"MACKEREL SKY"

Introduction: Amnion

I am in the habit of stealing my way down to the water's edge in the mauve light of the early morning and watching the cockatoos burst from the trees and wheel in burnished green against the reddening sky.

I am in the habit of dreaming this shit up while I lay my lazy ass in bed till noon-time.

I arouse myself to the syncopated rhythms of some passing Latino's woofers, bolted behind the back seat of his El Camino, with some dude playing the bass-line on tuba while another gets his balls squeezed as he croons about love.

Sometimes I feel myself to be an art conservator passing his instruments over a large canvas; with my magnifying lens, stereomicroscope and ultraviolet and infrared illumination trying to find the best avenue in, the weakness in the layering of paint that will allow its removal without damaging what is beneath.

I make myself some green tea, but I really need coffee.

My breath fogs in the frigid air of the large room that houses the canvas, symbolizing the vast dimensions of the realm of my existence.

The room is full of statues; unarranged, filmed with dust and mute. I am the only figure in this room who is self aware and active in its own existence.

I have found myself the inheritor of this canvas, which has been overpainted several times, so that the original is concealed underneath.

Only I know that I was the painter. In fact, each time the canvas was overpainted I have been the painter. The canvas has been around for eons. But I am an amnesiac. As restaurateur I must reclaim my previous works-- sacrificing each one for a glimpse further into the past.

I have the camera and tripod set up. I switch on the array of lights. I adjust the shutter-speed and aperture. I take the photo. Then I begin peeling away the layer ever so tenderly, picking at it first with my swivel knife, then daubing solvent over a dismal area of varnish where it is oxidized to a dark brown. I strip this first film away from the design layer, exposing the first strata of paint; paint in-painted over innumerable, perhaps inseparable, underlying layers. Even after this short time it is veined with craquelure.

This piece portrays a monkey-- face enormously enlarged, eyes liquid and intelligent, body diminishing away from the viewer as the torso, with its hands rreaching out to grasp the edge of the canvas, descends into a spindly waist and legs with tiny grasping feet, trailing down towards the disappearing point, diminuting with the perspective, all the while conforming sinuously with the undulation of the oak bough, rendered with the perfectionistic, stylized realism of a Wyeth as it cascades down towards a trunk ringed with a fiery flush of autumn leaves.

The sun plays in shadows and dappled light all over the canvas. ROY.

I am sipping my green tea over this writing pad as a bright afternoon light seeps through the white drapes. The drapes conceal my view of everything but the silhouettes of the trellises overgrown with jasmine and the outlines of trees framing blue sky.

I picture two cocks fighting in the same cage. Two hamsters wrestle in their bloodied litter. Two male siamese betta fish duke it out in a small glass bowl. Rocky heads it off with that Russian dude. I knock myself on the forehead. Stop it, I say. Stop it. You're silly.

The blonde and white border collie sighs in her sleep, curled up on the multi-colored Navajo throw-blanket on the futon. My housemate, Zuzu, has taken away all of the chocolate-chip cookies. Me and Sappho were up until two last night, snacking on them, talking about our childhoods. Mental illness. Families. How our religion helps us digest our experiences and put them into perspective. How we rediscover family in community.

The other day I was at my ex-girlfriend Cassie's house and I was looking over my drafts as she talked on the phone. She asked me, why do you need to do that?

Because I need to reread them after I've let them sit for a while, I say. Sometimes something seems brilliant when I first write it but then when I reread it later it has no power, or I've left something crucial out, or in order to communicate it to a reader who is coming to it with no background I need to provide a lot more detail, I say. She is in the shadows of her dining room and when I look up from my papers, on the table, in the light of the living room, I can hardly see her.

Oh, she says to me, because you're too vague. She comes to me. I have left my papers and stand in the dining room doorway. And then she draws me to her, as if to comfort me, as if I am a child and she has just knocked me down and she is picking me up. As if she didn't mean to say something so truthful.

Bring forth the art nouveau paintings. In the pale light pace among them searching out the cat-brown eyes, the female skin's snow-white beauty, the fullness of hips bare and draped with a careful light. The half-accidental poses of the figures make them appear sensual and nutritious. Pause at the alluring roundness of each body. Note how beautiful she is when she is sleeping. Piece this together with a bronzed shine to the brown-bright hair, a distinctive down-sloping of the brows that frame the orbits of the amber eyes with elegant curves of bone, make every feature balanced and make her facial expressions all charming. There-- you have something of Cassie.

Pluck the flower and leave the stem. I forgot to mention cuteness. Cuteness and dominion. Cassie was made for cuteness... and also for dominion. Pluck the stem and leave the rose. It is her radiant goodness that makes others want to please her.

Make her eyes shimmer with hints of green and make her skin glow and watch her feet pace their way in the gray winter light of overcast Portland along a disturbingly pristine sidewalk to a cafe where Ms. Frizzle from the Magic Schoolbus serves rich coffee from Hawaii, Ethiopia and forested Kenya. Make her hands always warm and make them want to touch you. Make her sashay out of the cafe like she's on a catwalk, looking hard at the crowd before she makes her little turn, long hair trailing behind. Make her dance like a child sometimes, so joyful. Make her every expression choke you as if you are breathing raining rose petals. Fragrant. Melting you. You have nothing to say. Make the world stop spinning for a moment, please.... Make the whole universe turn inward to focus on her. Make the willow stems red and the maple leaves green and make the lilies bloom and the air still smell crisp with hints of snow. Make the whole world retouched in technicolor with hues that are scru! mptious. Make every shadow with four gauzy walls, inviting to lovers. People the air with ideas and dreams and gossamer-winged fantasies. Give those fantasies two perfect rows of ivory-white teeth-- sharp and bitingly delicious.

Make yourself say, "You have some lovely illusions." and mean it, sincerely. Be dumbfounded. Glad. Make yourself want to be nourished only by her. Make yourself so wrong in every way. Make yourself so right. Make yourself.

Be astounded by the abundance of the world. Rethink your spending habits. Invest in new bedding. Instate a regimen of hair-care. Consider yourself condemned and slated to be demolished. Begin to design how you would like to be rebuilt. Poll her for suggestions. Fill out every ticket that includes you in a drawing for a tropical vacation getaway. Engage in extensive non-business use of the phone. Piss off your employer. Skip out on your duties. Surf the wild waves with no wetsuit. Hike the hill on your lunch break and get bad with the B-ball. Break out of your cage. Live free.

Later on we are sitting on her mother's blue leather couch and we are speaking of something that suddenly excites me. I don't remember what it was-- a movie, a story from work, or an idea I had, who knows. Her legs are over my legs, so I gesture with my arms, like a cartooon character, painting unconscious kinetic pictures of what moves me. Upon reflection I think it must have been something about the startling vapidity of boy bands and how their songs creep into my consciousness like chiggers between my ass cheeks and I find myself mimicing their dance moves like a spastic monkey whenever I am grooving to some funky tunes in my bedroom and think myself alone. She assures me that I have always wanted to be in a boy band. She also gestures from her side of the couch, making abrupt movements, mocking me.

We seem to have a big enough clown suit that we could both step inside of it and make something work-- back to back, two legs become one, separate wigs, separate red noses-- but somehow sharing a reality is not plausible. I wiill throw my white face make-up all away. Say good-bye to the big top.

Draw at thirty paces and fire.

Sometimes I just want to rip all that cuteness off her face. Sometimes I want to string her illusions up like Christmas lights and torch them-- start a structure fire.

Make her less immune to you. Infect her with your passions. Illuminate her mind with eccentric follies. Ignite them randomly. Cite self-help jargon. Encounter benefactors who have overwhelming interest in your business propositions. Invest the venture capital of indiscriminate love. Meet with inordinate and unhygienic amounts of success. Become internationally renowned in the multidisciplinary field of lucid reality re-engineering and the trans-transitory empirical vagueness of speculation and child-like wonder. There will be a symposium in Brussels next fall. Watch the boringness and mundaneness of life rest easy on her because of her curiosity and openness and her willingness to be influenced by all the sensations that come pouring steadily in. Watch her splash and caper in the pool of this new, shiny stage-set, muppets on lily pads, non-chlorinated reality. Create her into a person of your imagining. Stay heavily medicated. Be right for her.

