent thief, and he, the penitent thief.
Something passes by in a foreign language. When I glance out and down from the window I see Boris conversing with two other men in what may be his native tongue. It's hard to tell whether it's broken down or not.
Hearing and trying to interpret a language you don't understand is a difficult task, but we've all heard of body language and its generality. Between the civilians, the citizens and the outsiders, body language is the one thing we all have in common.
So instead of listening I watched. I watched Boris's eyes as it was the only way to read him, and I watched the other two men as they made gestures that spoke of industrial matters. Maybe some sort of machinery, a piston or multiple gears.
It took a while, but eventually I realized that either Boris or the other two men were in fact not speaking in their native tongue. I figured it was Boris's tongue, seeing as he had far fewer gestures than the others, and he of course seemed to struggle less.
Things started to make more sense for everyone, myself included, and perhaps even you, when Boris went into his car and tried to start it. The sound that came next was a sound that we are all familiar with, the sound of a car that won't start.
Once Boris finishes his demonstration they lift up the hood of the car and peer inside of it, and this is around the time I move on to other things.
Language is such a dynamic organism and there are so many forms of it that some of them slip our mind. It's almost like the bending of philosophy. If you asked me I'd say there was no such thing as a simple or complex philosophy, mostly because philosophy is not so much objective as it is subjective.
The simplicity or the complexity of the philosophy depends on the person who is doing the philosophizing, and where one person sees a simple truth, another sees complex truths, but that's not to say that the complexity outweighs the simplicity. Regardless, with any philosophy, there will be those who bend it to a certain degree, and then others who bend it much, much further, sometimes to the point where it breaks, and of course no one knows what truths lie beyond the breaking point.
At this same time, what was a simple two-dimensional circle becomes a complex three-dimensional sphere and the single path that orbited the flat circle becomes open to an infinite amount of paths from various trajectories.
That actually reminds me. I was going to save this for another time, but what's the difference? It's all the same. Anyway, there was this story of a rebel who was working on 6 | THALIA MELPOMENE
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an epic fictional story, what the genre was is unknown. For decades the rebel worked tirelessly on the epic, but a series of unfortunate events led to the rebel's death before the epic could be finished.
The epic stayed stored away for an uncountable amount of years until someone found it. They read it, found it interesting and then began to duplicate it and had others read it.
What was most fascinating, however, was how the fictional tale slowly began to grow as historical fact. Eventually, it was accepted as full truth.
That's just one version of the story, another tells that it was a mass extinction that killed the rebel before the epic could be completed, along with all the other humans. On this same timeline, the uncompleted manuscript of the epic survived, and an uncountable amount of years later, a strange species began to form and evolve until they were able to recognize the piece of writing as a story. It shouldn't come as a surprise that when they were indeed finally able to understand what the story was telling, they accepted it as full truth.
Countless men and women have died trying to open the minds of others, being cursed for their radical and sometimes blasphemous persuasions. Imagine the poor soul that might see past this story, having the ability to question its authenticity. The poor soul that might have both the courage and stupidity to bend what has been put into place.
“Question everything,” said any teacher whoever said anything worth saying. It's obvious that when you spend more time with yourself, you learn more. More about you, more about the world. It seems though, that more and more each day we are surrounding ourselves with electronics that make us unaware of our own existence.
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Chapter 73
FILE 3 OF 3, “BLOODTHUMB”
1:3:8:73
THIS is the way nightmares begin. Or, perhaps, end. Very simple, direct, unadorned.
Incredible, and yet so terribly real, that even while they're happening we live with them, and digest them, and assimilate them. And if it's twelve o'clock noon, that's what you preoccupy yourself with. You don't think about twelve o'clock noon on the next day or the day after that. But that's what we should have been thinking about, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We were preoccupied with hands on a clock when we should have been checking off a calendar.
An employee of Omar Robinson sets up several lines of cocaine and begins to snort them one by one. “I gotta get a tie like that,” an other nearby employee remarks. The snorter looks up at the television screen and notices the speaker's tie.
“That maroon is what's up,” the non-snorter continues. “Maroon?,” the snorter asks.
“Yeah, the color of his tie,” he replies. The snorter pauses briefly, “You mean red?”
The door to the room is opened and in walks Deion Jennings and right behind him Omar Robinson. The snorter and the non-snorter stand up in panic.
“What the fuck?,” Deion asks. This area was suppose to be a drug-free zone but apparently these two had other ideas. On any other day, Deion would have reprimanded them, but today was the day that Deion and Omar found out that Derek's body had been found.
“They found the body and Spy is probably going to spill, so we're cleaning house,”
Deion continues.
“Cleaning house?,” the snorter asks, “Why would he spill? He doesn't know we did Derek.” Omar walks up to the snorter, looking at the remaining lines of cocaine, and with a stern face tells the snorter that if the body had been buried properly, then Spider probably would have never had any reason to do anything displeasing.
“We could just tell Spider that it was the other crew, like they was trying to get back at us,” the non-snorter suggests. Again, Omar tells them that Derek's body was improperly buried, which was in itself a story of its own that would tell Spider that someone was trying to hide something.
The question was whether or not Spider would be smart enough to realize this. Omar, however, gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided to take no risks.
With the stern look still on his face, Omar blows away the remaining lines of cocaine and begins to walk towards the door back to Deion. “Clean this mess up else we'll all end up in jail,” Omar says, “those test tubes and the scale, just get it all out of here.” The two exit the room.
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“Is there gas in the car?,” Omar asks Deion. “Yeah, there's gas in the car,” says Jennings, “but I think the people down the hall know who you are.”
About four years ago, I had a dream. “Don't worry,” I say to my patient as she dives into her deep subconscious. This was real black therapy, all alone in a rehashed memory while a hypnotist attempts to guide you. It was my job and it was my idea, to guide her through her own mind and the pieces that layed dormant there.
It was past nine o'clock and we were all in a dimly lit room; myself, the patient, one of her family members and three others who were there mainly for regulatory purposes.
“Do you see the car?,” I ask her. “No, I just see a street, with some buildings and two street signs,” she replies. “What are the street names?” “Willoughby and Myrtlebank, but I see a gentleman replacing the Myrtlebank sign for a sign that says Maple.”
“Is there anyone around?,” I ask. “No, and it's dark.” “Where are you exactly?” “I'm standing in front of a small store that sells and fixes different types of jewelry.” “Can you see the name of the store?”
It takes her about twenty seconds to finally answer me, and when she does she says that “she was no longer in front of the store, and was now on the other side of the street and had no memory of ever crossing the road.” I saw this a lot. Black outs. Memory spots.
"It's like you just woke up, doctor. You don't know where you are, and you don't know why you are there. The only thing that can answer your questions are the notes you wrote yourself while you were still doing that one action to remember what you were doing. Sometimes you write a note to remember where something is. 'Your bike is in lot 5A.' All you have are your own notes, and nothing else. Not your memory, not anyone else's word, nothing but your notes. You wake up in a car, you're angry and you don't know why. You wake up at a friend's house, you're frustrated and you don't know why.
You wake up while walking, you're in this part of town but you don't know why. You're not really waking up, but that's what it feels like. You can still learn how to do new things, though. With that kind of memory still there, it's important you learn to recognize your own handwriting. You have to know what you wrote and what you didn't write.
Other than that, having this condition is like you just woke up. As soon as I stop talking to you and my attention changes focus, I will forget all of this and I will wake up again, and maybe I'll be saying goodbye to a complete stranger."
Dozens of patients like this, and what I learned from them all is that memory and experience is a fine gap-filler for the lack of intelligence and foresight. Maybe you couldn't figure out how a particular thing worked, maybe something like multiplication, and when someone asked you what five times three was, you couldn't answer. The next day, you see someone solve the math problem and it stays with you, fifteen, and even 9 | FILE 3 OF 3, “BLOODTHUMB”
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though you couldn't figure it out for yourself, at the end of the day you still found the correct answer and your memory allowed you to hold on to it.
My patient suddenly begins to quiver and soon after she falls onto the ground, yelling
“I see it, I see it” and almost convulsing. “You see the car?,” I ask her. Laying flat on her stomach, she looks up and begins to peer. “100RFD. That's the license plate number,” she continues to yell.
Her relative checks to make sure she is all right, and the regulators, as well as myself, hope that this information she has provided will actually be useful.
We contact the local police department and they search through their records and eventually find a match for 100RFD. While we weren't sure she was driving at the time, we now knew that the first lady was the owner of the vehicle, and this very fact alone was enough to wake me up.
I needed to take a shit so I went into the bathroom and took a shit. After wiping my ass and after washing my hands, I stared at one of the bathroom walls for a while. Not because I'm crazy or because the wall was interesting, but because I had an autostereogram on it. One of those three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional surface, and if you focused well enough you might see something that others can't.
Besides trying to find the hidden image, things like these always helped me think.
Thinking about shattered dreams. Playing out how something will happen in your head before you go. The anthology complex. It feels like you're sitting in a room that is darker than normal and the only light is the stream of light that pierces through the window.
After enough time you'll realize that what you chose to fix your eyes on was where the light ended, on the floor just a few feet away from you. “Yes, captain, all those pieces really do matter.” Is that a little shadow man in that patch of darkness there in the corner of the autostereogram?
It's been two and a half minutes now and I still have not been focused enough to find the image. I've seen it before, but it's lost on me. Like a lost dream. Have you ever had one of those before?
Most people don't write down their dreams, and even those who do sometimes lose the dreams they've written down. Fortunately for me, it's singular and not plural as there is only one dream I cannot find. It's somewhere in that library and I've been searching for it for years but can never seem to find it.
I remember giving the dream a title, like any other, but I don't remember exactly what I titled it, so now I just call it “Moby Dick.” A nemesis that gets the better of me every single time.
The dream was mostly about pain, and I don't mean the emotional kind. I mean the less complex and more superficial kind. The physical kind. I was bitten by something in 10 | FILE 3 OF 3, “BLOODTHUMB”
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the dream, and when I awoke the pain followed me into the real world and lasted for the entire day. I guess, more or less, you could say that it was indeed something psychological, but even though the pain stayed with me, I felt that when I woke up I had left more pain behind than I took forward.
