Back And Forth

“This is how you do it… see?” The tall blond man pulled his racket back as the tennis ball came towards him, he stretched back and then swung at the ball with precise violence. The ball went flying over the net ferociously, it bounced off the green cement and then flew back against the tall wire fence that encircled the tennis court. “See? You can’t hit it softly. That just won’t do. You can’t be afraid of it. Here, try it…”
The tall blond man walked over to where his son was standing. His son was eleven years old, blond as well, dressed in long pants that didn’t allow him to run as freely as he could have otherwise. The man handed him the racket and looked to make sure that the boy was holding it in the correct way.
“Make sure your grip is tight, make sure you don’t let it get weak as you swing, make sure…”
The boy nodded and walked towards his position at the edge of the court. The tall blonde man signaled and his friend on the other side of the court threw a very easy ball over the net. The boy pulled back his arm and swung awkwardly at it. The ball bounced off the edge of the racket and flew back towards the blond man, who caught it easily with his hand.
“You see what I’m telling you? You can’t swing so tentatively! You can’t be afraid of it! Look… it’s soft! It won’t hurt you!” He threw the ball softly at the boy and the boy caught it easily with his hand. He nodded, acknowledging that the ball was indeed very soft. Then the blond man walked over towards him and he stood right over him, creating a cone of shade around the boy.
“Look, I know what it’s like… you hear me?” His voice was a bit softer now, almost a whisper. ”I was like you are now. Once I was afraid of things, of girls, of men, of people in general, of little balls…”
The boy looked up at him, squeezing his eyes and wondering if the friend on the other side of the court would be getting impatient. He didn’t want to make a scene. He just wanted the whole thing to be over as soon as possible. But his father was still talking.
“I was like that… you know?… afraid of everything… and you know what happens when you’re afraid of everything? Nothing… that’s what happens… nothing at all… you swing at the ball and it just bounces back at you… and nothing happens at all… no game, no back and forth… no back and forth at all…”
“Let me try again then… let me…”
“No, you have to listen now… when the ball comes, you have to set aside all your fear and swing at it with all your strength…just set your fear aside… if you learn to do that here… you’ll do it anywhere… but here is where it starts…”
He stood back and nodded towards the friend who was waiting on the other side. A new ball came flying towards them. It flew easily over the net in a wide arch, with such a slow grace that it almost seemed suspended in the air. The boy pulled his racket back and brought it flying around his body, driving it directly towards the ball that was flying at him. The ball missed the racket by only a few inches and flew back into his father’s waiting hands.
“Not good enough, see?… Don’t get me wrong…I saw you trying…but it’s just not good enough…As long as you flinch, as long as you hesitate, then there can’t be a true game, and it’s only when the back and forth begins, that’s when the game has started… then we can talk about winning…but right now you can’t even play a real game…”
He pulled the boy aside gently and then stood where he had stood. He pulled back on his own racket and looked across the court. He nodded to his friend and the ball came at him with swift violence. There was an audible zoom as the man brought the racket around and a clear pleasant explosion of air when the racket met the ball. The ball went flying violently again, bouncing against the court on the other side and then bouncing again off the fence, hard enough to make the fence shake. The boy liked watching it happen and he smiled. The man turned towards him, there were long drops of sweat dripping from his forehead onto his face. “That is how you do it…see? When you can do that, without fear… that’s when the game begins.”

