vi. triptych

a distant wail

Energy hits the body like a thousand volts. Sunlight on the cheeks,
the sky a cobalt blue, the smell of youth an intoxication. A day to be
alive, to lose the hours cruising around in vehicles with windows
down, music blaring, every lyric and riff imbued with meaning and
clarity.

The blast of wind across the skin, the prickle an aphrodisiac. Close
company with the opposite sex, one on each side, stuck in the middle
of their smell and touch. Every breath taking in this drug of life's
choices. Everything is physical and real and so very immediate.
Screaming for no reason, squealing just to test those pipes, slam
those brakes. The curves of corners go fast and tight, the crush and
the heat of visceral contact in the backseat.

Discovering what is real and what is right. Learning this is youth,
these sensations new, horizons open up and skies break through so
very clear.

back to reality, right here right now

the song in my head that is stuck. i weep because it is so beautiful.
it is like a turning point in time, when life is revealed so damn ugly
and wonderful and all there is to be done about it is laugh and cry,
one in the same. what follows is a story told in three parts. words
that have never been said before. will never be said again. people
lost and wisdom gained. words that run together without so much as a
breath to break them apart. the emotion that spills out like a hot
scream, steaming the landscape forever. learn how this life will never
be the same again, the tender veil parts, the wicked are we
reflections in each other ourselves. people tell me to stop writing
because they know what comes next. i tell them i've yet to get to the
best parts. when it all becomes madness, because i lose and i don't
know what to say, so i just keep going because that is what i do. i am
here now, this story has a long ways to go. travel with me yet, this
unreliable narrator, author boy wise beyond his years, never measuring
up, disconnected from his friends and family, willing to destroy
everything he has built for a chance to show just how much he loves an
impossible dream. he is already dead, he just doesn't know it yet.

First Panel - Mayhune Lovers; a story about what it means to be

becuase it means something to me at this point in the telling. I've
not been able to put my words down in quite some time. You read this
linear but I write when words seize me and refuse to let go. It
happens when it wills itself, here and there. Make no mistake that
I'm struggling with who I am and where I'm going in this life,
understand that by committing myself to this project and seeing it
through, many sacrifices were and will be made. Every word is a choice
and I have to live with the consequences.

I am a lazy human being, full of idle thought and means of leisure. I
occupy myself with entertainments, diversions and frequent breaks from
reality. I have been drinking to excess. You know nothing of my
present and I apologize, but you can always skip ahead to the second
half where I detail in greater length my present woe. It's a different
sort of story, so very different from the one that will immediately
follow. When I set out to collect my thoughts, I thought these Small
Wood reminisces would be easy. I said how I am very lazy, I tell you
I thought this would write itself. I was wrong and now realize just
how hard this will be to continue at this pace and say what needs to
be said. So often when I sit down to write I give up half-way through,
delete what came before and retire to my bed. I need to feel the click
in place with this language, this past. It doesn't have to be true; it
just has to feel true.

...

Her name was like so many other girl names, named for a flower. He had
his father's name, the fourth father's name in a row. They did not
truly see the other for the first time until her fifteenth birthday.
Their parents had been best friends, grown up together, courted,
married and had children together. Their families lived on opposites
ends of the town, which meant they lived pretty close by, never more
than a phone call away. Four or five days every month got spent
co-mingling, the kids clashing, bonding and spurting through the years
while the parents worked, mellowed and enjoyed the rearing.

The birthday party was nothing special. Her family had set-up a large
table out in the backyard. It was summer, of course. The small
children played in a sprinkler, on a slip and slide. The bright husks
of broken water balloons were not well hidden in the tall grass.

The girl was sullen and distant, not wanting the carefree ritual
burden of tearing through wrapped presents, eating cake and ice cream
that were her favorite flavor, smiling and thanking everyone for their
thought and consideration. The boy was quiet but kind, realizing that
his place in this world was changing, that things were changing and
never going back. He was remarkably attracted this almost sister
of his. She was the keeper of so many of his secrets and lived forever
in the pages of family albums.