I still lack the focus and finally give up when I hear someone knocking on my door. A soft knock but it's not Lynne or Sara. Instead it's a man holding a pamphlet who begins to speak to me about supporting a child for less than $3.14 a day. I take the pamphlet and ask him why he chose exactly $3.14. He didn't really have an answer, so that made it even stranger. It was just a number, and what I should have really been thinking about was what more I could do to help.
Three point one four, one day away from the Ides of March, not to mention the mathematical implications.
After he leaves, I am left standing there with a pamphlet I planned to throw away and staring at Lynne's potted flowers. Next thing I know I'm downstairs checking my mail and going through pieces of paper that tell me I may have already won a prize. That, and some credit card information for one George Johnson. What a joke.
When I get back upstairs I can hear my phone ringing. That damn ringing sound. I walk towards it slowly and then stop completely when I get in front of it. I stand for a while and let it ring, wondering when the caller will finally give up, but they never do.
“Hello?” “Hey, I'm at work, do you think you could pick up Sara and David for me?
They're at Olya's.” “Olya?” “She lives in the next building over.” “Oh yeah.” “Yeah I'm running late but I'll be home soon.” “What happened to Alondra?” “She's away with her mom for the week.” “Alright yeah, I'll go get them.”
I change my shirt and head outside, then I happen to run into Amy Steinbrenner. I nodded, she nodded, so on and so forth. Walking away I noticed that she was losing a little weight, but it all seemed to be in vain as she was smoking. Maybe one has to do with the other.
Cigarette smoking is something I like to call an absurdity. It's tolerated because we have been therapized to accept it as a norm, but when you really sit down to think about it, it's crazy. Putting a leash on a dog, keeping track of dreams, actually having a positive outlook on your future and on life in general, all these things are absurd.
The moment I go to enter the building, I see Olya coming my way with four kids.
“Thanks for coming,” she says as she hands David and Sara off to me. “No problem.”
She heads to her car with her children while the three of us go back home. Sara puts her hand in mine while David sprints across to our building. “Do you know the movie
'Green Monster Pam?,'” she asks me. No, I say, then ask her if she watched it at Olya's house. “Yea, it was funny,” she laughs.
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When we catch up with David, we can both hear him reciting “Green Monster Sam, watch out for his wam and bam.” Sara replies, “Green Monster Pam, watch out for her wam and glam.” David looks at her then at me, and he asks me if I know about the new movie called “Green Monster Sam.” Again, I say no, and he tells me about how they watched it at Olya's house.
When we get into my apartment I tell them to sit down on the couch and to not touch anything until I come back. When I do return I find that they hadn't moved an inch, so I offered them a television to watch. They declined, and even when I told them that the cartoon with the three stupid kids running around trying to make money was on, they still declined. It was kind of depressing because I really like that show.
“Do you guys want to use the computer instead?” Now I was speaking their language.
I brought them into my bedroom and the first thing they did was play a game that was created by the same people who made their new favorite movie. When I looked at the title of the game, which was also the name of that same movie, I saw its correct name. “It's
'Green Monster Jam,' you idiots. Sam and Pam are just the main characters.”
Of course they didn't hear a word I said, and for the next thirty minutes they played their lives away. I started to wonder where Lynne was and if she was just simply running more late than she already was.
About a minute after the thirty I went back inside to check on them and found Sara still playing but David sleeping on my bed. “David went to sleep and didn't pray,” she says. “That's fine,” I say, “he can pray when he wakes up.”
I walk up to her and see how far she is in the game. “I'm trying to beat the boss ham,”
she tells me. It was amusing to watch her play for a little while, and after enough time passed I asked her what she usually prayed about.
She tells me about how she prays for God to help all of the poor people, and to help her father, and to help David be able to sleep better. Tall order, I guess, but miracles do happen.
Not too far from then Lynne finally arrives with food. “Thank you so much.” She takes her children and brings them home to feed them then comes back to my apartment to tell me that tomorrow was her first day off in six days.
“I was thinking I should buy a sprinkler for the garden,” she says. “You mean the one at the home?,” I ask. “Yeah.” “That's a good idea.” “Do you want to go tomorrow?”
I told her that I would just stay home and would rather just help her set it up the next time they went to the home. That's not what she wanted but oh well. “I guess you wouldn't want to come with me to my check-up then?” “What check-up?,” I ask.
Every period of time she would go in for a check-up on her cancer condition slash situation. Make sure every thing was still working and that every thing was fine. I 12 | FILE 3 OF 3, “BLOODTHUMB”
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assumed she was asking because she was afraid to go in alone, but I also wondered what made this one so different from the rest.
I said no to that as well. I don't detest hospitals like some people, but I never liked them either, with their smoking and non-smoking areas, stupid kids playing around like it's suppose to be some happy place. She was alone on this one.
She wasn't upset, but I could see that she was disappointed. I think a younger Lynne would have been even a bit confused, but that's the one thing she wasn't now. She understood.
With that same disappointment still lingering on her face, she tells me about how she started writing poetry. She talks about how when she was at my parents' home, it was the most serene she had ever felt in her life and she wanted to capture the feeling. To write it down in some way, so she tried to hold on to it and when she got back home tried to express it.
I asked her if I could read some of it but told me I would have to wait because she wasn't any good yet. What she says next is something I've never heard from anyone else.
Nothing I would ever expect to ever hear from anyone else.
“Do you know that I look up to you?” I didn't know what to say. “I know it almost sounds childish, but it's true. I've never met anyone like you and I've never felt this way about anyone else. You just inspire me in so many ways that sometimes I can't even think straight. I wish you could stand in my shoes so you could see yourself the way I do,” she finishes.
“Don't look too hard,” that's what I would have said if I didn't care about ruining the mood for her. Don't look too hard at anything, especially life. You look too hard and you might miss more than you see.
Anyone in my current position I'm sure would have been flattered. To have someone tell you that you inspire them. Her words made me think of something someone told me a while back, something that may or may not be completely accurate.
It was about Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who hired a servant to walk behind him as he received praise from the people he ruled over. This servant's only job was to say one line every time Aurelius received a compliment. In Aurelius's ear he would calmly whisper, “You are only man.”
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Chapter 74
HERUTOPIA
1:3:8:74
HOW will the world end. What exactly is the definition of the end. Is it the destruction of civilization or the destruction of Earth herself.
Once I had a lucid dream where I was held inside a holding cell with a couple of other people. At this point I'm not lucid, but there is however a crazy woman sitting directly across from me who has a serious staring problem. The other cellmate has a staring problem as well, but I'm not his main subject, his main subject is more-so the floor.
After about an hour of staring, the crazy woman comes closer and sits next to me and starts to open her mouth to speak. The first thing I noticed about her mouth was that every other tooth was missing, and she had twice as many teeth on the bottom than the top. On the bottom row, the teeth on either ends were filled with some kind of metal, and one of her top front teeth was chipped about ten percent. How's that for description.
“The Sun is expanding,” those are the first words she ever said to me. “I walked the surface of the Sun and felt its intense heat; I felt the sensation of powerful burning and it left me wanting more. As it got hotter and warmer, it grew and brought me more pleasure than any man before and there since after,” she finishes.
When she began to talk about the surface of the Sun, I became lucid and I immediately knew which dreamline I was in. At first I thought I was back in Cape Town, but I soon saw that I was in a place that used to be known as the city they called Johannesburg.
I asked her what her name was and how she knew the Sun was expanding, and right then and there she went into a speech.
“Ramix, I like that name.” You'd think those were my words, but they were hers and it seemed like she just made up a random name and decided that's what she wanted to be called.
Now she's talking about how the Earth's water will eventually escape into space and all known terrestrial life will become extinct, that we were all doomed and anything we tried was futile. “If only you saw the storm that was coming,” she says. I actively began to understand why she was where she was.
“The Sun will continue to grow and grow and our Earth will become too hot, and eventually she will be sucked into the massive starbody and decease,” she almost cries for her dystopia. Before she can a guard opens the gate and looks at me, saying, “Get up number forty-one.” It was somewhat difficult, but I was able to stand and left Ramix behind, and when I got to the outer limits of the jailhouse, I saw slaves working in a field.
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destiny I had was already set in the stones they were breaking.
We passed them and entered under through a sign that said “Civilian Hall.” From what I could see, and from the state of things, she was deceased already and had been so for a very long time. Once inside the building, I woke up.
When I traveled three or more so years ago, I went to all types of places and saw all types of people. The poor, the tourists; the main attractions, the slums. I was indiscriminate but even more in some kind of a trance state that clouded my mind. That may have been why I started to see all the people as one.
Wherever I went, I tried to blend in so I wasn't seen as an outsider, because that's exactly what I was then and what I am now. There were times when I caught myself wondering if I could ever live in a specific place, permanently and comfortably, but each time I came back to my senses knowing that I wouldn't be there for too long.
As you already know there were people I ran into, people I remember but I'll never see again. One of the people I've been turning in my mind ever since was someone who was very much like Ramix. The only difference was the fact that she was missing more teeth than Ramix.
I felt that when she talked, even if I understood and spoke her language, which I didn't, that I would have had a hard time understanding her pronunciations. So yes, even a translator would have been useless.
The only thing I did understand about her was the poverty she probably went through for most of her entire adult life. Seeing someone like her makes you wonder if there are plants that only grow at night.
A lot of us live in societies where it's okay to not care for the needy. It's not that we actually don't care, a lot of us do, but it's okay if you don't. Yet we care for ourselves and sometimes those close to us, physically and mentally, and I think this stems from the carnality of our own existence.
Are we one or aren't we? If someone gets HIV, even a complete stranger, does a part of me get HIV as well? No, right? This is how we see life, how we are designed to see life, but I've heard of a man who more than likely saw past the design and said that he feels sorrow when one human dies.
“Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
In all her poverty she still believed in a personal God and that there was a place for her in Heaven when she passed. I didn't intrude on her beliefs because it was really the only possession she had. God was her's and she was God's.
Sometime later I was at an airport, ready to go home and sitting with the other to-be passengers in a waiting room. By then I realized that I was not a traveler, and that I was 15 | HERUTOPIA
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more a person who stayed in one place. It was time I accepted who I was, for all the better and for all the worse.
