It all moves so fast. And I’m used to fast by now, I do drive, after all. But there’s so much of it, in every direction the eyes turn. Highways pump masses of cars along like mechanical arteries. Planes descend overhead at regular intervals like artificial eagles coming home to roost. The train whizzes along, making a blur of objects in the foreground. A knot is forming in my gut as the grey mass of city takes over the landscape around us. I can feel the immense density of its humanity. Millions of thoughts, feelings, hopes, despairs, little deaths, all mush and press and layer and inter-fold upon one another. The air itself feels pasty and hard to breathe.
“I don’t like big cities.” I confess to Jack.
“I know. But it’s a necessary evil for continuing our adventure, mum.”
He seems awfully chipper about all of this. What is he up to? “Do you like it here?”
“I like what I can get here.” I glance over at his grin & it’s slightly reassuring.
Once exit the train station downtown, everyone seems to be in such a terrible hurry; in a hurry to wind through the rat’s maze of their own making. Jack grabs my arm as my head starts to bob and follow each manic passerby.
“This way” and he heads me down a street and up a set of stairs. Above the street trains clatter and screech along on elevated tracks. Whoever thought this up had no consideration whatsoever for the humans who would inhabit this space. This is the city of machines and one must lend one’s body and time to the machine that they may survive, get what one needs and get out with a margin of life left.
At the top of the stairs we are greeted by turnstiles barring our entry onto the train’s platform. I step over to a booth where a woman sits behind thick glass and ask for a ticket. At first she ignores me. Then she shouts something to me that is incomprehensible through the barrier between us. Several confused looks and “I can’t hear you’s” later she points to a machine behind me which dispenses passes for riding. Why do they have someone sitting in a booth if there is no need to sell tickets? We dicker over the machine for a few minutes.
“I thought you said you had been here before!”
“I was, but they changed the system since I was here. Last time they just took cash.”
“Do you know where to go once we get in?”
“Yeah I’m pretty sure. They haven’t changed the train lines around really for decades.”
“When is the last time you were here?”
“The early 90’s. It sure has cleaned up since then!”
This is clean? I want to ask out loud but I stop myself. No sense starting trouble now. “Where are we going, by the way?”
“South side.”
“South side of Chicago.”
“Yup.”
“You are dragging me to the South Side of Chicago, as written about in such fine tomes as ‘Ain’t No Makin’ It’ and ‘Chicago’? That south side?”
“Will you quit worrying? Jeees! Mum you are starting to be a real drag. We will be fine.”
“I’d rather be a drag than in the hot seat. Sometimes being a drag is just plain being the smart one. Look at us, Jack! We’re among the whitest of the white on Earth. We don’t belong on the South side of Chicago, not if it’s anything like what I’ve heard about.”
“I can’t believe you are such a racist! YOU! How can you hold race up to make such a big difference when you yourself were born so terribly different with a trait no one can see on your skin!”
“I’m not talking race. I’m talking territory. I’m talking about culture. We are invaders and we are going to be walking targets!”
“For what? What? What could possibly hurt you?”
I hold my tongue. We’re already on a southbound train. The question is more one of ‘whom could we possibly hurt’? I look out the window of the elevated car as it rocks along the tracks. Directly below us houses, squeezed together cheek by jowel, pass by. Laundry hangs off ropes tied across back porches. Toys lay strewn in backyards left deserted by winter. The train turns briefly and I see my own reflection in the glass mapped across the skyline. It’s so easy to end up entirely alone in a maze this jammed with people. From a distance the tall buildings of downtown remind me of a Jewish cemetery with all of its headstones packed together tight.
We get off at 47th street and start heading down a street filled with bedraggled remains of once fine houses and floating bits of trash. Then I see them. Mile after mile of homogenous concrete buildings stretch north to south. There’s a sinister nature in their lack of diversity. Character is not given through artistry or architecture but through the scars each edifice has earned. Burn marks streak the sides of one building. Windows are broken, façades pocked with bullet marks on another. Each looks like a whole lot of the bad life beat it up and left a nasty bruise.
“C’mon” Jack grabs my arm and heads toward it.
“I am NOT going in there!”
“Well you’ll be in bigger shit if I leave you standing out here on your own! Now come on!” This time he seizes my elbow in a most unforgiving vice and I lurch along behind him, whingeing all the way. “Look, we want passports, right? Well the type of people who make nice passports for people who aren’t nice do not live in bloody Lincoln Park. They live here. Welcome to the projects.”
He is hell bent on aiming us into one of the buildings when a tall, black man with a shifty gaze steps in front of us. Under his breath Jack warns “not a word out of you.”
“ w’chu wawn?” He never quite opens his eyes more than halfway and seems most intent about chewing on the toothpick in his mouth. But with arms folded and legs in colossus stride, it’s clear there’s no getting past this man. Man? Upon closer inspection he looks like more of a very tall boy.
“Looking for Stubs.” Is all Jack says.
“What bidness you got wid Stubs?”
“Private business. He’s usually quite pleased to see me.”
“We don’ like folks just comin on in here that don’ belong here.” He looks us over good, giving us his best evil eye and persistently chewing that stupid toothpick. I want to yank it out of his mouth and order him to pull his pants up. Maybe Jack’s right. I am a racist.
“Perhaps you could tell Stubs that ‘Jack Black’ is here?”
“Whatin-a hell kinda name i-zat? ‘Jack Black’! Donchu come roun here makin like you is all gangsta and shit. I look like yo foo? I look like I your messenger o’ sompin? Who you think you is comin in here treating me like a nigga?? You think ah’m yo nigga mista white an’ mighty?”
I’m way too old to put up with his lip. “Hey! Who asked you to step in our way, you moron!” I shout. “You own this place that you can stand in front of the door like a troll or are you just bored? If this is your turf then why don’t you get busy and start fixing it up?”
His jaw drops only briefly before he pulls a revolver from the front of his pants yelling “BITCH!” I don’t know where the speed or gumption comes from but I lunge forward and grab the wrist of the gun arm, pull him toward me and set fangs into him. I don’t go in deep enough to drink, just to put in the first shot of venom. He drops to the concrete like a lump. I keep the gun.
“After that cry-baby act I didn’t think you had it in you.” Jack crouches next to the body to examine the boy. “Nice work! Very neat. And to think you were scared.”
“Eh… He had a shitty gun-hand. Kids these days! They expect that fancy high-powered, semi-automatic assault weapon to do all the work for them. Not a one of them learns to handle a gun with a real fighter’s grace. Shame what things come to.” Lying on the ground without his tough expression, I can see he’s actually quite a handsome young man, almost beautiful. But here he is, in this giant concrete filing cabinet where the government stuffs people it can’t understand.
“How long do you think he’ll be out? How much did you shoot in there?”
“Enough to leave him looking like a helpless girl on the ground for a few hours. Now, we got someone to see here or not?”
Stubs home, or cell, depending on your perspective, is piled high with ledgers, paper stocks, and computers of all different models. The clatter, whiz and hum of printers emanates from another room. A few dim fluorescents hang from the ceiling. Most of the light in the room is emitted by spot lights that hover over desks with lenses attached to their necks.
“That you Jack Black?” A voice calls out as we let ourselves in. In the kitchen, fixing some tea is a portly old man in long underwear and pants held up with suspenders over the top. As he turns I see spectacles, with a jewelers’ lens attached, balancing on his nose. He looks like an African-American Santa. “I heard that commotion and I figured it was you. Someone giving you trouble out there?”
“Nooo sir, not at all. Just a fine lad trying to protect the door is all.”
“Oh, that be Elmur. Didn’t hurt him too bad did you?” And he chuckles.
“I didn’t touch a hair on his head. But mummy here kicked his ass!”
“yo muthuh?” And old Stubs bends over in a laugh that sounds more like a cough. “Ha haa! That is jus’ too good! Now whut chew come on over to see Stubs fo?”
“Well, we, my mother and I, need some identification.”
“m-HM! I see I see. Where you goin off to this time?”
I almost volunteer an answer to his question when I realize that honesty is probably not a good idea here. I hold back and decide to let Jack do the talking. I’ll stick to the fighting!
“Oh all around. Mexico, Cuba, maybe off to the Carribean.”
“Ha! You won’t make it out of Tiajuana! Alrighty then. You need passports and what else?
“Driver’s license” Jack offers.
“And birth certificates” I add on. Hey if this guy is that good, why not?
A few hours later and some less some gold, we each emerge with our new identities in hand. My new passport rests inside my shirt, bearing my new name “Eleanor McClean”. That was Gabriel’s name and I do sometimes miss wearing it.
“Hm. Irish. Well, if anyones can pull dat one off its you, ma’am!” was Stubs final call on the monicker.
Jack had wanted me to give up ‘Eleanor’ as well, but he also knew better than to fight me on it. Showing his own flair, Jack became “Blake Breton”.
“May I continue to simply call you ‘Jack’?”
Outside the afternoon is wearing on. The season is starting to relent and the few patches of what passes for grass squish under our feet. School is out for the day and throngs of children rush past, making all sorts of noise and chatter. From the herd wafts a scent of sweat and fried food.
Just then we notice another sullen figure coming up behind them. Walking slow with his head down, he’s the real reason we’re here.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Nanowrimo - 20
In the nook of space behind the drivers seat, I'm cradled and rocked off to sleep by the motion of the car as it bumps down the road. The sounds around me drift away as if I’m sinking under the surface of the sea. The water is warm and dark and still. Nothing can get to me down here. No lost thoughts, no memories, no animal visions, no images. I rest in the deep darkness.
How much later, I don't know how long, a terrific howling pulls me from dead slumber. A racket comes from the direction of the front seat. After a minute of confusion I recognize the source. It’s Jack howling along with the radio.
"Beyoncé?" I ask. Pulling myself up to see.
"Good catch! Not bad for an old fart.”
“I’m not so very much older than you, mate.”
“ True, very true. How are you feeling? You went to sleep like a baby after its bottle!"
"I feel ok. At least physically. My body feels great."
"Good, climb up front and lets talk about how we're gonna get out of this mess."
I pile over the passenger seat, getting stuck only briefly when I manage to wedge myself between the seat and the roof of the car, which brings Jack some indelicate moments to laugh at. Finally I land in place and belt myself in, which makes Jack look at me funny until I remind him that driving without a seat belt on invites in the law. With this he fastens his own.
"Is this really such a good idea? Me sitting in front? Aren't they going to be looking for me?"
"Even if someone has discovered your home yet, which I doubt, they're going to be on the hunt for a woman in her 50's." He flips down the visor and opens the mirror. "You're not that woman anymore."
The face staring back at me causes me to catch my breath up short. I had grown so accustomed to the dry, spotting skin, the face that quoted each smile with lines about the eyes and mouth and the silver weaving its way through my hair. So strange to see her face again, young as the day I was married to Fitz, she is, and smooth. My hair is thick again and bright in color. I feel down my body. The parts which had begun to migrate with age are firmly back in their original locations. Jack just grins as I make my discoveries. Suppleness has returned, scars have disappeared. It feels right to be in my own skin, again.
"And to think you wanted to give this up." He grins. I won't award him the satisfaction, of a reply, not yet.
He continues "I've been staying on back roads to avoid places where they photograph the car. Bloody good deal you drive a Prius. We won't have to worry about stopping for gas. But we're going to be nearing Chicago soon, so we have to loose these wheels."
"I'm surprised they aren't already after us."
"Probably no one will notice until she who became your breakfast doesn't come home in the evening."
"Any number of things can happen. A delivery person could come by, or if enough calls get ignored someone might drive over. I don't think I had any appointments today where I'd be missed."
"Whatever it was, the urge knew it was the right day."
"I suppose. It didn't take long to find Jones, though, and he was a shut-in."
"I called 9-1-1." He blurts out the confession as if he were saying 'I have to stop for cigarettes'.
"What?"
"I told you! I called Emergency. As soon as I came down from the high I rang them up and scooted. What's the big deal?"
Just as we were seeming to get along, all the reasons I'm angry with him come flying forward. "How could you have done such a thing to such a sweet man!"
"Stop it. You know how. You did the same thing not three hours ago."
"I saw his body! You had him drawn and quartered and broken like - like I used to watch them torture criminals! It was horrible! Absolutely disgusting and frightening! How could you have done such a horrible, cruel thing?"
"The same way you smashed up your house, woman! I don't even remember doing it! I just remember... I remember how it felt. And I remember how it felt to sense you finding his body. Look, I know how sad it makes you to think about it but he didn't die in pain."
I hold my tongue for a long while. 'Sad' is not the word to describe my feelings. Finally I peel my eyes from the winter landscape and turn to him. "How did he die then? Tell me."
"I'll tell you if you tell me the juicy tale what finally made your resolve slip up."
"Deal. Tell me all of it."
"Alrighty. Just after you left I flew back over there."
"As the Corax? He saw you as the Corax?"
"Yes, now don't interrupt. After you left he remained sitting at that kitchen table for a while, staring off into space. He was looking out at his garden and missing his wife. You could feel it coming through the walls so great was his longing. He couldn't understand why he had been left on Earth so long while everybody else had transitioned on to heaven. He was lonely. So, I flew over to the kitchen window and tapped on the glass. He saw me and came over, talking to me through the glass. 'Hey there old man' he said, 'you come to keep an old fella company?' And he opened the window for me.”
“Hm, Fella… that’s a word he would use.”
"I just hopped in. He brought over the remnants of the soup in his plate and fed me some chicken. He was very sweet, very gentle. He never saw me coming. When he turned to put the dish into he sink I morphed and took him from behind. He felt maybe only a moment's sensation. That's all."
I'm crying and he tries again to console me. "There there! He barely felt a thing. Mummy, I was much gentler than the heart attack heading for."
As much as I hate it I have to credit that discernment. "hmm. all that canned food. You're right. It shits me how mortals are so terrible at keeping themselves alive. Even the nice ones."
"So, your turn now. What happened this morning?"
"Well, I had the urge before I was even awake. I was having this dream that I was a fox, running from the hounds. And when I woke up those pointy little fox teeth were still in my mouth. The urge had me in its grasp and I was struggling for control. It kept dragging me around, down the stairs, toward something. But, I have some ways to control it that usually work. I was using those, or trying to, although it was a battle against my own limbs to do so. I even bit at my own hand."
"How can you RESIST it?" He's incredulous. "Especially after so long? How do you do that?"