She had been unwanted by a boy, a feeling she'd anticipated ever since
childhood. It was the other half of play, when one doll snubbed the
other for the affection of herself. Dejection was always a concept,
never an actual emotion. So very different from being left behind as a
child at a gas station, being forgotten for a moment, a terrifying
moment. Altogether alien and foreign to her, a slight against her
character, her not being good enough, attractive enough, ideal enough
in the eyes of her own ideal. Her head was clouded with thoughts of
endings, of melodramatic over-simplifications. She would change
herself to challenge him, to change his perception of her. She would
go into the bathroom and cry as quiet as she could, look into the
mirror and hate that awful no good reflection.

He pined for her gaze but had no trick up his sleeve to catch it. He
was ordinary, altogether plain. He would sit in the grass, let his
brothers and sisters wrestle him to the wet carpet. His eyes would
never leave her, they played for his smile and smile he did. He wore
glasses, dressed like an old man. The sound of a fog horn off in the
distance, birds overhead. He drank cherry soda and wiped his forehead.
She sat silent, so her mother shook her shoulders to stir some life
back into those bones. She smiled weakly, played with a mash of cake
and cream.

Keep waiting for that moment of connection because he and she were
like fish in a bowl, always brushing past each other, never touching.
He was clumsy like the words out of his mouth, she was stoic with her
inward gaze. Compare and contrast for effect. But they had a history.

He remembered something, a moment he'd forgotten. They were age nine
or so, lanky springs of acutely conscious energy, polar in their
pursuits. She wanted to be a vet, loved animals and was preoccupied
with breeding rabbits. He'd help her clean cages, little fecal balls
rolled away and he'd have to pick them up, one by one with his
fingers. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life and didn't
much care to worry. His gaze was on her. He knew he enjoyed her
company. She tried to teach him little things which he'd forget
completely. Yet he remembered every thing about the way she said it,
how much fun they were having.

She only saw him as uninteresting, plain and simple. She grew tired of
trying to improve him, he was not worth her energy. But they had a
history, and she too remembered moments. When they were thirteen, he
could not begin to understand who she was becoming. Never were they so
very different. Somehow he remembered the smallest thing she said at
the lake one spring. About how she wanted to go to Nepal and climb the
highest mountain and at the top instead of leaving a flag, she'd leave
a photo of herself to be buried under all that snow.

When the day was done and he had left with his family, the painful
waves and hugs and thanks all exchanged, she went up to her room and
sat in silence. She looked over all her unwrapped presents and
considered him again. It was nothing really, but she kept thinking
about him and she didn't want to.

He'd given her a stethoscope for her birthday. She'd wanted to be a
doctor now and hadn't told anybody, even him. She wanted to help
people because there was so much sickness in the world and she knew
nothing of it. He was so simple, so silly. She could not get him out
of her head. The day turned to night and she sat on her pillows, her
legs crossed, her chin cradled against her hands, forehead creased and
set like stone.

Inside her chest her breathing came short against her throat, she
breathed through her nose, every thought and beat of her eyes a
measure of her consideration. Her hands were sweaty together entwined,
eyes more out of focus with every flutter.

...

Second Panel - The Sacrificial Pair; a story of who we were

Just write and this will all make sense.

Idyllic: a beautiful word for a beautiful state of being. We never
know we are living in such times until they are gone from us forever,
memories rooted just beneath the surface like gentle barbs. There are
two basic forms of idyllic existence, the flurry hurried up passage of
time and the trawling crawl of time.

The first time I ever felt connected to Small Wood, I was standing by
a large upturned log with my new friends Justin and Kate. We were
using Justin's hi8 video camera to record footage of Kate wandering
around. I had written something and that impulse required me to reach
out and use what I could find to bring life to the endeavor.

Kate was a year between Justin and I. That day she was dressed
plainly, very much acting like a tomboy, assertive, adventurous and
content with half a sly smile. Justin and I would make light fun of
her, something she enjoyed. She appreciated people who didn't take her
too serious, who dared her to let her guard down. We'd think of odd
behaviors to stick to her on camera. Bite into this raw onion, it'll
make you cry. We didn't want to capture the tears so much as her
protestation and eventual resignation to her fate.