Sitting in the waiting room for as long as I did, I thought about my future and the family that left me behind. Right before the plane arrived, I began reading a book. Or maybe it was a magazine. It gave suggestions on where to place faith and suggestions on what to believe. Prior to then, though, I read somewhere that you have to be ware, and that you can't just believe anything you read.
I knocked on Tao's door but it was Tian who let me in. “You're still here?,” I asked him. “Yes, few more days.”
I walked a bit further in and noticed that Tao had replaced his fish tank and also purchased a few new fish and aquatic items to place in the tank itself.
“You missed the first round,” Tao states. As long as no one got knocked out I didn't really care. I just wanted to see a good fight.
“Who's this guy again?,” I ask about the boxer with black trunks. “Some dude from Canada,” Tao replies. The boxer from Canada was up against a class champion from England who sported white trunks and a deadly left hook.
When the end of the forth round came around, the pizza that they had ordered was finally delivered and Tao came back to spread the wealth. Once the fifth round began, the boxers had developed a feel for the other and the match became a back-alley brawl. The moment the Canadian landed a left hook of his own, the fight took on a different shape.
“!!!,” Tian says something in what I believe may be Hanyu. “English,” Tao says,
“speak fucking English.” Tian then asks him how you would say a certain word in English, and Tao tells him to just say “haymaker.”
The fifth round ends and the fight that I thought would go the distance now seems like it may end with any one blow.
For most of the seventh, eight and ninth rounds, Tao and Tian slowly differed and chose separate sides. I guess Tian found some kind of attraction to the Canadian boxer, and for whatever reason began to root for him.
The difference and separation gets me thinking, if Tao and Tian developed a program, or a universe, what would it be like. If they decided to give their subjects, which would be the lifeforms for a universe and text and images for a program, a certain level of consciousness, do they become important? Are the things that are done to them then considered real?
You spill milk and it's not that big of a deal, but dream a dream of someone spilling your guts. You'll probably go into shock, and of that shock you would be very conscious, which in of itself will bring even more shock. There may come a time when the things that we thought were of no consciousness begin to ask for their own rights.
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“To dry up; to deprive or exhaust of moisture; to preserve by drying; as, to desiccate fish or fruit.” Webster's dictionary, 1913. This is what a desiccant does, a hygroscopic substance that induces or sustains a state of dryness.
Vampires are known to suck the life out of those who are mortal. In the same way a desiccant may drain the moisture of its surrounding area, absorbing water for whatever reason. The difference between these two that most of us will see is that a vampire is conscious while a desiccant is not, and even though both seem to perform the same action, only one of them is accountable for their actions.
With a state of consciousness, we start to think of things like fate and morality, right and wrong and whether or not we ever really had a choice. Is this ability and knowledge alone enough to give weighted realty to reality. Do those fabrics of consciousness make our actions more important, especially over other forms of life that may not have a conscious mind? If a rabbit cannot perceive pain and is unable to comprehend death, is it okay to kill it? Switch the rabbit to an old woman who has these same inabilities, she'll probably think you are just sending her to Herutopia.
Given some kind of sense of justice, you could say it's our job to figure out the appropriate actions, but it seems we tend to fail time and time again. I'm tried for robbing banks, but I have killed unarmed people. Where there are purpose characters, there too are purpose sentences.
Middle of the tenth round and the fight has begun to die down. Tao and Tian are still on either sides and have actually put a fifty-dollar bet down.
“Did Jack tell you when he was coming back?,” Tao asks me. Jack said he'd be in Springfield for a while but made no mention of how long he was staying there exactly. At that moment, though, exactly, the boxer from England landed a nasty left hook and sent the boxer from Canada down to the canvas. I think it was safe to say that it was over. Ten seconds later, Tian was looking for fifty dollars that he didn't have.
I left Tao's apartment after the fight and instead of going to my own, watching television for so long prompted me to go to a nearby video store. Maybe I'd get something for Sara and David. I guess it wasn't too nearby, though, as I opted to take the bus. On the way there I almost changed my mind when I saw that “Fools And Assassins”
was playing at the theater, but I wasn't in the mood for a three-hour long movie.
When I got to the sex video store, I talked to the working employee and asked him if they gave out rimjobs. “Sorry,” Diggler said. While they were known for their unique pleasure packages, a rimjob was not on the list. Relax, I'm kidding. Fucking idiot. Makes you wonder, what are the chances that something will come out of those sentences later on in the composition.
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and asked him if they had “Meadowlands,” a crime film about a guy who made up stories on the fly and was a compulsive liar. What made it so interesting was that you never knew when he was bullshitting, and you just had to take his word for it.
I purchased it and then began to browse around. In action there was “Joint Function,”
and it made me wonder if any of the characters in it had an anatomy complex. Phantom pain from a missing piece of biology.
I skipped romance and landed in drama, where there was “The Last Rose Of Summer,” but the summary on the back made it seem more of a melodrama than a drama-drama.
In thriller, “Discourse Is Identity,” and in documentary, “Monsters of the Midway.”
Sport, nothing there, western, nothing there; adventure, fantasy, musical, skip, skip, skip.
Mystery had “Snowy Pastures,” and it reminded me of Lynne because it was probably something she'd like. A woman all alone in what appeared to be a hidden town.
Comedy, “Clouds For A Day,” directed by Larry Javid, biography, “M.B.J.,” directed by Oliver Schoen; horror, I didn't bother, war, again reminded me of Lynne and her father.
“Cyborg Noir,” “Saholocaust” and “A Twilight Odyssey,” all belonging to history, science-fiction and film noir, irrespectively.
In the sitcom section I found nothing interesting, and finally I arrived in the animation section. I subsectored into family and then into kids, and there I found a movie that Sara and David were sure to enjoy. “The Lion King,” I could do no wrong.
I left with both movies and when I got home I went to Lynne's apartment and knocked on the door. A minute passes but no answer. Another and still none, the two would have to wait until tomorrow.
Looking down and at potted plants, I am left with the image of my mother and her passing. Like any sane person she too liked flowers, and like any sane person she was just always too busy to ever sow.
By the time I was aged fifteen my mother and brother were gone, and my father, some odd number of years away from his grave. Around that time, there was a day when the circus came through town. I'm talking about clowns, freaks and managers, they all came and then passed through.
Still learning about life I grew curious of the event and at a certain hour took part of the festivities. I walked around, saw some strange shit, talked to a few weirdos, but the best thing about that circus show was a man who literally had a skeleton face. It was peculiar because his head was so skinny but the rest of his body was normal weight. I suppose it may have been some kind of rare genetic disease. Your skin sticking to the bones on your face, enough to make it seem like your bones were made of skin.
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Sometimes I've written down dreams that I haven't yet had, and often times I find myself wondering who may have had a dream of me the night before. The strangeness of it all, to be in more than one place at once.
Events, whether they are real or just a dream, have a long spectrum of position. A real event can be over-exaggerated and begin to tip towards the lie while a dream event can be remembered as such a clone of a real event and begin to tip towards the truth. It may be that you did not see things as they were then, or maybe you just don't remember things as they really were.
When I got home and looked at the time I see that it's four a.m. and wonder where the preceding hours went. I turn on the light and go to my television with plans to feed my video player. As I take out Meadowlands, however, I am touched by a familiar tone of voice.
“Believe, and the Lord will shed his light upon you.” The time was about right for a religious infomercial like this. Throughout the advertisement of their product, they had fortunate people talk about their blessings.
“Praise the Lord, he blessed me with a new car,” one man says to the video camera. “I looked in my bank account the next day and there was four thousand dollars extra,” one woman says to another. “When I opened my mail and I finally got my check for nine hundred dollars, I fell down to my knees and gave thanks.” God is good when life is great.
I watch the infomercial for as long as I can but it seriously begins to drag on. Each time I look at the time, chunks of it were missing. Eventually, parts of the infomercial begin to remind me of a God that I did know, and of one who spoke cautiously of time itself.
Time travel, I haven't talked about that yet, have I? I can't remember. Either way, I had a dream which occurred before his death but after he gives Satan a book of stories. In the dream we are hovering above the planet Earth, the one that we know, and as we look into it we see a time in which dinosaurs roamed the third rock from the Sun.
I asked him how we were able to see so far back into the past. He tells me that if you travel far enough in space, light begins to behave differently, and if you have the vision, you will see things that once occurred, are occurring, and have yet to occur.
I ask him about the light and its behaviour and its process into change. “I know that he told you that time is like a circle, but to me it is more like a triangle, or any other polygonal entity,” he states and continues.
“We are often subjected to visually pleasing images, but when you unscrew a light-blub, that’s when you see the metals and wires and the ugly design behind it all. The same thing applies to time.” It probably even applied to the infomercial.
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The dying God then told me that like a triangle, time can shift itself into different types of triangles. The outcome of the triangle type was always determined by the governing forces of nature, and as each force, or law, affected the triangle, its three points constantly changed position but were always the same.
What he meant by “always the same” was the fact that each point was interchangeable with any other. When explaining to me, he used the examples of birth, life and death, each one representing a point on the triangle.
“Throughout existence, as time develops, certain things become predictable and even inevitable, things such as your own birth. And from birth you gain life, and may someday pass into death, these things are immutable, but between these points time itself is interrupted by entropy and the things that take place here are unpredictable and unknowable.”
God then, out of thin air, produces a geometrical item. When he asks me what it is, I tell him that it's a prism, and he says yes. “Yes it is a prism, a triangle that has been affected by a force far greater than anything you've ever seen. Along with its appearance, the abstract idea of time has too been affected.”
You could flip the equilateral prism any way that you liked, and each time it landed it would appear as it did before. The point of death may have switched with the point of life, but in the end they had both once inhabited the same location. The forces and laws, they allowed you to see both the triangle and the concept of time in different ways.
After God was done with time, he then began to speak of everlasting life, and this is when I woke up. In my room, I looked out the window and saw that the circus was leaving. They only stayed for one day and I assumed it was because there were more freaks in our town than there were in their own charades.
Agent Cochran inspects Derek's body while it lays on a morgue table awaiting an autopsy. South West, South East, Wallace is shocked when he hears of his friend's passing, but not too long after learns that this type of life does not have a mourning period.
“You have to be able to hold your own ground. A lot of shit is going to go down in the upcoming months,” Jennings says to a Wallace who is being considered for a promotion.
