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":...in the clouds"
Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Greece
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"Does nature shape our personalities more than nurture?"
Nina Karacosta, France When I sit in a Vietnamese restaurant I sit there for hours. The waitress keeps bringing me tea
and then her mother brings some more. My plate is already empty. I look at the television via the reflection of the glass door. It starts raining. I feel lost a bit desperate. The tea is warm. I leave coins and paper money to them and leave the place. I walk pacing myself passed the bridge to go to St Michel. It is rare this slow walk. Paris it is now familiar. Familiar doesn’t mean friendly. I have other cities I have friends no blame this solitude heart remains with the eyes I walk passed the bouquinistes glance at their antiquarian books, keep walking between place and memory in every step, as if time is a place, a place that existed before. I’m passing rue Saint Jacques and heading to Odeon. feels like I’m trying to keep me in track then there is rain again, soft skinned drops it is never summer here ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- territory your strength is in need in the box of herbs and then things become I don’t see the clouds moving i am standing wolf woman through the poisons, the infections, the fasco fears the fever the ferocities looking at what resists you have strength against you foresee with the eye that reveals you are weak but it becomes lesser with time this is a herb a snake came crawling can flame rose can flute can add pepper red black green white can open the young leaf we have Hanna that looks with blue eyes through we will dance again and vanish shaking out of the body the ferocious claws ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the days of who I was “Let it be told” as my eyes with it I stood there indecisive coming and going circulation of birds i painted them hundreds of times bringing food to my famine thick perfumes of those lost buttercups “I will paint several. I will paint paint!” they reflected their golden shade the spread-out white paper counted and recounted its surface I shall finish it yet it is only a skin, a facet leading me somewhere else eating soil and drinking bullets from a cup pours the fatal powder only deeper sometimes terror faces angry thirsty demons shameless sometimes a new black Sanskrit driving the force I stopped to have a smoke I was puffing frozen o’s in the snowy air and the quiet night was as scary as my painting as my inside the darkness comes out from a place of light that allows it its space to hibernate, to incubate into other forms to arrive at the surface but fear is the dream of being dirty "ΓΑΙΩΝ‧ΕΝ‧Η‧ΔΟΞΑ‧ΤΗΣ‧ΓΑΙΑ‧ΕΙΝΑΙ‧ΕΖΗΚΕ‧
Gaíōn en hē dóxa tês Gaîa eînai ézēke (Rejoicing in the glory of Earth is living)" Douglas Colston, Australia “Change”, they say, “is constant,”
and they are right. King Cnut, too (contrary to traditional readings), realized it was impossible to hold back the tide. History, of course, has also shown that the climate changes – we experience it on a daily basis in our own lives and in the distant past the Earth has experienced ice ages, significant changes in sea levels and global warming. While humans have lived, they have responded by attempting to live life best while changing behaviours: moving; altering diets; wearing different clothes; developing adaptive technology; and the like. The same will occur in the future – and while humans exist, it is optimal to enjoy the beauty and splendour of the World … such an existence is truly living (it is not rocket science). "Spring Back"
Olchar E. Lindsann, Virginia hark angelic covid pallid choir,
merrily stalking yr springtime raindrop backbeat, flipping icicle basking its creep up eaves, and spoke of bicycle fatty acid smiles broadly pounce on charming lamb skin softly downy tickle fluff of giggle throat-rip stomach bile onesie; am I wrong? for lo, demonic baby death rattle, mask of nineteen vivisection toys jaggedly crawls through gentle fangs of lullaby radiation, tree-scalp counts elephantine cold front coughing breeze and daisies’ marrow reaps shreds of groundhog ribbons, pacifier razor candy swallows, walking baby steps tool land mine, kiddo, pollen, snowshod hunter fed on flesh scrap veiny. "Piranesi"
Carl Scharwath, Florida Still blue pond waters held the old man’s face. A reflection in every timeline of a history slowly
coming upon its end. Interacting- jostling- shapes distorting features once youthful, once purposeful. Images reflected by the sun dancing on ripples created from the breath of the sky A family, a past and the memories of a happy time when the future held promise. Now in his vision he only sees the depths of black ink, emanating from a tannin coated floor. He knew he was given everything needed for an unspecified time. The Sirens of the pond called him, opening their arms to a watery grave. Silently walking away to a new judgment, he would wait for the Parousia. • The title Piranesi is also a fantasy novel by English author Susanna Clarke, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2020. "Suffer NOT lest a SwaT of teeming Memories"
Joshua Martin, Pennsylvania morph = [ed] [ing]
appendix ,, dust regarded shovel hIp tO cRoWn of finger , NAILS , ‘lessons learn’d before a legume’ : : : - - - . Each beneath MaPlE flavored rOAr. Bo Bop Beep . . . ! . . . > ToWaRd scratch < H[a][e]Y of wIt , , , , leak in s=e=l=d=o=m ] bunch [ - - - . Outer strum dodo ,, dodo , , dodo , , DaDa ,, DaDa ,, DaDa ,, ::: ‘venomous beaver matcha membrane solidified anthropology of the sun’ . "The Odds of a Shellfish Dynasty Turning Up Drunk"
Joshua Martin, Pennsylvania Curated skis armed TO
TeeTH & pumice procedural dramatic twisted nipples - - - [form , less a studious frankfurter than the SHALLOW tube overwhelming the tuba players first base chemistry experiment ] - - - . The healing power of hiccups ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Minestrone hOt pepper saucy reservations ,, piercing hat BOX wigs to chagrin cushioning bubbles | spread | dreaded hyperbolic carpets ( ( ( ( ( FOR SALE ) ) ) ) ) . Heretofore , , , heavier tho strident , , , touchable tissue oyster crackers spraining weeps /\ /\ cLaSs WiThOuT tHe hurtling computer swarms , , , , , MuSt lEAn enough to forgo the snaking sneeze syndrome. "Basic Training for a Virginia Boy"
Charles A. Swanson, Virginia Dad (April 17, 1943; Fort Lewis, Washington):
I did a little rifle practice today for the first time and made 39 out of a score of 40 at two and three hundred yards. I surprised everybody when I came home with the bulls eyes because I don’t have much to say about what I can do and if I do say anything it is that I couldn’t hit a barn ten feet away. Lt. Hawkins told them all that was the way Va. Boys backed up their state. I really hate to let him down since he wants me to stand out in front because both of us are from Va., but I guess I had better look out for myself first. Son (79 years later): I really hated to let you down. If it were just enthusiasm, I could have faked it. But I couldn’t hold the gun still. I flinched every time I pulled the trigger. They’re hunting at the farm today, and I’m left out—not that I want to be there, trying to do something I can’t do. Perhaps you’ll smile at this. I killed a skunk last week. I killed him with a rock. A rock. Sheath of tears. A hard place in my bruised heart. Hurting you hurt me. "A Long Way from a Kiss"
Charles A. Swanson, Virginia Dad (April 20, 1943; Fort Lewis, Washington):
I heard from Judy and Peggy yesterday. Here is a paragraph from Judy’s letter but keep it to yourself. “Yes, Eugene, you do deserve a kiss—so when you’re home you may collect. If I’d known a good while back what I do now, I would not have objected to your good-night kiss, but everyone makes mistakes, so you can count that as one of mine. By the way, the sugar coupons haven’t stretched any so I’m going to send you a box of store candy and later perhaps a box of home made candy. Will that be O.K. for now?” Son: She was across the country, but I feel her infringing on Mom’s territory. But I’m being unfair to a 19-year-old who hadn’t met his wife-to-be. Sugar and kisses. Send candy across the country. Dearly purchased. Dearly sent. Light like a feather under table her leg brushes, trying to tether. "Late Night"
Charles A. Swanson, Virginia Dad (April 23, 1943; Fort Lewis, Washington):
It is about eleven o’clock and I have really put in one full day. I got up about 4:00 o’clock this morning and the wind was about to blow the tent from over us. As fast as we drove down one stob another one would pull up. We have worked 19 hours today and during that time I have marched about twenty miles besides being on the firing range all day. Guess I will have to stop because the lights are going out. Son: (Callands, Virginia) What I hear in your words is hunger for home. How you and Mama bundled us up. The long miles we traveled on Friday nights, after you’d worked a full day at Kelly Springfield Tire. The six hours from Cumberland to Callands. The tires’ rotations. The backseat darkness. The heaviness of sleep pulling down my eyelids. Yet you drove and drove and drove, a darker figure behind the wheel, seeing something I couldn’t see in the dark road unwinding. I remember the porch light coming on, yellow like artificial butter. I remember the door stone because there was no porch. I remember Grandma’s feet scuffling across the living room floor to open the door and let you in, her first-born son. Gone is the gloaming. Night. A distant tree line. One star to dance on twigs.
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Avant(Stories)Please make sure to address story submissions to Dave Sykes. Thanks!
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"The Angel Baby"
Nancy H. Williard, North Carolina
Nancy H. Williard, North Carolina
I knew something was wrong with the baby as soon as Kali laid it in my arms. A solid sack of flour. The baby looked at me with flat, pale eyes. Not a wiggle. The puff of white hair on its little head stood out as sparse as dandelion fluff. I didn’t know what to say.
Kali was proud, standing there with her after-baby fat hanging over her blue jeans. Her sister had a boyfriend, but they hadn’t made one yet. The first boy to get Kali in the backseat of a car… bam. He disappeared down the road, maybe Nashville. I could see she was not just any girl anymore. Kali was a mother.
She plucked the pacifier out of its mouth and thrust in a bottle of lukewarm formula.
“There. He’ll drink that and sleep and then poop.” She looked at my face, flipping her pale ponytail at me as I juggled the bundle to keep the bottle upright. “Don’t worry, I’ll take him then.” Kali flashed her eyes at her sister and went to her desk laughing.
Next to her in our tiny school trailer, her twin Karol twisted in her student desk and wrapped her arm around her homework so that Kali couldn’t see. Karol always got better grades. Kali, second born by a minute, struggled with division, so I spent more time with her. Karol and Kali were both way behind for tenth grade. When the alternative school, Aspire Academy, had kicked Kali out, Karol wouldn’t get on the bus without her, and Gramma’s car was unreliable. The elementary principal let them study in the trailer. We did what we could in our town. When I started as the special teacher aide, the principal told me that my primary job was to keep them from fighting. At least, in this tiny trailer, nobody heard them scream.
“Your homework is on the desk,” I said as I balanced the bottle. “You can take most of it home but be sure you understand the math.” They ignored me.
“I was only in labor for three hours,” bragged Kali. Karol’s desk screamed on the linoleum as she turned it further from her sister. “Gramma said that I must have a slippery womb.” Karol scrubbed with her pencil to erase another answer on her math paper. “I bet I will have more children than anyone in my family, now that I’ve got started.” Karol froze.
“Do your work, Kali.” Even as I spoke, I knew we were in for it. Karol was muttering to herself. Holding that baby made it hard for me to get up from the wooden teacher’s desk, but I waddled over to stand next to the twins. My arms ached. I tried to look at Karol’s work. “That looks great!” My encouragement was useless. The hair on my arms rose, so I headed back to the teacher's desk.
“Gramma said that God loves the innocents and since I have an innocent baby, he loves me more,” Kali spoke to the bent blond head of her twin. “In fact, God gave me this baby to start my own family.” In her study desk, Karol’s back stiffened and the older twin hissed expletives louder than the buzz of the air conditioner.
“In fact, Gramma said she’s going to have me move into the front bedroom because of the baby.” Kali looked directly at her sister’s back. I stood at the front desk rocking the baby who didn’t seem to care.
“Girls. Girls. Let’s focus.” I felt desperate but I stayed behind the solid wooden teacher's desk, bouncing the baby bundle.
The explosion between the two was so quick I almost fell over. Karol popped up from her desk with a growl, her arms reaching over to grab Kali’s ponytail as she popped her sister in the face. Blood splattered on the math papers. Kali howled, throwing herself at Karol. As the desks tumbled, the twins rolled on the floor screaming, “Bitch! Hoe!” I rearranged the baby, so I had a hand free, and hustled to the phone on the wall to call the principal. From the smell in my arm, I knew the baby had pooped.
The twins went at it until the principal showed up, next came James Stout, our one cop, then the girls’ Gramma. By that time the girls were separated; their clothes were bloody and torn. Gramma yanked the baby from me and used her other hand to push the twins out of the trailer. Alone, I began to right the desks and gather the math papers. The janitor would have to clean up the blood.
As I was signing the substitute book in the principal’s office the next morning, the secretary grumbled, “You will be in Mrs. Peterson’s third grade today, Sherill.” Miss Gail didn’t approve of me since I had left college. She didn’t like quitters. I had gone through almost a year at community college so for all she knew I might even go back to Knoxville next semester. I stared at her until she looked up.
“The twins applied for homeschooling.”
“But who will help them with math?” I bleated. Then I looked down, embarrassed to be so unprofessional.
Miss Gail looked up at me over her half glasses. “God, I suppose.”
About a month later, I was in the grocery store in Sevierville when I saw Gramma and the twins at the meat counter. Kali drifted away from her sister and Gramma, who was arguing with the butcher. She gravitated toward me as if I were a lost friend.
“Where’d you go?” she whispered.
“I’m at the elementary now. How’s the baby?” I asked Kali.
“The angels took him,” she said, her eyes full of glory.
I didn’t talk to anyone about Kali and the baby, even when Momma asked me what happened, why I was at the elementary school now. Her questions exhausted me. Why wasn’t I in a real job, why wasn’t I at college, why didn’t I fix my hair up, why didn’t I go out with Bobby? And always the big one – did I think about marriage? And grandbabies?
That’s why I begged out of going to church. Momma was sure to sit next to Bobby’s mother at the church dinner. I was not sitting next to Bobby again. He was an ok boy, but he didn’t spark my fire. Nobody fired me up. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no innocent. I’ve had fun before but just now, I feel dead inside. Wet-eyed from boredom, I was spread out flat on my bed in my pajamas, when I heard the noise. Nobody was home but me. I went downstairs anyway.
In the kitchen was a lanky stranger rummaging with his head in the refrigerator. I held my breath. Rising on my toes, I edged to the stove and lifted the cast iron frypan without a sound. I had it above my head when he turned. The shock of seeing his eyes threw my swing off. The pan swiped his shoulder and dropped to the floor, ringing loud, rolling round and round until it settled.
