Rise of the Old King

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. Slumbering peacefully, the lightest touch would rouse him, incurring the violence we feared and longed for. In our shinning world of straight edges, mirrored glass, blue screens and open source, it was easy to lose track of the other thing, that which lurked in the places we had avoided for so long, the real animal brutality of our own deepest subconsciousness. Emerging from the depths, and not from the skies where we raised our dream machines towards the stars, the old King returned to us from the realms of myth and shadow.

He came from the caves, from the hollow center of our world, a kingdom we had forgotten in our infancy as a race. Somewhere through the ages, in our race for distant suns, we ceased to look down at our own root. The memory of the inner Kingdom faded as the last pages of the world’s most ancient books turned to dust and blew into the cracked walls of crumbling libraries. When the first star was born in a magnetic bottle and its power was harnessed to make the world a fantasy of unending light, we shed that old skin of memory, of dream, shadow, and terror and began the expansion beyond the terrestrial.

In our quest to drink in the light of all the stars our universe could offer, in our dance with infinite space, and a newfound command of movement and time, we found worlds like our own. One in every thousand had the potential to raise life from its mineral rich soil, and on some we found the evidence of civilizations that had flourished and fallen before we had ever even mastered the use of fire. Thus, we learned that there had been life in the universe, but death had won over it.

Among the ruins of tumbled citadels sunk in grey sand dunes beneath the faint glow of a red star we wept. There would be no meeting with the alien other, no exchange of ideas or culture. Our archeological work began. Countless dead worlds came under our scrutiny as the expansion continued. For our biologists there came a few worlds where life was present as rudimentary single celled organisms. We would have to wait and see if our cosmic brethren might someday grow from one of these worlds.

Eventually, the expansion lost its appeal. Our songs had grown cool and calculated, our dreams had flown back to us empty handed. The age of our enlightenment was coming to a close. Our own star was near death for the second time. We had mastered the art of reviving it, yet it was upon this reoccurrence of imminent stellar collapse that we ceased to resist and plunged into darkness. The door to the inner world had been re-discovered in our arctic desert. Perhaps we had forgotten and remembered it many times during our evolution. Now we remembered it again. As our star shone small and white, its planetary nebulae dancing red and blue in the vacuum, the ancient seal was broken.

There would be no brotherhood among the stars, nor any great conquest there. No friends to keep nor enemies to vanquish, until the seal was broken, and the Old King rose from our hollow core with a fearsome bellow. His legions were loosed, his appetites awakened. In the moment of our most supreme boredom, we were catapulted into reckless, euphoric terror. Our Council was crushed, our infrastructure demolished, our stranglehold on light loosened.  The shadows grew longer, music roiled, wild and discordant, as the Old King showed us what it meant, that old word: vanquished.  He walked amongst us once more, drew us into the inner world and gave us gifts both beautiful and terrible. Upon the surface he ruled as he hadn’t for an eternity.

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. The old King grew weary as it grew strong and we returned him to his sanctuary, singing our farewell. We were naked as we bore him back, our skins stained with the fruits of the vines, the soil from which they grew, the blood and sweat that had been spilled in our orgiastic remembrance. His legions followed and folded peacefully around him like fallen leaves upon a forest floor.  

Party

It is almost the end of the party. I dream every night about what it was like when the party was young. Everything was fresh and new and full of wonder and hope. Now I look at the balloons sinking to the floor under gravity's cruel embrace and the torn streamers dangling melancholic from the rafters and I am haunted by the memory of what was.
The worst part is knowing that I was annoyed by the noise of the music and the party blowers. I was stressed by the chaos of spilled drinks and chip crumbs ground into the carpet under carefree heels.
While the party was happening I barely enjoyed it, I was so worried over the myriad details and eager for a perfection born of fantasy. I wanted organized games, quiet conversation, careful observance of etiquette. It seemed like the party would go on and on and I wished for the madness to end. I didn't know how to enjoy it, how to throw back my head and laugh with the others or dance the night away in blithe merriment.
It took time for me to see the magic contained within the pandemonium, time for me to let go and join in the festivities. And now that I've learned how to do it, the party's almost over. Everyone's gone or leaving, suddenly as serious as I once was. They've grown older and I've grown younger so that once again there is a gap between us, insurmountable as I sit among discarded party hats and other favors on a layer of sparkling confetti, watching them go.
It was a beautiful party.
I wish that it could have lasted forever.