None of this is working. None of this could work. This is mud tracked in on the linoleum in shapes that resemble two squabbling birds, nothing more. Do not expect her to see the birds. She needs her lists. She needs separate rooms furnished in memories. She needs her environment set up in thus and such a way and she needs dominion. She has her own idiosynchratic system of organization. She is self-led. She is not to be toyed with. She can demean you in the cobalt tones of a confident young woman ordering better service at a cordon bleu restaurant. She remains so infuriatingly adorable.

I am at work. I watch an infomercial for CitriShine(R). I am drawn to remember the very few times I have ever seen, much less tried to clean, a mess of the species described by the charming sales-babe. This is normally the sort of mess that seems built into the house. Like the bad spackling job, or the distorted window glass that can turn a normal scene into the daubs and swirls of a Van Gogh painting. Stains on the tiles or the bathtub, linoleum with enough lines and streaks and blemishes that you can make out Chinese characters.

But my! With the power of CitriShine(R) such household cleaning jobs are monumentally simplified! Suddenly the thought of searching out grime and dirt to defeat with this new super-product seems positively recreational. The logistics of a wholesale household scrub-down no longer seem so daunting. You forget that you have never before considered the logistics.

Meeting Cassie was like happening upon that infomercial in the dead of night when you find yourself mesmerized by a product that you didn't even realize you needed. Miracle solution! only two low payments of $19.95 plus S & H. Results are gauranteed! The face you see holding the product is convincing and beautiful.

No one can disabuse you of the notion that you had a problem in the first place. We all want the miracle solution. We are all dirty. Suddenly we realize that we may have let some things go to seed. Why? We just hadn't noticed. Now it is spread out before us, in fluorescent infomercial light. We are offered a solution. We can be sparkling clean. We can be vigilant against the stains that had blemished our previous existence. There is a new and better way. It is infomercial salvation.

I am a sucker for salvation.

Their job is to dispense fantasies. My job is to need it more and more. The products are real. The need is not. But after one buys the product, one must wonder, "How did I cope before?"

There was one time when we drove out to her grandfather's with a moving truck to leave some furniture. We drove away with some furniture left in the back of the truck, stacked within arm's reach of the rear door because so little had been put in there. We drove out from the rural Oregon community, along hilly roads with freshly ploughed fields, houses, barns and crispy new mall developments. The conifers spiked the scene with a little neon from their fresh, new, bright-green tips, and in the fields were glossy crows, mitigating the sunny scene with a little horror.

We drove from there, along the highways and deep into residential Portland before we were hailed by someone gesturing at us at a stoplight from his beat-up old Impala. Hey, he said, your back-door is open.

Shocked, we pulled into the next side street. We crept around the side of the truck as if to surprise a cat-burglar that we feared lay in wait around the corner. We took a breath. We looked inside.

Every piece of furniture was unmoved. Highway speeds and hilly roads had not budged the merest dresser drawer or cardboard box a single inch. We laughed and hugged and high-fived and thanked our lucky stars and closed the door on our marvelous good fortune and this odd David Copperfield, as televised, twist of fate. All we needed was a table cloth and some wine goblets and we were sure a magician would show up to place the full goblets carefully upon the cloth and then whisk it away. The taste of adrenaline singed my nose. I was high on accidental salvation.

So much of the joy of life seems to be happenstance. So much of it seems just half a song away. The tune might just pop into your head, unbidden. You just need to be like a cat, who lays on the front lawn and makes silly expressions and crouches down and rolls in the grass and gazes wide-eyed at the passing action, twitching its tail. Flex your claws. Feel the sun on your pelt. Blink those beautiful eyes.

You have to be ready to pounce. You have to let the sillyness and the stupidity flow. You have to laze in the sunshine of all the unplanned possibilities.

I crave a chance to be useless with somebody. Useless and free. We could levitate above all of this and bat at butterflies from cloud bungees. We could dress impractically, ignore traffic signals, and drink way too much caffeine. We could just stare out of the window sometimes. We could love being.

I am sitting in a cafe. The rounded asses of passing women crowd my thoughts with detours into desire. An ambulance speeds past, screaming in consternation at the cars, herding them out of intersections and onto the roadside.

I remember a world where iced tea tastes of aromatic rose-hip fruit, plump as apples, and cicadas shrill in many different tones, deafening picnickers in the summer months. I remember common roadside trees that ooze a green slime that can be chewed like gum by children, until it squeaks like rubber between your teeth and you spit it out rather than grate your nerves with the noise. The vomit of dogs often contains this ooze and it stains one's clothing with a shade of yellow bordering on chartreuse.

I am not sure if these are all remembrances of the same world. Perhaps those memories are of occurences in different lifetimes and they belong each to their respective worlds.

I have never tried to set these events down as narrative before. I cannot be certain that my recollections have not been irretrievably colored by my most recent experiences.

Having sifted through so many minds and histories I find myself wanting to trace my way back and to revisit souls I have been, but these histories and souls cannot be reclaimed. All has changed. Whether I travel forward or backward in time the sequence of events is never repeated or reversed. I will find myself in a strangely similar place and time, and yet all is subtly altered. Altered just enough that I feel myself once again betrayed-- deceived by my own mutability-- eternally unable to reclaim what once seemed so solid to me.

Every permutation of history is different. Each new soul colors my memories. This storyline that follows and these souls that are described no longer exist. Perhaps they never did exist. Perhaps they exist in many subtle renditions but none identical to the one I remember, none of them the person that I was. Perhaps they have only ever existed in my own mind.

Nevertheless, I will do my human duty as a historian. I am the only one who can tell this tale. I owe it, if nothing else, to my parents-- those sweet scientists that I have never seen since my first spoken words, my first independent forays into existence. I beelieve that if I do not start now, the record of these events will be lost even to myself, as I find myself changed, reinvented, replicated, or even deleted. The realm of my existence is a tempestuous place.

I find myself despairing at times, thinking that all is meaningless, that there is no lasting value to any of my actions-- no purpose to my existence.

But if this is so, and as I have gleaned from the human sages, and more recently from a vampire show on TV, then the only meaning is in what I do right now and how I live my present moments. Through relating this story I will better know myself, and in knowing myself I can become more confident in my nature and learn to exert myself as an instrument for the betterment of the universe, rather than acting clumsily and without awareness of my effects. A conscience may be of dubious utility to me, but my soul is, after all, a human soul, and shaped largely by human lives and I must set it to human purposes.

So now I have found myself the mind of a writer. Whether he will simply serve my purposes or will turn my lives into "immortal prose" remains to be seen. But I dare not leave this body till this tale is told.

Look first at my hero, the man I once loved with such a passion-- my first love. He made me much of who I am. In the afternoons, when he was teaching history, he was like a lion pacing the stage-- full of tension and energy, obsessed with the details of events and contingency and the minutiae of the daily lives of the citizens of past societies. Such a wealth of information on the species! Such a vein of throbbing emotive extravagance! The students stood transfixed. This kind of teaching merited a box-office.

I first saw the professor when he was peeing self-conciously into his nasturtiums from the brick steps of his back patio.

Picture him as an olive-skinned man, with a finely-lined forehead, a full head of unruly, black hair (of medium length). Picture him in a faded yellow check-patterned collared-shirt with tan slacks. Picture his zipper down, his dick hanging out.

I learned to expect this whenever the stresses of his isolated life had let up, leaving him with aimless, unidentified energy. Apart from his performances before his classes, derided by his colleagues as a circus act of sorts; an effusive overindulgence in false charisma that was only a cover for his insecurities as a scholar; this was his most daring impropriety-- he was inviting negative attention. But the imaginary intruder he envisioned appearing on his patio never materialized, andd no neighbors made their displeasure evident. A man, after all, was allowed to pee on his nasturtiums. Still, the act enlivened him through its supposed flirtation with impropriety.

He was a very meek little puppy at home. He would come to his apartment and collapse.

Come into the present moment with me now.