“Ow, now why’d you do that?” The man waved a loaf of Sara Lee bread with his good arm in explanation. “I’m not gonna do nothing to you, girl. I’m just hungry.” His eyes were like looking up at the sky washed clean after the storm cleared.
I turned and ran upstairs, my heart beating like crazy. I could hardly catch my breath, but I had enough sense to put clothes on. Clenching my fists, I went down to face the invader. First, I peered around the door. He was making a giant sandwich and all the insides of the refrigerator were on the table. His faded red t-shirt had a big map of Texas under the Dallas Cowboys logo and his blue jeans fit his butt. His hair hadn’t seen a barber in a while but had seen a lot of sun. My chest tightened up, but I took a deep breath and stepped into the kitchen.
“So how’d you get from Texas to here?” I asked, bold as brass.
He looked up from the sandwich and I felt those pale eyes make the pit of my stomach burn. “You hungry?” Cutting the big sandwich in half, he put one half on a paper plate and slid it to my side of the kitchen table. I flopped into the chair. I don’t remember eating the sandwich, but it was gone, and he was deep into his sad story by the time I came to. I didn’t listen; I was memorizing the wrinkles on his face. He didn’t look old, just rode hard as Momma would say.
“So I need to get to Cherokee. The guy I was riding with let me out down the road. You got a car around here?”
“My brother Mark’s truck is in the garage. I guess I could drive you to the highway. What’s your name anyway?”
“Frank,” he said and leaned across the table. I could feel the flush rising from the very bottom of me up to my neck and spotting my face. I tried to smile but got up to get the keys and my backpack. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Mark would kill me for driving the truck that Grandpa left him when he died, but I felt like I was going to hell anyway. As I pulled out onto the road, I kept practicing how I would say it in my head.
“Frank,” I would say, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”
No, no, no. “Frank, let’s get married.”
No. “Frank, kiss me.” I couldn’t decide but I sneaked looks at him as I drove. Frank rambled on about his great job waiting for him in Cherokee.
“The money in being a dealer is amazing! Once I get my gaming license, I’ll be able to pick and choose my jobs. Hey, why don’t you come with me? I’ll take you out to dinner at the casino. A little surf and turf?” Frank leaned over and put his hand on my shoulder. “I need to pay you back for the use of the truck and all the gas. Come on, you’ll enjoy it.” I tingled as I pulled into the gas station outside Sevierville. That last CJ Roberts novel started just like this.
“Ok, I’ll fill up before we get on the highway.” I was doing it; I was going for it, finally. Life here I come. We both hopped out and he went to the pump.
“You go inside to pay, and I’ll wave when it’s full,” Frank gave me another blue steel eye lock, and the wind blew his hair like in a movie. “Oh, you might want to use the restroom. We’ll drive straight through.”
In the bathroom, I took my brush out of my backpack. Fluffing my hair in the mirror, I wasn’t pretty, but I was decent.
I walked around the corner of the building swinging the wooden paddle on the end of the restroom key. The evening wind was coming up and I was smiling. For a minute. Until I saw the truck was gone. I rushed inside and squeaked out, “Where did the truck go?”
The attendant shrugged his shoulders. “God knows, he just took off and said you would pay up. That will be twenty-three dollars.”
When I finally made it home it was dark. Mom and Mark were out back standing under the garage floodlight yelling, so I snuck in, slipped upstairs, and changed into my pajamas. I heard the door slam and more shouting, so I came down and stuck my head into the kitchen.
“What are you yelling about? You woke me up.”
Mark was waving his hands in the air. Mom had her hands on her hips. Both were hollering.
“I did not leave the keys in your blasted truck.”
“But you were the last one to drive it, Mom.”
“Hey,” I said, and they both looked at me, “what’s up?”
“And you, you lazy slug, sleeping all day. Did you not hear anything?” Mark started across the kitchen at me.
“No,” I shrieked and ran like the devil back upstairs. I was not coming out for anything. All I could hear was godd**n this, and godd**n that - on a Sunday night. I thanked God for saving me. I could be in Cherokee eating surf and turf and making babies with some guy named Frank. Anybody could have a baby.
Looking out the window I could see the two of them in the yard and the blue lights coming up the drive. The front door slammed, and James Stout’s boots stomped into the house. He thought he was something now he was a cop, but he was still what he was in high school.
“Sherill, can you come down here?” His cop voice boomed up the stairs, so I put on my Hello Kitty robe and came down. James stood like the Colossus of Rhodes in our living room and his little radio was squawking. He pulled out a tiny notebook and a worn pencil.
“Where were you today? You weren’t in church,” James frowned.
“I had a sick headache,” I whined trying to look puny, “I stayed in bed.”
He made a note in his book. Screech, mumble, buzz said his radio. “Did you come down at any time?”
“No.” I leaned listening to the squawking from the dispatch. Did they say “Frank”?
“I have a report that you were seen in Mark’s truck with an unidentified man about 16 hundred,” he frowned. “That’s four o’clock.”
The flush went straight up from my heart to my head.
“Well, he said he’d kill me if I told,” I blubbered, “He made me…” Then I talked as fast as I could telling him a Law and Order scene where the girl gets kidnapped.
“Miss Sherill, did this man abuse you in any way?” James was writing in his little notebook.
“None of your business,” I wailed. I didn’t wait for anymore. I just scampered up the stairs and slammed my door. After a little bit, I heard James’ cop car pull out of the driveway spitting gravel.
I didn’t answer the door so Mom gave up knocking, finally. When the house settled, I crawled out the window onto the stone chimney that Grandpa built. Back in the day, they built them wide with big stones from the fields. I’d climbed up many a time to the roof. As I lay on the bumpy shingles, I watched the night sky remembering the lectures I heard when I hid in the planetarium at college rather than go to English class. The stars move but we can’t see them unless they fall. Whether this fills me with disappointment or relief, I’m not sure.
“Why do you keep messing with us?” I said to the sky. “Isn’t life hard enough?”
Climbing down back into my room, I did not fall and kill myself as my mother always predicted. The blanket felt like arms around me, and I must have slept because when I opened my eyes the dawn light in the room made all the colors look the same. I went to the window to watch Monday coming. Across the trees in the valley I saw the shining metal roof of the trailer next to the elementary school. A shuffling downstairs drew me from the window. Wondering if Frank had returned, I tiptoed down the stairs. But it was only brother Mark drinking chocolate milk.
“Did you get any sleep?” I grabbed a glass, slid into the chair at the kitchen table, and poured some milk for myself. I felt bad about the truck. The least I could do was sympathize.
Mark’s face was stark white, and his eyes looked like he’d been crying.
“Hey, buddy, they’ll find your truck.”
“It’s not that.” Mark swallowed. “It’s Grandpa.”
“I’m sure he’s watching baseball with God,” I tried to be funny to cheer Mark up. A tear squeezed out of his eye. “He’s not worried about his old truck.”
“No,” Mark sounded hoarse. “It’s all my fault.” I reached out to pat his hand.
“Grampa’s in the truck.” Now I was really confused.
“Huh?”
“I never dumped the box of ashes in the lake. I just couldn’t. Nobody would help. The time never seemed right. The box from the funeral home is still behind the front seat of the truck.”
“Mark, that was last year,” I squealed.
“Hush, Momma needs her sleep.”
I put my hand over my mouth, then took it off and whispered, “What are you going to do?”
We just sat there until all the chocolate milk was gone, then we both went back to bed. But I could hear him messing around in his room. I wondered if my fake illness could last through Monday morning.
In the end, I didn’t have to be sick again because James was there at breakfast to take both Mark and me to the jail to identify Frank and the truck. I had to ride in the back of the cop car where the doors won’t open, and you can’t roll down the windows. That was some justice.
Mark went off to see his truck in the impound. James took me through the station to the jail. The secretary looked through her plastic window and buzzed James right through. I had to sit there until James brought Frank up for the ID. The waiting room was cold concrete with old wood benches like pews. As I waited, Kali came in with her grandmother.
“Hi there, Miss Sherill, we’ve come to see my uncle. Who are you waiting for?” Kali said like we were just waiting in any old office.
“Just business,” I sputtered. “Where’s your sister?”
“She’s gone to my aunt’s in Knoxville,” Kali said this like it was the most natural thing in the world to be un-twinned. Luckily James stuck his head out of the door just then because I was stumped. I followed James in silence. Chitchat in the jailhouse was beyond my ability.
Frank did not look as good behind the jail bars as he had in the kitchen. I was surprised that my feelings seemed to have gone away overnight. But Mark was counting on me.
“That’s him. Said his name was Frank,” I told James. Frank didn’t even look up. James took my arm to turn me around and lead me back out, but I tugged away.
“He didn’t hurt me. Are you going to let him go?”
“No,” James gave Frank a lethal look, “He has lots of problems.”
“I want to say something to him.”
“Why?” James frowned.
“None of your business.” I stared at James; he groaned and let go of my arm. I used to kick him on the playground.
“Go ahead.”
“No, you back off a bit. This is between me and him.”
James shook his head but stood further down the hallway. Frank looked up at me and I waved at him to come closer to the bars.
I whispered, “Is the box still in the truck?”
“Huh?”
“The box behind the driver’s seat? Is it still in the truck?”
“What box? I didn’t do anything with a box. I’m so sorry darling that I left you behind, but I was keeping you from trouble. I didn’t even tell Deputy Dawg over there that you came with me. I want to protect you. Hey, sweetie, how about you bail me out and we can get this all fixed up. We still have a date for surf and turf.”
I did not believe his nerve. “You won’t tell anything because kidnapping is a federal offense. You shut your mouth and I’ll tell them I went voluntarily because I was just trying to help, which I was.” Hissing that out, I turned on my heel and marched over to James.
“Officer Stout, it was all my foolishness. I was just trying to be a good Christian and help the poor man get to town.” My heart was thumping but I kept telling myself that no one could tell.
Back through the metal door, Mark was sitting on the pew looking happier. I went to sit next to him. Kali and her grandmother were still there. It was strange to see Kali by herself, but she looked fine.
“It was still there,” Mark whispered.
“I know,” I whispered back, “I’ll go with you to Sevierville. You shouldn’t have to go alone.” When Mark went to the window to finish the paperwork to get his truck out of the impound, it dawned on me that maybe I almost had the biggest adventure of my life, and no one knew. In my town, where everyone knew what you ate for lunch before it digested, I had secrets. As I sat there thinking about Frank and how Grandpa had been safe all along, Kali left her grandmother and came to sit beside me like we were in the principal’s office, not the jail.
“Don’t worry,” Kali patted my hand, “Everything will be fine. Just like the Angel Baby.”
Kali was proud, standing there with her after-baby fat hanging over her blue jeans. Her sister had a boyfriend, but they hadn’t made one yet. The first boy to get Kali in the backseat of a car… bam. He disappeared down the road, maybe Nashville. I could see she was not just any girl anymore. Kali was a mother.
She plucked the pacifier out of its mouth and thrust in a bottle of lukewarm formula.
“There. He’ll drink that and sleep and then poop.” She looked at my face, flipping her pale ponytail at me as I juggled the bundle to keep the bottle upright. “Don’t worry, I’ll take him then.” Kali flashed her eyes at her sister and went to her desk laughing.
Next to her in our tiny school trailer, her twin Karol twisted in her student desk and wrapped her arm around her homework so that Kali couldn’t see. Karol always got better grades. Kali, second born by a minute, struggled with division, so I spent more time with her. Karol and Kali were both way behind for tenth grade. When the alternative school, Aspire Academy, had kicked Kali out, Karol wouldn’t get on the bus without her, and Gramma’s car was unreliable. The elementary principal let them study in the trailer. We did what we could in our town. When I started as the special teacher aide, the principal told me that my primary job was to keep them from fighting. At least, in this tiny trailer, nobody heard them scream.
“Your homework is on the desk,” I said as I balanced the bottle. “You can take most of it home but be sure you understand the math.” They ignored me.
“I was only in labor for three hours,” bragged Kali. Karol’s desk screamed on the linoleum as she turned it further from her sister. “Gramma said that I must have a slippery womb.” Karol scrubbed with her pencil to erase another answer on her math paper. “I bet I will have more children than anyone in my family, now that I’ve got started.” Karol froze.
“Do your work, Kali.” Even as I spoke, I knew we were in for it. Karol was muttering to herself. Holding that baby made it hard for me to get up from the wooden teacher’s desk, but I waddled over to stand next to the twins. My arms ached. I tried to look at Karol’s work. “That looks great!” My encouragement was useless. The hair on my arms rose, so I headed back to the teacher's desk.
“Gramma said that God loves the innocents and since I have an innocent baby, he loves me more,” Kali spoke to the bent blond head of her twin. “In fact, God gave me this baby to start my own family.” In her study desk, Karol’s back stiffened and the older twin hissed expletives louder than the buzz of the air conditioner.
“In fact, Gramma said she’s going to have me move into the front bedroom because of the baby.” Kali looked directly at her sister’s back. I stood at the front desk rocking the baby who didn’t seem to care.
“Girls. Girls. Let’s focus.” I felt desperate but I stayed behind the solid wooden teacher's desk, bouncing the baby bundle.
The explosion between the two was so quick I almost fell over. Karol popped up from her desk with a growl, her arms reaching over to grab Kali’s ponytail as she popped her sister in the face. Blood splattered on the math papers. Kali howled, throwing herself at Karol. As the desks tumbled, the twins rolled on the floor screaming, “Bitch! Hoe!” I rearranged the baby, so I had a hand free, and hustled to the phone on the wall to call the principal. From the smell in my arm, I knew the baby had pooped.
The twins went at it until the principal showed up, next came James Stout, our one cop, then the girls’ Gramma. By that time the girls were separated; their clothes were bloody and torn. Gramma yanked the baby from me and used her other hand to push the twins out of the trailer. Alone, I began to right the desks and gather the math papers. The janitor would have to clean up the blood.
As I was signing the substitute book in the principal’s office the next morning, the secretary grumbled, “You will be in Mrs. Peterson’s third grade today, Sherill.” Miss Gail didn’t approve of me since I had left college. She didn’t like quitters. I had gone through almost a year at community college so for all she knew I might even go back to Knoxville next semester. I stared at her until she looked up.
“The twins applied for homeschooling.”
“But who will help them with math?” I bleated. Then I looked down, embarrassed to be so unprofessional.
Miss Gail looked up at me over her half glasses. “God, I suppose.”
