My only real friend in Elysium was Peter Porlucas. He was Italian, but he wasn’t, cause he was adopted. His mom was a one-woman assembly line of food, feeding us cheese-laden, breaded dishes bathed in olive oil with names that I couldn’t begin to pronounce, let alone spell. Tastes so different from anything I had ever put in my mouth, I was never sure they were supposed to be eaten. She had hair in places that you normally saw bare, and there was something around her eyes, a Mediterranean depth that belied any Midwest roots. Her ankles were as big as my father’s, but she had an olive beauty that you could make out beneath the surface. His Dad was stout and had a Boston accent, despite being from Missouri. He always sat by the TV with a pipe and nodded at us as we’d go in and out of the house, tapping his pipe loudly on the end table if we forgot to shut the door behind us. Peter had reddish hair and freckles, with a rabbit’s overbite and the build of someone who tried hard to be athletic, despite all that nature had held back. You could see in Peter’s body the things he tried hard to be, they reached out like arms grasping for something perpetually out of reach. It earned him the nickname “little Italy”.

Pete’s brother was eight years older than us and had changed is name to Aloise in his senior year of high school, after his favorite hockey player. He’d beat up on Peter every passing chance he got. There were always shouts from either parent, from somewhere in a different part of the house, “Aloise, leave your brother alone!”, but no one ever did anything about it. So it always kept happening, getting worse in slow gradation. We’d be walking around town or even in the country, and all of a sudden Aloise would screech out from nowhere in his SWAT van and kidnap us. It was terrifying, but it was also the most fun I’ve ever had.

One afternoon, behind a dead barn, Pete taught me how to masturbate. I pretended I didn’t know how. He made me promise we’d always stick together and never let the outside world get to us. We were both outcasts, me by choice, sort of, and him by defiance of his will. He tried so hard to fit in, that it made the chances of such a thing happening hopeless. I’m not sure if he settled for me or if there was some kind of magnetics that brought us together. Either way, he would shed tears in front of me, about his brother, about his height, about everything that he kept inside. He’d always end these confessionals by pretending it was all in jest. But there was a spark of knowing in his eyes, a silent pact he was making with me. When we were at school, though, and the kid’s would get bored and start picking on him, he’d turn on me. Every time.

“Hey, I saw Indiana taking a bath with his mom.”

Things that had no basis in fact, but would do the trick in re-routing the attention and ridicule from himself for a few minutes. For my part, I would take it in stride, either letting it wash over me, or in braver moments, murmuring back to the biggest kid who would ask me, in a mocking bellow so that everyone could here, “Is it true, you take baths with your mom?”

“No.” I remember answering one day, after my father had disappeared, “It was your mom.” That incident sent me to the nurses and then to Dr. Handler’s for stitches.

Peter would never disclose to the others any real confession I made to him. The ones he’d let loose were from out of nowhere. I wonder if they were, in part, things that were true about his own life, things he was embarrassed about. I figured he’d never let slip anything we had talked about, thinking it would maintain the bond of trust we had. Whenever we were alone, we’d never discuss it, why he’d turn on me and make up those lies. Partly because I think both of us knew why, but the words were not ready for our pre-adolescent lips.

One day we were playing war in the woods behind his house with his father’s old army gear, which we had snuck out from the garage. It had just rained the day before and everything was mushy, except the air, which was crisp. I had captured him and was standing over him, his arms pinned under my feet. He kept saying I could wear the gear next, but it would always be “five more minutes”. I held in my hands the hard metal helmet he had been wearing and we looked at each other. It was a dull, brown green and I held it over him, examining it like a spoil of war, as he looked up at me from the ground. I caught his eye and, both by accident and on purpose, I let go of it. The hard stained helmet came down on his face, catching his buck-rabbit teeth and making a clink that echoed like a bee-bee gun. I watched the sound escape through the branches of the trees above, like a bird fleeing. He let out a loud “Ahhhhhh” That rose in volume, as he got up and felt his lips, which were bleeding. I was frozen with shock, not quite believing what I had just done.

“I didn’t do that” is the first thing I said.

When he took his hands away from his mouth, I could see that both of his front teeth had been chipped.

“My mom’s gonna fucking kill you.” He lisped.

I watched a speck of blood fly out, as he spoke, and land on my soiled, white t-shirt. In between the dots of mud, it almost blended in. And I thought to myself, maybe no one will notice.

By the time they found the cancer in his stomach, it was the size of a baseball. He spent four weeks in the hospital and then died, the day after our eighth grade graduation party where I kissed Sally Potter, behind Ed Nance’s Gazebo. I never visited him in the hospital, not once. Not because I was scared or angry. Not because I didn’t love him. Things were just moving, in their own direction. And I didn’t know I had a choice, or maybe I didn’t want to know.

I saw his mom. She came to our graduation and wailed the whole time like the women in those spaghetti westerns or The Godfather would, dressed in black and huddled in the midst of consoling arms. Her olive was just a dull green now. I avoided her the whole time, like I had when she had come to our house, offering to take me to the hospital so I could see Peter. I was always gone, or hiding, when she came. My mom never pressured me, maybe because my father. Maybe for some other reason I don’t understand. I was coming out of the bathroom after the service, everyone had left and I was staying back to help clean up in exchange for a missing P.E. credit I had needed for graduation. She was there waiting. No one else was in the gym, where our ceremony had been. The silence ricocheted off the walls like the sound of basketballs dribbling.

I was cemented to the ground with the bathroom door swinging behind me. I wondered where all the women were that had been consoling her, propping her up. It hadn’t seemed that she could stand on her own before, she had looked like a black cloud being carried along. Now she stood squat, suspended by those ankles, girders propping up a leaning tower. And I wondered if it was evolutionary biology that gave her those ankles, knowing she would one day have to support herself under a weight that normal anatomy would never have allowed. She broke what seemed to be an infinite silence.

“He loved you. Gary. He loved you.”

She needed something from me, but I didn’t know what. I wish I could have cried, broken down right there and held her, or at least have her hold me. But I was silent. I couldn’t even move. After what felt like minutes, she left me standing there. And I continued to stand there for another half-hour, unmoving, unblinking, until my mother came in looking for me.

“Gary, I’ve been waiting outside for twenty minutes.”

“I’ll walk, Mom. Just go.”

As I watched her leave, I thought of how he’d turned on me, those moments on the playground. I wondered if somehow, some part of him, knew we’d need this balance. But it didn’t really seem like balance. It just seemed like air. A distance that was there, but that I couldn’t see.

http://intao.deviantart.com/

there are no words for what i am feeling
but there are names for the gods that you can chant
something to call out
or to keep inside
i am at the video store
i am inside your skin
i am at the coffee shop
there are all these things to distract me
i am in the andes
and on spanish steps
i am climbing towards the place where they said you would be
and falling down drunk at the thought of getting what i want
a terrifying thought
ferocious limbs
asymmetrical desires that form a perfect circle
skin so soft it would eat me alive
everything in your heart is so unsettled and yet well placed
but perfection is always messy
i want a body i can trust and a soul that fits inside of it
i am tired of keeping my wishes in these bottles
there’s no point in collecting things that are supposed to be enjoyed
so we will open up our hearts and drink what’s inside
and if we are always drunk, we will never be hungover

photo by richard seah: http://www.jpgmag.com/people/uptight

the first time i read ‘a perfect day for bananafish’, it was from a battered copy of nine stories gifted to me by a close friend and dysfunctionally brilliant writer who had been given the book for his birthday, as evidenced by someone else’s inscription to him on the title page. it took me thirty minutes to finish, a relatively long time given the size of the story. this is mainly because i kept re-reading lines and sitting with them for a moment; both out of fear that i’d miss something and for the slight promise that they would equip me enough to continue on with the story, comprehending it for what i knew it was, for what i knew it could be for me. if only i were able to ‘really’ understand it. it was like beginning a movie that, five minutes in, you know is going to be one of your favorites. for me, pulp fiction and lolita both had that quality. and as with them, i willed or prayed for time to slow down, so i could milk this moment for all it was worth. and it turns out it was worth everything. you don’t get a second-chance at a first time, after all.

by the time i came to the end, i realized that it was not necessary to sit and analyze everything to get its deeper meaning. salinger had done this for me, for us. he had already analyzed, lived and pained through the deeper meanings and context. he surfaced them in crisp, simple sentences; western koans, which if you were too smart about it, might belie their rich, metaphysical context. this is salinger’s gift and ultimately what made him the most unappreciated-appreciated writer ever.

i clearly am not alone in my deep admiration and even my feeling that he wrote for me, or at least people like me. yet i have read a lot of qualifications about him today, in all the bios bouncing of the digital walls, after his perhaps timely death at ninety-one. there seemed to be a glut of qualifications, such as, “because so many writers have followed in his footsteps, he can almost seem a parody of himself” and other more notorious reviews from when his works were first published, bad reviews from the likes of such luminaries as joan didion and john updike, dismissing some of my favorite stories of his as “trivial” and “self-indulgent”. it made me wonder, in his defense, ‘if something contains a reflection of the self, does that make it self-indulgent?’

it is suggested that this clouded reception to his work, post-catcher in the rye, is why salinger retreated into complete and utter obscurity, vowing never to publish again until he was dead and gone. whatever the reason and whatever kind of person he was (all the talk is that he was not so nice of a guy), he had bouts of post traumatic stress-disorder and issues with lovers and children. but it doesn’t really matter. at least not to me. i am as interested in the reclusive mysterious side of him as much as anyone, and i am eager to read anything else that gets published (apparently he wrote almost everyday since retreating into obscurity, in the early sixties, when he last published). but what i truly have from him remains and has always been separate from him. his words, organized in mostly short prose pieces that break apart life in this insane universe and societal stew and let us see the beauty and the suffering in the cracks. they provide a stimulating feeling of intimacy, in that we feel we are being let in on an open-secret that no one has admitted to until now. our personal madness it turns out is shared.

i think the main issue that his detractors and even his apologists have, is that they thought he was winking at us; playing the smart ass with his “intentionally bad grammar and his sparse, zen-like phrasing. perhaps they looked at him as a version of today’s hipster with irony worn on their sleeve (or at least their t-shirts).

but he wasn’t winking at us. he was crying.

