Just to the Right of the Dictionary (Excerpt)

                Ryan was drooling, quite unattractively, when Officer Pearson found him asleep on a park bench. He shook his head as he nudged Ryan. “Hey kid, wake up.”

                Ryan mumbled in his sleep, and a large blob of saliva slid off his cheek and plopped to the ground. Officer Pearson tried not to laugh as he crouched down to Ryan’s level. Ryan’s shoulder slid back into the bench as he gave it a quick shove.

                Ryan woke up with alarm. “What? Whoa!” He shrunk back into the bench as he made eye contact with Officer Person. He was a big man and a wide smile spread over his face as he laughed.

                “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “The front desk attendant was on break during your wake up call. I hope I wasn’t a rude awakening.” He patted Ryan on the shoulder as he stood up.

                “What?” Ryan’s eyes were still spread wide.

                “It’s nothing. I thought I’d remind you, since you’re here, that park benches are not for sleeping.”

                Ryan looked down at the bench beneath him. “Oh, sorry man,” he said as he started to get up. Then he clutched his head and laid it back on the metal bars. “Jesus. Oh fuck, that hurts.” He squeezed his eyes and tried to push the throbbing away.

                “Hey, you just gotta take it slow.” He held his arm out to Ryan who tried not to groan as he sat up. He propped his head up with his hands and rubbed his thumbs over his eyes.

                “What the hell happened to me?” he said.

                Officer Pearson looked at him for a second and asked, “Where are you from, son?”

                “Huh? San Salvador.”

                “That’s it. You a student here?”

                “Yeah, I just started at CSU.” Ryan peered up at him between his hands.

                “Shit. How’d you end up all the way out here? That’s a good eighty blocks away. Well I can’t say I’m too surprised. Some weird shit always goes down on this first week. Half an hour ago I found a kid chained by the neck to a bike rack. So you’re not alone. You think you can walk yet?”

                “Yeah.” Ryan nodded.

                “Good. you need to get on home and get some more rest. These benches aren’t the best for sleeping on. How well do you know the buses around here?”

                “I don’t think I’ve ridden any.”

                “Okay. Well the easiest route for you to take is the Euclid Avenue bus. It will take you down to the big library and student center. You see the big striped building at the edge of the grass?”

Ryan turned in the direction of his outstretched arm. “Yeah.”

“Well, you gotta circle around to the front of that building. And continue past the pond out to the big intersection. Then make a sharp left and the bus stop is down the sidewalk in front of Thwing.”
                “Thwing?”

“It’s Case’s student center. There’s big sign out front. And they’ve got restrooms if you need them. When you get on the bus keep your ears open. You wanna get off at East 21^st. Got it? ” Ryan nodded. With one swift motion Officer Pearson lifted him off the bench. “Before you take off, what’s your name, son?”

“Ryan.”

“Ryan?” He put on a puzzled look. “Really? I’ve never heard of anyone named Ryan with an accent like yours. You’re sure you’re from San Salvador?” Officer Pearson chuckled to himself.

“Alright Ryan well I want to tell you one last thing.” He craned his neck down to look straight into Ryan’s eyes.  “If I find you on one of my benches again, I will personally spearhead your intervention. Just keep that in mind.” With that he pushed Ryan down the path.

                A minute later he was trudging through the thick grass that bordered a large stone building. As he reached the corner an orange industrial lawn mower cut around the edge of the building and slammed to a halt a foot away from him. The man mounted on top of the mower screamed at him over the noise of the engine. “Hey! Get off the grass! There’s a path right there! Why don’t you walk on it!”

                Ryan jumped to the path as the mower roared over the grass he had just been on. He kept to the path as it rounded the front of the building to avoid any other irritable caretakers. His stomach gurgled unpleasantly as he walked, and giving up on getting to the bus, he sat down on a stone bench between two large bushes. He leaned over so his head rested on his knees. He couldn’t close his eyes because the spinning patterns on his eyelids made the grumbling inside him worse. He stared at the toes of his shoes, where a tiny black ant was navigating the craters of the mesh fabric. He let it run until it had reached the laces, then he wriggled his shoe off and blew the ant into the bushes. He had just settled his head back onto his knees when he heard someone walk around the bushes at the end of the path. With each step the clop, clop, clop, clop of the footsteps got louder. Ryan adjusted his head just in time to see a pair of cowboy boots stop in front of him. “Hi!” A girl’s voice rang out above him. “You okay?”

                Ryan raised his head. A thin girl with wild, curly hair smiled at him. “Sort of,” he said.

                “Well you only ‘sort of’ look okay to me. Here I know what will make you feel better. A silly band!” She flung out her wrists which were covered in a rainbow of colors.

                “What’s a silly band?”

                The girl pulled a dozen off of one hand and held them up to Ryan’s face. “They’re rubber bands that are made into shapes. I love them. See this one’s an elephant, and this one, what is that? Oh it’s a princess crown. This one’s a sun. Which one do you want?” Ryan stared blankly as she pulled a dozen more off her wrist and sat down beside him. She looked at him expectantly and then tore more off her wrist. “I know. I have the perfect one.” She sorted through her growing pile until she found a lime green band. “It’s a brontosaurus. They’re my favorite.” She grabbed Ryan’s wrist and snapped it on.

                “Wait,” Ryan said, “I can’t take your favorite one.” He went to work it off, but she brushed his hands away.

                “Sure you can. I have two more still. And they’re only ten cents a piece.” She pulled another lime green band off her wrist for proof. “This way we can be bronto-buddies.” Smiling at him, she rearranged the bands on her wrists. Ryan started laughing. “See!” she said. “I told you silly bands would make you feel better.”

                “Ok, well, bronto-buddy, you were definitely right. I do feel better.”

                “Since we’re bronto-buddies, you should probably know my name, huh? It’s Jamie.” She held out her hand to him.

                “Um. Ryan,” he said shaking her hand.

                “Ryan. That’s totally not the name I was expecting to hear. I was thinking it would be Javier, or Felipe.”

                “My middle name is Gerardo,” Ryan offered.

                “Oh! That’s so cool. I love the way you say that. Where are you from?”

                “El Salvador. Except I’m originally from Guatemala.”

                “Awesome I’ve never known anyone from either of those places. Are you going to school here?”

                “Yeah. CSU for pre-med.”
                “Wow. Okay. That’s way over my head. I just go to the CIA.”

                “What? You’re a spy?” Ryan heard the words come out of his mouth and thought they were the dumbest things to ever emerge from his mouth. “Wow, I’m an idiot,” he mumbled.

                “No it’s fine. It stands for the Cleveland Institute of Art. A lot of people get mixed up. They would never let me into the other CIA. I’m way too artsy fartsy for them.” She laughed and turned around on the bench. “See that red building over there with all the windows. That’s my studio. I come out here to sketch and paint though. There’s so much color and life that gets lost when you’re looking through glass. I can’t stand painting inside. Also all of my favorite trees are over here.” She looked down the hill at the pond, and the willow trees sunk into its banks.

                Ryan looked down the bank. He knew the conversation was lost after they had sat in silence for a few minutes. “I guess I’ll leave you to your painting, if that’s what you’re here to do.” He stood up to go. Jamie still stared at the banks.

“Okay. I’ll see you around bronto-buddy,” she said. “I hope you feel better.”

Ryan nodded. “I do. Thanks.” He started to walk away, but turned around. “Umm. I’m sorry to ask but I really don’t know where I’m going.”

Jamie’s face lit up at the prospect of being helpful again. “Actually, I was thinking of taking the bus downtown to have lunch anyways.” She hopped up. “There’s a really great middle eastern place that’s only like a block away from CSU,” she said as she gathered up her bag.

“I don’t want you to go out of your way,” Ryan said.

“No. It’s worth it. Trust me. You should come try it out.” She turned around and saw that across the lawn a young man was looking at her over his newspaper. “Hello,” she said. “Would you like a silly band too?” The man shook his head and ducked back behind his newspaper. Jamie shrugged and took off down the hill, letting Ryan trail behind.
               