Of Shoes, Mystical Artifacts And Colfax

What do you kiddies want to hear about today, hmm? Shall I tell you about the time I was buried under an avalanche of discarded mismatched sneakers in the back of a Goodwill in South San Francisco? South San Francisco is not real San Francisco, and there are lots of old unstylish low lying houses and low income apartment complexes and liqueur stores and gentleman’s clubs with signs over their storefronts manufactured in the 1960’s, and one of those dull yawning caverns of a Goodwill plopped down in the middle like the center of a grotesque flower, all the other haunts of the impoverished derelicts, and professional sex workers splayed around it like drooping petals. This is all off of the route 130 bus line and very near to a BART station and I make it sound even worse than it really is. People probably only get knifed outside of those places every other night or so, and during the day, if you’re there, you’ll only just get a very dirty feeling that will make you want to rush home and wash that intangible filth away.
I was once in a place that was much, much, more dangerous, where people were knifed in broad day light, probably about once every three hours. That was in Colorado, and the street was an infamous stretch whose name has now been blotted out by the many years in which I have lived without thinking about it, but now that I am trying, the gears in my head are grinding real hard so that my neighbor down stairs bangs on her ceiling with the tip of a broom and shouts “quiet up there!” Little bits of recollection are coming loose in my watery mind like bits of milk scum left in the bottom of a coffee mug that was poorly washed before being used again.
The street drifting to the center of my mug is called East Colfax, and nobody that wasn’t completely insane and didn’t have to be there was there. I, sadly, was part of that first category, the “completely insane”. Particularly I was lured there by the presence of the area’s largest magickal supply store. It was Kmart for Wiccans ,Thelemites, alien abductees, and Christians converted to New Agers (you will find that there’s hardly any difference between the converts and the original, but the Christians hate the New Agers, and the New Agers pretend that they love everybody, even the Christians. Actually the Christians pretend to love everybody too, but in their version of that lofty feeling, you can kill anyone that’s a Muslim or a Satanist and call anyone who isn’t a member of your church one of these before killing them and consider it God’s will, whereas the New Agers like to think that everything is okay and everybody is okay and things are just fine, and all we need to do is picture ourselves bathed in white light and it will all get better. Another related point of conflict between the two is that the Christians know that there is a devil creeping around acting refined and educated, urging you to vote for a black president and buy a hybrid vehicle, while New Agers are sure that there isn’t and he just sits with them in drumming circles dressed all in white, grinning and waiting for them to drift off into a peaceful bright white slumber so that he can rape them and steal their wallets.)
The thing that I don’t recall, no matter how I scrape at the sides of the cup, is the number of the bus route that led to that esoteric super store, nor do I recall the name of the store itself. At any rate I was 18 years old and rode the bus and had to get off and walk a block or so before arriving in heathen heaven, were they carried 64 different tarot decks, some imprinted with photographs of your mother doing various unhallowed things. Tra la, la, I skipped up the street, a slightly cynical veneer covering my country bumpkin naiveté so that I would melt in the mouth not in the hand, and a woman with scraggly hair, missing teeth, and fresh bruises all over her face stopped me and asked,
“Are you walking?” I looked down at my worn sneakers and, just like Crissy from Three’s Company probably would have said, I answered,
“I was on the bus before. But yeah, now I’m walking.”
“Oh good,” without missing a beat she continued, “Because I got these two guys in an alley over here…”
Those gears I told you about in my head started grinding. My jaw dropped.
“Oh. I’m walking, but I’m not walking. Sorry.”
And away I went, off to the gun shop of Isher, otherwise probably known as Merlin’s Beard or The Glitter Star Rainbow Cauldron, or something like that.
The clerk was kind of a mean mediocre middle aged fellow with a moustache and no interest in being helpful, and whether this was because I looked too rough or seemed too sweet, I’ll never know, because it’s always hard to see oneself, even when looking back through the pools of antiquity. It is not surprising, however, that the whore I met on the way took me to be one of her own profession. When she caught sight of me, she saw an extremely skinny girl with long bare legs and a shaved head wearing army fatigue shorts and a tank top, and my eyes were still a little bruised from a car accident I had been in a month or so before. So perhaps the cranky old fake wizard thought, as she had, that I was just some cranked up prostitute choosing his store as a momentary refuge from the broiling sun outside. I bought something unnecessary and completely forgettable which probably changed the course of my life to come and made it back home without further incident, but wrapped in a slowly developing state of shock. (I told you that I was a small town girl out for a dip on a big dirty city street).
All in all, compared to East Colfax Blvd. in Denver, South San Francisco along route 130 is like downtown Disney, but compared to downtown Disney, South San Francisco along route 130 is like East Colfax Blvd. If you have to choose between these three destinations, pick downtown Disney, unless you’re looking for toothless hookers and illegal drugs.
As for my experience in the back of that Goodwill, I can’t tell you very much about the avalanche because it hasn’t happened yet. Now that I think of it, it will be unpleasant trying to chew my way through all of those shoes while I wait three days for emergency rescue workers to dig me out, and drink cool aid from a thermos strapped to the back of a trained rat named Bernard who is accustomed to being lowered down wells and sent into collapsed buildings to offer refreshments and a game of five card draw to disaster victims while they wait to be unearthed. I think perhaps I will skip the whole affair and get a pair of shoes at Payless instead. Hell, just to make sure, I think I’ll go to the Aerosoles shoe store in Union Square in real San Francisco. There they’ll wrap my purchase in hot pink tissue paper and lower it into a stripped gift bag so that when I leave I’ll be smiling like it’s my birthday. So dearies, you’ll have to settle for this story about the time I took the bus to the Unicorn’s Mystic Haven on East Colfax and nearly started my accidental career as a two dollar hooker, and excuse my while I count my shiny nickels and prepare for a shoe shopping trip in Fancy Frisco.