About a month later, I was in the grocery store in Sevierville when I saw Gramma and the twins at the meat counter. Kali drifted away from her sister and Gramma, who was arguing with the butcher. She gravitated toward me as if I were a lost friend.
“Where’d you go?” she whispered.
“I’m at the elementary now. How’s the baby?” I asked Kali.
“The angels took him,” she said, her eyes full of glory.
I didn’t talk to anyone about Kali and the baby, even when Momma asked me what happened, why I was at the elementary school now. Her questions exhausted me. Why wasn’t I in a real job, why wasn’t I at college, why didn’t I fix my hair up, why didn’t I go out with Bobby? And always the big one – did I think about marriage? And grandbabies?
That’s why I begged out of going to church. Momma was sure to sit next to Bobby’s mother at the church dinner. I was not sitting next to Bobby again. He was an ok boy, but he didn’t spark my fire. Nobody fired me up. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no innocent. I’ve had fun before but just now, I feel dead inside. Wet-eyed from boredom, I was spread out flat on my bed in my pajamas, when I heard the noise. Nobody was home but me. I went downstairs anyway.
In the kitchen was a lanky stranger rummaging with his head in the refrigerator. I held my breath. Rising on my toes, I edged to the stove and lifted the cast iron frypan without a sound. I had it above my head when he turned. The shock of seeing his eyes threw my swing off. The pan swiped his shoulder and dropped to the floor, ringing loud, rolling round and round until it settled.
“Ow, now why’d you do that?” The man waved a loaf of Sara Lee bread with his good arm in explanation. “I’m not gonna do nothing to you, girl. I’m just hungry.” His eyes were like looking up at the sky washed clean after the storm cleared.
I turned and ran upstairs, my heart beating like crazy. I could hardly catch my breath, but I had enough sense to put clothes on. Clenching my fists, I went down to face the invader. First, I peered around the door. He was making a giant sandwich and all the insides of the refrigerator were on the table. His faded red t-shirt had a big map of Texas under the Dallas Cowboys logo and his blue jeans fit his butt. His hair hadn’t seen a barber in a while but had seen a lot of sun. My chest tightened up, but I took a deep breath and stepped into the kitchen.
“So how’d you get from Texas to here?” I asked, bold as brass.
He looked up from the sandwich and I felt those pale eyes make the pit of my stomach burn. “You hungry?” Cutting the big sandwich in half, he put one half on a paper plate and slid it to my side of the kitchen table. I flopped into the chair. I don’t remember eating the sandwich, but it was gone, and he was deep into his sad story by the time I came to. I didn’t listen; I was memorizing the wrinkles on his face. He didn’t look old, just rode hard as Momma would say.
“So I need to get to Cherokee. The guy I was riding with let me out down the road. You got a car around here?”
“My brother Mark’s truck is in the garage. I guess I could drive you to the highway. What’s your name anyway?”
“Frank,” he said and leaned across the table. I could feel the flush rising from the very bottom of me up to my neck and spotting my face. I tried to smile but got up to get the keys and my backpack. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Mark would kill me for driving the truck that Grandpa left him when he died, but I felt like I was going to hell anyway. As I pulled out onto the road, I kept practicing how I would say it in my head.
“Frank,” I would say, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”
No, no, no. “Frank, let’s get married.”
No. “Frank, kiss me.” I couldn’t decide but I sneaked looks at him as I drove. Frank rambled on about his great job waiting for him in Cherokee.
“The money in being a dealer is amazing! Once I get my gaming license, I’ll be able to pick and choose my jobs. Hey, why don’t you come with me? I’ll take you out to dinner at the casino. A little surf and turf?” Frank leaned over and put his hand on my shoulder. “I need to pay you back for the use of the truck and all the gas. Come on, you’ll enjoy it.” I tingled as I pulled into the gas station outside Sevierville. That last CJ Roberts novel started just like this.
“Ok, I’ll fill up before we get on the highway.” I was doing it; I was going for it, finally. Life here I come. We both hopped out and he went to the pump.
“You go inside to pay, and I’ll wave when it’s full,” Frank gave me another blue steel eye lock, and the wind blew his hair like in a movie. “Oh, you might want to use the restroom. We’ll drive straight through.”
In the bathroom, I took my brush out of my backpack. Fluffing my hair in the mirror, I wasn’t pretty, but I was decent.
I walked around the corner of the building swinging the wooden paddle on the end of the restroom key. The evening wind was coming up and I was smiling. For a minute. Until I saw the truck was gone. I rushed inside and squeaked out, “Where did the truck go?”
The attendant shrugged his shoulders. “God knows, he just took off and said you would pay up. That will be twenty-three dollars.”
When I finally made it home it was dark. Mom and Mark were out back standing under the garage floodlight yelling, so I snuck in, slipped upstairs, and changed into my pajamas. I heard the door slam and more shouting, so I came down and stuck my head into the kitchen.
“What are you yelling about? You woke me up.”
Mark was waving his hands in the air. Mom had her hands on her hips. Both were hollering.
“I did not leave the keys in your blasted truck.”
“But you were the last one to drive it, Mom.”
“Hey,” I said, and they both looked at me, “what’s up?”
“And you, you lazy slug, sleeping all day. Did you not hear anything?” Mark started across the kitchen at me.
“No,” I shrieked and ran like the devil back upstairs. I was not coming out for anything. All I could hear was godd**n this, and godd**n that - on a Sunday night. I thanked God for saving me. I could be in Cherokee eating surf and turf and making babies with some guy named Frank. Anybody could have a baby.
Looking out the window I could see the two of them in the yard and the blue lights coming up the drive. The front door slammed, and James Stout’s boots stomped into the house. He thought he was something now he was a cop, but he was still what he was in high school.
“Sherill, can you come down here?” His cop voice boomed up the stairs, so I put on my Hello Kitty robe and came down. James stood like the Colossus of Rhodes in our living room and his little radio was squawking. He pulled out a tiny notebook and a worn pencil.
“Where were you today? You weren’t in church,” James frowned.
“I had a sick headache,” I whined trying to look puny, “I stayed in bed.”
He made a note in his book. Screech, mumble, buzz said his radio. “Did you come down at any time?”
“No.” I leaned listening to the squawking from the dispatch. Did they say “Frank”?
“I have a report that you were seen in Mark’s truck with an unidentified man about 16 hundred,” he frowned. “That’s four o’clock.”
The flush went straight up from my heart to my head.
“Well, he said he’d kill me if I told,” I blubbered, “He made me…” Then I talked as fast as I could telling him a Law and Order scene where the girl gets kidnapped.
“Miss Sherill, did this man abuse you in any way?” James was writing in his little notebook.
“None of your business,” I wailed. I didn’t wait for anymore. I just scampered up the stairs and slammed my door. After a little bit, I heard James’ cop car pull out of the driveway spitting gravel.
I didn’t answer the door so Mom gave up knocking, finally. When the house settled, I crawled out the window onto the stone chimney that Grandpa built. Back in the day, they built them wide with big stones from the fields. I’d climbed up many a time to the roof. As I lay on the bumpy shingles, I watched the night sky remembering the lectures I heard when I hid in the planetarium at college rather than go to English class. The stars move but we can’t see them unless they fall. Whether this fills me with disappointment or relief, I’m not sure.
“Why do you keep messing with us?” I said to the sky. “Isn’t life hard enough?”
Climbing down back into my room, I did not fall and kill myself as my mother always predicted. The blanket felt like arms around me, and I must have slept because when I opened my eyes the dawn light in the room made all the colors look the same. I went to the window to watch Monday coming. Across the trees in the valley I saw the shining metal roof of the trailer next to the elementary school. A shuffling downstairs drew me from the window. Wondering if Frank had returned, I tiptoed down the stairs. But it was only brother Mark drinking chocolate milk.
“Did you get any sleep?” I grabbed a glass, slid into the chair at the kitchen table, and poured some milk for myself. I felt bad about the truck. The least I could do was sympathize.
Mark’s face was stark white, and his eyes looked like he’d been crying.
“Hey, buddy, they’ll find your truck.”
“It’s not that.” Mark swallowed. “It’s Grandpa.”
“I’m sure he’s watching baseball with God,” I tried to be funny to cheer Mark up. A tear squeezed out of his eye. “He’s not worried about his old truck.”
“No,” Mark sounded hoarse. “It’s all my fault.” I reached out to pat his hand.
“Grampa’s in the truck.” Now I was really confused.
“Huh?”
“I never dumped the box of ashes in the lake. I just couldn’t. Nobody would help. The time never seemed right. The box from the funeral home is still behind the front seat of the truck.”
“Mark, that was last year,” I squealed.
“Hush, Momma needs her sleep.”
I put my hand over my mouth, then took it off and whispered, “What are you going to do?”
We just sat there until all the chocolate milk was gone, then we both went back to bed. But I could hear him messing around in his room. I wondered if my fake illness could last through Monday morning.
In the end, I didn’t have to be sick again because James was there at breakfast to take both Mark and me to the jail to identify Frank and the truck. I had to ride in the back of the cop car where the doors won’t open, and you can’t roll down the windows. That was some justice.
Mark went off to see his truck in the impound. James took me through the station to the jail. The secretary looked through her plastic window and buzzed James right through. I had to sit there until James brought Frank up for the ID. The waiting room was cold concrete with old wood benches like pews. As I waited, Kali came in with her grandmother.
“Hi there, Miss Sherill, we’ve come to see my uncle. Who are you waiting for?” Kali said like we were just waiting in any old office.
“Just business,” I sputtered. “Where’s your sister?”
“She’s gone to my aunt’s in Knoxville,” Kali said this like it was the most natural thing in the world to be un-twinned. Luckily James stuck his head out of the door just then because I was stumped. I followed James in silence. Chitchat in the jailhouse was beyond my ability.
Frank did not look as good behind the jail bars as he had in the kitchen. I was surprised that my feelings seemed to have gone away overnight. But Mark was counting on me.
“That’s him. Said his name was Frank,” I told James. Frank didn’t even look up. James took my arm to turn me around and lead me back out, but I tugged away.
“He didn’t hurt me. Are you going to let him go?”
“No,” James gave Frank a lethal look, “He has lots of problems.”
“I want to say something to him.”
“Why?” James frowned.
“None of your business.” I stared at James; he groaned and let go of my arm. I used to kick him on the playground.
“Go ahead.”
“No, you back off a bit. This is between me and him.”
James shook his head but stood further down the hallway. Frank looked up at me and I waved at him to come closer to the bars.
I whispered, “Is the box still in the truck?”
“Huh?”
“The box behind the driver’s seat? Is it still in the truck?”
“What box? I didn’t do anything with a box. I’m so sorry darling that I left you behind, but I was keeping you from trouble. I didn’t even tell Deputy Dawg over there that you came with me. I want to protect you. Hey, sweetie, how about you bail me out and we can get this all fixed up. We still have a date for surf and turf.”
I did not believe his nerve. “You won’t tell anything because kidnapping is a federal offense. You shut your mouth and I’ll tell them I went voluntarily because I was just trying to help, which I was.” Hissing that out, I turned on my heel and marched over to James.
“Officer Stout, it was all my foolishness. I was just trying to be a good Christian and help the poor man get to town.” My heart was thumping but I kept telling myself that no one could tell.
Back through the metal door, Mark was sitting on the pew looking happier. I went to sit next to him. Kali and her grandmother were still there. It was strange to see Kali by herself, but she looked fine.
“It was still there,” Mark whispered.
“I know,” I whispered back, “I’ll go with you to Sevierville. You shouldn’t have to go alone.” When Mark went to the window to finish the paperwork to get his truck out of the impound, it dawned on me that maybe I almost had the biggest adventure of my life, and no one knew. In my town, where everyone knew what you ate for lunch before it digested, I had secrets. As I sat there thinking about Frank and how Grandpa had been safe all along, Kali left her grandmother and came to sit beside me like we were in the principal’s office, not the jail.
“Don’t worry,” Kali patted my hand, “Everything will be fine. Just like the Angel Baby.”
"Cat Eye"
John Sparks, Kentucky
John Sparks, Kentucky
Go ahead, Mr. Maddox. The tape is running.
Okay.
In the name of God, amen. I, Elder Joseph Maddox of the Forest Retreat Rest Home--
Ahem.
Oh. Sorry, Mrs. Chafin. I mean, I Joseph Maddox of the Forest Retreat Care and Rehabilitation Center in Perkinsville, Kentucky, being very weak and sick in body but still of sound mind, thank God, do now add this… whatever it is, to my last will and testament. Mrs. Chafin, the social worker, brought me a tape recorder and tape and is right now setting with me and running it for me and promised that she’d stick to them new hippa laws and not let anybody else listen to this nor talk about it to anyone, and also promised, at my death, she’d give the tape to my son, Joseph Maddox Jr., who I run off from home at Christmastime 1980 and who, last I heard, is now living in New England. I think my other kids knows his whereabouts but they never ever speak of it to me. So I hope this gets to you, Jody. It’s the only way I can talk to you now. I don’t want your brothers or sisters ever to listen to it, but I’ve got to take that on Mrs. Chafin’s promise and them hippa laws and, I guess, plain faith.
Jody, son, I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we ain’t talked in thirty-odd years. I figure you don’t believe that, but it’s true. And specially that you was so scared and bitter at all the people around here, and maybe me too, that you wouldn’t come home for your mama’s funeral. She always pined for you, even atter that one time I got mad and told her since she missed you so much she could leave and go with you and stay and cook for you for all I cared. You know I can’t never approve of how you live your life, but before a man dies he ort to be honest enough to confess his own faults, and I know I’m the reason that you’re the way you are. I reckon I just always hated to admit it, even to myself. But I’ve preached out of the Bible the last forty-five years, near half my life, and the same book that says qu—well, people like—that—is an abomination before God, that same God is a jealous God who’ll visit the sins of the parents onto the children to the third and fourth generation. So if I take one thing for law and gospel I’ve got to take it all. And my sin that was visited on you was Cat Eye. I would tell you his real name, but there’s no need; everybody down around the coal camp at Lively where I grew up knowed him as Cat Eye, same as they knowed everybody else by their nicknames, me included. I was Mad Dog, ‘cause of our last name. So if you really want to know who Cat Eye was, come back home and look in the Library for Perkinsville newspapers from November 1945 and you’ll find it, alongside mine.
