MONKEYHEAD, a full length novel by Danny Beatty

MONKEYHEAD


a novel by Danny Beatty

























Dedicated to the memory of my father, Henry Colter Beatty, to Debbie Roberts, who I will always miss, and Wanda Lea Brayton whose brilliance keeps me constantly inspired and to all the little bastards who tried to stop me along my way







































MONKEYHEAD



Monkeyhead  Monkeyhead
I love you

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
boo hoo hoo

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
set onto a table

....glimmer, glimmer, glimmer eyes
your head, a pivot, pivots, turns
back, forth, and forth and back

tick tock  tick tock
how your eyes do glimmer


























Chapter one
garage


                                                                                                                                                 
          I mourned him two minutes — a great distance, far enough to get well on the way to any planet in the solar system, perhaps even beyond.  My love and my memories travel at the speed of light.  I have never loved anyone more, and I love truly well by modern standards.
        I suppose that’s why he went along with my plan.
        He loved me with every ounce his little pea brain could muster, enough to encompass all that there is of me until I had no need to love him back, so I did.  Howie had always known that if you want to be loved like that, you have to love like that. 
        Poor Howie.
        I find myself become less and less fanciful with each passing day.
        Had I not gone mad with fear when I saw him stiff in the chair, headphones tight against his ears, stone dead, I would have gone mad with grief as I realized he had fallen asleep prior to the instant of death: mouth gaped wide open and back almost to his ears, grinning throughout all of his face -- which  was pulled up beyond the ability of his jaw muscles to hold their insertion points by muscles stitched way back, all of a sudden, into a severed Sardonicus nerve reflex — this, the monstrum effect of sudden nocturnal death.
        How this struck me in my final lucid moment:  a vertical tear at the mid point of his lower lip where it had been unable to withstand the stretch; a straight, finishing river of dried lower lip blood, its purple, blackberry luster over the point of his chin then down across his adam’s apple and beyond, to pool in his sternal notch.  It was a tiny pool.  His heart had stopped beating almost instantly as though it had been suddenly blown apart, but it had not.  I know now that it lie in there, resigned as a closed flower in permanent night.
        Since that day, I have examined several victims of sudden nocturnal death, have learned that the phenomenon occurs exclusively in middle-aged adult males.  Their blood chemistry is always the same;  there is no massive adrenaline storm as found in most ‘fall dead’ heart attacks.  It occurs always at night during peaceful sleep marked by a beatific smile--wondrous to behold, according to their bed mates--but there are certain enzymes, proteins, antigens in the blood normally found only in the blood of burn patients and victims of long drawn out torture.  The fact that Howie and I were teenagers at the time of his death and that he died in the daytime has led me to conclude many more deaths may be attributed to nocturnal death syndrome than has been reported, just as sudden infant death syndrome in infants is misunderstood because its pathology is identical to suffocation, the result being that the dead infant’s parents are often charged with child neglect, or even murder, so it is with nocturnal death syndrome that the corpse is often disposed of with no questions being asked, nor autopsy performed.
        So I fear my dreams and refuse to sleep until my brains screams for its sleep, its little drug house, so it can make its chemicals.  At times it screams so loudly I pass out from the pain of shattered ear drums, but the vision of Howie’s blackberry river, its lustrous little pool in his sternal notch, gives me the courage to bear the drug demands of my brain, to bear the onslaught of my first instant of sleep and experience it as that final instant of sleep in my first long ago sensation that I never escape from into my normal waking state now:  the soft, warm caress of fingers slowly lulling me first deeply into dreams, then urging me up almost to consciousness where cooing whispers entered my ear pushing me back down into a deep place over and over again.  I know that mothers and baby sitters quiet children who cannot sleep because they suffer colic or have begun teething, but I often wonder if this is only kindness.
        Howie never said he slept like a baby, eyes with a far away look, the way most people occasionally do.
        Howie would never have gone mad or been grasped by sleep’s end and fondled, pressed by it, uncertain at first after waking that his initial day breaths were deep enough, until, little by little, the same desperation a squeezed toad exudes would take root and grow like a plant beneath bricks to become stronger, stronger, all the better able to struggle for the unreachable air. 
        Not Howie.  Howie woke fully apart from his night world every morning. 
        Howie never slept like a baby. I am certain that is why he died. 
        I find myself becoming less and less fanciful with each passing day. 
        As I mourned flight of my fancy, I noted this data:

A deeply sweet aroma mixes yellow smelling sourness similar to that of vomit but not as flat and hard, just much, much thicker and impregnated with all the possible colors of a slightly odd and predatory universe.  This aroma fills the room, hornet-buzz sharp as swamp polluted ammonia pings.  Wolf dung carries airborne parasites that eat brain tissue and  doesn’t smell any worse than bird dung, but there is a reason  why  --  which isn’t really blue but more like bleached, rotting plum skin people listen to wolf howls to heal their own souls.  I know that this mysterious and aggressive smell might have something to do with that.  Howie’s long, white arms, now dead blue--are beginning to crook at his elbows and his fingers begin to bend like claws.  His wrists arch inward, further signs of rigor mortis;  elbows begin to push inward against his ribcage, their skin, even dead, still has the brown pucker patches of old-people-skin even babies have there.

I think it just waits to spread up tender underarm skin even old people have but just never quite gets the job done, not in those places, and not at the tops of the feet or at the folds of the ears or their lobes, or even where nose skins curves up into nostril hairs.  No one knows why elbow skin stays away from those places, though I have my suspicions about that as well.

        The headphones continued to feed into Howie’s ears messages air molecules were sending from inside the coffin, now under dirt, seven and one half miles away  from the garage floor my dead friend’s long, white arms and silent wide eyes stared down at. 
Had he awakened, he might have experienced simple and irrevocable despair and recognized it as the now useless last sane thought that he would ever know. I did not take up the headphones to my own ears;  I knew even then.

        I further noted, with the finest longhand I could muster:
 
        Howie’s eyes have become milky like cheap marbles.  They point nowhere.  His legs and arms appear intent upon gradual envelopment of his torso like fat tubers at the base of a new plant species.  It is a peaceful scene.  The room lilts with imaginary smells.  I sense bats take flight, hear voices from faces I hold in my hands whisper curses--until I kiss them gently on the lips, each, one at a time, each in their endless turn.
       
        Some are witches.  These look up me and moan.

        That’s when I decided to become a mortician.



                                                                                     


—from old papers found by Stevie Dooda in his dad’s garage

Chapter two
jobs



How do you do?  My name is Jesus Gun.

        Among the many things I have been, a Green Child of Ireland  is among them.  I am one of the two, the only two, of whom it is said, in legend and antiquity, that the greatest works of the greatest minds came about by their owners inadvertently crossing paths with one or the other of us, the Green Children of Ireland, in one way or another.
        A mere brush upon the skin, naked and flushed in passion or otherwise. 
        For example, Shakespeare, one day in his twentieth year--a farm lad, some say, and a simple one at that--decided to hop into a merry, mint colored, white-streaked stream with one of the many young women who inhabited the countryside, and, perhaps still do, though perhaps now not of such shy demeanor nor dress as then, but by  no means less vigorous and wonderful, and upon doing so, came into contact with the same water either I or my sister, Juliet Roy Rogers -- whom I have not seen in centuries but know that is her name, somehow, don’t ask how -- had just taken a drink from, having recently shed our green skin after having been exposed to Old England’s peasant meat and potato and hearty ale diet. 
        It is said that several days later, he, Shakespeare took on a swoon and a luster, closed himself in a barn and wrote his first poem which he immediately lengthened into his first known drama. 
        The rest is history.
        Another, one Mozart--who later had several children all born geniuses--came into contact with us the same way when he was only three years old, as did several well known composers and artists, among them Van Gough, Gaughan and Klee, with the exception that Van Gough who early into an unsuccessful academic stint, decided to lie down in a field to view night time stars, the very field in which I had only few days walked through, indeed, the very spot I had stepped upon.
        The same is true of Alexander the Great and, of important note, one Jesus of Nazareth on a day as he rested beneath a stone near one of the exquisite tables he was making to sell so he and his mother and father would be able to have something to eat again for at least a few days.  Some say he made profoundly strong, yet light, crosses for a local Roman magistrate, though I strongly suspect that this is a mere lie put out by those who feared him, but I have no knowledge of that, nor do I care.
        The numbers of humans made great in this manner are immense, I’d bet.
        There are jobs and occupations which can make humans great, and there are humans which can make any job great and noble, almost without exception, but one of the jobs this is not true of is that of ... the mortician. 
        The mortician is profoundly singular.  He is our last friend or last enemy, depending upon his or her mood.  Yet, no matter how the mortician strives to bring a blush upon gray substance no longer blushing nor angry, but simply in profound repose, no matter how great the skill used to do the impossible with nothing, the result no matter how grand, in relative terms, that is, does not last very long, depending upon the temperature of the day of embalming, and depending upon how long the funeral shall take to be set in motion.
        He, thought to be either a pasty fellow or a morbid one of suspicious night habits, has these things in common with all other morticians, things which make the mortician much more or much less than is commonly thought.  He has lips pure as pumpkin batter, and has dark sleep wherein those who speak in tongues, or the ancient tribal shamans, or their ancestors going even further back into Earth history, repeat what has been whispered into the fecund sleep of the pre-mortician, the kid the mortician was once, who then hears the sounds that there are within the confines of new coffins and bolts upright awake screaming, inconsolable.  No one knows why this occurs, it just does.
        He awakens in terror.
        He can’t breathe.
        He becomes interested in making a living providing a very valuable service to those who not only won’t breathe, but can’t.
        This allows him to breathe again.
        There are some fake morticians who become morticians for morbid reasons, but they don’t last long and soon find a job in the banking industry or selling things, all noble undertakings, of course.  But of real morticians ...

Each night, the real mortician, the one who really, really is into it,  tubes and all, pickle smells, tubes running into mysterious and dank pots, disinfectant that doesn’t really have to worry about the health department guy saying where it must go, and who has a needy wallet, this person, the real mortician whistles while he works, and has a gun by his bed.
    It is loaded.  It is a real gun.  It does not love.
    Each night the real mortician begins to suffocate, begins to hear what the coffin linings all hear, all the billions and millions of them, each and each and each....
    He gets up and goes to work.
 
    I decided to inhabit the mind of one, for awhile.  His name, Derogatus, a man of many talents, indeed.

    So read you now, this tale of heaven and hell.










                                                                                         

                                               





































Chapter three
a Pope is murdered



Monkeyhead  Monkeyhead
I love you

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
boo hoo hoo

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
set onto a table

....glimmer, glimmer, glimmer eyes
your head, a pivot, pivots, turns
back, forth, and forth and back

tick tock  tick tock
how your eyes do glimmer



        This I found carved into the back of the murdered Pope, Petro Johannes I, several years beyond the magical date of 2012, the date time was supposed to end.  When they carted his butchered body away in silence and a twin brother took his place and many of the dead man’s close friends were dispatched in odd ways at odd times--until only those who knew him from a distance were left with their safe Pope.  Time changed, 2012 may have been a  hoax, of sorts, but it was about 2018 that the world actually did change, and it about this and its aftermath that I write.     
        However, it is important to note what exactly was carved into the dead Pope’s back, and it was done while he was alive and conscious.  Take my word, his remaining consciousness, the consciousness which exists as a sort of record for up to three days after the heart dispatches its final, desperate throb, is a record for the Gods.  You see, in spite of all that has been believed, getting around all the different space time conveyance of the universe is no easy task and there are many intriguing places to instantaneously be, which I am often bewildered by, and being able to bi-locate at will and move instantly from one place to another, anywhere in the universe and several others beyond this, it should not surprise you that there are times when I only find an aftermath of a significant nature, and not the happening as it occurs.
        This was one of those times.
        Again, I say carved into the back of Petro Johannes I were these words.   


Monkeyhead  Monkeyhead
i love you

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
boo hoo hoo

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
set onto a table

....how your eyes do glimmer
your head, a pivot, pivots, slowly turns
back, forth, and forth and back

tick tock  tick tock
how your eyes do glimmer


          The letter were impossibly tiny.  They were fancy letter, scrolled letters with intricate little tails upon each word.  The carving would have taken hours to perform.
          A claw of sorts had been used, for the edges of the wounds were not uniform, nor were they  by any means of uniform depth, but slowly drawn they had been, and the blood of the poor man had flowed freely from the grievous writing.  The carving was done in such a manner that it was completed at the exact moment of his losing consciousness when his heart finally went into frantic ventricular convulsions, shortly followed by the the death of his entire frontal cerebellum, the godhead of human intelligence and being.  At this moment he found peace. 
        The meaning of the poem shall become clear as we proceed.
        But why was this done?
        I found him in this unfortunate state:  mouth opened wide but silent against the long metallic spoke driven through his vocal cords so that he could make no sound, as it had severed several vital nerves and a particular ligamental connection which allows the vocal chords to resonate vibrations you would recognize as human sound.
        Perhaps he made long  and odd sounds during the carving, but these would have been very quiet, almost tender and soft, similar to the sound of a baby bird’s sound when it falls out of its nest and, upon dying, breathes a sound few have been privileged to hear.
        I have heard this sound. 
        It is the sound of a God tear landing upon a human eye at the instant of birth.
        But why was this done to Petro?  I immediately knew and sensed that within his final thoughts there was the existence of papers and manuscripts which would have brought down the world as it was then known, and which is not now missed, but nonetheless, this is why he was murdered.

        The manuscripts are as follows, with a short introduction written here specifically for you, dear reader:

        Papal confirmation of the authenticity of certain newly discovered documents, and whether those documents are worthy of inclusion in the Holy Bible--this is a heavy and weighty matter which would have to be taken into consideration by various judicial bodies of the church over a period of time.  No such documents had been discovered for at least a thousand years or more.
        The documents in possession of Petro would have indeed, destroyed the church, as it was then known.  He had been about to deliver them into the hands of insurrectionist  and rebellious Bishops as well as their enemies, for consideration and study.
        Also included in the papers, which I discovered in a hidden place in the Pope’s apartment, were an occasional paragraph or two as notes, or pieces of prose which he must have written as he viewed with dismay what the documents revealed.
        His apartment, incidentally, had been completely taken apart, almost piece  by piece--the furniture,  the walls, even his clothes--all of which were pieced back together again with great care to hide the evidence of a search.  Yet the papers had not been found, not by these experts in murder and espionage, but I had found them easily  when I went into his final reposite of consciousness just before it vaporized in the gray death of final, fallen brain cells deep within the dark, serpent brain of the prenatal stage of human brain development, where all such final repositories come to their final rest and vapor.
        This place, the final throes of the Serpent Brain, is also the final resting place of pure horror--the realization that one’s life has been nothing, after all--that, in fact, their destiny is hell, their own, or joy that theirs shall be heaven as they had so dreamt.
        Petro was an unusual man.  No one knew that he had a photographic mind.  No one could have found these documents, for he had destroyed them, wishing them to be placed before the appropriate papal officials at the appropriate time.  Within the documents themselves was the location of their source, where other such documents existed and which, in fact, did  hold more very similar documents. 
        How could he have known?
        These places, along with much of the planet would be destroyed in a great asteroid catastrophe only a few years hence.
        But, at the time, it probably struck him as a good idea.  Furthermore, the knowledge he held could not be tortured out of him, for, as his tormentors discovered, he suffered amnesia of a peculiar sort, a very specific type of amnesia brought about by ingestion of certain chemicals which he had begun to ingest  after he had destroyed the documents. 
        The carving done upon his back was performed as a message, but for whom, and its meaning in the word Monkeyhead, even I did not know at the time. 

These documents I present to you as I found them upon the final dwindling place of human thought within The Serpent Brain:
   


I, Petro Johannes I, servant of the Lambs of God, say to you:

Culturally, there has always been a connection between the divine, the infernal and the world of the dead... but read thee now these things I have found, and know at last...

            they are one, they are at my door and to kill me
                heaven’s undone
                those who break down my door
                . . . with their  noose, their holy lie
  pray there is no God, for I have seen this one
a terror he be
a terror he be

                              for they shall write in my name, this forgery —
    I, Petro Johannes I
    THE LAST
    servant of the Lambs of God
    blessed be this year of our Lord, 2012

...their lies
                                      ALAS, the door gives way, their lies shall creak as a rope upon a beam, and the neck of the world                   
                        ...shall break  ... this now they shall say, a lie:

I SET MY SEAL UPON

Discovered I this scroll in the Great Vault of the Vatican.
Read, pray there is no God, for I have seen souls.
    :
    — Revelations 22, proposed upon sufferance of the Holy See
        NIHIL  OBSTAT  denied,  heretical through blaspheme              this scroll of Aramaic as:

their words here are of the only truth they shall publish:

Yet I, John, Apostle —
    anointed by very hands of the Christ, and within the suffering and penance of the burns which cover my body through immersion in hot oil for eternity of 33 seconds, one each for each year of his life, my Lord I adore thee, and this was done so at pleasure of the emperor who yet spared my eyes, and through thee, my adored love Jesus Christ, heart in love of my sweet Jesus, the Christ,  say, after further investigation, unto all, this:
    I have seen souls, at last, those of angels, not of men, and, alas, they are such that I say truly unto thee, once thou seeth these and pray as thou wilt then that there is no God, no, none whatsoever, not one, no not one, I say unto thee that there is a God, there is, there is, and though even now in heaven there are angels fallen, but not to earth, and carrying savage weapons...one, a terror, mimicry of flight, for did not the Christ appear to ascend unto heaven, but most fearsome of them all, the second  — light that always seems to be somewhere else, for this is the weapon of the Prince of Light, and all is Anathema that comes through this prince, Son of Perdition, his weapons are terrors to behold, blood of bone, and yet still in heaven his own roam, and upon seeing the souls of these, will thy heart burst of horror and of final  revelation and spring from thy lips shall rise the cry:

    ‘Rulest thou in Heaven, my God?’
     
Further, I say, thou shalt bellow:

    “Behold the souls of angels,
    for this why they hate man — his soul is the tear of God.”


Discovered I this notation regards the two scrolls in the Great Vault of the Vatican.
    Read, pray there is no God, for I have seen souls.
    :
    — Revelations 23, proposed upon sufferance of the Holy See
        NIHIL  OBSTAT  denied ,  heretical through blaspheme
        this scroll of Aramaic as: 

    Oh my Jesus, my Lord, have thy Lambs  been  forsaken by the Father? 
    Was it thee, Oh my sweet love, cast by God down, who art  Son of Perdition?
    Came thou Jesus as Light.  Come thee down, Oh God, save us from the Light, at last.  Come quickly, be the firmament alone no more, save us from its brusque intelligence of death.  God be God?
    Adorable Jesus, art thou the Son of Perdition, or art thou God?
    My soul trembles.
    Holy Mary, Mother of God, what hath thou wrought?
    What hands have anointed me?  Thy breasts bring forth the tears of God.
    My soul, tear of God,  shines, trembling, for the fallen, their  strides, are long.
    Hasten, God.  Hasten.
    Amen.


THIS LIE THEY SHALL CONNIVE AND PRETEND TO HIDE    but Read, pray there is no God, for I have seen souls ...
    :
    Scrolls, in content above, numbered at F15 * 16/33, through extraction from clay soil at level 9 viable site 522,  segment right near the location Golgotha, place of the skulls, and  parameter of associative burial sites, this at center e at third level excavation, 700 yards due Easterly of such and in Jurisdiction of Israeli police commandant, sector Jerusalem, l7th site 231, 006, l89,  and in the script Aramaic, and contained near this found are strands of cloth not dissimilar to those of the Turin artifact and benign so far undated to 42 AD,  writ by finger of blood and not by manipulation of tools on stone or papyrus.
    Finder expired through self-strangulation,  June 6, year not divulged, but day following  presentation as the final scroll discovered among the final known writings of St. John, the Apostle, whose suffering from survival of being immersed in boiling oil for a lapse of time of 33 seconds, one for each year of the life span of Jesus Christ, and at the pleasure of the Roman Emperor,  Diocletion, and through the most adorable  suffering as prophesied by the Christ that he would among all the Apostles not die a martyr, but live as martyrdom itself, is found guiltless and forgiven lieu of his immense pains through immense years, and plenary indulgences granted unto all saints through grace given unto Holy Father, intercession of Holy Mary, Mother of God, and bounty of communion of all the Saints, long be St. John the Apostle.
    Scroll ensconced in the Great Vault of the Vatican wherein kept are all things ungiven as naught or as heretical derived from virtue uncharismatic. Candidation as Revelations 22 and 23 or therein expunged  as findings do not support  candidacy of script as divinely inspired  or given through divinity charismatic as determined by the Magisterium in coordination with the Holy See of which declares it heresy through blaspheme in this the year of our lord 2012.
    Of this Heresy through Blaspheme, confesses the church by  Holy Father, servant of the lambs of God —
    LET IT BE ANATHEMA,
    Petro Johannes I
    servant of the lambs of God
    blessed be this year of our Lord, 2012




I Petro, Servant of the Lambs of God,
say to you the tear of God is man, weep weep for me



                    AT LAST THE DOOR GIVES WAY










His final thoughts ended at this place as The Serpent Brain itself died... make of these final thoughts what you will.

Chapter four
the Blue People meet The Great Grand Paw Flowers



Long, long ago, before those things we call civilizations began, there were others earlier, far, far away beyond what we imagine is distance and time, and others, so, so near beneath the soils of the Earth, even beneath those we have imagined are the oldest civilizations ... there was another.  Read of its fate and of The Great Grand Paw Flowers and the now peaceful, yet, at one time, predatory race :  the Blue People  ...

        On the first day of spring, the New Blue-Sun Planet shimmered with intense light.  Its Golden Waving Strands were a joy to behold.
        “Mikey did what?” Benny sighed, admiring the scenery outside. “Did he really do that?”  Benny swung his short, fat, two-year-old body to and fro, and continued staring out the window without looking at the old guy.
        “Yep,”  Grandpa Flowers croaked, “yep, yep,” his voice close, and then far away to Benny’s hypersensitive ears, as he rocked back and forth in his ancient rocking chair.
        “Whoa.”
        “Yep, yep.”
        Benny admired the practically endless carpet of Golden Waving Strands that glowed at him from outside the farmhouse all the way to the far horizon miles and miles away.  The old, white structure sat on a hill like a pitcher’s mound, in the middle of a round plot of Super Green Lawn bordered perfectly, as though it had been painted in place by a fastidious decorator using masking tape, by the Golden Waving Strands that absolutely made  Benny shiver with excitement every time that he looked at them. 
        “Geez,” he said.  “what’d he do that for?”
        “Who woulda known?”   
        Benny turned around to stare at the ancient, old guy.  He shrugged, feeling kind of sorry that grandpa Flowers was so stupid.  Even after five years the poor, stupid old guy didn’t realize how crazy Mikey must have been to do something nutty like that.  Looking back out the window, he thrilled to how the blue sunlight poured down onto the Golden, Waving Strands.  They practically shuddered, as they drank up the blueness.  The horizon was about fifteen miles away, by Benny’s calculations,  or at least a ten or twelve minute run, and every square inch of it perfect, without weeds, lush  and full of golden food.  Beautiful. 
        Grandpa Flowers was a moron.  “Geez...hey, don'tcha jest love springtime.”  Benny wanted to change the subject.
        “Yep, yep, Spring’s sure great alright...Mikey  just didn't know, that’s all.”
        Benny pulled his appendages out of his pockets, and leaned onto the window sill.  “Well, he shoulda.”
        Silence.
        Grandpa Flowers’ rocking chair had stopped rocking, but then started up again, just as Benny was about ready to turn around, prepared to administer some discipline just in case the old guy decided to spit at him or something like that.  These old ones could be pretty cantankerous at times, but he knew that Grandpa Flowers wasn’t a bad old one.  He wasn’t violent or anything like that, but you could never get too relaxed around any of them.  Even without their blue tubes attached, they could still be dangerous.  Benny knew that he was still pretty green behind the ears.  This first assignment was just part of his training, but Grandpa Flowers was pretty easy to handle, or one of the three or four-year-olds, or in an extreme case, maybe even a five-year-old would have been assigned to the farm...those guys didn’t mess around.  Just the same, he didn’t want to screw things up by getting too relaxed about security.  He could just about tell the time of day by the number of creaks that the old rocker made on one of Grandpa Flowers’ days off.  That’s how predictable the old guy was, most of the time, but you could never tell what might happen.
        “Yep,” Grandpa Flowers croaked, “I woulda followed him, by god, except that I was afraid.”
        “Geez.”     
        “It was dry that year.  Corn was stunted and dry.”  The rocker stopped creaking again.
        Benny turned around as fast as he could without alarming the old fart.  It was good practice to do that.  He smiled.  “Corn.”  He fought bile down that began to crawl up his gullet.  “Corn?”
        “Yep.  Yep.  Corn, stunted and dry.”
        The old guy’s face cracked into a grin.  Benny could barely stand to look at him when he got like this.  Corn.  What a waste.  “Geez.”
        “Yep. Yep.”
        Benny watched the Golden Waving Strands  swirl under the blue sun outside.  “Did you ever eat any...uh, geez, corn?”
        “And plenty of it.”
        Benny closed his eyes.  Gripping the edge of the window sill, he shut his mind to the thought that anybody would actually be able to bring themselves to do something like that.  The old ones talked about things like corn.  Sometimes, they even rambled on about potatoes and alfalfa, depending upon where they had lived, but it was ok to let them do that.  The theory was that it was  healthy  for the old ones to go ahead and talk about the past, once in awhile, if that’s what they wanted do on their days off.  Benny knew that by the time his year with Grandpa Flowers was up he’d be ready for just about anything.  His bald, square head throbbed with pleasure and relief as blue sunlight oozed across it.
        The rocker creaked again, and Benny swung his torso in time to the steady rhythm.  The old guy was still  unable to sit directly in the sunlight without his blue tubes attached, and couldn’t stand to have the window open for very long at all unless the oxygen enhancers were going full blast, at least not until he had his Super Green Lawn supplement with his breakfast food, if you could call what these people ate food.  Just the same, the old guy was getting pretty good at jerking his armless and legless torso forward and rocking on his useless stumps to propel the chair back and forth.
        “Course, Benny, back then things were different...lots different.”
        Duh.  Benny figured it was getting time to attach the old guy’s blue platinum-silicon limb tubes so that he could go outside and walk around for awhile  That might get his mind off of yapping about corn and about how things used to be different around there and all that.
        “Grandpa,” he said.  “Mikey shouldn’t have done what he did.”  Benny turned around slowly and stared at the blue tubes that he was going to attach  to Grandpa Flowers.  “You do realize that, don’t you?”  The tubes were flashing blue light around the room.  He scowled.  “Don’t you?”   
        “Yep, yep.”
        “Good.”  Benny sighed.  The tubes needed to be oiled sometime soon.  Their joint structures had sounded like Grandpa’s old rocker the day before, during chores.  “You wouldn’t do anything like that, yourself, now would you?”
        “Nope.  Nope.  ‘Course things were worse then.  Sun was yellow, before they fixed it, and it sometimes got so hot that a fella could hardly stand to go outside and work.”
        Benny shuddered. Yellow sun...like the corn.  He reached over and raised the window to let in some fresh blueness.  He was trying to get Grandpa acclimated a little bit more so that he wouldn’t have to depend so much on his breakfast supplement to withstand the oxygen-poor environment outside.
        Blue vapor oozed into the room and curled up Benny’s nose.  The rocking chair stopped creaking.  Grandpa began gasping and wheezing like he always did whenever Benny did that, but eventually Grandpa’s old lungs would be able to take it better and better until finally he might not need to have the oxygen enhancer turned on inside the house at all anymore.  After a couple of minutes, the wheezing and gasping stopped as Grandpa Flowers’ lungs adjusted to the increasing concentration of blue atoms inside his blood.  The rocking chair began creaking again.  Benny smiled at the Golden Waving Strands outside... miles and miles of it as far as his eyes could see...one more time before getting ready to attach the blue tubes to grandpa’s stumps.
        “Well,” he said, “Mikey must have been nuts, is all I can say.”
        “Nope, nope,” Grandpa Flowers gasped, balancing himself expertly on his leg stumps, leaning over the side of the rocking chair and spitting into a bucket.  He smiled at the back of Benny’s square head.  “Jest didn’t know.”
        “Geez.”  Benny shook his head.  “Pretty stupid.”
        “Yep.”  The rocker creaked back and forth again.  “Turned out that way, alright.”  Grandpa Flowers wheezed, trying to fill his lungs up with the blue vapor that was gradually filling up the room.  He closed his eyes, pressed his neck into the back of the chair and concentrated, the way that he always did, on letting the slop fill up his lungs, ooze through them and release what chintzy little bit of oxygen that it contained into his lungs.  The first time that they’d forced him to sit in a room of the stuff, he’d almost suffocated, but now he was getting better at just relaxing and letting his lungs grab whatever air they could. 
        Benny sucked in the good ole blue stuff.  What a relief.  He sighed at the sheer beauty of the blue sun floating above the Golden Waving Strands outside.  He knew that eventually Grandpa Flowers would be not only be able to start the day off without any oxygen-enhanced air at all, but would actually come to prefer blue air the way that Benny did.  Then they’d really be able to get some work out of the old guy.  Benny turned away from the beautiful sight to see how gramps was doing.  The old guy was pressed into the back of the chair, eyes closed, but his color was better than it usually was this time of day.   
        Ye gods.  His color was better than it had ever been before during the morning acclimation.  “Whoa!  You look pretty good, already, Grandpa.  Feeling better?”
        “Yep.”  Grandpa Flowers exhaled.  It was practically like breathing real air, once you got over the initial urge to puke.  “Course, the sun was all the way blue by time Mikey got up that morning, so he couldn’t see how things really were.”
        “Poor Mikey,”  Benny sighed, shaking his head.  The poor, dumb little shit.  “Too bad.”  It hadn’t been foreseen, but all over the earth that day the same thing had happened...almost the entire agricultural work force of that brand spanking New Blue-Sun Planet had been lost in that one morning, five years ago.
        “Yep.”  Grandpa Flowers smiled across at Benny with watery eyes.  He coughed.  “Yep, yep.”
        Benny thought that it might be a good idea to have the solar panels adjusted.  Grandpa would always need a little bit of the old-fashioned yellow sunlight no matter how acclimated his lungs became to blue air.  All of the old ones just kept getting older faster and faster.  Of course that effect of blue sunlight on humans had been foreseen, but there had been so few of them left, after the initial disaster, that even two-year-olds were encouraged to turn up the solar adjustments inside the farmhouses to see if the aging process could be slowed down long enough to breed an adequate number of workers. 
        “Poor Mikey.”  It really was sad.  These old ones had it pretty easy, though.  All that was expected of them was that they feed the Golden Waving Strands, using their blue tubes to shoot nutrients to them via the stiff, underlying surface membrane of the Super Green Lawn.  Benny knew that pretty soon it would be next to impossible to adjust the solar panels up high enough to keep Grandpa Flowers alive without harming himself, so if the old fart didn’t get acclimated pretty darn soon, well, that’d be all she wrote for poor old Grandpa Flowers.
        “Grandpa,” he chirped, checking over the blue metal tubes that were leaning against the wall next to the window.  “Would you like to walk around for awhile, today?” 
        “Yep.”
        “Good for you.”
        Grandpa Flowers sucked more blue air down, pretending to savor it for Benny’s benefit.  Sometimes he’d think about the morning after Mikey had done what he’d done.  Waving his freshly amputated stumps back and forth under the sheet that was tied across his torso, screaming and crying his ten-year old boy’s heart out, terrified, until somebody with a square head, a completely  hairless and square head, just like Benny’s, had come into the room and injected him with something that burned its way up his arm straight into the middle of his head.  Then he’d fallen into a black sleep. 
        When he woke up, he felt a lot better about not having any arms or legs anymore. 
        “You know, Grandpa,”  Benny was saying, kneeling down next to the chair,  arranging the blue tubes, getting ready to attach them, “if Mikey had just put his ear down to the Super Green Lawn, he would have known.  I mean...” he glanced up at Grandpa Flower’s big grin, “he really would have, ya know.”  He slipped both leg tubes into place.  They were easy to attach because all they had to do was hold up grandpa while he did his work. 
        Benny just popped them right into the old guy’s hip sockets, easy as pie.
        “Really appreciate this, Benny,” the old guy croaked, wincing.
        Benny shrugged, reached over to another blue tube, felt it’s smooth, hard surface.  “I mean,” he continued, “all Mikey had to do was listen.”  If you  stuck your ear down an inch or two into the Super Green Lawn, then you’d know.  Gurgling.  It was pretty much like the sound you heard, if you pressed your head against a baby’s abdomen right after it ate.  “Mikey should have done that.”
        “Who woulda thought.”  Grandpa Flowers winced again as Benny attached one of the blue metal tubes to an arm stump. 
        “Dunno,” Benny shrugged.  “But then, he’d of probably known if he’d done that.”  He  wrapped the two stubby tentacles bifurcating from the ends of his powerful, thick arms--so superior to the  finger-hand configurations that Grandpa Flowers had been stuck with when he was born that it wasn’t even funny--securely around the blue tube, and twisted it gently into place.  Benny had seen pictures of the finger-hand deformities that old guys like Grandpa had been stuck with at birth.  He felt grandpa wince again.  “Geez.”  He always tried to be a gentle as possible.  Grandpa should be grateful for having such swell things to work with instead of the miserable, useless deformities that he had been born with.  Benny shook his head.  “Sorry, Grandpa,” he breathed.  “There, feel better now?”
        “Yep.  Anyhow the lawn was practically dead that year, just like the corn.  It was a lot bigger, then, the lawn, even if it was full of weeds and bare spots.”
        “Whoa.”
        “Yep, it even had to be mowed once in awhile, and sometimes it was pale and gray, or yellow, if the weather was dry.”
        “Geez.”  Benny knew that things were so much better for them now, and suspected that the old guy was grateful, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
        “So you can imagine our surprise,” Grandpa Flowers said, holding up the blue tube that Benny had just attached to his right deltoid muscle, “when we got up that morning and looked out the window to see why everything outside was so blue...of course, it was getting harder and harder for us to breathe by the minute, which is why we woke up so early in the first place.”  He leaned over and grinned at Benny’s fat face concentrating on attaching the other blue metal tube to his left deltoid muscle. 
        “It’s too bad the instructors didn’t arrive on time.”
        “Yep.”
        “They’d have kept Mikey from doing what he did.  They got delayed.  They were supposed to be here to help you guys out before sunrise that day.”
        “Who woulda known.”
        “Well, it is a shame.  Maybe your folks could have been stopped from doing what they did, too.”
        “Yep.”
        “Oh well, stuff happens, ya know.”  Benny was just about done hitching Grandpa Flowers’ left deltoid up to its blue tube.  “Really is too bad about your folks.  They probably would have been ok if they hadn’t gotten up and gone out so early.”
        “Yep.”  Grandpa tested the arm tube that was already connected.  Flexing his deltoid and back muscles together the way that he had been taught to do, he grinned down at the side of Benny’s flat face.  The tubes weren’t so bad, once you got used to them.  Just load ‘em up and stick ‘em in the ground.  That’s all he had to do all day long.  He swished it silently above Benny’s head.  Benny was too busy with his right arm stump to notice.  Grandpa smiled.  He was glad that they’d finally sent him a two-year-old.  “It was quite a shock, you know, Benny, to look out that window there behind you and see all that wheat instead of corn...miles and miles of wheat.”
        “Wheat?”
        “And the Super Green Lawn!”
        “Geez.”  Benny rolled his eyes, made a final adjustment to the left arm tube, making certain that it was sitting inside grandpa’s shoulder socket properly.  He stared at the wrinkled face.    The old guy had a suspicious look about him.  Benny thought he’d seen one of the arm tubes start to raise up in the air above his head while he’d been concentrating.
        “Benny.”  Grandpa Flowers gave him his best smile. 
        “Umm?”
        “Could you, please, adjust this just a little bit, for me?”  He rolled his shoulders, clanking the right blue tube that Benny was staring at, against the floor.  “Could you, please?”
        “Oh.”  Benny felt relieved.  “Geez, I’m sorry.”  He wrapped his tentacles around the old guy’s shoulder.  He scowled.  He’d hitched the deltoid muscle up to the arm tube just the way that he always had.  He better get those panels fixed right away or before too long the old guy would be complaining about every little thing.  “There.”
        “Thanks, Benny.”
        “Uh...yeah.”
        “Benny?”
        “Geez, what.”
        “Could you please check those leg tubes, for me?  I think they’re a little bit loose.”  Grandpa Flowers scooted his butt around in the chair and winced his best wince.  “Yep.  Bit loose.”  He smiled at Benny apologetically,and shrugged his shoulders.  “Could ya please, Benny?”
        Grandpa Flowers could feel Benny’s tentacles wrap back around his waist as the cold blue metal prongs of his tube legs slid into place again around one of his hip joints, and then snap into place where his leg muscles had been severed.  “Oh...yeah,” he sighed.  “Anyhow, it was quite a shock looking out and seeing all that wheat instead of corn....”
        “Wheat?”
        “Yep. Yep.”
        “Geez Louise,”  Benny grunted, concentrating on the other leg, now.  “You wouldn’t have thought that, later in the day, when the blue sun started to set.”  He figured that pretty soon he’d have the stupid old fart up and around for the day.
        “I really appreciate this, Benny,”  Grandpa Flowers crooned.  He tensed up both of his deltoids, felt the tubes respond perfectly.  They didn’t look like much, and they were light as feathers, but he could shove them into the Super Green Lawn easily, no matter how hard the ground was.  One time he’d swung one of the tubes at a young sapling that had grown in the Super Green Lawn overnight.  He’d just swung the tube at it for fun.  He’d watched in utter amazement as it had spun around, cut through clean, like a slab of fat sliced cleanly through by a razor, spurting green liquid out in all directions.  He’d barely been able to get out of the way as it landed with a loud thud across the Super Green Lawn.  The four-year-old in charge of him at the time had been pretty upset about the fact that there had been a cancer, which is what he’d called it, growing there, and had been even more upset about the fact that Grandpa Flowers had used one of the tubes to cut it down, because that meant that the tube would have to be replaced.  That same day a couple of other four-year-olds, with a five-year-old supervising them, showed up at the farm in protective clothing--moon-suits--like they were cleaning up some kind of toxic spill.  First they’d cleaned up all the green liquid, then they’d tied a big chain around the trunk of the sapling and hauled it away.  They left a couple of guys behind to spray the area real well to make sure that none of the red seeds that had fallen off of the sapling survived.  The stump of the sapling had wilted away by the time the next day rolled around.  Only a slimy, wet spot remained where the sapling had been, but there was always a bare spot there in the Super Green Lawn after that.
        For about three weeks after that the four-year-old had loaded all kinds of chemicals into the tubes so that there wouldn’t be any more cancers.  According to the four-year-old, that had been the only one that had appeared on the New Blue-Sun Planet.  The seeds from the cancer were really dangerous. Grandpa was warned that they grew like wildfire, and once they got started reproducing, all the Golden Waving Strands would be killed off, and the whole New Blue-Sun Planet would die off.  The four-year-old figured that the sapling must have gotten started by a seed accidentally brought from the last New Blue-Sun Planet that had been destroyed by the cancer.  Grandpa knew that it was the only kind of new plant that could grow in the blue sunlight, because he’d never seen any other things growing except the Golden Waving Strands and the Super Green Lawn.  Grandpa Flowers could remember how nice the sapling had smelled, and how fresh the air around it had been.  He had started to feel stronger and stronger from the moment that he had felt it’s leaf-spewn  oxygen coil down into his lungs.
        “Ah...that’s much better, Benny,” he sighed. 
        “Geez.  I better check this one leg tube again.  It should’ve been ok.”
        “Anyhow, Mikey was older than me and wanted to go on outside and run around in all that new wheat, but I thought it would be better to wait for Dad to get back.  He always went out in the fields early in the morning, and I knew that he and Mom had both gone out that day, for sure, to inspect the corn to see how much was going to survive the dry spell.
        “Holy Smokes.”
        Grandpa Flowers smiled.  “Yep. Yep.”  He flexed his deltoid and felt its arm tube respond perfectly.  “Yep. Yep.”  Benny’s head was completely bent over, his hand tentacles were beginning to uncoil from the gleaming blue leg tubes.  He was about done.  “Benny.”
        “Yeah.”
        “Tighten that left one just a hair more.”  Silence.  He watched Benny shake his head,  Its square shape swiveled in consternation.  “Benny.  Please?”
        “I s’pose,”  Benny gasped.
        Grandpa Flowers smiled as both of Benny’s hands, and all four tentacles wrapped back around the leg tube and his groin.  “I really appreciate this, Benny.”  He began, slowly, to raise both gleaming, blue arm tubes up into the air.
        “Yeh.  Yer welcome, I s’pose.”
        “...anyhow, we waited and waited till about noon, but we went ahead and played around on the Super Green Grass, because we couldn’t believe how beautiful the stuff was.”
        “Sheesh, its gray without the blue sun shining on it.”  Benny was getting impatient.  As far as he could tell the leg tubes were perfectly hitched, just like the arm tubes had been.  “Gray, not green, and slimy looking, really slimy looking, just like the...uh, wheat, as you keep calling it.”  He smirked, craning his neck to get a better look at Grandpa’s hip bone to make sure it was snug inside the top of the metal hitches.  “Geez, how’s that?” 
        “Little more.”
        Benny sighed again, stretched his neck, to get a better look at Grandpa’s stumps.  They looked okay to him.  What a stupid old fart.
        “Anyhow, Mikey told me not to worry, that he’d go out and look for mom and dad, but that he’d be back in awhile.  So off he went into the wheat.”
        “Wheat.”
        “It was swirling and blowing back and forth.”
        “Geez Louise.”
        “You see, Benny,”  Grandpa Glowers said, pulling his arm tubes behind his head as far as they would go. “That’s what scared me.”
        “What?.”
        “The wheat blowing like that, moving and swirling like it was.”  Grandpa Flowers smiled down at the top of Benny’s throbbing flat head.  “You see, Mikey didn’t notice, or he probably wouldn’t have gone out there.”
        “What?  Didn’t notice what?”
        “That day, Benny.  Oh...little bit more.”     
        “Jeez.”  Benny twisted the blue leg tube a little bit harder than he had to.
        Grandpa Flowers winced, stretching his arms full above his head now.  “No wind, Benny.  No wind.  It was a perfectly calm day.  So I thought to myself, what’s making the wheat move?”
        “Duh...it’s livestock.  Hungry livestock.”  Benny glanced up at the exact instant that Grandpa Flowers slammed both metal tubes with all of his might down onto the top of his head. 
        Whap. Whap.
        “Yep. Yep.”  Grandpa Flowers said, wiping skull and brain from his face with one of the tubes.  “Livestock...not wheat.”
        Grandpa Flower’s leg tubes raised Benny’s corpse up off the floor, and flung it across the room.  It bounced into a wall, and thudded to the floor.  He stood up, clunked stiff-legged, hips churning, over to the open window, and inserted one of his blue arm tubes into his shirt pocket, and vacuumed out the pod of sapling seeds that he’d been hiding there, just waiting for the first day of spring.  He raised the blue tube up to the window, and smiled.
        “New red wheat.”
        A puff of red powder dispersed several billion seeds into the gentle spring breeze. 
On the first day of its last Blue Spring the New Yellow-Sun Planet shimmered with intense light.




