They discuss among a group of eight in what seems to be an unfinished warehouse that may or may not have been recently acquired.
After the meeting, all individuals exit the premises through a backdoor and begin to walk towards their vehicles. The moment Omar tells Wallace that he was going to be riding with them, a bullet goes through the left side of Wallace's face, just under his respective cheek.
Cover is taken and shots are fired back, except none of the eleven have any clue as to 20 | HERUTOPIA
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which direction the enemy fire is coming from.
Wallace gets back up and hides behind an SUV as he equips his handgun. Omar and Deion look in Wallace's direction and notice that he is beginning to bleed on the entire surface of his left face, an appearance that would later credit him the nickname of Two-Face.
Deion tells Wallace to cover them as they enter the vehicle, and of course Wallace does as he is told. Omar and Deion get into their vehicle and begin to drive away while their subordinates take care of business.
As Wallace gets up to return fire, another bullet grazes the left side of his face and narrowly takes out the right tail light of the car that Deion and Omar were driving away in. As the firefight continues, the enemy's attack almost seems to be coming from two places at once, up until it completely dies down and the group of nine are left wondering if there will be a second wave.
Still hiding behind a vehicle, one of the assassins asks another, “Do you see anything?” “Yeah man I saw 'em. I saw his leg. He has one of them handicap knee things on, so he can't be far.” It takes a while, but the initial assassin eventually remembers a successful bullet that took out Rock's knee.
“You don't think it could be Rock do you?” The second assassin pauses for a moment.
“There's no way. No one came out of that store alive.” He may have been right, but things seemed to point in the opposite direction, and from these founding thoughts, a myth would grow about Terrell and whether he was or was not still alive and well.
“What the fuck is going on, I thought everything was cooling down,” Omar says.
Deion switches lanes and keeps to his right for an eventual right turn, but the right turn never comes as they are stopped by a police officer.
Both vehicles pull over and the officer of the law walks up to them and asks them for certain documents. They comply and every thing is in order, however the problem was the fact that one of their tail lights was broken. The officer tells them to get it fixed and would have left thereafter, but whether it was by fate or by chance, he recognizes Omar's face.
“Alright, give me a few minutes to process this,” the officer says and walks back to his black and white. He calls for back-up and it arrives shortly, and when it does, Omar understands that he is in for a long night at the county jail.
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Chapter 75
TITLE DEPOSITION
1:3:8:75
TITLE CROSSED OUT. Nine or ten years ago, I had a chicken sandwich. I remember the day exactly; August 4th. The chicken was unusually delicious, but I remember the day more because of a dream I had written down years prior on another August 4th, and on that chicken-day also reread. I opened the selected composition book to a page that had a crossed out title and a dream that seemed to make no sense at all.
I must have seen the bones in the attic. They glistened with golden sparks and left behind a feeling of remorse. The window nearby gave sight to an ambulance that stopped in the middle of the road. Out came jackals, not firemen. They began to circle the firetruck up until an old and wrinkly lady came by and began shooting at them with a pellet gun.
Just then, she fell down to her knees, suffering from some sort of leg cramp. She said something in sign language and not a minute later I was standing beside her. “You should have taken the two cents,” I say, “but no, you wanted to dance with danger.”
I don't know why I keep these types of dreams or why I even bother to write them down. Garbage dreams, that's what I called them at first, but as I had more and more of them I realized they were better suited by the term “Constellation Dream.” Constellation because it was like you were on a star, and you jumped from star to star to star to star.
Of course, without any sense of true direction, it all just seems like you're going from place to place and there is no bigger picture, but then you are taken up to a high place and you look down at the places you had been and slowly an image begins to emerge.
Whether or not constellation dreams really do have a bigger picture remains to be seen. A deeper meaning behind it all, or all just a bunch of fluff. Because the dream was so skippy, I can't even be sure that the way I wrote it down is exactly how every thing occurred chronologically-wise. put joke about radio silence here. One big schizophrenic timesmash.
Just then, Justin, I heard a boom from the apartment up above. I figure it's nothing but it's eventually followed by a bigger boom, and soon the booms become consecutive.
After a while it stops but is taken over by the noise of glass shattering.
I leave and go upstairs to see if anything was wrong with Mary or Anthony. By the time I get up there the noise has stopped and when she opens the door she has a calm look upon her face.
“Yes?,” she asks. I ask her where all the noise was coming from but she has no recollection of any recent noise.
After seeing they were fine it was my intention to leave, but as I begin to go Mary 22 | TITLE DEPOSITION
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starts to speak. “Anthony's walking.”
You remember that language I was telling you about? The one that hides and often slips your mind? I caught it this time. In her voice I heard more than just words; loneliness, depression, take your pick. By now she's figured out that I'm not the type to socialize so she uses Anthony as a way to get me to come in. No, not because she's interested in me, but because she is now beginning to perceive that all the friendships she's had in the past were superficial and associative at best.
I go in and learn that the doctor told her that Anthony might have problems talking.
She gets so depressed as she's speaking that it almost begins to wear me down. And I thought I was a depressive person. I needed to tag Boris in or something.
As she's talking I watch Anthony from the corner of my eye as he sits and plays with an airplaying. Airplane. A moment after he begins to slide against a couch and I can tell he's about to attempt one of the greatest and one of the most monumental actions of his early life.
He begins to stare down his mother who is still blabbering on about something and then finally lets go of the couch and begins to walk without any support. The first few steps stuttered and went largely unnoticed by Mary, but as he got closer and started to walk more properly she then saw him coming and began to wave him towards her.
I simply watched, witnessing history in the making. The last few steps were not actually steps but a very brief run into his mother's arms. “???,” Anthony says something as she lifts him up.
Anthony seemed to be a normal and healthy human being, and as little as I know about biology and the process of things, it, at least at the time, didn't seem like he was going to have any development issues. Not any issues that were far from the regular. I expect him to eventually turn into a person without any integrity and one who lacks the ability to think for himself, because what person doesn't. For now, though, he was a castle made of sand.
There are things out there that you can't bring down to an exact science. Things of the intangible nature. Take an athlete and measure her strength and speed but you cannot scientifically measure her will to succeed. There's nothing to be quantified here. In the same regard I look at Anthony and remember that he was suppose to die.
TITLE SCRATCHED OUT. About two minutes ago, I finished eating a tuna sandwich. Suffice to say, or maybe not, it is August 4th again today and right now I have a composition notebook opened in front of me. It is a different one than the one from before and takes place in a different year as well, but alas it is again dated August 4th.
It is a page that has a scratched out title and concerns a dream that makes about as much sense as the aforementioned constellation dream.
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The bathroom was well lit. It smelled of something funky, like that thing you smell of during a night that had vomit in the streets. “Where's grandma?”, you think, and now on the television there are weathermen arguing about the future of a ballerina who had recently chipped a nail. She had a big nose too, but no one seemed to notice.
“I'll take two bags of candy, please and thank you.” No, no, no, no almonds. Where am I now. Some kind of dungeon?
I started to tear. Out the page knowing that it is almost useless to my destruction, and when that wasn't enough I began searching for the other 0804 dream. Hundreds of notebooks but I figure I'll find it within an hour.
Composition 216, 422, 79, it goes on. After I check about a dozen of them I find that I have already collected over ninety constellation dreams to place in a box full of confusion. No need for them to be associated with the other dreams that actually had a type of coherence. That might be a joke, I don't know.
Seventeen minutes later the pile in the box grows but I still haven't found the dream I'm actually looking for. I can't be sure if I hadn't already done this and already placed it in one of the constellation boxes.
Composition 107, 13, 499, it continued. It continued until I heard a knock on my door. I looked through the peephole and saw a woman who was nicely dressed and wondered what it was she could have possibly wanted.
If we are all of one sub-atomic soup mix, that would mean we are all everywhere all at the same time. It makes me wonder if there is a chance that we've met in our dreams.
Can we all be in eachother's dreams. You don't know what I look like, I don't know what you look like, but what we do both know is that the flesh only participates on one plane of existence. One scale.
The moment I opened the door she introduced herself as Mya Jackson and as an officer of the law. I haven't done anything wrong. At least not in this life.
I ask her what the nature of her visit is and she informs me that Derek has died. I have to say it didn't hit me as hard as you might think it would, but listen carefully; you can never see madness coming. And when it does finally come around, it changes all complextion.
She came in and sat down and told me she was investigating his murder. Where he resided she found some of my writings to him. Writings about composition and merging ideas. I had even donated some of my “stories” to him so that maybe he might be able to start from there. In the same pile she found a letter with my address on it that he had planned to mail but never did.
Obviously I was not a suspect but Mya came to me for any possible help regarding the situation. I had nothing. “I hadn't seen him for about a year,” I tell her. There was 24 | TITLE DEPOSITION
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very little association.
For a while she kept asking me the same questions and there just wasn't enough time for the answers to change. In some way this told me that she took her job very personally or felt obligated to find his killer; maybe guilt, maybe pride, I couldn't tell.
The next time a duplicate question came around I wondered if she realized that she was basically asking the same questions. Talk about disarray.
After she accepts that I cannot help her, she thanks me for my time and leaves. I think about Derek for a while, about Jamal, about Spider. I think about them until I remember what I was doing before the knock came to my door.
I go back to the room that houses the composition notebooks and I start to look through them again, searching for that jackal dream. Perhaps by luck, I find it in a matter of minutes and add it to the constellation box and decide I've had enough for the day. I move the constellation box back into the closet where it will sit idly for God knows how long. It will accompany the other constellation boxes until the dream becomes an answer to a question.
I go to sit down and watch television but at the same time can't get the picture of Derek dying out of my head. I land on a random channel and find a television show about a family coming to America by ship. They seemed to be of the southeastern Asian heritage, but who knows. Everything about people in general is so confusing these days.
Honestly mistake a Dominican for a Haitian and they might get offended. A Mexican for an Italian and you might receive an unexpected reply.
The show gets melodramatic so I switch channels but end up falling in and out of sleep. “I love life but my sleep visions keep reality vivid.” I can't tell if that came from me or from the television.
Another knocking wakes me up and at the door stands Lynne and her children. I almost forgot that we were visiting the home for the weekend. I guess being caught off-guard by the Grim Reaper does that.