You used to get irked at how much I’d talk about the Great Depression, but remembering the times is the only way you can make any sense out of what happened—from the mines going down to one or two days’ work a week, if that, and making them that didn’t have any stock and garden land to picking poke sallet and dandelions along the road and cooking them without grease or salt, to the Swamp Angel making homebrew and selling it for a nickel a quart, and to the men and boys getting together and robbing freight trains and letting the womenfolk fence the stuff out among all the neighbors. People back then was so hungry and desperate they’d do anything to keep body and soul together, and pretty much, that’s Cat Eye’s story and it was mine too. His family lived up the other holler across the tracks from where we did, and his daddy was one of the meanest men there was in a camp full of mean men. One time when Cat Eye and me was playing on the porch at his house, his daddy come out and somehow Cat Eye got in his way and he picked him up and throwed him down to the ground and said to him, “Keep outa my way, you little white-haired son of a b*tch.” I don’t mention that now to be a-cussing or blackguarding, but I’m just trying to tell you. That all right, Mrs. Chafin?
Sure, Mr. Maddox. Anything you want to say.
All right then. Just so you know I was quoting. But it turned out that Cat Eye’s daddy finally shot himself, or at least that’s what was said, although the guts ain’t a good spot to shoot and by the time he died you could hear him screaming a mile. My daddy run up there and come back home with a weird look on his face and told Mommy about it and I listened. Said he got there about the same time the company doctor did, and when the doctor asked to see the revolver, Cat Eye brought it to him, a big .45 hog-leg. When the doctor opened the cylinder, there’s six bullets in, so he says to Cat Eye, “Son, this gun’s not been fired.”
“Oh, yes it has,” Cat Eye answers. “I put another bullet back in.”
And that’s all I know. Daddy said the doctor made a weird look too, but he marked it a suicide on the death certificate and they left Cat Eye a-kickin’ around the bloody pillow his old man died on. Never was the only odd death around Lively no way.
So then that family had to move into a little tarpaper shack near Cemetery Hill, and Cat Eye’s mother and sisters made money—well, the only way they could have except selling homebrew and the Swamp Angel had the market for that. I never told your mother about it, but that little shack’s where every boy in Lively learned about the birds and the bees. Back then our parents never talked to us about—that kind of thing, and so they only way to learn was through older boys and watching livestock. Or with Cat Eye’s mama, who just charged two bits or barter and was better at it than ary daughter she had--
I’m sorry, Mrs. Chafin.
Don’t worry, Mr. Maddox. This is all confidential.
Okay. But son, none of us knowed right from wrong in them days, Lively was so godless with everybody so hungry all the time, and so when it turns out that Cat Eye grows up and he don’t like girls, likes boys instead, we didn’t even think about it being sinful. Not evil at all, mind you; just different. Churches never mentioned it yea nor nay in them days. All they preached about was a travel from nature to grace and against drinking and sworping and stealing and killing and unbelief and going to other churches not of our faith and order. So Cat Eye’d get little crushes on one or another of us and we’d just be good-natured and laugh about it with him. He was a kind soul, after all. Not that that makes any difference in a just and righteous God’s eyes, of course.
Well, then, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and we went to war. I’m trying to make a long story short, because you never liked to hear me talk about the Marines neither, but I learned a lot while I was in there about the big wide world and what was right and wrong. Fact is, qu—well, I mean, people like that—was the main talk of the drill sergeants, who accused us all of being that way, and even in the barracks we’d accuse each other of it too. You had to prove yourself all the time that you wasn’t one of the—that kind. Somehow I survived four years in the Pacific, and then me and the other guys come back home and here’s Cat Eye too, who the Army wouldn’t take because—well, you know, but he was working in the mines, which was at that time up and running pretty good. Us veterans could wait for jobs, though; we got what they called back then the 52-20, twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks for a vet, not a bad living for the time. So for months we was playing poker every day at the station house with our 52-20 money and worrying our families to death.
Cat Eye was really the odd man out then. Though he’s working regular and we ain’t even started using the GI Bill, much less looking for jobs, we’ve all heard so many sergeants and officers downtalk people like him it just comes off that same exact way in our normal speech. One Friday evening in November we’re playing cards at the station like usual; the Swamp Angel has just made a big batch of fresh homebrew, and we’ve bought some and we’re pretty rowdy. Cat Eye’s had a little to drink too, and he comes in the station house and walks over and asks me if he can bum a chew of tobacco.
“What kind you chewin’ these days, Cat Eye?” I asked him. “Red Horse, Red Man, or Red Dick?” And I ain’t repeating it to blackguard now, but—it’s just what I said. Lord help me.
All the veterans there near split their sides laughing, of course, but it made Cat Eye madder than a bull. He wants to step outside the station and fight it out bare-knuckle with me, and though I was already sorry I’d shot my mouth off, the other guys were already laying bets on me and calling him “Beauty On Duty” and egging both him and me on more. So we square off and he pops me a roundhouse right to the cheekbone that lights fireworks in my head, and I can’t see straight but I let go a haymaker back and when it makes contact I can feel it all the way from my knuckles to my shoulder. Heard a horrible pop right then too.
Somehow I’d caught him right under and a little behind the left ear. It broke his neck and he fell down stone dead without as much as another sound.
So that’s pretty much it. They impaneled a coroner’s jury and it all got wrote up in the papers except for what Cat Eye was and what I’d said to him, but I wasn’t never charged with a thing since all my buddies there swore that he started the fight and landed the first punch. They buried him up on Cemetery Hill near his mama’s little shack and that was it. But that didn’t change the fact that I sent that poor man straight to a brimstone burning hell with my bare fist, never once trying to make him see how his life was all wrong.
It’s why I changed my life, Jody—or I should say, the Lord changed it for me. I seen the error of my ways and repented and He saved me and I joined the Old Regulars. And I got married to a decent church-going girl, your mama, and got called to preach and I promised God I’d never let another poor man die the way I did Cat Eye without trying to show him the right way to go. Sometimes the deacons would get irked and tell me they wished I’d preach once in a while on something other than that, but I never let ‘em stop me because I knowed my duty. And it’s what I’m trying to do now with you, too, son, one last time while I have breath. Though the Lord has visited my sin on me in my generations, it ain’t too late for you. I love you, Cat Eye. I mean Jody. Jody. Jody.
Mrs. Chafin, can we back up over that last little bit and do it over?
Okay.
In the name of God, amen. I, Elder Joseph Maddox of the Forest Retreat Rest Home--
Ahem.
Oh. Sorry, Mrs. Chafin. I mean, I Joseph Maddox of the Forest Retreat Care and Rehabilitation Center in Perkinsville, Kentucky, being very weak and sick in body but still of sound mind, thank God, do now add this… whatever it is, to my last will and testament. Mrs. Chafin, the social worker, brought me a tape recorder and tape and is right now setting with me and running it for me and promised that she’d stick to them new hippa laws and not let anybody else listen to this nor talk about it to anyone, and also promised, at my death, she’d give the tape to my son, Joseph Maddox Jr., who I run off from home at Christmastime 1980 and who, last I heard, is now living in New England. I think my other kids knows his whereabouts but they never ever speak of it to me. So I hope this gets to you, Jody. It’s the only way I can talk to you now. I don’t want your brothers or sisters ever to listen to it, but I’ve got to take that on Mrs. Chafin’s promise and them hippa laws and, I guess, plain faith.
Jody, son, I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we ain’t talked in thirty-odd years. I figure you don’t believe that, but it’s true. And specially that you was so scared and bitter at all the people around here, and maybe me too, that you wouldn’t come home for your mama’s funeral. She always pined for you, even atter that one time I got mad and told her since she missed you so much she could leave and go with you and stay and cook for you for all I cared. You know I can’t never approve of how you live your life, but before a man dies he ort to be honest enough to confess his own faults, and I know I’m the reason that you’re the way you are. I reckon I just always hated to admit it, even to myself. But I’ve preached out of the Bible the last forty-five years, near half my life, and the same book that says qu—well, people like—that—is an abomination before God, that same God is a jealous God who’ll visit the sins of the parents onto the children to the third and fourth generation. So if I take one thing for law and gospel I’ve got to take it all. And my sin that was visited on you was Cat Eye. I would tell you his real name, but there’s no need; everybody down around the coal camp at Lively where I grew up knowed him as Cat Eye, same as they knowed everybody else by their nicknames, me included. I was Mad Dog, ‘cause of our last name. So if you really want to know who Cat Eye was, come back home and look in the Library for Perkinsville newspapers from November 1945 and you’ll find it, alongside mine.
You used to get irked at how much I’d talk about the Great Depression, but remembering the times is the only way you can make any sense out of what happened—from the mines going down to one or two days’ work a week, if that, and making them that didn’t have any stock and garden land to picking poke sallet and dandelions along the road and cooking them without grease or salt, to the Swamp Angel making homebrew and selling it for a nickel a quart, and to the men and boys getting together and robbing freight trains and letting the womenfolk fence the stuff out among all the neighbors. People back then was so hungry and desperate they’d do anything to keep body and soul together, and pretty much, that’s Cat Eye’s story and it was mine too. His family lived up the other holler across the tracks from where we did, and his daddy was one of the meanest men there was in a camp full of mean men. One time when Cat Eye and me was playing on the porch at his house, his daddy come out and somehow Cat Eye got in his way and he picked him up and throwed him down to the ground and said to him, “Keep outa my way, you little white-haired son of a b*tch.” I don’t mention that now to be a-cussing or blackguarding, but I’m just trying to tell you. That all right, Mrs. Chafin?
Sure, Mr. Maddox. Anything you want to say.
All right then. Just so you know I was quoting. But it turned out that Cat Eye’s daddy finally shot himself, or at least that’s what was said, although the guts ain’t a good spot to shoot and by the time he died you could hear him screaming a mile. My daddy run up there and come back home with a weird look on his face and told Mommy about it and I listened. Said he got there about the same time the company doctor did, and when the doctor asked to see the revolver, Cat Eye brought it to him, a big .45 hog-leg. When the doctor opened the cylinder, there’s six bullets in, so he says to Cat Eye, “Son, this gun’s not been fired.”
“Oh, yes it has,” Cat Eye answers. “I put another bullet back in.”
And that’s all I know. Daddy said the doctor made a weird look too, but he marked it a suicide on the death certificate and they left Cat Eye a-kickin’ around the bloody pillow his old man died on. Never was the only odd death around Lively no way.
So then that family had to move into a little tarpaper shack near Cemetery Hill, and Cat Eye’s mother and sisters made money—well, the only way they could have except selling homebrew and the Swamp Angel had the market for that. I never told your mother about it, but that little shack’s where every boy in Lively learned about the birds and the bees. Back then our parents never talked to us about—that kind of thing, and so they only way to learn was through older boys and watching livestock. Or with Cat Eye’s mama, who just charged two bits or barter and was better at it than ary daughter she had--
I’m sorry, Mrs. Chafin.
Don’t worry, Mr. Maddox. This is all confidential.
Okay. But son, none of us knowed right from wrong in them days, Lively was so godless with everybody so hungry all the time, and so when it turns out that Cat Eye grows up and he don’t like girls, likes boys instead, we didn’t even think about it being sinful. Not evil at all, mind you; just different. Churches never mentioned it yea nor nay in them days. All they preached about was a travel from nature to grace and against drinking and sworping and stealing and killing and unbelief and going to other churches not of our faith and order. So Cat Eye’d get little crushes on one or another of us and we’d just be good-natured and laugh about it with him. He was a kind soul, after all. Not that that makes any difference in a just and righteous God’s eyes, of course.
Well, then, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and we went to war. I’m trying to make a long story short, because you never liked to hear me talk about the Marines neither, but I learned a lot while I was in there about the big wide world and what was right and wrong. Fact is, qu—well, I mean, people like that—was the main talk of the drill sergeants, who accused us all of being that way, and even in the barracks we’d accuse each other of it too. You had to prove yourself all the time that you wasn’t one of the—that kind. Somehow I survived four years in the Pacific, and then me and the other guys come back home and here’s Cat Eye too, who the Army wouldn’t take because—well, you know, but he was working in the mines, which was at that time up and running pretty good. Us veterans could wait for jobs, though; we got what they called back then the 52-20, twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks for a vet, not a bad living for the time. So for months we was playing poker every day at the station house with our 52-20 money and worrying our families to death.
Cat Eye was really the odd man out then. Though he’s working regular and we ain’t even started using the GI Bill, much less looking for jobs, we’ve all heard so many sergeants and officers downtalk people like him it just comes off that same exact way in our normal speech. One Friday evening in November we’re playing cards at the station like usual; the Swamp Angel has just made a big batch of fresh homebrew, and we’ve bought some and we’re pretty rowdy. Cat Eye’s had a little to drink too, and he comes in the station house and walks over and asks me if he can bum a chew of tobacco.
“What kind you chewin’ these days, Cat Eye?” I asked him. “Red Horse, Red Man, or Red Dick?” And I ain’t repeating it to blackguard now, but—it’s just what I said. Lord help me.
All the veterans there near split their sides laughing, of course, but it made Cat Eye madder than a bull. He wants to step outside the station and fight it out bare-knuckle with me, and though I was already sorry I’d shot my mouth off, the other guys were already laying bets on me and calling him “Beauty On Duty” and egging both him and me on more. So we square off and he pops me a roundhouse right to the cheekbone that lights fireworks in my head, and I can’t see straight but I let go a haymaker back and when it makes contact I can feel it all the way from my knuckles to my shoulder. Heard a horrible pop right then too.
Somehow I’d caught him right under and a little behind the left ear. It broke his neck and he fell down stone dead without as much as another sound.
So that’s pretty much it. They impaneled a coroner’s jury and it all got wrote up in the papers except for what Cat Eye was and what I’d said to him, but I wasn’t never charged with a thing since all my buddies there swore that he started the fight and landed the first punch. They buried him up on Cemetery Hill near his mama’s little shack and that was it. But that didn’t change the fact that I sent that poor man straight to a brimstone burning hell with my bare fist, never once trying to make him see how his life was all wrong.
It’s why I changed my life, Jody—or I should say, the Lord changed it for me. I seen the error of my ways and repented and He saved me and I joined the Old Regulars. And I got married to a decent church-going girl, your mama, and got called to preach and I promised God I’d never let another poor man die the way I did Cat Eye without trying to show him the right way to go. Sometimes the deacons would get irked and tell me they wished I’d preach once in a while on something other than that, but I never let ‘em stop me because I knowed my duty. And it’s what I’m trying to do now with you, too, son, one last time while I have breath. Though the Lord has visited my sin on me in my generations, it ain’t too late for you. I love you, Cat Eye. I mean Jody. Jody. Jody.
