The Climb

We eventually dug our way out of the tunnel. It was bound to happen sooner or later. If we worked hard enough, we were bound to be successful. We had talked about it long enough. We had dreamt about it for so many nights that were like days, and we had sung about quietly during the days that were dark.
One night we clawed through all the muddled dreams, through the bright geometric nightmares, through unspeakably complex puzzles all made of dirt and branches and dust. And we did it with our own hands and we did it with our own voices and with our newfound language which easily disturbed and broke apart the thick walls of our established identities that had turned into heavy pieces of rock.

I could feel the heavy force of gravity the entire time – pulling us down, down, down. I saw old symbols carved into the walls as we passed by and kept on moving and many times I slipped on the outstretched forms of a few equations and algorithms for which I had no understanding or explanation.

Something may have helped us along the way, something that sometimes pulled us up, something leading us along through barely visible silver threads. But it had no name and it had no voice so we would never speak of it and we couldn’t have said anything about it even if we wanted to speak. We would never acknowledge its presence even among ourselves.

Our improvised songs travelled out ahead of us like guides, then came back as echoes and told us of the future. We wouldn’t let any force stop us. Not fear, not hunger, not exhaustion. Nothing would pull us back, we wouldn’t let anything pull us back down. Sometimes when I looked ahead I saw the same nothing staring back at me, nothing behind, nothing ahead, nothing below us, nothing above. But I kept on digging, and I kept on singing and I kept on speaking.

I awoke on the other side, naked and red with blood and bruises, encircled by cold and darkness. Bubbles clung to my skin, and the past dissolved behind us in a black puddle.

We all walked away in different directions then and I never saw any of them again. I never even tried to search for them. When I think of them now, they have no faces and they have no names. I am not even sure that they ever existed at all.

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?

Rise Hawk Rise

Haunted for weeks afterward I would recall the way we sat, the skeletal appearance of the emptying convention hall, Hawk's stoic candor.
I see it now, sometimes from his perspective, sometimes from mine, sometimes hovering beyond us both. I was leaned back in a chair with my long  legs in stockings stretched out in front of me, heels forsaken, devouring a bag of generic brand party mix. There I slumped watching exhibitors drag carts laden with boxes of comics and the trappings of their booths out the yawning cargo door 120 ft away.

I was waiting for my partner to bring the truck around. A moment earlier she called to say the line of vehicles waiting to reach the loading dock was wrapped around the hotel. It would be a while.
So I was resigned to sitting there in a numb stupor when Hawk returned to his table beside mine. Presently my chair was turned with the back to him.
When we started talking I sat up and turned sideways so that I could twist around to face him, gripping the metal back of the chair to stay in place.

At that moment I still knew him as Jim and not Hawk, the quiet artist that sat beside us for two days dressed in a black t-shirt and slacks, his steel colored hair being all that I could see while his face was turned down to his work.
On Saturday, I had decided that maybe he was a snob who thought himself better than us. He didn’t do much to initiate conversation or contact. That was the day that I wore the tight red dress with the push up bra.
On the morning of day two I glanced over and saw him applying color to a drawing of Harlequin. I felt a sort of jolt realizing that the perfect plastic look of these characters was coming from Jim’s attentive work. This quiet man wearing wire framed spectacles seated next to me was making those drawings look like that.

That was why at the end of the day as we started tearing down the booth I turned to Jim and told him I had taken the opportunity to watch him work and was impressed. I told him his work was beautiful.
He welcomed me to flip through the pages of his portfolios. When I had finished looking through them he offered  to let me choose one.
I selected the Harlequin I had seen him working on in the morning and packed it carefully away. Now he stood beside his suitcases on wheels and talked to me as I craned around in my chair.

Jim’s father had insisted that he would never amount to anything. He didn’t like or understand comics. He thought they were for kids and couldn’t understand his grown son’s interest in them.
One day Jim showed his Dad a copy of Arkham Asylum to demonstrate that comics weren’t just for kids. It left his father speechless on the subject ever after. Jim suspected that it was merely because he was afraid of being shown something like that again.

Jim bought and ran a comic store during the comic boom in the 80’s when you could find a comic book shop on every block. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the craze of the day.  It was during this era that Jim started attending exhibitions, carting all the wares of his comic shop into convention halls. A few years later his employees suggested he table as an artist while they ran the booth dedicated to the shop.

One year a boy approached and asked Jim to sketch something for him. Jim explained that he wasn’t that sort of artist. He was afraid of how it would turn out.
But when he saw the forlorn look on the kid's face as he walked away empty handed, Jim called him back and sketched a hawk man. The kid loved it, but Jim, not convinced that this was work he’d want to be known for, signed it “Hawk” rather than using his real name.

The following year the kid returned with an army of other kids, all eager to get sketches from Hawk. So Jim became Hawk, a fixture at the comic book conventions each year.
He was the longest tabling artist at Wonder Con. When they moved the operation from San Francisco to Anaheim they offered to fly him out to maintain the record. But Hawk had to decline because at this point he was caught up caring for his mother.

Hawk had to sell his comic book store after his father's death because the old man had left his wife with nothing but a mountain of debt. Hawk stepped in to care for his mother.
He took a job at Cisco Systems as the personal assistant for a man who wouldn’t walk five feet to fetch his own coke from the mini fridge.
He started building her a house. He still sold comics from a van to some of his old customers making special deliveries, but his finger was no longer on the pulse. He simply used the catalog to look up and order the items they requested and lost sight of the vast complicated scene that had once been his area of expertise. Slowly the number of customers dealing with him in this way dwindled until there were less than a handful left.

To  fend off the wave of sorrow that was threatening us with silence I said,
“But at least you still have your passion. You’re here.”
And Hawk looked at me and said,
“To tell you the truth I don’t feel passionate about it any more.”
I looked at him, Hawk, battered by the storm of life, weighed down by his father's curse; Hawk, resigned to being pulled into the abyss, and I cried.
“Then you have to find something else, something to be passionate about. You must have passion!”
Hawk blinked at me, digesting my outburst.
My partner arrived with the dolly and without ceremony we began to load it up. Hawk offered to help but we said we had it covered.
“See you next time.”
I smiled as we headed towards the light cascading in through the cargo bay. Hawk waved and rolled his suitcases towards the hotel lobby.

And so it was that for weeks I would be haunted by the incomplete tale of Hawk. Would he rise at last beyond fear, beyond his father’s voice within, beyond the mortal coil, to soar and grasp with outstretched talons the fire eternal that burns in the hearts of the pure?
Or would the cold gray wave that was the hand of his ancestors pull him quietly into oblivion?
And I hoped, I hoped that Hawk would rise, that the encounter with the dame in the red dress would shake the sleep from his wings and remind him of what it is to be alive and striving against the cold and the curses. I hung the picture of Harlequin in the hallway and I whispered to it:
“Rise Hawk. Rise.”

Always Distant Sun

Chasing the always distant sun, we will ever be.
Power strength number soul, we will ever be.
In silky sand tear drops falling,
there our song was written.
Falling sliding, walking shadows, black legend free.
Burning, soaring, chalice pouring,
there we will ever be.
Beyond savage Saturn's grin,
where memories and dreams are one.

"There, there now, poor beast," I say as the guardian rests its great horned head on my lap.
Nova and Burn are near, reading the maps, looking at the lights in the black distance.
I am Sage. They found me in the desert, all scorched and broken. Under the cooling shade of those wide leafed trees which have no name I was washed and mended.
I am returning slowly. When first I saw my reflection in the dark cool waters I couldn't even say who I was. I stared at a stranger who gazed back at me with fear in his pale blue eyes.
But now I am Sage and the guardian rests its heavy hard head upon my lap.

The garden is all around us. Dripping green, rose red, slithering white. Flowing tendrils of life to love me, to hurt me, to hold me. A symphony of unknown fury and rhythmic lust, surrounding me on all sides.
This too seems familiar. Something almost remembered gleams through the strangeness all around me. I was here before, I will be here again, or maybe I have never been away.
I remember the burning gate glowing in fury. The descent, hard and fast. Flesh ripping from bone, sinews snapping, memories like butterflies blown from my silent center. I can see it all through the thick green leaves that hang over us like flat fingers bursting with dark blood. I can see the desert rising from below, screaming as it receives me.

Small clouds moving fast over the faded blue horizon. Sand as white as bleached bones, the sand is out there beyond the leaves, unforgiving in its white fury. Crawling, I found a still green lake whose salty water burned my wounds and brought my insides out. Vast emptiness. A desert bleeding. No self. No other. Nothingness.