The nasturtiums quietly endure the treatment, drooping fitfully beneath the random drops of his splattering stream. The urine droplets bead up into gleaming spheres on their flat surfaces and then drop below, to moisten the discarded husks of nasturtium seeds, dried leaves, dead flowers, and the bugs and amphibia that live among them.

Done.

Carmen, on the other hand, was always pure momentum-- relentless and incontrovertable. Her internal drive made her impervious to any external changes in her environment-- stresss was an irrelevant concept that she likened to drinking excessive coffee and then blaming one's jitters on an environment of caffeine. She did not partake in stress.

As I watched her that day she was forming two distinct and conjoined thoughts in her mind with an essayist's clarity. She was marching from her office. She was opening the glass-windowed door, with one chipped aureole left by a rock near the left side of its pane. She was moving confidently down the hill, dressed smartly in ironed linens. She was opening the door to her car.

Now she turns the key ever so slowly in the ignition, and stops, paused in mid-activity, as if arrested by some huge catastrophe that only she can see through her two widened eyes.

Picture three disembodied fetuses swimming in slow-motion through an olympic-sized amnion-- eyes closed, suspended by their separate umbilical cords.

The background noise is the rhythmic whooshing of a universal heart.

Be born, baby. Be fucking born.

CHAPTER 1: JACKET

Dr. Patrick Barrientos sits and reads a minute entry in the morning paper:

"...Peredan Zhankovska, the nation's leading 'algiatrope' is the genius behind a new field of neural programming, involving the splicing and rerouting of the neural network for a desired effect. His field, dubbed Algiatropy, specializes in altering the basic chemistry of pain in the body...."

"Boy, I need some of that." mutters the professor to himself.

There are times when the chicken of supressed passion, laying endless eggs of infertile ambition, just needs to be fucked. Well, I'm the damn rooster.

Look at how he passes his hands over the countertops, how he skates his hand over the surface of the cabinet before he pulls its handle, how he passes his hand over his face's fine outjut of defined cheekbone and down to the stubble of the sides of his cheeks before he flares his fingers back and upward to scratch some of the morning's grit from the hollow beneath one of his eyes.

I am sitting in the trash bin outside of his house, snug up to the side of his back porch wall, and I am watching him.

Notice how the veins in his temples when caught in that single shaft of sunlight passing through the above-the-sink window are a shade of blue that matches the faded hydrangeas, as he passes back and forth through the light-beam; forgetting the spoon for his coffee, remembering the spoon but not the coffee, bringing the bag with the coffee back with him, to the stove-top, where he has left the spoon, lifting the boiling teapot, dribbling hot water on the grounds, passing his hand over his face in the same manner, rubbing the other eye.

He drinks his coffee as he carries the bag back, passing his head again through the light-beam, his veins catching my attention momentarily as they reveal themselves in the color of hydrangeas, and he sets the coffee in the cabinet beside the door to the back patio, passing his hand over the face of the cabinet before pulling its handle, closing the cabinet again, pausing to look past the door-jamb and out at the day, and at the opposite wall of his patio, with its cracked stucco, his face framed on one side by the bush of fading hydrangeas, his lips sultry as that of any surly, tousle-headed youth, drooping into a magazine-moment wherein the muscles of the face relax momentarily to let the paleness of the washed-out light draw out the architecture of the model's features in greater contrast before the shutter flares at the chosen aperture and then closes, leaving the play of light that was distinctive to that face at that moment at that angle, impressed by the subtle wei! ght of the light itself, particle and wave, in individual grains of silver-halide upon the slick surface of the black-and-white exposure. Its a wrap.

His mangy cat, Scherzo, paws at the sliding door.

He believes the world to be made up of beautiful, beautiful lies.

"Now this really bugs me..." the professor comments, shaking some kitty chow into the cat's bowl.

He loves the world, but does not trust it.

It is approaching mid-morning and I am reading his lips. The day is misty with bright sun, a few morning clouds, dew on the grass.

"Should I bring an extra shirt or not? If I bring it, I will wear it, because I won't want to carry it. But I don't want to be too hot." he says.

He is not sure if the world expects him to trust it.

He believes the world just expects him to take the ride. Very often he has not enjoyed the ride.

He remembers a dream he had. It was the dream with the golden, illuminated, coruscant spires set atop an undulating spine of basaltic, black, interlinked plates of stone-- where the spires rode on top of their bases like flaming cones of intensely bright fire, set upon a mechanical sea of undullating, interlocked stones. Each fire that he approaches repels him with its heat, but he tries to get closer and closer, by crouching closer and closer to the intense coldness of the stones. As he slides on his belly towards the fiery spire he feels heavier and heavier and his eyes squint tighter and tighter against the light and the heat of the blaze. But just as he feels he can't get any closer, as he feels his body become stiff and frozen and his eyes feel as if they are burning in his head and his hair is being singed away, he notices dark shapes moving within the flames-- standing upright and unharmed-- and they are human shapes. He feels the swell of the stone beneath him. As ! it rises upward under his trapped and frozen body it excites him. The sound the spires make as they burn is like rainfall on the charred wreckage of a burned-out building; like the one he saw when he was a child. Like the one he saw when his daddy was angry and was taking him away from his mommy, but they got in an accident, and the building was burning, and they had to go back. Then he didn't leave. That was a lucky day. But his daddy stays too-- all through his childhood. And then the dreams began. Then he awakes.

I am also fingering his mind. Each time I do this he swats at his ear. I can hear him through his own nerves at these times. I could stop reading his lips, if he were to let me. This professor is the sweetest vein of pent-up passion that I have ever seen. Look at him! I say to myself. To others this is not evident. To others he keeps up appearances. To these borrowed eyes everything about him is dripping and quivering with nervous energy. Spectacular and resplendent dreams, an unconscious bleeding with the echoed reverberations of individual souls incessantly impinging on the magnetism of his psychic currents-- a prodigy, a monster, a gifted oddity, a goldmine, you hear? I say to myself, although it is only chattering and grunting. I should contain myself. I am thinking out loud, but I am only a gibbon. It is really of no use to try to speak to myself. I contain all the data charting the attributes of the various "sensitives" who participated in my parents' experiments, s! o I know a good egg when I see one.

The professor pauses, cataloging the recent weather patterns in his mind, making prognostications, weighing pros and cons, theorizing about the pattern of sunlight at various times and places throughout the day.

"I think I'll take an extra shirt. I just hate being cold in the morning."

Scherzo lets the incomprehensible maunderings drift over him unnoticed. He knows he has to wolf down his chow now. Who knows when this human will remember to feed him next? Field mice await in the shade of the tall grass of the vacant lot nearby, but he can stalk all the better with a full belly. Somewhere in his mute feline brain he knows that if he figures out the catch on that sliding door, he's in for a more steady diet of kitty food and a warmer place to crash at night. But his thoughts are on other things now; the feeling of diminishing hunger, the prickle of a raw scratch on his hindquarters, the sun on his haunches, and every sound that might possibly be any small animal as the day's cacophony comes tumbling into his consciousness and is recognized through the filters of his exquisite, alert ears.

"Or maybe I should take a jacket."

I lose track of myself in the cat's senses and the gibbon that I am at present almost gives me away, startling itself up from a sleep and crashing against the trash-can lid.

I take ahold of its brain and guide it out of the trash can, out of the back patio, out of the apartment complex and into the nearest hedgerow. Then I leave it be.

He never did take the damn jacket.

CHAPTER 2: MOTHER

Up on the foggy coast where the mountains plunge straight into the sea, jutting straight above a coast serrated by bays, is a nation named Ehido. “Ay-hee-doh.” I always liked the sound of that word.

Ehido is a clean slice through a pomegranate, juice spurting out—red stain on a white linen napkin. Ehido is a nation where politicians argue the rights of wild peccaries to disrupt the morning activities of Tai Chi practitioners in the parks of the city of Bahia Blanca. The Ehidense are a people who roll their tongues at strangers and hide their faces behind hats while kissing. Ehido has a kick to it. Tangy. Ehido is all golden-eyed, rain-splashed momentum. Ehido is crispy when you bite into her and doesn't whine like that old gray-faced dog does, the one with the cataract eyes who lives off scraps in the Pichihubi Train Station, when the vagaries of life run her and her lonesome sorrows through the clothes wringer... she just smiles, in that sideways way, and leaks a little on the edges, her carefree spirit dribbling its way through the downstream eddies of both bitter and pleasant providence, to where the foggy islands rise away, bellying their fir and spruce covered s! houlders into the ninth wave of the sea, where the seals go crazy. Ehido is like that, y'know, like a young beauty, hair disheveled, thumbing a ride in front of an apartment building where she woke up beside a stranger after an unexpected one-night stand— sad, but saucy.