Chapter five
caveman future



I, Jesus Gun, teach you now:

          Grand Paw Flowers set in motion many things upon the Beautiful Special Planet referred to by humans as Earth ... simply put, he saved human beings from becoming extinct.
          Humans would go through many phases of development in the ensuing thousands and thousands of centuries, during which humans would become their own worst enemy and destroy their civilizations just as the Blue People had done to them. The surviving humans would become a simple caveman biped species, which you know as cavemen, generally, who would find a way to rebuild civilization, which you, your children and their grandchildren had come to know and believe was the history of the world.
          Your world, as you now know, would only crumble again, although this time much more quickly, into a second caveman phase, the one which would begin one day sometime in 2018--the year, its number being of no consequence, for all things happen on some date or other, or they do not happen at all. Yes?
          The first human phase of caveman existence, now commonly known as the original document, once hidden, but retrieved by a great Pope and released at cost of his own life, The Book of Eden, is remarkably different from the second, the one which, as you now know, your children and grandchildren would experience.
          I present them here in reverse order, so that you will know the human mind as a civilized tool can become a simple, unthinking, savage spirit in a short period of time.


Read you now of our once again modern world, its birth, the second caveman phase.


          His red-reflex predator eyes shone. The stone maw gaped where he crouched at its entrance. Silent, still as a tooth he was.
          He studied from his high cave the tree lines far below. The horizon beyond its green billions bared itself to him like a never ending tin bucket.
          Desolation.
          The rubble long since grown over, and he, long since gone mad from jaw pain-- as others had gone mad from their own curses, maladies, injuries, grief over slaughtered loved ones and praying for the return of the burdens they’d once had-- could not remember the gradual loss of himself into something else.  He only knew its increments, the continuing increments welcomed now.
          He pressed his head against the stone, sighed. He tried to remember that he did not know anything anymore.
          The cool surface of the stone maw he was now a part of soothed him as he rubbed his face upon a round nub, tried to contemplate how he had come to be what he was now, or even on very good days when he was feeling ambitious and adventurous what he had been before that, but he was hungry again, and could not remember anyway.
          He drooled the taste of the blood of his tongue he’d been chewing into again down onto his chest, mumbled words of a language he no longer thought in, sighed, threw back his head and cried a high clear note — rage at how history has been made.
          Oh, there would be epiphanies again this night.

          He crouched, hummed, half articulated an old tune he had once understood ...


Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
I love you

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
boo hoo hoo

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
set onto a table

....how your eyes do glimmer
your head, a pivot, pivots, slowly turns
back, forth, and forth and back

tick tock tick tock
how your eyes do glimmer

Chapter six
The Book of Eden



I, Jesus Gun, teach you now:

Read you now of the first caveman phase, wherein the last of Grand Paw Flowers’ children becomes the father of a new race, and these words below now commonly known to many as the original Book of Eden:

THE BOOK OF EDEN

          Pigs don’t kill. They just eat.
          He could not remember the legends of one named Grand Paw Flowers.  The Blue People had left but a few. They were gone.  He could not remember anything at all.
          He only knew the pig snarled and whirled outside the entrance.
          He did not want to be eaten alive.
          This last man was thinking about that, his back rubbing raw against the granite wall of the shallow cave, more a hole in the towering mound that formed one of the feet of a young mountain where he hid. The pig clunked around in angry circles outside in the rain, occasionally spinning on the flat mud to peer in at him, yearning, hungry, savoring the metallic sting of what little blood the biped’s foot had left in its snout. It reared back its head and squealed. It spun around. Strips of mud popped out of the ground; it galloped back and forth, sides heaving, saliva rolling out of its mouth to hang for a moment, gray light of a rainy day tinkling through it as it whipped back against the pig’s forelegs —shivering anticipation.
          His savaged foot, big toe hanging off to the side by its tendon, was numb and cold. Blood smeared its way through the hair on his leg, mingling with sweat and mud, matting his body hair tight across his skin where the pig’s tusk had stabbed through,  tearing meat out of him as he’d nose dived into the cave.  Last man coughed.
          It wasn’t bleeding now, but he knew that he would surely die on this day, for outside was the thud of the pig’s hooves, as though still behind him, closer, louder, as he’d scrambled up towards the hole at the bottom of the mountain’s foot. Half crying, he slid down against the granite behind him. Knees trembling and banging together, he could feel sweat pushing its way through the mud packed across his forehead.  He waited.
          The pig galloped suddenly up to the opening. It stood there and peered in at him. The undercurve of its jaw, pulling back the sides of its crinkled snout into a curving and lugubrious smile, bulged with foul smelling gas. Pig snorted. Stuff blasted out of the side of the smile and spilled into the hole.
          Rage churning in his gut, he shook his club at the pig.  Its little eyes glinted in at him as it planted one of its hooves tentatively on the mouth of the cave.  Its snout poked through...sniffing, savoring. He growled to frighten away the pig. Then he hissed, swung his club; it clapped against one of the pig’s tusks. The pig shook its head, snorting, and lifted its hoof up over the ridge of the entrance, digging it firmly into the ground inside.
          Pigs don’t kill. They just eat.
          Wrapping both hands around his club until their knuckles turned white, he raised it high over his head, his eyes bulging, teeth clenched, then brought it down with all of what was left of his strength, hard, against the pig’s leg...felt bone give way -- a loud crack. The pig’s snout raised up, tusks scraping the ceiling of the hole, undulating, slobber blowing out both sides while it spit squealing agony at him.  Its front quarter lunged sideways and down into the dirt.  Its head banged against the ground again and again as it squealed, eyes bright red, attempting to gouge the man’s leg with its tusks. Thudding its bulk up and down against the floor of the cave, by increments, inching toward him, the pig finally heaved its bulk on through.
          His injured foot braced against the granite wall of the cave, toe flapping as he hopped up off his good foot, he jerked it  away from a swipe of the tusks. Backed tightly against its furthest recess, he raised his club high, to the ceiling of this terrible place, where he knew--practically weeping in fear--that he would be eaten alive, writhing, howling. This pissed-off, bellowing monster at his feet would crunch his bones down one at a time so close to his screaming mouth that pieces of them would fly down his throat, until it grew tired of the sport, and then it would dig its snout deep into his belly to pull out his guts and slurp them away in front of his dying eyes.
          Pigs don’t kill. They just eat.
          His brain screamed it into his arms as he brought them down full force.  The club bounced weakly into the dirt. He looked up, unable to believe what he was seeing. The pig, its head pulled back by a hand sticking through the mouth of the cave, was being hoisted by the scruff of its barrel neck up high into the cave air, and like a baby lizard snatched out of its shell by a feeding predator, the pig twisted, and writhed — gray, fat slug. The pig’s short, thick hind legs kicked futilely, useless stumps waving, jerking, as its head was driven forcefully into the granite above again and again. The pig’s head splintered, squirted. Parts of the snout and of the brain behind it plopped across the dirt.  Its fat torso was jerked out of sight through the mouth of the cave, instantly, as though it had been small enough to float through.    Chunks of fat and gristle held together by the black matted skin hung on the entrance.
          He fell to his knees, weeping. The club rolled slowly out of his shaking hands...silence, punctuated by the sound of blood dripping from the mouth of the cave, was all that he heard. Then, a rustle: coarse gravel crunching beneath flesh made him look up. A being like no other he had ever seen with his first man’s eyes stood in front of him. He rocked slowly back against the granite wall, and hung his arms. A pale green hand was suspended down and out in front of his face.  Its fingers curled back like the petals of an orchid exposing its shimmering tongue to a honey bee, hovered above his shoulder.  It touched him there.
          It curled under his chin, tucked him there as though he were a small child, pushed his head up, forcing it back a few inches, and then up, up, until he stood, and his eyes were level with its eyes. They glimmered like a hawk’s to their golden centers. He watched the pale, naked being tilt its head at him, smiling, and then crouch down slowly pulling delicate hands across his torso, then down to his hips, exploring their bony prominences, down his legs, unhesitating, probing, stopping at the avulsed toe.
          A flash of bright green light popped, gulped up the cave--kicked his eyelids shut...a reflex. Sharp jolts of electricity banged through his injured foot, up his body. His neck muscles tore themselves into a grand mal spasm that jerked his head back, ground his teeth hard together, back and forth, over and over again--forcing spit, churned to foam, between them. He felt the cool, effervescence of it roll and plop down onto his chest, and into his ears.
          Hoisted up like an open-mouthed sweet child, dreaming, he was carried away from the cave.
          “God, how I do love you,” She whispered, kissing his forehead.
          The Golden Waving Strand pulsed. It gleamed. The firmament glowed.
          He woke out of a dark, syrup sleep that he had never known before. His eyes fluttered. Orchids that swirled out of the ground, bounced in the wind, tapped his face, tickled his belly, as though nodding to the roses that wrapped around his arms and legs with their thornless, svelte stems. He stirred, pulling his arms and legs free, and sat up. He saw jewels floating around his head:  butterflies of all shapes and colors -- living charms--beating their broad, hovering wings, yet floating only. He rubbed his eyes and watched the beautiful little things float through the boughs of fat trees overgrown with pink and blue flowers, as well as edible mushrooms and grapevine drooping to the ground from the weight of glowing balls whose clear nectar made him gasp with thirst just from looking at them. He reached out, began  to place his hands on one of the glowing balls, but thought, as he looked suddenly into the sky, that the lilac bushes soaring upwards  beyond the tops of the flower-dripping trees went so high that surely they would rend the belly of heaven and it would  pour its black outer guts, stars, and planets down upon his head. So he bolted onto his feet, crouching defensively, instinctively, as though he were alone on a dark night and a hand had tapped the back of his neck.
          He started to run...panic...overwhelmed, but then scowled, remembering his gored foot.  No pain now.  He looked down.  Where his gored foot-- the toe separated and hanging by its blue and white ligaments all the way to his heel--had drug uselessly behind him, there now was only a thin red line, not jagged meat, drying and rotting.
          Last man ran until the sun set that day, and for the rest of his life he would be aware, usually at sunset, that he was being watched. His eyes would study the trees above him and the rocks nearest him. His ears would perk, his nose would take in all the familiar odors...intensely checking, scrutinizing, He would shrug and continue with whatever it was that he had been doing, occasionally looking back over his shoulder...uncertain of all, save the love of his mate.
          She, high above him, would gaze down through leaves and branches at this beloved, winsome thing, and eventually, upon deciding that it would be an acceptable mate--if this planet devastated by the Blue People  was ever to be a viable planet again,and considering available resources--came to call him First One.
Their green children would be a wonderment.

— The Book Of Eden

Chapter seven
the lord, She comes



June 30, 1908, 7:30 a.m.  ... somewhere in the Siberian tundra:
The Tunguska Event

          The sun had risen oddly pink.  The man and Dog awoke, each shuddered.  The air was cold, but Dog was patient beneath its black, glossy fur.  Its muscles lie in repose upon its huge shape.  Its master was a big, dependable human, well worthy of worship, service and protection. 
            Dog could remember the death of its mother, her long agonizing descent into snarling madness as the snare had slowly cut her right upper leg away as she ran, staggered, leaving red droplets of blood.  Dog’s puppy legs were too short and the snow too deep for him to keep up with her.  As he lay down, that day so long ago, exhausted,  his small body, overcome at last by the rigors of cold and physical exhaustion, began to die. 
          The man had found Dog, saved Dog.  Dog loved the man with all of his Titanic heart and as he licked his master’s hand as his master woke slowly inside the makeshift hut, Master playfully rubbed Dog behind the ear. Dog’s black nose glistened with joy.
          The sky grew suddenly bright.
          Dog’s love glowed.
          Dog and Master glanced toward the front of their tent.
          Its flaps suddenly tore outward, whooshed away into flapping dots an instant before their lungs burst and they were instantaneously torn into thousands of twirling pieces, vaporized an instant later.  A great sound engulfed the tundra as all life ceased to exist for 37 miles in either direction.  Birds were drawn upward, then exploded into atoms in the vacuum born of a gigantic air burst five miles above their looming, arctic flights.
          Plants, insects, the organic molecules of earth minerals and still hard ice merged into a maelstrom of light ....
        Death at ground zero.

The huge 15 megaton air burst explosion caused by a 60 meter wide asteroid traveling at 1000 miles per hour, with moisture in its core sublimating into superheated steam bursting it apart during 1500 degree Fahrenheit contact with our upper atmosphere, occurred in remote Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, at about 7:30 a.m. on June 30, 1908.  Its immense power hit like a sledgehammer, flattened thousands of square miles, and the seismic shock wave was detected as far away as London.

Yet, it was a mere airburst.



June 17, 2018, 11:30 p.m. Greenwich Mean time ... somewhere several million miles in space from Earth directly in tangent to the Eastern United States ...
The Second Planck Epoch (second Big Bang)

... a behemoth floated in space

... a crystalline googlehedron of millions of curving planes

... a shimmer in space, an almost invisible disruption in the dim light flung from stars far beyond this solar system in which it now moved inexorably closer to the asteroid belt on its way to Earth.

The region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, in which most asteroids are found, is known by many simply as the The Asteroid Belt.  It contains 230 objects, among millions of others much smaller, with diameter greater than 100 km ... greater than one thousand times the diameter, as well as mass, of the object that caused the Tunguska event.

          Her feet gleamed. Her quiet repose, the stars and a billion planets reflected beyond Her eyes and She sighed love,  Her thighs, curvaceous as the side of a shimmering dolphin singing to its young lofting beneath, and Her lips parted alive.  As She gazed beyond Her googlehedron, its crystalline billion-sided immensity began to flex in rhythm to her heart beat.
          Far beneath, the Beautiful Special Planet sang its hues and tones into the immense vacuums of space as She lay and remembered its earliest creation:  Her children...their place within Her heart.
          The Beautiful Special Planet loomed. She wondered at the speed it rotated, the curling ellipse of its orbit around the vast yellow star, small by Her standards, yet gallant and beautiful in its fiery hydrogen chaos.
          How She loved this system of one star, its blue and white lovely jewel planet She’d bred within her thoughts, as two lovers would make a child upon a thousand nights’ lovemaking--the one born, the one most beautiful to them, to Her heart--the Beautiful, Special planet, Earth.
          How She mourned its inevitable demise in spite of all She could have done, had done, to nurture its existence.
          She sighed and moaned as a tear bright crept its life away down her cheek, its fluid turning to light. The firmament paused for an instant, then continued one, as a new sun formed a billion light years away.
          How She loved Earth.
          Time to collect Her children, Jesus Gun and Juliet Roy Rogers, The Green Children of Ireland as they’d first come to be known as ten thousand years before.  Her moan, a deep fuscia-blue tone scape, reveled across the firmament.  Her lips parted, Her hands bowed, fingers arching as She sighed a remembrance of Her last and final visit to retrieve them. How She’d wept at their struggles, and yet, even unaware of their purpose, they had brought upon the once barren planet all the art, the poetry, it majestic and divine beauty, and music, Her own heart’s blood flute notes--Love.
          Shamans and dervishes had danced the depths of their magic throughout all the tribes and cultures and had given the planet hope. She shook Her head in sadness. How Her last visit, so long ago, had hardened Her resolve to retrieve them.
          Her beloved Beautiful Special Planet bore more love upon it, than light, and its brilliance--myriad life forms all designed to exist as a necessary part of an elegant whole--was known throughout the galaxies, yet all to no avail.
          She had failed to understand the one thing love does not have, yet can give, but only to those who truly love.  The one thing, it, the very root of love itself, true love, She had forgotten.
          She closed Her eyes and remembered Her sorrow, the realization that love was not enough, and that upon Her final visit, one night long ago, upon a baby boy and his mother--both to whom She had given Her greatest gifts:  to him, powers of her own hands, and to her, the understanding and wisdom of Her own heart--these two of many, who were to bring the one thing which even She could not bestow upon another of any species, the one thing that must arise within the heart of the beholder of Her majestic creations, the one thing, She knew someday would never be.  For was not light Her Father, Imagination, the one thing She could not create to give as a gift to Her beloved humans?  For was it not the one thing that only Her loved ones could bear--as a child in moonlight--as the moon gathered the light of the sun from the other side of the Beautiful Special Planet?
          Another tear spawned light, its quarks spinning into the firmaments where a new star was instantly born, only yet another of the millions and millions She had cried into existence as She’d traveled and wept Her immortal beauty upon the universe seeking the one thing.  Her joy found its place suddenly within Her heart as She remembered her two children, Jesus Gun and Juliet Roy Rogers...Her sudden joy at the remembrance of how that race of warriors, the Blue People, had changed their ways, had become peaceful under the spell they had cast upon themselves, naming Her loved one’s human ancestor, Grand Paw Flowers--whose cunning and bravery had defeated them at last and had saved Earth--as their God.
          The Blue People had learned imagination, the one thing, She knew someday would be, for was not love Her Mother, and could She not gift this within all the hearts and souls of humans?  Yet, so fleeting it was without imagination.  She gazed out of her behemoth crystalline googlehedron as it approached the center of the Solar radius, the place of asteroids and grave danger, even to Her.
        She remembered First One, the last of his kind, how She had saved him, and his race from final extinction eons after Grand Paw Flowers had given the human race one final chance. Only Her intervention had prevented the demise of these, Her own beloved creations, upon Her own Beautiful Special Planet.
        Her final visit two thousand Earth years before wafted upon her hands;  in their warmth, the long curl of Her fingers, the bright suns had awaited their births in Her eyes, the tears they held.
        She remembered this visit well, and Her journeys into the night as the baby boy slept with Her powers and lustres ingrained into his heart and soul.

          Moon hidden behind deepest black clouds, snow on the forest floor was ridden suddenly with billions of sparks, brilliant in hue, numberless in tone.  An owl gaped its swivel ball eyes, slowly closed them, indignantly. The spirit stood in the snow and all grew dark again. She looked at the trees and the ground, and shook Her head sadly.
        “There was enough love,” She whispered up at the owl who opened one eye and ruffled its feathers.  It flew off to find some peace from this fearsome  intruder.
          She sighed. “Yes, there was enough love.”
          Then she was gone.
          The next day a little boy was playing by the stream that flowed through the forest. He saw a dead fish floating against the current towards him.  Retrieving it, he squatted and rubbed his eyes, arms up so that his little elbows worked like paddles.
          His mother knelt beside him.  “Wrong way fish again?” she said, smiling, stroking his hair.
          His shoulders trembled as he stroked the fish. “Why do they float wrong ways?”  He sobbed, and sighed over the dead fish.
          She whispered into his ear until he began to giggle his tears away.
          They played kissey eye for awhile.
          When he was happy and his eyes shone, she hugged him, swooshed him onto her back.
          He crowed his joy.
          “They are not wrong ways,” she whispered back into his joyful laughs. “They float towards you.”
          He was silent.
          “There was enough love in the world,” she sang. He hummed.
          “But,” she pulled him across her shoulder and smiled into his baby eyes, “this time,” she cooed into his writhing giggles, “we will not lose this world again because of lack of imagination.”
          He looked into her eyes.  “You mean, mama, that love without imagination is slavery.”
          She kissed him tenderly upon his nose.

          The googlehedron hummed and droned.
          How Her hopes had been dashed again.
          Though within Her own soul’s continual flight, there was a never ending galaxy and its rivers held water’s motion, light’s beacons of colors and bright tipped reflections, fetuses of myriad life forms as yet unborn, yet each awaiting a teardrop and release into the firmament, She knew would go on forever until the end of Her creations had far outlived Her, though that time might never be, or now be, She sighed to herself as She stood and raised Her arms in loving watchfulness as the Beautiful Special Planet grew closer to Her crystalline googlehedron.
      It was a shimmer in space, an almost invisible disruption in the dim light flung from stars far beyond this solar system in which it now moved inexorably closer to the asteroid belt on its way to Earth.
          She knew nothing was immortal but light, and its root the charmed quark; upon one which had gone astray in immense tidal explosions a billions eons prior to even Her, She had been born — the first being created by the simple elegant profundity — light.
          The Beautiful Special Planet came full into view beyond the killer rubble of the solar system’s asteroid belt.
          She began Her descent. She had been alone in Her googlehedron for the many eons since Her days with First One, the human whose children, Jesus Gun and Juliet Roy Rogers, as they were now known, She had borne.  He, First One, lone survivor of the Blue People’s ravage upon this blue-white spectrographic sphere, the Beautiful Special Planet, Earth. First One,  last descendant of Grand Paw Flowers, the human who had outwitted and single handedly put an end to the Blue People’s reign of terror upon it.
          Earth, how proud She’d been of it, its rise--from a thought and a sigh She’d given deep from within a melancholy dream’s most hopeful moment--had propelled from darkest pigments a hyper-speed light implosion, its dream walls, forced into one another at a billion galaxial weights per square inch.  The first black hole stillborn, released the first singularity of time--its outward titanic boom some would, billions of eons later, label ‘big bang’ .
          They’d said the Lord would come, yet had they only known, they’d have sung songs of absolution to the sides of a whale and dolphin in dive instead of the sky in its distant depths, eternal widths, its terrors and its palls.
          And so, now, Come She would.
          30 million heptagonal planes bent, convex-lense-outward, like blood gorged fingertips sliding into a lover’s mouth, each separate from its neighbor’s six adjacent planes by a width of six electrons, and would have been solid to the touch during the final second of existence this would represent for anything or entity coming into contact with it, but undetectable to microwave or radio wave emissions.  These would be sucked like water attracted by the dark matter beyond the six electron spaces, where a fetal black hole within, though as yet unborn, began to writhe its anticipation. All unnecessary particles would be drawn in, through, and out the other side, as long strings of dead particles seeking charmed quarks, the building blocks--linkages of the pieces of light all dead particles have once been--to find life again, refusing to acknowledge the remorseless, impatient eternity of stone dead death.
          This is the brusque intelligence of the firmament and it chaotic puzzle mastering.
          She bent Her head back and sighed.
          30 million planes, each a living thing, a small unborn land, a being of hope, Her unity: memories of fierce things, dragons guarding water for walking upon, never would be, and so became no more, and things to come from the promised egg of each would be within the googlehedron’s plasmatic, revolutionary chaos, the totality of its shape like all the worlds of the worlds, made as they must be made, not as She wanted them to be, but as they would be, for Her divinity was its own light, with the one exception...the gleam of Her tears just as they would leave Her cheek when She cried, during the instant of brightness, were human souls.
          She swayed, watched the killer rubble of the asteroid belt loom, holding Her and Her Beautiful Planet apart as She navigated its rubble. She marveled, that even though divine, even She--when confronted with the firmament of Her creation and its chaos--was only a mere God, that the things of elements, light and the one thing awaiting birth--Imagination--that She was only mere power.
          The one thing, She knew someday would be, She prayed for, as even Gods have their Gods, and She wondered at this and was filled with imagination, mere love grown wings, never mere power ever again.





























Chapter 8
the lord, She comes



I, Jesus Gun, show you these things:

The Siberian Plains, 2000 BC ... an unusually warm summer

            He swooped his arms and turned slowly as his skin,  appearing gray beneath the blueberry dye swirls, pressed into his face, gleamed of oils fragrant with wildflower essences where he spun beneath the moonlight. The old man, ancient crevasses clawing his skin and neck from a long life of riding in winds and living in caves, sang a song he had never heard before. His wizard mind dealt the puzzles of Oak Moon messages into images.  His eyes appeared black to the boy who watched, secretly, for to watch this one dance was forbidden.
          The boy watched from behind a bush, the  very bush which I had slept beneath.  Moon sighed at him to behold the stars, for these were her messengers.
          The old man turned and swooped his arms the way his brother the Eagle had taught him in its flight, the way of his night teacher, Oak Moon, lunar breath of the Great Spirit, for it is in the night when all things have gathered the wisdom of Mother Sun, and it bursts forth.  He stopped suddenly and crouched, then roamed in circles, knees bent as he brushed dirt and stems up into the night air with his palms, his bare feet scraping the limestone rubble that lie in front of his home, a mountain.  His tongue darkened to black within his thrumming turns and songs. He felt eyes were as blinding lights and his skin gray and blue like mating wolves.
          The boy heard a soft paw upon grass behind him. He spun, startled, hand upon an obsidian knife, sharp as the birth of an opened thorn’s judgment.
        “What do you watch?” whispered a tiger cub, its large golden eyes flashing in curiosity and pity, “ Why do you watch, young king?”
          The boy was filled with terror, even though he knew the old man’s chanting and dance swirls would protect all within sight of the Dance of Night, even though to watch was forbidden, for the rules of the tribes were not the rules of the gods, nor the goddesses, who ruled them.
          The boy smiled.
          “Why brother Tiger Cub, and sister Mother Tiger, who watches over you--and to whom I pray not to take offense—I mean you no harm, little tiger cub.” The boy motioned toward the old man. “Do you not see, my little brother, the dance of my father?”
          The tiger cub mewed in joy as a nectar drop grew out of the ground, and, within it, the face of a small child. The tiger cub hopped on top of it and tilted its furry head back to the young king.  Its long, golden whiskers shimmered with intense light.
          “Why brother, young king, and your father’s spirit who watches over you—and to whom I pray not take offense—I mean you no harm, little brother. “  The cub tilted his head at the face of the small child in the nectar drop.  Its face glowed with green light flowing from its eyes.
          “But,” the tiger cub spoke, “why do you watch into the future, for your dance is most beautiful now, also.”
          The boy turned away to look at the old man dancing and swooping, his father, the King. There was only the mountainside and the scoring of limestone into his own, yet tender and young, bare feet.
          “All you need do is begin and dance,” the small child’s voice whispered with the long, slow flutter of wind through stone gullies.
          The boy spun back to reply. But he was alone. Within each hand was a golden light absorbed by his palms. The boy began to dance and twirl .... phantasms of terror came upon him, yet, this time he cast them away,  as the golden streaks now in his blood gathered Oak Moon and pressed all but truth away.
          An immense spirit twirled upon the mountaintop, swirled and danced, the new shaman of its people.

Shamanism, based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits that affect the lives of the living, contrasts sharply to animism and animalism, which any and usually all members of a society practice, for shamanism requires specialized knowledge or abilities. Shamans are not, however, organized into full-time ritual or spiritual associations, as are priests.

The word shaman originated among the Siberian Tungus (Evenks) and literally means he (or she) who knows.  The belief that the word may be derived from Sanskrit is perhaps due to a confusion of the words 'shamanism' and 'shramanism' from the sanskrit shramana, Pali and Prakrit samana, but the samanas were ascetics, not shamans.

It has replaced the older English language term 'witch doctor,' a term which unites the two stereotypical functions of the shaman: knowledge of magical and other lore, and the ability to cure a person and mend a situation.  However, at the present time this term is generally considered to be pejorative and anthropologically inaccurate.

June 17, 2018, 11:30 p.m. Greenwich Mean time ... somewhere several million miles in space from Earth directly in tangent to the Eastern United States ...

          She sighed, gathering Her strengths.
          Her heart blew exultation and the firmament ceased to exist for just an instant, long enough for it to open its space petals of non-time and nonexistence, but not so long as to be noticeable to any being, or molecule or even light quark that existed. She raised her arms one more time, for was it not time that She gave birth to the one thing, Imagination.
          Her breasts began to swell. She remembered First One and gave thanks for Grand Paw Flowers. Her endless, curving hands drew Her torso into their arcs, and Her chaotic, random, charmed quarks brewed photons to flourishes where Her eyes shone and gave birth.
          Her feet gleamed. Her thighs, curvaceous, alive, rose. She squeezed herself into an embrace. Her throat bent back like the whinny of a thousand ponies within a cliff-top mist, their weight less than one single electron, the approximate weight of a human soul, or thought.
          They’d said the Lord would come. The preachers, the shamans, the wise of the Earth. Had not their cries wandered the galaxies as ancient, decrepit sound waves from the Special Beautiful planet?
          They’d said the Lord would come.
          Her nipples, their aureoles unfolding like flower petals in a morning sun from whose fountains of light all the waters’ of the worlds’ births, flowed.
          She sighed, threw out Her arms, stood wide-legged and sang a high clear note.
          The googlehedron’s glow, this second Planck Epoch that has ever been, flashed a billion colors, most never seen before, except by those humans dropping from a scaffold with a hangman’s noose upon their neck, all cats, some dogs gone mad, each and every dolphin, as well as a few drunken artists who drank to remember again all of their endless tints and shades they could not remember when they were sober, yet these, deeply, decisively dreamt of only the night prior. . .
          Her note blew into the gulf, beyond which lay the Beautiful Special Planet.