The Ghost Of Fasler Cove

There is something rather extraordinary about my hometown of Fasler Cove. It is a phenomena that flows from the gift given to one ordinary man.
Walter Pedington was not the sort of fellow to rock the boat. How many people, if you gave them the gift to travel forward and backwards through time, would stay in the same small town doing the same small things that could have been done anyway?
Some people will tell you that they would go back to stop Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, or Adolf Hitler. Others would want to go back and see a dinosaur. Most would be bent on increasing their own wealth; perhaps collecting antiquities to sell in a future where they are valuable or bringing a handy gadget from the future into a past where it can be passed off as their own invention for profit, or even playing the stock market or betting on ponies. Some would try to rule the world, others save it, which might amount to the same thing.
But when Walter Pedington received his gift, none of these things apparently interested him or crossed his mind. This perhaps, was the very reason he was trusted with the gift, for that we know of, he never abused it for profit or to change the course of history.
It was common to see Walter at age 54 sitting on the porch swing of his parents' house on Behemoth Lane conversing with Walter at age 7.  He very much enjoyed talking to himself. Indeed, you might run into him at Morey Point watching himself painting a picture of the sea, or catch him at the Fallout Cafe playing a game of chess with himself while a younger Walter shared a cigarette with a pretty girl outside and a fourth sat brooding by the window, remembering that same girl's death. Walking your dog along the path from Pelican Landing to  Frost's Wood you might  be passed by Walter at the age of 10 zipping by on his bike only to then pass Walter at age 64 sitting on the bench before finding Walter at 18 laying on a blanket in the grass with a sweetheart.
There is a possibility that Walter is guilty of that sin for which I acquitted him, for if he had already altered the course of history and ruled the world before I was born, I would have no way of knowing it. I have often compared the face of 19 year old Walter to a photograph of a bust of Alexander the Great. It is possible that after 12 years of conquest he was prepared to live a quiet life again in a world shaped by his own youthful ambitions. But how would I ever know? And further, Walter has always seemed more interested in introspection than in governing others.
His funeral was a mind bending affair. Walters of various ages were in attendance and out numbered other funeral goers. He outlived his friends and lovers and left no survivors. Once he was married to a young poetess but she left with a younger version of himself before filing for a divorce later that year. Likewise he never had children, for he had himself all those years and always kept a ball and mitts, bicycle, and snacks on hand for when he visited and even drove himself to his own sixth grade piano recital. There were days when his yard was filled with a chorus of his own youthful laughter while six or seven young Walters played capture the flag or kickball.
Even after his death we continue to see Walter, in line buying tickets at the new Cineplex, hiking the trails in Frost's Wood, eating a banana split at the ice cream parlor. It is impossible to imagine Fasler Cove without him, though as time passes, we see less of him and he is more often alone. I imagine that in another 20 years, there will be no one left here who remembers who he is, no more grandmothers who can point him out and say that their mother went to school with that boy, or kissed that young man at a barbeque 100 years ago.
He is like a ghost from a time that has slipped into the realm of fantasy, but soon he will be such a ghost that his presence will go unnoticed and seem utterly ordinary.

