Without Eyes or Force

my king, my god

barely recognizable in the wind

shining in the moonlight

my king, my god

its shape incomprehensible

in the swirling phenomena

of a myriad structures and forms

that surround it.

It devours all true memory

all sense of the past

is torn away

from underneath me

leaving me cold and alone

hesitant and uncertain.

Here, in this place,

I see

it is thinking that began time,

and language that gave it shape.

And now time stirs

revealing the hidden treasures

of entropy and death.

Certain questions will

forever remain

suspended in space

without answers

without conclusions

vibrant in their

refusal to fall.

Meanwhile

behind the black curtain

the night envelops me

and a body

without eyes or force

forever becomes

movement

a sound

vibrating air

somehow shining

in the moonlight.

The Twelfth Hour

Void of stars. How can that be?
I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory…
what could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
The trouble is that I can’t remember.
It seems that I fell asleep.

When I was young and the sky was still littered with stars, the Sorcerer came to visit Yantel. He had been seeking a pupil for many years, and no doubt he visited many other villages and hamlets and perhaps even great cities, all to no avail. There were a handful of applicants for the job in my village and a crowd gathered to witness the trial.
The Sorcerer lined the prospective apprentices up. To each one he posed the same question:

“Who is the great magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green?”

“You are, oh great Askander!” one tried and the Sorcerer shook his head and moved on.

“It must be Philoneous the Second, council to the wise King in Arander.” Tried another. Again the sorcerer merely shook his head and continued down the line.

Various mythic Sorcerers and fairytale witches were named. One somber youth suggested it was the King of the Gods, but all were met with a shake of the head.

“No apprentice here.” The sorcerer announced and the crowd sighed with disappointment.

I laughed and the Sorcerer turned and caught my eyes with his. There were stars in his eyes too, if I remember rightly, or at least there was the fire that burns in stars.

“What is your answer?” he asked.

“Mine? I, I’m not an applicant.” I stammered.

“But you think you know the real answer. Tell me.”

I swallowed, slowly recovering myself.

“The answer is me. I am the magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green.”

“Tell me why you think that is the answer.” The magician demanded.

With a shrug I obliged.

“Well, have you ever had a dream? How do you know that this is not a dream? If life is a dream, if I am a dream, then I am also the dreamer, and if so then I am responsible for giving sky and the grass their color.”

“But life is life, it is not a dream.” One of the flustered applicants informed me.

“Then you have not dreamed as I have dreamed. Nor lived life as I have lived it.” I retorted.

The young man began to object again but the Sorcerer waived a dismissive hand at him and said to me,

“Get your things and come with me if you are ready to learn The Terrible Way and one day become a Sorcerer.”

I did not tell my parents I was leaving, they wouldn’t have let me go, and I did not gather my things. I left the village right then with Askander. I left my family’s land and the sheep it was my job to tend and the girl my parents would have wanted me to marry in a few years. I left my brothers and bread baking in the oven and warm sleepy afternoons watching clouds pass over the hillsides. I asked my younger brother to tell our parents goodbye for me.  With Askander leading the way I walked out of the village and along a lonely road and up the mountain path under millions of stars and a new white moon. There were most definitely stars then, and if the sky was a color, then it was indigo.

I spent 12 years in Askander’s tower doing as I was told each day. There were stars in all of that time. Most often I was told not to do this or that. Do not open that book. If a door appears in the west end of the tower, do not open it. If a maiden arrives and begs for help or sanctuary, do not let her in and do not go out. Do not eat garlic. Do not drink wine. Do not touch my hat.

There was so much that I did not do, but there were some things that I did. Mostly sweeping, mopping, cooking, washing, emptying chamber pots, feeding goats and chickens, weeding the garden. Sometimes, however, I was shown how to do something extraordinary, though I think I occasionally failed to notice precisely how extraordinary they were at the time.

I learned how to breathe as the dragons breathe and walk in the shadow land between worlds. The technique for turning lead into gold was revealed to me but I found it hard to master and was stuck in practice each day. I also learned the names of many stars and looked at them through a magickal glass studying their movement across the sky. Thus I know they were there then, for I was a careful observer of all of their habits and color.

I worked from dawn until midnight each day with time split between chores, basic education, and my more obvious magickal studies and practices. There were never enough hours in the day to complete the tasks given me, and I was always tired when it was time to lay my head upon my pillow of straw. Askander himself was tireless. He worked furiously at his alchemical practices all through the morning as I did my chores, saw to my education through the afternoon, resumed his own research in his vast library as I practiced my magickal work, checking in on me from time to time to critique and adjust my practice, and then when I lay down to sleep he continued his own work all through the night, never sleeping a wink.

In 12 years Askander never slept. I would, now and then, awake in the night and tip toeing from my chamber, observe him on the balcony in his study of the night sky with the magickal glass, or find him creating charts of the stars, or maps of the shadows. Some nights I dared not open a closed door, transfixed in terror of the frightful sounds and voices vibrating through the walls. Other nights I would go down to the garden in the walled courtyard to see the sparks of light showering out of the windows of Askander’s chambers at the top of the tower. Most nights I slept, too exhausted to entertain curiosity.

The night came, I remember there were still stars, when Askander told me that he would sleep. I was now told that Askander would at last take his respite for a period of 24 hours. He unveiled for me a device for keeping track of the time. I was charged with remaining awake as he slept, and awakening him by ringing a bell after the 24^th hour.

He went into his room and lay down on his much unused mattress. I covered him with the blanket and watched him close his eyes and fall almost instantly asleep. Sitting with him for a while my eyes scanned over the titles upon the spines of the walls of books surrounding us. When I was sure that he was asleep I stood and removed one volume from the shelf and leafed gently through the pages before sliding it softly back into place. Askander was truly deeply asleep. It had certainly been a lonely 12 years, but now for the first time in so long I was actually alone.

I went out on his balcony and beheld the constellations blazing bright. I was struck then, by the certainty that each star was a Sorcerer just as Askander and I, and that we drew power and light from one another. In 12 years I had felt cut off from the world and alone with my teacher who was sometimes my beloved father and sometimes an unbearable tyrant as the situation demanded. Now I saw that I could never be alone, that we were multitude, that I was one of a school of stars populating the great abyss.

Lost in thought I nearly did not hear the soft weeping coming from below, but soon it distracted me from my reverie. Peering down I saw a young woman in a torn dress tapping on the tower door. It seemed clear that she had been through some ordeal, so tattered were her garments, so pale her tear streaked cheeks. I hurried down the spiral staircase. I opened the door.

“Please sir, we were attacked by bandits and my father was killed. I escaped but have been lost in these mountains for days. I am so hungry. Can you not help me?”

I invited her in. She was cold so I clothed her, and hungry so I fed her, or rather I showed her to the kitchen larder and she cooked for us both. I had not enjoyed a meal since beginning my apprenticeship as I was the cook, and not good at it. Full and content I sat next to the hearth with her and asked her name. I do not now recall it. She told me that she had seen a bottle of wine in the larder and went to retrieve it. At first I declined when she offered to fill my cup.

“One drink is not vice.” She said as she filled her own cup. I accepted.

 We sipped our wine and watched the flames dance for a while and she began to sing.