Ehido has a look in her eye and can size you up and tailor you into a new philosophy in no time flat. Then, in the next few days she’ll whirl you around in a tangle of distraction and contradiction and leave you dizzy, with no undergarments. She is perceptive, like so few nations are, but tries not to let on. Ehido is ambitious in a black skirt with impertinent earrings. Ehido is laid back in flowing patterned cloths and feet bare and adorned with toe rings. Ehido ascends the slopes of world affairs as a phoenix-feathered, goat-footed, vituperative, sans agenda, kite-flying, spitfire, animal loving, faucet-sipping vixen of a old-souled child who can spit foreign diplomats on their own inconsistencies and fry them to a nice caramel brown in the space of their own hastily phrased backpedal. Simultaneously the feeling grows upon them that they should have simply provided their own counter-argument along with their original statement and saved her the trouble. Ehido is a shar! p tongue filed to a keen edge from birth and tempered in the flames of public conversation. Ejido is a flame-haired angel lost beneath the snows of Mt. Shasta, jumping the six rivers to the sea shore, and giving her neighbors the tongue-smirk thumbs-up and a blinding half-moon view of her fog-white ass as she blindsides through their dour politicized poker games on her celestial snowboard. Ehido is all of this, and none of this, and ever so much more.

Ehido is in every way so possible, and seemingly without limitation. Ehido is deep, and odd, and overly dramatic, and overpriced, and so worth it. Ehido is what it is all about.

That spring the leaves had shot out bright and full and greener than ever. The waters that marked their path with the abandoned cargo of tidal debris that mucked the margins of this bayside town, had been steadily rising, in steadily dirtier waves of flotsam, as the shores of western Nueva Trezuenze were disintegrated into the sea.

The fine frost of snow and ice that had become the norm in the winters of this temperate coastal valley disappeared with the outbursting of the leaves, and this new but older sun prickled the skin and seared the eyes through its thinning veil of ozone. Spores, molds and allergens were rampant.

The new topic of conversation among the gossipers and the chronically hypochondriac was the increased likelihood of everyone just dropping down dead one sunny day from respiratory distress. "Governor Maria Becerra Sojomandia almost did just that, last week." They would say sagely, with a nod of their heads.

The following autumn was buried in mountains of leaves. Up in the suburban highlands overlooking the city, Patrick Barrientos was consulting with his friend and colleague, California Barrega, Psychiatrist.

Dr. Barrientos handed Cal a note, over which he had been crying. The note read:

26.08.24-- You're leaving for college tomorrow— at 5 am. We drive away to Transmontania. What can I say? You're one of my favorite peoople in the world & I enjoy being with you so much. I'll miss you horribly and awfully........ But I know it is what's best— so, enjoy yourself— learn to slow down & focus & not try to do too much. Practice doing the things that make you feel good about yourself, & learn to love yourself. Enjoy everything. See the humor in everything. Keep your perspective & mostly, your balance in your soul. Be open. I love you so much.
Mama
A biggie— Be teachable. Learn from everything & everyone.
California handed the note back. "You never properly thanked her before she died?"

Patrick wiped away his tears, said, "No— no, I thanked her. I said the right things... we got along just fine.”

“She sounds like a very wise woman.”

“She was a complete saint.”

“Maybe a saint isn’t the easiest person to please?”

“I don't think she ever judged me as harshly as she should have. She really was a saint. Not an unkind thought for anyone. Not even my father—and if anyone deserves some condemnation its him. He left her with nothing after she gave him the most amazing love and acceptance that anyone could ever expect. She never could bear an ill word against him, and I really believe she completely forgave him. And she loved me. Loved me so much. Like the note says…. She’s always been that way.”

“So perhaps you just need to accept that it will be very hard to get over her death. It stands to reason—she was an amazing and beautiful person. That’s something to be thankful for. You need to find out how to carry on what you loved most about her in your own life.”

“Well I guess that’s a big part of it. Lately I just wonder what's gone wrong? How did I ... I feel like I've lost it all, all the things she tried to leave me. She asked such basic things... humor, happiness, balance. But I just thought that was garbage, or it was too hard for me, or they were distractions. I had to be everything else, everything exceptional... I had to be better. I’m not even worthy to be her son."

"Well, I’m not sure how that kind of thinking will help you. None of us have anything to do with our parentage. But, what do you mean by needing to be better?"

"Better than all them. The other people. The ones who....” Patrick thought for a moment, head down, stroking his brow just above the bridge of his nose with his right thumb and forefinger. He took his glasses off for a moment and polished them on the hem of his shirt. “Well, better than people like my dad."

California looked up at the sky through the autumn leaves. The colors of the trees had never been so brilliant in his childhood. Then the leaves had just turned brown and fell off— now, with the changing chemistry of the atmosphere and the climate, the colors were quite decent, he thought.

A line of swallows erupted from a telephone line and chattered their way up above the trees, snapping at insects. "They'll soon be shitting their way down to the tropics. They're just little shit-powered, insect eating machines." California said, smiling.

Dr. Barrientos looked up at the sky, gazing randomly as if a bit lost, readjusted his glasses and shoved the note into his pocket. "You aren't listening."

"Calm down, Pat." California said, "I'm sorry. Well, I suppose I got distracted. I don’t know why. I'm just not a psychoanalyst. If you want someone who will hang on your every word, then I don’t know why you came to me. I get distracted for two seconds and you get angry at me.”

Patrick narrowed his eyes and moved his left ear slightly backward as he tensed his jaw.

California continued, “From all I can tell, you're a functioning human being who is suffering a bout of depression—reasonable depression considering the loss of such an excellent woman as your mother. Perhaps her loss has brought on the beginning of an identity crisis. Maybe you also feel some guilt. You’re expressing a great deal of self doubt. You have, in a sense, lost a part of yourself than you hadn’t yet realized. Part of you aspired to embody the qualities that were so evident in your mother and that she encouraged in you—but you haven’t reached that level of self-realization yet. I mean, these are just theories from off the top of my head. I shouldn't even be diagnosing you. You see, I'm not the right guy. I'm already doing it wrong. I don't have any listening skills worth mentioning—not really. But I’d be glad to recommend some colleagues, people outside of the university, but I'm just not fit for the cosquillecerebro routine."

"Don't you think I know that! Don't you think I have my reasons for asking you to do this for me? But how can you just sit there and act all ‘together’ and calm and gathered and ignore the fact that I’m opening up to you, and this is hard, and really—pardon me for saying this, I know you love your birds—but who cares about shitting swallows when I feel like my mind's come unhinged! I don't want some anonymous shrink to pry me open and figure me out. You know, the thing about you and me that you might not be taking into account is that we have more similarities than you might want to admit—and that’s what this is all about. I need to feel like I am being heard by someone who will not willfully misunderstand me. Maybe you’re right. Maybe someone else could be more professional, but professional is not what I want. I want someone who will be real with me. So just try to forget the fact that you're a psychiatrist and be a human being with me, por Dios! I really don't trust th! is to anyone but you.... I guess I could say at this point that I don't have any friends. In the past year my social connections have just withered away. You're the closest thing I have."

"A mailbox buddy?"