Jack waited till he couldn’t hear the girl’s voice before he dared poke his head out from behind his newspaper. When he felt certain they were gone, he folded up the pad of notes on his lap and then wrapped the paper around it. He tucked the package under his arm as he stood and walked down the hill toward the pond. He walked slowly around it, letting the questions swimming in his head settle into words. If he phrased them right this time he might get an answer. A pair of lights flicked at him from the street, and he saw his father lean from the driver’s seat and push the passenger door open for him.

                “How’d it go?” he asked.

                “Fine,” Jack said as he got in. They pulled away from the curb and into traffic.

                “So tell me what you learned. Who is this girl?” He tapped the picture that was pinned under his leg. “Start off with the easy stuff. Profession, habits, routines.

                “Well like you guessed she’s a student.”

                “Ha!” He slapped the dashboard, and Jack grabbed the wheel before they veered out of their lane. “I called it didn’t I?” he said as he took the wheel back.

                “Yeah sure. Keep your hands on the wheel. Remember we didn’t even have money for the insurance policy on this thing. You can’t crash.”

                “Sorry. So what’s she doing?”

                “Art major. At the art institute.”

                “Kay. So do you think she’s in the gardens as much as we were told?”

                “From what I gathered, she is there every day. Mostly painting.”

                “Any other interesting habits or routines?”

                “She says hello to everyone she sees. Even to me.”

                “What?” Jack’s father brought the car to a stop a little faster than he needed to at the light. “She noticed you? Why were you even in a position for her to see you? What were you thinking?”

                “I was across a courtyard, reading. I didn’t even think she would bother to look at me.”

                “You have to be much more careful. If she sees you again she’ll get suspicious.”

                “What if she sees me in the park?” Jack said “There’s nothing to suggest I’m anything more than a business man on lunch break. I might even get to talk to her.”

His father looked at the road for a minute. “It’s dangerous to get that close. If even one of her friends can describe you…”

“I know. I don’t plan to make friends. But sitting on a bench in plain sight is much easier than sneaking around in the bushes. I can learn a lot more if she can talk freely around me.”

His father scrunched his brow. It made his greying eyebrows bristle. “Okay. I think you’re taking my advice too far but you might be on to something.”

“Know your mark?”

“Exactly. So what else did you learn?”

“Not much. I got most of this because she was talking to someone else.”

“Who? A friend.”

“No. I think they’d just met. Another student, not from the institute.”

“From CSU?”

“Yeah, but there was something wrong with him. I didn’t catch it all, but she left with him.

“Do you think he’ll show up again?”

“No. I think she was just helping him get home.”

“Good. It seems like this won’t be a problem for you. I’ll tell our client that you’re up for the job.” He pulled out his phone and started to slowly type out an email, letting Jack hold the wheel.

“Dad, you know how you always said to tell you if something about a mark doesn’t feel right?”

“Yeah. Is there something wrong with the girl?”

“It’s just… I don’t see why our client wants her dead. How does anyone gain from killing her?”

His father sighed. “You’re forgetting the second part of my advice. Know you mark, but stay away from your client. Our guarantee is anonymity. We keep our clients hands clean by staying away from them. It keeps us out of trouble too. They never see our faces.”

“I just get the feeling that there is no reason. And that makes me think that we’re walking into a trap.

“You’ll just have to trust me. I know when I’m walking into a trap. It’s happened before, but I’m still here. I wouldn’t lead you astray.”

Jack rode in silence until they pulled up to the airport. His father spent a few minutes typing out an email on his phone as they idled in front of the sliding doors. Then he rummaged through a pile in the back seat and produced a ticket. This is for the flight to Boulder next Saturday. Don’t lose it.” Jack got his suitcase from the trunk. “Good luck.” His father hugged him. “And don’t forget the rule.”

“Know your mark, not your client.”

“That’s right. Make me proud son,” he said as the sliding doors opened for him. Jack got back in the car and drove away.

               

                Jamie and Ryan had grabbed two adjacent seats in the farthest corner of the bus running downtown. Ryan watched her with his peripherals as they lurched back and forth in their seats. Her gaze ran along the streets outside the bus lingering on pedestrians, street corners, and store fronts. As the bus passed in and out of the shadows of buildings, light wove through her thick curls and each jolt of the bus sent it bouncing out of her hair.

                “Look,” she pointed out the opposite window over the head of a stocky Mexican man. “That brick building was the old masonic temple. The interior burned in the ‘70s. It was arson.” She turned around in her seat to point at a dilapidated house in the field past a closed car dealership. “And that’s the last standing house from Millionaire’s Row. It was a clubhouse for a while but it’s been sitting empty for almost twenty years. They’re planning to bulldoze it next month. To be part of a parking lot for the Cleveland Clinic. Fucking Cleveland Clinic.” Ryan looked down the length of the bus. Every banner and poster read Cleveland Clinic Health Line at the top. Jamie looked at him with a sly smile. “If they were as good at removing cancer as they claim to be, they’d be gone by now.” She laughed to herself.             

                “My friend’s parents back home told me that Cleveland was good for pre-med because the Clinic was so big,” Ryan said quietly.

                “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “they’re great at what they do, but that’s what I hate about them. They’re too big. It seems like each time I find something interesting in this city, they’ve already got permission to turn it into another parking garage.”

                “From what I can see right now, a parking garage might be an improvement around here.”

                Jamie was looking back out the window. “Yeah, probably but it’s not the right kind of improvement.”

                “What is?” Ryan asked.

                Gesturing up at the buildings above them she said, “See all the old factories. When I’m a rich and famous artist, I’m gonna buy them all. And I’ll make one my studio, the one with the biggest windows, and the rest I’ll give to my school for studio space and offices and whatever. Use what’s already beautiful.” She leaned against the glass and stared at the passing streets again.

                A few minutes later, she sat up and pointed across the bus at a squat stone government building. “My mom works there,” she said as they passed.

                “Really? What’s she do?” Ryan asked, relieved she had finally broken the silence.

                “She’s the City Council President.”

                “Wow. That’s cool.”
                “I suppose. She’s probably not even there right now. She’s at her campaign headquarters I’ll bet. She’s trying to get elected to the Ohio General Assembly, so she never leaves her office there.”

                “That’s a really big jump isn’t it?”

                “Yeah, but she’s not really gonna make it. Her opponent has had his seat for six years and he’s a Dem. She doesn’t have a chance against that in an urban area.”

                “I’m sorry.”

                Jamie looked at him and smiled. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. She’s not cut out for the job anyways. And if she did get it… jeez. Talk about tyranny. We don’t need another title going to her head.” As she rolled her eyes, the driver came over the loudspeaker.

                “19^th Street East.”

                Jamie whirled around. “Oh shit. We went right past your stop. I wasn’t even thinking about it.” They hurried out the bus door. “I hope you don’t mind walking a few blocks.”

        

(There will probably be a number of scenes between the previous scene and this one in the future)

                Jack’s eyes opened towards the studs in the roof of his childhood home barely visible in the darkness. From his room in the attic he could hear a whispering rustle coming up the stairs. His mother leaned silent over his bed. He barely saw her face, but he felt her hands brush his hair backwards as she kissed his forehead. In a moment, she was back down the stairs without a word. Jack held his breath and listened. He still heard her moving in her room, the soft sound of her feet sweeping across the carpet. He rolled off his bed, down to the floor, and crawled over to the top of the stairs. His mother flashed past the bottom of the stairs, a large box in her hands. Her long skirt fluttered behind her. A moment later a muffled rumble, the sound of a chair rubbing backwards on the tile floated up from the kitchen.

                Suddenly a pane of glass crashed, and Jack’s mother shrieked in surprise. Then she whispered, “Roger? You scared me. What were you thinking?”

                The front door opened and the glass from the window crunched under heavy boots. “Good morning dear,” his father’s voice came through throaty and hushed, “you’re up early.”

                “I, I wanted to get a fresh start today, and…and…”

                “Hit the road before dawn?”

                “No. I’m just packing up some old things for the thrift store.”

                “Dear, you don’t have to lie to me.”

                “I’m not lying. Please dear.”
                “You’re running away because of the nightmares you’ve been having. I can see it in the way you look at me in the morning. You think I’m a killer. You think I’m mad.”

                “No. I love you. Please believe me.”

                “Do you hate me?” Jack’s father let the question hang in the air. “You’re afraid of me…”

                “Yes,” she answered in a whisper.