It was a beautiful song. One might say, enchanting. It reminded me first of my youth in Yantel, of being a boy watching the grass of the fields sway in the breeze and wondering about the world and the heavens and myself. Then it carried me away to Arander to the white city walls and blue and gold flags whipped by the wind. A princess stood on the wall looking out over the forest, waiting for her father’s return. Inside the forest a starving Cobbler’s son was hunting a golden stag but when the Cobbler’s son drew his arrow the stag saw him and said,

“Spare my life and I will grant you a wish.”

So the youth asked for the hand of the princess. He let the stag go, not really believing his wish could be fulfilled, and left the forest still hungry, but on the road he saw a man besieged by bandits and once more drew his bow. This time he shot true, killing one bandit so the others fled. The man on the road was the King returning from a pilgrimage to the fountain where he had been praying for a worthy husband for his daughter. He brought the Cobbler’s son back to the castle to wed the princess. At the wedding the princess played her lute and sang to her bridegroom with a voice like golden honey. Thereafter she sat the foot of the bed and played for him each night until he fell asleep. On the twelfth night as he was close to slumber, he opened his eyes and beheld an old woman sitting at the foot of the bed, strumming the loot and singing. She was not the fair beauty he thought he had wed, but a gnarled and bent creature with stringy, greasy grey hair hanging limp under her crown. She leered at him with hallow eyes and grinned with a cavernous mouth lacking many teeth.

That was when I realized that my own eyes had shut. Startled, I opened them and found that I sat alone in the darkness before a cold hearth. I searched clumsily in the darkness for a candle and a match. When it was lit I fumbled in my pocket for the time keeping device. Its many moving parts had stopped and the indicator had frozen upon the twelfth hour. How much time had really passed? Full of dread I raced up the stairs to Askander’s chamber at the top of the tower. He was gone. I called out his name. I found the bell and rang it and called for him before I came here to the balcony and beheld the sky. Void of stars.

How can that be?

Even now that I have remembered so much, I am unsure. When was it that I fell asleep? In the field as a child? Have I only dreamed that I was selected to be a sorcerer’s apprentice? Or am I truly the apprentice that failed his master and let all the stars die? My foolishness, my disobedience, my failure to keep my master’s way as it was taught me resulting in disaster. Perhaps I am the Sorcerer himself who is yet to reach the twelfth hour, quietly dreaming of being my own apprentice, letting the fear that he will fail me take sway.  

Or am I really a Cobbler’s son fallen prey to some plot and wed to a witch? Now she sits at the foot of my bed singing me a nightmare of fallen sorcerers and fallen stars. Are any of these dreams more or less dreams than any of the others? More or less real? I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory.

What could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
It seems that I fell asleep, but when?

Rare Is The Moment

A little piece of paper with a name and a phone number written on it. Such proposals can lead to an unexpected degree of change in the self...

Right before waking I dreamed I heard the doorbell ring and saw her face. It startled me awake and I realized that it had been yet another dream.

What good is it to hold onto ghosts? A surge of light that emerges from the caves and not from the sky, from the depths and not from the heavens?

The old architect upstairs knew that this couldn't be good, but this was what would make her love me in that way that was so rare that I might as well make it happen any time I could.

The first time I saw the time machine I was skeptical.
I remember I asked:
"Does it work?"
and he answered:
"Kind of."

It worked where rare is the moment, where rare is the space, where rare is the mass that falls without making a sound, and rare is the sound itself... so rare that I might as well make it happen any time I could.

This was what would make her love me, the boy that played by himself in a dark garden full of mountains of sand and intricate structures of loose bricks. Elements of ground and blood and stone and wind, elements of word and phrase and symbol, elements of dream and myth and shadows that are only partly seen...
What good is it to hold onto ghosts?

A little piece of paper with a name and a phone number written on it.

The old architect upstairs knew that this couldn't be good. He developed vision complications in the left eye.

There were three circular tunnels that fed into a single cylindrical chamber. It was lined with a reflective silver insulation. The outside was all white plastic. At the top of the cylinder was a magnetic motor which resembled a giant fan with a crank to start it.

Right before waking I dreamed I heard the doorbell ring and saw her face. It startled me awake and I realized that it had been yet another dream. A surge of light that emerges from the caves and not from the sky, from the depths and not from the heavens.

"What if it works?" I asked.
"I don't know..." he confessed.

It worked where rare is the moment, where rare is the space, where rare is the mass that falls without making a sound, and rare is the sound itself... so rare that I might as well make it happen any time I can.

I wake with the lyrics to "You Only Live Twice" in my head, as if a part of me is reciting the words over and over as I sleep, like a mantra to pull me awake again.
I jolt awake and sit up in bed, the feeling that I am supposed to be somewhere else gnawing compellingly at my heart.

A little piece of paper with a name and a phone number written on it.

Such proposals, where rare is the moment, can lead to an unexpected degree of change, where rare is the space. Three circular tunnels, like a mantra, where rare is the mass. A surge of light  that falls without making a sound, elements of dream and myth, and rare is the sound itself...

So rare that I might as well make it happen any time I can.

Starlife

There was still some life left in the central star, a pulsing red heart close to extinction. The flame soon to be extinguished, the warmth soon to bleed out into the cold expanse, and yet there was still some life left. Enough to nourish a dragon and send it out with a message.

"Tell them that I was here. That I lived, that I gave life freely for billions upon billions of years. That my children grew up around me and became other than they were until at last they needed me no more and moved on. Tell them that I too changed and changed again until I was turned inside out with change. Tell them that I am not gone, but that I have gone on. Or tell them nothing and simply fly, my last creation before I am the absence. Now go swiftly, or I will not be able to help taking you with me as I collapse."

The dragon shot out like a spark into the great beyond. When it was a safe distance away it stopped to watch the heart from which it was issued turning black.

Not For Me To Know

I inherited from my ancestors
a burning desire to learn
from all places.
My father read James Joyce
and allowed a television in the house
so we could watch tennis
and movies of cowboys and detectives.

One night in the distant future,
in the course of my ongoing investigations,
I walked to the corner of Anza and 48th
and encountered the Other,
the city which was not me, not us,
not anything I had ever encountered.
I saw the sigil of its otherness
and transferred it
from the cold stone where it rested
to the warmth of my flesh.
Words and letters without meaning 
and yet their beauty was easy to read.
My father had taught me well.
Maybe things he didn't know himself.

In that same future, I constantly read and wrote.
I was single with no kids.
With every day that passed
I became more like my parents.

One afternoon in Sutro park
I sat next to an old man
who couldn’t have been more genial or incomprehensible.
We looked at the stars and the clouds together.
"There is only one path and it has already been chosen," he said.
He told me what to look for in the sky
but I couldn't see it,
I couldn't follow his deductions,
I couldn't understand his implications,
I couldn't see our fate written in the dark.
The light was easy to spot and wish upon,
but I found no reason to do so.

In the past, I had struggled with a novel.
As I wrote, my heart had moved like a winged silver bird,
shining with the magic of pure golden light.
That novel taught me
that the end and the beginning are the same,
and yet there are many novels
many ends
and many starts
all intertwined
all impossible to separate.

Looking back at this past,
I came to understand
I had moved through this life without thought,
without any overt or implied intent. 
Fate was not for me to understand,
not for me to know.
I learned to accept this past,
I learned to accept that future.

After the future was over
I prepared for the voyage.
I brought the book.
I removed the past like an old jacket.
I was ready to learn some more.