Communication. That is where it all resides, without it there is nothing. 
The crash left us mangled, almost killed this unit, should have killed this unit. Instead, it left me glittering; broken bones and glass and silver, a shiny starburst in the sand.
Communications were damaged. The others were gone, the long twisting coiled cords that connected us were severed. Hope left me like water from hot sand, sizzling up into vapor. For a time, a time long enough to change me, long enough to inflict deep wounds upon my whirling psyche, I was alone.

Nova is our pilot. He will figure out a way to lift us back up or he will die trying. I trust him implicitly, I will do what he asks.
Sometimes he comes over and talks to me, runs a wet cloth over my forehead, whispers some words. I respond and he smiles. Then he leaves and I watch his tall shape sliding away from me under the dark canopy of trees, his green tail flicking the earth behind him.
Nova's body is big, but the guardian leaves us all in shadow. As big as the guardian is, he is gentle and kind. To us. He is what he is to others.

Burn, the silent one, gathered the pieces, her six long black legs quick and nimble. Wherever Nova directs her she goes, back into the desert, deep into the verdant tangles of the garden, beneath the surface of the boiling pools by the jagged mountain where she found the guardian wandering.
She is small but strong. Not heat or cold, neither dry or wet, disturb her. She is one part of what was our engineer. Nova tells me the other part, the part that spoke and knew is gone. This makes things more difficult, but it will be all right. As she is, Burn can still put things back together with Nova's instruction. We must repair communications.

I remember falling beyond savage Saturn's grin. I remember the colored lights, the intense bursts of wild sound in the distance, the echoes of lightning, the violent screeching of our ship. 
I shudder and the guardian shifts his head in my lap with a sigh. I remember the desert. I remember when Nova lifted me from the sand and I was frightened. Strangely familiar. Startlingly new.
What we now need is fuel. Flaming white hot. Vibrant life from the darkness, from the clouds, from the hidden entrails of mud, from blood, from flesh. 

Nova and Burn read the maps and look at the lights in the far away black distance. We chase the always distant sun, our hands wide and open towards the morning star.
The guardian is weak, he seems weaker every day. This is no place for him. I stroke his heavy head in my lap. I will give him strength, I will give him my fuel. For as long as I can. 
"There, there now, poor beast."
Chalice pouring, mouth wide, sacred savage eyes.

For now, the Garden. I remember. I remember the garden. And the burning gate. And the falling. Each unique, all as one.
For now I can remember. Someday my memories will become dreams. And someday my dreams will become memories. I will forget and remember and remember and forget. Each time this happens I will be startled by the newness of our quest. Each time I will wonder at the familiarity.
It may take a long time. But we will find it: the always distant sun.  We will fix communications and awaken to life once more. Then we will soar.

Tomalynn

I listened to the peppy, vivacious voice on the answering machine. A sweet high female voice spilled into my ear, promising she would call back, “just leave a message!” I stared out my window into the overgrown garden of weeds and bright red geranium, knowing she wouldn’t, that the voice could never call me back.
It was a voice I had never heard and I was startled slightly by its ring. I was familiar with the woman. I had been in her house and looked into her blue-gray eyes, had sung along while she played piano and forced a smile at her relentless jokes with punch lines I could never quite grasp.
But I had never heard that voice. It came from a time before, years before cancer had punched through her energy and taken parts of her brain and spine, before her potent sing-song voice turned scratchy, then hoarse, and then, when there were just a few days left, it was gone, leaving a wide hole where song had once been.
It had been a few weeks since I had last seen her. I called her phone on that partially cloudy day and heard the voice of a woman without cancer, a woman whose world was long and stretched for years, filled with music, dreams and dogs that didn’t stop barking, adding to the music with punctuated beats of their own.
I left a message for the woman who was now gone, who had changed, who was turning into something else. Her husband called me back a few minutes later.
“It’s been downhill since the last time you saw her. We have her in a hospital bed in the living room. Her sister is here now. She has a lot of experience with cancer patients.”
“Can I come over to see her? Do you have any idea when she might be up?”
I went over at four-thirty. She lay in her hospital bed with crisp white sheets and a thin pink blanket. She had turned skeletal. In just a few weeks she had transformed from a woman who looked sick to a corpse that was still breathing. Her mouth was agape, breathing loudly. I could see the silver fillings in her back molars. I reached under the pink cover to find her warm hand. She seemed to be asleep.
“She’s refused food and water since yesterday. The nurses say that we should just let nature run its course and I tend to agree. We don’t need to postpone the inevitable.”
I looked up at her husband with his hands gripping the metal rails of her bed. He looked into my eyes nervously, shallowly, with sadness, with a solemn understanding that there would be no more treatment, no hope for cure or remission, that his wife would soon waste away in his living room. It would be the natural end for a disease that had exhausted all his hope in miracles.
His blue eyes held onto flecks of pain, revealing themselves in the way he glanced nervously around the room, as though looking for a safe space to land. My eyes stung with tears and I looked back at her sallow, sunken cheeks, having no words of reassurance.
“We renewed our vows yesterday,” he said looking at me, a smile crossed his mouth for a moment. “It was good for us.”
He nodded to himself, his hands on the sides of his narrow hips.
The TV was on in the background, just a few feet away from where we were. The husband stood on the other side of Tomalynn’s bed. He told me the details of her care, the time shifts of the hospice nurses, the morphine patches that had released all her pain. He glanced every now and then to the TV and then back to me, telling me Tomalynn was not in pain, reassuring me though I did not ask.
I did my best to be polite, to nod in sympathy at his details. As the TV mumbled and as Cary exchanged a few words with his heavy-set sister-in-law, I silently repeated the words I had come to say.
Between the silences, when I saw Cary staring at his dying wife, holding onto her hand as though it were a rope to another life that they were soon leaving, I wanted to tell him how Tomalynn wished he could find peace, how she hoped that he and their daughter would live on, somehow coming to a sense of resolution with her death. I wanted to tell him what she had revealed to me, but I could feel tears riding on the edges of my eyes. So I kept quiet, remembering it was more important for me to be there for Tomalynn, to remain calm and soothing and repeat the words I had come to say.
“You can talk to her, she might be able to hear you,” Tomalynn’s sister said helpfully from the couch against the window.
“Hi, it’s Lydia,” I said awkwardly, “remember to relax.”
All I needed was a bit of quiet, a space to be with Tomalynn without noise or explanations. I wondered why there wasn’t music playing, something beautiful and soft the way Tomalynn had always loved it. But I kept my mouth closed, my eyes on her as much as I could.
Sometimes her hand would twitch or she would take a big gasping breath and then open her eyes, but that vital life force, that thing I recognized as conscious and cognizant, that thing seemed gone.
“I think she has one foot in the other world,” her sister said.
I nodded. Her daughter came out of the back room. A thick teenager with hair dyed into a rich auburn sheen and thin red lips in the middle of a wide moon face. She was pretty and hard, looking a little jaded as she tossed her hair around with a sweep of her hand.
“Hi momma,” she said. She gave Tomalynn a kiss on the protruding cheekbone and a hug. “Momma,” she said.
We all stared silently at the corpse-like body in front of us for a while, a woman who had lost all vigor. It was only the warmth of her hand and the thick, rhythmic breaths that indicated she was alive. I couldn’t bring myself to touch any other part of Tomalynn. I watched as her sister stroked her face, as her daughter kissed her cheek. I knew a part of me was afraid of it, of death, afraid of contamination, of cancer somehow spreading from her to me. I was scared of the finality just a few inches from me.
I wanted to say something to her husband, wished somehow I could ease his pain, perhaps stop death itself. But I refocused, remembering I needed to stay calm, and so I stayed quiet. Holding my words, holding my tears, keeping my energy inside. I got up to leave and saw the catheter bag half full laying on its side against the carpet beside the bed. The dark color burned itself into my mind and I realized, in one bright flash, how serious it all was, like its very presence was the ringing bell, its sound telling me the body was failing, soon she would be gone.
I stepped out of the house, feeling the cool breeze of a partially sunny day. Her sister, with her humpty dumpty figure, her worn skin and teeth, she was outside, twenty feet away from the house, smoking. “Thanks hon, thanks for coming. I know it means a lot to Cary, he’s been a nervous wreck.”
I nodded, smiled a bit, and got into my truck. I knew I needed to work harder, to remain calmer, to work more than I ever had. I drove away and the images flooded me. The hospital bed, the family, Tomalynn’s sunken cheeks and sallow skin. Thoughts turned into words, words into sentences and soon, at home, I began to write.