Vigilance

It was too hot. That was the one thing that was clear. Too hot to be out here. Too hot to be wearing three layers of clothing: the undershirt, the sweater and the regulation light blue button up shirt. Too hot to be standing and trying in any way that he could think of to look like he was actually busy, like he was concentrating on something, like there were urgent things for him to do, and not look like he was just standing, out here in the sidewalk, away from the cool tranquility of the museum’s halls, and just standing here alone, bored, tired, with nothing to do but look at the people walking by him, maybe wondering who had decided to put this poor guy out here, what was he there for really?
He stretched lightly and looked around, up at the slight rustle of the branches, at the tall thick trees that lined the sidewalk across from where he stood. He tried to remind himself that there was a reason that they wanted someone out here, as invisible as it might be, he was indeed serving a purpose. It was a strange dangerous world and right when you least expected it, something terrible could happen, and maybe then, they would say: “Thank god he was there to stop it! Imagine if he had been inside?” and then he would smile full of pride and they would look at him with great admiration, because he had saved them all, and that had been his role all along, if they had only paid attention, if they had only known, if they had only followed the chain of logic all the way to its conclusion.
He was in fact ready to be a hero. If the opportunity didn’t come along, well, that wasn’t really his fault. If he was truly ready, then he was a hero already, and as he thought of that, he puffed his chest out and ran his hand over his shaved head and breathed a little easier.
Just then, three girls in bicycles were about to cross the street, just a few feet away from him. He looked over at them. One had long curly brown hair and another had short blonde hair and a third was a little full figured but still pretty cute and he smiled at them and nodded but they looked right through him, as if he was a pillar on a building, just another fixture of the landscape. He looked right at them, letting them know that he was an avatar for authority, for the one authority that ruled over this little land of trees, and buildings, and displays, and air conditioning, and he was not smiling anymore, but still they didn’t look at him, even when they rolled by, so very close to him and even when they stopped their bikes only a few feet away.
They were discussing where to go next, and how much longer to keep on riding, and he could hear it all from where he was standing, and he was right there, so close, and he wondered if maybe they were looking at him off the corner of their eyes, maybe they were having wild thoughts about this handsome man in uniform that was standing right there, so close to them, so available, maybe their thoughts were not unlike the thoughts he had, but they wouldn’t dare to look straight at him, because he was so strong, because he was so powerful. If that was the case, then that was ok, he could understand that, he could see that he could be pretty intimidating, what with his blue uniform, and his radio, which crackled every once in a while, and his shaved head, and his strong muscular body. It was not in vain that he went to they gym four times per week, and he knew that any girl that was truly a girl would notice, even through the three layers of clothing that were making him sweat too much.
Just then he worried that maybe they had noticed the sweat on his forehead, even though they seemed to be looking up the street and talking amongst themselves. He didn’t want to disgust them, not at all. He reached up and wiped some of the sweat with his long sleeve and he was surprised to realize how much he was truly sweating. It was coming down his forehead in big long drops, and, if the girls were looking at all, they would have surely noticed. Maybe that was why they were now going away. He could see their asses pressed against the bicycle seats as they rolled up the sidewalk away from him, and he wondered if it was the sweat that finally had made them go away, if it was the sweat that had disenchanted them with the handsome guard that stood before them, keeping them safe.
If it had been the sweat, at least he could rest easy in the thought that it wasn’t his fault. He did not choose the uniform, he did not choose to stand out here, he did not choose the shift or the hours. He was just a man ready to be a hero and he would go wherever they told him to go. He couldn’t expect these girls to understand that. And it was just too hot, too hot to be out here.