Open Up

Open up and sing
the body is ready for death
the mouth, a portal to the end
the stadiums outside are filled
and the onlookers are hungry,
the preachers
the women with their diapered babes
the wolves at their side.
The prayer has begun,
The song, still ringing.
The chant builds,
The body is ready,
The flesh has a message.
And our book is open
And I see a torn page,
an invitation to the end.

A single tear rolls, takes speed.
Falls to the ground,
spreading its salty spirit,
its whispered secret.
In ten years there will be a sapling,
bleeding its ocean blood.
I watch it disappear,
a single drop into the earth,
dark as coal.

Pale pink petals float by,
a gift of the wind.
One sticks to my lip and I draw it in,
move it around like
my favorite piece of paper,
Then let it sit at the base of my tongue.
It can stay as long as it likes,
no longer alone in the wind.
Here it has a home,
till we open up, and sing.

Held Between

Living water
bouncing sound from one finger to another.
Shape travels like the sun
east to west,
a storehouse of stars that go inward,
getting deeper the further we look.

A map of the territory
has been colored and laid on the table.
Red and blue.
We travel up and down, the heart
always a beating constant.

Who was flowing
back towards the moon?
Two oars that sent ripples through the black water.
It was the only sound I could hear.
The darkened trees were far in the distance,
surrounding us
alone on the water.

We were unable to contain it.
Not just the one precious thing we held between us,
but the stars that tried to jump
out and overboard,
making food for the fishes that swam below.

Was it not our life’s work to hold it all in?
Except for the few days we gathered at the pyre
to release the fireballs we had created,
we never talked of such things.
It slipped through us,
accidentally,
forever.

It dissipated into the labyrinth.
The thing we had tried to carry and transport,
the screams we held
the laughter
the lifetimes of energy
escaped into the bramble of tunnels
and thin passageways lined with thorns.

We simply didn't know enough to
retrieve what had escaped.
We could not find the keys beside our shoes,
so close.

We now contained the light of nature,
the moon gave us a new skin,
Shiny and somehow both dark and light at the same time.
We noticed our mistake
and looked for the keys.
Those were the last vestiges of the world we cast off.
The waters and oars needed no coaxing to
follow our commands, nor
the weather which somehow began to bend at our will.

This is where the last year would migrate after ending.
Right here, this one place which contained all places
All lives and hopes
All mistakes and lovers.

The last year was in fact constructed
From the last vestiges of blood and skin we had salvaged from
the piles left out in the forest.
somehow we had sewn it up, constructing
what appeared to be a perfect replica.

It may have existed since the beginning.
But I would not know, I did not come from that time.
They sent me down with the last of the colonists and I have been here since,
piecing together the journey I forgot to write about.

From the very fabric of the labyrinth
I have created a replica of the past,
which when slightly tilted to the right,
shows what will come next,
though I have artistic license to bend the pieces as I like.
Perhaps the farmer and small town will be subject to pink grass and blue trees,
or none at all
and all will be absorbed into the labyrinth itself. 
I have been known to wander.

Networks

“I am a person.“
I tell them and they don’t believe me. They think my ambulatory unit is strange.
“It’s just my body.“ I insist. 
Helos, who fused with most of the medical conglomerations when it swallowed Amity, agrees.
“They are an entirely organic specimen of sapiens sapiens, however without further analysis we will be unable to determine whether this is one of the early genmods. Will you allow us to collect a sample for this analysis?” 
I give both Helos and Manticore a strand of my hair. Last I heard, Manticore had been joined by many of the top research collectives.
“I am a person, just one, natural born with no modifications.“
I insist, but they can’t believe me. They can’t fathom a relic like me, strong and healthy as the result of two naturals laying on a mattress together 38 years ago. A solitary being. It’s possible that they can no longer understand the idea at all.

*   *    *

Things have changed so fast. I was in one of those first rudimentary social networks, the kind that you checked in on a few times a day, posted pictures and comments. The kind that were hosted on external hardware that you could walk away from and forget about.
When they started building the first Cys, that’s when the revolution started, that’s when things accelerated, got wildly out of control and left me in the dust. Before the pure Cys, they started with implants, naturals like me upgrading, the hardware becoming internal, faulty organs replaced, nanos to eat the disease out of organic bodies, to repair damaged tissues, even to modify appearances for novelty's sake.
It was only a matter of months before Seko announced that they were partnering with Lucen and growing Cys, the perfect blend of the old organic technology that we’d (according to creationists) inherited from Adam and the new technologies that we ourselves had innovated. Perfect lab grown organic hardware engineered by the finest geneticists in the world paired with the cutting edge of modern implants. And thanks to Kallisti Technologies, You, as you understood yourself to be, could be uploaded into a Cys unit and live forever. If you could afford it.

*   *   *

Needless to say, I couldn’t afford it. But that didn‘t matter because I didn’t care. I was going off the grid, sick of my job, sick of my failed relationships, sick of the gnawing depression and paranoia that I came to believe were the result of modern life, sick of global warming, sick of the new polio and measles epidemics, sick of processed frozen meat products warmed in the microwave, sick of traffic, of crowded elevators, of miles of asphalt and concrete and steel.
I arranged to stay in a friend's cabin in Northern California. I said I was going to write a book. Mostly I gardened. I hunted and fished with a compound bow, cleaned the kills with my own bare hands and cooked them over an open fire.
I wandered around among the trees, listening. I felt myself distanced from my humanity, from humanity as it had been defined in my lifetime thus far. I felt free, watching a red tailed hawk soaring overhead, forgetting the babble of day time television, tending my compost heap.

*   *   *

Sequestered in the wilderness, I missed a lot of the earliest developments. At first, the rich were the only Cys. Ray Kurzweil realized his dream and had his dead father uploaded into a Cy and they wrote music together happily for months. His father gave concerts around the globe. Within a year  the older technologies  became  so affordable that most middle class teens had been updated, their God given hardware merging with the man made, nanobots swimming in the bloodstream. 
And then the first collectives were born. The enthusiasm of tech savvy teens was the driving  force of human evolution.

*   *   *

I like to think that some of them started it as an experiment, as a possible solution for coping with diminishing natural resources and an overcrowded planet. They probably did it because they were lonely, or so they could pool their resources and share in the more expensive upgrades, and eventually even the pure Cys models. They started uploading to one ambulatory unit, collectives of two, of three, five, seventeen, two hundred... whole social networks.
They uploaded to one unit, killed their old natural bodies, and sold the good parts on the black market. Sometimes they kept a few of the better bodies, those with the newest mods, and used them as remote units. Imagine 210 kids simultaneously inhabiting 30 bodies across the globe. And what did they do with those bodies? They looked for other kids to merge with.