"Well, I listen to U2 and eat bacon." After a stunned pause he laughs so hard the car almost goes off the road. "Easy! Easy! Don’t wreck us out here because I don’t plan on drinking any more Midwesterners."
"I’m terribly sorry, please continue" He says with a flutter.
"I managed to get to my iPod and get the music on. After that I started to calm down enough to go fry up some bacon. So, I'm standing in the kitchen, still in my nightgown, which is drenched with sweat from the battle, eating sizzling-hot bacon straight out of the pan, teeth still protruding, when the bitch comes up behind me and startles me."
Jack cannot contain himself for a second. He's beginning to titter. I never realized that this could be so funny. "He he he! You must have been a sight!" he says in a high voice.
"So, I'm all startled, I turn around and realize that she's seen me with the whole fangs and eyes thing going on, not to mention that I've got grease all over my front side and I'm sweating profusely. What could I do? I had to take her down! Bitch deserved it. No one catches me in a moment like that and gets to live!"
We're both in hysterics for minutes.
"That has to be the funniest feed story I have EVER heard! Ahhhh finally! Proof that you're my mom!"
We laugh for a few more minutes, guffawing over Eileen’s pathetic last words on Earth “you have an ipod!” before I have to ask "so, why are you helping me? I thought you were mad at me. I thought you wanted to fight."
He lets out a long sigh. "Oh mummy, anger just makes time go slower. I’ve not spent all of these years chasing you for revenge. That’s so mortal! This was all I wanted!”
He smiles but I catch the faint scent of doubt under his words. He may want to believe what he’s just said, but he doesn’t know he’s not 100% there yet. No matter. We’ve got to much time between us to reconcile for anyone to be 100%, yet.
“So, what’s in that box? You ever going to open it?”
“It’s for Agnoletti. A gift.”
“Why didn’t you give it to him?”
“He refused it.”
“So why don’t you open it for yourself? What you got in there, the holy grail or something?”
“Not mine. Belongs to Zoltan if Agnoletti doesn’t want it.”
“Zoltan.. I know that name.”
“Yes, he lived in Paris. I found my way to him after leaving… after I abandoned you and your father. He trained me. I left him just before he died. He starved himself to death. I tried getting him to feed but, after 2,300 years he decided that he’d seen enough.”
“Zoltan… died? Really?” There’s a note of doubt in his voice. “Have you ever gone back to Paris to check?”
“Need a passport. I got a fake birth certificate and driver’s license, but passports are another story. They get out the proctoscopes when you come calling for one of them. Especially now. And I suppose I got set in my life, didn’t want to move on or face the many challenges that regular reinvention brings on.”
“They don’t chop off people’s heads in the town square, anymore. And to boot it hasn’t been a war zone in years! You’d like Paris, Mum! Hey, I know a fabulous forger in Chicago - top of the line! He can hook you up with a passport in a snap!”
“And if they don’t? We get carted off to jail.”
“And if that happens we’ll solve that problem the same way once borns have always gotten themselves out of tight places… we’ll EAT our way out!”
“I don’t like it.”
“Oh Come on! You’ve let Iowa get into your head! C’mon mum! We only live once!”
I have to hesitate, this could be fun or it could be trouble. But, Jack looks so excited so I concede. “ok!”
“Great!” he grins and drives a little faster.
Winding around on side streets to avoid any intersections that might have lights and, therefore, cameras, we drive to the furthest reach that one of Chicago’s Metra lines sends out into the countryside on spidery legs. We park the car on a residential street and walk to the station, hopping the next train downtown. As the grey, toothy skyline of Chicago rises out of flat land, Jack and I both start to sense it. We are coming to Chicago for more reasons that we originally bargained for.
Somewhere on the south side of Chicago, hiding away in the Robert Taylor homes, sits Artie. Little Artie Jones doesn’t socialize well with the other children. His teachers think it’s because he lives in the projects and his dad was a junkie who deserted the family after selling off everything they owned for dope. His momma figures it’s because of the mistreatment he gets at school. Sometimes she tell him “don’ be so SENSITIVE! Boy you can’ listen to what mess they be talkin’!” Some times she figures that he really just needs a father. It’s just that there’s few father figures to be had. At least where she is and how she sees the world. But on this day, little Artie Jones is hiding out in his room. Late winter sun filters through the dirty window and an acrid smell fills the air. He’s taken the cigarette lighter from his momma’s purse, which he employs in the sinister act of melting the face off of a GI Joe that he has stolen from the toy box at school. Under his bed he conceals the melted, exploded, tortured remains of many purloined action figure. More than a few of these remnants are covered with strange chew marks. Sometimes Artie will wake up with one of the dolls in his hand, looking like dog just ate on it but they don’t have a dog. Sometimes he dreams he’s a wild animal and he wakes up to find the sheets torn up. He hides the torn sheets and steals new ones from the lady next door when she hang hers out to dry.
Artie knows something about him ain’t right like the other kids but he can’t place it. The blame won’t squarely fit on any one source. And today, thirty miles to the south of the Robert Taylor homes, two once-borns approach to collect one of their own.
How much later, I don't know how long, a terrific howling pulls me from dead slumber. A racket comes from the direction of the front seat. After a minute of confusion I recognize the source. It’s Jack howling along with the radio.
"Beyoncé?" I ask. Pulling myself up to see.
"Good catch! Not bad for an old fart.”
“I’m not so very much older than you, mate.”
“ True, very true. How are you feeling? You went to sleep like a baby after its bottle!"
"I feel ok. At least physically. My body feels great."
"Good, climb up front and lets talk about how we're gonna get out of this mess."
I pile over the passenger seat, getting stuck only briefly when I manage to wedge myself between the seat and the roof of the car, which brings Jack some indelicate moments to laugh at. Finally I land in place and belt myself in, which makes Jack look at me funny until I remind him that driving without a seat belt on invites in the law. With this he fastens his own.
"Is this really such a good idea? Me sitting in front? Aren't they going to be looking for me?"
"Even if someone has discovered your home yet, which I doubt, they're going to be on the hunt for a woman in her 50's." He flips down the visor and opens the mirror. "You're not that woman anymore."
The face staring back at me causes me to catch my breath up short. I had grown so accustomed to the dry, spotting skin, the face that quoted each smile with lines about the eyes and mouth and the silver weaving its way through my hair. So strange to see her face again, young as the day I was married to Fitz, she is, and smooth. My hair is thick again and bright in color. I feel down my body. The parts which had begun to migrate with age are firmly back in their original locations. Jack just grins as I make my discoveries. Suppleness has returned, scars have disappeared. It feels right to be in my own skin, again.
"And to think you wanted to give this up." He grins. I won't award him the satisfaction, of a reply, not yet.
He continues "I've been staying on back roads to avoid places where they photograph the car. Bloody good deal you drive a Prius. We won't have to worry about stopping for gas. But we're going to be nearing Chicago soon, so we have to loose these wheels."
"I'm surprised they aren't already after us."
"Probably no one will notice until she who became your breakfast doesn't come home in the evening."
"Any number of things can happen. A delivery person could come by, or if enough calls get ignored someone might drive over. I don't think I had any appointments today where I'd be missed."
"Whatever it was, the urge knew it was the right day."
"I suppose. It didn't take long to find Jones, though, and he was a shut-in."
"I called 9-1-1." He blurts out the confession as if he were saying 'I have to stop for cigarettes'.
"What?"
"I told you! I called Emergency. As soon as I came down from the high I rang them up and scooted. What's the big deal?"
Just as we were seeming to get along, all the reasons I'm angry with him come flying forward. "How could you have done such a thing to such a sweet man!"
"Stop it. You know how. You did the same thing not three hours ago."
"I saw his body! You had him drawn and quartered and broken like - like I used to watch them torture criminals! It was horrible! Absolutely disgusting and frightening! How could you have done such a horrible, cruel thing?"
"The same way you smashed up your house, woman! I don't even remember doing it! I just remember... I remember how it felt. And I remember how it felt to sense you finding his body. Look, I know how sad it makes you to think about it but he didn't die in pain."
I hold my tongue for a long while. 'Sad' is not the word to describe my feelings. Finally I peel my eyes from the winter landscape and turn to him. "How did he die then? Tell me."
"I'll tell you if you tell me the juicy tale what finally made your resolve slip up."
"Deal. Tell me all of it."
"Alrighty. Just after you left I flew back over there."
"As the Corax? He saw you as the Corax?"
"Yes, now don't interrupt. After you left he remained sitting at that kitchen table for a while, staring off into space. He was looking out at his garden and missing his wife. You could feel it coming through the walls so great was his longing. He couldn't understand why he had been left on Earth so long while everybody else had transitioned on to heaven. He was lonely. So, I flew over to the kitchen window and tapped on the glass. He saw me and came over, talking to me through the glass. 'Hey there old man' he said, 'you come to keep an old fella company?' And he opened the window for me.”
“Hm, Fella… that’s a word he would use.”
"I just hopped in. He brought over the remnants of the soup in his plate and fed me some chicken. He was very sweet, very gentle. He never saw me coming. When he turned to put the dish into he sink I morphed and took him from behind. He felt maybe only a moment's sensation. That's all."
I'm crying and he tries again to console me. "There there! He barely felt a thing. Mummy, I was much gentler than the heart attack heading for."
As much as I hate it I have to credit that discernment. "hmm. all that canned food. You're right. It shits me how mortals are so terrible at keeping themselves alive. Even the nice ones."
"So, your turn now. What happened this morning?"
"Well, I had the urge before I was even awake. I was having this dream that I was a fox, running from the hounds. And when I woke up those pointy little fox teeth were still in my mouth. The urge had me in its grasp and I was struggling for control. It kept dragging me around, down the stairs, toward something. But, I have some ways to control it that usually work. I was using those, or trying to, although it was a battle against my own limbs to do so. I even bit at my own hand."
"How can you RESIST it?" He's incredulous. "Especially after so long? How do you do that?"
"Well, I listen to U2 and eat bacon." After a stunned pause he laughs so hard the car almost goes off the road. "Easy! Easy! Don’t wreck us out here because I don’t plan on drinking any more Midwesterners."
"I’m terribly sorry, please continue" He says with a flutter.
"I managed to get to my iPod and get the music on. After that I started to calm down enough to go fry up some bacon. So, I'm standing in the kitchen, still in my nightgown, which is drenched with sweat from the battle, eating sizzling-hot bacon straight out of the pan, teeth still protruding, when the bitch comes up behind me and startles me."
Jack cannot contain himself for a second. He's beginning to titter. I never realized that this could be so funny. "He he he! You must have been a sight!" he says in a high voice.
"So, I'm all startled, I turn around and realize that she's seen me with the whole fangs and eyes thing going on, not to mention that I've got grease all over my front side and I'm sweating profusely. What could I do? I had to take her down! Bitch deserved it. No one catches me in a moment like that and gets to live!"
We're both in hysterics for minutes.
"That has to be the funniest feed story I have EVER heard! Ahhhh finally! Proof that you're my mom!"
We laugh for a few more minutes, guffawing over Eileen’s pathetic last words on Earth “you have an ipod!” before I have to ask "so, why are you helping me? I thought you were mad at me. I thought you wanted to fight."
He lets out a long sigh. "Oh mummy, anger just makes time go slower. I’ve not spent all of these years chasing you for revenge. That’s so mortal! This was all I wanted!”
He smiles but I catch the faint scent of doubt under his words. He may want to believe what he’s just said, but he doesn’t know he’s not 100% there yet. No matter. We’ve got to much time between us to reconcile for anyone to be 100%, yet.
“So, what’s in that box? You ever going to open it?”
“It’s for Agnoletti. A gift.”
“Why didn’t you give it to him?”
“He refused it.”
“So why don’t you open it for yourself? What you got in there, the holy grail or something?”
“Not mine. Belongs to Zoltan if Agnoletti doesn’t want it.”
“Zoltan.. I know that name.”
“Yes, he lived in Paris. I found my way to him after leaving… after I abandoned you and your father. He trained me. I left him just before he died. He starved himself to death. I tried getting him to feed but, after 2,300 years he decided that he’d seen enough.”
“Zoltan… died? Really?” There’s a note of doubt in his voice. “Have you ever gone back to Paris to check?”
“Need a passport. I got a fake birth certificate and driver’s license, but passports are another story. They get out the proctoscopes when you come calling for one of them. Especially now. And I suppose I got set in my life, didn’t want to move on or face the many challenges that regular reinvention brings on.”
“They don’t chop off people’s heads in the town square, anymore. And to boot it hasn’t been a war zone in years! You’d like Paris, Mum! Hey, I know a fabulous forger in Chicago - top of the line! He can hook you up with a passport in a snap!”
“And if they don’t? We get carted off to jail.”
“And if that happens we’ll solve that problem the same way once borns have always gotten themselves out of tight places… we’ll EAT our way out!”
“I don’t like it.”
“Oh Come on! You’ve let Iowa get into your head! C’mon mum! We only live once!”
I have to hesitate, this could be fun or it could be trouble. But, Jack looks so excited so I concede. “ok!”
“Great!” he grins and drives a little faster.
Winding around on side streets to avoid any intersections that might have lights and, therefore, cameras, we drive to the furthest reach that one of Chicago’s Metra lines sends out into the countryside on spidery legs. We park the car on a residential street and walk to the station, hopping the next train downtown. As the grey, toothy skyline of Chicago rises out of flat land, Jack and I both start to sense it. We are coming to Chicago for more reasons that we originally bargained for.
Somewhere on the south side of Chicago, hiding away in the Robert Taylor homes, sits Artie. Little Artie Jones doesn’t socialize well with the other children. His teachers think it’s because he lives in the projects and his dad was a junkie who deserted the family after selling off everything they owned for dope. His momma figures it’s because of the mistreatment he gets at school. Sometimes she tell him “don’ be so SENSITIVE! Boy you can’ listen to what mess they be talkin’!” Some times she figures that he really just needs a father. It’s just that there’s few father figures to be had. At least where she is and how she sees the world. But on this day, little Artie Jones is hiding out in his room. Late winter sun filters through the dirty window and an acrid smell fills the air. He’s taken the cigarette lighter from his momma’s purse, which he employs in the sinister act of melting the face off of a GI Joe that he has stolen from the toy box at school. Under his bed he conceals the melted, exploded, tortured remains of many purloined action figure. More than a few of these remnants are covered with strange chew marks. Sometimes Artie will wake up with one of the dolls in his hand, looking like dog just ate on it but they don’t have a dog. Sometimes he dreams he’s a wild animal and he wakes up to find the sheets torn up. He hides the torn sheets and steals new ones from the lady next door when she hang hers out to dry.
