Small Boat Sails into Big Mystery

THE SPIDER'S TALE

2011-01-27T20:04:00.000-08:00

Today I completed the current rewrite of a novel called The Spider’s Tale. This took about six months. The original version of the novel was written in the mid-eighties and took about six years. By the time I reached the last page I was completely done with it and did not have the energy or inspiration to undertake the formidable task of wrestling it down into something accessible and manageable. I let it go.

Twenty years later I started thinking about it again, and on a whim, I picked up the old typewritten copy and started entering it into a Word document, shortening the sentences when necessary, throwing out whole sections that didn’t work, and creating new ones that did. The experience was stunning. It was like meeting myself as a stranger for the first time, and feeling a strong, curious attraction. I couldn’t put it down. I worked on it every day during my lunch breaks at work, and I thought about it compulsively as I walked to work every morning from the bus stop.

This has been a remarkable experience but also an entirely private one. For awhile I was posting the unfolding chapters on the blog, but I couldn’t keep up on myself, and I would often go back and make changes to the chapters I had already posted. So I stopped posting, and now I have removed all the archives from the blog.

Do we write entirely for ourselves, or are we supposed to share our work with others? Frankly, when I see how hard it is to get anyone to read your blog, let alone to attract the attention of the “publishing industry” I begin to think that the desire to be read is merely the selfish desire for attention, and nothing else. But is that really true? The work wells up in me like a spring of cold pure water. It is quickly contaminated by the ego who wants to use it to call attention, to garner me some gratifying positive feedback. But I am convinced that the initial impulse is pure. The question is, for what?

Here’s my intention. I am going to make one more pass through the work I have created, to shorten, tighten, and “pith it up” as best as I can. I anticipate this will take about one to two months. Then I’m going to take it down to Kinkos and get 2-3 copies nicely bound to make it look and feel like a book. These I will offer on loan to anyone who wants to read them, on the agreement that if you lose or destroy your copy you will promise to reimburse me the money to print a new one (probably $10-20).

I guess I should tell you a little what the book is about.

The setting is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta of California’s Central Valley. There are many large, cultivated islands, but in between, the natural untamed watercourse of the river has created numerous small “wild” islands, constantly changing by the whim of the tides and the instability of the man-made levees. During the 1970’s refugees from the collapse of the flower-child movement escaped to this wild islands to live lives outside the confines of society, surviving primitively for awhile without the amenities of electricity or running water. I knew some of these people. It really did happen, although the phenomenon is considerably exaggerated in the book.

My protagonist, Hunter Brown, is an amnesiac who can only remember the present, not the past. He works a routine job at the paper mill and practices Zen meditation in the evenings. At first it might appear his amnesia is intentional, brought on by his spiritual practice, but as the story unfolds we see that it is much more complicated. The plot line follows Hunter’s immersion into the wilderness of the Delta and how it restores his relationship with the flow of time. The title of the book is from an African folk tale of Anansi the Spider, and how he wrestles the stories down from the Sky Kingdom:

Before that there were no stories on the earth. Nyame, the Sky God, hoarded them beneath his throne, and the earth creatures walked around in a kind of memory haze, no two events ever connecting, one with the other.

Posting a blog on the internet is such a weird thing. It could be likened to opening up your handwritten journal to a certain page and then leaving it on a bench at the Greyhound Bus Station, hoping that someone might pick it up and read it.

I release all expectations from this action. I will just post this and see what happens. When the book is ready for printing I will announce it via Facebook (If Facebook is still the relevant vehicle by then).

In the meantime, whoever reads this, I hope your life is deep and fruitful. These times are strange indeed.

just pondering

2010-05-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

I've been having some thoughts that are decidedly not politically correct and I'm not sure how to deal with them. Maybe I'll use this old blog that nobody has gone to in many months to air them. Perhaps somebody will give me an argument, or an agreement, or an earnest discussion. Let's just see if anything happens.

Let's face it. Everybody dies. Some die young, some die old. Suffering is a part of life. We should be compassionate with one another as fellow sufferers and mourners of the dead. Is it really the government's responsibility to try to put an end to these normal facts of life? Wouldn't it be better for the government to concern itself with the distribution of resources and wealth, and especially to stop directing resources and wealth into destructive activities such as war and the corporate destruction of the ecosystem? Wouldn't it be better for the government to direct its energies into helping each person discover his/her capacities/aptitudes, and then empowering each person to do meaningful, constructive work according to his/her capacities/aptitudes, channeling the resources and wealth so that each person can make a sustainable living doing meaningful, constructive work? Then each person could afford his/her own preventive, basic health care. Government-funded health care could be reserved for emergencies, and for those massive, life-threatening conditions and diseases which are by-and-large caused by the destruction of the ecosystem due to government-funded corporate greed.

Well, huh? What?

THE LIMITED POWER OF ETERNITY

2009-10-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

I'm selling my latest batch of home-recorded songs on CD for $8. It's called "The Limited Power of Eternity." Let me know if you want one. Rather than use ink and paper I am posting all the lyrics here. If you buy the CD and want the lyrics just check this posting and read 'em. Thanks for listening!

MONEY IN THE MAIL

Getting out of Gotham was the best thing we could do;
That town ain’t seen no sunshine since the spring of 62.
It’s hard to step on the rats once they get bigger than your shoe
And really, once they get that big they’re much too tough to chew
So we set out for the country just like Henry David T.
A flat bed Ford, a can of paint and a yearning to be free.
Mama she sat up in the front with the baby on her knee
And every time we’d hit a bump that baby’d shout with glee

CHORUS: Coming home across the fields with catfish in the creel
You call the dog and kiss the wife and make the baby squeal
And once a week without fail there’s money in the mail
That’s how it’ll be once we get daddy out of jail.

Daddy never lied to us unless it was in fun
We’d sit around the fire when the supper things was done
And he’d pull out his bag of tales and tell them one by one
Then send us laughing off to bed when all the yarn was spun.
I guess that’s how it happened on that rainy summer night
When daddy sat us down and said, I’ve had an awful fright.
Sheriff Brown is on my trail, his net is drawing tight.
We said, Daddy, tell another one, you’re really hot tonight.

Now the grown-ups say there comes a time in the life of every kid
When he starts to question everything the grown-ups ever said
But daddy, don’t you get those crazy ideas in your head
We’re with you till the bitter end, we don’t care what you did.
Now the night is warm and moonless and the old coyote’s still
And spikes of summer lightning strike the ridge behind the hill.
We’ve got our movements all worked out, we learned our signals well
Tonight’s the night we’re gonna spring old daddy from his cell.

THESE TREES

These trees were planted by my father
Before I was even a seed
Yet through the roots of memory he brings me
Everything I will ever need
So now is it you I see before me
Approaching through the orchards in the night
The branches of your arms reaching to hold me tight.

These trees have lived such a long time
That now it’s time to cut them down
For like all else they’re locked toward the winter
And there’s no way to turn around
So sweetheart let us keep the fires glowing
Though the book of love was written long ago
With every page we turn she sings I love you so

O come and look out on the water
As she casts the reflection of the moon
The renegade who came to steal your lovelight
Is now lying on the haystack in a swoon
For to fathom the secret of the seasons
Would bring the proud man to his knees
So take my hand and let us freely wander through these trees.

A WHEELED WORLD WILL ROLL AWAY

See the silver highway rolling on, see the golden fields of Avalon
The green hills hiding in a veil of grey
Many colors fading into one, a radiant union like the sun
To reach before your life is over.
Look again the wheel is losing spin
Look again the ring is wearing thin
The sunset colors splash and fade away
Many kindred souls have come and gone
They plucked the highway with their song
And now they sleep beneath the clover

A wheeled world will roll away (X 8)

In the sky the swans are winging home, see the chevron shifting like a poem
The birches blazing in their autumn clothes
Every son of thunder knows his end, the place where home and highway blend
The bend that draws the homesick sinner
In the time it takes to tell the time little birds compose their closing lines
The last song fades into the afterglow
A screen door slams and a barn door swings
And a hound dog barks and a woman sings
The bell is ringing, time for dinner.

A wheeled world will roll away (X8)
I told the road to take me down the road
But the road refused to take me down the road (X2)

On the road the cars keep rolling on
In the night they wake you with their song
The life they call to mind seems far away
So you turn and seek the shadows deep
And travel lightly into sleep
And make the changes without knowing

(Chorus)

MORNINGSTAR

This world is a big place and the people all gather In buildings and cities where the big rivers flow
But there’s a road that leads out into wide open spaces And it’s there that I’m fixing to go.
So I found me an acre in the Anderson Valley On a high wooded ridge with a view of the sea
And I met me this woman named Emily Carson And I asked her to live there with me.

Sweet was that summer, 1967, languid the days in the warmth of the sun
And the wind in the pines like a whisper from heaven brought no portent of the trouble to come.

Winter was hard but we met some good people,
Refugees from a commune they called the Morningstar Farm
Deep were the nights by the old Danish woodstove Burning thoughts as a way to stay warm.

Emily had a brother, he came up from El Cerrito,
He was broken and homeless and ravaged by cocaine
And he wrestled with demons seven weeks on the back porch
Until the winter finally gave in to the spring.

One morning in April we found him sitting by the woodstove,
clean shaven and lucid and squirelly-eyed
He said I’ve had a vision of a pathway untraveled, and a call that will not be denied

You see the answer is simple, it’s like a wheel in a wheel
It’s like a night in the day, like a day inside the night
It’s a gift to be given, it’s a secret to reveal, it’s a love to bring into the night.

That summer was a scorcher and the wind burned the corn
And the carrion crows locked in circling flight
Emily grew restless, distant and forlorn Like the wild fires that raged through the night

I should have known it would happen and one night it happened,
There were tears and accusations, tantrums and blows
And in the morning there was nothing but a note and a daisy
And a dust cloud hanging over the road.

Last night awakened by the first wolf of winter; in the morning the hills in a blanket of white.
Sometimes I swear that there’s no music finer than the sound of the wind in the pines.

Well, this world is a big place full of buildings and cities
And the cruelty gathers where the big rivers roll
But there’s a road that lead out into wide open spaces
And it’s there that I’m fixing to go.

LOVE BUZZ #3

Well, how could this happen? Was I not immune
To the thrust of the sun and the draw of the moon?
I’m working on Sundays. I’m getting no sleep.
I’m drinking cold coffee and I’m thinking in Greek.

I got a love buzz, I got a sweet tooth
I got a tendency for telling the whole truth.
Well, you know that burning urge they talk about
All the time?
Well, I got it bad, baby, and I got you in mind.

Well, maybe a vacation would settle my mind
Like Christmas in Mexico where the sun always shines.
Well, I’m living on oxygen, I’m traveling light
But I get mighty hungry in the still of the night.

I got a good nose for the smell of a striking match
I’m like Pinocchio baby, I got no strings attached.
Well, you know that freaky Friday feeling like a wind chime
Well, I hear it ringing baby when I get you in mind

So you don’t see the connection, you don’t follow the groove
Of the curve of your words or the way that you move.
I’m a slave to your intentions, my loss is your gain
I crave your attention like a dog on a chain.

Tender is the feeling like a freshly laid bruise
that you notice one evening while reading the news.
Well, I tried to ignore it, I tried to be cool
But it spread cross my body and it turned me into a fool

So wiggle that sweet walk, give me a sugar rush
I got me a line of talk that’s bound to make you blush
Well, I don’t know where this might go
By the time we get to the cherry wine
It’s just a feeling, baby, when I get you in mind.
Well, I don’t know where this is gonna go
By the time we get to the cherry wine
Cause I got a love buzz, and I got you in mind.

NO ROADS THAT DO NOT BEND

Well, I went to check out the Mystic Maze south of Kingman, Arizona
Where the People of the River lived before the Age of Petroleum
But in the changing light I saw no remnant of them there,
Just a red tail rising on the currents of the air
And I turned to Kate and I said, “Do you know what’s happening here, my friend?”
She said, “There are no roads that do not bend.
There are no roads that do not bend.”

We’ll I stepped into a time machine just to get my kicks
I went back to 1955, I was driving down route 66
And I had to pull to the side of the road just to stop and stare
All the cars were round and old and in serious disrepair.
And I turned to Kate and I said “Do you know what’s happening here, my friend?”
She said, “There are no roads that do not bend.
There are no roads that do not bend.

Why don’t we take a long drive on the highways and the byways.
Let’s visit every national park in the nation.
For the hour is slowly moving in,
The winds of change will soon begin
To leave all hobos stranded at the station.

So you’ve holed up in some river town in the Sacramento Valley,
Or maybe you’ve gone back to Mom and Dad in their sweet suburban oblivion
Or have you sunk your roots somewhere your children can’t get in?
You who used to liken yourself to pollen in the wind.

Well, I have to blow this candle out, the mosquitoes are too thick
And with each hour my passion grows like a fire on an oil slick,
Well, why do you have to be so quiet? Can’t you make a sound?
Don’t you feel that big wheel turning underneath the ground?

And I turned to Kate and I said, “Do you know what’s happening here, my friend?”
She said, “There are no roads that do not bend.”
She said, “There are no roads that do not bend.
There are no roads that do not bend.”

BABY BOY

Now that you’ve had some time to find your way around the hexagram
In every quiet clocklike chocolate moment of the night
Seeds of new concern are germinating in the aftermath
Looking at life on one hand while on the other hand looking at how we life
I wonder how do you feel about the baby boy?

Before he was a pedestrian he was looking out through the universe
See here boy, we got a promise here
We’re gonna try to make you smile
After awhile he was dancing around as if to embrace the universe
And nothing I say can approximate the way you make me smile
I wonder how do I feel about the baby boy.

Bless my father dreaming tonight in the loving eye of the television
Bless his long term vision to be the last good man in Babylon
Bless my mother’s lovely face as she worries about the television
The nuclear family scatters under the threat of a nuclear holocaust
I wonder how do I feel about the baby boy.

The military argues the prosperity of a war
Even you liberal lovers of the good life, look how well you live
Well, these things are done on foreign shores, you need not even know
Think about all this precious freedom in which to realize yourself
Tell me how do I feel about the baby boy.

In good time a man of peace comes walking down the road
Scuffly patent leather sandals ringing out over the cobblestones
He says there are no more fires burning in the fields of heaven
Hush now, this is the hour of division, the government from the firmament
I wonder how do you feel about the baby boy?

OUR LADY OF THE BREEZE

Hail Mary, full of grace. Hear how the trees rustle in the wind
Holy Mary, mother of God, how are you?
Bless my soul this life of mine! A quivering course to the heart of love.
Truth and darkness intertwined together.

Everywhere I go the eyes of death are at my shoulder
Stand and take your orders
Deeper still my spirit sinks into the well of Maya
Ooh loo roo la da la da

In the night this pilgrim passes, remembering when he stood on the mountain of God
Take my pain, cruel whips and lashes do not mar you.

Other pilgrims hurry by to clamber up the ladder, to falter at the alter
Still this equal thirst demands its portion of the water
Ooh loo roo la da la da…

In the lake a raindrop splashes. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord
Save your skin, the neon flashes, the word confuses.

Hail Mary, full of grace. Hear how the trees rustle in the wind
Holy Mary, mother of God, how are you?
Hail Mary, full of grace. Hear how the trees rustle in the wind
Holy Mary, mother of God, how are you?

THE PASSING OF A TUNE

We made a stop in the city, the windshield was dirty
The mechanic, he told us the news
She was inclined then to thumb it, but I was far from it,
I hadn’t got over the blues
It was God’s holy half acre, it was Market and Jones;
I was counting the holes in my shoes

And there was a drag queen, she was buying her outfit for the ball
And there was a beggar out paying a penance for us all.

She lived a short walk from Macys, my fingers were greasy
I guess I approached her too soon.
There was a man in the lobby, he must have been crazy,
Howling like a dog at the moon
And I confess when she asked me I told her your name
O, I thought that she might change her tune.

And there was an air preacher preaching a sermon to the air
And an old Catholic barber was making a crucifix out of hair.

There was a time I was gallant, my gold was my talent
I chose to distribute my wealth.
For then my life was an ember, I can’t even remember
When I first came to mistrust myself.
O, I saved some time for the book I was reading to you
But now it just sits on the shelf

And there was a moon goddess saving her body for the moon
And there was a songwriter mourning the passing of a tune.

WHILE ON THIS EARTH WE STAND
When morning breaks on the wheel of time
The stars will fade and the sun will climb
Immense and holy, grand design, Gloria Deo

Our daily labors we attend
Our earthly courses to defend
Unseen, our spirits must ascend in glory Deo.

How great the mystery of our lives!
In sleep we wake and in dreams we rise
To chart the secrets of the skies, Gloria Deo.

Don’t waste this moment, this gift of time
Throw out your beacon, let it shine
Let Spirit use your heart and mind
While on this earth you stand.

When darkness falls in the form of the night
The stars again through the curtain break
Infinite vision! Holy light! Gloria Deo.

How strong this yearning! How sweet it’s cease!
How deep the stirrings of release!
Take back your part of heaven’s peace
While on this earth you stand.

When darkness falls in the form of the night
From cosmic reaches the starlight breaks
Infinite vision! Holy Light! Gloria Deo

Gloria Deo, Gloria Deo, Gloria Deo

© 2006 by Jim Nail

two poems

2009-10-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't been reading or writing the blogs for awhile. As an act of intention I will post this:

I found two poems in one of my old journals, written on May 12, 1997. I generally think I am a better songwriter than a crafter of stand-alone poetry, but these tickled me, so I thought I would post them here:

Poem #1

In the heart of a blue spruce night
in the reflective waters of a cascadian lake
a bright green fireball falls
the trail fades before it can be traced
it seems to linger a little longer in the reflection
These things never seem to reach the ground,
muses the hermit
as he tosses a stone into the lake
but it's too dark to see the ripples.

Poem #2

Signs abound, stationary in stone, fluid in time
but haste not, ye traveler, in your interpretation
That black cat crossing your path may be more about the dog
that is chasing hi than about any ill luck he portends.
That spread-eagled ladder inviting your path down the sidewalk
It may be better to stand under
than to understand.

Small Boat Still Sailing

2009-10-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

I'm letting some people know that the entire novel is still available on this blog. In the archive list click on the posting dated January 8, 2009. This will be Chapter One. You can follow the thread from there.

Thanks for reading!

Jim

mysterious happenings on the oregon coast

2009-07-18T11:42:00.001-07:00

So Thursday night around midnight I walked out on the beach and the breakers were cresting with a pale blue glow. Dinoflagelates, bioluminescence. I wasn't sure at first until I walked down to the shoreline and kicked the wet sand. It sparkled like faery dust. Up the beach a group of aging hipsters on their way to Burning Man were celebrating the 5oth birthday of one of their members, a female fire dancer who was juggling several flaming hula hoops.

The next day we hiked out on Cape Lookout. Someone had attached a leaf to the sign advising hikers on what to do if they encounter a bear ("if a bear attacks, fight back"). The leaf was notched so that it looked just like the face in The Scream by Edvard Munch. At first I thought it was just an oddity of nature until we came across several more similarly notched leaves on the trail. See photos.

Coincidence?

No Roads That Do Not Bend

2009-06-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

www.myspace.com/amazingflyingsky

Another new song on My Space- follow the link to hear it.
This is a new, lower and slower version of a song I had posted in the past. It's in memory of Kate Wolf who was a friend. I had the good fortune of being asked to play accordion on a couple of her albums. In her song, "These Times We're Living In" Kate wrote: "If I could I'd tell you now there are no roads that do not bend." That line kept rolling in my head as I was driving through the Mojave Desert where the road often seems to stretch unbendingly all the way to the horizon.

The Mystic Maze is a large system of furrows near the town of Needles, California, created in ancient times by the Old Ones. I stood on a bluff and looked out over the fields at the changing light of dusk but I couldn't see anything. Later an old Mojave told me that they are best perceived from the air, which is interesting because when they were created air travel was not a reality. Or was it?

Small Boat Still Sailing

2009-06-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

Don't like to be so self-involved, but one question keeps bugging me. Over a period of months I gave away my entire novel, Small Boat Sails into Big Mystery, a chapter at a time. What I want to know is, who read it and what did they get out of it? The response at the end was minimal. One friend said the ending was more "religious" than most of the books she reads. A friend who is a pastor said he was disappointed by Claudia's behavior at the end, but he saw it as the typical excess of a "new Christian."

The story that unfolded as I wrote the book continues to unfold within me and resonates in waves with what is currently happening in my life. Other people, in stories, songs, conversations, letters, are using the image of a small boat sailing on a big, dangerous ocean to describe the mystery of our current era.

I don't know what else to do with this book. It is not my first novel, but all the others seem like "practice" for this one. I know there is something to be said for the craft of art, how it is something to be honed, like fine woodwork or watercolor technique. I put a lot more into the craft of this work than anything else I have written. But ultimately it was more like a storm that raged through me than a project I was working on. I have no idea if I have created a marketable product. That's why I gave it away, rather than tried to sell it. Some say that people don't take seriously the things you give away. They only value the things they pay for.

The book was not intended to be "religious" or promoting any specific religious doctrine. Among other themes, I was exploring the contrast between a spiritual presence taking the form of Jesus against the confines of organized Christianity.

If you haven't read the book and you want to, start with the posting dated January 8, 2009, Chapter One, and continue from there. My light is still lit. Stop in a see me anytime.

A Wheeled World Will Roll Away

2009-06-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been mostly using the blog to let you know when I post a new song on My Space. They let us post ten songs at a time now and I try to keep ten there at all times. The latest went up yesterday. It's called "A Wheeled World Will Roll Away." I wrote it in 1992. Brendan was 12 and Devin was 9 and it was looking like my traveling days were over. Little did I know that in 12 years I would have a job that would send me flying and driving all over the continental United States, amassing a large catalog of new songs and stories. Now that job is gone and the song suddenly takes on a new, welcome resonance. Follow the link to listen to it, and the other nine songs currently posted:

www.myspace.com/amazingflyingsky

Here are the lyrics:

A WHEELED WORLD WILL ROLL AWAY

See the silver highway rolling on, see the golden fields of Avalon
The green hills hiding in a veil of grey
Many colors fading into one, a radiant union like the sun
To reach before your life is over.
Look again the wheel is losing spin
Look again the ring is wearing thin
The sunset colors splash and fade away
Many kindred souls have come and gone
They plucked the highway with their song
And now they sleep beneath the clover

A wheeled world will roll away (X 8)

In the sky the swans are winging home, see the chevron shifting like a poem
The birches blazing in their autumn clothes
Every son of thunder knows his end, the place where home and highway blend
The bend that draws the homesick sinner
In the time it takes to tell the time little birds compose their closing lines
The last song fades into the afterglow
A screen door slams and a barn door swings
And a hound dog barks and a woman sings
The bell is ringing, time for dinner.

A wheeled world will roll away (X8)
I told the road to take me down the road
But the road refused to take me down the road (X2)

On the road the cars keep rolling on
In the night they wake you with their song
The life they call to mind seems far away
So you turn and seek the shadows deep
And travel lightly into sleep
And make the changes without knowing

(Chorus)

artichoke tonight

2009-05-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

Tonight I have a 30 minute gig at the Artichoke Music coffee house on Hawthorne Street in Portland, 8 PM. I'll be joined by my good friends David Peyton on flute, Leslie Logan on violin, and my lovely, faithful wife Claire singing harmonies and making miscellaneous weird noises.

Right now I'm feeling very insecure about my singing voice- a great disconnect between the emotion behind my songs and what seems to come out when I try to perform them. I'm not fishing for complements here, just trying to give an honest description of where I'm at. Tonight I hope to lay low, work with the microphone and try to get out of my self a little, into the love (make love not art).

If you are local and you are free, please come and hear us, and the other fine musicians who will undoubtedly be performing at this fine venue.

early light

2009-05-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Another new song on My Space- please listen; it's the one called early light. Feel free to listen to the others too, if you'd like. Here's the link:

www.myspace.com/amazingflyingsky.

This was one of many songs I wrote in the mid-seventies after I first discovered there is more to spirituality than just being a good Methodist. In fact, holiness is not so much a virtue as it is a presence, one that is as close as the air we breathe, and is accessed not so much by our efforts to achieve it as by our surrender to its loving insistence in our lives. Hence the lyric:

There is no choice, he said, it's all been done before you
Matters of surrender are not left to choice or chance
So stop your aimless running, there's a place in the circle for you
We're meeting on the hillside, won't you come and join the dance?

I was also under the strong influence of progressive bands like Yes and King Crimson at the time, so I tried to infuse my songs with a spirit of rhythmic and harmonic experimentation. I hope this song still speaks, 30 years later.

Love Buzz #3

2009-05-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

Another new song on My Space. This one's just for fun.

One morning I was making a pot of my favorite fair-trade coffee- "Love Buzz" by equal exchange. I started singing:

Well, I got a love buzz
I got a sweet tooth
I got a tendency
For telling the whole truth...

Wow! A song! So I went to the internet to check the title. It turns out there is already a song called Love Buzz, originally by a Dutch band called Shocking Blue, who also gave us the song "Venus" which was a big hit for Bananarama and was later featured in a very silly ladies' shaver commercial. The original Love Buzz was also covered by Nirvana.

So I call my song "Love Buzz #3", the first Love Buzz being the Shocking Blue song, the second being the fair trade coffee. Mine is the third. Listen to it please:

www.myspace.com/amazingflyingsky

new song on myspace

2009-04-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

I posted another new song on My Space, plus a short blog on how (and why) I record my songs. The link is:

www.myspace.com/amazingflyingsky

The song is about the contrast between two lifestyles. On one hand there's the drop-out-get-back-to-the-country-escape-society lifestyle. On the other there are those who want to plunge themselves into the heart of the human condition in all its ragged glory, usually best accessed on the streets of the City. Wendy Waldman wrote a great song on this subject. It's called "Back By Fall"; the best rendition is by Maria Muldaur on an album called Sweet Harmony. I borrowed a line from her song for mine, but first I contacted her through My Space for permission. She was graceful enough to write back, but her answer was no. So if you listen to her song next to mine you might catch the line that was changed.

Here are the lyrics:

This world is a big place and the people all gather
In buildings and cities where the big rivers flow
But there’s a road that leads out into wide open spaces
And it’s there that I’m fixing to go.

So I found me an acre in the Anderson Valley
On a high wooded ridge with a view of the sea
And I met me this woman named Emily Carson
And I asked her to live there with me.

Sweet was that summer, 1967, languid the days in the warmth of the sun
And the wind in the pines like a whisper from heaven brought no portent of the trouble to come.

Winter was hard but we met some good people,
Refugees from a commune they called the Morningstar Farm
Deep were the nights by the old Danish woodstove
Burning thoughts as a way to stay warm.

Emily had a brother, he came up from El Cerrito,
He was broken and homeless and ravaged by cocaine
And he wrestled with demons seven weeks on the back porch
Until the winter finally gave in to the spring.

One morning in April we found him sitting by the woodstove,
clean shaven and lucid and squirelly-eyed
He said I’ve had a vision of a pathway untraveled, and a call that will not be denied

You see the answer is simple, it’s like a wheel in a wheel
It’s like a night in the day, like a day inside the night
It’s a gift to be given, it’s a secret to reveal, it’s a love to bring into the night.

That summer was a scorcher and the wind burned the corn
And the carrion crows locked in circling flight
Emily grew restless, distant and forlorn
Like the wild fires that raged through the night

I should have known it would happen and one night it happened,
There were tears and accusations, tantrums and blows
And in the morning there was nothing but a note and a daisy
And a dust cloud hanging over the road.

Last night awakened by the first wolf of winter;
in the morning the hills in a blanket of white.
Sometimes I swear that there’s no music finer
than the sound of the wind in the pines.

Well, this world is a big place full of buildings and cities
And the cruelty gathers where the big rivers roll
But there’s a road that lead out into wide open spaces
And it’s there that I’m fixing to go.

Distant Shores

2009-03-31T21:42:00.000-07:00

This seascape was painted by my father, Clelland "Spike" Nail sometime in the late 1950's. Dad worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, California. He was often gone for several weeks at a time, working on the atomic bomb tests in Nevada and the south Pacific islands. For solace, in his spare time he roamed the deserts, the beaches and jungles, and painted watercolors of what he saw. What a treat it was when he sent these paintings home in the mail!

Eventually his conscience would not let him remain on this job. He quit in the late sixties and spent the rest of his life working for the cause of nuclear disarmament. As a family this meant a drastic adjustment in economic status but we didn't mind.

We miss you dad. Your work is not forgotten, including this work, which is now framed and hangs above my piano.

Moving On

2009-03-30T19:41:00.000-07:00

OK, it's been two weeks since I posted the last Chapter of Small Boat Sails into Big Mystery. I said I would mothball Jim's General Blog and use this one from now on for all my blogging compulsions.

If you read the book you can still comment here on any of the posts, or send me an email:
nail.james5@gmail.com.

If you haven't read the book, you can still do so. Start with the third posting in the Archive list, dated January 8.

I am adrift now, not sure where to take this next. The book and its oceanic presence has been such a strong part of my inner life for a long time. I need to demonstrate by my actions that I stand behind my favorite self-created slogan, MAKE LOVE NOT ART. It is not our accomplishments, and especially not the money or the fame we desire from our accomplishments that matters. It is placing oneself fully in the flow of love from which all creativity streams. This is not something I have yet learned in my deepest tides. I still grieve that at age 61 (next week) I have still not "arrived". There is only one terminal at the end of this earthly journey and we should not be in such a rush to get there.

I have a lovely, actual spiritual community here in Portland. The idea of establishing a global, virtual community via the internet is intriguing, but not essential. Here is my probing heart. Are you out there? Do we have anything to say to each other?

THE END OF THE STORY

2009-03-16T15:32:00.000-07:00

The following two posts concludes the novel, Small Boat Sails into Big Mystery. Thank you so much, all of you who have journeyed the whole distance. If you have been reading this, now is the time to come out of the closet, like Amanda, the patron saint of lunch meat. Please leave your comments, lavish praise, constructive criticism. If you can't post comments on the blog, send me an email at one of these addresses:

nail.james5@gmail.com
amazingflyingsky@hotmail.com

And if you liked the book, please tell your friends and neighbors. If I decide to try and get it published it would be nice to say I generated a certain buzz with it when I posted it on my blog.

I think after this I will mothball Jim's General Blog and just use this one for all my blogging purposes. So don't be a stranger, come and see me any time, and I will do the same for you.

Thanks again!

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: DELIVERANCE

2009-03-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

Just outside the hospital the sun is going down. Wilbo scans the parking lot for Arno’s old green beat-up Falcon, but it isn’t there.

Why am I not surprised? he asks himself. To further complicate the matter, he has no idea where he is. He had no idea there was even a hospital in this town and of course he wasn’t paying attention the morning they brought him in. Standing at the curb, he has a wistful moment. All those people who came to see me when my house was rebuilt, all the presents, the music, the dancing! Now here’s the great Wilbo Hoegarden, recovered from wounds received while rescuing the girl, and not even his brother is there to meet him! Where are your friends when you need them the most?

But he doesn’t dwell on this thought. What’s the point? Self-pity has always been one of the most useless of human indulgences. Wilbo searches the sky for the position of the sun. Setting in the west, then. Ocean to the west, that’s the direction he should go.

It takes him a good hour, zigzagging through unfamiliar streets, keeping an eye on the sun, before he begins to recognize landmarks. By this time the sun is gone but it’s OK. He knows where he is and he feels fine, with only a little tightness in his stomach. All that late night wandering through the hospital has served him well.

Some light still remains in the sky when he emerges from the tunnel and stops to gaze down on his own little beach, to sniff the air and to read the signs. It’s been a clear day; there isn’t a cloud. The tide is coming in. A few beachcombers are picking about on the rocks near the driftwood forest; otherwise the beach is deserted.

Almost always at this point he quickens his step, anxious to see what might be waiting for him at home. Tonight is no exception. Hurrying along the trail through the driftwood forest he feels grateful for the skill of the good doctors who stitched him up- everything seems to be holding. And there’s his house. As usual, he slows when he approaches it.

The first thing he notices is that the yard around the house has been cleaned up- all debris from the party is gone except for a few unbroken glass bottles which are lined up neatly on the porch. Then he sees two things at once- two objects stuck to the door, messages! One is sealed in an envelope while the other hangs loose from a thumbtack.

He grabs the envelope first, rips it open, recognizes Carl’s scrawling handwriting.

WILBO, I TOOK IT UPON MYSELF TO PUT A LOCK ON YOUR DOOR WHILE YOU WERE GONE. HOPE YOU DON’T MIND- MEN OF STRONG CONVICTIONS WATCH ONE ANOTHER WITH SUSPICION (HOFFER)
CARL
Ps: the key is in the blue bottle.

Yes, in fact there is a padlock on the door and one of the bottles on the porch is a blue one with a mouth wide enough to fit a key. But Wilbo’s attention is drawn anxiously to the other note.

The paper is pink. The left hand margin is ragged like it was torn out of a tablet. The words are written in bold black marking pen. When he grabs the note he sees that some of the ink has blotted through and stained the door.

WILBO PLEASE COME AND SEE ME 9 PM, THE LIGHTHOUSE, CLAUDIA

Wilbo looks at his watch. Eight twenty-three. The numbers seem to flash at him like an alarm going off. At the same time he feels a great weariness rushing into his legs from all the miles he has walked, now that the walking is over.

Claudia! He reads the note over and over, looking for its hidden meaning. Why is the paper pink? Why is the margin torn? And why did she use a marking pen? She must have stood on the porch and tacked the paper to the door before she wrote the words, as evidenced by the ink blotting through. Nine o’clock! I just have time to get there if I set out now.

Nonetheless, he honors his weariness, briefly. He finds the key in the blue bottle, opens the padlock and steps inside the house. It’s dark and quiet and clean. All the books are back on the shelves. All the papers are neatly stacked. The dishes are washed and set to dry on the wooden rack. The bed is neatly made. He sits on it, then he lies on it. He feels his body sinking into the mattress like a stone into a deep lake. But all the while a single word is ringing in his head: Claudia! Claudia! Claudia! Eventually its force overwhelms him, pushing him up out of the bed, through layers of heavily weighted air. In a moment he’s out of the house and in the next moment he’s off down the beach leaving the door ajar, the padlock hanging open on its hasp.

As he trudges doggedly along the trail, pressing against the forces of inertia, her name keeps repeating itself on his lips, Claudia! Claudia!

The Lighthouse is crowded. Musicians are setting up, perhaps the same musicians. The stage is littered with sophisticated electronics and primitive percussion. Wilbo stands at the door searching the crowd for her face. When he finally sees her, it’s not as he expected. Somehow he pictured her sitting alone at a table; perhaps she’d be reading a book; perhaps there would be a single red rose lying on the plate in front of her, like some lonely heart’s club code. What he isn’t expecting is to see her standing behind the counter, wearing an apron dusty with flour, laughing with Jimmy while tossing a wad of pizza dough back and forth between her hands.

When she looks up and sees him her smile falls for just a moment before another smile replaces it, a deeper smile, with less mirth. She raises her arm, wiggles her fingers in a wave. She says something to Jimmy, then she pulls off her apron, tosses it to the floor, and comes swooping out from behind the counter toward him. Her arms are out and she throws them around him, burying her face in his chest. The embrace is tender but chaste, although she remains in it for a long time.

“Wilbo, I’m so sorry,” she blubbers, “It didn’t turn out well. But it’s OK, I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Do you want something to eat?”

Before he can answer the door bangs open. Claudia looks up and releases her hold.

“Oh, good!” she says, “Here’s Arno.”

Wilbo drops his arms to his sides. His feeling is somewhere between rage and terror. But Arno’s body language is disarming, if not a little overdone. He comes slinking in with a sideways shuffle, his head bowed to the floor, his hands clasped behind his back. Claudia and Wilbo have broken their embrace. Arno sidles up to both of them but he addresses Wilbo directly.

“I know you’re mad at me,” he says. “I don’t blame you. Claudia and I talked about it for a long time. She set me straight. It takes a woman to make me understand my own brother.”

For a long, uncomfortable moment the three of them just stand there staring at each other. Wilbo can’t imagine what he would say. It’s like in a movie by Cassavetes where the silence, although speaking louder than words, still says absolutely nothing.

It’s Claudia who finally speaks. “I think we should sit down,” she says. “You can talk better when you’re sitting down. Maybe we could get something to eat.”

They find a table in the corner, somewhat removed from the bustle and the noise. The body of the lamp at the table is a hula girl and the lampshade is a palm tree over the hula girl’s head.

Claudia sits against the wall with her chair pushed back, her hands folded in her lap. Arno commandeers the entire tabletop by covering it with his arms and splaying his fingers as wide as they will go.

“I know you’re mad at me, Wilbo,” he repeats.

“I’m not mad at you Arno. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know what happened. You just left, that’s all.”

“We didn’t just leave. You told us to leave.” Arno is getting defensive. “Claudia explained it to me afterwards. At first I was angry. But then she explained it to me. There’s a lot for you to have to take in right now, Wilbo. Some things you don’t even know yet.”

This one hits Wilbo like a rubber bullet in his gut. Some things I don’t know yet? He gets the urge to just stand up and walk away, but no. He’s got to stick it out. He’s got to find out what’s really happening.

At that moment there’s a loud blast of electronic noise from the stage. The band is nearly ready. At the same time, Wilbo sees Jimmy, weaving through the crowd toward them, an order pad in his hand. He knows, momentarily, conversation will be impossible, and anyhow, he’d like this conversation to end as soon as it can, as soon as the necessary information is imparted. So he asks the most direct question he can think of.

“So, do you have a new boyfriend, Claudia?”

Claudia’s face flushes. She takes a huge breath and then she lets it out in a long, slow, studied sigh. She rocks her chair forward and flops her arms across the table. She leans forward and looks into Wilbo’s face with a strange, almost disembodied expression.

“Yes Wilbo, I do.” she says. “His name is Jesus.”

At once, a deafening chord chimes from the stage, followed by a drum roll and the chaotic squawking of a saxophone. Then there’s Jimmy, standing next to the table with his pad in his hand, standing over the three of them as they sit there dumbfounded, locked in a frozen moment of time.