Chapter nine
the lord, She flash



          The flash would be dismissed as an atmospheric oddity.
          One or two meteorologists paused in their television presentations, remembering love and affection they had destroyed by their own contemplation of phantasm they had always thought was joy and not manipulation, or the cold, livid bloodletting of false promises seductively made. These one or two meteorologists blinked, looked stupid for another blink, and then continued with their television presentations.
          They would not understand the sudden crying they would break into hours later as they slept, and as their loved ones had sweet dreams of flowers and fragrances that fluttered beneath their eyelids, ardent to be absorbed.
          Drunks, priests, politicians, saints, kind men, cruel men, great women, homeless men and women, prostitutes, pimps, tax collectors, torturers, gamblers at tables, drug addicts sitting alone in their banks or megacorporate offices--all these, and the many varieties and configurations that the human puzzle master, DNA, is  capable of producing in the test tube of whatever environment the object of its rough lovemaking had been subjected to--all, would have one lucid moment before returning to whatever madness had driven them to be where they were at that exact instant.
          Some madness is good.
          Some madness is bad.
          It lays its flesh upon us, leaving shiny places.
          The murderous rampages of chaotic light and dark matter we teach our children is the universe, but which they know is the place witches ride their broomsticks as clowns smile their winsome smiles of hidden and squirming thoughts, and, which we know in our nightmares and happiest dreams--where flowers lie in a patient repose we steal as music and art and excuses for romantic delusions--is the epiphany, simple tenderness.
Chapter ten
The Two Principles of the Irreducible Complexity

First Statement of the Principal of Irreducible Complexity
the power of light and imagination


          The first Planck Epoch, sometimes referred to as The Big Bang, a human theory of creation which gives the human mind comfort by interceding against the chaos of existing matter at war with existing dark matter on behalf of the human mind, so that it can function within the bounds of its own limitations, is the smallest possible segment of time. The first Planck Epoch is that instant during which Creation existed.  It has not existed since, nor did it exist before, but it was at that moment my mother was born.
          In other words, Creation was Her first baby thought.  Those terms, most humans shall be able to comprehend.
          This second one, as the first, the duration of the first instant of time, or 10 to the negative power of 47 of one second, hundreds of thousands of times less than an instant (the blink of an eye--an eternity compared to this) which even an illuminated nanosecond does not register across, was the smallest segment of time that has ever existed, the time it takes for light to pass over the surface of an electron.
          Forever after that first Planck Epoch, time would consist of segments immensely larger than that, or 10 to the negative power of 37, or only a few hundred millionths of one second, or, as it is sometimes called, quarks, the building blocks of light--there, six building blocks of which light is made. The most important one is called a charmed quark. This is the quark which electricity in the brain bonds with at the beginning of human life. It is the same as what is sometimes referred to as God, but that is a limited human view of God, and also, profoundly incomplete.
          You may not desire to receive a lecture on quantum mechanics, but it is good for you, so pay attention.  It is the place from which witches fly on their broomsticks, the place where a child's smile originates.  So pay attention.
          Due to the nature of light, its speed which cannot be exceeded, for matter traveling at the speed of light becomes so heavy that it begins to swallow light, and ceases to exist as an object consisting of light, and so is obliterated by becoming longer and longer, endless as threads billions of miles long, an object unable to keep up with itself. This is what happens when a black hole swallows something, and on the other side of a black hole--a type of worm hole, a short cut through space--other dimensions and universes exist. The threads eventually become dark matter, or, antimatter. Prior to the first Planck Epoch, light had no essence, because time was made of segments too small for it to broach.
          But then She was born.
          Put simply, when a star or solar system is born, or dies, it gives out radiation. This is like the trembling of a leaf which you cannot see, but which occurs when the moon presses down upon the ocean next to where the leaf is fortunate enough to exist in spite of tides and oceanic winds.
          When creation was born, it gave out imagination.
Just know that it was too light and winsome to land, so it passed away.
          Listen, listen....
          I have ridden a quark or two as it entered into a black hole. Believe me when I say you do not want to ride that pony.  Let me tell you, if you are planning on doing any kind of time travel you will have to become more like me and less like you, for humans, in spite of their elevated view of themselves, have only just begun the long journey that evolution has in store for them.
          So listen.
          Evolution as conceived by humans is a primitive way of saying that humans had to come from the source of one DNA molecule formed by magic as a bolt of lightening struck a pond full of fertile, yet lifeless scum. Otherwise, as the thinking goes, there must have been a God, and so, there must be now a God.  This frightens certain humans in charge of scientific discovery. They have had unpleasant experiences with other humans, often cruel, blood thirsty and rather stupid by human standards, claiming to know what God is. Both types of humans are correct, yet their journey into wisdom has barely begun.
          The human, Charles Darwin, understood this, and his discovery which he is known for is not what he truly discovered. Simply put, Darwin stated as his scientific thesis, not any principle of organic change brought on by environmental factors, but this instead:  there is no irreducible complexity, and if one is found, then there must be intelligence which created the universe, and specifically, mankind.
          Darwin stated that if an irreducible complexity was ever found, his theory would fall of its own weight, for nothing complex is not of smaller parts.
          Irreducible Complexity: the element of an object which cannot be made smaller or less complex is the beginning of the creation of that object, and if that element is made up of parts which cannot be broken down, then there must be a God. Humans figure that if they can’t figure it out, then only God can figure it out.
          In other words, if your sister or brother turns you on, they may not be your sister or brother. Put another way, if they are your brother and sister, then society and its taboos are an illusion. Put in yet another way, if society and its taboos are an illusion, then there is no protection for the weak against the strong which has been ordained as good and moral ... in other words, there is no God, if your sister or your brother turn you on, unless you yourself are insane.
          Man-made religion helps keep you sane.
          The belief in a specific one God, is irresistibly refutable, begging for mockery and disproof, and so Darwin, much to his dismay, and far from his personal preference, became the flag carrier for atheism.
          I apologize for this long digression, but it is good for you, so further, I, Jesus Gun say listen ... listen.
          They say Darwin died with a grin upon his face, for this he knew:

The entire purpose of evolution is to turn all organic matter back into the light from which it came. This light is often worshipped as the ultimate God. It is not, but only man in his final phase, obliterated into quarks. This is why humans continually destroy themselves, for they go where they are unable to function, into elemental regions, simple to higher, though less loved beings, but unreachable for humans. Yet humans are the most magnificent form of organic matter in the known universe, but that is not saying much, since organic matter is primitive and non-angelic.
There is another way of stating the principals of quantum mechanics and evolution:

Second Statement of the Principal of Irreducible Complexity
The Fable of The Madman, The Flower and The Wolf

          A wolf, a flower and a madman sat down together. They were hungry, but there was no food. The flower sat upon the head of the madman and told this story to the wolf, the first wolf as it moaned with its powerful head between its paws, blinking its green, intense eyes bent in sadness, for Wolf had not found the source of the song calling to it from beyond whatever mountain he had searched looking for the one who sang the song.  The song haunted the wolf, for he was incomplete by himself and he knew he must learn the song he heard.
          The flower and the madman looked at the wolf sadly, and the madman giggled, then nodded a signal for the flower to begin its tale.

          “You search for God, do you not?” crooned the flower, opening its multicolored and beautiful long myriad of wings which would become birds one day. The birds would spread seeds and the earth would become multifarious and teem.
          Wolf blinked his eyes slowly and sighed.
          “Listen, Wolf,” croaked the madman, his voice full of music and confusion and chaos. The madman’s happy eyes gleamed and danced dances which would someday become laws and customs and art and beauty . “Listen, Wolf, your lover listens also. Now stop your whining and listen to your true soul ...  Flower.”
          Wolf’s ears perked high and it opened one eye, became perfectly still. These two bothersome entities had been following him everywhere and he had decided that he would just put up with them. He rolled his eyes and listened...
          “We have watched you, Madman and I. Together we have followed upon the winds behind you in wonderment. We thought we were the only ones, and so followed you, for you are meant to be wisdom. You seek and follow the folds and mends of the earth from which you came. These we have learned from you, yet our wisdom and our souls are incomplete. You seek what we seek and this seeking is our joy.”
          The madman chuckled and nodded.
          “Yet,” continued Flower, “you remain unhappy and have learned nothing, though you know much.”
          The wolf closed its eyes, and a wolf tear dropped down its thick, black fur onto the ground.
          The madman shook his finger at Wolf. “... or so you think, brother Wolf, brother from the earth also. Do you not hear Her call to you now? Is it not from within you, and not from beyond the mountain? Do you not hear Her now. She is right before you.”
          The wolf opened his eyes and another, like himself, yet different and enchanting, his true self within the space between this magical being which had suddenly appeared and his wolf’s sleek body, stood before him and She suddenly, playfully reared, spun and ran into the trees at the foot of the mountain he had just been exploring.
          The madman chuckled and the flower shimmered with joy.  One of its petals fluttered to the ground, spun and flew away as a colorful new bird species.
          “Go,” crooned the flower.
          Wolf scrambled off as fast as his legs would carry him.
          A long, beseeching song raised from deep within the mountain gullies darkened the blood within the wolf. He loped faster and faster into the dark, green mountain forest.
          That night as the flower and the madman made love, they listened to the first french horn call of the Wolf, its melancholy yet joyful hues going aloft as the moon ascended, the song of two lovers together at last.

Chapter eleven
Apocalypse of Light



          Her googlehedron closed in on the killer rubble of the Great Asteroid Belt, an oddity of this particular solar system.
          They'd said the Lord would come.
          Her lips, they parted.
          And come She did.
          A few dead grimaced in their coffins, all the rest were still. Worms twirled, became organic tornadoes in mud pockets, some were torn to pieces, others not, and the neutral ground fed upon the pieces it always did. People, one here, one there, others someplace else, began to weep uncontrollably, and others proclaimed God visions, but it was a big planet compared to smaller ones, and no one in its numerous other places much noticed anything in particular.
        Each plane of the googlehedron bulged for an instant; the Beautiful, Special Planet, all somber space it traveled through waiting for its return inside this terror were urges and oddities, plasmatic dirges that swelled, glistened up and down along each of the l80 million plane edges for the duration of exactly one Planck Epoch. The second one that has ever been.
          Wolves knew this would be, why their frenchhorn-call haunts humans who make up legends to listen for their own souls through, worship their own thoughts.
          Humans and wolves had waited for the second Planck Epoch, but did not know math or science or mechanical vectors, nor did humans, though they were convinced what they called these things was not simple chaotic happenstance. So some worshipped the moon, and others the sun, and some the Wolf, for it has long been imagined that these had other names.
          But imagination had only just arrived.
          The asteroid belt grew closer to Her even as the new era began.








PART TWO

Chapter twelve
caveman future



Monkeyhead  Monkeyhead
I love you

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
boo hoo hoo

Monkeyhead Monkeyhead
set onto a table

....how your eyes do glimmer
your head, a pivot, pivots, slowly turns
back, forth, and forth and back

tick tock tick tock
how your eyes do glimmer


          He gazed, the hours ticked and the sun lowered and hammered its rays hard upon the ground. Once, he remembered, where the small town had been far, far below, there had been a shimmer of red lights, cops, ambulance lights, but he had not run away. He drooled and looked at the sky.
          It was the color of the bottom of a tin bucket, a simple implement that had been so useful.
          Many had gone mad when the hospitals were gone and the doctors were dead. Though later investigation showed that most doctors had been mad themselves, their ministrations were sorely missed.
          High tech dental work had given way to rot or impact injury during brawls or normal activities such as breaking into neighbors homes to get at water, any fluid as the hot sun beat its frantic, patient pace, and infections had drained living bodies of the will to scream, but they screamed, anyway, on and on.
          Contact lenses had ceased to be effective after a time and could not be replaced. The seeing blind had been helpless. Emphysema tics suffocated screaming blood, as cancer patients died quickly and more mercifully, although more intensely, than they might have otherwise. Broken bones and burned flesh had healed slowly and the screams became commonplace as those who died, died slowly and as those who ruled, ruled at their own convenience, playing what unkind games they so desired.
          There had been pleading and begging during those days of the new plenty.
          This he tried to remember.
          But when all this had run its course and disease had run its myriad course and, finally, when only those immune remained, it disappeared entirely from the face of the earth.  Reckoning was brought upon those who had ruled in unkind manner and had their own cruelty visited upon them with unimaginable cleverness.
          Increments. Bad behavior. Tin buckets. Blur.
Pikings, skinnings, roastings and families gagging their grief ridden vomit out onto the once civilized facade and its still plant covered soils ... blur blur
He rubbed his face against the cool maw of the cave mouth and tried to think of the tin bucket, but he was hungry, and could not remember anyway.
So he readied himself and began to dig the matting drool from his beard.
Blur. Buzz.
          The late day sky would soon begin its transformation.
          He could smell men. Somewhere far below in a forest were men.
          He mumbled, in some language or other.  As he dug the last bits of matting from his beard, he could not remember that this phenomenon used to be called dusk by masters.  He grinned.  He could remember some things, and he remembered how the masters cursed as their slaves gave thanks — unless a full-moon would bring more hours of work--as the orange blood glow upon a black horizon line creaked like a coffin lid.
          Day after day it would come down.
          Happiness in a slave brings foreboding, for where there is lightness of heart, even a momentary one, its speed can support other things such as heightened pain thresholds, suppression of appetite, all links in the chains masters adore. The clubs, and jack boots would fly, the herding back to sleep shacks noisy with shrieks and groans, and the black, short butts of military issue automatic rifles stroked hard.
          Blur. Buzz. Buzz
          Day after day it would come down.
          Blurzzz
          He moaned and coughed, wiped blood from his mouth, the remains of a small field thing he’d found huddled at the mountain base. It had already been dead and the jackal bugs — the bugs that clean and prevent cholera when human corpses rot and keep the maggots of flies at manageable numbers — these bugs had only just begun.  The hum of night would come crawling like a giant horde of dark colored spiders entwined in the blinding mass night was to him  now.           
          He would eat within its quiet swirling bowels.
          At the thought of this, his gums, tough as nails, ached beneath squirted saliva.  What broken pieces of tooth roots remained embedded in his jaw bones after he had pulled the rot from his screaming mouth, had settled down after months of agony, as the infections and sores subsided,  and had finally made themselves at home.
          He had no memory of the fevers, their heat snatching his dreams and sleep and memories and all but a few posted, ripe laws he had known when he was born. He grinned. He pondered the vacant place he used to inhabit.  The place where he had known how to speak.  The time before caves and mass death and pain.  He could not remember that it had ever been, yet he knew that it had been, the way he knew he was hungry, yet had not always been.
          The child had nursed him through it.
          He was still alive. His gums were tough as his long, long, finger and toe nails. These he often used to begin his long scuttle down the rock beast he festered through the daytime inside. When his belly was signaled by his pineal and pituitary glands and his blood of the need for food, he scuttled, a scavenger, ravenous.
          The child. A child, of sorts .... blur blur ... he shrieked and glared at his feet, he knew they were his feet because that is where he ended.
          He could not remember anyway.
          Crowing in howls of glee, he slapped his hand against his head over and over again, mocking his own emptiness, until he began to grow sleepy.
          He shook it off.
          During the sleep times inside the thing the maw was, its rock belly innards, his cave, where sunlight could not reach him, he’d sigh for the buzz to come and wind its loving arms around him. The child. A flicker.  He’d grown used to the twinge of momentary sadness it brought, but beyond many increments was the child, increments of the buzz of thousands and thousands of nights.
          Hunger.
          Blur.
          Buzz. Its loving clamber rustled far off, but came with the speed of retreating light.
          The moon's lugubrious, grinning beam waited for release onto a new tangent of the Earth as the Sun began to descend.
          He nodded and turned his face sideways and back, sideways and upward. It was almost time for the hunt. There were men, below, close by and their smell mingled with the smell of many men, yet there were two, two only ... these multiple-smell men he knew were cannibals.
          His eyes darkened and he crouched, began to shiver in anticipation, could feel the child restless beneath his skin again.
          Once they’d said the Lord had come, the they — he knew their kind — the they, but could not remember them. Yet a violin he would often hear deeply through shadows, far from where he’d hunt.  Its flight of sound, unlike a bird, would beckon to him, although he was uncertain what sound was, nor did he know if he could swallow enough meat to fill his belly.
          He sighed patiently and watched the sun’s slow and certain descent.
          The hair upon his back glistened brackish dots of gray light.
Chapter 13
apocalypse cats and the first hours of the future


“Culturally, there has always been a connection between the divine, the infernal and the world of the dead."

          Molly paused, sighed gratefully, folded herself languorously deep into her lamb’s wool blanket. And, oh, what a great, lovely couch under me, she thought. An excellent, excellent buy. She gleamed just thinking about it and about how the colors of her living room, the shapes and textures of all its inhabitants, were brusque, joyous, and were ardent, too, in being attentive to all of her visual needs.
          She continued her recording.

“When sleep is the place they meet there is nocturnal death, a special kind, for the heart has not forced the hyper adrenaline release found in fatal night heart attack, but the chemistry that fueled the life gone now is intact and the dying is a mystery, yet it always occurs the same way and so should be solvable and understandable, but this is a peaceful death originating in the right atrium of the heart, in every case, and no doctor understands its origin, methodology or the gentleness of the aftermath, chemically, for there has been no chaos, only dying — sudden, inexplicable dying, This dying has as its mark, its absolute brand, the face of the world of the dead: a look of abject terror, the gaping mouth, the remarkable signature of this death.”
She paused again, to shudder.
“But sometimes all this occurs, save death.”

          She put away the microphone and gazed at the old personnel file next to her. It had grown dog ears from her reading it over and over again, particularly the essay.
          “I must discuss this with Patty,” she whispered into her ‘blue dog’ coffee cup and its creamy brown life inside, as she flipped open the file with one hand and thumbed through it to William Dooda’s old essay, a free-association essay required of perspective death-row employees during the final selection process.
          “Oh, sure.”
          She had just recorded it’s first lines committed to memory.
          And she perused.
          On it went, its purpose two-fold: the essay was to determine if certain aspects of the applicant’s personality, considered necessary for psychologists at correction facilities, were present, for the psychologists must be capable of random, controlled illogical thought to make valid summaries of the conversations and monologues of condemned inmates asked to reminisce during final interviews, either under the influence of mild sedatives--in the event they were unwilling to reminisce to their soon-to-be-killers--or only under the influence of whichever demons or angels a heart beats to, knowing it will soon be snuffed out.  The other purpose was to determine at a date after hire if the applicant, as known, had changed in any way during his or her tenure. It was only a rough way to assess progress, or regression. Simply put, it was used to determine promotion or continuance of employment after the probationary period had lapsed.
          Molly smiled at the blue dog dancers, her comfy feet like in heaven ... new knee-high socks ... and read on

Shamans. These flutter, like in water for walking upon, vow promises of circadian rhythms to come, and hover in tribal myth-like firmament, same as medicine dogmas our modern bodies ride like ponies, but die from causes our culture demands torments be made of;  for these our shamans have blessed.

Skin walkers. These wander the patient fields where our houses never used to be, and so go through them, and always at night to search out tender, melancholy destinations which always are where we stand shielded from the night’s musculature and its eggs with fierce things inside.

We have the thickness of shoes, and cannot remember anything, anyway, although slaughtered land and patient, wild, wildflower seeds wait for pouncing winds to grasp them and lay them down where our cows shall have eaten us whole one day.

Bees sense this, are yellow hellions and the gleeful, highest scavengers of all.

          Molly sat the file down and leaned back into the soft depths of her comfy chair. “Oh sure.”
          She shifted her back into the soft, snugly pillows, arranged just so, and plied her feet together and deeper into giant, endless virginity her new socks. “There is nothing finer than new knee-high cotton athletic socks,” she sighed, staring at the file.
          “Oh nothing here is like William at all.” She continued reading.

Wolves know things we used to be that we shall not remember to be again before our cows eat us whole, except for some of you who do and have, and so the wolves hang around and walk with discernment near all humans, for they cannot determine which to take first, before all the rest.

            She sat up with a start, alarmed.
          “No. This is not William’s.” Molly scowled and flipped the page. “I must discuss this with Patty. Oh sure.”

Morticians. These know the facile innocence of children, its sham. Their trade brings them up close. Some know why souls have fled, yet know that only then does the worm consider you worth its while. What terror had kept the worm at bay, much to your relief? Morticians have a low suicide rate, as though close proximity to corpses reveals to them the utter redundancy of self-murder. Others simply pray there is no God. None ever look for another trade.

A lovely thing it is to be, indeed, born a natural mortician.

They are happy, tender and joyless. Some of them never die. Those that do, leave no wake in their absence.

          “No.” Molly shook her head. She stared at the ceiling. “This is not William.”
          He worked as a technician in a mortuary at one time, before attending college, but this is not William’s, she mused, yet the surveillance cameras in the personnel section had clearly shown that Dr. William Dooda had composed the paper during the hour of allotted time, shortly before he was hired three years prior.
          “Something has been added to him, somehow.”
          Molly scowled and flipped the page. “Patty will find this interesting. Oh sure.”
          On it went.

Lunatics. Why are they? Have they simply grasped the primal chaos of randomness in a way that distinguishes them from the inelegant, roughshod simplicity of utter madness?

Failure to yawn the yawn.

One night you may be awakened by the need to breathe. You do not understand if you have never awakened unable to yawn the yawn, the yawn that demands yawning of you the way the birth of a sneeze insists you were born with a nose, and that now, right very now, is the time for you to use it.

When you can’t yawn the yawn, you can’t actually get enough air to maintain homeostasis. Entropy begins and the galaxies, their blankets of firmament and elemental things, turn their attention to you and demand you perform so they can get on with their business of universal plasmatic revolution. But if you don’t have a nose, or are a quadriplegic unable to muster even involuntary muscles....

Molly picked up the microphone and read out loud so that she could think more thoroughly about what William Dooda had written.  She’d always understood whatever she read out loud.  The words startled her because the amount of time it should have taken for him to write this amount of prose would have been far greater than the amount of time allotted.

“This is often referred to as a panic attack. You perceive your skin does not protect you from the outside things, but, instead keeps you inside, trapped there like a slug on a hook over water where snapping fish, hungry ones, wait for you. Your muscles beneath are revealed to you for what they are: insulation, big hands holding you further inside. You begin, piece of skin by piece of skin, to determine that being skinned alive would get the clogged air filters open again. This, the musculature of night, begins to lay eggs with fierce things inside. These fierce things are the primal knowledge of chaos. That primal knowledge is simple horror.”

“You try to grasp the string of instants by which you never came to be exquisite. But you cannot fight your way out. You seek a way to do it.”
She cleared her throat and sipped coffee for a moment before continuing.

“How much tissue should be removed?  You begin to estimate and become feverish inside, begin to walk though your house. All colors dim. Music that you remember grows distinctly tone deaf. Thoughts loose their hold upon you and beyond these you learn for the first time that there is no firmament that will allow you to pilot through it, no skin, no service, unless you bring it close up to your face like a satin coffin lining. Then the struggle begins, for you shall bring the firmament close in order to break through into any cool, long draught of air that might lie behind: deep, pointless inhalation of useless drabness drives home bliss and desperation cloying together like matted blood and the simple facts.”

“These simple facts are: god is not benign or caring in any recognizably predictable or poignant way, for there is hell, and either might offer relief, yet both are remorselessly unavailable.”

“The only release from this realization is suicide as the only way out of the bag. The horror of it is that you are the bag within the bag.”

She was amazed at the length of the essay, its neatly, painstaking  exactness, straight lines, a consistent use of all the letters and their swirls.  William should have had a numb hand from writing with such speed and accuracy.
          “It is in William Dooda’s handwriting, though.”
            Molly shifted her weight.
          “Why would he memorize something this long. We throw the essay at them as a surprise. They don’t know its coming.”
          She continued reading, bewildered at how William could have written this in such a short period of time and in such an unhurried, almost maniacally perfect script.

“A panic attack does not occur in a suicidal person, for such a person need not any longer suffer realization of the firmament in its chaotic, linear randomness. A panic attack occurs in a person who does not want to die, but suspects that is the only possibility of escape from the confines of the bag within, that being the body of the soul itself. Upon realization that the body itself is closing in and has the effect of suffocating you just as surely as a fish drowns in the ocean of air, you so yearn for more and more each second, the more you realize for the first time that it is just beyond your skin. You begin to hate this obstacle, immovable object, and your need, irresistible force — you begin to hate that, too.”

          “Oh, sure.” Molly stared into the ‘blue dog’ cup. “Oh, sure.”  She began to read out loud again.

The desire for life remains stronger than the desire for relief, or suicide happens, or to be more accurate, suicide does not happen; it is something you do to yourself: not the suicide cancer inspires in its throbbing poetry along firing nerve synapses a physical brain can no longer bear or receive, yet flowing freely not to be denied.  Nor  is it that of a bereaved lover who has, over a number of years, made the fatal error of performing alchemy upon the flesh and bones of a dearly departed loved one. These suicides might actually bring some sort of relief by merely being an option. Yet when no other exchange is available other than that of one unbearable dismay for another, madness is grown in the brain to provide a release, such as catatonia, or its sweet, little sister, amnesia.

Manic depressives will happily tell you all about how this works when they come out of their catatonia, if they come out, and pass from that into their manic phase where all is well, exceedingly, exceedingly well, if not downright alarmingly well. That’s when they talk their heads off. Later, when brain chemistry can no longer sustain this machine gun firing of synapses, the depressive phase takes over, and well, that’s when they may have discovered they cannot yawn, and what’s more, may have discovered anew, and they discover anew over and over and are completely incapable of tearing this thought away, that they cannot yawn.

There is a thing within my skin I cannot divulge. It is a child, a red and shiny monster which I know and have found to be controllable, in a curious way. It is not unlike the yawn that cannot be yawned.

This we cannot treat with drugs, although we do. We cannot stave this realization, or fantasy, or whatever clinical term, or non clinical term, we apply to it. This need for air, overrides everything. The brain will not allow its own obliteration through suffocation anymore than it will allow the manic phase of depression to continue without a response such as catatonia.

Yawn denial — failure to yawn the yawn is utter desolation. Laugh, you, laugh, until the lustre comes for you. This is how the psyche becomes a shape shifter — to avoid death.

My child within my skin has told me so.

          “No, something is terribly wrong.” Its lustre. The speed with which it must have been written. Molly leaned upright and set the blue dog cup down. It clinked. She was suddenly startled as she stared out the window.
          A sudden flash covered the entire sky, but she missed its nanosecond of duration, although its brilliance would have been subliminally noted by that portion of her brain she used to store unashamed fantasies inside. It would have appeared crimson-yellow to her, although to the neighbor’s dog huddled inside its heated potty house, it appeared green-red.
          The dog whined. It curled up more tightly and was content in its own body warmth. The cat that glared mirth at the dog from inside the neighbor’s kitchen window, noted a pink nanosecond had blown across the sky. The cat blinked and glared more mirthful hatred at the dog, for it is well known that all cats hate the planet earth, for it is said that they have their own and are stranded here, and so its demise is of no interest to any cat that ever lived, for cats are not linear thinkers, as are dogs, the race of which this particular cat hated with a trueness born of sheer depth.  The cat hated no other thing in creation, none, more than whatever dog it beheld, or any dog, and this dog this cat beheld was hated, purely, truly and marvelously hated. The cat glanced up into the snow night sky, blinked, tilted its head in surprise, and, for the first time in its existence, mourned.
          Molly continued gazing outside as the flash slowly dimmed. She glanced at the file, and a thought occurred to her.
          “Oh, I missed that, first time around.”
          She picked up the file and held it in front of her....'psyche becomes shape shifter to avoid death.’
          Then, for the first time, she noticed the length of the essay exceeded by a factor of at least ten any essay that had ever been written in an employment interview that she had ever seen.  She knew that was not possible, but it was right in front of her.  She wondered why no one had noticed its length, and hoped that the video camera that filmed all activity during employment exams was still available with the tape.
            “Odd.” No sense of rush here, she thought. “Oh sure, I missed that, too.” The plodding, easy all-day sense of it. She rotated her head on her neck, listened to the tiny scrunching noises this caused directly beneath her head. Relaxation spread into her shoulders. “God.”
Time for some music. “Oh sure.”
          She closed her eyes. “Time for Juliet Roy Rogers.”
          Molly loved violin music; in fact, she loved all strings as well as all woodwinds. Wood received human breath and the bow in a special way she could not understand but truly loved. She pressed the remote control and waited for the notes of her very favorite musician, Juliet Roy Rogers. Patty had introduced her to the new sensation, apparently considered to be some sort of quick study genius.
          Molly caressed the blue dog cup with her right hand and let the file bend onto her lap as Juliet Roy Rogers  sent a melancholy glow into the air. Molly sighed, and thought to herself,  I must get Patty to see if there is still a copy of the video we have of Dr. Dooda writing this essay.
          Video tapes involving interactions with prisoners were saved for five years, usually.  Tapes of interactions with potential employees were something else altogether. She just didn’t know, but if a tape of William writing his essay could be found — and it would exist entirely by oversight, as most such tapes were simply copied over as soon as it was convenient to do so — she was certain the results would be interesting.
          She waited for the music of Juliet Roy Rogers to completely overcome what nervous energy Dr. Dooda’s essay had created in her.
          “Oh, sure.” She sipped more coffee. “Oh, sure.”
          After awhile, Molly read on, but allowed the wind and rain of Juliet Roy Rogers to impel her mind through the sentences. She had always read to music, and especially this kind of music, to ease compilations of data into her unwilling but experienced brain, allowing these notes before her, about William Dooda, which seemed to her to want to find their ways beyond the walls of her apartment and plow deeply into the snow, the way Captain Nemo’s ship-ramming sub Nautilus had submerged full-tilt speed, bright, yellow windows of light turning green as the deep night sea took it like a lover on its way to mayhem and murder and glorious destinies...
          “Oh, sure.  Oh, sure,” she mumbled, then slurped from the blue dog cup. Her mind was wandering, and she was glad that it was. She closed her eyes and followed Juliet Roy Rogers into a lovely bright, note-night of melancholy, spider-webbed emeralds.
          Her fingers loosed their hold on the folder’s manila skin like stems pulling away from shade, gradually, and into new light, for she had read the last of the essay many times, now, but Juliet Roy Rogers was, well, quite indeed, endlessly endless collections of all exquisite things like childbirth, yet painless, and as beseeching.
          She sat up suddenly. She had to finish so she could relax with more of the music. She grabbed the file and held it up to her face with determination.  She read on, unaware, as most humans, of a growing tumult outside her window beneath and above the snow as the smallest insect shuddered and remained still within defensive postures, and cats, dogs, lions in jungles, and their subjects, spun and lay still, trembling. Even raptors and vultures descended to huddle together, many for the first time in their existence.

“Doctors do not understand the etiology of this disorder. That’s why they don’t talk about it or consider it to be anything but the raving of lunatics, when they come across it, which it indeed does become, although the raving itself is nothing more nor less than reporting of real data.”

“Until we understand the difference between real data and what is in our own limited, educated brains, we shall not find cures.”

“Lunatics are illusions. Its the rest of us who are mad. We don’t know that, though, which is what makes us mad, you see, or that we are frightfully happy, so, like trees changing color, we do not have realization of the exact moment we became mad, not the clear-as-a-bell way those we label ‘disturbed’ or ‘insane’ know it. Its the not knowing that makes us sane. We can cure no thing.”

“We only become melancholy and say existentialist things to ourselves, hoping we didn’t really say those things to ourselves, but believing that we have no other choice than to have some sort of life of the mind, paltry and depressing as it becomes. We only know that we aren’t insane and we do not feel frightfully happy, though we live off the residue of that which we ignore.”

“But, mad we are, nonetheless. We stave off entropy that way, we think, but only enhance its continuum, its steady, swaggering pace. Like the bow of a titanic vessel upon a smooth, windless sea, it plows the essence of our time away and the droplets within evaporate and so time just becomes less, less, less.”

“The child within my skin, the red, shiny monstrous child, tells me so.”

“We do not understand that entropy IS homeostasis.”

Molly stopped reading it out loud.  Her voice was becoming horse.

Dream states often follow us up through our first waking moments. They cling to our brains and follow, intrude into our sleepy, new day consciousness for a moment or two when they do this. For a moment or two they cloak us, and we do not know the difference between what we have dreamt and what we have become, namely, just us again.

We do not reveal these moments to others, not fully, but in giggling dismay, the better to make light of some things, eh, for we know that were these mysterious and rare waking moments to extend and overwhelm us, and become our actual awareness, that we would be enlightened or will have become schizophrenics, for the chemistry of the brain once altered through this clash with awakening within receding dream states, need not necessarily follow us to where we had usually gone.

To awaken mad, and knowing that we have, in this there is a moment of decision to go there, or home again. Listen, listen. These decisions are final.

So we flat line. Homeostasis is wise, yes?

That’s why I would make a very good interviewer of the condemned.

signed,

William Dooda

          “Oh, sure,” she breathed a tiny, sort-of, snore. “We may have to let him go.”
          The snowflake blanket beyond the tall, slender panes of glass her blue dog cup was not dissimilar to--but for pigments and firing of kilns--and her drooped eyelashes which flickered momentarily at,  wavered in a quick little gust of wind, jiggled and made lines into itself as though a little snow god played chase games with brethren beneath its moon-sparkle skin.
          Cat streaked across it towards distant trees, and beyond.
          Dog began to howl with a broken heart, for all dogs love their true masters.



Chapter 14
caveman future, cannibals



          Park and Dave were going to die.
          Deep within the trees, as far from the tree line as they could safely be without losing their way, they, these two cannibals, made camp.  As they worked, each to his own appointed task, each would occasionally glance out and up at the tall base of the young, rock mountainside way off in the distance, and with the well-honed instincts of cannibal hunters, were uneasy, but shrugged this off as melancholy, for had they not passed this way before, and were they not fearless?
          Hunger-maddened wolves would slink away when these two passed near a den--even an alpha male.  They would often snatch the cubs and roast them as squirming morsels.
          One stood straight, a hand upon a well-honed machete blade, the other hand resting upon the butt plate of his rifle, back-slung to his shoulder, and listened, chin bobbing to the remembered sounds of recent kills, sniffed the air, listened some more. One yellow tooth bore the glisten of mucus born of thirst.
          The other stood straight, eyes glinting , nostrils flaring, wooden sticks in his hands.
          A late afternoon breeze, blowing from deep within the forest, crested, upswept into thermals, flowing  air river into a swirling hover as its currents met with the uplift of land where the mountain foothills began their sharp ascent. A clear, high note, the vocal cords it sprung from, purely human but for the intensity of what powered them, blew from a maw in the mountainside, was caught, disrupted upwards from its focus down into the forest and was dispersed into the pink noise of all things.
          Each, the other, turned away, continued gathering firewood, attending to their tasks. They had heard of the great yellow thing with pink slits for eyes which roamed these forests, as well as other stories of a shiny and bright red monster, savage beyond imagination and forebodingly hungry.  They had heard of the strange violin music and of a child so tender and sweet that even the yellow thing with pink eyes for slits and the brightly shiny red monster mewed at its feet like kittens, yet this one was most feared by these men. They felt chills.
          Each, these cannibals, shivered with private terror, yet, were they not also fierce and savage? They asked themselves. Human finger bones clacked in their hair. Claws of mountain lions wreathed their necks. Were they not men?
          Park and Dave were going to die.









