The Past Comes Calling

Behind his cluttered towers of books and old fashioned type writer he could be as eccentric as he liked. This was his fortress. Within it he could let his hair rise in an electrified bride of Frankenstein way without feeling the need to tame it with a comb. In here, behind these impregnable walls of dusty books, he could wear his thermal underwear coupled with just a pair of jeans and fear no reprimand. He was the prince in this kingdom of fiction and nonfiction and coffee table conversational items and references. Letting his appearance blend with the general clutter, his mind could wander down forbidden corridors poking into thoughts left undisturbed by most. He could be David the Heretic, David the pervert, David the mad, or David the meek and no one would know.
Unless he wrote it, which he often did, and sometimes shared it at the weekly writer’s workshops or poetry jams hosted in the back of the shop. Even in this case he was still safe within his kingdom and those delirious poets and various unloved writers either appreciated his own breed of madness or else were too self absorbed to notice him at all.
He could remember too well the days when he had written in spiral bound notebooks in his bedroom and had feared discovery, the time when his sister accidentally carried one of his notebooks away mistaking it for her own, her horrified reaction, the subsequent beating from his father, his mother’s weeping and begging to know where they had gone wrong.
He could remember and the remembrance made this new phase of life all the more precious for its spacious anonymity and freedom of mind and word. They were, after all, only words and held no power of their own. Their power was lodged in the myriad of associations evoked in the reader or listener rather than in the words themselves. He was one of a rare breed that appreciated this truth and thus had no fear of them and twisted them every which way and used them to penetrate the carefully guarded darkness secreted away in the hearts of others, even and especially at the risk of calling forth their wrath and terrible sorrow.
Hunkered over a single serving of raspberry yogurt one afternoon he heard the bells hung over the front door jingle as someone entered. He finished spooning a portion into his mouth before looking up to greet the patron. Raising his eyes and wiping his mouth he beheld with astonishment the sparkling blue eyes of his sister. Her blond hair hung in a short bob around her face and her mouth was creased with lines that betrayed years spent frowning.
“Reina.” He uttered her name in shock, wondering what she was doing in this city, how had she found him, why she was here breaching his defenses.
She smiled a little.
“Hello David.”
Then he only stared at her. All that he wanted to know was what she wanted but it seemed callused to ask after 10 years of estrangement. He couldn’t think of what else he should say so he stared.
“Daddy’s sick David.” She said after a few moments, and big tears welled up in her eyes. “He’s dying.”
Again he could think of nothing to say so he merely watched the tears form in her big eyes and splash down upon her cheeks. She dried them with the back of a gloved hand and said,
“I’ve come to bring you home to see him.” She sniffed and looked at him waiting.
He thought for a moment that he might be dreaming so he leaned forward to the antique type writer and began to type an account of what was happening so that he would remember it better when he woke up.
His fingers clacked away at the keys and Reina said softly,
“David.” But he kept typing and then she cried hysterically: “David! Did you hear me? Daddy’s dying.”
He stopped typing and looked up at her .
“I heard you.” He said and leaned back in the chair rubbing his eyes with both palms.
“We should go as soon as possible. Before it’s too late.” She said “The flight will take about eight hours.”
As she spoke, she adjusted her hand bag.
“I’m not going.” David said simply.
“What?” her voice was high and demanding, “He’s dying. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand, and I’m not going.” He answered nonchalantly. Then he stood up. “Thank you Reina, for coming, for uh, finding me and giving me the choice. I… appreciate that. But I won’t go. I don’t want to see him. Even if he is dying. I don’t want to. You could have just called me, you didn’t have to come all the way here.”
“I know,” she said bleakly. “But I knew that if I called, you wouldn’t come. I thought that if I came to get you, you might.”
“I won’t” he told her with a small shake of his head.
She leaned forward and took a pen from his desk and wrote a phone number on the corner of a sheet of paper.
“My cell number.” She explained. “I’m leaving on the 4:30 flight out of SFO. I already bought your ticket, if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.” he repeated softly.
She sniffed again and this time he offered her a tissue from a dusty Kleenex box. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose and pocketed the tissue. Then she waved the tips of her gloved fingers and walked back out of the door, the little bells overhead tolling her departure.
David sat back down and brushed the keys of the typewriter absently with his finger tips. His fortress had been compromised. The same piles of dog eared brittle paged books still towered all about him, but suddenly they were an ineffective sanctuary. He no longer felt strong or safe, but rather small and weak, as though he were a twelve year old boy hiding in his bedroom, waiting for his father to come and dole out the punishment he didn’t deserve.
He realized that his hands were trembling so he folded them in his lap and gazed at the door. Breathing slowly, he let the phantoms of his childhood evaporate under the radiance of the present. He was a man now, and the body of his father would soon be returned to the earth, and Reina would be gone before morning. When their mother died perhaps she would only call, and that would be even easier than this.
After a moment the trembling subsided and his battlements felt once again secure. He picked up his yogurt and finished it, licking the spoon clean when it was all gone.