Struggles With Mother

She has always wanted me to be different, I understand that more clearly now. I didn’t have the words long ago to describe the repeating pattern, the predictable questions and requests sewn together like a simple quilt of three colors that followed me at first, then absorbed silently into my skin, tempering me with its weight and threads. 
I see it now from a slightly objective angle, my eyes just barely reaching above the gray fog and swirling shapes, the unsaid yet clearly defined goals that propelled me to a university and into the angst that would endure for decades, a sort of uneasy darkness that was just under the skin and could ooze out, thick and black if scratched just slightly. 
I didn’t understand it then, could not see the words making up the sentences that rolled through her head like a conveyor belt, getting more and more worn and rusty, but rotating nonetheless. As a baby girl she must have looked at me with all the hope and wonder in the world, projecting onto the blank screen of my white naked body all she saw as right and just, all perhaps that she had done and enjoyed and wished to repeat, all that she had not done but hoped to do through my skin and eyes.
As a young woman, both headstrong and naïve, I pushed against what I thought were inequalities, the mores of American society that everyone I knew seemed to accept and go along with, nearly universally without question.
She tried to keep me as a girl for as long as she could, even when my breasts started to bud and poke out from smooth cotton t-shirts.  She would not let me shave, and then when I did on my own, without consent, she looked at me sadly, finally relenting to the unstoppable flow of womanhood and said, ‘now you can never stop.’ 
Five years later, a head full of simple feminist ideology, unanswered questions and a body and mind full of open, bursting wonder and tinged with a splash of vehement anger, I stopped.  There was a contradiction I could not reconcile…I could not quite understand why when I looked at a man’s leg, covered in hair, why was I not repulsed?  Why did I have the opposite reaction seeing a slightly smaller leg, one of a woman, covered in hair? I decided it must be the culture, it must be a shared, accepted concept of beauty without anything behind it but current fashion and taste.
She did not see the young girl struggling to find her place in the symbolic order. She did not see the exploration, the push and thought against culture and the play with body and definition and experimentation with beauty and expectations, the transgression of a young girl in a society that demonized questions and moving against the wind. 
Then, as now, she could only see me through the eyes of others. She wondered and worried about how she would be defined and judged, how she would be one of the mothers that failed, who had not properly created and raised a young woman ready to join society beyond the safety of four walls. It was she who was the voice of society, she who demonized me, who pushed back against my own conviction with equal force, who judged the hair, who looked at me in disgust.  It was she who could not, who refused to see the thoughts behind the action, the tension and struggle.
I had thought it was them, the great nameless of society, thinking, moving, bulging as one big mass. I never thought it would hit so strong, come right back without ever leaving our house, come with such force from the single person tasked with guiding me through the world.
She has always wanted me to be different.  After nose rings and tattoos, it is now her obsession to hide my trees and mermaids from polite society, to hide me from the bikers and drug addicts they will attract, to hide my transgression and keep it locked in the dark attic of our household. 
This is not the girl she imagined, not the girl she wanted, the girl who would travel Europe- not Mexico. The girl who would go to a university and get a career and a Jewish husband, who would provide grandchildren. 
These wishes, pushed onto me since birth, have gone unanswered. I am not what she wanted. I am asked to hide myself, to shave, to wear long dresses, to go along with the lies she has woven about career and status. I have lost interest, the sting has dulled though every rematch is a burden- the tug and pull of my own thoughts wondering if I should please her, shock her, ignore her, and which one of my actions is coming from which thought? 
What hurts more? Covering myself time and again or seeing the disapproval in her eyes, the ashamed glance down as she looks at my skin? She has never taken me as I am and I have never cut the string, the threads of just a few colors which bind us together.