PART THREE

Chapter fifteen
Billy the Lobster



            Sometimes Stevie felt like he was pregnant.  When he felt like he was pregnant, his skin sort of oozed upon him and around him like he was stuck inside the skin of a big, fat worm.  That’s how he knew that when the worm fist came into the place his heart was,  his friend was coming to take care of him and protect him.
          His friend was red and shiny.  He had even given his friend a name. 
          It was red and shiny.  It clacked along the sidewalk behind him wherever he went.  Little Stevie Dooda loved his pet lobster.  Yes, he did.
          clickityclickityclickityclak
          “Donkeyboy.”
          Most mornings, the belt buckle, flicking hard and fast from the end of Dad Boss Dooda’s alligator-hide belt whirred past his face. If Stevie didn’t jump out of the way in time, its tongue would rasp a white-laced blue streak across the tip of his nose. Stevie’s eyes would water for the rest of the day.
        “Donkeyboy.”
          Usually, Stevie managed to duck out of the way before the tongue got to where his nose was, because he’d had lots of practice. So Dad Boss Dooda would just stand there gazing at him from half way across Stevie’s bedroom, bouncing the buckle against the wood floor over and over again.
          clunkaclunk
          “Donkeyboy.” This, whispered.
          clunkaclunk
  He’d smirk because Stevie’s eyes would dart around the room.  Then he’d jerk his shoulder forward just a hair, feigning another snake-flick at Stevie just to make him flinch. Usually that worked pretty well, and Dad Boss Dooda would giggle for awhile. He had a high-pitched giggle that bounced around the bedroom like a string of wet firecrackers that had somehow managed to go off. He’d wrap the belt slowly around one of his fists, never taking his eyes off Stevie. Then he’d walk over and give Stevie a punch in the chest, just hard enough to make him cough a little bit and take a step back to keep his balance. Dad Boss Dooda would stand there for a couple of seconds and giggle again.
“Donkeyboy.”
          One day the wormfist came.  clunkclunk. 
          Stevie always thought that was the day Billy got born, sort of like Christmas or something, except that it was different, because Stevie had stopped believing in God a couple of hundred chest slugs ago.
          clunkclunk
          When Stevie’s chest did that, it felt like a gob of worms wrapped around a piece of metal inside him had tightened up all together at once, like the fingers of a wet fist trying to pull whatever was behind it straight up into his head.
          clunkclunk.
          Dad Boss Dooda would purse his lips and make a soft, wet kissing sound real close to Stevie’s face...       
          clunkclunk...
          ...and push Stevie’s glasses back up to the top of his nose, real slow.
          clunkclunk.
          Stevie knew that he better stand straight up at attention when Dad Boss Dooda did that or he’d wind up dodging the alligator-snake a couple of more times.
          Finally, Dad Boss Dooda would saunter out of the room He’d pull the door closed very, very slowly. After what would always seem like a couple of billion centuries to Stevie, because he had to stay standing straight no matter how much his nose was stinging from the alligator-snake tongue, the bedroom door would click shut.
          clunkclunk.
          The wormfist would swirl around in his chest for a long time after that.
          One time, out in the park across from school where all the kids took their lunch hour, a big, ugly kid had stomped on one of Stevie’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, right in front of everybody. That kid had stood over him, making kissing sounds at him before sauntering away, while all the other kids laughed at Stevie. The wormfist got so big that it began to crush his lungs and heart and turn his chest cavity into a bag of slime. He would have started screaming, except for the fact that the worms had worked up so much foam it started filling his mouth.
          That’s when he met Billy.

          He didn’t actually go and get Billy at an ocean-pet store, or anything like that. Billy just sort of showed up in the bushes next to where the squashed sandwich already had ants swarming all over it. Billy must have been sitting there close by, watching the whole thing. By the way that Billy had waved his big, red, ham hock claws around at Stevie that day, it was obvious how mad the whole thing had made Billy, and how sympathetic he was to Stevie.  Billy reared up on his hind end and clicked his claws--both of them, one at a time--at the kid, then he clicked them one time, together, at Stevie.
          That hadn’t scared Stevie; the click sounded pretty friendly. The worm fist went away.
          Then Billy scuttled, sort of catty wumpus, which was how lobsters walked according to the encyclopedia that Stevie had looked up ‘LOBSTER’ in that night, over to where Stevie was sitting in the grass. Billy reared up and rubbed against his shoulder, pushing his lobster body up and down while he balanced on the end of his tail section.
          Billy was dancing under water.  It was obvious.
          Stevie knew that things looked like that under water, because he could remember sitting in the bathtub when he was real little, and Dad Boss Dooda had shoved his head down through the foam clouds of bubbles on top of the bubble-bath water...way deep down until Stevie’s nose was smashed flat against the metal drain stopper. Dad Boss Dooda was mad because Stevie had gone to the bathroom under the bubbles. When Stevie started to swallow foam and water, he opened up one of his eyes. He couldn’t see very much because the water stung his eye so much, but a coil of his hair sort of floated past his face in slow motion. It was bobbing up and down from Dad Boss Dooda wrenching his neck so hard. Stevie had tried to pull his head up out of the pissy foam-water by grabbing the water faucet that the back of his head kept digging into every time that Dad Boss wrenched him up a couple of inches before slamming his nose back down against the water drain.
          He pulled and pulled and pulled...foam down his throat--foam lungs, foam lungs.
          When Dad Boss Dooda finally yanked him back up into the air, he’d made a sound that Dad Boss Dooda had giggled and giggled at. After that night, Dad Boss Dooda always called him donkeyboy. So when Billy started dancing that day in the park, Stevie knew right away that he was doing an ocean dance.
          And he was in love.

          That was the day the worm fist died.
          Stevie loved the ocean dance. Billy showed it to him on that very first day in the park.  Billy’s legs and accordian-like torso bobbed up and down in slow motion. The first time Stevie had seen Billy do that, the wormfist drilled itself back into his chest just for an instant, but then it went away, because, all of a sudden, his neck got all hot and his scalp got goose bumps all over it.  Watching Billy do his ocean dance, Stevie had realized that Billy wanted to grab the bully kid’s hair with one of those big, red hamhock claws and pluck his head right off the top of his shoulders so fast that his spine would come out along behind his head. Stevie knew that Billy would wave the whole thing around in the air for all the laughing kids to see and that Billy would toss it up like a toy into one of the big elm trees that grew like weeds all through the park. The kid’s head would lodge inside the fork of a couple of big branches way up high, and everybody would see the spine dangle in the breeze for a long time.
          The elm trees all died eventually. They got replaced by other types of trees that weren’t as pretty, but that was okay because they had their own killers, too.
          Anyhow, that’s when Stevie knew that Billy was reading his mind, because right away Billy started purring, not like a cat, or anything like that, but more like a big tomcat and an even bigger snake curled up together in the hot sun. Billy just kept brushing up against Stevie during the ocean dance, his thick, stumpy, serrated hind end curling up and swiveling back and forth. Billy’s claws waving back and forth in the air always reminded Stevie of a cheerleader waving pompoms after a touchdown.
          Stevie began to bob and weave right along with his new friend that day.
          The bully had started running and was only fifty feet away by the time that Stevie and Billy had become fast friends. Stevie let Billy go ahead and eat the squashed sandwich, ants and all. Stevie felt so good that he wasn’t even hungry for the rest of the day...not one bit.
          At first Stevie was surprised that Billy would eat ants, but later on, probably because there wasn’t an ocean anywhere nearby, Billy started digging up grubs in the lilac bushes on their way to school in the morning.  Later on in the day, Stevie liked to take him out in the garage where there were plenty of spiders and roaches for Billy when he was real hungry.  Lots of times Stevie wouldn’t even care if Billy ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that Dad Boss Dooda had always made him take to school for lunch.  As long as Billy didn’t go hungry, that was good enough for Stevie.
          Stevie thought it was pretty stupid of Dad Boss never to notice the fact that Billy was getting bigger and bigger everyday.  Billy usually sat in the corner of Stevie’s bedroom closest to the door.  So it was really stupid of Dad Boss Dooda not to notice how Billy would wave his long, thin red antennae slowly back and forth and scoot himself around in a little semicircle, practically spinning like a top on his accordion tail, every time Dad Boss Dooda walked into Stevie’s room.
          Billy would start spinning and turn dark purple, which meant--at least according to the encyclopedia--that he was upset.  He’d spin around until one of the corner walls would stop him, then he’d pivot back the other way until he clunked up against the other wall, too...back and forth, back and forth. Billy would keep on doing that until Dad Boss Dooda was gone. Dad Boss Dooda never seemed to notice.
          Stevie knew that someday Billy would be too big for Dad Boss Dooda to ignore, then Dad Boss would have to stop flicking the alligator-snake at him. After he met Billy, the wormfist didn’t squirm inside his chest when Dad Boss Dooda was in his bedroom, no matter what Dad Boss Dooda did. Someday Dad Boss Dooda would see how beautiful Billy was, and what a good friend he was -- then things would be different. Stevie was sure of it.
          One day, Stevie realized that he’d been wrong. On that day, Dad Boss Dooda should have noticed that things had changed. The first thing that Dad Boss Dooda hadn’t noticed was that when he lashed the alligator-snake at Stevie, the foam balls sitting at the corners of Dad Boss’s Dooda’s mouth were a lot bigger than usual and should have made him want to wipe them away.  They looked real heavy.  Stevie started to smirk. He couldn’t help it.  He could just feel his face crinkling into a smirk.  Stevie thought for a second that Dad Boss Dooda would start whapping him with the belt buckle instead of giving him a chance to dodge it.  That’s what he’d done one time when Stevie had smiled at him for no reason from across the dinner table.  All of a sudden, Billy forgot that he was on a leash and started to lunge at Dad Boss Dooda even before Dad Boss Dooda had let the belt unravel down to the wood floor. Stevie had jerked back on the leash just in the nick of time.
          Dad Boss Dooda grinned.  Donkeyboy was already starting to flinch before he’d even pretended to take a swipe at him. “Eeaaww,” he’d whispered, shaking his head, enjoying the feel of the buckle dangling on the end of the cowhide leather. “You didn’t get those big, fucking, ugly flap-ears and those little monkey eyes from your mom.” He yanked his arm up so that the belt would lash out and snap the kid all of a sudden.               
          “Or me.” Missed.
          “She was...” He took careful aim. The tongue lashed. Got 'im.  “...beautiful.”
          The tongue popped Stevie’s nose.
          Billy turned pure black. Billy looked like a huge hornet-fish of some kind rearing up out of one of those radiation-poisoned oceans on a late monster movie. That was the second thing that Dad Boss Dooda hadn’t noticed...how utterly beautiful Billy had become. The third thing that Dad Boss Dooda hadn’t noticed was that right then Billy started to do the ocean dance while Dad Boss Dooda was still in the room. The fourth thing that Dad Boss Dooda hadn’t noticed was that Billy had started growling--not a dog’s growl, or anything like that, but more like, well, more like a King Cobra.
          And those are really big snakes.
          Dad Boss Dooda chuckled to himself as he walked out of the room.
          What surprised Stevie more than anything else, as he held his nose that  last morning of Dad Boss Dooda’s life, is that Dad Boss Dooda hadn’t realized that Billy had tripled in size from the time that Dad Boss entered the room to the time he left.
          The instant the door clicked shut, Billy scuttled across the floor before Stevie could do anything to stop him.  Not only had Billy gotten a lot bigger, but he was a lot faster and stronger, too.  Billy reared up on his tail section and threw himself against the door before the door knob stopped its clockwise back turn, and began trying to open it by clamping both of his claws around it and working them back and forth across it.
          His antennae were flat down his back.  His claws were pulsating.  Billy was having a bad day.
          Stevie had just hugged Billy around his hard accordion torso where his pincer arms jutted out. Stevie didn’t even have to kneel down to do it. That’s how big Billy was by then.
          “It’s okay,” he whispered, nose stinging, eyes watering.  “It’s okay. I know you love me, Billy.  He can’t help it.  He was ok before mom died, I think.”  Billy stopped growling, and started to purr again while Stevie managed to get a new leash around his neck.
          “Oh, Billy. Oh. Billy.”
          Stevie stood up after he’d gotten the new leash on Billy and noticed that Billy wasn’t changing back to a lighter color like he always did after Dad Boss left the room. Just as Stevie stepped back from Billy, Billy lunged at the doorknob and began banging on it over and over again with one of his big, black hamhock claws.
          A loud knock.
          A lilting, sweet voice.
          “Donkeyboy.”
          Stevie held onto Billy tight.
          “I can come back inside, if you don’t cut that out and keep your temper in check, sweetie eeeaaww.”
          “Please,” Stevie had whispered to Billy, hugging him again, hoping that Billy would keep on purring and not start growling again.  Dad Boss Dooda would probably notice that the second time around.  Then he’d come back into the room.
          “Eeaaww, eeaaww, eeaaww.”
          “No, please.”  Billy began to rear up and Stevie started to wrestle him back down away from the doorknob.
          “Know what, donkeyboy?”
          “No sir. Please, no sir.”
          “That’s better donkeyboy.”
          Stevie knelt beside Billy on the bedroom floor for a long time after that, holding him down although Billy didn’t seem to want to fight against Stevie too hard.  Stevie knew that Billy could easily throw him off if he really wanted to. He just knelt there hugging Billy as hard as he could, listening to Billy purr, telling Billy how much he loved him and that everything would be alright, until he heard Dad Boss Dooda go out the front door of the house for the day.
          Stevie stood up as Billy pushed up against his pant leg and started dancing again for the second time that morning, pushing himself up and down on his tail section. Stevie thought the windows would start to rattle.  Dad Boss Dooda would get a call at work from the neighbors and come home. He’d stick his head through the door the way he always did whenever Stevie tried to listen to his portable radio late at night under the covers.
          Dad Boss Dooda got him a radio for Christmas once, but as soon as Stevie had ripped open the box, Dad Boss Dooda busted the headphones up by twisting them into a crackling, splintered, plastic knot right in front of Stevie’s face so that donkeyboy would know that donkeyboy wasn’t supposed to listen to music or tapes or any crap like that late at night. If Stevie forgot and listened to it anyway, Dad Boss Dooda would stick his head in the door, and look around until Stevie turned the radio off. Then Dad Boss Dooda would smile, the hallway light behind him making a shadow out of his face, except that each little blob of shimmering foam sitting in the corners of his mouth would reflect some of the indirect light like a pair of eyes staring out of a garden late at night.
          Then the voice, sweet, lilting, would come from the hallway.
          “Good night, donkeyboy.”
          Now, while Billy was purring and dancing with Stevie that morning, the idea had occurred to Stevie that he’d probably have to hit Dad Boss Dooda there pretty darn hard with a sledge hammer when Dad Boss Dooda was asleep to knock those foam balls out of the corners of Dad Boss Dooda’s mouth to get them back inside behind his teeth where they belonged. All of a sudden Billy had reared away from Stevie and swung one of his big, black claws at the doorknob.
          It shattered.
The entire locking mechanism tore out of the expensive oak door and landed on the hallway rug outside Stevie’s bedroom. It looked like a brass dumbbell with one of its bulb ends smashed flatter than a pancake right up against the other.  Stevie stared at the jagged hole where the doorknob used to sit inside the door paneling.  The splintered wood hanging down across the hole, where the lock used to be, smelled good.  Stevie could see where blood was dripping down the door, streaking the white paint dark red.
          “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.”  He swallowed hard and looked back at Billy swaying behind him purring and purring.  Stevie shrugged.  Billy didn’t seem to be hurt.  He just wanted to dance.
          Stevie and Billy danced real well together.  Billy had taught Stevie how to dance just exactly the way lobsters deep in the ocean dance.  Sometimes, Billy would lean back like a limbo dancer and touch his antennae to the ground behind him. Then he’d flop forward real quick, flicking his tail-section in the air so that it looked like a cross between a scorpion’s stinger and a pill bug trying to wake up in the morning.  He’d wave his claws in circles and clack them together like maracas.
          He’d execute a slow pirouette that Stevie knew lobsters weren’t supposed to be able to do even deep in the ocean where they were really graceful.
          That was okay with Stevie.
          His hair tingled like crazy when Billy did those fancy tricks. He worked real hard to be just like Billy.
          Stevie would try to mimic Billy’s movements as best he could.  He got pretty good at it after awhile.  When he did it perfectly, Billy would really bang those claws of his together, hard and fast, and Stevie’s neck would get hot while his scalp tingled and tingled.  He could just see his hair catching on fire.
          “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.”
          When the dance was finally over, and it was time to go to school, Stevie stuck his hand inside the hole in the door to open it.  The door fell off its hinges because the screws that held it to the jamb were stripped out their holes and had been just sitting inside the door jamb wood waiting for somebody to try and swing the door open.
          “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.”
          Stevie hoped that they wouldn’t run into the Scrugg brothers on the way to school that morning. It was getting late, and he was already in enough trouble. The Scrugg brothers were a couple of hoods that liked to hang around the edge of the park that Stevie had to go through to get to school.
          Stevie knew that Billy would have to stop and rest at least a couple of times on the way to the school.  Lobsters were better suited for scuttling along the ocean floor than they were for walking along sidewalks.  In the ocean, Billy would be light and buoyant, even as big as he was now, but on land lobsters were clumsy and catty wumpus, a pile of lopsided, clicking sticks, because of the the sheer weight of their huge claws.  Stevie knew that on the way to school Billy would get even more tired more often than usual because he was so big now. He hoped the Scrugg brothers would be gone by the time that he and Billy got to the edge of the park. Stevie had never been late to school before, but now he was hoping that he would be really, really late for once.  He didn't want Billy getting upset all over again.
          Billy was having a bad day.
          “Hey. geezer eyes,”  Buster Scrugg's voice, cracking in the middle of the sentence, would lash Stevie in the face from a block away.  Buster, the bigger and older of the two Scruggs, liked to show off for Pete Scrugg who was also big, at least as far as Stevie was concerned.
        Pete Scrugg would lean with his hip jutted out, against one of the huge elm trees that lined the edge of the park, and smirk though the long, fat streak of smoke squirting off the end of the cigarette that was always dangling out of his mouth and making his eyes red.  He’d watch while Buster shoved smaller kids off of the sidewalk after he knocked their books out of their arms.
        “Hey geezer eyes,” Buster would shout whenever one of them spotted Stevie in the morning. He’d saunter toward Stevie, egged on by Pete who had a wet firecracker giggle just like Dad Boss Dooda did.
          “Hey, c’mon over here, ya little weenie.”
          That’s the way it would go, and Buster would shake his head back and forth for a while in exaggerated disdain as Stevie would walk by pushing his heavy bifocals back up onto his nose.
          If the Scruggs were too busy picking on somebody else to notice Stevie, he could get by them.  It was late, though, and the streets were deserted.  All the other kids had already made it to school, and Stevie was hoping that Billy would get tired long enough and often enough so that by the time they got to the park, the Scruggs wouldn’t be hanging around there.
          But that morning Billy was different.  Besides being a lot bigger than he had been the day before, he seemed to have a lot more energy.  Stevie tried to stop about a block away from the park to give Billy a rest, anyway, but Billy just kept going, pulling on his leash until Stevie thought that either Billy’s leash was going to break right in the middle, or Stevie’s arm would get ripped out of its socket.  When Stevie tried to pull back a little bit on the leash, Billy had reared way back up on the end of his tail like a wild stallion bucking and galloping at the same time.  Billy lunged forward so hard that Stevie almost fell headfirst into the sidewalk and had to start running behind Billy just to keep his balance.
          “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.”
          That’s when he saw the Scrugg boys. Buster shoved himself
away from the tree that he and Pete had been leaning against. He flipped his cigarette way out into the middle of the street. Smoke hissed between his teeth.
          Stevie sighed.  His glasses slipped down to the tip of his nose and pressed sweat right into the sore snake-tongue place. His cheeks felt big and fat against the rims of his bifocals as he tried to pull back one more time on the leash to slow Billy down.  Billy just pulled harder and harder...faster, faster...straight at Buster Scrugg, who was starting to look a lot like a semi-trailer truck to Stevie.
        That’s when he heard Pete start giggling.
        clunkclunk
        “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.” Billy’s claws began to raise up in the air.
clunkclunk...clunkclunk...clunkclunk
          “Lookin’ for trouble, geezer eyes?” He giggled, strutted out.
          It was a high pitched giggle.  Stevie remembered how the bathtub water had burned his eyes and blown down his throat while Dad Boss giggled just like that.
          “Hey,” Buster Scrugg’s voice lashed him across the nose like the tongue of a snake. “Hey, geezer eyes, weenie, weenie.”  Buster was using his best sissy voice.
          foam lungs...foam lungs...clunkclunk
          Pete’s high pitched giggle roared like the bubbles that Stevie had coughed up out of his chest while he’d tried to pull himself out of the water.  Billy’s leash was pulling his arm out of his body.
          Roaring, roaring bubbles...donkeyboy, donkeyboy...down, deep into the ocean.
          Dad Boss’s giggle filled up the world.
          Pull up. Pull up. ClunkClunkClunkClunk...wormfist up, up out....  Stevie was running behind Billy, who thundered ahead of him.  Billy reared up high on his tail and then swung back one of his claws.
        “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.” Stevie felt the wormfist click into place from the tip of his toes to the ends of his hair.
          Pete Scrugg, in mid-giggle, choked on his own spit.  He stood up straight, eyes wide. His cigarette stuck to his lower lip for a second, then dropped into the dew-soaked grass.
        Old Jack Creynameyer was sitting on his front porch, creaking back and forth in his rocking chair, trying to read the morning paper, but, as usual, he hadn’t been able to relax much because those two hoodlums hanging out beneath the park trees across from his house had been stirring up trouble again.  Although things had gotten pretty quiet since most of the kids who traipsed past his house everyday had gotten to school by now, those two hoods had hung around for awhile spitting on the grass and whistling at the cars that drove down the street.  Jack wanted them to be on their merry way so that he could enjoy what was left of the damn day in damn peace, goddamn it anyhow.
          He’d just about given up trying to relax there in his goddamn rocking chair, anyhow, and was getting ready to go back inside the damn house when a short, fat kid stumbled by his damn house. Then he noticed the kid’s hand hanging limp against blood wet jeans. The kid had fractured all of the knuckles on his right hand. Pieces of bone were sticking up like splintered golf tees all along the top of the back of it. The kid plowed right into the hood with the big mouth who was standing in the middle of the street. Jack watched in amazement as the kid picked up Buster Scrugg and tossed him like a rag doll across the pavement into the gutter.
          “Hey,” old Jack yelled, walking as fast as he could over to where the hood was lying crumpled up against the gutter. The hood was crying, holding his hands up in front of his face, while the short fat kid stood over him waving his arms back and forth in the air.
          “That’s enough.” Jack stopped in his tracks and stared. A wad of foam and bubbles smeared the kid’s face. Part of it was hanging from the bottom of his thick bifocals as though he’d buried his face in a bubble bath.
          Jack felt his feet leave the ground.
          “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.” the short, fat kid said, eyes dull and glazed, looking up at Jack.  “Oh, Billy. Oh, Billy.”  Stevie smiled apologetically up at the man who had startled Billy and interrupted their ocean dance.  He hoped that Billy would put the poor old guy down without hurting him too much. 
          But Stevie loved his pet lobster, yes he did.
          While he was flying through the air, Jack caught a glimpse of Pete Scrugg running full speed across the middle of the park  just before he found himself rolling like a toy across the park grass up to the elm tree where Pete Scrugg had been standing only moments before.  He could hear the hood in the gutter sobbing. Bushes were cracking, breaking. The short, fat kid with bifocals tore through a dense lilac hedge. Thick branches flew up in the air as though a power mower had dropped into the middle of it.
          Old Jack Creynameyer lay flat on the grass, staring up at the morning sunlight filtering itself through a couple of million green leaves that turned it into a golden glow, and listened to Buster Scrugg sob.  Jack’s shoulder hurt quite a bit.  He wasn’t sure, but he thought that it might be dislocated.
          Stevie hoped the poor old guy wasn’t hurt too bad, but he loved Billy.  He loved Billy’s black, shiny exoskeleton.  He loved the lobster way Billy was pulling him along that morning through all the bushes, over to where they had first met, over to where he had let Billy eat the squashed, ant-covered peanut butter and jelly sandwich, embedded gravel and grass and all.  It had been a real nice day then, and it was a real nice day now.
          He hadn’t missed any school that year, so he figured it would be okay if he and Billy just sort of hung around in the thick lilac and quince bushes and watched the kids during lunch hour eat their food.  It would be fun.  Billy always enjoyed eating his lunch right along with them.  Stevie had forgotten to grab the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that he knew was sitting on the kitchen table, but Billy wouldn’t mind. There were always lots of grubs in the dirt by the bushes.  Later on, he and Billy would go hang around in the garage for awhile, until Dad Boss Dooda got home from work. Dad Boss Dooda always liked to take a short nap after a long, hard day at work.  The garage was where Dad Boss kept all his tools.
          Stevie hoped Dad Boss Dooda wouldn’t be too upset about the broken door.
          He picked up the five pound sledge hammer Dad Boss Dooda used on his pet turtle the year before, and sat in the corner of the garage, holding Billy tight as heck and grinned like cabbage in the Texas sun.
          Stevie loved his pet lobster, yes he did.
Chapter 16
Stevie Dooda



          Stevie Dooda was my friend. He didn’t have too many of those, so I kept my mouth pretty well shut about it. There was also the fact that he was sort of young to be pals with an older guy like Derogatus, that's me, I  mean that’s me inside Derogatus.  I usually  do his talking for him.  I never bothered to really get to know him, I just thought his mind was a good place to go.  It was full of amazing stuff.  He was a bit old for Stevie, but he needed some friends, or at least one or two. 
Now Stevie’s dad, Dad Boss Dooda, who some folks said had a secret stash of cash, had lots of firearms and a hot temper besides. Dad Boss’s wife had died in mysterious circumstances, given the fact that the weight with the waterproof ink suicide note  which was fixed around her neck weighed about 200 lbs, and she only weighed about a hundred, and Stevie...well, Stevie had always been a little bit peculiar, but not enough to get the attention of the school nurse or anything like that, though just enough to be a loner. He didn’t necessarily want to be a loner.  Its just that the other kids wanted it that way.
          Stevie had been aware of me long before we met.
          After Stevie was born, there were whispers that Dad Boss' brother-in-law was found face up on the highway with a bullet hole in the back of his head, his left eye and cheekbone, along with his nose, blown away where the bullet exited...a high velocity head wound.  But, then again, most towns, especially small ones, have some type of urban legend, don't they?
          Supposedly, the old farmer who found the guy got rich suddenly and moved out of the county after selling his farm.
          I can attest that no such brouhaha ever crossed my embalming table, but you never know. The body of Stevie’s mom, however, did indeed. Full-house .308 sniper ammo was merciful, I discovered on that day. She hadn’t drowned.
          I decided to get to know Stevie Dooda right after that.
          BeeBopaloola
          Nothing blatant, mind you, just an occasional friendly chat.
          You know.
          Stuff like that.
          Me not being a particularly paternal type, after Dad Boss was brutally murdered, Stevie--newly orphaned and him being a minor--was shipped off.  The Dooda family was not particularly well liked or even much known.  No one in town had a desire to be any such guardian, especially me.
          He came back after he was l9, and I hired him as an assistant in the funeral home. He took to the embalming room right away and made himself generally useful with sharp instruments, tubes, draining fluids and handling canisters and stuff like that.
          He liked to whistle while he worked.
          While he never told me anything specific about his experiences in the child protective system, or about any of his foster homes, he seemed exactly the same as when he went away, just like a fourteen year old kid, except he wasn’t.  He never had been.  I assure you of that.
          We became pretty good buddies, off and on, in a manner of speaking, you see, the way older guys and younger guys can be, at work, and all that stuff, you see.
          One day while we were cleaning up the equipment, and as I was putting on my tux to welcome the grieving crowd for a memorial service, he told me about Billy.
          But then again, you see, I already knew about Billy.

Chapter seventeen
the good ole days



          Drunk as dangling eyeballs we were.
          “Does the dark flower of love inside us bloom only to become a necromancer? What would be the point of that?” Derogatus burped and grinned at little Stevie Dooda who would eventually name himself William Dooda after his pet lobster, Billy the Lobster.
          Derogatus, the mortician, that’s me, too, guess who, checked his watch. He squinted at the front of the bar where late day light landed hard, glancing blows. The sun would be going down soon and it was a long lope into the mountain trees.
          “Oh, indeed, to be a beast,” Derogatus waxed philosophic.
          One eyeball to another.
          Stevie gave Derogatus, that’s me, a blank stare, and we raised our index finger high, high in the air and bent it at Stevie. “Did you not yearn to touch a dead one?”
          Stevie blinked.  In the womb, his brain had formed perfectly, but things had not worked out.
          “Lad,” Derogatus, that’s me, whispered, snapping a finger above beer foam, “I said...”
          “Nope. I never heard of eating flowers at all.”
          Derogatus closed his eyes. “Not flowers....”
          “Oh,” a light flickered somewhere and Stevie grinned happily as a blop of suds squiggled down his throat. “Yeah, yeah, then...oh, fer sure.”
          Derogatus opened one eye, hoping for the best. “Well?”
          “Well what?”
          ”Dear God.”
          Stevie winced. “Jeepers.”
          Derogatus, that’s me, too, glared.
        “But not flowers, just the other stuff’s ok, though.”
          “Do you remember your first touch?”
          “Oh.” Stevie sat up and grinned hugely. “Yes. Yes, I do. I was pretty sure daddy was that way. That hammer....”
          “Hey,” I leaned forward and scowled, index finger against my lips.
          “Whoops.” He squitched around on his chair like his butt itched, and sighed.
          “You’re old enough to drink now, you know, and nobody can say nay to you anymore.”
          Stevie’s dad, Boss Dooda, had stashed away a bunch of money, and after he was murdered there was enough to get by on. This was Stevie’s 21st birthday and he was free of child protective services two years now.
          “Yep.” Stevie slouched languid and happy. He didn’t mind his medication, but he took it, anyway, since it didn’t have much effect on him, he figured.  and XX Sometimes, he forgot to renew the prescriptions, anyway, but today he’d taken it. He liked Derogatus.  He’d told him all his secrets. That’s why he liked him.  Stevie couldn’t remember why he’d told Derogatus all the secrets, but he knew he would remember some day.
          Stevie knew it would be ok.
          His eyes danced on the other side of the glass. I could see right through it.
          “Once it's all in place, they won’t know a dictatorship from a pretty baby with handcuffs.” I mimicked Stevie’s slouch, smacking my lips at Derogatus’, that’s me, my own cleverness.
        I loved Derogatus. Still do.
        Derogatus was a jackass. Always would be. He’d made all his money by being a jackass. That was just fine and dandy with Derogatus. The corpses he prettied up had no complaints, either, and neither did I.
        “Hoo boy.” It was fine and dandy with Stevie, too. Derogatus liked him and he liked Derogatus, who paid the tab and the rent and all kinds of stuff. Stevie hung on each and every word of Derogatus who was very wise.
        “Imagine the remarkable designs of the one jawed man upon a plate of spaghetti.” Derogatus belched and shot Stevie a meaningful gaze. “It is more than the utter, utter finesse of dreams.”
          “Tell me that story again,” Stevie chirped. Sometimes he didn’t understand stuff Derogatus said, and that was okay with him, and it was okay with Derogatus, too.  That’s why he liked him and trusted him, and the same was true for Billie. “Tell me the story about that.”
          Derogatus rubbed his hands in glee. “Of remarkable designs?”  My favorite topic, and so Derogatus’ favorite topic also.
          “No,” Stevie sighed hopelessly. “I didn’t get that one.”
          Derogatus gazed sorrowfully at the young fellow. He brightened momentarily. “Well, then, the Green Children of Ireland?  I’d bet.”
          My second favorite topic.
          “Oh boy.” Stevie slurped beer, jaw working in and out under his pumpkin batter skin.  In that way he was truly athletic. TV commercials teach us to be many things in many parts of our bodies. “but I like that one better, the one about the Red Wheat and Great Grand Paw Flowers.”
          “Red Wheat?”
          “Yep.” Stevie grinned. “The Red Wheat and the space guys.”
          “Great Grand Paw Flowers?”
          “Oh, boy.”
          “...space guys?”
          “Yes. Yes. Oh, oh, boyee.”
          It was a wonderment.
          Red Wheat. Great Grand Paw Flowers.  I’d made a mistake on that one, alright.  Derogatus was getting a headache just thinking about losing control and getting so drunk that he actually told Stevie about the Red Wheat and Great Grand Paw Flowers.  Luckily he’d told it to Stevie.  No harm, Derogatus guessed.
          “No Red Wheat, today, lad.”
          “Coo-ell.” Stevie’s face went blank and popped back on. “But I like that one.”
          Stevie smiled a huge smile and plopped his chair up close to the table, crossed his hands and gazed with anticipatory glee that would have been erotic on any other face.
        Derogatus, took a deep breath.  I was ever, ever hungry. Self control, at least in public places, is the mark of an ordinary man, a free man...that is, not in jail, I mean, but nonetheless, ordinary.  Camouflage was good.  Had its place.
          “Long suffering, the short road to release, binds us all like duct tape beneath a teasing whore,” Derogatus said, tossing Donovan a little grin. “What do you think, little fellow?”  Derogatus’ eyes glinted inside his own cleverness.
          Donovan, the barkeep, did not consider himself to be a little fellow, even though he was short and all, but, nonetheless, he prided himself on not being much of a little fellow, if he was little at all. He did not appreciate the uninvited invitation to take part in the discussion of the two drunks at the table against the wall by the jukebox.
          He tore his gaze away from that of the good lookin’ woman who was leaning across the bar intently flirting with him. Women like that didn’t flirt with little fellows.
          “Need something?” His voice insisted that they had better not need anything. “Jerks,” he mumbled, just loud enough for them to hear as he turned back to her, nifty her.
          Stevie slammed his glass down. “Jeepers.” He shuddered as Billy stirred inside his work boot. He hoped Billy would behave himself for once.
          Donovan the barkeep leaned back and glared at both just as ‘goodlookin’, who had gone around the end of the bar and positioned herself on his seat in front of the small sink, put his index finger into her mouth. His mind began to wonder and he gave the two jerks one last cursory glare, but his brain wasn’t in it.  His brain was approximately where his finger was.
          She clasped the back of his legs with her bare knees.
          He’d read once that morticians became morticians because they used to like children, but didn’t like children anymore and that most necromancers, whatever they were, didn’t become morticians like most people thought they did. The reason given had been that the processes used to ready corpses for viewing were not erotic, and that, in fact, most necromancers worked as lab assistants in morgues late at night, where the last bit of the flush of life might yet linger in places upon the skin, and whatever dark flower had been in the heart of the deceased had not yet completely curled away.
          Get ‘em young ‘fore they get teeth, his dad had told him once. He’d figure what that meant someday. He did not want to die innocent, or at least, not innocent in the biblical sense. He’d figure that out someday, too, he hoped.
          It occurred to Donovan, the way a rare butterfly might swoop momentarily across the vision of a half asleep picnicker, noted, but not fully comprehended, and destined to be completely forgotten, that necromancers might actually be the only true lovers of the thing that makes one spark of life different from another.
          Donovan had given this much thought, but did not really know why. He had no idea. Goodlookin’ pulled his middle finger through her lips onto her tongue.  None whatsoever.
          He was actually a sordid, complex and tender person.
          Donovan liked not having ideas. What usually caused that state of mind to descend upon him was usually a lot more pleasant than what made ideas come along in the first place. He looked into her mouth and its soft glimmer. He preferred to be in charge to having ideas and things like that, even though ideas had their place and purpose occasionally.
          “More foam. More foam, next time, little fella.”
          Donovan forced his eyes away from the place his fingers were disappearing, each in their turn, and smiled balefully at Derogatus.  “In the moonlight on a magic night, 'good lookin’ whispered up at Donovan.
          “Foam,” he mouthed the word at me and I knew then that although he lived on the outskirts of town, all the plants and weeds he'd never tended probably weighed on his mind, so I didn’t blow him a kiss, because that would be adolescent and just, well, stuff.
          Stevie rocked back and forth in his chair. “Red Wheat. Red Wheat.”
          “Not today, lad.”
          “Aw c’mon.” His hopeful face began to fold into dimming, dimming skin. “Heck.”
          I sighed. The question to everyone’s answer is usually answered from within.
          “Once its all in place, they won’t know a dictatorship from a pretty baby with handcuffs. ”
          “What?” Stevie felt Billy the Lobster begin to climb out of the top of his work boots.
          “Never mind.”
          “Good grief.” Sweat gathered on the end of his nose.
          Derogatus leaned towards Stevie. “Are you okay?”
          “Yeah.  What did you say?”
          “Do you want to hear about the Green Children of Ireland or not?”
          “Heck yes.” Stevie grinned, felt the sweat beginning to break out along his skin directly above his spinal vertebrae.  It itched like crazy and he rubbed his back into the chair to relieve himself.
          “Pay attention.”
          “Heck yes.” Stevie took a quick gulp. He hoped Billy would go back to sleep. He liked Derogatus and didn’t want any trouble today.  He wiped his nose. It was beginning to throb. “Wow.”
          “Long before,” Derogatus stated, wagging his finger in the air, “long, long, before the likes of Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo or King David, two children, the first ones, in fact, of all the great men there ever were, were seen wandering through a bean field in Ireland and were approached by a concerned farm wife. The two children appeared to be confused and lost. They were faint with hunger, she could see.  As she came closer to them she noted they were wearing unusual garments of fabric she had never before seen, and what’s more, the two children had very green skin. Green as forest trees they both were. She took the two children in and all the neighbors hearing of the two green children of strange garb would come by daily and offer them food. The two children would not eat. They began to die, and became restless. One day the woman noticed they were looking for the pith in the bean stalks. Of this they eagerly ate.  Eventually, the two became used to food such as bread and beans and grain, and came to have the same pigmentation the farmer and she had. These two children never grew old. They live somewhere in Ireland today, or wherever they are.”
          “Whoa.” Stevie slammed down his drink and wiped his mouth. “Coo-ell.” He gazed with admiration into Derogatus’ glare.
          “Do you mind?
          “What?”
          “I have not completed this narrative.”
          “Oh.” Stevie felt Billie the lobster squeeze lazily against his shinbone up next his boot top.
          “Oh.” Derogatus squished up his face as he mocked Stevie’s voice. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He leaned forward with half closed eyelids. “Young man, may I continue?”
          “Gosh, yes.” Stevie winced as the lobster pincer squeezed into the thin skin place along the top of his shinbone, all the way from his kneecap to his ankle. “Golly.”
          Derogatus glared for another second, and rolled his eyes. While it was true that Stevie was, uh, challenged, and, uh, generally hung on each and every word anybody said, Derogatus knew that within the boy-man’s heart lay the dark orchid of the true monstrum. That was fine and dandy with Derogatus. He liked monstrum pretty damn well.
          He had licked it to a pure, rounded glisten many times.
          “Anyhow, it is said oft times,” he paused to glare at Stevie just to make sure that he had the monstrum’s fullest quandzillionist fullest attention. “ It is said that oft times when the sun goes down beyond the ocean and the sky is aflame with festive pastels, and the gulls are settling in among the porous cliff sides, these two sing ballads as they face the sea, ballads never heard before and never to be sung by them again. Through the ages, every once in awhile, a wandering minstrel would hear and begin to compose the finest he has ever composed and to play and sing with a renewed spirit.  Though the two children have inspired some of Ireland most beautiful and important folk music, never have the ballads of the green children been captured on paper, or in the voice or instrument of any minstrel, but yet only in the hearts of those who have known and lost truest love and who know that death is not the end of anything worthwhile that has ever been.  It is said the two green children of Ireland came before and shall go after all that has ever been.”
          “Holy smokes.”
          “They say Van Gough wandered these fields at one time, and that forever his painting became mysterious, peculiar and of much wonderment.”
          Derogatus crooked his neck and waved his finger in the air. “But,” he crowed, unable to believe that he had such an eloquent tongue, “the same is said of cockroaches, but this is a misunderstanding of paleontological principles.” Derogatus burped, wide eyed, and gave Stevie another meaningful stare.
          “Gosh.”
          “It was they who taught the Irish to grow potatoes, and so the English took notice of their exposed French flank.”
          “Cockroaches?”
          “Idiot,” Derogatus breathed, completing another wet swallow of beer. “The green children.”
          “Oh.” Stevie squinted. He didn’t much care to be called an idiot. He felt Billie rubbing impatiently against the skin of his leg that always itched like crazy when he took his steel-pointed boots off at night.
          Derogatus leaned across the table and stared deeply into Stevie’s eye, the one that was open. “Do you, my fine young fellow, know what that means?”
          “Heck yes.”
          “What does it mean.”
          “It means that the two green children of Ireland were in love,” Stevie chirped.
          Stevie took a big gulp of beer and grinned. He could feel Billy the Lobster undulate against his lower tibial skin.
          Derogatus smiled and nodded.
          “But,” continued Stevie, “ the Irish got potatoes from somewhere else and were aborigines at that time, not farmers.”
          “Young man, the Green Children spawned all the great teachers that have ever been since.” Derogatus was amazed. Stevie was like that: a light bulb that came on, dimmed, and went out.
          Derogatus gazed at him sorrowfully. “Willful stupidity, this is?”
          “But potatoes came from somewhere else.”
          “You, Stevie, are a curmudgeon. How came you to be such a curmudgeon.”
          “England, too be exact.”
          Derogatus sat back and shook his head sadly. “Poverty and meaningless sleep.”
          “What?” Lights out.
          Derogatus was used to that, but found Stevie immeasurably interesting. That, of course, is why I had been taken with his soul long before.
          But I digress.
          “Why you are such a curmudgeon.”
          “Heck, no.  I don’t have a girl friend.” Light flickering.
          Derogatus sighed.  How much could we accomplish if we didn’t need to sleep, he whined to himself. “You and that bloody minded little buddy of yours doing okay?”
          “You mean Billy.”
          “Yes, Billy the Lobster.”
          “Hey.  Keep your voice down. Jeez Louise.” Stevie bent his head down and scoped out the room to make sure that nobody had been listening.
          “Ooops...sorry, young sirrah.”
          Stevie took one last glug from the beer glass. “Holy smokes.”
          Derogates leaned forward again. “A weak God is a terrible thing, yes?”
          “Hey,” Stevie plopped his glass down and glared. He felt his face get redder and redder by the second. “Billy loves me, you know.”
          “I didn’t mean...”
          “Yes sir, he does.”
          “When would we not need God?”
          “Like the green children?”
          Derogatus rolled his eyes and dropped his head. “Young fellow,” he whispered, “where did you get that idea?”
          “Golly.” Stevie felt stupid, now, and could feel Billy start to brush up against his shoe. Billy did that when he was really, totally, and so waking up. “You are starting to get Billy upset.”
          “We, er, I mean, I, yes I,” Derogatus pointed his nose sideways and fixed one eye steadily upon Stevie, “I, and only I, would not be a captive of the sun...”
          “Jeepers.”
          “... the sun would have no dominion, nor the moon its repose we find in dogs’ worshipful eyes, and mistake it as adoration, but are afraid of a chicken’s eye and what might lie behind.  Without the sun we are held in circadian rhythm chains by, we would need not God,” Derogatus tilted his head back to get the last bit of foam, “nor anything, except the moon, were it not for the sun.” Derogatus thrummed his fingers on the table top and smiled a wide, bright smile at Stevie.
          Stevie was very happy now. Billy had gone back to sleep.
          “It’s okay.”
          Derogatus sighed relief. He’d seen what could happen when Billy got really upset. “Come, oh come,” he said suddenly, willing the unpleasant memory, the utter horribleness of it, away, “let us wax philosophic.”
          “Jeez Louise.”
            Derogatus began to sing a dangling eyeball song, and Stevie clapped his hands and joined in once in while, at the beginning or ending of a word here and a word there, the way he’d always done in church when the congregation recited things that they were all supposed to know by heart.