                No noise came up the stairs for a moment and Jack felt his heart thudding into the floor. And then a chair was thrown back as his father lunged. There was a crash, another window shattered. His mother’s scream rose above the chaos, “Stay away!” A plate shattered, and then the front door crashed open.

Jack broke free of his trance and screamed, “Mom? Mom!” He jumped up, running headfirst into a rafter. Tears welled up, and he fell backwards onto his mattress. His mother’s screams ended abruptly. He sat up rubbing his head furiously and ducked over to the stairs. He ran down the stairs calling for his mother. As he reached the bottom he heard someone else call her name.

“Carol! Where are you?” his father’s voice echoed down from her room. Jack froze in the hallway, bewildered. His father turned a corner barreling down on him, eyes full of panic. Jack gave up a blank stare as his father toppled over him. He was back on his feet in a moment, hoisting Jack up, a hand under each arm. “Where’s Mom?” he said. Jack broke into tears as his dad carried him out the front door. His mother lay writhing in the grass, a large knife jutting out of her chest. Jack fell out of his father’s arms. Crouching in the grass, he whispered to her and then sprinted back into house for the phone. He kneeled over her with it, the cord suspended over Jack to the receiver. Ten minutes later the ambulance roared up, and paramedics pushed his father away.  He cradled Jack in his arms as they sat on the stoop watching as the paramedics attended to her. Finally they stopped work and wiped the sweat from their brows. Tears rolled down onto Jack from his father’s cheeks.

Jack woke up sweating. This time only a blank white ceiling hung over him. He laid still in his bed, watching the intermittent blips of the smoke alarm, mind churning. There had been no burglars, like his father had reported to the police.

                Jack threw the covers off and stared at the wrinkled sheets of the other bed his father had been sleeping in. Sticking out of the mattress, where his father’s chest had been the night before, was a large knife. Jack scowled at it, embedded in only fluff. He cursed his hesitation last night.

Whimsy*

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed in with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot

I put my nose to the pavement and flare my wings, stumbling on barely knotted shoes that catch the ground in front of me, and skip off my nose as they push the pavement past. My wings won’t hold the wind; they flap uselessly like a kite in dead air that will fall to the grass when you give up running to catch a bit of air for yourself. Laces of tar jostle by; their smoothness a cool relief on my nose (like Puffs tissue) which is a glowing tip, sparking like flint on the craggy asphalt. The buzzing street lamps watch me skate by; peeking through the overgrown foliage of trees craning for the artificial light in the midnight hours. I swoop an arm down to brush the manicured greenery while arcing round a corner. A muted metallic clank resonates in my wrist after my outstretched fingers graze the base of a stop sign, but despite the numbness I spread my digits; pinions to ensnare the pockets of air that slip by which little by little will separate me from the earthbound sleepers weighted down by quilts, defying the feathers under their heads.

All of a sudden a pressure builds up at my back and my stutter-step smooths. The pockets of air beneath my wings billow out to support my weight, and I lean out onto their cushioning fabric. I’m no longer running into puddles of greenish light thrown by the arc lamps, but they are blown past me in tremendous, towering waves by a ferocious wind that would snap your tenuous kite string, and will bear me aloft. I jump and my nose lifts from the tarmac but falls back skidding. I jump again and again sending the sleeping world farther and farther from my feet but I keep crashing down in puddles of light splashing drops into the darkened lawns which, being spongy and quite parched, thirstily drink up the luminous liquid.

I leap, leave the ground behind and forget about landing (I could land flat on my nose, now raw and nearly fanned to flames, for all I care) and in the moment before my descent begins the air below me swells and swells, bursting and swirling, an exploding kernel of popcorn suspending me above the blacktop, the lawn ornaments, bird-nests and darkened bedrooms, severing the knotted, musty ropes that had bound me to the rock below. For the first time I am moving over the world instead of the world moving itself past my stationary frame and I am followed by the whooshing noise of the breeze propelling me through the speckled sky.

I look down at the ground that I am speeding past and let out a whoop of enthusiasm, but in my excitement I forget how dangerous flying can be, and like Icarus I will fall because I’m caught up in the moment. A branch slaps me on the head and claws my neck and I look forward at the tangled mess just ahead of me. I fumble the air around me to gain altitude but the branches below are tearing holes in my buoyant cushion, and I am descending into the thicket. Boughs shatter, but my inertia carries me through into a web of wires strung between the branches. The electricity snaps at me like angered spiders and copper lines crack like whips as they’re torn from insulating anchors. I shelter my head in the crooks of my arms as I careen through the canopy and towards the unforgiving sod below me that is waiting with open manacles to arrest my upward movement with newly forged chains of steel. But leaves suddenly thin and recede into the distance and a pale yellow light wells up beneath me. And I crash.

I prop myself up on one side; pieces of the wall are still falling onto the ground around and there is a large scar, twenty feet above me, where I collided with it. A brick teeters and falls at my head but it bounces off me without damage. I pick it up; a box of breadcrumbs. Next to me cream of mushroom soup is oozing onto the cobblestone. I look up again, confused. There are still stars dotting the sky above me though most of them have been extinguished by the competing light of hundreds of kerosene lamps. And reaching up to blot out the remaining stains of light in the sky are shelves upon shelves all stocked with produce, canned goods, freezers, appliances, books, even pets for sale, all lining the alleyway I crash landed in. Shoppers walk past, dreamily oblivious to the mess of broken cans and boxes littered around me. Some mount tall ladders strung all the way to the top of the buildings and collect items from the uppermost shelves. I stand up and wander into a row of smaller shelves that stand between the walls of the alley and make my way towards the light at one end, and away from the dark neighborhood streets. As I walk my eyes scan the shelves on either side and something catches my eye. A gold fish bowl filled with chocolate balls. Without thinking I take one, just to taste. It flakes into a thousand little pieces at the slightest pressure and then dissolves on my tongue, rich sweet chocolate and creamy hazelnut. I eat a few more and grab a handful that go into my jacket pocket. I walk past the lines and out of the alley into the brightly lit town center. A broad traffic circle sweeps around the plaza and the thin traffic creeps by to turn down larger streets at four points of the circle. A multitude of pedestrians mills about in the plaza, crossing the traffic and ducking in and out of the alleys carved into the faces of every building.

I stand at the edge of the sidewalk, still slightly dazed and disheveled from my fall into the canned goods aisle. After watching the movements of the people in the town square… rather town circle… for a time, I decide to cross the street to where a lot of pedestrians seem to be heading; it seems to me that the town center is clearing out steadily. I cross the traffic and see that everyone is filing up as they walk towards a large sign labeled “Transportation.” I file in behind a man who looks as if he is walking in his sleep, but as we inch towards the entrance (moving like the legs of a millipede, in waves) I don’t see an escalator down to the subway. Instead there is a revolving door. People walk in and they seem to smear and are whisked away as the door shuts behind them and occasionally someone new condenses and walks out the other side. I stop at the front of the line and stare into the machine while people detour around me. I look at the floor where little holes in seem to suck the departing down as they gasify, and in the ceiling are tiny spigots that extrude the arrivals. And right at the threshold was the sniffer. That’s what a sign to my right says it is; sniffing for contraband and dangerous items. It twists to examine every one of the transported and they are careful not to tread on it. I remember the chocolate balls in my pocket and I’m suddenly wary of entering the revolving doors in case the sniffer can smell them. It keeps turning its nose my way when there is a lull in the traffic overhead. I walk around the side past the operator who is reading the paper and watch the people disappear for a number of minutes; many of them close their eyes as they are evacuated from the booth as if the process were uncomfortable and they were being sedated. As the last person in the line disappears in a spray of mist I see something else in the revolving doors that had been obscured by the constant motion. Two eyes are staring at me from behind the glass. A pair of eyes that is completely transparent, invisible. I can’t tell if my imagination is playing a trick on me but then I notice a long tail and flicking ears and the large feline form that paces back and forth, trapped in the enclosed glass of the revolving doors. Whether insubstantial, invisible or imagined I can see a tiger rubbing its sides up against the glass in the transporter booth and still view everything behind it with perfect clarity as if there is no image of it at all. I turn to the operator and try to catch his attention.