Dancing Inside

Julie and Isa walked up to the glass and metal door at the far end of the lobby.  Visiting hours were over at the Santa Cruz county jail and the rows of chairs in the waiting area were empty. The large female officer behind a Plexiglas window at the receptionist counter had directed them to the metal doors in the far corner just past the metal detector. Isa reached out and pressed the cold silver button on the right side of the door.
“Yes?’ asked a deep and husky voice that rode the edge between displeasure and curiosity.
“Hi!”  Julie said with exaggerated enthusiasm that seemed to drip with false friendliness, “we’re here to teach the ‘exercising your power’ class. It starts at six." 
There was a momentary pause as they waited for his response and Isa imagined him shuffling through papers and looking at the list of scheduled visitors.
“We’ll send a guard to escort you in. It’ll be a little while.”
“OK! Thanks!” Julie said into the metal speaker embedded in the wall.
Isa turned to Julie, “Why are you so friendly with them? I hate the people working here, I hate cops.”
Julie shrugged, “They’ll do what we want if we’re nice to them.”
Somewhere inside Isa understood that to be true, but she was too angry to let it resonate and inform her behavior. She held the people there responsible for her own unhappiness, thinking each one of them had somehow contributed to Ray’s felony conviction, sentence and continuing drug and legal problems.
They waited in front of the thick reinforced doors for a while, it was one of the few portals to the cells behind the cinderblock walls where the humans in orange jumpsuits were kept locked away from sunlight.
Isa felt a loathing for every one of the people in dark blue uniforms. She thought they personally benefited from the containment and detention of people and could not contain her dislike when confronted by one of them. 
When a large male guard showed up and opened the door for them Julie once again used her most enthusiastic voice, it was high pitched and seemed to clash with the cold metal and whitish-gray walls of the interior.
“Hi!  How are you?”  she asked.
“Fine,” the man responded quickly, “follow me.”
To Isa, it seemed like he had been sent from a casting agency, fitting every cop stereotype she had ever seen on tv: round stomach, pale face, cropped hair, cold manner. Isa responded in kind, she stood there with a straight face as well, not a glimmer of warmth or friendliness towards the man. 
They followed him through the sterile hallway, the architecture screaming, “INSTITUTION.”  The space was all hard edges, angles, Plexiglas, metal, cold walls, thick doors, light paint that felt devoid of human emotion and compassion. It was the opposite of home, the opposite of love and warmth and rehabilitation.
The halls were well-lit with overheard florescent bulbs, the floors were shiny. On each side of the hallway were rooms with Plexiglas windows. They were unused at the moment and the lights were off, looking to Isa like dark portals.
They passed an inmate in an orange jumpsuit. He was holding a mop, a large trashcan on wheels was close beside him. He stared at them as they passed. Isa smiled faintly.
Julie spoke, “This is our first time here, we’ll need to tell the women what the class is about.”
“OK, I’ll bring you to the women’s dorm first.” 
They turned a corner and entered a darker space which was a very large central room. There were no lights on. Along the edges of the room were the various ‘dorms’ divided by sex. It was like looking into many fishbowls, they could look in and see the inmates. 
In the center of the main room was an unmanned desk. On the left was the room where the men were kept.  It was crowded with triple bunk beds. The room was teeming, men sat on bunks on the floor, men were walking and standing close to the window.
Some men took notice of Isa and Julie as they were led past the room to the women’s cell. Just a few more feet down, past the view of the men’s window was the women’s dorms.  They wore the same style of jumpsuit only in a dark maroon color.
The guard led them into the room and yelled out, “Listen up!  These girls want to tell you about a new class.”
The dorm housed one hundred women and all eyes turned to Isa and Julie. It was the first time Isa had smiled since entering the doors from the parking lot. She smiled, somewhat embarrassed to be the focus of such attention. 
“Hi,” she said a little shyly, “I’m Isa and this is Julie and we’re starting a class tonight called ‘exercising your power.’ It will be a combination of dance, exercise, journaling, writing and music.  If you want to check it out, we’ll be starting in about 10 minutes.”
Isa and Julie left and were escorted to the recreation room.  Isa plugged in the boom box she had brought and Julie lay out the journals and old magazines and glue sticks. The guards had confiscated the scissors. 
Then the women arrived. Isa watched them enter through the door, all of them shuffling in their county issued white socks and plastic sandals.
The single file group of women continued and seem to never end. Isa looked at Julie with amazement. When the last one had entered the room was crowded, there were at least forty women in front of her, almost all of them older than her. They looked to Isa and Julie, waiting for instruction.
Julie started, “So this is going to be a really loosely structured class. We brought music for the women that want to dance, we brought journals and art supplies for those of you who want to write. We want for this to be a creative space, so tell us what you’re into and what we can do more of.” 
Isa turned on the music, a cassette of disco/techno music she had gotten in Italy years before. She and Julie led the women in a free dance, exercise session. Many of the women suggested different moves and Isa looked around at one point and saw that everyone was smiling. 
Together, she thought, they could make it seem like home for a moment, maybe an hour.

Home

Hey, this is home. I think this is home, I wonder and heave as I stare at a strange shape that seems to breathe with dark smoke, pulsing, expanding and contracting. Eyes like windows. Doors that open with each inhalation. Home. A twisty multicolored spiral ending in pools of black water. I can see the nostrils, flaring. This beast. A wide mouth with wooden doors and thin glass panes. A painting in the living room that looks at me with wide questioning eyes. I stare back, unblinking, who are those pale women in straw hats? Their skin smells of roses and oxygen-filled water.

Home. At least that’s what I tell myself. If this is not home, then I'm lost. I’m an orphan in a cold world that smells of dark gray and burning charcoal. Was there another? Another place that could have burned with memory and scandal? I can’t remember where home used to be, how it spun or smelled, if there really was one that had a different sort of beast in it with scaly flesh and a cold double tongue to wipe me clean. Home. A place to hang my feathered hat, the resting place for my heart, waiting, beating for a cavernous chest in a messy underwear drawer...