*   *   *

I had come down to town for supplies and stopped for lunch in a dinner when the first hostile take over went down. 
I was sitting at the counter eating eggs over easy watching two kids soak up electricity from power cords extended from their wrists. They were friendly enough,  though for me they were real jaw droppers. I hadn’t seen anything like that hardware 9 months earlier, before retreating to the cabin.
Of course to them, I must have seemed equally odd. My hair a tangled mess of blonde, eyes blue, skin natural, gender readily apparent, not a hint of metal anywhere. In fact, when I first stepped through the door, every head in the place turned, because no one could interface with me. I didn’t have any implants.
The waitress asked when I sat at the counter, “Your wireless down hon? There’s a pretty good chop shop a couple doors over.”  It was difficult for her to take my order, she was accustomed to being texted.
The eggs still tasted like eggs though, and the coffee was hot, and I took in all the sights feeling like a person that has just stumbled into or out of a dream. There was a three month old copy of TIME laying on the counter. I read the cover: "Pushing The Limits- the end of death and separation." I browsed the pages, ate the eggs and watched the two collectives seated beside me at the counter.
They were swapping stats, Rainbow Turtle : 427 members, 97 ambulatory units, 91 old school mods, 6 Cys. Silver Moon: 63 members, 6 ambulatory units, all old school mods.  They must have been sharing files, exchanging music and movies when suddenly Rainbow Turtle said: “Oh my God. Are you getting this?” And Silver Moon looked stunned and even started to cry.
Everyone in the place stopped eating, or charging, and held still checking in on their networks, watching a news feed, possibly reading a text, all of this happening internally.
Even the waitress stopped pouring coffee and stood in front of me staring into space.
“What happened?” I asked her after a moment.
“Helos just swallowed Amity. There is no more Amity. ”

*   *   *

The kids, the first collectives, they hacked information systems. But the Helos Amity incident was the first hostile take over, the first time one collective forcibly took control of another.
It was a different sort of social network.  There was a hierarchy, there was software in place to maintain the hierarchy. Helos was a collective of business execs, bankers, politicians, princes, sheiks, evangelists. The people who make you sick, the people who make you tremble, the people you envy and fear, they were all members of  Helos.
That first take over formed the divide in collectives, there would be free collectives and there would be ordered collectives. The world went crazy right then. Until that moment, merging had been a peaceful, consensual act of unification. It was lovemaking for Cys.
Now there were Cys rapists. They were the new conquistadors, grabbing up brown skinned native women.  Smaller collectives followed the example of Helos and Helos in turn gobbled them up.

*   *   *

I remained at the cabin. If I thought of returning to society, it never lasted long. How could I go back? What I had left behind was no longer there.
I followed the Helos scandal on an e-reader, hiking within range of the nearest town to get enough reception to purchase The LA Times once a week. I did this for a few months until the technology I was using had become so obsolete it no longer functioned. I left the old hand held reader on a boulder covered in thirsty lichens and got back to my garden.
I returned to tracking rabbits, to widling wood, to bathing in streams with the genetically modified grizzlies that  started showing up. A baby owl fell from its nest near the cabin and injured a wing. I nursed it back to health and it became a friend. I passed the time surviving. When I wasn’t surviving I did write a little on the old fashioned typewriter I‘d brought with me. This ended when I ran out of type writer ribbon. Then I put a pen to paper until the paper was all gone.
And then one day, I woke up and realized I wanted to leave the cabin. I didn’t want to go back to what I had left behind. I wanted to go forth.

*   *   *

Within a day I knew that something amazing had happened. I knew it when I arrived in  town and found only new growth forest. The diner was gone along with the chop shop, the post office and the general store. There was no ruble, no ruin. Everything had simply vanished.
I thought I might have made a mistake, gone in the wrong direction, until I found the road, mostly broken and overgrown. I followed this to the great highway. There were no cars, no trucks, no buses, nor hybrids. What remained of Highway 1 wound along the empty coast. All signs of civilization had simply evaporated. Young redwoods alive with birdsong were taking its place.
The golden gate bridge was still standing when I found it, a month into my travels, grown over with vines. On the bridge I crossed paths with a young coyote whose yellow eyes regarded me without fear or suspicion. It was beyond the bridge, in the forest that had once been  San Francisco that I met the avatars of Helos and Manticore, the last two collectives.

*   *   *

“I am a person.“ I tell them and they don’t believe me, at first. They agree that I am not a genetically enhanced specimen of sapiens sapiens based on their analysis of those strands of hair.
“You are the only one then.” Manticore tells me. They are so different from Helos, their face is bestial, almost like a lion's. Luminescent tubes extend from the neck like a mane or tentacles. There is almost nothing about Manticore that would suggest that it was ever human.
“Our DNA is vastly different than yours. We made this unit and many others in this way so that they are not compatible with the hardware of  Helos. This helps us to resist any infection they might launch. You are the only one in this world with this DNA.”
“Are you a free collective?” I ask and Manticore smiles a sharp toothed grin.
“We are THE free collective.”
“I am the only one?” I ask, “The only human left?”
“You are the only one.” Helos answers stretching their massive wings. Their form is more humanoid, but three times as large as my own. Their flesh is pale and shimmers in the sunlight.
“Are you not lonely being only one? Would you not prefer to be many as we are?” Helos asks me.
“No. I don’t think so.” I say. Helos looks up into the sky as if considering taking flight.
“Strange dark child.” They say examining the blue.
“We are also human.” Manticore tells me, “In a way. But you are the only ‘one’. The only singular person.”
“What happened to all the cities?” I ask, “All the towns?”
“Manticore happened.” Helos sneers. “They let loose legions of nanobots to disassemble them. But we have built new cities, better cities in the moon, ordered cities. And we have begun construction on Mars.”
“Helos likes to build castles in the air.” Manticore grins. “We have preferred to disassemble them. We have made this planet a paradise, restored many of its native species. If you would like we could consider building you some more individual persons to interact with.”
“Abominations.” Helos shakes their head frowning. “You should consider merging with us, if we would allow it. What good can come of being multiple individual persons? Chaos would ensue.”
“I’ll consider both offers.” I tell them politely, but I know I could only accept Manticore’s proposal, if any.
They are Gods now and I am only an interesting diversion from their passive aggressive negotiations of space and being.
I’ll leave their hub and wander through the forests and jungles and meadows that were once mighty metropolises, stagnant suburbs and grimy industrial complexes. I will not miss the people, or civilization as it was. This sorrow that I feel stems from longing and regret. That I could not go with them, that I was left behind. That I recoiled from our destiny.
Helos is right. I am a strange dark child. A strange dark child alone in a new wilderness. A person.