With a rush of blood to the head, Wilbo stands up, nearly knocking over his chair. He turns to a strange sight. Everyone in the room is facing the cacophony blasting from the stage. Every single person is caught in the same gesture, both arms raised high above the head as if they’re all being held up by the same gang of bandits.

In his rush between the table and the door, Wilbo catches two short bits of conversation above the rumble of the band. The first voice is Claudia’s, the second is Arno’s.

“Wilbo!”

“It’s OK, Claudia, let him go. He needs to think.”

Wilbo smashes through the door into the dizzying, clear, cool night air. He doesn’t stop to look around. He doesn’t want to hear his thoughts. He wishes he could take the sound of that band with him, just to drown out his thoughts, but he can’t stay in that room. And besides, he knows where he wants to go.

A raging pain drives him on. It seems to be pulsating from the center of his chest and the center of his head at the same time. But at least his stitches are holding. He gives them a workout as he plods blindly over the wooden walkways and the stone cobbles of the warehouse district.

Finally his destination appears in the distance as a fuzzy, neon glow. A number of cars are parked on the street outside, although he recognizes none of them. Still, that’s a good thing. The place will be full of people and warmth and cheer, and drink! He can already taste the heat rolling down his throat.

He throws open the door like a cowboy entering a saloon and scans the crowd for a familiar face, but he sees none. It’s all right. There will be friends at the bar. The peripheral people come and go.

His usual stool by the salty shell peanut bowl, is of course, occupied by someone else, a skinny man in glasses and a string tie. What does he expect? They certainly can’t hold the spot for him indefinitely. He leans over the counter, looking for Karen’s familiar face. But tonight’s bartender is someone else, a portly, bearded man he’s never seen before. The man catches Wilbo’s glance.

“What can I get for you, mate?”

Wilbo is beginning to feel a bit disoriented. He sweeps his gaze up and down, along the stools at the bar. No Carl. No Floyd. He focuses his attention on the little table by the kitchen door where Levon and Opal usually sit. But it’s unoccupied, and piled up with unopened crates of Corn Nuts.

“Where’s Karen?” he asks the new bartender.

“Oh, she had to go to Montana or someplace. Something about a girl named Jocelyn. Don’t worry, she’ll be back. What can I get you?”

The question presents Wilbo with a real dilemma. What he drinks here, almost always, what he wants, is something known as the usual, a secret formula known only to Karen and passed on to the other, usual bartender, Rick. Wilbo has no idea what’s in it. It’s something strong and sweet and amber in color, over ice, with a maraschino cherry floating in it. That’s all he knows. His perplexity is immense. He glances up at the colorful display of bottles on the shelf behind the bar and his eyes fall on a long slender flask of amber liquid with a distinctive label.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, “How ‘bout a shot of Johnny Walker on the rocks.”

“Sure, matey. Black or red?”

Wilbo’s head spins. He feels like he’s going to fall off the barstool. In fact, he does slide off the stool, landing shakily on his feet. The hum of voices in the room continues to swell and reverberate, but in the small space surrounding the bartender’s question, an attentive hush builds, as if to the handful of people in earshot the fate of nations hangs on this one simple decision: black or red.

Or perhaps, he imagines all this, but nonetheless, he bolts for the door. He feels nothing but the heat of bodies as the crowd parts to let him through. Snatches of conversation come to his ears and an irrational part of his mind ascribes them to his departure.

“Well, if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen,” someone says, and from another part of the room, a woman’s voice: “His intentions were good but it’s all in the delivery.”

Thrust out of a room full of warm bodies for the second time in one night, into the cool and falling dark, Wilbo staggers like a drunken man over the cobbles of Water Street. In fact, he’s feeling real, physical pain now, a stretching and tearing in the incision in his stomach, but it’s nothing compared to the whirlwind of emotions raging through his arms and legs and mind. He feels the boundaries of his body dissolving. He feels the powerful energy of a great sorrow pressing against the restriction of a lump in his throat. He feels like a small boy on vacation, left behind by his family at a rest stop. He wants to run after the departing station wagon crying, Mommy! Daddy! He knows he has to run after something, or toward something. As he stumbles onto the wooden walkway of the warehouses he realizes what it is.

The realization slows him down a bit- that and the pain in his stomach. He’s feet on the planks make loud, clonking noises; his step becomes steady and determined; his pounding heart and racing breath seek equilibrium.

He steps through the notch in the wall onto the quiet beach. Memories flood his mind. He remembers the time he first passed through this notch with Claudia, to walk on the beach and talk, and he remembers the other time when she left him here in anger, forgetting her shoes. Still no thoughts, just images; he crosses the dark, public beach, scattered with occasional campfires. He ascends the shoulder of the cliff and passes through the tunnel.

His own beach is deserted and very dark. There’s no moon and the stars are obscured by fog. As is his habit, he stops to sniff and scan, but he only does it out of habit; he notices nothing. He really only has one thing on his mind. The trail through the driftwood forest could be lined with mermaids for all he notices. The image of his house is fixed like a mathematical constant in his mind, and inside the house…

The door of the house is left ajar, the padlock hanging on its hasp. At first this startles him; then he remembers. Claudia’s note. His hasty departure. He pushes through the door and fumbles around on the counter until he finds the box of matches. So much is different in the house. He’d forgotten that, too. Even the counter is not where it used to be. But he locates the matches by their distinctive cardboard feel, and in the light of the first struck match he sees the lantern. He has to strike a second match to light it.

Yes, there it is, standing tall and proud in the glow of the lantern; he has a half-memory of noticing it when he first came here out of the hospital- and it’s even bigger than he remembers, bigger than the first bottle, the one he shared with Carl but drank none, a full one and a half liters, Almaden Tawny Port, plenty good plenty.

Plenty good!

He rips the seal with his fingernails and the cork pops with a lovely, resonant tone. He pours rapidly into the big stone mug, filling it to the brim. The aroma is overwhelming. He raises the mug before he drinks as if to salute an invisible comrade. In fact, his words are addressed to a specific ghost.

“I told you I never made any promises!’ he declares out loud, and he drains the mug in four large gulps.

The rush that rises to his head collides with the warmth cascading down his throat. The power of it seems to make things happen in the house. The lamp wick flickers and the shadows dance. Colored glass beads hanging from wires in the window begin to sway. A silent music from the walls themselves enters the room.

“More of this!” he cries. He fills the mug, drains it; he fills it again. The sweetness of the wine is powerful but it does not daunt him. It tastes like something his soul has been craving for a long, long time. He fills glass after glass. When the intoxication begins to hit, he slows down a little, allowing the liquid to roll over his tongue, swirling it around in his mouth, bringing it in contact with all his various taste buds.

He leans back in the chair and his vision travels in great, sloppy loops around the room. The colored glass bottles look like voodoo dancers in the window, their super-sized shadows leaping across the wall in the flickering lamplight. The bottles make him laugh. He laughs out loud at the bottles.

He sees faces in pictures, not in artwork on the walls but in the logos of products on the shelf. A Quaker in a broad-brimmed hat and a Mona Lisa smile peers out at him from a tin of oatmeal. A newborn chick, fresh from the egg, looks to peck on a can of powdered cleanser; hasn’t scratched yet! A beautiful Indian maiden morphs out of a green stalk on a box of cornstarch.

“Why do I have cornstarch?” he asks out loud, and then he laughs out loud at the question.

Why do I have cornstarch?

In throwing back his head his eyes light on something he hasn’t seen before. A poster is taped to the rippling driftwood ceiling, Mott the Hoople. All the Young Dudes. A gift from Floyd Collins and the lovely Amanda. It’s a collector’s item! Carl must have put it there. He wonders if Floyd would be offended to see this treasure stuck to his rippling driftwood ceiling with a piece of masking tape. This thought makes him laugh. He laughs out loud at the poster on the ceiling.

The room spins with his laughter and his head rocks forward until his eyes light on something else- another source of amusement! Hanging in the window on a shoestring chain, Arlequino stares back at him with his happy-sad smile.

“Oh, it’s the omelet!” he cries, and an image of Mac’s Burger Shack flies through his mind. Then he thinks of a pun, and the pun makes him laugh so hard he can barely say it.

“The omelet! It’s easy! His yolk is easy. It’s over easy!”

His laughing doubles him over. His doubling-over pulls at the stitches in his stomach. At that moment something happens. There’s a sound outside, or maybe not a sound. There’s a presence. Wilbo sits up suddenly straight and the room spins in the wake of his sitting.

It has returned then. Its pursuit of him is relentless. It’s calling him again. He knows instinctively where it lives when it’s quiet and it isn’t calling him, but it hasn’t really stopped calling him, not since the night when he first heard it calling him from behind the arched rocks. It ‘s voice has permeated the events of recent days, the voice of the skunk, the salamanders, the coming of Claudia, the turning of Arno, the mysterious appearance of Amanda, the patron saint of lunch meat.

“I know who you are” he whispers.

The words stand there solid as a rock that won’t be moved and can’t be scaled. Yet something inside of him wants to rise up against them, either that or plunge whole-heartedly into them.

“I know who you are,” he says out loud. Everything in the room seems to stop and listen. “I know who you are,” he says again, this time a little louder. “I know who you are!” He stands from the chair. He rushes to the door. He throws the door open.

“I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” he cries out into the night. But then he stops and stands dumbfounded.

Something very strange is happening out there. It halts him completely. He falls back against the house and rubs his eyes. He squints hard to clear the crust from his vision but what he sees persists. The fog has rolled in from the sky and poured out onto the beach, softening everything with a light, misty filter, but this does nothing to obscure, and even seems to enhance the mysterious event taking place at the line of the breakers.

There, at the turn of each wave, where the dark of the sea changes into the brightness of foam, a light breaks, a brilliant, blue, dancing and sparkling incandescence, streaking sideways along the crest and then, as the waves pour out along the sand, fading back into darkness. It isn’t moonlight-there is no moon, and even if there was, it would not be moonlight. The glow is emanating from the waves themselves and not from any sort of reflection. Smaller waves behind the big waves break into a similar light.

Part of him- his thinking mind- knows at once what it is. Dinoflagellates. Bio-luminescence. The phosphorescent ocean. He’s seen it before, but never with such intensity, and the explanation does nothing to subdue the effect.

He stumbles out toward the water. He’s beginning to realize just how drunk he is, but it doesn’t matter. In fact, the intoxication serves as a driving force. He reaches the shore and stands there, tottering, with the little waves lapping at his feet. His eyes are drawn beyond the flashing breakers to a dark space, and in the arch in the middle of the space, a blue blaze pulsating. The source! In the blossoming of some half-remembered pondering, a message flashes:

I can go there. I have a boat.

He turns and begins a faltering trek back to the house. The intoxication is in full bloom. He knows in time the crash will come but for now he rides high on the power he needs to complete the task.

The boat is easy to upright. A short piece of rope tied to the oarlock provides a good tow hold. He stumbles many times as he pulls the boat out to the water. Sometimes he lands on rocks, striking his knees. Sometimes the boat itself clips him in the heel. He thinks he might have hurt himself but he feels no pain.

When he reaches the water he wonders, should I take off my clothes? But by that time it’s too late. The wave has already surrounded him and lifted the boat up off the sand. He feels it tugging to get away from his grasp. No time to lose! Summoning the power, he hurls himself up over the oarlock and into the hull, striking his head hard on the bench and collapsing in a heap in the bow. Still no pain, although he thinks there might be some blood. He lies there quietly for a while and he feels the boat catch the wave and rise up toward the sky.

The voice of prudence reminds him: this boat won’t just take him out to the rocks on its own, like a faithful horse. He has to surmount the breakers. He has to use the oars. For a moment he’s afraid he’s left them behind, but no, his knee clunks against one of their splintery blades. Getting the oars into the oarlocks is another story. He almost decides it’s physically impossible before he figures it out. The small end goes in first, and it fits in from the front.

Fully oared, he scans the line of breakers for an opening. With his first stroke the oar strikes the sand beneath the waves and sends a shock of impact up his arm. Shallower strokes bring him closer to the breakline but the boat keeps turning in circles- half the time he’s rowing backward into an unknown fate.

He has his back to the breaker when it hits. It’s a big wave- maybe the seventh, and the boat catches it right beneath the curl. Suddenly there is light everywhere. The boat is filled with liquid light and light explodes off the oars, the oarlocks, the bow, the deck. Light drips from his arms and dances a wild tango at his feet.

Wilbo gives a good tug with both oars and the boat seems to rise up over a hill and sink down into a dark valley. When it rises again he can see what he has accomplished. He has passed the breakers and he is floating on the high plateau of water beyond them. He sees the shore as a dark and distant thing. He sees his house like a shadowy mound against the cliff. But even as he sees these things he feels the boat lunge forward with the next incoming wave.

The work is not done!

He gets a hearty grip on the oars and somehow manages to pull the boat around so that he faces his goal. The rocks appear much closer from here, and they also seem much stranger, presenting an entirely different face from the one visible on the beach. In the many nights staring at these rocks he has grown familiar with their distinctive burls and even on idle evenings assigned them quaint nicknames like Bob Dylan’s Stovepipe Hat, Agnew’s Ears ,the Skunk in the Pulpit Now a whole new array of shapes rises up to greet him, suggesting names like the Wounded Salamander, Gary’s Knife, the Clock on the Wall. The arch is at an angle from this vantage. He can see straight through it, and strange stalactites hang like teeth from its ceiling. The bioluminescence inside the opening is furious, leaping off the walls with each strike of the waves. For the first time, he sees the sea lions. Illuminated by the strange glow they scamper about on a narrow ledge inside the arch, casting huge shadows on the blue lit walls. When they dive their wake flashes like fireworks.

Wilbo considers his goal: to get behind the rocks. To get to the source. Nothing is as clear now as it was when he first set out, and everything seems to be happening at once. The waves are driving him back to the shore and the rocks themselves are dancing with activity- sea lions jumping, waves crashing. From the higher ledges he sees the dark shadows of cormorants dive into the light and swoop back up into the darkness. Behind the rocks the incoming waves are enormous, like mountains rolling toward him, threatening to engulf him.

He rows hard but he feels his strength failing. When the first big wave arrives it lifts the boat up high onto its summit, higher even than arch, or so it seems. Wilbo sees strange things- something that looks like a tiny village of straw houses on a cleft of the rock, and above that, some kind of writing, large symbols like ancient runes scrawled in white chalk, or maybe it’s just the droppings of many generations of seagulls. He can’t tell. It’s just a glimpse, for at that point the boat catches the gravity of the far side of the wave and begins sliding down its slope with dizzying speed.

Wilbo pulls the oars out of the water and hides his eyes like a child at the beginning of a roller coaster plunge. When he opens them again he is at the bottom of a great well of water, the walls rising up before him and behind him, veined with light. There’s nothing to be seen but water and sky; then the wall behind him advances, the boat tips forward and rises, and in the rush of water before him he sees a terrifying thing.

He is behind the rock, in line with the rock, and being lifted up by a wall of water with a relentless trajectory toward the rock.

I know who you are, he says to himself.

The rock seems to change form. Its features melt together and reassemble themselves into a face, with a smile that could be crying, and eyes hollow with laughter, yet filled with tears.

And you’re afraid of me, it says, as the downward spiral begins.

There is water everywhere, and a swift forward spinning, following by a tremendous crash and a dazzling blue concussion. His body seems to fly everywhere at once. There is no up or down, there is no here nor there, until suddenly something urgently here presses in on his mind: he is under water. He shouldn’t breathe!

His face breaks the surface and the flash blinds his eyes. Seeing nothing but afterglow he draws a huge breath and inhales a great gulp of acrid brine. He coughs violently into the air and vomits up a ball of burning light before the current pulls him under. He tumbles head over heels and a file of pain rasps his back as the wave drags him along the jagged backside of the rock. At the same time a large chunk of wood, a plank from the broken boat, strikes him on the head and pins him momentarily against the rock, then releases him into the undertow.

Better not to breathe, he thinks, I’m going to die, but the thought doesn’t sit well. In fact, the moment he thinks it a powerful force gathers in his arms and legs and he finds himself kicking and thrashing until he breaks the surface again. He flails his arms to stay afloat and he twists his torso in all directions, frantically trying to get his bearings.

The wave has taken him further out to sea. He sees the rock blinking and sparking in the distance. He can’t see the shore. He gasps and sinks, struggles for the surface, gasps and sinks again. His arms feel like stones; his stomach seems to be opening up like a mouth, and he has no sensation in his legs. As the seaweed pulls him under, the words fly from his throat, I know who you are. I know who you are…

“Wilbo!” A voice speaks his name.

Perhaps it’s not a voice, really. Perhaps it’s just a synapse firing idly in some corner of his head. But it contains his name.

“Wilbo!”

Feebly he raises his shoulders and his head surfaces slowly. Cautiously he sips the air.
There is a momentary sense of calm. He is out past the breakers now, out beyond their noisy crashing violence, out where the sea draws its energy from its depth and vastness, and not its collision with the land. It’s dark; there is no more luminescence, although a few faint stars glow weakly overhead. Wilbo rides the slow rise and fall of the waves and he feels his body giving in. Soon he will surrender entirely and sink below the surface into the welcoming arms of death, his bride.

Shouldn’t there be memories? You always hear stories of people remembering things at the end, their entire lives flashing by like time-lapse photography. He tries to conjure up some memories but nothing comes. Nothing. Maybe his name, Wilbo Hoegarden. That’s about it. Am I really going to die? Where are the memories? Perhaps I’m not going to die. But how could I not die? Who could rescue me now?

He pulls his head up out of the water and looks toward the rock. It seems far away and dark but as he watches, something appears, a glow, blue like bioluminescence, but calm and steady, not flashing. It rises up out of the water and then it begins to change form, like an amoeba. Part of it presses out and forms a limb, then another. The limbs begin to stride, they are legs, and their striding propels the light-shape forward across the surface of the water. Arms form. The arms are swinging, the legs are striding. There is a sense of determination and purpose. Colors appear, and shapes; a diagonal band of red, like a sash, a robe, a cloak, hands, fingers, a face, a beard, a long, streaming mane of flowing brown hair.

It’s Jesus, walking on the water, an image straight out of the painting that Wilbo remembers staring at every Sunday, on the wall behind the pulpit, through the long unintelligible sermons and the endless droning hymns. It’s the very same Jesus, the same tender, androgynous face, the same blemish-free skin, the same fine hippie hair and beard, the same faint halo of light around the head, the same soapstone flowing robes, the same beautiful feet.

It’s a hallucination, he tells himself, it can’t help me.

He closes his eyes and makes his final surrender to the downward pull of the water, but the moment he does he feels something underneath him, something soft and warm and flesh-like, yes, flesh-like, and cradling, like arms, arms! Under the water he feels his body come to rest in a pair of human, cradling arms. He rolls sideways into the softness of a warm human breast, and through a wet cotton tunic he hears the sure and steady beat of a human heart. He feels his body rising up out of the water, cradled in the arms, pressed against the breast where the human heart beats.

When he opens his eyes the face he stares into is unbearably sweet, sweeter than tawny port. He can’t take it. He closes his eyes quickly. He begins to feel a gentle rocking motion as he is carried across the waves.

This can’t be, he tells himself, this is just too corny! But every time he opens his eyes there’s that face, that famous Sunday school face, the watercolor eyes dripping with compassion, the tender little curl of a smile on the lips. He thrashes just once to get away but the grip just becomes surer, firmer. He closes his eyes and gives in, ever so slightly, to the forward motion, to the strange, rhythmic cadence of feet over water.

The motion is remarkably swift, moving with nearly the speed of a surfboard, cresting the waves and gliding down easily on the other side. When he opens his eyes again, Jesus is smiling right at him, and to his amazement he sees there between the smile-parted lips the large dark gap of a missing front tooth.

This is way too corny. This is like something out of a movie.

He thrashes once more and cries out loud, “God damned movies! I’ve seen too many God damned movies!” as he feels his body come to rest gently, safely, on the dry sand of the beach.

ENDPIECE: OUT OF THE STORY INTO THE SNAPSHOT

2009-03-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in a house in some suburban inland city a snapshot is stuffed away in a drawer full of other things, of broken pencils, torn ticket stubs, dead or dying flashlight batteries, tarnished copper pennies, empty prescription bottles. It’s creased randomly in two places, probably from someone stuffing something else into the drawer, and its edges are frayed and dog-eared.

It’s a picture of Wilbo Hoegarden, at his usual spot, between the tilt-a-whirl and the bumper cars with the wooden bench and the breakwaters behind him. At the lower right hand corner of the picture is a smudged and faded date: August 23rd. The year itself is torn off and lost in the repository of forgotten years. This is one of countless forgotten snapshots, stuffed away in countless cluttered drawers in a million inland suburban homes. This one might even be considered the Jungian archetype of the forgotten snapshot, the perfect Platonic form to which all forgotten snapshots aspire.

But nonetheless, there’s a story there.

It’s a fine midsummer day, August 23rd. The air is bright and balmy and the sun is beating down with the confidence of a celestial body that has overcome all its previous springtime reticence. Hordes of happy people are moving along the boardwalk. They’re dressed in shorts and short sleeves and tanks, and even a few brazen young girls are wearing bikini tops. The tilt-a-whirl is whirling, the bumper cars are bumping; in the distance the Big Dipper rounds the hairpin with a creaking rumble and a chorus of screams.

Wilbo stands by the ticket booth reeling out The Flowers of Edinburgh, wagging his head to the rhythm. He looks about the same as he looked when the story started out. Maybe his joints seem a litter stiffer, his hair a little thinner, but his eyes are clear, his face is calm and peaceful. He clicks his heels like Bojangles, executes a funny little chicken-like movement with his elbows, and segues gracefully into The Boys of Bluehill.

Up the street a gaggle of children approach, maybe twenty of them; they’re all wearing odd little carnival hats; some of them have flowers painted on their faces. Two skinny, short-haired women appear to be in charge. One holds a long sparkly plastic wand with a spout of green tassels on the end. With this she seems to be directing the children, but her attention is focused entirely on the other woman. Both the women are talking at the same time but the other woman, with two hands free, is engaged in a series of expansive gestures, arcs and barrel rolls and back-row summons, like Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic.

Wilbo thinks to himself, she’d be a kick to mime. But then something happens. One of the children, a little girl, breaks loose from the others and comes to a standstill before him, her eyes transfixed on the movement of the bellows. She’s holding hands with another girl so the other girl has no choice but to stop as well, and then a trio of boys, looking elsewhere, collides with the girls, and a major pile up ensues. At first the two women don’t notice; they just keep walking, approaching the tilt-a-whirl, the woman with the wand waving it causally. When they finally reach the cotton candy stand and turn around the scene has changed entirely.

All the children have stopped and all the children are staring at Wilbo, who seems delighted with the attention. He has modulated, most appropriately, into The King of the Fairies in E minor, and he puts a little shuffle into his feet to accompany the wagging of his head.

One little boy breaks away from the others and begins to mimic him, drawing his arms back and forth like bellows and duplicating Wilbo’s shuffle with his feet. Wilbo zeroes in on him and copies him back, making his movements a little smaller, a little more boy-like, capturing the boys distinctive sideways wobble. The boy gets the joke. He raises his right arm and wiggles his fingers, and Wilbo does the same, employing an old trick he’s perfected over time, allowing the weight of the concertina to pulls the bellows open so he can play with one hand, at least for a few notes.

This draws great laughter from the other children which in turn emboldens the boy to try other things, knee bobs and shoulder rolls, all of which Wilbo reproduces, nearly simultaneously. It isn’t long before the boy has met his match and he tumbles backwards and rolls into a little boy-sized cannonball. Wilbo does the same. Of course to do so he has to stop playing and toss the concertina aside. In the cessation of music there comes a chorus of children’s voices.

“Me!”

“Me!”

“Do me!”

“Do me!”

This is where the picture is snapped, perhaps by the instamatic camera of one of the two skinny chaperones. Let’s just look at the picture for a moment, before it goes back in the drawer, and both the story and the drawer come to a close.

Wilbo is in the foreground and slightly to the left, standing on the boardwalk by the railing, next to the coin-operated telescope, his concertina lying open-bellowed at his side. He’s scratching his head like one who has to make a difficult decision, but there’s an expression of vast amusement on his face. A crowd of children is gathered around him. One little boy is sitting on the planks at his feet, looking smug and self-satisfied, while all the rest of the children are raising their hands and waving them about. In the background, on the right-hand side of the picture a man in a straw hat is leaning out of the concession stand to hand a cone of cotton candy to a toddler no bigger than the cotton candy itself. In the center background a few pink clouds hang in a brilliant blue sky. Below the sky, and just faintly visible in the photo’s faded grain, the horizontal line of the ocean beckons like an invitation out of the known into the unknown, out of the commonplace, into the mystery.

LAST REMINDER

2009-03-14T09:00:00.001-07:00

Only one chapter to go. It will post next Tuesday, Saint Patrick's Day. Thank you all so much for reading this. Remember, if you are behind, all the chapters can be found numerically in the Archive List, starting with Chapter One dated January 8.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE BACKGROUND CHANGES

2009-03-14T08:45:00.001-07:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

Small troubled thoughts occur to him in his sleep and briefly interrupt the succession of blissful dreams. There is some kind of chasm across which he must jump, and there are people on the other side, waiting to applaud his success, if he is successful in jumping across the chasm. Carl Rogers is there, on crutches, and there is Doralina Steindl Klaus, in her floppy hat, swaying like a willow tree, swaying in the wind. He thinks of Levon Blue Lake Moon, how sometimes you call him Levon, sometimes you call him Blue Lake. But Opal is always Opal. He thinks of Will and Arnie, and he thinks, we’ll never go back to those names, and he thinks what will they call us next? He thinks of names from fiddle tunes, Billy Berwick, Captain MacGreal, Denis Murphy. He thinks of names of Indians, Crazy Horse, Black Elk, Little Big Man. What will they call us next? So much hangs on this unanswered question.

Claudia returns the following afternoon. She’s in jeans and a grey sweatshirt with the hood pulled down. She wears no jewelry. There is nothing around her throat, nothing in her earlobes. Her only nod to color is a blue and green babushka, tied over her head. Her hair has been pulled off her shoulders and rolled into a bun under the cloth.

“Claudia, what’s happened to you? You look different.”

“Oh, I didn’t have time to get pretty for you, Wilbo. I’m sorry. I just wanted to see you.”

He reaches for her hand. “You look pretty to me, Claudia. You don’t have to do anything.” This is true. She looks as pretty as ever, but something about her appearance disturbs him, no so much for himself as for her.

“I got a job,” she tells him.

“You what?”

“You heard me. I got a job.”

“What for? I though you had plenty of money.”

She pulls her hand away from his. “I never told you I had plenty of money. You just inferred that because you think I’m a rich bitch.”

She’s kidding, he hopes. He smiles at her. “Where are you working?”

“At the Lighthouse. Waiting tables, the lunch shift. I wouldn’t work the dinner shift. I need my nights.”

Another wave of disturbance is carried to him by this piece of information. “I thought you couldn’t deal with those people. The last time I talked to you, you said you weren’t even sure you could live there any longer.”

“Oh, they’re not so bad, not really. I was wrong. I had a long talk with Jimmy. It isn’t like I thought it was. They’re not… I don’t know what they’re not, but Jimmy’s a good guy, really. He has some good ideas. I take it back, what I said about Jesus freaks. Besides, I really do need the money. My dad, he’s not a bottomless pit, or at least he doesn’t think he is. But what about you? You look great? Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, I feel better. Just a little weak around the middle. Look ma! No hands!” he raises his arms to demonstrate that he is completely free of intravenous attachments. “I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m looking forward to a decent meal.”

“I could bring you something to eat. Do you think they’d let me? The Lighthouse has great food.”

“Well, sure. You could try. But Claudia…” He stops himself, realizing that an urgent question has risen in his mind without actually announcing to him what it is.

“What, silly? You sound like a dying cowboy in a movie.”

“When I get out I’m… I’m going back to my house, you know. It’s OK for me to go back to my house. My brother Arno, he thinks it’s not OK for me to go back to my house.”

“Well, why would Arno think that?”

“He thinks it’s dangerous. He says, well, I’ve been attacked. It’s not a safe world out there. Of course it’s not a safe world. I don’t care about that. I want to live, not just survive. But he also says I’ll be in a weakened state when I first get out. I should go and stay with him for the first couple of weeks, or with someone else.”

Claudia sits with this for a while. She stares off into space. When she speaks it’s clear that she’s tapped into a deeper level of emotion than the one she came in with.

“Don’t talk about the future right now, Wilbo,” she says, “Or the past. The present’s just about all I can handle.” She looks at him and their eyes lock. Suddenly there’s a connection, like a little bit of kinko syncho quinto, like if either one of them was to move the other would move in the same way. But her next words completely break the spell.

“I’ve made some bad mistakes, Wilbo.”

He can’t let this pass. He grabs her arm. “What do you mean by that? Bad mistakes?”

She pulls away and shakes her head, like she’s shaking off a swarm of flies. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. You’re not ready to hear that. Forget it. I’m sure you’ll go back to your house. There’s no reason for you not to go back to your house.”

Then she’s quiet, and Wilbo is quiet, but he’s not quiet inside. In fact he’s churning with questions, none of which he can ask because they all have to do with the past, or with the future, the present being nothing but a hospital room, and how much can you say about a hospital room?

“Where’d you get the book?” she asks suddenly.

He glances down at The True Believer tossed open at the side of the bed with the dust cover falling off. “Oh, that was from my friend Carl, Carl Rogers. You know Carl, don’t you?”

“Well, actually we’ve never met, but you told me all about him. He’s the guy who said you spend too much time alone. Alone with your thoughts.”

Wilbo nods. “Yep. The very guy,” he says.

She covers his hand with both her hands. “Well, maybe you should be alone with your thoughts now. For a little while at least. You need to rest. Don’t worry, I’ll stay here with you. Get some rest, Wilbo.”

Vague troubled ideas rise up weakly to resist her suggestion but an overall sense of fatigue weights them down and he closes his eyes. He doesn’t know how long she stays there with him. He pieces together impressions in the misty borderland between waking and sleeping.

She had a long talk with Jimmy. He gets a picture of Jimmy, wailing away like a true pagan on the congas across from the blazing glow of the fire.

Don’t talk about the future or the past. The present is about all I can handle right now. Why did she say that? Especially at that moment, when the conversation turned to his release from the hospital, and where would he go? Bad mistakes! What bad mistakes? I’m sure you’ll be able to go back to your house. There’s no reason for you not to be able to go back to your house.

Over it all, though, there’s something larger, humming and hovering like a great alien mother ship over a barren Arizona landscape. Whatever it is it makes all other concerns seem petty and trivial, especially the matters of attraction and affection and all the bruises and the pleasures of the ego. What is this thing hovering? Maybe it’s just sleep. If it isn’t sleep, sleep is nonetheless riding in on its coattails. He feels sleep gathering like heavy blanket of clouds in the sky of his mind, asking him to forget all these disturbances and just follow.

When he wakes its night. A quick glance at the clock fixes his place in time: 7:45 p.m. The nurse is back in the room- the same one- banging about some metal objects in the corner.

“Hey!” Wilbo announces himself.

The nurse turns. “Mr. Hoegarden.”

“Why do I always wake up for you? Where’s the pretty nurse?”

“Oh, I lied. There are no pretty nurses here. But that little girl came back, just now. She said not to disturb you. She just wanted to bring you some food. Seems like you’ve been complaining about our rations.”

These words usher in an aroma of fresh garlic and basil, like a Mediterranean breeze.

“We don’t normally allow food this exciting into the hospital,” the nurse continues. “I snuck it past the armed guards.”

It’s a big piece of home made hand-tossed pizza smothered in pesto sauce, layered with crumbles of feta cheese and wedges of sun-dried tomatoes. There’s also a salad with generous portions of arugula. The effect this has on his appetite is explainable. What surprises him is the way it also cross-wires down his synapses into his sex, eliciting an immediate erection.

“You have to eat hearty and get strong,” the nurse tells him. “They’re talking about letting you out tomorrow.”

Wilbo looks up in surprise. “Tomorrow?”

“It depends on your brother. He was here tonight. He came with the girl, actually. He was negotiating with the management, trying to convince them you’ll be well enough to get out tomorrow. What do you think? You be well enough to get out tomorrow?”

But Wilbo’s head is swirling. “He came with the girl?”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe he didn’t come with the girl. They showed up at the same time, though. You’re a little testy, aren’t you? You must be feeling better.”

Wilbo considers throwing something at the man, maybe The True Believer. But he reigns in his impulses.

“Well, don’t you think I ought to try walking around a little first, before they decide to let me out? I haven’t even been out of this bed yet.” A question occurs to him, suddenly: where have I been peeing? Another, more pressing question follows immediately: where can I pee now?

“Well, of course you can get up,” says the nurse. “You should get up and walk around. Test out your sea legs.”

Immediately Wilbo is sitting up on the edge of the bed, and then he slides off the bed onto his feet. At first it feels like his stomach is going to rip open and all his guts are going to spill out onto the floor. The nurse grabs his arm. “Steady mate, you’ll get used to it.”

Wilbo straightens his back and places his hands gently over the scar on his abdomen. “Gotta pee.”

“Straight on back,” the nurse tells him.

The first few steps are the hardest, and Wilbo’s thinking, I’m not getting out of here tomorrow. But then he feels his strength kick in as auxilliary muscles wake up and rush to the aid of the ones that were wounded. He reaches the bathroom and finds, to his relief, the lid left up.

Unsupported by anything, standing free and slightly swaying, he feels what seems like a lifetime of impurities streaming out of his body. When he’s done the sense of calm and relief is far greater than one would expect after nothing but a good pee.

“Come eat this pizza before I do,” calls the nurse. “Then you can walk around. Go ahead, just walk anywhere you want. I’ll come see how you did after awhile.”

So the nurse leaves, Wilbo eats the pizza, and then he gets up to walk around. It isn’t until he’s out in the hall that he stops to notice what he’s wearing- a suit of institutional white pajamas underneath the standard striped hospital gown that ties in the back.

Well, at least you can tell the doctors from the patients, he thinks. But it doesn’t really matter. For the most part people treat him as if he’s invisible, and he can go just about where he pleases. With every step he feels his body grow stronger as if the kinetic energy from his legs is knitting him together, a stitch at a time. He wanders the hallways peeking into rooms where people lie or sit in various levels of infirmity, where loved ones armed with balloons and bouquets gather around ailing family members, and where lonely old men languish away in the blue television glow. He begins to like the idea of getting out of here tomorrow. He begins to believe it’s possible.

Shortly after midnight he is approached by his friend, the male nurse whose name turns out to be Nash, as embroidered on the pocket of his white jacket.

“Mr Hoegarden. You’re still walking?”

“Of course I’m still walking. What? Do you think I’d be dead by now? And also, I can answer your question.”

“What question?”

“Yes. I think I could go home tomorrow. In fact, I don’t think you could pay me to stay.”

The nurse glances around surreptitiously. “Well that’s good because you’re up way past your curfew, man. We don’t like to keep troublemakers like you any longer than we have to.” He takes Wilbo’s arm. “Do you realize how far you are from your room?” Gently he begins to guide him down the long dark hall.

Wilbo sleeps deeply through the quiet hospital night and wakes refreshed to a vision of Claudia sitting in the chair beside his bed. She looks better today. She’s wearing a black scoop neck leotard and a strand of African clay beads around her throat. She has earrings and her hair is loose and flowing on her shoulders. When he sees her he smiles both inside and out. He feels great. He feels like he’s ready to go home.

Then there’s a scuffling sound from across the room and another person stands beside the bed.

It’s Arno. He’s got the same punky hairstyle and the same earring and now he’s wearing a black, sleeveless tank top with a bold, dramatic picture of three empty crosses on a barren hill.
Wilbo’s heart falls and his face falls with it.

“Oh,” he says to Claudia, “I see you’ve met my brother.”

Arno doesn’t give her a chance to answer. He swoops in like a buzzard and grabs Wilbo’s hand.

“We met at the Lighthouse. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for turning me on to that place. It’s exactly what I needed. It’s like coming home. I’m not alone anymore.”

A sharp jab of pain bites Wilbo in the stomach and it makes him gasp, but he does it quietly, hoping nobody will notice. He realizes what it is, or at least what it means. I need to move my bowels!

Even so, he’ll be damned if he’s going to let on. He clenches his jaw, tightens his sphincter muscles, and contemplates his reply. But Arno speaks first.

“You saved my life, Wilbo. I knew you’d do it. I knew you’d come through.”

Wilbo feels a flush of anger. “I didn’t save anyone’s life,” he replies. “And I haven’t made you any promises. I already told you that.”

“You don’t have to make me any promises, Wilbo. You’ve been called. You’ve just been obedient to the call.’

Wilbo glances frantically at Claudia who just sits there, unsmiling. How can she just sit there, unsmiling? How can she just listen to this line of bullshit without saying anything?

But he decides to let it go. “So you’ve come to negotiate my immanent release,”

Arno smiles. He seems equally relieved by the change of subject. “Yes, we have, actually. I’ve been talking to the doctor. He thinks you’re ready, but you’ll need a few more days of bed rest. And the stitches come out in a week.”

At that point another wave of pain hits and his stomach makes an audible rumble. He closes his eyes and a brilliant display of phosphenes explodes on the darkened screen of his eyelids. He feels dizzy. Mostly he’d like to open his eyes and find that he’s alone, or at least Arno would be gone. He wouldn’t mind if Claudia was still there. He decides to vocalize his thoughts.

“Just go away,” he says, his eyes still closed.

“Wilbo…” It’s Claudia’s voice, and it softens him a little. He qualifies his statement.

“For a little while, at least. Go away for a little while. Come back later.”

He opens his eyes to see them both staring at him with matching dumb looks on their faces, like a pair of bookends.

“But… we’ve got it all worked out,” Arno says. “My car is waiting outside. We're taking you to my house.”

Wilbo releases an exasperated sigh. “Well, if you really want to know, I gotta take a shit,” he says. “Then, I don’t know, I just want to think about it for awhile, OK? Go away. Come back in a couple of hours, OK?”