“Hey! Excuse me sir, but I think there’s something wrong with your booth. There’s a tiger in there, but it’s invisible and you probably can’t see it there for yourself. Anyways it’s trapped between the doors and I don’t think you should let anyone else through until you get it out. Hello?”

 I tap him on the shoulder to make sure that he isn’t listening to music, or half asleep like the people in line and that he can hear me, but he continues to flip through his paper. I walk back to look at the tiger; it is still staring at me and the sniffers nose is all ears as I approach. Suddenly the operator asks.

“Are you gonna go through or what?”

“No” I say. “But I really think you should do something…”

“Ok. Well I’m packing up then.” He starts to fold up his newspaper.

“What? But – the tiger!” He finishes folding his paper and pushes a button on his console and I stare with incredulity as the front of the revolving door divides and the circle disappears like a pie, devoured slice by slice. It folds itself like the paper, into a flat sheet, and then slides into the ground, tiger and all. The operator walks off into an alley and I’m left alone in the barren traffic circle.

*Unlike most of my stories, this one is not out to make any sort of point, so don't trouble yourselves looking for one or wondering what it is. This story is an attempt to lucidly describe a dream that I had this summer and I tried to keep it as faithful as possible to the actual events of my dream while also giving it the right voice. I did quite a lot of experimenting with language especially in the beginning of the story and my beta testers have commented that this made the first read an ordeal and a half because it obscured the plot for about half the story. Much of this story is an attempt to craft my writing to imitate the stories that I read by James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy over the winter break. Thank you for reading.

The Spider's Sestina

The blank, white orb was at rest in the window, a moonbeam drop;

The spider had marooned it in her web, alone, stranded.

She stared intensely waiting for the movement when it struggled;

Her web was held taut by slender digits, which burned

With anticipation for that tiny quiver that sent her mind reeling in fear;

It was barely even a tickle.

She had loved the orb, her greatest work of sculpture and weaving, until that first tickling

Wriggling movement, that made the sac, which had been clutched so closely, drop

To the floor as she backed away, always watching it, fearfully.

It had inched its way behind her, towed by a silk strand

While her head raged with frustration and terror; she felt her affection burn

And shrivel like paper for the milky ball and its insidious struggling.

Suddenly it began again, a persistent clambering struggle,

And a faint memory began to nudge her mind and tickle

Her thoughts until a sickening feeling slid around her gut, and her hard skin burned.

She began to conspire with herself, as she glared ruefully at the lustrous drop

That strained and pulled against the tensed strands,

And drove her mad with nervous fear.

A hateful noise ran through her mind, provoked by the slithering fear

Which had metastasized from gut to head, and protested the infernal struggling

That had possessed her beloved ball of silken strand.

A thread of thoughts entirely new tickled

And tantalized her palps; her fangs unfolded bearing glistening drops

Of venom that seared and burned.

She lunged out of her nest, in the crevice between windows, and bit down with burning 

Poison, condensed fury, and tore at the papery skin of the orb which trembled with fear.

Her young, little milky spiders fell out into the web, squirming droplets

That squealed and cried as she stamped and bit at them as they struggled.

She caught them all; some crawling up her legs, betrayed by their tickling

Feet and others that were desperately scrambling away on invisible strands.

She cleaned her web, grinding up the bodies of her young, picking them off sticky strands.

A weary relief had settled in her head when suddenly a memory burning

Like lightning jumped through her mind, and a sickening tickle

Filled her gut. It was the recollection that had spawned her fears

Of first waking up, and of munching and crunching food for the first time while her prey struggled

In futility. Screams of pain were drowned by her siblings’ gleeful cries and venom drops.

She had hatched with her siblings, a stumbling, clambering, struggling mass of pearl droplets,

And found their decrepit mother tangled in her own strands, where they fell upon her with tickling

Legs and burning poison as she wailed and screamed in mortal fear.

Cynicism and the feeling that every romantic comedy is just trying to sell me "Love"

Almost a week ago I tried to explain to my mother what a cliche really is. Putting aside the fact that "trying to explain what something really is" is a cliche itself, what I tried to explain is how a cliche feels and all the things they remind me of : corporate jingles, the live air advertisements on reruns of I Love Lucy for Carnation Condensed milk, and the canned grocery store ads the seem to be running longer and longer every time I walk in Kroger/WalMart/Giant Eagle and slowly replacing the soft rock, smooth jazz and the sporadic and ever cliched "clean up on aisle #" of the last decade. I'm not sure what my mother said to bring up the subject (though I'm sure it was something about summer Sunday School) but I told her that whatever she had said was a little of a cliche. She didn't understand because she couldn't remember hearing anyone else saying it before, which is exactly where my explanation of the essence of cliches becomes important. The reason that I associate cliches with on air ads and store special announcements is because when I hear them it sounds like someone is trying to sell me something. I don't think my mother understood, which is one of the many reasons my mother is such an amazing person (not a cliche or attempt to earn brownie points, FYI). I also tried to explain to her my perpetual fear and second guessing of my own motives that spring from my constant analyzing and interrogating of myself and she didn't understand why I did that either. But I believe that she can actually live with these things I think are awful cliches and work in a job that I think is full of them without giving a moment's thought to the idea that maybe all these phrases have been engineered to be catchy and still 100%, obviously, blatantly true in all situations. (Which is what makes cliches spread and more importantly sell their ideas.) So my mother can live life without every really being sold to or swindled because she never really gives a thought to the marketing.

Exactly how terribly awful and cynical is it for me to feel that my mother is trying to sell me something every time she utters a cliche, even if I know she never really thinks of them that way?

Anyways, moving past how cool my mom is, the interesting thing about cliches is that one person can just think of cliches as true and always say them like they were fact and another person can see them as complete scams, a marketing ploy fabricated just to sell you an idea you could have had on your own. In other words a cliche is fact and fraudulent simultaneously and what anyone sees in it is really only a part of its nature as a whole.

The day after I talked to my mom about cliches I had another thought (it was a very thought provoking weekend) though it was a bit different and requires a bit of storytelling before I can get to the point. The week before last I was drawn in to thinking about my past more than I normally do because of my neighbor. She keeps asking me questions about my past to help clarify some worries she has been having. But the whole thing led to a pretty lengthy internal dialogue that went through my head on the day in question

Mental dialogues with a person I have already been talking to are one of my stranger habits but they usually allow me to think with a level head about the things that have been bothering me.

The most relevant part of my mental discussion to the rest of this post was the part where I was describing myself as being conflicted, meaning that my head is in constant turmoil (my thoughts might be a little dramatic). I even went on to say that I was conflicted morally and spiritually and often conflicted even with love... but maybe that was a good thing because it made my love more honest and less about just finding someone to get married to and have kids with. That was where the more sensible part of my brain caught up to the rest of my train of thought and pulled the brakes.

During this entire imagined interchange I had been sitting outside with a bowl of calico beans (which were extremely delicious and were loaded with bacon and ground beef -- YUM!) and watching bees of all sizes pollinate flowers that were a safe distance away from me. As I approached the climax of what had become a long winded thought I started watching a tiny wasp that had flown in to the bunch of flowers. The wasp wasn't very big compared to its company hovering over the queen anne's lace however it stuck out because even if only seeing it for a moment I think most people would notice that it had a needle sticking out from behind it that was longer than the whole insect would be. It was a beautiful shiny black all over and would hover lightly in place before it would reach out and cling to a cluster of flowers but its abdomen stuck out at an unnatural angle and just made the needle at its bottom even more visible. From years of biology I knew that the needle was actually a thin tube called an ovipositor and is used for laying eggs, and this one was so long because it's used to lay eggs inside of things, inside trees and other insects. The weird thing is that I finished recalling my biology lesson the same moment my speech stopped.

I was trying my hardest to figure out exactly what I meant by "a love more honest and less about just finding someone to get married to and have kids with." And then I asked myself if I was saying that the love everyone else feels is the same as this wasp's ovipositor? Just some adaption that humans have to encourage our propagation? And was I really saying that my love is different and better just because I think spend more time fretting about who I like than every other person I know?

My imagined dialogues are really just self-centered; dramatic is a euphemism that keeps me from worrying about it. Really though, who's imagined dialogues wouldn't be all about them? 