make me unified
i may not be real
i may just be the pieces someone found
a collage of angst
from adolescent scissors
scraps of books
fed to the lions
so that they could know what it is they are eating
and what it is that we felt
when we were relevant
when we knew what everything meant
and everything meant something
when we cared so much that it ached
in places they say were never real to begin with
and they looked at us like we were precious
and dumb
but we were so much smarter then
with our pores clogged by passion
stumbling into ditches on back road ecstasy
of moonlit sonatas and death as candy
off the reservation
with no lack of obligation
we all went down
one by one
even as we gripped each others souls
and swore we’d never let go
with teenage claws
sharpened by grasping at everything we could reach
we eventually succumbed
all of us
to the comfort of planned obsolecence
they have made us into molds
so that the machines would have an easier time with us
so that we would fit
into the places they had made for us
convenient parking
regard for real estate
a place to work, breed and die
real estate is fake
and efficiency is highly overrated

you can shine tonight
that’s what you’re supposed to do
make yourself bright
because the visibility is low
here in the place i thought i’d find you
it’s bigger than i remember
and i usually remember things
so much bigger than they actually are
maybe they were that big
at some point
anyway there are so many people here
with a lot to talk about but not much to say
the din is deafening
and the beer light can only guide me so far
bring me to where you are
i am strong enough to go there
i just need help finding my way

barry rosenthal @ getty images

my thoughts are arched
to the curve of your back
the beat of your brow
hands pushing time
time pushing me
across the line
you know, “the line”
but it’s not a line at all it turns out
it’s a shadow
that draws a
perfect circle
around the places that we think we’re heading
but we’re not going there
not tonight
so make me
like i am making you right now
into something that does not have a name
only a shape and a dotted line
point it towards yourself
and let it go

mimas, saturn’s moon
image courtesy of: http://www.spaceinfo.com.au/mimas20081203.html

slick sunrise
you know who you are
blond sweat and broken dreams
the narcotic ecstasy
of sleeping while others toil

i cut my leg on broken fence
drunk stumbling
i am bleeding on the world
and the world is bleeding on me
there are no words
for the things that we want

silence makes the morning come
in an alchemical haze
we awake
to find they’ve taken the best
and you say, don’t worry
the best wasn’t good enough

still from ‘the seventh seal’ by ingmar bergman, 1957

say you know what i mean
without me having to say more about it
the simple breaths one takes
the beginning kisses

i can’t hold you tonight
my arms won’t reach
and my soul is on ice
i can’t find fingers anywhere
that will dial your number
or delve in for pleasure
i am alone
and alone in being alone

i didn’t understand
but i knew what you meant
about the shape
that the steam made on the mirror
i said i couldn’t, but i saw it
i just read it another way

http://miyaandostanoff.deviantart.com/

i was in wet grass midwest samadi
counting stars
lying next to you
on god’s lawn

we noticed perfection
how it has endless miles to travel
before it reaches our skin
and so many stories to tell
once it has arrived

but before it reaches the end
it is gone again
dawn hides the writing
that the moon let us read

there maybe only one life
but there are so many bodies
in and out of the ground
we grow
like weeds
we take shape
from the seeds that are planted
by the hands that we hide

death will be a room
where we change
into the skin that surrounds us
and the skin that we surround
huddled in boxes
diving into the sunset
i wear you when i want to feel
like i have nothing on

edward ruscha, western, 1991

remember what we said
about what we wouldn’t forget

when we were on fire
and there was no end
to our beginning

we move so quickly
that we forget what we want
and what we want forgets us

it’s only fair, though
that our thoughts would drift
as we reached those once-distant hills

they came up on us so quickly

and before we knew it
the horizon had changed
and there was an ocean
where our garden was supposed to be

we didn’t have time
but time certainly had us

and i forgot the names that i had given
to the secrets that we kept
all the maps i had made without a compass
ended up being the lines
of our palms connecting
making a loop
leading us in circles

but we are round like a ring
and we fill up the center
with what we don’t know
with what we feel

and sometimes
we get it right

inside the breath
that travels before my face
there is a vision
and a song
with curves that lead me home
and hooks that keep me holding on

there’s a persistent beat to the sunrise
like the sound of men falling
and women waking up

babies that have yet to be born
are wailing just beyond the skyline

somewhere underneath it all
in upside down alleyways
there are needles going into the red
and engines that are about to catch fire

when you go below again
tell them i said hi
tell them i probably won’t be back
not anytime soon

Abstract Needle,Knot & Thread #2 Reloaded : Version #2
Piazza Cadorna – Milan

when you gaze into the infinite sunrise
whose face do you see
do the parts come together
or do they just spill out
across the ocean and the miles
into the cracks of canyons
and the curves of country roads

my wet dreams
your dry summer
when everything just caught fire
and burned
until there was nothing left

nothing burns in winter
not unless we want it to

stark sunrise: www.whoartnow.co.uk/abstract1.php

i am filled with your body
and your body is filled with me
so complex, the tastes intertwine
across palates and plain states
familiarity and contempt
you know what i want
before i even want it
there’s no more room for the records anymore
the beats are all condensed
true love waits for the winning hand
we are not even digital anymore
that was just a dream
we are somewhere beyond that now
into skin cells and dying vines

and washing the pixels out of your hair
you turn to me and say
“you are almost real”
i see your eyes
or at least where they used to be
and it makes me smile where i once had a mouth

gary indiana – (a serial novel)

part two

chapter fourteen

At some point, I doze off. Seems hard to imagine, given the circumstances, but I have no memory. I do remember where I am and what I’m doing. I am hiding from the sheriff and his deputies, one of who is now five feet away from me, on the other side of a small band of growth. Something’s different. I feel about fifty pounds lighter, like I could float right up into the air if I wanted. I have a momentary panic that I might. I take a deep breath and have the distinct sensation that my whole body is filling up. It’s as if I could keep taking this breath for as long as I wanted.

The radio blip is what must have woken me. I’m not sure how much time has passed, but Sheriff Bradley doesn’t seem to be any less pissed. He’s squawking orders from the bridge. I can hear his shouts coming through the radio and from the river, in stereo.

Does he know? Is he in with Dr. Handler? What did Handler tell him? The order comes through to regroup at the bridge and the footfalls of the deputy fade away. I begin to feel blurry then my vision goes dark. Then I go dark.

I awake and it’s night. The cicadas are clicking their code, speaking in tongues of the ancients; the language that keeps the plants growing and the world spinning round. I get it for a brief sec, see how it’s all working, and then it passes. It’s the realization that everything that’s happening is making everything else happen. It is all necessary.

“Play your part.,” the noises tell me. My thoughts come back to my present. My small self, the one that’s now an outlaw. Images swirl, my mom, Dr. Handler, the River County Sheriff’s Department.

Dylan said, “To live outside the law you must be honest”. I’m just not sure I have it in me. Honesty seems like a lot of responsibility right now and there’s too many things I’m trying to hold down, keep down. I am caked in the half-dried muck from the primordial banks of the river’s edge, which I had to crawl through. I feel more a part of nature than I want to be. I listen for any sign of human life, and hear no audible traces of deputies or anyone else. I suppose my lack of consciousness has come through yet again. I slowly rise and with as little sound as possible, get up and take inventory of my situation.

I make my way to a clearing in the brush and from what I can see, which isn’t much, there is no sign of life on the bridge. I still take pains to make as little noise as possible through the brambles and the bushes, which leave their marks on me as I wrestle through their groping barbs. I suppose everyone’s gone, but I don’t know enough not to worry.

I’ve never crossed the bridge from this side. Technically, I’m in Illinois right now, east of the Mississippi. Before there was a “mid”-west, there was just “west”. This river was the demarcation of the “new” new world. William Burroughs said “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil from before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.” He was most likely on a lion’s share of smack when he said or wrote this, but I feel like I can relate right now. I can feel something deep in the bones of this land like two halves fighting. I can feel it in my bones too. Something racing through my veins. Something so foreign, yet so uncomfortably familiar.

I am now at the foot of the bridge, twenty yards from the mark on the railing. Yet, I can see it perfectly. I can’t really tell if I’m actually seeing it or if it’s just burned into my brain. I’m not sure there’s a distinction anymore. I’m pulled towards and pushed away from that spot by competing parts of who I am and who I am becoming, by the parts that still think there’s a difference. Standing in front of the railing I place my hands on either side of the mark. I stare at it in the light of the mostly full moon. I close my eyes and yet still see the image clearly, like it’s drawn on the inside of my forehead.

It’s a metallic click that makes me open my eyes. The click stands out, apart from any of nature’s noises. I know what it is, who it is, without having to turn around or hear his voice. I just can’t figure out how I missed his footfalls coming down the bridge.

“Hello, Gary.”

“Hi, Dr. Handler” I say in a tone much cooler than I feel “is that a gun you have pressed to my head?”

“Yes, Gary.”

“This must be another of those holistic treatments. Or maybe just another form of lobotomy? A more direct form?”

“Well, that’s all up to you, Gary.”

I can hear him breathing through his mouth, which means that he must be slightly winded. I wonder what he did to sneak up on me like that. Was he underneath the bridge waiting?

“Your mother’s a wreck, Gary. I had to give her special sedatives to keep her in her body.”

I tense up and that same ribbon of anger shoots through my nerves.

“What did you do to her?” I bark.

He gives me a sharp tap on the back of my head with the tip of his gun; to settle me down I presume.

“She’s just fine, Gary, there’s nothing wrong inside her head. She just doesn’t want to lose the last living member of her family.” He pauses to catch his breath. “I imagine you don’t want to be lost? Do you, Gary?”

“Can’t say I do, Doctor.”

“Now you’re just such a cool customer. I bet they already started to work on you… those mechanics?”

I’m silent.

“Yes, Gary, that’s right. This dumb, old country-bumpkin of a doctor knows a hell of a lot more than you think.”

I want to keep him going, keep him talking while I figure out what the hell to do.

“Of course, they never worked on me. My ancestors never got to cross over. My family’s pure, Gary. No genetic defects, like the Indiana’s.”

Half of me is intrigued and wants to ask questions, but I’m conscious of the fact that I should try to do something while he is still short of breath.

“Your damn father and his family always treated us like we were beneath them. So aloof, so secret, all the Indiana freaks were like that. It was us, my family and my ancestors who did the dirty work. Would have been impossible without -”

Dr. Handler coughs and the barrel of the gun momentarily eases off my head. I drop to the floor and swing my leg around sweeping the back of his knees. Dr. Handler hits the ground hard and the gun goes off. I climb to the railing and quickly look at the mark, there between my Converse.

As I lift off from the side I can hear the crickets, cicadas, the wind and the toads, singing in harmony, like an extraterrestrial barbershop quartet. There is a loud crack from the gun that penetrates everything and my shoulder feels as if it has gone up in flames. There’s silence and I fade to black. Then the black goes black.

chapter fifteen

When traveling through space you got to have the right vehicle. Just as you wouldn’t tear down a highway at 70mph without a car or at least a motorcycle, you need something to contain yourself as you travel through space. Something other than your body. Which is where the notion of a “construct” comes in.