"We talk—and when we talk it makes sense. It's more than having adjoining mailboxes to me. Can't you just give me a chance? All I do is listen to myself these days. I need to get these things out. Its hard, I know, you can't really ever see what I see, but you have to—or I beg you to—just listen and give it a chance to make sense. All the things you’ve said sound reasonable and make sense but there's all these things going on inside of me, and... my mom has, you know, passed on, and that has yet to become real to me and I keep wanting to call her at night, or I dream that I have called her, and it leaves me feeling so empty, and also, there are these nightmares... all sorts of things go on in these nightmares, and, well—I haven't been sleeping well at all. Good dreams or no dreams or bad dreams— not much sleep. But you see, there’s more than all that. I know you can explain all this away as being normal—I just lost a mother—but I really don’t think that’s enough to cover ! what I’m going through. I can only really hint at it right now—it would take too long to tell—but the past few mornings when I am making coffee, I just haven't been feeling that well, and it gets scary sometimes, alone in a quiet apartment... thinking I might go crazy, or can't handle it... its not right, so you know I'm doing my best to reach out. Please, I'm desperate, and you’ll just have to forgive me if I get angry—and I think you’re the kind of person who will. You’re a man of integrity. Please—just stay."

California felt his left foot grip on the gravel and his body turned as he tensed his leg. "I feel like I'll never catch up." California said. "I can't really see myself being any good at helping you, but I will try. I’ll hear you out. You have been a help to me in the past, when we have met over academic matters."

"God, I'm so relieved! I thought I was scaring you off or something—y’know, babbling. I mean, I feel overwhelmed.... Right now I'm not the most relaxing person to be with. Maybe I never have been. So next time we should meet at some place that's comfortable, like the cafè on campus, right? Less cold there. A bit more comfortable. God I wish I had brought a coat."

CHAPTER 3: MIASMA

California sat on his back porch watching the wind kick at the long, overlapping bodies of clouds-- nuzzling together in extended banks. The south wind pushed back the long ships of vapor, progeny of the storm clouds that ppassed through before.

Down below the drainage that dipped into the gulch underneath his property line, he could see the barest twinkling of the lights of Espalda Seca, the town to his north. He took a drag off his cigarette.

The cigarette burned and crackled, glowing brighter as he inhaled, the red coals eating up the length of its white tube with a voracity, dropping ash and red bits of charred tobacco as California held it away from his body at an angle and tapped it with a finger.

Sometimes it was hard to sift back through his experience to his childhood, when he had played in these fields. Sometimes he could remember his mother, Gwen-- her presence. Sometimes he couldn't. He had been very young.

Gwen started from her ghostly wanderings in her childhood province of Cohu and felt a seeping of painful love for her son. He, like she, found it so hard to let go.

Now, as his children got older,he felt the need to feel his way back to those earlier experiences, knowing he could not live off their childhood forever, knowing at the root that there was some poetry to that era of being that could not survive translation. He had been trying so long, wrapped in his life of duties and cogitation. Soon the poetry of his children would be lost to him, as it dimmed in his memory, if he did not find his way back to that primal language.

His mind was braced for epiphany-- for all the dark corridors of his adulthood to be burst aside like a dandelion head parting in the wind.

Sometimes the reams of psychiatry that he had ingested just seemed to highlight the shortcomings of human explanation. He felt like jettisoning the tomes of his library out of his office window and leaving for the life of simplicity which he knew was mythical, but still yearned for.

He knew the real path was painful and hard.

Sitting here on his back porch, in the house that his father had built, he felt the vague proddings of childlike duty fingering at his conscience. These talks with Pat had been getting to him. The feelings of spiritual failure rang all too true.

Both had left simple upbringings for the ivory towers and found themselves wondering if they had lost more than they had gained. Patrick was alone. California had a wife and children, but though they were the center of his life, he knew how tenuous the security of family was, given human psychology and the unknown challenges which faced his children. So many things could draw them away from him. He knew he had spent far too little time with them, drained by his duties and the rigors of lab work, deadlines, and bureaucracy.

He felt a frantic love well up inside of him-- an impossible clawing at all the lost chances and the possibilities still open to him, if he were to desperately pare down his life in order to make them truly central, surmounting the restrictions of money, pride of position and recognition, and the highly adorned jail of modern security and posessions.

His own father had set him free, had always been directly himself, had always regarded him with the playful distracted affection one shows for a stray dog. Sometimes California had felt distanced, unsure of his knowledge of his own father. But his father's serenity and singleness of mind were so sure and inviolable that there was always a sense of peace around him, so his habitual privacy and quietness did not often seem a burden, but more of a pleasant mystery.

He never said a harsh word. He did not discourage, nor did he show any great interest in or surprise at his son's far-ranging plans and ideas. When the anxieties of adolescence set in, California found himself tugging at his chain, only to find it was not tied.

When his plans came together, he said goodbye. His father was acceptant. He hugged his son, kissed him on the forehead and bade him well.

In the years to follow, his father continued tilling his small farm in his distracted, monastic way. California's long, ebullient letters went unanswered. Occasional notes would find him, tracking him through postal forwarding as he jumped from address to address, penned in his father's firm, childlike hand-- short, unpreposessing and entirely unrelated to whatever California had written.

Soon they stopped communicating. California got his first degree. His plans kept skewing their course but he stayed in school with dogged determination, unwilling to be anything less than the best-- whatever, in the end, that may be. He never paused to think that out. He just knew he wasn't there yet.

Years later, after detours through architecture, sociology, political science and anthropology, he ended up in medical school and plowed his way through psychiatry. It seemed he had come to the end of his lead, and yet it still had some slack. And there, penned in by his degrees and credentials and the obligation to apply himself and to do something with all that he had achieved, he discovered himself, lost and wide-eyed-- startled at the noise and traffic of this urban world which seemed to have just now forced itself upon his blindered attenttion.

The city churned its gears and sped its cars around its narrow, unimproved streets. The city hummed the mantra of desire, oblivion, busyness and lost days.

It was intolerable, and he left.

He caught a plane to Soranotaria, where he picked peas and hallucinated on goldentop mushrooms for months on end. He worked his way onto a ship headed for Araucania by packing boxes around the wharfside for a summer, listening to the interminable drone of a million cicadas and getting drunk in the pubs with no small number of Soranotarians-- all just as bent on swilling their life away.

The cicadas clung to their twigs and died in great numbers. The world was a great flash of summer light and the noise of restless wings. The world was hope and end of hope and no mind to forget and no mind to remember

Several Soranotarians looked at California out of the corner of their Asian eyes and judged him nervous and incompetent. A foreigner with no subtlety. Soranotaria would eat him alive if he let it. It wouldn't take much. They sipped on their beers and thought sober thoughts. The sober thoughts of a people with no autonomy and an active desire not to recognize the possibility of better things in life.

Arriving in Araucania, he found himself unable to deal with the bustle of the grand urban masterpiece of architectural elegance and decay. The economy was friendlier in Macunda, so he headed there, snaking his way up the coast to the edge of Patagonia, where he found jobs picking fruit and catching the occasional salmon from the pebbled beaches of the iridescent lakes.

There he met his wife Miriam. She made him feel more alive than ever before. She made him feel hungry for every moment. He brought her home, full of proud plans about how he could settle down and pursue his profession, now that he had found love.

He introduced her to Ejidense poverty.

Jumping from position to position in small colleges, picking up odd jobs for extra pay, making limping payments on his student loans, he finally landed a research grant, made his first significant study on brain-chemistry and disease, and clawed his way most literally into a position with the University of Bahia Blanca; his interviewers for the position at Bahia Blanca stood startled at his arrogance and brilliance. They wondered how he would behave during their long bouts of decision-making. The long, conversational process of arriving at a common sense of decision was a hallmark of Ejidense universities. It was his pot of gold, the university he had visited as a child, in his home area, in the valley below the hills where he had grown up. Bahia Blanca, the urban nexus whose suburbs had made their slow, sluglike encroachment, year by year, closer and closer to his father's farm.

He wrote a letter-- one of several. His father's replies never came. He became obsessed with his teaching, and intent on his research. He was ssoon a father himself. He had a nice apartment. He was writing important papers that hinted towards breaking new ground in his field, eventually.

But slowly, the old anciness returned. The urban scene began to weigh heavy. He spent long hours after work, walking the moonlit marshes on the city's edge, dreaming of home and wondering what kept him away-- wondering also what drew him.

An egret startled from its muddy contemplations, bent its legs and launched itself away. Blinking its eyes once at California before it turned tail and disappeared around a bend of marsh; dipping slightly to the left on one long wing, it swung itself low over the section of marshland where it would begin its hunt again.