The Form Of The Other

I feel the pain, that particular pain that makes me retreat into myself, that makes me try to hide within my own body. I feel it often. So often now that I don’t run anymore, yet I do not smile, not yet. I’m not quite ready.
I hear them laughing and I cannot stop my heart from beating a little louder. Thump, THUMP. It hurts. I hear them walking down the wooden stairs and my chest begins to pound, each footfall is another kick in the gut. They are coming. They are coming.

It all points back to the early years when it seemed that there was no danger, when safety fell from the sky like rain and it formed puddles around my soft hands, letting me know that there would never be any kind of danger.
In my youth I was cheerful, kind , and, above all, an obedient little girl. The very sweetest and kindest are most susceptible to conviction. That’s what I’ve come to learn. When they suggested that I take them into my heart I did just that, rather than pretending, like everybody else did, rather than playing along, leaving my insides untouched.
I did not know the limits as a child. I was too slow to catch on to the ways of the world. When they bade me to accept them I opened my arms and flung wide the doors to my little heart and cried:
"Come in, come in! I am ready!"

I have to stop. There’s only so much I can explore before the pain becomes too strong. I feel a vortex of energy coming now, I feel a vacuum growing within me. I feel the pull of a star-less space, a microscopic black hole in the very center of my core reactor.
There is a tug on my toes. My attention is going elsewhere, like waves on a shore that only recede, it’s going to a place where little spindles fly in circles and dive into my joints. They join together, tight as a brick in my jaw and then I cannot talk. I cannot laugh or smile. I am stuck. It’s hard to move, it’s even harder to breath.
I go back. I lose myself in thoughts that may make me forget what I am feeling.

That was how it all started. Very innocently, with the best of intentions. My crime, of course, was, is and ever shall be an indulgence in conviction. While immersed in a culture of images there can be no greater sin than sincerity.
They returned, stronger than I had ever known them and I opened the temple of my mammalian countenance and threw back my head to howl an invitation:
"Come in, come in! I am ready!"

My attention returns because they are coming. They are coming down the stairs. That’s what I tell myself. It is because of them that I feel these metal pincers squeezing at my damaged heart. Their voice, their laughter, their rules, their sucking in all the energy of the space, pulling me out and robbing me of my smiles and my air. Anxiety swirls around me like a conscious whirlwind, moving to the right, to the left, wherever I step like a fast-footed athlete. They are the reason, the source, the pain. That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I have to tell myself. Even if it doesn’t really help, even if the pain remains intact and I still can find no real sanctuary.

I asked them inside of me. There was never a more generous or hospitable offer to make, nor shall there ever be.
Now I hear from others that this is a very frightening and naughty thing to have done. I hear from human animals that this is a bad thing, what I did. But how could I have known?
There was no one to ask, no one to consult with, back when it was happening.
I am not ashamed to have looked into my own innermost quarters, into the depths of my being, into the secret crevices of my mind and discovered that there was darkness there, a true darkness that pulsed with forbidden life.
I am not ashamed to have discovered that I am but a mere mortal, an animal alike in my fears and desires to all other animals. I am not ashamed to have made a sacrifice of that animal on the altar that we call a lifetime.

I could now hurt and blame them and that would be my story, a story I would remember and tell myself, just like I tell myself all these other stories. The little explanations that last until the carousel breaks in a puff of smoke and all the plastic animals tumble out. It is so easy to place the cause outside of me. Just so easy.
Pain comes from the outside, from the Others.
Pain is caused by the Other.
The Other.

But there are only habits. A myriad of habits that multiply endlessly in all directions. The habits of politics and speech and body movement. The habits of the machine, transmitted and programmed since birth by parents and school and friends and church and society. The learned habits of an entire culture run amok through this body of flesh and bone and light.
Each bio-machine has a thousand habits. Each is convinced of their ultimate rightfulness.

Can I transcend these deep habits, so ingrained that I mistake them for the sky?
I say clearly and loudly:
“You may keep all of the rewards in store for the obedient animals, I will take all of the punishments reserved for the strays.”

Freedom is paid for with responsibility, accepting the consequence of my actions and inactions. I will try to be faithful to my purest impulses, to my open hearted wonderment and willingness. I will accept my worst nature, my cowardly yearnings, as they are mine too, and I will be the one to master them with open eyes and a gentle hand.

I hear them coming with the force of a train, my habits begin to creak. The pain begins. They bring their own habits, they exhibit them. Their hands move wildly. Their voices rattle the walls.
But it is the clash of my habits with theirs which hurts. It is the reaction of one bio-machine to another. The Other has a different set of habits. There is no fault. There is only learned mechanicality. The differences are what cause the pain. The clash between what I want and what they are. The clash between how I want things to be and what Is at the moment. It is the clash that causes the pain. Not the Other. The Other is just me in a different form.

My kingdom is in the invisible heavens and hells, embedded in every shadow and every reflection, in every grain of sand and every tear drop. I am all that have breathed and ever will breathe. May I live in small gestures that grow grander, may I flow through subtle shapes that refuse to take a final form, may I rest on gentle hues and whispered murmurs, may I flourish under this veil of mortality. May I then invite then into me with a true and open heart:
"Come in! Come in! I am ready!"

Love Song

You found me,

Alone,
With a camera,
Staring at the fields of train cars
and the colored boxes that sail the seas.

And I smiled at the clouds

You found me
And you saw me through the scratched glass
You saw me,
through the layers I had yet to scrub
There were doors
Heavy gates
Wooden posts and splinters

And with my camera
Staring at those buildings that passed
The signs
The espresso cup
that revolutionized the world

I saw you
Moving like a black haze through yellow lights
And woolen coats
and all those eyes that never looked

And that camera
The closed lens
The open lens that brought you
The stairs
The door
Open just a crack
That train, forever moving
Back and forth
Back and forth
Moving all of us

Moving me towards you
You towards me

And now the song plays
Now the tears flow like they never have
Now the song plays and the piano dances
And I wonder how
it could have ever been different
I never played
I never danced
I never sang
And now I play
And now I sing
And now I dance
Now there is music
Streaming right in
And your hands move
Through buttons and channels and
I listen
Dancing to your music
Watching as it flies towards me
in great gusts of red and blue
and black.

The New World Of Sticks

The sun shines down on the little garden, bathing it in a strong heat that would bring small buds to bloom. The narrow rectangular yard is enclosed by a tall wooden fence and stuffed with young gardenia trees and a hedge of rosemary and lavender. It is a garden for smelling above all else, the shrubbery was planted with the nose in mind and not the eyes. Jasmine covers the back fence, transforming the wooden planks of the border into a wall of green and white speckles.
Beneath the lavender blooms, nearly hidden from sight below the thicket of pale green and purple is a young girl. Her bare feet are caked in dust, creating the look of a pale brown shoe that is corrected only by looking at the small toes tipped in pink nail polish. She squats close to the ground and her long brown braided hair sweeps along the soil like the tender caress of a broom.
The girl does not notice her hair, tipped with the earth’s dust, nor the shoes of soil she wears, all her attention is on the ground before her. She has arranged a series of vertical sticks in a circle and some tender green leaves from the jasmine bush have been impaled on thin twigs, creating flags for her city beneath the lavender canopy.
She has been in the same spot for hours, missing the lunch of macaroni and cheese her mother prepared and also the visit from her friend Dave from next door. She didn’t hear them calling or feel the pangs of hunger. Nothing distracted her from creation. She created a world, and she could feel nothing but the rush of excitement as the small city of wood and leaves came together.
She sits still, adding the last touches of thin sticks and then places one solitary lavender stem in the center of the city-circle. The metal latch of the back gate slams closes and she looks up. Through the fragrant stems she sees her brother walking along the back side of the house, approaching the door that leads to his bedroom in the converted garage.
“Sean!!” she cries excitedly. She jumps up, her pigtails gathering a few yellowed leafs as she runs through a hedge of geraniums. “Sean, come look at what I made. It’s a whole city. A whole world!”
He looks at her, at the little girl whose feet are covered in dirt, this little girl that smells of salt and sun and flowers. She’s running towards him, about to grab onto him as she always has.
“Mattie! Stop! You’re all dirty and I’m on my way somewhere. Don’t get me dirty, I don’t have time to change.”
“Sean! Come look at what I made,” she squeals excitedly, not hearing him.
“Don’t get me dirty Mattie, I’ll come look, but don’t get me all dirty.”
“Okay” she says, slowing down and turning in the direction of the lavender bush, “It’s this way. It’s in here.”
Sean walks towards the bushes and comes to the edge where the purple stalks become a wall. Mattie steps into the narrow path she has created among the lavender. She turns to him, “you have to come in to see it.”
Sean rolls his eyes. “Mattie, I told you…I can’t go in there, I’m going to get all messed up, I’m on my way somewhere. I’m going to get covered in that stuff.”
“Please, it’s so cool. I don’t want anyone to see it but you, it’s a whole world. It’s such a special place.”
“Look, I can’t get in there now, but I’ll look at it later, okay?”
She looks at him, wearing his clean jeans and crisp black blazer. He looks nice, and she wonders who he is going to see.
“Okay, you look nice. I guess you shouldn’t get all dirty, it’s just a little world. Maybe you can see it tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I’ll check it out tomorrow. I gotta go grab my stuff and leave now, okay?”
She nods and then Sean turns and walks towards his bedroom door. She takes another five steps and then kneels, her hair sweeping the soil once more. She takes a deep breath, then starts to breathe into the circle of the new world. Her breath becomes a slight wind and all the flags of leaves begin to flutter.