Constructs are “vehicles” that we puddle jumpers use to travel from one space to the next. Of course, we’re not consciously using it. Constructs are thought-forms, illusions, which our subconscious creates to distract our conscious mind from the crazy shit that’s “really” occurring. The impossible-to-grasp mechanics of space travel. Constructs are a rendering of a reality that we are comfortable with, a true story. Or, at least a mostly true story; one that we can relate to, that grounds us. It provides a context and a way to keep in check, while the chaotic magic of inter-dimensional commuting takes place. If we didn’t have something to comfort and appease our conscious mind during all this, we would go insane from the sheer overload of data. We would short-circuit and potentially explode. Or worse.

My current construct happens to be on the rooftop of the River County courthouse in downtown Elysium, Iowa. I’m on a blanket underneath a night sky, making love to Sam. Even as my body and soul are undergoing atomic transformation. Everything I can see, or imagine I see, is lit by the unnatural glow of a thousand stars overhead. I am inside of her, out of my head and in my body; at least that’s what I think. The warm night air rolls against my back in an ecstasy parallel to the meta-flesh connection I feel with her. Sam’s breath and her blood are the only things that matter to me right now and she is whispering words that physically stroke my senses. This is a very effective construct.

“I’ve always been with you, Gary. I always will.”

On some level this is reality. And, on some level, my whole life has been a construct of one kind or another. Of course, the real answer is both. I am beginning to realize the real answer is always both. On some plane of existence I am making love to Sam and on another, perhaps more “true”, plane of existence this is merely a construct. There are some giveaways that this is not quite “real”, but I don’t really care, within my construct I am not conscious of any of this reality business.

There is an almost inhuman sensation of closeness between Sam and I, with each push and pull we are drawn into each other, deeper, until I am almost completely inside of her, my whole body and mind. Then I begin to feel an itching sensation in my shoulder blade. I try to ignore it, but the itch grows into a burn and it’s taking me back into my head. I finally have to scratch it and as I do, Sam moans with pain and cries for me not to leave. I tell her I’ll never leave. But something is shifting inside of me. My shoulder catches fire and I’m forced to roll over onto my back. It’s a separation and exit, from her, that’s more painful than the burn itself.

There is a crescendo of pain, accompanied by the now familiar white light that explodes from inside of me. Then everything goes black. And then the black goes black.

chapter sixteen

Sam and I officially met at the River County Fair, the summer before I first jumped in the river. I’d seen her a few weeks before, and even a couple times in between. She’d just moved from somewhere in Missouri and it was hard to miss a newcomer in a town of five thousand, especially one like Sam. There was all the bleating from the Elysium community about welcoming our new sheriff and his daughter, quickly followed by the rumors that inevitably start to circulate. Apparently Sam’s mother had died the previous year. I hear there were questionable circumstances around her death, the gossip would go But, wasn’t it nice that they decided to make River County their new home? I’d overhear all this, from the town storks in their loud whispers, between aisles of the supermarket and lines at the hardware store, I hear she doesn’t talk much, the girl. My Betty called her odd. It must be difficult…

Sam was more beautiful than anyone in town, but she had something else about her; hidden yet obvious. She had an invisible mark, above her eyes, on her forehead. I could see it, it looked like the one I had. Maybe it’s loss, maybe something else entirely. I think it kept anyone from engaging her beyond, “Hi, what’s your name?” I figure that’s exactly what she wanted. It also didn’t hurt that her father was the new sheriff of the county. That tended to keep some at a safe distance.

She approached me that morning at the fair. I was in my own world, where I was most of the time, camped alone under the bleachers watching the demolition derby.  Since I can remember I’ve lusted after being a part of the derby. Sadly, they lifted the entrance age a couple years ago from sixteen to eighteen. Johnny Angell who was seventeen at the time, got killed by a flying fender. He wasn’t even in a car, just part of a pit crew. Sometimes rules don’t make sense. Sometimes they’re only there to make people feel better about things they can’t control.

“Hey,” she said approaching me under the bleachers, “are you one too?”

She caught me by surprise and I reflexively jumped up, smacking my head on the aluminum bench above. “What? Ouch…what?”

“Sorry, about that.” she came close to me and softly touched my head. She acted like she wasn’t, but I could tell she was nervous. “An outcast. Are you an outcast?”

“Most of the time.” I mumbled, “I guess.”

“Well, good. I’m an outcast, too. So, I guess it’s okay for us to hang out.” she paused, “If that’s okay with you.” She looked as if she was waiting for me to say something.

“Uh…yeah.” I stammered. I’m sure my head was bleeding, but I pretended it didn’t exist.

With that, Sam gracefully eased down onto the dirty cardboard plank I’d been sitting on. She didn’t even bother trying to whisk off the dust. I instantly liked her. After a whirling moment of pain and dizziness I collected myself and sat down beside her. I’m not sure we said anything for the next hour. We just sat there watching the junk cars spin around the track, like big clumps of crumpled aluminum foil on wheels, painted and dirty and crashing into each other. I thought about how this whole demolition derby is what life on Earth would look like to an alien watching us from high above. But, most of all I thought about Sam; how our hands would slip on the dusty cardboard, fingers making contact and then coming apart. And how after a while we just let them touch, without needing to pull apart at all.

chapter seventeen

I open my eyes and the stars are there. Something in my body, or mind, knows that I shouldn’t try and get up. But I try nonetheless. It causes a pain that starts from so deep inside me that I don’t feel it at first. I register no movement in my body, but I am overtaken as my organs sear and debilitating nausea overcomes me. I am blinded and white pinpricks of light take the place of the stars. My body reclaims the controls from my will as I hover over my senses in some barely conscious state.

When my body settles into some version of normalcy, I just lay there, knowing better now. I keep still for what seems like endless hours of existential deliberation. I’m haunted by the unshakable and disquieting feeling that something or someone has been working on me. Like I was a car, or a TV. And then something clicks as if a time-release mechanism has unlocked itself from inside of me. My sense is that I can move, but I’m weary at first.

“Sam?” I’m not even sure I say this out loud.

There is no response. I start by turning my head to one side, the general direction where I imagine Sam was. Nothing. Without moving from my prone position, I gently allow my head to make a scan of the area to either side of where I lie. I see no one, hear nothing. Wearily, I begin to make the preparations in my body and mind to ease myself up to a sitting position. I’m leery of another attack of debilitating pain. There is an ache, but it is a conscious pain. A healthy one that lets me know I’m probably still alive.

No one is here, and I’m not sure anyone ever was. Maybe, Sam was just an illusion. My whole body feels ravaged, but it’s most pronounced in my shoulder and I can’t move my left arm. Using my right arm I lift myself up and tentatively make my way to my feet. My knees tremble but I breathe and am able to stand somehow.

I look out over the town square of Elysium from my vantage point on top of the town’s pharmacy. It must be the early hours of the predawn. There’s nothing, no cars, only a few remaining streetlights that blink intermittently. I can’t make out much at first, under the darkness of the new moon. Then I begin to make out the lines and things come into focus. This is not the Elysium I just left. It is cracked and abandoned. There are broken, boarded up buildings. My mind reels and I blink and breathe heavily to make sure I’m really conscious; that this isn’t a dream or something else. All signs point to life.

I head to the other side of the roof and carefully, as I still have no use of my left arm, make my way down the fire escape ladder. When I hit the ground a scurrying of something shakes me into fear. There’s a clanging sound that echoes off of the alleyway walls as a metal trashcan falls and a few rats scatter down the alley. I exhale and slump down to sit and catch my breath.

I eventually make my way along the square trying to be covert as I can. ‘I am the only living person here’ is all that’s going through my head as I tour what seems to be a ghost town. I feel like I’m in Planet of the Apes. It is all decayed; the market, the record store, the health food place that smelled like cat litter. They’ve all had been abandoned. Not just abandoned, though. From what I can see, through the cracks and broken boards, the stores and restaurants all look rotted out. I don’t want to go inside any of them, for fear and from some sense of morbid melancholy.

I cross the square, cutting through the small park in the center, and return to the pharmacy. I summon up the courage to go inside and see if I can find aspirin or water. Squeezing between the broken boards, I wedge myself inside. It’s pitch black and I hear more scurrying, so I decide I’ll wait until daytime for further inspection. As I’m about to squeeze back between the boards to exit, I hear a loud rumbling from somewhere close and freeze. It’s a muscle car or, no, a diesel truck. The sound is quickly ranging into immediate proximity. I decide to find a place to hide inside the pharmacy, where I can see the action on the street. Sure enough, within twenty seconds a massive and blackened, late-model bronco with pink, fluorescent lights emanating from above and below the cab, comes roaring into view and banks a hard, last-minute left to cut across the grass on the center of the square. The familiar, pre-cranial cries of drunken, male voices ring through the air.

“Gun the fucker, Clancy.” One of the riders appears silhouetted in the night by what remains of the streetlights, his torso hanging out the passenger side window. He’s holding a baseball bat. “I’m gonna git her tonight” As the car passes the statue of a female astronaut from Elysium, erected when I was ten, the boy holding the bat swings and a piece of the statue flies off and lands on the street in front of the drugstore. It is a space helmet.

“I got her, I got that bitch.”

Another voice comes from the cab, projected by a loudspeaker, apparently wired to the vehicle. “You only got her helmet, Nutbird.”

“Go again, I’ll git her this time.” He bellows in a mock-pleading and drunken yelp.

“Not tonight, we’re late.” the amplified voice of the driver answers. With that, the truck peels away leaving the acrid stench of rubber and gasoline.

Other than the fact that the town looks like it was left for dead, that business with the truck and the bat and the statue could have constituted a normal, late-night weekend’s activity for any of the drunken hicks that dotted the population of Elysium. Was this the future or the present or neither?

I make my way out, tentatively at first and cross through the square. There is a structure in the middle of the grass, a gazebo, where Sam and I used to sit and hang out watching all the town’s activities from late night hick entertainment to the sound of nothingness. I get there and sit down, catching my breath and regrouping. What am I supposed to do? There must be something or some sign.

I don’t remember falling unconscious, I must have dozed off. I come to after what I guess is a few minutes. When I open my eyes I notice the graffiti scrawled on the ceiling of the gazebo. Five words that make the blood rush out and the stars fade. “TheRE’s nOwHeRE TO rUN, gaRY”

chapter eighteen

I feel completely exposed. Every nerve ending freezes at such an immediate and alarming rate I am about to snap. Fear bathes me so completely that I get pure bliss from it. I’m drunk on helplessness. He knows I’m here. It is unmistakably Dr. Handler’s work, the exact phrase he uttered from his bathroom window, as I got into my mom’s car and drove off. But where is here?

Shit. My mom. And Sam.

Where are they? Certainly not around here, I hope not anywhere near this apocalyptic version of Elysium. But, I can’t shake the feeling that they’re in danger or at least not safe. I think of Handler and a little ribbon of anger stirs. The ribbon grows wider and cuts into the cloak of fear that I’ve wrapped myself in. If this is a dream, I figure, or a nightmare, there’s nothing much to do but play it out. I can’t just sit here and wait for Barry Bonds and his buddy to come back. I need to do something. If Handler is trying to find me, the best thing to do is find him first.