What real bond did he have to his quiet, distant father? Who was he anyway-- this man who had raised him? What had happened inside of his father after his mother's death to make him recede so far intoo himself that his son was just a passing distraction and life but a repetetive routine?

Miriam, in her halting English, and with her shy, playful mannerisms, tried to nudge him back into the Cal she had fallen in love with-- carefree and full of exuberant enjoyment.

"Hey jungle monkey!" she would say. "How was your day in the trees? Did you bring back any squeezy, soft, sweet-fruits for me?" He would smile and laugh, tension giving way to a wash of humor, and think to himself that anyone as fine as Miriam deserved much more than a confused bastard like himself could ever provide. His love was limping on one side.

She saw him tensing up tighter and tighter like a coiled spring until he must snap loose from his casing and unravel, clanging in a bent metallic snarl on the floor.

She continued her life, and theirs, in her patient, methodical way-- all smiles and practiced light-hearted banter-- she was the thermostat, constantly adjusting to keep things temperate, to mmake things easy on the spring coil that triggered the furnace, slipping from Macundu to Ejidense, giving him room to feel his emotions honestly, and stroking him into a looser mood. She hovered near him like a cat hoping to be petted, letting him know she was always there. She forced his attention on Marco, their son suckling at her breast. She had Cal hold him. She bound the baby to him with a long strip of cloth, so he would spend his absent-minded evenings with a baby strapped to his chest. She touched her husband freely, caringly, and without reservation.

She would hug him from behind and bury her head in his shoulders, so he could not see her face. While massaging his chest and upper arms she would think, "What makes it so hard for you to be happy? Why so anxious baby? Won't you just open your arms and hug me back? Won't you shine on me the way I shine my love on you?"

She invited him back to a world free from worry, but he would not come. He would worry for the both of them.

Then one day he left the university. His afternoon classes were expendable. They could mill about like lost cows. They could go celebrate their free afternoon likethe unfocused libido-monkeys they were.

He drove up to the hills along the remembered roads, frightening in their familiarity. His hands clenched white at the wheel and became slick with sweat. He willed them to relax, saw the pink come back, and then watched them tense up again.

Strange images of his childhood burst into his brain like short clips taken randomly from a film-- all characters and no plot line.

When he pulled up he had a bodily sensation of his clothes hanging about him, every fiber large and scratching him raw, like his adulthood had melted itself away and pooled in his nervous sweat beneath him, on the running board of the car, leaving only the child.

CHAPTER 4: IT IS GOOD

    Kansas, a gardener, clasped his large dry hands. Though faded, they were strong. He held a stout hoe like a staff, supporting him, with the head sunk into the wet earth. There was a tremor and sway in his solitary figure-- like a large tree leaning with the wind. He was.

The winter sun shone meekly while thick clouds lumbered towards it. The sphere dimmed and then once more was covered. The clouds continued steadily north, where the breeze tossed among fallen alder leaves.

"The land." the old gardener murmured, either to himself, or maybe to an unseen companion returning from the past; or possibly the wind. "The land. It must be prepared."

The close of winter was dawning and the man, without the use of a calendar or thoughts of months and days, knew that the time had come. In his mind, a hoe sunk into the damp ground, pulling forth the beautiful darkness. The tangled vetch was sliced through and tilled under.

--No, not with a plow. I don't use a plow. Not anymore.

He knew where it lay; rusting in the tumbledown barn. He did not use it because his horse was old, as he was, and he respected its age.

--Yes, he continued. As I was saying, a hoe.

The imagining ended and without thinking, without realizing a beginning; he began. His back bent in the familiar curve and his muscles tensed in the remembered pattern. Chop, chop... chop, chop.

It was not a concious beginning but a logical ending. The repeating of a cycle begun in the distant, fresher years of his life and recurring now; the same. It was a midpoint, where beginning was past and ending was yet non-existent. All was now and "nows" yet to come. The pattern continued and was comforting; like the old hat on his gray head and the faded blue shirt, now too large for him.

The pattern continued as the black sod was torn free, along with its rich smell, rooted in the deaths of leaves and plants. It continued as the wind blew onward, northward, and the sun peeked out only to be covered again. The worms once again heard the sound of the hoe and burrowed deeper. They knew... or not. Who knows the mind of a worm? And truly, some did the opposite; appearing on the surface, unseen to the old man's clouding eyes. Maybe it was too wet down there.

The old man paused and gazed a moment at the new thing before him; the old thing once more. It was not large, smaller than others this land had been and known, but the man didn't notice. As his life had grown larger, his life had grown shorter and his body had responded with the same. As he was smaller, the plot seemed larger, and for him there was no change. He stooped with his knees and with his hands drew out the seeds; the offspring of many other plants that had supported his life throughout these years. He could tell their names by their familiar shapes, yet he peered at them anyway with his clouded eyes (to be certain) and then placed them in the earth.

He placed them with visions of what they would be and as he finished, he looked back upon rows and rows of succulent images and smiled and let them disappear.

That night came quickly, with a blending of darknesses. The dimness of the day merging with that of night, as the sun receded beyond the reach of the clouds. The old man finished his supper of cabbages and turnips (from his winter plot beside his back door) and went to bed; the cold covers taking warmth from him and then giving it back.

This was another pattern; the giving and taking of heat, along with the resting of his hand upon the familiar tear between the green and blue patches on the right side of the quilt. The tear comforted him, as did his prayers, and he soon fell into sleep.

He dreamed that night of a day long ago when a woman held his hand as they walked upon the lawn. He walked with her once more, but he was frail and she was young; it was true, he had never seen her old, she would always be young in his mind. As they walked she grew but a little older, still beautiful, and then faded softly into a blue mist.

He walked alone now and came upon some lumpy ground. He looked down and saw that it was the burn-pit. A layer of ashes lay upon the bottom and they shifted and sighed with the wind that was now blowing. He felt suddenly heavy and tired and stepped down into the peacefulness of the hole. He sat and then lay down, cushioned in the ashes. A profound warmth washed over him and he slept.

Checking itself abruptly, the wind paused and changed direction. The piled leaves underneath the maple tree shifted and moved like an animal. Gracefully, they blew and settled upon the stillness of the old man's chest. Slowly, the hole filled and the wind left. Out of the leaves projected a single object, his hoe; standing where he had left it, unknowing, as a marker.

The sun rose upon a peaceful day. The light was scarlet among the remaining clouds. The door of the house was open and the early light shone upon an empty bed, the leaves within the burn-pit, and the handle of a hoe.

Time passed. One day an automobile drove up to the house. A middle- aged man stepped from the car and stood at the fence. He gazed searchingly about. The door was still open. A bird sang from a nearby tree. The man's face was flushed as he ran to the door.

"Father!" he cried. He searched the vacant rooms. "Father!"

A note lay on the bedroom table among a company of dust.

Time has passed. I soon will join her. It is good.
Below it, in a different color of pen:

Cal, all is yours. Bury me beneath the maple tree, with Gwen.
California ran, not seeing, tears on his cheeks. He stopped below the maple tree. There lay his mother's grave, covered with leaves. He searched about, and then his eyes fell upon the leaf-filled pit, with the hoe projecting, and his tears fell upon the wet earth.

Slowly he walked. The leaves were compacted and now lay lower. He dug cautiously into the wet mass. The leaves were thick. All there was were leaves... and then something white.

Quickly, he refilled the hole, sobs choking his frantic breaths. He ran to the barn and returned with a shovel. In a frenzy of digging, he covered the hole, filling it to a mound and leveling the surrounding earth.

The shovel was flung away-- tossed so strongly that it flew and fell ringing on the hard stones of the pathway, seeming to cry out in a pale, clatterinng way, of days of digging. It was flung ringing like a church-bell, a warning gong, a frying pan rattled into voice to scare away the bears and wolves or the pale demons of our innate fears; dancing, rebounding, in an adrenaline slowed pattern that appeared, in his delusional state, not unlike a form of distress.

This dance and this noise called into his mind images of herons startling from the shallows where their marshy feet had rested for hours in the weed-greened mud... a place where California had stood for hours at the city's edge and yearned for home.

Home... he thought, slowly, hollowly, cupped in the pooled coldness of his grief-infected mind.