Oh, no, no, no
ain't got no birds on me
not got no birds, nor bats nor fleas
oh, so, so, so
ain’t got no skin on me
not got no scars, nor wrinkles, none
don’t need no hat ya see.
Ain’t got no God on me.

      Derogatus stopped suddenly in mid flat note and belched.
    “Wow.”  Stevie crowed.  Clapping his hands and swaying.
          “Out, out, out.” Donovan shouted, forcing himself away from the ministrations of ‘goodlookin’.
          “The way morticians make us look afterwards,”  Derogatus whispered in Stevie’s ear.  “Lips pure as pumpkin batter.”
          Donovan stood up high on his toes and glowered over them both.           
‘Goodlookin’ watched appreciatively, as Derogatus stood to intercept Donovan’s stern scowl before it could rearrange Stevie’s facial expression.  There was Billy to consider.
          “Sir.”  I swayed uncertainly.  It was true. Derogatus was dizzy drunk. “You know not what you do.” Derogatus’ eyes were red, watery. He glanced down at Stevie. “My..” he grasped the edge of the table to maintain his balance. “umm, little friend here, he is ...”
          “I know what the little fucker is. I know about him bein’ in the loony bin an’ me an’ lots of others around here figure we know what he did to his pops.”
          “Sir,” Derogatus smiled at Donovan, “have we violated some sort of public ethic?” He looked around the empty bar and spread out his arms.  “Well?”
          “I know ‘bout him. I know ‘bout you, too, ya corpse duckin’ piece of nothin’.”
          “Is this going to get biblical?” Stevie eyed Donovan with trepidation.
          “You wouldn't believe it.”
          Goodlookin’ crossed her legs and gazed at the tall, blond man’s long pony tail, that’d be mine.
          “Well, then, if you know all that, sir, perhaps you know that they don’t always get at the root of the matter in those places of mental healing.”
          I hiccuped again. Derogatus was doing just fine and Billy’s claw was protruding from the bottom of Stevie’s pant leg.
        “Holy smokes.” Stevie was beginning to tremble. His shirt was soaked with sweat.  Stevie felt Billy’s claws pull at his sock and then release the fabric.  “Jeepers,” he whined, feeling vomit begin to rise.
          “Yeah. I know that.  I know ‘bout you, too.  I’ll bet you do what you will over there with them corpses. Oh, my yes.”
          Goodlookin’ rolled her eyes.
        “Their intimacy with our last hours and days when the spirit is detaching from flesh,” Derogatus whispered, backing as far away from the table as possible, the hairs on his neck bristling like hackles as Stevie began to stand up, “is highly overrated.”
          “You hoo!” Donovan was not to be denied.  “You,” he said, “and yer little buddy, out.” He jerked a meaty thumb sideways.  “Hell,” he snorted, flapping his arm down to his side and turning around.  “I’m callin’ the cops on you fuckers.”  He stomped over to the end of the bar and hoisted up his cell.
          ‘Goodlookin’ leaned her weight to her elbows upon the bar and gazed nonchalantly at the mirror images originating behind her. She scootched her butt into a more comfortable position, several times, and very slow indeed beneath the giving, black silk.
          “He is pointing in the general direction of the street,” Derogatus sighed down at Stevie. The hairs on my neck stood straight up.  Stevie gleamed with sweat.
          “Wow.” Billy was unfolding his claws.  One raised then came down and tapped the floor. “Oh boy. Oh boyeee.”
          “He better not puke on my floor,” Donovan hooted over his shoulder, as he finished dialing.
          “Noooo, Billy. No. Get back up there.” Stevie kicked his chair out from underneath himself and began to hop around in a sort of jerky way.  Derogatus shook his head sadly. “Oh, here we go again.”  He slowly backpedaled towards the door, without looking down at Stevie.
          ‘Goodlookin’ tongue stroked her oversized beer glass rim and wondered complacently if it was crystal or simple leaded glass. She honed her secret, and knew that someday she would be a great violinist, but such, she knew, had to fall in love, fall out, and pray for death, and in this way only, find how to release mastery-- the melancholy music that must be relinquished to the audience--that the violin and all music must be.
          It must.
        That was how she prayed, I thought thunderstruck.  She was watching Derogatus intently.  Her eyes were unmistakable.  She was my sister.  I was thunderstruck and could barely focus through Derogatus’s eyes.  I curled into a small spirit ball and began to weep, for her I truly loved.  How I wondered at her physical shell, and knew that it was her, that she was not in a simple human body, for I could see our Mother, She, within her.
          Thunderstruck, I could only gaze.
          She studied the tall man backing up towards the door, and smiled, closed her eyes. Yes, she thought.  Yes.  A beginning to a song began to form within her mind.  Her fingers began to move as her wrists bent over an imaginary violin.  She sighed.  The notes were....
          She opened her eyes and gasped.  Arterial blood whipped across her face, then venous.  Her testimony got Derogatus into a lot of trouble, and later, much later, little Stevie Dooda changed his name to William and became a prison psychologist.
          We never lost our connection.

Chapter eighteen
more good ole days

          Donovan’s body had been hauled through what was left of the front of the bar, as soon as his head could be located off in a corner behind whimpering, semi-hysterical ‘goodlookin’, and I had not yet been arrested, although it would be a couple of years, in 2018, to be exact, which were supposed to be many, but weren’t,  and were supposed to consummate in a lethal injection, after the requisite appeals, etc., before I saw the light of day again except by the good courtesy of cell bars or in intimate relationship with handcuffs, and very often, leg irons.
          I never hired an attorney, but, instead, allowed the brave, yearning, eager and fresh law school grads to learn the ropes, and even though I never spoke to any of them--and there were many through all the appeals--most of them came away from my case with a better understanding of something or other, though they would never, not in their dreams nor in their quiet remembrances, know for sure the primal root of it, but only for sure that there was something or other, besides the nuts and bolts and public speaking practice, they’d gotten inside them, yet couldn’t quite get hold of it... not until the end came.
          It would prove to be a time of penance and contemplation for me, and not at all unpleasant, but merely semi-tedious.
          The ones who survived would develop other skills, as well.
          “Is there not always the hope that what the present is is only a transition?”
          Two cops in the interrogation room glared at me, but kept silent.
          “And, further, that circles really do exist in nature surely as squares and straight lines do not.”
          Eyeballs rolled. A female sat across the table from me, and continued to read notes from a paper, ignoring my soliloquy.
          The two cops, plain-clothed, who were slouched against the painted cinder block wall, looked hopelessly bored. The room, its pale yellow, heavily-slapped-on paint, was perfectly square. One cop stared up at the fluorescent light filter. One cop stared at light green floor tiles alternating with light gray floor tiles.
          The woman, who apparently was in charge of the whole affair, or at least was a superior of some sort to the two art lover cops, sat across from me, sat across from me, and sat across from me some more, taking copious notes, rustling paper and indulging in some devil may care staple play.
          “I don’t really think its necessary to go through it all again,” I said.
          She was cute, I suppose, even attractive, as powerful, intelligent women  go, which I’m sure she was, up until the very end, whatever that would be for her, I’m sure.  But, as I’ve said, well, you do remember don’t you: "strawberries to onions", so unlike ‘goodlookin’.  If you love music, you’ll know her as Juliet Roy Rogers. Strawberries and strawberries. Onions and onions.
          “Please,” she looked up with a too-sugary smile, “refresh me, once again.”
          So I did.
          “A perfect square is a very bad shape for any room, as any architect knows. A perfectly square room will always echo, will seem lopsided, will, for a variety of unproven reasons, create depression, anxiety and, fidgeting...purposeless, grinding fidgets.” I paused dramatically, and sighed, throwing her my best morose smile.
          ”No one knows why,”  I sighed.  Derogatus was so much fun to inhabit.
          Her bright, attentive eyeballs were slamming at me from the 45 degree angle her head tilted down towards her paper required them to communicate with me that she was running out of patience, true enough, but that she was indeed so patient I wouldn’t even believe it.
          “Oh very well,” I sighed. “Look, her eyes were closed.”
          “She says she thinks you slashed his throat.”  Needless to say, I was very disappointed with my sister, Juliet Roy Rogers and would someday straighten her out on who I really was.
          “My dear young lady, ‘thinks’ is the operative word.”
          “His head was actually ripped off of his body.”
          I shook my head sadly. “Yes, apparently. Poor fellow.”
          “Okay,” she laid her pencil down and clasped her hands together on top of the paper. “Let’s forget,” she said, smiling — and sardonic smiling it was, I must admit, “about Juliet, and discuss your young companion.”
          “Like the number 13, a perfectly square room is one of the very few, by modern standards, if any quick perusal of any skyline or modern neighborhood anywhere in the world, with the notable exception of any oriental environs, that is, a no-no.”
          “No shit,” crowed one of the pear shapes, chuckling at his own sense of irony and elbowing his companion, a burly pear of a fellow he was, who scowled at him, and rolled his eyes.
          She tilted her face at me, maintaining her smile.
          “Look,” I scootched the chair forward an inch or two, warming entirely to the subject, “do you not see it? The secret the orientals had learned, or had, by some strange ancient sea’s chance, had it driven into their collective DNA that a perfect square is actually quite imperfect and, if forced to conform to the demands of nature, of plants, rocks, gardens, and coexist within such a brouhaha, the perfect square, because it is imperfect, and thereby searches for the perfection it can be, becomes at last nonexistent, until only the green  fleshly life within it--or surrounding it--exists.”
          “The forerunner of Feng Shui is the perfect square...how to solve its stubborn imperfection,” she flipped the words at me.
          I was astonished and even wondering if I needed to re examine my previous position regarding onions and strawberries, which is the single electron difference between the two food types, just as a single DNA strand was the difference between humans and angels, such as yours truly —for the room brought to him, Derogatus (that’s me, too) immense peace.
          “Stevie Dooda,”  I chirped.
          “He remembers nothing,” she said, looking up at me. “His condition...”
          “Yes, the poor wretch isn’t quite right, you know.”
          She leaned back in her chair. “So they say.”
          The minutes passed by.  Increments came and increments went.  Pears shapes, the flowers and stems, the crossed and recrossed arms, the perfect squares of the tile and of the room shimmered, and deserts beckoned doomed critters with promises of endings just over the horizon.
          “The amount of blood covering him, and the lack of such on you would indicate he was very close, in fact, in actual physical contact with the victim.”
          “Depends.”
          “Depends on what.”
          “...the position of the deceased at time of...”
          “Decapitation.”
          “Yes.”  I smiled at her sweetly.  She was very pretty, for a human.
          “The damage to the bar, the chairs, the very hard--now cracked and solid--very solid bar counter, and the bruises on Stevie’s hands, his cracked knuckles, etc., all indicate that he may have done the damage.”
I smiled at her.
          “Just a theory,” she smiled back.
          “Perhaps, the poor lad was also assaulted and was simply lucky to escape with what damage to him there is.”
          “Continue,” she said, writing like mad.
          “Children,” I continued, “have revealed themselves to me, a little bit at a time, one after the other. There is no physical dichotomy that a dead child’s body cannot bridge. There is no dichotomy that a dead child cannot become.”
          She held up her hand and shot me a blank look. “What does that mean, uh, Mr. Derogatus.”
          “Derogatus is not my last name. It is my first name.”
          Her face changed at once. She looked down at the paper and her notes. “Then what is your last name.”
          “I haven’t the foggiest.”
          The two pear-shapes sighed, shifted their weight and rolled their eyes. “Stupid motherfu...”
          She spun in her chair. The shapes froze and assumed their enforced, silent stillness, wanting cigars, cold beer and the way that things used to be when their superiors did not have tits, vaginas, nor the power of physical attraction to make the orders given by them painful yet oddly persuasive no matter how trivial, procedural or decisive those orders might be.  Then she turned her face back to me, intently back to me.
          I thought to myself, the firmament, its brusque intelligence of chaos offers linear randomness, too. Supple summer, I miss you so.
          She cleared her throat, sort of, to remind me how patient she could be, patient as the sun cooling.
          “Dear young lady, am I under arrest?”
          “We can hold you here for questioning, but if you want an attorney....”
          “I believe that topic has been broached.”
          “Just a few more questions.”
          “Tedious. Tedious.” Derogatus began to rise.
          Pear shapes, flowers and stems, a joyful, sudden shift of their positions, the time elapse photography revealing the unnoticed, unimaginably vivid and colored movement of flower petals, their stems, and light returned to light, these two really wanted me to get rowdy.
          “Sit.” She pointed at me with the pencil.
          I did. I had no idea how erotic she was, but I’m certain she was.
          Flowers and stems sighed inside pear shapes.
          “It was either you or him.”
          “You mean poor, little, deranged Stevie, not the deceased.”
          Snickers. The room was very square. Flowers and stems sought light.
          Immense peace and contentment began to overwhelm Derogatus. “The dull dark sliver of metal I lay them on and the makeup I apply to their features form a synthesis of contradictions. Only the maker of children know the root of this.”
          She cleared her throat and smiled the same way again.
          “Children, like the kind that poor Stevie Dooda was, even at his advanced age of 18, have the same skin that a pregnant woman shows to us,  and her hair has the glitter of wet ravens. These birds, ravens, perhaps crows as well, are seldom wet.”
          “Mr. Derogatus.”
          “Nothing is more beautiful than a pregnant woman’s skin and breasts, unless, of course, you are that pregnant woman who has become so through rape or misapprehension of the promises of a lover long fled.”
          The top of her head was well-formed.  Her hair, gleaming and healthy as it  was, could not outdo the fine shape of her skull bone. She was short and perky faced with a turned up nose above full-lips that bore no lipstick and were, for that, the more beautiful than the entire rest of her, and so unlike the pear shapes that hunkered against the interrogation room wall, so unlike anything they would ever dream of, even when they died, and I was certain they might die hard.
          At that point, Derogatus understood, again, and only too well, the compunction of sin, the lust by which most humans were driven.
          She turned in her chair and nodded to flowers and stems and pear shapes.
          “Children are the root of our melancholy, in their perfection, they pretend to bring back to us an innocence, you see, an innocence structured deep into the ground we wish were were--the patient, patient ground, like a post, the first part of fences where dogs mark with their spray, and crows sit above, mocking the sheer brilliance of the wheel.”
          “Mr. Derogatus,” she said. “I inform you...”
          “Crows and Ravens, mistaken by idiots to be melancholy as a funeral dirge, and who do not understand clowns, but grow instead to love these birds begrudgingly, are the only things created who understand children truly.”
          “...you are under arrest.”
          Stems and flowers entwined Derogatus.
          He said into the side jowls of one of them, “but only children, understand clowns.”
          “Stupid mother fucker.”
          “But,” I said, looking back at her as she gathered her papers and pencils, “do you not understand.”
          She ignored me.
          “Do you not see that the terror of it is that children truly understand clowns, and...”
          “Come along, now,” Jowls cajoled happily, affixing his cuffs to me.
          “....and that they laugh merrily, and truly, truly love clowns, and...”
          She stared at me, finally, in exasperation.
          “...that is the terror that children are.”
          “What is?”
          The room was perfectly square, I’ve heard, right up to the end which came almost exactly one year later, about one year before the end, on the day Juliet Roy Rogers played her violin for the very first time and made some dough, and not just a couple of bucks, either, as a viable street musician.
          “That they know the nature of what they love, and yet still love.”
          She rolled her eyes, and froze for a moment, dramatically, as though at an audition for the first time, uncertain how to portray sudden drama. But then her face collapsed, a small piece of time and space only I could have seen transfixed her.
          “Their love is not blind.” she mouthed the words.
          “Tell me, “ I shot, “do you like Juliet Roy Rogers?”
          Her face brightened up just for an instant.  “I don’t know her personally but I’ve heard she is incredible when she gets her hands on a violin.”  She picked up her papers, stuffed them into her briefcase and strode out of the room.
          Jowls chuckled as he hurried me along.  In my joy, I kissed him on a stubbly cheek.
          Derogatus came to in our very, very first cell.



PART FOUR
Chapter nineteen
caveman future, going for food


    He raised his eyes upward to the sky, becoming bold.

    blur
    buzz
    its hum
    hummm

    He whispered meaningless sounds, sounds he knew had been a language once.  He had no concept of the words, nor of their meaning.  He only knew he'd heard these sounds once, a voice, human perhaps, or perhaps one of the mad things he conversed with in chaotic languages during his sweetest dreams. 

    came
    the
    horde night        the
    moon swam        above

    its billion legs    these
    spread dark musculatures    their eggs 

    the fierce things inside

    His lips, they parted.
    The campfire, a careless speck of glee, and he, a fly upon rock, no wings, but possessing the powerful thing, the memory of being within and having once been a fierce thing.
    His hunger and he rappelled downward.  His glee, patient as oddities, and he, were dexterous and primal.  The gleeful speck, the musculature, the spreading night before him--with its promise of things to come--all these things and his billion legs he began to claim.  This, his birthright.  He, its green, green red food taker.
    He could not remember, anyway, but only the dizzy, stargazing long ago.  He knew now its origin, though then he could not remember this, and this above all he could remember now, it, like the side of Jesus, its opium smile...and now, he, as down he rappelled, gazing at the gleeful speck....
    Down....long, curled toenails dug tentatively into the rock, sand, dirt of the base of the stone wall. He landed.

    He scuttled into the waist high rocks far below the rock maw that was his home.  The gleeful speck of the careless campfire, the food that would be gathered around it, the fierce eggs in the night sky and their moon:  all these he could remember and the DNA he had become.  He drew the dark musculature of the night into his lungs and was no longer melancholic, for he was no longer subject to its mysteries.
    Loping towards the campfire, each stride like brush strokes of color bringing its glow and hover beyond distant trees more clearly into focus, grass tops brushing elbows, night’s musculature bending eggs into his mouth, he swallowed.  The smell of the earth, a copious being of its own accord, struggled among the wet folds of his pharynx, became atoms, and him.
    The ground flashed up to him, then beneath him, then far behind him.
Chapter twenty
a binary dialogue within
last moments of the past

footage:  old tape 22x 5) r ..
designation: of ruins, rubble damage
dated:  carbon date estimated approx 2018

Molly tells Patty about
Dr. William Dooda's employment essay
on the day after the flash
 
      Patty.
      Molly.
      Smile, Patty.
      Ok. But this is supposed to be my day off.
      Put on your big girl panties and deal with it.
      There was a bright green flash in the sky last night.
      The radio said lots of colors were reported.    Here, this is the video you called me about last night.
      Good, Patty.  The video I called you about last night.
      You were right.  It had been misfiled, but I found it.  Good guess.
      Oh, sure.
      Didn’t you see that bright flash in the sky last night?
      I know a lot of telephone lines went down and some satellites, but my connections weren’t affected.
      Mine either.
      You saw it. Patty?
      Totally cool, Molly ... dark green camera flash, like.
      I saw nothing.
      People saw other colors than the one I saw.
      UFOs.
      Probably.
      Molly.
      Patty.
      Molly, how dangerous is he?

      silence   

    Molly, how dangerous is Dr. Dooda? 
    I did not say he is dangerous
    You said he was peeking.
    Oh. sure.
    What do you mean?
    He has lost his need for homeostasis, Patty.
    Enlighten me.
    I mean he cannot, and need not, receive sound, anymore.
    Hearing?
    Sound.
    Okay.  You can have mental sound, Molly, but that makes no sense to me.
    Good, Patty.  Good.
    Thank you, Molly.
    More than that.
    What is?
    Homeostasis.
    At the cellular level?
    Oh, sure.
    Okay.  Explain.
    Every tissue, every microorganism in every cell has a skin which separates it from other microorganisms, the same way our body is cloaked with a skin to keep us separate from the environment at a physical, though not necessarily psychic or emotional level.
    Ok.
    This skin we wear throughout our very being requires harmonics, frequencies, dissonance, and assonance to function, a soul of sorts each tissue requires,  or it dies.  These are the elements of sound, not just what our ears pick up but what our bodies require to continue their own intelligent chaos.  William doesn't need that anymore.
    What does that mean.
    It means that Dr. Dooda no longer, and may not  ever, or at least not since his early years, have required any output to maintain his own homeostasis within his cellular walls, as though there was something within him providing that.  I have never seen this before, but after viewing Dr. Dooda's tape, I believe we will come to the conclusion that he is capable of shape shifting, of transcending physical limitations, and he may not even know it.

    silence

archival note:  at this place in the tape, low frequencyclial  reverberations detected ... nature:  subsonic
 
    Molly, I have heard of the possibility of this.  A complex organic system can be a very good conductor, even more so than any metals or alloys known to man.
    Oh, sure.
      But how does this happen?  Molly, how could this be done at such a deep cellular level, and by what?
    He has experienced a terror beyond the supernatural.
    You mean he was frightened, traumatically frightened.
    No, that is not what I mean.
    What is beyond supernatural?
    The real world, Patty.
    At the cellular level?
    I said he need not  receive sound anymore.
    I’m all ears.
    He does not have a biological problem.
    Help me grasp.
    I have examined him.
    Yes.
    I have also examined victims of sudden nocturnal death.
    Yes.  I have heard of the Old Hag, too.
    No, Patty, that's not what I mean.  That is a terrifying phenomenon, common to many people, especially children, but it is not a biological imperative held within the bodies of those who suffer the Old Hag Syndrome.  It is a fear of the female self within withering and becoming a witch, a predator seeking the man, to eat the man.
    But the Old Hag is the ultimate nightmare, not just for children.  You have read the reports, Molly.  You know they are terrifying and unexplainable as sudden nocturnal death.
    Oh. sure.  But the Old Hag may not be a nightmare.  There are many reports of people being awakened, unable to move...and a hideous old woman approaches them, sometimes straddles them and begins to suffocate them.  How many deaths, the ones we call sudden nocturnal death, are really the cause of this?
    Oh my God.  Molly, and the SIDS  statistics ....
    No, Patty.  Children would not have the same fears.
    Ah, yes.  It is true, also, that the vast majority, if not all, of the nocturnal death victims are men.
    Yes, Patty, men of middle age with healthy hearts and perfect bodies as a rule.  Middle age is when we all begin to fear our own inner lives, our own inner despondent dreams which seem to have always remained just beyond our fingertips.
      So these deaths during sleep may not actually have been during sleep.
      Correct, Patty.

        silence
 
    See, Patty, what I mean by that is that logic, objectivism, the basis of our scientific assumptions are just that, intuitive assumptions.
    I need some coffee.
    Get me my ‘blue dog’.
    Okay, Molly.
    Thanks Patty, dear.
    The Old Hag.
    Patty, The Old Hag would flee him.
    But, sudden nocturnal death.....it only happens to middle aged adult males.
    His blood chemistry is the same.
    Look, when that happens there is no massive adrenaline storm as found in most ‘fall dead’ heart attacks.  It occurs at night during peaceful sleep and is a peaceful death, at least biologically, but always the look of terror upon the face, grinning, absolute horror.
    Explain how that would look.  I’ve never seen one of those corpses.
    Like a severed sardonicus nerve, Patty.
    Sardonicus nerve severing creates a monstrum effect.
    Oh sure.
    But Dr. Dooda is not dead.  Average health.
    Obsequious in appearance, too, Molly.  He is completely unremarkable in appearance and is in perfect health.
    You mean his soul would look like it had a severed sardonicus nerve?
    No.  He has undergone sudden nocturnal death over and over again.
    I’m all ears.
 
archival notation:  at this place in the tape low frequencicyclical reverberations increasing in parabolic spaces, decreasing linear placement, sine/cosign distance approach negative
 
    Ok.  Listen.  He writes in the essay, ‘all these occur, save death,’ right at the start of it.
    You mean, like he knows.
    Oh, sure.
    Sounds exasperating.
    The traces of this are in the blood, certain enzymes, proteins, antigens.
    Okay.
    I have discovered something else about our William.
    Okay.
    He has all fourteen characteristics of a serial killer, plus one new one.
    That being?
    He is totally sane and has all the  fourteen.


        silence


    Totally sane, and all the fourteen.  Molly, that makes no sense statistically.
    Oh, we know already that he is not a serial killer.
    It would be better if he were, Molly, don't you think?
    We do not need common ground with statistical analysis to proceed, Patty.
    You want to define it.
    Serial killer, yes, in terms of this discussion, Patty.
    Yes, then.
    Kills for food.
    Psychological food?
    Oh, sure.
    Perhaps he has suffered a very severe Fischer’s Wound, the one young males suffer, which breaks the bond, or loosens it, with their mothers and fathers, or guardians--the first moment of the first great confusion, disillusionment, like the realization that Santa Claus is unreal, or that the Easter Bunny is only an icon.
    Good, Patty.
    Thank you, Molly.
    That would merely be one of the characteristics of a serial killer, common to all males.
    Serial killers have many things in common with all of us?
    Oh, sure.
    Explain.
    Dolphins aren’t serial killers, neither are Octopi.  No study has ever suggested that, but both species have brains similar to ours, larger, more complex, even, but they are not serial killers.  So, right away you can eliminate higher nervous system functions as a constant.
    I’m going to kill you someday.
    I know.
    Go ahead.  Do you want a warm up on that coffee?
    No, thanks, Patty.
    You're welcome, Molly.
    Patty, we cannot assume those high species have religion or philosophy, but they may.  Monkeys, particularly chimps, have the same types of violent behavior humans exhibit at their most horrendously brutal level.
    It's a bipedal deal then?
    Chimps and humans are almost the same things, Patty, except for one.
    Well, they are biologically identical at the molecular level--DNA, specifically--99 percent identical at that level.
    Yet chimps don’t have philosophy or religion, not at the observable level, do they, Patty.
    And we do.
    Oh, sure.
    Religion and philosophy, then, don’t create serial killers?  That is your idea?
    Not as a constant.
    Chimps and dolphins may have religion and philosophy.
    No, they do not.
    How do you know that?
    They have never been observed killing for psychological food.
    You said religion and philosophy don’t make serial killers.
    They don’t, Patty. They give comfort, perhaps, but not germination.
 
silence

    Look, Patty, both dolphins and chimps kill without mercy, often and many times without apparent cause.
    Only from rage or to give protection to loved ones, or from jealousy, particularly chimps.  They get jealous and kill, or they kill for resources and territory.  Dolphin kill sharks for fun, it is true, but sharks are not the same species and are a threat to their young.
 
silence

    Is this going to get biblical?  Molly, don't go biblical on me.
    Logical analysis proceeds directly away from any way of knowing God, unless you understand the intuitive nature of our perception of solid, objective things.
    Entropy, then, a reduction of ability, ability to function  Children are free of all this?
    Entropy is the deleterious effect of atoms losing speed in their orbits.  There is a universal ten percent.
    Universal ten per cent.
    For every event, ten others preceded to produce it.
    Eventually we all just die beneath ice, then?
    It all just peters out.
    Pure horror.
    Oh, sure.
    Enlighten me.
    Atoms offset entropy  by 90 percent to maintain their integrity.  But there remains the ten percent.  That is time, nothing more, nor less.  Clocks are file cabinets which help us keep track of the next footprint to make, but they have nothing to do with time.  It does not truly exist .  It is not sound.  I am talking about homeostasis.
    Homeostasis?
    Oh, sure.  Food.  Hunger.  The esoteric kind, like cheeseburgers uncooked yet eaten.
    Food.
    Oh, sure.  We do the same to maintain our sanity.
    Back to dolphins and chimps.
    No.  They do not maintain their sanity.  They either have it or they don’t.  We do not know what they are inside their heads.  We only know that we think they are innocent.
    That is not provable.  Dolphins may have psychological problems.
    Learn their language, then come back to me with that and I’ll set up a consultation with one of them.  We only know animals, especially higher animals with elegant brains, suffer emotional pain or enjoy emotional joy, but its priority to their behavior remains unknown.
    This is my day off.
    Innocence.
    You said this would not get biblical.
    No.  I did not say that. Logic and data proceed directly to that.
    Via psychology.  I see.
    No.  Via psychology, only apparently.
    He must have a Fischer’s Wound?
    All males have that after a certain age, Patty.
    Another thing in common with serial killers?
    Oh, sure.  But Dr. Dooda, his nature, is many, many powers removed from that.
    Yes, but a really bad wound, I mean.
    Irrelevant.  The wound is a psychological term referring to the first knowledge all boys get:  that he is no longer cute when he acts like a moron and adults are no longer manipulated by the cuteness he used to have, because he no longer has it.  It can refer to the first great disenchantment with justice,  in that, life is unfair, and the first unfairness, when dealt out by one trusted fully--such as a parent--is devastating and sends the child on to the rest of his life.
    Is he insane?
    No, this only has an apparent connection to psychology.
    What does it have to do with?
    It has to do with the firmament collapsing upon us.
    Molly.
    Patty.
    What do you mean, Molly?
    Our cells come from the firmament.
    You said this is not a cellular issue.
    It is a firmament issue, therefore it is a theological one as well.
    I like your ‘blue dog’ cups and your circular reasoning.
    Oh, sure.  But everything is a circle.  Nature has no straight lines, not even electrons or quarks are straight lines.  Circular reasoning is, perhaps, the mother of logic, and as any child, rebels, yet is foolishness and wise at the same time.
    How dangerous is he?
    A terror is he.
    Like a scary movie or monster?
    That would be a mercy.
    Back to beyond terror?
 
archive notation:  at this point in tape a subsonic reverberation and sine/cosign approaching confluence as animal frequencies pick up possible among lower species ... intensive tremular vectors approaching confluence

