Category: Short Story

I’m pretty sure I can see her eyes looking at me. The corner of her eyes meeting the corner of my eyes. We both look away without knowing the other saw.

I carefully move. I’m on a show. Add a little grace to the move of pinkie, a swirl as I open the zipper. Does she notice? I’ll try to look interesting. Look down the road past the front of the bus. Is there any interesting traffic? Probably not, I don’t remember. I was just trying to make sure I made a suitable post card. For sure she has noticed me.

I take out my ipod. Rummaging through my playlist, my hand at an awkward angle, that I hope looks somewhat natural. With her visibly watching, thnking I’m engrossed, I can see I captivate her. I go through my entire artist list, trying to appear both artistically selective, and non chalant. I wonder if she’s impressed by my music taste? I choose a song, and begin to study the scene around me. The bus driver trying so hard to get his sandwich out of his bag while we’re moving. Some girl clearly wearing to tight underwear talking about where the best place for ice cream after Christmas is. A man of maybe 40 I offend by offering him my seat. Sirens reflecting luminously off the glass next to the drivers head; I nearly leap out of my seat to see some sad spectacle; trying hard to look like the type of person who thinks he might be of some help, scouts the scene, then sits back and looks away, clearly not interested in watching the private scene of someone suffering.

I feel so romantic.

The girl asks if I know where Georgia is. I tell her where it is, and ask her where she’s going. She tells me she’s going home. The conversation starts, and she instigated. I guess this was backwards, me preening, her going for the cheesy line, but the conversation started.

We chit chat and bear our souls in the way that only the supremely confused are. She tells me she’s in economics and wants out. I tell her I’m in university and want out maybe. We don’t make eye contact. We both feel that maybe we’re telling to much. Change of topic to where she’s from (Iran), how miserable the weather is (horrible), and how long buses take (really long).

We’re on safe ground but not really sure we want to be. Her stop comes. We exchange names. We meet each others eyes almost, then her friend taps her on the shoulder, they walk off togethor, and I keep riding on the bus, and I don’t look back.

I open my eyes, forgetful, nothing, spinning my drives, trying to boot up. What is the what is the what is the what is the. My mind functions perfectly, I know everything, just, I haven`t remembered it all yet. It`s there somewhere. And its flooding in, and here I am, becoming me. Yes, yes, yes. I was asleep; that is where I was, and here I am now, here again. Awoken. Alive. Again. A lovely phenomena. I wonder what it will be like to not wake up again? If it will feel any different.

Ahhh, it feels good to stretch my brain, to become myself. I gaze around my room, staring at nothing particular, I just don`t particularly feel like shutting my eyes or staring at nothing; else I have to think of something, and at this particular moment of my consciousness that just doesn`t feel necessary.

Now, why am I up again? Is there a reason? What woke me up? There’s no alarm, but I have a sense of urgency. Do I work today? Could I go back to sleep? I don’t know, but I’m uncurious right now, time is slow and I’m sure whatever in the what it is that I’m going to do for this particular burst of consciousness can wait these few sparse minutes that contains an infinite of blissful moments while I rediscover after the death of sleep the solemn pleasure of being a human being.

I feel myself remembering my past lives. Not in some pseudo-religious way, it’s still too early for that, but rather, my atoms and cells recall to my mind their endless lives as a part of the universe. I was a tree, and I will be a star; right now I am a human being and all the parts of my body are singing praises for they, unlike a tree or a star, it is they that get the privilege of being a part of me at the right now, at the this moment. Here. Cus, well, while a tree might rise to the height of a cloud and gaze solemnly at generations of life built in its shadow, or a star might live for a billion passion filled years, it is only the human, only the human in all the universe, perhaps, who gets this privilege of consciousness. To actually have that gift of not just being an actor in the universe but a spectator also; the only spectator; the spectator who has the inexplicable privilege of seeing the perfection that prevails everywhere.

Ahh, the quite musings of my fresh mind make me smile uncontrollably for a lifetime or a minute. I forget. I, for a moment or a lifetime, feel at peace. Is this death? Is this life? Is this the idea of infinite or nirvana? Perhaps, I will just slip into one infitismile moment and that will be it. Never age, never die, just exist forever right here and right now in this isolated lonely morning. This single second.

The fuck. The fuck. I am standing. I was lying, but I am standing, and I did not tell me body to stand but I am standing and why what the fuck how how. Ok. Cool. Shit. My body is telling my brain. Just chill and let what the fuck just happened register. Why am I standing? Ok. It was because I felt something move on my head, and then the something walked over my face, and the something, some great dark mother fucking thing eclipsed my eye. My home body reacted, thank you very much body: shaking convulsing wrenching, and here I am standing. OK. That’s logical. I guess. But what the fuck was on my head. And more important. Or at least more critical in my deconstruction of events, where is the dark creature now.

I am on guard. The animal in me pushes my brain down and all I do is hunt. Where. Where. Fucker. Where are you. You can’t hide. Where. Where. THERE. I see you. I corner you. Cock sucker you are mine. I will tear you apart. I am big, you are small, and you have bothered a colossus you stupid stupid stupid

But now that I have caught my prey, I wrench the controls away from the animal within me. The danger is passed, and I need to be in control. I always need to be in control. It was a mistake to give up control for that last moment. I was weak. I am always weak. But that doesn’t mean I will always be weak.

I see my darkness. A spider crawling with ponderous slowness across my bare cement floor. I watch him. For the moment, with danger at a safe distance, I am enthralled. Another living beast. You, yes you the spider, you have motives don’t you. But lo, he is horrible, a nightmare beast. Big and bulbous, with that fur that doesn’t belong to the realm of nature but rather to most surreal fantasy. The fucker had been on my head. The fucker had been on my head. The fucker had been on my head. The fucker had been on my head oh god oh god the fucker had been on my head. I feel the primal me attempt to wrench control, to deal with this situation in the right here and the right now and I feel close to letting him but NO I will not be defined by the actions of an animal and NO  I will not give up control of this situation. BACK DOWN SELF. Now. Now. Good. This is me again. Ok. Ok. I want the spider out of here. Now. Where is a cup and a paper towel; loathsome as the beast might be, I don’t want to kill it. I feel that if some great force like me goes around annihilating smaller forces solely because it has the capability then why should whatever god it is we eventually discover not deal with vermin such as myself in the exact same manner. A meaningless gesture on my part, but still a gesture, and it is not the impact of the gesture on the world whose impact I worry about but rather the impact on my personal perception of my own soul.

Bam. The spider is dead. The animal inside me leaves as suddenly as it came and I am left with my desolation. Had the spider ran towards me all of a sudden? I don’t know. But poor pitiful creature. My sincerest apologies are moot, death has caught you, but I still offer them to the universe as condolence. I have affected the pattern of the universe. I have made a change to the organic structure of life. Me. Any causality resulting from this is the fault of me. I add this though to the mountain weighing down the back of my soul, and regard the situation that I have wrought.

Like after bad sex, after the passion is ended, there is this hollowness of the aftermath. Every necessary motion a reminder of the vileness of the deed. I grab a dust pan and sweep. Sorry little fellow. Did you have children? Did you have a wife? Do spiders have wives? I attempt to feel nothing but pure sympathy for the spider, but, underneath my façade in a manner that even my most external emotions recognize my conscious is brimming with rage. Yes, I acted wrong. But the mother fucker was on me. He walked over my eye. He destroyed my nirvana. The world for me is darker for both the entrance and the exit if this little giant monster.

I have to go to work. Oh yeah, that’s it, that’s why I’m up. I’m pretty sure. Or at least I’m pretty sure I said I’d go. I guess I’m obliged. I don’t believe any force in the universe that says it’s going to do something should back down from its requirements. I have said I would do, therefore, I should go. If I am to be a force of entropy, then I shouldn’t say I would do something. Unless that is a part of my entropy. But at the moment, I don’t want to decide whether I am, or am not, a force of chaos, and  therefore or however or maybe or perhaps, I should do those things I said. Even though I don’t have to. Besides, why not. Why not accelerate my engines to full speed and see where my conscious mind takes me unconsciously.

With the grace of unwasted motion I glide to the washroom. I stare myself in the mirror, realizing I’m naked. This makes getting into the shower a bit easier. Perfect. Does this even out my experience with the spider? No. But it is the first step in making amends, paltry though it is. It will be many moments before I am at peace again.

Well, anywise, I shower and brush my teeth and say my prayers and think about many things which for me are very interesting, but I have forgotten them, or at least forgotten to remember them. Life is not so terrible, I did have the pleasure of their thought running through my mind, but I do apologize for not sharing them with you, though truthfully I don’t care that much. However, I do feel that it is necessary for you to know that now, I am standing just inside the door of my apartment (yes I live in an apartment) and have just finished putting on my shoes. I am ready to go outside, to go to work, to be alive; to go about that activity of squandering my infinite with the drudgery of waiting for death to take me away again or again or again. I am smiling, I think.

Now, I could be recounting all of this to you for just the sheer pleasure of communicating what it is to be alive as a me. Perhaps I will do this for you one of these days. But my god, that process is slow or endless and by the time I fully explain to you life as it is for my living we’ll have both realized that we never really lived a life: myself, because I spent consciousness trying to pin down with accurateness the atomic workings of a single moment; and yourself because you fell through the hole of my mind and I greedily will not let you out. You are mine. And why would you want to quit something you have started?

Another digression. Apologies. I was thinking this conscious recollection could go somewhere specific, but, instead  it will go here. I’m not going to tell you the pleasure of my ride on the bus, or the casual interactions I undergo in my environment with its various interesting object and denizens. Rather, I want to tell you about this new door, not my front door (that was further up that page and now we’re down here), that I find myself in front of. A door that I don’t know if it is real or fake, if it is dream or consciousness, if I have walked through the door a thousand times or if it is just my fear of walking through the door which makes its other side seem so familiar. What I do know, or what I claim to know right now but please don’t hold me to that, is that here, in front of me is the door. And I have just knocked.

If you’re curious why I am here, at this door, it is because of my work. And I do have the time while I wait for the door to be answered to explain to you what my job is, but really, even if you do care, I don’t care to explain it. Not, because of laziness but because it is my life and I would rather think about the freedom of clouds or the specific blue of the ocean then to recount my job. I like my job. It gives me a reason to not stop existing. But what it is is simply a job, and really, it is like any job. The door hasn’t opened yet, but that thought is finished. Is it so wrong? Are you curious? The person who would describe to you what their job is, is not who I am, and if that is what you want I would not just ask but implore you to look elsewhere in your reading. You can stay here, I love our communication. But if I am having pleasure and you are displeased them I am greedy, I am robbing you, and while I love you and what you have given me I ask that you leave. Even if you leave me alone. Loneliness is a fear for me, but it is a horror that I can accept.

The door opens and a young Chinese woman opens the door. Without thinking I give her the pleasantries of my work, go through the motions with my body while my mind curiously runs its tentacles over the ladies body and possessions. Ahh the color pink is everywhere, it hurts my vision but I hear that woman and men see colours differently, so perhaps it is beautiful inside her eyes. Oh, there are pictures of a tiniest baby, yet no pictures of an older child. Could it be she has a baby? I accept and absorb everything, my consciousness reveling in the novelty of the surroundings, and I am content that for the moment my moments are full.

But, wait, what was that? My autopilot of conversation is operating smoothly, and I can tell I am talking with her both professionally and with friendliness, but there is something strange in her responses. I don’t understand why, but the penetrating eye every person has in the center of their mind for me suddenly turns to the woman like a spot light. What’s going on? There is a causal alarm going off somewhere, I can’t tell if it is in the house or in my mind. If there is a fire or if my sixth or seventh sense is telling me to be on guard. But my silent confusion is ended, the lady tells me she has something that has finished in the oven she has to deal with. While usually with people in my sort of work this is a less then subtle excuse to get rid of me, this woman, with whatever strangeness it is she possesses right now, it seems more like an invitation. A welcome excuse to bring me into her home, deeper into her life, if only for right now. If only for the fantasy that perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Something. Neither of us knows quite yet.

She is talking to me, but I haven’t really been listening. I now turn my attention to whatever it is she feels is necessary for my knowledge. Ahh. She is a mother, I was right. Ahhh, she is a new immigrant. I guess her language is very foreign, now that I listen to it, I just hadn’t noticed. Ahhh, her husband hasn’t emigrated yet but soon soon soon. And then she, her darling husband, and their beautiful son, they can be all be together. Life, for this strange little woman, will be complete again; it will be as in her dreams.