The Snow

Shelly, my friend, sat on a massively tall red-brick wall. It was the very top of a building, only a couple of feet from the flat roof of the rectangular apartment complex. She sat on the ledge, her thick white legs were bright in the midnight light. A small breeze played with the edges of her thin silky white slip. She was relaxed there on the edge. Her hands were behind her and she relaxed into their support as she would with a comfortable chair. One of her feet was on the ledge, the knee of the same leg very close to her face. The other foot hung over the ledge. She looked like a rock star, confident and defiant, teasing the night. I could tell she was not okay. It looked like she had lived through many years of extensive drug abuse, and now, she sat relaxed, ready to die on the edge of that building.

I awoke. I was still.

The dream lingered. It was one of the many unusually strong ones that had come upon me in the week that I had been here in the mountains. Six other girls in bunk beds slept around me in the small wooden cabin. There was a girl above me now, dreaming her dreams. The cabin was dark and my fingers groped for the small headlamp that I had placed beside the bed’s legs before I closed my eyes. I had been with these women for a week. A full week of meditation and silence, there was still one more to go.

With the headlamp in my hand, I crawled out of the sleeping bag like a caterpillar breaking free of its cocoon. Only there were no orange and black wings, just a sleepy girl in baggy long johns and an oversized sweater. I walked to the door and stepped out as quietly as I could, but in the nearly silent mountain night, even a falling snowflake makes itself known.

And it was a sound I heard which moved like muted echoes. All around me, soft drifts of white snowflakes fell delicately. The ground and stairs were covered already with a thin coating, and I walked with a smile down the rough outlines of a path to the large cement dormitory a few hundred feet in front of me. The world was dark. The thick woods to my right were dark, the paths that led to the meditation hall were black. There were no lights, nothing to provide my city paranoia with security, but I let the initial habits of panic wash over and through me. The night felt safe. The stillness was safe. Different, much different than I was used to, but I could step into it. The falling snowflakes added a new element. A touch of the extraordinary, a light whisper of magic dancing on my eyelashes. It was all worth noticing, every leaf, every quietly waiting bough, but the snow brought an energy I was not used to. A duality of parallel lines, calm and still, yet filled with constant movement. They glittered somehow, without the moon, without street lamps, somehow they gave enough light that I could walk through them without the aid of my headlamp. I walked casually, letting them melt on my warm neck and in the folds of my clothes.

I entered the dormitory and used the bathrooms there, then I walked back into the snow drifts, back to the wooden stairs of my cabin, clunkily taking off my boots and moving the other shoes beneath the cover of the eaves. Then I crawled back into the silky red cocoon, ready to see what other tales the subconscious would spin for me.

When I woke the following morning and stepped onto the steps to retrieve my cold boots, the land was covered in snow at least a foot deep. So much had fallen in just a few hours. There had not been wall-shaking wind or rattling, it had just come down hard, intent on its descent. The buried path to the meditation hall was now white and invisible, I made my own way, delighted in the footprints I left behind. The snow brought with it a silence so complete. I could hear small out-weighed chunks of snow topple off tree branches and land with a thud on the already blanketed ground. It wasn’t just quiet, it was like the mountains themselves chose to whisper. It was like the woods nodded with a small wink and began to move just a little slower. There were people around me, others walking quietly to the large square building that awaited with pillows and warm walls. But despite the presence of humans, the mountains opened with its ways. Movements usually hidden among chatter and cars and noise and quick movement. A careful deer emerged from the white-wooden thicket and walked timidly to the bushes. With the whiteness, time slowed. There were no human sounds of laughter, nothing to disrupt the absolute serene stillness of trees, branches, grass, rocks, everything buried in snow. I walked the paths softly, silently filled with the sounds of snow and the simple process of a thaw.