I have plenty of hearts. Some rapid, some barely a flicker on the tin drum. If this is that place, the place of the beast, the place with my waiting heart, well, then this is home. Isn’t it? I look for my hat, that pale gray wool one my grandpa gave me. I grope the hooks on the wall, searching, finding only peeling wallpaper. Forget the hat, I might not have a head.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I had to loose my head to get here. And what about my heart? Is that a muscle with two important valves that pumps blood through a corporeal body, or is it something that looks like a leaf plucked from a clover, used to signify the presence of certain emotions usually linked to reproductive drive and familial relations? I don't want to rule out the possibility of having one, but as far as I can tell, I may have lost my heart as well.

I thought I had dozens, but I grip my chest and find just a cold hole. My fingers are sticky and I see dark footprints leading towards the basement. What part of me sees with no eyes? Don’t loose your head, don’t loose heart, or sometimes, take heart or use your head. These old axioms offer their council, written down on the back of a napkin like driving directions obtained at a Denny’s from an old trucker sitting at the bar over his Grand Slam and black coffee.

All I am sure of is that it got hold of one of us. And all I can say is “it” because I don’t have any other words to use for what “it” is. How can I think with no head? Even if I had a head, would the words be meaningful or hollow without the heart guiding them gently like a Sherpa swathed in wool? Empty I say. You could drop a coin through their vowels and never hear it hit bottom, just wait for it to come out the other end and put out a Chinese man’s eye. (Lucky fellow has a head.)

You can give me a good scrubbing, but I'll still need that head. Strip the flesh right off my bones with one of those metal wire brushes used for scrubbing oil stains off driveways, I’ll go on, but the head...I’ll always long for, always lament the loss of the head. Like the scarecrow, I’ll get torn apart by flying monkeys for the chance to think deep thoughts.

Still, who was worse off, him or the tin man? Ah, if I only had a heart! I’d be tender, I’d be gentle and awful sentimental regarding love and art... But somehow, I adapt to the loss. How often it is like that. We think that we’ll simply die if it comes to this or that, then this or that comes and we go on, altered but still in motion.

For example here I am, wherever here is, (It must not be home, I’ve searched the underwear drawer and under the bed, but still no heart...) My fingers do the seeing, my toes the thinking. They stamp out my thoughts like an ecstatic mime desperate for an audience. The crowd claps and it seems the theater seats are almost full and I am encouraged to go on, flopping like a fish when my legs go numb and the toes are mute.

There’s my grandfather in the front row with his crooked banana of a nose, clapping appreciatively. Naturally he is biased, and at this point he is the only one enjoying the show. The hecklers start booing and howling, “Off the stage!,” which is bad enough, but to my embarrassment my grandfather tries to defend me, “Hey, you should do so good, with no head and no heart!” He is still yelling at the crowd when the proprietor hooks me with the curved cane and I convulse spasmodically, looking more than ever like a speared salmon. He drags me off stage and leaves me in the gloom behind the curtain, tired out from my elephantine efforts.

This place, with the smell of spilled soda pop turning acrid like vinegar and peanut shells and stale popcorn, is this home? It seems plausible enough as I have been here for a very long time listening to the mice scurrying over the rumpled heap that I generally regard as “me.” There may be a hat here somewhere, on the prop table perhaps, and hearts were broken over there, just beyond my reach under the bright lights. Maybe not real hearts, but pretend hearts, which must hurt as much as the authentic versions because actors' tears have stained the wooden planks of the stage leaving it splotchy and discolored. When you have it, you have to work it to keep it, and if you haven’t got it you pretend to work it until you have it. Very simple. But now it seems that I’m being pushed out with the rubbish by a custodian wielding a shop broom, and no doubt this bright revelation will be lost.

I just got to know the world of the damned. It’s colored like a rainbow and the red moves with flames. We drank rank tea with scaly men, men with rubber skin and yellow eyes. Men with white long beards and penises that dangle to their knees. They gave us tiny cucumber sandwiches on embroidered napkins. They were gentlemen until we started to sway. Then the trouble began. The sweating. Didn’t I mention that I get in trouble? Haven’t I been in trouble before? This was no worse.