Artie knows something about him ain’t right like the other kids but he can’t place it. The blame won’t squarely fit on any one source. And today, thirty miles to the south of the Robert Taylor homes, two once-borns approach to collect one of their own.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Nanowrimo - 19
I no longer fly in slumber. My imagination lost its strength long before my spirit. Dreams are not something one catalogs. They’re just markers on the journey. And just as one can travel along for miles and turn to wonder when the countryside suddenly became so dry, one day I wondered when I went from a windborne creature to runner and a swimmer. These boundaries look so definite on the maps drawn in retrospect, but I never see myself passing over them.
I run close to the ground, tall grass whipping at my face and feet spurred on to their fastest pace by the baying of hounds behind me. Men on horses seek only an afternoon of pleasure, riding about in the woods. Capturing the little red fox is merely a portion of the enjoyment they derive from getting out of the house and away from the women. For them my evasive moods are a puzzle and the dogs which torment me are the pawns sent out to do their bidding. Canine foot soldiers pursue the enemy through the countryside never realizing that the real threat to their soul and safety lies behind them, enthroned upon the horses. It’s cloaked in the political rhetoric of survival, but all war is merely a game the powerful play and there will always be wars, hunts, and those dogged pursuits to kill what is other or unknown until the day the powerful become supremely bored with the game of ages. Perhaps then they will simply go home and suck the life out of their own selves for once.
My legs are tiring. The dogs are sounding nearer. I zig zag through puddles and streams in attempts to throw them off. I’m gasping for air and can feel the blades of grass strike at the tongue hanging out of my mouth. I’m panting wildly but I refuse to stop. I refuse to give in to this misguided battle of beasts. At long last I see the small dark opening of a warren and dive in. The hounds bark and paw at the opening, still hoping to retrieve me, but I am quite beyond reach. Hunting trumpets call the beasts home leaving me, the little red refugee, in the dark.
As I return to the body in the bed from the fitful land of dreams the beastly teeth stay in my mouth. The urge is upon me even before I’ve woken up. I slide from the bed onto the floor, dripping with sweat and crawling on all fours. Around me the room spins like a bright red tunnel and I feel pulled along as if someone has put a hook into my belly and yanks me toward the prey like an unwilling catfish.
“Noooooo.” Is all the sound what comes out of my mouth. No, not now. I can’t do this now. Crawling down the stairs, panting and aching from a run, my mind is still mingled with the fox. “The fox is in the hen house… the fox is in the hen house,” keeps rolling through my brain like a taunt. I try to push myself backward on the steps and banisters but I’m unforgivably pulled downstairs. At the bottom I get a brief respite and the hot tunnel widens just big enough for just long enough for me to spy my iPod. I lunge at it, snatching it and stuffing the earphones into my ears quickly. My body rebels what it knows is coming next. It screams and lurches and yanks toward the door. My own fangs gnaw at my hand trying to stop it from turning the dials.
But I win. In seconds “The Fly” is blasting through my ears and the urge is losing its grasp just enough for me to stand upright and get to the kitchen. Pots and pans clatter their complaints that I so indelicately disturb their repose. But soon the skillet is on the stove and the bacon is on. Just the smell of it is making me pant. My teeth are still hanging out and my nerves writhe. Everything in my mind is saying “drink”. Every last cell in my body wants to drink. A drink would make all this struggle go away. Why, it’s been coming on more frequently. It used to be once a month or so, it’s almost daily, now.
“It’s not natural to starve yourself. Trust the urge! It’s there to keep you alive! It’s there to lessen the pain. You should let yourself feed.” A sinister voice whispers in my ear.
And once again I fight. I fight it all reaching for that one shred of humanity left in me. I listen to that one cell who rebels against the whole to say “NO!!!”
“No! I will not do it! I will not feed! I don’t WANT to stay alive! It’s my time to DIE!! If I feed all I will do is delay the inevitable reconning.” I shout into the air, into the tunnel constricting itself around me, pulling at me.
It comes back up in me in heaves and starts. By the time the bacon is done enough I need it so badly that I grab it from the frying pan with my bare hands and begin cramming the strips of meat, still sizzling and popping, into my mouth. Almost done, I breathe, almost done.
Just then a voice sounds from behind me. “You have an iPod!” I turn to see Eileen, who has arrived early to finish the paperwork that went neglected yesterday afternoon when we both became highly engrossed by my antiques.
And she beholds me, still wearing sweaty bed clothes, bacon grease dripping down my chin and holding the iPod aloft. And then I realize what else she sees. Behold, the fangs of the vampire and the clouded over eyes of one lost to another dimension. Her eyes lock on my face and I watch her puzzlement yield to horrified disbelief.
“You!”
It’s the only word she gets out. It’s the last word this mortal will utter on the earthly plane. In a second I’m on her. My teeth dig in with purpose and the sweet nectar rolls down my throat. She’s been eating doughnuts and coffee, had ham for dinner last night with mashed potatoes and creamed corn. The mélange makes a heady wine. Well before she’s fully dead I feel the high coming on. Out of possession of my own senses and better thinking I gulp all 3 liters down like a thirsty man at his first visit to an oasis.
When it’s done and the white body lay prone halfway between the living room and the kitchen my ecstasy is uncontrollable. With new vigor and strength pumping through them my limbs thrash and jump about. Their newfound power is exerted upon any object or surface that might wish to resist. The smashing feels good.
After an hour of the high, most of which I barely remember, I sit on the floor of the living room, surveying the damage. Everything, absolutely everything in the house is broken. Banisters, bookshelves, chairs all make heaps of tinder on the floor. The couches are torn open as if by a clawed beast. The windows are smashed. I look slowly over the piles of stuffing, fabric, books, busted wood, kettles whose handles have been ripped off, chards of glass that used to be fine pieces, ripped up paintings and the white heap of body that used to live and breathe and be Eileen. It slowly dawns on me what I’ve just done. And then I rest my head back to sob.
“There’s something that’s been in their blood since the 1950’s that produces these particularly violent states of post feed highs.” A voice says above me. I hear the clunking of heavy boots making their way through the debris.
“Jack”
“Some say its food additives. But I have another theory.”
“I was so afraid that you would kill. But then I did it. I did this horrible thing!”
“All the surviving superpowers after World War II performed extensive nuclear testing in the 1950’s. Thousands of bombs exploded in the atmosphere. The planet was a Petri dish for what perfect method would kill the best. All that nuclear activity changed the carbon in the atmosphere from C-12 to C-14. This essentially morphed the chemistry of a fundamental building block to all life on this planet. And now, here is part of the result.” He steps over an upturned coffee table and comes to crouch in front of me. The morning haze hits his face and in his eyes I see my own brilliant green color. “Some call it the nuclear high, which I must say is apt. It sure looks like a bomb went off in here.”
“I didn’t want to do this!” I’m simply sobbing uncontrollably and the words have to heave their way out of my throat. “I was so mad at you about Jones. I was so worried that you would kill. I was so worried for the people around here.”
“I know! I know.” He puts a hand up to my mouth to silence my blubbering ramble. “But it wasn’t me that brought you to this. It was your own nature. And your nature isn’t bad. Take into your own heart some of those sermons you reassure the congregation with.” As he says this I start bawling again. “Oh Mum.”
He leans forward and puts his arms around me. We settle there for a great while, just rocking back and forth.
“We have to go, now. He says eventually, releasing my hold. Get dressed. Pack a valise. We’re leaving.”
“Where on earth am I going to go? What do I do now?”
Just pack! He orders. And I bound up the stairs with an odd strength to collect a few things quickly. I pull an older bag from the back of the closet knowing that the police will instantly remark on the disappearance of a new one. For some reason I keep thinking of how I’ll talk around this, but it’s no use. Jack only started what I just did a perfectly good job of finishing. I can’t come back here, not anymore. Destroyed house or no, I’m the prime suspect, public enemy number one.
At the door I turn back. “Wait!”
“What IS it? Mum, we have to hurry up!”
I race back into the house and from the piles of wreckage where a bookshelf once was I retrieve a brown package, tied with string.
“What’s that?” Jack asks
“A gift for someone that I’ve been carrying.”
“Gods! The once born can be such packrats!”
“Well, there’s comfort in stuff, sometimes.”
He scoffs and jumps into the driver’s seat of my car. “Get in the back and get down. We don’t want someone spying you leaving.”
“Where are we going?” I ask, crouched behind him. “What do I do now?”
“You’re going to reinvent yourself, Mummy! You’ve been stable for too long!”
I feel the car skid around on the gravel. The stones crunch and hiss as if to say “go on now!”
I run close to the ground, tall grass whipping at my face and feet spurred on to their fastest pace by the baying of hounds behind me. Men on horses seek only an afternoon of pleasure, riding about in the woods. Capturing the little red fox is merely a portion of the enjoyment they derive from getting out of the house and away from the women. For them my evasive moods are a puzzle and the dogs which torment me are the pawns sent out to do their bidding. Canine foot soldiers pursue the enemy through the countryside never realizing that the real threat to their soul and safety lies behind them, enthroned upon the horses. It’s cloaked in the political rhetoric of survival, but all war is merely a game the powerful play and there will always be wars, hunts, and those dogged pursuits to kill what is other or unknown until the day the powerful become supremely bored with the game of ages. Perhaps then they will simply go home and suck the life out of their own selves for once.
My legs are tiring. The dogs are sounding nearer. I zig zag through puddles and streams in attempts to throw them off. I’m gasping for air and can feel the blades of grass strike at the tongue hanging out of my mouth. I’m panting wildly but I refuse to stop. I refuse to give in to this misguided battle of beasts. At long last I see the small dark opening of a warren and dive in. The hounds bark and paw at the opening, still hoping to retrieve me, but I am quite beyond reach. Hunting trumpets call the beasts home leaving me, the little red refugee, in the dark.
As I return to the body in the bed from the fitful land of dreams the beastly teeth stay in my mouth. The urge is upon me even before I’ve woken up. I slide from the bed onto the floor, dripping with sweat and crawling on all fours. Around me the room spins like a bright red tunnel and I feel pulled along as if someone has put a hook into my belly and yanks me toward the prey like an unwilling catfish.
“Noooooo.” Is all the sound what comes out of my mouth. No, not now. I can’t do this now. Crawling down the stairs, panting and aching from a run, my mind is still mingled with the fox. “The fox is in the hen house… the fox is in the hen house,” keeps rolling through my brain like a taunt. I try to push myself backward on the steps and banisters but I’m unforgivably pulled downstairs. At the bottom I get a brief respite and the hot tunnel widens just big enough for just long enough for me to spy my iPod. I lunge at it, snatching it and stuffing the earphones into my ears quickly. My body rebels what it knows is coming next. It screams and lurches and yanks toward the door. My own fangs gnaw at my hand trying to stop it from turning the dials.
But I win. In seconds “The Fly” is blasting through my ears and the urge is losing its grasp just enough for me to stand upright and get to the kitchen. Pots and pans clatter their complaints that I so indelicately disturb their repose. But soon the skillet is on the stove and the bacon is on. Just the smell of it is making me pant. My teeth are still hanging out and my nerves writhe. Everything in my mind is saying “drink”. Every last cell in my body wants to drink. A drink would make all this struggle go away. Why, it’s been coming on more frequently. It used to be once a month or so, it’s almost daily, now.
“It’s not natural to starve yourself. Trust the urge! It’s there to keep you alive! It’s there to lessen the pain. You should let yourself feed.” A sinister voice whispers in my ear.
And once again I fight. I fight it all reaching for that one shred of humanity left in me. I listen to that one cell who rebels against the whole to say “NO!!!”
“No! I will not do it! I will not feed! I don’t WANT to stay alive! It’s my time to DIE!! If I feed all I will do is delay the inevitable reconning.” I shout into the air, into the tunnel constricting itself around me, pulling at me.
It comes back up in me in heaves and starts. By the time the bacon is done enough I need it so badly that I grab it from the frying pan with my bare hands and begin cramming the strips of meat, still sizzling and popping, into my mouth. Almost done, I breathe, almost done.
Just then a voice sounds from behind me. “You have an iPod!” I turn to see Eileen, who has arrived early to finish the paperwork that went neglected yesterday afternoon when we both became highly engrossed by my antiques.
And she beholds me, still wearing sweaty bed clothes, bacon grease dripping down my chin and holding the iPod aloft. And then I realize what else she sees. Behold, the fangs of the vampire and the clouded over eyes of one lost to another dimension. Her eyes lock on my face and I watch her puzzlement yield to horrified disbelief.
“You!”
It’s the only word she gets out. It’s the last word this mortal will utter on the earthly plane. In a second I’m on her. My teeth dig in with purpose and the sweet nectar rolls down my throat. She’s been eating doughnuts and coffee, had ham for dinner last night with mashed potatoes and creamed corn. The mélange makes a heady wine. Well before she’s fully dead I feel the high coming on. Out of possession of my own senses and better thinking I gulp all 3 liters down like a thirsty man at his first visit to an oasis.
When it’s done and the white body lay prone halfway between the living room and the kitchen my ecstasy is uncontrollable. With new vigor and strength pumping through them my limbs thrash and jump about. Their newfound power is exerted upon any object or surface that might wish to resist. The smashing feels good.
After an hour of the high, most of which I barely remember, I sit on the floor of the living room, surveying the damage. Everything, absolutely everything in the house is broken. Banisters, bookshelves, chairs all make heaps of tinder on the floor. The couches are torn open as if by a clawed beast. The windows are smashed. I look slowly over the piles of stuffing, fabric, books, busted wood, kettles whose handles have been ripped off, chards of glass that used to be fine pieces, ripped up paintings and the white heap of body that used to live and breathe and be Eileen. It slowly dawns on me what I’ve just done. And then I rest my head back to sob.
“There’s something that’s been in their blood since the 1950’s that produces these particularly violent states of post feed highs.” A voice says above me. I hear the clunking of heavy boots making their way through the debris.
“Jack”
“Some say its food additives. But I have another theory.”
“I was so afraid that you would kill. But then I did it. I did this horrible thing!”
“All the surviving superpowers after World War II performed extensive nuclear testing in the 1950’s. Thousands of bombs exploded in the atmosphere. The planet was a Petri dish for what perfect method would kill the best. All that nuclear activity changed the carbon in the atmosphere from C-12 to C-14. This essentially morphed the chemistry of a fundamental building block to all life on this planet. And now, here is part of the result.” He steps over an upturned coffee table and comes to crouch in front of me. The morning haze hits his face and in his eyes I see my own brilliant green color. “Some call it the nuclear high, which I must say is apt. It sure looks like a bomb went off in here.”