Wedding

The day was drenched in mist that turned into larger drops of rain as she traveled through the twisting tree-lined roads of Marin. The greenery was old and time had created a canopy of leaves above the path of asphalt and motion. She drove through the white mist that turned the trees into a shade of magical green and scented the air with eucalyptus and lavender. As the drops hit her windshield she wondered if a bride’s wedding was being ruined. She would find out soon.
She had on her uniform of tight black Dickies and a collared black shirt. Neither of the garments fit her very well. The pants were just slightly too short, even for her 5’3 frame, and they seemed to like to burrow themselves between the cheeks of her ass. It was always slightly uncomfortable, and during each catering event, she would vow to get some new ones, but then she would forget again until the next wedding required they be pulled out of the closet again, and then she would remember and pull herself into them.
She drove until she found the Marin Art and Garden Center which was a sprawling piece of land with many chambers that could host multiple functions at the same time. The sound of a fountain greeted her as she walked up the couple of steps that separated the parking lot from the entrance. She walked up a curving path that passed a bursting rose garden that smelled electric in the slightly muggy air. After a sharp right at the rose garden, she followed the path that led to a green lawn.
On the lawn, but slightly to the right, was a long rectangular three-sided tent. One wall was open and exposed the interior. There were multiple rugs on the ground that covered and protected it against the damp grass. In the center was a foot tall coffee table that held a couple of glass votives with candles. Dozens of pillows were strewn on the ground, creating a harem-style lounge area. To the left of the soaked lawn was a narrow wooden deck that was covered in a slanted beige canopy of canvas. The moist air released the scent of the deck. Even after countless people had tread upon it, it still held the power of the smell. The deck was met with sliding glass doors that opened into the rectangular banquet hall and hidden from sight, the kitchen.
There were a couple of people inside, dressed in black, rolling tables out from their storage space in the large closet. A couple of others were carrying plastic crates of plates and wine glasses and ceramic coffee cups up from the dolly which was parked out by the stairs that led to another storage shed. She quickly found out what tasks needed to be done. She spent the next hour and a half arranging place settings and unfolding chairs and rolling napkins into little scrolls.
Her supervisor gathered all the people in black into a little group.
“Okay, we got word that it is dumping up on Mt. Tam (the place were the ceremony was taking place). They said that they are coming here a little earlier than expected. Everyone is cold and wet and grouchy. The kitchen is brewing some hot tea for them now. Please do your best to make everyone feel really welcome and cared for, even if they are grouchy.”
Everyone nodded.
“So lets do our best to finish everything up before they get here. Is there someone who can man the tea station?”
“Sure, I can.”
She walked to the rectangular table adorned with a crisp white table cloth and votives that fought against the wind to remain lit.
Within a couple minutes, guests started arriving. She smiled at them as they passed and offered them some tea. Most were more than friendly and quite grateful to be given something warm. Most of the women were wearing short dresses, wholly unprepared for the task of looking nice and staying warm, it was one or the other.
After a while, a crowd had gathered below the canopy, although some had refused to stand out in the drizzle any longer and sat at their circular tables in the banquet room. There was the comfortable murmur of chit chat over cocktails.
Then an angular small white car, one that could have been seen in England in the early 60s, drove down the narrow asphalt pathway that ran between the grass of the harem tent and the larger lawn. Applause erupted among the guests and two tall people emerged into the drizzle that thudded against a canopy tent.
The bride was olive skinned and lean. Her dark hair was pulled back into a twisted elegant braid that was bundled near her neck. Her dress was sleeveless, reveling her bony shoulders. The skirt of her pure white dress was long and skimmed the wet grass. The groom, just a little taller than she was, was wearing a gray suit to match the color of the clouds.
Her father, waiting beneath the canopy, held a microphone in his hand. In his thick Israeli accent he said, “if it’s going to rain, then let it rain!”
The DJ sparked a Michael Jackson song as the father jumped out into the drizzle and ran to his daughter with open arms, a wide smile spreading across his face. He grabbed his son-in-law and kissed him on the forehead. Other guests followed his lead. Some women took off their shoes and stepped into the soft earth. The couple was surrounded by fifty people, each one giving them hugs and words of congratulations. The majority of the guests stayed below the eaves, watching the merriment from afar.
The girl in black watched with the crowd below the eaves. She shared their joy. Tears came to her eyes. She heard the voice of her friend, “let the energy flow through you.”
The song faded and then a Klezmer band, which stood close to the couple, beneath the cover of trees, burst into song. The people quickly formed into a circle, bound by clasped hands. The circle spun and spun and eventually a small inner circle formed of the bride, the groom, the father of the bride and two other people. They spun in the opposite direction of the larger circle.
Four men stood close to a padded chair that had been draped in satin cloth. The bride sat in it and the group each took a chair leg and hoisted her high up into the air, bouncing her up and down. The bride clung onto the seat with her white-knuckled hands. Complete joy and terror mingled on her face, she let out a scream as the men lifted her chair up and down. The groom held onto a marigold colored napkin, he swung it around the air like a stripper that had just taken off his first garment. He swung it and then tossed it gently to his bride, she too waved it in the air. Then she held the napkin out to him and he managed to grab an end of it and they both held on as their chairs moved un-rhythmically.
The night was long. There were small plates of salad delivered and cleared. Family-style plates of food were delivered to each table. Hundreds and hundreds of different shaped glasses that were filled and then put back dirty into the plastic crates in which they arrived. The girl in black listened to loving toasts and worked as hard as she could to make sure everyone at her assigned tables was content.
Then the guests left one by one and soon is was how it began, with a small crew dressed in black. They were just about done, she was finishing the final sweep of the deck area. She looked into the night, into the lawn area where the two satin covered chairs of the bride and groom sat beneath the trees. But in the groom’s seat, was the leader of the Klezmer band. She had seen him walking around all night without any shoes on, wandering between the bar and the harem-lounge area. She smiled at him.
“What do you think it would be like to be married?” he asked into the dark night.
Many thoughts filled her mind, but she didn’t way anything.
“Come and imagine it with me,” he said.
She went to sit down on the chair, carrying her broom beside her like a scepter.
“Oh, it’s wet,” she said surprised. She stood.
“Okay, we can stand,” he said.
She looked into the empty lawn of grass, at the three horizontal strings of rounds bulbs that hung artfully above the grass. She imagined dancing and laughter and a happy father. She looked at the man next to her.
“I’m sure that day would be very nice, but I just can’t picture myself in it. I don’t think it is something that would happen for me. I feel like I am married already, but I can’t imagine a party like this.”
He smiled, his eyes nearly closed slits.
“Look at all those lights hanging up, no one owns the light, no one owns the light. Go to where the light is.”
She nodded and then he smiled. He nodded distantly and then smiled again. He seemed to shrink, as though something had shifted. He disappeared into the night, stepping back into the tent and the trees.