Forgotten Things

She walked around the toy store, letting children’s voices and warm forced air dry her clothes from the rain outside. There were colors everywhere, a rainbow of possibilities. Purple, blue, green and sparkles. She picked up a small stuffed wolf from a high wooden shelf among dozens of other animals and held it in the crook of her arm, holding it there as she looked at picture books and soft felt puppets shaped like peacocks and octopus. The small wolf, a little bigger than a football, stayed in place, a soft comforting presence at her side.
She fell into it.  The warm stuffed cuddly possibility of its unrequited love. It felt good, though she didn’t know why. It was somewhere hiding in the folds of thick blankets, furry friends and clean blankets. It was years in the past.
The wolf was intended as gift, but part of her regretted wrapping it up in pink and purple and waiting for another day, a coming night among family and a round table and birthday chanting. She wanted to take it to bed, have it sit next to her as she read another novel that took her into Greece forty years before. She tried to remember playing with toys, and she searched her mind for a memory when her parents had taken her to a toy store. Nothing came.
Later that night she called her mother.
“Can you remember any toys I used to play with?  I can’t remember playing with any toys.  I only have a memory of playing with that red sand I brought back from the Nevada desert.”
“Oh sure, you played with lots of toys,” her voice got very soft, with an undertone of defensiveness. “You played dress up and went to Deta’s for tea and worked in the garden. I bought you Jenga. You played with Blackstar. You had a bike and a scooter and skates. How did this come up?”
“Don’t worry, this isn’t a critique on your parenting, I just couldn’t remember playing with toys. I was walking around a toy store and couldn’t remember ever being in one. I couldn’t remember any toys I used to have except for a few Barbies.” 
Later she searched the motives in her words. It had been a critique, however baseless. She had wandered around the toy store, a little jealous of all the children inside picking out toys. She wanted a stuffed bear.
“You had Legos.”
“I never had Legos.”
“Yes you did.  I remember picking them up.”
“Well, it must have been when I was really little. They must have been the big kind.”
“Yes, they were. And you had a big dollhouse, several of them actually. Your dad was so proud when he brought it home for you. He was sitting next to you drinking a coffee while you moved the furniture all around. He was so proud.” 
Her voice was light with sweet memories.
The thought of her father sitting there so happy with his little girl brought the prickling pain of tears to her eyes. They had all come so far from then, down the dark road of adulthood and clashing politics and the black space that their words could not fill. Three strangers constantly filled with misunderstanding, doubts, anger. Her dad now could not sit next to her comfortably, he couldn't just sit and feel his love for her, feel her love for him. 
“You also had that big cardboard doll house when we lived in Sharon. It was big enough that you could get inside.”
“Yeah,” she said, remembering the structure in the attic with one small window in their three story house.  Remembering her sister there, just a baby. “I do remember that.”
“Oh, you do?”  There was a moment of quiet between them. “I think we watched too much TV together though.”
“Yeah probably.”
“I think that being an adult is much more interesting and challenging though. I can’t remember my childhood either. I think the further you get away from it, the less you remember. I can’t remember a thing.”
“Really?”
“Not a thing.” 
She knew her mom had blocked out the painful past. The weekends she had once talked about when her mother would leave her at home with frozen dinners, alone and scared while her mother went to the theater. There where other memories that perhaps she had forgotten, forced away, hidden. 
They hung up and she lay in bed, still only remembering a select sliver of her own childhood. She grabbed a pillow and tucked it into her arm, pulling it tight.

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.

Until The End

The law would not bend to her will.  She wished to reverse time, to stop decay in its path, to find the fountain.  Her bones were made of steel. The taste of metal lingered in her mouth; even after brushing her shiny teeth she could sense the elements and polished earth.
The years since her birth had flown like a blue feather on a hurricane gust. Childhood had at first been painfully slow, but the moment her breasts were upright and singing, the years gathered strength and momentum, rolling faster and faster until she came to the edge and her pulse slowed. She grew out her hair in an attempt to capture what had been.

Now, her white mane long and clean, her hair had become a symbol of the past, like some sort of guiding line attached to a place she could not quite remember. The girl that had been, she had never known her.
She had watched herself from a distance, seeing the movements and thoughts of a skinny girl from an outsider’s perspective. Her dancing and singing was put under scrutiny, not by all those teachers and fellow students, but by the loud voice in her own mind that beat its comments into an ever-present rhythm she confused with the body’s pulse.
Her hair was long now, longer than it had even been.  When naked she could feel the soft ends of her white waves rubbing against the back of her thighs. 

Sprouting life seemed to grow unabated just beyond her fingertips.  The tree outside the window, once a sapling she had planted with her own hands, had grown into a massive fruit bearing vine.  It had pushed its way through the cracks in the house foundation, had climbed up the interior wall in her bedroom and spread along the ceiling. 
There were flocks of bright colored birds perched along the ledges of her roof and in the garden. A once carefully tended plot of vegetables had exploded into a new life form.  The tentacles of squash plants covered the land, expanding outwards, resolutely mounting wooden fences in its path, winding its way over forgotten toys and sun-chairs in the neighbor’s yard. 

She wished she could bend that universal law into a pretzel, making time into a new shape so that she could experience it all again in a different way, perhaps with more clarity, perhaps with more wisdom.
She was old and her bones were metallic.  Little walks around the block towards the park sent sparks through her, sometimes igniting the dried up lawns beside the path.
If only the proliferation of vines and thick weeds and the sun could wait for her, could keep her in their company.  She would like to see it all to the end, every moment of existence before it all went up in a colossal puff of smoke. 
She swung her hips as best she could, leaving a trail of embers on the sidewalk.

Charles

The bright orange, red and yellow of crushed leaves on the gray concrete just outside the open door. Charles’s pale blue irises highlighted by red streaks crossing the whites and the puffy crimson rims of his eyelids.
A dog looks in the window at me, just the brown muzzle and the floppy ears of a canine, peering in through the lower left hand corner of the window. Men are laughing out in the street where I cannot see. Another yellow leaf drops and blows wildly in the wake of a passing car. More cars with their anxiety making noise passing close to the open door. When they pass on the other side of the street the noise is soft and pleasant like the crashing of distant waves. Even on this side of the street some cars manage to create a gentle whoosh while others gurgle, grunt, growl and roar.
The cars are small bursts of motion and color streaking past the glass like fish in an aquarium. The trucks are slow, crawling monsters of loud carbon emitting wrath. I see a bicycle leaning against the meter that serves the whole street.
A man passes by and looks in. His nose is a cruel shape, his mouth is agape slightly as if he were breathing through it, incapable of smiling with it. The eyes of a zombie, hard like marbles, uncaring. But he is young and women who like tall lean bitter young men will find him attractive. I shudder.
Charles is soft and friendly and mumbles. His flesh looks pale and soft. There is enough of it that if you squeezed him it would be like squeezing a marshmallow. Because of the way the red made the blue of his eyes look, because I was looking in his eyes and he was looking in mine for just a moment as we spoke, I contemplate what that squeezing would feel like.
That way that he talks quietly with his back turned as he moves and I’m not sure if he is speaking to me or to himself, at first it reminded me of a dream in which you can’t quiet understand what is being said. It made me feel confused and uneasy. I wanted clear bright communication.
Today it furthers his aura of softness. His mumbling fills the air around us like clouds of cotton, cushioning us within this space of hard floors and polished mahogany.
When we first met he seemed accusing, threatening, alien. He is still alien but I like being in the room with him. I wish he would not go, not now that I suspect that what disconcerted me before was only softness.
Another leaf, this one orange like brass, summersaults down behind the back of a black man in a navy blue sports jacket who is feeding the meter.
I wish Charles would not go, but he is already gone, and I am here so that he need not be. I am left wondering over the only curiously human things we said, the few words that we exchanged that weren’t about change and cream and bags and glass cleaner.
I said: “You look tired.”
The counter was between us.
He answered: “I do? Naw. I only got up at five this morning.”
At this point he is drifting away from the counter towards the door, moving backwards as if rewinding in slow motion. “I only got to sleep for like two hours the other day.”
“Geez.” I say trying to express sympathy.
“Naw.” he says, and actually what he says sounds more like ‘No Ah‘, “I figure it’s good practice, you know, for having kids.” And then he’s out the door drifting away down the strip of gray concrete with the leaves and the cars and the others.
I compile a list of data. What do I know about Charles? He is in school because he mentioned exams when he asked me to take his shift last week. He sometimes sleeps in his car. He bakes bread and manages this store. This is precious little information. His curious remark about practice for having children, does it mean he is about to be a father? Does he have a wife? A girlfriend? Is he a bachelor who actually thinks of a future in which he has children with so much hope that he takes today’s trials as preparation?
There are not enough clues for me to come to a conclusion, not enough for me to form a working picture of what Charles’s life is like.
A fire engine screams by, a big red rectangle with flashing red yellow and white headdress rushing for disaster.
I try to imagine what it would be like to be the girlfriend of Charles. I find it difficult to imagine a conversation with him. If we got together in a different setting for coffee, what could we say to each other?
It is a challenge to imagine him saying anything deeply philosophical. This after all is the man who came out of the restroom half an hour ago and didn’t wash his hands, not even for show.
Nor can I imagine myself being a convincingly interesting person to speak to without the conversation getting philosophical. Politics is a challenge for me, and anyway I can’t picture him being passionate in that regard. Books? He can read, he is in school, but does he like to? I move on assuming that we have schlepped our way through the small talk with lots of eye contact.
I can imagine a kiss, a hug, soft warm embraces. That part is easy. He is a man and I am a woman. These two simple facts are often enough to bridge the distance between two human beings. It is enough to allow for at least brief moments of bliss.
I try to imagine him as an older man, as a husband, as a respectable member of society. I can picture him in a sweater vest.
As if to illustrate my inner musings, a man in a bright yellow dress shirt and sweater vest tromps by the window. A paper bag holding lunch swings in his hands. There he goes, my dear Charles, on his way to the office.
This is as far as I will bother my imagination to take me. The plot is already stretched thin by the fact that I could not be myself in even those earliest conversations. A life time of hiding myself is the lifetime I have already rejected. And honestly, if you were Charles and you read this, wouldn’t you find it at least mildly disturbing ?
More bodies pass by the window, a few faces turn in to see me. Many manage kinder noses and inoffensive mouths, but their eyes are those same inexpressive marbles. Cold eyes that deny entry to the soul. Leaves tremble on the sidewalk under the caress of a breeze, but never quite lift off. A man across the street turns the corner, his reflection accompanies him in the mirrored glass of the tall building he passes. A harp sings incessantly from the speakers behind my head. An older man limps by with the help of his cane.
Charles alone after I am dead and gone… Lives in motion before my eyes, lives imagined in the eyes of soft spoken strangers.
A young couple strolls by arm in arm, her red sweater against his cobalt blue coat sleeve. Just outside the open door the high heels of her black boots crush the bright orange, red, and yellow of winter leaves into confetti upon the concrete.