BONUS TRACKS. Mya enters her vehicle and begins to drive back towards the police department. On the way there she receives a phone call from her partner, detective-lieutenant Richards, telling her to meet him at a certain address to dissect a crime scene.
She drives there, and meanwhile, thinks of the life she may have ended. Of course she couldn't be entirely sure that it was her fault and this is what bugs her the most. The escape of information.
When she gets to the address she finds Richards writing notes as he towers over a dead body. Mya looks over the body and notices a kippah just under the left leg, and at the same time Richards asks her a question. “What's the difference between Santa Claus and a Jew?”
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She was getting tired of his dry sense of humor but couldn't really do anything about it. Despite the fact that she simply ignored him, he still delivered the punchline. “Santa Claus goes down the chimney,” he laughs.
Eventually the Sun begins to set and the crime scene is cleared while Mya makes her way back home; the same place you first found her in. Yes, she still lives alone, and yes, she's still not lonely, but a darkness has begun to loom over her as she advances in her career.
A cop who is naive enough to believe that there are police forces out there whose intent is fully focused on justice and whose only mission is to protect and to serve, she is slowly beginning to learn that sometimes the cops are just the same as the criminals, simply playing different roles.
Cops and robbers, maybe you've played it; how often and how quickly did you and your friends trade professions? And after the game was over, you too went home. You ate dinner, watched T.V., whatever, only to play again the next day, and the next day, and the day after that.
That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted. Not my words but the last words of a dying actor. The sentence was seen in a scene on a wall from a maze dream. Section 8
compartment 51.
“Put those in the trunk,” Lynne says to David as he lugs his telescope and his dreamcatcher through the parking lot. He took them everywhere now.
I opened the door to the passenger side and sat shotgun all along the way. “It's raining,” Sara says calmly. It wasn't actually raining but you could see the storm that was coming. “Can we still go to the park?,” she asks. “If it rains we can do something fun inside,” Lynne replies. The reply didn't satisfy Sara, though.
“Stop kicking my seat,” I tell David. His subconscious chair kicking habits were starting to become very annoying. It wasn't his fault but I was this close to breaking his legs, or atleast the leg that did the kicking.
The moment he stops you can see the little rain droplets beginning to hit the windows, and soonafter it really started to come down. No park today. I look back at Sara as she looks out the window and her sad face reminds me of Clownface.
This is when lightning strikes and is soon followed by the noise of thunder. I'm not sure if it was because of the weather, but the ride took much longer than usual and there were traffic jams all over. The long duration and long moments of silence may have been why Lynne got the idea that we should all go on a roadtrip.
“I've always just wanted to drive from town to town with the people I love,” she looks at me and laughs. It was an interesting idea, I guess.
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behind us. We had only been here a few times but already it was starting to feel like a different house. She was gardening, cleaning, interior designing; even thought it wasn't exactly her home, in many ways she made it hers.
I think about the first time she ever saw this place and laugh. She couldn't have had any idea then that this would to her become such a familiar place.
Time went by and everyone mostly did their own thing. The rain decided to stay and so did the thunder and the lightning. At some time in the evening I actually lost them all and couldn't find them. It was when I looked in the study that I found Lynne sitting at a desk writing. I asked her a question about the sprinkler she bought and then left her alone.
I always find people to be a bit more annoying than usual when I am writing down my dreams or contemplating the answers that evade us, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Sometimes it requires deep focus, and other times, well, it doesn't.
One page or fifty pages later, you start to wonder if the person who was bothering you before would actually understand any of the words you wrote, but be it lyrics, a short story, an essay or a poem, you can write solely about your life and people will be able to relate because sometimes your story is their story as well.
So many people finding differences among themselves but the fact is we are all born, we all live for some time and then we all die. Those are the only similarities we need to negate the differences.
It's too bad that a lot of young people create plans in their head to change the world, though. The truth is there are no more Martins, no more Gandhis. I'm not sure if there are even anymore Hitlers. All those who were truly great have died and left the world with a giant bandage on it.
There are still many problems in the world, but I'd like to think that each of us ultimately will have a story to tell at the end of our roads. I'd like to think that for each problem, there is a person who will dedicate their life to fixing it. “This isn't our fight,”
my partner says to me as I try to help a prostitute find a way out of her broken life.
A while back in a dream dated two years ago I found myself somewhere in Myanmar, or what you would have called it then, Burma. I woke up and realized I had taken temporary residence in the house of a farmer.
It had rained the night before and when I got outside I could smell the moisture in the air as I looked out across the field. One could feel that dewy myst absorbing through their skin.
In the distance a rectangular Sun was rising and was affected by the Zemlya effect; this mirage that gave the impression that the Sun was rising even though it probably really wasn't. It was here and gone too soon.
“Me and my son used to play soccer here all the time,” the farmer says as he walks up 27 | TITLE DEPOSITION
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beside me. “I would tell him that we were in a huge stadium with thousands of people watching,” he continues.
“What happened to him?,” I asked assuming there was some kind of tragedy, but there wasn't. “He plays for a national team now.” Before I left he too talked of a sort of Zemlya effect. Telling me that being a father came and went by too soon. You think you have all the time in the world but before you know it one year turns into eighteen. The circle of life.
By the time I finished assimilating the sprinkler everyone was together again and it finally stopped raining. There was still a bit of daylight outside so we all went into the yard to test it. When it was all said and done, the sprinkler, all of a sudden, went off and sprayed me in the face.
Everyone was laughing but David's was by far the loudest. Once I saw that he wasn't going to stop anytime soon, I told him that if he kept laughing I would make the sprinkler his new mouth. He doesn't stop so I end up chasing him around the yard and when I finally catch him I drag him to a hose and wet him down. I asked the others if they wanted any as well but they knew better.
After the discipline the sprinkler begins to work properly as it waters a few nearby zinnias. “Consistency.” That's one meaning for the zinnia. Some people don't want to experience something new each day, they just want to eat cheeseburgers, play the lotto and watch television as they call on the mundane. After one hundred years of living you learn that there's nothing wrong with being normal.
Even after the sprinklers and after all daylight was gone we decided to stay in the yard, which was why we couldn't see the rain that was coming. We ran back inside avoiding earthworms and being drenched from the rain.
It was rounding ten o'clock so Lynne wanted to give her seedlings a bath. Or a shower, I can't remember. Either way, I recall that Sara wanted her company during the cleaning but David did not. That's just the type of kid he was, too old for his age and growing too fast.
When they were all clean Lynne put them to bed and then went ahead and did all of our laundry. Like I said before, this was her second chance and she made it hers. And I haven't even gotten to the college part.
She was beginning to develop the consistency she needed for herself and for her children for the God knows how manyith time, and maybe for the first time she was starting off on the right foot.
I helped a bit too with the laundry but only because I wanted to put on some of the clothes as they came out of the dryer and were still warm. That electromagnetic attraction. No more laundry mats for her and no more expensive apartment washers.
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When she was nearing the end of the last load I went to check on David and Sara, and while David was sound asleep in his room, Sara was still wide awake. I asked her if she was having trouble sleeping. “I wanted to go to the park today.”
I thought again of the farmer as I told her that we could go tomorrow. The bad news was that I was sure it was going to rain again.
I stayed with her until she began to snore. As far down the field as you can see, there are still just some things that are invisible to the naked eye. You can never tell which people will stay with you in your life until the time you die. I was in deep now, a guardian to Sara, and as long as I was in her life and she was in mine I would have to look after her like a parent.
I pulled the blanket over her and opened her window and then left her to dream; the lioness sleeps tonight.
The moment I stepped out the door Lynne appeared out of nowhere with that stupid smile on her face. “So, what do you think about that trip?,” she asks.
Let me see. I didn't go with her to the hospital for a check-up that might mean inconsistency again. The way I see it, if I do this then I get a few more passes.
I'm kidding, I don't give a fuck about passes or about feeling like I owe anyone anything, especially Lynne. The only reason why the next few words that came out of my mouth were positive for going on the trip, as were for most things, was because of David and Sara. If I owe anyone anything, it's children and their right to have a childhood, respectively.
She starts doing kung-fu moves to show her excitement and actually challenges my immaturity. We agreed on going in the coming months at a time when she could get away from work and would tell Sara and David in the morning.
She kisses my cheek and then walks into the room Sara was sleeping in. I went down the stairs and even further down some more stairs into the basement and laid down on the couch. Bedtime.
Orange juice, blue bowl, white cordless telephone, gray pen, red lamp, black desk, a couple of clear cylinders, holed copy paper.
Something must've woken me in the middle of the night, maybe a whistling from the wind but I couldn't be entirely sure, so I got up to check the house. When I flipped on the light, though, I was puzzled by the image. I found David lying face first on the cold kitchen floor. When I got to him I could hear Lynne walking, almost running, down the steps.
He was fine for the most part but I didn't know he was a sleepwalker. It would be a few months from now that I learn just how terrified he really was of going to sleep, and at that same time I tell him that his dreams aren't real. That the nightmares weren't really 29 | TITLE DEPOSITION
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happening.
Could it be that the nightmares you have are what define you? Dreams filled with bubblegum and rainbows are very gay, but it's the darkness that leaves its mark.
I carried him back to where Lynne and Sara were sleeping and whether he realized it or not I didn't know, then I setted up camp in the living room instead of the basement.
When I truly awoke in the morning and went to check their room, I saw that the kids were still somehow dead asleep. “I'm in here,” Lynne yelled from across the rooms. I went into an empty room and saw her painting.
Before my mother axed herself, her and my father were having another room conceived to be used as a small entertainment facility. Never got around to it obviously and then after it was just left to rot, that was until Lynne began to talk about how she's always wanted to paint an entire room.
I figured the room was already going to waste, what worse could she do to it? When I got in I saw that she was already mostly done with one wall and was going on to the next.
This next addition was going to be a “Raven Landing” on a tree branch.
“Where is all of this?,” I ask her about the art. She doesn't answer. At first I thought she didn't hear me because she was too focused on her work but I soon saw it was because she was thinking about the question. Or remembering something.
“You know, I had a dream about you last night,” she says after a while. “It was weird because it wasn't like, of this world. It felt like it was a dream from a life I lived before this one,” she continues.