I can swear everything just blinked. Not the lights, but the world. It must be me.

I decide to carefully make my way to our house, which is only a ten-minute walk. Then I’ll try Sam’s. I don’t run into anyone or hear anything on my way. All the houses are abandoned, boarded up, like the stores on the square. I see no squirrels or birds or anything. There’s been nothing, aside from the rats. The lack of life, nature, or whatever is beyond eerie. Summer is missing the sound of crickets and cicadas. I never realized the level of noise and ambience that nature provides. Now that it’s on mute, the silence makes me feel like I’m walking on eggshells. I feel exposed like I am wide open. I am a drop of blood on a white sheet.

When I turn the corner, where the library is, I’m ready for my house to come into view, ready to see it boarded up like all the rest. I have to blink when I do finally see it. Unlike every other house and building that I’ve passed, my house is exactly like I left it. It’s in pristine condition with warm lights emanating from every window. My nerves seize and my body buckles.

Get a hold of your self, dude. I think to myself. This is a trap.

It makes sense that Handler would do this. He set this up and probably even spray painted his messages everywhere, in hopes that I would see them and run scared, right into his arms. Those goons in the square are probably his Halflings, on patrol for me. He knows I’m coming, but does he knows I’m here?

I decide after a brief, internal debate to quietly explore the house. From a distance, initially. I don’t want to trip any wires or alert him to my presence. I enter the next-door neighbors yard and get a look through the windows of my house. Close, but not too close. I can see through the first window into the kitchen. Nothing. No, wait. Oh my God, it’s my mom.

Everything blinks again. It’s like a monitor pulsing. I’m not blinking though, it’s not my vision. It’s definitely coming from the outside. I have the sensation that I would see what it would look like for the world to turn off.

She goes to the sink and fills a glass of water. I almost lose control and lurch across the fence, but I stop myself. She goes out of site, into the next room and I try and follow her progression making my way further along the fence to see into the next window. I wait for her to appear. But I’ve lost her. She must have gone upstairs.

I have a decision here. This could be a trap, is probably a trap. But, what’s the hell’s my mom doing here? Why is our house the only one alive? Is she waiting for me?

Then comes the rumbling. It’s distant like it was before, but getting louder and closer, until I can almost taste the diesel burning and see the pink lights and hear the shrieks of the louisville slugger and his driver as they pull up to a screech in front of my house.

“He’s gonna kill you, Jimmy.” the baseball fanatic says to the driver as they make their way up my steps. “We were supposed to be there, on the bridge. And now that little shit’s probably got away.”

“Just keep your mouth shut, Nutbird. Let me handle this.”

They knock on the door and I wonder if I should do something. Have they come for my mom? I am a cross-section of fear and anger and indecision. I search for a weapon, a board or something. Miraculously there is a rusty pipe sticking up from the ground. I have to work it for a second to get it loose, since I have only one arm to spare. As I get up and look over the fence again, the door opens and I’m about to go running out, when I hear Dr. Handler’s voice.

“What the hell are you boys doing?” He says wearily, but without anger. He’s standing at the front door. My front door.

“You told us to let you know, uh, if we found anything, you know, on the tape.” Jimmy seems nervous. “We were late getting to the guardhouse, and, well.”

“What are you saying, James?” Handler looks at least twenty years younger.

“He’s here! The fucker’s here” Nutbird bursts out.

Jimmy gives him a sharp jab to the kidneys.

My heart drops thirty floors.

chapter nineteen

Whenever Sam’s mother would listen to Blue by Joni Mitchell, it was known that she was not to be disturbed. These moments were reserved for when her sadness and depression were at a place where no pills, potions or screaming could exorcise her pain. It was like this for the last few years before she died. She couldn’t share her tears or just didn’t feel right doing it. There was more, but that’s really all Sam was willing to share. And the only reason she was willing to share this was to try and explain why she couldn’t see me on this third Sunday, after we met under the bleachers at the demolition derby.

We’d spent the better part of our first weeks together joined at the hip or at some other part of our anatomy. Yet it was clearly more than physical, there was a connection to something that ran far below our skin and bones. Something borrowed, something blue, is what Sam would say about it. Nevertheless it was palpable; what we both held, for each other. Not a day went by when we wouldn’t taste everything each other had to offer.

When Sam said she had to be alone that Sunday, I couldn’t help but feel the first pangs of something wedging it’s way in between what I’d accepted, unquestionably, as magic. I hadn’t been waiting for the other shoe to drop, like I normally would. I was just too engrossed in Sam to even entertain anything but ecstasy. But this sudden shift in tone worried me, and that familiar emotion of doubt began to creep in, like oxygen from a newly opened car window after an hour of hot boxed love. Like any boy or man, I instantly wondered what I did. What it had to do with me. And what I could do to fix it.

Having lived alone with her father for the last year,  against the backdrop of something that needed to be fixed but never could be, Sam discovered and accepted this male trait. Loved it and loathed it, in equal measure.            So, she could translate the emotions unspooling themselves across my eyes and mouth. I didn’t say anything at first, but she knew. She knew from the times that her father so desperately wanted to hold her, yet couldn’t seem to gain purchase. And doubt began to enter her rendering of the magical realism that the last three weeks had contained for her.

These are the moments that define us as humans, when perfection balances at the precipice and begins to teeter under its own weight or maybe the weight of the world. These are the moments when magic hangs in the balance and usually disappears, as if it was never there. As a species, we learn from history, but mostly take away the lessons of what went wrong. While this is helpful in some cases, to know history as to not be doomed to repeat it, it can lend a jaundiced view of life. For if we learn only from mistakes and what went wrong, we avoid lessons of what went right.

The tragedies are always what we seem to be taught. The lessons of what not to do, to avoid death or dismemberment or something altogether worse, like failure. The documentation of what’s gone right seems to take up much less real estate in the lesson plans that we are taught as children and adults.

This thought crossed Sam’s mind and maybe because of her mother’s loss of magic, or maybe just in spite of it, she was determined to make things right. That was the gift she had been given, or that she had decided to take. Through failure, she would succeed, in life or love or whatever else was thrust upon her, in this curious game of flesh and bone.

During these times of solitude, that Sam had tried to explain to me, she would perform the same ritual: wrap herself in one of her mom’s blankets, lay the same Joni Mitchell record on the turntable and let go of all of her functions. It was a way to let go and a way to remember. It was her own private moment, something she shared with no one. Except, on some level, her mom.

But now, it was time to break the rules, that hadn’t really been rules in the first place. About an hour after our short visit, the one where she said she had to be alone, she appeared in my room and took me by the hand without saying anything. I began to say something, but she shook her head to let me know there were no words. She led us outside and we walked all the way to her house in silence. We went to her bedroom and she took the record from where it was kept hidden, on the shelf. She placed it carefully on the turntable and set the needle down. She took her mother’s blanket from the basket in her closet and led me to the oversized chair that looked out the window to the garden in her backyard. There was a light September rain. We sat down and she wrapped us both in the blanket. And without words, we stared into the space and time of a place that only existed in the company of silence. Where, on a razor’s edge, magic skated along, undisturbed for yet another day.

chapter twenty

Dr. Handler goes inside and Jimmy whispers something menacing to Nutbird. He looks away disgusted and then decides to spit on his face. Nutbird use his sleeve to wipe off his cheek and Dr. Handler reappears a few seconds later.”

“Get to the bridge.” He’s calm, but clearly pissed. Nutbird opens the passenger door for Handler without saying anything and jumps in the bed of the Blazer. As they drive off I let myself slide down, against our neighbors fence, trying to piece together something that isn’t necessarily supposed to fit. I do this a lot. Trying to reverse engineer and understand the logic of how something works. It’s a trait my Dad instilled in me. At least I think that’s what he was trying to do. It’s served me well with cars and physics, but doesn’t seem to be of much use now. Logic’s in the backseat, randomness is driving and confusion’s riding shotgun.

There isn’t really any other choice, though. I have to go inside and get my mom and escape somehow. I know this instinctively, but can’t see how it’s gonna end well. Handler and his goons are only gone for the moment; they’ll be back looking for me. They must have wanted me to end up here.

I get up slowly, still aching a bit, and take a breath to ward off the dizziness and displacement. I make my way along the fence to the front of the property line, listening carefully for the rumble of the Blazer. I’m a master at sneaking into this particular house; I know the drill. I get to the side door and pull the handle so the tracks on the frame don’t squeak.

I creep inside and listen for footsteps, at the same time, trying to gauge what my mom’s reaction to seeing me will be. My eyes rest on our family portrait on the floral print wall. I have to keep staring for several seconds. I can’t reconcile what’s there with what, I know, is supposed to be. It’s the same portrait with the same cheesy, blue-sky background and the same clumsy grin splattered across my eight-year-old face. But instead of my Dad with his arm on my shoulder and his other around Mom, it’s Dr. Handler.

My insides split at the seams, my eyes can’t tear away from the abomination. The ubiquitous anger and fear seem petty now. Everything I think I know turns against me in an instant. His false eyes stare from the portrait, taunting me. They are the last things I see as a hard blow is delivered to the back of my head and everything turns white, then black.

chapter twenty-one

Initially it’s the laughing. That’s all I can hear and I don’t think it’s human. When I find out it is, I don’t want it to be. There’s something somewhere in the house that is making that noise. A retching sound that breaks my heart, and my pre-conception about what can be considered earthly noise. It comes in random waves, playing out for minutes at a time and then wheezing to a halt. Something that no one will acknowledge until Nutbird says, “Should I go and feed him?” All this earns in response is a sharp look from Dr. Handler and an elbow between the ribs from Jimmy.

Nutbird says “he” though. Whatever it is that’s making this horrific sound is a “he?” It occurs to me that in this moment, at least, I’m not really scared of Handler and his minions having me tied up in this chair, my living room chair. I’m not frightened of my mother, absent now, but surely the one who knocked me out. No, what I am primarily concerned with, right now, is the inhuman and chronic laughing emanating from somewhere in the house. It must be coming from upstairs. It’s too enormous of a sound to chart the origin and I wonder how I hadn’t heard it before.

Paradoxically, and in all other aspects of my being, I have an uncalled for and uncharacteristic cool. It’s as if I’m detached but not checked out. In fact, my minds reeling with equations and calculus. Scanning data, deducing the best tactics and overall strategies for getting out of here. I’m on auto-pilot.

But the sound of this thing, this ungodly hyena, makes my thoughts short circuit and lose their place. Handler must sense this.

“Oh, Gary. I wish it could be different.” He gazes to the ground, and then up at me and then down again, with an affected stare to go along with those dime store words. He gestures with a tilt of his head towards the stairs while looking at me in faux, deep concern.