I think that’s what she’s saying to me but it’s hard to be sure. And besides, just because she’s saying it  doesn’t mean it has any truth or resonance to it. What I do know is she is lonely. Impossibly lonely. Perhaps I constructed unconsciously the story of her husband being away. Perhaps there is no husband. Perhaps I’m just unthinkingly formalizing the painting which my perceptions have painted, but have interpreted to strokes wrong. What is important is that I am aware or the colors. And this woman is lonely; looking at me with eyes too big for her head, expectantly quivering while I speak, then torrenting out words, mostly nonsensical when I stop speaking: the dam of her mind has been breached and out flows all that emotion which had been blocked. I wonder idly, perchance arrogantly, when the last time a person had knocked on this lady’s door.

Blah blah blah blah blah. I feel moderate guilt, this is not the way I promised to perform my job. But I killed that spider this morning, and perhaps if I give a little goodness to this fragile little flower the universe will find some form of equilibrium in how it deals with me. I dunno. I’m bantering though, and I feel good because I’m pretty sure I’m making this little lady feel pretty good. I’m patting myself on the back.

But she freezes for a minute. Stares at me with a mixture of confusion and anger. Why? What had I said? I had asked her where her son was, since the house was so quiet. She is under control again now. But the façade has crumbled. I saw the devil in her soul, and even if this woman herself doesn’t know it, her body knows the malevolence that percolates it’s fiber. And for a minute, this beast revealed itself to me.

The woman is under control. She goes back to bantering. Her son is a wee bit sick with fever and napping. She is a good mother, so at the first sign of any sort of sickness she took him to the doctor, and the local doctor has told her that her baby has a bit of a fever, nothing serious, just to give him some mild off the shelf medicine and to keep him from getting too hot. She is bursting with pride when she tells me that with hard work she has performed the doctor’s orders perfectly. I am feeling strange though. I don’t know why, but I have stopped patting myself on my back. The light is still joyous, the scene still jolly but something in this woman is a vacuum for sucking up my pleasure and I want to get away from her. Fuck whatever it is that has twisted her soul into that devil below the surface. It is my business, as another human being, to care. To give her my empathy and my support. But I am weak. I am weak and I want away from this tattered little beast. From whatever it is that I’m sure I will discover if I stay much longer.

However, horribly, I find myself walking with the woman through her house. Her endless nonsensical sentences have not stopped, but now, they seem to have accelerated. I know her life story. Word for word. Worse yet, I can recount it. She is burning what she says into me. And she is accelerating  Her momentum is pushing me and my levianthic self is being pushed off of my calculated route. Stop! Woman. Free me! But. It is too late. For what, I don’t know; though my body is free this lady has dug her claws into my spirit and it would be murder or suicide to extract myself now.

We are walking, not quicker in speed but quicker and quicker and quicker in mental momentum. I find myself talking freely with her. Telling her my waking dreams, about how my job is and why I do it, about my artistic ambitions and my fear that I am too weak to meet them. Her hand out of nowhere is in my hand I have no idea how it got there. If it was always there. If I took hers, or she took mine, or if just in passing they met sporadically and perfectly. Here they are.

And again, for the third time in this recollection or reconstruction or fabrication or reverie or what have you, I have come to a door. Now, the momentum of my mind, which had been asymptotically accelerating comes to a seismic halt. The supernova is over and what is left is blackness and bleakness and I have not the ambition or capability to walk through the door. To see what it is that this bizarre little woman has brought to show me. I don’t know. I am finished. I am spent. But! That dyadic relationship between the momentum of my mind and the momentum of my body for the first time in the story but the legion time in my life separate, and I continue stumbling forward, trapping my mind as an imprisoned traveller.

My physical momentum causes me to walk through the door with the little lady without missing a step. I remark on how strange it is that I’m here. A piece of me wonders if perhaps I should sleep with the woman, lonely as she is. Another part of me reviles at the notion. But the majority of me is centered on the crib in the center of the room. Not touching any wall, strangely in the dead center; almost a shrine; maybe, indeed it is a shrine. In the perfect middle of the crib is a baby, perfect looking, of no more than a very short life. A new creature. His features fill my vision and I notice that even as young as he is, even with those misshapen features of childhood, he looks like his mother, and for the first time I realize that his mother is beautiful. Impossibly so. And she is standing next to me. Making quiet cooing noises and telling me with compassion to not wake her little god.

I don’t want to acknowledge the death of the little creature in front of me, and for the moment, or for at least this sentence, I will avoid it. I would perhaps tell you my own love of children, my own dream to one day have some of the little guys myself. But my god. My god. This poor woman. This poor woman. This benevolent murderer. I know the words patricide and matricide and fratricide, but what do you call it when you kill your own son? What do you call killing when it’s not murder? An accident? True, accidents may happen, but if the causality is death the word seems too weak.

The crib is in the center of the room. The baby is in the center of the crib. The baby is lying on sack, after sack, after sack of ice. He is using a bag of ice as a pillow. He has a thin bag of ice as a blanket. He is dead. Frozen. Blue. Perhaps this way for weeks. Oh, the poor mother. Oh, the hope that there is no father to have to suffer such desolation. Oh, a dead cub of humanity, the worst sin. Why couldn’t I have protected it. Oh, my mind is spinning, repulsing and crying. I weep, and I weep and I weep. Oh this poor woman. And, this woman. This woman right now is still whispering to me to be quiet. That her baby is sleeping. That he has a fever and needs sleep and to not be warm. And he isn’t warm, she has been a good mother and made sure, just as the doctor ordered, that he doesn’t become warm. Therefore, what he has need of is sleep. And I must let the little baby get some sleep. The little precious baby.

I slowly twist my brain and my head toward the woman, my brain a blank canvas not knowing how to paint this scene. I stare at the woman. Could she not know? How could she not know. But our eyes meet. For an instance, but in that instance we recognize. I fall inside her and am her and touch the inside of her brain and see that she is empty. She is sleeping. She too is dead. Or if not dead hanging from a rope, waiting for the emptiness to find her. But! That is but a part of her. Some other part has grabbed the wheel. Is driving with fury and absurdity; has built a fortress of irrationality that everything is ok, everything is perfect, and this crazed demon met my eye, and wanted confirmation and acknowledgement that indeed the world was correct. That she was a foreigner in a new country, a country where a person is to trust the authorities. She has done as those authorities had instructed her. Therefore, by the logic of the land she now called home she had performed the proper actions; even if things seemed foreign and strange, perhaps uncomfortable, everything was foreign and strange for her in this new country. Ahh! The poor little creature.

I collect myself. I know my actions, but I don’t analyze them. The animal that killed the spider fills me again, works to protect me, to save me from harm. It is telling the little woman, perhaps even jollily, how precious the little baby is. How he looks very strong, and if he looks so strong at so young he will grow up to be a very strong man. A great man. Yes, he is beautiful. Yes, that is the perfect name for him. Oh inside I revile the universe; this is not the reality that the sunny day promised. But either was the spider. Oh little woman, can’t you be free? Can’t you be happy.

Back on the street, here I am, but how? It is over. I feel my mind drifting away from the last scene. Reconstructing it into a paradigm that my memory can accept as the true series of events which just passed. Perhaps I overreacted. Perhaps I saw the baby quiver just a little bit. Of course the baby was alive and sleeping, just as the mother said. I have an imaginative mind and I subconsciously thought the worst just to give my mind some dark entertainment for the day; just to construct a flight of fancy for the sake of curiosity: for the what ifs. I can feel myself accepting this. At least accepting the possibility, and this is good.

I am back home now. Gazing idly at a wall content. Not really thinking about anything important, or at least nothing that would be classified by others as important though I am finding tremendous pleasure in my idle thoughts. Here I am on a white horse, king of somethingorother, somebody to look up to, somebody to dream to be and here I am dreaming it. The woman is out of my head. Forgotten with so many other random entropotic forces that hammer at the walls of my sanity. Those forces who I have to decide whether I am for or against. Again, today, you are my enemy, and my walls have held. If only barely. I am still myself. I will still go to work at a job which is meaningless, even on time because I said I would. I still live in a world which makes sense. I am still one of the denizens of normalcy, still a progenitor in a justified belief in the logical.

A spider, again, comes out of nowhere. With thought, I repulse my animalistic nature, and step on the spider. He is dead instantly. Guilt hits me again, yes, but it is less than before. More manageable. Why take the chance that maybe this spider will walk over my sleeping eyes also. Why take unnecessary risks in a world that wants to be chaotic. I go outside and rub my feet on the soft grass of a neighbor’s lawn. I think superficially that the night is a lovely temperature, that it is the perfect sort of weather for a walk with a friend; I think in tertiary way that it was right for me to kill both spiders, but the second was more correct because I felt less guilt for it: that is how the equation works; I think subliminally, in those voids of my soul whose existence I acknowledge but whose location I’ve never been able to map out, of the lady. The mother of the baby. Of the look, just as she was shutting the door on me and had already said goodbye. The look that perhaps was her letting her guard down for a minute, the look of acknowledgement mind body and soul of the sin that she has committed. The self knowledge of her dissonance. And the refusal to deal with it at the moment. To put it off for a little while longer, just a little. Perhaps the baby had been frozen there for years. Perhaps the world was more crazy then I cared to acknowledge. Perhaps this entire gift of consciousness that earlier this morning I has so reveled in is no gift at all, but the greatest curse bestowed on any character in the universe. The ability to see beauty does in no way negate the virulent despair of interacting with what we used to call the devil. Perhaps the devil is the norm, entropy is the norm, chaos is the norm: these are the true laws of the physical world, and us bastions of rationality, us believers in a world that makes sense, we are the irrational.

Perhaps.

Here I am, somewhere new. A river to cross. I need to get to the other side. Why? Adventure, maybe. I forget the initial why, it has left me, there is only the knowledge of truth that on the other side is the place where I need to go. That this is the way forward.

How will I go? If I had wings I would fly, so easily, I would not even notice the river: it would be nothing but a beautiful sight to appreciate, a break in formless terrain, an addition to the infinite equation of beauty. As a man, there are no wings to fly, just feet to walk on, and while I know beauty is here, even I am absorbing it, yet, what my mind sees is a dilemma. There has to be a solution. There is not always a solution but this is the way forward and I will find a way.

This river, the river, it is not going to be crossed with ease. It is fast, torturous, wide, cold, nasty, dangerous, evil. Lovely yes, but it is a feat. It is dangerous. It is deadly. One slip and the raging river will carry me away. It will kill me. How will I cross it? How will I cross it. My eyes stumble on the massive husk of a long dead tree, degrading back to nature, a behemoth of lives past. Elegantly splayed across a narrow portion of the river I see it as a solution, the only solution that enters my mind. The way forward.

I analyze the tree. I see it as it must have stood in another century, majestic, the king of the forest. Fallen. What was, was, and what is, is, and this tree is now nothing but a bridge, the majesty of yester year not lost but reduced to a residue, an emotion of wonderment at what  was rather then sublime awe at what is. Pity. Lucky, for here is a way forward.

Yes, it is the way forward, yet, this new optimism gives me reflection. While striving to reach the end of my endless path, to finally see the true light of my hidden dream goals, I see the corpses of the past greats, those entities greater then I will ever be whose corpses now litter my path. One day, before I reach my goal, I know I will be something just like this tree. Another fallen. Perhaps I can hope to at least provide the way forward for another adventurer, another seeker of the honest equation. Perhaps all these littered corpses mean something. Perhaps the dream of achievement for oneself is a myth, perhaps the meaning of what we do is simply to be another bridge forward; perhaps, instead of many getting to the end, the point is to work in one great sequence to try simply get one small entity to the end. Perhaps that one will be me.

Staring upon the massive roots of this fallen goliath, I begin to climb to the trunk which will be my plank. I begin to see the arduous danger of my path. A length that seems endless but microscopic in diameter. A walking surface slippery, splattered with the foam of the raging river. What else? Wind. Fear in my heart. The stars have been aligned for me so far, but here, as in every fresh new challenge, I feel the potential that my time is due. That this will be the end.

