Nightmare on May 19

Adelia sat on a latrine, with one needle between her eyebrows and another on the top of her head.  When she exited the toilet and re-entered the infirmary, the acupuncturist barked at her for moving and then proceeded to extract the tiny silver spears.  She found needles all over, but felt perfect, a symphonic wave of calm lapped from her feet to her head.  Why there were acupuncturists in an infirmary was beyond Adelia, but there they were and so was her team, rocking listlessly on hammocks under a tree on a desert bluff just outside the billowing ivory tents.  She found her own hammock and joined them, laying down slowly to accommodate an awful oceanic rush in her head as she looked above at the cloudless sky.  

There was a speck in it, very high up, and then there were four specks that drew closer, falling rapidly-- four airmen were parachuted down.  How nice of them to come so close to the front, she thought, as she looked beyond the bluff at an army of teenage soldiers running up from the water to the shore.  They had descended from a large ship like ants in a recently flooded mound.  The queen had yet to show herself.  Each young soldier carried one grenade and two rusty pistols, the shinier versions of which Adelia remembered ladies back at home carried in their purses.  "Futile," Adelia thought before the morphine kicked in and two rows of foreign peacekeepers materialized with their body-length polymer shields.  One row blocked the movement of ragtag soldiers aiming for the base beyond a vulnerable stretch of northern beach, the other kept their targets on a cluster of local militia and several unmanned aerial vehicles nestled in the nooks of cliff.

Atop the bluff, a smooth oak floor sprawled out underneath the tents, ivory curtains waving royally in the South Pacific breeze.  It was only an infirmary by name.  The four gentlemen were armed with mobile controllers, and they each took shifts with these devices as the others sat with Adelia and her friends on their oversized bed of white couches.  A strong smell of pisco consorted with sea breeze.  Tom was among the four, to Adelia's surprise, as it had been almost a decade since she had seen him last.  They had met in Austin some thirteen years ago, where Tom was trying to make it as a musician, but his reckless habits always got the better of him.  After three years, he had asked her to marry him but she declined replying as gently as she could that she could never marry a drunk.  

There he was, a somber ten years wiser and a Captain, with that same mischievous sparkle.  He hesitated as he made his way across the room, and yet Adelia surprisingly took his hand and rose.  Jack laughed.  Between distracted cat calls, he pushed buttons and watched little balls descend in pixelated screens.  There was thundering outdoors and then silence.

No matter how little both Adelia and the Captain believed in fate, they couldn't help but feel that this was serendipitous.  A distant smile here, a memory there.  On went the night, more dancing and conversation, more pisco until the winds subsided and all fell into a quiet, satiated slumber.

When Adelia awoke in the few dark hours before dawn, the moon was hanging low and cast a floodlight on a smoking fixture in the ocean and the vulnerable stretch was speckled with local militia and not just a few mistaken, aerial blasts taking at least a hundred young lives.  It turns out the queen had never showed.  With the beach secure, the peacekeepers were still moving between the wounded and dead.  Adelia quietly negotiated her phone from a tiny clutch and snapped a photo.  "Massacre at Paracas," she labeled the gif and off it sailed up through two continents before landing in an editor's inbox.

Remains

The couple clung onto their narrow edge of road, driving recklessly on a two-lane highway off the western cliffs, the kind of winding path that looks serene in daylight but monstrous at night.  He was blasting music that offended the sights around, so she switched it off and with all her girlish command, ordered her companion to listen to the rush of darkness, to the absence of stillness, to the energetic, scouring, thundering below -- couldn't he feel it?  It clears all the senses, fills all the senses.  He shrugged as his irritation crumpled from his shoulders and rolled off somewhere underneath his seat.  He hadn't "felt it" - he was enjoying the last of the summer balm with his favorite song and favorite girl when she was less like this, but there was no changing her mind.  He sighed.  Something had taken a hold and she was no longer his, no longer there - but belonged to something in the wind.

They stopped the car on the edge of the highway on the outermost rim of earth, and leaned over against the emptiness until they were laying down on the loose eroded mountainside, facing the sea below, a body full of silver.  She watched it reach upward, eagerly, greedily, as the sky obliged and sent an electric jolt through the reaching tips and lit a million shining currents that skid fleetingly across the shore.  The current coursed through her spine.  She stood up and breathed over the ledge as he put his arms around her, and she leaned into them.  She stood inside, looking outward for that glimpse of eternity as if they were standing on this cliff as their hairs greyed and their eyes crinkled.