Clearly he’s insinuating I shall soon have to meet whatever is causing that sound to happen. He knows. Whether it’s real, or some trick to frighten me. It’s terrifying enough to think that he has something that puts such fear into my workings, real or not. That he would know how my insides work, what would debilitate my will.

But even these thoughts, and the anger that begins to rise again, help me gain my bearings. Bearings I never had before.

Another short-circuit, everything blinks and pulses again. When it happens Handler’s expression changes and he looks into my eyes with concern.

He’s so predictable. I see him now, as a caricature of himself. I wonder if it’s all an act, just like his Andy-Griffith-country-doctor persona. It must be. But even so, he’s still transparent. I’m not quite sure how I seem to know this, I just do. It’s the math going on in my head. Or, maybe he’s just a bad actor.

What makes me gain my composure is the realization of how he’s playing this out. I catch something in his eyes and his affectations as he glances upstairs, trying to fan the flames of my terror. I know he has no intention of introducing me to the origin of that sound, not just yet. It isn’t me, or at least not the conscious me, that somehow knows this. It’s instinct. Instinct for something I’ve never done.

All of a sudden I have the kind of skills that take lifetimes of learning, at my disposal. At my disposal, but not at my control. I am definitely being dragged. That’s what it feels like. Like my mind has my body running a race that it has no business being in. It’s uncomfortable, yet I can’t really complain at the moment. These skills are keeping me alive, or whatever I am. I’m not ready to trade them in just yet. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to.

chapter twenty-two

“Gary, I told you there was nowhere to run.” Dr. Handler is dressed like he’s going on safari. He gestures to the boys to go outside. “You just had to do it the hard way.” He’s sitting at my father’s chair, pulling on his boots. “And now look what happened.” He gestures upstairs and outside to the desolate town. “You caused all this, Gary.”

He gets up and walks over to me. He comes up close and pokes his finger into my chest as hard as he can. “It was you. I didn’t want to have to do it.” He backs away and begins walking around the room throwing gestures to highlight his speech. “So many nice families.” He turns to me without expression, “Such a nice girl.”

I wasn’t prepared for this and I snap. “What the fuck did you do to her?” I lurch forward spit sluicing out of my mouth.

Handler just chuckles “What her, Gary? There is no her.”

“I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

He starts laughing even more. “You, Gary? Even if you had the ability, would you really harm your own father?”

I look down and collect myself. He wants this reaction. He’s fishing. My extra senses do their best to reel in my nerves. Freaking out is exactly what he wants me to do. A smile creeps across my face and I look at him. His face bends a bit and then he catches himself.

“Smile all you want, son. You have no idea where you are or what’s going on. I’m the master of this domain. You wouldn’t be here if you had any control.”

Then comes the first blast. The walls of the house shake and the laughing begins again. Handler runs to the window, as the door breaks open. Nutbird and Jimmy burst in.

“They found us.” Jimmy reports.

“They must have found the slip.” Nutbird is freaked, “That was a big, fuckin’ blast.”

“Shit.” Handler looks around for something then barks at Nutbird, “Frances, go get Esme.”

When the second blast hits, it knocks everyone over, including me. There’s a scream from above and a beam from the ceiling falls on Jimmy.

“Jimmy!” Handler calls from behind the couch where he’s just getting up.

There’s no reply.

“Esme!” Handler bolts up the stairs, leaving me behind.

I try and liberate myself from the couch by biting at the duct tape. It’s to thick, so I scour the area for anything sharp.

Handler makes his way down the stairs with my mom, followed closely by Nutbird who’s holding a leather box, where the laughing must have been emanating from. Except it’s not laughing anymore. There is a deep moan. It’s the saddest sound I have ever heard; I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

Handler checks Jimmy out and gets Nutbird to put down the box. They pick up Jimmy by either arm. He must be alive still.

“We have no choice, they’re too close and he’s worth more later.” Handler says to Nutbird, “I’ll come back in for the carrier.”

“I can do it, I can get him” complains Nutbird, unconvincingly.

Handler shouts something inaudible at him as they exit the front door. There is a deep rumbling, much louder than the Blazer could ever make, coming from a close proximity and gaining. I keep expecting whatever it is to crash through the house.

The door swings open again and it’s Handler. He takes out his gun. “I just want you to know that I could have you right now. One shot to the forehead is all it would take.” He is a few inches from my face and I strain against my bondage to get close enough to take a bite out of his nose or at least an ear. “All the kings horses and all the kings mechanics wouldn’t be able to fix Gary again.”

His breath is sour and he is sweating profusely. He smells like rotting meat. “You should realize,” Handler says, “that the only reason I’m not killing you, is because I’ll have my chance. You’ll be worth even more to me then.” There is another blast and he flinches. “I’m actually glad you escaped my office, to think of how short-sighted I was.” He taps me hard on the forehead with the gun to accentuate his point. “I’ll be there. You’ll know when, but you won’t be able to do anything about it. There’s nowhere to run.” He flips the safety off his gun. “Since you healed up so nicely from the last shot I want to give you another one, to remember me by. Sooner than later, Gary. Sooner than later”

He let’s off another round, right into the same spot and I see a thousand points of light that bleed into one, as I fade away. All of a sudden my brain is a black screaming train. And space is all I can see. It’s all black now. Then, blacker than black.

gary indiana – (a serial novel)

part one

chapter one

As I stand on the railing of the trestle bridge I watch the Mississippi flow beneath me. It seems still and quick at the same time and the silvery glow of gasoline and chemicals give it a look of mercury. The collective sound from insects, amphibians and reptiles from the banks on either side of the river is a fugue by instruments of creation that have avoided evolution. They are speaking to me in a prehistoric buzz. It is a secret code that I can’t quite decipher. But I know it’s telling me something.

I’m not scared. I know what I have to do, but the moment is so sad and beautiful I can only close my eyes and cry. I cry because everything is so dead and alive at the same time. Everything in this world is both. Birth and death seemed so far apart at one point. Now I see them for what they are: two Midwest, muscle cars heading towards each other at impossible speeds, destined to come together. Life is an intentional accident.

The air right now is a hotbox of flora and fauna that clings to me like saran wrap. I shift my feet in nervous expectation. I stare at the mark on the railing below my feet, the one I made after I saw my father leap from the exact place I stand now. The mark that started as a simple line but grew in shape and meaning as I visited again and again, searching for an answer. I carved into the treated wood a new line, each visit, using my father’s old pocket knife.

It’s been seven years. Is the carving complete now? I don’t know. Is there a meaning? Probably.

I think I finally recognize what the mark is, but I’ve never seen it before. It looks like one of those Buddhist mandalas the monks draw with sand, or like those crop circles that aliens supposedly make in the cornfields. It’s neither, but it feels like it has some meaning beyond its shape. Could be I’m making that up. Maybe because I want some meaning beyond my shape, some explanation.

I am about to discover meaning, or maybe the lack of one. My muscle car is about to collide with something. I don’t know what the outcome will be. I don’t know what the wreck will look like. But I have no choice. That’s the only thing I do understand; from all these images and noises swirling around me, screaming at me, keeping me awake all night. I have no choice. Maybe that’s why I’m still standing here, a last minute rebellion by my free will. But I know nothing’s free.

When my feet leave the railing it’s effortless, like gravity has reversed. I’m floating and I see blue sky. Then I’m falling and I see the scales of the river; a silver snake. And like my father before me, I am about to find out what is waiting on the other side of the surface.

chapter two

There was no splash. That’s the first thing that passes through my head. I’m dry. My eyes are closed, if I still have eyes. I am somewhere. I’m not alone. Then the black goes black.

I awake again, if awake is what this is, still not sure if I have eyes. I have no control, I don’t know how to speak or move. I am not sure I even have a body; my thoughts are here, though. I remember what my body looks like, or “looked” like. There is a hollow silence that’s not coming from my ears. It seems to be coming from my center, wherever that is. I can see something, all of a sudden, in clear and saturated color. I see a scaly shape. It’s a snake. It’s the river. Then red. It’s my mark, the one on the railing of the bridge.

It hits me. I’m seeing my thoughts. They’re so clear, without any senses to get in the way. Each thought is lucid, three-dimensional; more than three somehow.

Then it’s him. He is whole in my thoughts, older and younger than I remember him. My father. Things go dark.

I fall into a deep and vivid dream. In my dream I am a car, a ‘69 GTO. I’m in pieces in a silver garage, thirteen pieces. Everything is silver. There’s no light but I can see everything. There is what looks like a mechanic at each piece, dressed in black, I can’t see their faces. They work on my parts; hands moving so inhumanly fast that I can only make out traces and blurs. They speak to each other making loud, clicking noises in rapid succession. Some kind of alien, Bushmen language. A few minutes later they stop clicking and pick up the different parts of me they’ve been working on. The phantom mechanics move towards each other holding the parts up and, as they come together, everything clicks. A pain, like I have never felt, blankets my awareness and a white light explodes from inside of me. Then it fades to black. I’m gone again.

I awake once more and everything is different. I feel my body again; I know I have a body now. I know I can open my eyes, but I am terrified, terrified to even think. All my thoughts are still being rendered in this grossly articulate form; I am cold and I am laying down on something solid, but soft.

Then there is a hand on my chest and an electromagnetic pulse waves through my whole body. Clear as day, with eyes still shut, I see my father. I see him, as I know he would look if I were to open my eyes. Right now.

chapter three

Time travel is false advertising. It has much more to do with space than time. In fact, time is just a way we humans have devised to cope with space, endless and vast and conflicting space. I have nothing against time, per se. Time is quite creative and an extremely practical tool for the day-to-day lives we lead.

As humans we take in around eleven million pieces of data per second. But, we’re only conscious of forty of them at a given time. For those keeping score, that’s .000364%. A far cry from the supposed 5% that’s often given as our percentage of brain use. In reality our brain is functioning at 100%, but our awareness is at .000364%. The rest is subconscious. Deep space.

I say this not to confuse, but to illustrate just how narrow our bandwidth of comprehension is. So, when I say “time is an illusion” you can appreciate what I mean. Time is a way to comprehend space in bite-size chunks, which we can then plan our days and holidays around. Space is the eleven million and time is the forty. Time is our conscious mind. Space is our unconscious mind.

The speed at which I travel can no longer be tracked by conventional means. It is beyond the conscious mind and into the eleven million. I’m a space traveler, or, as it’s called in our family, a puddle jumper. My father was a puddle jumper, his father before him, his father before him, and on and on and on…

I did not know this at first. It is something you have to come to, and through, without any real understanding. I had to jump into the river, without really knowing what I was doing or why I was doing it. If my conscious mind was aware, it would have kept me from accessing my unconscious mind and I would have drowned, most likely. It’s complicated, but that’s just the way it works.