Should I stop? Could I stop? So far forward from where I began. Would this be a demerit to myself? I try to rationalize. I try to compromise the evil of compromising my ideals with the evil of compromising my mortality with the danger ahead. Life on the river, this could be it, this could be what I have waited for, the tree just a tease at the possibility of a wrong way forward. Life here. The spot is lush. This could be it, this could be it. My brain has rationalized, and indeed it may even be right, but, that unfathomable beast living in my heart screams different. The way forward is not to stop. The way forward is farther ahead. Across the river. Across this tree. Dangerous, yes, but such is the way of ambition, such is the danger of exploration, to fly: to see vistas never seen, perils never thought of. To touch the sun and be burned by its ravenous brilliance. I will cross the river. I don’t have to. Life could be here, this could be it. But I will cross the river.

Climbing with a casual grace from hand hold to hand hold, I reach the top of the trunk that will be my bridge. I stand tall at the top. I feel strength and fear in equal measures locked in a battle for my waking mind. My unconscious mind ignores such petty squabbles and forces my right foot forward. That first step towards oblivion, my route already charted, there is nothing to do now but maintain momentum. My brain is screaming with fear, giving me endless reasons why this danger is not necessary with that very same logic I know will eat me alive if I were to turn back. Death or coward, are those my choices? I could walk away and still be a man. I could walk away and live a meaningful life, even a perfect life. But I will not turn back, I have chosen the direction forward, and for better or worse I will not compromise the logic which led me so deeply already through many endless choices. Forward. Forward. Forever forward.

My left foot climbs, moves forward and falls. My second step landed, just a hair in front of my first step. I am moving forward. My mind is calming. Finding peace. Knowing no longer is it profitable to blanch endless banalities; now, it is only about moving forever forward. Another step. Another step. Another step. It is as slippery as I feared. It is as windy as I dreaded. But. Another step. Another step. No thought on anything larger than the individual motion. No thought at all but: another step. Another step.

A universe of steps successfully planted, I have no idea if I am a step away from the far end or if my mind is simply playing tricks, making those endless steps I am sure I have stepped through nothing more than a figment of my hyperactive imagination. At this point, no different then so many moments before it, and what could have been so many steps after, my landing food touches an especially gleaming bit of bark and throws off my semblance of balance. The slow motion of my life is reduced even more. I can feel my foot searching millisecond by millisecond for a new, safer landing; I can feel my arms wildly trying regain my balance. My brain is clear. This will be the end of me. My brain is at peace. This will be the end of me. Should I have not attempted to climb this log over the river? I feel the time to think. I feel time so compressed that perhaps I have all the time of the world to think over this one point. Maybe, even, this is the afterlife, just endlessly replaying that movement that ends you, questioning for all eternity where it was that you went wrong. I do not need infinite time to come to peace. I am at peace. I made the only choice I could make so that at the end of my life, even though it is right now, I can feel this sense of serenity. To hell with what could have been, to hell with the safe life on the riverside where I could have had a peaceful perfect life, only breaking from the reverie of my own happiness during cold sweat nightmares of knowing that this is not the life I should be living. To hell with living life between nightmares, to hell with a long life lying on a framework of lies. My brain and heart are curiously in agreement, this lack of fear a novel emotion in me. Well, then, death, I knew one day you would come, and truthfully I am bitter with you, taking away this game of life before I managed to move all the way around the board, but, then, so be it. At least I was playing on a board that was a reality I believed in. I am falling into the river. This is death. I am not smiling, but I am not sad. I am simply at peace.

Lying on the bed next to the girl that I love, I think of the transience of life. This lovely girl, a flower just blooming, the treasure of the garden of my soul, is going to die. Soon. She lies next to me, seeming fine, yet we both know wasting on the inside. We don’t talk, some languages are more powerful then speech, and death requires the most perfect communication. Yet, she is scared, and I am scared for her, and she looks me in the eye, lying next to her, counting each finite minute. She wants to talk, and I am foreboding what she will say but I am ready.

The Dying: Do you believe in god?

The Living: Yes, I believe in god, I pray every night.

The Dying: Do you believe in an afterlife?

                Ahhh, those gentle lies we want to caress the world with, to give false promises that the world will be perfect, that things will get better. That life will be that dream we all fantasize about. That there is no reason for fear, since there is nothing to fear. Oh, ghouls, you eat my soul.

The Living: Yes, I believe in an afterlife. I believe that this world is just a test, a dream, for the perfect life that will come after.

The Dying: Please. Please. I don’t want you to say what I want to hear. I want in my last days of life to live honestly. To deal with the realities of life while it is still my reality. You’ve told me many times when I wasn’t…sick…that you don’t believe in an afterlife. You’ve said you don’t believe in god. Me, yes, of course, I want to believe in an afterlife, I want to think that my mind isn’t about to disappear, that all my memories will just cease to mean anything and the universes of my consciousness will cease. I am so scared, so scared. But, to be scared is honest, death is something to be feared. What is worse is a lie, to accept the sweet nothing you’re whispering to me while that last bastion of my soul, my heart, knows the secret fallacies of the reality you have constructed for me. So please, please, be honest. Do you believe in god, do you believe in an afterlife. And why, why, why?

The Living: I don’t believe in God, the god who lives on a cloud or the god who will one day talk to you or shake your hand. I don’t believe in an afterlife, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t want to hurt you, my beliefs have made me choke with fear at the thought of death and I am not dying. Please, please, lovely love, just appreciate the beauty of the universe and trust whatever it is your heart says. Belief is belief, and the hollowness of my holiness is something whose contagion need not blanket you.

The Dying: No, please, please, in my heart I feel that there is no god. That worms will eat the last remnants of my spirit. But I know you to hold little fear in those things you have just said. Please, explain life to me. Share your vision and maybe there will be something that will fill this void, this abyss, in the plains of my peaceless dissonance.

The Living: …..Well……I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to tell you. You are right, I am at peace. If I was to die with you, so soon, I would be afraid, I would be sad, because I have enjoyed this plain of existence enormously, but I think I would be at peace. I think that there is no god, but I believe in holiness, I believe in the pleasure of existence. I think rather than dwell on what could be, no matter how bitter a topic that might be, it is better to confront what has been. We have existed with consciousness. Of all the things in the universe, from trees to stars to electrons to deer to grains of sand, these things may be great of small, live for a few seconds or live for billions of generations of the lives of men, yet, out of all this wonder, it is only us, these little fragile human beings, who have had the pleasure of consciousness. We have not just been alive, but appreciated the fact we have been alive. I think this is a wonderful privilege. I think it is like winning the lottery of the entire universe, and it is selfish enough to demand this existence, to demand it perpetually would be demanding more than is fair from the universe. When I die, I will not stop existing, I will continue on as before, as some molecule of dust, some flower that will never make it past the seed form, perhaps even make up the parts of another human being, but my consciousness will be over, this fantastic chapter of the eternal building blocks that make me, me, will be finished. But that does not mean it did not happen. Much like someone lives a life where he can only do certain things at certain times: graduate once, make love for the first time, be born, hear music for the first time, we get only one life; yet, much like with the things in life that we do for the first time, after losing the virgin encounter with the complexities of life the action does not disappear but rather lives in memory forever. True, when you die, you don’t have your memories anymore, your consciousness does not exist, but in the memory of the world you were real. Every molecule you shed changed the entire course of the universe, its slightness in no way affecting the causality since truly everything is about perspective. To the atoms that make up your body you are a dying god, a burning out universe whose death will forever alter the future of trillions of individual entities. To a star, it will never know you lived or died, yet, one day, our sun will supernova, eat the Earth, absorb all the molecules that were once a part of you, and use you as fuel to generate light that will be transmitted across the entire universe. Death is horrifying, it is taboo, but we will all die. I beg you, truly, to not fear death, or, perhaps, yes, fear death, but in that same way a man fears a wedding or a child fears that first day at school: be apprehensive about the unknown, since truly everything is going to change, but do not think that the book of your existence is ending, rather, it is just the evolution of a new chapter, one written by the same author that created you, just, maybe, the new chapter is from a different perspective, a different point of view.

The Dying: I know what you are saying, and thank-you for your honesty. But this does not quell the qualms of my heart. You are right, I am just one facet of my infinite life. Yet, what does this mean to my waking mind. Perhaps it is nice to know that some faint residue of my resonance will remain, but what makes my mind mournful is my loss of memories, that disappearance of mind, that eternal shutting of the radiant sun in my mind. I will disappear. I am going to disappear. That sunshine which you say I have the privilege to appreciate, I do appreciate, I’m crying with its sublime beauty and I want to spent a thousand more days, a thousand more lives just staring in rapture at such perfection. Why do we have to die? Why can’t we appreciate that infinite which you claim is all around us. What a cruel temptress nature is, to provide such a perfect paradise and we get no more than the faint light of candle to illuminate nothing but a few dismal shadows. To truly appreciate life! Yes, I know, this is nonsensical, that if I was to live for another fifty years I would still have these same intangible fears, haunting the full extent of my transitory mind. But most people can hide this fear, stare at the ground because they know the sun of the truth will destroy their mental sanguine; but, I have no luxury. I don’t want you to feel the horror of my mind. You can stay asleep. But I ask you to just lie here next to me, to hold me, to touch me, to let me feel the full pleasure of existence in this dwindling twilight of my mind. Death is coming for me like a freight train, and I am not ready, but, I am going to shut my eyes, pray to a god I don’t believe in, and ignore death as she wraps me in her embrace. If I want to enjoy these last few moments, I am going to have to be ignorant. I am just not going to think of an afterlife. I am just going to try to exist, for just a few more moments.

Lucifer Christ is sitting quietly on the center of his couch, staring dreamily contemplating the nature of his neighbors sins. Yes, he thinks, she must be all those terrible things. Yes, undoubtedly I must do something about that wretched woman. And, firmly coming to this conclusion, Lucifer returned to pulsating with fear waiting for some dread nightmare to awaken into his life.

A little background to this scene is sure to illuminate the reason for Lucifer’s fear. The story is like this. Lucifer, who is by trade a cashier at a major box store, returned to his large apartment block one night after a particularly onerous shift. He hazily punched in his floor number, walked off at the generic landing, went to his door, twisted the knob, and walked into what was supposed to be his apartment but was in fact the one directly below his: he had clicked the wrong floor accidentally. Now, Lucifer only opened the door for a split second, immediately realized he was staring into the wrong apartment, quickly shut the door, then went up a flight of stairs to his own apartment where we find him in the paragraph above pulsating with fear. You see, unfortunately, the apartment that Lucifer walked into  by shear accident was some form of murder den. For the split second the door was open Lucifer could see a plastic lined apartment, a few stray body parts littered around the plastic, an enormous quantity of blood, and his cute neighbor Tilda standing in the center of all this with a welders apron around her waist and a hacksaw in her hand. She looked up in surprise when Lucifer entered, probably had time to question why on earth she didn’t lock the door, made direct eye contact with Lucifer, then Lucifer shut the door and scampered off.

Now, of course the rational thing for Lucifer to do in a scene like this would be to run away, run quickly, never come back. Of course alerting the authorities goes without saying a point number one on Lucifer’s action plan. Yet, the human mind is not a perfect organ and one must remember that this is all happening rather quickly and for whatever reason neither alerting the authorities of escaping the premises even enters Lucifer’s mind. No, all he thinks is that what serendipity: the entire city is looking for the infamous murderer and here he finds her by sheer! It’s too bad, Lucifer thinks, since she was rather cute. He giggles to himself that make it is a good thing he never pushed harder for a date; his cowardice pays off. Lucifer is giggling. And, of course, pulsating with fear.

There is no plan in Lucifer’s mind what he should do, resulting in that he just continues to sit in the middle of his couch. There are not room mates coming and going to break his reverie, there is no beep of the telephone to remind Lucifer that he is part of a world external to the last few minutes. Nope, all Lucifer does is sit and shake.

Eventually a certain amount of time passes, say a quarter of an hour. Perhaps if an hour had passed Lucifer would have woken up, but that amount of time does not pass. After this certain amount of time Lucifer hears someone twist his apartments door know. He, unlike the murderer remembered to lock his door, and Lucifer giggles to himself before retching with horror as he hears a mechanical cutting noise and watches his door swing open.