Arno looks at Claudia but she doesn’t look back. She has her eyes fixed on Wilbo. Her expression looks like her thoughts are going a mile a minute. Finally she breaks the impasse but not the silence. She leans over and plants a kiss on Wilbo’s forehead.

“It’s all right,” she whispers in his ear, “Don’t worry. Trust him.” Then she straightens up and turns to Arno. “Let’s do what he says.”

But Arno’s not so quick to agree. “Wilbo, this is silly. We can wait out in the hall while you take your crap if you want. We came to get you. We came to take you home.”

Wilbo closes his eyes again. The pressure in his bowels is almost unbearable and the word home bounces around in his head like a bad oath. He hears Claudia’s voice.

“He just needs to be alone. I know what he’s talking about. I’ve been there. Let’s go. Let’s do what he says. We can come back later.”

Arno grumbles and mumbles unintelligible words under his breath. Wilbo keeps his eyes closed until he hears their departing footsteps, and he’s quite certain he’s alone in the room. Then he leaps out of bed. The pain of the impact is only slight this time, and the turbulence in his digestive tract is overwhelming. He reaches the toilet in the nick of time.

There follows a day of waiting, as long as it is deep. Having successfully voided his body of every solid and liquid impurity, Wilbo feels clean and strong and whole and ready to go. But nobody comes for him. Breakfast comes which he eats with appetite, and then lunch, which he eats with some reserve. He meets the pretty nurse at last, but she’s not that pretty. He asks her several times if anyone has come for him, or if anyone is waiting for him, but she knows nothing. In the afternoon, the doctor himself appears, a shaggy unkempt man who shows him his charts, presents him with a laminated table of the four food groups, and pronounces him fit for release with a sharp knock on the knee. But when Wilbo asks him has anyone come to get him, he knows nothing.

“That’s something you’ll have to ask the nurses,” he says.

Through the long afternoon Wilbo wanders the halls. He talks to people. He even attempts a few sketches of some of the nurses and interns but they aren’t very good. All he has is a number two pencil and a pad of ruled binder paper. Nonetheless, the subjects act impressed and the pictures get passed around the hall.

“This is what I do for a living,” he tells them, but it doesn’t ring true.

When evening falls he’s back in bed, wondering what they’re going to bring him for dinner, when a white-coated figure pops a bushy head into the room.

“Hey! What are you doing here?” It’s Nash, the night nurse.

Wilbo looks up. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? I live here.”

“No you don’t. You’re gone, man. It says here they released you this morning.”

“This morning?”

“Yeah. Your brother came and got you. Don’t you remember?”

Wilbo feels his whole body make a little jerk. “Oh yeah? Well, I must have died then, and this is hell.”

“Get up man, and get your clothes on. And hurry. We’ve got a liver patient supposed to occupy this bed in half an hour.”

“My clothes? Where are my clothes?”

“In the bag. On the floor. Where they always were.”

On the floor? Where they always were? Wilbo giggles. “You mean I could have just got dressed and walked out of here any time?” he asks.

“Well, it’s what you’re gonna do now, and make it snappy,” Nash replies. “Or I’m in big trouble. God, how was I to know this was happening?”

Sure enough, there’s a bag, on the floor, with all his clothes, except that they’ve been laundered in some kind of heavy starch and folded into a tight little bundle. The pants are so stiff he has to force them open with his legs and the shirt sits on his shoulders like a cardboard box.

Nash is already making tracks behind him, ripping sheets off the bed. “Don’t forget your book.” he says.

Wilbo takes the book but his thoughts are still in a puzzle. “But… what if there’s no one here to pick me up?” he asks.

The nurse stops what he’s doing just long enough to frown. “You’re a healthy man, Mr. Hoegarden,” he says. “You don’t need anyone to pick you up. You can go anywhere you’d like.”

With a nod and a chuckle, Wilbo takes one last look around the room until his eyes light on the one memorable object, the clock on the wall. Six thirty eight. Without another word he hurries to the door.

REMINDERY

2009-03-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

Two chapters to go. Hang in there. If you get lost find your place in the archive list. Chapter One is the third post, dated January 8.

Thanks for reading!

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: THE BODY MENDS

2009-03-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

Stick figures appear against a continuous background of sky blue. Their bodies are elongated, like shadows at twilight, and they move slowly from side to side with their arms trailing slightly. They seem to be peering in from somewhere. The general tenor is inquisitive, curious, like they’re saying, what’s that in there? That’s interesting. We’ve never seen anything like that before.

Time doesn’t want to behave itself. It jumps ahead in fits and starts, then it slows nearly to a standstill. Sometimes it even seems to move backwards. Things that happen seem to happen again for the first time, even though they’ve already happened.

A door opens and someone comes into the room. This event repeats itself numerous times, both forward and backward. It seems to be the focal point of some sort of information. Whenever it happens a new piece of information is transmitted, or maybe it’s the same old information being transmitted, again and again. The stick figures are the ones who transmit the information. They are the ones who come and go.

For a long time, Claudia is there in the room with him, or maybe she comes and goes, like the stick figures. He’s not sure. He just knows that sometimes when he opens his eyes she’s there in the room with him, sitting in the chair next to his bed. He’s not sure if there are times when he opens his eyes and she’s not there. He can’t remember the time when she was first there, but he feels quite certain there was a time before that, when she was not there. He just can’t remember when it was.

It occurs to him that they’ve been talking, both of them. He’s been talking, she’s been talking, they’ve been conversing, but he’s not aware of what they’ve been talking about. It’s like the sound of a television left on all night in the next room. This bothers him. He doesn’t like the idea that he’s conversing with someone without any awareness of what he’s saying. He tries hard to bring his attention to the sound of his own voice. The effort of this attention forces his voice to be silent. The silence of his voice forces his attention away from his voice, onto the details of the room.

Suddenly it just pops, not unlike the popping of one’s ears. Suddenly everything just falls into place. A rush of consciousness floods his mind and he is fully awake and aware of everything that’s happening to him.

He’s in a hospital bed. His arms are harnessed with clamps and straps. Coils of plastic tubing bloom out of his wrists like tendrils of ivy. Something heavy and tight is pressing against his stomach. He can’t see what it is, or reach it with his shackled hands. Claudia sits in a chair holding his immobile hand. She’s wearing a modest blue blouse and a plain silver chain around her throat. He can’t tell what she has on underneath.

“Claudia.” he says. His voice is weak but he is fully inside it. He knows he has entered the conversation.

“Wilbo.”

“What have we been talking about?”

Claudia smiles, a little sadly. “Well, I’ve been doing most of the talking,’ she says. “You’ve just been agreeing with me. You know, you’re very agreeable when you’re drugged.”

“How long have I been here?” He has the urge to sit up in the bed but he lacks the strength to accomplish this.

“Oh, about twenty-four hours. You were in surgery yesterday, but I don’t suppose you remember any of that. It went very well, though. You’re gonna be allright, Wilbo. The doctors were amazed. They said it was almost like Gary knew exactly where to stab you so he would miss all the major internal organs. It’s weird and I hate to say this, but that seems like something that Gary would do.”

It’s not like her words bring back the memories for the first time. The memories are there. It’s more like she throws open a door and the light spills in and makes the memories visible. He follows the memories backwards. He remembers pulling the knife up into his stomach, so Gary wouldn’t get it. He remembers Gary’s words just before the attack: what have I done to offend you, Wilbo? He remembers how he and Claudia had moved in perfect synchronicity to grab the wrist that holds the knife. He remembers the boldness of his own words as he stepped into the alley: come away from the girl! He remembers the shock that sent him reeling when he first peered into the alley and saw them there, Gary thrusting himself into Claudia’s helpless body. This image is the most powerful. He won’t go back any further. He stops and his eyes begin to fill with tears.

“Oh, Claudia, are you all right?” he whimpers. “Did he hurt you bad?”

“Hell, no, he didn’t hurt me. I think I hurt him if you want to know the truth. But it doesn’t matter. Those cops, they hurt him a lot worse. I felt a little bad for him, actually. They clubbed him hard. Police brutality, but that’s OK. He deserved it.”

Wilbo closes his eyes and the tears spill out and slide down his face. With his eyes closed it’s harder to make time behave itself. Faces and words crowd in on him and he begins to forget where he is or who he’s talking with. He opens his eyes quickly.

“Where is he now?” he asks. “I mean, Gary. What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. They beat him up and took him away in a police car. He won’t bother me again. I’m sure of that, this time. This time it’s the end.” She squeezes his hand and a current of pain shoots up his wrist. “You’re a brave man, Wilbo. That was cool, what you did. My hero.”

Wilbo feels a wave of dizziness sweep over him and at the same time a host of little thoughts comes swirling about like leaves caught in the circular eddies of a whirlwind. He wants to say something but there’s so much to say, and the thoughts don’t fit together in any conventional manner.

“Claudia,” he begins, then he pounces on one of the thoughts at random. “There’s something… there’s something behind the rock.”

Claudia doesn’t say anything. How can she? He needs to be more specific.

“There’s something behind the arch rock,” he continues. “I need to go there. When the tide is low you can almost walk to it. That’s how low it is. The tide, I mean. And the seals have come back. I mean the sea lions. Carl tells me they’re sea lions if they bark. Seals don’t bark. Carl tells me I spend too much time alone. Alone with my thoughts. That’s why I’m telling you this. There’s something behind the arch rock. I need to go there.”

Claudia squeezes his hand again. This time it doesn’t hurt. “You be quiet now, Wilbo. You’re not making any sense. Just get some rest.”

Wilbo sighs. “I know I’m not making any sense to you, Claudia. But I am making sense. My brother, Arno tells me that God is calling me. I don’t know what I think about that. Hey, I don’t even know if I believe in God. But there’s something behind the arch rock. The other night it called me. I was naked and I just went into the water. Then… I don’t know what happened, it was like it just stopped calling me…Claudia! Something started happening to me the day that I met you. I’ve just been thinking it was you. Sometimes I thought that you actually had some kind of sorcery, and you’ve been practicing it on me, deliberately, for some reason or another. Maybe just because you’re young and you wanted to try it out. Young people like to try out new things. But now, I don’t think so. In fact, lately, I’ve been thinking that you aren’t the cause of any of it.”

When he says this he feels her loosen her hold on his hand.

“I mean, you’re a part of it. You’re an element, like the salamanders or Arno, or the way I lost my mime. It’s like it’s happening to you, too, like it’s happening to both of us, like when we do that thing, that kinko syncho quinto, it’s like something bigger than the both of us takes control. And then the other night I saw something behind the arch rock, like a light or something, it was not quite visual, but it was calling me, and I was naked, and I went out into the water, but then, I don’t know, it just stopped. I… I think maybe that’s what it is, or maybe that’s where it is, behind the arch rock. I want to go there. At low tide I could almost walk there, or I could wade there, or if I had a boat…”

His words trail off. His eyes are closed now, and in his mind’s eye he sees the arch rock and the waves crashing around it, and the faint blue light glowing behind it. Then words form, but he’s not sure if he says them out loud or he just thinks them:

I have a boat!

There follows a string of images, almost like a movie. Goddamn movies! In the movie he’s dragging the boat out to the breakers. He’s naked, and he feels the cold waves splash over his naked body as the boat takes float. Quickly he hauls himself over the oarlocks into the boat and grabs the oars. At first he has to struggle hard to overcome the waves. All this time there’s this exciting, discordant music playing, like in a move when a ship is battling against a storm at sea. He finally pulls through the breakers onto the smooth glass of the sea beyond. After that it’s just effort, the sure and steady effort of rowing toward the jagged arch rock, backlit by a pale, blue, unearthly glow. The music changes. It becomes mysterious and ethereal, and woven with a velvet strand of high, wordless female voices. The music is so seductive it draws him into a world of pure sound, and little by little the visuals begin to fade. Soon he’s just floating on the music and there is nothing else. He lets himself go and rides currents of peace and bliss for a long time. Updrafts of peace and bliss elevate him and he soars above the world, slowly drifting down until he catches the next updraft. At one point in the process he thinks to himself, I’ve lost consciousness. This thought has enough arresting power that it jolts him slightly, and he opens his eyes.

The room has changed. It’s dark, for one thing, and also, there’s nobody in it. He scans the room until his eyes light on a clock. It says one o-clock, but that doesn’t tell him everything he needs to know about the time. The door opens and a person comes gliding into the room.

“Mr. Hoegarden,” says the voice, a man’s voice, “I see you’re awake.”

Wilbo tries to sit up, and is painfully reminded of his restrictions. “Oh, hi doc,” he says weakly,

“How am I doing?”

“I’m not a doc,” says the voice, “Just a nurse. Sorry, I’m not as pretty as the last nurse. I’m just here for your goodnight cocktail.”

Ok, then. It’s one A.M. The nurse starts fumbling around with something on the sideboard.

“So, how am I doing, nurse?” Wilbo repeats his question.

“Well, as a matter of fact you’re doing incredibly well,” replies the nurse as he fills a syringe. “There was absolutely no major internal damage. Of course you’re gonna have a nice scar to impress your grandchildren. Now we just gotta juice you up with antibiotics. A wound like that is an open invitation. I’m glad to see you looking so bright and chipper. You were pretty out of it earlier.”

Wilbo smiles. “Yeah. I’m in of it now.”

“That little girl that was in here today. She your daughter?”

The words sting. Wilbo doesn’t answer. He just stares straight ahead. Perhaps the sting shows on his face.

“Whoops,” says the nurse. “Guess I overstepped my professional boundaries. Here, roll over. Take your morphine.”

Wilbo rolls over and he feels the needle. After that there’s a long, dark, blank space with very little in it, maybe a few images, some criss-cross grids, a couple of treble clef signs. When he opens his eyes again it’s day, with all its sound and color. There’s someone else in the room but he can tell at a glance it’s not Claudia.

It’s Arno. He doesn’t recognize him at first. He’s got a new hairstyle, a short, croppy cut with lots of pomade, so that his whole scalp is covered with tufts of greasy hair, pointing in every direction. He wears a sleeveless vest of bleached white denim. But the weirdest thing is the earring, a single silver hoop in the left ear.

“You look different, Arno.” Wilbo says suddenly.

Arno startles slightly. Wilbo realizes that this is probably the first thing he’s said since his brother appeared on the scene. Arno shakes off his surprise and forms a benign smile, like an undertaker.

“I am different, Wilbo. I’m a new creature. I’ve been born again.”

Wilbo narrows his eyes. “Yeah, Ok. But your hair’s different, too.”

Arno doesn’t answer this but he reaches up instinctively to pat his head, as if to make sure all the spikes are in place.

“And what’s with the earring? Is that symbolic or something?”

Arno brings his hand down from his hair to his ear. “Yeah, I guess it’s symbolic. It’s like a wedding ring, except even more so. A wedding ring you can take off and your finger’s still there, just the same. But you take the earring out and you got a hole in your ear. Jesus had holes in his hands and his feet. It’s like being married to Jesus. Wilbo, we’ve got to talk. Are you awake now? Do you feel OK enough to talk?”

Wilbo looks around the room until he finds the clock. It says nine-thirty and there’s sunlight coming in the window. At least he’s got his bearings in time.

“Yeah, I’m Ok. What do you want to talk about?”

“I was here yesterday, after the surgery, but you were out cold. I just want you to know that. I came as soon as I heard. I’m your brother you know.” Arno gets up from the chair and walks to the window. He seems to be looking for something outside. He turns back to the room. “I talked to mom. I called her as soon as I got home. She seemed to be OK. I mean, she didn’t fall apart. You know mom, she doesn’t fall apart. She said, you tell Wilbo to get better and come see me. She wants us both to come see her at Christmas. So I said, mom, Wilbo doesn’t have any money. He doesn’t even have enough money to pay the hospital bill. It’s like, he doesn’t have any health insurance or anything. So she said, Oh don’t worry about that. I’ll just sell one of my stocks. You tell Wilbo don’t worry about the hospital bill. I can pay the hospital bill. I just want you two to come see me at Christmas. That’s what she said. So I guess you don’t have to worry about the hospital bill, Wilbo. Pretty cool, huh?”

Wilbo smiles a thin little smile. “You should have told me that later, Arno. I wasn’t at the point where I was starting to worry about the hospital bill yet.”

Arno sits back down on the chair. He gets a perplexed look on his face. He’s perplexed by something Wilbo said, but there’s more to it than that. It’s like a programmed perplexity, like there was something he wanted to say and he was just waiting for an opportunity to say it. Wilbo knows this but he doesn’t know why. Arno is his brother. He just knows these things about him. Arno speaks.

“I don’t want you to call me Arno anymore.”

“Why not? It’s your name.”

No, it isn’t. My name is Arnold. They call me Arnie. Your name is William. They call you Will. Will and Arnie. Those are our true names. The names we were given. Those were our names before we sinned. That day when we became Wilbo and Arno. That was the day we first sinned.”

Something like a bolt of blue light, like the light behind the arch rock, illuminates Wilbo’s mind for just a flash when Arno says this. He speaks at once. Perhaps at another, more guarded time he would have weighed his thoughts and stopped the words.

“That’s not true, Arno. You have to change your name. More than once. The background changes and you have to change your name to fit the background. It’s like Little Big Man. Maybe we aren’t Wilbo and Arno anymore, but we aren’t going back to Will and Arnie. We’re becoming something else.”

Arno sighs. “You’re not making any sense, Wilbo. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

Wilbo’s exasperation is almost tactile, like a fluid surging through his veins. “I’m tired of hearing that I’m not making any sense. That’s what Claudia said, too. I’m making more sense now than I’ve ever made before.”

“You’re not making any sense, Wilbo. I’m sorry I brought it up, about the names. We can talk about it later. Besides, there are other things we need to talk about. Practical things that need to be addressed right now. Like where are you gonna go next? You just can’t go back and live in that little shack again.”

These words infuriate Wilbo, and his fury sends an instinctive signal to his body to get up and start pacing around the room. But the moment the signal reaches his muscles, even before they can respond, a jagged blade of pain rips through his stomach. It’s like he’s feeling his injury for the first time. This only infuriates him all the more, and he has to take several deep gulps of air to calm his nerves so the pain can subside.

“What’s the matter with the shack, as you call it?” he says at last.

Arno lifts his arms and drops them to his sides with a slapping sound. “Oh, come on, Wilbo, you’re living in the eighteenth century, can’t you see that? You’ve been attacked. This is the modern world. These are the end times. The world’s gone mad. People are totally out of control. People need the Lord, but they’re not all gonna find Him. That’s sad, but true. We have to face it. You can’t live in a shack on the beach without a lock on the door, without a telephone, without even electricity or running water, without a gun at least.”

Wilbo grabs rapidly at the waves of rage that are flying at him and tries to funnel them into someplace safe, where they can’t hurt him. This requires considerable deep breathing, as words form slowly in his mind.

“Arno… is that what this new religion thing has done for you? It’s made you into a neurotic paranoid. It’s stolen away your trust and love for the world. And this is what you’d like for me to embrace? I’m sorry, Arno. I’m not going there. I’m going back to my little shack as soon as I’m strong enough.” A wisp of memory of voices singing drifts through his mind. “And I will never own a gun.” he adds.

Arno is silent for a while. It seems like maybe this little speech has had some effect on him. He bows his head and folds his hands. Perhaps he’s in prayer.

“Well… at least you shouldn’t go back right away. You’re gonna need some time to heal, even after you get out of the hospital. Won’t you think about coming and staying with me for awhile, or if not with me… maybe you’ve got a friend that you like better.”

This remark causes Wilbo’s feelings to shift, just a little. Well, shucks ,he thinks, I’ve hurt the poor little bastard’s feelings. But that’s OK. Let him stew in it for a while. He’s got some growing up to do.

“Yeah, OK, Arno, I’ll think about that one. We’ll see how I feel when they let me out of this place. The doctor says I’m doing remarkably well.”

After that neither of them speaks. Wilbo begins to feel a wave of weariness, mixed with nausea. He closes his eyes. Immediately an image appears on the inside of his eyelid. It’s a picture he remembers staring at, many times as a child; a stormy sea, three stars-Orion’s Belt- shine weakly in the distant sky. In the near distance, a sinking ship; in the foreground, a bearded man struggling against the waves. Then there’s Jesus, standing right on top of the ocean, his body bathed in light, his red robes dancing in the wind, reaching down, pulling the shipwrecked sailor out of the water to safety.

Eventually the picture disintegrates into a warm, comfortable darkness and he falls into a deep peaceful sleep. When he awakes he’s clear-headed and feeling fully cognizant of his position in space and time. The clock on the wall says six and the color of the light says PM. There’s someone else in the room, a nurse- the same nurse as the night before. He’s bringing a tray of food. It smells like cardboard and brown gravy from a package mix, but nonetheless, Wilbo feels his appetite stir.

“No more hard drugs for you, Mr. Hoegarden,” says the nurse. “You’re on your way to recovery. It’s solid food from now on.” He sets the tray on the extended table by the bed. It bears some kind of white meat with a pad of mashed potatoes and peas and a soft white dinner roll. “Oh, yeah, and there’s a package for you. Came in the mail this afternoon.” He sets the package down on the tray next to the food.

The package is obviously a book, wrapped loosely in a salvaged grocery bag bound with twine. The paper is torn open to expose the title. It occurs to Wilbo, this is not the condition in which this arrived. The hospital must censor all incoming reading material.

He rips off the remaining shreds of paper and frees the book from its bodice of twine. A paperback, obviously used and often read. Eric Hoffer: The True Believer. The nurse leans over inquisitively.

“Religious book, huh?” But Wilbo can’t answer because a wave of tenderness has made his eyes go teary. He blinks to regain his vision, then he opens the book to read the inscription.

WILBO
I’M SORRY I WON’T COME TO SEE YOU. HOSPITALS GIVE ME THE CREEPS. BUT MAYBE THIS IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO READ THIS BOOK. GET BETTER BUDDY; I’LL SEE YOU SOON.
CARL
Ps: if nothing else, it’s a good way to meet girls.

The nurse senses the moment. “Well, enjoy your food then,” he says. “I’ll check in on you later.”

That night after ravenously devouring a meal of bland white hospital food, Wilbo reads The True Believer from cover to cover. It takes him until 3:47 AM and his attention never leaves the page. It’s not that he is all that much interested in the subject matter, or that he feels any great investment in Hoffer’s train of thought. To be honest, he finds Hoffer’s style of writing rather maddening. The man uses expressions like the great leader, the true believer, men of conviction and passion. But he’s obviously talking about something negative, something bad for us, a dire warning of a great danger. Yet he won’t commit himself to his role as a lone prophet crying out in the wilderness. It’s all so objective. Some new little Hitler could just as well get a hold of this book and use it as a guidebook to fashion some brand new mass movement!
But these thoughts don’t matter. What he feels the strongest in those chocolate-rich hours between 6:30 PM and 3:47 AM is the living presence of Carl Rogers, sitting next to him, perhaps staring into a fire, into the wee hours of the morning, sharing a mug of Tawny Port, talking about ideas, books, people, anything at all, talking in slow comfortable tones to a background of waves and wind.

At 3:47, when Wilbo finishes the book, he turns to the back sleeve and reads about the author.

At age seven, and for unknown reasons, Hoffer went blind. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was fifteen. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could. His eyesight remained, but Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading. He was completely self-educated.

There is no picture of the author on the sleeve but there is an odd little space above the writing, where a picture should be. Wilbo stares at this space until a picture of Carl Rogers appears there. When it does, he allows the book to drop to his chest and he falls into a deep peaceful sleep.

REMINDER REMINDER

2009-03-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

three chapters to go. If you need to catch up, find your chapter in the archive list. Chapter One is the third one, dated January 8.

Thanks for reading!

CHAPTER TWENTY: BLOODSHED

2009-03-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

By the time their passion is spent, the pale glow of dawn has crept almost imperceptibly into the eastern sky above the wooded hills. Naked and exhausted, they lie entwined. The oil in the lamp is almost gone. The wick sputters. A cluster of stars, neither the full moon nor the crescent planet Venus, peers in on them through the chimney opening. The waves boom. Sea lions occasionally bark in the distance.

Neither Claudia nor Wilbo has spoken since their lovemaking ended, some time ago, at some undocumented hour of the night when the limits of their bodies took control and the lamp began to sputter. Now Wilbo is beginning to sense words forming, or at least concepts that will eventually ripen into words.

One must choose one’s words carefully at a time like this, he tells himself. These are the first actual words that come. He attends to the concepts awhile longer, and to the search for words. The concepts have to do with the concept of concepts, and their relation to words. It’s a slippery slope for sure, but finally he thinks he has a handle on it.

“The moment we… try to describe our experiences… we are no longer experiencing them.” he says, out of the blue.

Claudia props herself up on one elbow and looks at him quizzically.

“Would you like me to disagree with that?” she asks.

Her voice surprises him. It’s not that it’s any different than before; it’s just that he hasn’t heard it in awhile, and he’s surprised by its lilt and its timbre. He doesn’t really hear her words, or at least register their meaning.

“Civilizations are built on the concepts we come up with to describe our experiences,” he continues. “But the concepts are not the experiences. The experiences are always private. When I try to describe my experience all I can give you are my words. I can never give you my experience. There’s no proof that anything that goes on out there has anything to do with what goes on in here.” He thumps himself soundly on the chest.

She flops onto her back and folds her arms across her chest. “Oh, shit!” she sighs.

Wilbo feels a little stung. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?”

“No, no, it’s not that. You can talk about anything you want. I just remembered. I got a class in the morning. I mean, it is morning. I mean it’s almost morning. I got a class. That’s my experience, right now. Sorry, Wilbo. It’s interesting, what you’re saying.” She sits up in the bed. “Tai Chi. I’m going to fall asleep right in the middle of Repulse-the-Monkey. I’m so sorry, Wilbo. I’ve got to go home. That’s my experience. Whether you get it or not.”

Wilbo stares at her naked back, at the curve of her waist, at the velvet of her skin, and the way her crimson hair cascades onto her naked shoulders. He almost feels as if he could become aroused again.

“Well, I’ll walk you home, then. Of course you’ll want me to walk you home.”

“No, Wilbo, please don’t. Don’t treat me like a child. I know how to get home. It’s safe. All the bad guys are either dead or unconscious by this hour.”

She stands up, finds her dress on the floor, raises her arms and lets it fall onto her body.

“Do you know what happened to my shoes?”

“They’re by the door. Where you put them, I thought.”

Claudia frowns and wrinkles her eyes. “I didn’t put them anywhere,” she says. “I haven’t seen them since the other night when I was… so upset. I thought maybe you’d picked them up.”

In the short confused moment that follows her remark, Wilbo feels something that he can’t quite grasp, a sort of tremor of dread, a foretaste of danger. It’s a private experience. He knows he can’t explain it.

“Please let me walk you home. I’m worried about you. It’s so late and dark and you’re so… so naked.”

She seems to be stumbling about in her mind for a response. She turns to the door, awkwardly. She turns back.

“Wilbo, please don’t turn into an old man on me now, Ok?” Her voice is pleading. “What we did tonight… was beautiful. Take your own advice. Don’t start thinking about it. Don’t start thinking about the future, or the past. And for God’s sake, don’t start worrying about me. I’m Ok. I’m safe. I can find my way home.”

She turns again. This time she makes it to the door, a little clumsy, but she makes it. She steps out. Wilbo stands up. She turns back.

“Don’t follow me, Wilbo,” she begs. Her voice has a ragged edge. “It would be a bad mistake!”

Turning back she trips on something that turns out to be her shoes. Wilbo hears them clunk several times on the deck before she manages to get them on her feet. Then there’s the sound of her trying to maneuver her way through the various items of party debris outside the house. She stubs her toe on some beer cans. She bumps into the sitting bench. She mutters, “Oh, shit!” under her breath. Then there’s silence. Wilbo realizes she has successfully made her escape.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in the flickering lamplight, he suddenly feels incredibly alone. Alone! How many nights has he spent by himself in the house with the wind and the seagulls and the seals, and never once has he thought to himself, I’m alone. Years of nights. Nights in the winter when the rain beat so hard that the windows bled, and the wind blew so hard that pieces of the house were ripped off and carried away. Summer nights so warm that he slept naked with the quilt pulled off and the moonlight streaming in. Nights like this one, in the springtime when the scent of laurel mingled with the seaweed and the sea lions freshly arrived from the south sang their exuberant songs of welcome, even into the light-turning pre-dawn hours. Never once in all these nights has he stopped to think to himself, I’m alone.

You spend too much time alone, Wilbo. Alone with your thoughts, I mean.

So how is one to respond then, to this being alone? He asks the question of the darkness; then he sits for awhile in silence, stilling his thoughts, listening for an answer.

You’re naked. Put your clothes back on.

Not quite the answer he expected, but there it is. Like something a skunk would say. He finds his clothes on the floor where he dropped them, still partially folded. He climbs into his pants, throws his shirt over his head, locates his socks and pulls them over his feet, then sits on the bed and steps into his shoes, tying them securely.

Fully dressed, his next move is obvious. He stands, throws open the door, and steps outside.

It’s not long before dawn. The sky over the sea is pale blue. There are other sounds besides just the ocean sounds, flitterings in the sage on the cliffs- little birds perhaps, stirring in their sleep, and the sound of a single, tired cricket, his chirp slowing after a long night of chirping.

Wilbo walks to the sitting bench but he can’t bring himself to sit down. The pondering he has to do is too kinetic. He has to pace. He paces, back and forth in front of the sitting bench, pondering.

Alone.

But aren’t we always alone? Isn’t that what I was just trying to tell her, before she decided she had to get up and leave? Every experience is private, even when bodies are together. This is just yet another private experience I’m having now, this experience of being alone.

Alone. What does that mean? What do people mean when they say they’re feeling alone? Does it have any connection with what I’m feeling now? When people say they feel alone, it means they’re feeling lonesome. They’re feeling sad because they’re by themselves. I’ve never felt lonesome. I’ve never felt sad because I’m by myself. I don’t feel sad right now. I like being by myself. Besides, I can always have companionship if I want it. I can go down to the Dogfish. I can go see Mac. I can go down to the boardwalk and annoy the tourists. It’s not like I’m a curmudgeon. It’s not like I’m a hermit. I enjoy the company of people. I just don’t have any problem with those times when I’m by myself. I need those times. I need to ponder.

He sits down for a moment on the bench but his body won’t let him stay there. It’s like his legs have little legs inside them, and the little legs keep moving, kicking at the big legs from the inside, forcing the big legs to keep moving. He gets back on his feet and resumes his pacing.

It’s because of the party, that must be what it is. Such a big dose of companionship all at once. Every friend I have was there I think, and a lot of friends I don’t have. And it was all about me! All the presents and all the music and all the dancing. It must be the contrast, that’s what it is, all that companionship- such a big, strong dose of it, and then suddenly here I am, like this, all alone. Like how silent it seems when you first unplug the amplifiers, or how dark it seems when you first switch off the light.

And then of course there was Claudia.

Oh, Claudia!

She was so beautiful! She was so incredible! She was everything I’d hoped she would be. The way she touched me- perfect! The places she touched me- every move was perfect! Her thrust and her release; the way she rode me like a bobbing buoy; the way she carried me like a diving dolphin. The way she came on strong, like a gypsy dancer, then pulled back shy like a frightened child. They way she moaned and whimpered and howled like a she-wolf in the night. She was everything I could hope for. She was every fantasy come true. Oh, Claudia!

What have I done?

I have broken all my vows! I have abandoned all my resolutions! I have forsaken my moral code! I have released all my inhibitions and poured myself without restraint into the essence of another person! And the worst of it is, I feel no regret. At the merest suggestion I would do it all again. There is no restraint against what I might do. What have I done?

“What have I done!”

These last four words he cries out loud, with full voice into the silence of the pre-dawn sky. Part of him, the spectator-bird, wakes up when it hears these words, and stiffly flaps the fleas and dust out of its molting feathers. What is that man hollering about now? I swear, he’s been doing entirely too much of that lately. I think he’s seen too many movies.

Wilbo pulls himself together. He stops pacing and sits down on the bench- on the very edge of the bench, so he can hop right back to his feet if necessary. But no. It looks like his legs are going to behave himself. Perhaps that outburst was what he needed. Perhaps that was where it all was leading, all this pacing and shuffling about. Perhaps it just needed some form of release.

Perhaps I exaggerate, he ponders. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Besides, there are mysterious forces at play here. Mysterious forces. Things are happening to me that seem to be out of my control. I don’t know what it means, but it’s not like something I can just resist. There’s some stuff I’m gonna do, and that’s all there is to it. I’m doing things that don’t even have a name yet. Kinko Syncho Quinto. Last night, with Claudia, that was just part of it. I don’t think that’s the end of it. Maybe that wasn’t the most moral thing to do, maybe not by conventional standards. But I had to do something. Maybe there was a better way I could have responded, but I had to respond. And it isn’t all just about sex, either. That’s not it. It’s not just sex. Even if it seems like it.

However true the thought may be, it comes heavily weighted with a string of powerful images, and the moment he thinks it he stops thinking, and slips into a reverie, entertaining these images. He remembers the moment she first pulled her dress up over her head and his immediate certainty that this nakedness would be different from her other nakedness, that this time there would be nothing standing in the way of what their bodies were compelling them to do. He remembers the artlessness of their first coupling, the uncontrolled rush toward penetration, without foreplay or technique, and he remembers the grace and precision of their subsequent couplings, movements like dance, or like watercolor, with big, bold brush strokes, or like waves rolling over each other at high spring tide. He remembers the textures of skin and hair and the smell of perfume and perspiration and garlic and cilantro. He remembers the hot wind of her breath on his chest and his belly and he remembers the liquid velvet of the inside of her mouth. He remembers the unmistakable clench of her orgasm, and the cry of surprise that flew from her throat. Slowly the memories have their way with his body until he finds himself sitting there on the bench, fully and foolishly erect.

Oh,this will never do! He jumps to his feet and resumes his pacing. Where was I before I was so rudely interrupted?

But thoughts don’t immediately gather in the wake of the retreating erotic images. A heavy mental fog cloaks his mind. Although he paces, his tread is slow and wandering. Perhaps he’s beginning to feel the effects of nearly twenty-four hours of uninterrupted consciousness. The approach of dawn is accelerating. Shapes in the sand begin to take form. That’s a bucket, a shovel, a cereal bowl. Some of the brighter items begin to fill in with their true colors. He identifies some items of clothing laid out flat on the underside of the overturned boat- a couple of sweaters, a pair of socks, perhaps they were left by the party-goers.

Wilbo wanders about as if he were investigating the relics of some antediluvian culture. He picks something up- a glass, a shoe, an exhausted party-popper. He examines each item briefly and tosses it back down. He’s not really looking for anything. He’s looking for thoughts to appear on the horizon of his mind, and then come rolling in on him like breakers. But instead, the breakers seem to be moving out into the open ocean where his conscious mind will not go. There are limits to the conscious mind, even while the hidden thoughts roll on forever.

His eyes are just beginning to droop when he notices something that shocks him awake, although at first he’s not sure what it is, or why it shocks him. He first sees it in silhouette, as something hanging in the air, or hovering like a humming bird just outside the cabin door. In an agitated stupor, he stares at it for a while, not registering anything except for a vague uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. No, it’s not floating or hovering. It’s hanging there by something, hanging by a string or something like a string, from one of the driftwood limbs that jut out from the side of the house.

Well, that’s not so strange, he tells himself. But then a second shock wave hits him, the shock of recognition. With one quick step he lunges onto the porch and grabs the object in both hands.

Yes, he was right. It’s the amulet. It’s the Arlequino. The mournful eyes. The joyful smile. The skunk said it might offer him some clues. The last time he saw it, it was…

The implications, although not specific, are overwhelming, and they all point to one thing.

"Claudia!" he cries out loud. He drops the amulet and staggers away from the house. Out in the open he scans the beach, following the trail up to the cliff where it disappears into the tunnel. But that’s foolish. She would be long gone by now. By any logic of time she would be in her apartment by now. She would probably already be undressed and in her bed, drifting off to sleep, repulsing monkeys in her dreams. But if that’s not where she is…

His feet compel him. He sets off at a brisk pace. He’s wide awake now, and his heart is pounding. He feels frightened, but he also feels excited, and animated with a strong sense of purpose. It’s almost as if he can hear exciting music playing in his ears, pacing his footsteps, trumpets and flugelhorns and snare drums, like in a movie when the hero is rushing into the adventure. Mostly he feel single-minded, at one with his body, a whole new level of Kinko Syncho Quinto.

Due to a trick of light, day seems to have dawned more fully over the public beaches on the other side of the tunnel. Pale feathers of reflected pink are drifting in the southwest sky over the sea, and the sea itself has a silvery gleam. Everything is still sleeping except for a couple of pelicans cutting a horizontal line over the waves. The beach is devoid of human life and no boats blink on the horizon. All the campfires of the night have smoldered out. There are no curling wisps of smoke. There are no sounds of traffic or industry from the town across the cement wall. Even the breakers are muted, like respectful janitors in a hospital of sleeping patients.

On the public beach Wilbo slows his pace and strains his eyes in the pale but rising light, looking for clues. In the wet sand he identifies a single pair of fresh footsteps, small feet, surely they’re hers. And at this point she is still alone. He follows them and they lead him where he expected, up to the trail, along the cement wall, and through the notch into town. There’s enough blown sand on the trail that he can follow the footsteps all the way to the notch.

So far, so good. He slips through the notch himself and faces the town, the darkened storefronts and restaurants, the public bath house, the warehouses with their high loading docks. There’s no more sand, no more footprints. There are several routes she could have taken to the Lighthouse and her apartment above it. Which one to follow? He stops and sniffs the air and scans the maze of streets. He stills all of his body sounds so he can listen hard for clues.

At first he’s not sure of the voices. They could be seagulls, drifted inland, fighting over a scrap of food in some back alley, or they could be the whine of a belt slipping on some piece of machinery somewhere in the caverns of the warehouses. The sound comes from the warehouses, though. That becomes increasingly clear. He starts in that direction, taking care that his clothes do not rustle in his ears and obscure the sound.