She was all he needed, all he wanted, standing in front of him leaning over death and life.  He would do anything, anything for her.  When she laid, he would lay; where she stood, he would stand.  Shouldn't that be enough, shouldn't this be it?  But somewhere in the hidden squares of his devotion, he knew that it wasn't.  Beauty was beauty, and that's all they needed to know - isn't that what she had said once?  Some famous poet said it, or something like it.  It wasn't fair, but that didn't matter much.  He would be enough, even if he didn't understand what she wanted, even though she always spoke in riddles made for art, where the right answer was never right enough.  It wasn't fair. 

His eyes had never left her and she could feel them smile almost at the same moment she grimaced.  His resolve was disturbing, a desperation wrought from the end.  She tore herself from the silvery expanse and faced him with a look, as though she was only showing him the back of her soul.

"You know, this is a scientific phenomenon."

"What?"

"You should look-- really look at it. Have you?"

"I did-- I am. It's really pretty."

"Yeah, it's pretty," she laughed unkindly.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Nothing.  Never mind."

"I don't like these questions."

"I said, never mind, as in, let's drop it."

"Okay, well, it is pretty."

She nodded as she turned her face away from the cliff again and they stood there, in another kind of silence until it grew too cold to stand.  They slipped back into the car, and he smiled tiredly as their song came on again.  He twisted the dial and they were heading back towards reality, free for five minutes in the space between, though she always brought with her a quiet trace of magic from the sea.

Beaconsfield

for mama

Ben is swimming in a pool exactly the width and length of one lane.  Pulling against the water, accelerating with each stroke, he rushes in oval laps as fast as a hydroplane, until he's only gliding, then lifted and airborne, the water falling in streams off his boyish torso, down his leg, down onto the grassy edges of the churchyard, sliding off the black iron fence.  Rising upward, he can no longer see the grassy field, nor the sanctuary, nor the cemetery, nor street, nor town -- he is flying towards the horizon, towards a soft orange light that fades into dusk.  The wind he creates clings as he pushes forward, at once warm yet exhilarating on his skin.  

Asteroid. It was a rock, or a boulder hurled to his stomach; his eyes are suddenly wide open, and he blinks, taking in his surroundings.  On grass.  In the churchyard.  Pummeled by a football.  The boys were standing there, laughing?  Why?  He can't even breathe -- the wind.  Ben gulps for air and stumbles away from the field, through the iron gates, past the creek, across the driveway, towards the brick steps, yanks at the heavy brass knobs until the oak planks yield slowly and he's able to slide through.  

He clamors up the stairs to an upper room, his favorite hiding place.  It smells like wet wood, like forest after rain and the light tumbles across the cold stone walls in technicolor splinters.  Ben lies on a bench and sighs; the sun falls in colored refractions across his body – he is part of the furniture and at least for a moment, his muscles melt into a lump over the oak bench, his face is tilted towards the warmth streaming in from the windows, stained glass images he looks on with a grimace.  So he shuts his eyes, and all the muscles in his young face relax as well.  The sound of his breath makes him feel like he owns the entire space.

He stands up on the bench to look out the window.  The boys are still running around the field.  There’s cheering from one end, and then a stampede of victors with their hands in the air as they gather and slap each other on the back.  The fight in their faces reminds Ben of school, which is not his favorite place.  He takes his pocket knife from his jeans and carves a jagged line through the top left corner of the bench.  He feels immediately guilty for doing so, sighs so the walls can hear, and putters around until he doesn’t think about it anymore, and he’s doing sit ups and handstands through the splintered light.

Ben’s in a handstand when the door creaks open and on the floor below he sees a long, skeletal shadow cast through the building attached to the lanky silhouette of an elderly man holding a guitar case in his right hand.  Astonished (as one is when he is completely alone and then suddenly intruded upon), Ben noiselessly lowers his body to the bench.  He thinks the intruder can hear his heartbeat accelerate from the little room above – it sounds like blood is pumping through the entire chapel, a pulse that sounds like an ocean in his skull. 

But the aging musician sits down on a dusty red cushioned pew, unlatches the brassy latches of his black case, runs his fingers across the velvet lining as he reaches and plucks the instrument towards his chest.  The strings are strummed all, as a chord first, then one by one while the pegs are adjusted and the musician languidly eases into song.  He plays for half an hour before Ben breathes again through his mouth; the guitar and song are so ancient that they seem to be coming from within the walls, the walls Ben owns.  Yet the rickety tenor lingers like a sun haze through the summer, in the kitchen, in his bed, on the river.  The walls are still warm with cadence as the green trees spark aflame and Ben slips back into the school pool.  His shoulders are now almost as wide as his nemeses', good for catching medals on his way towards that old horizon.