She was at a party that took place at the top of a skyscraper. After a few drinks she went out onto the balcony to embrace the city-view but hadn't realized that I was already out there, too looking down at the city-lights. She apologized but I told her to stay, and naturally, this was how we first met.
We talked and laughed the night away, blah blah blah all that dumb shit. After she recounted the dream to me it wasn't too long before she started talking about soulmates and true love. The stuff that people who are in love love to talk about.
Maybe it was a beforelife, or maybe it was just an alternate life. These ideas that you often hear me talk about. “I don't know it was really, really weird. When I woke up I felt like that life was over and I was now here in this world, but maybe I got to see a glimpse of my previous life.”
“Do you realize how crazy you sound?,” I ask her. I know, I know. She laughs,
“What can I say? I'm a dreamer.” That she was.
When I left the room so she could continue it began to rain again and eventually the lightning woke up the children. Sara was frustrated but I don't think David really cared. I tried to think of things we could do so she could maybe get her mind off of going to the 30 | TITLE DEPOSITION
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park but I don't think there really is a substitute for outdoor fun.
“You know what, I bought you guys a movie but I forgot it at home,” I tell her. She asks me what movie it is and when I tell her the name she almost freaks out. She runs to David and tells him the name of the movie but he doesn't believe me.
After Sara tells Lynne, Lynne explains to me that they used to have the movie but at some point it got lost and they haven't seen it since. It was their favorite movie and as long as they were kids it would stay their favorite movie.
I ended up driving back to the apartment and retrieving it and when I got back to the home they finished moving things around in the basement so we could watch it. “The living room's not good enough for you guys?,” I asked them.
We now had to move the television set from the living room into the basement, but unlike hers it wasn't as heavy. We pick it up and navigate towards the basement and then down the stairs to set it atop a table. Along the way she tells me that she informed Sara and David about the trip and told me that they were very excited. This is how you battle back against the rain to win a little girl's heart.
I plug it in and turn it on and immediately the television starts talking. “Well, only about an hour of daylight left. We better get started.” “Is it unsafe to travel at night?”
“It'll be a lot less safe to stay here. Your father's gonna pick up our trail before long.”
“Can Lorka ride?” “Yeah, I can ride.”
I begin the movie and then join them in sitting. This might very well be the first family event ever done in this house.
As I sat and watched, every once in a while my mind would wander as I thought about how any object could have an abstract concept. Telephones provide communication, guns bring forth pain. But to add to this dimension, objects can also be given a subjective concept, like a television that symbolizes a first meeting.
Is it your story that defines you? Does your ability to give your story meaning define you? It is noted that absolute zero is the coldest temperature possible. At this temperature, entropy is at its minimum. One might like to think they have a sense of control over it all but that's absurd, the only thing a person has control over during an absolute zero life is the meaning they get from it. How they choose to interpret it.
In these times one might find moments of clarity, but something about this doesn't exist. It's thrown away, so how can one read such words. They are not the included chapters in the book and not the intended sentences to be recognized.
If I don't see you again in this life, or even in this world, then perhaps I will see you in the next, or in the other.
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Chapter 76
PAGE 4 OF 8, “THE EIGHT DREAMS”
1:3:8:76
FOURTH year again, April 22nd, I had this dream. Roach and I were leaving town and saw a weird passage way through an alley from an apartment complex. We took it but it only led to another street, a street named Sodom. We walk down Sodom for a while and notice that the town grew more and more empty. Streets turned into rocks and trees to plants. About a mile or two in, Roach and I gazed upon an abandoned warehouse building.
“This is where I stay most of the time,” Roach says. It was too far away from civilization for anyone to want it. It stood on small rocks, was losing its paint, and there were tons of windows lined up one by one all cracked by something that came before. I wondered what store had been here before it became this, but I guess that didn't matter; I'd come here when I was nowhere else.
We walked up to a near-door and when Roach went to open it the door completely came apart, fell down. No more door. The rest was the same. Most rooms in the warehouse either had a bunch of junk, like left over pieces from cars, or were completely empty. There was basically no use for anything here. After a while we just sort of chilled and sat on the hard cold ground. The only thing we needed were some drugs.
Times like these there were no more comfortable beds to sleep on at night when you were tired. There were no more chairs or couches made of fine expensive material to sit on while you watched television. There wasn't even anymore television with over eight hundred channels to watch. There were no more telephones or cellular phones to talk on with your best friend or a family member. There were no more holidays to celebrate with your friends and family. There were no more computers or internet to use while you sat at home, bored as hell, despite all of the things you had. There were no more cars to drive around and paying for gas to fill up the tank so you could get to work; there wasn't even anymore work.
There were no more radios to blast while you listened to your favorite album. There were no more video games to play while you rotted your brain away, as my parents always used to say. There was no more paying to go to college so you could receive a higher education while children died in other countries. You give up everything only to have something that means nothing to the world around you. There was no more of any thing. There was just you and world.
“How do you live like this?,” I asked him. “Live like what?,” he asked back. How did he live without any real certainty in life. His answer was that none of us have any real certainty. There may be illusions of certainty, but they are just that, illusions. A place to 32 | PAGE 4 OF 8, “THE EIGHT DREAMS”
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sleep, something to eat, clothes to wear, you can never be certain you will always have these things.
“A month after I turned twenty-five, I left home and started walking south,” Roach begins to speak, “I walked aimlessly for thirty miles the first day. I stopped once the night came and I thought I'd finally get some rest, but the night was like Hell. I almost froze, and the cold temperature did a good job at keeping me from sleeping. Once the Sun came back up I started walking again, but only within the area. When the Sun started to go back down again I found an unsecured bicycle and took it. I rode around, and I don't know what it was, but it must have been something I saw that made me decide to go back home. Thirty miles out, I haven't slept in about forty-five hours and I've barely had much to eat. You could say the ride back was the most I've ever pushed myself in my life. When I did get back home, right before I finally laid down to rest, I realized what it was I was suppose to do.”
I looked at him and thought about his story but wasn't sure what points he was trying to get across. “Do you know why you are still here?,” he asks me. I didn't, not consciously anyway, but Roach lets me know. “It's because I am free in all the ways you are not,” he finishes.
I'd tell you that one of the hardest things to do in life is to surrender yourself, to give up total control whether it be to a God or to another person. While it is difficult, there is something to be said about this siren's surrender song. To let go of the steering wheel and let the powers that be, or whatever, take control.
When I woke up in the morning I heard rocks hitting the windows on the other side of the room. When I looked down it was Roach who was throwing rocks at them. The way they cracked, they seemed to make art.
In the corner of the room there were some pieces of paper, all notes, each with a different message. Most of them, I felt, spoke of the American nightmare.
Sometimes it is difficult for me to comprehend how others can live the lives that they do. Some of them, they work jobs that they hate so they can buy things they don't need.
How much sense does that make. These same people are probably more than likely the ones who will beg for more time when they see him coming from afar, and if by chance he does give them more time, they go back to that same life never really changing. I've seen rocks that are more interesting than some people.
It comes down to this; think of the circular theory and ask yourself if you are willing to go through this again. There's not much more to it. I do it often and even though most of the time I'd rather just put a bullet through my brain, I am predisposed to living and have many miles to go before I sleep.
I pulled the blanket off my sweaty body and stood up from the piece of cardboard I 33 | PAGE 4 OF 8, “THE EIGHT DREAMS”
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was sleeping on. I placed the blanket in a corner and then sat down on a chair on the other side of the storage unit. I start writing down the dream I just woke up from and for some reason it took longer than usual.
You know, years and years into dream writing and you start to feel like you aren't writing down dreams, you feel like you're simply writing down stories and it gets so that you start to develop a sort of desensitization to the dreams. They are no longer dreams after you've built a tolerance for them.
I visited Joe a few times a while back and even though he was never awake I feel it should count for something, but how can it count for anything if you can't tell whether it really happened or not. I wonder how he's doing.
I wonder what he's dreaming about, if he's lost in a place where no one knows his name and in a place that he knows nothing about. What will he do when he realizes that seven is six?
Desert spirituality, desert theology, they are annotated as ways of seeking God. A lot of people will tell you that life is not possible without water or some form of liquid, and in the desert these things are a rarity, though some of us find ourselves trapped in the desert and somehow make it out alive.
Before long ago I spoke with Satan about these types of things and he told me that man originally walked on all fours but then began to stand upright and walked on twos. I had no idea why he told me this, but soonafter I began to realize a pattern. There were times in my dreams when I looked for Heaven, but most of the time, I looked for Hell.
Across the desk I see printed images of a lunar eclipse that reminds me one was suppose to occur tonight. I reach over for them and study their notes for a while until I decide to head out. It must've been the most humid day of the summer so far. I wasn't awake for any more than ten minutes but I felt like I was about to sweat to death.
I get to my building and check my mail on the way to find some junkmail about how I need a vacation. I thought I went through this already and signed up for a roadtrip that would happen in the coming months.
Jamaica. I don't want to go to Jamaica. Why is it always Jamaica. There must be something I'm missing in Jamaica. D'yer mak'er.
A few upward steps later and I'm walking down a dimly lit hallway. Something must be going on with the lightbulb. Before I enter my apartment I look at Lynne's door. The Footstone of Liberty.
When I get inside I throw Negril in the garbage and then sit down to watch television.
Still humid as hell, I'm sure I may have lost a few pounds on the way over here. I grab the damaged remote and flip through channels but can't get the humidity off my mind.
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shooting some black guy; another racial crime even if it actually wasn't. That's the way it works. The order of it all. And of course, if you're on trial, you are guilty. That's how many people will view it.
So quick to judge but every case is different, caught in a rush and disregarding the ambient. If you do something wrong and are put in the trial seat, a good amount of people will have your punishment automatically conceived in their mind, even if the punishment isn't yet entirely clear to them themselves. What a good amount of people fail to realize is that the punishment is sometimes much more complicated than the crime itself. Too many things to consider, such as the state of mind and complete intent.
The next story is about a natural disaster in Japan. It's a shitty way to go, I guess, but it beats cancer. No black holes and escape velocities around here. Die on your own terms and never look or go back. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, a child miseducated is a child lost.
Did I ever tell you about the time I was released from prison and my partner waited for me outside the penitentiary. Probably not, but you see, in a dream, while you're dreaming that dream, every thing makes sense. It's not until you wake up and think about the dream that you realize how strange it was and how it would never work in our reality.