  What Dr. Dooda has is like seeing God, continually, as though his limbic system--the one creating anger, joy, inspiration, madness even--has been inflamed or completely removed and something else put in its place.  See, Patty,  we all seek to die in our secret places and ways.
    Die?  Secret places and ways?
    Obliteration.  Continuously, second by second.  No death taken or given.
    Molly, explain what this means.
    Homeostasis is common to all human beings.
    Homeostasis, homeostasis.  I am getting a headache.
    Patty, the biological warfare we see beneath microscopes — think about it.
    But you are speaking in psychological terms.
    No, I am not.
    The cellular level has undergone a change?
    Oh, sure.
    Then enlighten me about how this is not a cell thing.
    Evolution occurs when DNA changes must be passed on to offspring, are beneficial, are not recessive, and changes the position of the species on the biological tree, so to speak.
    These are accidental.
    But not random.  Homeostasis creates major transformational experience, there is the sound of the god code--the god code, tantra of sound, the web that holds the universe together--and sound is the glue of reality, which is what we stupidly refer to as 'handicapped people.'  For instance, the deaf ones may have secrets and experiences which set them apart and above.  Like blind people, who cannot receive light, yet have their own, deaf people cannot receive sound, but have their own.  Light has vibration, which is sound.  Hearing is receipt of vibration in the form of sound.  All is sound.
    Which you say Dr. Dooda no longer needs, Molly.
    He doesn't.  He has achieved total chaos.  On a universal scale, that is homeostasis.
 
silence

    Centeredness?
    No, homeostasis.  Centeredness is a form of self delusion which leads to a sanity of sorts, but not homeostasis.  Serial killers can be very centered.
    Happiness?
    No, homeostasis is not delusion nor the perfection of avoiding challenges and difficulties, nor embracing easy answers and being a coward.  Homeostasis has nothing to do with happiness.
    I’m all balance and waiting, Molly.
    Homeostasis does not need happiness.  Happiness is temporary, dependent upon outside sources, a reaction to either environmental stress relievers or a lack of healthy challenge--or the input of individuals who may withdraw their input, thus making it primarily a slave/master relationship.  Happiness is not homeostasis.
    Do babies have it?
    No.  They do not need it yet.  What we call their innocence is simply a lack of cellular and frequencies chaos.
    Innocence is not the same thing, then?
    No, Patty.  Innocence we can live without, and in fact, striving for perfection is meritorious, whereas being innocent is...
    A gift, and without merit or blame.
    Excellent.
    Thank you, Molly.
    You’re welcome, Patty.

silence 

    Is that because innocence does not know how to keep itself?
    Oh, sure.  It doesn’t need to.  It is a simple, temporary attribute.  Try having a relationship of any kind with an innocent person, innocent in the biblical sense.  There are none.  Animals and plants have it, perhaps.  Their brutality or cruelty is  natural or easily understood.  In other words, its germination is observable-- such as chimps go to war for territory, or food, or revenge--the way their closest biological relative, we, go to war.  These, of course, are tribal characteristics and are generally visited upon other tribes.  Society, human society is identical in all respects to chimp society, or dolphin society.  Even the octopus who has no society, behaves in an identical fashion.  They are all innocent, in an observable, though unpleasant way.
    But we are not.
    No.
    But if you are innocent, you don’t have homeostasis, merely a temporary condition.
    Homeostasis is what you have if you are innocent, but you don’t have to be innocent to have it, and if you aren’t innocent, you need it.  If you're dead, you're dead.
    I don’t understand.
    Its not a function of the brain’s chemistry.  It is major transformational experience, not unlike madness, but more like despair and ecstasy having sex together.  The kid they have is homeostasis, not necessarily innocence, but possibly.
    Understanding?
    No.
    Why?
    Understanding is only explaining instead of defining.  It goes nowhere.  It just is and then you look at it, and it looks back.  You both shrug and either go away together, or split, but no matter... its all in the shrug of things that don’t matter.  Once you get them where you want them, turn on the stereoscope, and finally become indifferent, you have really got nothing except, possibly, enlightenment.  Even that is questionable,  because enlightenment is built upon philosophical etiologies which can be attacked continually with intellectual examination and is, therefore, dependent upon the status quo.
    Inspiration?
    No.
    Why.
    Inspiration is like understanding except that is only describing instead of explaining.  It just is.  You use it up until you are burned out and find that it's a lot like a drug you can’t imagine doing anything creative without...except that, not only can you not work without it, if you become reliant on it as a fuel,  you also find that it becomes the only thing in your existence that you can’t live without.
    So, you stop living.
    No, you stop creating.  You just sit around feeling inspired.  But you are, in fact, dead-in-the-water sitting.
    Give me an example of homeostasis, then.
    An example of how homeostasis works, one of its manifestations, or causes, for example is the frequency of 8.00 hrz which is good for altered consciousness, relaxation, and getting rid of depression and really bad vibes, like the ones you get when you think about how tuning forks are hard to eat with, and how worms writhe on hooks that giggling kids use to catch bluegill.
    What do you mean?
    I mean the situation with the worm is a situation which has all attributes and descriptive colors, except one:  homeostasis.  The example of the tuning fork is a situation where you try to use something for what it appears to be meant for, but is meant for something else much more limited in duration and usefulness.
    The situation remains lifeless, and no good can come of it, then.
    Except that which is a delusion.
    The children cannot be in love and do that, then.
    Excellent, Patty.  Now you can warm my 'blue dog' cup up.
    There is more than one type of homeostasis, though?
    Not the chemical one.
    That’s just synergistic flow of atoms, electron exchanges seeking ph balance.
    Correct, Patty.  We are talking about the other kind of homeostasis.
    The one that really, really matters.
    Oh, sure.
    Not the chemical one, then.
    You are grasping, Patty.  Thank you for the new hot coffee.  You're a sweetheart.
    My fingers await longer growth. 
    The real homeostasis, then, the one that makes us do things we don’t really want to do, or even care about doing, but have to do, or something in our brain dies.
    What would die in our brain?
    Not a chemical death, something more real than that.
    Souls?  The Heart?  Humaness?
    Excellent.  Or even something higher than that, see.  The ability to evolve.
    Okay, tell me about that one, then.
    An example you want?
    Please.
    Okay.  Mozart, the eldest one, was tormented by his noxious, talented sons.  There were many Mozart sons and they were all seminal geniuses.  They would wait until he was asleep and then they, one who drew the long straw, would sneak down to the piano and play from the position of middle C on the piano the notes CDE, EDC, CDED  without the final note the human ear requires of that particular progression.  The progression must be finished, namely middle C, or its just a linear advance into chaos, silence waiting for a portal, which is similar to suicide well thought out. 
    Okay.  I follow you.
    Well, the eldest Mozart couldn’t stand incomplete progressions-- and believe me, that particular progression, incomplete at the last note, will drive most normal people crazy.  Mozart, the eldest one, would have an instant nightmare. He’d dream he was falling into a pit of seething saliva. which he could not swallow fast enough to avoid drowning.  He’d leap up, stagger down into the music room and complete the progression.  He went to his grave not knowing why this would happen to him.  He only knew that he had to get the piano and hit the C--middle C, that is-- to complete the sound progression of the piano's notes,  or his sanity would simply disappear, much the same as the end the progression completed had, in that way, disappeared because the brain insisted that it was there, and that it could and must be placed where it was...even though it wasn’t there yet, and it was a helpless progression without outside help.
    How did he lose his homeostasis.
    Mozart?  He didn’t.
    Why?
    Because he finished the pattern.  The Mozart Note, as it is known, is the overwhelming compulsion to move from one second to the next, and not commit suicide, but accept or manipulate the next second and go on.
    No, Boss Dad Dooda.
    William’s father?
    Yes.
    You’ve been reading William’s file, too, then.
    Yes.  I watched the tape you had me look up, as well.
    Oh, sure.  That’s good.
    I thought he looked like anybody else writing a paper.
    But...
    Molly.
    Patty.
    That is, until I noticed the tape player was set on ‘slow’.
    So you sped it to normal,
    Well, what I saw cannot be.
    Intuitive assumptions, Patty.  Intuitive assumptions. 
    What are we talking about, here.
    William.
    William.  Duh.
    We are.  Once removed, enhanced to a second power.
    Go on, Molly.  I'm all ears again.
    Burial is a form of homeostasis.
    You mean like closure, no pun unintended.
    Nope.
    Well, closure helps stabilize things emotionally, doesn’t it?
    That’s not homeostasis, that’s finding a comfort zone to suffer inside.  Homeostasis, non chemical, real homeostasis, is how we can love somebody, give to somebody, believe in stuff and be fulfilled, not because we get love and stuff back, but because we have done it.  Period.  Without homeostasis you go mad.  You go air dead.
    Grief can drive you mad.
    Oh, sure.  This is not about grief, though.  Perhaps rage, at first...but something else happened, and now we have a cellular issue beyond manipulation.
    Okay.  How did Dr. Dooda's father lose his homeostasis?
    You mean why did he record the sounds from inside coffins, live time, yet into William's ears as William slept?  Why did he do this?  You want to know.  Burial is a form of homeostasis, Patty.
    Okay.
    Well, what he did was put a relay mic in a coffin, and then he put a receiver for it in his basement, as an experiment.
    Who.
    Boss Dad Dooda.
    Okay.
    Why?
    Got me.
    Okay, go on.
    I will, Patty.
    I know, Molly.
    Anyhow, he turned on the receiver the day after the coffin went in the ground.
    And?
    And he was just never the same after that.
    What do you mean?
    He lost his homeostasis.
    How do you know he did that thing with the mic and receiver?
    I mean he never told anybody about whether or not he heard anything over the receiver.
    He must of told somebody about what he did or you wouldn't know about it.
    True.
    Well, who did he tell?
    He didn’t tell anybody.  He left a paper, a document in his garage from when he was very young.  He titled it  'Garage'.  He left a tape.
    How do you know?  Confess, Molly, confess.
    I know because William let me listen.

        silence..

    That’s how I know what homeostasis is.

        silence..

    William kept Dad Boss Dooda’s tape.  I know things now.
    Can I listen, too?
    Yes, here.  Put these headphones on.
    Okay.
    Comfy?
    Yes.
    Okay, ready?
    Yes.
    Here goes.

        silence..

    Well, what do you think.

        silence..
 
    I know, Patty.  I know.  Here, set the headphones down now.

        silence..
 
    See, he used to play it into William’s ear when the kid was asleep.

        silence..
 
    You know that little Stevie changed his name to William.

        silence..
 
    Are you okay?
        silence..
 
    I’m turning it off, now, Patty.  Put the headphones down, Patty.

        silence..
   
    Hey look at me, Patty.
    Oh, God.
    Why are you crying?
    Up until a couple of seconds ago...
    What
    I believed in God.  .
    A lost God is a terrible thing.
    And so why are you  crying like I am?
    Because I still do.
    Homeostasis.
    So we have a problem.
    Yes.
    God, we, dolphins and chimps have nothing to do with this.
    No.
    Nor psychology and food.
    No.
    This is something new.
    Oh sure.
    How dangerous is he?
    He doesn’t need food.
    Feeds on himself?
    I said he doesn’t need.
    How dangerous is he?  I asked, now I know.
    Dangerous would be a starting point for a descriptive word.
    A terror he is.
    Like Boss Dad Dooda.
    A power second removed.
    And we are?
    Well, how do you feel, Patty.

        silence
 
    Same here.
    That is the nature of nature.
    Oh, sure.
    First ones we are not?
    Excellent.
    He’s like Adam or Eve?
    Oh, sure.
 
archive notation:  at this point in tape, approx 2000 ft, sine/cosign confluence with tremular vibrations approaching sonic levels with potential vectoring beyond potentials ... nature: unknown, yet emergence within seconds of this point in tape .... detectors indicated within distant relay points cataclysmic referencing through deep granite earth core points

    Molly,  what was that?
    A sort of thrumming...what...
    No, Patty.  Pay attention.
    Ok.  What should we do about William?
    He can do no harm there.
    Interviewing condemned prisoners?
    Gathering their last thoughts.
    Dead end job, Molly.
    Oh sure, Patty.
    Yes, but...
    Yes, but what?

        silence
   
    You do see, then, don’t you?.
    The tape?
    Excellent.
    Let’s listen again to the tape.
    Oh, sure.
    And then make some new ones.
    The condemned prisoners.
    Many.  Many.
    Homeostasis.
    Paradise lost.
    Oh sure.
    And entropy is...Patty, I got it.
    So, Molly, entropy is...
    Paradise regained.
    The Mozart Note.
    Not God.
    Not God.
    How long has man waged war? 
    Same as chimps.
    When did evolution begin to stop?
    When its own first thought arrived.
    Which was...
    That it is hunger, and not necessarily a good thing.
      And it didn't ...
      Care.
      And William Dooda ....
      Shapeshifter.  New species created by fear.  Evolution.
      A terror he is.  Or angelic.
      Destroy the tapes, Molly.
   
      Good, Patty.
      Thank you, Molly.

      Do you feel the building begin to tremble?
      What .....

                                                    ARCHIVE NOTATION  SIGN OUT                                                     
                                                                      here tape fills with white noise at 87 hrz  ....

no further tapes exist
destruction of immediate area
and environs

out out this date .... sign off
Chapter twenty one
IN WHICH THE MONKEYHEAD IS DISCOVERED
excerpts of the binary dialogue within
last moments of the past

from damaged sections, in which I, guess who, had been present — within the minds of two brilliant human females .... a most unpleasant experience for me, unpleasant the way a dog, feeling nervous and outmatched at some primal level, views an eagle — with a certain amount  of circumspection

This damaged portion of tape is only a random gathering which I was able to rescue sometime after the cataclysmic events:

   
        Molly, there have been reports of strange things happening.
        Oh, sure.
        No, no, I mean there have been reports of asteroids.
     
Eavesdropping, curious, for my little friend William had seemed hopelessly fretful at some antics or other of these two females, for he was on to their analysis of his employment essay.  I listened intently to them and became atoms and rearranged and got to know them pretty well, but did not intend to affect them, but, alas, I think I might have.  I had forgotten the stern voice of my mother, She: “Do not, beloved little thing, forget ever that the fire you were in, born an angel, part human,  haunts, haunts me.  Also remember, you do not want to know what the thoughts of a woman really are, for there is no universal plasmotc chaos that can compare, neither in its creative powers or in the blinding, killing brilliance which is your lot as a human male, of sorts,  from which you are to be forever locked away, only to derive the benefits thereof, and that is your lot.

But I, upon having taken my father's (First One’s) hand during walks, and seeing how he grinned at the mysteries of all that had befallen him--and had blessed him, as well--I knew the plight of the human male was not so bad, nor so pathetic as human women believe.
     
    Get my 'blue dog' cup, Patty.
    Here.
    Thank you, Patty.
    You're welcome, Molly.
    Oh, sure.
    You were talking about Juliet Roy Rogers ...
    Oh sure, play my tape of her.
    Sure, Molly.  I like her, too.
 
Oh, and I was sure to remind my laughing, joy-lit sister, that remarkable as she might be, she was only atoms,  atoms, after all, like me, and she would sing back with the beautiful lightness that is the female human voice, proving, whereas she might be only atoms, like me, that there was the matter of how the atoms were arranged, and off she would go, with all of her damnably, marvelous arrangements...but I digress, I digress, except to say that as our parents were part human and part god, the usual rules of brother sister relationships as understood by humans, and humans alone, are irrelevant to being of different origin than full human blooded humans.

It turned out--and I didn’t learn it until much later--that Juliet Roy Rogers, my sister, did, indeed have the ability to assume a physical shape at the same level as humans, but that ability came with a downside.  It would make her forget her ability and her true origin, and would make it even more difficult  for her release herself from that form, once she had taken it.

Their powers are, well...the little secret is, you see, that if you were to take all the life energy of every female alive at any given second of time--anywhere in the universe, I might add, not just on this giddy, little planet--the light would be equal to the manifestness of God.  Whereas, if you took the same reading off the sum total of male life energy in the same circumstances, you’d need a really good pair of sunglasses, but you wouldn’t need any sunguard chemicals or anything like that.
 
    Thank you, Patty.
    You're welcome, Molly.
    Oh, sure.
 
While Juliet's music was playing, they stood and listened for awhile, but I would like to explicitly state that God is neither male nor female.  Let me assure you of that.  Simply put, She is God.  Of course,  there is the matter of recessive genes, and all that, which human females, who were scientists at the time, had discovered were human male bonders--meaning that human males were an abnormal departure for a developing fetus to take a detour and become, but women will surely miss the male of the species if certain dire predictions regarding the prophetic nature of lesbian love becoming the normative for women naturally inclined towards bisexual or even heterosexual activities, come true; and also, perhaps why men in love are more the object of humor than women in love.

There is a primal knowledge female humans have, which their counterparts do not have.
 
That’s why it is easier to be male, than female.  Males have females to lean on, but what can females lean on?  Other females, of course.

Anyhow, I digress, for I wished merely to gain a foothold within these two females, and I had forgotten, just simply forgotten, the warning She had given to her little boy, namely me.  For some reason, I began to reminisce about father and mother, First One and She.
   
How they loped like the wind.  The things he became when she wrapped him gently as photosynthesis, and enfolded him inside herself and made love to him,  I remember, and his long, high notes--the ones that Juliet  first captured, the result being that stringed instruments became imbedded within the generations of humans which would someday populate this planet--and the wolves we captured and who fed us eagerly as their own whelps, that we might gather more of the earth which mother could not pass along to us though the mechanism of my father’s love for her.  How Juliet and I came to dance along those wild, Irish shores, with their lovely gulls and salt spray anarchy of ocean waves exploding against the many hundreds of feet of sheer granite indecision... and how man would always listen to the wolf cry so that he might hear his own soul.
   
        Oh listen, Patty.
     
        silence
 
        Wondrous.
        Yes. Yes.
     
      The long, fine strands of music. like hair gleaning energy and weaving fantasies into the minds of these two human females — ordinary, ordinary they were, so ordinary, as all women are, in their superiority, both genetically and physically to their male counterparts--who always mistake the ability to lift with the knowledge of life, death and terror, so much so that I had forgotten not to take it for granted, as is the way of garden lovers who take the chuckle of lettuce to be mere shape and a symptom of a good crop to come...or the appearance of a weak scraggly crop, mostly useless, but for compost.  Unremarkable nature doing what nature remarkably does, the utter complexity of the human female's astonishing resemblance to what humanity calls God, had simply escaped me until I took the liberty of  listening  inside this taped conversation.
      Human males often find a mysterious presence inside the straight-laced business woman who goes home and plays the drums in private, exposing one red sock and one black sock as she drives primal backbeats with her base drum pedal, and never crosses the red sock leg the wrong way over the black sock leg to show the wrong sock.  She crosses her legs without mental reservation only when she wears a dress and doesn’t wear any socks at all.
       
        silence (as the music ended)
 
        You have had dreams, too?  After listening to the tape, the coffin tape, the one William used to listen to?
        After listening to the tape.  Oh, sure.

        more silence
     
        The first time?
        No, Patty.  I had black, long, thin dreams for a couple of weeks.
        Mine were inexplicable, dark and beautiful and foreboding, and there was the search for air.
      You mean, long, thin, empty dreams.
        Dreams without shape until they are long, thin.
        Oh, sure. Worm hole thin.
        Like they had gone through a worm hole?
        Like in space.
        Yes, Molly.  Yes.  Just like in space.
        Oh, sure.  Tell me about one of them Patty.
        Okay.  Here goes.  I wrote it down.  Let me get out the paper.
        Oh, sure.
        Okay.  I tried to pull away, for there approached a mask of darkest horror, worse, far worse than the gaping sardonicus of nocturnal death, for this was the utter expression of purest, purest bland, cold, indifference: a dark, melancholy, anti-monstrum, like a monkey face.  There were fierce things inside this, but I could not see these, only hear the writhings they were.
      Yes. Yes.  Oh, sure.  Read more.
      I was where time and what I am no longer intersect--not where you remember and dwell inside, usually, but experiences you mercifully remember as dreams.  Flash-eyed demons straddle you...shove warm and fuzzy thoughts into you, those dreams you have, occasionally.  But those are not dreams you have;  they are neither warm nor fuzzy.
    That last part, Patty, was a dream?
      No, Molly, it wasn’t.
      What is it, then?
      It is why I don’t have dreams anymore.
      Why.
      The Monkeyhead, Molly.  The Monkeyhead.
      In the video of William, we both saw saw him write so fast that he was a blur, and not a fuzzy one, but a slow moving sway, the way helicopter blades go around at thousands of rpm, but from a distance look like a slow, circular rotation--but I don’t care, because now I understand how this can be.  Objective data is an intuitive assumption.  When that data provides proof that objective data is absurd, then I know I can no longer dream of goodness, for there is no reason not to dream of evil and so my mind opens like a dark, savage rose.
    Good.  Oh, sure.  Oh, sure, Patty.
    Thank you.  Now tell me about the dreams you have had after listening to the coffin tapes, Molly.
    In my dream, the last one I think I ever will have, a monkey head is on an old, old dusty dining room table, you know, a table where people used to share food together.
    Yes, a remnant of our tribal ceremonies, now lost in time, but we still pluck leaves from trees we walk under.
      Oh, sure.
      And we eat differently alone.  We must be free some of the time.

    silence
 
    I’m sorry.
    Its okay, Molly.  Go ahead.  I have that thought. too.
    This countenance, now very approximate within sleep, threatened to enfold me into a place biblical, fearsome as coffin life, joyful as pure love totally requited.  Unable to move, I could only experience.
    Yes. Yes.  Molly.  Molly.  Yes.
    Anyhow, this monkeyhead swivels one way, and then swivels the other, and its eyes are like crystal, but imperfect, as though not quite blown into shape at the right temperature.  I kneel at the table and weep for it to tell me that it loves me.
    Oh, god.
     
    silence
 
    Oh, god, Molly.  Me too.
    Its okay, Patty.
   
    silence
     
    Juliet Roy Rogers.  The dream, it was like Juliet Roy Rogers' music.
    Oh, I think, so, Molly.
    Her music is like time used as something other than linear guidance from one objective instant to another, when you fall between those seconds.
    Yes?
    And into this room, with the monkeyhead and the table, you fall.
       
    silence

   
    And then, Patty, as I weep and beg the monkeyhead to see me, it merely swivels and gazes beyond where our eyes meet, but do not, and continues to swivel.
    Molly.
    Patty.
    I want to cry.
    Oh, sure...but in outer space, it's almost a perfect vacuum, becoming more and more perfect, the smaller the area observed.  Sound waves do not carry.  I assure you, this principal is universal and, therefore, also true of inner space.  I had forgotten this, fool that I am. 
    What does that mean, Molly. 
    In front of the monkeyhead is a dark place, like the place general anesthesia finds for you, a form of death, and amnesia--but not necessarily a place where nerves, their branches and the synapses and sodium pumps that drive them, will have been temporarily excommunicated from the brain--and it may be that we only imagine, or hope, this is true, else modern medicine would simply become another form of horror...for is not the brain much more clever than the things we use and which are its mere creation?
   
Let me say, here, as I listened to this tape, that the casual observer would have noted my mouth open in a scream which emitted nothing, with the exception of a perfect, infallible silence. 

    Molly, the monkeyhead is this master?  Fear as an emotion become solid?
    Good, Patty, good.  Our lives of fear.  Oh, sure.
    Thank you, Molly.
    And Juliet's music opens up this hidden thing, this thing which has driven societies and nations to kill each other off.  Juliet's music is the thing, a thing, which frees the heart.
   
    silence
 
      Patty, I had thoughts like this: the rage at how history has been made is only  need for a common reference point, an ideology to help folks ignore the intricate workmanship of capitalism and socialism, murder, pillage and mayhem, state or otherwise.  Once they’ve made sense of it, they won’t know a dictatorship from a pretty baby with handcuffs.  So these places we wait to be made for our tired heads, our longing surge into destiny, is really only what we heard love was when we were children, with children's ears.  Our master, growing inside us, built firmaments and visions and complicatedness, until finally we were released from the bondage of childhood into the utter, gleaming universes we think we are.
      Good girl.
      Thank you, Molly.
      It is the ability to make sense of horrible things that keeps us enslaved.
 
    That’s how she plays the way she plays.  I was astonished.  Juliet Roy Rogers was a green child of Ireland.  And so was I, and there had been only two.  She was my sister.
   
    Molly,  Monkeyhead is entropy.  The ability to evolve.
    Yes, Patty.  It is the ability to become an asshole.

I dispersed, released myself into the free, hugeness of air, much wiser and humbled.  A  millisecond or two after release, I realized that Juliet Roy Rogers had upon that very day sold her 30 millionth CD.  So, perhaps human males would not become extinct, after all,  but I no longer cared, nor had I ever, for you see, I had fallen in love...at last.

    Good, Molly.   
    Thank you,  Patty.


Chapter twenty two
somewhere in space, last instant of the present


The deadly asteroid belt closed proximity.  Her crystal ship held true.
She was not alarmed at the nearness of the whorled mace heads, the asteroids, their particles, some as big as earth cities, several were thousands of miles across, others small as a mouse, all traveling at thousands  of miles per second, each capable of delivering massive thermonuclear thunder and wizard death, the death that grows geometrically becoming greater than its own potential, much the way that an idea spreads among its willing denizens wisdom of chaos, its divine orders of beauty, madness and truth, or perhaps the simplicity of nothing at all, what might have been, be it good or be it evil, the whole. 
She watched drops of color, hue, tone and small quivering masses, specks of things mysterious even to Her engulf the Beautiful Special Planet.  She remembered how the blue white sphere She loved gathered sparks and orchids glistened in rain beneath moon or sun or clouds across the vast planar Earth surface.
“Oh,” She sighed, “how I love you my Beautiful Special Planet, my love.  How I would gather you up at last ...” 
One asteroid separated itself from the others, its distance irresistibly reduced by Her crystalline ship’s forward momentum randomly moving towards it. 
“... to save you from time, if only I could.”  But She knew time was beginning again and there would be no turning back from this ending of Her epoch.  She sighed, but knew others would take Her place eventually after they had learned their true nature and powers.
How She loved Jesus Gun and Juliet Rogers.
“And First One,” She said quietly, “I miss you so.”
A flash of light.
A voice rang a flute note of flower petal softness.
“Do not despair.”
She spun, giggling suddenly, forgetting all of Her cares, for Her little friend the phantasm was visiting Her again.  Its origin, its wisdom, its beauty She knew nothing of but that She loved it more even than She had loved First One.
“Do not despair,” it sang again upon soft, coy notes.
“Come my sweet,”  She cooed, its eyes dark as cured madness, its arms and legs fluid translucence.  It smiled, became a beautiful whirling thing.  She had no other word to describe it even to Herself, for She had not created it, nor had She ever conceived of this small and wondrous dervish thing.  It settled upon Her lips and kissed Her, then flitted back and wafted before Her eyes.
“Why have you not become again?”  It bobbed the way water spreads out when landing upon a rock, just before splitting to smaller droplets.  “Why have you not come to stay and again become to this poor little blue ball you love so as had when you became the lover of a mere human, your own creation?”
She spun slowly  to avoid the phantasm’s ardent position inches away from Her eyes.  “Oh,”  She giggled, for She loved its adventurous and wickedly cute existence.  “My little thing, how I do love you.”  She held out Her hand and it landed upon Her palm.
“Ah, yes.  It is true.  Your children will take their place someday as your beautiful blue and white planet lives on, and one day, it is true, it shall begin and teem with fresh things and greens yet unimaginable.”
It swished and giggled. 
“And their time shall end as yours and their children shall take their place in yet another new beginning of time.  Endless, endless is imagination.”
It hummed and slowly descended. “Why do you love me most of all?”  Golden sparks flew from its undulating form as it found a repose within the palm of this wondrous looking god it loved. 
“Oh,”  She teased.  You have been the pet of many gods, but this god, I, this god is the finest one it you have ever beheld.” 
“Why would you die if you love me?”  It pouted and hovered. 
“Oh, I shall not die, but shall be gone.”
She sat down slowly. She did not want to surprise or frighten it in any way.  Her legs crossed as She sat and kissed the head of this phantasm of whose wisdom She had slept within, for Her love for he lost First One had replaced itself in this little miracle She loved as much, and so She had learned to create Her many worlds by Her melancholy tears.  Her lips felt like they’d dipped into sparkling water as She gave it a kiss. 
It fluttered and turned pink.
“Oh,” She cooed to it. 
It hummed and the golden sparks turned fuschia, then orange, then one or two hues even She had never conceived much less dreamt. 
“How I do love you, too,”  It sighed.  “I shall miss you.”  It spun in Her palm and felt Her heart warm.  She thought of First One.  How She wanted it by Her side. 
“Why not resurrect First One?”  The phantasm grinned mischievously and spread into a flat pulsating oval of light, waiting Her answer, for it feared She would say She could not resurrect one whom She had fallen in love with because their death would then be meaningless and that, besides, would refuse the right of peace all human souls have, a right which She had given them upon their deaths.
It pulsed and glowed, angelic, for it knew a secret and it was time to tell Her.
“Because I love it true,”  She whispered.
It sighed, “I feared you would say this.”  It spun into the shape of a flower, dropped a petal into Her hand,.  “Of remembrance, “ it whispered then dispersed as golden droplets of trembled lustre through the confines of the googlehedron’s crystalline delicate sheen, then wafted out and away into space. 
“Goodbye my little love,” She cried.
Musical notes, chords which might one day in the far future have been discovered by a lonely musician who’d lost love, and by the finding have found even a greater love, gathered from the phantasm’s final, adoring salute.
“Goodbye.” 
She stood trembling, watched the asteroid belt exhibit one tiny pebble, like an offering of one golden trinket from a conquering king to his conquered foe to wear upon his hand before dying, which began to block out Her view of the Earth.  The pebble’s sides grew clear and a thunderous color emitted from within it as it approached. 
“Hello,” She sang, spreading Her arms and legs and standing to receive a least beautiful of all of Her creations, the most humble, one useless rock whose being was as pure as death’s color, one resounding and ardent and final.
A golden teardrop fell from each of Her eyes. 
Suddenly the phantasm appeared upon one of them and bounced, giggling up onto Her lips.
It began to twirl upon Her breasts and before She could find words for Her joy, it swooshed away and burst into white mist from which First One appeared and ran over to embrace Her. 
“First One, First One, “ She cried, how, how I love you so.
As the asteroid pebble blocked out the firmament, She knew that the phantasm was First one, truly.  She closed Her eyes.  The asteroid pebble thundered its indifferent destiny.
Her lips parted.  She smiled. First one and She leaned together as the asteroid sturck.
    “Come to me now, my true true love.”
A distant golden spark hailed and glimmered in the eyes of two doomed lovers far, far, away on a beach at night far away on  the Beautiful Special Planet. 
First One sparkled and She glimmered with intense light. and merged at last as a billion histories and creations became, at last, alone.  She and First One only heard the firmament blaze an instant of white. 


    And then they were gone.


PART FIVE

Chapter twenty three
caveman future, going for food


    He raised his eyes upward to the sky, becoming bold.  Again he hummed .

    blur
    buzz
    its hum
    hummm

    came
    the
    horde night        the
    moon swam        above

    its billion legs    these
    spread dark musculatures    their eggs 

    the fierce things inside.

    His lips, they parted.
    The campfire, a careless speck of glee, and he, a fly upon rock, no wings, but possessing the powerful thing, the memory of being within and having once been a fierce thing.
    His hunger and he rappelled downward.  His glee, patient as oddities, and he were dexterous and primal.  The gleeful speck, the musculature, the spreading night before him, with its promise of things to come--all these things, and his billion legs, he began to claim:  this his birthright,  and he its green, green, red food taker.
 
    He could not remember, anyway, but only the dizzy, stargazing long ago.  He knew now its origin, although, then he could not remember this, and this above all, he could remember now:  it--like the side of Jesus, its opium smile.  And now, as down he rappelled, gazing at the gleeful speck, dug long curled toenails tentatively into the rock, the sand, the dirt base of the stone wall

    ...and landed.

    He scuttled into the waist high rocks far below the rock maw that was his home.  The gleeful speck of the careless campfire, the food that would be gathered around it, the fierce eggs in the night sky and their moon; all these he could remember and the DNA he had become.  He drew the dark musculature of the night into his lungs and was no longer melancholic, for he was no longer subject to its mysteries.
    Loping towards the campfire, each stride-like brush stroke of color bringing its glow and hover beyond distant trees more clearly into focus, grass tops brushing elbows, night’s musculature bending eggs into his mouth...he swallowed.  The smell of the earth, a copious being of its own accord, struggled among the wet folds of his pharynx, became atoms, and him.
    The ground flashed up then beneath him, and then far behind him.