The Book

The three story bedroom house was quiet and still. In the many suburban neighborhoods that surrounded the home, all the children had been put to bed, all the cars that been shuttered in their respective garages, the land was quiet, a brief pause in momentum before another day. Inside the house, after hours of bright illumination, the talking heads on the TV were finally off, the energy of them was finally settling on the dinning room table and the pale beige carpet like dust, settling down ever so slowly. They were probably still mumbling out there, somewhere in the ether world their voices raged on, but not here, not while the clock ticked quickly towards the new day. The refrigerator mumbled softly, turning on and off in uneven intervals. His wife was asleep, covered below a pile of thick comforters. His “snow queen,” he would jokingly call her, since the woman always seemed to be cold. This was his chance for a little bit of peace, a brief moment before the cycle of his life had to begin again with coffee and an incessant alarm that was objective in its dire warning. Before the newspaper, before the search for work began on the internet. He could look now, but…this was a special time and he would not squander it on the fruitless perusal of classified ads. There were just a couple of lights on in the house: the dim kitchen light over the stove had been left on accidentally, the outdoor porch light his wife insisted be left on throughout the long hours till morning, and one more, the only light he really needed, the soft yellow bulb on the end table, right next to his blue lazy-boy recliner.
He sighed, a long expansive exhale that just kept going and going…did he really have this much air inside? His chest caved in, releasing every bit of carbon dioxide he could manage to push through his open mouth. He felt himself sinking into the plush blue fabric, the chair that had been his companion for nearly fifteen years. How many hours of his life had he sat on this very spot? While the earth continued to spin, while the weather morphed from heat to rain, while a hundred wars came and went on distant soil, he sat here, in this exact spot in front of the TV with his wife on the couch beside him. They took turns picking shows to watch and she always insisted on watching the female news hour, that’s what he called the assembled cast of TV-ready personalities that gave their disgusting opinions on everything from warfare to the newest diet pill. They truly made him sick, they, people who had no real-life experiences to back up what they professed as truth. It was the time of the day he least enjoyed, watching their glossy lips move up and down, chatting amongst themselves. He always felt like a voyeur, an unwanted guest in a living room full of squabbling idiots.
But he had nowhere else to go. His work area in the garage had long ago been crowded out by boxes and old clothes and other things he considered useless junk. The extra room held even more stuff, a lifetime of their acquired memories and the third bedroom had been converted into a gym for his wife. And because his muscles were sore and because he had already eaten and didn’t want to sit in the kitchen on one of their hard-backed wooden chairs, he remained where he was, enduring the six gabbing voices, shrill and ignorant and loud. But thankfully, the sixty minutes passed, just as all expanses of time eventually do, and his wife had started yawning and she stood to turn off the box and she gave him a single kiss on the forehead and walked up the stairs to the bedroom.
This was the silence that he did enjoy, the precious moment that needed to be grasped and held like a beating jewel. It was an endurance race and he was just a little ahead, able to keep his eyes open just a little longer than his wife or the other people on the block. He felt just a little more alone, a little more at peace knowing that every house in the area had their lights off and all the TV sets had fallen silent. He felt the energy of the quiet streets, he felt the wind calm down just slightly, allowing him a little more room to breath and think.
He bent over and reached over towards the small ledge between the legs of the end table. He emerged with a hardcover book, a thick 1000 page tome with a black and white cover of a battle scene. He studied the cover, just as he did every night when he picked the book from its somewhat hidden shelf. It was a scene from the Spanish Civil War. A small group of men in casual clothes and rifles pointing in the direction of an unseen enemy. His new friend had sent him the book four months ago, his new friend who was really just a man he had met while waiting for his car’s tune-up at the local dealership. They had begun talking and the stranger with a full head of gray and a whiter beard had turned out to be a retired war historian. They talked, long after both their cars were finished and ready to go. Not long after, he had received the book in the mail.
He leaned back and stared at the cover, as he had done each night since the stranger had sent it, examining the haunting picture without opening the book. He held it for an hour, studying every detail of the men, their clothes, their posture, their fingers on the triggers of their guns and rifles. He imagined the photographer, not focused on the approaching violence, but on the men at his side. These men where a thousand lifetimes away from the talking heads that filled his living room every night. Here there was no incessant laughter, no incessant opinions and no speculation. For them, there was only the crystal clarity of action, beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond argument. There was only action and nothing else. It was action that moved them, action that made them great. Tonight, he felt a wave coming over him, a mounting pressure that made his heart begin to beat harder and his palms begin to sweat. A sting of tears came to his eyes, it was a distantly familiar feeling, something that he had known before but had forgotten somewhere along the way. Tonight was the night. It was time to open the book.