“I didn’t want to do this!” I’m simply sobbing uncontrollably and the words have to heave their way out of my throat. “I was so mad at you about Jones. I was so worried that you would kill. I was so worried for the people around here.”
“I know! I know.” He puts a hand up to my mouth to silence my blubbering ramble. “But it wasn’t me that brought you to this. It was your own nature. And your nature isn’t bad. Take into your own heart some of those sermons you reassure the congregation with.” As he says this I start bawling again. “Oh Mum.”
He leans forward and puts his arms around me. We settle there for a great while, just rocking back and forth.
“We have to go, now. He says eventually, releasing my hold. Get dressed. Pack a valise. We’re leaving.”
“Where on earth am I going to go? What do I do now?”
Just pack! He orders. And I bound up the stairs with an odd strength to collect a few things quickly. I pull an older bag from the back of the closet knowing that the police will instantly remark on the disappearance of a new one. For some reason I keep thinking of how I’ll talk around this, but it’s no use. Jack only started what I just did a perfectly good job of finishing. I can’t come back here, not anymore. Destroyed house or no, I’m the prime suspect, public enemy number one.
At the door I turn back. “Wait!”
“What IS it? Mum, we have to hurry up!”
I race back into the house and from the piles of wreckage where a bookshelf once was I retrieve a brown package, tied with string.
“What’s that?” Jack asks
“A gift for someone that I’ve been carrying.”
“Gods! The once born can be such packrats!”
“Well, there’s comfort in stuff, sometimes.”
He scoffs and jumps into the driver’s seat of my car. “Get in the back and get down. We don’t want someone spying you leaving.”
“Where are we going?” I ask, crouched behind him. “What do I do now?”
“You’re going to reinvent yourself, Mummy! You’ve been stable for too long!”
I feel the car skid around on the gravel. The stones crunch and hiss as if to say “go on now!”
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Nanowrimo - 18
I can still feel the weight of him. How it felt to pick him up. As he grew weaker the falls became more frequent to the point where he came to seem like a tiny bird, all bones and skin.
One day I heard those words came out of his mouth what I feared had been forming in his mind. "I must die alone. You must leave now."
"I can't leave you like this! Zoltan, you can barely get around. I must stay and help you."
"I'll have none of that!" he yelled thinly with whatever power was left in his lungs. "I've managed perfectly well for over twenty four hundred years now. I'll be fine. Don’t need help! I wish to be alone." Then, perhaps sensing my anguish, he rested back and looked at me squarely, allowing a hint of sadness to steal across his face. "It's time for you to go anyhow. You must go have your own life, make your own mistakes. Do it all wrong and patch it all up again. You have all the time and all of the world ahead of you and I cannot be so selfish as to keep you under the shelter of my roof for a minute longer. Go."
"I can't"
"You will. In fact, there are some things I want you to take with you for your journey. I've put them together." He motions to a bagged bundle next to the bed that I hadn’t noticed before.
"I can't take your possessions."
"ohhh, I shall hardly run out of them! It's just a few things that I think you will need. And besides, there is a journey you must take for me, to Agnoletti."
"The Neapolitan living as a monk."
"yes, that's the one. You must take him this." From the bedclothes balled around his legs, Zoltan produces a box wrapped up in brown paper and tied. My first suspicion is that this will be the return of the illuminated manuscript, but it proves to be too light to be such a thing.
"How will I..." I start to ask, but I know better than to finish such a question. I'll know how to get there easily enough. Just follow.
And Zoltan was right, it was time for me to make the great mistakes. I spent the next few decades inadvertently ticking off each one of them in a row. Falling in love with a mortal? Check! Settle for animal blood? Indeed, I tried that whilst ship board to Portugal. Some I continue to make, such as my insistence on ignoring the urge. I envy his commitment to seeing life through to an end. I've only begun to feel the nip of the wringer and find myself staving off the pains with bacon, which, it turns out, lessens the craving to feed and keeps one stronger than having nothing would. I look back over my life some times and feel like such an enormous failure at all things. Years of broken and torn relationships hilite my failure to truly love. Many failed attempts to become something better have merely amounted to creating this, a blackened heart in the middle of a blackened heartland. So I've begun the long process of merely marking time until the end comes. For what was I born? Why am I thus?
"You, too are a creation of God." Agnoletti said in his fruitless attempts to comfort me. To arrive at his hovel I had to cross a continent exhausted by Napoleon’s ambitions. Outside one village lay a heap of bodies dead from illness. They swell and rot in the sun, yet despite the fetid odor a pack of wild dogs besets the pile, scavenging for meat. Fields stretched on and on filled with thin workers scrapping at the ground for life. Everywhere the people were pinched by the expenses of war and heart sore at sending their sons off to fight a continual enemy, which advanced from every corner of the continent. I saw many mortals just as gaunt and frightened into submission as I had observed before the revolution. All that blood, all those headless bodies had merely succeeded in shuffling the decks of power. The face cards still held all sway. It was all the madness of ambition for power. Then, for once I wanted to do something to provide them some comfort. But I could not. Their torture ultimately grew from the twisted roots of poverty in their souls. “Why am I such a creature if I must stay in the shadows. Why could I not lead them to peace?"
"Some take great assurance in their suffering. Even though they suffer, their suffering is their only understanding of life!" He told me. My attempts to present him with Zoltan’s gift were spurned. “No no! I have taken a vow of poverty! I cannot keep such material possessions as did our Zoltan! You must keep it. It must be something he meant for you but he could not hand it to you outright. I know it is a gift far to powerful for me, I can feel it. You must keep it and be careful that it does not attract the greed of the ignorant.”
His quarters were indeed spartan. A small cell hardly large enough for one body to move around, its sole furnishings were a straw bed and a table. The only adornments were a wooden cross over the bed, underneath which the monk would kneel to pray regularly, and a candle holder.
I curl up on the floor of his cell to sleep and conceal my traveling bag underneath his bed. “Did Zoltan ever speak to you of the man Jesus?” I ask into the darkness while we try drift off for the nightly repose that passes for slumber.
“Yes, we had many great, windy discussions. It always came down to my scripture versus his memory. Ah but the scriptures themselves are merely dim memories. Still, it was fascinating to talk with someone who had known the man, had known what it felt to be near him. I can only hope to invite that same sensation in those who come into contact with me.”
“I feel perfect here, if that is any consolation. For a small bit I feel free of the upset and confusion in my mind.”
“That is good, child.” He said as his spirit drifted off into the darkness.
At night we take flight. Sometimes the journey leads through memory. Sometimes it takes us through the land of memories yet to be experienced. As the body relaxes I feel the spread of wings and the lift of spirit body from the confines of flesh. In the recurring night life experience which haunted me I would find myself soaring over vast amounts of dark, briny water. For as far as I could behold there would be not a spot of land in sight. Then, below me, I would see the ellipse of a tiny wooden water faring vessel like tiny container of life fighting against the vast ocean of emptiness. As I circled and circled around the ship, getting lower and lower and finally low enough to hear the voices of its passengers, I would always become aware of the sound of screaming. A red stain spread across the deck below me and I would instantly busy my soaring wings in the act of flapping to the heights for escape.
The vision troubled me, but I did not wish to disturb Agnoletti with such stories. Still, he sensed something. His morning meditations were growing increasingly disturbed and at times he would even cut them short, shaking with anxiety. “Something is on its way here.” He would confide.
When the blackbirds descended upon him, neither of us were really quite prepared for the deep fear that would shake us. We were not so much in the habit of feeling fear and such powerlessness. Within a turn of the glass I was gone from his place, carrying the pack of strange worldly possessions with me.
All manner of strange baubles and coins were traded for my passage to Baltimore. Still, some things clinked from my pack and the strange box bounded around. Some of the items became gifts to people who showed me great kindness, such as the Unitarians in New York State. But still, even through the frontier, the rage, the pilgrimages, through all of the pretend lives, Agnoletti’s box stayed with me.
“What’s in that box?” Eileen asked one day, pointing to the now quite man-handled and dirty package resting prominently upon one of my many bookshelves. I had yet to realize just how meddlesome she could be when I hired her. That must have been a bad day for the intuition.
“It’s was a gift.”
“Aren’t you, like, supposed to open gifts? Like, you left it wrapped up so how is the giver supposed to know if you liked it at all?”
“It wasn’t a gift to me. It’s something I’m carrying to another person.”
“Well, you might wanna re-wrap it before you turn it over. Looks like hell.”
I look at her, a plump, overfed figure with strangely colored hair and bright red nails that pour through the pile of papers on her lap, and marvel that all the millennia of human evolution has merely resulted in this. “Thank you.”
I’m no old fart. I love the new gizmos that beep and shine and speed life’s pace to an exhausting frenzy. Eileen badgers me for not having a cell phone or a laptop computer. But, I don’t believe in sending technology to commit those acts that my senses are perfectly capable of performing. I’ve never told the plump miss that I own an iPod with which I happily download the music of all the ages I have visited.
Sometimes I land in my bed from slumber only to find the most uncontrollable urge to feed overtaking me. I refuse to submit. I refuse to be driven to the point of such beastly loss of control. At such times my only recourse is to listen to lots of U2, eat bacon fried extra crispy, and wait for the insanity to pass. I’ve thought of sending that story to Apple as a possibility for one of their goofy ads. “The iPod tames the beast and saves lives!”
One day I heard those words came out of his mouth what I feared had been forming in his mind. "I must die alone. You must leave now."
"I can't leave you like this! Zoltan, you can barely get around. I must stay and help you."
"I'll have none of that!" he yelled thinly with whatever power was left in his lungs. "I've managed perfectly well for over twenty four hundred years now. I'll be fine. Don’t need help! I wish to be alone." Then, perhaps sensing my anguish, he rested back and looked at me squarely, allowing a hint of sadness to steal across his face. "It's time for you to go anyhow. You must go have your own life, make your own mistakes. Do it all wrong and patch it all up again. You have all the time and all of the world ahead of you and I cannot be so selfish as to keep you under the shelter of my roof for a minute longer. Go."
"I can't"
"You will. In fact, there are some things I want you to take with you for your journey. I've put them together." He motions to a bagged bundle next to the bed that I hadn’t noticed before.
"I can't take your possessions."
"ohhh, I shall hardly run out of them! It's just a few things that I think you will need. And besides, there is a journey you must take for me, to Agnoletti."
"The Neapolitan living as a monk."
"yes, that's the one. You must take him this." From the bedclothes balled around his legs, Zoltan produces a box wrapped up in brown paper and tied. My first suspicion is that this will be the return of the illuminated manuscript, but it proves to be too light to be such a thing.
"How will I..." I start to ask, but I know better than to finish such a question. I'll know how to get there easily enough. Just follow.
And Zoltan was right, it was time for me to make the great mistakes. I spent the next few decades inadvertently ticking off each one of them in a row. Falling in love with a mortal? Check! Settle for animal blood? Indeed, I tried that whilst ship board to Portugal. Some I continue to make, such as my insistence on ignoring the urge. I envy his commitment to seeing life through to an end. I've only begun to feel the nip of the wringer and find myself staving off the pains with bacon, which, it turns out, lessens the craving to feed and keeps one stronger than having nothing would. I look back over my life some times and feel like such an enormous failure at all things. Years of broken and torn relationships hilite my failure to truly love. Many failed attempts to become something better have merely amounted to creating this, a blackened heart in the middle of a blackened heartland. So I've begun the long process of merely marking time until the end comes. For what was I born? Why am I thus?
"You, too are a creation of God." Agnoletti said in his fruitless attempts to comfort me. To arrive at his hovel I had to cross a continent exhausted by Napoleon’s ambitions. Outside one village lay a heap of bodies dead from illness. They swell and rot in the sun, yet despite the fetid odor a pack of wild dogs besets the pile, scavenging for meat. Fields stretched on and on filled with thin workers scrapping at the ground for life. Everywhere the people were pinched by the expenses of war and heart sore at sending their sons off to fight a continual enemy, which advanced from every corner of the continent. I saw many mortals just as gaunt and frightened into submission as I had observed before the revolution. All that blood, all those headless bodies had merely succeeded in shuffling the decks of power. The face cards still held all sway. It was all the madness of ambition for power. Then, for once I wanted to do something to provide them some comfort. But I could not. Their torture ultimately grew from the twisted roots of poverty in their souls. “Why am I such a creature if I must stay in the shadows. Why could I not lead them to peace?"
"Some take great assurance in their suffering. Even though they suffer, their suffering is their only understanding of life!" He told me. My attempts to present him with Zoltan’s gift were spurned. “No no! I have taken a vow of poverty! I cannot keep such material possessions as did our Zoltan! You must keep it. It must be something he meant for you but he could not hand it to you outright. I know it is a gift far to powerful for me, I can feel it. You must keep it and be careful that it does not attract the greed of the ignorant.”
His quarters were indeed spartan. A small cell hardly large enough for one body to move around, its sole furnishings were a straw bed and a table. The only adornments were a wooden cross over the bed, underneath which the monk would kneel to pray regularly, and a candle holder.
I curl up on the floor of his cell to sleep and conceal my traveling bag underneath his bed. “Did Zoltan ever speak to you of the man Jesus?” I ask into the darkness while we try drift off for the nightly repose that passes for slumber.
“Yes, we had many great, windy discussions. It always came down to my scripture versus his memory. Ah but the scriptures themselves are merely dim memories. Still, it was fascinating to talk with someone who had known the man, had known what it felt to be near him. I can only hope to invite that same sensation in those who come into contact with me.”
“I feel perfect here, if that is any consolation. For a small bit I feel free of the upset and confusion in my mind.”
“That is good, child.” He said as his spirit drifted off into the darkness.
At night we take flight. Sometimes the journey leads through memory. Sometimes it takes us through the land of memories yet to be experienced. As the body relaxes I feel the spread of wings and the lift of spirit body from the confines of flesh. In the recurring night life experience which haunted me I would find myself soaring over vast amounts of dark, briny water. For as far as I could behold there would be not a spot of land in sight. Then, below me, I would see the ellipse of a tiny wooden water faring vessel like tiny container of life fighting against the vast ocean of emptiness. As I circled and circled around the ship, getting lower and lower and finally low enough to hear the voices of its passengers, I would always become aware of the sound of screaming. A red stain spread across the deck below me and I would instantly busy my soaring wings in the act of flapping to the heights for escape.