Biscuits For The Devil

I wriggle my way through the dark earthen tunnel. Little roots, probably those of dandelions, tickle my face like coarse living hairs. The truth is that I had been warned against sticking my hands into holes dug in the ground. On the school yard, we children dug through the sand until we reached a layer of Indian clay. It would have been very fun to dig up some of this stuff and play with it, but it was rumored that hell lay just beneath that layer of clay, so when its ruddy hues could be seen, all digging stopped. I was never one to push my luck when it came to frightful mystical warnings.
My sister and some other girls from the neighborhood went into the bathroom to call Bloody Mary, locking the door behind them. They would turn down the lights and turn in circles chanting her name and then face the mirror to see if it would reflect her gruesome face. I would not go in. I stood outside pounding on the door begging them to stop, hot tears streaming down my full young cheeks.
She was my younger sister. I was the elder. I had been sent to a Christian pre-school so that something of human spirituality could be imparted to me without my parents having to confess their own ignorance, their own fear and confusion.
My father did not believe in the Christian story of Genesis. He held that a race of Alien beings, called the Annunaki, had come to this planet in search of gold which played a crucial role in their technology. They used their advanced understanding of genetics to engineer mankind by synthesizing their own DNA with the DNA of the apes that already inhabited this world. We were created to do the dirty work, the mining of that much needed gold. Despite this idea, my father was strangely superstitious. Despite this idea, he sent me to a Christian school.
My mother had never read the Bible. She had scarcely ever been in a church and certainly had not been in one since marrying my father. They were married by a judge in the town hall. My mother wore a blue dress. She told me that if anyone asked me what religion we were I was to answer that we were Christians. If they asked which church we attended, I was to say that we studied the bible at home. We did no such thing.
My sister did not attend the Christian School for more than a week. She hit the other children and was sent to sit to the picnic benches with her head down. I, being a good Christian quite naturally, sat with her with my own head down although I had done no wrong.
So you can see that crawling down dark earthen tunnels represents a dramatic change in course. Otherwise, the first line might be that I am building a flying machine to join the choir of angels that sings gods praise and makes it rain when they weep over the sins of mankind. I have gone through a sort of metamorphosis to be wriggling through here today.
I will be honest with you and explain that it is not that I have rejected all that I learned at that tender age. It is that I embraced it more deeply than others. I let the truth dig down into my heart like a shard from a broken mirror. There it sits keeping a space for me to reflect on the nature of my existence as a human animal.
Spirituality is an affliction from which I suffer where no other member of my family does. It is very strange that a choice that they made for me has set me so far apart from them. As an ostracized member of my own family, I am on my way to visit a man who found that his kin felt one way and he felt another. They rule the seen and he guards the hidden chamber at the heart of existence, endlessly polishing the mirror fragment that lodged itself there as it has within me. This is what makes him “otherwise” than they. This is how it is that we are two of a kind.
While Red Riding Hood is delivering a basket of goodies to her grandmother, I am inching down past the Indian clay with a basket of biscuits for El Diablo.