You can also look at space as a book. In our relative world we normally read a book from beginning to end, we go by page numbers, one to whatever. This parallels our limited understanding of time and space. The thing is, time and space exist in the same way a book does. You could turn to any page in a book, say page 88. Even though you are on page 88, page 333 of the book still exists, at the same “time” but in a different “space”. You may have trouble comprehending the book if you start at page 88, but that doesn’t change the reality that the different pages all exist simultaneously.

The “me” that is talking to you right now exists simultaneously to the “me” you just left in the last chapter, lying on the table, afraid to open his eyes. This “me” also exists simultaneously to the “me” on page 228, who is confronted with something that could simultaneously affect all the instances of “me” throughout this book and beyond. Crazy, huh? You don’t quite understand right? Well, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to. Not yet, at least.

chapter four

My eyes are still closed; the table is still beneath me. It’s as if I am looking at my father in an old television set, the kind with tubes and knobs and magic. I won’t open my eyes. Color is faded, perspective is bent. He is looking right into me, I know he is. I can see him, even with eyes closed tight. Such a cold stare and such a warm heart. I just let him look at me for a few minutes. I’m paralyzed with fear. Then I fade to black. Then the black goes black.

I awake, eyes wide open, lying down on the railing at the same spot where I jumped into the river below. I lose my balance and almost fall in. I correct and fall onto the bridge instead, landing hard on the solid beams that support the tracks. I catch myself in time to avoid major injury, but it knocks the wind out of me. I eventually shake the pain off, pull myself up and stumble over to the railing. I run my hand reflexively over the mark as I stare out into the winding water.

It’s much later than when I left, maybe three hours. The sun’s going down soon, there’s a streak of red. I’m sad like I’ve never felt. I don’t know why. It’s like I’ve left something behind; a way of seeing the world that I’ll never get back. I don’t know what just happened, but I’m changed. I pine for something that I can’t put my finger on, ignorance, not knowing. “Ignorance is bliss,” I think to myself. I just keep repeating these words, over and over. It’s like a reverse mantra I’m using to bring my mind out of deeper levels of consciousness.

I know far too much now and I don’t even know what I know. But it’s there, just below my surface, if I want to look. I still can’t open those eyes; I won’t look, not yet. I want to live in this world that I have known all my life, just for a few more hours, a few more minutes, before… before I open my eyes and see everything for what it truly is, unending space. Life is a machine. I am a car. My dad is a television. Please, not yet. Not yet.

chapter five

When I was eleven, my mom and Dr. Handler let me know I might be schizophrenic. I think it was a lack of understanding of what really might be wrong. It was the year after I saw my dad jump in the river and disappear. Mom was always keeping a watchful eye that first year. When I exhibited no outward signs of weirdness, she got worried. After a year of acting normal, abnormally normal, she brought me into Dr. Handler’s office. He ran some tests, which I gather were inconclusive, and gave my mom and I some medication. We agreed I wouldn’t need to take it, unless something went wrong.

Well something has gone wrong. So I rifle through the kitchen cabinets looking for those pills I’d been prescribed six years earlier. Looking for anything, really, that might stave off whatever is trying to surface. My mom comes in waken by the noise, I presume. She looks tired. It’s 10:45 at night; vitamin bottles, cereal and other assorted kitchen paraphernalia are strewn about the counters and floor. I’m holding a milk bottle in my right hand and my shirt and the floor are drenched.

“Gary?” she says, half tired, half in shock.

“I got it under control, mom.”

“What exactly do you have under control?”

“I’m really trying.” I’m delirious; about to fall prey to whatever is trying to take me over. I can feel it bubbling, about to come up like a bad lunch.

“Gary, are you on drugs?” she’s starting to take a different tone, clearly losing her patience and her suspension of disbelief. I turn around and look at her with what I imagine are the mad eyes of a serial killer or a wolf man.

“No.” I say “do you have any?”

“Gary, what the hell is going on?” she starts to come towards me. “Get down from the counter top.” she extends her hand to help me down.

Even in my manic desperation, I am half-aware of how completely insane I must seem. But I don’t care. Maybe things are as they seem. Maybe this is insanity. Maybe this is how it works. It seems nearly plausible. Or, maybe it’s just my mind taking the deep-dive after all these years. This is oddly comforting. As I get down from the counter, I feel slightly less manic. A smile even escapes my lips.

“Maybe I’m just going crazy.” I say with a glee that makes my mother feel my forehead and check my pulse.

chapter six

It’s 3:30am. I’m in my bedroom, on my third viewing of Ghostbusters. It’s keeping me sane, and awake. I fear sleep. I fear closing my eyes. I have stuffed down the existential nausea that earlier threatened to surface like a German U-boat. I’ve tricked my conscious mind into believing it was simply an anxiety attack, or some deep, psychological trauma attempting to unpack itself. I’m using whatever techniques I can to anchor myself to Earth, eight bowls of cereal and one Xanax, which my mom reluctantly admitted to having. It’s… you know… there just in case, she qualified before cutting into her stash.

I talk her and myself out of an emergency room trip, settling instead for a morning appointment with Dr. Handler. I’m biding my time; doing everything I can to avoid sleep until then. The visit to the doctor comes with its own set of concerns. I’ve been using all of my resources to avoid even referencing any memory of what happened on the bridge, let alone, my metamorphosis from shapeless being to Pontiac GTO. Yet, the vision of my father, embedded in all of that, is what I am banking on for an explanation. Repressed grief, manifesting itself in paranoia and delusion. Even though I know it was real. Or at least, not fake.

But I can’t go there, not now. It’s like smelling bacon when you have the stomach flu. One whiff of my experience and it may all surface again and this time I might not be able to stop it. The fact that I am praying for mental illness is not lost on me, but I stuff that down as well.

I’m not sure if it’s the Xanax or the sleep deprivation but Sigourney Weaver is starting to get to me. Something about her possessed, floating body. I pack that in, too, for worry it will also have an adverse effect on the stability I am barely achieving.

Maybe Ghostbusters is too heady. I think there’s a copy of Top Gun around here somewhere.

chapter seven

I end up falling asleep for a couple hours before my mom wakes me to go. I can barely move. With the invention of daylight, I’m now dreading my decision to agree to Dr. Handler.

It seems like I may be able to work this out on my own, after all. Nothing happened in my dreams and I don’t feel nearly the same way I did last night. It may be up to me, my decision as to whether or not to bring this on or not. Clearly, my decision for right now is an unequivocal “no”. Not yet at least. I’m just not ready for whatever “it” is. And I know it’s okay. I’m just not ready to be a car or a TV or whatever I’m expected to be in that reality.

…Is it that easy? Probably not. I’m worried that a visit with Dr. Handler might just stir things up quicker than if I just keep laying low. He’s always been a bit discomforting, underneath that small-town-doctor veneer. Kind of like an evil Andy Griffith, but not really “evil”… I just don’t want to get in there and open anything up, that’s the bottom line.

So I Google “panic-attack” and go to the Wikipedia entry: “very sudden, discrete periods of intense anxiety”. That ain’t no lie. Maybe this’ll be easier than I think.

My mom’s already had her “come-to-Jesus” talk with me this morning. It was less painful than I had predicted. I just nodded and said she’d made me feel better. It was true. Without her last night, I might have OD’ed on Echinacea and Raisin Bran, or worse.

She’s not what I’d call “religious,” not compared to a lot of the other folks in this town. But it’s there when she needs it. Who can fault her really? I mean your husband jumps in a river with no explanation and leaves you alone to raise your kid in small-town Iowa. You gotta have something to hold onto. I can appreciate that. Now more than ever.

So I decide not to fight her on Dr. Handler and go peacefully. I get in the car and we catch some pancakes and coffee at the Loving Spoonful. I listen to all she has to tell me. Since my Dad bailed, she’s the one person I trust in this shape-shifting world I’m in. There’s nothing stronger or more powerful than that kind of bond. Not in the world I know. Or hope I know.

chapter eight

Kurt Vonnegut uses the word “karass” to describe a group of people whom, often unknowingly, are working together to do god’s will, or atheistically speaking “destiny”. The members of the “karass” are kind of like the fingers on the hands of fate. Vonnegut likens them to the fingers holding together a cat’s cradle.

Another way of looking at it is that there are people in our lives, some we may have yet to meet, and to whom we are “karmically” linked. This is, like fate itself, for good and for ill and for neither. We don’t get to pick and choose our karass. Just like fingers, it is the hand that brings us together. The relationship that we have, as a karass, is not always apparent or recognizable until certain events occur. Some may go through their whole life never recognizing the members of their karass, nor the destiny they have fulfilled with the group.

My dad read me Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” when I was seven, and even though I was too young to get most of it, I’ve been looking out for my karass ever since.

It was the night before I first leapt into the “Big River”, Johnny Cash’s moniker for the Mississippi. I hadn’t seen my girlfriend, Sam, in two weeks, ever since her dad pulled a gun on me, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t loaded. There was an orange moon making its way over the tree line and we were lying on the roof of her house. She had warned me about walking lightly, as her father might get wise to the fact that we were up here.

We had just finished good things and she was running her fingers along my face. I hated this, but no matter how many times I flinched or turned away, she kept doing it. It was like nails down a chalkboard for me and she knew it. I love her; completely as you can, I guess, at 17. I’m not sure love is any different when you get older. Maybe there’s just more shit that can distract you or go wrong.

I was about to go mad, not just from her fingers on my cheeks. There was something bubbling. I would wake the next morning knowing I had to do something; that something brought me to the bridge and, well…

I guess it was already happening that night on the roof. Half of me was trying to separate from her, subconsciously. The other half just wanted to lay there with her forever. As long as she stopped playing with my face.

I needed to get out of there. I needed to scream and run and hide. But I didn’t want to leave her, to make her think I didn’t want to be with her. I thought about getting inside her again, but I was too restless. So I did the only thing I could think of. I lifted my legs up as far as I could raise them and then brought them down, full force, on the roof. The thud was so loud all the dogs in the neighborhood started wailing.

“You’re a real shit, Gary.”

“I know.”

chapter nine

Dr. Handler’s practice is located in a purple, Victorian house on the outskirts of town, off the old highway. It always struck me as odd that the only doctor in Elysium wouldn’t have an office in town. It’s attached to his farm, though; the one his family has owned since forever. So maybe it makes sense from a certain perspective. The Handlers and the Indianas helped found this town several generations ago. There’s all sorts of stuff named after them and you can find a bunch of stories in the library.

Dr. Handler’s waiting room is littered with the same sort of old pictures and historical artifacts that you find at the library, telling the history of Elysium. At least the good parts. All these old towns must have a checkered past, one that gets amended over time, as memories fade and people take secrets to their graves. William Burroughs once said, “America is not a young land…it’s darker and older than we think.” Or something like that. I imagine it’s true.