The vision troubled me, but I did not wish to disturb Agnoletti with such stories. Still, he sensed something. His morning meditations were growing increasingly disturbed and at times he would even cut them short, shaking with anxiety. “Something is on its way here.” He would confide.
When the blackbirds descended upon him, neither of us were really quite prepared for the deep fear that would shake us. We were not so much in the habit of feeling fear and such powerlessness. Within a turn of the glass I was gone from his place, carrying the pack of strange worldly possessions with me.
All manner of strange baubles and coins were traded for my passage to Baltimore. Still, some things clinked from my pack and the strange box bounded around. Some of the items became gifts to people who showed me great kindness, such as the Unitarians in New York State. But still, even through the frontier, the rage, the pilgrimages, through all of the pretend lives, Agnoletti’s box stayed with me.
“What’s in that box?” Eileen asked one day, pointing to the now quite man-handled and dirty package resting prominently upon one of my many bookshelves. I had yet to realize just how meddlesome she could be when I hired her. That must have been a bad day for the intuition.
“It’s was a gift.”
“Aren’t you, like, supposed to open gifts? Like, you left it wrapped up so how is the giver supposed to know if you liked it at all?”
“It wasn’t a gift to me. It’s something I’m carrying to another person.”
“Well, you might wanna re-wrap it before you turn it over. Looks like hell.”
I look at her, a plump, overfed figure with strangely colored hair and bright red nails that pour through the pile of papers on her lap, and marvel that all the millennia of human evolution has merely resulted in this. “Thank you.”
I’m no old fart. I love the new gizmos that beep and shine and speed life’s pace to an exhausting frenzy. Eileen badgers me for not having a cell phone or a laptop computer. But, I don’t believe in sending technology to commit those acts that my senses are perfectly capable of performing. I’ve never told the plump miss that I own an iPod with which I happily download the music of all the ages I have visited.
Sometimes I land in my bed from slumber only to find the most uncontrollable urge to feed overtaking me. I refuse to submit. I refuse to be driven to the point of such beastly loss of control. At such times my only recourse is to listen to lots of U2, eat bacon fried extra crispy, and wait for the insanity to pass. I’ve thought of sending that story to Apple as a possibility for one of their goofy ads. “The iPod tames the beast and saves lives!”
Monday, November 17, 2008
Nanowrimo - 17
He’s full of anecdotes and old tales, this one. Regularly he opens an exceptionally ornate copy of the Bible to expound upon his version of events. It’s fascinating and hilarious, really. And I guess it’s only fair as he was around for most of it. He’ll read the Sermon on the Mount and annotate with completely different translation. “None of these translations truly capture what Yeshua was saying. Pity there weren’t more scribes back in that time. What ever did he expect by expounding like this before a mass of illiterate bumpkins! The fig trees would have been a better audience. It was all much more, well, active, than it has been translated here. Such a pity that those lovely words have been reduced to this scabby text so easily abused in order to keep the masses poor. Tsk! Tsk!”
He reads the story of the feeding of the five thousand. “Well, 4,999, actually. I fed too!”
“How did you manage to know Jesus?”
“Yeshua, my dear. Jesus is what they called him when the story got to Greece and cross pollinated with Zoroastrianism. ‘Cross’ pollinated… ha ha ha! But any how I was a bit bored with Babylon after a couple hundred years and a few armies marching through the place to reshuffle the rulership. Really if one never dies one simply cannot expect to stay in one place. People start asking questions. So, every 30 years or so I would move on. I followed the Babylonian trade routes Eastward to Arabia and on into Egypt. And then for some awful reason I got stuck in Palestine. I had perhaps followed some prey onto a ship and got carried away. But the place was simply horrible. The fighting was constant. Always there were thefts and attacks from zealots – a real viper’s nest. What on earth the Romans wanted from such a dry little land full of religious fanatics I will never know. But I had learned some Hebrew in Babylon from the slaves and retained a basic sense of their leanings. So, I did very well for myself. Then, this MAN began roaming the countryside making the most fantastic statements. There had been Hillel before him, but Hillel didn’t preach and gather the same quantities of attention as this new one did. Yeshua. Yeshua ben David. All manner of stories about him were told in the streets; that he was Elisha returned, that he was a new king from the line of David come to free the people from Rome, that he was the anointed of God. I had to find him out. There weren’t paintings of such a man like there would be now. And the only news was word of mouth. I wandered all about listening to rumors of where he would be. Finally, I was on the road to Bethany, hot an parched, when I came upon a group of simple travelers resting under an olive tree. I decided to stop, too, to see if they knew where I could find the man Yeshua. But I could not ask. As soon as I approached them this simple man welcomed me and, I just knew. He did not look so special. But something about his face shone. Something about him spoke to me in my heart and I could feel my heart sing back. He welcomed me to the gathering like no human had ever welcomed me. I could not help but to follow him!”
“Oh, but the following he drew troubled the Romans. They’d had more problems with zealots in Palestine than gnats on a summer night in the swamps of the Nile. It’s such a pity, his words are so poetic and sweet. But no one listened to his words, they just wanted a king and freedom and from their need he was killed. His apostles had all been approached with the possibility of betrayal. All of them. And that sweet life was sold off for such a tiny amount of money simply because one of them thought he would force Yeshua to show his power ascend to the throne. They weren’t concerned about souls at all. They wanted to be knights to a king! Such selfishness! What a pity indeed. Even more of a pity how lost is his truth and twisted are his words.”
Zoltan flips languidly through his hand-scripted, illuminated Latin Holy writ. “How did you get this Bible?” I ask. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen. I’ve never once come upon one that was entirely scripted out in such a beautiful way.”
“Hmm. It’s from before the printing press. I’d imagine that you wouldn’t have seen one such as this, you’re so young. Agnoletti, a once born living as a Monk in the Neapolitan countryside created it. We helped each other evade the superstitious mobs that roamed Europe during the Black Death hunting for the demon culprit, and this was a gift of brotherhood. And really, if one is a monk and once born, there’s all the time in the world to paint a Bible!”
“How long did it take him?”
“Oh, about 150 years. Lovely, just lovely.”
“Yes.” I rest back from the stand where the book is on display. “I still don’t understand. I’ve heard so many stories that we should have cold skin and fear daylight. That we should sleep with the dead and rise every night to kill. Are you sure I’m one such as you?”
Zoltan maintained an expert talent for expressing himself with eyebrow motion. He now crooked them at me and considered me archly for a while before answering. “I can tell you what you are for decades, child. You will not understand the truth of my words until you have had your own experience.” Turning back to the Bible to admire some lettering in Matthew’s gospel he continued. “What you describe is the folklore of a vampire. This does not come from reality at all but rather it rises straight from mortal’s fears of death. The monster you describe is their imagining, don’t enrobe yourself in this false reality. You are clearly not cold and clammy – why our skin is most sanguine. We don’t hide by day, although many prefer the comfort of night because the antics of mortals in sunlight can be quite offensive to our tender emotions. Clearly we do not sleep in coffins, nor do we feed every night. We are natural as any human, feeding off the life concentrated in another being’s flesh. We just happen to prefer humans as our diet and, well, we don’t die.”
“We never die?”
“No, indeed not. Never.”
“Not even if someone shot us with a musket or sliced us with a sword?”
“What in heaven’s name would you want someone to do that to you for? No! Not even then. We heal up too quickly.”
“There is absolutely nothing that will ever kill us?”
“Well,” he hesitates for a second, theatrically pondering the text before him. “There is one way. Just one way.” With this he closes the great, thick text. Grabs his candle announcing “that is enough talk for one night!” and he’s off to bed.
Daily the pronouncements and lessons continue. “Don’t ever fall in love with a mortal, it will only break your heart because they simply lack the sensitivity to understand you. And you never know when you’ll wake up hungry and feed from your mate by mistake.
“Never settle for animal blood, it will merely make you horribly sick. Sheep, I can tell you, are especially wretched.
“Trust your urge to feed. The urge is bigger than your solitary senses. It’s bigger than all of us; it’s what binds us and keeps our kind alive.
“Live a quiet life, avoid getting mixed up too much in human affairs unless you can extricate yourself in a timely way.
“Be choosy about who you feed upon. Someone who is very unhappy will deposit their unhappiness into you.
“Every thirty years or so, move on to a new location.”
“Are these things you know because you made the mistakes yourself?” I cannot resist the temptation to ask.
He pauses, of course, cocks his eyebrows, of course. “You do ask quite a lot of meddlesome questions for and Englishwoman! If you must know, yes, I have forced myself to feed upon an animal when I was worried that there wouldn’t be a suitable human and I did not trust the urge. It brought the gorge up for three days! I have encumbered myself in human affairs when the moment came that I thought someone with my talent for oratory and perspective would be of great service. I was greatly mistaken in this. Mortals do not truly wish to have great leaders because they are each incapable of being greatly led. And, if you must know, yes, I did fall in love. I fell deeply in love with an Egyptian woman so sweet and fair I could barely contain it in my heart. She couldn’t hope to reciprocate the magnitude of my emotions. Perhaps that is how I ended up on that boat to Palestine!”
Outside the world was tearing itself apart. The people were growing thin with famine from several bad growing years and the ravages of war. Nothing from the royal coffers was left to allay their lack. So the masses of starving people began to write angry flyers. Then they started to march. Then they started to revolt. And then they started to kill.
I have to confess that seeing the greatest and worst of French men and women ridden in shame to death at the guillotine gave me a slight sense of relief. Any of my former guilt over notions of my being a murderer faded away when I persistently watched as the again and again the blood stained blade rose into the air. Again and again it would fall with a “chop!” and crowds would yell and cheer as another gruesome visage was held aloft. In a sort of political poetry, those who commanded the killings eventually met the blade of their own accord.
“I don’t understand why you go must continually observe that insanity! I simply cannot stand such folly!” Zoltan exclaimed as I returned home one evening.
“It reassures me that I’m not so bad a soul to feast on these beasts.”
“BAH!” He retorts, fumbling with his robe and his cane.
“Have you seen it? This guillotine? It’s amazing how much less cruel this is than the torturous executions of the wheel or being drawn and quartered. The lack of shrieking is a great benefit.”
“That’s simply because they need to be fast about it! There’s a queue! It’s gastly I say!” Just then, as he’s shaking an expressive fist at me, Zoltan collapses to the ground. I rush over and attempt to lift his great weight up. I succeed only in pulling him onto my lap. In the light I can see that he is pale.
“My heavens! Are you ill? You are pale! What has happened to you?”
He pats my clutching hand in comfort. “Now now. This is just what happens, you know. I’ve been getting weaker and weaker and now it’s getting the better of me.”
It’s true, I had noticed that his skin, his features, were all aging quickly but was reluctant to mention such a thing. Now that I hold him close to support him, I see the extent of whitening hair and spotting skin. “What is making you weak? Are you sick? You said nothing could kill us!”
“Ahhh you were not listening. I said ONE thing could kill us.” He looks up at me with an exhausted expression. “And I have been doing that one thing. I haven’t fed. I haven’t fed in over fifty years. I can’t watch anymore, Ellie, one must die sometime. You can carry on what I’ve learned. But I simply cannot watch life anymore.”
His voice grows thin and he rests back in my arms more for comfort than support. I want to extort him to stop this nonsense and get back his strength. But I feel what he’s saying. If he would feed he lacked the strength to do so. I simply hold him close in my arms.
He reads the story of the feeding of the five thousand. “Well, 4,999, actually. I fed too!”
“How did you manage to know Jesus?”
“Yeshua, my dear. Jesus is what they called him when the story got to Greece and cross pollinated with Zoroastrianism. ‘Cross’ pollinated… ha ha ha! But any how I was a bit bored with Babylon after a couple hundred years and a few armies marching through the place to reshuffle the rulership. Really if one never dies one simply cannot expect to stay in one place. People start asking questions. So, every 30 years or so I would move on. I followed the Babylonian trade routes Eastward to Arabia and on into Egypt. And then for some awful reason I got stuck in Palestine. I had perhaps followed some prey onto a ship and got carried away. But the place was simply horrible. The fighting was constant. Always there were thefts and attacks from zealots – a real viper’s nest. What on earth the Romans wanted from such a dry little land full of religious fanatics I will never know. But I had learned some Hebrew in Babylon from the slaves and retained a basic sense of their leanings. So, I did very well for myself. Then, this MAN began roaming the countryside making the most fantastic statements. There had been Hillel before him, but Hillel didn’t preach and gather the same quantities of attention as this new one did. Yeshua. Yeshua ben David. All manner of stories about him were told in the streets; that he was Elisha returned, that he was a new king from the line of David come to free the people from Rome, that he was the anointed of God. I had to find him out. There weren’t paintings of such a man like there would be now. And the only news was word of mouth. I wandered all about listening to rumors of where he would be. Finally, I was on the road to Bethany, hot an parched, when I came upon a group of simple travelers resting under an olive tree. I decided to stop, too, to see if they knew where I could find the man Yeshua. But I could not ask. As soon as I approached them this simple man welcomed me and, I just knew. He did not look so special. But something about his face shone. Something about him spoke to me in my heart and I could feel my heart sing back. He welcomed me to the gathering like no human had ever welcomed me. I could not help but to follow him!”
“Oh, but the following he drew troubled the Romans. They’d had more problems with zealots in Palestine than gnats on a summer night in the swamps of the Nile. It’s such a pity, his words are so poetic and sweet. But no one listened to his words, they just wanted a king and freedom and from their need he was killed. His apostles had all been approached with the possibility of betrayal. All of them. And that sweet life was sold off for such a tiny amount of money simply because one of them thought he would force Yeshua to show his power ascend to the throne. They weren’t concerned about souls at all. They wanted to be knights to a king! Such selfishness! What a pity indeed. Even more of a pity how lost is his truth and twisted are his words.”
Zoltan flips languidly through his hand-scripted, illuminated Latin Holy writ. “How did you get this Bible?” I ask. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen. I’ve never once come upon one that was entirely scripted out in such a beautiful way.”
“Hmm. It’s from before the printing press. I’d imagine that you wouldn’t have seen one such as this, you’re so young. Agnoletti, a once born living as a Monk in the Neapolitan countryside created it. We helped each other evade the superstitious mobs that roamed Europe during the Black Death hunting for the demon culprit, and this was a gift of brotherhood. And really, if one is a monk and once born, there’s all the time in the world to paint a Bible!”