In walks Tilda, carrying a small mechanical power saw in her left hand which must have been used to break through his lock. She is looking very calm and collected, and even has a bit of a jovial look in her eye, as if she is quietly tittering at what an absurd situation this has evolved to.

She walks confidently into Lucifer’s apartment, shutting the door behind her. Really, she is a rather cute girl, round face designed for smiling and a lithe figure that’s perfect for dancing. She is smiling now, as she asks Lucifer “Well, have you ever put me in a tight spot! Do you know what a tight spot you have put me in?” She gives Lucifer no time to answer, which is good since Lucifer’s mouth was agape and the chances that he might have piped in an answer were remote to nil. Tilda carried on, “Here I go and play my little games, and take all the precautions, and a forgettable detail like locking the door completely slips my mind! What are the chances! You really didn’t mean to come into my apartment did you? I saw your face, it was priceless, you certainly didn’t expect to see me playing my games did you? Well?” She suddenly loses her smile, pierces Lucifer with a dontfuckwithme look and waits a solid fifteen seconds for Lucifer to stammer “I…….I……..I was on the wrong floor…….it was an accident……..I was so tired……”.  Giggling Tilda claps her hands, “Oh, an accident! Well, isn’t that just my luck, oh ho ho ho, an accident! What are the chances, what are the chances…” Clapping her hands with enthusiasm Tilda seems to be actually enjoying this rather odd situation when she suddenly stops and begins quickly moving toward Lucifer with the saw revving at a high RPM. With the squeal of a stepped on puppy Lucifer leaps behind his couch yelping “You can’t kill me, please don’t kill me, please of please of fuck, please please don’t kill me. I won’t tell anybody. I didn’t see anything. There was nothing to see. What is it you are talking about? Oh please. I won’t tell anyone anything, oh god oh god oh god please please.” In the face of this barrage of excuses Tilda seems incognizant until Lucifer weepingly mumbles “If you kill me I will go missing and and and then people will find you because you can’t hide from all the attention that me disappearing would happen on the building.” Suddenly, the saw goes off, the killer leaves Tilda’s eyes, and again she seems jovial; a laugh is living just inside her lips. “You know! I think you’ve got a point,” she ponders with enthusiasm, if I do kill you, you will be a head ache! I would have to move from here for sure and I’m so happy here, the land lords are so nice and I’m so fond of my view. Yet, if I don’t kill you then you will go to the police and I’ll be an even bigger mess! No, I think I’m going to have to kill you, unless, hmmm, do you have any ideas? I’m open to suggestions!” Gasping for air Lucifer is crying, “Suggestions, suggestions…of course I have some suggestions…..” Tilda is tapping her foot, looks at her watch and begins to fidget while she waits for Lucifer to respond. “How about,” suggest Lucifer, “If you find something that you could make me do so that if I was to tell anyone that thing which I may or may not have seen I would be in just as much trouble as you?” Tilda lights up like a sun beam, and yelps joyfully “Of course Lucifer, that’s a fantastic idea! Here, you wait here, I’ll be right back! Two seconds. Don’t do anything foolish though, I wouldn’t want to have to eat your mother or anything!” And with that hopefully sarcastic statement Tilda is bounding out the door.

Now, with Tilda gone, Lucifer collapses back into his comfortable spot on the couch and manners of conducting an escape suddenly flood his mind. “Yes,” he thinks, “I could simply run out of this building, go to the police department, and turn Tilda in. Yes, that’s what I will do. Yet…..what if she does do something terrible to my family? She certainly seems crazy, and for her to have not gotten caught yet must mean she is somewhat successful at staying ahead of the law….no, I think the proper thing for me to do is stay here. Maybe I will get a weapon and if the chance arises I’ll kill her! Yes, that’s a good solution! That’s exactly what I’ll do.” Rising from the sofa going towards the kitchen, Lucifer is looking through his drawers when Tilda stumbles back into Lucifer’s apartment with a large bag the size of a human body being dragged behind her. She looks at Lucifer, sees him with the knife in his hand and sweetly asks him “to please put that fucking knife down or I’ll use it to cut you so terribly that your only mode of communication will be breathing patterns!” Lucifer puts the knife down, and stares at Tilda quixotically.

“Well,” Tilda says, “Here’s what’s going to happen. In the bag I have my next toy, and while I was going to have fun playing with him I thought if you were to maybe murder him that would be the sort of action that would keep you from going to the authorities. So if you could do me a favor, and take that knife you just put down, and come over here and just stab the bag a few times? Don’t worry about blood, the bad has a self repairing meniscus so everything should stay in the bag. Just stab it a couple times and I’ll be off and everything will be exactly like it was before! Just let me get out of the way so you don’t stab ME by mistake, ohohohohohohoh!” And with that Tilda shies away, and is staring at the agape Lucifer.

Lucifer is just standing there, very still. His brain is working faster than his heart. He cannot be a murderer! That is a thing so vile, so vile. Yet, then, he will die if he does not kill this man. And this man will die one way or the other. Oh, how tricky. he can’t kill a man, he can’t. Then, then the man is going to die anyway. Oh, fuck it. And without anymore thought then that just listed above Lucifer takes the kitchen knife he’d hoped to pluck between two of Tilda’s ribs and instead plants it solidly into the writhing black bag. The bag shudders viciously, and Lucifer surprises himself by instinctually stabbing the knife a dozen more times until the movement stops.

Springing from the other end of the room with a great big grin on her face Tilda comes and grabs the bag that used to contain a man. “Fantastic work Lucifer,” she gushes, “Everything should be good now! You can’t tell anybody about my games because then it would come out you were a murderer. Here just let me take that knife from you for fingerprints, thanks, and I’ll store the body in such a manner that I’ll be sure to be able to pin it back onto you, so you don’t got telling anybody you hear? Okay. Good, anyway, have a pleasant evening and I’ll see you around the building. Maybe I can borrow your laundry soap, mines almost out. But I’ll talk to you about that later.” Then pulling the corners of the heavy bag with all her strength Tilda takes the great bag out of Lucifer’s apartment.

Looking at the ruined lock in his door Lucifer sighs. “That’s going to be a pretty penny to fix,” he thinks morosely. Then without allowing himself a second thought for all of the events, he stretches out on his couch, turn the TV on, and lets his brain turn off.

Where am I, where am I? A dream I just had, or is it even over, not nightmarish, barely remembered, but infiltrating my soul. Where am I? Is this a dream? How can I know, truly know. I hear a baby screeching, not the cries of normal youth but the retching of pain. I shake my head, wake a little more, and the screech is gone.

I am still not awake, or at least not entirely, but I have the aptitude to unconsciously check my clock, know the time, know it is not time yet for the necessity of full wakefulness, and allow myself to revel in this tertiary environment of awake but still dreaming. I am in control, fantastically constructing cities of l’amour that set Paris to shame with one half of my mind, while with the other half solving the problems of government for the next several decades. I should write all these things down, though I distrust my mind at all times and especially now. Who know what cleverness the universe is radiating on me at this exact moment, what hidden capabilities my mind squirrels away in these recesses of sleep.

But these ideas are lost now, ethereal as they were; it is like atoms: by trying to capture their speed I lost their position, and now, I am left with my hands empty of all that I vainly tried to capture. Just a few grains left, enough to make me feel some real remorse of what I have lost. Even those are casually slipping. May they all leave, I don’t want any haunting of the past, never.

Now, here I am, awake. I have forgotten what beauties I thought, and now, instead, all I feel is a casual apprehension of fear, likely the remnants of my nightmare, if that’s indeed what is was. I shake my head, trying to dispel, but I don’t have the will to lose it entirely. What was it? What was it to shake me so, what winds are there that leaf through my soul, lifting and revealing the crevices that I would wish to never acknowledge? What edible thoughts do I not even know I have eaten, do not even know were in my capabilities to fabricate?

Now, sadly, it is the time to make things happen, to wake up, to drag myself to whatever it is that must happen today. It is not a day of that unfortunate paradigm of work that sucks at us all, stealing our lives to construct unbeautiful things. Rather, it is that mealy day of rest that men absorbed with efficiency have calculated that I need if I want to retain the dismal sense of efficiency they assign to me.

It is the day of rest though, and why spoil a lovely morning, light filtering in attractive patterns from the sun through space, diffracted by the atmosphere and my window into a fantastical pattern on my bed sheet. Beautiful. What will I do today? What will I do with this life? Why is it, that I am alive. I am hungry also.  I want to be more alive then I truly am; I fear death. I fear the absence of existence. Who am I. Where am I going. Why, why, why, why, why, why.

Cluster fuck shit, I don’t want to go there, forget! New things. I propel myself from bed, and the momentum carries not just my body but my thoughts to a new place, a different place, and I decide that of all the ethereal images flying through my mind, the most manageable, the most real, is my hunger, and on this here, this day where it is given that I have time at my beck and call I decide to make breakfast. The breakfast I dream about on those long drives to work with nothing but a coffee. I go to the kitchen and become lost in my task, thinking about nothing substantial but using all my processing power, every megabyte of ram I have, to make the most virtuoso breakfast I can with those supplies given at my hand: things are imperfect, I appreciate the fact I do not have ideal circumstances: there are not the right food stuffs, and indeed my ability to shape them into something remarkable is vaporous at best; but I will try, and even if what I create is imperfect at least it is something, something to put my name too, something to say YES, I created this: even, if after all this, perhaps to eat it, digest it, then to learn from it, to perhaps make something more perfect next time. While my thoughts devolve unconsciously into streams of colors (or are they flowers?) I begin my breakfast, and decide that yes, it is something to be proud of, it is something that I am pleased with.

Astonishingly quickly I gorge; devouring my construct, eliminating its beauty, turning it into a pulp in my stomach indecipherable from any other edible substance: its beauty is lost, forever, the cleverness of my hands will never be known. With remorse I wish that someone had seen me in action creating something of substance, to share in what is now lost, to reaffirm my abilities of creation. Banal, these thoughts, I know my truth, but what is truth without benchmark, without people to compare to, to sit on someone’s shoulders and feel tall?

What now? Do I have any responsibilities today? Of course. But fuck them, can I escape? Will I suffer if I do the nothing that I want? I should write something beautiful, something to give me fame, fortune and respect. But not today, I am not in the mood. Conditions are un-ideal and I appreciate the constancy of this reality. I should visit my mother but I am simply inert; she can wait till a time where I am not where I am now. I should go for a run, maybe around the lush lake just a few minutes from my apartment, but no, no, I can escape that too. This is the day of rest prescribed to me, and I will munch on my antidote in the vein that it was given. I will do nothing. Utterly nothing. I will continue sitting here, on this couch (when did I cycle from the table to this couch?) and revel in revelation, enjoying the solitary thoughts that flit through my mind, the casual entertainment of life passing outside my windows, the joy of being in my pajamas and not having anyone watching.

Thoughts percolate through my mind. Dissolving in that barrier between substance and nothing. This is OK. I can feel the war in my subconscious, attempting to create; always, every thought a battle with the nothing; every subtle flicker of light in the back of my mind a victory against the emptiness of the universe. Why do I squander such virtuous gifts? Why is it I do not use the light of my mind to shine brightness on the darkness of the soul. To construct magical spells of vision to help enchant a disenchanted reality. I could. Yes. But, when, why, and why is it every time I try, tease that my brain is, every time I try to document the beauty of my thoughts, the cleverness of my mind, they dissipate: hide, or become the nothing themselves; to realize that they were never there in the first place, to realize that all I was doing was giving myself illusions of brilliance to hide from the truth: my lack of genius.

No, much better to continue hiding in the revolutions of my brain. To continue resting here, doing nothing, but endlessly imagining. To simply be alive, and appreciative that the vast majority of the universe does not have the benefit of life, and the vast majority of those things experiencing life do not appreciate consciousness. And here I am. Winner of the genetic lottery: the sum total of infinite. And I casually wish for more. Shame on me: to not appreciate what I have: to take it for granted. Life is here, happening, in me. Yes, perhaps, perhaps there is more to life than simply existing, perhaps I could create universes different than this one presented to me, but for today, on this day of rest, on this day where I can do anything, doing nothing is enough.

I come back from being alone, by myself, where I was. I have left there. Where am I now, the place I used to be, the place I am supposed to be. My home. Yes. Here I am. And what now? To make a life, to be the man I am supposed to be; yes, life has been postponed long enough. Yes. Here we are, at the start, a normal start, a fantastic start, lets fly together, let’s see reality, let’s be that subtle voice that I hope, pray and know is somewhere in all of us.