The clamor of a car engine, turning and firing, breaks into the morning quiet, obliterating all other sounds. Wilbo stops and waits. He’s reached the block of the warehouses and he stands in front of a bank of frosted green windows. From a side street a Sears delivery van appears and rolls up to the stop sign. The driver looks both ways, then looks both ways again, even though it’s obvious there isn’t a car in sight. Perhaps he’s no quite awake yet. Perhaps he too is recovering from a night of love. Finally he emerges cautiously into the invisible line of traffic and disappears into the vortex of the road that leads out of town.

In the wake of the engine sounds Wilbo hears the voices again. This time there’s no question about it. There are voices, and the voices are tense, even shrill, and one of them is disturbingly familiar. His heart jumps into his throat and he begins to run.

A thin fissure of an alley opens where the two warehouses almost meet. It’s no more than five feet across and at least three stories high. A chain link fence spans the opening but it’s broken down and the links have been cut. A strip of frayed orange tape hangs loosely from the ruins, bearing the words POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.

Hushing his footsteps, Wilbo scampers to the wall and then creeps along it until he reaches the opening where he first crouches, then peers in.

The alley ends at a small metal door lit by a single bare light bulb. In the glow of this bulb a man is leaning into a woman. The woman has her back against the wall and her arms are flying, striking against the man who thrusts himself at her repeatedly, one hand clenched at the fabric of her dress, just below her throat.

“It’s what you deserve, bitch! You like it, don’t you? You’d pay for it if you had to. You can pay for it. You got money, bitch!”

He pulls her toward him by the hold he has on her dress, then he shoves her back against the wall.

“Please, don’t, Gary!” she wails. “You’ll regret this. You’re gonna be so sorry when you realize what you’ve done. Please, stop!”

“Oh, you think I’ll be sorry? I’m not gonna be sorry. I’ve had enough of you. You’re nothing but a fucking rich bitch! You deserve to be fucked!” He forces himself onto her, pressing her hard against the wall.

Reeling with shock, Wilbo staggers into the alley, nearly tripping on the broken chain link fence. Quickly he regains his composure and rises to his full stature.

“Let go of her!” he cries.

Claudia gasps and Gary throws himself off of her, stumbling backwards against the opposite wall. He spins around and then he appears to puff himself up, all fur and muscles, like a cornered tomcat. He’s covered in leather and spikes and the spikes seem to bulge out like bristles all over his body.

“Who’s that?” he snarls.

“It’s Wilbo Hoegarden. Come away from the girl.”

“Wilbo Hoegarden? You mean the artist? That Wilbo Hoegarden? Hey, I been looking for you everywhere, man. I went into that weird little bar you told me about. You weren’t there. I went to that place on the boardwalk where we met. You weren’t there. What gives, man? I told you I wanted some portraits.”

Gary starts advancing toward Wilbo. His posture is loose and casual but there’s something menacing in his gait.

“You’re not coming out of this alley, Gary.” Wilbo tells him. “You’re not getting past me.”

Gary keeps coming. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wilbo.” he coos. “You seem upset. What have I done to upset you, Wilbo?” His arms move quickly and suddenly there’s a flash of reflected light. In his hand he holds a short, sharp, shiny switchblade knife. “What have I done to upset you, Wilbo?” he repeats, this time with a whole new inflection.

"Wilbo! Look out!” Claudia cries. She’s running up the alley. Gary spins around and waves the knife at her. “Stay out of this, Claudia! You don’t have any idea what’s going on here. Wilbo’s my friend. My old buddy. We just have a little score to settle, that’s all.” He turns back.

Wilbo doesn’t waste a second. Impelled by a rush of adrenaline, he lunges forward, thinking I’ll grab the wrist that holds the knife! But a weird thing happens. In a moment of perfect kinko syncho quinto, Claudia rushes forward as well, mirroring Wilbo’s every move. Their hands come together on Gary’s wrist- the hand that holds the knife- and with their combined strength they pull him to his knees.

But he doesn’t drop the knife, and he doesn’t lose much momentum. He jumps to his feet so quickly that Claudia is thrown back against the wall.

“You don’t understand me, Wilbo.” he growls, no longer concealing the threat in his voice. “We just have a little disagreement. We have a little score to settle.”

It happens quickly. Wilbo has his hands at his sides, ready to grapple, but he doesn’t see the knife until he feels the blade sink into his stomach. There’s no pain, just a strange sensation of numbness radiating out his arms and legs. Just before he falls he has one furious thought: don’t let him get the knife! He grabs the knife in both hands, pulls the blade up hard into himself, and crumples to the street.

“Wilbo!” Claudia cries. Suddenly there are lights, spinning red lights rolling on the alley walls, and a short whoop of a siren. Claudia stands up straight and waves her arms.

“Hey! In here! We’re in here!”

Gary takes a furtive glance around and begins to run, but Claudia is immediately onto him, leaping onto his back and pummeling him with blows. The last thing Wilbo sees before he loses consciousness is Gary falling to his hands and knees, with Claudia riding his back and pounding him furiously with both her fists.

RE-RE-RE-REMINDER

2009-03-07T07:54:00.000-08:00

Four chapters to go. If you need to catch up, find your chapter in the archive list. Chapter One is the third one, dated January 8.

Thanks for reading!

CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE PARTY AND WHAT FOLLOWS

2009-03-07T07:29:00.000-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

The first guests to arrive are the young ones. No one seems to know who they are- they’re just the young people who keep one ear to the ground for the approaching rumblings of a party. None of them brings a gift but many bring bottles of beer and wine and one man carries a beat-up Silvertone folk guitar without a case.

Doralina welcomes them as if they were old friends. She takes each one of them on a tour of the house, both inside and out, pointing out distinguishing features like the way the Austin Healy hubcap is modeled after the Rose Window at Chartres, and demonstrating how the full moon and the crescent Venus will be visible from the bed through the open chimney window. The young people are duly impressed and they set themselves to the task of gathering wood and building a large bonfire in the fire circle.

In the distance Wilbo sees what appears to be a man and a woman approaching, but the woman’s movements are stiff and brittle and the man has to help her along. It turns out to be Floyd Collins and his date, the lovely but edgy Amanda, punk-queen of the mannequins, patron saint of lunch meat.

“This is not my present,” he announces upon arrival, his voice breathless from the effort of his escort. “I just thought she’d like to come. Here. Amanda has your present.”

Amanda has her fingers wrapped around a long, rolled-up poster. Her grasp is not too good. A rubber band, stretched around her wrist, holds the poster in place.

Wilbo unrolls the poster. Mott the Hoople. All the Young Dudes.

“Well, what would you expect from Amanda?” Floyd explains. “Besides, it will be collector’s item. In ten years it’ll be worth a fortune.”

The next recognizable guests are the Moons, Levon Blue Lake and Opal. Levon’s gift is a glass salamander, actual size and correct in every detail except that you can see right through it and it’s flecked with speckles of gold. Shortly after arriving, Opal positions herself comfortably but properly on the sitting log, and Levon stands behind her, with one hand on her shoulder, smiling at everything. They assume this post for the duration of the party.

Mac arrives with things to eat. He’s closed down the Burger Shack early and unloaded the larder of bratwursts and corndogs and curly fries, all tossed into an oversized ice chest and hauled down to the beach with the help of his assistant, a Chinese boy named Ken. Ken quickly strikes up an acquaintance with Amanda, who represents for him everything he is not and wishes to be. He remains close by her side throughout the evening.

Many other people from the Dogfish arrive, people whose names he can’t remember or never knew but whose faces shine with a comfortable familiarity. They bring gifts like tablecloths, welcome mats, boxes of fancy pastels and stoneware serving bowls and leather-bound journals. Some who had no foreknowledge of the nature of Wilbo’s house, in particular its lack of electricity or running water, have brought gifts that are wholly inappropriate, things like electric coffee grinders and decorative incandescent lamps. These people hide in the shadows, feeling embarrassed and awkward but not wanting to lug their gifts all the way back up the beach with them. Doralina ferrets them out, takes the gifts and welcomes them back into the circle.

“Don’t worry,” she reassures them. “Everything will be used.”

The young man with the guitar starts to play. He sits on the hull of the overturned boat and starts plunking out some folk riffs and some twelve-bar blues. Phase One of the party has set in, the phase where most everybody has arrived and has a glass of something in hand, and short little volleys of conversation are ricocheting about. Topics come to the surface at various places in the crowd and get handed around without much development, like interesting artifacts from some third world country that nobody knows much about. Everyone is poised and waiting, ready to go with the flow of the event, but the event has not yet begun to flow.

This effect is accentuated by the setting. There are no walls. The beach, although small, is broader than a ballroom, and then there’s the ocean, the edge of the unknown, right there in plain sight, probably the largest object in the picture. It’s not quite dark and the fire is not yet full. Some people are out at the breakers with a Frisbee. A dog is chasing seagulls.

The name of Carl Rogers pops up here and there. There is some concern over his whereabouts. The last person to have seen him is Wilbo, that night that he came and drank the wine, search party number one. Speculations are conjured up. What if a sneaker wave got him on the way back to town? What if he’s been mugged? He likes to walk around late at night. Maybe he just walked down to the freeway and stuck out his thumb, like he did that one time before, just to see where he would wind up. He wound up in Ensenada and he came back with a knapsack of books about the Mexican Revolution. Has anyone been to his house? The subject of Carl Rogers begins to draw the crowd together. More and more people are talking about the same thing.

Suddenly there’s a shout from the fringes of the crowd, out at the shoreline, a woman’s voice.

“Hey, look! Look at the moon!”

She may not have intended for everyone to hear, but due to a coincidence of acoustics, everyone hears. Even the guitarist stops playing, and the crowd turns as one to look at the sky over the horizon.

It’s the new moon in the old moon’s arms. Engorged by the slant of the earth’s atmosphere it appears twice as large as it should, and its lowermost point is just piercing the grey line of clouds between the sky and the sea. It’s a normal sight, but a pretty one, made all the more pretty by the fact that attention has been called to it.

From various places in the crowd rise exclamations of the sort normally reserved for a display of fireworks. Then someone starts to applaud. It’s such an odd thing to do that it catches on. Someone else starts to applaud, then someone else. Suddenly the whole crowd turns as one and moves out, away from the fire, toward the beach, applauding the moon.

Across the face of the beach a girl, perhaps the very one who called the herald, leaps forward and starts doing cartwheels in the sand. The applause grows. Now it’s for the moon-girl combo, and some people start whistling and some people start cheering. The crowd, having established its collective identity, is rapidly growing very happy.

Then there’s another shout, just as loud as the first, a man this time.

“Hey! Who’s that?”

Again the crowd turns, this time toward the cliffs, and the cheers and whistles melt into a cacophony of inquisitive voices.

The silhouette of a man is approaching with a slow, studied effort. He’s walking with crutches and with each step he stops, checks his balance, and peers toward the crowd. He could be Christopher Columbus fresh off the Santa Maria, approaching a crowd of Indians who have never seen a white man before. His face is obscured but a strange trick of twilight causes his whole shadow to shimmer and shift through a spectrum of dark colors.

“It’s the Green Knight!” somebody cries.

The shadow man seems a bit nervous. He lifts one of his crutches high in the air and waves it over his head.

“Hello, everybody!’ he calls.

Wilbo recognizes him at once. “It’s Carl!” he cries and he starts running across the sand. His running is contagious. About a dozen people follow him including some people who have no idea who Carl Rogers is. Fueled by the warmth and goodwill of the moment, Wilbo delivers Carl an enormous bear hug and nearly knocks him off his feet.

“What have you done to yourself now, Carl?”

Carl looks down sheepishly. “Oh, I stepped off my porch. It’s just an ankle. Here, I brought you a present.”

He lifts up his massive arm and pulls out something wedged between his armpit and the butt end of his crutch. A dark green bottle. Almaden Tawny Port.

“Hide it,” he says, “For the right moment.”

This is the point where the party hits its stride and becomes a party. With Carl’s arrival and the approaching darkness, everyone moves back into the glow of the fire. More drinks appear and a few joints are passed around. The guitar player returns to his guitar, this time playing songs with words, singing in a gravelly second-generation Bob Dylan voice. Soon other people join in. He doesn’t sing any Bob Dylan songs, at least not at first. He sings songs by Neil Young and Cat Stevens and The Byrds until finally Floyd Collins edges in sideways through the crowd and taps him on the shoulder.

“You know any Rolling Stones?”

The guitarists nods and segues gracefully into a rendition of Ruby Tuesday. This works. Soon all the oldsters are interspersed with the youngsters, and everyone is singing the chorus together.

Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday Who could hang a name on you?

After that the suggestions come flying in from all walks of life, and amazingly, the guitarist knows them all. They launch into the Beatles catalog, singing Yesterday, and Michelle, and Yellow Submarine. They attempt All You Need is Love, but the weird rhythms overwhelm them and the song falls apart into a tangled mess of noise. Quickly recovering, they turn to Cream and take on White Room, belting out a rowdy rendition of Sunshine of Your Love, shouting loudly and only half-melodically to the ocean:

I’ve been waiting so long To be where I’m going….

Badge, however, suffers the same fate as All You Need is Love, tumbling into chaos by the second verse.

After that they turn to the folk songs, Puff the Magic Dragon, Man of Constant Sorrow, Blowin’ in the Wind- the first and only Dylan song of the evening.

Carl wants to sing, This Land is Your Land. This gets absolutely everybody singing on the chorus, and almost everyone on the verses. Carl tugs the guitarist on the sleeve.

“Let me sing the unknown verse,” he says.

Propped up on his crutches and booming his voice out over the hooting and the whistling, he sings

As I was walking that ribbon of highway I saw a sign that said No Trespassing, But on the other side it didn’t say nothing, That side’s the side for you and me.

During the last chorus Wilbo slips from the crowd into the house to fetch his concertina. As the song ends he approaches the guitarist, instrument in hand.

“Do you know any fiddle tunes?”

The guitarist nods slightly. “Name one.”

“How ‘bout Devil’s Dream? The key of A.”

“You start it.”

Wilbo starts it, and yes, the guitarist is with him, quickly catching the rhythm and chasing down the chord changes. They play Devil’s Dream for as long as they can, and then without a break Wilbo calls out, “The Crippled Kingfisher, key of D!” and off they go, into The Crippled Kingfisher, followed by Soldier’s Joy, and Star of the County Down.

The partiers, no longer able to sing, take to dance. It starts out with just a couple of girls dancing hand in hand like lonely farm girls at the barn dance without a beau. But it isn’t long before practically everybody is moving in one way or another to the music. The crowd swells outward to make room for its own movements. All styles of dance are represented. There’s ballroom and hoedown, and Irish two-step and ballet and belly and Grateful Dead-style free-form, plus there’s jitterbug and country line dance and samba, and of course the twist, the Watusi and the Bristol stomp.

New sounds enter the mix. Propelled by the flow of the moment, not to mention the flow of alcohol, people have sidestepped their inhibitions and sacked the house for pots, pans, plates and spoons to use as percussion instruments. Variously tuned wineglasses tintinabulate about the crowd when struck with sticks and forks. Every now and then one of them breaks with the lovely cascading flourish of shattering glass. Someone is playing a harmonica. It’s a D harp, which only works on some of the tunes, but he continues to play it nonetheless.

Then there’s the sound of real drums from somewhere on the other side of the fire. Wilbo glances up. There’s a man there with a set of congas. The drums are painted with brightly colored African designs. The man is wailing away, throwing his head back, having the time of his life. He opens his eyes briefly, catches sight of Wilbo, and flashes a big loopy gap-toothed grin. It’s Jimmy from the lighthouse! And that woman, next to him, swaying with her eyes closed- that’s Toni, Claudia’s friend, or one-time friend. They’re all Jesus-freaks, Wilbo. All of them. Even Toni, she’s a Jesus freak.

Eventually they run out of fiddle tunes, or they just lose track of them, and the music evolves into an open jam, staying close to the key of G so the harmonica can fit in. This is when Opal starts to sing. She sits on the bench with her eyes wide open and she sings in a high, wordless voice that sounds like the wind in the pines, or the coyotes in the hills, or the song of the seal-people just after they shed their human skins. When she sings, the mood shifts from that of riot and revelry to something deeper, more thoughtful, almost like worship. The music slows and the dancing slows with it. The fire is low now, and the dancers cast long fire shadows on the sand. Some couples dance together, lovers entwined, oblivious to anything but the magnetism of their bodies. But most people dance alone, each one moving to a private music. Some spin like dervishes, arms extended. Some trail pieces of cloth, or even pieces of seaweed, floating out from their hands like banners. Others are weaving in and out of the crowd, deliberately, gently caressing people as they pass, while still others just stand in place, eyes clothes, and sway.

Amanda has one arm raised over the crowd like she’s passing a blessing. Ken sits cross-legged at her feet, his head slowly listing from side to side. Doralina has a bubble wand. She stands on a rock and produces a blanket of bubbles, barely visible in the darkness. It drifts down and settles on the crowd. Levon Blue Lake rests his hands on Opal as she sings. He runs his fingers down her long straight hair, caresses her shoulders, then returns to her hair, over and over. These things go on for a long time, and during them, no one speaks a word. There’s only the sound of the music, the rustling of bodies, and the crashing of waves. In the future, when the party is remembered and talked about in places like the Lighthouse and the Dogfish, many people will report that they heard something like the sound of a flute, in perfect tune with the music, coming from somewhere out beyond the breakers.

But even a moment frozen in time eventually gives way to the movement of time. One by one people come out of their trances and begin to converse in muffled tones. Someone checks his watch; the action is contagious. Other people start checking their watches. The dog barks. People start looking for their shoes, their jackets. Finally the event horizon is breached and the guitarist stops playing. Wilbo sets down his concertina. There is a scattering of applause. A few flashlights go on.

Out on the beach two girls are still dancing. These two have been pretty much connected the whole time, but now they dance apart, whirling and swooning in two big circles like the hands of a clock. Whenever they intersect they reach out to each other, clasp arms, unclasp and spin away. On their outermost orbits they are lost in the mist. When they draw near to the fire their happy singsong voices drift on the air.

The migration begins. Some people are sloppy and stumbling. Other people help the stumbling ones along. Some people are stiff and sleepy, others are loose and jangly and talkative. Almost everyone comes to give Wilbo a hug or a handshake or a punch in the arm or a Dutch rub. A line of flashlights, like fireflies, grows and moves along the trail up to the tunnel. Doralina, Floyd, Ken and Amanda leave together as a foursome. Floyd has had a bit to drink and Doralina holds him up. No one knows how Amanda feels, but mysteriously, she seems to be walking on her own, propped between Floyd and Ken, with Ken clinging to her hand.

Carl lingers by the fire, leaning on his crutches. Wilbo sits on the log, stirring the ashes of the fire with a stick. Neither of them speaks for a long time. Wilbo’s arms are sore from playing so much concertina, but he’s feeling content and alert. He’s wondering if Carl wants something and he’s waiting for the right words to ask for it, like maybe he wants open up that bottle of Tawny Port. This is when it dawns on him that he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol, not by any discipline of choice- it’s just the way it fell out. It hadn’t even occurred to him until now, and even now he wonders if it’s true. In his arms and in his head he feels the pleasant glow that lingers after a night of sensible drinking. But no, if he were drinking, he would remember it. He would remember the taste.

Finally Carl speaks. “Well, I guess I’d better be getting along home. It’s a long way to lug this tired old bag of bones.”

“You could spend the night here if you want, Carl.” Wilbo suggests.

“Naah, I miss my own bed. Besides, there’s some pills there I’m supposed to take.”

Suddenly they are not alone. Out of the mist like dream figures, the two dancing girls have materialized in the dim glow of the fire. They could just as well be mermaids. They are both very young and very pretty. They hold hands.

“Whoa!” says Carl, “You scared me.”

The girls giggle awkwardly. “We come in peace,” one of them offers, then the other says, “Peace and love.”

A few waves break. Nobody speaks. Then Wilbo gets an idea.

“Well then, maybe you girls can perform an act of love for us,” he says. The moment the words are out of his mouth he realizes they are fraught with implications, none of which he intends. Quickly he explains himself. “My good friend Carl, here. He has a long walk ahead of him before he can sleep in his own bed, and as you can see he is old and infirm. Perhaps you girls would oblige in providing him with a safe escort.”

The girls drop hands. They study Carl, up and down.

“He doesn’t look so old and infirm,” one of them says.

At that moment a log in the fire turns and throws up a shower of sparks, casting an orange glow on Carl’s face, providing the distinct illusion that he is blushing.

“Well, I uh, well…you know…” he stammers. “Well, it’s just an ankle.”

One of the girls pulls away from the other and takes Carl’s arm. “Well of course we’ll walk you home,” she says. “You shouldn’t let that mean man say those things about you. Don’t believe a word he says.” There is a lilt of mischief in her voice. The other girl comes forward and takes Carl’s other arm.

“But maybe we won’t go straight home.”

Carl gives Wilbo a helpless look. “Wait a minute, Wilbo, I don’t know about this. Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

Wilbo bites back his laughter. “Well, of course it’s a good idea, Carl. What are you worried about? You know, if I were in your shoes…”

“Well, you’re not in his shoes, man.” says one of the girls. “Sorry. You stay here by yourself. We’re taking Carl home with us. Come on ,Carl, let’s get away from this place.”

Gently but firmly they begin tugging him by the arms, away from the fire.

“Wilbo..”

“See you, Carl. Thanks for coming. Thanks for the present. Thanks for everything, Carl.”

“See you, Wilbo!” “See you, Wilbo!” cry the girls as they disappear into the mist. Then Wilbo hears one of them say, “Hey, Carl, have you read any good books lately?” There’s a pause, then Carl’s voice.

“Well… Well, there’s one book that everyone should read. It’s called The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Hoffer. He was a longshoreman, like me. I used to be a longshoreman, but then I got in an accident. Hoffer. When he was a little kid he went blind, all of a sudden, with no reason. And then like a miracle, he got his eyes back. When he got his eyes back he made a vow that he would read every book that was ever written. Of course maybe that was a bit hyperbolic, but Hoffer, he says…”

Wilbo never gets to hear what Hoffer says. Carl’s voice is swallowed up in the sound of the waves and the wind and a flock of noisy seagulls that happen to pass over at that moment. But he’s heard what Hoffer says. On many occasions, actually.

He sits on the log for awhile, enjoying the silence and the way it fills with the echoes of voices, voices singing and laughing and shouting:

Don’t worry, Everything will be used..
Hey, look! Look at the moon!
It’s the Green Knight!
Let me sing the unknown verse.

It’s not exactly pondering he’s doing. His energy is too high and jangling for anything as steady and studied as pondering. He wonders how he will ever get to sleep. It must be very late.
Then he remembers his ritual. Yes! Of course. The four directions. Some things from the old school must carry over into the new.

Inside the house he lights the lamp, and for a moment his senses reel. Everything has changed. Nothing is the same. The bed, the dresser, the cupboard, the windows- nothing is where it used to be. Even the walls are different walls. The effect is both disorienting and exhilarating, and does nothing to subdue his high, strong spirits.

He takes off all his clothes and folds each item, even the socks. In the old school he used to lay these on the trellis at the foot of his bed. Now the trellis has gone, he’s not even sure where, and a new order must be established. It’s too much to think about. He drops his armload of folded clothing onto the floor and steps outside naked into the crisp night air.

At the water’s edge he stops when he feels the damp sand under his bare feet. The night is dark and moonless and fog obscures the stars. He can’t see the waves but he can hear them. What is visible is one blinking ship on the horizon, and a faint blue glow in the western sky. Just below the glow a dark band of clouds rolls slowly over the water.

He faces the west. Inhaling, he raises his arms high above his head. Exhaling, he begins to lower them, as is his practice. But then something happens. It’s as if his arms, in their descent, catch an updraft, turn inward and then begin to spiral back up, over his head. There are currents in the air, all around him. They direct the movements of his arms, his hands, his fingers. He finds them irresistible. His hands rotate on his wrists and his fingers wave like the tentacles of anemones. The movement streams like water, or like something stronger than water, down his arms and into his body. He begins to dance.

At first it’s just a gentle sway from side to side, a naked man on the beach with his arms above his head, swaying gently from side to side. He takes a step- it’s a graceful one. Every movement he makes is imbued with a grace that seems to come from somewhere outside, or very deep within. The step leads to another step and the steps, one after another, lead to a slow whirl. The whirl leads to a swoon. With his arms outstretched like eagle’s wings he whirls and swoons. Unconfined by walls or by crowded streets he fills the beach with his movements. He whirls out to where the waves splash onto his feet and he whirls in to where the dry sand clings to his salty steps. He makes noises with his voice, half singing, half shouting. He dips and glides and skims over the rocks and the seaweed and the contours of the beach. He can feel all his pent-up energy funneling into his movements. It’s movement itself, free from any thought or purpose. Its Kinko Syncho Quinto for solo artist. It’s Coltrane on the saxophone. It’s Hendrix on the guitar. It’s what would happen if the wind could blow without any obstructions, or the river could flow without a bank, or if ideas could course through the brain without having to pass through synapses.

Eventually though, his body weight gets the best of him. A clumsiness of foot leads to a passing thought- something like well, that was clumsy, and this thought breaks the flow which leads to more clumsy moves, which lead to more thoughts, culminating in one massive clumsiness, a sort of forward staggering that nearly hurls him to his knees. When he gets his balance he realizes how winded he is, and how hard his heart is pounding. These things were happening all along but they were masked by the dance. Standing still he feels the momentum of the spin continuing in his head, in fact, the whole beach seems to be spinning around him. Perhaps I should sit, he thinks, and he sits abruptly in the sand.

The spin continues for a while but seated securely on the beach he can handle it. Like Dylan’s Rainy Day Woman, he’s got no place to fall. He feels no remorse. He enjoys the spin and the way it gradually slows. He enjoys watching his breath grow calm and his heartbeat steady. He enjoys his tiredness and the approaching possibility of sleep. He enjoys everything there is to enjoy about the moment and his place in it. He’s thinking, maybe this should become a new ritual.

After awhile he gets up and starts back for the house.

From a distance he can see the embers of the fire still glowing. They offer him a directional beacon in the dark. In the sand outside the house a few artifacts of the party are strewn. Wineglasses, some broken; some beer cans, some wrapping paper blown up against the bushes; something he doesn’t recognize or remember- a child’s rag doll lying across the bench.

Then he sees the shoes. Claudia’s shoes, the little red sandals, placed neatly, side by side, in front of the door. When he sees them, his heart resumes its pounding. But of course her shoes are here. He brought them here himself on that night, when they parted so badly. Last night. He doesn’t remember placing them by the door, but someone else could have done it. Doralina, maybe. Then he sees something else. Through the multi-colored cellophane of the Rose Window, a pale light is glowing.

I left the lamp burning. Strange I would leave the lamp burning.

A trembling in his arms and legs propels him to the house where he throws open the door.
Claudia rises from the bed. She is wearing the same black lace dress she was wearing the last time he saw her, but this time she has nothing on underneath. When she sees him standing there, naked in the doorway, and when she sees the immediate effect her presence has on his anatomy, she pulls the dress up over her head and tosses it to the floor. Without a word their bodies fold together into the union they have been craving since the day they met.

RE-RE-REMINDER

2009-03-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

Don't forget, if you get behind in your reading you can find the chapter in the archive list to the right. Chapter One is the third posting, dated January 8.

Thanks for reading!

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: REBUILDING THE HOUSE

2009-03-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

In the night, a dream, in the dream, a woman, his bride-to-be. It is an arranged marriage, an agreement between both sides of the family, his and hers. There is much protocol and ceremony involved. They have taken several ceremonial walks together through a sunlit garden, hanging with purple flowers and populated by a profusion of birds. He has never seen her naked, and he steals glances at her, wondering what she looks like naked, under her many layers of colorful, ceremonial clothing. Her face is pretty. She is shy, almost timid. They talk of inconsequential things, but underneath it all he can sense her excitement, her anticipation at their coming union. He can feel it too. It creates a tender presence at his physical core as he moves through the other locales of the dream world. It is like nothing he has ever felt for another person before. The dream repeats itself through the night, and when he wakes in the morning, before he opens his eyes and remembers who he is, he feels the tender presence of his bride-to-be, glowing, fading in his physical core.

There’s a morning chill and the blankets are damp from the blowing mist, and from the damp that percolates up through the sand as the night shifts into day. Wilbo stirs with discomfort. His eyes are sore and swollen and the lids are sealed together with crusty deposits of salt. There’s sand in his hair, and tiny sand crabs are sporting across the mattress and down the back of his shirt. He’s spent the night in his clothes, wrapped like a burrito in salt-stained blankets with no pillow. He’s not ready for the day, but he appears to be awake.

The events of the night come back to him one by one. They come to him in the form of a broken orange crate, lying sideways, spilling out its contents of pencils and crayons and notebooks; a toothbrush sticking upright out of the sand like a strange bristly flag; a single, small woman’s red sandal hanging by a strap over a nub on the back of the sitting log. Directly after he sees the sandal, he sees the woman, sitting on the log with her back to him, staring out at the sea.

It’s Claudia! is his first thought, but his second thought surprises him.

God, I hope it’s not Claudia!

But it isn’t Claudia. It’s a short, rounded woman with soft, slumped shoulders. She has a heavy black cloak pulled around her shoulders and she’s wearing a floppy hat lined with black lace and laden with buttons and bows and pockets with tiny tools in them. She knows he’s awake. She speaks without turning.

“Quite a work you’ve got here, Wilbo, Do you know the name of the artist?”

Wilbo sits up groggily. With nothing but his hands to clear his face, he clears his face with his hands, raking his tear ducts with his fingers, breaking the flakes of tears and sleep.

“Well, it wasn’t me, anyhow.” he answers.

“No, I can tell. This isn’t your style.”

Wilbo coughs and slaps his hands together and slaps his hands against his chest. He rolls over to his hands and knees, thinking to get to his feet, but no, it’s not quite time to get to his feet. He rolls back onto the mattress.

“What on earth brings you down here at this ungodly hour of the morning, Doralina?”

“I’m a morning person. I’ve been up for hours. The only problem is all my friends are night people. And my work, of course. I have to do most of my work at night. It makes for a hard life. I must burn my candle at both ends.”

She turns to look at him then. The effect is startling. The lace that fringes her hat also extends down in front like a sort of visor, partially covering her eyes. It attaches to the hat on the right with a small pink silk rose.

“You know, it’s true what they say,” she tells him. He waits for her to tell him what it is they say, but she doesn’t tell him. So he asks her.

“What do they say, Doralina?”

“No man is a grunion, you know what I mean. You know the grunion, the fish that comes up out of the water to spawn in the sand. You don’t have to do that, you know. Not when you’ve got friends. When you’ve got friends, you’ve got connections. Everything is interconnected.”

Wilbo works this over for awhile. It’s a typical example of Doralina Steindl-Klas reasoning.

“I think you mean no man is an island, then.” he says. “ That’s what they usually say. They don’t usually say no man is a grunion. Maybe sometimes they do.”

“Well, that’s why I said it. It’s something that needs to be said. On account of everybody at the Dogfish. It’s been four nights now, and you haven’t made an appearance, not since that night that your brother showed up. So we got together and sent out a search party. That was Carl Rogers, search party number one. But Carl never came back. So here I am, search party number two and look at this place! I come back and you’re lying in the sand and look at this place! What’s going on here, old man? What happened to this place? Was there a fight? Did you get in a fight with Carl? What did you do with Carl, Wilbo?”

Wilbo manages to get to his feet. “Whoa! Whoa! Slow down, Doralina! Don’t jump to conclusions. I don’t know what happened to Carl. He was just here the other night and we talked for a while. He drank some wine, then he left, that’s all. Last night when I came home… from work, I just found the place looking like this. I have an idea who did it, though. I have a pretty good suspicion.”

Alerted that Wilbo is standing, Doralina stands too, and turns to face him. She is oddly but ruggedly dressed. She’s wearing a long black multi-pleated skirt, tied with a belt from which dangles an array of items, seashells and small scissors, a hole-punch, several paint brushes, a magnifying glass, a tiny ball peen hammer. Over the skirt she wears a bulky lavender sweatshirt printed with a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi sitting at a spinning wheel over the slogan, TO WORK IS TO LIVE.

She turns from Wilbo and starts rummaging through the rubble. “You need some coffee. I brought a couple of pannini rolls. We have to get your blood flowing again. Then we can rebuild.”

Wilbo knows Doralina well. He knows that Doralina’s actions have a momentum behind them, like that of a locomotive on a downhill slope. There’s really no point in getting in her way, and there’s really no harm in getting out of her way. He knows this about Doralina. Doralina’s actions always lead to something good. Briefly reasoning through all this, he sits on the bench and waits to see what she will do.

First she finds his camp stove under a scrub of sage by the rocks. It’s a bit dented but she pumps it up and strikes a match that she extracts from a tin tied to her belt. Poof!
She has a flame, a big flame at first- it almost singes the fringe on her shawl. But she fiddles with the knobs and manages to get it down to a nice robust blue glow.

Miraculously she locates a plastic jug of water and a saucepan, not that far away, and there’s an unbroken mug, full of sand yes, but unbroken. She rinses it out with the water. She doesn’t have to look for the coffee. She has a vial of strong espresso paste tied to her belt. She talks a continuous stream of consciousness while completing these tasks.

“You know what they always say, old man. It’s better to forgive than to receive. That’s why the sap is always flowing in the redwood trees. One big sequoia can produce five hundred pounds of wood in a year. You know the Indians used to set the forests on fire when they got too thick, and they knew what they were doing. No one ever accuses the Indians of not loving the trees. That’s what you’ve got to do, old man. Forgive and rebuild, forgive and rebuild. The trees that come out of the fire are stronger and healthier than the ones that burn. They knew what they were doing, those Indians. Forgive and rebuild.”

So Wilbo and Doralina sit together on the log, drinking strong espresso and eating pannini rolls and considering the task ahead, forgiving and rebuilding.

Doralina stares out at the waves. “What do you see out there, old man?” she asks.

“I see waves. Waves coming in, waves going out.”

“Yeah, but what about the waves? What’s special about those waves?”

Wilbo isn’t sure what she’s getting at. “I don’t know,” he says, “They speak French, maybe?”

Ah!” she throws up her hands. “I can’t believe it! You sit here on this bench every night and you look out on those waves and you don’t notice anything. Tell me, this, if you can. What phase was the moon in last night?”

“I don’t know.” He scratches his head. “It was dark.”

“Well, of course it was dark! That’s because there was no moon last night. It’s the new moon. Do you know what that means? No, you probably don’t.”

Wilbo is humbled into avoiding the number of wisecracks he might offer in response to her question.

No, I probably don’t.” he says simply.

“It’s the spring tide. The lowest tide of the month. There will be things out there that haven’t been uncovered in a long, long time. This is a fortuitous event, old man. You need stuff to rebuild your house, and there’s going to be lots of stuff out there. Fortuitous, old man.”

Not long after that, before the tides can turn, with a jolt of caffeine racing through their veins and the sun burning off the morning fog, they set out for the intertidal zone to look for what the sea has left behind for them in its romantic pursuit of the moon.

Doralina explains the time frame of their work. “We have to do all our gathering first,” she tells him, “While we still can. After that, we can build.”

Between the beach and the twin arched rocks that provide a playground for sea lions and a nesting ground for gulls and cormorants, stretches a bed of smaller rocks, some jagged, some round and smooth, all riddled with fissures and hollowed-out punch bowls, blow holes, periscopes. At high tide these rocks are completely submerged. At neap tide they make brief appearances between the waves, and people mistake them for mermaids or sea serpents. Only at the lowest of low spring tides do they appear as they do today, not only fully visible but mostly dry, spread out like piles of dog food rendered in the style of a Japanese water color. There’s a trend of slant to these rocks- they could be the stern end of a great ocean liner sinking, most of its bulk already below the sand. Geologists would cite this as proof of a great cataclysmic upshift of the earth along the tectonic plates in some primeval era before the last ice age.

But Wilbo and Doralina are not geologists, at least not today. Today they are beachcombers, scouring the shore for what on any other day would be considered refuse, flotsam and jetsam. Today there will be treasures, rendered treasure-like by a need: To rebuild. To forgive and rebuild…

Doralina has taken off her hat. She’s brought other things with her besides just some pannini rolls and the collection of tools she wears around her waist. In fact, she’s brought a whole duffel bag full of things, and now it lies stashed in the shade behind the sitting bench. These are the tools of her trade, she explains to Wilbo. She has to carry them with her everywhere she goes.

“You never know when the muse might strike.” she tells him.

From the duffel bag she has taken only one thing with her out to the tide pools. It’s another bag- a bag within a bag- this one an old burlap gunny sack sporting a picture of a potato-man dressed like a beatnik with a goatee and a beret, and the words IDAHO’S HIPPEST POTATOES. She will use this to gather the harvest on several trips out to the rocks and back to the house while the tide holds out.

Everything interests her. The moment they step out onto the rocks she starts turning over boulders and poking about in the cracks with a stick. She finds some dry, brittle starfish bodies with no life in them, and these she tosses into the sack. She selects certain pieces of driftwood for their size and smoothness and special curve. She collects some fish net and some kite string still wound on a wooden spool and a few broken sand dollar shells. There are no whole sand dollars.

Layers of seaweed are draped over the rocks as neatly as if they were a harvest set out to dry by some indigenous tribe. They lie in rainbow bands of color, the first being the feathery green algaes, followed by the leafy reds, the dulse and carrageen, then at last, near the wave line, the giant brown kelps and oarweeds with their bulbous float bladders and broad serrated fronds. Doralina collects a few of the reds but she’s especially interested in the kelps, rolling up long ropes in bundles as big as channel markers and stuffing them into the bulging sack.

“You gotta pick things up, old man,” she exhorts him. “You’re not picking anything up. There’s no rules. Just pick up anything that has beauty for you.”

