REMINDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.