We go somewhere, to the place that I am. Here we are. Are we ready?

Start.

Screaming.

Screaming.

Shrieking.

Screaming.

Is that my own voice I hear?

Is that anyone I know?

I casually touch my lips to mouth. Feel their faint glue and know that it is not me screaming. When was the last time I have talked? It has been long, maybe.

Screaming.

Where is it. Is this a vague sense of adrenaline striking my frigid system? I see a girl, young, lying, screaming, with a man on top of her. We are in the middle of a busy street. If the street was alone and this man was on a screaming girl it would be rape. But, all these others. She must be on drugs. Poor angel. Can that be true? Could this sin be capitulating before my vision, before the aghast averted sights of all this multitude? Better to think not. Drugs. Sinner. She deserves her terror. Or so I tell myself; tell myself while secretly reveling; tell myself while I feel a wind in the listless fields of my shadowed mind: this is life happening, something to differentiate today from all other days. Or so I tell myself.

Screaming, screaming, it’s still here, I can hear it! But the women, that screaming nymphet, she has passed long gone, that was days ago, was it even real or even a dream, is this nothing but a color on my subconscious, but I feel it! I feel it! I feel it! Like a slot machine in my mind endlessly looping but never lining up this fucking shriek! Leave here!

What am I supposed to be doing. What am I supposed to be doing. Maybe. I’m trying to start a car but it’s not getting there. All these cars around me and I can’t get mine to start. Are they looking at me! Stop looking at me! Stop it, I’m better then all of you! Look at me, look at me, mortals, losers, I fly, you drive in your stupid little cars but I have wings and I’m flying all over you and you are nothing, little ants in my quickly rescinding vision, ignored as I stare to the heavens, but in my heart, yes, my true heart, all I feel is fear of falling and the enormous work it is to stay aloft. To stay flying. And now, that I am here at heaven, horribly, what would a fall feel like. This height has given me momentum in a direction dangerous. Horrible. Where am I. Screaming. Where is it.

 

As we come off of a rugged road, more pot hole then road really, my guide is telling me the facts about the men I am about to meet: “Each of them, all of them, have killed. Each of them, all of them, have raped; many times, when there was not enough women to rape, they raped the children, even the males. These men, they are hungry, they are animals; in all the world, I doubt their equal exists. Me, personally, I will not look at them, I will not shake their hands. I just hope that god exists, to put these men through hell, through a hell designed just for them because regular hell is not good enough.”

I am a journalist, I am going to meet the rebels in Eastern Congo. I have met men called terrible before, and while I process those words given by my guide I don’t let them effect my perception of who these men will be. Inside, I question who to compare them too. Will they be like the radical revolutionaries hiding behind cloth during the Baathist uprising in Iraq? Will they be like the scared children unwillingly holding the banner during the failed Green Revolution in Iran? Or, will they be like the seasoned professionals maintaining the instability of the FARC rebels in Columbia. I don’t know. In many ways, I don’t really care, I won’t deny that this job has lost much of its romance, much of its luster. That I go with a formula designed to catch special words that will get me that perfect soundbite for my employers, who will then say to me a job well done and let me go home. I just want this to be over with.

We are getting close, apparently, to the rebels head quarters. I go about getting my game face on; I review my list of questions, and am determined to do my job adequately. The car stops at two sentries, stone faced, cold, who do not easily let my car through. I don’t know if there is truly any problem, or if these men just enjoy the power of making a foreigner wait at their beck and call. Regardless, after a certain amount of waiting we are allowed to drive into the compound.

The compound is the center of a small village. There is everything you would expect to see: a football pitch filled with players and spectators, a bar with a few doughty adherents, a restaurant with many talkative faces and the streets, the streets filled with beaming faces, thoughtful faces, playful faces: all going towards some destination. There is nothing to suggest this scene is anything but another village, except for the lack of women and children. Even the heavy amount of weapons present does not seep extraneous when compared to the normal village in this part of the world.

My car pulls up in front of what must to have been the chieftains palace, garnering many curious looks from the people of the vicinity. When I get out, I am the center of attention, not so different from any other isolate village. I can feel the look of all those collected, perhaps sans my driver, follow me to the door of the chiefs palace. I come to the door and there is a sentry at duty. I tell him my business, and his curiosity is radiating, is infectious; I know these men fit every definition of evil, but still, while we address each other, I pull a joke or two. I see his eyes become enraptured with pleasure, and evil while I wonder the number of rapes this man has taken part in I still feel myself enjoying his presence. Monstrous humanity, give me strength against your wiles.

The guard, my friend, takes me to the rebel leader. I meet him, and unlike any of my expectations he is not a bit out of the norm. He is perhaps dressed a little better, but still in rags by Western standards. He does not surround himself by luxury, or, indeed, by work, but rather he sits in a circle of confidents chatting away the day much like any other big man in a small village. The sentry raises the fact of my presence to the rebel leader and he quickly turns around and his eyes are filled with the most sincere pleasure.

This man. This man. He is the man responsible for war crimes that would see him brought to the Hague. For condoning the raping of women by such a long line of men that the women defecate out of their vaginas. For ordering the burning of thatch huts with entire families left inside, while the doors are barricaded shut from the inside. He is accused of eating human flesh. He is accused of enjoying the eating of human flesh. Regardless, he is responsible for the maintenance of a state of anarchy in this particularly dark corner of the world which still results in the indirect death of over forty thousand a month. The man is a monster.

And he comes towards me, eyes brimming heart felt good cheer, hand out to shake my equally outstretched hand with a vehemence bordering on the insane. He wishes me a “Good morning, sir! And how are you today? Welcome, welcome, you are most welcome. We are sincerely honored to have your presence here, and hope to make your stay as pleasurable as possible.” His English is good, there are rumors he was trained by American’s, that they thought he was useful during the long dead cold war. Who knows, it could be true.

I am jocular. My job is to push aside the trappings and meet the man, to outlay an honest vision of this man’s humanity, of his peoples humanity, and I intent to fulfill my quest. He makes me comfortable, and tells me he will be ready for my questions after a quick lunch. He invited me to join him, and while I tell him it would be my pleasure I have just eaten, and would appreciate the time to prepare myself for the interview. He affably communicates his understanding, and I am left alone with my computer to work on my notes.

While I wait, my sentry friend comes from behind me and sits in a chair in front of me. He doesn’t talk, understanding my need for silence, yet his presence is there. I look up at him, and I stop. I see him. This man. I think of the stories he could tell me, of the way he must see the world. I then, unbidden from my lips, breaking a very definite ethos which I am beholden too, I ask him if I can ask a few questions.

“Of course.”

“What’s it like being a rebel.”

“Am I allowed to talk to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Being a rebel is my life, it is all I know, it is what I have been doing since I was a young boy.”

“Do you like it.”

“You know, I am not going to be the normal soliloquy, the voice you would expect to hear. I’m not going to tell you what it is that I know, because what I know is a mixture of ignorance and idealism. What I know is that I want to move to the west, everybody wants to move to the west, for their life to be like some fucking Hollywood movie, which is an unreality. What I believe are those things which I’ve come to see are being realistic. Life has been hard to me, but the lives of many others are not so less difficult. Me, I have done things you consider barbarous, yes, I’ve raped women, cut throats, thrown babies against walls until they wail no more. And what of it? You know what, I was brought into this rebellion when I was twelve years old, brought in by an older brother who himself was brought in by an uncle. You think morality was a problem? It was us against them, we do not have your nice forms of media to humanize our enemies. We do not know that they can talk just as lusciously as  you or me, rather, we are taught that they are the people who butchered our people. And, then, when we do our raiding we are drunk, we are high, we are full of blood lust, we are peer pressured, we are anarchic, we are out of control. It is the wild night time and we are alive, a part of the night, we are the night. So, oh yes, those things you hear, from your chair, that you call us monsters for, of rightfully so because we are monsters, but, in context, oh that evil word context, our actions make sense. I hate myself when I wake up every day; but, every night, when I am the night, I exist! I can do anything. And I tell you that my innocence was never allowed to happen, that I was made a monster, and me, just as I was brought here, bring new  lambs here, to slaughter their innocence. To poor blood on them until they are stained and no longer god’s creatures.  Until they have nothing in existence, like me, except the blood. Always the blood. And really, those worst crimes we are accused of, I don’t even see, that boy that starves to death in fear of me I will never know, never meet, whose death I will never mourn. You ask me if I like it. Fuck you. I am a man. I have killed innocents. I am the damned. I hate myself. I hate myself. But! I am me. I have made my decisions and I will live by them. I am the damned. And fuck you, I am myself, I don’t want to die, and that means I must continue living. And truly, beneath this scarred interior monologue which never rises to the surface is the voice of an innocent. I have never been educated enough, and have been manipulated too much, in the evils that I interact with. I kill like I have always killed. I play football like I have always played football. My sense of morality is finished, if it was ever really there. I see you come, and I crack a smile, feeling that same curiosity that any villager would feel at seeing a foreigner. And that is the truth: I am just another villager, just: I happen to be a killer. And I am sorry, if it makes a difference. But then I am not. I believe, somewhere in my soul, that these people I killed, it was either us or them. I am a survivor, no killer. Survivor.”

And of course that last conversation didn’t happen, rather, I just stared benignly at my sentry, who sat there staring innocently at me. But, as I wait for the rebel chief I do feel the difference here between the other rebellions I have witnessed. Here, there are no motivations for the fighters. They don’t believe in what they do, don’t even really care, it is just their lives. I think of the evil these men have done in their childlike innocence. Yes, they know they’re in trouble, but do they comprehend the enormity of their actions? How could they. If live is all about perspective, what is it these men would compare their lives to?

The sentry smiles at me. Not a crocodile smile, just a good natured grin. He is an innocent. He is innocent. For all the terror he has done, I forgive him, because in his heart he is not an evil man. He is like anyone else, just going from situation to situation blindly; just managing the crevices of life in a god, not understanding but attempting perfection to the best of his ability. I smile back at him.

Blackened ash lifting in delicate spires touching the sky, visible against the black night only from the bright halo of flames delicately criss crossing  a tortured city. Is the wail of suffering audible above the caucophony of bullets and rage, or is it just that a scene of such terror triggers a cry in my own mind.  People are suffering in front of my eyes. People are dying in every direction. The taste of ash is on my tongue.

What is happening? The war was over, has been over for months. Grass has been growing green in the parks and children have been filling the streets with the sound of laughter as they played without fear. That was this morning, just this morning. My own son and daughter are with my wife and I looking out the window of our flat. They should not be here, I will send them to bed soon, yet, this is their country, these are their people. We missed the war, we will not miss whatever beast arises here before my eyes, they have a right to put a name to that fear which I am sure must be in their hearts. Both my children are being held close by my wife, I put my arms around all three of them providing what comfort I have. I can feel the silent tears streaming down my sons face.

The crackle of gunfire is still in the distance, not immediate. Should we run? My family looks to me to take command. Their safety is in my hands. Who is winning the city? Who is even fighting? The power is out, the internet is out and cellphone coverage is out. Loud cries on megaphones shout revolution and religion, but then many of their banners are in flames. My family and I arrived back soon after the war, I felt that my homeland needed me, needed people like me to take her from such a dark future into something brighter. I wanted to help make a country that my children would only know as a land of happiness, a place of peace. If the current crisis is from a remnant of the old regime coming to take back what they feel they lost they would be brutal with us, people like me, the opportunists, the stooges. Should we run. Should we run. Run where? Where is safe? Are the noises coming closer? I want to know what is happening. How can life move so fast. Things will be alright. I need a clear head. Watching this is helping nothing. There is a fire spreading to the freshly named parliament hill.