In one of the switch dreams there is a room with a thermostat-type thing and you can adjust the level, and the title given to this setting is “Fisheye.” I'm guessing one has to do with the other, but I'm sweating way too much to think about it right now. I fucking hate summer man, I have to take twice as many showers as I usually do, which amounts to one time a week. But zero times zero is still zero.
Francis William Mainor and Timothy David Ryan occupy the police department's locker-room as they wait for Omar Robinson's hearing process to begin. Sometime before where we are now they were in another type of room, an interrogation room, with one Spider.
It only took a few minutes into the conversation for Ryan to become irritated with Spider and his lack of information. “Any kid on the street. Take your pick,” Tim yells,
“Jamal, Derek. I got plenty more names for you.” Still, Spider didn't budge. It wasn't until Ryan turned the volume up a notch and said “You people, you keep fucking killing yourselves and you take others along with you for the ride.” At this very moment, anger became a physical presence and called for the attention of both Spider and Frank.
Frank takes Ryan outside to try and calm him down but Ryan's anger becomes Frank's anger and everything goes to Hell. Spider is released from the room and sent back to his holding cell and takes the night to think about various things. Prominently, Derek.
The following week, the two detectives try again once more, but to their surprise it is Spider who does most of the talking. He tells them about how he murdered a cop, and 35 | PAGE 4 OF 8, “THE EIGHT DREAMS”
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among dozens of other things, tells them about crooked cops and a Pakistani underage sex ring that he and the others knew very little about.
When they asked him if he knew anything about the apartment murders he said no, but went on to talk about the hits that Omar has ordered and his very obvious drug trafficking operations. “This all started because someone sold drugs to his sister?,” Tim asks, but more so comments.
The ball was rolling now and no one was safe. Once Spider snitched, everyone started snitching and had to look after themselves.
Flashforward to now and Spider's reduced prison sentence is beginning to take form.
Omar, Deion and some others have been arrested and are being charged on multiple offenses.
And so we are back to where we began, in a locker-room with two men who have yet to credit fate. “Hey man, if I was to accidentally shave off a nipple would it be covered by workmen's comp?,” Ryan asks Frank. Frank laughs, “I suppose so. If you were man enough to actually file a claim, I'd buy you one, out of my own pocket.” Ryan puts on his dress shirt.
“You know what I think about often,” Ryan says, “if I could figure out how to care as much about family as I do my job, I might be a decent human being. And the same thing could even go for Omar or any of the other scum who walk the earth. Imagine what Hitler could have done if his parents were around.”
Frank laughs again, “Yeah, maybe. I know I'm not the philosophical type, but what good is it if you make it to the top but lose your humanity along the way.”
They exit the locker-room and then exit the police station and begin to drive towards the court-room. During the drive they talk about going back to their real jobs to do real work; homicide and narcotics. And Tim, he thinks about the luck factor that paddled them from A to B.
When they get to the building, the two enter a room to see the procedure has already begun and they find a line of their friends behind a desk. Omar, Deion, other major players. For a second Omar looks back, and Tim sees this, but their eyes never actually meet.
At this hearing they learn that most of the defendants, especially Omar, would only be tried for narcotics trafficking and not for any homicides as the evidence was too slim. It didn't come as a shock to either of the two, but this meant that Omar was off the streets for at least three years.
Two weeks pass by, maybe two and a half, when Frank gives Tim a phone call. Frank had caught a body of a man who was a known drug dealer that was just released from prison. Tim knew the man and his associates so Tim relayed any information he had to 36 | PAGE 4 OF 8, “THE EIGHT DREAMS”
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Frank and afterwards they decided that they should, maybe in the following week, sit down and get something to eat.
The time comes at night, tonight, and on his way to the food joint, Tim's car dies in front of an old church. He was driving through an abandoned part of town so no help was available. He calls Frank and lets him know that he will be late, but instead Frank drives out to the area to give Tim's car a jumpstart.
During the start, Frank gives Tim a certain look. “The fuck did I do?,” Tim asks. The car was dead-gone and it was taking a lot of patience to get it started. In the meantime, Tim tried to make small talk about how Raheim was probably going to move in to town and expand his real estate, but Frank paid no attention. Just then Frank was able to get the car to start and after wiping his brow, he asked Tim a question, “You happy now, bitch?”
It was getting late so the two decided they would catch up at another time, and with a high lunar moon up above they go their separate ways. Actually they go the same way for a while but after about ten minutes they go separate ways.
Behind them, they left a sign back at the old abandoned church that Frank happened to catch sight of. While some of the letters were missing, the sign could be easily read in full. “All t e angels sing abo t Jesus's mighty sword, and they'll shield y u with t eir wings, and keep you c ose to the Lord.”
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Chapter 77
CLEAR FALLS THE RAIN
1:3:8:77
“SO we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This was an epigraph written on a tombstone found in over a hundred and fifty dreams. Every once in a while I'll browse through the graveyard looking for some kind of memory.
Hello? Waking up today I felt the atmospheric pressure and soon after became aware of the rain that was hitting my window. Some people love the rain, others think it a good idea to use it as a setting for their antholithic narratives, and that's fine, but the problem comes after the rain when you are left with wet earth.
I get up and take a look out of the window as I usually do and I see the crystal raindrops fall, the beauty of it all. It reminded me of those dreams you have, the ones that feel almost cinematic, as if there was a director, a writer and a cast behind it all. Setting set so well and those San Francisco nights. I might have a bad disease, but from my brain is where I bleed.
Just before I leave I take a mental image of lightly shaking leaves. I would have gone for the door, maybe start an exciting day filled with adventure, but the thing is I'm caught with something narcoleptic. These days I haven't been awake for more than a couple of hours.
I go back on the bed and just lay there, half and half. At some point something makes me think of my childhood and the friends who were part of it. We had a lot of kids in our neighborhood and generally we all got along as well as any other group of kids would.
Sure, their faces were fast disappearing but their characters were still intact. The more I think about them the more ghostly they seem. That place is like somebody's memory of a town, and the memory is fading. It's like there was never anything there but jungle.
For the most part, I played with a specific group; three boys and two girls. We walked through woods, spied on neighbors, picked on who we could pick on, but the times I seem to remember best was when we would go out looking through dumpsters for cardboard to slide down those steep hills.
Lucille, Simon, Jessa, Morgan and Gerald. I wonder if they remember me or if that's just all in the past. The first time I'd met them was in school, the time when all the kids from a certain grade went outside to play. They were hanging around so I walked up to them and asked them which way the nearest water fountain was.
The funniest thing though, in my childhood, was my grandmother. I guess you could say she was your typical grandma, like one you'd buy at a store, but she had a wonderful sense of black humor. Like one time, she told me to go kill myself. We laughed at that for a good while.
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She wasn't always funny though, and one of my fondest memories of her was more serious than anything else. I guess when you're that old you get a feel for wisdom, which she had, the same kind of wisdom that she would eventually pass on to my mother.
Things like being kind to people, not judging anyone, trying to stray away from prejudism. “Give God the first portion of your income.”
Anyway, what I remember was the time she told me that when you begin to understand life, the rain will stop and you will see clearly, and you'll know where you're going and why. Cliche at best but even fortune cookies sometimes tell the truth.
Whenever I think of her I wonder if she's still alive somewhere, personifying the objects around her. Tell me friend, can you comprehend eternity? We live in a place governed by time, or at least the idea of it, but in eternity all the things we know now begin to shift. The white flag is up and this is the final lap.
Half an hour later I wake up to find that it has stopped raining, but of course I grow tired soonafter and by the time I go back to sleep it had begun to rain again.
Lying down, I try to keep my mind clear of any thoughts, maybe to float in the complete darkness before me, but sooner rather than later I begin to see flashes of images and hear unintelligible voices, and the pictures come to me as in a dream, with a terrible lucidity. This might be normal had I been in a dream state, but I am not.
So I lay, and the fourth picture that appears to me in that void of darkness is the face of a little girl. Who it was, your guess is as good as mine, and the voice that followed about two minutes after the picture faded, it was completely unrelated. That's how it always worked, just senseless randomness.
Pass the time and the sixth picture is that of a tree in a desert. The voices are gone but a memory of the past begins to develop in my mind. A hotel that kept me restless in a winter time.
Whatever it was, the images, the voices, the hotel and its lack of sleep, something made me sit up and stare out the window that was being pounded by the rain. A deep sadness came over me. Not like one I've ever felt before, and I promise you no puzzle, I didn't know where it came from, I did not know its source.
After some more time passed, I thought about it and laughed. On a day like today, I have to feel so fucking sad. “Where would you like your sorrow?” I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere.
I remember as a child, on my way to school, construction workers remodeling a new apartment building. What I mean is, there was an old apartment building hidden somewhere under the new one. Every day I would walk by and they would be working on it until one day they weren't.
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like I always did and maybe ten minutes later realized that my mother had not yet come in to check on me, so instead I went to check on her. Needless to say, she was there, but she wasn't really there. Mother died today.
A long while after the media circus, my father sat me down. By now he was completely alone and I guess he just needed someone to talk to. He chose me because I wouldn't tell him that it would get easier and the pain would fade away, I was much too young to talk like that. He was getting tired of hearing those things and just wanted someone to listen to him for a change.
“I never wanted this for you,” he told me. He goes on to tell me about how right before it all happened, she was getting more and more irritable each day and how there was actually a night when she threatened to “take us all away.” He went on, thinking I was too young to fully comprehend what he was saying, and the last thing he told me that day was that there just wasn't enough time. Not enough time for family, not enough time for life. Maybe he was trying to settle it in my mind to forgive him at a later age, or maybe he was just trying to convince himself that it was out of his power.
I lose track of time and when I look out the window once more I see adults and a few older kids standing on the corner under black umbrellas. Somewhere on the edge is Alondra and somewhere in the middle is Lynne and Olya who seem to be chatting about something pleasant.
Make time and a school bus comes by, but it's not theirs. Seeing Lynne reminds me that her birthday was exactly a week ago, and on that day finding out that I am two years older than her. Does your age define you as a person. If I told you to subtract ten years from the age you estimate Joe to be, how much would that change about him? Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Would he be wiser? Perhaps. But he might as well change to recklessness just the same. This from a book that spoke of character and preached that wisdom does not correlate with age.