Wilbo is barefoot. They are both barefoot, but Wilbo seems to feel his barefootedness more than Doralina. The rocks are covered with the calcified skeletons of old barnacles and their sharp edges torment his tender feet. Doralina scrambles ahead of him. Her voluminous skirts seem to give her extra buoyancy. She reaches the edge of the first tide pool and beckons with her hand.

“Lots of life here, old boy,” she says. “You need to come and see.”

Wilbo hobbles to the rock where she squats and there he sinks to his knees and leans far over until his eyes grow accustomed to the shadowy depths of the pool.

It’s a classic tide pool. All the components are there. It could have been arranged by marine biologists and built into an aquarium tank to demonstrate to schoolchildren what a tide pool should look like. The walls are white with calcium and the bottom is variegated with a deep lush carpet of sea greens, sponges and wracks and coral weeds. Three or four starfish saunter about. One holds up its light-sensitive tentacles to see the way as it searches for a safe, shady crevice. Another drifts as it hangs from the underside of a rock from perhaps one single tube foot. Above the water line the anemones are closed, like slimy green buttons, but underwater they explode into full bloom of red and blue and pink, tentacles waving, beckoning. Spiky purple urchins hide out in urchin-shaped hollows at rock bottom. Schools of tiny silver fish dart about and glisten in the penetrating rays of the sun. The pinchers of hidden crabs poke out of cracks and wave greetings. The wise crabs do not appear.

After awhile, rested and breathing normally, Wilbo begins to review certain ponderings, ideas from the past that return and are freshly nuanced as he stares into the pool. He’s only vaguely aware of Doralina as her stick slowly trawls through the water and the little velvet crabs poke their heads out of their rock houses to see what just passed. A small voice speaks very quietly in a corner of his head, as if a filling in one of his teeth was picking up a faint radio station.
You spend too much time alone, Wilbo. Alone with your thoughts, I mean.

“I had this thought the other day,” he says out loud. “It has to do with the ocean. The shore as the edge between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Inland is outward- the known, the conscious mind, the things we do every day, the stuff we see on TV, you know, the governments and supermarkets and the organized religions. The ocean is the mystery place, the unknown, the unconscious. None of our rules apply there. We can’t understand what goes on there using the kind of thinking we apply to the mainland. Then there’s the shore. That’s the place where the two meet. The shore is the place of dreams and art and music and dance, the place where you do things and you don’t know why you do them, they just come. These creatures we see here because the tide is out. They just prove my theory. These creatures are from the dream world.”

Doralina is clearly very pleased with this idea. She lets her stick lie still in the pool where it is quickly surrounded by a posse of small shrimp, and her face settles into a deep and faraway smile which she holds for a long, long time.

“It was fortuitous, old man,” she says finally. “It was time. Your house was due to be rebuilt. You can thank the artist who tore it down. Let’s not stop. The tide will soon change.” She’s on her feet and hoisting the bulging bag up over her shoulders.

They make four trips to and from the tide pools, each time lugging a sack heavy with their numinous catch, before they first notice the change. They’re at the outermost edge of the pools, in the brown bladder kelp zone just before the narrow channel between the tide pools and the arched rocks. They’re working at prying loose a common limpet from a bed of green whelks when out of nowhere a noisy quarrelsome wave comes splashing up through a blowhole and explodes into a foamy white fan, drenching the dry sunny rocks, and the two unsuspecting beachcombers.

Doralina coughs and sputters and shakes the salty water out of her hair.

“That’s it,” she says, “The window is closing. Hey, there’s one more place we haven’t tried yet. The cape. It might still be dry there. Let’s hurry and get there while we still can.”

Impelled by a sense of urgency they haul their last sackful back to the house and set out for the cape. This cape is the elbow of the large madrone-covered shoulder of earth and rock that encloses the small, secluded beach where Wilbo lives. On most days this rocky outcropping is a blustery playground for the elements, where forceful waves come rolling in from both directions, carving faces and forms in the cliffs and gouging out deep overhanging caves where the octopuses hide.

Doralina is only partly right in predicting that the cape will be dry in this low spring tide. When they come in sight of the point a big wave has just receded. The sand around the point is passable but glistening wet. Out on the wet sand, half-buried and dangerously close to the breakers there is something- some large, boxlike object with rounded edges. Decayed and crusty, it could be manmade, it could be natural, it’s hard to tell.

“Hey! What’s that?” cries Doralina. “Let’s go get it!” She starts running but another wave rolls in and she has to step back and wait. This one’s not as big as the last one, it doesn’t reach the rocks, but it covers the object. As it recedes it breaks off a small corner and carries it out to sea.

Doralina rushes forward with Wilbo at her heels. When she reaches the object she gives it a shove and topples it out of its lodging in the sand. Even up close it’s not immediately clear what it is. It’s flat and square and it’s completely covered with barnacles, live barnacles and the empty chalky shells of many generations of barnacles. A few small decay holes reveal a hollow center. It’s about the size and shape of a radiator from a small automobile, and for good reason. It is a radiator from a small automobile. The barnacles have filled every convolution of the metal grill, but the giveaway clue is the pressure cap, still snugly secured.

There’s a story here, thinks Wilbo.

“You want this!” Doralina cries. “Let’s get it out before the next wave!”

She tries to pick it up but its too heavy. Wilbo takes the other end and they lift it off the sand. It’s heavy because it’s full of water. As they stand there water gushes out of a hundred hidden holes and the radiator slowly lightens in their hands. But before they can move the next wave hits and they’re standing knee-deep in the ocean.

“Just walk!” Doralina orders. They drag the radiator to dry land, and then fall down laughing.
“You need this in your house!” Doralina howls while catching her breath. “It’s so… symbolic!”
Then she glances up at the rocks and sand, and the shifting waves. “Come on, there’s more stuff up there! No time to lose!” And she’s up and off, with Wilbo following. Her enthusiasm is childlike and contagious. She clambers up on the shelf above the waves where there are a few pools, a few starfish. But she’s looking for something else. She finds some short boards, too young to be driftwood, printed with letters of the Russian alphabet. She finds some unbroken brown bottles with wave-smoothed necks. One is still corked. She finds one whole Austin Healy hubcap.

Then at the very tip of the cape they come across two wooden oars, floating in a tide pool, tangled in kelp. Wilbo gets to them first. He pulls off the seaweed as if he is unwrapping a birthday present. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re nicked and gray with weathering but they’re completely intact and fully usable.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” Doralina says confidently. “Where there’s oars, there’s a boat.” She hops down from the pool and approaches the edge of the cliff where the rock drops into the sea. There she crouches and crawls forward cautiously to peer over the ledge.

“Yep! Just as I thought. There’s a boat.”

The boat is wedged in a narrow fissure in the rock, upside down and bow side in. It’s just a little wooden rowboat, badly battered, with its stern end bobbing on the water. It’s about a six foot drop and it looks like the ocean has arrived for keeps, but then even as they watch, the waves inhale and draw back and the boat drops and bumps on the sand with a moist clunk.

“Jump, Wilbo!” Doralina cries.

Without a thought, Wilbo jumps, and he is surprised by the grace of his landing. No time to lose! He turns, grasps the oarlocks and gives a sharp tug on the boat. It dislodges easier than he thought and he stumbles backwards onto his butt.

No time to lose! He gets up quickly, grabs the boat and flips it over, right side up. Just in time, the wave hits. This one’s a big one. It lifts the boat up and hurls it at the rocks. Fortunately Wilbo’s on the other side or he would be the unwitting pate’ in a boat rock sandwich. He clenches his teeth as the boat strikes and the wave covers his head. A moment later he can feel the swift acceleration of the outflow, like the beginning of a thrill ride, as the ocean tries to reclaim what was taken from it by the rocks.

“Just get in!” Doralina cries from the cliff above.

Not a bad idea, he thinks, but not easy. With considerable effort he manages to pull himself up parallel with the boat and then he rolls over into it, landing on his back. The first thing he sees is a framed picture of Doralina, standing on the rock, holding the oars.

“Here’s the oars!” she cries, then there’s a splash, then another splash, on either side of the boat.

Eventually he gets the oars, after much lunging and tipping. This is not what he usually does for a living. By the time he has the oars threaded through the oarlocks Doralina has been reduced to a stick figure on the distant shoreline and the boat has been transported out well past the breakers. But it’s not hard to bring her in. With just a few tugs he catches an incoming current and after that he can ride the waves as they rise and fall, obeying the landward urge.

Doralina is waiting on the sand when he arrives. Her skirts are soaked but she doesn’t care. She grabs the bow and pulls him in as the last wave coughs up the boat onto the beach.

“Well done, Captain! Welcome to America!”

The next job is dragging the boat to the house, but not just the boat. There’s the radiator. Don’t forget the radiator! Then of course there’s the bag, all the stuff they picked up on the rocks before they found the boat. The solution is simple. With the boat upright, they toss the oars and the radiator and the gunny sack inside and then, each grabbing an oarlock they drag the boat all the way back to the house, cutting a long sandy wake that beachcombers will speculate over until the next high tide.

After that they are hungry and there’s no more food in Doralina’s knapsack, so they leave their precious booty in piles around the ruins of the house and trudge the distance of the trail, over the shoulder, through the tunnel, across the public beach, through the notch, and onto the boardwalk, specifically, to Mac’s Burger Shack where Mac fries them up two juicy cheeseburgers smothered in onions and served on his private reserve of Kaiser rolls, gratis complimentis. He also brings out Wilbo’s concertina and sketch book, still stashed behind the counter.

Doralina leans over as if she’s going to tell Mac a secret, but she speaks in loud, clear tones.

“Big party at Wilbo’s tonight,” she says. “It’s a housewarming. He’s getting a new house. Spread the word. And tell everybody to bring a gift.”

On the way to the beach, Wilbo says, “Doralina, you take great liberties with my lifestyle. What if I don’t want a party tonight?”

“Oh, you want a party, Wilbo. You know you do.” she replies.

He smiles and doesn’t say a thing until they get back to the house. Of course she’s right, he’s thinking. A party is exactly what he wants.

So they spend the afternoon rebuilding the house. They start by classifying all the building materials and sorting them into piles, including the salvageable items from the ruins, most of the driftwood, the furniture, the unbroken dishes, and even some of the broken ones.

The first layer is the walls. The walls of the new house take on a slightly different shape than the old walls. Following the curve of selected pieces of driftwood, they arch inland toward the rocky cliffs, then take a sharp outward sway to the sea, culminating in a sort of open chimney through which Wilbo will be able to see a patch of the night sky as he lies on his back in the bed.

“The full moon will pass right through that opening,” she informs him, “So will the crescent Venus.”

Doralina opens her knapsack and spills out the contents. She has hammers and saws and nails and screws of all sizes. She has a battery-powered electric screwdriver. She has duct tape and masking tape and black and green electrical tape. She has protractors and compasses and float levels and plumb bobs. She has a carpenter’s square and another tool that must have once been a square but has been forged and melded into a series of curving angles. Almost every item in her bag she uses at least once in the construction process.

The radiator is installed in one of the window openings where the glass was broken out. It acts somewhat like a radiator, the cool winds breathing through its barnacle-encrusted vanes. Having removed the pressure cap they fill the opening with a garland of blue California lilacs. The blossoms splay out like a Japanese fan against the rough wood wall. The Austin-Healy hubcap replaces the bicycle wheel in the round window frame, but first Doralina takes a pair of tin snips and cuts it into a design patterned after the rose window in the cathedral at Chartres. Into each opening she fixes a piece of colored cellophane from a package in the knapsack.

“You have to rearrange the furniture,” she tells him. “Nothing should go back as it was. What’s the point of change if it’s not complete?”

The bed is placed along the south wall where the moon-and-Venus port is visible from its headspace. The cupboards are rebuilt from salvaged boards on the wall opposite from where they used to be. A whole new set of bookshelves is fashioned from the planks with the Russian letters and hangs by twine from the driftwood nubs over the bed. The dresser, the nightstand and the wall mirror all find new homes.

With the walls rebuilt and the furniture in place the next step is to bring everything back in, all the bits and pieces- they decide that nothing will be thrown away, all the broken pottery and shards of window glass and splintered wood will be brought back in and somehow woven into the fabric of the house, mortared into the cracks with mud, wedged into the chinks and cubbyholes or strung on twine and suspended from the ceiling as mobiles.

As a crowning touch, the outside of the house is covered entirely in seaweed. They start with the heavy brown kelps, layering it thickly in crisscrossed patterns, followed by the fluffy green algae and feathery red dulse which give the odd effect that the house is a single organism in bloom, or that it is simply out of focus when viewed from a certain distance.

“It will stink after a few weeks,” she tells him, “But be patient. The stink will pass.”

From a distance they stand and admire their work. The house does look different. It looks like a sod house, or a haystack, or a small Native American sweat lodge. The sun is going down now and the shadows are deepening. The house itself casts a new shadow on the cliffs behind it. It looks like an open hand. A pair of black oystercatchers hop down from the rocks. Fluffing their feathers, they peer inquisitively into the open cabin door.

“We did good, old man.” Doralina says.

Wilbo stands and smiles but doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s feeling good but he’s also feeling hungry and tense, expectant, wanting something- food, fun, adventure- something.

Suddenly there are voices, many of them, in the distance.

Up at the shoulder of the cape, through the tunnel, people are arriving, lots of people. They are talking, the voices far away but light and happy. They are carrying things and they are colorfully dressed.

The party is about to begin.

A RE-REMINDER

2009-03-03T13:05:00.001-08:00

I'll probably post this reminder from now on until the book is fully posted, which will be soon. You can catch up on your reading by opening the chapter you are on from the archive list. Unfortunately I don't know how to change the archive list so that it shows the Chapter title rather than the date the blog was posted. Just remember Chapter One is the third blog posted January 8 and you can find your place.

Also if you look at the older posts you will see I have added a picture to every chapter.

Please stay with me, we are nearing the end! Thanks for reading!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WILBO

2009-03-03T12:54:00.000-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

At the crest of the ridge he stops and looks down on the small, secluded beach where he lives. Often he pauses here to sniff the air and scan the horizon, looking for changes, signs of visitors, signs of danger. Tonight he senses danger, perhaps, or at least change. Something is different down there. It’s enough to dissolve his silly motion picture emotions and to rivet his attention to the here and now. What could it be? He allows his eyes to sweep the horizon from left to right. It’s still not quite dark. The outlines of the rocks and snags and mounds of kelp stand out against the whiteness of the sand. The breakers produce themselves like broken chalk lines drawn by a ghost on a gray slate board.

His house! It’s gone!

No, no, it’s not gone. It’s still there. But there’s something wrong with it. It looks different. It’s hard to tell what from this distance. Something has changed.

With his eyes fixed on the shadowy shape of the house, he starts down the steep trail into the driftwood forest. Soon he can no longer see the house. It’s hidden behind the driftwood and the dunes. He quickens his pace. He breaks into a run. His feet still bare, the shoes growing heavy in his hands, he stumbles on stones and leaps over small streamlets. Blades of cord grass slice at his ankles. He breaks into a clearing and the house is visible again, or at least the place where the house should be.

The house! It’s gone!

No, no, it’s not gone. It’s just different. Something is different about it. Something has changed.

He reins in his gallop to a cantor, then a studied trot, keeping his eyes on the structure, trying to figure out what’s going on there.

It’s like the house is transparent, like you can see right through it. Is that what it is? It looks like a child’s drawing of a house. The details are gone. The perspective is wrong. The house seems to be moving, waving, like wheat in a wind. What is happening? He slows his pace to a walk, he crouches, he advances slowly, like he doesn’t want to see it all at once, like it might overwhelm him, what it is.

He begins to see things outside the house, scattered about, shadowy objects silhouetted against the white sand. One by one the objects come into focus and reveal themselves.

There’s a chest of drawers lying on its side; the drawers are pulled out and items of clothing are spilling out onto the ground. A shirt is draped over a brush scrub, one sleeve flapping in the wind. A table lies on its back, like a wounded horse, its legs slowly kicking in the air. A huge striped worm appears to be oozing through one wall of the house. On closer examination it reveals itself to be a mattress slung over a railing.

Wilbo stubs his foot on something and almost falls. On the ground a heavy shard of broken pottery is the first thing he fully recognizes: his stone crock, smashed to pieces, the pieces sharp and menacing. He stops in his tracks.

His house has been torn apart, completely. All the driftwood and pallet and shingle walls have been ripped off and broken down and thrown about, leaving only the bare skeleton of the park service tool shed like a lonesome ghost of a building leaning in the sand. In the door frame the abalone-shingled door hangs on one hinge. Everything in the house has been thrown out. The beach is covered with debris, plates and cups and bottles and blankets. Books lie bleeding on the rocks, their spines broken. Pages from books and other papers blow about. The bicycle spoke window has been deliberately bent in on itself, like a clamshell. The kerosene lamp has been decapitated. The bed frame has collapsed into a pile of splintered planks; the mattress hangs over one remaining wall joist.

In shock, Wilbo stands in the debris of what was formerly his house. His feelings are far from simple. In fact he feels very little, or at least very little that has to do directly with the destruction of the house. About the destruction of the house he thinks, oh, this is strange. This is very strange. This has never happened before. This’ll take some fixing up. I’m not even sure where to begin.

He strolls about the mess, nudging objects gingerly with his bare feet. It’s getting darker now, hard to tell what anything is. He picks a few things up. Many things are not broken. Most of his pottery is OK, the bowls, the mugs, the glazed plates. All of his clothing is fine- just scattered about. He sets to the task of uprighting the dresser where it lies, gathering all the shirts, pants, socks, stuffing them back into the drawers. Then he takes a broad sweep of the scene, collecting objects in his arms with little thought of their identity and tossing them back into the foursquare containment of the house frame. He pulls down the mattress from where it hangs and lays it flat on the plank porch.

Sleep there tonight, he tells himself, I’ll do the rest tomorrow. Now I need to sit. I need to build a fire. I need to ponder. This is going to take some pondering..

He sets out, looking for driftwood. Driftwood is everywhere on this beach. The good stuff is in the cove up against the cliff where the high tide rarely goes. He’s got his arms full- all he’ll need for a fire tonight- and he’s started back toward the house when he spies the neck of the bottle sticking up out of the sand.

“Ah!” he cries out loud, and a happy warmth rushes to his limbs. ‘They left me my Tawny Port!”
He throws the firewood to the side and makes a lunge for the bottle. But the moment he grabs the neck he knows something his wrong. He can tell by the weight. The bottle is not broken, but it’s empty.

“You god damned bastards!” he cries, surprised by the power of his own emotion, and he hurls the bottle with great force. With all the available sand around, it chooses to strike a rock and explodes with the resounding crash that usually signals the beginning of a barroom brawl.

“You motherfucking bastards! At least you could have left me my wine!”

The next thing that comes is a wall of tears, a flood of such mighty volume that the first thing it pushes out is a sob from his mouth, like a little child sobbing for its mother.

“Claudia!” he cries, loud enough that anyone on this little piece of beach could hear him.

When he hears her name, escaping like this from his own lips, he is stunned. At once he sits down hard whomp on the beach, hard enough that it hurts. The tears are still flowing through his eyes but he manages to get control of his thoughts at least.

What am I doing? What am I thinking? This isn’t the way for a grown man to behave. I can’t be acting like this. I’ve got to build a fire. I’ve got to ponder. I’ve got some serious pondering to do!

He pulls himself up and brushes himself off. He gathers up the scattered firewood in his arms and carries it to the fire circle in front of the sitting bench. He has a little trouble locating the paper to start a fire. Finally he tears some pages out of a notebook he finds blowing in the sand. He doesn’t stop to notice what’s written on them. It’s too dark to read, anyhow.

With a fire brightly blazing, throwing flickering dune shadows out across the beach, Wilbo sits on his private and comfortably contoured log, and ponders. The moment he sits and begins the process he feels an incredible sense of relief come over him, like pulling into the driveway after a long, long journey. His pondering is heavy with relief. His pondering is the relief of a dog who jumped out of a truck miles from home in the middle of the night and had to trudge for hours in the dark, following his instincts and his sense of smell, and now he lies curled up on his familiar rug by the fire. His pondering is the relief of a cottonwood seed dressed in fluffy feathers and buoyed aloft on currents of air, drifting high over valleys and hills and cities and lakes, for days, weeks, maybe even months, until at last, in a moment of calm it comes to rest in a fertile field near a river, where it can germinate and sprout, and take root in the soil. His pondering is the relief of a long, strong dominant seventh cadence finally resolving after much fanfare and cadenza into the deep homecoming of the tonic chord.

Why did I call her name? He ponders. Twice now, I’ve called her name, out of the blue, both times without warning, without forethought, like Kinko Syncho Quinto. Why her name? Does she mean that much to me that her name comes flying out of my mouth as if from nowhere? Has she lodged herself that completely in my subconscious mind? Am I going to be seeing her face in the way the smoke curls from my fire, am I going to be hearing her voice in the crowd as I walk down the streets, just like in all those corny songs?

And what about that thing we were doing together, back there in the street? It wasn’t like the other times. It was like something greater than both of us took control. But if neither of us was in control, then neither of us was leading. It was no longer a competition- there was no more wrestling of power. Nobody was making this up, and yet there was nothing random about it. It was almost as if there was a music, but there was no music. There was only one will between us. Or am I deceiving myself? Could it be that she was in control all along, entirely in control, like a sorceress, and I was her unwitting experiment? Is that what’s happening to me now? Has she climbed into my mind, deliberately, intentionally? Does she know what she’s doing? Am I a victim of something, maybe something new that the young have learned, some new craze, while I’ve been growing old?

His thoughts go quiet then, or at least they soften into a series of fuzzy, round thought shapes without much detail or intellectual edge. He thinks thoughts like perfumes that slowly shift and fade into one another, or like the rhythms of hand drums modulating with the changes in the ambient temperature. He enjoys these imaginary senses and sounds. He allows himself one more concrete idea: so what if she doing it on purpose? So what if there is some sorcery behind it? Could there possibly be any malice in her motives? What sort of malice could there possibly be? If she’s driven by anything, she’s driven by pleasure. What malice could there be in pleasure?

Then he lets that thought go and just listens for a while to the sounds of the waves. How many nights has he done this, as part of his pondering, listening to the waves as if they were an organized piece of music, analyzing the time shifts and the melodies and the counter-melodies, counting the cadences and the codas. It’s always a complex piece, like something by Debussy or Hovanness, and it’s never the same. In fact, it’s the original piece, the one that inspired many works by these composers. He doesn’t think any grand thoughts about this, about the One Mind, the great Cosmic Composer, and all the strange and sundry names assigned this Being by the world’s great religions. No, he doesn’t think that thought. He just sits and listens.

After awhile another round of emotion wakes up and starts its ascent within him. It begins when a new sound is added to the mix of the music- the sound of seals barking out on the jagged arched rocks. Sea lions, properly, he reminds himself, as Carl once reminded him. Harbor seals don’t bark. Sea lions. It’s the first time he’s heard them this spring. Their song sounds plaintive and mournful although in fact they’re probably just happy to have arrived and to be alive, out on the rocks, in the night, with the cold salt spray splashing in their faces. Their song reminds him of the distances they’ve traveled, from the secret hidden depths of the ocean to the curved and rocky threshold of the shore, where the known meets the unknown, where the conscious meets the unconscious, where the images of dreams take form in the creatures of tide pools, where the movements of dance flow spontaneously from the body and names fly unbidden from the mouth.

Claudia!

Claudia! Why do you torture me?

You have exceeded all your designs. You have accomplished all your goals. When I inhale, I breathe you in. When I exhale my breath repeats your name. My breath funnels into yours. My movements mirror your movements. My body covers your body. My soul is at your mercy. Take me and do what you will. Move my limbs about like a doll. Dress me up like a doll. Dress me up like a man. Dress me up like a woman. Dress me up in any sort of clothing. Just take me in your arms is all I ask….

Sitting by the blazing fire, with the waves pounding and the seals crying, surrounded by the broken, fallen, and scattered rubble of his house, and of his life, abandoning all inhibitions, Wilbo weeps.

REMINDER

2009-02-28T08:07:00.000-08:00

If you get behind in your reading you can find all the chapters in the Archive List. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to make the chapter title appear there instead of the date it was posted, but Chapter One is the third posting, dated January 8. You can do the math from there.

Thanks for reading!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: A STROLL ALONG THE SHORE

2009-02-28T07:53:00.001-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

A man and a woman are walking arm in arm along a quiet beach at sunset, just after the sun has dipped below the forested coastal hills and left its pale pink imprint on the feathery clouds over the ocean. It looks like a poster you might find in a college dorm room in 1967.

They aren’t completely alone, this man and woman. Down the beach some kids have built a driftwood fire and the sounds of a guitar rise with the smoke. In the other direction someone is walking a dog, and at the foot of the cliff some people are picking through the rocks for agates. But these few distant figures only impart a greater sense of solitude to the picture, and to the focal point of the picture, a man and a woman, arm in arm, strolling the beach at tideline, courting the incoming waves.

Claudia has not spoken since they left the boardwalk. At Wilbo’s request they stopped off at the Burger Shack so he could stash his concertina and tablet behind the counter. There she nodded to Mac timidly, clinging to Wilbo’s arm like a shy child clinging to her father. She kept her arm in his as they sought the beach, through the notch in the wall and down to the waves.

Now the sun is down and the sky is lightly streaked in its fleeting glow. They stroll slowly at the water’s edge in bare feet, having kicked off their shoes at the notch. Claudia keeps her body pressed up against Wilbo’s side, fitting into all his contours. Wilbo does not question her silence. He enjoys her touch, more than he should, he thinks, but he doesn’t think about that very much. Mostly he is just an enormous bundle of awareness, a single, shimmering sense organ, taking in everything, without filters, the ocean, the sky, the sand under his feet, the air against his skin. He can’t remember when he last felt this wide open, this receptive, this wondrously frightened. Maybe that one acid trip, during the human be-in, Golden Gate Park, 1968. It feels a bit like that.

He wonders what she’ll say when she finally says something. He knows better than to be the first one to speak. An especially large wave, the seventh perhaps, breaks over their feet and sends them scampering over the dry sand. They laugh, but their laughter is muted. She quickly takes his arm and presses back against his body. They cover only a short distance after this adventure, and then she begins to speak.

“Wilbo,” she says. For some reason she finds it necessary to break the silence with his name. “The Lighthouse. That card you gave me. I went back the next day. Yesterday. I walked right up to Jimmy and I said, Jimmy, are you a Jesus freak? Tell me the truth!”

She stops talking and she keeps walking. Wilbo is unsettled. It wasn’t what he thought she would say. All this time he thought she was with him, attached to him, sharing his moment of hushed wonder, this brilliant vulnerability. But no. She was thinking of something else! Her silence says, respond to this! Ask me, “What did Jimmy say?”

So he obliges. “What did Jimmy say?”

“I can’t believe what he said. That’s the thing. He said, Claudia, I’m not a freak. Please don’t call me a freak. I’m just a man who loves Jesus..” She stops walking and talking this time. She pulls away from his side and just stands there for a moment, agonizing over something.

“I’m so confused, Wilbo. They’re Jesus freaks. Every one in that place is a Jesus freak. Even Toni. Jimmy says they even have a church that meets there on Sunday mornings. Of course I wouldn’t know about that. Sunday mornings I’m dead to the world.”

Claudia sighs. She takes Wilbo’s arm again and runs her hand down his wrist, grasping his hand in hers, fingers laced.

What am I gonna do, Wilbo? I don’t want to move out. I like living there.”

Wilbo is perplexed. “Well, why would you need to move out?”

She gives him a look that says isn’t it obvious? “They’re my landlords, Wilbo!”

“Yeah… and?”
“Well, I’m not like them. I could never be a Jesus freak.”

Wilbo feels his exasperation rising and his high spirits plunging. “So? What if they were Hindus, or what if they were Buddhists or… hell, what if they were deadheads? Is there some hidden clause in the contract that says you have to embrace their belief system if you want to live in their apartment?”

“You don’t understand Jesus freaks, Wilbo. That’s what they’re all about. Their whole thing is to turn other people into Jesus freaks. I think there’s a cash reward in heaven for every person they win over. If you’re not in, you’re out. That means you go to hell. Mahatma Gandhi…goes to hell! The Dalai Lama… goes to hell! Jimi Hendrix…goes to hell!” She’s starting to raise her voice and fling her hands out like she’s flinging mud balls, every time she says the word hell.

Wilbo, wishing to calm her down, resorts to a joke. “Well, it sounds like you’d be in pretty good company.”

She doesn’t laugh. She shakes her head like she’s trying to get water out of her ears. “I’m so confused. Jimmy, he’s such a sweet guy. How could he be a Jesus freak?” She lets go of his arm and sits down suddenly, crosslegged on the sand. She bends her head down and pouts her lip.

“They’re not gonna get me,” she says. “They’re not gonna corner me with their little pamphlets and start asking me questions like where do you plan to spend the rest of eternity? I don’t do little pamphlets. Wilbo, help me up.” She holds out her arm.

He pulls her to her feet and immediately she starts out across the beach, doing a little dervish dance with her arms out like windmill blades. “Wilbo, Wilbo, Wilbo!” she says in singsong as she whirls past him. “You know who I am, Wilbo?” Her voice is birdlike as she spins to a halt in front of him.

“No, Claudia. Who are you?”

“I’m that girl in the song. The Elton John song. I’m the tiny dancer. The one who says to the Jesus freaks, the boulevard is not that bad. Hey, that’s true, Wilbo. The boulevard is not that bad!”

Wilbo chuckles. “Never said it was.” But inside he’s torn apart. She has these moments, he’s thinking, these moments when she acts just like a child, like she’s a freshman out of high school. God, what am I doing? What am I doing here? I’m nearly out of control with desire for this girl, and she’s just a child!

“Do you think you’ll really leave the apartment, then?” he asks. “Where will you go?”

She looks down demurely. She kicks the sand with her toes.

“Oh, I don’t know. No, I don’t think I’ll leave. I probably just won’t go down to the coffee house anymore. I can’t leave that apartment; it’s way too cool. Besides, I have to go back home in the summer anyhow, when the classes are over.”

“Home?”
“Yeah, home. Los Angeles, remember? I promised my dad I’d go home for the summer. He says we still have some bonding to do. I have to get some medical tests. It’s stupid but he wants me to do it. I fell down at Christmas. A couple of times. He worries about me. He’s sweet that way. Besides, I might get to be a back-up singer on a Don Henley album.” She grabs Wilbo’s arm and gives it a tug. There’s a trace of a whine in her voice when she speaks again. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” she says. “On the beach. I want to go back to my place. Let’s go back. Just talking about the apartment makes me want to go back there.” She grabs both of Wilbo’s hands and pulls on them. “Come on, Wilbo, come back to my apartment with me. We can put on some music. Maybe we can dance or something. I’ve got a bottle of wine.”

Wilbo’s head is spinning. He’s feeling something like an intense nostalgia for a time that was only five minutes ago. It’s like someone tied a series of graduated fishing weights to the loopholes on the perimeter of his heart. He takes Claudia’s left hand in both of his. The gesture seems corny, like something from a movie.

“Claudia…” his voice sounds as corny as the gesture. She gives him a quizzical look. But he continues. What choice does he have? “That thing we did… the Syncho Quinto… The first time we did it, it was like a contest. But this time it was… it was…”

Claudia pulls her hand away. “I don’t always get you, Wilbo. Sometimes you talk just like an old hippie.”

He feels infuriated but he stifles it with a quick breath of salty air. His voice trembles a little.

“There are hidden things, Claudia. There are things hidden behind what we see in front of us. There’s voices hidden in the waves at night. There are other conversations going on in the overtones of our voices when we talk to each other. There are the things we see in dreams. They call that the occult. It’s just as important as the things we see in from of us. Maybe more.” He is astounded by these strange words coming out of his mouth. He thinks maybe he is being possessed by something.

The way she cocks her head to look at him reminds him of the skunk, the way it cocked its head to look at him when he threw back the shower curtain.

“No, Wilbo, I can’t let you talk like that. If you talk like that, this isn’t going to work. That’s creepy talk. That’s old acid head talk. You have to be wild and strong, Wilbo, not creepy.”

Wilbo is about ready to give up, abandon the project, walk away, but then a weird thing happens. It’s a visual thing. He’s staring at Claudia and suddenly there’s something like a shimmering of light around the contours of her body, blue light shifting into magenta. He watches a smile appear on her face, but it’s not her smile, it’s not her face. It’s more like another person is emerging from her body, like a bird pecking out of an egg, or a reflection breaking out of a mirror to explore the other world. He only glimpses it for a second- an older woman, smile crinkles at the corners of her eyes, a sweet sadness at the upturn of her lips. Then he blinks and the image is washed off his retina.

Claudia speaks. “How old are you, Wilbo?”

He comes back to the moment with a jolt. He knows what she wants to hear. “I’m thirty-three years old. That’s what you want, isn’t it? An old man. How old are you?”

Her reply is sharp. “I’m nineteen, OK? No, I’m not old enough to have a bottle of wine! What is this, anyhow? Did my dad send you to spy on me?”

“Now, wait a minute! This isn’t my doing. I didn’t approach you. You’re the one who approached me. I was just minding my own business. You came at me like a meteor! All that kinko syncho quinto! You came up to me that day on the boardwalk, and then you came all the way down to the Dogfish to find me. You said it yourself, you put a spell on me. What is it that you want from me?”

Claudia responds immediately. There’s a fire in her voice. “Well, first off, I don’t want you to go all hippie on me, you know what I mean? All peace and love, like sitting around burning incense, sticking daisies into rifle barrels. Peace and love. Like my dad. That’s over, man. This is the wild time. I want you to be wild.”

“You can’t just do that, Claudia. You can’t just be wild for wild’s sake. There’s something we have to overcome. There’s this huge thing we have to overcome. You have to have a code of ethics.”

"Ethics?”

“Yes, that’s right. Ethics! I don’t mean the old kind of ethics like don’t cuss, don’t fuck, don’t smoke pot. It’s a new code of ethics we need. One that says don’t kill, don’t hate, be kind, love your enemies, look for the truth, be honest!” Following this litany of modern virtues he hears a little voice in the left hand side of his brain, Doralina’s voice. It says, and don’t forget- favoring women! But he doesn’t let this voice out.

Claudia screws up her face like she’s tasted a lemon. She stamps her feet in the sand. “Oooh!” she cries, “I hate myself! I’m a stupid girl! What was I thinking?”

Wilbo can’t stop the flow of words from his mouth. “You got it wrong, Claudia. You don’t need an older man to help you be wild. You need an older man to protect you, to take care of you, to help you find your way…”

“Shut up! Shut up!” she holds her hands to her ears. “I don’t need protection. I’ve been smothered with protection. I’ve got the whole fucking record business to protect me. I want to be Janis Joplin. I want to be Sylvia Plath. I want to see everything and know everything. I want to walk on the wild side.”

“Those people are dead. You’ll just be dead, that’s all you’ll be. You won’t see anything.”

“Let me be dead, then. It’s better than being kept in a room without any windows or doors!”

“I don’t want you to be dead, Clauda. I want you to be alive and happy. I want to help you be alive and happy.”

Claudia puts her hands over her eyes, then over her mouth, then she throws them to her sides. “You’re a Jesus freak, aren’t you?”

This angers him more than he can understand. “I’m not a Jesus freak!”

"Yes, you are. You’re either a Jesus freak or you’re an old man. Or maybe you’re both. I can’t stand you. I want you to leave me alone. I’m going home! Don’t follow me, OK? You can’t come to my place.”

With these words she stomps off across the sand but her first step is an awkward one, and she stumbles to her knees, landing splash! in a small pool of water left by the creek at a higher tide. She picks herself up.

“Ok, I’m clumsy, don’t laugh at me!” she wails, and she breaks into a run, making little sobbing noises under her breath.

Wilbo doesn’t pursue her. He stands there dumbfounded, watching her figure grow smaller and smaller, until she reaches the concrete wall. Then he raises his arm, as if that would catch her attention.

“Don’t forget your shoes!” he calls out.

But she forgets her shoes. Without turning back, she disappears through the notch in the wall, like a candle flame going out.

Wilbo stands there for a long time, trying to get a grip on his feelings. One image keeps repeating itself, the way she stumbled and fell, and got her knees wet, they way she stood up and said, “Ok, I’m clumsy.” This image overpowers all the others. He feels no anger. He feels something like tenderness mixed with dread. His thoughts grow troubled.

What if I’ve lost her? What if I’ve actually succeeded in driving her out of my life? I wouldn’t want that. I want her in my life.

He starts walking for the cement wall. He’s not quite sure what he’s going to do. He’s pretty sure he’s not going to go after her. But he starts walking.

At the notch he reaches around in the hiding place behind the driftwood until he finds the shoes. First he pulls out his big clonking boots, then her dainty little red leather sandals with the star-shaped eyelets. Such small feet! he thinks. Then he does a very corny thing. He presses the sandals hard against his chest. A powerful, sappy emotion rises from that point in his chest where the sandals touch, and fills his eyes with tears.

“Claudia!” he exclaims out loud. Then he comes to his senses. Totally embarrassed, he looks around furtively, hoping no one has seen or heard him. It doesn’t appear so. There’s no one in sight except for the kids down the beach, quite a distance, with their campfire now burning low.

With his boots in one hand and her sandals in the other he sets out across the beach. I just need to get back home, he tells himself. I need to sit and ponder. He thinks about the bottle of Almaden Tawny Port, under the bed. Maybe it’s time to finish that off. It’s not till he reaches the place where the trail curls around the shoulder of the cliff that he remembers his concertina and art supplies still stashed under the counter at Mac’s Burger Shack. That’s all right. They’re safe there. I can get them in the morning. All this time he’s fighting off an emotion like something out of the movies, like when the soft violins come in just as the actress turns to leave, like that scene in Old Yeller when the little boy’s father comes home and the little boy says, Pa, I had a dog…

Damn movies! I’ve seen too many God damn movies!

IF YOU GET BEHIND

2009-02-26T23:39:00.000-08:00

Purest Green suggested I make the chapters individually available in the archive list, so if you get behind in your reading you can just click on the chapter where you left off. I have tried to do this but I can't figure out how to make the titles show up rather than just the date they were posted. If anybody knows how to do this, let me know. In the meantime you can probably find where you are in the archive list pretty quickly by clicking on one of the archived posts to see what chapter that is. I have them listed by the oldest ones first. The first two are introductory. Chapter One begins on the third posting(January 8).