“How long did it take him?”
“Oh, about 150 years. Lovely, just lovely.”
“Yes.” I rest back from the stand where the book is on display. “I still don’t understand. I’ve heard so many stories that we should have cold skin and fear daylight. That we should sleep with the dead and rise every night to kill. Are you sure I’m one such as you?”
Zoltan maintained an expert talent for expressing himself with eyebrow motion. He now crooked them at me and considered me archly for a while before answering. “I can tell you what you are for decades, child. You will not understand the truth of my words until you have had your own experience.” Turning back to the Bible to admire some lettering in Matthew’s gospel he continued. “What you describe is the folklore of a vampire. This does not come from reality at all but rather it rises straight from mortal’s fears of death. The monster you describe is their imagining, don’t enrobe yourself in this false reality. You are clearly not cold and clammy – why our skin is most sanguine. We don’t hide by day, although many prefer the comfort of night because the antics of mortals in sunlight can be quite offensive to our tender emotions. Clearly we do not sleep in coffins, nor do we feed every night. We are natural as any human, feeding off the life concentrated in another being’s flesh. We just happen to prefer humans as our diet and, well, we don’t die.”
“We never die?”
“No, indeed not. Never.”
“Not even if someone shot us with a musket or sliced us with a sword?”
“What in heaven’s name would you want someone to do that to you for? No! Not even then. We heal up too quickly.”
“There is absolutely nothing that will ever kill us?”
“Well,” he hesitates for a second, theatrically pondering the text before him. “There is one way. Just one way.” With this he closes the great, thick text. Grabs his candle announcing “that is enough talk for one night!” and he’s off to bed.
Daily the pronouncements and lessons continue. “Don’t ever fall in love with a mortal, it will only break your heart because they simply lack the sensitivity to understand you. And you never know when you’ll wake up hungry and feed from your mate by mistake.
“Never settle for animal blood, it will merely make you horribly sick. Sheep, I can tell you, are especially wretched.
“Trust your urge to feed. The urge is bigger than your solitary senses. It’s bigger than all of us; it’s what binds us and keeps our kind alive.
“Live a quiet life, avoid getting mixed up too much in human affairs unless you can extricate yourself in a timely way.
“Be choosy about who you feed upon. Someone who is very unhappy will deposit their unhappiness into you.
“Every thirty years or so, move on to a new location.”
“Are these things you know because you made the mistakes yourself?” I cannot resist the temptation to ask.
He pauses, of course, cocks his eyebrows, of course. “You do ask quite a lot of meddlesome questions for and Englishwoman! If you must know, yes, I have forced myself to feed upon an animal when I was worried that there wouldn’t be a suitable human and I did not trust the urge. It brought the gorge up for three days! I have encumbered myself in human affairs when the moment came that I thought someone with my talent for oratory and perspective would be of great service. I was greatly mistaken in this. Mortals do not truly wish to have great leaders because they are each incapable of being greatly led. And, if you must know, yes, I did fall in love. I fell deeply in love with an Egyptian woman so sweet and fair I could barely contain it in my heart. She couldn’t hope to reciprocate the magnitude of my emotions. Perhaps that is how I ended up on that boat to Palestine!”
Outside the world was tearing itself apart. The people were growing thin with famine from several bad growing years and the ravages of war. Nothing from the royal coffers was left to allay their lack. So the masses of starving people began to write angry flyers. Then they started to march. Then they started to revolt. And then they started to kill.
I have to confess that seeing the greatest and worst of French men and women ridden in shame to death at the guillotine gave me a slight sense of relief. Any of my former guilt over notions of my being a murderer faded away when I persistently watched as the again and again the blood stained blade rose into the air. Again and again it would fall with a “chop!” and crowds would yell and cheer as another gruesome visage was held aloft. In a sort of political poetry, those who commanded the killings eventually met the blade of their own accord.
“I don’t understand why you go must continually observe that insanity! I simply cannot stand such folly!” Zoltan exclaimed as I returned home one evening.
“It reassures me that I’m not so bad a soul to feast on these beasts.”
“BAH!” He retorts, fumbling with his robe and his cane.
“Have you seen it? This guillotine? It’s amazing how much less cruel this is than the torturous executions of the wheel or being drawn and quartered. The lack of shrieking is a great benefit.”
“That’s simply because they need to be fast about it! There’s a queue! It’s gastly I say!” Just then, as he’s shaking an expressive fist at me, Zoltan collapses to the ground. I rush over and attempt to lift his great weight up. I succeed only in pulling him onto my lap. In the light I can see that he is pale.
“My heavens! Are you ill? You are pale! What has happened to you?”
He pats my clutching hand in comfort. “Now now. This is just what happens, you know. I’ve been getting weaker and weaker and now it’s getting the better of me.”
It’s true, I had noticed that his skin, his features, were all aging quickly but was reluctant to mention such a thing. Now that I hold him close to support him, I see the extent of whitening hair and spotting skin. “What is making you weak? Are you sick? You said nothing could kill us!”
“Ahhh you were not listening. I said ONE thing could kill us.” He looks up at me with an exhausted expression. “And I have been doing that one thing. I haven’t fed. I haven’t fed in over fifty years. I can’t watch anymore, Ellie, one must die sometime. You can carry on what I’ve learned. But I simply cannot watch life anymore.”
His voice grows thin and he rests back in my arms more for comfort than support. I want to extort him to stop this nonsense and get back his strength. But I feel what he’s saying. If he would feed he lacked the strength to do so. I simply hold him close in my arms.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Nanowrimo - 15-16
“What have I just done?” I ask the distinguished gentleman in fine robes who emerges from the darkness on a Parisian street. “I don’t understand why I do this thing. I don’t want to kill people.” I stagger toward him, still delirious and high.
“Ahhh I know. But that is what has brought you to me. Come!” He reaches out his hand for me to take it. Following feels like the most natural thing, as if I have seen this face in dreams since I was a child. But the distrusting Englishwoman in myself rises up.
“Why should I follow you? Who are you, anyways?”
His eyes shift from side to side briefly before he answers in a hushed tone. “There are lots of people on this street who would love to know who I am but should not, so I will refrain from answering. And you should follow me because left to your own devices in these streets you will be in great danger very soon. You will call attention to yourself. So, take my hand.” He grabs my hand and puts it over his elbow. “And follow, now. See? Not so terrible.”
The streets wind around higgledy piggledy with none of them making a straight course between any two points. We turn left, then right, then up a narrow street, then left down a slightly bigger one, passing all manner of people. Beggars litter the byways with their gaunt bodies. Bakers sell bread from carts and stalls and crowds of the hungry lurk nearby, hoping for the seller to be distracted just long enough for them to procure a biscuit or two. There are groups of men, their bellies full with too much drink, raising their cups and carousing as they make their way home or toward their next den of iniquity. Hungry and tired, children cry and run about the street. Some clutch the skirt of a mother, but many are alone. The smell of the place is rotten.
At last, coming down a narrower and quieter lane, we come to a door, which he turns to unlock with a great key that dangles about his neck. “Come! Come now!” he takes my arm and pulls me through the door and into the darkness it has kept contained.
As my new companion lights a lamp the strangest scene unfolds around me. Brightly patterned carpets stretch across the floor. The furnishings seem a bit mis-matched but are all covered with the most exquisite fabrics. Objects strange and rare rest on every table or surface or protrude from every wall. Vases, paintings, fine swords, crystal, and some statuary too strange in form to identify, come from the darkness as he continues going about lighting lamps.
“Are you rich?” I can’t take my eyes from a metal form depicting a woman with four arms, large, round breasts and a cruel look upon her face.
“That is Kali, do you like her? She’s the goddess of death who dances in her drunkenness upon the blood of her enemies. I’m not really rich, I’m mostly just very very old.”
I peal my eyes from the statue to look back at him. “You don’t look old.”
“Ahh, there is much for you to learn. And to answer your earlier question, my name is ‘Zoltan’.”
In all my hours spent musing the contents of his home I’m not quite sure I was ever able to take it all in fully. “This does not even begin to scratch the surface, cheri. I have this house, I have a small fort in Transylvania, a cave in Persia as well as a catacomb in Rome taken out for the purpose of interring my dead body but, well, holding my body of goods, instead.”
“How do you have so many possessions? And why is it all so far away from you? It would take forever to get to Rome and Persia both, I would think.”
“Hm, I will answer your questions but, well, not in that order. I do not worry that my wealth is at a distance from my person. It may well require weeks or even months to journey to some of these places. No matter! I have PLENTY of time to make the journey. I like to have it all tucked away in neat little pockets so that no one may, at any time, get at the whole lot. Now, I have been around pack-ratting for quite some time so I have collected quite the lot of antiquities. It would simply be folly to have it all visible and in one place due to the risk of theft or nosy visitors. And all I own would stuff this building completely to the gills and make it all quite messy. Why, there would be no room for me to live in such a place! And to your first and last question, I have come to own much because I have simply been so many places and have been around for such a long time!”
“You can’t be that aged, you don’t appear to be so terribly old at all!”
“Well, there is much about your own self that you simply do not understand! I was born in the city of Babylon during the Chaldean times. I am, by the reckoning of the present calendar system, 2,383 years old! Now, that number is off by about 25 years because the engineers of the Gregorian calendar miscalculated grossly in their effort to center the counting of all time upon a nebulous historic event. But, let’s just say, I am quite old, do not plan to die soon, and tend to be easily bored. So, I travel from place to place and as I travel, well, things just come into my hands.”
He sits back in a chaise, arm draped out beside himself, relaxed and resplendent in his robes. This home is astonishing. From every corner fine fabrics and exotic forms beacon to my eyes with their sensuous marvel. But, this man is clearly insane. I have to get out of here. It is not at all proper for a woman alone to be in a strange man’s home. What was I thinking, coming here? I must leave at once!
My panic is barely verbalized as a cloud across my face when Zoltan raises his hand. “Stop. Do not run out of here into the night. You don’t know enough about yourself to survive and the attention you might attract will endanger more than yourself. Many like us live in this city and our secrecy must remain paramount. Stop, sit down, stay. You will soon realize that it is much more of a benefit than a danger to remain here.”
“How could I hurt them? Who are they?”
“Others here who share our nature, we are all connected deeply through intuition. Much more so than mortals. Living a life untrained would be psychic warfare upon our kind.”
“What is this nature you refer to, that which we share?” I slide into an ornate and slightly overstuffed chair.
He plays with his glass of wine, dipping a finger into the bloody liquid and tasting it in his mouth. “What you just tonight out there in the street. Did you understand it?”
“I know that I was overcome by a most uncontrollable urge. It felt as if I were being guided along by a force I did not understand to find that man, all alone. I felt, strange, as if I were not myself but somehow MORE myself than ever before. After I finish I feel the strangest elation, like nothing I’ve felt before.”
“You’ve done this before. I take it. I’m assuming that is why you left your native shores and thrust yourself onto the whims of chance.”
“Yes, I did. It was once, three years ago. I was at a ball with my husband when I found myself strangely attracted to a young man. But, when we were alone I found the strangest passion rising in me. I, well, I drank his blood from his neck. It was the most horrid thing, but also quite satisfying, quite elating.”
He crooks an eye and leans forward. “You have a husband?”
“Yes, I deserted him in London. He wants nothing to do with me. I’m merely a female bauble to hang from his arm in public and to produce an heir. I wants nothing of me.”
“Produce an heir?” The pitch of his voice is getting higher with each question.
“Yes, in the fury after that – incident – I forced my husband to submit to me. As a result I had a son.”
“A SON!” He fairly explodes out of his chair.
“Yes, yes I had a little boy. My husband would not permit me to come near the child. Neither would he condescend to make the effort required to create another child. So, I left.”
“You left.”
“I left. I will not be missed.”
“Oh that is not true! Your husband may not miss you in his bed but his pride will miss you in his house! Did anyone else know you were leaving?”
I shake my head ‘no’.
“Did you share your plans to come to Paris with anyone? Even a maid?”
“No, I did not. I just left. I took boats to the coast and found a Scottish vessel to Calais. From there a series wagon carts brought me here.”
“Astonishing. Why here?”
“I heard talk at some of our card tables about the chaos in France as well as the upset over the King’s spending money to assist the North American colonies in leaving the crown. I, well I don’t know. It just sounded like it would be easy to disappear here, to be untraceable. And once I found French soil I was drawn to Paris.”
He sighs and sips his wine. “Well, you’re safer here than just about anywhere in Europe. For now. Oh it’s terrible the way that foolish young Louis bankrupted the coffers just for some spite of old King George. But those ‘Americans’ as they call themselves, they are quite interesting. The same liberté has, unfortunately, not been so extended to the French masses. This you no doubt saw in your journeys. Well, you will have to make a new name for yourself, just in case your inattentive husband decides not to play the wronged gentleman and comes on the hunt. Did you give anyone your name during your travels?”
“No”
“Good. Although my senses are telling me that the existence of this son will be problematic.”
I don’t need anymore guilt about abandoning my child. “You still haven’t explained to me what it is I am, or we are.”
“Ahh child. Amongst ourselves, we are called the ‘once born’, for we do not die. We can live forever on the material plain in vigorous health and vibrant youth. We possess the greatest strengths and intuition of all human kind. But, there is a caveat. Unlike other humans who live fifty or so years and then die, ‘mortals’ we call them, and who live by consuming the fruit of the earth, we must live by consuming the life blood of men.”
He notes the look of surprised horror across my face. “I know it sounds wicked, but it is true. We feed on our fellow travelers of Earth. But it is not so horrible. Mortals themselves survive by taking the lives of creatures.”
“But, this just can’t be true! I’m a normal person, I eat food! I am not such a wicked creature as this!”
“Now, now, listen to your heart. Listen to the silence whispering inside of you. In there you know that what I say is true. Think back to every dinner you’ve ever had, every supper plate in front of you. At the end of the meal was that plate empty? It was not, was it? Do you remember the taste of food? All through your journey from London to Paris did you once crave for a simple loaf of bread to stave your hunger? Tell me true. Did you eat so much as a morsel between London and Paris?”
“I did not.” I confess. “But then, what you are saying, that makes me a vampire! I am a monster!”
“No! No no, we do not use that term. That is their term for us and it comes straight from misunderstanding, fear and folklore. We are merely ‘once born’, and if you want to see a real monster, find yourself a tax collector and follow him about on his rounds. Watch how he mistreats the poor, old and sick. There’s your monster. We are not killing to murder. We are merely feeding to survive, just as God has appointed all creatures to do.”