'Closing' by my mama

Letters from Earth - Prelude

It’s not easy to recall moments of suffering.  For instance, I cannot remember the moment when my father was admitted to the hospital.  I cannot recall how the news was broken to me that he might not survive.  Our brains are amazing organs, we do not remember because our bodies do something peculiar in moments of sorrow – we forget.  We file away in some secret compartment the things that scared us, like our father being chained to the bed like a dog so that he would not rip the sutures from his heart, or his rasping breath as he grasped my hand weakly and pled for more painkillers—because the man I knew as my father, the man that was a military officer, the man who overcame civil war, the death of his parents and brother—if this was his last moment, I would remember that man in his strength, in his ability to overcome. We forget the events that brought us sudden pain or anguish, and remember the good things; remember the strength of a man walking again for the first time, or opening his eyes from the surgery bed. 

In a similar way, Jonah called his mother's illness a “good experience.”  It took the family by surprise, the first attack - it was a miracle she even survived, but it switched something in Jonah.  In the following months, he gave up everything: he did not go to school, nor did he take a job; he instead stayed and lived and breathed with his mother, every last breath.  He walked with her and talked with her, ate with her, saw her in her weakest moments which were simultaneously her moments of greatest strength.  He was there for her to rest upon, and he would carry her, like she carried him at the beginning of his life.  They often lay on her bed, looking at the ceiling, talking softly, lightly about matters the rest of humanity found so heavy, and then other days they talked about nothing.  Several times, under the weight of silence, he felt like she was already gone, his hand suddenly wanting to move closer to hers, like this was the last moment, this was the moment that I had prepared myself for… and then when she breathed again, he too breathed.  They would walk together, arm in arm under the shadow of trees that turned from green to bare.  On these walks, she treasured her last moments with her son on this earth; she looked at him and wondered how it was that such a man came from her body.  She had always thought this, but it was in those last months that the pair was able to communicate (not so much in words, but merely in their being together), their gratitude for each other and the quiet expanse of their love.  But the love had always been.  From an early age, it was her smile that had become his own. 

It was this that I found most interesting when I first spoke to him.  The teacher pushed play and we sat there, watching the film in the dark when I looked up at Jonah to my right, and he looked down at me.  I felt completely safe.  The expression was not a smile, it was not a frown, it was not angry, nor was it peaceful.  Bored.  But full, not of light - maybe full of nothing, maybe full of black which is the absence of light, or white, which is not a color at all.  Yes, he was full of white.  It was in this moment I knew he was the kind of friend, brother and son that stayed with you, in whatever way he could.  He was six years my junior, but I felt his loyalty.  

Loyalty and sadness.  What the hell does it mean to be "full of white?"  Nothing.  That's what writers say when we can't figure it out, we use metaphor.  But now I know what it was.  Underneath his armor of rules, I saw great sadness.   

We were speaking now, and suddenly, Jonah smiled from his insides in a way that a passerby, too busy or moving too fast, cannot detect.  It was quiet and dark like Neruda's un-bloomed plant, weaving softly in this world, but deeply in the unseen.  It was when he told me about his mother that I realized this joy was an inheritance given to him.  The last moment he spoke to her, she had said with a small laugh, I am scared.  The sound echoed all his fears.  So they sat together, terrified, together, in that small sterile room.  All was white when she fell into a coma.  It was the last time he held her hand.

Except, today she is still with him, in his dreams.  A portion of her spirit lies in a hidden square of his subconscious.  In these dreams they walk together, talk together like they did in her last days.  Only in these dreams, she is young and quietly vivacious, she is the woman that his father fell in love with.  Scholars have dissected the meaning of dreams and why we have them, and none have come to a satisfactory conclusion.  Some have said that dreams reveal our deepest desires, and others that they release subconscious energy.  I like to think that our dreams occur in a world separate from ours; and in our subconscious state, we can escape to a place untouched by this earth except by what we bring to it.  The event that revealed Jonah’s spirit to me was in his telling of this story: that in such a world, in his deepest subconscious, both what he brings and what he is given is the spirit of his mother, cleansed of her aged and ill body and in its place walks the angel, l'ange, she is and had always been.

Chapter I

This is not a love story.  Jonah is barely twenty, and has long been, under the terms of his code, betrothed before his god and irreligion.  But in order to understand the story of my father and my family, you must understand a little bit about Jonah and his.  They say every comedy begins with some sort of tragedy.  We have to go up from somewhere.  So there you have it, we have begun at death.

Ode to Nasty Sounds

Zoe’s pale yellow dress shouted "purity!" but she wore it anyway because she liked the way it fluttered around her knees when she danced.  It made her smile.  Having been instructed by her wiser friends to look older than she actually was, she double-checked her heavier-than-usual makeup and tucked her new ID in her bra before she stepped into the cab.  She grinned nervously at her friends as she felt the counterfeit plastic warm against her skin.  Annie greeted her from inside, saying, “God, Zoe, didn’t you have anything else to wear?” 