Bunny

Rex looked down into his blue wicker basket. What was there to understand? He wasn’t the type that usually got all worked up and went off half hopped after some bunny opened their big mouth and said something that ruffled his fur, but Trixie had managed to make his blood boil. He ran a paw over his whiskers and flattened his ears back.
“You don’t get it.” She had said.
“It’s meaningless, that’s all. Rabbits leaving eggs. It’s the most ridiculous occupation a rabbit could have. Really sort of demeaning.” He’d answered her in his calm monotone way.
“Ah! I’ve had enough. I can’t listen to this anymore. You don’t know anything. I don’t know why I listen to you. You don’t hear a word that I say. You don’t understand anything! I’m moving out! That’s all there is to it.” Her fur had stood on end, she was so furious, but seeing no reason to stop, he kept going anyway.
“Well, where are you going to go? I’ll forward your marshmallow chicks to you.”
“What the jellybeans is that supposed to mean? Forward my Peeps? I…” she’d shook her little lemon yellow head and trembled all over with furry abandon. “I’m going to stay with Beck. He really understands Easter, unlike someone else I know. How’s that? Ha!” and she had hopped away.
Five minutes had lapsed since her departure. Rex looked into his work basket and felt the white hot rage course through his veins. There was nothing there to understand. It was completely meaningless. An empty ritual that he and Trixie and a gazillion other rabbits built their lives around. He loved the summer and the fall when it was all over with and he could almost forget who he was and pretend to be a regular rabbit. The winter filled him with dread of spring, and spring… well, it was torture.
Some rabbits had to slave away over vats of hot chocolate pouring it into molds made in their own likeness or in the likeness of a chicken or even a cross or a human male nailed to a cross. Others prepared jelly beans and marshmallow confections. Then there was the manufacturing of plastic eggs.
All of it was really hideous as far as Rex was concerned. Completely appalling. Being born into a proud line of Easter Bunnies clearly did not necessarily qualify one to be good at it. Why? He asked himself. Why wasn’t my mother an ordinary jack rabbit? I could have spent the last few years nibbling clover and out running from coyotes instead of palling around with the multicolored egg crowd.
They were all so proud of it. It was like being born into nobility or into a mystical priest hood. Making candy and delivering candy. That was all that it was about. The things that vexed him so were the details hinting that it might be about something more, the particular shapes of the candies, the stories, the date upon which they made their big delivery. None of it added up in a way that made Rex feel that his existence was meaningful. It was mumbo jumbo. Now Trixie was gone too. Oh well, he was fed up with these small warren girls anyway. He needed to get out of town, have a look around, see the world.
“That’s what I should do.” He said to himself. Then he sat the little electric blue basket down. His mother had taught her children that it was an honor to bear the basket, a great privilege. Lots of rabbits carried their baskets around with them throughout the year just to make sure everyone knew that the rabbit they were looking at or speaking to was an Easter Bunny. Common conies admired them so.
“I’ll leave it all behind me.” He said and with that he scampered out of his burrow into the cool moonlit night. After twitching his nose and testing the air he bounded away across the meadow. He stopped when he reached the top of the hill and looked down upon his old home.
For a minute he thought he should run back down and find his supper in the usual place, nibble a dandelion or two and get home before dawn. He let the idea slide away down the hillside with the shadows. His mother, Trixie, and the others would not understand his choice anymore than he understood theirs.
The moon, who had been listening to his thoughts, whispered into his ear, “And that is okay dear. It takes more than one type to make the world go around. I don’t understand my brother the Sun, and he does not understand me. It isn’t important. I do what I will do and he does what he will and you too must do what you will do. We don’t necessarily have to see things eye to eye. In fact, it is necessary that we do not.”
Rex twitched his nose and thanked the moon for her kind wisdom.
“Goodbye.” He whispered to the valley below. Then turned his back on it and ran on into the mysterious night, the moon caressing his back.

Destroyer

The destroyer laughed, looking up at the blackened heavens. All above was a blanket of glittering lights, the stars hung in the sky, low, like fruit waiting to be picked by a youngster with sticky hands. The destroyer laughed. The stripes on his sleeve attested to a long-distant past, the battles he had survived, the men he had killed and the ones he had saved. The captain beside him shrugged, he could not laugh with a man who so resembled a skeleton, a creature that had once only existed in the minds of little boys. But the apparition before him was real, as real as the worries that clung to the edges of his being, as real as the wind that brushed close to him like the wife he used to know. There was nothing he could do, he was a powerless lump of skin, shrouded by white flesh and a baggage of pain that rested on his shoulders like heavy bricks. Another chorus of laughs strung his ears, the captain raised his head, following the gaze of the destroyer to the flashing lights above. The stars where out of his control, just like the ship. Above, they moved by the whims of other forces, they would never answer to firepower, they would not respond to taunts of abuse or even soft kisses. Just as everything else, they were beyond his sphere of influence and it was pointless to wrestle with that simple truth.
He shook his head regretfully, and looked to the destroyer. Before him was a tube of metal and steel and white teeth painted like a picket fence. This was no man, but there were no other words to describe this being of decrepit laughter and sickly smells.
The ship bounced reassuringly. The waves were calm, the ocean was a baby asleep, its dreams moving quietly with the sharks below. The captain looked at his watch, the second hand moved slowly, too slowly, as slow as death seemed to approach his hell. Dawn herself seemed just out of reach. Why did she tempt him so? His memories of her were soft… bright golden rays that chased waves from their mountainous forms, pink clouds that announced the rising orb. He watched the movement of time. The hand moved slowly.
The destroyer let out another laugh.
The captain knew he was engaged in a battle that he could not win. The forces were too strong, too violent… even for a man like him. He still had shreds of a conscience, he still felt pain. The others did not.
He was surrounded by a horde of strangers who looked more like vampires and walking skeletons than the humans he remembered. Was he the lone survivor in a game of savages? For a second, he debated his own will. How long would it be until he became like them? How long could his stomach growl before he began to feast on human flesh? Before he went into the ship’s chambers and found the softest girl available and he began to chew on her breasts, bite by bite. There were plenty of girls below, their pastel dresses stained in blood and soot. There were plenty of them, plenty of food for a ship full of animals, hungry cannibals that had not seen the beauty of the moon for years.
The stars continued to shine, but the moon had begun to punish them, taking away their light, blinding them to the movement of a larger time, a larger cycle. Without the moon, they would have died on the sea had they not come across the lost ship, after months adrift.
The lost ship was like a gift from a maker who had given up on existence. When they had climbed aboard, they discovered the ship had a full belly of ample women and their men were too soft to stop the destroyer. He had walked right up to the captain and in minutes had turned him into their first meal in weeks. With the captain gone, and a pile of soft men who knew nothing of true savagery, they made a stew of the men and brought the women aboard as prisoners, as food to be stored til the next meal was needed. Now, with ample supplies, each man, each thing resembling a man, could have what he liked. A nipple, an arm, a piece of a lip. There was plenty for all. The old captain heard the belly of the destroyer rumble, the thing laughed and began to walk towards the lower chamber of the ship.