MONKEYHEAD
a novel by Moqui Takoda

Chapter 24
asteroid strike

    Dr. William Dooda didn’t like this one darn bit.  A heck, heck of a deal, it was.
    That personnel director had been snooping around in his personnel file, her and her snitty assistant.  Molly and Patty.  He sniffed and scowled.  Molly and Patty, and Patty and Molly.
    Zippetydoodah zippetee aye, my oh my what a wonderful day.
    He blew his nose.
    He’d spent a lot of time and energy developing his reputation as a boring, dutiful and adequately competent psychiatrist.  Medical school was far, far and long ago, so, so historical, now, just like the black outs he’d have at exams that he always did pretty darn good on anyhow, and he was perfectly content to prescribe occasional  psycotropics to violently depressed and grimly suffocating prisoners who couldn’t complain about anything anyway, and he enjoyed that part of it, especially that part of it.  He enjoyed his paperwork and the interviews because it was just all words and words and words.  At least, they looked like words and he certainly had no memory of writing them, but  the darn red itchy compressed place on the side of his second right finger reminded him of when he was learning his multiplication tables a long time ago.
    He had plenty of time for things he really enjoyed, like bowling, and coloring books, and never had to worry about things like patients complaining about this and that and stuff like that.  The demands on him were minimal, considering the alternative:  being a real doctor.  Ever since they had transferred Derogatus to this facility, he whined to himself, he had known he would have to give a terminal interview, because it was his job, and because it was a requirement that all prisoners must be assessed immediately prior to execution.  It was just paperwork.
    But it was also Derogatus.  Billy the Lobster hadn’t done anything but take a nap ever since that day.  William sighed.
    The interview was mandatory.  The prison system had its requirements and its unrequited stratagems, particularly where the death penalty and the paper work involved in such undertakings were concerned.
    Nope.  William didn’t like this one darn bit.
    He knew he’d have to get through it somehow, but he certainly didn’t like this at all.  He didn’t want anybody to get the idea that he and Derogatus had been friends, and that, in fact, he had been present at the time the crime Derogatus was going to be executed for had been committed.
    William felt bad about Donovan, the barkeep.  He didn’t think Derogatus was guilty or anything like that at all.
    Billy the Lobster was so happy now.  He missed him.
    William felt all itchy just thinking about stuff.
    Holy Smokes.  Good gigs like this one were getting hard to find.
    But I, guess who, a Green Child of Ireland, Jesus Gun, approved heartily.  I was so proud of him.  Such progress.  I was dying to find out about Billy.  Did he still exist?  So far, I had let Stevie, that’d be William, as he called himself, ask me some questions which I promptly, within seconds of the answers, forgot--not because they were uninteresting, but simply because he forgot them even before I did.  I had let him pretend that the initial discomfort he felt, as I shuffled in all my shackled glory into his office,  didn’t exist, and for the past forty five minutes had played along with him and his hopes.
    Old friends, especially when one is ashamed or extremely nervous about what the other one knows, or about what the other one is, often carry one polite conversation, for a short period of time which mercifully ends, and they go on their way,  never again  frequenting  the places they could meet by chance, like a restroom in a particular part of  a building at a certain time of day.
    No point in pressing one’s luck, when a certain period of time lapses and polite, disinterested conversation can no longer bear the civil disregard all people bear towards others whom they would just as soon not have to speak to without the ability to make them disappear--or at least the ability to make themselves disappear.   
    I itched right along with William.  It was, well, it was erotic. 
    Erotic.
    As the interview progressed, and let Derogatus talk for awhile, I waited for the moment when civil disregard is no longer possible without the civil part of it, not to mention that the disregard part of it becomes even more embarrassing than all the rest of it could ever have been in the first place.  The particular, exact moment of critical mass, as homeostasis has been achieved, arrives with a thud, like the unexpected cessation of the house hum when an air conditioner or heating system's thermostat commands the system to shut down for a while, and it is now time to enjoy the reality of it.
    Oh Lord, erotic is the brusque intelligence of entropy.
    Erotic.
    “Do you remember your first touch?”  I whispered it straight at him.
    Buzzzzzz.
    HUUUUUMMMMMMMM..........
    Silence.  The time for departing arrives, but, in this case, of course, poor Stevie, that’d be William, and I are trapped, ensconced, doomed to loom beyond the pregnant and telling instant.
    Thud.
    Hummm.
    Buzzz.
    We cleared our throats.  He gazed out the window, hopeless, glum, as I studied the bead of sweat beginning to form on the tip of his nose flare for an instant with the energy of a piece of the outside, sunny day’s light.
    I jiggled my shackles.
    “Do you remember your first touch?”
    His eye lids fluttered and he glared at me for a second and then his face went blank.  “Golly.”
    Lights on.  Lights out.
    How I loved him.  How I love you.  Pray there is no God.
    I crossed my legs, clasped my shackled hands together on top of my highest knee, and smiled at him.  How I loved him.
    The office was sparse, its walls institutional bland, of course, and the desk simple that the one behind it, whoever that might be, could fit in very well to all who did not know about humans or their complex, subdued ancient and primal Red Wheat  natures.  He was almost like all men, like me, and many others whom I know as well, and in that one way, decidedly different.  I knew him well.  I knew him better than he knew me.  Anyone but yours truly, that’s me, would have been terrified of him, knowing what I knew, but then even lovers are not terrified of one another, except in their misinterpreted and misconstrued dreams which they share with each other after love making, if only with themselves...and that’d be him.
    “Do you remember your first touch?”
    William sighed.
    He squinted at me across the eraser end of his yellow pencil.  The lead tip  fluttered back and forth along his thumb web and he grinned.  “Yes,” he said.
    “Your first touch, not your first experience of being a human, of sorts.”
    He spun his wrist at me.  Snot was beginning to form a bauble on his left nostril, and gleamed like a cheap earring in a belly button.  “I’m s’posed to be asking the questions,” he sniffed.  It disappeared.
    He sneezed.
    “Gesundheit.”
    “Please don’t tell them.”  William was holding his head in his hands and rolled his eyes at me.  “Puleeeeze.”
    “You first touch, Stevie.”
    “Corpses, you mean.”  He leaned back and nodded at his own sudden recognition of some genius somewhere in his DNA which most of the rest of his relatives had never been able to bring out as well as he had.  “I know you quite well.  Corpses you are talking about now.”
    “There are corpses and then there are corpses.”
    “Umm...”
    “Some walk; some don’t.”
    “Duh.”
    “Duh?”
    He started up straight behind his desk.  “Let us, get on with this, uh, Mr. Derogatus.”  Then his shoulders slumped.  “Puleeeze.  Geeze Louise.”
    “I won’t.”
    He cleared his throat and whipped out a tissue from his top drawer and wiped his nose.  “Criminintly.”
    “You first touch, not your first embalming session.”
    He blinked at me.  “Oh.”
    “First touch.”
    “When Billy taught me to dance the ocean dance,” he wheezed.  “Now, I need to ask some questions.”  He glared at me above his glasses, head bent down, and poised his pencil.
    “Okay.”
    “Oh,” he blinked, shook his head.  “Okay then.”
    “Well?”
    “What.”
    “First question.  Your first question.”
    “Oh.”
    Silence.
    “Ask.”
    “Well, then,” William sighed.  “what did you do the first time that you were unhappy.”
    “I have never been unhappy.”
    “A mere clever existentialist observation and not too dad gummed, er, uh...”  he rolled his eyes and looked embarrassed, but he wasn’t really, for when the things we have inside us crop up unexpectedly, often the end of careers or freedom or life itself can result,  "ummm, I mean and not too clever, at that.”
    He smiled victoriously at me.  I shuddered for his comfort and looked down at my feet, hands clasped beyond the handcuffs like cauliflower pieces.
    He scowled.  He looked down hard at his notebook.  “May we now continue where we left off?”
    “Glory is fleeting?”
    “Do not...” the lead tip sapped sideways and blapped a slanted crooked line, “ever read my mind.”  He snapped his head back and squinted.  “You, read my mind and make smarty pants, uh, er,” his eyes looked immensely sad for just a very short second, “...I mean,” he cleared his throat, “apparently intelligent non-sequitur, as though I did not know you were reading my throat...uh, er, I mean, mind, mind, yes, yes, that’s what I meant.”
    “I read your mind?”
    “Yes, you know me, oh yes, you do, and you know I have some problems, but you should understand that it is not I who am about to be, well, you know ...”
    “About to not be, is what you mean. Yes?”
    “I will take no pleasure in it.”
    “No, none whatsoever?”
    He leaned back and the sad light flared again.  He closed his eyes and brought his hand up to his face.
    “Jimminy Crickets.”  He bleated it, and his body shuddered.
    “Shedding sanity is the first step to a good, groomed appearance.”
    “I will take no pleasure in the ending of your life, yes...oh my, er, uh...I mean, I will take no pleasure, and if you do not get back on point here so that we can continue this interview I will terminate it, which will be a loss. “
    “You’ll take a lot more pleasure in it than I will, I assure you of that, Doc.  That is what they call you is it not?  Doc?”
    “Jimminy Crickets.”  He started up straight and closed one eye.  The other was also becoming bloodshot.  His lip curled up on one side of his face and a swath of gooey looking sweat made its way down his adams apple to the top of his tie.
    “...er, uh, I mean,...”
    “Jiminy Crickets, I’d say,” I said.
    He made a slight cackling sound and closed his lips.  His eyelids were tight against each other, like lovers tied together just before being tossed into an abyss or river.
    “Yes?”  I asked.  “No?” I asked.
    He moaned ever so quietly as though bored with me and completely fed up with my transparent conversation.  It was well known that prisoners of all types and categories, provided they were clever enough and interesting enough to be given the chance, found great pleasure in toying with authority figures.  Sometimes it was best to humor them and let them take you where they wanted you to go.  This was especially so where research in the state of mind of condemned criminals was concerned.
    Somewhere in his brain, these thoughts fought their way to the forefront.
    “Yes.” He said, both eyes staring at me, but not quite making it through.
    The tip of his nose was beginning to shine in the plain, institutional light of the room as a second blob of moisture made it to his necktie.  He began to shiver, just a little, beginning to get wet in the dry, overly air-conditioned office.  Another earring began to form, this time outside his right nostril.
    “Billie?”
    “Billie.”
    “Did you say something about Billy?”
    “No,” Derogatus whispered, that’d be me, too.  “How is the little rascal?”
    William’s, that’d be Stevie’s, pencil was rapidly tip-tapping a fiery little staccato drum solo, louder and louder, loud as a pencil tip can be.  He rolled his eyes.  “Oh boyee.”
    “It’s ok, doc.    Children revealed their nature to the mortician to be.  What they really are, even after they were.”  I thought I should keep talking so that he could get a handle on whatever it was that he needed to get a handle on, which was evidently something or other.
    “What they shall become, “ Derogatus continued,  “... what  they shall become.  The boring, stupid, average and cowardly adults all parents hope their children will not become, they make their children into...although, of course,  they wouldn’t  have kids in the first place, if they knew what this mirror image of themselves never had the cruelty to reveal--that, well...having kids and sex in the first place,  would be tantamount to suicide or, at the very least, homicide."
      William, that’d be Stevie, began to giggle onto his wrist.  He moved his lips an inch one way across it and then an inch the other way across it.  Getting control of himself, he suddenly sat up straight and poised his pencil.  "Continue," he chirped.
    "Abortionists know that, see, and somehow, at their very root,  in that place so deep even they don't consciously know it exists, it does, far beyond the scope or wildest imagination of hypnosis, faith, love or psychology.  Morticians know this stuff, too, but they get it backwards.  The dark flower inside them blooms, though, like a necromancer.”
    Stevie, that’d be William, spun in his chair, eyes glittering, each more brightly then the wet glitter of his nostrils directly in front of it.  “It has been my experience,” he gasped, “my experience...”
    “Yours.”
    “Mine.”  He wiped the earring from his right nostril.  “Gosh.”
    “...your experience that...”
    “They have the deepest terror of euthanasia, and are cruel, and give out their own special clown humor.  They are like children, these makers of the dead, are.”  He pointed his pencil at me.
    “Astonished, overjoyed me.  When Stevie’s light was on, he was God-like.  Truly.
    Erotic.
    Death of entropy.
    “Continue, please, “ I whispered, jiggling my shackles.
    “This, all children know, and never tell.  But did you not yearn to touch a dead one.  Do you remember your first touch?”
    I was astounded.  Stevie had a splendid brain of sorts.  Yes, he did.
    “Well?”  He waited, smiling, victorious.
    “Yes.”
    “Oh.”
    His mind blinked off momentarily at this point.
    “Doctor,” I whispered.”
    “What?”
    “My first touch.  Yes.”
    “Yes?”
    “Yes, I do remember it.”
    He shook his head and fumbled around with his hand inside his breast pocket.  “Remember what?”
    “Red Wheat?”
    “Yes, yes.”  Impatient.  No handkerchief.  “I know that story.”  He wiped his nose and flicked the sweat off his fingers.  “And the green children, too, right?”
    “Right.”
    Oh, how I love you as much as I ever loved Stevie
    He sat upright.  Sudden.  “Wow,” he chirped, “There have only been two true children on earth...the green children of Ireland.  The first to see them, on that long ago day, fell down to her knees and prayed for the first time in her life never to go to church again.”
    “Later she was burned as a witch.  Remember?”
    “But, but, uhmm,” he scowled.  It brightened like a kissed tit.  “Oh. that was mostly just for fun.”
    My pride knew no bounds.  “And what fun it was, too.  Remember?”
    He stared right at me.  He had become his own man, of sorts, during my long incarceration, which Derogatus knows more about than I do, for I must admit, I did leave him once in a while, oh, not for too long, mind you, prison conditions being what they are, but none the less, once in awhile I did leave him to his own devices, or more specifically, to the devices of fellow inmates, and without me, of course, he was as the new born infant that I flew to, like Jesus to the breast of Mary.
    “The green children of Ireland loved her,” he said.  “What kind of fun could that have been?”
    “Explain.”
    “The old peasant woman you told me about in the story of the Green Children of Ireland.”
    “What about her.”
    “They loved her”
    “For starters, William, for starters.”
    We sit in silence for awhile, enjoying the company of the other, the other every one chooses to be with when in the company of something else.
    His face is lit like the after image of a sunlit retina.
    “Do you see it, my little William?”
    “Oh yes.  Holy Smokes.”  He rocked back and forth and sweated profusely.
    “What do you see?”
    “God.”  His smile sparkled like a firecracker in a hall of mirrors one thousand miles by one thousand miles.
    “Cool.”  I jiggled my shackles.  “Cool ain’t she.”
    “God.”

    The hall of mirrors filled with intense light and became plasmotic.

    “What need has the doctor if he is a necromancer, to save a life?”
    Derogatus smiled, impressed at his own cleverness which his question most certainly displayed well indeed, he was sure of it, and leaned back in his chair.  However,  the straps on his wrists were beginning to annoy him much more than the chain linked to a heavy rubberized belt around each ankle did, but I didn’t mind, although I felt them, also. and found the  itching sensation which sweat causes when mixed in small and tedious amounts with arm hair as well as body hair to be...well, sort of amusing, not that I had any body hair, mind you, much less a body.
    Mind you also, Derogatus was a good sport, for both he and Dr. William Dooda, once known as Stevie Dooda,  knew full well who really had killed that bartender on that fateful day.
    William Dooda gazed at Derogatus inside the maximum security prison office which segregated the condemned prisoners’ section from the death room, whereunto, Derogatus would be escorted in only a few hours.  He felt the ground begin to humm.
    “How odd,”  he muttered to himself, crabbily setting his coffee cup back on its well-worn and sat-upon stain ring.   
    “What’s odd,” chirped Derogatus.  “You mean, the sense of electricity in the air which has just entered this room?”
    William glared at Derogatus.  He plied his pen between his fingers using them to sort of twirl it slowly and clumsily, albeit with some skill from long  hours of practice while gazing at the ceiling of his office.  He cleared his throat.  “Yes,” he snapped.  “Odd don’t you think?”
    “Odd as eyeballs in a cup,”  Derogatus whispered, leaning forward and tilting his head.  “Odder still would be the cup which holds them, okay, to try a lobster for murder.”  He leaned back as William stopped twirling his pencil and began to sweat.  When William sweat, sometimes bad things could happen, but, of course, only he, Derogatus, or should I say we, I being Jesus Gun--experiencing the odd and knotted prominences of a most interesting mind, a chuckle of a mind, I might add, that mind of Derogatus--both he and I, we,  enjoyed  Derogatus’  last hours immensely, perhaps he more than I alone would have been capable of doing.
    “Jeez.”
    William Dooda was not a bright fellow, but certainly a most interesting fellow. Take it from me, I had been inside that labyrinth of horrors many times.  That is what made him interesting.
    “Jeez Luis,”  William croaked, glaring at us, they would be at this point in time, Derogates and me. “Just get on with what you were saying.”
    “Very well, my little friend.”
    Derogatus looked at the ceiling.  As the moments passed, a distant humm began to make itself noticeable, a humm from the skies outside, at first inaudible except for the dogs which had begun to whine and bark across the city as though the weekly tornado siren were being tested.
    “Well?”
    “Well what?”
    “Jeez.”
    “Oh, sorry,” Derogatus said, sitting up straight to point his eyes directly upon William’s trembling, sweating fingers.  “Please, calm down, now.  We don’t want another incident with Billy the Lobster.”
    William shuddered.  “Awl.”  He wiped his forehead and took a deep breath.”
    “Oh, its okay, I haven’t spilled the beans.  They all think you are, how do you say, human.”
    “Jeepers!” William jumped up and banged his knee into the desk.  “Damn.” He grumbled and rubbed his knee.  “I am human, and Billy is my friend.
    “Yes, I suppose.”
    “Just, just...”  William sat down, “get on with it.”
    “With what?”  Derogatus stared, grinned and began to whistle.
    “Why...”
    “Do you hear that?”
    William could indeed hear it.  He felt nauseous.  A red lobster claw began to dig inside his shoe, right at the bottom of his foot on the plantar surface, the pad on most people’s feet where the big toe, much like  the thumb on their hands, protrudes from a fat pad--friendly looking yes, but always the first place to itch or to attract a splinter with a driving, ardent destiny to pierce all the way through and hurt far beyond its size or capacity to give pain.  He knew the claw was red.  It felt red.  The dances he and Billy did when he was young, the ocean dances he did in the boys’ shower stall when he waited for the other boys to leave, these were all dances for Billy to show off his red claws and his magnificence.
    “William?”
    William started.  He glanced at Derogatus.  “What,” he chirped, smiling.  “Oh!”
    “Put Billy away.”
    “Yes. Yes.”  William cleared his throat. “Now, ha,” he shifted his weight and hung his hand down to push Billy’s claws back inside his boot, his signal to Billy that it was nap time.  “Anyhow,” he grinned, pulling his hand back up.  “As to your question...”  He gave Derogatus a meaningful stare.
    “What question?”
    Silence.
    “Oh!  You know, the one where you talked about necromancers and stuff.”
    “William.”
    “Yes?”
    “I said, ‘What need has the doctor, if he is a necromancer, to save a life?’ ”
    “Yes.”
    Silence.
    “Well?”
    “Well, what, William?”
    “I hate that.”
    “What William?”
    “Stop it.”
    Silence.
    “Oh!  Yes, well I meant, what do you mean, Derogatus, when you ask a rhetorical question like that?  Is it part of your final musing?”
    “None of my musings are final.”
    “mmm...”  William tipped his foot and swiveled it as hard as he could to stop the itching there and also to let Billy know that he should just go to sleep and ignore the bad things Derogatus was saying during his final interview.  “Ah.  Yes.  Of course.  Then go on.”  He gazed as well as he could, the way he was supposed to so that the condemned prisoner he was talking to would feel free to open up and let any final musings he might wish to convey come forth freely.
    Silence.
    He didn’t much care for the grin Derogatus had on his face, but at least Billy was back to sleep again, so all was well.  He even managed to ignore the sweat trickling down his nose, off its tip and onto his shadow beard mustache, where it dwelled and began to itch like crazy.  He twitched his nose and pushed his glasses back up as high and as nonchalantly as possible.
    “Go ahead.”
    “Okay, but why don’t you read what I was saying before?"
    ”Very well,”  William casually placed his finger under his nose and ruffled paper with his free hand so he could press hard and rub his finger back and forth to get rid of the sweat and the horrible itch.  His eyes watered.  “Ah.  Here it is.”
    “Okay.  Read it so I don’t have to go over it again, and then I can answer your question.”
    The sky outside flashed again and again as though lightening bolts were striking ground nearby, and there was a murmur inside the cell block adjacent to death row.  Both Derogates and William felt the hairs on their necks rise and fall and then rise again, as though they were sitting in a room filled with a negative charge of about two million watts of electricity on its way through their bodies.
    “Holy Smokes.”
    “It's just an atmospheric sway, William.”
    Someone outside in the parking lot was crying and another car was honking its horn, not with the deliberate and rhythmical beat of a computer chip security system scolding that you were standing too close, but with the confused bleating of an already faulty wire fried into final analysis by a ground surge rooting from the ionosphere.
    Derogatus continued. 
    “I remember, when I was a kid, we had a guy come to the school auditorium.  He was a teacher of Electrical  Sciences, or at least that’s what they called the class in those days.  Now days they would just call it Electron Flow Analysis 101, or something equally...whatever.”
    William watched him intently, paid close attention, and tried to pry his mind away from a terror that was beginning to loom--the certainty, the undeniable certainty that he was about to die.  He knew it for sure.  He hoped Billy would stay asleep.  No telling what would happen if he woke up now.
    “William.”
    “Gosh, what?”
    “Pay attention.”
    “Yes.  Yes.”  William eagerly urged  Derogatus to continue as fast as possible with as little delay as possible.  He motioned his hand toward himself and smiled, a sort of smile, but nonetheless a smile.  “Go on.  Go on, Go on, Go On!”
    “Calm yourself.”
    “Yes, yes, yes, yes...”
    Derogatus rolled his eyes.  “Okay.”
    “Go, go, GO!”
    Derogatus was sort of upset, you see.  So I will translate what he said, or at least what William thought he heard him say during the last moment of the present--or to put it more precisely--the first instant of the future, which, as you well know is far, far in the past, unless, of course, you were killed like most people were during the first few moments of its ascendancy.
    Anyhow, this is what Derogatus said to William, or as he is known by those who know his real name, Stevie Dooda.  Yes, yes, he named himself after Billy, but that was only for professional reasons, or something like that, I am sure.  Let me quote from memory:

When you use up the parts of the rock, those parts must equal the potential energy of the entire rock.  It's like a rule.  Einstein, see, confused a lot of great minds when he proved to a mathematical certainty that if you propel a rock at the speed of light multiplied by itself, then you get energy from the weight of the rock, like a perpetual motion machine--i.e., energy from the rock without using up any of its atoms, because the weight of the rock, itself, and not any particular atom of the rock, at that speed, bends gravity, slows time a couple of nanoseconds.  The difference between where the rock actually is, and where it would have otherwise been, is equivalent to the energy which is the difference in weight left between those two points (a couple of atoms which contain usable energy)--since matter cannot be destroyed but can only be changed, which is what happens when energy is released from any object.  For instance, comprise about one or two atoms out of the billions that the rock has--which is why a small amount of that rock could light a city for a million years, or why a piece of really active stuff doesn’t need anything near the speed of light to lose atoms as though it were at the velocity of light speed, just waiting for some poor fool to put it into motion with explosives so that it can release all of that energy.  This is not free energy, and in fact has probably used up more energy from other sources than it is capable of giving, unlike a perpetual motion machine, which both feeds upon itself and regenerates itself forever as sourceless energy.

This is Love. 

This is why love can only be made meaningful by imagination.  Imagination is a machine.  It is the only thing that really exists unless a thing is dead or irrelevant.  For instance, when a large, fat cow stands chewing its cud, it is an irrelevancy, except for the purpose of producing milk, its product and reason, its so-called owners would insist, for being, and that is the reason it is loved.  Yet there remains within the powerhouse body of a really swell milk cow more than production of milk, but only the cow knows this.  That is why cows look back at us with what we hope is simple blind nothingness behind their eyes, instead of contempt and a knowledge of things to come.

Do you see it?

A cow can be loved, but  imagination?  Does the cow have it?  Pray not. 

Believe me when I tell you that opposing thumbs are greatly over exaggerated, for can they not be amputated?  Remember this if you remember nothing else:  Remembrance of another imagination and its glow is the birth of a new one.  Imagination.

This machine must overcome entropy, the gradual decline of the essence of all things.  That’s why scientist believe this machine does not exist:  matter is held together by bonds which break down over time.  A period of time shorter than a Planck Epoch does not allow for these bonds to break down.  This is hate and the reason food spoils in the sun.  Scavengers are useful and despised, for the lessons they  teach us go unnoticed. 

Do we not mistake sentimentality as God?


    Long silence.


    “You are done?” William asked in his best querying voice.
    “Nope.”
    "Geez."  He rubbed his head.  His terrible headache, now only moments old, felt like a wrapped mummy spoiled by time and centuries into doing whatever it wanted to do.  As soon as he got home he would do the ocean dance with Billy for the first time in many years.  He smiled at the thought of it. 
    “Very mmm....”  he cleared his throat, “well, then.  Yes!  Continue.”  He smiled at Derogatus and nodded approvingly, poising his finger above the recorder’s ON dot, pencil in hand and ready for some more fast writing.  He was very good at fast writing.  His dad,  Dad Boss Dooda, had taught him how to write very, very fast, indeed, as the belt would come smacking down across Stevie’s knuckles whenever he paused to relieve the cramp during his apology writing punishment sessions.
    “My name was Stevie then,” he whispered as he looked at the paper and punched the ON switch.
    ”What?”
    “No.  Don’t start.”  William hurriedly punched the OFF dot.  “You promised you’d get away, you did.  You promised.”  He hit the table with his fist.  The lamp teetered on the edge of his desk and he barely managed to grab it by the shade as it went down.  He put it back in place and grinned.  “Sorry.”
    “No problem.”
    “You promised you wouldn’t trick me into giving away my real name, like by saying it while I was recording.”  William gave Derogatus a stern scowl.
Derogatus shrugged innocently and smiled.
    William’s face brightened suddenly, as though a light bulb had gone off inside his arms, as he became momentarily agitated.  “So, what does what you just said before have to do with why necro...necromancers don’t heal, or, um...something like that?”
    “Why nothing at all.”
    “Geez!”
    Derogatus gave William a pleasant smile.  “But, I will say this: The revenge children give us by learning the mere things that we teach is horror.”
    William sighed, wrote, shuddered, and looked at the ceiling of the office as it began to crack.  A distant sound, a pink noise of things colliding, collapsing, and people screaming, rolled toward them.  He dropped his pencil and watched Derogatus snap his arm bonds and the chains that held his feet together, stand up and walk over to his desk.
    “Billy, no!”  William began slapping at a bulge that began to appear where his shoe used to be but was now a torn, burst, piece of useless leather.
    Derogatus leaned over and pulled William close to his face.
    “William.”
    “Golly.”
    “If you could find a way to put one Planck Epoch together with another and another,  things--don’t forget atoms and time and light are things--things would become heavier and smaller with each generation until a black hole was born, and during the instant of that black hole’s birth,  anything adjacent to it would become a form of antimatter coming into contact with pure energy.”
    “William, this is what happens when a nuclear weapon is detonated.”
    He let William slide back into his chair.
    “There is a Rule and it is The Rule: 

      First things have more essence than second things,  second things are bigger than first things, but don’t weigh as much, and third things are bigger and lighter than the other two, but are more complex.  Complexity  is the natural tendency of all things to partially offset the effects of entropy :  largeness and lightness, smallness and heaviness.  These four versus the war maker, gravity.  Their child is imagination.”

    Derogatus stared at William’s face.  It was covered with froth and vomit.  His eyes were yellowish and hellish.
    Derogatus ducked as a huge red lobster claw swooshed through the air. It was wielded with the accuracy of a wild animal's strength and speed.  It would have taken his head off, but the floor of the office collapsed.
    The ceiling collapsed on William and Billy and Derogatus.
    The building began to turn and tip as a huge sound blew the world white.  Birds, men, and fish were sucked into space where they blew apart in sudden vacuum.  Whales , sharks, and dolphins--and all the members of their kingdom--found their world a froth of steam and rising, gorging superheated wafts, as the atmosphere of the earth gave way and unscrolled for a few seconds, allowing the sun’s microwave intensity to have its way on what was left as hydrogen molecules released their heat into chaotic maelstroms.
  The oceans began to boil away.
   
Chapter 24
asteroid strike



    Dr. William Dooda didn’t like this one darn bit.  A heck, heck of a deal, it was.
    That personnel director had been snooping around in his personnel file, her and her snitty assistant.  Molly and Patty.  He sniffed and scowled.  Molly and Patty, and Patty and Molly.
    Zippetydoodah zippetee aye, my oh my what a wonderful day.
    He blew his nose.
    He’d spent a lot of time and energy developing his reputation as a boring, dutiful and adequately competent psychiatrist.  Medical school was far, far and long ago, so, so historical, now, just like the black outs he’d have at exams that he always did pretty darn good on anyhow, and he was perfectly content to prescribe occasional  psycotropics to violently depressed and grimly suffocating prisoners who couldn’t complain about anything anyway, and he enjoyed that part of it, especially that part of it.  He enjoyed his paperwork and the interviews because it was just all words and words and words.  At least, they looked like words and he certainly had no memory of writing them, but  the darn red itchy compressed place on the side of his second right finger reminded him of when he was learning his multiplication tables a long time ago.
    He had plenty of time for things he really enjoyed, like bowling, and coloring books, and never had to worry about things like patients complaining about this and that and stuff like that.  The demands on him were minimal, considering the alternative:  being a real doctor.  Ever since they had transferred Derogatus to this facility, he whined to himself, he had known he would have to give a terminal interview, because it was his job, and because it was a requirement that all prisoners must be assessed immediately prior to execution.  It was just paperwork.
    But it was also Derogatus.  Billy the Lobster hadn’t done anything but take a nap ever since that day.  William sighed.
    The interview was mandatory.  The prison system had its requirements and its unrequited stratagems, particularly where the death penalty and the paper work involved in such undertakings were concerned.
    Nope.  William didn’t like this one darn bit.
    He knew he’d have to get through it somehow, but he certainly didn’t like this at all.  He didn’t want anybody to get the idea that he and Derogatus had been friends, and that, in fact, he had been present at the time the crime Derogatus was going to be executed for had been committed.
    William felt bad about Donovan, the barkeep.  He didn’t think Derogatus was guilty or anything like that at all.
    Billy the Lobster was so happy now.  He missed him.
    William felt all itchy just thinking about stuff.
    Holy Smokes.  Good gigs like this one were getting hard to find.
    But I, guess who, a Green Child of Ireland, Jesus Gun, approved heartily.  I was so proud of him.  Such progress.  I was dying to find out about Billy.  Did he still exist?  So far, I had let Stevie, that’d be William, as he called himself, ask me some questions which I promptly, within seconds of the answers, forgot--not because they were uninteresting, but simply because he forgot them even before I did.  I had let him pretend that the initial discomfort he felt, as I shuffled in all my shackled glory into his office,  didn’t exist, and for the past forty five minutes had played along with him and his hopes.
    Old friends, especially when one is ashamed or extremely nervous about what the other one knows, or about what the other one is, often carry one polite conversation, for a short period of time which mercifully ends, and they go on their way,  never again  frequenting  the places they could meet by chance, like a restroom in a particular part of  a building at a certain time of day.
    No point in pressing one’s luck, when a certain period of time lapses and polite, disinterested conversation can no longer bear the civil disregard all people bear towards others whom they would just as soon not have to speak to without the ability to make them disappear--or at least the ability to make themselves disappear.   
    I itched right along with William.  It was, well, it was erotic. 
    Erotic.
    As the interview progressed, and let Derogatus talk for awhile, I waited for the moment when civil disregard is no longer possible without the civil part of it, not to mention that the disregard part of it becomes even more embarrassing than all the rest of it could ever have been in the first place.  The particular, exact moment of critical mass, as homeostasis has been achieved, arrives with a thud, like the unexpected cessation of the house hum when an air conditioner or heating system's thermostat commands the system to shut down for a while, and it is now time to enjoy the reality of it.
    Oh Lord, erotic is the brusque intelligence of entropy.
    Erotic.
    “Do you remember your first touch?”  I whispered it straight at him.
    Buzzzzzz.
    HUUUUUMMMMMMMM..........
    Silence.  The time for departing arrives, but, in this case, of course, poor Stevie, that’d be William, and I are trapped, ensconced, doomed to loom beyond the pregnant and telling instant.
    Thud.
    Hummm.
    Buzzz.
    We cleared our throats.  He gazed out the window, hopeless, glum, as I studied the bead of sweat beginning to form on the tip of his nose flare for an instant with the energy of a piece of the outside, sunny day’s light.
    I jiggled my shackles.
    “Do you remember your first touch?”
    His eye lids fluttered and he glared at me for a second and then his face went blank.  “Golly.”
    Lights on.  Lights out.
    How I loved him.  How I love you.  Pray there is no God.
    I crossed my legs, clasped my shackled hands together on top of my highest knee, and smiled at him.  How I loved him.
    The office was sparse, its walls institutional bland, of course, and the desk simple that the one behind it, whoever that might be, could fit in very well to all who did not know about humans or their complex, subdued ancient and primal Red Wheat  natures.  He was almost like all men, like me, and many others whom I know as well, and in that one way, decidedly different.  I knew him well.  I knew him better than he knew me.  Anyone but yours truly, that’s me, would have been terrified of him, knowing what I knew, but then even lovers are not terrified of one another, except in their misinterpreted and misconstrued dreams which they share with each other after love making, if only with themselves...and that’d be him.
    “Do you remember your first touch?”
    William sighed.
    He squinted at me across the eraser end of his yellow pencil.  The lead tip  fluttered back and forth along his thumb web and he grinned.  “Yes,” he said.
    “Your first touch, not your first experience of being a human, of sorts.”
    He spun his wrist at me.  Snot was beginning to form a bauble on his left nostril, and gleamed like a cheap earring in a belly button.  “I’m s’posed to be asking the questions,” he sniffed.  It disappeared.
    He sneezed.
    “Gesundheit.”
    “Please don’t tell them.”  William was holding his head in his hands and rolled his eyes at me.  “Puleeeeze.”
    “You first touch, Stevie.”
    “Corpses, you mean.”  He leaned back and nodded at his own sudden recognition of some genius somewhere in his DNA which most of the rest of his relatives had never been able to bring out as well as he had.  “I know you quite well.  Corpses you are talking about now.”
    “There are corpses and then there are corpses.”
    “Umm...”
    “Some walk; some don’t.”
    “Duh.”
    “Duh?”
    He started up straight behind his desk.  “Let us, get on with this, uh, Mr. Derogatus.”  Then his shoulders slumped.  “Puleeeze.  Geeze Louise.”
    “I won’t.”
    He cleared his throat and whipped out a tissue from his top drawer and wiped his nose.  “Criminintly.”
    “You first touch, not your first embalming session.”
    He blinked at me.  “Oh.”
    “First touch.”
    “When Billy taught me to dance the ocean dance,” he wheezed.  “Now, I need to ask some questions.”  He glared at me above his glasses, head bent down, and poised his pencil.
    “Okay.”
    “Oh,” he blinked, shook his head.  “Okay then.”
    “Well?”
    “What.”
    “First question.  Your first question.”
    “Oh.”
    Silence.
    “Ask.”
    “Well, then,” William sighed.  “what did you do the first time that you were unhappy.”
    “I have never been unhappy.”
    “A mere clever existentialist observation and not too dad gummed, er, uh...”  he rolled his eyes and looked embarrassed, but he wasn’t really, for when the things we have inside us crop up unexpectedly, often the end of careers or freedom or life itself can result,  "ummm, I mean and not too clever, at that.”
    He smiled victoriously at me.  I shuddered for his comfort and looked down at my feet, hands clasped beyond the handcuffs like cauliflower pieces.
    He scowled.  He looked down hard at his notebook.  “May we now continue where we left off?”
    “Glory is fleeting?”
    “Do not...” the lead tip sapped sideways and blapped a slanted crooked line, “ever read my mind.”  He snapped his head back and squinted.  “You, read my mind and make smarty pants, uh, er,” his eyes looked immensely sad for just a very short second, “...I mean,” he cleared his throat, “apparently intelligent non-sequitur, as though I did not know you were reading my throat...uh, er, I mean, mind, mind, yes, yes, that’s what I meant.”
    “I read your mind?”
    “Yes, you know me, oh yes, you do, and you know I have some problems, but you should understand that it is not I who am about to be, well, you know ...”
    “About to not be, is what you mean. Yes?”
    “I will take no pleasure in it.”
    “No, none whatsoever?”
    He leaned back and the sad light flared again.  He closed his eyes and brought his hand up to his face.
    “Jimminy Crickets.”  He bleated it, and his body shuddered.
    “Shedding sanity is the first step to a good, groomed appearance.”
    “I will take no pleasure in the ending of your life, yes...oh my, er, uh...I mean, I will take no pleasure, and if you do not get back on point here so that we can continue this interview I will terminate it, which will be a loss. “
    “You’ll take a lot more pleasure in it than I will, I assure you of that, Doc.  That is what they call you is it not?  Doc?”
    “Jimminy Crickets.”  He started up straight and closed one eye.  The other was also becoming bloodshot.  His lip curled up on one side of his face and a swath of gooey looking sweat made its way down his adams apple to the top of his tie.
    “...er, uh, I mean,...”
    “Jiminy Crickets, I’d say,” I said.
    He made a slight cackling sound and closed his lips.  His eyelids were tight against each other, like lovers tied together just before being tossed into an abyss or river.
    “Yes?”  I asked.  “No?” I asked.
    He moaned ever so quietly as though bored with me and completely fed up with my transparent conversation.  It was well known that prisoners of all types and categories, provided they were clever enough and interesting enough to be given the chance, found great pleasure in toying with authority figures.  Sometimes it was best to humor them and let them take you where they wanted you to go.  This was especially so where research in the state of mind of condemned criminals was concerned.
    Somewhere in his brain, these thoughts fought their way to the forefront.
    “Yes.” He said, both eyes staring at me, but not quite making it through.
    The tip of his nose was beginning to shine in the plain, institutional light of the room as a second blob of moisture made it to his necktie.  He began to shiver, just a little, beginning to get wet in the dry, overly air-conditioned office.  Another earring began to form, this time outside his right nostril.
    “Billie?”
    “Billie.”
    “Did you say something about Billy?”
    “No,” Derogatus whispered, that’d be me, too.  “How is the little rascal?”
    William’s, that’d be Stevie’s, pencil was rapidly tip-tapping a fiery little staccato drum solo, louder and louder, loud as a pencil tip can be.  He rolled his eyes.  “Oh boyee.”
    “It’s ok, doc.    Children revealed their nature to the mortician to be.  What they really are, even after they were.”  I thought I should keep talking so that he could get a handle on whatever it was that he needed to get a handle on, which was evidently something or other.
    “What they shall become, “ Derogatus continued,  “... what  they shall become.  The boring, stupid, average and cowardly adults all parents hope their children will not become, they make their children into...although, of course,  they wouldn’t  have kids in the first place, if they knew what this mirror image of themselves never had the cruelty to reveal--that, well...having kids and sex in the first place,  would be tantamount to suicide or, at the very least, homicide."
      William, that’d be Stevie, began to giggle onto his wrist.  He moved his lips an inch one way across it and then an inch the other way across it.  Getting control of himself, he suddenly sat up straight and poised his pencil.  "Continue," he chirped.
    "Abortionists know that, see, and somehow, at their very root,  in that place so deep even they don't consciously know it exists, it does, far beyond the scope or wildest imagination of hypnosis, faith, love or psychology.  Morticians know this stuff, too, but they get it backwards.  The dark flower inside them blooms, though, like a necromancer.”
    Stevie, that’d be William, spun in his chair, eyes glittering, each more brightly then the wet glitter of his nostrils directly in front of it.  “It has been my experience,” he gasped, “my experience...”
    “Yours.”
    “Mine.”  He wiped the earring from his right nostril.  “Gosh.”
    “...your experience that...”
    “They have the deepest terror of euthanasia, and are cruel, and give out their own special clown humor.  They are like children, these makers of the dead, are.”  He pointed his pencil at me.
    “Astonished, overjoyed me.  When Stevie’s light was on, he was God-like.  Truly.
    Erotic.
    Death of entropy.
    “Continue, please, “ I whispered, jiggling my shackles.
    “This, all children know, and never tell.  But did you not yearn to touch a dead one.  Do you remember your first touch?”
    I was astounded.  Stevie had a splendid brain of sorts.  Yes, he did.
    “Well?”  He waited, smiling, victorious.
    “Yes.”
    “Oh.”
    His mind blinked off momentarily at this point.
    “Doctor,” I whispered.”
    “What?”
    “My first touch.  Yes.”
    “Yes?”
    “Yes, I do remember it.”
    He shook his head and fumbled around with his hand inside his breast pocket.  “Remember what?”
    “Red Wheat?”
    “Yes, yes.”  Impatient.  No handkerchief.  “I know that story.”  He wiped his nose and flicked the sweat off his fingers.  “And the green children, too, right?”
    “Right.”
    Oh, how I love you as much as I ever loved Stevie
    He sat upright.  Sudden.  “Wow,” he chirped, “There have only been two true children on earth...the green children of Ireland.  The first to see them, on that long ago day, fell down to her knees and prayed for the first time in her life never to go to church again.”
    “Later she was burned as a witch.  Remember?”
    “But, but, uhmm,” he scowled.  It brightened like a kissed tit.  “Oh. that was mostly just for fun.”
    My pride knew no bounds.  “And what fun it was, too.  Remember?”
    He stared right at me.  He had become his own man, of sorts, during my long incarceration, which Derogatus knows more about than I do, for I must admit, I did leave him once in a while, oh, not for too long, mind you, prison conditions being what they are, but none the less, once in awhile I did leave him to his own devices, or more specifically, to the devices of fellow inmates, and without me, of course, he was as the new born infant that I flew to, like Jesus to the breast of Mary.
    “The green children of Ireland loved her,” he said.  “What kind of fun could that have been?”
    “Explain.”
    “The old peasant woman you told me about in the story of the Green Children of Ireland.”
    “What about her.”
    “They loved her”
    “For starters, William, for starters.”
    We sit in silence for awhile, enjoying the company of the other, the other every one chooses to be with when in the company of something else.
    His face is lit like the after image of a sunlit retina.
    “Do you see it, my little William?”
    “Oh yes.  Holy Smokes.”  He rocked back and forth and sweated profusely.
    “What do you see?”
    “God.”  His smile sparkled like a firecracker in a hall of mirrors one thousand miles by one thousand miles.
    “Cool.”  I jiggled my shackles.  “Cool ain’t she.”
    “God.”