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.

A Moment To Be Alone

An hour was all he needed, maybe a half hour when there was too much work, maybe less if the calls were falling like leaves from the tree of endless complaints, the strange tree that he was meant to trim daily but was always overgrown by the time he returned. But an hour was what he really needed and what he hoped for in the long spaces where there was only a computer terminal, a phone and his own hands typing away at a keyboard, like endless little footsteps that go nowhere, nowhere at all and very fast, when the light was yellowish and fuzzy and the window was glazed over with the steam of the heater and the breath of the people that walked by and talked in whispers, because everyone had to be working, and he was too, and his mind was so deeply focused on the glaring computer screen that he could barely hear the sound of the people behind him, or the cars outside, or the radio in the assistant’s cubicle, turned down real low, which only made it travel further and find its way underneath his skin where it would reside for hours, even after he was long gone and there was no longer any radio there, or the sound of his boss talking loudly to another manager on the phone, going over the latest ball game, laughing loudly, his feet up on his desk, just a few steps away.
But if he had an hour, just an hour, with nobody around, then that made it all disappear as if by magic, it made things come back to a place where he could vaguely remember who he was, and why he was, or if it wasn’t really remembering, at least it was a kind of lucid imagination that could stand in for memory, and maybe it was better than real thoughts. Here in his car, alone among the trees and the birds and the joggers and all the other creatures that lived in the park, he could at last breath, and it would take him a full ten minutes to get his breathing down to a place where he could smell again, and then he could smell the leaves and the flowers and the leather seats of his brand new car that he only drove for a couple of hours each day, and the smell of his own sweaty skin which he now realized other people might smell as well, but maybe they were just as clogged up as he was and maybe they were just as compressed as he was and maybe they were just as lost as he was so maybe they would have no smell, no smell like he did, until he was alone, here in the car, and by that time there was nobody else around, so he could only smell the sweat of the joggers as they passed by but nobody could smell him, and it was so beautiful that, for that moment, the smells were like a symphony of aromas and all the different aromas fit in so perfectly that he wouldn’t have rejected any one, not even the most noxious, not even the black smoke that trailed through the branches from the trucks that passed by on the main road just a block away, not even the putrid urine fumes that came from the homeless man that slid his way from one nowhere to another, sliding close to all cars, maybe hoping one would be open and a gold watch would be inside, or at least some change. He wouldn’t trade any of them, not at all, because they all added up to a kind of silence, a silence that drove into him through his nose and filled his lungs with delight and calm ecstasy and soon, after another ten minutes had passed, he would be smiling and his face felt strange for a moment, as if doing a strange acrobatic move that it wasn't accustomed to and then he would know that it was only a smile and it was all ok, at least for now.
It was only then that he would lean his seat back, all the way back so that his face would be looking up at the roof of the brand new car and then he would throw caution to the wind, and set aside all worries of who might see him or who might not, or what they may think or what they may not, and then he pushed his feet outside the window and he opened his mouth wide and swallowed the air like heavy food that would sustain him and then he yawned so powerfully that his whole body trembled, and even the car might have shaken a bit like a horse shaking beneath the weight of its master. Then he was smiling broadly and he knew that he had what he wanted, what he truly needed, the only thing he really asked for: a small moment to be alone, here in the park, in the middle of the trees and the birds and the joggers, just a few blocks away from the building where the computer terminal still waited for his return.
Ten more minutes and the sounds would begin to pulse through him, the footsteps outside, the songs that slid like silver necklaces enchanted by wizardry through the latticework of the thin branches above him, his own breathing which by now had become slow and heavy and then he could feel himself release even further and the sounds had become a drone and the drone was the street itself and the car was still and quiet but for him it was all moving and that movement signified that he was travelling, and he was further than anyone could suspect and the trees gyrated in the window and the window itself gyrated and then he closed his eyes and there was only darkness and the sound of teardrops falling on a vast pool of dark oily water. He stood alone, wet up to his ankles, and the noise of the cars driving by his own parked car were like waves, and the songs of the birds were like flashes of thin lightning across the infinite blackness of the sky and here he was truly alone, and this is all he needed, this is all he wanted. Soon he would be ready to return and the people could keep on whispering and the radio could keep on making its trebly soft complaints and the boss could keep on talking loudly onto the phone. After a moment such as this, he could take another afternoon, maybe another morning, just as long as he got an hour, maybe a half hour sometimes, but ideally an hour. That was all he really needed.