Machine Without A Master

Do you hear the bell toll? Listen to it ring; ding dong, deep and mournful. It began when there was a hand to pull its ropes, and it will stop when the hand is gone. You can read in the news today that 41 people were taken hostage in an immigrant service building in New York State. Some were shot and are critically wounded. You may also watch videos about a called received by 911 in which a woman shouted “Die, Die!” as she stabbed her toddler to death. In the pictures of the week, there is a photo of a man with a bloody mouth and naked baby dolls pinned all over his white dress shirt. At a glance you might assume that he is protesting abortion. A closer inspection of the caption below the image will reveal that he is in fact a performance artist that has positioned himself outside of a courthouse where a man is being tried for imprisoning his daughter in a windowless cell for 12 years and fathering eight children by her. The farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia are systematically being placed on suicide watch after a seven year drought has turned their ranches into desert wastelands. The frogs of the world are dying en mass. The economic fate of all the lands of this earth was discussed at the G 20 summit yesterday, the problems of a failing global economy were to be resolved in one day by clean learned white apes in designer suits. The president of Brazil has declared that those responsible for the economic collapse are all white with blue eyes; there is not a single black or brown man among them. You can read it all in little lines of text on the Internet if you are not afraid of the virus that was released on April 1st . You can watch video upon video, look in magazines, scan the headlines of newspapers, search every where for the equations whose final result can only be a fading civilization.
What are we really?
Animals that hold the fate of a world clutched in our greedy frightened paws. Because we shower and use chemical body products and shave the hair from our bodies, we forget what we are, we forget that we have risen from the mud of this earth and that it will swallow us again. If you listen in the hallways of public spaces, you will hear the frightened self centered conversations of these animals. Our prized linear intelligence, an abnormality that sets us apart from the rest of the creatures that cohabit this whirling globe with us, makes us fly in random confused patterns, like those lost bees we read about months ago, crashing and burning without direction, without a clear purpose, without a place to land.
Our personal disease is a secret sickness that infects this entire glass snow globe, but its very nature demands that we not take heed, that we blatantly ignore our left hand slowly bringing the revolver to our temple, finger poised over the trigger. We will not hear the bell, we will not hear the shot ring out as we gently squeeze it while holding our martini glass poised in the right hand. That line we began about God and his design will end abruptly and fall flat into the dead silence of that moment in which there is no longer a hand to pull the rope.
The endless void will yawn and swallow our collective dream back up into its eternal stillness, a moment of deep sleep between the cycles of dream. The lands that we have trod upon, and imagined were separate from us, will turn over inside of us as unborn children in the womb of an unsuspecting mother. God’s design will disintegrate with our tongues and will be replaced with the endless machinations of half formed equations that we will pour through the emptiness like water over the mill wheel, mere grease for the ceaseless clockwork of a mysterious hidden gauntlet. This fading dream touches upon the realm of nightmare just before we startle awake and find that the design called for death, but never for paradise. Evaporated mirages break upon an even more startling reality. Silence.