Mrs. Chafin, can we back up over that last little bit and do it over?
Appal(Trad)
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"Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection"
a novel by Jim Meirose, New Jersey
Chapter 5: Prep Video for Second Trip to Bern
a novel by Jim Meirose, New Jersey
Chapter 5: Prep Video for Second Trip to Bern
The Davis’ rooms on the top floor of their ancient funeral home were in the costly noisy and dirty process of renovation, which must be done about every fifty years when the giant old three-story Victorian needed to be refurbished to be up to code, and to be an attractive comforting place rather than a morbid rotting leaning dark stinking shabby horror house of a place. And the place was actually four complete stories if you count the grotesquely immense and ancient moldy-stinking basement, where the actual work of receiving, preparing, embalming, restoring, dressing, casketing, and in general processing the cold dead flesh inputs and outputs of the Davis’ fourth-generation end-to-end one stop shopping funeral business, was performed from day to day, using the same ancient fixtures and instruments and everything else that had been installed when the funeral home first opened four full generations ago, in January nineteen-twenty. That had been a subzero day, there had been five blizzards the previous month, and it was a bad omen that on that very first day, the Great Davis Funeral Company founder and trigger of the rags-to-riches story of the establishment itself, which establishment per se is much too murky and disturbing to be part of a book on sale to the general public, namely Abraham Davis, slipped and fell off the icy top step of the front porch of the new funeral home, with his heavily mittened hands trapped in his pockets where they had been shoved because of the subzero windy chilly hard-blowing knifelike cold, and was unable to break his fall, and smashed his skull wide open on the sidewalk, spattering red clear and grey matter from the split, and also in the process knocking down on by one the town officials lined up Indian style behind him, who one by one man and woman Marshas and Marks and Melissas and Prestons and Joeys all set up behind in a row, went down like dominos, each cracking their skulls wide open on the sidewalk in slow-motion sequence sustaining the exact same fatal head and brain and neck wounds and causing the same puddling steaming hot messes as the great leader Abraham, so right off the bat the newborn business boomed, as there were suddenly over half a dozen funerals delivered right to the front door to be done on that very first day of the home’s operation. And it did not even cost gas money to pick up the subjects, because there they were all neatly stacked up and shuffled out like a deck of cards down the front walkway from the porch to the road. It was hard to handle so many clients at once because, the founder Abraham had developed a reputation, as he worked his way up through a number of embalming apprenticeships, for being a virtual virtuoso of the embalming room, capable of, much like a chess master, of pushing upward of a dozen clients through the process from receipt through casketing, in a single eight-hour shift, alone. But he was of course unavailable to work through the bulging with work first week of the brand-new Davis funeral home; that at least was what the general population in the heavenly yard of prison-human-race called this planet was ever allowed to know. And the secret of what happened was never revealed. Like you can never hold your own bleached out skull in your hand, ever. Like you can never see your brain while you are alive, ever. Or the small of your back with no mirror and not your round puckered anus with no mirror, ever. No one will ever know until there is handed down from heaven some magic mirror using which you can see everything that has ever happened in public or in private, much like God himself can see; no one will ever know what God knows truly happened; that late on the night of Abraham’s viewing, he lay stretched out relaxing happily looking forward to his eternal retirement. But, he felt guilty at what he had heard seen and felt during his own embalming. Jesse and Carol, the two apprentice embalmers he had signed on to work under him in the new business, were forced to jump right into the mess of the overloaded immediate backlog of bodies generated by the tragedy on the top step on the first day that contained the whole rest of Abraham Davis’ life and put him in line to be the first subject to ever be processed by the two dumbo fumbling greenhorns Jesse and Carol. And he got butchered. He said to himself as they did him from a book called Embalming for Dummies, It is very lucky, old master of this craft, that my nerves of pain are buried at the bottom of the crush of all my absolute deadness that just knows but feels nothing, which alone keeps me from needing to leap from this steel table to get out from under their relentless ripping and tearing butchery masquerading as funeral preparation. Thus, after they left for the day, he threw off the death-trance, rose, and went to work, so irritated that God agreed after much mental pleading otherwise known as devout praying, to push him back through death’s gate for just a shift, and at that also moved the day to last week, temporarily, to when he was still alive. And so, he worked through the night doing all the ones that died that day until they were ready to go, and, satisfied, yes, he lay back down, arranged himself, and returned to the kingdom God had already told him he was bound for; maybe Satan’s kingdom, maybe God’s kingdom. He already had been through the judgement and assignment before he came back temporarily to help out, you see—but there was no one there with him to converse with and also maybe say where he was bound. And no one will ever know, which is as it should be. The next day when Jesse and Carol came in to do the next client, they saw everything was already finished off to perfection. All clients were laid out in the various viewing parlors. And in their shock as they assumed they had done all that work the prior day by some miraculous means, and had worked so hard got so tired and slept so deeply that the memory of working that hard had been completely scraped free off their medullas, rendering their memories totally as unusable as dementia patients’ even though they were still young and vital, they went off and off all higher and wilder and crazier and up and up, so high that they got locked up for the rest of their shock-shortened lives in the now-abandoned Sanely Brothers privately owned and operated nondenominational equal opportunity lunatic repository and punishment center, conveniently situated past the edge of town, for your viewing pleasure. And then, we--
Jamed! Jamed, I found the tape. Wake up, you’re nodding off. Wake up! Let’s watch—wait, hey, what’d you do with the VCR remote? Where—oh there, there, next to you, Jamed. Toss it over. I need it.
The big old moldy book Jamed had dozed off reading slid down his lap and crushed down onto the floor, as the sleep shot free from his popped-open eyes, and he blurted loud to Wendy, Hey, what? What’d you say? Where am I, hey—oh never mind. I was dozing. What you want Wendy?
The VCR remote. It’s there—by you there.
Oh—ok—here you go, he said, grabbing up a long black narrow squared-off sticklike thing, and quickly tossing it her. She swiped her open hand across to catch it and her hand hit it and it spun down instantly into her lap, the pilot would have for sure been killed if it were a manned unit. She seized it, pushed it out to the VCR, and the video they needed to study started to roll. The video was important. They’d put off watching it much too long. Four long years had passed since they were accepted into Le Club de la Résurrection at the world headquarters in Bern. It nearly was time to report back there for their next level acceptance testing. Before the trip they were expected to view the induction video they had been given in their first visit. They were expected to study the contents in preparation to be tested on their familiarity with the overall Club de la Résurrection concepts—they stared at the screen intently and more intently and more and more intently, until, after about fifteen seconds of blank screen, the presentation exploded over them super-loudly crashing and splatting as though a mild tsunami against both their quite conscious mental resort beaches for knowledge and ideas, jarring them and sending Wendy’s hand fumbling for the volume control on the remote—as she fumbled, the television blasted the room surrounding them with the hair-raising words, as forcefully as is designed to peel the paint from the ceiling and walls—and yes no no, turn it down turn it down. Their new four-year old Janie would wake, no, that can’t be. It took an hour and a half for Wendy to get the mildly-sick Janie slip toward the great God Nod’s palace, as Wendy had told Janie the land of sleep was called. Wendy felt it wise to watch the video with Jamed while Janie was upstairs out cold and dreaming. Though she would probably not take notice of what they were watching, Wendy felt it wiser that she not be around at all. It’s not important to tell her yet. She won’t know what it means, so there’s no point. When she’s twenty-one we’ll tell her. When she can comprehend, you know. A child should not be troubled with or even spoken to about the fact that there is a thing called death. That she would one day disappear was not something she would benefit in any way from knowing at this point. And, plus, Wendy had been taught long ago, that being a child with only child’s thoughts is a temporary blessing that we must not rob Janie of. The video recording was rolling now, focus, yes, you both—focus, what’s he saying who is that they talked past us focus catch up catch up—on the television screen stood a large fleshy man, stating, Ranier Boonke is the guy who turned us on, really, he is the one who first had the vision and for twenty years before he died in Heilbronn Germany of throat cancer in his very own childhood home, magically says the legend, to the end being tended by his resurrected mother, who when he died was barely twenty and still much younger that when at last she and an unknown fascist soldier would bring little Ranier into the world—and, luckily Ranier Boonke got through his life and made his accomplishments and now would die well before his reborn Mother would find that this time around the loop of time, Ranier’s Father never existed at all, and thusly Ranier, if still alive, would implode out of existence with a silent puffing sound, and never would have accomplished anything and you would not be sitting right now watching me on this videotape which would never have existed—whew! Imagine that now, will you? See this illustrates one of the binds you can get tangled in if you play with the timeline and slide the pointer you invented forward and back too much as though you were a bright eyed just burped fascinated toddler just learning to use tools, and because you are childlike the timeline will fail and there will never ever even have been a big bang and even earlier no God to light the fuse on the big bang and earlier than that even—but I will stop there, I think you get the picture. Haw haw haw, very funny, right. That is the attitude to have. Everything’s quite silly—so now, I will turn it over to Prof. Dr. Hooterian, who will give you an encapsulation of the Great Founder’s doctrine, as taught him by Ranier and modified and enhanced and streamlined down to a fifth-grade reading level. You need not know how to diagram sentences even, which is the primary pastime of half-senile retired English teaching nuns stacked up to rot against the ultra-dark back wall of the abandoned convent’s cellar. Hello, Dr. Hooterian. Have a seat. Not there, no, here by me. I am so pleased you were available today. Thank you.
You’re welcome, said Prof. Dr. Hooterian—I would like to start by saying that--
Wait, wait, snapped the smooth-talking host. I would like, before you speak, to let the audience know one or two highlights of your most impressive resume. Do you mind?
Of course not. No.
Good. See, audience, the good Dr. here is a direct advisor to the Great Founder of the Club de la Resurrection, and who also will be in the first batch of subjects resurrected when we start up the series of great tests, scheduled to commence when sufficient capital is obtained or when the Great Founder received a dream-message from Ranier Boonke telling him to proceed immediately. Right Doctor?
Yes, sure—thank you for the intro. Again, as I was saying, I would like to start by saying that--
No, no, wait, one more thing—audience, be aware that Prof. Dr. Hooterian is a Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist. The importance of the Nobel prize is known to every literate non-savage on the planet today. The importance of the Nobel prize will only wane when the day comes far far far into the future that the expanding dying star we call the sun engulfs the earth in the final flamelicking finale of a too-long series of very embarrassing portents of things to come. Just think; the Nobel prize is only given to geniuses, actually, spirits far above geniuses, of such rarified levels of greatness that one could only, and this only during periods of stone cold logical and actual sobriety, begin to believe that God had made an error on placing these spirits on planet earth; that the human frame is barely able to contain the massive weight of pure genius, which is so great, that it goes from gas to liquid to solid and ultimately like some rare element, crushed under its unimaginable weight of pure solidified, rarified and unearthly, yes gone all hot cosmic, stinking of big bang full throttle wide open massive roaring power to over whelm underwhelm middlewhelm every-dead-educated priestesses--
Wait, calm down, hold it. I will not end up with time to say my piece, so quiet while I say as I started saying before, that I would like the candidates to know that--
No, you cannot speak unpreceded by the appropriate accolades, such as having been plucked from a field of millions and given the laurel wreath of being one who has conferred the greatest benefit to mankind, and--
No. Stop. Now, stop. Stop now. Will you let me talk?
No! No! And, in bestowing the multiple Nobels on you, the selection committee gave no regard to your nationality. If you were a denizen of the chrome and glass brilliantly polished corporate high-tone above it all appropriately groomed and bearded if male world, or of the land of mud huts grass roofs spread dirt and wild animal frequented hovel of hovels in the far land abroad. And as a matter of fact, you--
Please stop. It’s my turn now.
Wait, just a few more seconds—the committee of people more intelligent than any other human group on earth have found that yes, indeed, you have produced the most outstanding output. This must give you a most elevating but humble and human demeanor, unlike the first time you got praise like this that was so uplifting you loosened your bowels right there in your auditorium seat and left it to be brown to this day—as a memento isn’t that a memento hmm weren’t you actually in perfect control didn’t you do that just because you knew it would get press hm isn’t that true hmm isn’t it hey hmm isn’t it hey—there’s a plastic-covered brown stained seat there now with large covered words, saying, This seat was sh*t on by Prof. Dr. Hooterian in the early days before the Nobel was conferred--
All right then, sir, that’s quite enough. I will just talk over you. That seems to be what you want, you robot-like parrot of a so-called slackman! I want to tell everyone that the Resurrection Club is only here today because of the genius of--
—no, no, no, if you force me to shout, I will—yes isn’t it also true that you, Dr. Hooterian, actually received the Nobel in recognition of your work to clarify the quantum structure of electro-weak interactions? Yes, that’s right—The quantum structure of electro-weak interactions! Do you hear that? Is that not super complicated to be able to comprehend that? And is it not true that you not only comprehend it more than fully, but that you back at the beginning at the very first error-free version of the burning bush invented it all from nothing, from only vapor, actually from far less than vapor, yes, it is true. You invented it all from nothing more than the spittle you rubbed into your hand and then your thrusting that hand out to the drive-up window at the next twenty four hour seven day a week Greek diner that prides itself that it does not even have locks on the doors because they would never be used, not even for bad weather—and so, because of all all of that that you were awarded not only the coveted McBooby prize, but the Spinozapremie prize; yes, yes ahoy! The annual award of two and a half million Euros to be spent on new research not on craps and slots and baccarat cigarettes and whisky and wild wild women, but on virtually any other major or minor consumable, so said the giver, the fancy-named Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, which named the award in their inimitable light, breezy, summery manner after the most lighthearted philosopher who ever lived, Baruch de Spinoza--
Yes! cried a sudden off-screen heckler. I knew you would say that! Now that you have, I must object! Yes, you are worthy of getting an award named for a charlatan! Yes, the phony hollow man charlatan jester-masked Spinoza, who died of possible silicosis as a result of breathing in glass dust from the lenses that he ground. What a stupid thing to do! Even a dog would know not to breathe in glass dust! Even a chicken or turtle, rat or blowfly. They claim that medical science had not yet warned mankind of the danger of breathing such sh*t so capable of tearing human guts apart, and somehow that excuses him of having to wear the placard of self-absorbed stupidity, but I say, no! No no no! And--
Shut up! Now! We have no time for heckling! Security! Remove that man!