At this point, rather than telling myself that my whole speech was a really stupid thing to think and then going over all of my neighbors outraged reactions at being so heinously marginalized by my comment, my thoughts continued with the questions. "If love really is just an adaptation, what would that mean for religion and philosophies of love? Would love really mean anything then?" Then I got to the probably the most cynical question that I have ever asked in my life "What if the philosophies of love were all lies? Isn't it convenient that every major religion and philosophy of ethics has love at its heart which is coincidentally the exact same thought that brings together most couples that have children and continue the species? What if religion and philosophy all say that love is the most important thing in your life because they were all designed to keep us going as a species or even as a religion (I always like the Simpsons episode where Homer shows Marge a Catholic pamphlet titled Plop Till You Drop, discouraging contraceptives). Or maybe as humans we are hardwired to say that love is the answer to our problems and it's just instinct to crave it." Maybe this is all b.s. and all of my thoughts about it are either conspiracy theories or are hardly scientifically plausible but they worry me. What bothers me the most about them is that when I think about church or U2charists and the repetition of love is what matters, love is the answer, Peace/Love/and Saving the Planet, like a Buddhist mantra it seems like the whole idea has gotten old but the priests and rock stars keep pushing it relentlessly, pleading with us to love others and to love God almost like they're trying to sell us on it, like after 2000-some years it's a cliche.

I know there are a lot of you who don't feel this way, and I don't want to argue with you, that's why I'm writing this as a blog rather than telling it to you face to face, but I have to think that you're like my mother, you don't feel the selling, you only feel the truth in the statement.

And if you don't agree with me ask yourself this: priests and novelists, rockstars and daytime TV show hosts all push love and caring out to their audiences like they need to defend it, like it is being attacked when clearly it's not. Why? There is no one around threatening to crush the life out of it, no one pushing any other idea to replace it. What I see is a lot of people who don't see enough love in the world and are trying to sell more people on it through sermons, songs, and tales that seem a little farfetched and they are not really defending it, they are trying to compete for our attention, they are advertising.

I don't think love is bad and I think it's like many other things that people are trying to sell, it's good and healthy like organic foods (which is another thing they sell at my church these days). But then I get back to my original fear of cliches; that there is truth in them but the idea is somehow changed by the marketing of it. It's not any less true but it's somehow less pure.

Maybe I am just kidding myself though and I'm just clinging to some unrealistic fantasy of true love that I got out of a fairy tale/Disney movie or maybe I'm thinking that somehow the thought of love is spoiled when it is spoken and that no one could do it justice. I don't think either of those are true though because then no sensible person would spend time trying to talk about it.

Maybe it just seems to me that their passion for love is misplaced, and maybe that's just because talking about it is so damn hard that most people end up talking about how great it is and how it changed their life, just like the people on Proactiv infomercials have had their lives changed and "Your life could be changed too! Just call ..." Maybe the big problem with people talking about love is that they haven't yet figured out how to talk about it without making it sound like an ad. I think it's hard for me to talk about anything really important while still sounding sincere.

To throw in a cliche of my own, the whole thing is just the difference between sugar and corn syrup, in your soft drinks one make them pure and refreshing and the other tastes the same at first but after drinking it too many times it leaves a crappy taste in your mouth that is impervious to toothpaste and mouthwash. =) (It's hard for me not to think that if ever I give a defense of love in this post it's going to be a cliche as well)

I really want to believe that I am a good person, that there is more to me than just a cynical person who has a knack for honing in on delicate subjects that are handled poorly. I really would like to believe that I care about love and talking about it because some part of who I am really needs to sort this out and that it's not just the cynical and false parts of me that are fueling this entire thought. That part, if it's there is what wants something more real than advertised love. And if that part of me is there searching for something real in love, then isn't that a reason to actually give a crap about other people and actually trying to love them? (At least that would give it a chance to find that reality.)

More importantly if some part of me like that exists, isn't that a clue that there actually might be something out there that satisfies it? And wouldn't it be great to have something that couldn't be torn down by that calculating cynical part of me as just an advertisement or a downright lie that I believe in just to keep the cynicism at bay?

Even if it's not there, there is always something about love or at least good relationships that makes a difference when cynicism is concerned. When I'm with my girlfriend, or my family, or a really good friend, pretty much whenever I don't feel so alone; I don't spend time thinking about how people can make love feel fake and spun in the same way supermarket ads can be. Essentially when I actually feel some kind of love, the cynicism disappears and I have a chance to see how fragile it really is.

}            //That means "the end" in C++

*I thought I would experiment with the quote tool today rather than banish all my interesting thoughts to footnotes way at the bottom of the page or fill up my paragraphs with parenthetical text

A story remembered and written while driving down long dark roads.

The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it all without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being-- that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of  just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky         ---David Foster Wallace

I was seven years old and I had a dream of frightening implications; it wasn't a nightmare though, it was a documentary, but not the generic PBS special. It was kin to the films showing the slaughter of dolphins by fishermen, missing limbs and burns covering the bodies of children in war zones and violent murder reenactments of crime television. The whole situation was fairly unique compared to my other dreams which were mostly about fighting off a giant T-Rex from the rooftops of thriving metropolis and other fantasies. This dream had a narrator and as he began his monologue a dramatic reenactment was performed on the back of my eyelids. The narrator began with this. "On a moonless night in ancient Egypt as fires burnt down to embers and people took to their rest an old man staggered across the sand and stumbled into the camp of a caravan. Two guards woke with alarm upon hearing the intrusion but found only a fragile, famished old man at the edge of camp. They carried him on their shoulders into camp and gave him sips of water and sat with him in the late night. Before long uneasiness was eating at them. They were not supposed to trust anyone outside of the caravan and this man should not have been an exception despite his obvious need of help. They mustered up the courage to turn him out of the camp but the old man who had been silent until now pleaded with them and asked the guards to trust a stranger for all his life was worth. The old man had a mesmerizing voice that held their attention hypnotically and soon they acquiesced, leaving him in the center of camp by the remains of the fire. The old man grinned with sharp teeth and pretended to sleep until the guards went back to sleep at their posts." The narrator stopped and let the camera pan around the camp showing the sleeping guards and merchants and then back to the center of the camp which was silent and deserted. The camera followed craters that are all that can really be seen of footsteps in the parched sand all the way to where the guards lay motionless and lifeless. The camera moved quickly to the nearest tent and outside you could hear the faintest noise. The camera moved inside right over the body of an anemic looking merchant and right into the face of the old man who face was repulsively contorted as he leaned over to dispatch the man sleeping at his feet. He viciously bit down and restrained the man who struggled for a moment before dying a quick and Hollywood-esque death. The old man finished his horrific meal and gave a quick glace into the camera with complete indifference to the corpses at his feet. The narrator now explained the graphic seen I had just watched. The old man was in fact old but rather than a man he was the subject of our film, an Egyptian Vampire.