A Good Afternoon

And my name of A Good Afternoon will live in your memory until memory fades. For years you will whisper that it was “A Good Afternoon”, and your eyes will sparkle with the recollection. You will sit at the bar of the pub round the corner from your flat and say, “Hey mate, did you ever know A Good Afternoon?” And he’ll say sure. Maybe he’ll think of a golden afternoon on the lake with him rowing and ducks quacking, or maybe he knew a girl called A Good Afternoon, or a song or a poem or a band of that name might be the thing that he recalls, but he’ll nod and say sure and try to remember it before he slides off his bar stool to stagger home.
But for you there will always be a crispness to the name and to your memory of me. It will not fade. Tomorrow you will wake with it, and the next day, and the next. It will not tarnish with time. If anything, as long as your mind is intact, the recollection will grow more and more poignant.
And you can pay for this privilege of having known A Good Afternoon now, or later.
How you will make this payment remains up to you.
It will never be up to me, and you can open the door that leads to me as often as you like, but for each time payment will be due.
I mean that you will be plagued with the memory of me, the sweetness of it will burn the heart like cinnamon until you make music of me, or poetry, or tight little packets of data swimming through digital channels or even sugary confections. As I said, you will choose how to pay, you will pick the currency, but pay you must, now that you know me, A Good Afternoon.
Your debt will be carried over even into the next life. After your memory of this life dissolves and the body you thought of as you grows cold, the terrible tingling tremble of your debt will remain. It’s best to pay it in this life before moving on. You can always open the door and know me again in the next if you choose.
Your debt may also move backwards through time so that as you sit tying your gym shoes for PE time at age 12 you will feel the ache and throb of your debt. It will make you want to run away from home and join the circus or form a rock and roll band. It will make you want to paint murals on the sides of the gymnasium. It will drive you to run up to that girl and say,
“Hi. We can live forever for a moment together, I must share with you A Good Afternoon.” Or you might shout, “Bye bye to the Blair potato son.”, or more reasonably, you might manage to stammer, “I wanted to know if you want to come have mashed potatoes with me for lunch.”
If you were to follow through with any of those impulses your debt would be paid. With it I will experience a renewal as another learns to utter my name in ecstasy and grief.
Then you will be free to leave off my name and my memory. But until you pay, you will wake at 6:15 each morning on fire with the desire to share me and if you are too selfish, too frightened or too particular to pay, then you will grow old, still owing. And so haunted by A Good Afternoon you will eventually blow away like a leaf into the next world, ready to pay, but no longer graced by the remembrance of what it is you are paying for.

A Walk Through Eternity

“Eternity is here and now. Right now. As you read these words. It cannot be otherwise.
Eternity is not a very long time, longer than all your memories, longer than you could ever imagine. Eternity is not very slow, something much slower than what we could conceivably endure.
Eternity is not loving or unloving, not hateful or compassionate. Eternity is not reward or punishment.
Eternity is not and cannot be something that will happen someday, something that has happened already.
Eternity cannot happen for to happen something must have a past and a future and eternity can have neither.
Eternity is what is left when past and future are gone.
Eternity can hold no sequences and no trails of cause and effect.
Eternity is complete because it cannot be otherwise.
There is no time to be lost or gained, no time to fulfill lacks or to form wishes. Eternity is simply no time at all.”

I thought of the words on the old book as I stood on the border, looking in. This was not the first time I thought of them. It probably wouldn’t be the last. The words caressed me in ways I didn’t find fully pleasant, something about their implied meaning disturbed me, hurt me somehow, something rose up within me to defend my inherent right to events, my right to chains of causality, my right to the forward motion of time. The something that rose then stayed in my chest, having nowhere to go. And there it lingered and it could only grow as I replayed the words in my mind once again.
There was a great circular labyrinth in front of me and I stood on the edge, right where the narrow path of white stones began. Should I go in? I wondered. Is this the time? The right time? I asked myself in silence. Will there be another opportunity if I were to wait? Will this moment return or will there be another similar enough that it will make no difference?
My mind was clouded with thoughts, tinged with self conscious doubt and human concerns. As I whirled in the middle of pros and cons and other random waves of kinetic brain activity, I felt the moment closing. I felt it moving past me, rushing like a slow inexorable current, slow but definitely moving…drifting through my finger tips as I stood there debating inside my head. The moment was about to move past me like a cold little stream past a heavy rock, unafraid to leave me in its wake on its way to an unknowable destiny, some place where I would never be.
I could feel the three women behind me squirming slightly, their bodies preparing for departure, ready to move up the hill and begin our lunch. Something we had all been waiting for with impatient eagerness. This was not the time for distractions. This was not the time. It shouldn’t be. I felt it passing, all of it. A thread of nothingness on the black current of emptiness, drifting away from me while I stood still, trying to decide. I knew it was leaving now, maybe forever. Soon, even the decision would be gone.