Not Dying

I am not dying, although many will think that I am. My flesh is no longer pink as they remember, and the sun does not spend hours upon my skin as in years past. The people who once held me no longer remember my arms. The ones who laughed with me will scarcely remember my form or the deepness of my singing voice. My name will come up at parties, where friends who have grown wider and older will remember the times of the past, and I will fit into the pieces of the puzzle and they will think of me and wonder about my grave.
Off of what cliff did I walk?
Under what star do I now breathe and work?
No one has heard from me. No one has seen me. No one truly ever did.
But I am not dying, I am not hidden in the dark places between rocks.
I am not dying, I am only becoming invisible.
Like the flickering lights of a TV set, I am dwindling, declining in physical substance. Atoms have torn apart, taking with them my curly hair and with them the cheeks some will remember and with them the person once seen.
To those who knew me, I am gone. A name of the past, a character in a book that had long since gathered dust on the highest shelf. I am becoming invisible to the ones that walked and cried and laughed with me….the ones who blindly pushed me on the path and the ones who could see it coming.
They can no longer see me, but if they look, they might get a glimpse of the traces I leave behind. Images and sounds, vibrant colors with ribbons of truth that dangle from the ends.
They cannot see me, just the electrified trail that buzzes when seen.
And I am Nameless now, even my picture flickers from the pages of an album, even the memory will crumble with the coming years.
I am quiet, formless, traveling the blue roads. Moving forward, using the past, delving into it with the newfound realization of form and language. Using scissors and glue and rocks and wind and little green bits to turn it all over and examine it again, looking for the truths, looking for the sparks, amazed at the questions and wanting and head-banging. Looking at it all, holding it like a child makes sandcastles, each piece a wonderful part of the puzzle, the earth at my feet, the stardust inside that can either push me forward or pull me back, depending on the method used.
I am walking forward, under a blue sun, under a red covered sky, I move towards the distant dreaming deserts. A place seen in dreams, a place that might not be…but moving forward still.
I am not dying, I am not gone, it is only to those who look with the old eyes, the ones who cannot find the colored ribbons, the sounds that used to make a body shiver and now exalt the remains of flesh.
This is the new, the invisible to those without careful eyes.
To the one that I stepped away from, to the ones who may never know me again, yes, to those people, I am not dying. To them, I am already dead.

No Cherries

Maybe you were right, silly little puddy headed boy sitting on the forest green carpet in a dim living room. An old man is snoring on a couch in an adjacent room and you are questioning me, why the masks?
Why the masks? You ask me, but you aren’t really asking, you already have an answer in mind.
You tell me I am very sad. Ha. Of course I am. That is all that I am. I am the sound you hear when you place your ear to a seashell, that gentle whoosh of nothingness that they say is the sea. When you strip me of those scary masks and paints and then tear away the pinkish flesh we are so accustomed to seeing each other in and then shred off all the layers of muscle and break the bones like glass and watch all of the vital organs explode like balloons filled with red paint punctured by an artists dart, all that is left is a silent wailing, a complete and utter sadness.
That is why I smile so much on the average day, and joke as often as I can, because on the surface I can do what in the depths I am not able to do. One is to compensate for the other. One is a scattered toe taping dance desperate to stave the other off.
One day I will not have a face to curl up into this silly grin. Silly grin will be gone, gone, down the drain, and nothing is all that I will be. A little bit of nothing that was briefly something, a something no more unique than one blade of grass is from another, a something that could be blotted out and never be missed by anybody. A replaceable little something coating an endless nothingness.
I told you that wasn’t the point. That I didn’t need to be analyzed. I was fine. I was right then, just fine, as fine as I have ever been or ever will be. Yes I am sad, but that is unimportant. The I in that phrase makes the sad completely insignificant because I am very, very, very forgettable.
I confuse you and make no sense because I don’t seem to want what you want, but of course everybody wants the same things, so what is it that’s got me all twisted up? You wonder and you guess, stabbing in the dark with your words and questions like a little oriental man pulling down the arm on a slot machine, hoping to get three cherries, hoping for the sirens and flashing lights and the sweet “ca ching” of everything you ever wanted cascading into your hands, waiting for the sigh and surrender, but you get a lemon, a cobra, and a green skull.
What the hell is this? I tell you to beat it. Off you go, and away I fly to wear my masks and be sad and embrace a philosophy that agrees that suffering is unavoidable, coming soon to an experience that is you (or in this case me). We are going to be alone you see, forever and ever, always meeting strangers and finding ways to paint them as familiar, or maybe getting shredded up by our unaccountable differences, like those blades of grass I mentioned, being chewed mercilessly by the glittering steel blades of a gas powered lawn mower.
AHHHHHHHH!
Then we’re gone, or crippled, gimping around dispensing lemons and cobras and skulls out of our mouths, the way the witches of Eastwick made folks dispense cherries, an unending supply coming from what seems like nowhere.
Cha cha cha.
You were right. I am sad. Most likely you thought that you could make me happy, like I thought I could make you happy by distracting you from your concerns when we were youngsters. That’s where you were wrong. You can not make me happy. Maybe you are capable of experience happiness. I am not. Happy is just another mask, a temporal state. I am sad all the way through. Life and death both make me want to cry. They both make me laugh.
Existence is suffering. And existence is endless.
I might as well get used to it.
Maybe I’ll learn to like it.

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.

An Endless Walk That Spans The Length Of Time

An endless walk that spans the length of time. The number of fog covered mountain passes defies the measurement of mathematicians. They are also invisible within the vast void of my imagination. They sprinkle their theories and equations, erupting in sums, moving though suns, embedded within orange planets of amber. I sit on a chaise lounge in Miami, sipping cool tea and contemplating the cause of my condensation. Pastel buildings surround me and brown asses jiggle past my hands every three seconds. Iridescent beads drip towards my belly, finding solace within the deep hole of my belly button. Quickly, you come and suck them out, the last bit of water that sits upon my surface. The endless desert stretches taught on this pale sand. Mirages are liberally dosed within all my crevasses, and there are many. Explorers have mapped the contours of a an armpit, but only you have discovered the valley of date trees. Barefooted men have found their way to these fields, a spectacle of tall trees, geometric in their planted patterns. Row after row, each springs forth from the land at 36 inch intervals. Down to the millimeter, the measure is exact, the desire of a lost king. Shedding their names and memories, the bald headed men, each uniformly dressed in red shirts and white slacks, they cling to the bark with their overdeveloped leg muscles. It is their thighs alone that keep them upright, that keep them from plunging head first into the cracked silver earth. A machete in their mouths, they move like a battalion of hungry military men, in search of the fruits that will shed them with endless wealth.
Move you fools, higher still!
The branches sag, the boughs not easily giving up their seeds. Their meaty flesh. The hunger within pushes them beyond any limit. The limit of words or biological strength. The sounds of high ringing can be heard even clearer at this height. Ring inside, the clanging pushes this energy even further past the doorway of eternal glimpses.
Let me shine with the glory of a thousand lifetimes, a thousand deaths that defy the meaning of logic, the meaning of these words, bound in a leather bound dictionary and carried by a little Asian schoolgirl in her backpack. You can use it for the test, but the memory will soon be forgotten.
It’s not enough to remember, you must learn.
You must learn to do.
Must learn how to do.
There is this…or the other.
Not doing.
Checking out. To swim in a vast pool of misery and human dread. The endless search for nothing. Can you find something in an illusion? Can you project your own lifetime and its own conclusion?
The death of my ancestors. The death of me comes closer each day. I only hope that it happens in the bed of my lover. May I have my brains freshly tasted and be buried beneath the sage. Burn my leaves. Smell me before the invocation.
If I have learned to do before then, perhaps I will enter, perhaps I will dance inside of you.
Perhaps I will move with all the atmospheric movement you shall circulate within the earthly confines of a café full of curiously scared wide-eyed fools.
When you reach for me, I will be the same as I am now.
The same as it ever was.