No, I will not shut up and will not be removed! That award’s namesake must be exposed—the sheep flock following his stupidity even made a shrine of his home in The Hague! Better they had built a mound of crushed glass higher than rumor has it the tower of babel was high or higher than rumor has it the hanging gardens of Babylon hung down, very deep deep deep so stupid so stupid so stupid so low so below the belt illegal--
Shut up! Shut up! Security remove him! Remove him now!
The Master of Ceremonies and Dr. Hooterian sat open-mouthed and blank faced as the attack of the super-loud heckler went on tooth, nail, hammer, tongs, dropping blade, lunette, and tender neck until a bullet exploded from some unexpected large-bore gun behind the curtain, and reached the audience plugging the heckler in the heart even before the audience and viewers could determine if the heckler was man woman young old casketed or simply shrouded, embalmed or stinky raw, but they knew right now, after this scene had burst upon them through the paper banner of a bullet-bang, like a team-scene bent on winning, blasting onto into the field; the roar of the crowd; the death of the heckler; and the incrementation down by one of the total number of living human beings in the universe.
Woozy!
Jesus Christ, sneered Wendy. Jamed, I can’t watch any more. They gave us the wrong video, I think. This is a snuff video. This is crazy and dirty and I want it gone! Shut it off! Send it back! Call them up! Do it now! This club is bullshit!
Ok!
At that very mindless blurt, Jamed’s thumb crushed the pause button freezing the falling back chest clutching blood spattering heckler, just by luck in the single frame that the person was shown having just been fatally bored on through, but he didn’t look; he looked at Wendy, who had picked up the old school Princess Phone she’d kept to herself since girlhood that made her feel thirteen again when she clutched it to her breast this way and being back in time she had pulled the screen down tight against the moment of the reality of the shot heckler and the fifty flung-out blood spatters sharp enough to thread cheap new needleholes, which then became not yet happened but could also mean never happened at any rate Wendy was freed from the stony dreadful live on video killing, that you saw every day every time every moment that you looked at the news on the screen and saw and heard the things that only were absolutely true when they screened alive in instant, but that got encrusted by thickening falsity like lizards giving themselves lie detector tests with no adult supervision and ensuring that every slab rock rose rock of an answer would have the true side turned up for review, even though before the review it may have gone from true to lie and the highway of truth would be delivered to the precise space described as the wineries, which would be the next stop on the tour—but Jamed jumped and jerked when a great void off the side removed the large gap of reality exposing what lies behind the false curtains he’d been carrying around him since the age of science and technology; Whew! We are bushed, yes, we are, but we keep the clamor lickin’ along. Plus, later a shrine was made of Baruch de Spinoza’s home in The Hague, even after you had given up trying and decided to leave for your home in your choice of the many available plush suburb overrun far away dreamlands; but the phone was at the dazed Jamed’s ear because he had all this while been raising his eyes and claim Stafford’s beautifully claimed multi-carcass, and it rang precisely thrice and opened shooting its load into the head of the great later wise land, ahoy!
Mister Davis, how do you do? We’ve been expecting your call. All is well.
What? I said nothing. How do you know--
Listen please listen, do not talk. We are about to play you the audio of the long thick snake of a leader give you the scoop and if you like, scoop after scoop after scoop, but there is one condition. You must--
Jamed what are they saying? cried Wendy. What?
Wait Wendy—I am trying to hear the phone.
Who’s on the phone is it—is it the Club people?
Yes, I think maybe—be quiet please I must listen!
And with that, Jamed’s hand clicked open wide long and flat palmed and somehow don’t ask his hand clapped the side of his head and the world became only the words of the Club de la Resurrection hot lines on duty crisis vendor, who, of course in true form, knew everything.
—Jamed Davis, you are about to be given secrets but you cannot share them with Wendy Davis, as a matter of fact, the place you called and why you called needs to be bent down to nothing never was wrong number and however else you can frame it, no call at all really. Just a sweet sexy hypnotic dial tone in the distance, as a matter of fact, a sheaf of them in the manner of there being described sheaves of lines in Russel’s hyperhomeric but incomprehensible principia mathematica mysteriously since first and only read lost somehow within the superheated summer attic with all the rest of the perishable items. Is that clear?
Yes; and the smoke drifted back revealing an ornate gold-trimmed back room that nothing would tell you was actually a mop room in the back of a dentist’s office in Bern Switzerland. Jamed stood there, all a-wonder.
Lord God, thank God, I have wakened, he thought. My God how could I have dreamed up such a horridly insane place? Lord God—and it is cool here. Here’s an easy chair. My La-z-Boy.
He sank back into the perfectly broken-in padding of the chair, pulled the recline lever, and the world went and now he crouched down hard on the ground with their ears pressed hard to the dirt and he listened as a calm cool member of the ex-manic approved studio audience.
A grizzled old man like a buzzard all crooked and mangling went with his staff to the podium, upon which was hung a big posterboard yelling HILTON! is pleased to host LE CLUB DE LA RESURRECTION and the honored honorary founding member, Baruch de Spinoza.
QUIET PLEASE
It was more than you could hear a pin drop. Pins were actually dropping and thundering down getting louder and louder and tending toward earsplitting, as the quiet in the room deepened enough to make the words begin to vacuum out the mouth within the speaker’s grizzly outer crust only held on by spittle and sweat. He tapped his staff on the floor and began.
Members of Le Club de la Resurrection. This talk is intended, as you’ve already been told, to prepare you for your venture to Bern for the second examination of your body and soul to assess if you still are on track meeting the criteria for advancement to higher levels of awareness of the true nature, in the end, of the Club. So. Let me start, with point one.
As you know through the ages, there have come and gone men who have shown themselves able of raising the freshly and even fishy-cold and clammy dead that are continuously being expelled from the flaming anus of the collective creature-build from the metaphorical ball of string-like loosely bound up being we have come to call so falsely some kind of human race. Agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
Pop!
And, as you also know through the ages, when technology moves forward to certain tab stops in the draft of our planet’s life story, it is found that looking back and checking reveals that we may have figured out the mechanical nuts and bolts step by step methods by which to duplicate flights of fancy that in previous generations were only explained by the use of the word magic, or miracle, or sorcery, or witchcraft, or wizardry, or necromancy, or enchantment, or black magic, voodoo, hoodoo, mojo, charm hex, spell jinx, pixie dust, fairy dust, wonder, marvel, sensation, phenomenon, mystery; agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
Pop!
And, as you additionally know through the ages, the technological breakthroughs that duplicated the previous centuries’ metaphysical wonders are such as aviation, radio, television, mass production, electricity, penicillin, semiconductors, optical lenses, paper, internal combustion engines, vaccination, the internet, the steam engine, nitrogen fixation, sanitation systems, refrigeration, gunpowder, personal computers, the compass, the automobile, industrial steelmaking, the pill; so far so good man? Agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
Pop!
And, the list goes on and on, and is worth carrying out to conclusion, as; nuclear fission, the green revolution, the sextant, the telephone, alphabetization, the telegraph, the mechanized clock, photography, the moldboard plow, Archimedes’ screw, the cotton gin, pasteurization, the Gregorian calendar, oil refining, the steam turbine, cement, scientific plant breeding—but nothing! All of a sudden, nothing, and Jamed whirled around to find that Wendy stood in his face close enough that there was really only one face with the faces facing each other blind to the rest of the world and she was blurting, Jamed! What the hell are they telling you on the phone? Why so long? What have you said Yes to a dozen times already? Don’t you think I ought to be part of whatever deal they’re forcing you into—that tape trick was shit, they are scumbags I think, what are they telling you—but Jamed yanked the phone from her hand pulling back her forefinger nail and as she jerked away gripping her hand in pain, the phone clapped back to his ear and continued thank God my God thank you they are still there talking stringing out the words in the word-string toward the point they would make in the end, saying; oil drilling, the sailboat, rocketry, paper money, the abacus, air conditioning, anesthesia, the nail, the lever, the screw, and last but not least the combine harvester. So far so good man? Are you still there man? Agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
—see there you are saying yes again agreeing to something without me well we are talking about our lives and our futures and what about Janie, what about her how are you affecting her she relies on us to decide what’s right for her what about what about--
His hand pressed the phone harder as though trying to fuse it to his skull choking her out sealing her out they must be almost to the end they must be damn caught in this caught in the middle please don’t be mad Wendy please don’t I will just be another moment or two or even a year maybe what is time anyway you can’t see hear feel smell it how real can it really be; the phone stated onward yes, onward, oh; so if man has been able to conquer all those things with technology and put an end to each thing being done by priests saints monks, religion, or its opposite, doesn’t it seem odd that calling the dead back to life has never been researched and developed and achieved and made commonplace and everyday by the application of hard science? Yes, to us it is very odd—and so we take it up. We are not afraid who calls us crazy. We are not afraid who calls us phonies. We are not afraid think of the next one and then we are not afraid think of the next several think of the tens hundreds thousands millions and billions yes think think think yes think is what to do! Got that? You agree? You feel that same way? Let it out man! Let it out, scream it scream it scream it now—the lack of pursuit of reviving the dead, is the visible manifestation of a centuries-old plot by organized religion to force us to think death is final and that there is no cure for it and we must look to their God to obtain safe passage into some imaginary great puffy white super-bland happy-happy joy-joy forevermore beyond!
Lord God, yes! shouted Jamed, hearing himself strong and hard in his head, but his words, also spread out in the room where Wendy had formerly been out there with him, do not make a sound because there’s no one in the room to hear them fall, in the same manner as trees; he chuckled his prior seriousness away, as futile and foolish and he felt as if he just kicked a whole cluster of the most addictive brain draining hotdrugs which a hundred and fifty years ago were over the counter and why, oh why, can it not be like the time of Coleridge today, where you could go on the street and even take a pee into the gutter and find that when you turn around what you’ve done has emptied the town into a ghost one where every room in town is empty so they only really exist except for the illusion that they have their outer walls, in the same manner as trees. His attention spotlit its glow around the room around and around it ran ending up running back to the phone and it found the phone was empty and the bottom fell dropping with the phone loud to the floor. Jamed lurched away his leg asleep and swayed and stamped his way to the door, no; Wendy is pissed off thank God they are done she is pissed off I’ve never been so rude to her I’ve never pissed her off so bad got to go got to see got to run got to go—and on the floor now alone in the room the phone lay undamaged going on throwing up words Jamed had thought were all there were but thank God he never would know he didn’t hear the last small chapter of the muddy story that they were both supposed to hear before once more going to the end of the great big point they were making, which was; Elisha resurrected the son of the great Shunammite woman, stated the telephone earpiece; this is an interesting account recorded in two Kings four of the Human Race Operator’s Manual. Let’s go over it slowly. In it we will find the truth, in the silences and pauses in between the words, which were carefully chosen by the author to deceive, much in the manner of the method used by the ancient alchemists to pass on their secrets in the form of written texts, the obvious meaning of the words is a deliberate falsehood, but the shape and form and patterns of them indicate the underlying truths, in much the way that the draping flowing down over a shrouded figure, contains folds and wrinkles and lumps and bumps and hollows as a form of general flow that, when seen slit-eyed head tilted and at the right length in the right light, will tell you instantly that this is not just a sheet thrown sloppily over, but is actually the secret thing beneath, which can be easily recognized by one with eyes to see, or as how it’s described that God sees, as a big thick heavy famous book has written in the middle of the massive pile of millions of words lines and phrases, oh, how do I know? I know because I know is why; I know it says, God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart—sure enough find it it’s in there—find it in the big operator’s manual for the typical human, when all the rust mold and grime and slime is professionally power washed away, which can only be done by paying a total stranger, just one of a million that do power washing, randomly picked like a card from a deck, take a card any card look at it don’t let me see it, you know that kind of picking from a deck, and; oh, yes, yes it is. Yes, it’s true that this whole theory is really that simple, just like every great theory once discovered is seen to be quite simple, yes, just like all complicated art that is successful is in the end seen to be quite simple, humans are programmed through years of hypnosis to throw multiple layers of rotten dense waterlogged cargo netting over, so that they can simply look and look and finally throw up their hands and say, Too complicated. Can’t be true. Must be a metaphor. Pigs can’t fly. You cannot raise the dead you cannot, yes that’s what I said, no one can do it, no matter how rich poor shiny or dull the words from the hypnotized slimy common crowd stinking of farts spitting out the cars window at highway speed or stopping to pleasure themselves in front of the wide tall display windows of lingerie boutique after lingerie boutique why is there one of these on every street corner? And why is there always a line of dark cars containing only drivers pulled up before these storefronts at all hours of the night with the cars coming and going each only staying between seven and ten minutes, eleven tops? I can tell you why maybe you can figure it out yourselves you look like very smart and clean-hearted boys and girls, and so I need to clue you in. They’re--
Huh? Wait. What?
Silence filled Jamed’s ear; but he kept listening in case it just starts up again, no doubt this is a test to see who will hang up now, so that their names can be stricken from the eligible candidate’s list, a test sure they are weird tests and secrets and secrets and tests and gibberingly long strings of pearl-white sharp pointed words and--
What? sniped the earpiece. What? No? Why now what do you mean no hey what wait a minute Jeff cut the line yeah Jeff like I said cut the audio! Right!
Silence again begun with a kind of switch-click then a deeper hollow nothing that all screamed all crazy, the show’s shut off the plug is pulled there will be no more go on and hang up—at the emergence of this hollow nothing meaning everything gone empty noise, Jamed gave up and pulled the phone from his burning with pain ear, the lobe of which was beet-red from having tight pressure applied day after day of this months-long dissertation, which might be over now yes or no but it seems the answer is yes because the pulled-down earpiece hissed with sudden sound easily heard that said in every decibel of its elemental incoherence, OK listen now we’re close to the end thank God we’re close to coming so wake up!