Straightening up, I call my wife my daughter and my son by their names to look at me. I tell them that we have of course planned for things like this to happen, we will follow our preparations and if we act smartly of course everything will be fine. We must be brave. To my wife I tell her to pack essentials, if we get a window of opportunity to flee we will take it. I don’t expect such an opportunity to come, I don’t tell her this, but it is smart to be prepared. It is reassuring to me as well to see the bags there, a concrete plan of action that we choose not to take, a power when so much of what is happening in front of us is bigger then we can control, we are just a leaf in a gale and it is lucks grace that will spare us, just as it is lucks bleak fate to take us low. My wife silently begins packing. To my son I tell him to make sure all of our curtains are blacked out, and to place as much furniture as possible to block our street exposure. We have practiced this, I squeeze his shoulder and he takes a deep breath to dispel his fear and begins his tasks. To my daughter I tell her to knock on all of our neighbors doors, to make sure they are doing as we are and following the emergency preparations we agreed on. Every family in our building is involved in the reconstruction effort. Everyone has something to lose. My daughter runs quickly and silently. I look to the window, parliament is on fire, the wail of screaming is now no illusion. The night burns brighter, closer.

Let me get in control of myself. Let me get in control. We planned for this. It is true we planned for this. Of course what we never said in these plans was that we were so small in a darkness so vast, we are insignificant, just a  building, even just one family that may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some hate us, people I have never met hate my children, hate my wife, hate me. I need to be brave. I need to be strong. There is nothing to fear, only life and the destiny that I cannot control. I will play chess with my maker. Today, I pray, even if it has been so long that I last prayed, that fortune will smile down on me and mine. Tonight does not have to be a nightmare, tomorrow can rise with these memories nothing but  a bad dream. I clench and unclench my hand. I clench and unclench my hand. There is nothing to do but wait to see if we are an island of peace of a part of the fierce torrent of violence.

My family comes back, their tasks completed. Some neighbors come in, it seems by reacting first they have decided to make my home headquarters. That is fine. Safety in numbers, they might as well congregate here rather than anywhere else. There is the sick smell of panic in the air. I am no leader, but someone has to say something before the fear in all of our hearts bubbles to the surface. I quietly ask them if they have made all their preparations, as we planned previously. Everyone nods. Is the downstairs foyer and fire escape secured? Yes. Well, alright then, everyone might as well make themselves comfortable: the night may be long.

Everyone’s eyes are riveted to the window at my back. More flames licking the city, so close. Was that a gunshot on our block? The individual please of mercy and cries of aguish begin to come towards us: please, there are no bad people here—please, there are children. The faceless mob ebbs and flows. The night is filled with the thunder of gunshots. There is no way to know the fate of those pleaing, of those crying. The chaos comes closer. Down a side street a few men run by carrying weapons. My son sees it and huddles closer to hit mother. Everyone in my apartment seems to huddle closer together. The tides are not in our favor, so much of the night is left. So much time for terror to breed, to take advantage of the private blanket of darkness. Fate, today, is not with us.

There are many children in the building. So many wanted as I want to create a land that their children would be proud of. Second guessing feels of naïvete and stupidity will not have time to rise in my head now. We planned as well as we could. I tell the other adults that it seems like maybe tonight luck is not with us. It was meant to be just a little bit light hearted, it falls flat. I sigh. I look at each of my neighbors in the eyes. I say we need to protect the children. They all agree, which breaks the last barrier in my mind that this nightmare may come to a happy ending. We have a room in one of my neighbors apartments where the door can be covered by a bookshelf. The room itself is in a top corner of the building as far away from the street as possible. It is not a perfect hideaway, but, well, we don’t always get the pleasure of perfect solutions. In our minds when we all talked about the need for a room such as this we tried to be serious, yet, we never thought we would truly need this. Fear creeps up my heart, back down, back down, I must be strong. Others depend on me. We put all the children in the room. We leave a few women with them to keep the children calm and comforted. The room is completely full. I have already hugged my wife and children, I was lucky that my wife was able to stay with the children. I have done the best I can for their safety.

My neighbors come back to my apartment. Everyone in the building is either in my apartment or the hideaway. Some of my neighbors have weapons, ranging from hand guns to knives to kitchen mallets. My own hands are empty. I must master my own fear. The street is slowing filling with a trickle of combatants. There seems to be a silence in my mind, across the street I can see a flat level with mine having the doors kicked in. There are no people in the flat, did they have a plan like ours? The throw a Molotov cocktail in the parlor and quickly go into the next room. We cover the last sliver of our parlor window that is still exposed, look towards the open door that leads to the buildings stair case and count time to the beat of our own hearts.

Nothing happens. Screams trickle through every crack. Fire spreads, but the brick buildings are strong. We do not talk. We do not look at each other. Nothing happens. Hope quietly asks to be allowed into my heart, and I slam the door in its face. There will be no hope until the sun shines and the streets are empty. Nothing happens. My mind is filled with a huge vacancy. For some  reason the feel of walking on thick green grass fills my mind. Where was I that the grass was just like that? The sort of grass that makes you want to lie in it and just stare at the sky, to count the clouds. We hear a commotion in the stair well. Screaming. The mob has come. Our preparations do nothing. The noise of heavy feet running up the stairs fills our ears. We do not look at each other we look at the door.

My flat was on the fourth floor. We hear doors being kicked open below us. They are coming. They are coming. One of my neighbors becomes brave, walks to the door, walks to the railing of the stair case and bellows ‘there are no enemies here. We are all good people. Please, we are brothers. We are brothers. It does nothing, there is not even a response. These are not men streaming through my building, they are not even monsters, they have drunk from the flames of the night and are drunk on their own passion. If only they hates us, to be killed by someone for a reason would mean something, I shake the thought from my mind. I will not allow myself pity, we must be brave, we must think of our children.

“Well,” my neighbor says, “should we try to kick these sons of bitches out?” Grimly we file out of my apartment and take the positions we plotted months ago placed between my floor and the top floor where the children were. We touch each other lightly and unconsciously whenever we go past each other. My position is midway between my apartment and the children’s room. I have a small hand gun that I practiced with just for a purpose like this. Amazing how we did so much preparation for something we never thought would happen. Men are filing up the stairs, I have never fired at a living creature before. I see someone in a clear line of sight waving a Molotov cocktail. I fire, at the same time as a few on my neighbors fire. We shouldn’t waste shots, though we have enough ammo. It’s just a bad habit, a bad habit that the instructor at the gun range was so adamant we were aware of. I curse myself for wasting the shot, and see the man I fired at lying on the ground. Is he dead? Was it my shot that killed him? Why is there no emotion in my heart. I ready my gun again.

More and more people people stream up the stairs, many with Kalashnikovs. We fire back as best we can, but my neighbors are being killed in front of my eyes. We keep firing. I do not have a perception of time. Nothing exists except the struggle to again and again raise me gun, to keep is steady, to keep it loaded, to shoot at anyone walking upwards, anyone I can, How many are left. I must raise my gun again. There is no noise, no silence, just the raising of my gun. How is it such a small device can have such power. How terrible a device of such death was ever created, the power of an army should never take such a deceptively small shape. I am lying on the ground, how long have I been here for. There is blood coming from me, is it my blood? I cannot tell. I feel my gun still in my hand but it is becoming increasingly heavy. Soon boots are running past me higher, I should shoot. Then, the boots are running back down in fewer numbers. How is it time is passing. Are winning or are we losing? Time is so fast, or is it so slow, I cannot tell.

Someone shakes my shoulder, is he going to shoot me. I look up into the eyes of death and am greeted by a neighbor. He shouts that I’m alive but bleeding quickly. I am lifted and brought to someones kitchen and laid on the table. I am so close to passing out. Someone in my ear, is it my wife? Someone, she whispers don’t worry, tonight we have won.

 

the annihilation of all those things

that used to be important to me

 

1. I)

So where are we? A setting, is that what is required? This initial birth of writing needs to build something, to start, to be a start, the start. Where are we? Where is it that we will journey through together, hope to discover together? Truly, where we are, it is meaningless, just the disguise in which our theme will hide below, yet it is a disguise which must be communicated, the window through which any possibility of discovery this story might transmit will be seen through.

Where we are, or at least that setting which I will attempt to depict to you, is the seaside. The ships are old, we are at a great port, there is a tangible feel of that great age of discovery and exploration, that here: these ships, they will be the next Columbus, they are the brave, inhabited by the adventurers. Perhaps it is four hundred years, perhaps five hundred years ago, it does not make a difference.

Into the chaos of this hopeful scene walks a young boy we will call Trevor Nobody. He is young, no more than a child, but from the absurd strut to his walk we can see he is a mixture of hope and worry, precociously attempting something new but feeling the mountain of his inexperience, realizing that he is out of his element. What wonder, youth, to do things for the first time, and with the grin of the aged and wizened we watch young Trevor experience an aspect of life for the very first time.

He is wanting to be a cabin boy. In fact, he has a long history, a history that would need its own story to explain and perhaps it will be written one day. But this is not the place; so, suffice to say, poor little Trevor Nobody, his life has not been easy, and what we are witnessing is the dual action of the fact he is desperate, since Trevor has nothing in life and destitutions ignoble wings flutter over him, and then he is hopeful: here, in the bowels of the great ships, many men have come to greatness: perhaps Trevor Nobody can be one of them.

Now, this next part is important to communicate, though it may seem tangential to Trevor: there is one ship in the harbor more important than the rest, a legend made out of wood and fabric: the Ave. Crewed by the best of any ship, built no larger than the other ships yet with a detail that shows art in its every plank, and captained by the most lionized man of any ocean, maybe who has ever lived: Captain Trouver Infinite.

Just to have the Ave in port is an honor, just to witness her subtle beauty, to see for first hand that the legends are not just the Big Fish of drunken sailors but real, here, in front of us, materialized in fabric and wood. However, poor Trevor Nobody, he has no idea, to him all the ships are legends. Has he ever even seen a ship before? The large eyes of his scream no, he is like a man from a land of plains for the first time seeing a mountain; to him, every mountain is so large that he does not even know to crane his head to differentiate Goliath from David. Awed little boy, today is your lucky day, of course, of course, you will become the cabin boy on the Ave.

How does this remarkable reality happen? Well, it is a story, it need not be realistic, and the explanation could simply be that there was an opening position. But, sometimes it is more meaningful to have a touch of destiny in these spectacular types of situations, so what instead will say is this. Trevor was going from ship to ship, applying with all his will to find a position and having no luck. Why not? Well, he is green, and perhaps more maliciously not very pretty, and then he is not the only boy dreaming of grandeur in the high seas, trying to escape the bleakness of poverty, the destitution of ignorance, and the hatred of the masses. No, sadly, as perhaps even now in the present, whenever that might be, there is an endless plethora of young boys suffering sadly, hoping for a better life that most will never get to experience. All we can say is that there must be something to Trevor Nobody, something that I am sure he has not revealed to either author or reader yet, but something that the grandiose man who will at a later date will be revealed to be Captain Trouver Infinite sees. He walks quickly down the pier towards his ship, the palpable awe of all on the docks giving him a palpable halo visible to all except Trevor Nobody, who is staring at his feet as he walks, trying to mentally leap past the dejection of all of the rejections he’s stumbled through. It would appear that Trouver is going to pass him without a second thought, some great thought weighing on his noble mind, when just as he pulls level with Trevor he stops, stops gracefully which should be impossible such was his momentum but he has done this. He quickly looks at Trevor, a quiet merriment suddenly sparkling in his eyes, then tells Trevor to come to his ship, the Ave, they need a new cabin boy. With that remark and no more Trouver continues walking with that same strange momentum as before, again at the unstoppable speed as if he had not stopped for Trevor, as if his invitation had been nothing but a fantasy, and a fantasy is what Trevor would think it was if not for the envious eyes of all the sailors around him. To be a cabin boy on a ship like the Ave is an honor equitable to being a captain on any other ship. Trevor Nobody pulls himself together a bit, ignorantly mentally slaps himself on the back for a job well done, then heads towards the Ave for a  future that he at this point he could not even begin to understand.

—

Now, on the Ave, we are going to have time sped up for awhile, have Trevor go through a certain number of important experiences in the blink of an eye. To take the bilgerstein of his metamorphosis from child to man as nothing to write much about, though truly it is important to this story. To preface this cyclone of entropy let me say that Captain Trouver Infinite is a fine reader of men, since the transition from ignorant waif to confident young man that Trevor undergoes is dazzling. He works hard on the Ave, he takes to the chores given to him with a natural preponderance that belies the apparent weakness of his body, he becomes the adopted child of the entire crew: a boy who through his natural cheerfulness and genuineness of spirit ingratiates himself in the heart of every grizzled sailor. And oh, how Trevor Nobody is loving it all, loving doing work he finds meaningful, sharing many a happy moment with these, the men whom he has come to admire and lionize. Truly, these men are worth lionizing, Captain Trouver is not the sort to employ the usual mariner, those part pirate part mercenary who sail simply to escape the gallows, no, these men, the men of the Ave, they sail because it is in their blood, because it is what god or destiny or whatever made them best at, and these men are just the sort who want to do nothing in life but what it was that they are fated to do.