One of the main pieces of history, always tossed about, is Elysium’s role as a major hub in the Underground Railroad. Positioned as it is, along the Mississippi, it served as a temporary sanctuary for the abolitionist movement led by John Brown. Brown had a kindred relationship with a one-eyed preacher named Ames Handler, Dr. Handler’s ancestor and a ‘conductor’ of the Underground Railroad. Brown used Elysium as the hub of all his actions and plans and kept a storehouse of weapons in the church basement. He met in my great grandfather’s great grandfather’s saloon with other conspirators to plan his raids in Kansas and Virginia. Ending with the raid on Harper’s Ferry.

The Handlers and the Indianas were always involved. But never in office or a place of record or power, like mayor or city council. They always seemed to work behind the scenes. Always the heroes at whatever point along the grid of history that there needed to be heroes.

A few years before he was gone, my dad must have had a falling out with Dr. Handler. I could only make out pieces, I was so young. But I remember it was the only time I had ever seen or heard my parents fight. Dr. Handler’s name was being thrown about. It was late at night and I’d woken up. They didn’t know I was there. The expression on his face that I caught through the swinging door was unguarded. It was an intensity that made my father look almost inhuman. Or more than human.

chapter ten

Dr. Handler’s in the middle of the story he tells me each year I come for a check-up; the one about our ancestors working together to fight slavery along the Mississippi and support the union cause. It always makes me drift off into a sleepy haze. I realize that’s probably his m.o., a story he can tell without having to think; one that distracts and relaxes his patients. Like clockwork, he comes to the end of the twenty-minute tale and it’s usually time to go.

When he hits the end, the part where Lincoln honors our mutual kin in a presidential decree, I reflexively get up to go.

“Hold on a sec, son.” he gently rests a hand on my shoulder. “I want to talk to you, if that’s alright.” Despite his easy demeanor, this is in no way an actual question.

I’m a little taken aback, but I ease back down. I’m cautious and now mentally preparing the planned alibi of repressed mourning and panic-attacks that I had rehearsed a couple hours earlier. Dammit, I almost got away clean.

“Son…Gary,” the doctor begins “I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like for you to lose your father… well, to see him go the way you did.”

This is playing straight into my hand and I feel a surge of confidence, which I try not to show.

“I saw my father go, too.” he continues “Not the way you did, perhaps, but enough to know it’s not easy.” he fixes my gaze with that old-man empathy “it’s something that hasn’t left me, in all these years.”

I nod along with him, realizing the less I say the better. Just let the old guy go, my smarter half suggests.

“I’m not trying to compare us, son” he puts his hand on my shoulder again, this time a little firmer. He follows it with a gentle pat that seems out of place and a little disingenuous. I don’t know why but all of a sudden a ribbon of anger arises in me. I push it back down, cause I just want to get out of here. No need to muddy the waters or stretch this out.

“Your mom told me a bit about the condition she found you in last night.” He stops and I can tell he’s searching for something. “I hope that’s alright,” he grins, “you know you can trust me.”

An alarm bell came up with that last line, but I try not to let it show on my face. In my experience, no one you can trust ever says something like that. Not in life or in the movies. I keep nodding and even do an “aww shucks” glance to the ground. I can tell he’s reading me. Underneath that faux-Matlock charm, he is working me like a parent would, probably trying to scrutinize me for extra-curricular drug use.

He moves across the room and opens the top drawer of his old-fashioned, roll-top desk. He takes out what seems to be an old and beaten block of wood and walks back over, grinning again.

“Gary, I have something for you.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out an old pill box “But first I want you to take a dose of these supplements. I’m going to prescribe these to you for daily use and give them to you.”

He takes out a pill and hands it to me with a cup of water. “These are more along the lines of ‘alternative medicine’, something to help you relax. They aren’t filled with all the junk most doctors dole out.”

I take the pill and the cup from him. I simulate washing it down, but instead palm the pill and stuff it in the pocket of my jeans when he glances away.

“Good.” he says as I hand him back the cup. “You’re a special boy, Gary, a special boy.” His tone is markedly different, more personal than I have ever heard it, a bit sad even. “From a special family” he looks down “you must have gathered that by now?”

I’m instantly struck that this is going somewhere unexpected. It’s as if his exterior is melting, ever so subtly. I nod, but I am beginning to feel something rise. Dr. Handler hands me the block of wood and asks if it looks familiar. I turn it over. It’s a solid piece of pine, very old but smooth. And when I see what’s on the other side of it, all of my insides disappear.

Carved into the wood block is the mark, the same one I made on the railing of the bridge. I look back up at him and a white light starts to fill my vision, like a semi coming right for me. The last thing I see before I lose consciousness are his cold, alien eyes, the ones he’s always kept hidden behind a carefully cultivated mask of humbleness.

chapter eleven

When I awake, I’m once again on a table with my eyes closed. I assume it’s the good doctor’s table as there are no accompanying visions of my father or metaphysical mechanics. I am still in Kansas, or at least Iowa. I didn’t go blacker than black. Just black. Whatever that means.

I don’t know how I have the capacity to be cool, completely still, as I pretend to be unconscious. My normal reaction would be to startle out of sleep, clawing around for reality. But no, I’m on it, keeping my eyes closed and my breathing regular. Even palming that pill that he gave me, that’s just not something I’d normally pull of.

The door opens and someone comes in.

“Is he awake?” my mom sounds desperate.

Is she part of this!?

“No, what I gave him will keep him down for several hours.” Dr. Handler answers.

“What did you give him, John? I swear I-” mom gets cut off.

“Esme, I would never do anything to jeopardize Gary’s health.” I can now see the cracks in the soft veneer of his tone. “He means too much to me, you mean too much to me.”

What?

“John, I don’t care what crazy concoctions you have in your head. I just want my boy to be well again.”

“And he will, Esme. I’ve cleared all my appointments for the day.”

The doctor walks across the room and there is a rattle of metal objects as he puts, what I imagine to be, operating instruments on a metal plate.

Oh man, what the fuck? I think to myself. My mom sounds concerned for me, but I’m becoming exponentially confused. Why would this turkey try and put me out like that? Why is my mom okay with all of this? I definitely don’t trust him and he sounds way too friendly with my mom.

“John, I’m not sure about this. Is surgery really necessary?”

Surgery!?

“It’s not really surgery, it’s an out-patient procedure, Esme, we discussed this on the phone and we’ve been preparing for this reality. It really is the only way. Besides, it won’t affect his daily activity, or his personality receptors. This isn’t a lobotomy. We’re simply removing something that never should have been there in he first place. We can’t take any chances. If my assumptions are correct, he has already begun to transition. He’s already been across once and the change has begun. He’s held it off, as far as I can tell, but it isn’t something that will stay buried. Days, maybe hours, that’s all he has. Then our options are diminished. We have to make this happen now, Esme, before it’s too late.”

“I don’t know, John. It just seems different from the talking and planning. I’m worried about my boy.”

Damn right, you should be!

“Did he just move?” my mom asks.

“Impossible.” Handler brushes her off, “He’s likely dreaming, or worse.” there is a pause, a studied silence. “Esme, the procedure isn’t dangerous. Again, it’s not a lobotomy. What we are removing isn’t even part of his brain, technically. It is an anomaly, an abnormality that runs in Nathan’s family, a defect. We are doing young Gary a favor. I promise you that.”

Something odd is beginning to happen, like when I could see my thoughts so well, back in that other place. But this time, I can see my mom’s thoughts; maybe not see them, but they are palpable. She doubts. She’s worried. It’s not a vision or a smell, not a sound; it’s another sense or something, letting me know.

“Esme,” Dr. Handler is speaking in an odd, uncertain voice “you don’t want to lose Gary, too, do you?”

There is the loud sound of a slap.

“Esme, I’m sorry, I-” She cuts him off,

“Stop, John, you’re over the line.” Man I know that voice. “Don’t say a fucking thing more.”

“I-” he’s cut off again.

“I said stop, goddammit.” she pauses and breathes “I’m going for a walk. I need air. You touch him while I’m gone and I’ll burn every last one of your little antiquities. I’ll burn your whole goddamn farm.”

“Esme, I wouldn’t-”

“Enough, John.” There’s a pause and I can tell he’s trying to say something. “Enough!”

chapter twelve

Their footsteps trail off as they close the door behind them and I am alone. I sit up and take inventory. There is a tray of instruments set up and a shiver goes up and down my spine. I gotta get the hell out of here, pronto. There are no windows, but there is a second door, the bathroom.

I make to get off the table and it creaks. Shit! I freeze and listen for any noise on the other side of the office door. Nothing. I continue to the bathroom door, carefully this time. Everything’s old in this place and it all seems to creak. The door’s no exception and I have to really work it to not be heard.

I’m in the bathroom and there’s a window, very small. I lock the door and step on the toilet to reach the sill and slide it open, but it won’t budge. I look around for something to pry it with. I try the plunger first, but it’s not the right tool for the job, too big. I scan the room for something else.

The door between the office and the exam room opens. Shit. Handler’s footsteps stop, and head towards the door of the bathroom.

“Gary? Are you in there?” He tries the door. “Gary, you should not be up. You should really not be up. This is troubling.”

I feign a groggy voice and talk into the toilet bowl to give him a mental picture of me slumped over into it. “I’m really not feeling well, doctor. I think I may throw up.”

“Let me in son.” His anger and desperation begins to leak out of his country charm.

I scan the room again in a desperate attempt for anything and my eyes lock on some ancient, horrific-looking, antique surgical instrument. It looks like a chisel with barbed hooks at the end and it’s on the wall mounted on a block of wood.

“One second, Dr. Handler.” I make my way, on tiptoes, to the wall and pry the tool off with a crack of breaking wood.

“Gary!? What the hell’s going on in there? Son?” I hear the rustle of keys as he mumbles curses to himself.

I get on the toilet and try again and again to gain purchase with the tool and the window. He is fitting a key in the lock. I finally give up and just smash the window with the chisel. I knock all the pieces of glass out of the sides as to not mortally wound myself upon exit.

“You don’t have anywhere to run son,” he warns as he starts throwing his body against the door. It breaks down as I slide out, barely making it through.

I land and turn to see his cold gaze, looking through the window. I can feel his mind working; he knows he can’t catch me. I run towards my mother’s car and look back again. His face looks frenzied, desperate.

“Where do you think you can go, boy. You’re gonna end up lost or dead. Just like your father.”

I throw the chisel and he has to duck back into the window to avoid getting hit. I get in my mom’s car and reach under the mat for the keys. I start her up and spin clouds of rubble everywhere as I gun the gas and head to the only place I know to go.