The title of the documentary in my dreams flashed across my mind faster than I could comprehend and the film picked up where it had left off. "Egyptian vampires" said the narrator "are deceitful, repulsive spiders. They appear to us as hideous old men, weak and frail wearing nothing but rags and they come to us when there is no one else around. When I say they are spiders I mean that is how they act; Egyptian vampires have nothing to draw us to them, they look diseased and vile and with the figure of old men they cannot chase us down. Rather Egyptian vampires trap their prey with their assuring and magnetic voice. They hold onto your thoughts and imaginations and tell you to see only what they want you to perceive, that is their trick which is a snare that almost no one escapes. Once you are drawn in they wait until you are alone or until you are trapped or simply unaware and then they drink you up. These vampires live at night and bury themselves during the day to hide from the overbearing sun and the race they prey upon. They also have the unfathomable ability to endure the centuries through which mankind has lived and died. There are still Egyptian vampires today for this very reason and tonight we are going to follow one with our camera crew!" The pyramids at Giza appeared and the sky was very dark with only a few stars piercing the night. The camera focused on a group of tourists who were trying to get a good photo of the pyramid's lit face. An old man who was much shorter than any of the three tourists pushed his way in front of the group and started telling them the forgotten history of the pyramids. The tourists were obviously enraptured after a few minutes and the old man asked them if they would like to venture inside the pyramid. They all said no very quickly and my narrator commented that their decision was wise into the camera, but the old man was steadily convincing them of their absolute safety and that they were not in fact breaking any laws at all. Soon the entire party was moving closer and our narrator and crew were following behind with a night-vision camera. The old man was leading them on with the sound of his voice, one that put me in mind of the Pied Piper of Hamlen's flute, or a sirens song. Finally they reached a small opening in the side of the pyramid and showed them in letting the tourists go first with a small hand-held flashlight that shone like a floodlight in the camera. The old man followed them in telling them to be careful of any cracks in the stone. As we followed them in we could only see the faces of the tourists and the slight shadow of the old man behind them. A man in front was holding a flashlight and a woman was right beside him, behind the two of them was another younger man who was looking curiously up at the high walls on either side of them. The old man suddenly grabbed the man in the rear around the neck and pulled him out of sight. The couple turned around and the flashlight blinded the camera for a moment before the man dropped it. In the reflected light from the flashlight which was rolling on the ground you could see a body on the floor and the second man wrestling with the vampire but losing quickly and the woman was on the ground but getting up and running towards the camera. A muffled yell came down the hall and the woman looked over her shoulder just as she reached the cameraman. She flew into the camera and knocked it backward but a frightened shriek was clearly audible. The cameraman flipped his equipment over and focused again on the woman who was now crying and pleading for mercy. Suddenly a hand reached around her neck and the vampires head appeared over her shoulder. With glittering teeth he looked into the camera, said "Thank you." and then pulled the woman off into the now dark hallway which filled with strangled cries of terror.

I woke up screaming and crying and ran out of the room my brother and I shared into my parent's room next door. I shook my dad awake and told him I had a bad dream and spent the rest of the night sleeping in-between them.

The next morning I woke up and had to start packing. I was going to winter scout camp that night with my dad at Beaumont, a scout camp that was about an hour east of Willoughby. I spent most of the day avoiding packing at all but when my dad got home from work I was unwillingly forced to get all my clothes for the weekend into a bag, including lots of winter clothing in case it snowed though the weather had mostly been rain for the past week.

At about eight-o-clock my dad and I packed ourselves into his black Ford Ranger pick-up (I loved that truck) and started the hour long drive to the middle of nowhere,  Ashtabula County. It was very dark and raining and the radio was out of range of any interesting station so my dad and I drove in silence. I looked out the window into the passing darkness and a chilling thought came over me, what if the Egyptian vampires knew that I had seen them in my dreams, what if they were coming for me right now. I moved away from the window and a little closer to my dad for safety and watched the road through the windshield. As I watched  we slowly passed over a hill and as I could plainly see there was a monster waiting for us at the bottom. I was frightened and hoped that the truck would keep us safe and hidden in its dark cockpit. My dad edged closer to the monster which was keeping pace just ahead of us. The monster had huge red eyes that floated above the road and stared us down. As it reached the peak of a rise in the road we came up behind it and the angry glow from its eyes was bright enough for me to see my dad's face above me. There was smoke billowing and swirling around its high shoulders. It was cloaked in the vortex that poured off its body and reflected the fiery light blazing in its eyes and which trailed off into the air around our truck. My dad shifted over a lane and as we cam abreast with the monsters eyes I counted four wheels that supported it's boxy cargo. An eighteen wheeler was a little more familiar than a monster barreling down the road. Now that we had passed the semi-truck and its headlights were drowned out by the rain I relaxed a little and watched the splatter of rain on the windshield and the very long, very straight and totally empty road that stretched out ahead of us.

Whenever a car or semi would come down the other side of the highway I would watch as the light would be smeared over and over by the windshield wipers. For a moment the road would disappear because the rain was so thick on the glass then the wipers would flash through the world and leave streaks in the blackness and all the lights would turn into blurred, crude hummingbirds that flitted across the screen as the cars moved past. In a moment the rain would wash the hummingbirds and their streaky world out of existence but a moment later they would be back zipping from right to left and off into the darkness turning into little monsters with little red eyes of their own.

I let my mind go and stopped looking at the road because my eyes were sore and tired. Hummingbirds and monsters chased each other around in my head changing from one form to another with every flick of the windshield wiper. I was trying not to think about the dark figure that lurked in the shadowy parts of my head slowly creeping up on my unwary mind. A little tinge of fear gripped me and I wanted to tell my dad not to stop for any strangers while we were driving because it would be the vampire just waiting to drink me up. I didn't say anything though because I was superstitiously afraid that mentioning the ugly old man at all would summon him at once. I didn't look out the window anymore, the streaky, flooded darkness no longer had any hummingbirds or red-eyed monsters there was only a solitary vampire that thrived in the dark and that frightened me more than anything else I had thought up that night.

Suddenly the car decelerated and I slid forward in my seat belt. I looked up and had the terrifying experience of my nightmares coming true. As we slowed we passed a small hunched man who had been waving us over. I hadn't even seen his face yet but I felt the darkness close in on me and I knew it was the vampire who had beguiled my father into pulling our car over. I panicked and started to stutter to my dad to ask him what we were doing pulling over. "Karl we are just going to give this man a ride so he doesn't have to walk in the freezing rain; calm down." he said. "N-nn-no! We can't!" I objected but it was too late. The door was pulled open and I looked straight at a face I had seen before, grinning at the camera with glittering teeth. "Thank you!" he said in a thick accent. "It is absolutely freezing and I have been trying to get someone to stop for me for quite a long time but the road is so empty that I have not seen anyone for a few minutes." "I'm glad we could help." said my dad who was now pulling back out into the road. I looked at the vampire, who was sitting next to me in the bench seat of the truck, with an accusing glare for his comment about the emptiness of the road we were on. I knew he was just waiting for the road to be completely empty to start his deception. "Where can we take you?" asked my dad. "My car is on the side of the road a long way back and it's out of gas so I need a gas station to fill up my canister." The old man gestured to a large red can that smelled like a gas station at his feet. "And if you can spare the time I would be very grateful indeed if you could take me back to my car." My dad said that we had time for both and when the old man asked if he owed us anything my dad told him he didn't want anything at all.

We rode in silence for the next mile to the exit and my dad pulled into the gas station at the nearest stoplight. The man got out of the car to fill up his canister and I quickly tried to explain to my father that we should drive away right now and go home. My dad gaped at me and with a look of utter disbelief and said "What?" "He's an Egyptian vampire dad! The one from my dream and he is going to kill us!" I said urgently. "Karl that is crazy. That man is not a vampire. Vampires do not exist. It was only a bad dream." my dad tried to reassure me but I started yelling. "No! He is a vampire and we have to leave now!" "Oh God, Karl." said my dad. "This is absolutely embarrassing and I hope he didn't hear any of that. We are not leaving him here to walk all the way back in the rain and I won't argue this any more." We were silent for another minute as the man paid for his gas and put it in the bed of the truck. He got back in the car and we got back on the freeway going the opposite direction in continued silence. I looked at my dad and the old man fearfully as they sat on both sides of me. The vampire spoke, to my dad more than me. "I heard the argument between you and your son and I'm sorry that I have frightened him." "No." my dad replied. "It's not your fault, he just had a nightmare last night and it's just his imagination." The man didn't say anything for a minute and was staring at his knees and unexpectedly he said. "But your son could be right about me." I looked at him with what must have looked like pure terror at what sounded to me like an admission of his vampiric nature. He continued. "For all you know about me I could be an Egyptian vampire like he has said, or I could be a murderer or criminal; I might even be a pedophile and you could have no way of knowing at all." "I'm assuming that you have a wife and I know you have a child and I would guess that you also have a good job and that you enjoy your life, so why risk all of that?" My dad nodded a little to show that he understood and the vampire continued. "Also that I think, that despite your argument you love your son and would not want to put him in danger so even if you were willing to put only yourself in this situation what could compel you to risk something/someone that is undoubtedly more precious than your own life?" My dad glanced at me and at the man seated to my right but still said nothing so the old man continued. "Even if you could keep your son from harm why would you want to frighten him by having a complete stranger sit next to him with the fear that all these things may happen?" "My question is why trust me to be a good person, why help me when all it will most likely cause is angst and strife in you and your son, why should you even stop to notice me at all?" My dad stared at the road in silence. The eloquence and curiosity of the old man had evidently expired and he lowered his head in silence too.