I hope some of you are still with me and will stay with me till the end which should be about two weeks away. I'd love to hear from just about anybody. It's getting pretty quiet out there!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: WILBO LOSES HIS MIME

2009-02-26T07:31:00.000-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

Nine a.m., Mac’s Burger Shack, the start of another working day. Wilbo sits in his usual place at the counter with his back to the door, eating his usual breakfast. He hears the cowbell ring as the door swings open. Glancing up at the mirror behind the counter he catches the reflected eye of the man coming in. A familiar face- who is it? Oh, yeah, it’s that guy, the spiky-haired guy, Claudia’s ex-boyfriend, the guy who is “so gone”. He’s dressed in chains and black leather. A girl follows him. She has spiky hair too, metal chains, leather jacket. She looks a little like Amanda, the patron saint of lunch meat.

Wilbo leans forward and speaks in a soft voice so Mac has to come close to hear him. “Hey, Mac, isn’t that the guy who tried to sell you my picture of… of the girl?”

Mac glances up. “Yep. That be the one.”

“Well, are you gonna serve him? Didn’t he rip you off last time?”

“Yeah, but he came in later and apologized. Said he was just having a bad day. Broke up with his girlfriend. Looks like he found another.”

“Did he pay you?”

“Well, no, but he said he would, soon’s he could.”

Suddenly Wilbo feels a strong hand clamped on his shoulder.

“What’s going on here, boys?”

He wheels around on the stool. He can’t tell if the man’s expression is menacing or just sarcastic in a friendly sort of way.

“Hey, I know you. You’re that artist guy. The guy that did all these pictures.”

“Yeah, right. I’m that guy.” Wilbo puts on a cloak of impenetrability, but the man just pushes through it.

“You’re the guy that has that really cool act, with the accordion and… you know, you follow people around and you copy their movements and all that. Hey, Mac, you ever see this guys act?”

Mac smiles. “Oh yeah, I’ve seen it. Wilbo’s famous. This is the Wilbo museum.”

“Well, Wilbo…Wilbo…” The spiky-haired man turns and takes a few steps away, toward the door, stroking his chin. Then he turns back suddenly. “Hey, I want you to do some pictures for me. Remember, you gave me your business card. That bar. Look, I want you to check out my new friend here. Maybe you could do some pictures of her. This is Phoenix.”

Phoenix nods slightly. She does not smile or raise an arm.

“Yeah, well, I’m off duty right now. Maybe you can catch me this afternoon at the boardwalk.”

“Yeah, Ok, that’s cool. That’s cool.” The spiky-haired man nods his head and keeps his eyes fixed on Wilbo for just a few seconds longer than good manners allow. Then he wheels around toward the cash register. “Hey, Mac, how ‘bout some breakfast? Best hash browns in town.”

As the man turns and takes Phoenix by the arm, something catches Wilbo’s eye, just for a second, but he’s certain he recognizes it. A black shoestring hangs around the girl’s neck, and on it a pewter amulet. Arlequino! The clown who cries!

“Hey!” he says out loud. But the man doesn’t hear him. He’s already escorting Phoenix to a table under the window.

Wilbo sits there fuming. He’s lost his taste for breakfast. He’s not sure why he’s so angry, but he’s angry. Finally he pushes the eggs over to the side of the plate, takes a few bites of the sausage, and gets up to leave.

“Thanks, Mac!’ he calls as he picks up the concertina and tablet. “Off to work.” Without looking back, he’s out the door.

At first it seems like business as usual. Everything looks the same as he left it, two days ago. There’s the same polished wooden bench where he sets his things. The bumper cars are crashing and sparking, drowning out the tinny pop music on the PA system. Blue and pink puffs of cotton candy melt on a post at the concession stand. It’s a warm, sunny spring day.

The people, of course, come and go, a constant stream of new faces, but they might as well be the same. He remembers once he categorized his audience into roughly four types, but it has been a long time since he cared enough to remember what they were. Besides, the types have changed gradually over the years, along with fashion and political bias, and he has not felt the interest to repeat the exercise to suit the changing of the times.

He starts out, low energy, the concertina. A few people stop to listen, a few coins drop in the hat. Then he moves on to the drawing. He draws a brawny working man, on vacation, but still wearing a cap bearing a workingman’s word: HALTON. He draws a pretty young teenage girl in clean white play clothes. He draws an over-dressed, fuzzy math nerd who stares at the picture upside-down, trying to figure out what the heck it is. Some of the pictures find an audience, others don’t. He makes a few dollars. He gives a few pictures away.

The problem starts when he tries to mime. His first subject is a bearded, tree-hugging sort of fellow in comfortable clothes and wire-rimmed glasses, strolling along with a group of similar khaki-driven characters. He falls in line behind the man, tracks his footsteps, and begins scanning his gait and posture. But then something happens. His inner body refuses to kick in. He can’t seem to take the man on. Sure, he gets an image. He makes a short little film loop of the man’s movements in his mind’s eye. But he just can’t wrap himself around it. It’s like the organ that does this has died, or fallen asleep.

Realizing he has been tracking this man for more than a block, with no apparent reason, he falls back. The man glances around and gives him a quizzical look, but then moves on. Defeated, Wilbo slinks back into the crowd.

This happens again and again. Every time he tries to mime, it happens. He picks his subject, he falls in place, but he can’t do the deed. It’s almost like sexual impotence. His miming body will simply not become engorged. And he feels a similar sense of humiliation, as if he were in bed with a beautiful woman, unable to perform. For this reason, he tries again and again, but the result is always the same.

Finally he just gives up. It’s mid-afternoon by the time he gives up. He just gives up miming. He does not give up working. He continues to make music and draw pictures. These things he could do in his sleep. He could rattle his spiel off mindlessly while reading a book or running from a pack of wild dogs. I’ve drawn kings and I’ve drawn drag queens. I’ve drawn politicians gone crooked and I’ve drawn pot-heads gone straight. I once drew Eugene McCarthy doing a cannonball into the pool at the Hollywood Hilton. My specialty is hairy backs.

But his heart is not there. He’s just doing his job, that’s all. Just making a living.

It’s well past suppertime when he calls it quits. He’s hungry and tired but he has no idea where
he’s going to go or what he’s going to do. The money in the hat is meager at best. He sits on the bench, next to his things. He slumps forward and rests his wrists on his knees, his hands folded.

This is not good. Nearly half my livelihood has been taken from me. What will I do if I can’t mime? I’ll have to get a regular job. I’ll have to work in a factory. I’ll have to bag groceries or sell used cars. I’ll become a stevedore like Carl, and fall off a boat and collect disability and read lots of books. Maybe this is just temporary. Maybe if I get some rest.

This is not good. What will I do if I can’t mime?

Suddenly he feels the bench give, as if it has taken on some extra weight. It’s just a slight give. It’s just a small weight. He looks up.

Claudia is sitting there on the bench next to him. She’s wearing a black dress made entirely of lace, with a black shift underneath. There’s a gold link chain slung low around her waist with a clasp of two hands just below the visible indentation of her navel. She holds a brown paper bag.

“Hey,” she says, “I brought you a sandwich.”

The moment he sees her, the words he wants to say form in his mouth. I can’t mime anymore, Claudia, and it’s all your fault. But he doesn’t say them. He takes the bag and peers inside.

“Thank you, I really need this.” He grabs the sandwich and begins to devour it ravenously. “You want some?” he asks with his mouth full.

“No, no. I already ate. Hey, where have you been, anyhow?”

“Where have I been? What do you mean? I’ve been right here all day.”

“Yeah, but yesterday. You weren’t here yesterday.”

“Oh, well, yesterday… I took a day off yesterday. You know, we made so much money. I just thought I could take a day off.’

Claudia sits upright and pouts her lips. “Well, I helped you make all that money, you know. At least you could have taken me with you. And then you weren’t in that bar last night, either. I went there looking for you. They wouldn’t even let me in. I thought that was like… you know, your office or something.”

These words stop him. He can’t think of anything to say. He must look distressed because she leans over and frowns into his face.

“What’s the matter, Wilbo?”

Well, you asked for it. He shakes his head miserably. “I can’t mime anymore, Claudia,” he says. And it’s all your fault, he thinks, but he does not say it. Then before he can stop himself, he says it. “And it’s all your fault.”

Claudia’s reaction is unexpected. She seems to know exactly what he’s talking about. She sits back on the bench and folds her arms across her chest.

“You bestow upon me powers I don’t even pretend to possess.” she says. Her words sound like lines from a play.

Wilbo feels exasperated. “That’s bullshit, Claudia. You know exactly what you’ve done to me; you’re a sorceress. I remember the very last thing you said to me. I’m not done with you yet, Wilbo. That’s what you said.”

Claudia giggles, unfolds her arms, stares into the passing crowd. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

“I saw your friend this morning. Your boyfriend. He came into Mac’s while I was having breakfast.”

"My boyfriend? What boyfriend?”

“That guy, that punk guy. The guy you were with the other day. The guy who hit you.”

“Who? Gary? He’s not my boyfriend. He’s not even my friend. That guy is out of here. What does he have to do with this?”

“Well, maybe he’s not your friend, but he’s been seeing you.” He waits for her to register some surprise, but she registers no surprise. “You know how I know he’s been seeing you?”

“How?”

“He was with a girl. Phoenix. She was wearing that amulet. The Arlequino amulet. The one you took from me that night.”

Claudia makes a little gasp of recognition. Then she starts to laugh. “You silly man, He didn’t get that from me. I gave it back to you. You don’t even know I gave it back to you. I slipped it in your pocket, just before you left. If he’s got it, he must have gotten it from you.”

Wilbo catches his breath. The implications of this little piece of information hit him in waves. The other night. When something called him into the ocean. There was a couple on the beach. They took something from his house. One by one, the facts fall into place. It all makes sense. No, it doesn’t. Only some of it makes sense. There’s much that remains unexplained. Even the things that make sense don’t really make sense. They just fit together. Really, nothing makes any sense at all. Nothing. In confusion, he hangs his head.

“There’s something you should know about Gary,” Claudia says. “You should just avoid him, really. That’s what I do, just avoid him. He’s kind of dangerous. He’s like schizoid. One day he’s just the nicest, sweetest guy you’d ever meet, and the next he’s like… I don’t know. He’s like a demon. You should just avoid him.”

Wilbo considers this advice. At the moment it’s only another piece of information. Information is always flowing in, a constant stream of little facts and big facts, asking for attention, asking to be considered, asking to be assimilated or discarded. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is a reflection in some cosmic lake; periodically a stone gets tossed in and the image turns to chaos, then it gradually reassembles until the next stone is tossed.

“Well, at least now he has a name. I don’t have to keep calling him that guy. But what about you? If he’s so dangerous, shouldn’t you be careful?”

“Oh, he won’t hurt me,” she says pensively. “He knows better than that. I’m more worried about you.”

“But he doesn’t even know me.”

“He knows you well enough.”

They sit for a while with their thoughts. His are mostly thoughts of annoyance that she would think he has to be worried about Gary. He certainly doesn’t have to be worried about Gary. Her thoughts are clearly about something else. Eventually she turns to him and expresses them. She places a hand limply on his folded hands in his lap.

“How about a little Kinko Syncho Quinto?” she offers. “Maybe it will help you get your mime back.”

The suggestion elicits a feeling of dread. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to.” he says.

“Don’t worry about it. Just try it. Tell you what. You get up and walk that way for thirty seconds. I’ll get up and walk this way for thirty seconds. Then we turn around and walk toward each other. When we meet we just start doing it. Kinko Syncho Quinto. People will think we’re just meeting for the first time, on the street. It’ll blow their minds. And if you can’t do it, just keep on walking, that’s all. If that happens we’ll just come back around and sit on the bench.”

Wilbo doesn’t answer, at least not in words. He thinks it over. He’s not sure this will work, but oh well, what the hell? Something has to happen. He nods. He stands up and walks away in the direction Claudia indicates.

At the arcade he turns around. A crowd has surged out of somewhere- maybe some event has just let out, or maybe it’s just an oddity in the flow of traffic. For a moment he’s afraid he might not recognize her in the crush of faces. He notices some blonde children hopping up and down outside the bumper cars. He notices an old wino sitting by himself on the bench. Then, there she is. When he sees her he feels a rush of energy as if seeing her for the first time, and she is incredibly beautiful. Their eyes meet and lock, or at least her eyes lock on his. He tries to turn away but her eyes won’t let him. She is moving toward him at an accelerating pace, like a meteor entering the atmosphere. He has no choice but to quicken his.

He doesn’t know who makes the first move. It just happens. The first movement is hands, both hands, rising, palms nearly touching. When the hands get as high as they can, they arc outward and circle down, rise again, arc and circle, each circle a little smaller than the one before, until they reach a center and stop. Theoretically the spiral could keep on going, getting smaller and smaller into infinity- this is Wilbo’s last thought. Smaller and smaller, into infinity, theoretically. But they don’t. With brief reluctance he releases the thought, and what follows leaves him breathless.

Perhaps their eyes register a sense of astonishment, and they pass it between them, like an electrical current. The moment is too brief for words, but later, in his ponderings, Wilbo will reflect, it was like something greater than both of us took control.

The dance begins in earnest. It continues. It’s difficult to say how long it goes on, how many seconds, minutes, even hours their bodies move together in perfect synchronicity. Perhaps the drunk on the bench glances up at the clock over the concession stand the moment the dance begins, then glances at it again the moment it ends, and says to himself, hmm, they did that for eleven minutes and thirty-two seconds

Through the eyes of the drunk on the bench, this is what it looks like: two people, a man and a woman, the man older than the woman, meet in the street and begin to dance. If you have to give the dance a name, you might call it a tango. In the dance they do not touch, but their bodies are very close. Their eye contact is unbreakable. Their movements are graceful and flowing and perfectly matched, like two sides of a mirror. They move with their arms and their legs, and they sway with their whole bodies. They move forward and back, and from side to side. The dance draws pictures even though there is no pencil, and creates rhythms even though there is no music. The dance is also not without sensuality or the glow of desire. A few people watch. A few people drop coins in the hat, but most people seem to be put off by the intimacy, and they pass on by.

After an unspecified time it just falls apart. It’s not clear when it starts to fall apart. Piece by piece the coordination breaks, one arm moves one way, the other moves another. An element of clumsiness is introduced. There is a moment of staggering, then a moment of severing. Eye contact is broken. The man veers to the side, the woman throws her arms in the air and begins to laugh. The man laughs. They fold together into a brief embrace, then pull apart, hands still held, laughing. Then they stop laughing and they just stare at each other, sharing an expression close to fear. The woman speaks.

“Maybe we can go find someplace where we can be alone.”

This is what the drunk sees. It’s different for Wilbo.

He gathers together the few coins that have been tossed into the hat. She takes his arm. They slip into the crowd.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: GOD'S NEXT MOVE

2009-02-23T20:30:00.000-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

It’s midnight again. Wilbo is on his way home. He’s tired, yet alert. He’s taking a different route; following the sign at the fork in the road. From this direction the distance to the business district is less than a mile. He hasn’t seen a single person since he left Levon’s cabin, over an hour ago. Nobody on the road through the redwoods, now dry and still, not a salamander in sight. Nobody at the fruit stand where he bought the last winter apple. The fruit stand in fact looks completely abandoned. All the signs have been removed and all the apples are gone. What’s left is a bare plywood structure that could easily be toppled by a gust of wind.

When he reaches the business district there are still a few people about. Some kids in the park are playing basketball. Some drunks swarms out of a tavern where loud music is playing. In an alley behind a market two men unload produce off a delivery truck. A lone figure in a wheelchair recedes down the sidewalk. Nobody seems to notice Wilbo at all. He passes invisibly through the downtown and onto the network of streets that run like rivers down to the sea.

Here he veers from the main boulevard and tries an alternate route. He’s not sure why he does this. All streets form a grid, he figures. One way is as good as another.

This street is tree-lined and the structures are large and old. There’s an ivy-covered apartment building with a courtyard where a fountain gurgles. A heavy, somber brick fortress turns out to be the public library. A path with boxwood hedges winds around the side of the library and back into the city park. Wilbo can see the dark outline of the courthouse across the park and the playground. On the next street there’s a row of stately craftsman-style houses with big trees just coming into leaf. In front of each house is an identical wrought iron post sporting an identical street light fashioned to look like a Victorian gas lamp. Even the incandescent bulbs are made to flicker like flame. The name of the resident in tasteful iron letters hangs below each lamp. Hawke. Levenworth, Saunders, Shufflebottom.

Before the end of the block, just after Adelsheim, the lamps end and the only light comes from the houses themselves.Half-asleep, half-awake, his eyes half-open, Wilbo drifts down the sidewalk, his feet turning automatically like the wands of a taffy-pulling machine.

Suddenly he hears music. It wakes him completely. It’s not in his head and it’s not on a radio. It’s real music, piano music- someone is playing a piano. He knows it’s real because there’s a mistake, a sour note, the music stops, then starts again. It’s a stride piano style with a strong walking bass. It sounds like Fats Waller.

He’s standing in front of a church. It’s a classic, whitewashed wooden church with an old rugged cross atop a tapering steeple atop a foursquare bell tower where a heavy iron bell hangs in the shadows. All the lights are on and the light filters through the rich colors of a row of stained glass windows and pours like sunlight out of an open door. The images in the stained glass are wildly imaginative. Angels with fiery wings ride creatures with the heads of lions and the bodies of horses. Insects like locusts with human faces and golden crowns are swarming out of the ground. In four large panes ride the four horsemen of the Apocalypse while in a larger center panel a winged lamb carrying a scroll rises above a menagerie of beasts, each sporting a fashionable ring of eyeballs around its head.

Then he sees the car parked on the curb outside, a dusty green Ford Falcon, the windows rolled down, the license plate askew.

“Ah,” he says out loud. “So that’s why I’m here.”

At the door he stands for a while, blinking in the blinding light. On the wall behind the altar rail, Jesus is in the middle of his Famous Dark Night, clinging to the rock with blood, sweat, and tears pouring from his face while the disciples slumber under a nearby olive tree.

The music is being wrung out of an old upright piano by a young black man in glasses. The man is clearly too young for this sort of music. He struggles valiantly to make it sing and succeeds in moments, but then his fingers stumble; he stops, curses wordlessly, starts again.

Arno sits in a pew toward the front, on the left hand side. Wilbo enters quietly, strolls up the aisle and slips in beside his brother. Arno has his eyes closed with his face raised toward some invisible focal point in the air above the altar. His face is smeared with tears. He’s got more tears in his face than Jesus at Gethsemane.

He knows Wilbo has arrived but he keeps his eyes closed for a while. He seems to be descending slowly from some high inner place. When he finally opens his eyes, he does not turn.

“Wilbo. I’m so glad you came,” he says to the air. “You don’t know how much this means to me. You knew where to find me.”

“Well, not really, Arno. I just found you, that’s all. I wasn’t looking for you. I was just walking and there you were. There was your car, out in front of this church.”

Arno finally turns to face his brother. He smiles a sad, ragged smile. “God works in mysterious ways. This is his doing. He brought you here to me. He looks after his children when they turn to him. He knows when the sparrow falls in the forest. He goes looking for the lamb that strays from the fold.” Arno intones these words in a deep, theatrical voice, with the hint of a southern accent. Then he turns his head away and resumes his normal tone. “I stopped by the Dogfish the other night, looking for you. You weren’t there. It made me so happy. I knew you would understand once you thought about it. I knew you would come through for me.”

Wilbo decides not to conceal his annoyance. “I haven’t come through for anybody, Arno. I haven’t made any promises. I just wasn’t drinking at the Dogfish, that’s all. You don’t know my reasons.”’

Arno smiles a self-satisfied little smile. He keeps his gaze straight ahead. “God knows your reasons better than you do. Jesus has called you, Wilbo. You’ve already heard him. Deep inside, you’ve already begun to respond. You just don’t know it. Jesus is standing at your door- he’s knocking at your door!” Arno’s voice is growing in intensity and the trace of an accent is creeping back in.

Thoroughly irritated, Wilbo makes a fist and socks his brother soundly on the shoulder, effectively stopping the flow of words. “Stop making that voice, Arno!” he cries. “That’s not your voice! Talk to me in your regular voice. Talk to me like… like I’m your brother.”

The outcome of this is not what Wilbo anticipated. Arno bursts into tears. He throws his hands into his face and doubles over in the pew, sobbing uncontrollably.

Wilbo wonders, is this really any better? Is this really an improvement? Arno used to cry like this when he was drunk, too.

The sobbing slowly ebbs. The piano music continues but it’s riddled with wrong turns and bad choices. Wilbo catches the piano man’s eye once, stealing a glance at the little melodrama going on in the pew. Finally Arno sits up and pulls his hands away from his face. Long strands of snot and slobber stretch from his nose to his fingers. Wilbo reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief.

“Here, Arno. Mop up your face. You’re a mess.”

Arno unfolds the handkerchief into a full square and then lays it on his face as if it were a tablecloth and his face a table. He blows his nose into it and then drags it off his face into a crumpled ball.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice still choked with emotion. “This is so embarrassing. You must think I’m… You must think I’m a… I am a mess. You’re right, I am, but I have to be. I have to be a mess for this to work. I have to fall apart, before God can put me back together.”

Wilbo is only somewhat softened by these words. He still feels a little antagonistic. He still wants to challenge.

“Well, I hope so, Arno. I hope you’re not just going to fall apart and keep falling apart. I’ve seen you like this before, you know. I’m just not convinced that this is any different.”

“It’s different, Wilbo.”

Wilbo nods. His skepticism gives slightly. Still, it doesn’t break.

“But all this blubbering and slobbering you’re doing. All this whining and browbeating. If this is such a good thing, how come it makes you so sad?”

Arno takes some time to answer this question. He opens the crumpled handkerchief, then folds it back into a neat little square and dabs the corners of his eyes.

“I grieve. I grieve for all the years I’ve wasted. And for all the people I’ve hurt. I’ve made such a mess of things. I wish I could just go back and start all over.”

The piano man stops playing during this pronouncement. He’s looking down at his fingers but it’s not clear that he’s thinking about the music.

“That’s not the only reason,” Arno continues. “I’m lonesome, Wilbo. I miss my friends. It scares me. I don’t want to go back to that life, but I miss the people in it. I’m not strong enough to go back as a new man, doing new things. I would just backslide. I would slip into the old ways. But I’m lonesome. I’m all alone. I don’t have anybody. Just you.”

Wilbo looks around at the pews, the altar rail, the pulpit, the stained glass windows. The piano man sees him looking and quickly returns to his music.

“Well, what about this church? Isn’t this where it all started? They’re the ones that are responsible for the state you’re in. Aren’t they gonna stand behind you, help you along?”

Arno looks up and fixes his eyes on the picture of Jesus. “Oh, yeah. They would. I came here the very next morning. It was Sunday, you remember. I came to church. They were very friendly. They stood around me and they prayed with me. But… well, they’re… they’re different from me.”

“You mean they’re black?”

“No, no, it’s not that, I mean they’re just… well, they’ve got their own thing going here. They’ve got their committees, they’ve got their little friendships, they’ve got their dinner groups going on, their Sunday schools. It’s… it’s hard to break in, that’s all.”

“You mean they’re black.”

“Oh, stop that, Wilbo! That’s not what I mean, you know that. I’m not a racist, OK? It’s just.. it’s just hard to get to know them. Brother Jackson there, on the piano, he’s all right. He’s a good guy. He let’s me come in when he practices the piano and just sit here and… you know, talk to God and stuff.” Arno waves to Brother Jackson who is no longer pretending to ignore the conversation. “Hey, Brother Jackson!”

“Hey, Arno!”

“Well, gee, Arno, it seems to me you ought to be able to find some people who… you know, share your beliefs. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Fellowship. Isn’t that a word they like to use?”

Arno nearly laughs. “You talk about them like they’re some sort of weird little group of freaks, like the Quakers. This is the truth, Wilbo. This is the one main truth. It’s the one truth that makes the universe go round.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. In that case you surely ought to be able to find someone who shares your beliefs.”

Arno doesn’t offer any answers and in the silence Wilbo feels a cascading spiral of weariness. He makes a mental picture of the miles he has yet to cover before he can sleep. When he looks up he sees a strange sight. Brother Jackson has stopped playing the piano and now he has his arms open wide and wrapped around the sound box with his shoulders slumped over and his head resting on the keys.

In this moment Arno says something totally unexpected. He starts making this little rocking motion in the pew before he says it, and when he speaks his voice is subdued, drained of his former theatrics.

“Do you think dad is still alive?”

Oddly, Wilbo doesn’t flinch. It’s like they have slipped suddenly into deeply familiar territory, like something they would talk about in younger days when they were drinking together. He can almost feel the glow of the alcohol.

“Yeah, he’s alive. I’m sure he is.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I went looking for him. You didn’t know this. I didn’t tell you. Maybe I wanted to be the hero. I tried hitchhiking to Tonepah."

"Tonepah?"

"Yeah, Nevada. Where they exploded the bombs. I talked to some of his friends in Sacramento. They told me he was still alive but they wouldn’t tell me where he was. They didn’t trust me. Of course that was a few years ago. He could be dead now. But why would he be?”

Wilbo entertains a thought. It was like this when they were drinking, too. The two brothers would sit side by side, not facing, talking into a shared space about arm’s length in front of them, as if their words were winter clothes they were packing away in a plastic tote. Arno squirms a little.

“So what do you think he thinks of me? I mean if he’s still alive.”

“Of you?”

“He didn’t know me that well. He knew you better.”

“He didn’t know anybody that well. He was a strange man. He had demons.”

Arno lets out a little puff of air. “Demons are real.”

“It's a metaphor, Arno. This religion thing you've gotten yourself into... Dad, he wasn't so big on religion."

"Dad needed Jesus."

"Oh, stop with this Jesus stuff. With this religion thing."

Arno turns to look at Wilbo, breaking the intoxication illusion. “It’s not a religion thing, Wilbo. It’s not even religion. It’s salvation. It’s the only way out of this vale of tears. This world has been given over to Satan. We can’t stay here. I’m afraid for you, Wilbo. I’m afraid for your soul. And Dad's.”

Wilbo can feel his heart sink and his arms and legs giving in to a great heaviness. These last few minutes were like the pastoral interlude in a Stravinsky piece, a brief respite in a field of agitation. He rises abruptly to his feet.

“I gotta go, man, I’ve had a long day. I’m exhausted. Hey, maybe we could meet for lunch some time.”

Arno sits up and starts straightening out his shirt sleeves. “Yeah, sure.” he says, rather absently. “You can call me. I still got a phone. Hey, man, I’d take you home but I told Brother Jackson I’d stay until he finished practicing. He’s scared to be alone in the church.”

Brother Jackson stirs. He lifts his head, then lays it down on the other side, eliciting a soft cluster chord from the piano.

Wilbo looks around to make sure he has everything he came with. Then he remembers something. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a small card. It’s the other card he picked up at the Lighthouse, the one he didn’t give to Claudia.

“Hey, here’s something. I picked this up the other day. Maybe you ought to look these people up.” He hands Arno the card.

Arno takes the card, glances at it without really registering anything, and sets it down in the pew.

“Thanks, brother,” he says. “Hey, don’t worry about me, OK? We’ll get together in a few days. We’ll have lunch, what you said. We’ll talk it over. You should be thinking about yourself now, Wilbo. God has called you. ”

Arno remains in the pew. Wilbo is thinking, a handshake is a bit formal, under the circumstances. But after this last remark he’s not feeling all that much like hugs. Instead, he reaches out and swipes the top of Arno’s head with the flat of his palm.

“Yeah, OK. Take care.” He turns and starts for the door.

Just outside the church he has to stop and allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness. A little wind has picked up and the trees are rustling. Out by the sidewalk his eyes catch sight of something moving. Some long ribbony object is dancing in the wind. Strange. He hadn’t noticed it before. He steps out to the street to see what it is.

There’s a rustic wooden cross planted in the ground next to a sign that announces hours of worship in Gothic letters. The moving object is attached to the side of this cross and trails out in the breeze. It’s a complicated object, not just a piece of debris. He has to get close to see what it is.

It’s a teddy bear. One leg of the bear is nailed to the central shaft of the cross. This is obviously intentional. Whenever the leg of any warm blooded creature, or an image of any warm blooded creature is nailed to a cross, you can be certain it’s intentional. But the rest of the bear is free, and the position of his body leaves no question about his intent. He’s trying to escape from the cross. His body is twisted away from his nailed foot. He’s pulling himself up with both paws into the crook between the shaft and the arm of the cross. His right leg is already slung over the arm, like an escaped convict scaling a wall. The wind blown movement is made by a long flowing cape of brightly colored scarves and ribbons trailing out from his shoulders. He’s also wearing a pair of pink, polka dotted boxer shorts, and a tiny pipe-cleaner halo floats above his furry head.

The moment Wilbo registers all this, he bursts into laughter, uncontrollable convulsions of laughter. He doubles over laughing. He laughs until tears come to his eyes.

“Doralina Steindl Klas!” he laughs out loud. “Doralina! Is there anybody else who appreciates your art?” He tries to contain himself. He wouldn’t want Arno to come out to see what’s going on. How would he explain it? Slowly he is able to whittle the peals down into guffaws and the guffaws into chuckles. He stands there for awhile, giggling and gurgling in appreciation of Doralina’s work.

“Doralina, Doralina…” he mutters mirthfully, shaking his head. Then he turns away and sets out on the last leg home.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: INTO THE KINGDOM OF GLASS

2009-02-21T08:08:00.000-08:00

copyright 209 by Jim nail

It doesn’t lead him where he thought it would.

He thought it would lead him to the heart of town, a place he’s been a few times before but only because he had to, the bustling center of commerce where goods are exchanged and government is exercised, and people rub shoulders with other people in the public arena. Mass movements, Carl would call it. The amalgamation of the establishment, Floyd would say, the place where peace and love become commodities that are bought and sold. Wilbo would give it another image: the conscious mind; the quintessence of inland, the outward expression.

To turn inland, he thinks to himself, as he crosses the intersection of the Coast Highway, where there’s no crosswalk or traffic light, and the log trucks and micro-busses are clipping by at the mandated 55 miles per hour. A well-worn metaphor, that one: the shoreline as the edge of consciousness. It’s just the opposite of what you might think. To turn inland is to turn outward. It depends on the direction you’re facing. The ocean is the unconscious, the unknown. It’s vast and uncharted, and teeming with strange creatures. It’s difficult to go there. The land is where the people are. It’s where they meet and mingle and carry on business. It’s commerce. It’s the conscious mind. But the shore. The shore is that narrow strip between the two. It’s the place where the conscious and the unconscious meet. It’s where I live…

Perhaps it’s being lost in these deep thoughts that causes him to miss the sign at the intersection, inscribed inside the pointed wooden arrow: BUSINESS CENTER 1.5 MILES. The other problem is that he’s hungry and part of him is thinking about this café he knows about downtown. They make pretty good pastrami sandwiches. But he’s well past the intersection with the arrowed sign when he realizes this. He’s on a country road by this time, winding its way up into the hills.

The rain has stopped, but the road is wet and the pines that line the road are speaking in their water voices. There’s the smell of sage blossoms and skunk cabbage. Cars swish by leisurely, one at a time with long buzzing quiet spaces in between.

Up ahead is a makeshift fruit stand in a clearing on the right hand side of the road. Painted signs nailed to trees promise PEACHES, MELONS, TOMATOES, BOYSENBERRIES. But the sign on the stand itself bears bad news: CLOSED UNTIL SEPTEMBER. However, there is something going on. A straw basket sits on the counter, brimming with shiny red globes, and there’s a green Volkswagen beetle parked beside the stand. Coming closer, Wilbo reads a small cardboard placard propped up against the basket: WINTER APPLES, LAST CHANCE.

A young girl in the visible throes of puberty is perched on a folding metal chair, her attention firmly fixed in a popstar magazine. She looks up with a start. She wasn’t expecting to see a man standing there. There was no car.

“Excuse me,” Wilbo announces himself apologetically, “How much would you take for one of these winter apples?”

“Oh, you scared the shit out of me!” says the girl. She throws the magazine onto the counter and drags the chair back. “You have to buy them by the pound,” she informs him. “We don’t sell apples.”

Wilbo picks out the largest apple he can find and tosses it in the air a few times. “Well, how much you think this one weighs?”

“That’s only one apple. I said you gotta by them by the pound. Seventy five cents a pound.”

He sets the apple down on the counter and selects another. This one he does not toss, but he turns it thoroughly and inspects it from all angles.

“These two then. Put them together. How much would they weigh?”

The girl rolls her eyes and pulls herself to her feet. She places the apples in a bucket scale and leans over to read the weight.

“Nope. Sorry, still not a pound.” She’s about to take the apples out of the scale but Wilbo stops her by placing two more randomly selected apples in the bucket.

“Well, how ‘bout that? Is that a pound?”

She read the scale. “Pound and a quarter.” she announces. “That’d be a dollar.”

He reaches in his pocket and fishes out some change, two quarters, three dimes, four nickels.

“Here, hold out your hand.”

Reluctantly she extends a hand, palm up, and he takes it from below, cradling her down-turned knuckles firmly but tenderly with his big fingers. With his other hand full of change he covers her palm and holds her hands there in his hands for just a moment while the money falls from his hand into hers. He can’t explain this bizarre gesture- it just seems like the thing to do. What surprises him is the sensuality of it, the pleasure of the contact, skin to skin. It embarrasses him a little.

“There you go. That’s a dollar.” He slowly relinquishes his grip. Then he picks up the biggest of the apples.

“This is the only one I want. You can keep the rest.”

“Yeah, well, whatever.” The girl seems a little disoriented. She just stands there staring at the two remaining apples on the scale, as if they hold some hidden secret.

“Have a nice day.” she says finally, after Wilbo has turned to leave.

He walks with the apple in his hand for a while, through several bends in the road, past a farmhouse, an orchard, a row of painted mailboxes, a stand of foxgloves blooming in brilliant violet. The apple is cold and smooth and foreign in his hand. He imagines the apple is more than an apple. The apple is a prize he had to wrestle out of another dimension. If there was a picture of him walking down the road with his apple, everything else in the picture would be cast in dull earth tones; the apple would be glowing a numinous crimson as if backlit by an otherworldly light.

The road straightens out and starts up a long steep incline without a visible bend for as far as the eye can see, or nearly. At the summit the two shoulders appear to converge at a dimensionless point, blurred by mirage, and by a horizontal ribbon of low-lying fog. As if suspended in air the blue-green tips of the redwoods poke out of the fog and point to the sky.

Up ahead, a round coin of sunlight appears suddenly on the shiny surface of the road and begins to move. It follows the pavement, advancing swiftly down the slope, like a running egg yolk, toward the place where Wilbo walks. The moment it reaches him the sun itself pummels out of the clouds overhead and everything goes suddenly Technicolor. Wilbo stops walking and gazes into the rise of the road ahead where the sunlight has already passed and the cloud shadows are brooding.

“Might be time to eat that apple.” he says.

A sawed-off tree stump by the roadside offers a suitable place to sit. The apple itself is maybe a bit anti-climatic- it is, after all, only an apple. But it’s a good one, crisp and juicy, and the juice runs down his chin like the juice should run from a good apple. Besides, he’s hungry. He hasn’t eaten a thing since breakfast at Macs. He devours the apple in circles from the stem down, breaking off chunks with his lower teeth. He eats the whole thing, core and all.

Then he glances up the road ahead and his eyes lock in mid-focus.

There’s something going on up there. It’s hard to say what it is because it’s so far away, close to where the roadbed merges with the fog. It looks like the road itself is moving, a shimmering sideways sort of motion, not quite like the flow of water- it seems to be composed of distinct, individual particles. At first he thinks it’s a heat mirage, but no, it doesn’t look like a heat mirage. What could it be?

He’s on his feet at once, and starts up the long steep slope. His eyes are fixed on the movement and his thoughts are clear of anything except curiosity and wonder. Curiosity and wonder propel him faster than his internal speed limit. His heart begins to pound, his breathing becomes labored; he feels the strain in the muscles of his calves and thighs. But he stays with the movement, watching the focus sharpen the closer he gets, like a movie on the screen after someone from the audience runs up and arouses the projectionist.

Yes, for sure, near the summit of the hill, something is wriggling, slithering, or flowing across the road from right to left, from the mountainside to the ocean side. At first he thinks there’s water, and whatever it is is being washed across the road in a stream of water, maybe fish or just some kind of debris, caught in a flash flood. But no, drawing closer he sees that the road is dry and speckled; the speckles are in motion. Looking closer he sees color, flashes of color, streaks of vivid popsicle orange. Then he sees the legs, then the tails. He reaches the edge of the living stream and stops to catch his breath and marvel at the sight.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of salamanders are pouring out of the dense wall of blackberry and vine maple on the right hand side of the road and scurrying across the pavement as if it isn’t even there, as if it is just a band of weather through which they must pass. On the left hand side the shoulder drops off abruptly into a green grassy hill tumbling into the town and into the sea. Wilbo can hear the little bodies continuously plopping off the edge like raindrops, and he can hear the rustling of movement through the tall grass.

He leans over and picks up a salamander between his thumb and forefinger. Its back is brown and scratchy, like a moist piece of sandpaper, its belly smooth and brilliant orange. Its legs keep moving in the same steady rhythm, marching time in the air. He holds it for several seconds and it does not lose momentum. When he sets it down, it continues at its pace, as if nothing has happened.

For a while he just stands there, struck by wonder at the sight, no clear thoughts forming.

Eventually the thoughts begin to form.

This is strange on many levels, he thinks to himself. In the first place, what if a car came by? But there aren’t any cars in sight. The road still seems to be leading someplace but most of its destinations have already passed- the driveways, the farmhouses, the fruit stands. What’s left is a rutted and gravel path, a road less traveled. This brings him to his next question.