Goals and Movement

He pushed the heavy shopping cart by leaning forward and resting all his weight on the metal handle. The cart was specially heavy today because they had loaded it with many extra supplies which they intended to use for trade. His woman had found an abandoned baby stroller just a couple of days earlier.
She was so happy when she came running up to him in the late morning, right when he was sitting among a group of friends close to the old smelly tunnel covered in moss and moist with old rain water. She ran right up to him and said: "I found something good. You have to come and help me get it!" but he was too aware of the looks that the other men gave each other as she approached, so he replied: "I don’t have to do nothing woman. I am free as a bird. That’s what makes us special. That’s what keeps us going! Look around!" and he signaled to all the men that sat around him, with their eyes bubbling up red and crisscrossed with sharp red veins and their blackened gloves which protected their blackened hands and their pants that smelled of old sweat and piss and shit and their chins still dribbling with beer and all of them nodded back at her, acknowledging their freedom, their carefree lifestyle which allowed them to do as they wished, and he nodded once again, looking back at her: "See, free as birds and you don’t tell me what to do!" Right then she realized her mistake and slid backwards a little and she whispered, as if to nobody: "I know where it is. Just tell me when you feel like getting it. I can wait." And she walked away and sat by a tall tree and slowly chewed on an old chocolate bar that she had been saving in the side pocket of her old ripped up pants.
About an hour later, he came over to her and said: "Don’t ever pull something like that again! You know that we have little, but at least we have our reputation!" and she nodded and agreed that she had made a mistake and then she led him to where the baby stroller was hiding, where someone had thrown it away in the middle of a web of branches that hung over a pit of trash. He saw it and smiled and nodded to her and he could tell right away that it would come in very handy for them, so he said: "Look after my cart and I will climb around the trees and will get it."
All of that had been a couple of days earlier. The next two days they spent begging pedestrians on Haight street for a little change here and there and they bought old things from other beggars and they scavenged through trash bins and they looked in the metal bins outside of the houses and they even stole a few beers from the local liquor store and finally they were ready. They wrapped it all in bags and loaded up the shopping cart, which always keeled over to the side because one of the wheels was bent, and they loaded up the baby stroller which she had found and he had managed to rescue.
When everything was ready, he said to her: "Now we will go for a long walk, you understand? I know you haven’t been with me long, but now you have to walk with me." She was still fixing the baby stroller just right so that things wouldn’t fall off when she pushed it. When the sound of his voice came to her, she looked up at him, clearing some thick dark snot from her nose, "Sure thing… but where are we going?" He smiled and looked at her with sharp eyes, "We’re going all the way to the beach. There’s a whole other crew over there and I’m friends with some of them. They always have some good stuff, it’s easier to get it over there, but other things you can’t get at all. So we will bring them some of this stuff and they will go crazy happy and then they will give us some of what we want." She nodded, "You sure? I wouldn’t want to go all the way over there for nothing." He frowned and leaned over her, suddenly terribly disappointed that he had shared this knowledge with her. "Look, I’m going all the way to the beach, I’m going to see the crew that’s over there, they’re friends of mine. You can come along if you want to, or you can stay here and wait, or you can go to hell for all I care…" She looked up at him with wide eyes and he was breathing hard and looking down at her with a smirk in his face, and his cheeks were stained with grease and old dirt and his eyes were bloodshot and his chin was all gooey with trails of saliva. He took a deep breath and then he talked again. "Look, it’s better if you come, because I can’t push the cart and the baby stroller at the same time, and now we have more shit, so we have more responsibilities… you can push the stroller, I will push the cart... are you ready?" She shrugged and stood up and said: "Yeah, I’m ready. I don’t have nothing else to do right?" "Right," he said and they started on their way.
Now they were just over a third of the way there and he couldn’t say out lout what he was thinking because what he was thinking resembled too much what she had said: "What if they don’t have nothing? What if they’re not even there?’ and the sweat was dripping over his face, and down his back, and his arms were hurting and his legs were hurting and he was pushing as hard as he could but the heavy cart moved so slowly that it sometimes seemed that it wasn’t moving at all. She was quiet next to him, also drenched in sweat but not as bad as him, and pushing on the stroller and looking ahead, all the way to where a sliver of white and blue outlined their final destination.
They came to a corner and stopped while a loud truck passed by. He grunted and gasped for breath and she said: "You alright?" and he said "Yeah, I just need to rest for a bit." She nodded and took a deep breath herself, looking up at the trees and at few birds that were flying among the branches. "Let’s rest a little, but let’s not stop too long. We have to make it all the way to the beach today. You said so yourself." He nodded and grabbed onto the handle of the heavy cart again. "Yeah, I know I said so and we’re going. I can rest a bit later. I think we’ll make it today." She nodded and pushed the stroller across the street. "Oh, we will. I know we will. You said so yourself." And they slowly crossed the corner, and kept on slowly making their way to the beach. "You said so yourself. You sure did…"

Anything

I lost control of my kite, my precious kite. Back in the days of darkness when I lived in a cage and could not hold my own babies on their birthdays I dreamed that one day I would stand with them on a hilltop and sail a kite over the blue with them. Now I can fly a kite and we have kept it up on some bright clear days, but then, on some other days, windy days like this, I’ve lost my grip and it sails away without me. Goodbye for now, kite.
I want desperately to say something but I don’t know what it is that I wish to say. I want to tell you NOTHING. I want to growl like a bear, whine like a dog, and coo like a dove. I want to be plugged into the wall like an appliance and sing my electrified robot love into the dark jealous night. I’d like to live in you, fade into you, and drink from the blue vial, stage my own death, run wild through life rather than become such a meek shade that all I shall inherit is dirt and the taste of a master’s boot heel. I have longed, since before I gasped my first breath, to do something. I came screaming into this world with a purpose which I cannot put into words, a purpose that is a roar, and my intent for following through with this impulse to live is stronger than steel. For a moment I may wax feeble, then at the last moment, as I sink into the pillowy soft depths of sleep, I remember to make a terrible sound, a sound which will shake the earth to it’s foundation and cause the mountains and plains to be shed like a skin and the oceans to leap out into the black abyss.
I do not want to loose a moment, patience has been a hard won upgrade. Saying something, anything at all is better than slipping quietly from birth to death. I want to live. I want LIFE with the capital letters. Let me manipulate this tender dream flesh, this world skin, until I have achieved that mysterious something which I intuit cannot be achieved, but is my purpose none the less.
If I am chaos, if my words are chaos, then at least they are something. At least they are here. I lack discipline. Without it I will never be able to realize my desire. This heart filled to the brim with sloppy passions and fears like tiny bent paper clips- cold malleable things that cannot hold any thing together, the pages will blow away in the wind despite motions to the contrary, and yet I keep the bent paper clips as if they will somehow do me some good.
I do not think that I will have to die.
Then I accept that I will but I cannot believe that I might have to return to my dark cell someday, my cold dripping cage.
Anything I say is silly. Everything I say is silly.
I can’t seem to hold myself together. I cannot even find the glow right now, the warmth that emanates from within me and spreads out across the universe, a warmth that is you, a heat that I call love. My cup overflowed, I let too much wine spill out upon the cold stone steps.
Damn machine, damn animal.
Damn metal spider like staples trying to hold me together at the seems. My molar is vibrating and I can see myself as a crazy man on the streets smiling with empty rubbery pink gums teeth long since removed with a dirty pair of pliers.
When I see those people, I know it’s me. I know, I know. I can look into their eyes and say, "I Know. I know it was real. I know it because things like that have happened to me"
They are real and they are unreal, these strange dreams I am dreaming.
I burn my soup. I burn cookies almost every day, and every day I try again to make good cookies but I always burn them. They are lumpy when I wish they were smooth, and smooth when I wish they would be puffy. I can’t find the right recipe Every morning dirty dishes wait for me and I try to clean them. I clean them all day long and still they are there in the morning waiting for me. I can’t get a fresh start, I long for a clean slate, a day to dawn upon which I awaken and everything is set and ready for me to run.
But instead each day my running shoes are tied together at the laces and my gym clothes are dirty and wrinkled and I can’t get them out of my locker because I don’t know how to open the combination lock and no one can take the time to show me how.
Everyone else knows, they can all do it, but I can’t because I found a gold ring in the gutter walking home from school, clothed in my grandfathers military jacket and lost it a year later changing before PE.
I can’t do it because my parents disappeared so they couldn’t teach me how to do it.
I couldn’t do it because my teachers loathed me because everyone else loathed them. I think they liked to see me fail because then my peers could turn their jeers and criticism on me and forget all about the teacher who can now turn while they’re not looking and wipe the beads of sweat from their forehead unnoticed. Everyone I knew before you lied to me. I didn’t realize it, or I couldn’t believe it or I wanted to excuse them for it so that everything would be all right. Everyone before you wanted me to fail whether they admitted that fact to themselves or not. They wanted me to fail so that I would stay with them, be more like them, or give them someone to whip.
You bought me a kite. You put my dream directly into my hands. We bought it at a drug store off of mission and I took my girls to a cliff near the sea and we flew the kite until the wind acted savagely and tried to tear it away from us.
Today I lost it, but tomorrow it will be back.
Tomorrow I will fly it again.