My dad drove on and eventually turned around and drove along the road going east that we had originally been on. The old man's car appeared after about five minutes, sitting with its lights off on road margin. My dad pulled over to a stop and the old man put his hand on the door and thanked my father for the ride as he unlocked the door. "Wait please." my father requested. The man turned back and gave my father a questioning look. I looked at my dad and saw that his face was a little scrunched and his brow furrowed which made me wonder if he had been thinking hard this entire time. "I never answered your question of me and I need to give you answer before you leave." "Ok." the old man replied. My dad paused to think for another second and then said this. "There are days where I fight to try and believe in something, and I fight with myself to find any good way to live every day. And what I keep trying to believe in is that generosity, helping people and actually trusting them is part of being a good person, even though I'm not even sure what a good person is supposed to be like. I stopped to help you and I trusted you because I have to fight the part of me that can only see the worst in people and I can't really fight it by doing exactly what it believes and just saying I believe something else, all that is is hypocrisy. So to fight it/myself all I can do is live how I want to believe and I can't just say what I want to believe otherwise I could never claim to be fighting the distrustful, cynical part of myself and I certainly couldn't claim to actually believe anything I say." My dad looked pointedly at the man who was still seated next to me and sighed saying "And that is why despite all my misgivings, and believe me I had a lot of them, I pulled over to give you a lift."


The old man looked like he was about to cry. He then did something that I have never completely understood, he embraced my dad, leaning over me and squeezing me in the middle, then he let go of my father and embraced me which, confused/frightened/paralyzed/shocked/comforted/stilled/blessed me and most of all made me want to hug back a little. He then spoke to me rather than my dad. "Your father is a great and generous man and I will pray every day for you, hoping that one day you will be as generous and faithful as him." Then he thanked my father with all his heart and got out of the truck and removed his large red canister of gasoline from its bed and walked away towards his car. As we drove away I thought I heard him shout "God bless you!" We arrived at camp just fine and only a half hour later than we had expected. That night I didn't dream of vampires or anything at all and the next morning I awoke to over a foot of snow and one of the best weekends of my childhood.

Now that I am grown and starting to live a life of my own I wonder why the old man stopped praying. I didn't grow up to be the person he wished me to be. I think that I fight the same battle my dad was fighting that night but I don't feel like I'm winning. Whenever I pass people on the side of the road with signs that read 'Homeless, Need Help' in scrawled permanent marker and I avoid their eyes and pretend I haven't seen them* I know that I am letting that overly cynical, and entirely apathetic part of me rule my life. And when I am at my church either Christ Church here in Blacksburg or Trinity in Cleveland and people tell me not to just give money to the homeless* and I end up agreeing with them despite my convictions that it is better to trust people than to only worry about uplifting them from their destitution. And when people I'm with blatantly refuse to help someone rather than just ignoring them or handing a few dollars and I say nothing and offer up nothing to help other than an obsessive stare at my shoes. All of these times I can't help feel the loss I suffer morally and emotionally because I can't even say what I believe much less act on it. And now that I think about it, maybe the old man is still praying, I don't think he would forget, maybe I'm just the one who fails to fight for my own morality, my own goodness, and fails consistently, every day.



(Sigh)



*which is a useless trick anyways since both they and I know that I have already seen them; they aren't stupid they have picked a spot where they can't be missed and I can't ever fool myself.

*because they will just use it to feed drug addictions and that it doesn't really help them and they'll just try again to scam you for more.

*The premise of this whole story is true in a lot of ways, I did actually have a documentary dream and the next night I did drive to Beaumont with my dad and think about telling him not to pull over for any strangers. The man isn't real though, he is about the only thing that isn't.

N.B. I did receive permission to use the persona's of all the people used in this story excepting the documentary host who it seems is working on another fantastical show, this one being on Victorian Age time machines. So as of right now he is temporally separated from me by about a century and a half and because time capsules like the US postal service only deliver messages far into the future I had no way of reaching him at all.

God Again*

Dr. Fredrickson didn't really believe in God, he was just trying to figure out how our universe began when he found God staring out at him from the pages of his research. Most people would have understood what he was saying a little better if he just showed them an image of Jesus that had miraculously appeared in place of his equation but that wasn't what happened. God was in the math and Dr. Fredrickson could see him there even if most of the world couldn't comprehend his scrawl. God did exist; the proof was on his paper. Fredrickson was a curious man at heart and felt that since he had been avoiding God for so long he should try to understand him a little before he published his finding and was swept up in a torrent of notoriety. What Fredrickson's paper told him was that God had indeed been present at the inception of the universe and his had been the hand that gave the push to start it all. According to Fredrickson the universe needed action to put everything in motion so that atoms could fuse, stars could burn and burst and life could start and God gave the universe the start it needed with a shove of his mighty hands.

Fredrickson's mathematical model worked well, extremely well but going over his work to learn more of God and his nature he discovered that he had neglected to add any further work by God into his equations after the great push. Fredrickson tried adding that same force back into his equation for later times but his equations ceased to make sense. He turned his thoughts over and over in his head and after days of failed attempts to include God into the universe he eventually resigned himself to the conclusion that the universe only made sense now if God wasn't having anything to do with it at all. But this frustrated Dr. Fredrickson and as he was an eternally curious man he started doing the math for God just to see what had happened to him after the universe had gotten started. It took him days just to get started but going on a hunch he found exactly the answer for which he had been searching. Over 300 years ago Isaac Newton published three laws governing the dynamics of all things in motion and as it turned out God was not excepted from these rules. Newtons third law states that every action results in an equal and opposite reaction. God pushed the world into motion and as Fredrickson discovered, according to that law when he pushed the world into motion he pushed himself into motion too and in the exact opposite direction.

Fredrickson had never taken interest in theological matters but he wondered what this meant for the church and theology in general. What did it mean for all the faithful people if their God was moving farther and farther away every moment. So he went to ask. His university had a respected school of theology so he dropped by the office of one of his colleagues the next afternoon. After his colleague had ascertained that Fredrickson really did have the proof of God and that he could also prove that God had been drifting away from the universe since its inception he went silent for a few moments. Then he asked Fredrickson if he knew what sin was. Fredrickson answered "Well I suppose I thought a sin was something you had done to offend God." His colleague chuckled "That only how people think of it today. The definition of sin I prefer to use is distance from God, which is also the same definition I use for hell. Do you have any idea what I'm getting at?" Fredrickson didn't feel like being lectured so he gave it his best shot and said "Because God is so far away we are all in sin, by your definition." "Precisely!" boomed the other professor "We are drowning in sin because of our distance from God and our sin is ever increasing. Have you ever felt like the world was going deeper and deeper into sin all the time?" Fredrickson wanted to say no but held his tongue for the time being. "This means that you and I and everyone who intuitively felt that have been right all along. And there's more! You have conclusively proved the idea of original sin, since our distance from God was all caused by one act. You have validated so many of my theories; I would have never thought it could all be settled with math and that I would be right on the mark!" Fredrickson had been listening very closely and knew he had pieced together something his colleague had not. "I haven't proved any of your theories." Fredrickson interrupted. The professor who had almost completely forgotten Dr. Fredrickson was there mumbled an apology and asked him what in the world he meant. "Well you seem to have forgotten entirely that God was the one who pushed the universe into motion." "I don't quite follow you." his colleague replied. "You said that I had proved the idea of original sin, because we were getting farther away from God due to a sin committed long before our time. I'm assuming that original sin was a sin done by man and we are paying the price in our distance from God. What you failed to notice is that God was the one who pushed the world into motion and pushed himself away and I think you know exactly what that implies. It was not man who sinned rather because God pushed us away the original sin is really his." Then Fredrickson gathered up his papers and left his dumbfounded colleague to figure out exactly how he was going to defend his papers and his job when the proof of God saw the light of day.

*I am again writing about God, not the same God I wrote about last time. The God I am writing this time is just the creator of the universe, he isn't even the Christian God; so please don't be confused. This was inspired by my ridiculous philosophy class and I'm just toying with ideas from the reading for tomorrow. Just try to be amused.