And what is it that those of the Ave do? Well, much like other merchant ships they sail port to port to pay the bills, but that is all that this is for, just to maintain the financial resources for the true mission of this ship. And the true mission, what of it? It is unknown to the sailors, something only known to Captain Trouver Infinite, but it is something wonderful for sure, something worth scouring the world for. If a man like the good Captain believes with all his heart that what he chases is worth devoting his life to, then who are ignorant men such as the sailors to question. The men don’t ask the Captain what it is they are chasing, they simply have a blind trust, a trust that indeed the captain deserves because he has not only given these men good lives, but he cares about them. He runs the sort of ship as if every sailor was his own son, as if all men were deserving of his love and admiration. The captain himself, though he is always cheerful, intelligent and jocular with his men, he is also insulated, always in his Cabin, always by himself: insomniac, lights on at all hours, the shadows just visible through tinted windows of endless charts, endless parchments, endless books lining every wall, taking up every table; and then, always, the Captain wraith like moving between them all, almost dancing, trying viciously and elegantly to discover something from all these enigmas displayed before him that the sailors could only guess at.

Captain Trouver talks to Trevor Nobody much like he talks to any of his other sailors, for of course Trouver is the captain and Trevor just the lowliest of all, a cabin boy, and the chance for them to interact truly does not occur often. Yet, to say that Trevor idolizes Captain Trouver is an understatement, since all the men of the Ave idolize the Captain; rather, Trevor worships Captain Trouver: the man who changed his life, the man who saw not the pitiful wretch that he was but instead the extraordinary man he had the potential to be; the man who gave Trevor the opportunity of a lifetime: the man who saved him.

Now, maybe, there should be an explanation of what makes Captain Trouver Infinite so worthy of the adoration he universally garners. He is a man not famous for the wealth he has created, though many of his sailors became rich under his watch, nor is he famous for the distances he has travelled, though in many of the most exotic places on earth there is a Trouver Island or an Ave Mountain, nor is he famous for his daring exploits, though as a captain in the King’s navy he is credited with single handedly changing the course of many a battle, no, what he is famous for is something more abstract, something which one only realized upon hearing the soft commanding lilt of his voice, upon seeing the peaceful eagle that resides in his eyes: here is a man not cut from the fabric of humanity but rather of the deities who live in clouds, and here, in the incarnation of Captain Trouver Infinite, is a man who will discover what it is to live, who will discover the meaning of life, discover utopianirvanaperfection, and, to follow him is to hope to share in heaven when he eventually reveals it.

—

Something needs to happen to make Trevor Nobody and Captain Trouver bond; giving them some form of a relationship is important to how this story will evolve. Maybe we could have one of them almost die and saved by the other, maybe Trevor likes to sing softly beautiful songs and one day the good Captain will hear him. I do not know yet, it is not revealed to me, but something must happen. I think what will happen is this: There is a terrible storm, the first true storm that Trevor has ever seen on the ocean. Lightning electrifies the air with crackling intensity, rain turns the air into a second ocean, and the waves are throwing the Ave through the ocean much like a feather through a hurricane. The storm is terrible enough that the sailors are grim, always a sailor must have weighing on his heart the possibility that nature will finally take back that gift of life she has bequeathed, yet, the men are not in a panic: Captain Trouver Infinite is at the helm, steady as a statue, calmly and clearly calling out correct commands. Trevor is simply trying to stay out of the way, to fresh to such intensity as this to be anything but a burden underfoot when, suddenly, he sees with a horrifying clarity a rope snap: flinging a sailor friend into the water, he is lost forever, and his downfall seems like a doom for the entire Ave as the lost tension of the rope sends the entire balance of the ship helter-skelter. Captain Trouver opens his mouth to command someone to climb the mast to secure a replacement rope, feeling in his heart a sick malaise as the unavoidable risk that this person must assume, a sickness that every leader must make peace with, when he is forced to shut his mouth: Trevor is ably climbing the mast, ably handling the wild convolutions of the waves, little Trevor Nobody, baby to everyone, the most precious child to all the men, and there he is: at risk! Like in the eye of a hurricane the chaos of the ocean is quiet, if only because the terror biting into the heart of all the men is so voracious an emotion that the senses of hearing and touch disappear around the horror of sight: oh, Trevor, you will fall, you will fall, screams in the heart of all the men, already tears brightening their rain soaked eyes as they begin to mourn, when, miraculously, Trevor manages to tie down the crazed rope. He is coming back down! Despair turns to hope turns to ash in the mouth of every sailor as the newly found hope is dashed: Trevor is blown from the ramparts and is falling, falling for an eternity: oh, if he lands in the water he is doomed forever and there he is, oh god oh god heading for the water. And with the slowness only made possible by the shock that mental pain plagues our mind with we see a staggering scene unfold: yes, Trevor falling, oh yes, into the sea, but, from another angle: hope, if only in its barest form. Captain Trouver, leaving the wheel to another helmsman, rope tied around his waist: he is in the water, he is trying to find Trevor: does his rope snap? Have we lost both of them? No! There he is, he is holding the sputtering body of another: Trevor. We bring him back in the sailors and us, and here, on the deck of the Ave, returned unharmed: both Trouver and Trevor. They stare at each other a moment, words unneeded so perfect has their shared suffering attuned their shared mentality, and, then, Captain Trouver stands up to return to the wheel, Trevor Nobody gets back to not being a pest underfoot, and the rest of the crew return to trying to master this bitch storm while being unable to shake the feel that they have just seen a miracle.

—

After this event of shared horror, that needed common bond between Trevor Nobody and Captain Trouver exists. It is something that is not talked about, not even truly there as a reality to either of them, just an invisible closeness whose reality from the perspective of the omniscient heavens is indisputable. Now that this shared link exists, we can get into the difficult matter of the impending downfall of Captain Trouver Infinite.

—

Downfall! Yes, but let this be a story in itself. How will it all happen: in a manner that this narrator feels as colors, but doesn’t know entirely what to paint. Lets discover this together.

The Ave has been at sea for a long enough time now for Trevor Nobody to feel as one of the men, very much at the bottom of the ladder but certainly sharing the same structure. He’s loving his life, feels that there is meaning in what he does, and ever since the bravery he exhibited during thegreatstorm, and his miraculous rescue by Captain Trouver, the other sailors of the ship have a sincere respect for Trevor Nobody in addition to their affection. Maybe for Trevor life would be good if things on the Ave could just continue as normal, nothing change, just blissful day after blissful day. But, sadly, such is not the lot for any in life, things change, fall apart, need to be reconstructed and in many ways this is where the wonder in life comes from; then, in many ways, this perpetual reconstruction is where much of the misery in life comes from too: alas, poor Trevor will not escape the endless grinding wheel no matter how much he might wish it, and the breach in his perfection, and indeed the breach through the brand of perfection through which the Ave was sailing, happened one day at the approach of a port that Captain Trouver and the Ave had never come to before.

To say this port was perfect sounds impossible, but for the allegory at work in this short writing it is easier to throw reality out the window and say, simply, that this port, this city, this isolated jewel in a desert of cacophony, is truly perfect. We will even call it Eden. And the men of the Ave can feel this, they know it to be true. Here, here is the place where a man can find nirvana. Here, here, is why they followed Captain Trouver: their messiah has led them through the wasteland of life and brought them to the holy land. The quartermaster of the Ave opens every cask of rum, uncorks every bottle of wine, and sets free every flagon of ale: the men will obviously stay here: it is time for the greatest celebration a man can have: that time when finally, finally, a man discovers that the feasts that only seem plausible to live in his mind have an earthly synonym. The party is beyond anything experienced by any of the men before, and toast after toast is dedicated to Captain Trouver Infinite: their leader: their savior.

Yet, where is the good Captain, for he is not with the men. The men believe that the Captain is trying to sacrifice the merriment of the party so that his presence would not act as an inhibitor of responsibility, but this is not the case. No, we find Captain Trouver in his room, by himself. He is sitting, a half full glass of wine in his left hand, his right hand unconsciously tapping his right knee, and a pensive peaceful gaze playing powerfully in his eyes. He is sad, but at peace with his sadness, a necessary part of life that he understands completely. Simply, he has come to a decision, and he came to this decision as both a captain and a man, and one thinks that maybe this is not the first time that he has had to come to this decision.

He leaves his cabin to go to the party, which by this point is at the point where a man cannot be held responsible for his actions, and Captain Trouver stands at the mast and announces quietly that he wishes to make a speech. Why make a speech of such import when his men are obviously in such a state of debauchery? Perhaps simply because the Captain must speak his mind while the spirit of the moment resides on his tongue. Perhaps the glass of wine we saw in his hand was not the first, and the Captain himself is a bit fucked. But, really, it is stupid timing, and if the Captain had chosen a better timing likely the same conclusion would have resulted, but one thinks that conclusion could have been reached with less antipathy. Regardless, this is the timing he has decided.

Quietly the Captain demands attention, perhaps feeling embarrassment of calling attention to himself, for though he is larger than life he is a humble man. Gradually, word spreads from those closest to the Captain to those farthest away, and assembled on the deck the captain is ready to begin his speech. The speech goes something like this:

“Men” Said the captain, and this initial syllable is not followed by anything but a deafening thunder of applause. The Captain waits, solemn faced, perhaps sobering to the reality that the emotion and action he wished to communicate will not be as simple as the preplanned speech of his mind.

“Men, my men, sailors of the Ave, men who have shared your lives with me, risked your lives with me, and, I would hope, have lived a wonderful life with me. I tell you truly, with utter honesty: I have never before come to a port like this: a place so perfect as to make one forget that Eden is only a legend.” Thunderous applause. “I tell you, men, that it is my firm belief that you depart from this ship here, to make a life at this port. While I hope that the Ave has been a home for you that has allowed you to live a life which you find satisfying and rewarding, I think there is something to which cries to the soul of man, something which every man searches for: perfection. I think that many of you might find that perfection can be found at this port, this Eden.” More thunderous applause. “However, I tell you, that for myself, I cannot stay here. I look with envy, even jealousy, at the potential you all share in finding a shared perfection together here, but it is not a perfection I can partake in. The litany of my life has been decided, and it is not here that I will rest, if indeed I will ever rest.” The applause has stopped, and an atmosphere of silent confusion reigns. “My men, my noble men, I know that a place perfect like this has been placed as a planned port firmly in each of your fantasy. This, this place is your dream, and I tell you with the admiration brought on by envy that it is a good dream, I see your natural peace, the natural way you would fit into this dream that has been made real. Yet, I tell you, and I pray you see this as no disservice to your own dream, that this dream you share is not shared universally by our crew, for it is not shared by me. Yes, I dream, of course I dream, but what those dreams are is immaterial: I will not be sated here, if ever I can be sated, and, therefore, I must carry on. If any of you wish to come with me, you may, however, I hope and pray that just because your dream is not shared by me you do not take this as any indicator on the happiness that you can find in the perfection of your own dream, and will be able to live in your re-found Eden with the bliss of nirvana. I, myself, will leave this perfection. If any wish to come with me, they may, but I hope to leave here alone. I will depart at sunrise. Thank-you, thank-you for everything….” And here, for a few agonizing moments Captain Trouver thanked his crew for such undeniably fantastic service but the ears of each crew member was frozen: Captain Trouver: leaving; Captain Trouver having a different dream of perfection; in the heart of each man an anarchic confusion bloomed, and upon the departure of Captain Trouver to his cabin the crews emotion was as driest kindling waiting for just the most basic spark to instigate an unimaginable blaze of whatever color that first spark happened to be.

Oh, it was foolish for Captain Trouver to leave. Such are the dark voices that eat at all our logic, taint any purity with the possibility of deceit, and soon a spark was born, a malignant whisper flowering, flowing from ear to ear to ear: Captain Trouver was trying to unload the crew of the Ave, that a man as wise as him would be foolish to pass up such splendor as the present port was brimming with, and, therefore, there must be even something greater that he wanted. Yes, all men agreed that the Captain was a great man, but wasn’t it the great men who were the most devious, the most likely to have risen to such heights by unfairly standing on the backs of the subjugated?