The Many Layers of Truth and Lies

I walked down McAllister in a mood of gentle openness and curiosity. The sky was bright blue, there was a chilly wind that roamed over my skin and the sun was just starting to break through the clouds. It was about eleven in the morning and I was coming back from my court appointment where my former wife had not even bothered to show up, leaving me with the white angry bull dog face of her attorney and the apologetic round little face of mine. As I walked away from the Civic Center, I talked on the phone for a while and I let my eyes roam over the people that walked beside me: a little group of young students in bright T-shirts and shorts, a beautiful woman across the street in tight jeans and a dark brown sweater, a short black guy with a thick black jacket that stared back at me in anger when I looked at him, a fat homeless woman that told her strange tale in a constant flow of gibberish that trailed off into the wind. I looked southward as I crossed Leavenworth to the medium sized building across the street and I realized that the Church of Scientology was no longer there. I realized that I had seen it many times and I’d had the impulse many times of walking in and posing as an innocent and curious seeker ready to be swallowed up by the waiting jaws of their institutionalized machinery. Now it was gone and I wondered if I would ever figure out where it had moved to. For a moment I imagined that maybe San Francisco had rejected them so profoundly and completely that they had been forced to move away, giving up their elegant building for a two story flat eyesore in the midst of a suburban corporate park. I regretted never having walked in but I shrugged my shoulders and continued walking.
I walked eastward on Market and arrived at Powell. There I could have kept on walking down Market but I decided to turn north and take some pictures of the cable cars and the tourists that mobbed around them. Up the block, I was stopped by two blonde girls in elegant dark clothing. They both smiled at me in the vaguely cold and friendly tones of salesmen and they handed me a flier for the Church of Scientology. I read it carefully: "From L. Ron Hubbard himself – An Introduction to Scientology- the only filmed interview". "Only" was underlined and I remembered a black and white clip I had seen of him talking behind a desk and I wondered if it was the same. I asked one of the blonde girls when the video was showing and she said: "Every hour, for free." And she smiled broadly, clearly pleased with my curiosity. I asked where the place was located and she said about fifteen minutes from where we were, right in front of the Transamerica Building. I smiled and nodded and said thanks and kept on walking. I remembered Vollman’s statement that he couldn’t really understand a writer until he had at least seen a picture of them, a video or film would be even better. There were subtle messages that could only be communicated through the face and the hands and the body, subtle messages that could drastically change the meaning of the cold statements of fact. I continued walking calmly, but moving in the general direction of the Transamerica building.
A short time after noon I arrived at a narrow corner where Columbus Ave met Montgomery at a sharp angle. There, at the tip of the triangular city block, was the new Scientology building, marked by a stylized cross and a strange symbol involving two triangles and a curved "S" shape that resembled a snake. I walked directly inside and saw two young men in white shirts and black pants and very trimmed short hair cuts. They both resembled Mormon missionaries and, as I listened to their last few words before they turned towards me, I realized that they had just walked in from a missionary expedition through the streets of the city. Behind them were two blonde girls, one of them behind a circular desk. All of them were standing and they all looked at me intently as I walked in. I spoke up first: "I got a flier about a film that’s being shown here every hour… a filmed interview with L. Ron Hubbard." The blonde girl behind the desk smiled and said: "Yes! I remember you! Come right in!" I then realized she was the same blonde girl I had met just about twenty minutes earlier by Powell. She extended her hand and said: "I am Audrey." I shook her hand calmly and said: "Hi Audrey, I am Juan." She pointed to her fellow blonde girl, a very thin and young little creature that reminded me of another friend I had once had under similar circumstances, in the entrails of a structure devoted to the search for life beyond structures. "Abby will show you in. Just follow her." I realized that they were all wearing white and black. It wasn’t exactly a uniform because they wore it in different styles and in different combinations, but in a group it clearly showed a semblance of unity.
The inside of the building was a mixture of a corporate bank and an old fashioned church. Along the windows that ran parallel to Columbus avenue there was a sequence of desks, arranged to give the illusion of slight privacy as they were covered by semi circular displays. Each desk had a phone, and office supplies and a comfortable chair on one end facing a couple of smaller chairs on the other. All of the desks were empty. Across from the desks was another set of semi circular displays. Behind those displays was a large meeting room where there were wooden chairs arranged in concentric semi circles. At the heart of the circles was a podium with a sculpture of L. Ron Hubbard upon it and a large cross with arrows crossing at its center, the same symbol that was displayed outside the building. The little blonde girl carefully walked me into a small room with a TV set, a DVD player and a few chairs. "This is from the only full interview that he ever gave. It’s the best way to hear about it, direct from the horse’s mouth, you know? It’s been carefully colorized because it was filmed back in 1967 or 1968… something like that. I will leave you here to watch it and then I will come back so you can fill out a survey to let us know what you thought about it and if you have any questions. Do you want the light on or off?" I asked her to turn it off. Then she closed the door and I was alone with a smiling L. Ron Hubbard.
My first impression was of strength, a man with a lot of experience and ability that was overflowing with confidence in himself. His face was wide and white, his mouth curled downward as he talked and it opened up further than seemed reasonable. It vaguely reminded me of a strange underwater monster that one might encounter in the midst of a colorful dream. His eyes were alive with expressiveness and calculated warmth. After the first wave of pure strength, calculation was the next layer that seemed dominant in his manifestations. Every word was carefully planned for effect. In this complete and masterful calculation he reminded me of a very good salesman or a politician, one that knows what to say, how to say it and when to say it. As he talked more, as he claimed that all he knew he had discovered on his own, as he claimed that there could be no contradiction between Scientology and any other religion, as he said that the only purpose of his organization was to help "able" people to become more "able", I began to notice the layers. There was a very thin layer of communication where he was simply stating the truth as he knew it. There was another layer under that where he was turning on a linguistic fog machine that would obliterate all detail from his speech making sure that nothing could be narrowed down to any kind of specifics. There was yet a third layer where he simply was not telling the truth. Each of these three layers further subdivided and overlapped into each other, constantly moving, constantly shifting, never staying long enough to be locked down into a simple specific statement of fact. As I opened my eyes wider, I saw a trickster avatar in action, a hustler of the highest degree, the kind that once upon a time sold snake oil to unsuspecting farmers in the lost little ghost towns of the American west. But, like I said to my friend a couple of hours later, "just because it’s snake oil, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes work …"
He talked about his quest for knowledge, how he had lived with men of all kinds as he traveled throughout the world, asking himself: "What is man?" How he had come to understand that nobody could give him an answer. He told of how he came to understand that philosophers didn’t have the answer and neither did psychologists. And he saw the answer in spirit. Man was a spirit clothed in a body and a mind. As long as your work with man focused on the body and the mind, it would go nowhere. But if you approached man as a spiritual being, then real progress was possible. Through Scientology, man’s intelligence could be raised, the real intelligence that came from the spirit which only used the mind as a tool. He said that they did not work with insane people. "The insane people are just… well, they are just insane," and as he said it, there was a hint of disgust in his face. He also said that they did not allow people into their organization with "bad backgrounds". The interviewer asked him if good and bad meant the same to Scientologists as they did to the rest of society. He said: "Yes, it’s the same. Exactly the same." He said that it was possible to be a Scientologist while still being part of any other church. He claimed that Scientology unified all religions into the one common purpose of making man be good, and that it clarified that process and accelerated it. All this work would lead to man, individual men, becoming smarter, more able to "deal with the world around them", more able to be "successful", more able to "fulfill their ultimate purpose in life". The interviewer asked what that was and he said: "We have been dropped as spirits onto this planet and it is up to us to figure a way out." To which the interviewer asked: "You say we have been dropped here but what dropped us here?" and he responded: "A Supreme Being… a higher intelligence…" "What other people would call God?" "Sure… what we believe in no way contradicts other religious beliefs."
At one point during the interview he stood up, leaned against the wall with one foot crossed over the other and talked in a more forceful voice. It seemed clear to me that he was voluntarily invoking a different state, a different "god" from the archetypal maelstrom, through a nearly invisible ritual that he knew well and that he had adapted into modern civilized habits so that a sleeping modern man would see it only as a regular man standing up to stretch his legs. In the end, he talked some more about how Scientology could bring about the change that all religions were asking for, that it was not enough to advise man on what to do, he had to be changed through very specific means. He smiled broadly with each statement and his lower lip kept on curving down like a strange kind of big white toad. The DVD ended with a simple written statement that moved up over a moving picture of the Earth floating in space and ended firmly static on the middle of the screen: "Scientology is the fastest growing religion in the world. For one simple reason: It Works." I felt clear and simple sympathy for that statement.