What about me? Is this it? The end of the adventure? Is this, then, what I came to see, and all that’s left is to retrace my steps?

It doesn’t seem quite right to come this far on a road and then turn back, especially when the road still leads somewhere.

He contemplates the stream of moving creatures. He focuses on the gaps between them, and the advancing formations of the gaps, and the relative velocity, and the patterned angles, and the available freeboard.

Yes, he concludes, a crossing by foot is possible.

Addressing the stream a moment longer, he considers one more variable. It has no dimension, but it requires action.

First, remove the shoes.

With his shoes in his hands, his socks balled up in the shoes, Wilbo steps barefoot into the road. At the edge, the salamanders are sparsely populated- he has no trouble stepping into the spaces between them. But he must keep moving. The spaces fill quickly. About forty paces and he’s into the thick of it. His eyes are darting, tracking the passage of the space ahead, and the space ahead of that, one for the right foot, one for the left. It’s a bit like fording a stream on slippery stones. He must narrow his peripheral vision and shut out all other concerns. This creates a sort of vertigo in which the field of salamanders appears to be stationary, and it is he who is moving, listing precariously to the right. He feels dizzy. He stops in his tracks.

At once he becomes like a rock in a stream and the creatures swarm like water over his bare feet. The effect is disconcerting. He loses his balance completely and sinks to his hands and knees. One hand cups a salamander in motion but it manages to wriggle free and escape through his fingers. The others swarm over him, climbing over his ankles and wrists and passing in formation under his chest and arms.

Shaken and breathless, he pulls himself into a crouch and rises slowly on his trembling legs. He wishes for a railing or a walking stick. He wonders if he’s going to be able to complete this passage. But it’s just as hard to turn back now.

After his fall he no longer advances with confidence. Now he takes each step at a time, pausing in each footing, allowing the creatures to overtake him while he scans the road for the next.
About ten paces of this and he suddenly feels the unmistakable sensation of something crawling on the underside of his arm. In a panic, he flings his shoes away, but the salamander remains, plodding steadily up his arm toward his armpit. With his right hand he grabs it and throws it hard against the pavement, but it seems to be unharmed- it picks up its pace where it left off and keeps moving.

The shoes, however, have done some damage. One of them lies on its side over a limp body, an orange tail twitching convulsively against the laces. He reaches the shoe in two steps and snatches it up, but the damage is irreparable. The creature is mostly a flat patty of roadkill, only the tail retains some dimension.

First do no harm…

From this point on his passage is painstakingly slow and heavy with troubled thoughts. His thoughts are not clearly formed. He does not ponder. Most of his mental energy is required for the task. But he gets images and he hears voices and other sounds, not just voices. The sounds he hears are ocean sounds, like seals on the rocks, or the waves flinging pebbles, or the distant calliope of the carousel on the boardwalk. The voices are saying things like the dog will never catch his tail, or there is no coin with only one side. The images are mostly faces and the faces are mostly children’s faces, children moving quickly or children sleeping. But gradually another face begins to appear and slowly insists itself upon the palate of his mind. It’s the image of Arlequino, the one on the amulet, last seen hanging around Claudia’s neck.. The face plays tricks. The mouth smiles but the eyes cry. Sometimes the eyes hold so much sadness they make the smile look like a frozen grimace. Sometimes the mouth holds so much mirth it makes the eyes look like they’re about to brim with tears of joy.

At first he doesn’t notice that the road has entered the shade of the redwoods. He’s at a point where he can’t see either shore of the river of salamanders, ahead or behind. That’s when he looks up and sees the glass.

Suspended from a redwood branch overhanging the road, about twenty feet up, there’s a long slender teardrop of pure white glass. At first he thinks it’s moving, so fluid is its form. But no. It just drapes from the branch and hangs there suspended, catching the diffused sunlight in its translucent surface. The moment he sees it he feels a sudden hush fall on the forest, as if the very act of his seeing it could cause a sudden hush to fall on the forest. What could it be?

Then he sees the others.

Just ahead, the forest is full of glass. Clusters of glass grapes in deep greens and purples cascade over the outstretched limbs. Bird’s nests made of tiny glass straws, holding robin-blue glass eggs nestle in the crook of a branch. A chime of glass rods, each a different color and length, hangs from a piece of driftwood suspended from a copper wire. The moment he sees it a breeze disturbs it and it sings a tiny minor chord. A riot of cut glass prisms dangles form a gossamer thread strung between two trees. Around the trunk of a young redwood a glass snake spirals and glowers through garnet eyes. A glass stream cascades out of the hollow of an oak; tiny sparkles of color dance in the flow. A glass cobweb hangs between two branches, a glass spider guards the fulcrum, a glass dewdrop hangs from one strand. He’s not sure about the cobweb. It might be real.

Patches of sunlight appear and move rapidly through the trees, flaming each glass fragment for only a moment, then hurrying on. Wilbo stands motionless. Each moment of sun illuminates him briefly, as if he himself were made of glass.

He closes his eyes and watches the moving patterns of sunlight on his eyelids. High in the branches there’s a chattering sound, followed by a tapping and a clicking. Maybe a bird, maybe a squirrel. A high wind sways the very tops of the trees and strums a few bars of an ethereal melody, like something by Debussy. Down on the ground it’s still and silent.

Still and silent.

Wilbo opens his eyes. Still and silent! The salamanders are gone. The road is empty and motionless. For a moment he wrestles with a disturbing thought: were they ever there at all? But, yes, they were there. He has proof. Down the road in the distance a passing swatch of sunlight chases a few stragglers toward the shoulder.

Wilbo draws a deep breath of the loamy, forest-scented air, and releases it slowly through his nostrils, savoring the yeasts and the alkalines of decomposition.

Well then. That’s that. As adventures go, that was one of the stranger ones.

He brings his attention back to the road ahead where the forest is flashing, tinkling, and pulsating with color and light. And this is a bit out of the ordinary as well, he tells himself.

His first steps into the new adventure are hesitant. Translucent salamander ghosts appear on the pavement and expand until they lose their shape and vanish. But even then the road won’t lie still. It ripples and swirls like molten glass.

It’s Ok. It’s safe. You can walk on it. You don’t have to be careful anymore.

At the crest of the hill the road widens into a rounded open space. It’s very dark here. It’s the heart of the forest where the ancient, moss-hung redwoods are huddled together like a conference of wizards, and even if the sun were shining fully in the bright sky, very little of it could penetrate to this dark and quiet place. Wilbo scans the circle looking for where the road might go next. But this is the end of the road.

Directly across the clearing there is a house- a cabin- he doesn’t see it at first because the wood is unpainted and it blends in with the forest. A large porch wraps around the front of the cabin. Glass objects of many different shapes and colors spin and dangle from the eaves of the porch. A cord of firewood is stacked neatly, ten by ten, next to the open door. An axe with a shiny red blade leans against the logs. He sees something like a bright blue point of light dancing in the air above the porch railing. At first he thinks it’s a glass object, but no, it moves differently; there’s a willfulness behind its movements. Then he sees the man.

The man is sitting on a stool. He’s wearing a pair of thick dark goggles. His eyes are obscured. His face is thin and his hair is long and skinny. He’s doing something with his hands that makes a bright ball of blue light dance and flicker. Occasionally showers of white sparks fly from his fingers.

Wilbo smells something- no, he smells two things, layered and blended in the still air. There’s the strong industrial stench of burning acetylene, and there’s the slow, rolling aroma of wood smoke and something delicious, roasting on a wood fire.

He stands respectfully at the foot of the porch steps with his hands folded behind his back, presenting himself.

“Hello, Blue Lake.” he says.

Levon does not look up from his work. “Welcome, Wilbo. Would you like some fish?” Then his head nods imperceptibly to the right. “Opal, Wilbo is hungry. Fetch him some fish.”

He hadn’t noticed Opal at all. She is woven invisibly into the fabric of a quilt, draped over the back of a porch swing. When she rises, she seems to rise straight up, like smoke from a fire and then drifts silently like smoke down the porch steps and across the yard to where a ring of stones encloses a bed of embers. She sinks to her knees effortlessly and with bare hands draws a foil-wrapped parcel from the coals.

Meanwhile, Levon is conjuring up a blue heron from his wand of glass. The neck flows gracefully out of the flame and a tiny glass thread curlicues from the tip of the beak, solidifies, snaps off, then vanishes into thin air. Levon turns off the torch with a pop. He holds the heron in his gloved hand while it cools, then sets it down on the porch railing.

“Rest your feet, Wilbo. Eat some fish.”

Like an apparition of Sacajawea Opal Moon materializes before him, holding out an open foil of flame-baked salmon in one hand, a tall tumbler of cold water in the other.

These are the rules with Levon Blue Lake Moon and his wife Opal: you don’t worry about lulls in the conversation. There are no awkward pauses. Words happen only when required, to convey information. Wilbo takes a comfortable seat on the top step of the porch. There are no utensils but that’s not a problem. Propelled by a day-long appetite, quelled only by one small winter apple, he digs into the fish with his bare hands. It tastes like salt, water and sky, fused together by fire, seasoned with lemon. He eats slowly and the flavor seems to center him, to draw him into himself.

Blue Lake leans easily on the railing and looks out into the forest. “I won’t be at the Dogfish tonight,” he announces. “The newts are spawning. Send my regards.”

“You mean the salamanders?”

Levon nods. “It isn’t safe to drive.”

Wilbo considers this. He considers the way the salamanders made their crossing above the last driveway off the road. He thinks about Levon and Opal’s predicament, cut off from the rest of the world by the spawning of newts as surely as if they were drifts of snow.

“I don’t think I’ll be there tonight either.” he says quietly.

Some time passes. Opal returns to her place on the porch swing, folding back into the pattern of the quilt. Wilbo finishes his salmon and drains the tumbler dry. A squirrel scampers to the center of the clearing, stops, rears up and shakes his fist, at what? Who knows?

“Something has changed in your life.” Blue Lake says. He says it matter-of-factly, as if he is saying you’ve got a little fish caught in your beard.

Yes, this is true, Wilbo thinks to himself, but exactly what? It seems like many things have changed- a whole tumbling maelstrom of change, disrupting practically every aspect of who he is and what he does. It seems like everything has changed. He searches his mind for a cog in the machinery, the one main change that started it all.

“I met this girl.” he says at last.

Levon makes a deep utterance in the back of his throat, a word that can’t be spelled, like the Hebrew name for God.

“What’s her name?” he asks.

That much is easy. “Claudia.” he tells him.

Levon closes his eyes for awhile. It looks like he’s searching through a file cabinet behind his eyes. He opens them and looks at Wilbo.

“Her name means she who walks with a limp.”

These words are hard and troublesome. Wilbo wishes he hadn’t heard them. “Well, that’s not a very good meaning.”

“Sure it is.” Blue Lake replies. He straightens out his body to its full height. His head almost touches the eaves. He rolls his head in a slow circle, working out the kinks. He leans back on the railing. “Everyone walks with a limp. It takes courage to do it outwardly.”

Wilbo ponders this tidbit. Sure, it sounds wise, but it doesn’t seem to fit.

“She doesn’t walk with a limp.” he says. “She’s a dancer. She’s graceful. She’s light on her feet. She’s young.”

“There you go.” A sly little smile turns up the corners of Levon’s mouth. “We get our names for a reason. Sometimes we have to grow into them.”

At first these words draw a blank. They speak of the future, and it’s hard to think of the future. It hasn’t happened yet. But after a period of silence he feels a little wave of emotion, a brief, heartstrung tug of tenderness, like something a mother might feel when sending her child off to college for the first time. It passes quickly and he lets it go without comment.

A longer time passes. The shadows deepen. The setting sun makes one last appearance and throws long slanted yellow beams through the forest, glancing off certain glass objects while others remain subdued in the blue shadows. A golden-haired dog strolls up from somewhere and presents its ears for Blue Lake to scratch. After much scratching it grunts its appreciation, ascends the porch steps and climbs up into the porch swing where it lays its head down with a sigh on Opal’s lap.

“So…why do the salamanders cross the road?” Wilbo asks. The question makes him laugh. It sounds like he’s asking a tired old riddle, hoping for a brand new answer.

“They’re spawning.” Blue Lake replies. “These are the males that are crossing now. The females will go in a few weeks. They’ll go to meet their boyfriends in the marshes by the beach.”
“
They stopped crossing when I was coming up here.”

Levon nods. “They stop when the sun gets low. But it’s still not safe to drive. There’s always a few who don’t stop. What would Carl call them? The eccentrics…”

Wilbo ponders. “Like us then. The eccentrics.”

Levon’s reply is uncharacteristically immediate. “You think a lot about that, don’t you Wilbo. How you differ. From the pattern of the world.”

Wilbo’s retort is just as immediate. “Don’t you?”

Blue Lake closes his eyes. There’s a moment where he is standing on the porch with his eyes closed, and Opal is sitting on the porch swing, scratching the dog behind the ears. Opal is the next to speak.

“It’s more important how you differ from the pattern of yourself.”

Immediately Wilbo remembers something Carl said, just the night before. People don’t change when they get older. They just become who they always were, only more so. The time when someone changes into something else as they grow older- that’s the stuff of legends. It amazes him that he can remember this, out of all the other things that Carl said last night.

Levon speaks next. “Tell me more about this girl,” he says.

Wilbo’s thoughts are far from Claudia at this moment. Claudia is like a burning sensation in his loins. Claudia is like an alarm clock waking him up to a strange scene, a landscape, a bed in a cabin beside a lake with tall alpine mountains rising in the morning mist, reflected in the lake, shimmering, a broken reflection, a wind across the water, the reflection of the mountains broken on the surface of the lake.

Claudia! What can he say about her? She is a mystery. But she isn’t that mysterious. Not really. She is a rich girl from Los Angeles. Her father works for Warner Brothers. She is looking for an older man to help her get wild. To help her let go. Onto the scene she bursts with razzle dazzle, a great clumsy exuberance and a full keg of sensuality, enough to impregnate the expanding universe. Claudia!

But before that. Before Claudia, or swirling with Claudia in the maelstrom of events of the past two days, breaking like a stamping horse into the repetitive pattern of three layered years. Arno, his little brother, with his crazed demand. A skunk offering an amulet as a talisman for the coming changes. A mysterious phosphorescent presence behind the arched rocks, calling him into the waves. Floyd Collins in his recurring grief, soothed by the magic song and propelled into a newness of action by Doralina Steindl Klaus who brought Amanda, the patron saint of lunch meat, out of the closet. A stream of salamanders, crossing the road, throwing him into the eccentric of the wheel, conditioning him for this moment, this cathedral-like moment, standing before Levon Blue Lake Moon, pondering the request: tell me more about this girl.

“I don’t know, Blue Lake,” he says at last. “Maybe it’s something more than just a girl.”

Levon nods. “I could have told you that.”

Wilbo sighs. It’s a weary sigh but it’s not an endless weariness. It’s more like an expulsion of air as the weariness is being pressed out by something much larger, some large and awesome thing rearing up inside, like a big brown bear waking up from hibernation. When he opens his mouth to speak he is startled by the flow of words.

“I used to wobble. It used to be all wobble. My dad went missing in 1961. He was part of the Manhattan Project. We lived in Livermore. He worked on the atomic bomb. One day he just drove off in the car and never came back. I think he told something to my mom but she never let on. She never really tried to find him. There was a silent understanding. Even today nobody knows if he’s dead or alive. Mom won’t talk about it. She gets this funny sad little smile. But to me it was the end of the world. Not just my world. The whole world. I read books about prophecy, ancient prophecy. The Hebrews, the Mayans, the Hopis, Nostradamus. I decided it was the bomb that would be the agent by which the world would be destroyed, to fulfill the ancient prophecies. I had this weird hunch that dad knew this too, that’s why he left.
But then suddenly it broke open. Suddenly there were wobblers everywhere, big time wobblers. That first human be-in in the park, the psychedelics, the Mime Troupe, the communes, the Diggers. Like the earth, moving into a whole new field of cosmic energy, you have two choices, go with it or be destroyed. The new children dance! I am young! Life is change! How it differs from the rocks! Those were the happiest days of my life. We were doing things that didn’t have a name yet. Suddenly it all made sense, There was hope. There was a meaning for everything, even the bomb. The bomb had come so we would leave the path and strike out in a new direction. Stupid hippies!”

The last two words are like a derailed locomotive hurling off a cliff over a rocky chasm. They echo once in the tall pines and then they are swallowed up by the silence of the forest. Wilbo repeats them, but this time quietly, mournfully.

“Stupid hippies… You went out of control. You completely abandoned your code of ethics. Floyd is right. Personal hygiene! That’s what it all boils down to. Personal hygiene. I think I was already beginning to see that when I took this job. I think at first the job was a ministry, another way to wobble. I would be a thorn in the side of the establishment. I would be a guerrilla on the sidewalk. I would be an art form. But it didn’t take long for it to break down. There was no movement, like Carl says, no movement. All the freaks in town, just sitting around in the Dogfish every night drinking and talking about how it used to be. And the hippies in the hills, no personal hygiene. Hepatitis. And the rock stars, all of them, phonies, the great phony, Neil Young stopped off at the Lighthouse and ordered a vanilla milkshake. The Lighthouse. Jesus Freaks. She doesn’t know it yet. I wonder when she’ll find out. Jesus freaks…”

He stops talking abruptly, as if he has hit a wall of silence. He listens to his own words rattle around in his head for a while until they simmer down and finally fall silent. So many words for such an empty mind! He enters into a short period of amnesia where he can’t seem to recall anything he’s been saying. Then he remembers.

“Everything is changing, Levon.” he blurts out. “Everything. It feels like my life is being washed away. Frankly, I’m a little scared.”

For the first time since this conversation started, Levon moves. He stands up straight and picks up the glass heron from the porch railing. He holds it up against the fading sunlight and studies it with first one eye closed, then the other. He runs his finger over the shape of the bird until he reaches the tip of the beak where he very gently pinches off a tiny glass spur. He sets the heron down, turns and takes the empty foil and tumbler from Wilbo’s lap.

“That’s because you fight it,” he tells him. “You’ve been fighting it for a long time. When you fight it, it’s difficult. But when you let it go, it just happens. It’s supposed to happen.”

After that he disappears into the house. This is a sign for the yellow dog who perks up on Opal’s lap, hops off the porch swing and follows his master into the house. His paws make tapping sounds on the hardwood floor. There’s the brief sound of water running, then the slobbery lapping sound of a dog drinking water.

Then there’s a breath of silence- just a breath, before the next sound begins.

The next sound is the voice of Opal Moon, singing. There is no prelude to the sound of her voice, no formal introduction, other than the breath of silence. Maybe the breath of silence was the sound of Opal, taking a breath to sing. Regardless, Opal begins to sing in a voice pure and high and shrill, erasing thought, commanding attention.

The sure provisions of my God attend me all my days,
Oh may thy house be mine abode and all my works be praise.
There would I find a settled rest while others go and come
No more a stranger nor a guest but like a child at home…

When she finishes the song there is another breath of silence, like the one at the beginning, except this one flows out, so the song is framed on both sides by an in-breath and an out-breath. After that the ordinary sounds fill back in, the birds in the trees, an airplane in the sky, Levon in the kitchen washing pots and pans. Wilbo feels no compulsion to move and apparently neither does Opal. The moment flows on for a long, long time.

CHAPTER TWELVE: WILBO TAKES A DAY OFF

2009-02-19T08:06:00.001-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

Clouds roll in while he sleeps. In the morning the sky is colorless and a light mist of rain is falling. He wakes up feeling groggy and his head is pounding. It’s worse than a hangover- there’s no faint reminder of intoxication.

He gets up, gets dressed, heats the water, prepares the coffee, but he does not drink it. His skin cries out to be clean. His body itches where the clothing touches it. He puts on his hooded windbreaker and pulls the hood over his head. He grabs a handful of change from the money bag and stuffs it in his pocket. He leaves the coffee cooling on the counter, leaves the house, locks the door, and starts for town.

In the public showers, he’s alone-that’s a good thing- and the floors are dry; no one’s been there yet- plenty of hot water. He doesn’t know what time it is, and he doesn’t care. He’s taking the day off.

Standing passively in the shower, he allows the water to work its magic, washing away not only the grime, but also the weariness and the ennui, and the heavy silted layers of unremembered dreams and undigested impressions. Soon he’s feeling fresh and invigorated, ready for adventure. He has the day off. He’s made lots of money. He can do whatever he wants. Like the skunk said, he can do something new.

Dry and naked, he contemplates his clothing. They’re full of the sand he came in with. Too bad he didn’t think to bring a change. For a moment he has a crazy thought. What if I just left my clothes in here and walked out naked? But no. Maybe that’s a little too new. Besides, it’s raining. Instead, he turns the pants and shirt inside out and slaps them soundly against the wall to knock out most of the sand.

At the Burger Shack, Mac nods at Wilbo’s entrance and starts for the icebox where he keeps the freeze dried hash browns. But Wilbo stops him.

“Lemme see the menu, Mac. Think I’ll try something else today. And I’m paying. I made a lot of money yesterday.” He pulls himself onto the stool at the counter where the little toy oyster will snap up any coin you place on its shell for the March of Dimes.

Mac tosses a menu on the formica. “How much money, Wilbo?” he asks. “You know, I’m pretty expensive.”

Wilbo runs his finger down the list of breakfast items. Denver omelets and Belgian French toast, spicy Cajun scrambles, German potato pancakes, poached eggs with Swiss cheese on an English muffin. It’s a veritable trip around the world all right, but somehow nothing sounds quite as good as the usual: two eggs, over medium, crispy hash browns, a slab of Italian sausage drenched in grilled onions.

“Oh, I guess I just have the usual,” he finally admits, “Except, make the eggs sunny side up. And bring me a cup of coffee. And I’m still paying.”

Mac already has the coffee pot in his hand. He fills the upturned and empty cup at Wilbo’s place.

“Hard to teach an old dog new tricks.” he says. “Hey Wilbo, where’s your stuff? You came in empty-handed.”

“I’ve taken the day off, Mac. I told you I made a lot of money yesterday.”

Mac opens the icebox. “You won’t know what to do, man. You’re a slave to the routine. I predict you’ll be back at your corner, drawing pictures by four o’clock this afternoon.”

He throws a mound of onions on the grill and the room fills with the spatter and the smell.

“Nope.” Wilbo lifts his coffee cup. “I mean it. I’m taking the day off.” Then his eye focuses on something on the wall. It’s where Mac pins up all his pictures, the ones the tourists bring in. This is a new one, and it’s a picture of Claudia. He feels his nerves jump and immediately he thinks, is she naked? But no, she’s not naked. She’s wearing the blue dress, and she’s doing that little snake thing she does with her hands.

“Hey Mac, when did that one come in?” He nods to the picture. “That new one. The one of the girl.”

Mac looks up from the grill. “Oh, This morning. About an hour ago. Some punk kid brought it in. He wanted to sell it to me. I said no man, people bring these pictures in, gratis complimentis, or not at all. This is the Wilbo museum. Finally he just gave it to me and walked out. He didn’t pay for his burger.”

Wilbo nods. “You let that go?”

“Yeah. I let that go. I let a lot of things go. Hey, here’s your breakfast.”

So Wilbo enjoys his breakfast, the usual, gratis complimentis. He has every intention of paying, but Mac won’t let him.

“It would be just too weird, Wilbo. It would upset the cosmic balance.”

Slipping off the counter stool, his eyes lock in on the picture of Claudia on the wall. Suddenly the implications strike him with a wave of dread. He realizes they were festering in the back of his mind all through breakfast. As he steps out of the shack into the rainy street, he feels dizzy and he stumbles once.

How did he get the picture? When was it drawn?

Was it the same guy?

He looks up the street toward the boardwalk. Even with the light rain falling, people are beginning to mill about. He locates his place of employment, the sidewalk in front of the bumper cars. Two winos are sitting on the bench, elbows on knees, staring vacantly out into the day, a brown paper bag between them. They sit so still and sepia-colored, they could be a painted backdrop, while all around them motion and life swirl in cheerful hues. Men and women. Out of habit he focuses on one person after another, looking for a likely target.

A girl emerges from the crowd, subdued dress, red hair- it’s Claudia! But no, of course it’s not Claudia, don’t be silly. It doesn’t look a bit like Claudia. But there’s another girl, walking away from him, slim, and meandering pensively, blue parka with the hood pulled up. That could be any girl! What is he doing? He turns away.

I’m taking the day off. Don’t know where I’ll go, but I’m not going to the boardwalk.

Facing the empty street that leads to town, away from the midway, he feels something like a mass of kinetic energy at his back, like the spattering of onions on a hot grill, like the snakes on the head of Medusa, writhing in every direction, like a wild and happy audience, stamping and clapping and calling out for an encore. The temptation to turn back is overwhelming, but no! He won’t do it. I’m taking a day off! With firm resolve he steps into the wet empty street.

The first thing he notices is a commotion, an unexpected gathering of people. The territory around the boardwalk is so well-worn and familiar to him that he immediately registers anything out of the ordinary, even if it’s just in his unconscious mind. There are people standing on a corner where people don’t normally stand around. He feels curious. he draws closer.

It’s a bunch of hippies, hanging around a corner lot. Old guard hippies, he thinks. Even from a distance he senses this. It’s in their movements- slow, languid motions, none of the unbridled enthusiasm of the very young. They’re just hanging out, that’s all, waiting for the next big thing. It’s a little be-in, a lonesome remnant of the big be-ins of the sixties. As he gets closer the details fill in. There’s music, someone playing conga drums, someone banging out chords on a guitar. Some people are sitting on a bench or a log, acting a little silly, rocking back and forth. There’s a circle of five or six locked in a communal embrace, swaying slightly as one. Drawing closer he recognizes the costumes, thrift store clothes, draped and wrapped and patched and soiled. Most of the men have full beards and long uncombed hair. The women are a little plump and bleary-eyed. There are several children, some of them naked.

One of the figures catches his eye. It’s a woman, standing very still, one arm outstretched in an improbable gesture, her back arched. Her hair is punked; she wears a leather halter top and hot pants, a gold chain of charms and baubles slung low around her waist. As Wilbo approaches she remains frozen, motionless, like a mannequin. In fact she is a mannequin. Wilbo stops suddenly in his tracks. The recognition funnels into him like tawny port into an empty bottle. He sees what he didn’t see at first. Her outstretched arm leans into a crude wooden sign. It’s hard to tell whether the woman is holding up the sign or the sign is holding up the woman.

COLLINS PROPERTIES
SINCE 1963
FINDING REAL ESTATE FOR NORMAL PEOPLE LIKE YOU.

“Hey, big brother, what’s happening?” A voice breaks into Wilbo’s reverie. The man’s face is completely covered with a coarse black beard. He wears thick-lensed glasses and a dirty denim jacket. “Hey, do I know you? You look familiar, man. Did you used to hang out in Sebastopol?”

“Nope. Never been to Sebastopol.” Wilbo thrusts out his hands to shake. “Wilbo Hoegarden. Realism and Surrealism. I’ve drawn…” But then he stops himself. His spiel is meaningless without the props.

“Cisco,” says the man, “Cisco Austin, like Cisco Houston, only Austin. Same state, different city. We just got off of Morningstar, me and Lemonade.” He nods to a woman, sitting on a guitar case, nursing a baby. “I mean, we left early because they were going to be busted. Hey, we didn’t do it, man. We didn’t fink. We were just warned in advance. By the Oracle.” Cisco leans into Wilbo’s face and glances around to see if anyone is listening. “There’s an Oracle in the trees, you know.”

Wilbo nods. “I know about that oracle. He tends to be a little sappy.”

Cisco doesn’t catch the joke. His gaze seems to be scanning the tops of the trees over the houses across the street. “We’re going to buy some property. It just came together out of the blue, this morning, like the gathering of the tribes. We all arrived here at once. Some of us are from Morningstar. Others just came down out of the hills. We don’t know each other, we just came together, out of the blue. We saw the sign.”

“Oh, you mean the sign. That one. For normal people like you.”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Normal people.”

Wilbo nods again. It’s definitely a time for nodding, this one. Pieces of a puzzle are rapidly falling together in his head but the picture they are forming is a strange one.

“It’s the woman, isn’t it? That woman. The woman pointing to the sign.”

Cisco’s eyes rest on the mannequin and he smiles benevolently. “Her name is Amanda,” he intones. “She’s the patron saint of lunch meat.”

Just then there’s a whoop of voices from a small group of people standing on the steps to Floyd’s office. Suddenly the air is filled with little bits of paper, fluttering down like winged alder seeds.

“They’re tearing up their birth certificates,” Cisco explains. “We’re all born again.”

A voice pipes up from the side, a woman’s voice. “Hey, I know you. You were there last night. At the church.” Wilbo turns. It’s the woman he saw last night at the Lighthouse, the woman with the tabla and the little white dog, and Claudia was dancing. He doesn’t see the dog anywhere.

“You mean at the Lighthouse.”

“Yeah, the Lighthouse. Praise Jesus!” She throws up her hands. Wilbo suddenly feels so uncomfortable that he just has to walk away. He walks straight into the crowd, across the parking lot. At the center of the crowd a man is juggling three bowling pins, a circle of people gathered around him. He juggles very poorly. At any given time two bowling pins are in the air and one is on the ground. Wilbo stops and watches him for a moment, then he turns around and retraces his steps. He pushes past a beardless boy playing a pennywhistle and two dogs at a tug of war with the tattered remnant of an American flag. He goes straight back to Cisco who is now face to face with Amanda at the sign, one arm on her shoulder.

“Hey Cisco, how are you gonna buy this property, anyhow? Who’s got the money?”

Cisco seems a little off guard. He drops his hand from Amanda’s shoulder and wheels around with his back to her, as if protecting her from bandits. It seems to take him a moment before he recognizes Wilbo.

“Oh, the money,” he says at last. “Oh, there’s always money. Money is everywhere! Besides, the man here, he’s going to help us. The man inside.”

“You mean Floyd.”

“Yeah, Floyd. The man inside.”

Wilbo takes leave of Cisco and heads for Floyd’s office. The door is wide open but the way is barred by the people on the steps. They have run out of birth certificates and now they are onto dollar bills. Actually only one of them is tearing up dollar bills, the tall man in the middle. The others are just passing dollar bills around, throwing them up in the air, catching them, passing them around. The tall man holds up his hand at Wilbo’s approach.

“If you want in it costs you a dollar,” he says. His shirt pocket is stuffed and bulging with crumpled dollar bills. There’s a dollar bill rolled like a cigarette wedged behind his right ear.

“Well, that makes about as much sense as anything else.” Wilbo stuffs his hand in his pocket but of course there are no dollar bills in there, only a generous fistful of loose change. “You’ll have to take it in silver.” He pulls out what fits between his fingers and thrusts it at the man who looks perplexed, then takes the coins and steps aside.

Inside the office there are more people, people sitting on the floor; a woman has laid out a spread of tarot cards, a couple of people are playing jacks under the philodendrons, someone is blowing soap bubbles. Bob Dylan whines from the speakers, The Times They are a-Changing, Pot smoke rises from a burning reefer in the ashtray. Floyd sits behind his desk discussing some documents with a huge pony-tailed man whose body pours like lava over a footstool in front of the desk. Wilbo glances up at the side window behind the vines. It is wide open.

Floyd looks up and his face breaks into a big smile. “And there he is!” he cries. “The man, himself!”

“No, Floyd, you’re the man,” Wilbo counters. “That’s what they told me out there. You’re the man inside.”

Floyd laughs and laughs. He’s acting a little silly but he’s clearly sober. “See, I was right about the future, Wilbo. It’s blue and egg-shaped. Just like I told Doralina last night.”

“Wow. You can remember saying that?”

“Of course I remember saying it. Why shouldn’t I? I remember everything about last night. You played the magic song and I remembered the future. Then Doralina went out the window.”

“You remember Doralina going out the window?”

“Yeah, that’s the most important part. Doralina had to go out the window so she could get Amanda out of the closet.”

Wilbo catches his breath. Again! he thinks to himself, Doralina’s logic supercedes the pattern of the world. “But Floyd,” he says, “Can these people really buy real estate? Do they have money?”

“Money? What’s that? Money is just information. These people are well informed, Wilbo. Francis here, he’s got a contract with Simon and Schuster. He’s writing the next Tibetan Book of the Dead. He’s good buddies with Jerry. And there’s people out there from Morningstar, ready to learn from their mistakes.” Floyd laces his fingers together and grins. “It’s the dawning of the age of personal hygiene.”

Wilbo shares his grin. “And Amanda out there, I suppose she’s the patron saint of lunch meat.”
Francis the future author reaches his massive arm to the ashtray and picks up the joint. He turns to Wilbo.

“You wanna hit?”

Wilbo considers briefly, then declines. “Floyd, I’m going to leave you to your business. You’ve clearly got work to do and I don’t. I’m taking the day off. I made a lot of money yesterday, so I’m taking the day off.”

Floyd takes the joint from Francis’ hand. “Oh yeah, that’s right. You told me last night. You met this girl.” He takes a drag from the joint and speaks through a smoke-filled outbreath. “I remember everything.”

Outside the crowd is warming up in the noonday sun. a few more guitars have joined the music, a few more drummers. People are milling, voices are more animated. Children trailing colored foil streamers weave in and out among the forest of legs. Wilbo hops down the steps through a shower of dollar bill fragments. Cisco spots him at once. He pushes away from Amanda and slithers through the crowd, rolling his head from side to side like a big fuzzy tennis ball.

“Well, did you see the man?” He rests his hand lightly on Wilbo’s arm.

“Yeah, I know that man. That’s Floyd Collins. He’s my friend. We drink together just about every night at the Dogfish.”

“What did I tell you, man? It’s the gathering of the tribes. It’s finally happening. We’re gonna get our land back.”

Wilbo leans in close to speak to Cisco directly, an idea that just pops into his head.

“Floyd said he had one thing he wanted me to tell you. Just two words. It’s like a message from the Oracle.”

Cisco’s face gets suddenly very serious. “What are they?”

Wilbo enunciates deliberately. “Personal hygiene.”

At that moment there’s a crunching sound on the gravel behind them. Shaken from the solemnity of the moment, both men spin around at once. A very dilapidated Plymouth sedan has hobbled into the parking lot. It has so many dents it looks like a crumpled piece of waste paper. Each of the four doors is a different color and the body yet another color, all of the colors rust-stained and peeling. Out-of-state license plates: West Virginia. A single word painted in bright orange across the hood: GANGA. The driver’s window rolls down and a brown face emerges, framed by a halo of wiry locks. The man’s hair is so wide it won’t fit into the window opening but spills out across the windshield and over the seat back. Next to him sits a petite woman in a brightly colored dress. In the back seat an uncountable number of small children are thrashing about.

“Good morning, good friends.” the man announces himself in a strong Jamaican accent. “Perhaps you can help us. We’ve been traveling now for twenty-seven days. Taking the back roads. It’s a beautiful country you have here, this America. But we are ready to settle down. We’re just looking for a home.”

Wilbo laughs out loud. This is all too much. The gathering of the tribes, indeed! He suddenly feels an urgent need to get away, not because it’s a bad thing. It’s just too much.

“You gotta see the man inside,” he says through his laughter. “Talk to Cisco here, he’ll help you.”

Just before he turns to go he glances at the car. One of the children in the back seat catches his eye, a little boy with a dirty face and a head of hair as wide as his father’s. He flashes a big smile and waves. Wilbo waves back. The boy waves again. Wilbo waves again. For a moment there’s a little Kinko Syncho Quinto thing going on. Then the car door flies open and the children start tumbling out. Wilbo turns and faces the road ahead with a renewed interest in where it might lead him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: VISITORS FROM HERE AND THERE

2009-02-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

He reaches the notch in the cement wall and steps through. There it is! The ocean! The smell of it, the sound of it, its fine, cool moisture on his face and on his arms. He inhales deeply and it fills his lungs. How many years did he live without it, not even knowing of its existence, let alone experiencing its presence, its power, its ability to bring truth and meaning to everything else in life- to work and play and friendship and sleep and death and food and drink? No wonder all those years he was so lost and confused. There was no ocean.

He climbs up to the crest on the trail where a short tunnel, blasted through the rock separates the public beach from the stretch of sand where he lives. On the other side, he scans the horizon. The moon is bright and the sky is cloudless. The breakers are blue with moonlight and maybe just a hint of phosphorus. The tide is coming in. He can see his weird little cabin off in the distance, lit by moonlight, nestled in the cove.

Then he sees something else. A tiny wisp of smoke is rising from the fire circle, rising straight up into the windless night, and even from this distance he detects the very faint glow of embers. He quickens his pace. Company! Who could it be? He follows the trail down to the edge of the sand where it winds through a bed of ancient fallen logs worn smooth by waves and stable enough to host the suggestion of a trail. His heart is light with happy expectation. Company is a good thing! Company is always a good thing. Anyone who comes to see him in his own home is a welcome sight, indeed.

He slows down as he approaches the cove and tries to make out the shadowy form seated on the log by the fire. Large of bulk, hunched of posture, motionless and calm, it could only be one man.

“Hey, Carl.” he says as he enters the firelight. “Welcome. How long you been here?”

“Not too long,” Carl intones. “Couple of hours. ‘Bout as long as you haven’t been here. I stopped by the Dogfish. You weren’t there either, which I thought was strange. So I came here.”

Wilbo sets his pad and pencils down on the porch. He sets his concertina case down on the pad, so the pictures inside won’t blow away. He takes a few sticks of driftwood from the pile and tosses them on the fire. The sparks whirl and fly.

“So, Wilbo,” says Carl, “What you got to drink around here?”

Wilbo smiles, happy to have a satisfactory answer to that question. “How ‘bout some Almaden Tawny Port? That just about oughta hit the spot right now.”

Carl nods, solemnly. “Yep. That just about oughta.”

Wilbo unlocks the door, enters the house, and fumbles around under the bed until his hand caresses the long skinny neck of the bottle. He pulls it out, pops the cork and breathes in the warm welcoming aroma. He takes two stoneware mugs out of the cupboard and fills each one to the brim. The bottle is completely drained.