Her friends instructed the driver to head south so the clown car twisted along some rainy streets she had never crossed— the drive becoming increasingly blurry due to the water bottle she had been instructed to drink from, but the cab soon slowed into an industrialized area loaded with semi-trucks and cargo trains.  Zoe and her six friends spilled out in front of an abandoned warehouse.  She crossed herself before getting out of the taxi because the blinking red lights in the warehouse’s top windows indicated that this was surely the kind of place her mother warned would send her straight to hell.

The rain had stopped, so she unzipped her raincoat and took in her surroundings.  It was clear that she was unlike the rest of the queue; their unwashed hair, torn t-shirts, exposed underwear and furry leg warmers made her stick out like their antonym.  One girl’s tattoos were laced thigh-high from her ankles.  Zoe recited the date of birth she had memorized as the broad-shouldered security guard questioned her and patted her down.  “Female, male?  I’ll assume female.  And exactly how many piercings had she on her face?”  Before Zoe could count them all, she had passed the test, and was swept into a corner where her friends together swallowed a series of little round pills.  Zoe politely declined, since the vodka had already inundated her with novel sensations, and she wasn’t quite sure how adding hallucinogens would benefit her on this particular night, or any night.

But the music was so loud, it was palpable and the lights blinked so vigorously that it wasn’t hard to feel like she had participated anyway.  She was smiling and swaying, closing her eyes, and before long an hour had passed.  When she looked up, she caught the DJ looking at her.  This gaze, too, was intensely palpable.  It was then she realized that he had been seizing and regurgitating sound waves that had pulsated from her body.  He ended the song as soon as was acceptable, began another one and slipped back into the general, crazed expression he wore during the first half hour of his set.

He was skinny.  Well dressed, donned in a black polo and tie.  His hair was neatly kept, and his pants were pants.  Excepting the soul he wore on his fingertips, he looked ordinary on all bodily accounts.  Yet his soul was mad.  The creation that came from his fingertips reverberated violently through his fragile body and made him wildly ecstatic at a periodic release of electric-gold bands that reached outward in flickering shades and sounds, carried by a vast, slow undercurrent laid tensely in the deep.  This, Zoe decided as she rifled through her classical repertoire, was true music.

She stopped dancing and stood in the middle of the sea, watching him.  This was the way life ought to be, she thought.  Everyone around her had been freed by the conductor’s fingertips, to be simultaneously fully present and fully elsewhere.  His set ended, and the next DJ that stepped on stage was less impressive, so Zoe and her friends escaped outside for a few minutes.  

Everyone began smoking and Zoe had come outside for some actual air, so she decided to walk around a bit to explore this new world.  She kicked the gravel as she rounded a corner of the warehouse; and partially hidden behind a cargo train, she saw him sitting on a cinder block looking like the thinker— holding a joint in the hand that did not hold up his face.  "Ah, jackpot," she thought.  He generally refrained from speaking with teenage girls, but she was determined to approach him.  It was a night of courage, of doing things she had never done before and liking it, of feeling like an adult.  So she said too loudly,

“Hey, I’m Zoe.  Your set was beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”  He smirked as he shook her hand, noting its youth and elasticity.

“Yeah, beautiful, hasn't anyone said that before? Are you busy?”

He looked at her, decided she was attractive enough to allow the intrusion, and so replied, "No."  She took it as a signal to press forward.

"What should I call you?"  

"Jasper."

“Oh, I thought I should call you by your stage name.”

“Yes.  No, uh—I mean, now I’m just Jasper.”  Zoe nodded as she took a seat on an adjacent cinder block.

“Why are you here?”  He asked.

“My friends brought me... they said I should come.  Why are you here?”

“What?”

“Why are you out here?”

“I wanted to be alone for a minute.”

They sat in silence for almost half an hour.  Zoe wasn’t exactly comfortable, but she felt safe.  She didn’t know what to say, but could tell that he couldn’t care less.  So when she finally broke the silence, it was a question that came from the inside of her universe.

“Do you believe in God?”

“…the fuck? No. I don’t know.”

“Why not?”  There was more silence.

“You believe that a person, a human being, lived inside a fish for three days and three nights?”

“It was a big fish.”

“Well, aren't you refreshing.”

Female Figure with Head of Flowers, Dali

 But the truth streamed out from Jasper’s lower gut through his eyes: Zoe was the material of fantasy.  He saw her in the light of the highway, a silky brunette with grey-green eyes and full red lips attached to a budding, untouched figure that shifted underneath her raincoat as she spoke.  Even through the fog of cocktails, he was arrested by a small thread of morality that held him perpetually on the edge of total self-destruction.  Zoe could think of nothing further to say so she stood up and left him sitting on his cold, concrete square, irritation cutting through half his face.  He’d just wanted a smoke.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.