    The hall of mirrors filled with intense light and became plasmotic.

    “What need has the doctor if he is a necromancer, to save a life?”
    Derogatus smiled, impressed at his own cleverness which his question most certainly displayed well indeed, he was sure of it, and leaned back in his chair.  However,  the straps on his wrists were beginning to annoy him much more than the chain linked to a heavy rubberized belt around each ankle did, but I didn’t mind, although I felt them, also. and found the  itching sensation which sweat causes when mixed in small and tedious amounts with arm hair as well as body hair to be...well, sort of amusing, not that I had any body hair, mind you, much less a body.
    Mind you also, Derogatus was a good sport, for both he and Dr. William Dooda, once known as Stevie Dooda,  knew full well who really had killed that bartender on that fateful day.
    William Dooda gazed at Derogatus inside the maximum security prison office which segregated the condemned prisoners’ section from the death room, whereunto, Derogatus would be escorted in only a few hours.  He felt the ground begin to humm.
    “How odd,”  he muttered to himself, crabbily setting his coffee cup back on its well-worn and sat-upon stain ring.   
    “What’s odd,” chirped Derogatus.  “You mean, the sense of electricity in the air which has just entered this room?”
    William glared at Derogatus.  He plied his pen between his fingers using them to sort of twirl it slowly and clumsily, albeit with some skill from long  hours of practice while gazing at the ceiling of his office.  He cleared his throat.  “Yes,” he snapped.  “Odd don’t you think?”
    “Odd as eyeballs in a cup,”  Derogatus whispered, leaning forward and tilting his head.  “Odder still would be the cup which holds them, okay, to try a lobster for murder.”  He leaned back as William stopped twirling his pencil and began to sweat.  When William sweat, sometimes bad things could happen, but, of course, only he, Derogatus, or should I say we, I being Jesus Gun--experiencing the odd and knotted prominences of a most interesting mind, a chuckle of a mind, I might add, that mind of Derogatus--both he and I, we,  enjoyed  Derogatus’  last hours immensely, perhaps he more than I alone would have been capable of doing.
    “Jeez.”
    William Dooda was not a bright fellow, but certainly a most interesting fellow. Take it from me, I had been inside that labyrinth of horrors many times.  That is what made him interesting.
    “Jeez Luis,”  William croaked, glaring at us, they would be at this point in time, Derogates and me. “Just get on with what you were saying.”
    “Very well, my little friend.”
    Derogatus looked at the ceiling.  As the moments passed, a distant humm began to make itself noticeable, a humm from the skies outside, at first inaudible except for the dogs which had begun to whine and bark across the city as though the weekly tornado siren were being tested.
    “Well?”
    “Well what?”
    “Jeez.”
    “Oh, sorry,” Derogatus said, sitting up straight to point his eyes directly upon William’s trembling, sweating fingers.  “Please, calm down, now.  We don’t want another incident with Billy the Lobster.”
    William shuddered.  “Awl.”  He wiped his forehead and took a deep breath.”
    “Oh, its okay, I haven’t spilled the beans.  They all think you are, how do you say, human.”
    “Jeepers!” William jumped up and banged his knee into the desk.  “Damn.” He grumbled and rubbed his knee.  “I am human, and Billy is my friend.
    “Yes, I suppose.”
    “Just, just...”  William sat down, “get on with it.”
    “With what?”  Derogatus stared, grinned and began to whistle.
    “Why...”
    “Do you hear that?”
    William could indeed hear it.  He felt nauseous.  A red lobster claw began to dig inside his shoe, right at the bottom of his foot on the plantar surface, the pad on most people’s feet where the big toe, much like  the thumb on their hands, protrudes from a fat pad--friendly looking yes, but always the first place to itch or to attract a splinter with a driving, ardent destiny to pierce all the way through and hurt far beyond its size or capacity to give pain.  He knew the claw was red.  It felt red.  The dances he and Billy did when he was young, the ocean dances he did in the boys’ shower stall when he waited for the other boys to leave, these were all dances for Billy to show off his red claws and his magnificence.
    “William?”
    William started.  He glanced at Derogatus.  “What,” he chirped, smiling.  “Oh!”
    “Put Billy away.”
    “Yes. Yes.”  William cleared his throat. “Now, ha,” he shifted his weight and hung his hand down to push Billy’s claws back inside his boot, his signal to Billy that it was nap time.  “Anyhow,” he grinned, pulling his hand back up.  “As to your question...”  He gave Derogatus a meaningful stare.
    “What question?”
    Silence.
    “Oh!  You know, the one where you talked about necromancers and stuff.”
    “William.”
    “Yes?”
    “I said, ‘What need has the doctor, if he is a necromancer, to save a life?’ ”
    “Yes.”
    Silence.
    “Well?”
    “Well, what, William?”
    “I hate that.”
    “What William?”
    “Stop it.”
    Silence.
    “Oh!  Yes, well I meant, what do you mean, Derogatus, when you ask a rhetorical question like that?  Is it part of your final musing?”
    “None of my musings are final.”
    “mmm...”  William tipped his foot and swiveled it as hard as he could to stop the itching there and also to let Billy know that he should just go to sleep and ignore the bad things Derogatus was saying during his final interview.  “Ah.  Yes.  Of course.  Then go on.”  He gazed as well as he could, the way he was supposed to so that the condemned prisoner he was talking to would feel free to open up and let any final musings he might wish to convey come forth freely.
    Silence.
    He didn’t much care for the grin Derogatus had on his face, but at least Billy was back to sleep again, so all was well.  He even managed to ignore the sweat trickling down his nose, off its tip and onto his shadow beard mustache, where it dwelled and began to itch like crazy.  He twitched his nose and pushed his glasses back up as high and as nonchalantly as possible.
    “Go ahead.”
    “Okay, but why don’t you read what I was saying before?"
    ”Very well,”  William casually placed his finger under his nose and ruffled paper with his free hand so he could press hard and rub his finger back and forth to get rid of the sweat and the horrible itch.  His eyes watered.  “Ah.  Here it is.”
    “Okay.  Read it so I don’t have to go over it again, and then I can answer your question.”
    The sky outside flashed again and again as though lightening bolts were striking ground nearby, and there was a murmur inside the cell block adjacent to death row.  Both Derogates and William felt the hairs on their necks rise and fall and then rise again, as though they were sitting in a room filled with a negative charge of about two million watts of electricity on its way through their bodies.
    “Holy Smokes.”
    “It's just an atmospheric sway, William.”
    Someone outside in the parking lot was crying and another car was honking its horn, not with the deliberate and rhythmical beat of a computer chip security system scolding that you were standing too close, but with the confused bleating of an already faulty wire fried into final analysis by a ground surge rooting from the ionosphere.
    Derogatus continued. 
    “I remember, when I was a kid, we had a guy come to the school auditorium.  He was a teacher of Electrical  Sciences, or at least that’s what they called the class in those days.  Now days they would just call it Electron Flow Analysis 101, or something equally...whatever.”
    William watched him intently, paid close attention, and tried to pry his mind away from a terror that was beginning to loom--the certainty, the undeniable certainty that he was about to die.  He knew it for sure.  He hoped Billy would stay asleep.  No telling what would happen if he woke up now.
    “William.”
    “Gosh, what?”
    “Pay attention.”
    “Yes.  Yes.”  William eagerly urged  Derogatus to continue as fast as possible with as little delay as possible.  He motioned his hand toward himself and smiled, a sort of smile, but nonetheless a smile.  “Go on.  Go on, Go on, Go On!”
    “Calm yourself.”
    “Yes, yes, yes, yes...”
    Derogatus rolled his eyes.  “Okay.”
    “Go, go, GO!”
    Derogatus was sort of upset, you see.  So I will translate what he said, or at least what William thought he heard him say during the last moment of the present--or to put it more precisely--the first instant of the future, which, as you well know is far, far in the past, unless, of course, you were killed like most people were during the first few moments of its ascendancy.
    Anyhow, this is what Derogatus said to William, or as he is known by those who know his real name, Stevie Dooda.  Yes, yes, he named himself after Billy, but that was only for professional reasons, or something like that, I am sure.  Let me quote from memory:

When you use up the parts of the rock, those parts must equal the potential energy of the entire rock.  It's like a rule.  Einstein, see, confused a lot of great minds when he proved to a mathematical certainty that if you propel a rock at the speed of light multiplied by itself, then you get energy from the weight of the rock, like a perpetual motion machine--i.e., energy from the rock without using up any of its atoms, because the weight of the rock, itself, and not any particular atom of the rock, at that speed, bends gravity, slows time a couple of nanoseconds.  The difference between where the rock actually is, and where it would have otherwise been, is equivalent to the energy which is the difference in weight left between those two points (a couple of atoms which contain usable energy)--since matter cannot be destroyed but can only be changed, which is what happens when energy is released from any object.  For instance, comprise about one or two atoms out of the billions that the rock has--which is why a small amount of that rock could light a city for a million years, or why a piece of really active stuff doesn’t need anything near the speed of light to lose atoms as though it were at the velocity of light speed, just waiting for some poor fool to put it into motion with explosives so that it can release all of that energy.  This is not free energy, and in fact has probably used up more energy from other sources than it is capable of giving, unlike a perpetual motion machine, which both feeds upon itself and regenerates itself forever as sourceless energy.

This is Love. 

This is why love can only be made meaningful by imagination.  Imagination is a machine.  It is the only thing that really exists unless a thing is dead or irrelevant.  For instance, when a large, fat cow stands chewing its cud, it is an irrelevancy, except for the purpose of producing milk, its product and reason, its so-called owners would insist, for being, and that is the reason it is loved.  Yet there remains within the powerhouse body of a really swell milk cow more than production of milk, but only the cow knows this.  That is why cows look back at us with what we hope is simple blind nothingness behind their eyes, instead of contempt and a knowledge of things to come.

Do you see it?

A cow can be loved, but  imagination?  Does the cow have it?  Pray not. 

Believe me when I tell you that opposing thumbs are greatly over exaggerated, for can they not be amputated?  Remember this if you remember nothing else:  Remembrance of another imagination and its glow is the birth of a new one.  Imagination.

This machine must overcome entropy, the gradual decline of the essence of all things.  That’s why scientist believe this machine does not exist:  matter is held together by bonds which break down over time.  A period of time shorter than a Planck Epoch does not allow for these bonds to break down.  This is hate and the reason food spoils in the sun.  Scavengers are useful and despised, for the lessons they  teach us go unnoticed. 

Do we not mistake sentimentality as God?


    Long silence.


    “You are done?” William asked in his best querying voice.
    “Nope.”
    "Geez."  He rubbed his head.  His terrible headache, now only moments old, felt like a wrapped mummy spoiled by time and centuries into doing whatever it wanted to do.  As soon as he got home he would do the ocean dance with Billy for the first time in many years.  He smiled at the thought of it. 
    “Very mmm....”  he cleared his throat, “well, then.  Yes!  Continue.”  He smiled at Derogatus and nodded approvingly, poising his finger above the recorder’s ON dot, pencil in hand and ready for some more fast writing.  He was very good at fast writing.  His dad,  Dad Boss Dooda, had taught him how to write very, very fast, indeed, as the belt would come smacking down across Stevie’s knuckles whenever he paused to relieve the cramp during his apology writing punishment sessions.
    “My name was Stevie then,” he whispered as he looked at the paper and punched the ON switch.
    ”What?”
    “No.  Don’t start.”  William hurriedly punched the OFF dot.  “You promised you’d get away, you did.  You promised.”  He hit the table with his fist.  The lamp teetered on the edge of his desk and he barely managed to grab it by the shade as it went down.  He put it back in place and grinned.  “Sorry.”
    “No problem.”
    “You promised you wouldn’t trick me into giving away my real name, like by saying it while I was recording.”  William gave Derogatus a stern scowl.
Derogatus shrugged innocently and smiled.
    William’s face brightened suddenly, as though a light bulb had gone off inside his arms, as he became momentarily agitated.  “So, what does what you just said before have to do with why necro...necromancers don’t heal, or, um...something like that?”
    “Why nothing at all.”
    “Geez!”
    Derogatus gave William a pleasant smile.  “But, I will say this: The revenge children give us by learning the mere things that we teach is horror.”
    William sighed, wrote, shuddered, and looked at the ceiling of the office as it began to crack.  A distant sound, a pink noise of things colliding, collapsing, and people screaming, rolled toward them.  He dropped his pencil and watched Derogatus snap his arm bonds and the chains that held his feet together, stand up and walk over to his desk.
    “Billy, no!”  William began slapping at a bulge that began to appear where his shoe used to be but was now a torn, burst, piece of useless leather.
    Derogatus leaned over and pulled William close to his face.
    “William.”
    “Golly.”
    “If you could find a way to put one Planck Epoch together with another and another,  things--don’t forget atoms and time and light are things--things would become heavier and smaller with each generation until a black hole was born, and during the instant of that black hole’s birth,  anything adjacent to it would become a form of antimatter coming into contact with pure energy.”
    “William, this is what happens when a nuclear weapon is detonated.”
    He let William slide back into his chair.
    “There is a Rule and it is The Rule: 

      First things have more essence than second things,  second things are bigger than first things, but don’t weigh as much, and third things are bigger and lighter than the other two, but are more complex.  Complexity  is the natural tendency of all things to partially offset the effects of entropy :  largeness and lightness, smallness and heaviness.  These four versus the war maker, gravity.  Their child is imagination.”

    Derogatus stared at William’s face.  It was covered with froth and vomit.  His eyes were yellowish and hellish.
    Derogatus ducked as a huge red lobster claw swooshed through the air. It was wielded with the accuracy of a wild animal's strength and speed.  It would have taken his head off, but the floor of the office collapsed.
    The ceiling collapsed on William and Billy and Derogatus.
    The building began to turn and tip as a huge sound blew the world white.  Birds, men, and fish were sucked into space where they blew apart in sudden vacuum.  Whales , sharks, and dolphins--and all the members of their kingdom--found their world a froth of steam and rising, gorging superheated wafts, as the atmosphere of the earth gave way and unscrolled for a few seconds, allowing the sun’s microwave intensity to have its way on what was left as hydrogen molecules released their heat into chaotic maelstroms.
  The oceans began to boil away.



PART SIX
   
Chapter twenty five
remorse of the Blue People and the Great Grand Paw Flowers



It had not been a Blue Sun Planet.
How could they have known.
The Blue People prayed forgiveness; their ancient folly upon the Beautiful, Special Planet, their gratitude their species had not become extinct through such folly.
The Great Grand Paw Flowers had been their redeemer, through his merciful and swift justice, and their wisdom had taken seed as they had fled to begin a new phase of their existence.  Wiser now, they, each, remembered and prayed as their soothsayers chanted.
Never again they vowed. Never again.
Their species shuddered at the memory of the Blue Sun Planet, its symbol of their past foolishness broken upon the heads of their world.
Back then, they came to conquer and farm away the resources of other planets, but had only their ultra violet receptor retinas, and did not know other colors existed.
How could they have known.
Their eyes had evolved, as they had worshipped Great Grand Paw Flowers message of Red Wheat Seeds, reckoning and death to war makers, and so they knew old visions of conquest and pillage for what they were and that they were not blue but black as death; yet they continued to be the Blue People, by name, this to remind themselves of their past foolishness. Once every thousand years they would gather upon their worlds and shut down their colonies for the great teaching of the past foolishness.
Once again, as it had been countless times before, it was time to gather.
The soothsayers told them the story so they would not forget, how they had fled, of course, defeated by the unstoppable vegetation, the parent seeds of Red Wheat, it’s toxins, and eventually, hopefully, they had continued on into other galaxies and universes, a very hopeful species, and eventually they learned to produce the environment they needed upon virgin planets with no mischievous or precocious life forms to delay their escape from an entropy that only true vagabond species could evade through adventurous destinies, over and over again.
This, the justice and reckoning, the salvation that Great Grand Paw Flowers had bestowed upon them through the Epiphany of The Red Wheat Seeds: The Red Wheat seeds had destroyed their experimental habitation upon the beautiful, small planet in the Blue Sun galaxy, but it had been a Yellow Sun galaxy, but this they only learned eons later, and at that time of the final defeat they had left their own seed, quite by accident, and for which they often prayed forgiveness, and it had formed, and it had become the one left behind, the only one of intended millions, these would have become the sole inhabitants of that small planet in the Blue Sun galaxy, and by the millions they would have created great civilizations throughout that Yellow Sun Galaxy, but the one green child had swallowed many, many of the Red Wheat seeds, and although alone and incomplete on the day of the release of the Red Wheat seeds and annihilation that followed, and unable to establish a workable gene pool, had melded into the bowels of the beautiful, Blue Sun planet, to become the the beginning of new growth and so the Beautiful, Special Planet had been saved by accident.  How the Blue People gave thanks for this, for it was this which had allowed them to find their own peace and destiny by its example.
The Blue People had soothsayers, and these brought peace and goodwill upon the virgin planets, and often told the tale of the last war and of the lessons learned regarding destiny and war and endless, endless forgiveness all through the Epiphany of The Red  Wheat Seeds, the gospel of The Great Grand Paw Flowers.
The Blue People grew viable colonies and civilizations. These eventually spread throughout the universe, their known one, that is, and often their children would bow down to the Golden Waving Strand gods, children of The Epiphany of The Red Wheat Seeds and pray for continued deliverance from the great Yellow Sun Orb and its fierce oxygen god, The Great Grand Paw Flowers, and his Green Child, destroyer of Blue Worlds, and creator of beauty, art, music and all the wondrous things of love.
And so, the soothsayers would gather once every thousand years, and reminisce.
It was time again.
One prophesied of an asteroid belt and of annihilation of the home of the fierce oxygen god, and its Green Child, and as their species had learned the hard way, such signs, rare and glorious, of the universes eternal plasmotic revolution against entropy, except where asteroid belts lie to capture these remarkable energies and bring annihilation to all within, except where the Great Grand Paw Flowers had been received unto them.  All bowed down to The Epiphany of The Red Wheat Seed and gave thanks for the power of the Beautiful, Special Planet.

One prophesied of return to the dreaded oxygen worlds, for many other war like civilizations had been known to leave their seeds upon myriads of planets, and who could know where such seeds had fallen to produce demonic offsprings and serpents.
Others chuckled at such foolishness, for what could threaten such fierce gods as the Great Grand Paw Flowers and his Green Child?
All sat quietly, shuddered, fearful of the wonderment of the firmament, of all that they had ever thought was not wonderment, and prayed for forgiveness, for were they not those whose children thrived in glory beneath the yellow howl of the Sun of the Yellow Sun Planet with its skies blue, yet of fierce oxygen atoms, and its lands, powerfully green with seas molten with liquid fierceness?
So all bowed, prayed and gave thanks, for their accidental seed upon the Special Blue Planet had born besides the wondrous Green Child progeny, whose source is The Great She, but another mist which settled into the bones of all who would be born within the Yellow Sun Galaxies, and this, they shuddered and remembered as the one, terrible stain upon their history which only the Epiphany of The Red Wheat Seeds could stave off:  a thing called fear,  named Monkeyhead by those who knew it for what it was — illusions of Grandeur as divine protection, called God, instead of Love, or sometimes to them in their greatest of chants ...  the true and only name of any God that is divine or Power that is infinite ...

Tenderness.

Chapter twenty six
the way way future and the caveman



Park and Dave were going to die. 
Their eyes were soft as grapes full. The campfire glowed.  It welcomed him his stealth and nearness, now, at last. He could smell them, now, and his hunger was deep and unabiding, and his hatred.  How he loved them for what they would become.
He crouched.
They conversed happily.  The campfire’s golden necklace drew graces upon their moist foreheads.  And they were happy men, though nervous, and fearful but what they could not truly sense and so had placed it deep into the backs of their brains.  Among the few pieces of dispersed humanity, those ones, the mountain people, the hippy dreamers and lovers who had learned to survive in a wealthy world, had become nightmare monsters that roamed the back roads with gun racks and confederate flags and big hard ones for any chick with a wimpy, soft little man, who had managed to survive.
  They had eaten well.  Rich marrow packed tight into the center of their bones, each and every bone, and rich fat swelled through and through their bodies.
Cannibals.  The kind that only want to be cannibals.
He sensed this, but could not remember it as an important thing, or unusual, not as unusual as the opposite, no not anymore.  There was only the immensity of the moment made upon the links of the golden necklace and the curly cue smoke  on this calm, chilly night.
His once handsomeness, even though Billy had left him in the day of the asteroids, he knew he must have been beautiful for his tongue had not been lost on women now gone, some eaten, some just gone, and had not been lost on feminine men who knew him in the old days and had suffered a variety of intriguing ends at the pleasure of creatures similar to the ones he studied here on this night close upon the campfire, and his eyes glittered at the wonderment that they had been so foolish, these two, to not hear his wails of hunger and madness which he adored now.  Perhaps they had full bellies too many nights in a row, and had become unaware that the first steps back to the old ways was unnoticeable as the first, subtle change of leaves early Fall is, and just as terminal, in spite of the apparent colorful array promising new life, liars each and every one, to the innocent, the dependent and the soon to be eaten. 
He was atoms.  This he could remember, for had not Derogates died and one risen from the corpse become physical and who called himself Jesus Gun?  That one had loved a woman with a violin, once, but of course, even though he and she watched him often and placed food at his cave mouth, he always floated down the mountainsides like glaciers into galaxies.
These times of the hummms and the buzzes he adored and found merriment in his own new powers. 
But he could not remember anyway, not really, not the coffin sounds spilling into his ears when he was asleep and a boy, nor the death of his first true love, Howie, nor how Dad Boss Dooda’s head had splattered like a red mist of bone and rubies.  How he and Billie had danced the dance of lovers.
He crouched, studied, and his tongue began its own contemplation, as these two who were going to die tonight made conversation like clucking turkeys on a Thanksgiving eve.  He blinked.  He did not know what that meant, but it was in his brain somewhere of things that used to be: things of food and pain.
He listened to Park and Dave chatter, and began to drool and grin.

Park, who in his daydreams, never bothered to cook his food glared. “You’ve only seen it once,” he spat into the fire, reminding Dave that the sounds and howls of earlier in the day were simply sounds of birds and winds.  He loved the sky, the earth and all that in there was, but best of all he loved meat, blood and bone and eyes, and loved the screams he remembered much of his food making.  He had this in common with what lie behind the  eyes of the last wild dog he’d killed and eaten.
His long tongue bent into the back of its teeth.  Visions of his mothers tit, the special one, reserved only for him, the one the other cubs were too small to fend him off.
Dave spat back at him. “Not really it.  More like a block of color.”
Park rolled his eyes.  “You were fishing, and it just came up behind and stared?” 
“I said, it was a ways off.”  Dave motioned with his arm.  “Ways off, long ways.” 
Park spit into the fire.  “Sheeit.”
“I fired at it.  Hit it.  Know I did.”  Dave, who in his day dreams fantasized of the horribleness of death by slow suffocation, glared at Park and imagined him with his mouth and nostrils sewed shut, slowly, bit by bit unable to breath or even scream.  “I spoke true.  Blood was real. Copper smellin’ just like a nosebleed.”
Dave had sensed something wrong with these woods before when they had been here and had fired at something, but he knew he had missed and they had left soon afterwards to hike into what was left of towns and camps of humans and their pets who had survived up  to then. 
“Sheeit.”  Park’s skin tingled as he leaned forward to spit again, but he thought nothing of that, since the night was cool.  The fire’s heat on his face made him conscious of his backside would explain that , he figured.  “Tell you what.”  He spit into it again. 
“What.”
“Read once,” Park leaned back, grinned, “read once its hard to tell a lie backwards.  If you can say it that ways, its probably the truth.” 

He  nodded and got ready to spring at these two.  He remembered something Derogates had told him once. “Fictional memory rebels at the confidentiality of stalwart analysis.  If you want to know if they are lying to you, have them tell it to you again backwards.  Actual memory could care less which end of the bottle you break to brandish.  Fantasy is erotic and wants only. The real thing cuts where it will and you bleed.  The soft end merely gives pleasure and you starve grinning.” 
He grinned and wiped his mouth.  He missed Derogatus and thing that had become Jesus Gun right before his eyes, and even though that one and she, his love, Juliet Roy Rogers, watched over him, he could not remember why he did not want to kill them and so stayed away from them.
Head lowered, ears back,  he shifted its weight to make ready a lunge as at the back of his throat masses of saliva began to gather in ready, patient globs.  He would have his way with them, the way Boss Dooda had always had his way, close up and personal, the way Billie would have, Billie the Lobster, his only ever truest love, not vicariously through the Roman scourging and nailings and piercings, but with his bare teeth and hands.  He studied his angle of attack and moved forward.  His eyes gleamed and began to grow dark in the moonlight and flames of the campfire.

“Pray, Park.” 
“Sheeit.”
“That’s it backwards.”
“Maybe so.” 
“But worse, this was different.”
“Yeah, you said that. 
“It is not innocent.”  Dave gazed into the dark set black by the fire glow upon the trees nearest him.
Park jerked up his head, began to wheeze in fear, in fear of it.
It tilted its head at the sounds these once-men made.  These were not innocent things.  As morsels they would resemble road kill, but was not entropy an immortal caustic, Derogatus had once said, and was the firmament misread by those who had gone before, those ancients whose compasses and goat herd dreams had begun it all, anyway?  It growled the way a mosquito must growl, deep within the confines of the small world of larvae and insects.
Park and Dave grabbed for their guns.

A large portion of arterial blood gushes into the penis of a man even modestly aroused.  This is second only to the large portion of arterial blood  shunted, redirected to the human brain when there is an adrenaline storm released by the emotion of fear, rage and the deep, final sleep of random victims of the mysterious adult sids known as nocturnal death syndrome. 
Randomness.  DNA digested, perpetually encapsulated like an idea arising from a masturbating monk’s penance, and then the most useful part of it flushed away,  DNA the remorseless one, and RNA, its pretty baby in handcuffs, gave the lie to the fable of entropy all mankind’s best brains enslaved themselves to as they made machine love to electrons, shortly before it happened one fine day comprised of the madness of centuries gone before.
The asteroid had done this deed and these mens' scent helped it, him, to remember, and when he’d eaten them and made their bones last many weeks until they were hollowed out, some to be made into curious oddity instruments he’d blow long, low and sweet notes into the night from the maw how she had done and shown him.
Chaos is DNA in the guise of transcendent order, and the mixture of what lies in  dogs eyes their masters mistake as adoration, and  drool that falls down the growling throats and brings up aromas and things unfathomable to all but their own ubiquitous spirits when they roam free at night with others like themselves, is the facade of civilization Scorpio prisoners all wait for the day of societal collapse to claim their unction by.

Park craved and lusted the milk time when his opposing thumbs ruled and his ruthless brain, more than ever, as he eyed his gun barrel glinting gray night light with orange fire lines flowing up it.
“It is a mere brute.”  Park turned in a slow circle, watching out into the black night.
“No.  It is not,” Dave whined.
“Sshh.”

They were winsome, these two. 
He began to circle, slicker than any cat.  Moist leaves, crepuscular as tumors, bent under the weight of his hands, and made peace in the fresh, soft muck. 

Levers pushed cartridges into eager, barrel chambers.  Two metallic clicks rode into the tree trunks. 
The golden necklace shimmered.
Dave could barely breath beneath his skin, its ungiving blanket.  The rifle was heavier than heavy.  He often dreamt of the small blood dot its bullets made the microsecond before it tumbled through skull bones into unsuspecting, bounteous history, love and retribution his target’s brain would never put into rational sequences and vectors again.
“Dear Jesus,” Park whispered.  He had read once about a place called purgatory.  He knew that when somebody knows they are going to die just about now that they hope all the stuff they read about sin and heaven and hell was a pack of lies.  He thought about the preacher man he’d try to get off him, the weight, the heavy, wet wet, and how he couldn’t breathe in that daydream.  He turned slowly with Park.

These human spits.  He could not fathom the beauty of that, for he knew that he was human at some level.  But there it was. 
His heart lit like wind through sunlit rain.
The wonder of it.  His face wondrous, free full of night air as he pounced.
Park and Dave fired.  The booms were like thunder.  Thunder looks to the casual observer to form struts that hold up the sky.  But they don’t. 
The golden necklace and the screams were a melancholy glee of shapes and music to the eyes and ears of the owl above the frenzy that suddenly erupted far, far beneath its feathered stump legs, as, now, far away, for far, far did it have to go yet into the Northern realms where its kind would breed again.  It circled back for the chance of some carrion pieces.
The owl was startled at the apparition: a fourth biped, almost the same as the three below by the campfire, hair flowing long into the mountain breeze as this biped on a rock above the cliff-nestled trees swayed to a melancholy music like a long mating cry of a raven or a hawk, and held a long walking staff waving the air as though the wind called dance steps to it.  A fifth biped, a short one beside him in a long, loose dress, played upon a violin and the owl could not remember why he had not heard such things before this, for such were deeply imprinted in his back brain where things are; distant and ancient things dwelt there, but the owl was impatient to follow the magnetics of the earth to its destiny.  It determined that the large, red, biped with claws like a lobster, and the head of a human would leave nothing but that which the ants could find if they were truly ardent. 
The owl tilted is body and swooped back into a new thermal.
Juliet twirled, impelled by joyous skips, her tall boots flashing, and these two bipeds were like bent branches filled by shapes and leaves in the moonlight the owl had dreamt of once when it was very hungry and near death.  Owl gathered its plumage and flew high into the black night up, up high beyond the screams and the music and the waving cane below.
I, Jesus Gun,  sang a high, clear note as the throes of the two cannibals were prolonged and the owl was redeemed by painting made across the forest floor.
And I danced with my Juliet and beckoned to William and Billy which he had finally become, and watched as he gathered our songs.

The violin notes, high, pure slid down iced branches, poured themselves like tiny, adventurous children into his ears; festive little gods they were, these notes.
He scowled and wiped drool from his mouth, a thing flickered in his brain, and he gazed at the bones and gristle upon the forest ground.  A thing flickered in his brain.  He wiped his eyes and sighed.  It occurred to him that he was incomplete, somehow, and he recognized this as deep sad longing. yet the things of the kill beckoned him, the gristle and Dave’s dead, staring cannibal eyes beckoned him.
Lovingly, he pulled one out of its socket and examined its beauty.
Little god notes danced around him and he crouched, glaring upwards at the place these came from.  His tongue sat in his mouth and dried as he gaped upwards and suddenly he leapt up and knelt down as quickly, covered his head with his forearms until these sensations of madness passed.
Then he stood, victorious.
He hovered above the gleaming femur bone, its still moist head, its insertion point where it had once fastened into the hip bone of  Park, grasped it at that place, now useless except to wield as the blunt end of a weapon with eons of millions of years to give it a solid reputation for mayhem, and skelter, or in less adventurous  usage, for knawing .
Juliet Roy Rogers, her skirt swirling up her legs as she played and danced in the arms of Jesus Gun, he ignored their revelry,  knew they would go away again like they always did, and knew nothing of their ways anymore, nor  cared.
How the bag of bones he drew up with him seemed this time full of mysterious uselessness.  He thought of Juliet Roy Rogers.
She was winsome, yearning for things he did not know existed anymore.
The femur bone clunked into a sack he had fashioned from large pieces of bloodied fabric, and he loped away into the underbrush that began the long ascent up into the black, starry night blotted out by the young and high mountain he found refuge in each day.
He stopped and glared backwards at the receding hill the two danced upon, until they were no longer there and he could continue his ascent.  Melancholy rose up in his chest, its deep muscles writhing to the rhythm of his climbing hand over foot upon the sheer face of solid rock.  He felt like a melancholy rose, but not organic as a plant that has roots into fertile soil, nor as a child becomes the thing, upon a time, once, that it never dreamed it would not be, but from only sorrows somewhere he did not remember anymore, anyway.
Rock maw opened as he approached its cliff-edge glow, and grasped with one hand its stone roughages.  But Juliet appeared beside him. And his terror began to dissipate and began to cry.
“The fire you were in haunts me, haunts me,” she whispered, pulling him across the precipice to the bright glow deep in the maw, the fire she’d made for them, for she, like Jesus Gun, was angelic, yet free and could do with him what she pleased.
“The fire you were in haunts me, haunts me,” she whispered and kissed him soft goodbye, for now.
A high, pure note he cried rose faster than the owl that had deserted the painting he’d made upon the forest floor.  Another note followed it even faster and what wolves that had survived the years of these times, and in earshot, hesitated to put forth their own in response, hesitated, remained silent and skulked quickly between trees following tribal markings, urinal and vestigial, into gradual and playful, hopeful flight. 

I, Jesus Gun, my face gleamed firelight,  for we, atoms only,  dispersed at last, for how these two, here, now,  instar no more, utterly were, her and I, and William, at last, the very first, and our children would be a wonderment.   
Owl,  miles far off,  swiveled its head back into the distant black infinity, temporarily confounded, then joyful, suddenly disappeared, for are wings not wondrous? 


END