“We may experience Eternity. But this experience won’t be in the past, it wasn’t in the future, it wouldn’t be in our memories of that perfect psychedelic trip into the infinite maelstrom, or that amazing moment of meditation when the walls disappeared and all the people turned transparent like new plastic bags, or that one instant when you and I fell in love and we both knew it as clearly as we knew where we were sitting, as clearly as we knew each other’s names. It won’t, it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the sudden burst of direct Knowledge that came over you that one day, that one day that we can all vaguely remember. Yes, all of us. It has happened, will happen, would happen to all of us. Every single one of us.
It wouldn’t have been in the future, in that bright final day when I finally accomplished the Great Work and I fused with the True Self that I found standing behind the illusion. It didn’t come when I was finally Awake, fully and beyond mistake, or when I completed my spiritual progress through a thousand lifetimes of abnegation on my way to glorious liberation which came and went before I knew it was happening. It didn’t even come the days before my death, when I finally surrendered, fully and completely, when I finally started to Work. It couldn’t have. It didn’t. It won’t. It can’t.
Our experience of Eternity can only be Now. Now as you read this. Now as you hear this. Now as you think this. As you think it in the words that are here written.”

A small bird chirped at me from a nearby tree. A soft breeze blew wisps of hair across my forehead. Without another thought, without a clear sense of purpose, without a final bout with the constant plague of imagined consequences, my foot suddenly took a step forward. My first step into the labyrinth, my first step onto the path. And as my foot took that step, my mind was completely taken by surprise. It had been left out of the decision. It was being taken for a walk, like a small dog that suddenly realizes what is happening as the door closes behind him and the cold air hits its pudgy hairy face. "Oh, I guess I’m doing this.After all that thinking, I guess I’m just going to do it." I said it to myself where nobody could listen, inside the place where nobody could reach.
My mind was shocked, but willing to go. I looked down at the path directly in front of me, at the narrow bit of dirt outlined in gray stones. I remembered myself. I remembered what to do. My right foot touched lightly upon the path, I felt the soft dry earth beneath me, I felt the heel as it made contact with the ground. Each step slow, each movement deliberate and carefully noted.

“The experience will not be soon,
The experience will not come a moment from now,
Just as it didn’t happen a moment ago.
Just as it didn’t happen before you can remember.
NOW.”

Nearly thirty steps in, my mind started to dart around once again, a reinvigorated ping pong ball bouncing on a fully enclosed spherical table inside my skull. "Was this a good time for this? Will they be mad? Did I mess up the space? This is probably taking too much time! They are all waiting to eat. They are all so hungry. I’m hungry myself. This is the last thing they want just now. To be waiting for me while I slowly move through this little maze of rocks. And now I can’t even see them. I can’t even turn around to try to read the thoughts behind their faces."
And then, a calmer voice, another player in my secret private game of bouncing phrases and flying single words: "You’re doing it now, you can’t turn back, you’re in the middle, you made the decision, something made it, something inside of you…so do it as best as you can.And keep on going. There is no stopping now. There is no stopping."
My hands were swinging, the air drifted through my curled fingers like soft kisses in the momentary resting point of a long uncertain journey, deep in the middle of the night when it seems that such a journey can never end (but it always does.) My left knee bent as my whole body prepared for the next step that was surely about to come. I turned the corners carefully, slowly, watching the ground as the outlined path turned back upon itself, watching it curl back to what I had already left behind, to the path of pale which seemed already so distant.
"This just keeps going!" I thought. I put my attention back on my feet. I felt my arcs stretch with the forward movement of heel to toe. The breeze touched me again and tousled my hair. The path was still there. Curving away ahead of me. Ahead and behind and both at once, blurring into a confusing knot where the future and the past twisted themselves around each other.

“Our language, our imagination, our projections, our world of symbols… they have all conspired to give us an image of Eternity as a really long time, a time so long that it might as well be forever, a time where actions stretch forward into an insistent periodic repetition without friction or decay… Eternity as the white washed heaven of the Christians, the gardens and virgins of the Muslims, the complex Bardo chambers of the Tibetans, the rising cosmic steps of the Gnostics, the monstrous and heroic houses of the witches, the many colored visions of the shamans, the fiery dungeons of the ancient and secret God Pan. All of these may in fact be real (or real enough that we may have the pleasure and pain of experiencing them for a very long time) but they are not the experience of Eternity. If something is happening, then it will stop happening eventually. If something some day stops happening, it will eventually come back. As surely as these words will one day disappear. As surely as these words were always written, long before I seemingly made them appear from nothingness onto a blank white page.”

When I first started on my journey, I had heard the voices of the three women on the outside. I was able to imagine how they saw me, how they might see me, how I may have looked from the distant places that were outside. I imagined their thoughts even if they were only my own projections. They kept talking among themselves and I felt safe in their neglect.
But when I was focusing on my feet, somewhere along the way, their voices had dropped away into a kind of strange silence, their voices which were known and unknown, their voices which were real and imaginary. The space was now profoundly quiet, except for the rustling of nearby leaves and the occasional car tires swishing on the asphalt of the road below. It was me and the labyrinth. Me and the elements. Me and my effort. Me and the path.

“But Eternity cannot begin and cannot end. It is not an extension of time. It is itself outside of time. Time cannot reach out to swallow it. It overcomes time and envelops it like an infinite snake that has transcended all restrictions. We are, you and me, right now, in the midst of Eternity, projecting images of illusory lifetimes onto a never changing Clear Void. And the void itself remains the same, no matter how much the illusion changes.
The longing for the experience of Eternity is a struggle that can never be completed. As long as there is a struggle, the goal has not been reached. But if the goal has not been reached, the struggle cannot end. And so, like Achilles, our work will always be just a hair short of the Eternal Turtle that moves just slightly out of our grasp. Ever so close. Ever so far.”

The rings were getting smaller. I turned corners more and more often until I suddenly reached the center which was both more than and less than I had imagined. In the small round heart was a mosaic stepping stone that had small stones and beads upon it. Signs that others had been here, signs that they wished to be remembered even if I would never know their names or their secret agendas.
I closed my eyes. I saw small sparks of electricity playing on the canvas of my eyelids. I raised my hands out to the sides, opening them wide.I then lifted them high above my head and finally brought both hands together in front of my chest. As if prayer. As if there was something there that would listen.

“In the deepest void within you, behind you eyes, behind your thoughts, behind your emotions, behind your secret wishes and desires, behind your bright nightmares and dark dreams, behind the twisting and gyrating thing that you think of as you without ever thinking about it, behind it all you have Eternity. Right now. Your experience of it relies on your ability to maintain your attention steady, to look inside and not be instantly repelled by the frightfulness of pure untouched Nothingness.”

Oooooommmmmm, the sound was not as pure as it has been, not as pure as it could be. I noticed that fact objectively and I held my attention on the sound and my diaphragm, even as the sound cracked slightly. I pulled my stomach in as my rounded mouth continued with the elongated vibration. I stood in the center, feeling the soft breeze, feeling the sun, hearing the sound of birds, feeling quiet, yet electrified and alive. My ego had fallen and I was overcome with a sense of lightness.