Finally their bus arrives as the rain slows down to a drizzle and the yellow monster spits out the children one by one, but some in twos. Sara walks towards her mother and David just kind of lingers around. Olya's two, they do the same.
Everyone else leaves the block but the the six remain. The children talk amongst themselves as do the grown-ups, but they know their time is short and that the rain is due back soon. That's one of the many things the rain does, it downpours on aspirations, and it sucks because on every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
Watching them, the sound of the radio begins to dominate as I hear a woman talking about justification in a recent homicide. People are mad today but these things never stick, not really. What are the circumstances required to justify killing another person or 40 | CLEAR FALLS THE RAIN
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persons. I'd then ask you what “justification” really means but we'll leave that for another call.
On these grounds; war, sanctioned by the state, euthanasia, self-defense, deadly force by police and fatal retaliation to save the lives of innocents. If you kill anyone under these circumstances a sort of justification ensues, but that's not to say you are guaranteed to be let off the hook. Our life is what our thoughts make it. I would go as far as saying that the majority of things in it are a subjicated matter.
Crimes go unpunished but our sense of crime is limited, both in the definition world and the moral world. The act of euthanasia is almost enough to blind someone when it comes to whether it is right or wrong, yet there are some who are so convicted in their notions that they are literally immovable.
Even though these pretzels are making me thirsty, I would still like to ask: if you were a God, or any type of being with the power to do so, would you eliminate murder? I don't have to tell you to think about the question before you answer it.
Now the woman on the radio is referencing to a past event, something called “the Narcolepty's town massacre,” but there's a good chance that I heard that wrong.
I go to the radio, turn it off and slam my face into the bed and once again prepare to sleep. Soft breathing, ininvasive thoughts, I fall asleep like a baby and don't wake up until the Sun goes to sleep. Yes, I'm still tired, but I've already paid quarters and I'm giving you a nightcall to tell you how I feel.
Stuck in this locked room I begin to pace around, back and forth, unknown to me that I'll be back here soon but in a different state. Isn't it funny, that when you read this paragraph the first time you didn't quite understand what it really meant? And at that moment of realization and understanding, time feels funny in both your world and mine.
The rain is starting up again and regaining the force it once had and then some as it is now accompanied by thunder and lightning. All the king's horses and all the king's men, they were together now, together again.
I wanted to go back to sleep but at the same time I didn't want to waste anymore of the night so instead I went over to the closet and tried to find something that might preoccupy my mind. What I found way down on the ground was a round rock revived in the corner, not making a sound. I am not particularly interested in geology, or archeology, or anything having to do with the unearthing of the Earth, but when I was younger I stranged, and one day I wanted to play a game. I wanted to see how long I could hold on to the first rock I'd see upon entering an alley.
Through all the years and all the times I've moved, to this day I've kept semi-possession of this rock, sometimes aware and sometimes unaware of its existence, periodically running into it somewhere in my chambers. I pick up the black rock and so 41 | CLEAR FALLS THE RAIN
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soon see another picture of my mind, of hundreds of beds located on the shore.
Where are we going to sleep during the roadtrip? Will I have my own bed? I don't know if sleeping next to Lynne is a good idea, not because it may give her ideas, but because it may give her children ideas. That singular scope of vision we have as children, believing the world has set rules and that there is a right and a wrong way to do any process in the universe.
I place the rock on a shelf, giving it a better home and then I close the closet and turn around to look at mt bed. I don't want to climb onto this fucking thing again. This much sleeping is going to kill me, and well, if it doesn't, whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger. A butcher is coming to town, sideshow freakshow hideshow meatloaf.
Dial tone. I'm not going back to sleep. I don't want to. I would like to stay up the whole night, eating chocolate candy and cheese-bagel sandwiches. Maybe watch a movie if I ever leave this room. Now I'm back in front of the window looking out again, rain drumming on my window. I wonder if anyone else is up at this late hour. Hey, I forgot to ask you before, do you remember when we felt the Sun?
I know I don't ever speak about my childhood this much, and not very often, but you've got me going so I won't disappoint. Unless you don't want to hear anymore about it. If not, just hang up now. Keep it in the back of mind though, that I'll be watching you.
Every smile you fake, every claim you stake, I'll be watching you.
As the years rolled by, everyone that I thought I'd know forever slowly began to move away one by one. First was Simon, then Jessa, and soonafter the rest followed.
It was the best of times, then it became the worst of times. That's the thing about certitude. Certainty is not a certainty. I wish I could say that God or the universe itself has a plan for me. A plan for us all. But the truth is I, nor anyone else, can be certain whether this is fact or not. That seems to be the a fatal flaw of the human and a large branch off the human condition. We've done a good job at preparing for uncertainties but bare it all, no amount of reassurance can be assured. We can never be sure of anything.
Fuck this, I'm going back to sleep. I can't even keep my head up or my eyes open anymore. I depart from the window and sit on the edge of the bed and eventually fall on my back, thinking of my contact and the other world. I hope someone gets this message.
This message in a bottle.
The thing is I've got electric light and I've got second sight. I've got amazing powers of observation. That's how I know that when I try to get through on the telephone to you, there will be nobody home.
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Chapter 78
THE WINDY CITY
1:3:8:78
THIS country, these cities, they're broken. Not because of what evil has to offer but because of the mindless squander. I believe in people, I believe in goodwill, I believe that love conquers all, but these parts of me are becoming less and less each day as I struggle to locate the man covered in darkness.
It's been a year now and while I've come close, I can never seem to find the butt-end of that cigar. And not to mention the crime that goes on, fighting it, it's like sweeping leaves on a windy day. In the back of your mind you begin to wonder if any of it is worth your while.
Winter. Snow. The cold. Tonight I saw a man with half of his face bashed in, all because he gave the wrong person a quick wink at a bad hour. One long year of searching and I've seen just about everything except him.
I've been to places with high crime rates, but that seems to be a waste of time. The only thing that is even remotely relevant to my task are the fantastic crimes that I've visited. Happenings of the immortal nature, like a man who was gunned down by the military after taking hostage an entire floor of a government building for what he called
“simple fun,” and when they went to collect his body, he was gone.
Most of the time I thought if I got there soon enough I might find the man shadowed in darkness, maybe living somewhere alone with his music, I thought maybe if I could just get to him I could convince him that love was the answer, but a lot of the time I instead ran into others like him. Others who too have found the truth.
There are certain things that when consumed they overwrite the image of any man.
Power, precocity, give these to a man and watch him gradually change. This is what happened and was happening all over, copycats so to speak who were influenced by the high amounts of new ultraviolence.
Of whom I've encountered within the year-long search was an individual who went by Rhathe. The villainous type who swore by the sword. Like the man drenched in darkness he sought to take advantage of his newly found optional immortality, but I soon put an end to his escapades when I enlightened him and gave him the knowledge of what he had done.
I'd have to say it was about nine months ago when I first ran into him, finding him by mistake, or maybe by chance, as I investigated a slew of homeless murders where the victims were decapitated in very public places.
What sent the whole thing out of control was the fact that one of Rhathe's victims was not entirely homeless and was actually the nephew of a politician. What office this 43 | THE WINDY CITY
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politician held, I'm not sure, but the victim had recently delve back into his drug-addicted lifestyle and at one moment or another crossed paths with Rhathe.
When the victim's uncle was notified he was shocked to hear that he went back to his old life and probably died because of it. That was all I got from the politician, but what kept the chain going was the reaction from the victim's mother. Imagine, your own son decapitated for the world to see. Veins and arteries attached to nothing but empty space.
Her depression grew and so did her laziness, and one night she goes out for a drive when she should be home in bed and of course she causes a vehicular accident that leaves the other two members of the party dead on arrival.
The worst part wasn't that she survived without a scratch, it was the fact that one of those two was trying to get pregnant and died with the baby inside of her. It wouldn't be until an examiner examined her that this would be revealed.
This information is relayed to her husband and he can barely stand it as he searches for somewhere to sit upon hearing those words. Don't feel bad for him though, it's all an act as he didn't want her and he didn't want a baby. What he wanted was to be with his mistress out in the open and free of judgment, so he thanked God when the victim's mother crashed head on into them.
It only took a couple of weeks for him to get over his deceased wife and unborn child and not too long after he found a “new” girlfriend. This, without a doubt, upsets the family of the wife and a problem begins to grow. The husband's family, the wife's family, they grow bitter towards eachother to the point that a brother of the wife begins to accuse the husband of tampering with the vehicle she would later drive.
Nothing can be proved so the heat dies down until one day the husband is driving his own vehicle throughout a neighborhood to realize his brakes are nearly ineffective while turning. He comes within inches of killing a child who is riding his bike and is furious as he contemplates whether or not his deceased wife's family could ever do such a thing. He goes over to the home and lets loose every inch of anger he has until someone calls the police.
This is when it got a little strange. Whoever called told the dispatcher that the husband was armed and dangerous, even though he wasn't, so when the police turned their sirens on and cranked up the speed they expected to be there within minutes to dissolve the problem. What they didn't bank on was slamming head on into another vehicle. Another vehicle containing three passengers; a boyfriend and a girlfriend who was in labor and too, fast on their way to a close place. Another unborn child dead and I'm left wondering what it may all mean.
The last thing I looked into was the surviving driver of the police-labor accident. He lost his girlfriend and his first son, forgive me if I don't tell you he was distraught. So 44 | THE WINDY CITY
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distraught he began to tell me that he knew bad things were going to happen to him. That because of his past, he was going to have to pay and that God himself would see to his suffering. “He'll,” his mouth dries up as he speaks, “he will show me no mercy, I know it.”
Yes, I told Rhathe the same, I even provided documents of evidence and he couldn't believe what I was showing him. He thought he was just killing boredom when he killed those people, but he had no idea how far down every decapitation went. I mean, if you need to kill someone, just kill a homeless person, right. Wrong.
Suffice to say his killing days were over but I was confused by the submission. How can you go from decapitating people to feeling complete remorse? At first I assumed it was because he indirectly caused the deaths of the two unborn, but I got a better grip on the confusion when I encountered another copycat. Csaloth.