Home.

And he stood silently, then weeping. He wept and prayed, wept and prayed, cried out and prayed, beat his chest and kicked the ground and prayed.

It is good. "It is good."

Gradually, his sobbing ceased and he found himself upon his knees in the garden plot, pulling weeds from the young vegetables. He ripped and tore and uprooted his anger into a great pile and then stood and looked upon his effort.

The rows stretched out in strange lines of satisfaction, a satisfaction someone else had once known.

In the years to come, a family would move into the old house. Beneath the maple tree, near Gwen's grave, on the burn-pit, a stone would stand as a marker, with a weathered hoe handle upright before it. The son's hands would dig into the soil, continuing a pattern began in someone else's life.

His children beside him would help, too, or pet the old horse, Utah, and learn as he once had. As the winds blew across the overgrown ground, going north, ever north, another man would come to plow images.

-----//------
Carmen handed him the sheet of paper and distracted herself by twirling her pencil for a few moments.

"I enjoy the simplicity of your commentary on life in connection with the land and natural cycles. I would not have expected it of you, but I know little of you except what I have seen in a professional capacity. You obviously feel this in your bones, and I felt it too, for a moment, while reading it."

"I grew up in it." said Cal.

Perusing the words again he felt strangely detached from his own experience.

"I didn't ever have that groundedness. But I saw that groundedness every day."

"And you emulated it?"

"No, it both attracted and repulsed me. I could never figure out what it meant to me, and in my confusion I rejected it, and my father."

"But you went beyond yourself in this story, beyond your childhood problems. When I read this story, I feel that I am seeing from the perspective of the land, the land is the narrator. The images it conjures in my mind are almost all at ground level, down low to the earth, looking up. The land tells the story."

California paused, "I guess you could say that."

Carmen nodded, "This shows a growing maturity in your perspective. You are not speaking as 'self' but as 'observer'. You have transcended personal conflicts, if not in your self, then in your writing. This is a good step."

Carmen trailed her pencil across the wooden desk, bouncing it off the veneer in little stuttering hops as the eraser rubber gripped and released.

California eased himself a bit forward in his chair and opened his mouth to speak.

Carmen, ignoring this cue, continued, "The old man loves the land, and the land loves him. At another level, the land is Gwen. Gwen is the land. Gwen was his young wife, but now she is the land. He always loved the land. He always loved Gwen. He loves the land and Gwen. The land and Gwen are one."

California paused and rested back in his chair. "Yes...." he said, hand to chin.

"And you imply that connection with the land and natural cycles has a superiority over the citified detachment that has swept over Ejido, or so it could be read, given that it is a very short story. You describe your own life as lacking, as needing something, and your panacea is the groundedness and ritual of life in connection with the land."

"Yes, but this was just in the story. I have never achieved that. I feel that in some sense I don't even know what I'm talking about. I'm idealizing my father and agrarianism."

"But for your father it was the only experience he wanted. He did achieve it, and you wonder what you are missing in your own life by not achieving it yourself, and perhaps not even being able to understand what he achieved."

"Yes, I'd say that's right." California responded.

Carmen bounced her pencil straight up and down against the veneer, snatching it midflight with her first two fingers and thumb.

"Do you practice that?"

"No, but let me take a wild leap and see if I can make a good stab at what your father, or at the very least, what this character, who you have based on your father is all about. What is it with him and this land? How is he motivated?"

"Okay, go ahead." said California.

"Okay, let's look at it this way. This is not just "land"; this is "the Land". This is a parcel of planet which is placenta to his bellybutton soul, and the umbilicus is love. This is a stretch of land which married him, loved him, bore children with him, and fell asleep beside him. Do you see?"

California nodded.

"This land is him, and he is it. When they married, it was till death do us part but that has slowly migrated to "Till death do us unify". One shall cleave unto the other and they shall become as one body in the sight of God.... not to get to deeply into theology."

"I'm familiar with the reference."

"So in his private perception of reality he and the land are one. They breathe into the same soul and death is no great change in this relationship. In the end, it is all much the same. It is what Is-- that is, all of existence simply is what it is, and death is accepted as part of this essential, undeniable state of being--- and It Is Good."

"Whoa..." California searched for a thought, moving his hand from his brow to some generalized space in front of his eyes where he made vague grasping motions, gesturing towards thought, "Well, I.... Yeah-- that seems right."

"I don't want you to feel like I'm fortunetelling or something. These are things you already knew, in some preverbal way. Otherwise you could not have written this story."

"Yes... this seems very familiar, but very new. I'm grateful for your time."

"You're most welcome. I would advise you to keep writing. You have a definite style and I think it would help you. Sometimes our experience is too complex to be easily processed. Writing can be an outlet."

"Thank you. I'll do that."

California exited the building by the back staircase, the bone-colored linoleum reflecting the dimming light of the mid-autumn day. The trees outside tossed in a fitful wind and reminded him to zip his coat up and secret the papers inside.

Diving out into the blasting gale, he ducked his head and made his way to the car. He should just make it to his meeting with Patrick Barrientos. He felt drained... but he felt a new emotion creeping up on him.

He felt completely meaningless and empty, and in this he felt rejuvenated.

CHAPTER 5: DINER

I am skimming minds for my own pleasure. Usually I am recovering some snippet of conversation that preceded a gasp, an "oh my", or a "what?!" Snack food. Sugar water for the hummingbird of my mind. I am keeping tabs on Patrick and California, but in the meantime I am skimming bursts of emotion. Affront. Disbelief. Dismay. They count for little, but they are delicious.

"I'm heading back to my own personal Zero Year, do you care to join me?" Gasp! "There are thousands of ways we could imagine filleting a beach ball into perfect partitions, but what would be the point?" What?! Ghosts of mathematicians giggle with repressed enjoyment. A tired theoriest replies to a trite greeting with the reply, "I'm running out of social constructs that require hindrance or confuscation. How are you?" Dismay. How do you think I acquire my vocabulary?

Come now-- its not so bad to enjoy these things. After all, it is so much more difficult to track through the mindfield for quiet wondder, or serene enjoyment, or selfless appreciation. These are the finer vintages of emotion that I cannot yet afford. Allow me to enjoy the grade A varieties of discomfiture. Lacking that, allow me to take morsels from the commonplace.

Now its your turn to change the diapers. I did it last time. Take out the trash! Speak slowly and e-nun-ci-ate. Come with me... it is time.

The snapping of her gum annoys me. Two sparrows flash by the window and bump up against the glass, thrown off kilter by the wind, and I sweep a strand of platinum blonde hair from my cheek and tuck it behind the arm of my glasses. I keep snapping that damn gum. I arrange my waistband and march off to deliver an order. I feel a sense of victory at finding a susceptible host so near to Patrick, and am glad to be without the annoyance for once of being a feral gibbon.

The reflection in the darkened glass, which warps and changes hue due to the gusting storm outside, allows me a moment of vanity, where I can see the pleasant contrast between my caramel skin, the platinum of my hair, and the shining blue of my eyes, enlarged slightly behind the untinted lenses of my glasses. My cleavage is pleasantly exposed, just above the V of my buttoned collar, and for a moment I think longingly of my mother, far off in the jungles of a world I may have lost. I am not interfering at all in her (the host's) behavior, and have the pleasant sensation of being carried like a child around a busy room where I am safe and relaxed and where all my wide eyed glances are received with a pleasant grace or blithe unawareness by the recipient of my attentions. In the back of my mind I remain attentive to Patrick, and snippets of conversation come into my awareness, but at the level of images and sense impressions, with no real surety of the words being used.

The hunger inside of me goads me on, however I know I must hold back. If he begins swatting his ear, then all is lost-- he will have sensed me and his highly tensile psychological armor will kick in. I have already pushed things too far duringg the sleepy hours in the morning where I tried to find avenue through his sense of distraction during his coffee routine. I know that I must be far more astute in my approach. I must hunt him patiently. I must lie in wait, yet not make him aware of me. I must know the opening when it comes but I cannot force such an opening. Fortunately my present appearance is just the sort of thing that might soften his vigilance and cause him to naturally extend some sort of romantic warmth towards me. California's heart would naturally reach out to children, and Carmen would sense immediately the neediness of a vulnerable but intelligent man, and position herself to catch his eye. Patrick will long for beautiful young women, and yet he would neve! r dream of what in his mind would be termed "taking advantage". Nevertheless, a strong enough longing may be enough for my purposes. I position myself close enough to overhear, but in such a way that I seem also to be attentive to the cries from the kitchen. I snap and snap my gum.