“But, why me? Wherefore am I thus? Was it some sin of my youth? Was I not baptized properly? What has turned me into such a creature?”
“Stop with his theatrical nonsense! You need to think! Think back to your own youth. Were you ever a gregarious child with many friends? Did people warm up to you?”
“No, they did not.”
“Think back even further, you can recall your infancy, can you not?”
“yes, I remember being very small, in my nurse’s arms.”
“did anyone ever tell you that is not typical of children?”
“I was scolded several times for sharing memories that my mother insisted I would have been too young to know, yes.”
“That’s because our brains are more! We are the ultimate humans! God’s more perfect creation in his own image! Now those memories, do they include many scenes of loving care at the hands of your mother?”
“They do not. In fact, I was weaned quite young.”
“Some of them can sense it and they draw away. That’s the normal reaction of ignorants in the face of their superior.”
“But what made me into this? You didn’t answer my question.”
“Oh, you never became a once born, you were born as one. Possibly there was a latent gene in your lineage or another one such as us in your family.”
I sit pondering this silently for a length while a sphinx stares back at me. I dig back and back through memory to recollect a childhood gathering. My father’s brother, Uncle Robert, was a most strange man full of an oddly youthful vitality. As his siblings were showing signs of age with graying temples and fragile skin, Robert was not. His hair remained black and his complexion hearty. I remember father talking about him, in the one moment when I was able to extract some facts. “He did a lot in his life, most of which he ought not to have done.” A consistent and pervasive distrust of Uncle Robert permeated the family. Perhaps that is why I preferred him and he doted upon me. We were both just as rejected.
And then he disappeared. I was still not even thirteen and so my parents kept the details hushed. I only knew that suddenly my jovial Uncle was gone without trace or mention.
“Yes, I see him. I know there were more.”
“See? It’s not such a bad thing. Once you come to master your urges, you will find this life quite a pleasure. There is one other possible draw back to our state.” He hesitates and looks quite serious for a spell. “When you drink of a mortal, you gain more than just life and strength from their blood. Their life’s emotions become a part of you. Their feelings mix with your feelings. So…” he looks down at his wine glass, swirling the contents about “you might wish to refrain from feeding upon indigents again. Or else, your life will come to feel very long indeed.”
“Ahhh I know. But that is what has brought you to me. Come!” He reaches out his hand for me to take it. Following feels like the most natural thing, as if I have seen this face in dreams since I was a child. But the distrusting Englishwoman in myself rises up.
“Why should I follow you? Who are you, anyways?”
His eyes shift from side to side briefly before he answers in a hushed tone. “There are lots of people on this street who would love to know who I am but should not, so I will refrain from answering. And you should follow me because left to your own devices in these streets you will be in great danger very soon. You will call attention to yourself. So, take my hand.” He grabs my hand and puts it over his elbow. “And follow, now. See? Not so terrible.”
The streets wind around higgledy piggledy with none of them making a straight course between any two points. We turn left, then right, then up a narrow street, then left down a slightly bigger one, passing all manner of people. Beggars litter the byways with their gaunt bodies. Bakers sell bread from carts and stalls and crowds of the hungry lurk nearby, hoping for the seller to be distracted just long enough for them to procure a biscuit or two. There are groups of men, their bellies full with too much drink, raising their cups and carousing as they make their way home or toward their next den of iniquity. Hungry and tired, children cry and run about the street. Some clutch the skirt of a mother, but many are alone. The smell of the place is rotten.
At last, coming down a narrower and quieter lane, we come to a door, which he turns to unlock with a great key that dangles about his neck. “Come! Come now!” he takes my arm and pulls me through the door and into the darkness it has kept contained.
As my new companion lights a lamp the strangest scene unfolds around me. Brightly patterned carpets stretch across the floor. The furnishings seem a bit mis-matched but are all covered with the most exquisite fabrics. Objects strange and rare rest on every table or surface or protrude from every wall. Vases, paintings, fine swords, crystal, and some statuary too strange in form to identify, come from the darkness as he continues going about lighting lamps.
“Are you rich?” I can’t take my eyes from a metal form depicting a woman with four arms, large, round breasts and a cruel look upon her face.
“That is Kali, do you like her? She’s the goddess of death who dances in her drunkenness upon the blood of her enemies. I’m not really rich, I’m mostly just very very old.”
I peal my eyes from the statue to look back at him. “You don’t look old.”
“Ahh, there is much for you to learn. And to answer your earlier question, my name is ‘Zoltan’.”
In all my hours spent musing the contents of his home I’m not quite sure I was ever able to take it all in fully. “This does not even begin to scratch the surface, cheri. I have this house, I have a small fort in Transylvania, a cave in Persia as well as a catacomb in Rome taken out for the purpose of interring my dead body but, well, holding my body of goods, instead.”
“How do you have so many possessions? And why is it all so far away from you? It would take forever to get to Rome and Persia both, I would think.”
“Hm, I will answer your questions but, well, not in that order. I do not worry that my wealth is at a distance from my person. It may well require weeks or even months to journey to some of these places. No matter! I have PLENTY of time to make the journey. I like to have it all tucked away in neat little pockets so that no one may, at any time, get at the whole lot. Now, I have been around pack-ratting for quite some time so I have collected quite the lot of antiquities. It would simply be folly to have it all visible and in one place due to the risk of theft or nosy visitors. And all I own would stuff this building completely to the gills and make it all quite messy. Why, there would be no room for me to live in such a place! And to your first and last question, I have come to own much because I have simply been so many places and have been around for such a long time!”
“You can’t be that aged, you don’t appear to be so terribly old at all!”
“Well, there is much about your own self that you simply do not understand! I was born in the city of Babylon during the Chaldean times. I am, by the reckoning of the present calendar system, 2,383 years old! Now, that number is off by about 25 years because the engineers of the Gregorian calendar miscalculated grossly in their effort to center the counting of all time upon a nebulous historic event. But, let’s just say, I am quite old, do not plan to die soon, and tend to be easily bored. So, I travel from place to place and as I travel, well, things just come into my hands.”
He sits back in a chaise, arm draped out beside himself, relaxed and resplendent in his robes. This home is astonishing. From every corner fine fabrics and exotic forms beacon to my eyes with their sensuous marvel. But, this man is clearly insane. I have to get out of here. It is not at all proper for a woman alone to be in a strange man’s home. What was I thinking, coming here? I must leave at once!
My panic is barely verbalized as a cloud across my face when Zoltan raises his hand. “Stop. Do not run out of here into the night. You don’t know enough about yourself to survive and the attention you might attract will endanger more than yourself. Many like us live in this city and our secrecy must remain paramount. Stop, sit down, stay. You will soon realize that it is much more of a benefit than a danger to remain here.”
“How could I hurt them? Who are they?”
“Others here who share our nature, we are all connected deeply through intuition. Much more so than mortals. Living a life untrained would be psychic warfare upon our kind.”
“What is this nature you refer to, that which we share?” I slide into an ornate and slightly overstuffed chair.
He plays with his glass of wine, dipping a finger into the bloody liquid and tasting it in his mouth. “What you just tonight out there in the street. Did you understand it?”
“I know that I was overcome by a most uncontrollable urge. It felt as if I were being guided along by a force I did not understand to find that man, all alone. I felt, strange, as if I were not myself but somehow MORE myself than ever before. After I finish I feel the strangest elation, like nothing I’ve felt before.”
“You’ve done this before. I take it. I’m assuming that is why you left your native shores and thrust yourself onto the whims of chance.”
“Yes, I did. It was once, three years ago. I was at a ball with my husband when I found myself strangely attracted to a young man. But, when we were alone I found the strangest passion rising in me. I, well, I drank his blood from his neck. It was the most horrid thing, but also quite satisfying, quite elating.”
He crooks an eye and leans forward. “You have a husband?”
“Yes, I deserted him in London. He wants nothing to do with me. I’m merely a female bauble to hang from his arm in public and to produce an heir. I wants nothing of me.”
“Produce an heir?” The pitch of his voice is getting higher with each question.
“Yes, in the fury after that – incident – I forced my husband to submit to me. As a result I had a son.”
“A SON!” He fairly explodes out of his chair.
“Yes, yes I had a little boy. My husband would not permit me to come near the child. Neither would he condescend to make the effort required to create another child. So, I left.”
“You left.”
“I left. I will not be missed.”
“Oh that is not true! Your husband may not miss you in his bed but his pride will miss you in his house! Did anyone else know you were leaving?”
I shake my head ‘no’.
“Did you share your plans to come to Paris with anyone? Even a maid?”
“No, I did not. I just left. I took boats to the coast and found a Scottish vessel to Calais. From there a series wagon carts brought me here.”
“Astonishing. Why here?”
“I heard talk at some of our card tables about the chaos in France as well as the upset over the King’s spending money to assist the North American colonies in leaving the crown. I, well I don’t know. It just sounded like it would be easy to disappear here, to be untraceable. And once I found French soil I was drawn to Paris.”
He sighs and sips his wine. “Well, you’re safer here than just about anywhere in Europe. For now. Oh it’s terrible the way that foolish young Louis bankrupted the coffers just for some spite of old King George. But those ‘Americans’ as they call themselves, they are quite interesting. The same liberté has, unfortunately, not been so extended to the French masses. This you no doubt saw in your journeys. Well, you will have to make a new name for yourself, just in case your inattentive husband decides not to play the wronged gentleman and comes on the hunt. Did you give anyone your name during your travels?”
“No”
“Good. Although my senses are telling me that the existence of this son will be problematic.”
I don’t need anymore guilt about abandoning my child. “You still haven’t explained to me what it is I am, or we are.”
“Ahh child. Amongst ourselves, we are called the ‘once born’, for we do not die. We can live forever on the material plain in vigorous health and vibrant youth. We possess the greatest strengths and intuition of all human kind. But, there is a caveat. Unlike other humans who live fifty or so years and then die, ‘mortals’ we call them, and who live by consuming the fruit of the earth, we must live by consuming the life blood of men.”
He notes the look of surprised horror across my face. “I know it sounds wicked, but it is true. We feed on our fellow travelers of Earth. But it is not so horrible. Mortals themselves survive by taking the lives of creatures.”
“But, this just can’t be true! I’m a normal person, I eat food! I am not such a wicked creature as this!”
“Now, now, listen to your heart. Listen to the silence whispering inside of you. In there you know that what I say is true. Think back to every dinner you’ve ever had, every supper plate in front of you. At the end of the meal was that plate empty? It was not, was it? Do you remember the taste of food? All through your journey from London to Paris did you once crave for a simple loaf of bread to stave your hunger? Tell me true. Did you eat so much as a morsel between London and Paris?”
“I did not.” I confess. “But then, what you are saying, that makes me a vampire! I am a monster!”
“No! No no, we do not use that term. That is their term for us and it comes straight from misunderstanding, fear and folklore. We are merely ‘once born’, and if you want to see a real monster, find yourself a tax collector and follow him about on his rounds. Watch how he mistreats the poor, old and sick. There’s your monster. We are not killing to murder. We are merely feeding to survive, just as God has appointed all creatures to do.”
“But, why me? Wherefore am I thus? Was it some sin of my youth? Was I not baptized properly? What has turned me into such a creature?”
“Stop with his theatrical nonsense! You need to think! Think back to your own youth. Were you ever a gregarious child with many friends? Did people warm up to you?”
“No, they did not.”
“Think back even further, you can recall your infancy, can you not?”
“yes, I remember being very small, in my nurse’s arms.”
“did anyone ever tell you that is not typical of children?”
“I was scolded several times for sharing memories that my mother insisted I would have been too young to know, yes.”
“That’s because our brains are more! We are the ultimate humans! God’s more perfect creation in his own image! Now those memories, do they include many scenes of loving care at the hands of your mother?”
“They do not. In fact, I was weaned quite young.”
“Some of them can sense it and they draw away. That’s the normal reaction of ignorants in the face of their superior.”
“But what made me into this? You didn’t answer my question.”
“Oh, you never became a once born, you were born as one. Possibly there was a latent gene in your lineage or another one such as us in your family.”
I sit pondering this silently for a length while a sphinx stares back at me. I dig back and back through memory to recollect a childhood gathering. My father’s brother, Uncle Robert, was a most strange man full of an oddly youthful vitality. As his siblings were showing signs of age with graying temples and fragile skin, Robert was not. His hair remained black and his complexion hearty. I remember father talking about him, in the one moment when I was able to extract some facts. “He did a lot in his life, most of which he ought not to have done.” A consistent and pervasive distrust of Uncle Robert permeated the family. Perhaps that is why I preferred him and he doted upon me. We were both just as rejected.
And then he disappeared. I was still not even thirteen and so my parents kept the details hushed. I only knew that suddenly my jovial Uncle was gone without trace or mention.
“Yes, I see him. I know there were more.”
“See? It’s not such a bad thing. Once you come to master your urges, you will find this life quite a pleasure. There is one other possible draw back to our state.” He hesitates and looks quite serious for a spell. “When you drink of a mortal, you gain more than just life and strength from their blood. Their life’s emotions become a part of you. Their feelings mix with your feelings. So…” he looks down at his wine glass, swirling the contents about “you might wish to refrain from feeding upon indigents again. Or else, your life will come to feel very long indeed.”
Friday, November 14, 2008
Nanowrimo - 14
“I often find myself coming to Emerson in those moments when I just feel like I need to hear the voice of an old friend. And this week was one of those times. Some of you have heard that one of the quiet hands behind this community, Jones Martin, made his transition this week.” Some of the faces I look over register a note of trauma and grief. But, many are wear blank expressions. “He wasn’t very loud, you’d never see him at a town hall meeting, but he always had a kind word to share. If you have been coming here for a while, and you brave handful know who you are, you’d see him going around here every Saturday between March and November. He tended the garden that surrounds our lovely spiritual home. And he did it for no pay. His payment, he told me once, came from the many things he learned from our weeds and roses. Although he did once confide that the weeds were far better teachers.” A collective chuckle ripples across the room.