Outside, Carl takes his cup with a grunt of appreciation. In respect for the man’s girth and commanding presence, Wilbo surrenders the entire length of the bench, sitting politely instead on a smaller chunk of driftwood opposite the fire.

“Your brother stopped by the Dogfish tonight,” Carl announces. “Said he was looking for you.”

This tidbit of information rattles Wilbo, just a little.

“Oh yeah? What did he look like? Was he drunk?”

“Sober as a monkey on a bicycle,” Carl replies. “Even wearing a tie and a white shirt. Tucked in.”

Wilbo frowns, as if this is bad news. “Well, what made him think I’d be there?”

Carl glances up. “Same thing that made all of us think you’d be there. It’s where you usually are at that time of night. Kind of mysterious, actually.” He takes a sip from his cup.

They sit quietly and stare into the fire for a while, for a long time in fact. It’s that kind of scene, the kind where you can sit quietly and stare into a fire for a long time, comfortably, even when there are uncomfortable issues at stake.

“I met this girl.” Wilbo says, eventually.

Carl nods. “Oh. I see.”

“She’s very young... I mean, I think she’s too young.”

“Uh huh.” Carl takes another drink of his wine. “Why don’t you bring her down to the Dogfish sometime and let me look at her? I’ll tell you if she’s too young.”

“Well, I think maybe she’s… too young to take into the Dogfish. I mean, legally.”

Carl chews on that one for a while. “Oh,” he says, “That young.”

Then they’re comfortably silent some more. The waves crash and recede. A grouping of little terns skitter about on the sand.

“That’s an interesting development, Wilbo.”

“It’s interesting.” Wilbo agrees. His thoughts are swirling, but they’re swirling slowly. He has time to look at each one of them as they swirl by. It’s a good thing about this kind of moment. He can look at his thoughts as they swirl by. He can take his time and form them in his mind until they make some sense, and he’s ready to articulate them.

Finally he says, “You’ve got to have a code of ethics, Carl. I’ve said that before.”

Carl agrees. “You’ve said that before.”

“You can’t just do anything you want. Maybe you could, but you can’t anymore.”

Carl shakes his head. “Nope. Not anymore.”

“That’s what she was asking me. The difference between being young and being old. But I couldn’t put it into words. Not then. But you know what it is. It’s a code of ethics. That’s the difference. When you’re young, you just do stuff, just to see what happens. But when you get older, it matters, what you do. You don’t want to do just anything. You don’t have that much time. Time is precious. You want to be sure you do the right thing. You may not get another chance.” Wilbo picks up his cup of wine, sniffs it, then sets it down without tasting it. An annoying memory has drifted, unbidden, into his mind. “She told me I was old fashioned, like somebody’s grandfather. That’s what she said. What does she know about that? What does she know about a code of ethics?”

Carl shifts his weight on the bench, slowly, deliberately. He passes through a phase of visible discomfort. He winces once and his breathing becomes labored. Finally he finds a new position that works- same as the old position, except that he faces a different direction. He waits until his breathing stabilizes. Then he takes another sip of wine.

“Well, from my experience, people don’t change when they get older,” he says at last. They just become who they always were, only more so. The times when someone changes into someone else as they grow older- that’s the stuff of legends. Wilbo, I suspect you’ve had this code of ethics ever since you were a little boy. I suspect you were raised with it. I suspect you haven’t really thought about it in the last few years. Not deeply.”

“Why do you say that, Carl?”

“Well, what is it, this code of ethics? Have you written it down? Have you made it into a litany? Can you recite it as a creed?”

Wilbo considers this for a while but his thoughts come up with nothing concrete.

“You’re the bookworm, Carl. You know it better than I do. It’s been written down a zillion times. There’s the Golden Rule. There’s the Fourfold Path of Right Action, there’s the Mosaic Laws. There’s the Hippocratic Oath.”

Carl chuckles and sips his wine. “That’s what I’m talking about, Wilbo. You defer to the common culture. You can’t tell me what your personal code of ethics is. I’ll tell you what your personal code of ethics is. I’ve said this before. I said it just last night. You make fun of people and you favor women. That’s your personal code of ethics.”

This accusation doesn’t have any personal punch for Wilbo. It’s just Carl, playing with ideas, like he always does.

“People are fools, all of them. They need me to make fun of them. They’re like sheep except that there’s no shepherd. The shepherd is dead but they still follow him. They follow his ghost. And women are more beautiful than men, so I favor them. Can you blame me? Isn’t that what I said last night? And then the hippies. Those stupid hippies. They had it right to begin with. They realized the shepherd was dead. But then they just went completely out of control. They had no code of ethics whatsoever. They just did whatever they felt like doing, with no thought of what was right.”

Carl turns his head slowly until he’s looking Wilbo square in the face. “Well, what about us, then? Your friends at the Dogfish. Are we just fools, too?”

“Of course not, Carl. We’re the eccentrics. We wobble outside the wheel, like we were talking about last night. Although I don’t know that we’re doing that much wobbling really. Mostly we just sit around and drink and talk about it. Maybe Floyd, he’s trying to do something with his real estate business. And of course there’s Doralina…”

For a moment Wilbo slips into a reverie, like a short film projected across the screen of his mind. Floyd Collins, in his office, is slumped over his desk with an empty Southern Comfort bottle in his hands. Then he gets up and knocks a plant off the shelf and opens the closet door and there’s a woman in the closet and he closes the door and Doralina climbs out the window. It all happens quickly, like time lapse photography. What was she up to, Doralina, climbing out the window like that? Wilbo has never known Doralina to start something that led nowhere.

In a long, drawn-out gesture, heavy with world-weariness, Carl produces a tattered red bandana from his pocket and blows his nose soundly and thoroughly into it, wringing out his nostrils and combing his moustache with it, before replacing it in his pocket.

“They were a movement, Wilbo, the hippies. If you study history you’ll see there’s always been movements of people who go against the grain. They rise up and they push the consciousness forward a little, but then they fall apart. They always fall apart. Sometimes they go bad before they fall apart, like the Nazis, so the bad overpowers any good they might have done in the first place. But there’s always good, and they always fall apart. That’s what Hoffer says if I read him right. Look at the Knights Templar. They renounced the cruelty of the Crusades and set up a mystical order of the highway. Saint Columba of Ireland. He broke away from the aristocratic priesthood of the O’Neils, and established a spiritual community on the island of Iona, based on the ancient and feminist Brehan laws. The Quakers. They were thrown in jail and even executed in seventeenth century England, just because they refused to swear an oath in a court of law. Think about the Utopians in New England. The Oneida Commune. The Transcendentalists. Think about… Henry David Thoreau. Mahatma Gandhi. Aurobindo and his wackly Hindus down in Pondicherry. Hell Wilbo, you ought to hitchhike down to Arizona sometime and see what Soleri and his people are up to in Arcosanti. Even the hippies. You can’t blame them for trying something new. Hoffer doesn’t trust movements, I don’t think, for all his talk. He calls them all mass movements. He says there’s good and bad mass movements, like Nazism or the Catholic Church. But I don’t think he goes far enough. I’m a firm believer in movements, Wilbo. Some of them, anyhow.”

The man does know his books, Wilbo thinks to himself. But he’s not sure how to fit all this with what he’s been talking about, and he’s not sure how what he’s been talking about has anything to do with Claudia.

Claudia!

“So I met this girl.” he says.

“Yeah. I believe you mentioned that. What are you gonna do about it?”

Wilbo picks up a stick and stirs the fire. He taps the coals and breaks up some big chunks into little chunks. He smooths out a ridge of fiery orange into a plain of glowing amber.

“Nothing.” he says at last. “Nothing in particular. Just roll with the punches, I guess. I don’t even know why I brought it up. You meet girls every day.”

Carl chuckles. “Maybe you do.” he says and he raises his cup. Just before he sips he stops. It’s like he’s making a decision. Oh, what the hell? his gesture says, and he drains the cup dry.

“You got any more of this stuff?” he asks.

Wilbo glances down at his own mug, untouched and still full to the brim, wedged in the sand against a rock.. “Nope. Just what I’m working on myself.”

This information seems to cause Carl some discomfort. He sets his cup down on the bench and lumbers through several different positions, finally settling on one, resting his wrists on his knees and curving his shoulders forward.

“You spend too much time alone, Wilbo. That’s your problem.”

“I don’t know where you get that. I haven’t been alone all day. Or yesterday. Or the day before that, as far as I can remember.”

“I don’t mean alone like… you know, alone, where there’s no people. I mean alone with your thoughts. You keep your thoughts to yourself, Wilbo.”

Wilbo thinks about this, to himself. Carl looks at him and nods his head several times. He leans back slightly, then leans forward, slightly. He repeats these motion a few times until he’s got a little rocking thing going, like a porch swing, or a pair of lumberjacks at a two-handled saw. Eventually he gains sufficient momentum to propel himself awkwardly to his feet. Erect, but shaky, he brushes the sand off his jacket and cracks his knuckles.

“You might want to think about what I said, Wilbo. About movements. You don’t have to be alone, you know. With your thoughts, I mean. You’re not the only one who thinks this way. Come back to the Dogfish tomorrow night and we’ll talk about it. Bring the girl if you want. We’ll find a way to get her in.”

Wilbo stands because Carl is standing. He’s glad to be on his feet. The little chunk of driftwood doesn’t have near the ergonomics of the ancient and well-worn bench. For awhile they stand there in silence, two comfortable old friends who rarely agree, in no hurry to part company. The sounds of the ocean nicely fill in the silence. The two figures standing by the fire begin to sway slightly. It’s not because of the wind; there is no wind. It’s more like an invisible music with invisible rhythms. It’s more like two invisible musics, each of the two figures swaying to a separate rhythm.

Finally Carl clears his throat. “Welp. Guess I’d better be gettin’ back. It’s a long walk for this old bag of bones.”

“I wish I could take you in my Corvette, Carl.” Wilbo replies. They both laugh. Then they shake hands and Carl steps away from the fire. Wilbo remains standing, watching him as he completes the entire distance of the beach and disappears into the tunnel on the cliff. This takes about twenty minutes.

Wilbo leans over and picks up his untouched mug of tawny port. He carries it into the house, sets it down on the counter by the empty bottle, and lights a candle. He fumbles through the items on the shelf until he finds something that might work- a small, stone cream pitcher with a pointed spout. Carefully he pours the wine from the mug into the pitcher, and even more carefully he pours it from the pitcher back into the bottle, holding it steady even after it empties, so that the last few drops can roll down the wall. Then he corks the bottle and places it back under the bed.

He takes off his clothes and folds them carefully, even his socks, and prepares for his evening ritual.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Awakened by something, he sits up suddenly in bed. It’s a voice outside. Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s outside.

He brings his weight around and sets his bare feet on the cold wood floor. The cabin is completely dark- not a trace of light enters through the open windows. It must be very late. The moon is down.

What would wake him so soundly like that? He is wide awake- no trailing wisps of glory from the dream world, no heaviness of body, no sluggishness of mind. He throws open the door and peers out into the night.

It’s like there’s nothing out there. He can’t remember when he’s seen the night so dark, and empty and silent. Outside the door there’s just a blank space, an empty room, an open mouth. Without dressing, he steps outside for a closer look.

Immediately he senses one more missing factor, besides sound and light. There is no motion. There’s no wind, there are no little wading birds doing the do se do on the sand, no seagulls cutting the sweep of the horizon, singing their lonesome songs, there’s no colony of seals bobbing and crying on the jagged rocks, there’s no beacon lamp circling and searching the shore from an offshore vessel beyond the waves. Even the waves themselves, though moving, seem strangely static, repetitive, without variation or modulation, like an endless looped filmstrip a landlocked person might watch when he’s lonesome for the sea.

Wilbo steps further out into the night, trying to get closer to what’s happening, trying to make some sense out of it. He gets a strange image: it’s as if, while he slept, the night was rolling on toward that proverbial darkest hour, just before the imperceptible return of the forces of light and activity. But it did not stop there. Somehow it slipped sidewise and kept on going, beyond that point, to a point outside of time where nothing changes, nothing develops, and there’s no way back.

He reaches the water’s edge, the scalloped line left by the last wave, and stands there with his bare feet in the wet sand. Presently the wave returns, licks his toes and heels, then retreats, carving a hollow and drawing sand out from beneath the arch of each foot. He notices that the new wave has left the shore unchanged. It has simply and neatly filled in the contours left by the wave before it.

This is just too weird, he thinks. Something is hiding behind something else.

There is a brief moment where he thinks, Oh, this.

Then he thinks, What do you mean, Oh this? State your case. More clearly.

Then it happens. There’s a shift- inside or outside, he’s not sure, but suddenly there’s a shift- everything changes- and at the same time he experiences a sensation he’s never felt before. It’s none of the five senses; it’s something brand new, and it being brand new, he has no point of reference. He can’t locate it anywhere on the meridians of his body. It’s not in his head. Perhaps it’s in his arms, but perhaps it’s just doing something to his arms, causing them to feel something… armlike. It’s doing things to his stomach too, and his legs, and now his heart is starting to pound, and his breathing is going shallow and strained. One thing is clear- it’s a feeling that requires an action, a response- there is something he is supposed to do about it. And it isn’t optional. His entire field of awareness is overtaken. Although he has no idea what he has to do, he knows he has to do it.

He falls to his knees in the sand, thinking, this is so corny. But what are my choices?

Once on his knees, he senses he has further to go, so he falls prostrate on his face, his hands stretched out before him, tasting the salty, gritty sand between his teeth. In this humiliating position he picks up a clue. It’s a picture of a place, a location, a physical center.

He lifts his head. The first thing he sees are the rocks, the double arched rocks, just offshore. They seem to be glowing. No, the rocks aren’t glowing. There’s something behind the rocks, glowing, a soft bath-like glow- it might be white, it might be blue, he can’t tell for sure. The rocks themselves stand silhouetted against the light. He can see the arch in one rock, with the light shining clear through it. The other arch is hidden from this angle.

Instinctively he finds himself scrambling to his feet and wading out into the water, toward the rocks, toward the light. There’s no thought whatsoever behind his action. His eyes are fixed on the rocks and his body is pulled toward them, like a magnet. A wave rushes in to meet him. It breaks against his knees and the foam splashes up into his face.

His movement slows. The water is icy cold and his feet shout with pain from hard pebbles under the waves. He stops and the water surrounds him. He turns to the rocks.

The glow is fading like a fire doused in water or like a cartoon sun dropped into the sea, faster than a real sunset, slower than the snuffing of a candle. By the time his mind completes these images, the glow is gone and the ocean is dark. He is standing naked in swirling waves feeling suddenly cold and silly and void of the sensation that drove him there in the first place.

He turns around at once and begins to wade back to the shore. Then he stops again.

There’s something there- a suggestion of movement. No, it’s more than a suggestion. There’s something moving. Where the trail meanders through the old fallen driftwood forest, someone is walking, ambling slowly, casually, almost gliding. No, it’s more than one person. It’s two. Attached at the hip and wrapped in each other’s arms, two star-crossed lovers, way past their bedtimes, taking a lover’s stroll across a deserted beach, or so they think.

Mortified by the thought that someone might see him standing there, alone and naked, Wilbo collapses into the water and sits down hard on the sand beneath the waves. But the ocean is inhaling. The waves pull back and suddenly there’s a naked man, sitting on the beach in plain sight, framed by breakers. Quietly, slowly, he rolls onto his belly and flattens his body against the shore, trying to make himself look as much as possible like a log of driftwood. He angles his head so that he can watch the couple advance along the trail.

Their passage is faltering and slow. Perhaps they stop to kiss- he can’t tell from this distance. At one point they separate and the girl runs ahead- at least he thinks it’s the girl. She stops and waits by a post marker in the trail. The man quickens his pace and catches up with her. This time it’s a kiss for sure. Wilbo can hear their voices blowing toward him on the breeze. He can’t hear the words, just the voices, lilting and happy.

It occurs to him: the hour has changed, then. Motion has returned, motion and sound and light. There’s a breeze. There are people walking. There are birds. There are modulations in the sound of the waves.

Just then the next wave strikes his body and engulfs him completely. He has to hold his breath while it does its thing, shifting the sand beneath him and wrapping a garland of seaweed over his back and shoulders. So this is what it feels like to be an inanimate object.

By the time the water has receded, the couple has reached his house. They are very curious about it. No longer entwined, they are exploring it from all angles, peering through the windows, climbing up on the corner frames to examine the pockets of the roof, poking and probing through the composition of the walls. Then one of them discovers that the door is ajar. Wilbo is pretty sure it’s the man. The shadowy figure shoves the door boldly with both hands. The door obliges. The figure disappears into the house.

Wilbo’s first inclination is to jump to his feet and rush the house, but he holds back. It would be quite a scene, he admits, but he’s not ready for that level of comedy. He lays low and watches.

The man comes out of the house. He’s got something in his hands. He takes it to the girl and they examine it together, holding it up between them, holding it up against the dark sky, holding it down against the sand. Wilbo has no idea what it is, but it’s something from his house, and they’re taking it. Does he care? Should he care about this? Should he stop them? He can’t decide. What if it’s his concertina? His bag of money?

He lumbers to his knees, then staggers to his feet just as another wave strikes him from behind and delivers him back to his knees.

He hears their voices again, laughing carelessly. He looks up and sees the girl running, the man chasing her. She keeps looking back and holding something up, as if to taunt him.

All right, that’s enough! No man who is a man would just lie there in the sand and let this sort of thing happen to him, no matter how naked he is. Even completely naked. He gets back to his feet and starts across the beach toward the house, not running, not shouting, still not exactly sure he wants this thing to happen at all. He finds himself assuming a stealthy gait, crouched, fingers splayed, striding singularly from side to side as if he were apprehending an enemy encampment.

The man catches up with the girl and they tussle. He wrestles the stolen object from her grasp and takes off running. She pursues him and their shadows diminish in the distance. Wilbo knows he will have to make some effort if he wants to catch up with them.

Is it worth it? No, maybe not. What’s the point? What could he possibly have that’s worth all that expenditure? He’ll go back in the house, that’s what he’ll do. He’ll assess the situation.
At the door of the house he stops to catch his breath. He feels terrible. He’s winded. His body is covered with sand, sweat and seawater. He stumbles into the house and lights a candle. He draws himself a mug of cold water from the crock and pours it down his throat. He grabs a towel and dry-scrubs his body vigorously from head to foot. Then he looks around the room in the candle glow, taking stock.

The concertina. The money bag. The pencils in their case; the tablet, with the pictures still pressed between the pages. The quilts and pillows. The parchments and prints on the wall. The books on the shelves. The colored glass bottles. The mugs and the cups on the counter. He gets down on his knees and fumbles around under the bed until he finds the bottle. Yep. Still there. Everything of any importance is still in order, as far as he can tell.

He sits on the edge of the bed and the room spins around him a few turns, then it slows and finally settles to a stop.

“What a strange night…” he says out loud, but quietly, not to be heard by anyone. Then he reaches for the money bag on the bedside table, picks it up by the drawstring, shakes it for its jingle, estimates its weight, sets it down.

Maybe I’ll take a day off from work tomorrow. I can afford it. I’ve made a lot of money. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll catch a shower first thing in the morning and then I’ll just… I’ll just take a day off. I’ll just see what happens. I’ll do something else.

He stretches out on his back and lies there for a long time, listening to the surf. Many waves break, in series of sevens. He counts the waves as one might count sheep. He counts them in sevens. Seven waves times seven waves break before he loses count and turns to greet the boatman, John of Dreams.

CHAPTER TEN: CLAUDIA GETS NAKED

2009-02-14T10:37:00.000-08:00

Dear readers,
As I mentioned in a previous post, from now on I will post a new chapter regularly on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays until the book is done. This is Chapter Ten. There are 23 chapters so you are approaching the halfway point.
Thanks for staying with me!

Jim

copyright 2009 by Jim Nail

The crowd has dispersed. Claudia stands alone in the street under a street lamp. When he sees her Wilbo feels a jolt, like an aftershock of the first wave he felt back in the coffee-house, back when it all started. It passes quickly but it leaves him breathless and shaking, fighting back an urge to stride boldly over to her, put his arms around her and crush her to his chest.

“Hey, you left me out here by myself with all this money.” she says. “I could have been mugged. I thought you said a woman needs protection.”

“Well, you had the concertina. Some people consider it an instrument of torture.”

She unlocks the door in the wall with a key that hangs from a long thin chain around her neck, and they enter to a flight of ascending stairs. Taking his hand she leads him up the stairs. Each step is painted a different color with the colors gradually shifting through the spectrum, from blue at the bottom through green and yellow and orange and purple to a hot pink at the top. The stairs creak, almost musically, and he gets the strange sensation that each step is tuned to a different note, the stairs as a whole singing him a melody, a hypnotic minor key tune like one that might be sung by mermaids on a rock just offshore. Claudia doesn’t say a word until they reach the door at the top of the stairs. There she lets go of his hand and produces the key from where it has been lying against her skin.

“Well, here we are,” she says, “My little hideaway.” She throws open the door and tosses the key onto the floor.

It’s one big room that fills up the entire second floor of the building. It looks like it might have been used as a warehouse once, or maybe a sewing room. Perhaps once there were dozens of tables with sewing machines in this room, and women, sitting at the sewing machines, turning out little smocks and bloomers. Or maybe there was a rug merchant here with rows and rows of tribal rugs, stacked from floor to ceiling.

Now it’s all just a big room and there’s not much in it. The floors are hard wood, polished bright and shiny. A few area rugs are scattered about. At one end of the room is a queen-sized bed with the covers thrown back. The only light in the room comes from a lamp with a red Chinese shade, on an end table by the bed. A collection of large, unframed art prints graces the walls, Monet’s Water Lilies, some Degas’ ballerinas, and one primitive painting of a band of Australian aborigines, raving it up at a coroboree in the outback. There’s a double sink under a blinded window, dishes in the sink. A small icebox. No stove. A small, round wooden table with a vase of flowers. Two chairs. A free standing wardrobe with the doors open, some lacy, silky underthings hanging from the handle. A record player sits on the floor by the wardrobe, the speakers separated. A burgundy loveseat with three or four embroidered throw pillows. A closed door- it must lead to the bathroom; a pen and ink profile of Bob Dylan on the door. That’s about it. There’s nothing else in the room. No books, no bookshelves, no stacks of papers. No food, except what might be in the icebox. No television. No mirrors.

“Well, what do you think?” she asks. “I haven’t been here very long. But I’ve got room to dance.” With this she leaps into the open room, kicking off her slippers and whirling through a series of spins and glissades that bring her back to Wilbo, gliding to her knees and folding her arms down like the petals of a flower at his feet. Then she’s up, tugging at his sleeve.

“Come on, let’s go to the table. We’ve gotta count that money.”

It’s dark at the table. There are no overhead light fixtures anywhere in the room. From somewhere Claudia conjures up a stubby little candle on a wooden candleholder. She lights it, places it on the table. She goes over to the stereo and pushes a button. A record drops. Claudia lifts the arm of the stylus and sets it down precisely in a groove. Music starts. Jimi Hendrix. Voodoo Chile. The long, slow version. They sit down to count.

They count silently, Claudia handling the bills, Wilbo doing the coins. He loses his place repeatedly. Her body seems to pulsate in the candle glow. He feels something like heat, but not heat, radiating from her, bathing his fingers, his arms, his face, his mind.

“I got a hundred and eighty three dollars here,” she announces, “What’d you get?”

“Uh, well, I think it’s uhh… maybe we should start again.”

“Oh, you silly man!” She reaches out and covers his hand with her hand. Wilbo lets his arm go limp and she guides his hand over to the money. She grasps his fingers in her fingers and squeezes them over each stack of quarters, nickels and dimes. Then when they’re stacked, she takes his forefinger and touches it to each pile, counting out loud as she does.

“Eighteen dollars and thirty five cents in change.’ she says when they’re done. “You do the math, Wilbo. Do the math! Don’t worry about the pennies.”

But Wilbo can’t do the math in his head. His thoughts are flying every which way. He looks around for a paper and pencil. That’s right- his drawing pad. It’s sitting at his feet. He picks it up and scribbles out the figures.

“Two hundred and one dollars and thirty five cents.” he says at last. He tries to think, Is that good? That’s good, isn’t it? But a value judgment expressed in monetary units is far from his mind.

“Whoa!” Claudia jumps from the table. “Two hundred one and thirty five!” She spins around.

“That’s very good, Wilbo. Isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s good, that’s…very good.”

“Draw me, Wilbo!” she cries suddenly. “Draw me while I dance!” And she’s off again, leaping across the floor into a whole new set of movements, always fresh, always spontaneous, always unrehearsed.

Wilbo picks up his pad but at first he can’t draw anything. He can only watch. His arms feel like stone. He searches his mind for some perspective that will free them. His thoughts go back to yesterday in the street, not so many hours ago, when they merged in an oneness of movement, and then he took the lead.

“Kinko Syncho Quinto.” he says out loud, and touches his pencil to his tongue. He clutches the pad and begins to draw.

She’s doing a cat dance, pouncing and leaping. In his first drawing she’s a cat, tossing a mouse into the air. He even draws a little mouse airborne in the top left hand corner of the page.
Then she goes into a spin, the force of the spin propelling her arms out like streamers. He draws her with candy stripes, and many arms.

The spin slows, then tilts, then wobbles into something else, a series of awkward, whirling leaps that threaten to fly out of balance at any moment. She throws her arms open wide and clamps them together as if she is trying to attract the forces of equilibrium. He captures her in a freeze frame, her arms together, her fingers grasping the toe of an outstretched foot. Her arms fly up and overhead, up and overhead, up and overhead; each arc is smaller than the one before. She’s lowering the roof, she’s bringing down the sky, she’s narrowing the possibilities. He draws her trajectory in a series of overlapping images, each one inside the other.

Like the nude descending the staircase, he thinks to himself.

It’s as if she reads his thoughts. Her descending arcs bring her to the floor where she remains for just a moment, her bare knees on the hardwood, her body prostrated forward, her fingers brushing the toe of his shoe. Then she rises as if rising from a lake. He can almost see the drops of water falling from her rising fingers. He grasps the pencil and tries to draw this image. But what she does next stops him completely.

Her arms descend from above her head, and with her lake-drenched fingers she undoes the top button of her dress, then the next, then the next. The buttons go all the way down. When all the buttons are open she lets the dress slip off her shoulders. It tumbles to the floor and she stands there, completely naked.

Wilbo knows he must not betray his pounding heart, not to mention his suddenly awakened and throbbing sex. He still has the pencil in his hand. Frantically he scratches out an image of her naked form. Perhaps it’s not the best nude he’s ever done.

She looks at his hands. At first he thinks she’s going to try to snatch the picture from him. But then she’s off again, whirling into a whole new dance, her naked dance. She does it with her eyes closed, her feet planted mostly in one place on the floor. She sways, side to side and front to back. She looks like she’s perched on the rim of a great precipice, courting its perilous expanse, daring it to catch her fall. She pulls back eventually, and begins a slow dervish twirl, away from Wilbo, toward the dark, hidden corners of the room. Her languid spin propels her arms up only part way, like petticoats below her waist. She keeps her eyes closed as if she’s still a little shy of her nakedness. Even so, she begins to approach him cautiously, flinging her arms in his direction while her body follows. She must be drawn by his heat, or by the candleglow on the inside of her eyelids. From the stereo in the corner, Jimi croons:

Well, my arrows are made of desire
From far away as Jupiter’s sulfur mines…

Wilbo draws in a frenzy. He’s thinking maybe the mental activity and the glancing away will keep him from exploding, but the pictures themselves excite him. His pencil becomes his fingers and the paper is her skin. He tries to draw her as something else, an object with less sensual power, a tree, a lamp, a vase. He draws her as a column of smoke rising from a stack. He draws her as a Chinese pagoda. But the woman keeps breaking out of the object and the sensuality keeps pouring out of the woman.

He has ripped out a dozen or more drawings by the time she makes her direct approach; gliding her bare feet across the polished wood floor, she must open her eyes now to keep from slipping on the scattered paper. The closer she gets the more clumsy her movements become, a great self-consciousness permeates them. Standing directly in front of him, within arms reach, she cannot maintain eye contact. First she casts her gaze down, then she closes her eyes completely and continues to sway, timidly in his presence. This genuine bashfulness only excites him all the more. The pad and the pencil fall helplessly into his lap.

Then he sees something he hadn’t noticed before. How could he have missed it? In all his mad scratching and scribbling, how could he not have seen? She’s wearing something around her neck. No, it’s not the key on the chain. She threw that on the floor when she first came in. It’s a thin black cord- a shoelace! and there, hanging between her breasts, a stone amulet, a carving of a harlequin-face, laughing or crying…

Instinctively he reaches out and grabs the talisman. “How did you get that?” he cries.

She pulls away. The stone slips through his fingers. Claudia suddenly regains her composure. She bursts into laughter.

“Well, I got it from you, silly. I got it from around your neck.”

“But…when?”

Now she can hardly contain herself. “You don’t remember, do you?” she says. “Ha! I got away with it! I did it! Now it’s going to haunt you. I’m going to haunt you, Wilbo. I’m going to haunt your dreams!”

Surely this is not her intention, but these words completely break the spell. It breaks with an audible snap. He thinks, what a child she is! A foolish child! The whole thing… so absurd! The absurdity crashes like a wave and he feels the power of his will returning, all the crazy impulses of his body draining away into stillness. At the same time the music ends, Jimi’s catharsis shrieking and wailing to a climax and breaking into chaos with the final ricocheting bang of the snare. Wilbo shakes back his head and straightens his posture.

“Put your dress back on, Claudia,” he says. “I think I’ve drawn enough.”

Claudia is strangely acquiescent. She stops laughing at once. “Yes sir!” she says. Perhaps there is a tone of mockery in her voice but there is also an ample share of respect. She scampers over to the dress, lying crumpled on the throw rug. She pours it back over her body like a marinade.
But once dressed, she becomes playful again. She waltzes over to the drawings on the floor and gathers them up in her arms as if they were wildflowers.

“Let’s see what you did,” she says. “Let’s see what you thought of my dance.”

Wilbo isn’t thinking of the pictures. “Am I going to get it back?” he asks her. Even though it’s a question, there’s the power of authority in his voice.

She halts with her arm full of drawings. “Get what back?”

“The amulet you took from me. From around my neck.”

She drops the papers and fishes for the cord from inside her dress, knocking open the top button as she does.

“Amulet? Why do you call it an amulet?”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No, it’s a silly necklace. What is it?”

He takes the stone from her hands and she makes her body go limp and somehow weightless, like a piece of cotton, so that he draws her toward him with a tug on the shoestring.

“It’s Arlequino. He’s the Italian trickster, like coyote is for the Indians, or like the Fool on the Hill is for the Beatles. His smile plays tricks. You can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying.”

She reaches up suddenly and grabs his wrist. Her touch is gentle but firm. She coos, demurely,

“Wilbo. Do you have a girlfriend?”

He sighs. This question does not make him happy. He releases the stone but she does not let go of his wrist. He pauses, he sighs again. He doesn’t know what to say. What a silly game! He must not give in to this silly game.

“Claudia, do you know how old I am? Do you know how old you are? I’m nearly old enough to be your father.”

She drops his wrist. She pulls back. She looks hurt. It’s only an act, he tells himself.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Her voice has a whining edge. “If you were twenty-one you’d be old enough to be my brother, but you wouldn’t be my brother. The point is, you’re not my father, Wilbo. What difference does it make how old you are?”

He doesn’t say anything. He knows the answer but he has no idea how to articulate it. Mostly he wishes they weren’t talking about this. He wishes they were still back where they were before, and he was telling her about Arlequino.

She flops down into the other chair, crosses her legs and arms. “Well, I was just asking a question, anyhow. I wasn’t asking for a lecture. Just answer my question. Do you have a girlfriend, Wilbo?”

“No, I don’t.”

“A wife then?”

“No. No wife.”

“Well, you had a wife then. Or a girlfriend. You’ve got kids. You’re a homosexual. I’m just looking for information here, ok? Cough up some information. That’s not so hard to do.”

Wilbo relaxes. Offer up some information. That’s not so hard to do.

“Well, I’ve had lots of girlfriends. I came into puberty in nineteen fifty-five. There were girls back then. And then there were the sixties. Lots of girls in the sixties…eager, willing girls. But something happened to me. It wasn’t like something that happened all of a sudden, like a bolt of lightning. It was more like the fruit of many long ponderings…”

Wilbo stops himself and thinks, why am I telling her this? She doesn’t care! But when he glances up at her, it’s evident she’s listening, at least. She’s leaning forward on the chair, forearms resting on her spread knees, staring at him with her jaw slack. What she’s hearing, he’s not sure. But she’s listening.

“I have this brother,” he continues. “His name is Arno. He’s younger. He got married in nineteen sixty-two. He got married to this girl I used to go out with, but that doesn’t have anything to do with it. He talked me into going to college with him. San Francisco State. I wasn’t going to go to college when I got out of high school. I thought the world was about to end. Why go to college? The world is about to end! But then when Arno graduated he talked me into enrolling in college. We would room together, we would get high and have fun. Let the world end! Who cares? But then that summer he married Eleanor, out of the blue, he married Eleanor. That one year I lived with them, it was a nightmare. His life was already falling apart. He wasn’t looking at the big question. Marriage, family, career- they’re all related. They all have to do with that one big question. You know the one…”

You don’t know the question, he tells her in his head.. At your age…But he continues.

“You know the question- the big question. Why did we come here in the first place? Why didn’t we just remain scattered particles of energy, diffused throughout the universe? Why did we have to get organized into bodies and brains and appetites? And only for a short time. Then we just fall apart again, like we started out…”

“Like flowers that bloom and fade!” Claudia interjects, suddenly. The words come spilling out of her, like she’s finishing his train of thought, because he’s not doing it quickly enough. She’s leaning so far forward she’s barely connecting with the chair. Wilbo is taken aback by her enthusiasm, and by the simple, charming appropriateness of her response. Unsure where to go next, he tries a variation on the theme.

“Like uh... like the cacophony of the universe…uh… like a piece of music, folding out of silence, then falling back into silence again.” This is good. Let’s stop this psychotherapy bullshit. Let’s play word games.

Claudia smiles and arches her back. “Like a dance,” she says, “Because of the music. And it ends because the music ends.”

“Like a wave.” Wilbo responds. “On a flat, glassy sea. It rises and it breaks, and then the sea is flat again.”

“Like a thought!” she cries. “It comes into your head, you think it, and then you forget it!”

Like an erection, he thinks to himself. It comes from nowhere. It goes away. Eventually. But he doesn’t say this.

“Like a dream,” he says instead, “It’s in Technicolor, on a big screen. It scares you; it excites you. But when you wake up, it’s gone.”

Claudia stands up abruptly, effectively halting the flow of ideas. She walks to the sink. She turns on the water and rearranges the dishes with no obvious intent. She turns off the water and faces him.

“But that still doesn’t tell me why you haven’t got a girlfriend.”

Wilbo was enjoying the abstractions. He really doesn’t want to have to go back to the story. It’s just too much work, trying to tell it. He attempts another approach.

“Well, what about you?” he says. “I could ask you the same question. Why haven’t you got a boyfriend?”

“Oh, you know about me, already, silly,” she replies. “You met the guy. I’m in between. I’m on the rebound. I’m young. Young people, we’re always on the rebound. But you, you’re… you’re not so young. There’s more to it with someone who’s… not young.”

“Ah! So it does matter, then. The difference in our ages.”

She makes an exasperated expression. “I’m not talking about us anymore, Wilbo. Let’s just drop that one. Look, I put my dress back on, Ok? I just mean… when you got some years behind you, you’ve got some stories. There’s reasons for the things you do. Us young people, we just do things. We’re impetuous. We do things… just to see what would happen.”

He has to laugh. “It doesn’t really change that much.” he says. “When you get older. Except that you get into ruts, and your energy starts to run out.”

As soon as he says this, he can feel it happening- his energy running out. It’s not that he’s tired, not physically, at least. He could go down to the boardwalk right now, throw out his hat and pull out his concertina, set to work, if it wasn’t midnight. If the place wasn’t deserted. He’s got plenty of energy for the work. It’s just this talking, this intellectual sparring, this guessing and counter-guessing, this dredging up of explanations and excuses. Oh, he could introspect right now. That’s different. He’s got plenty of energy for that. He could sit at his bench and ponder all night long, until it was time to offer up the fruit of his ponderings to old John of Dreams. That sounds pretty good right now. That’s what he’d like to be doing.

She breaks his reverie with a hand on his knee.

“I can read your thoughts,” she says, “You’ve had enough of me. You want to go home now.”

He looks at her and sighs. There’s a sweetness in her voice that disarms him, not to mention the irresistible loveliness of her face as she looks into his eyes.

“Well, maybe for now,” he says, “But we’re not done. We’ll get together again. We’ll do some more of this.”

Her smile is full mischief. “Yeah, ok. And maybe we’ll do some more of that, too.”

This makes him blush, visibly- he can feel it, and it ignites a little tiny spark- a pilot light- that he knows is going to be burning there for a long time. He picks up his pad and his pencils. He picks up all the drawings from off the table and off the floor and files them neatly between the pages of the pad. She does not protest. He finds his concertina in the case, checks to make sure the snaps are secure, then starts for the door.

“Hey, wait a minute! Don’t forget the money!”

He turns back. There’s the money, still neatly stacked in coins and bills on the table.
“Oh, yeah, the money.”

He walks to the table, fishes out the sack from his pocket, and sweeps the neatly stacked piles back into the disorder of the bag. He leaves one pile of tens uncounted on the table. He nods to it.

“That’s your take,” he says. “For all your help. Thank you, really. Thank you.”

She beams a big, smile, childlike and guileless.

“Wow! That’s cool! Thanks, Wilbo!” She snatches up the pile of bills and begins to count them. He’s just about to leave when he remembers something else.

“Oh yeah,” he says, “This might interest you.” He pulls one of the cards from the Lighthouse out of his pocket and drops it on the table.

She glances at it perfunctorily, then continues counting. Before she completes the sum, he is out the door.