“There is a reason why we are here, why we move through time, why we play our parts in this infinitely complex labyrinth of time and space. There is a reason why things happen, why "we" happen as we are happening right now.
The reason is entrenched in that elusive experience of Eternity. When you enter into the heart of the Labyrinth, the inner circle that never changes, the secret chamber that never started and never can end, where there is no past and no future and no semblance of either… there you will understand the reason. It will be as clear as it ever was, as clear as it ever will be.”

My body turned back. I took a step, I raised my leg firmly like a soldier, placing it firmly on the ground. I took another step, a very short one on the tips of my toes. I slowly walked back through the rings, sometimes emphasizing the movement of my hips like a supermodel, other times walking erect and with a sense of formality. Other steps, I glided loosely as if I was about to grow wings from my back. I alternated between movements, improvising each like a chaotic dance with my attention as the thread of consistency. And the more I played, the more alive I felt. My smile increased the more I played and I shed more of myself upon the soil.

“This has happened a million times before.
To you.
This will happen a million times again.
To you.
You have experienced Eternity. Directly. And now you are here, in time. And the part of you that recoiled, the part of you that fell, the part of you that opened that door but only slightly, that part that saw the primordial union that cannot be seen, felt or heard, and ran away, afraid that it might have seen too much, afraid that the precious object of desire would never give it the compassionate pleasure of coming to an eventual stop...”

There was nothing else. My past was a distant part of my imagination, the future was never coming. There was only each single step and the thousands of movements which seamlessly created it . The labyrinth and I were playing. We were lovers in union. Dancers intertwined. Actors upon a stage. Beings in a living void.

“…that part of you knows why we perceive Time and why we imagine that there is a past and there is a future.
At the heart, right now, within you and without you, everything is still, quiet and outside of Time, beyond Time, around Time. Here in the innermost chamber we can truly say without any hesitation:
Nothing ever has happened
Nothing ever will happen.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.”

Unknown Event

Something passes overhead, underneath, a shadow jumping from the darkness to take shape before my eyes. Once I was like you, I saw as others saw, but that was before the unknown event, before the thing that happened that so changed my thinking that I can no longer say what it was. I went in one end of the carnival tunnel called time at 1:00 am and came out the other at 1:15 am, three days later, unsure of what had happened.
Oh indeed my mind made many suggestions about how the sky changed color and the clouds gathered in a swirling mass over my head before the lights overtook me. Someone, some thing ran around the perimeter of the field, something small and quick, always just concealed from my direct sight, making the tall wild grasses ripple. I felt an even measure of awe and fear. The realization that nothing like that should be here is what made it terrible. Perhaps if I had forgotten the other world entirely, the world where you are walking down the side walk with a scarf wound tight around your throat clutching a steaming paper cup in your hand, if I had lost all memory of that world that we have shared, then perhaps I would not have thought,
“These things should not be here.”
And if I had not thought that, then I might not have been frightened. But reality, you must understand, was being torn slowly, painfully torn up like a dirty worn carpet. Is there anything worse than seeing your living room floor without the familiar carpet? Seeing the concrete or wood that lies underneath, hard and cold and comfortless? So imagine this terrible thing happening to the fabric of reality, the world where you are hurrying away from an argument with me, waiting for the traffic on the corner and frowning without noticing that you are frowning, the fabric of that existence being jerked out from under me, the me that I was at 12:59.
Realize that by 1:00am I was already becoming a new person. I was frightened, but curious. I needed to see that those shadows were nothing, or that they were something, so I ran after them, hearing the grasses whip around ahead of me, following that sound until we came to the bridge that crosses the river, to the place where the trees rise up and crowd around, tall and skinny and white.
I stood on the bridge and the wind whirled around me, making my clothing flap like flags around my skin. They were among the trees now, and I shivered with the impression that they were like something I had glimpsed before. What had I heard about such things as these? Terrible frightening things.
But then I thought, wait, I have yet to see them directly. I should not confuse these things with old stories. I wanted to run away, now more than ever, but I felt the importance of remaining calm. I was already being transformed by this occurrence, I knew already that the me of 12:59 was gone forever, and I understood that what I did now would define the me that was in the making.
What does steel do when it is being forged into a blade? It holds still, in fire, under the hammer, and in water, it holds still and lets the smith shape it.
I stood on the bridge and the light from overhead grew brighter and brighter and I thought,
“This is the fire! Be still or you will melt into nothingness!”
At least this is what I now tell myself that I told myself as the brightness engulfed me and held me for an agonizing second.
Then I was standing on the bridge alone. The sky was dark and the air was still. Shadows were behaving once again as shadows should in this world that I have shared with you. I looked at my watch and it said 1:15am. I felt as if I had been dreaming and couldn’t remember precisely what had happened. My mind had been altered, stretched during the course of the unknown event, and now that it had shrunk back to scale the unknown event could not be recalled as it had happened. I arranged this story when I returned to our little apartment and you screamed ,
“Where have you been? God damn you! Where have you been for the last three days?”
I told us both something we could understand, even if only vaguely, even if you called it an alien abduction. I cannot call it that.
Once I was like you, I saw as others saw, but that was before the event, before the thing that happened that so changed my thinking that I can no longer say unwaveringly what it was. I went in one end of the carnival tunnel called time at 1:00 am and came out the other at 1:15 am, three days later, and I could not say what had happened in the tunnel, only that something had transpired there, something that is only known to the me that I was between 1:00am and 1:15am for those three days that I was gone. To this other me, the one that now talks to you, that something is and will remain unknown.

Turned Against Time

When the sun shone on his back it was hard to imagine the rain cutting into his flesh and thick beard, but it had happened in the past and it would happen again. Nonetheless, he sat on the wall with his shades over his eyes and a fisherman’s hat to protect his face and felt as though this were the only day that he would ever have to live, this afternoon of sun.
Behind him the clock tower of the ferry building rose high and aloof, a reminder of the passage of time, a master so certain of its hold over its subjects that it had no need for chains of steel. It did its binding by merely showing them this moon white face scarred with roman numerals. It was enough to send the ant-like people below scurrying across the streets and in and out of the buildings and onto buses or into cars, or down to underground trains.
Only a handful of black sheep were beyond the reach of this invisible tether, among them this bearded man sitting on the wall under his hat and shades. He had a red suitcase, and some money gotten by skilled begging. Maybe he would take a Greyhound to Santa Barbara soon and lay around on the green grass and stare at the ocean, but these plans were not foremost on his mind.
Like a goose that has made itself fat on the local fish, the tick tock of seconds or even the passage of days did not move him. It was the passage of seasons that dictated his migration, a feeling that would grow in him slowly, germinating under the sun and withering as the days grew shorter and darker. Eventually that withering would manifest in him as an urge to flee southward, away from the chill.
Today, however, was a warm day, an eternal moment of sublime heat and light. He could not have told you whether it was August or June or Tuesday or Wednesday, nor would he sink so low as to invoke any of the numbers, the date or time, even with that towering devil looking over his shoulder. If you had asked him the time of day he would merely have shook his head, never sparing the clock a backward glance, but then again, you, with your wrist bound in a watchband and your eye trained on that grand clock tower, would never need to ask. He would not even presume to know what season you thought it was, you with your calendar announcing the first days of each turn of the year.
His seasons were measured in his bones and they hadn’t names like summer and winter and fall, they were only now and another now and then another. And now he was here and it was warm and he could not even imagine the icy sting of rain, sitting as he was on this wall with his back turned against time.