It’s standing room only. Bodies are silhouetted and black against all of the windows at the perimeter. I know not all of them have come to hear a lick of what I say. I spy the minister from the Baptist church down the street sitting about halfway back in the center. His arms are folded high across his chest in defiance. His chubby, pink body looks like someone poured him into that arrow collar shirt and polyester pants and then forgot to stop. Next to him at least five seats are filled with equally disdainful and stiff looking folks. They’ve come in under the ruse of showing some solidarity in the wake of this week’s brutal crime. I know what they’re up to. Come to see who’s draining off their crowd, they have. But it’s not me who is making the leak in their tithe baskets. It’s the comfort people feel when someone stands up at a pulpit and, rather than condemning them to eternal punishment for so much as letting a vegetable rot in the refrigerator, says out loud what deep down they have known all along to be truth and have been too afraid to admit. It is just that, though they burn out quickly, these bright stars are the glint in God’s eye.
“Jones was almost ninety years old. He couldn’t get around as well in these last couple years and so the precedent of his volunteer service has been passed on to new people with their own lessons to learn at the hands of nature. But he was bright and happy up until his last day. I sat with him on his last day, and we talked about his roses. Unfortunately, a few hours after our chat, I was called back to his home for a much less happy reason. It was then I saw what I hoped never to see. Our good friend and humble fellow traveler had been murdered.” Now comes the wave of gasps and knitted brows. None of this is for Jones, it’s worry for themselves that has them clutching the arms of a loved one and making eye contact with friends. In the back I notice the porcine figure of the Police sergeant shift his weight from leg to leg. Obviously not a regular church-goer, he arrived too late for a seat.
“He was not the type of man to wish for any sort of memorial service. He didn’t much care for attention being drawn to himself. In fact I think if he were in this room right now he would probably blush and hurry out the door! But I believe we can do him just as great an honor by turning our attention to the nature he loved.” And while I’m at it, why not get in a jab at that Baptist preacher?
“Ok, just by show of hands, how many of you, when you found this church community, cried your first time here?” At least half the hands rise into the air. “Ok. How many of you felt like you had finally found ‘your people’?” More hands shoot into the air, with less reluctance about the gesture this time. Well who wants to admit they cried?
“I bet I know why. I didn’t tell you anything new under the sun. I simply said the words that you knew to be true in your hearts. For all your lives you had been asked to render life from what Emerson calls “the dried bones of the past”. You were supposed to fashion the ‘armor of God’ from these worn and faded robes. You were bidden to serve at the altar of religion and denied the truth of your personal revelation. Your parents, well meaning and living out their own imprint of God and maybe some fear, warned you of all sorts of behaviors that would put you squarely on that God’s bad side and get you into trouble. Don’t talk back; be seen, not heard; be a lady; act right or the devil’s gonna get you; and most of all you must never EVER touch yourself! Am I right?” The room ripples with laughter.
“And probably a lot of you went in exactly the opposite direction as soon as you could! Am I right? I did. Heck yeah. I went to Paris! And the magic ingredient we were searching for was for once not to be told but to really experience something. I wanted to break the rules but mostly I just wanted to KNOW.”
“I don’t know about you, but no one ever told me that this curiosity I had in my mind was natural, was God-given. No one ever told me that it was ok to trust my experience, or my gut instinct. You women out there know what I’m talking about. How many of you had your life decisions taken away by a well intentioned father or husband or brother or had your intuition treated like superstition?”
In the back a tawny-skinned woman yells “amen!” I love it when they get fiery.
“Listen to what Emerson has to say: ‘We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He (or she) acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.’ So he’s saying that God’s gift to us, that the great teacher we have each chosen is not in a monument to religious tradition but our experience - as our own inner nature unfolds it to us.” I’m quoting Emerson and not the man known as Jesus and I can just feel that Baptist start to boil. Fuck him.
“How does that hit you? Hm? Wouldn’t you just rather have a devil to blame? Wouldn’t it be easier if I submersed you in water and just washed all of that junk out of your life?” I get another round of reluctant ‘amen’.
“But I can’t do that to you. I would be denying you the divinity of your true nature to create the life from which you must learn – from which you must remember, re-member, that God is in you as you are in God. That YOU are the creator. And that nature, your nature, your desires, are god-given and can be trusted.”
“How does that feel? How many times have you been told that it’s ok to trust yourself in mainstream churches? Hm. It’s a lot of responsibility all of the sudden, isn’t it?”
“Yes!” they shout back as one chorus.
“We live at the crest of an awfully inquisitive and materially progressive wave in human thinking. Our chemists, our doctors, our researchers and scientists have poked at nature and truly believe that they have forced her to relinquish her secrets. But are we any closer to understanding ourselves as people? Are we any closer to loving each other? We can see the wood that will build homes and make our Sunday papers but are we any better at seeing the trees? We all can look out our windows or drive down the road and know who owns what land around us, but who among you owns the horizon? We can go after nature, investigate her, divide her up into boundaries and buy her and sell her, but none of us will ever own the her best part. Who owns the sunset? Who owns the starry sky? Who owns the smell of the flowers? The one who owns these is simply the one who perceives them. Who stops to drink them in. And there is God, in that momentous evening light, in that fragrance, in that twinkling. Today. Now. Calling out to you to pause and simply allow yourself to be taught by that natural wonder that we are so good at pushing to the perimeter of our lives.”
“And this is what Jones Martin found in those rose bushes. Again as Emerson says: ‘The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.’ In every thing he found a delight. One time I was hustling along to the parking lot, running off to some meeting or another, and he came running up to me all excited. He was holding out something he had just yanked out of the ground. ‘Look!’ he said, ‘I just pulled this up! This is what I saw popping out of the dirt.’ And he showed me this little bitty green sprout about two inches long. ‘And THIS is what I pulled up when I decided to take it out of there!’ And he held out a root system that honestly was at least four feet long! Little bitty green sprout – Four feet of roots! Does that remind anybody of anything? How many little things you harbored in your mind that you didn’t really WANT the Lord to heal you of? Well it’s just a little resentment and she deserved it! It was just a little bitty lie and it was for the good. No one will know! But below the surface that little bitty thing is connected to a whole web of issues and other lies and resentments and dirty stuff that needs redemption. Those roots run deep and flourish in our psyches if we don’t tend to them regularly. Do you hear what I’m saying? It’s on us to cultivate our god nature.”
“Emerson continues to say: ‘Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result’. And I know, everyone figures well that guy was writing in the early 1800’s. Things are different now. But, not necessarily; not so fast my friends. This man was living in Massachusetts where he saw the industrial revolution rapidly remaking the landscape. In addition there were a lot more farms back then and as a result there was wide spread de-forestation. There are more trees in the Northeastern United States now than at the time of the Civil War. He’s beseeching people of his OWN time to not go too far, to find nature in their hearts – to experience directly and live deeply in the moment.”
They’re awful quiet. “So next Saturday I expect to see all of you out here planting petunias!” And they finally lighten up with a roll of laughter. “Hey, I’m serious! It’s almost the season! Just another month or so now.”
“So lets settle into our chairs, relax, and get in touch with that wise silence within. As you quiet your mind feel that still pool in your center. The presence of divine spirit within you is stronger than any calamity around you. Rest in that place and for a minute, let’s just allow God to love us…”
And I lead them through their meditation. Halfway through I open my eyes to see Jack seated near the front. He smiles as I spy him.
In my ear I hear him “Death may be natural, but not drought. You must choose to live.”
I have to kill or he will. What’s natural about that?
It’s standing room only. Bodies are silhouetted and black against all of the windows at the perimeter. I know not all of them have come to hear a lick of what I say. I spy the minister from the Baptist church down the street sitting about halfway back in the center. His arms are folded high across his chest in defiance. His chubby, pink body looks like someone poured him into that arrow collar shirt and polyester pants and then forgot to stop. Next to him at least five seats are filled with equally disdainful and stiff looking folks. They’ve come in under the ruse of showing some solidarity in the wake of this week’s brutal crime. I know what they’re up to. Come to see who’s draining off their crowd, they have. But it’s not me who is making the leak in their tithe baskets. It’s the comfort people feel when someone stands up at a pulpit and, rather than condemning them to eternal punishment for so much as letting a vegetable rot in the refrigerator, says out loud what deep down they have known all along to be truth and have been too afraid to admit. It is just that, though they burn out quickly, these bright stars are the glint in God’s eye.
“Jones was almost ninety years old. He couldn’t get around as well in these last couple years and so the precedent of his volunteer service has been passed on to new people with their own lessons to learn at the hands of nature. But he was bright and happy up until his last day. I sat with him on his last day, and we talked about his roses. Unfortunately, a few hours after our chat, I was called back to his home for a much less happy reason. It was then I saw what I hoped never to see. Our good friend and humble fellow traveler had been murdered.” Now comes the wave of gasps and knitted brows. None of this is for Jones, it’s worry for themselves that has them clutching the arms of a loved one and making eye contact with friends. In the back I notice the porcine figure of the Police sergeant shift his weight from leg to leg. Obviously not a regular church-goer, he arrived too late for a seat.
“He was not the type of man to wish for any sort of memorial service. He didn’t much care for attention being drawn to himself. In fact I think if he were in this room right now he would probably blush and hurry out the door! But I believe we can do him just as great an honor by turning our attention to the nature he loved.” And while I’m at it, why not get in a jab at that Baptist preacher?
“Ok, just by show of hands, how many of you, when you found this church community, cried your first time here?” At least half the hands rise into the air. “Ok. How many of you felt like you had finally found ‘your people’?” More hands shoot into the air, with less reluctance about the gesture this time. Well who wants to admit they cried?
“I bet I know why. I didn’t tell you anything new under the sun. I simply said the words that you knew to be true in your hearts. For all your lives you had been asked to render life from what Emerson calls “the dried bones of the past”. You were supposed to fashion the ‘armor of God’ from these worn and faded robes. You were bidden to serve at the altar of religion and denied the truth of your personal revelation. Your parents, well meaning and living out their own imprint of God and maybe some fear, warned you of all sorts of behaviors that would put you squarely on that God’s bad side and get you into trouble. Don’t talk back; be seen, not heard; be a lady; act right or the devil’s gonna get you; and most of all you must never EVER touch yourself! Am I right?” The room ripples with laughter.
“And probably a lot of you went in exactly the opposite direction as soon as you could! Am I right? I did. Heck yeah. I went to Paris! And the magic ingredient we were searching for was for once not to be told but to really experience something. I wanted to break the rules but mostly I just wanted to KNOW.”
“I don’t know about you, but no one ever told me that this curiosity I had in my mind was natural, was God-given. No one ever told me that it was ok to trust my experience, or my gut instinct. You women out there know what I’m talking about. How many of you had your life decisions taken away by a well intentioned father or husband or brother or had your intuition treated like superstition?”
In the back a tawny-skinned woman yells “amen!” I love it when they get fiery.
“Listen to what Emerson has to say: ‘We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He (or she) acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.’ So he’s saying that God’s gift to us, that the great teacher we have each chosen is not in a monument to religious tradition but our experience - as our own inner nature unfolds it to us.” I’m quoting Emerson and not the man known as Jesus and I can just feel that Baptist start to boil. Fuck him.
“How does that hit you? Hm? Wouldn’t you just rather have a devil to blame? Wouldn’t it be easier if I submersed you in water and just washed all of that junk out of your life?” I get another round of reluctant ‘amen’.
“But I can’t do that to you. I would be denying you the divinity of your true nature to create the life from which you must learn – from which you must remember, re-member, that God is in you as you are in God. That YOU are the creator. And that nature, your nature, your desires, are god-given and can be trusted.”
“How does that feel? How many times have you been told that it’s ok to trust yourself in mainstream churches? Hm. It’s a lot of responsibility all of the sudden, isn’t it?”
“Yes!” they shout back as one chorus.
“We live at the crest of an awfully inquisitive and materially progressive wave in human thinking. Our chemists, our doctors, our researchers and scientists have poked at nature and truly believe that they have forced her to relinquish her secrets. But are we any closer to understanding ourselves as people? Are we any closer to loving each other? We can see the wood that will build homes and make our Sunday papers but are we any better at seeing the trees? We all can look out our windows or drive down the road and know who owns what land around us, but who among you owns the horizon? We can go after nature, investigate her, divide her up into boundaries and buy her and sell her, but none of us will ever own the her best part. Who owns the sunset? Who owns the starry sky? Who owns the smell of the flowers? The one who owns these is simply the one who perceives them. Who stops to drink them in. And there is God, in that momentous evening light, in that fragrance, in that twinkling. Today. Now. Calling out to you to pause and simply allow yourself to be taught by that natural wonder that we are so good at pushing to the perimeter of our lives.”
“And this is what Jones Martin found in those rose bushes. Again as Emerson says: ‘The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.’ In every thing he found a delight. One time I was hustling along to the parking lot, running off to some meeting or another, and he came running up to me all excited. He was holding out something he had just yanked out of the ground. ‘Look!’ he said, ‘I just pulled this up! This is what I saw popping out of the dirt.’ And he showed me this little bitty green sprout about two inches long. ‘And THIS is what I pulled up when I decided to take it out of there!’ And he held out a root system that honestly was at least four feet long! Little bitty green sprout – Four feet of roots! Does that remind anybody of anything? How many little things you harbored in your mind that you didn’t really WANT the Lord to heal you of? Well it’s just a little resentment and she deserved it! It was just a little bitty lie and it was for the good. No one will know! But below the surface that little bitty thing is connected to a whole web of issues and other lies and resentments and dirty stuff that needs redemption. Those roots run deep and flourish in our psyches if we don’t tend to them regularly. Do you hear what I’m saying? It’s on us to cultivate our god nature.”
“Emerson continues to say: ‘Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result’. And I know, everyone figures well that guy was writing in the early 1800’s. Things are different now. But, not necessarily; not so fast my friends. This man was living in Massachusetts where he saw the industrial revolution rapidly remaking the landscape. In addition there were a lot more farms back then and as a result there was wide spread de-forestation. There are more trees in the Northeastern United States now than at the time of the Civil War. He’s beseeching people of his OWN time to not go too far, to find nature in their hearts – to experience directly and live deeply in the moment.”
They’re awful quiet. “So next Saturday I expect to see all of you out here planting petunias!” And they finally lighten up with a roll of laughter. “Hey, I’m serious! It’s almost the season! Just another month or so now.”
“So lets settle into our chairs, relax, and get in touch with that wise silence within. As you quiet your mind feel that still pool in your center. The presence of divine spirit within you is stronger than any calamity around you. Rest in that place and for a minute, let’s just allow God to love us…”
And I lead them through their meditation. Halfway through I open my eyes to see Jack seated near the front. He smiles as I spy him.
In my ear I hear him “Death may be natural, but not drought. You must choose to live.”
I have to kill or he will. What’s natural about that?
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