I am terrified. Not of Dr. Handler, but of what waits below the surface.

chapter thirteen

When I turned sixteen my mom handed me the keys to my dad’s 1969 Pontiac GTO. It was ceremonial for her, and I received it as such. She took the keys from the rosewood box he had made before I was born. She uttered some heartfelt words about the nature of life and death and of tradition and manhood. While her words and actions meant a great deal, I had long since made a copy of those keys. In fact, I had been taking out the GTO, solo, since I was twelve.

My father began the driving lessons when I was six and, by the time I was nine, he fixed an extension to the pedals so I could drive. As far as I know, my mom never knew about these lessons.

A Pontiac GTO, not unlike other vehicles of its ilk, is a subtle beast. Unlike other cars that react to how you drive, you have to react to how it drives. It takes a reverse instinct and logic from how you normally operate a motor vehicle. Since I began my experience with this type of transportation, it’s all I ever knew. I didn’t have to reverse logic or instinct. I was born backwards. The way the GTO is different from normal cars, driving on a gravel road holds equal and opposite challenges to the blacktop. Given the low profile I needed to keep all those years as an underage driver, these gravel roads were the canvas I learned to paint on. Long before my official acceptance of the keys.

I can relate the different experience of the GTO and the gravel roads, versus their counterparts, the way my dad illustrated it to me. He compared them to playing rock and roll versus playing jazz. A normal road or car is like a straight-ahead 4/4 beat, with hooks and corners that fall into place in a predictable way that you can easily dance to. The muscle car and the gravel road were a different way of playing altogether. Things would spiral out, almost beyond control, and then you’d have to bring them back in at the last minute. Back to the center. The alternative was ugly.

I am not a master, yet, but I’m a talented prodigy. I am not currently driving the GTO as I speed away from Dr. Handler’s, I am driving my mom’s mini-van. Regardless, I feel confident I’ll make it to the bridge without any interference.

So, it’s with equal parts shock and awe that I register the spinning lights on top of the sheriff cars at the end of the gravel road, against the banks beside the trestle bridge. My destination.

“What the fuck?” I say out loud.

I pull to the side, sure that the plumes of dust and gravel had been clocked ahead of my arrival. I quickly eject and tear into the growth of the Midwest jungle off the side of the dusty road. I make my way through the brambles and bushes, and head to the bank of the river. I take cover behind a fallen tree that slumps into the water. I listen to the noise of the radios and hear squawks that eventually became clear.

“He must have gone into the brush, sir” a voice crackles from the radios.

“Well, go in after him, dammit” a gruff voice barks back.

I can hear the voice both from the radio and from the bridge where it originates and recognize it instantly. It is the Sheriff of River County, Ben Bradley. The same man who, just two weeks previous, held a shotgun up to my chest to ever-so-subtly lend me a cautionary warning about socializing with his daughter, Sam.

I can hear the rustling of bushes about twenty yards away and know I have less than a minute before I’m spotted. The only thing I can think of is the water. I cut down one of the thick reeds with my father’s knife. I slip into the river, blocked from view by the fallen tree, and make my way across. I inhale a gallon of water, since I have to keep the reed low and unnoticed. I am sure the sheriff is surveying the river for any sign. I also struggle to not let the unpredictable currents, a couple yards below the surface, pull me under.

I make it across to where I ‘d spotted more fallen trees that could conceal me. I crawl through the muck and slime and river life that dwell in these primordial banks. I slip into the brush and under cover, listening for the sounds of the radio once again. My ears tune in to the amplified transmissions and I hear the frustration in the sheriff’s voice as his deputies report back that I’ve still not been found.

I know somehow that I have to jump from that mark on the railing right near where he is standing. I don’t know how or why I know this, and right now I don’t really feel like thinking about it too much. But I know no other bridge will do and no other place on the bridge will work. My only hope is to wait them out and, if I have to, retreat deeper into the Midwest jungle that surrounds this rural part of the Mississippi. They will eventually leave or find me. For now, I settle down and focus on my breath.

I suppose this episode isn’t endearing me any further to the father of the girl I want to spend my life with, but then again I’m not sure how long that life will be. Or in what world it will be lived.

gary indiana, part two

i am staring at a picture of my mom, dressed as a nun, circa 1964. It’s a photo I just scanned from a collection my aunt sent me. it was taken by my grandfather, as they dropped her off at the convent, the year after she graduated high school. the year after the first kennedy went down. i begin to venture into the photograph, as i am wont to do occasionally. i can travel within a frame, especially if i’ve been to the locale within the picture. i recognize the santa ynez mountains in the background and i start there. i can smell the blend of chaparral and the ocean air coming from the santa barbara coast. and even though i can feel my way into the scene, astrally and otherwise, i can’t connect with what my mom is feeling. i can’t get close enough to ask her. it makes me wonder if it’s just me, or if she too is having trouble connecting with how, or what, she is feeling at the time.

the look in her eyes is that of someone doing something that made people proud, her parents specifically, maybe others. but there is no indication that she is proud. she has a look in her eyes as if she is staring at something galaxies away. half-fixed, half-blurred. i try to grasp whether she is looking at somewhere she has left, or somewhere she is going. or perhaps neither. the sharp, angular lines of her habit (robe) frame her with an imposing sense of structure and strength. but her face, so soft and lost, almost looks as if it’s peeking out of a window or a cell. with a rigid smile to match the angles of her attire and make everyone feel alright. maybe i’m just projecting. maybe i have too much context. or not enough. she never lost that smile, the one that she used to assure everyone from clients to close relatives, that indeed everything is gonna be alright, that it already is alright. maybe that’s how i can recognize it as soon as i see it.

i know things now that i’m not sure she knew at the time this picture was taken. her life up to then had been filled with love; from her parents and sister and friends. but it had also been laced with confusion. she had desires that didn’t jive with the modern-day archetypes. feelings for her girlfriends that outpaced the desires she had for her boyfriends. what to do with this kind of data, ‘how do you solve a problem like maria?’ well, perhaps you stuff her into an angular wardrobe that leaves little to chance.

when she ‘came out’ to our family, when i was fourteen, her and i would talk a lot. she shared with me anecdotes about her earlier days. how she had known something all along but didn’t know where to put it. it goes without saying that she was beautiful. she dated the star athlete of the local high school, ‘wayne quigley’ (where did they get those names?). but her foundational memories, of late night pool parties at her friends’ houses and lingering glances from girls, were all kept well hid from others.

catholicism was at an apex in 1964, with a fallen martyr in kennedy and an avalanche of social change brewing in the near middle-distance. but i think it was confusion that sent her into a monastic life. or at least towards a monastic life. i can imagine and remember the tear-stained talks that one has at that age, with parents, friends, whoever. the confusion and doubt about what’s going on inside. and at the time, it wasn’t an option to let those closest to her know what was really going on below. i can only assume that there were surrogate issues she discussed, stand-ins for the unmentionable feelings swirling deep in the mix of teenage lust and denial. maybe these are what led her mom, and whomever else, to suggest the convent as an ideal place to purge the confusion of modern-day, feminine existensia. it was the catholic version of joining the armed services. fighting the good fight.

for her particular issues, though, perhaps being cloistered with a hundred, young vestile virgins, may not have been the elixir she was looking for. or maybe it was. i never went in to detail with her about her time there, from her perspective. i wish i had. the depth of understanding and misunderstanding, the realization and awakening that must have occurred in her year or two at the convent. it would have been quite enlightening. i’m not sure what made her bail on the scene, either. there’s always the flickering thought that it was something of an illicit nature, given the proclivities of the church (the proclivities of human kind, as well). or maybe she just realized at a certain point, that she was not a saint, but a sinner. and that was just fine.

she ended up going to art school and becoming a photographer. she married a jewish guy on the rock of gibraltar, just like john and yoko. she went to india, she had a family, she became a high-powered businesswoman, she learned to meditate, and she brought more light into the world and to her countless friends and family than she ever could have from the nunnery. we used to joke that we could be in some remote airport or unexpected place and without fail we would hear “kay cole!”.

and even though she sent me to catholic school, she never pushed religion. ironically, or not, when she finally ‘came out’ in 1989 (before it was cool) and the other parents of the catholic school protested secretly, it was an unexpected figure that first stood up in her defense. our school’s principal, sister mary frances, wrote a letter to the parents and faculty that ultimately said, if anyone has a problem with kay cole or her being gay, they have a problem with me.

so i look at the picture of my mom, in her formal attire, like she’s going on a prom date with god, and i realize that we are all looking out at something in the distance. and we are never quite sure what it is. even if we overcome that distance we still might not be any closer. religion is what it is, as is the religion of non-religion. i have a lot and nothing to say on that subject. but if there is a tradition that i would like to carry on from my family tree, it is to not bury anything so deep as to lose it forever.

what are you asking me to leave behind
what does ‘everything’ even mean
maybe the words are there to make a wall
or to tear one down

bright pink
sometimes
shiny black

back when we cared about the music
and the music cared about us
in caves at night
prehistoric notions in our head
mixing paint and dna
stretching your canvas around my frame

making plans
drawing lines that make it clear
fitting purpose into a place

but when the wind picks up
and blows shit south
the distinctions blur
and we can’t remeber where we started
or if we’ve even begun

Ed Ruscha
Hell Heaven, 1988
Acrylic on paper
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4 cm)
Collection of Jacqueline Burckhardt, Zurich
Photo: Lutz Hartmann

it’s so hard to be easy
and easy to be hard

the afterlife
telling you to be here now
subliminal preachers
the three branches of post-structuralism
that i keep forgetting
not that it matters
we are post-post by now
beyond the beyond
consciousness has become quaint
bodies can be altered
taken in at the seams
coming apart the seams

we flow between worlds
in different time zones
electronic butter
spread across everything
we consume

to fall asleep
once again
by the light of dawn’s breath
staring through the windshield
of the car you used to own
looking at love from a distance

© copyright 2009 dan kunkel

can you feel the air
as it leaves the room
the warm surprise
of nothing

i am falling
sometimes
across horizons
that line up
in rows
i can’t tell which way they go

i can feel the breath, though
and the weight of your satisfaction
it is like death
like mirrors
and tragedies

waking within a dream
i see my shadow
it stretches further than before
no longer anchored by the sun
by the light

the shadow has escaped
taking the darkness with it
but i am almost there
i have almost reached you
my self
my 25th hour

elysium’s gates open
like marble thighs
and everything else closes
there is no longer an outside
everything is within
and nothing is without

Wolfgang Tillmans: Freischwimmer 83, 2005
Source: www.tillmans.co.uk

i was burning inside her
but i’m not sure either of us was on fire
the septembers and all the rest
pretending, not pretending
time just went by
as if it didn’t exist
as if we didn’t exist
melting inside ice cream cones

i want to harvest our best intentions
what we strove for, when we strove
it’s down there somewhere
in the rubble
waiting

chris burden: stairway to heaven