Getting on in the place that night, with those scaly men, getting up on the shiny grand piano. And I, the singer for eternity. They sang along, crying, their tears pouring into their empty floral tea cups. They gathered what fell, then drank it once more, sharing their cups among themselves. Sipping ceremonially, just tiny sips. Salty. A gift from the body in this place of electric rainbows and flaming rivers. Tears that sprouted a heart which grew full and round and vibrant, booming with a resounding thump like the cry of a war drum. Music crawling its way up a multicolored twisting spiral ending in pools of black water. My men, swaying and sweating, a dozen sweet hearts restored to their abode in my chest, and if they don’t have me, then they are orphans in a cold world.

Wait. The bare breasted women in straw hats have come to roost like a flock of swallows under my eves, protected by my sheltering consciousness. They have all come home to hang their hats in my head. What place of rest do I need? What sanctuary that is not in me? A wide mouth with wooden doors and thin glass windows. Geraniums in terracotta planters. I deal with the cold. I am the beast, so that my people can hang their hats and warm their hearts around my fire. It’s not much, a small barony in an abyss, but hey, it’s home.

The Knife

A strange senseless thing, Annette giving her that knife that night. Annette had barely had it for a month herself, it was a gift from Tom and Tom had gotten it from his younger brother Jules six months earlier. Where did Jules get it? A fascinating question beyond the scope of this particular exploration. It is only relevant to note that Jules had hardly looked at the knife during the time that it was in his possession, and Tom had only practiced opening and closing it before giving it to Annette. Why did Tom give the knife to Annette?
It was a very simple stainless steel blade that folded into a black handle, the sort of thing that could be purchased in a sporting goods store, or a gun shop, or even at an army surplus store. Tom personally had no practical use for a knife, his chief interests being theater, literature, theater, and other boys. Looking at the knife, several times, he had thought it could be used to slit his own wrists or to cut his chauvinistic father's throat while the sweaty old man slept, but he had sharp razors to do the first job and too much sensitivity to do the second.
Annette was tall and lean and had blonde hair that had been shorn irregularly by her own hand in a self destructive rage. She wore cut off blue jeans and polyester shirts found in the thrift stores of San Jacinto and Sun City, which as everyone knew was where senior citizens were sent to die in sardine cans with white quartz lawns. If you needed a gaudy polyester shirt, you were sure to find one there.
Tom gave Annette the knife because he hoped that she really did possess all of the conviction he lacked. If he said idly, bitterly, that they should climb to the rooftop of the theater department and spill bags of animal blood over the kids in the quad while shouting that it was Tom’s AIDS infected blood, Annette seemed to consider it a valid pursuit. Whether she really would have done it or not, Tom was never brave or desperate enough to find out. The two were engaged in perpetual games of intellectual chicken, and Annette rarely backed down.
She was very touched by the gift of the knife. It felt as if, for the first time in her life, she was being given power rather than having it taken away. One night after her parents had administered the usual dose of psychological abuse, Annette crawled behind her dresser and, using the knife, carved something like a poem into the soft pine.
Three nights later, after work at the cinema, Annette gave the knife to Lisa. They were sitting in Annette’s room on the white day bed with porcelain balls on the posts. Lisa explained that she planned to move to New York within the month to go to broadcasting school. Annette’s blue eyes grew wide with wonder and empathy as Lisa confessed her fear of that distant Metropolis in which she planned to meet or make her destiny. Annette retrieved the knife from behind the dresser and pressed it into Lisa's hand.
Lisa had only four fingers on her right hand. The middle finger had been cutoff at the knuckle by a rusty antique farm implement in the lot behind her parents' trailer. Both of her hands, her arms, her face, her entire body was covered with pale freckles. They littered her milky white skin like stars in the night sky viewed from a high place beyond the smog and light pollution of the Inland Empire. Her hair was shockingly orange and curly.
What did she feel as Annette pressed the knife into her hand? Did she feel the force of the desires of all the knife's previous owners, who, like her, dreamed in their own way of an end to this small suffocating world? A strange senseless thing, Annette giving her that knife that night. A small gesture in a chain of gestures, heavy with significance.