The earpiece slapped the raw red earlobe full of intense pain close to that experienced by ones having both ears slashed off by unwashed men using old kitchen knives for some silly but very evil reason, only bearable in that this version though just as intense, is only momentary and words once more flowed into Jamed’s ear canal, smoothly anesthetizing the wounds where the ears feel like they’ve been forcibly removed, and calming him all the way in through his eardrum hammer anvil and stirrup spiraling around the centrifugal cochlea, down and down straining for the finish line crowd all cheering, stating in block letter sounds weighing around a full ton each, This interesting account is recorded in two Kings four, yes the Shunammite woman had no children yes for a woman to be barren in those days was a great source of shame yes note it says in those days yes well that’s a lie because there is no such thing as those days, there’s just these days yes meaning the spewing of the story always repeating from the fire hose of reality’s timeflow surging through you yes is a signal in the writing that the miracle that follows may be done again; may be endlessly repeated yes but let’s go on yes it next says her husband was old and impotent yes but because the Shunammite woman was genuinely kind and generous to one in those days called the prophet Elisha yes but who in the overall top secret timeflow is really the powerful force-of-nature person yes told her she would have a child in one year's time yes then he phoned up headquarters pulled strings called in favors, and she ended up conceiving and gave birth to a son yes but, foolishly the son was brought up stupid yes ended up dying of a stupid wrong toss of a now-banned yard dart during a hotsunny picnic in spinster auntie’s back yard the only yard in town is why yes so the Shunammite woman hastily went back to the neighborhood force-of-nature yes insisted he pull in his very last favor and resurrect her son, biblically. Whew! And this he did yes he did yes so, you see biblical resurrection from the dead was again successful, but because there were no favors left to pull in from the grown-ups above yes there would be no more resurrections no until far in the future but not so far as now, no, about halfway back actually yes year zero there.
The loud silence suddenly kicked Jamed in the head jarring his ear canal and associated small mechanical parts that the words from the phone had at first soothed but now the filaments of his hidden eureka comic book glow came up red burning yes burning no don’t stop give me more stop stopping and making this church full of worshippers whisper out Jamed’s lips, saying, No please my God let it be over when will this end go one I am ready I can take more there’s always more.
Silent phone pressing to the waiting cooling down.
Please come let’s finish this needs to end.
Silent phone pressing to the waiting tic toc tic cool cooling cooler.
Maybe it is, is it over, tell me now, no, never mind, no don’t. It’s--
Cold getting colder numb pain free ears.
Press one a beep says, What? Come on you are there this is too easy the room is reforming the lines of the corners up and across the ceiling and down again but--
Jamed you have hung up the phone how long have you been sitting here?
What who—no no more no--
No more what? Jamed. It is time for bed.
Yes bed. This is the way of feeling needing to pass through the movie theater out the end that’s still there like a loaded field.
Huh? Jamed.
Yes like passing. You know, passing. Like sh*t.
Yes sh*t.
The gasoline truck flowed gasoline into the ground. Maybe not into a tank at all, because I am smart and will not be deceived. There’s no cereal no gas no stench no blood not at all I--
What? What did you say Wendy?
I said card not cash. See my face see it?
What did you say Wendy?
Card not cash. Jeez, Jamed. Come hit the hay already.
Come me.
Jamed! Jamed, I found the tape. Wake up, you’re nodding off. Wake up! Let’s watch—wait, hey, what’d you do with the VCR remote? Where—oh there, there, next to you, Jamed. Toss it over. I need it.
The big old moldy book Jamed had dozed off reading slid down his lap and crushed down onto the floor, as the sleep shot free from his popped-open eyes, and he blurted loud to Wendy, Hey, what? What’d you say? Where am I, hey—oh never mind. I was dozing. What you want Wendy?
The VCR remote. It’s there—by you there.
Oh—ok—here you go, he said, grabbing up a long black narrow squared-off sticklike thing, and quickly tossing it her. She swiped her open hand across to catch it and her hand hit it and it spun down instantly into her lap, the pilot would have for sure been killed if it were a manned unit. She seized it, pushed it out to the VCR, and the video they needed to study started to roll. The video was important. They’d put off watching it much too long. Four long years had passed since they were accepted into Le Club de la Résurrection at the world headquarters in Bern. It nearly was time to report back there for their next level acceptance testing. Before the trip they were expected to view the induction video they had been given in their first visit. They were expected to study the contents in preparation to be tested on their familiarity with the overall Club de la Résurrection concepts—they stared at the screen intently and more intently and more and more intently, until, after about fifteen seconds of blank screen, the presentation exploded over them super-loudly crashing and splatting as though a mild tsunami against both their quite conscious mental resort beaches for knowledge and ideas, jarring them and sending Wendy’s hand fumbling for the volume control on the remote—as she fumbled, the television blasted the room surrounding them with the hair-raising words, as forcefully as is designed to peel the paint from the ceiling and walls—and yes no no, turn it down turn it down. Their new four-year old Janie would wake, no, that can’t be. It took an hour and a half for Wendy to get the mildly-sick Janie slip toward the great God Nod’s palace, as Wendy had told Janie the land of sleep was called. Wendy felt it wise to watch the video with Jamed while Janie was upstairs out cold and dreaming. Though she would probably not take notice of what they were watching, Wendy felt it wiser that she not be around at all. It’s not important to tell her yet. She won’t know what it means, so there’s no point. When she’s twenty-one we’ll tell her. When she can comprehend, you know. A child should not be troubled with or even spoken to about the fact that there is a thing called death. That she would one day disappear was not something she would benefit in any way from knowing at this point. And, plus, Wendy had been taught long ago, that being a child with only child’s thoughts is a temporary blessing that we must not rob Janie of. The video recording was rolling now, focus, yes, you both—focus, what’s he saying who is that they talked past us focus catch up catch up—on the television screen stood a large fleshy man, stating, Ranier Boonke is the guy who turned us on, really, he is the one who first had the vision and for twenty years before he died in Heilbronn Germany of throat cancer in his very own childhood home, magically says the legend, to the end being tended by his resurrected mother, who when he died was barely twenty and still much younger that when at last she and an unknown fascist soldier would bring little Ranier into the world—and, luckily Ranier Boonke got through his life and made his accomplishments and now would die well before his reborn Mother would find that this time around the loop of time, Ranier’s Father never existed at all, and thusly Ranier, if still alive, would implode out of existence with a silent puffing sound, and never would have accomplished anything and you would not be sitting right now watching me on this videotape which would never have existed—whew! Imagine that now, will you? See this illustrates one of the binds you can get tangled in if you play with the timeline and slide the pointer you invented forward and back too much as though you were a bright eyed just burped fascinated toddler just learning to use tools, and because you are childlike the timeline will fail and there will never ever even have been a big bang and even earlier no God to light the fuse on the big bang and earlier than that even—but I will stop there, I think you get the picture. Haw haw haw, very funny, right. That is the attitude to have. Everything’s quite silly—so now, I will turn it over to Prof. Dr. Hooterian, who will give you an encapsulation of the Great Founder’s doctrine, as taught him by Ranier and modified and enhanced and streamlined down to a fifth-grade reading level. You need not know how to diagram sentences even, which is the primary pastime of half-senile retired English teaching nuns stacked up to rot against the ultra-dark back wall of the abandoned convent’s cellar. Hello, Dr. Hooterian. Have a seat. Not there, no, here by me. I am so pleased you were available today. Thank you.
You’re welcome, said Prof. Dr. Hooterian—I would like to start by saying that--
Wait, wait, snapped the smooth-talking host. I would like, before you speak, to let the audience know one or two highlights of your most impressive resume. Do you mind?
Of course not. No.
Good. See, audience, the good Dr. here is a direct advisor to the Great Founder of the Club de la Resurrection, and who also will be in the first batch of subjects resurrected when we start up the series of great tests, scheduled to commence when sufficient capital is obtained or when the Great Founder received a dream-message from Ranier Boonke telling him to proceed immediately. Right Doctor?
Yes, sure—thank you for the intro. Again, as I was saying, I would like to start by saying that--
No, no, wait, one more thing—audience, be aware that Prof. Dr. Hooterian is a Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist. The importance of the Nobel prize is known to every literate non-savage on the planet today. The importance of the Nobel prize will only wane when the day comes far far far into the future that the expanding dying star we call the sun engulfs the earth in the final flamelicking finale of a too-long series of very embarrassing portents of things to come. Just think; the Nobel prize is only given to geniuses, actually, spirits far above geniuses, of such rarified levels of greatness that one could only, and this only during periods of stone cold logical and actual sobriety, begin to believe that God had made an error on placing these spirits on planet earth; that the human frame is barely able to contain the massive weight of pure genius, which is so great, that it goes from gas to liquid to solid and ultimately like some rare element, crushed under its unimaginable weight of pure solidified, rarified and unearthly, yes gone all hot cosmic, stinking of big bang full throttle wide open massive roaring power to over whelm underwhelm middlewhelm every-dead-educated priestesses--
Wait, calm down, hold it. I will not end up with time to say my piece, so quiet while I say as I started saying before, that I would like the candidates to know that--
No, you cannot speak unpreceded by the appropriate accolades, such as having been plucked from a field of millions and given the laurel wreath of being one who has conferred the greatest benefit to mankind, and--
No. Stop. Now, stop. Stop now. Will you let me talk?
No! No! And, in bestowing the multiple Nobels on you, the selection committee gave no regard to your nationality. If you were a denizen of the chrome and glass brilliantly polished corporate high-tone above it all appropriately groomed and bearded if male world, or of the land of mud huts grass roofs spread dirt and wild animal frequented hovel of hovels in the far land abroad. And as a matter of fact, you--
Please stop. It’s my turn now.
Wait, just a few more seconds—the committee of people more intelligent than any other human group on earth have found that yes, indeed, you have produced the most outstanding output. This must give you a most elevating but humble and human demeanor, unlike the first time you got praise like this that was so uplifting you loosened your bowels right there in your auditorium seat and left it to be brown to this day—as a memento isn’t that a memento hmm weren’t you actually in perfect control didn’t you do that just because you knew it would get press hm isn’t that true hmm isn’t it hey hmm isn’t it hey—there’s a plastic-covered brown stained seat there now with large covered words, saying, This seat was sh*t on by Prof. Dr. Hooterian in the early days before the Nobel was conferred--
All right then, sir, that’s quite enough. I will just talk over you. That seems to be what you want, you robot-like parrot of a so-called slackman! I want to tell everyone that the Resurrection Club is only here today because of the genius of--
—no, no, no, if you force me to shout, I will—yes isn’t it also true that you, Dr. Hooterian, actually received the Nobel in recognition of your work to clarify the quantum structure of electro-weak interactions? Yes, that’s right—The quantum structure of electro-weak interactions! Do you hear that? Is that not super complicated to be able to comprehend that? And is it not true that you not only comprehend it more than fully, but that you back at the beginning at the very first error-free version of the burning bush invented it all from nothing, from only vapor, actually from far less than vapor, yes, it is true. You invented it all from nothing more than the spittle you rubbed into your hand and then your thrusting that hand out to the drive-up window at the next twenty four hour seven day a week Greek diner that prides itself that it does not even have locks on the doors because they would never be used, not even for bad weather—and so, because of all all of that that you were awarded not only the coveted McBooby prize, but the Spinozapremie prize; yes, yes ahoy! The annual award of two and a half million Euros to be spent on new research not on craps and slots and baccarat cigarettes and whisky and wild wild women, but on virtually any other major or minor consumable, so said the giver, the fancy-named Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, which named the award in their inimitable light, breezy, summery manner after the most lighthearted philosopher who ever lived, Baruch de Spinoza--
Yes! cried a sudden off-screen heckler. I knew you would say that! Now that you have, I must object! Yes, you are worthy of getting an award named for a charlatan! Yes, the phony hollow man charlatan jester-masked Spinoza, who died of possible silicosis as a result of breathing in glass dust from the lenses that he ground. What a stupid thing to do! Even a dog would know not to breathe in glass dust! Even a chicken or turtle, rat or blowfly. They claim that medical science had not yet warned mankind of the danger of breathing such sh*t so capable of tearing human guts apart, and somehow that excuses him of having to wear the placard of self-absorbed stupidity, but I say, no! No no no! And--
Shut up! Now! We have no time for heckling! Security! Remove that man!
No, I will not shut up and will not be removed! That award’s namesake must be exposed—the sheep flock following his stupidity even made a shrine of his home in The Hague! Better they had built a mound of crushed glass higher than rumor has it the tower of babel was high or higher than rumor has it the hanging gardens of Babylon hung down, very deep deep deep so stupid so stupid so stupid so low so below the belt illegal--
Shut up! Shut up! Security remove him! Remove him now!
The Master of Ceremonies and Dr. Hooterian sat open-mouthed and blank faced as the attack of the super-loud heckler went on tooth, nail, hammer, tongs, dropping blade, lunette, and tender neck until a bullet exploded from some unexpected large-bore gun behind the curtain, and reached the audience plugging the heckler in the heart even before the audience and viewers could determine if the heckler was man woman young old casketed or simply shrouded, embalmed or stinky raw, but they knew right now, after this scene had burst upon them through the paper banner of a bullet-bang, like a team-scene bent on winning, blasting onto into the field; the roar of the crowd; the death of the heckler; and the incrementation down by one of the total number of living human beings in the universe.
Woozy!
Jesus Christ, sneered Wendy. Jamed, I can’t watch any more. They gave us the wrong video, I think. This is a snuff video. This is crazy and dirty and I want it gone! Shut it off! Send it back! Call them up! Do it now! This club is bullshit!
Ok!
At that very mindless blurt, Jamed’s thumb crushed the pause button freezing the falling back chest clutching blood spattering heckler, just by luck in the single frame that the person was shown having just been fatally bored on through, but he didn’t look; he looked at Wendy, who had picked up the old school Princess Phone she’d kept to herself since girlhood that made her feel thirteen again when she clutched it to her breast this way and being back in time she had pulled the screen down tight against the moment of the reality of the shot heckler and the fifty flung-out blood spatters sharp enough to thread cheap new needleholes, which then became not yet happened but could also mean never happened at any rate Wendy was freed from the stony dreadful live on video killing, that you saw every day every time every moment that you looked at the news on the screen and saw and heard the things that only were absolutely true when they screened alive in instant, but that got encrusted by thickening falsity like lizards giving themselves lie detector tests with no adult supervision and ensuring that every slab rock rose rock of an answer would have the true side turned up for review, even though before the review it may have gone from true to lie and the highway of truth would be delivered to the precise space described as the wineries, which would be the next stop on the tour—but Jamed jumped and jerked when a great void off the side removed the large gap of reality exposing what lies behind the false curtains he’d been carrying around him since the age of science and technology; Whew! We are bushed, yes, we are, but we keep the clamor lickin’ along. Plus, later a shrine was made of Baruch de Spinoza’s home in The Hague, even after you had given up trying and decided to leave for your home in your choice of the many available plush suburb overrun far away dreamlands; but the phone was at the dazed Jamed’s ear because he had all this while been raising his eyes and claim Stafford’s beautifully claimed multi-carcass, and it rang precisely thrice and opened shooting its load into the head of the great later wise land, ahoy!