The Word of the Lord.

O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless - of the cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of my eyes that vainly crave the light - of the objects mean - of the struggle ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of us all - of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest - with the rest of me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here - that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Uncle Walt1

God languished at the edge of the universe for lack of something better to do. He was just so bored by everything he had been doing for the last half of eternity (infinite minds are awfully hard to occupy indefinitely). So he told himself stories and waited to run into something or someone interesting. The universe that he had seen this far had ceased to interest him especially since there wasn't much to see, mostly shades of black on darkness; so he abandoned the void where he resided and his profound thoughts that can really only be contemplated in absence of anything else and went in search of something other than empty space and empty-headed thoughts. As there was still nothing to see God closed his eyes and watched the colors and forms that danced on his eyelids and wrote stories about the color and the little points of light. God liked to think that he was a great story-teller and his stories were filled with the detail and sensuous delight his universe was lacking. People with depth and life filled every scene; they had back stories and dialogue and were story-tellers in their own right. God was actually very proud of his creations; they were unorthodox in the void which swallowed everything that couldn't stand on two legs of truth and that they could stay in his head without being sucked up by the void as well delighted him. Most of the inhabitants of the void, those true things which couldn't be denied, agreed with its philosophy that anything that wasn't true should evaporate into emptiness because that's all lies and fictions are anyways, just emptiness, the absence of truth; some even thought God should evaporate as well since he was just full of it but none of them could deny his truth, so he stuck around and spent his days imagining entire worlds of imagining people.

With his eyes closed God could see everything ever wanted in the way of interesting worlds and things and people except one thing that he couldn't see because it wasn't inside his eyelids and he was very startled when he bumped into it. The soul that he bumped into shrieked, well it would have if it had known what a shriek was, but God had some idea and that's how he heard it. God whipped around and opened his eyes to see what he had unwittingly disturbed but like everything in the void it was black against darkness and even with Gods keen eyes he couldn't pick it out until he brushed up against it again and another shriek trumpeted in his ears. It was a speck and God feeling especially guilty for frightening it so badly cupped the speck of soul in his hands to calm it down, but when he reached out to it again to soothe it he was taken aback with shock and wonder. The little soul he held in his hands has no senses, it couldn't see the void or hear the booming voices of truths that passed though the universe whenever they were announcing their new platforms; it had never perceived or known anything until their chance encounter and since then all it felt was mortal fear. God was puzzled but his immediate reaction was to calm the trembling soul, to make it feel something other than fear since that was certainly the worst way for any truth to go through life. He spoke to it softly and tried to feed it calming thoughts but the soul was panicking at the intrusion to its previously blank mind and it darted frantically from one palm to the other only feeling more and more trapped. God was visibly upset and was afraid that if he did any more that he would only make the souls condition worse. But he wanted it to have more on its mind than just a terrifying encounter with something so much bigger than itself so he started feeding it images from its mind so that one day it might be able to remember those and not only its own experience. The soul fled eventually and God watched it go until he blinked and suddenly couldn't make out its form any longer. He had scared off the first interest thing he had run across in the universe: he sat and pondered since there was really nothing else to do and turned his mind back upon itself.

Bump! God was so confused. Bump-bump-bumpbump-bummmmp! He had been lost in thought for ages and this was such a weird, persistent feeling that had broken his reverie. He looked down at the speck that was poking him in the side with such conviction. The soul was back; and putting on the most impertinent display God had ever seen. God knew why it was here, every bump communicated the same idea and conveyed it very intently; interest, in anything God had to say. Ironically all God could think to say was "Huh."

The speck followed God wherever he went, mostly latching on to hear stories and thoughts that were constantly flowing from Gods mind and devouring each one with eager delight. God let colors and forms flow out of him and into the void where they mostly dissipated and some were captured by his enthralled parasite; God no longer cared that his thoughts were fading into nothing into the void, he was broadcasting for everyone to hear and was triumphant in the knowledge that he had one listener. Then out of nowhere came another bump-bumpbump, and God looked down; another stray soul had pressed up to God. It had just heard the faintest sound but after existing for an eternity without a single voice the soul flew to the sound of God. Suddenly scores of souls were flocking to God, all hearing and thinking for the first time. He had stumbled upon thousands of souls all clustered together as they had been since the moment of creation. They swarmed and flew around and God stood in awe for the first time in his life. All this time they had been sitting here at the edge of the infinite universe without a thought, a question, a voluntary movement or a story to speak of and every single one was now pressing up against him to hear something, well just anything at all. God thought, and pondered; he was so intrigued and he had hoped for someone to listen to his stories ever since he could remember wanting anything and now he had writers block. What to say, what is good enough? Then the very first soul did something he hadn't expected, it articulated exactly the story it wanted; it wanted to hear its own story, and at that moment God knew exactly how to begin.

God began his epic poem and said "Let there be light" and everything was bright. The souls could see the world of his invention and watched with anticipation. God separated the light from the dark to distinguish everything in it; unlike the universe, his mind was filled with things that were light on dark, where you could really see. Then he created an object, huge and permanent; a world to stand on and just for variety he gave it water and air because this world would be more than just something and the absence of it. Then God looked and said "There needs to be more, this world should be decadent and full of things that multiply to make more and more until there is no space on the world for anything stale or bland. So God imagined into his world, plants that grew and reproduced to fill water and the land. God also played with the light in the sky so it always moved and so every night he and the souls could look up and see twinkling stars: he was really on a roll. Then God looked at the teeming souls, without eyes or ears that could really only see and hear him and he decided to make them something too. He experimented with forms putting each one on the Earth and tweaking the next until finally he came up with something suitable for what they were; in fact as he saw it now they all were human and he gave each a body. The souls all started talking, touching, smelling, tasting and hearing the world God had created and they loved their story. God sat back and listened because he loved their stories too, each of them had at least one to tell. God had made them all in his image; they were all story-tellers too. They told stories of love, passion, hatred, war, honor, courage, loyalty, adventure and every quality that could motivate their tongues move. God watched every story unfold and people listened to people recount them again and again. Humans died, they died a lot but each time their souls would wake up from their dreamlike state in the universe and bed to be let back into the story of their life, even if they had to start over.

One day a soul came rocketing out of the story, screaming, shouting, cursing at the world and life itself and in his rage he ran straight into God. He looked bewildered for a moment but then aimed his curses and rants at God himself, saying that everything was a lie, screaming at him for deceiving all the people the world, never allowing them to know anything because he has shut them off from the truth and the real world. God was perplexed; no one had ever told him that they felt this way before; no one ever thought the story was a bad thing, or even a deception. He asked what the outraged soul wanted in the clearest of terms. The soul responded simply "I want to see the world for myself; I want to know what my existence really is; I want to know the truth!" "Oh." God said he picked up the tiny speck that was so full of anger and he placed him an arm's length away. "Here you are." he said and let go. The souls sight went black, his senses numb and he could no longer scream. He couldn't hear the truths trumpeting their ideologies and he barely even knew he existed at all.3 God watched with pity as the little soul squirmed and darted blindly one way and then another. He wanted something that his nature denied his having and God regretted that he could never show the souls what he feared some of them desired most, a glimpse of reality itself. It was in their nature that they were unable to sense reality for themselves and his nature was to to invent stories and fabrications and in consequence he could never truly show them it himself. He listened to the blaring truths but he could never recite their knowledge, their teachings. He looked at the souls crowded around him and wondered whether his stories had anything to teach.

The end.


1. Walt Whitman. For those of you who enjoy footnotes, Whitman is referred to as Uncle Walt in the Dead Poets Society which I just watched last week.
I found this particular poem (O Me! O Life) while searching Poets.org which I highly recommend to anyone who has some free time and can stand to read in verse. (Yes I do search poetry websites in my free time. Don't judge.)
2. The only reason this got published is because I couldn't sleep. It's 6:10am. I have church in 4 hours and 20 minutes. Hopefully the Scotts think this an appropriate excuse for falling asleep during the service.
3. I wrote the following after publishing this post on Sunday, I wasn't satisfied with the ending so I rewrote it on Monday. Just in case any of you were interested enough to read it again. =)