California says, "To make habits and break habits is human. I smoke, I drink a little, I have a regular coffee habit. Sometimes I go overboard, but I don't live in anxiety about it. To play a little bit with the statistics is one thing-- to make oneself a statistic is quite another. I think that involves losing hope. Losing oneself in the substance. Moderatioon in all things, I say-- but that includes moderation. Occasionally one must be immoderate to practice true moderation. Occasional excess is part of the true moderation game."

Patrick. "I'm not even comfortable with my dependence on coffee." He leans forward and flicks his nose in agitation. "What in God's name is taking this waitress so long, anyway?"

California turns and takes a good, long look in my direction. "Oh, let her take her time. It's not the end of the world."

California turns to Patrick, "You know, cutting back now and again is fine, and probably a good exercise, but completely quitting can't be wise. To never do something is not human, and to do things to extremes is not something I would recommend-- except on occasion, and for no great amount of time. It's best to find a balance."

Patrick. "Yeah-- I know all that."

I am not really hearing this. I have only the vaguest sense of what they are saying, but I have gleaned this from Patrick's mind.

Suddenly I notice a look of annoyance growing on Patrick's face. He looks more insistently at me. I flash him a bright smile. He only looks more annoyed. I panic. Giving the waitress back to her senses I watch her register Patrick and realize that she has not yet ordered their drinks. She flushes as she orders the two espresso moras and walks quickly over to apologize to the two men.

"Oh, here she comes now." California says.

California is graceful and inattentive as always and Patrick's growing violence comes to a peak and is calmed as she speeds through the requisite apologies. I wonder if I have ruined it all again, but then I feel a pang of sensual longing emote from Patrick and rise to tingle my inner brain.

I turn and flash a comforting smile that manages in its last seconds to be coy. Several barriers in his consciousness that normally stand sentinel around his impressions of women become pliable and my image begins to migrate towards that of his mother. I grab the two coffees and begin my way towards them. As I do so I extract from his memory a few bars of a song that his mother used to sing, and I hum them as I set the coffees down. As I walk away I feel his gaze wander down my waist to my ass and as he does so he shakes himself out of whatever trance of suggestibility he had fallen into and returns to the conversation suddenly clear minded and chaste.

Evidently there is more to getting into his pants than that. Really I have no idea what this man wants. I can't get into his most private thoughts and listen in as I can with so many other people. I know that I want him.

I feel my attention wander into an analysis of why he is so attractive to me, and know only that I hunger, that so many veins of energy converge in him, and I may find through these energies a passage through space and time, or I may more fully become a separate self, less dependent on a host being, less fearful of ceasing to exist. I do not fully know my hunger, but I know what I hunger for.

California. "You have to relax into it before you can relax out of it, Pat. The only way through is through. You can't circumvent it."

Pat leans forward, "But when I relax, I hear voices."

California leans away, "So has that been your problem all along? You've been too relaxed, Pat? You're defeating the voices by being all wound up and agitated?"

"Well, no-- but I have to keep vigilant or it overtakes me."

California put his hand to his chin, "What is that like?"

"What is what like?"

"The voices overtaking you."

"Well, it's like I'm disconnected with what is really going on. I feel kind of numb to reality, and then things are said to me. Suggestions sometimes. Unexplainable urges. Overwhelming remorse. A strange and specific craving. I can be locked in fear at an intersection because I am certain of the existence of invisible cars. Ghosts of things are registering in my perception and passing on the road before me and I cannot discount them. Then I get through it far enough to reassure myself that if they are invisible cars that I can barely sense myself, then they are probably immaterial and they will pass right through me, and I drive on. But I must remain vigilant or I could become catatonic at every other step."

California pauses, his brow furrows momentarily, and then relaxes. "But you've never been stuck in this state for hours at a time? You can always snap out of it and resume normal life?"

"Well, occasionally it has lasted a while, but that's always while I'm alone in my apartment."

"So you have some kind of control over this."

"Oh yes-- I've always felt that I could willfully shut out the sensations and go about my life. But I just wish that the sensations wwould stop bothering me. I'm not really crazy. I've never lost it completely. But it has always seemed like if I felt hopeless enough, or was injured and confined to a hospital bed, or some other catastrophe, then I could succumb to it completely. Since my mother died I have spent far too much time sleepless, awake, wandering a quiet apartment with no one to talk to, and feeling like I have failed her, and sometimes it just frightens me."

"Well, its good that you're clear headed enough to seek out help, although I still think I'm not the absolute best choice for a listening ear. And you know, its well documented that many of the most brilliant minds of the past centuries have suffered through various sorts of, um... 'madness', or are subject to bouts of eccentric thinking and behavior-- so it could be that you are just that brilliant. I mean, your lectures have earned you quite a reputation. Maybe you just nneed to lose yourself in activities that promote your strengths. Distract yourself."

"Well, I am very good at extemporizing. I feel safe and secure when I am at the head of a classroom lost in an organized form of thought."

"Well, see, you're solving your problem for yourself-- an 'organized form of thought', that's the ticket. Maybe opening up your schedule to study groups would be good? Spend moree time with students, where your strength is?"

"Oh yes. I think that would be good."

"Well, that's already supported by the university structure. You'd just have to fill out the paperwork and then off you go with a fuller schedule. I'm sure the students would come. You're a great teacher."

"That's a very good idea. And thanks."

"Maybe the symptoms will lessen when you spend more time with people exhibiting the skills you're most confident in, and in time the anxieties will wear themselves out. Speaking of wearing oneself out, working more should make you sleep better, if the time at work is well spent--you know, doesn't give you anxieties that last after work hours."

"All of this is true. You know, I am so glad you are not fixating on me as if I had a great and insurmountable problem. You don't even seem uncomfortable with me. You don't give me that 'crazy eye treatment'."

"I have confidence in you, Pat. I know you aren't completely off your rocker. We all have our quirks. The main thing is that you make it though, not that we obsess on the fact that you have this problem in the first place. And like I said, I'm confident that you are sitting on some untapped brilliance. I don't want you to give up on yourself. Demand more of yourself, I say."

"Well, that's a great encouragement."

As this is said I feel such a flood of relief emanate from Patrick that I feel myself go dizzy. I clutch my hand to the counter, remove my glasses and feel my forehead. All I see is white light, rushing streams of energy and the palpable strings of disembodied being that Patrick thinks of as "voices". This is it! I am frozen. I cannot move.

My vision clears and I see Patrick over there with California-- beatific, safe, understood. I cannot believe it. I breathe raggedly and brace myself for the plunge. The coldness of nonexiistence surrounds me for brief fleeting seconds, threatening me with its expanse, as I hurtle towards the doorway in Patrick's soul. Even now it closes. As I enter it is like a warm mouth closing upon me. Sensation and thought return. The experience of the transcorporeal plane becomes available to me as memory, and I see the waitress wiping her brow and accepting help from the monobrowed line-cook and I no longer care what she is thinking. I beam even more broadly, I bask in the expanded dimensions of this consciousness. I feel as if I am at a central crossroads, and many paths lead off like the spokes of a wheel from where I stand, and the terrain on all sides of me is beautiful. I keep myself quiet in my exultation, and listen in barely contained elation to Patrick's first words, heard f! rom within, as if I spoke them myself.

He says, "I will fill up my time with lectures and study groups. And I will call you if I have an anxiety attack."

And California replies, "I already said you could."

----

BIO:

Name: Joel Sebastian Moody
DOB: 28th December 1972
POB: Fortuna, California
Residence: California, U.S.A.
Publishing History: Never published prose. One poem, "Yanosrua," published Fall 1993 in The Hangman's Lime, Volume II, Issue I, at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
Email: qoheleth60@comcast.net
Site: http://home.comcast.net/~qoheleth60/

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