Soon, the men were arguing such virulence that it need not be regaled here. What can be said are the results. About half the men chose to stay in the port, chose to take the Captain’s advice and attempt to live the glorious life that it seemed god had firmly gifted into their lap. Then, the other half, what they did maybe there would be regret after a terrible hangover, but their actions were irredeemable and impossible to turn back time on. They drunkenly, in a mob, elected the loudest voice of malcontent against the Captain’s to be their leader, and what he proposed and what ultimately fell to pass was this: to wrestle the Ave away from Captain Trouver Infinite, to take his maps, to discover where it was that Captain Trouver was personally heading, and then to go there themselves. There was no hatred or disrespect for the Captain, just a feeling that they were fighting against a legend and it was time to make a legend out of themselves. It would seem that the Captain must have suspected that such a possibility as his exile would come to pass since when then men barged into his chamber he was in travelling clothes with a small trunk. The men placed the captain in a large dinghy with a sail, enough supplies to hold out until he could either go back to the port or scavenge food, and departed in the Ave. Captain Trouver stared quixotically at the Ave as she left, maybe even a bit of a grin illuminating his face, then set about rigging the sail to push his new ship forever forward. Of course, because such is the way this story though this came as an enormous shock to Captain Trouver, Trevor Nobody was underneath the sails ready to join Captain Trouver on his quest to find nothing.

 

1. II)

Now of course there is the temptation to speed time up, gloss over these initials momentsmemories of Captain Trouver (if he can still be called a Captain) sailing with Trevor Nobody (who really has always been a Somebody). Yet, then, if every emotion towards expediency was allowed, this story would be nothing more enlightening then a proverb: everything is perfection, all of reality is perfect; and, while this is the point of this story, it is the hope that with the added flesh of story on this thematic skeleton a foreign principle might by analogous metaphor be given some subtle scent of sublime truth. So, let us slow down time, deal with the relatively arbitrary, and maybe even enjoy this scene, enjoy the language as it flows to meet our senses just as we might enjoy a sunset or a first blooming flower: for their meaningless but real beauty; perhaps, also, a truth may be revealed.

—

Captain Trouver stares at Trevor nobody as he climbs from out of the stowed rigging on what we shall still call the Ave, for every ship that Captain Trouver controls is always called the Ave. This could be the time to tell you that the last ship, which we will never see or hear from again, was not the first Ave, and we doubt she shall be the last: the Captain seems to revolve: to rise to great heights, to fall to bitter depths, and then to rise again, and certain constants are always shared: the brilliance of the good Captain: his ship the Ave: the finding of perfection and the abandonment of the captain; then, of course, the cycle repeats. However, this time, an anomaly has emerged, and as Trevor dusts himself off and gabs away about his reasoning for staying with the captain, words which are very important to him yet we care not about, Captain Trouver Infinite is mentally attempting to deal with this off balancing alien to his equilibrium.

At last, Trevor stops lecturing, and we must say it was a very nice lecture, a lecture which fully encapsulates the deep love and respect which led to the logic of Trevor staying with Trouver and makes Trouver appreciate Trevor not as an added weight but as a treasure which warrants to be treasured. After the speech, which leaves Trevor a bit red in the face because of embarrassment and lack of oxygen Trouver Infinite tells him that he is happy to have someone so passionate join him on his voyage, but that he is worried that he will disappoint Trevor. His journey is not, as his former crewmates claim, one to find ever unimagined riches, rather, he will just continue doing as he has always done, going from port to port, fishing here and there, perhaps, if the opportunity arises of gaining new crew or a bigger Ave, he will take it, but, then again, perhaps not. Trouver is looking at Trevor with his eyes seeming to say I fear to disappoint you, that I live a life that most would deem unsatisfying, and Trevor seems to understand this, tells him that of course he is free to leave, would leave and will leave whenever he wants, if a life such as that which the Captain chooses to live is the sort of perfect life he deems appropriate, then maybe Trevor will have much to learn by attempting to live such a way as well. And such is the way their shared journey commences.

As a first order of business was food. While those hearty mutineers left Captain Trouver with some food stuff in addition to what he presciently brought with him, with the addition of course of Trevor this food would be reduced all the quicker and besides, what sort of a responsible man is sated with the barest adequacy of stores: Captain Trouver wanted to be amply furnished with supplies in the event of who knows what. Trevor and Trouver went to land to collect tools to make fishing rods. They went to sea and gained many a fish. They traded some of these fish with locals or merchants for any other goods they needed. Everything was done orderly. Everything made a certain sort of sense, yet, everything was different then it was but such a short time ago. How had this new universe supplanted the old, when the old had been everything?

Trevor was sometimes melancholic, not for himself since he found the quiet actions of daily life meaningful, yet rather for Captain Trouver, who he felt must be dispirited for his grave loss of position in the world. One day Trevor, in the midst of a particularly dark brood, said that he wished the very worst for those who had remained aboard the old Ave. Captain Trouver sounded surprised, and asked why would he wish such bad thoughts onto men who had always been so good to him, to which Trevor replied “They cast you out, their leader. They are mutineers, traitors, dark scum who broke the laws of their sworn morality in their betrayal of you.” Yes, Captain Trouver admitted, they had cast him out, but had he himself not in many ways cast them aside, or at least tried to, insisting that they stay in Eden while he left to continue his endless journey? And besides, had not each of those men given many a proof of their devotion to morality and proven many a time their goodness of spirit. No, adamantly though thoughtfully stated Captain Trouver, these men were merely hazarding the moral labyrinth which confronts each of our souls and getting through it to the best of their ability. Of course, inevitably there would be errors of judgment, indeed, perhaps it was an error of himself, Captain Trouver, which had led to so much of the friction: if he had just worded his speech better, had given it better timing. But if, if, if is meaningless, all that there can be is the metamorphosis of those past mistakes into the knowledge of wisdom, and perhaps all these difficulties faced by everyone would serve to make everyone wiser. He himself, he had no feeling of animosity against his old crew. Nor did he feel any antipathy against his present situation. What was, was. What is, is. And either way, he was the same man; either way, he would appreciate, enjoy, wallow in those beauties of life which chose to reveal themselves regardless if he was the Captain of the most famous ship on the seas or but the humble rower of a dinghy.

“But,” Argued Trevor, “Did you not spend your life trying to become a great Captain? Is it not all your work undone, all those past milestones meaningless?” And here, here, we have a point, stated Captain Trouver: yes, yes, all that work is undone, but what work was it? All life was but a voyage whose goal was the moment. A beautiful future was hoped for, striven for even, but the idea was never that the future would be better than the present; just, that, it would be something worth going towards, a port on the horizon to head a ship towards but what actually counted was what was happening on the ship itself: keeping every rope taunt, every crewman happy, the whole affair safe, orderly and at peace. Yes, getting to be the most famed captain in the world was a majestic port which he had set sail for, but just as when he had set course for Eden and had carried on leaving his crew, he was unsaddened, perhaps even ecstatic, by leaving that metaphysical port of departing from being the greatest captain in the world; for him, that was never a goal, just an arbitrary sight to head his life towards while he enjoyed the quiet invisible beauty of everything. “Then,” belied Trevor, “What do we head for now?” Maybe that tree, said Captain Trouver, but then again maybe that pinpoint of light on the distance, or maybe myself being a father, or maybe a farmer of plantain; it makes no difference, when I get there things will be as they are now, just as I can bring in sweet air at any point in my life I can breathe in the sweetness of the world around me. To spend a life staring at a wall would be a life just as valid as  becoming the greatest Captain in the world, yet, momentum, that deity, has more say then we would give her reason, and she pushes us forward in our first baby steps as an infant, before we understand who we are, before we have given any resonance to the question of what we want. Yes, we could stop, but stopping in itself would then be a goal, it would be a refutation of the wonder inherent to that movement that can infuse us when we first awaken to consciousness. No, what happens is not that we stop, what happens is that when we awaken men assume that this motion that they find themselves a part of must have meaning, must be something more resonant then being a part of a system where through fluke or folly everyone goes from age 10 to age 11, grade 1 to grade 2, child to youth to man, and, therefore, they must go from movement to the goal that this movement is heading towards. What that may be is up to personal interpretation, but, said Captain Trouver, who was saying all of this while staring at a flame on some shore somewhere (it makes no difference but that the flame gives him a look in the eye that one hopes you can imagine), I refute all this. I will not try to be a great man. I will not try to be a rich man. I will not try to be a success. All of this suggests a changing of who I am, and transfiguration from that man who I was to the man I should be. Fine, if that is what you want, but that is not what I will allow myself to want. I will not be so weak as to pretend, even if I believe it, that life is about stepping stones, goals, and finding meaning. No, to me, said Captain Trouver Infinite, me, a man who does not believe in a benevolent god, who believes when I die I will be nothing but dirt, to me this brief flash of life, this interlude of consciousness between the immortal contractions which the molecules which form my earthly form have found themselves and will find themselves, this time is about an appreciation: to see the universe in her perfection, and out of all glorious creations many dimensions, be one of those few conscious beings able to actually stare with the awe that the universe deserves. I will not distract myself from the sublime masterpiece with thinking of such mundane thoughts as who I want to be, what is wrong with my life now, what perfection would look like: no: all I will be is a man with eyes wide open staring in silent awe at the world around me. What I do with that awe is meaningless, it has led me to be the greatest captain in the world, then, it has led me to this, and maybe it will lead me to many more things. I tell you, Trevor, that before this last mutiny there were other ships I commanded, deeds I have done: always, it seems, even by accident, I have through thoughtlessness brought men to where they believed their dreams resided, perhaps this is what has made me a legend, and I believe in the happiness these men find there and am happy for their ecstasy but it is not for me, no, I must always walk away, continuing floating with this speed I awakened to find myself at, perhaps having a certain gravitational force which might attract things to me but that is not my intent, perhaps have a certain magnetism which attracts me to the extraordinary but that is not my intent. The only intent I have, again, and again, again, is to keep my eyes open, and when they shut, they will be shut, but for now they will be open and that is all that I have. And Trevor, I tell you, I cannot change for you, or more correctly I will not change for you. You are welcome to join me, I hope you join me. I believe my beliefs are worth believing. But, I will not advocate: I will not pontificate: I will simple be.

Well, Trevor was looking at the fire during this advocating speech which pontificated a belief and there is always something of when a man in alone with another, when there is not that corruptive influence of others to corrode the honesty of the words from a man’s mouth to a listeners ear with his corruptive presence, and here, by the fire, there was only the words of Captain Trouver Infinite and the ears of Trevor Nobody listening. Perhaps there is universal truth, or at least personal truth, and if we could communicate purely we would understand each other perfectly, maybe even be each other, but such is not the way of communication, flawed form for a flawed perfection, but, this day, Trevor understood perfectly enough to realize a certain reality which perhaps he was already predisposed to yet had just never taken the time to think through. He listened to the words with his ears. His brain processed them in analogies which made sense to his personal personality. And his heart accepted the warmth generated by the personal resonance found in these words as truth. “Yes,” said Trevor Nobody, “I will travel with you forever. I will try to be at bliss forever.”

–

So was it all so easy as this? Of course not. But, then, it was not so different from this as might have been possible. Trevor was used to the accepted idea that there were supposed to be goals, aims, a point to life. How simplistic to think the point of life was just in living! But, then, Trevor Nobody had spent much time aboard the Ave with Captain Trouver Infinite, and then, maybe he was one of those sorts of people who was genetically predisposed to such natural thought anyway, maybe those sort of people do exist. Maybe this was all more easy then it had to be, more easy then it would be with most people. What ended up happening was, from a written perspective, fantastic: many adventures together where these men only built on the name of Captain Trouver Infinite and the Ave, adding only a third canon to this mighty litany with the inclusion of Trevor Nobody; here was the things of legend, the thing to tell children at night in order to inspire them to dreams of grandeur and glory. Yet, for themselves, there was only the mundane day to day of taking in nirvana’s bliss out of every moment, and, when the lights of their lives eventually winked out much as the sun at the end of a particularly normal day, there was no sadness in their hearts, just the appreciation that they had seen the entirety of that day.