Mister Davis, how do you do? We’ve been expecting your call. All is well.
What? I said nothing. How do you know--
Listen please listen, do not talk. We are about to play you the audio of the long thick snake of a leader give you the scoop and if you like, scoop after scoop after scoop, but there is one condition. You must--
Jamed what are they saying? cried Wendy. What?
Wait Wendy—I am trying to hear the phone.
Who’s on the phone is it—is it the Club people?
Yes, I think maybe—be quiet please I must listen!
And with that, Jamed’s hand clicked open wide long and flat palmed and somehow don’t ask his hand clapped the side of his head and the world became only the words of the Club de la Resurrection hot lines on duty crisis vendor, who, of course in true form, knew everything.
—Jamed Davis, you are about to be given secrets but you cannot share them with Wendy Davis, as a matter of fact, the place you called and why you called needs to be bent down to nothing never was wrong number and however else you can frame it, no call at all really. Just a sweet sexy hypnotic dial tone in the distance, as a matter of fact, a sheaf of them in the manner of there being described sheaves of lines in Russel’s hyperhomeric but incomprehensible principia mathematica mysteriously since first and only read lost somehow within the superheated summer attic with all the rest of the perishable items. Is that clear?
Yes; and the smoke drifted back revealing an ornate gold-trimmed back room that nothing would tell you was actually a mop room in the back of a dentist’s office in Bern Switzerland. Jamed stood there, all a-wonder.
Lord God, thank God, I have wakened, he thought. My God how could I have dreamed up such a horridly insane place? Lord God—and it is cool here. Here’s an easy chair. My La-z-Boy.
He sank back into the perfectly broken-in padding of the chair, pulled the recline lever, and the world went and now he crouched down hard on the ground with their ears pressed hard to the dirt and he listened as a calm cool member of the ex-manic approved studio audience.
A grizzled old man like a buzzard all crooked and mangling went with his staff to the podium, upon which was hung a big posterboard yelling HILTON! is pleased to host LE CLUB DE LA RESURRECTION and the honored honorary founding member, Baruch de Spinoza.
QUIET PLEASE
It was more than you could hear a pin drop. Pins were actually dropping and thundering down getting louder and louder and tending toward earsplitting, as the quiet in the room deepened enough to make the words begin to vacuum out the mouth within the speaker’s grizzly outer crust only held on by spittle and sweat. He tapped his staff on the floor and began.
Members of Le Club de la Resurrection. This talk is intended, as you’ve already been told, to prepare you for your venture to Bern for the second examination of your body and soul to assess if you still are on track meeting the criteria for advancement to higher levels of awareness of the true nature, in the end, of the Club. So. Let me start, with point one.
As you know through the ages, there have come and gone men who have shown themselves able of raising the freshly and even fishy-cold and clammy dead that are continuously being expelled from the flaming anus of the collective creature-build from the metaphorical ball of string-like loosely bound up being we have come to call so falsely some kind of human race. Agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
Pop!
And, as you also know through the ages, when technology moves forward to certain tab stops in the draft of our planet’s life story, it is found that looking back and checking reveals that we may have figured out the mechanical nuts and bolts step by step methods by which to duplicate flights of fancy that in previous generations were only explained by the use of the word magic, or miracle, or sorcery, or witchcraft, or wizardry, or necromancy, or enchantment, or black magic, voodoo, hoodoo, mojo, charm hex, spell jinx, pixie dust, fairy dust, wonder, marvel, sensation, phenomenon, mystery; agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
Pop!
And, as you additionally know through the ages, the technological breakthroughs that duplicated the previous centuries’ metaphysical wonders are such as aviation, radio, television, mass production, electricity, penicillin, semiconductors, optical lenses, paper, internal combustion engines, vaccination, the internet, the steam engine, nitrogen fixation, sanitation systems, refrigeration, gunpowder, personal computers, the compass, the automobile, industrial steelmaking, the pill; so far so good man? Agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
Pop!
And, the list goes on and on, and is worth carrying out to conclusion, as; nuclear fission, the green revolution, the sextant, the telephone, alphabetization, the telegraph, the mechanized clock, photography, the moldboard plow, Archimedes’ screw, the cotton gin, pasteurization, the Gregorian calendar, oil refining, the steam turbine, cement, scientific plant breeding—but nothing! All of a sudden, nothing, and Jamed whirled around to find that Wendy stood in his face close enough that there was really only one face with the faces facing each other blind to the rest of the world and she was blurting, Jamed! What the hell are they telling you on the phone? Why so long? What have you said Yes to a dozen times already? Don’t you think I ought to be part of whatever deal they’re forcing you into—that tape trick was shit, they are scumbags I think, what are they telling you—but Jamed yanked the phone from her hand pulling back her forefinger nail and as she jerked away gripping her hand in pain, the phone clapped back to his ear and continued thank God my God thank you they are still there talking stringing out the words in the word-string toward the point they would make in the end, saying; oil drilling, the sailboat, rocketry, paper money, the abacus, air conditioning, anesthesia, the nail, the lever, the screw, and last but not least the combine harvester. So far so good man? Are you still there man? Agreed?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes.
—see there you are saying yes again agreeing to something without me well we are talking about our lives and our futures and what about Janie, what about her how are you affecting her she relies on us to decide what’s right for her what about what about--
His hand pressed the phone harder as though trying to fuse it to his skull choking her out sealing her out they must be almost to the end they must be damn caught in this caught in the middle please don’t be mad Wendy please don’t I will just be another moment or two or even a year maybe what is time anyway you can’t see hear feel smell it how real can it really be; the phone stated onward yes, onward, oh; so if man has been able to conquer all those things with technology and put an end to each thing being done by priests saints monks, religion, or its opposite, doesn’t it seem odd that calling the dead back to life has never been researched and developed and achieved and made commonplace and everyday by the application of hard science? Yes, to us it is very odd—and so we take it up. We are not afraid who calls us crazy. We are not afraid who calls us phonies. We are not afraid think of the next one and then we are not afraid think of the next several think of the tens hundreds thousands millions and billions yes think think think yes think is what to do! Got that? You agree? You feel that same way? Let it out man! Let it out, scream it scream it scream it now—the lack of pursuit of reviving the dead, is the visible manifestation of a centuries-old plot by organized religion to force us to think death is final and that there is no cure for it and we must look to their God to obtain safe passage into some imaginary great puffy white super-bland happy-happy joy-joy forevermore beyond!
Lord God, yes! shouted Jamed, hearing himself strong and hard in his head, but his words, also spread out in the room where Wendy had formerly been out there with him, do not make a sound because there’s no one in the room to hear them fall, in the same manner as trees; he chuckled his prior seriousness away, as futile and foolish and he felt as if he just kicked a whole cluster of the most addictive brain draining hotdrugs which a hundred and fifty years ago were over the counter and why, oh why, can it not be like the time of Coleridge today, where you could go on the street and even take a pee into the gutter and find that when you turn around what you’ve done has emptied the town into a ghost one where every room in town is empty so they only really exist except for the illusion that they have their outer walls, in the same manner as trees. His attention spotlit its glow around the room around and around it ran ending up running back to the phone and it found the phone was empty and the bottom fell dropping with the phone loud to the floor. Jamed lurched away his leg asleep and swayed and stamped his way to the door, no; Wendy is pissed off thank God they are done she is pissed off I’ve never been so rude to her I’ve never pissed her off so bad got to go got to see got to run got to go—and on the floor now alone in the room the phone lay undamaged going on throwing up words Jamed had thought were all there were but thank God he never would know he didn’t hear the last small chapter of the muddy story that they were both supposed to hear before once more going to the end of the great big point they were making, which was; Elisha resurrected the son of the great Shunammite woman, stated the telephone earpiece; this is an interesting account recorded in two Kings four of the Human Race Operator’s Manual. Let’s go over it slowly. In it we will find the truth, in the silences and pauses in between the words, which were carefully chosen by the author to deceive, much in the manner of the method used by the ancient alchemists to pass on their secrets in the form of written texts, the obvious meaning of the words is a deliberate falsehood, but the shape and form and patterns of them indicate the underlying truths, in much the way that the draping flowing down over a shrouded figure, contains folds and wrinkles and lumps and bumps and hollows as a form of general flow that, when seen slit-eyed head tilted and at the right length in the right light, will tell you instantly that this is not just a sheet thrown sloppily over, but is actually the secret thing beneath, which can be easily recognized by one with eyes to see, or as how it’s described that God sees, as a big thick heavy famous book has written in the middle of the massive pile of millions of words lines and phrases, oh, how do I know? I know because I know is why; I know it says, God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart—sure enough find it it’s in there—find it in the big operator’s manual for the typical human, when all the rust mold and grime and slime is professionally power washed away, which can only be done by paying a total stranger, just one of a million that do power washing, randomly picked like a card from a deck, take a card any card look at it don’t let me see it, you know that kind of picking from a deck, and; oh, yes, yes it is. Yes, it’s true that this whole theory is really that simple, just like every great theory once discovered is seen to be quite simple, yes, just like all complicated art that is successful is in the end seen to be quite simple, humans are programmed through years of hypnosis to throw multiple layers of rotten dense waterlogged cargo netting over, so that they can simply look and look and finally throw up their hands and say, Too complicated. Can’t be true. Must be a metaphor. Pigs can’t fly. You cannot raise the dead you cannot, yes that’s what I said, no one can do it, no matter how rich poor shiny or dull the words from the hypnotized slimy common crowd stinking of farts spitting out the cars window at highway speed or stopping to pleasure themselves in front of the wide tall display windows of lingerie boutique after lingerie boutique why is there one of these on every street corner? And why is there always a line of dark cars containing only drivers pulled up before these storefronts at all hours of the night with the cars coming and going each only staying between seven and ten minutes, eleven tops? I can tell you why maybe you can figure it out yourselves you look like very smart and clean-hearted boys and girls, and so I need to clue you in. They’re--
Huh? Wait. What?
Silence filled Jamed’s ear; but he kept listening in case it just starts up again, no doubt this is a test to see who will hang up now, so that their names can be stricken from the eligible candidate’s list, a test sure they are weird tests and secrets and secrets and tests and gibberingly long strings of pearl-white sharp pointed words and--
What? sniped the earpiece. What? No? Why now what do you mean no hey what wait a minute Jeff cut the line yeah Jeff like I said cut the audio! Right!
Silence again begun with a kind of switch-click then a deeper hollow nothing that all screamed all crazy, the show’s shut off the plug is pulled there will be no more go on and hang up—at the emergence of this hollow nothing meaning everything gone empty noise, Jamed gave up and pulled the phone from his burning with pain ear, the lobe of which was beet-red from having tight pressure applied day after day of this months-long dissertation, which might be over now yes or no but it seems the answer is yes because the pulled-down earpiece hissed with sudden sound easily heard that said in every decibel of its elemental incoherence, OK listen now we’re close to the end thank God we’re close to coming so wake up!
The earpiece slapped the raw red earlobe full of intense pain close to that experienced by ones having both ears slashed off by unwashed men using old kitchen knives for some silly but very evil reason, only bearable in that this version though just as intense, is only momentary and words once more flowed into Jamed’s ear canal, smoothly anesthetizing the wounds where the ears feel like they’ve been forcibly removed, and calming him all the way in through his eardrum hammer anvil and stirrup spiraling around the centrifugal cochlea, down and down straining for the finish line crowd all cheering, stating in block letter sounds weighing around a full ton each, This interesting account is recorded in two Kings four, yes the Shunammite woman had no children yes for a woman to be barren in those days was a great source of shame yes note it says in those days yes well that’s a lie because there is no such thing as those days, there’s just these days yes meaning the spewing of the story always repeating from the fire hose of reality’s timeflow surging through you yes is a signal in the writing that the miracle that follows may be done again; may be endlessly repeated yes but let’s go on yes it next says her husband was old and impotent yes but because the Shunammite woman was genuinely kind and generous to one in those days called the prophet Elisha yes but who in the overall top secret timeflow is really the powerful force-of-nature person yes told her she would have a child in one year's time yes then he phoned up headquarters pulled strings called in favors, and she ended up conceiving and gave birth to a son yes but, foolishly the son was brought up stupid yes ended up dying of a stupid wrong toss of a now-banned yard dart during a hotsunny picnic in spinster auntie’s back yard the only yard in town is why yes so the Shunammite woman hastily went back to the neighborhood force-of-nature yes insisted he pull in his very last favor and resurrect her son, biblically. Whew! And this he did yes he did yes so, you see biblical resurrection from the dead was again successful, but because there were no favors left to pull in from the grown-ups above yes there would be no more resurrections no until far in the future but not so far as now, no, about halfway back actually yes year zero there.
The loud silence suddenly kicked Jamed in the head jarring his ear canal and associated small mechanical parts that the words from the phone had at first soothed but now the filaments of his hidden eureka comic book glow came up red burning yes burning no don’t stop give me more stop stopping and making this church full of worshippers whisper out Jamed’s lips, saying, No please my God let it be over when will this end go one I am ready I can take more there’s always more.
Silent phone pressing to the waiting cooling down.
Please come let’s finish this needs to end.
Silent phone pressing to the waiting tic toc tic cool cooling cooler.
Maybe it is, is it over, tell me now, no, never mind, no don’t. It’s--
Cold getting colder numb pain free ears.
Press one a beep says, What? Come on you are there this is too easy the room is reforming the lines of the corners up and across the ceiling and down again but--
Jamed you have hung up the phone how long have you been sitting here?
What who—no no more no--
No more what? Jamed. It is time for bed.
Yes bed. This is the way of feeling needing to pass through the movie theater out the end that’s still there like a loaded field.
Huh? Jamed.
Yes like passing. You know, passing. Like sh*t.
Yes sh*t.
The gasoline truck flowed gasoline into the ground. Maybe not into a tank at all, because I am smart and will not be deceived. There’s no cereal no gas no stench no blood not at all I--
What? What did you say Wendy?
I said card not cash. See my face see it?
What did you say Wendy?
Card not cash. Jeez, Jamed. Come hit the hay already.
Come me.
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