I walked out of the dark little room and looked around the empty space. There was an older Latino man looking at a computerized display down the hall. Otherwise, the whole place seemed to be quiet and alone. I took a quick picture of the church and then the small, thin blonde girl came out of nowhere. She had a clipboard in her hand and she said: "Well? How as it?" I said that it was very good, very informative and that I was glad I had seen it. She asked me to fill out her form and I did so. I responded as honestly and as vaguely as I could to each question. Then I pointed to the display that ran along the little train of desks. "Are those all pictures of him?" She explained that it was a showing of pictures of him and also by him, that he had been an avid photographer most of his life so he had left them with a lot of pictures to document his travels and his very adventurous life. I asked if I could look at the display closely and she invited me to do so. I started with his childhood pictures and even in the earliest of them I could see the same strong eyes, the downward smile, the eagerness for life. In both the vibrancy of his presence and his abilities as a huckster and even in his smooth dismissive arrogance, he reminded me of other teachers I had known, old teachers with a long tail of cosmic dust behind them that lifted them up beyond the ordinary and new teachers just pushing up into their waiting translucent thrones. In his quest there was truth, in his arrival there were lies. The journey that was life always ended with the conclusion that was death. A place like this could then be seen as the propagation of death beyond its single momentary presence. Once he had been a strong fierce skinny boy facing the strange mysteries of the world, travelling through the Far East, through Africa, through the Caribbean, through Europe, all in an endless quest for something that he carried with him all along. Then he came to conclusions, to finished truths and perfected methods, and there he found something to hide, something to protect, something to guard, and the only way to hide it was with lies, and the only way to protect it was with lies and the only way to guard it was with lies. So the many layers of lies protected a kernel of truth, a kernel that may have been a living flower deep in his heart at one time but which might have suffocated a long time ago under the thick blankets of a protective hierarchy.
As I finished looking at the display, another girl I hadn’t seen before came towards me and said: "Don’t leave… Aubrey wanted to talk to you." I assumed it was one of the same girls I had already talked to and I had simply misheard the name. Meanwhile the little blonde girl looked all over the building for a book I had expressed an interest in: a book on Art. She said she created art as well: "Not as a serious profession. But I do like to create, I like to paint, you know?" I said: "Yes, I know." Someone else walked by me, and suddenly there seemed to be at least five or six women of different ages running around, all very aware of me. There was another sequence of displays which I looked at for a moment. These were all about the community work that the church did throughout the world: work with drug addicts, work with criminals, work with entire countries in need of guidance. There was a picture of L. Ron Hubbard handing an African nation the gift of a constitution. There was another picture of a long row of black men auditing each other in a dirty wooden building. Through the many words and images, the colorful displays communicated one clear message: "Look at us. We are good. We do good. Whatever bad things you have heard about us, they are lies. We are good normal people. We are good."
Just as the little blonde girl came back with a thick hardcover book on art and just as I had started to open it, I was called over to a desk by a young brunette. Her demeanor was very corporate, it said to me in unspoken gestures: "You are a potential client. Now I will show you what we can do for you and I will start you on your way into our organization." She introduced herself as Aubrey and shook my hand. Another girl handed her the survey card that I had filled out. She looked at it carefully and smiled at me. I was seated across from her and I was still looking briefly at the thick book on "art". One page said "Message". Another page said "Technique". I looked up at her and smiled and closed the book. Her hair was tied back in a tight little pony tail, her eyes were a little sunken and she was making a distinct effort to hide a bit of anxiousness that coursed through her small body as she dived into her predetermined script.
"So do you have any questions?"
"No, not really. I found the video to be very interesting."
"What is your impression of it?""I see that there is a lot of truth in what he says. I see it as being very similar, at least in principle, to the teachings of Gurdjieff."
"Of who?"
"Gurdjieff. You’ve never heard of him?"
"No," she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders and returned to the sequence as she knew it, "So it says here that you would like to wake up. What do you think prevents you from doing that?"
I smiled and took a breath. I could see L. Ron Hubbard still playing in my mind, I could sense his masterful use of half spoken truths and vague lies. I decided to try the same approach.
"It’s a matter of mastering my thoughts."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I have to be able to control my thoughts."
"Is this something that has been troubling you?"
I laughed slightly. "I think it’s something that troubles all of us, whether we’re aware of it or not."
"What has this prevented you from doing?"
"When left unchecked, it would prevent anyone from being able to fulfill their goals."
"So you are interested in fulfilling goals?""Yes, of course."
"And the problem with your thoughts has prevented you from doing that?"
"As I work more on it, it gets better."
"What do you mean by that?"
I looked at her. I looked at her foot bouncing back and forth as she crossed her right leg over her left. I looked at her eyes as they flew back and forth from me to the other people to the survey note in front of her and then back at me.
"Just like with you right now, you can’t prevent all that movement from happening. It happens unconsciously. It wastes a lot of energy that goes nowhere. It would be the same with my thoughts."
Her eyes opened wide for a moment. Something had gone down the wrong tube, this was not going as planned, but she recovered quickly and returned to her script.
"But specifically, what has this prevented you from doing in your life?"
I grasped at the word "specific". That was exactly what L. Ron Hubbard did not do in his interview, he never talked specifics. In his world, to show specifics was a weakness, it implied vulnerability. This girl had been trained by experts to make her clients vulnerable before she flew in for the close.
"When unchecked, it prevents me from fulfilling my goals."
She asked me a few more questions. As skillfully as I could, I tried to invoke the vague truthfulness of Hubbard with each answer. In doing this, I realized that I had learned something from him, something that was not spoken in language but was communicated through movement, through gesture, through posture, through raw physical invocation and through the shaping of the vibrational quality of the chamber. I cleared my attention and placed it back on her. She invited me to a short course. I said I might be interested in it. She said that it would cost $70 and it was one on one. I was still interested. I said that first I would like to read his book again, his first book "Dianetics" which I had read a long time ago. She suggested another book and gave me a free DVD. She asked me if I had any further questions. I said: "Yes. Can I take your picture?" She immediately jumped up and said "No!". I nodded and asked: "How come?" She said: "What is it for?" I said: "I make art with the pictures I take. I might write something and I would use the picture with it." "She hesitated for a moment and blushed and looked around. Once again, this was not in the script. "I don’t come out good in pictures. I just don’t look good in them. " I shrugged my shoulders. "I think you would look fine." She thought about it some more and then shook her head once more. I shook her hand and slowly walked out the door.
As the cool wind hit my face and the now full blazing sun warmed my skin, I held my thoughts and let the full wave of impressions make its way through me like a full delicious meal that hasn’t been digested yet. All the many girls I had just met inside the building probably had felt something very real upon encountering the church. This thing that they had felt was true and living. Then they had become enmeshed in the layers of protection, in the power structure that held a vast organization together and the glimmer of truth had become ossified, only accessible once again at the moment of converting another. I felt a sincere sympathy for them. Like many others, known and unknown, far away and very near, they were beyond my reach. The organization that stood behind them had the weight of a giant monster and I was just a little clueless musician taking pictures of doors and hallways and lampposts. The only effort I could fulfill for them was to take them in fully, to breathe in their presence and allow their full manifestation to wash through me like cool water. In return for being seen as a "potential convert" I would see them as true individuals, as full people whose spirit had entered the labyrinth of a vast complex church, not unlike the other people around me who had entered a vast corporation, or a military institution or a little school. In opening myself to their full reality, I was touched by the little blonde’s wide innocent eyes and the brunette’s blush when I asked to take her picture. I felt then a clear resonance with the young L. Ron Hubbard, wearing a sailor cap and posing against the railing of a ship against the background of an African jungle. He had lived fully and strong and furiously and had scratched desperately for wakefulness and presence much more than most ever would. If these people chose to make him into a God, then so be it. There were much worse things to do. As for me, I would continue to swim through the layers of vagueness, of lies, of slurred facts and half stated conclusions. In the distance there was truth, and it sometimes became visible through the mist.

The inner church meeting space.

L. Ron Hubbard through the many colored layers.

The second mysterious symbol in the walls outside.