Like most of our documentation, the footage of Kate and the log really
had no purpose; it was not connected to the narrative, just something
Justin wanted to shoot, something I could not imagine. Justin, who
would become and remain one of my favorite people in the world, was
two years younger than I was. At that point, he was timid and slight
with an intense gaze that would lock on to a person.

The first encounter I remember Justin by occurred in the school lunch
room. I was eating there atypically and reading a film script.
Justin walked by, recognized the page format and asked to sit and talk
about it over. It was a simple connection between two like minds. Justin
had lived his whole life in Small Wood, belonging totally to the
place, yet not surprisingly, never quite fitting in. He dreamt of
bigger cities, bigger budgets.

...

My fault for the horrible dialogue coming out of their mouths, I
winced because I knew how bad it was, smiled because they were trying
too hard to sell it and I didn't have the heart, we didn't have the
time to stop and try again. Because light was fading fast, their
energy was depleted, and we were all anxious to move onto the next
shot. I had given up caring about the words I'd written, instead
focused on the technical details and creative problem solving of
production. There is a dream inherent in youth. To aspire to so much,
try so hard, and fail so miserably. Always worthy, this attempt was,
learning the limits of what could be achieved through sheer will
alone. Money was not a factor, as we had none to spend. Actors had no
training, their only prequalification a necessary willingness to be
bored and waste time entertaining themselves and each other while we
worked out all the details of a particular shot. Our locations were
our saving grace. The city of Small Wood had a rundown quality that
looked appropriate and somewhat more beautiful because of the hi8
video. The foliage popped out a brighter green, the small scars and
stains of wear and tear lost themselves to the low resolution capture.
When we ran out of ideas we captured each others lives and tried to
somehow tie it into the narrative we conjured out of thin air. A
parade Kate had to appear in two towns away became a backdrop for a
scene in which the hero first eyes her and falls in love with this
being of luminous beauty. We kept moving and shooting, writing and
scheming. Justin and I would spend weekends trying to piece together
footage analog, scene by laborious scene on two editing deck VCRs. It
always ended up a mess, but we were always happy however aborted our
labor should've been. It was strange to capture so much youth before
it faded away so fast.
...

It should have been a religious experience seeing the Ark for the
first time. The wooden dreadnaught was empty of animals, fallen to
ruin, sitting unused and hollow on the side of a hill. The man who had
grown old building it, watched his wife and children leave him because
of it, still resided in a small shack workshop nearby. Animal cages
were many and empty, the scale of the project staggering in how
wasteful. He gave tours for free because God would want it that way.
People always gave him money anyways, he always said godbless, not
refusing charity.

I'd heard of the Ark from many people. Since I was new, everyone
explained in great detail, with much emphasis, how I needed to check
the place out. Members of the football team razed the place every
year, stealing supplies, pissing on it, breaking stuff for the hell of
it. There were signs off the road, hand-painted, pointing the way, I
did my best to keep a safe distance.

He was a young man named Philip. His red hair, a cocky mane he threw around to give more weight to his slender freckled frame. He had a thin beard and almost never wore a shirt. He loved the outside, loved women and couldn't stand to be wrong in the face of the obvious. Philip sang around campfires in a certain atonal hymnal, a frog-throated choirboy whose croaking seemed right no matter how inherently wrong it was.

Most of his friends were hippies because like them he liked to surf, smoke and screw. Philip had a dirty little secret and that was his personal relationship with the lord Jesus Christ. One summer night, baked on the beach, Jesus spoke to Philip and outlined his plan. Philip saw the ocean rise up and he scrambled for his surf board. His friends slept through the rising surf, disappearing beneath the water. Philip paddled for what seemed like hours, the world around vanished beneath. The water sang to him with the collision of every wave, the crash of breakers, the shift of temperatures beneath him, like thousands of voices, each more beatiful than any he'd heard in the sum total of his existence. Their effect was to render him prostrate on his board, weeping up at the sky, the clouds moving far too quickly, racing across, dissolving together.

The voice of God was the sound of water pounding in his ear drums. Thick and solid, splitting him open down the middle, good and evil, man and boy, father and son. He had no present, he was just his past and future. He knew who he was and where he came from, and then God told him what exactly was coming.

A flood like nothing he'd ever read about or seen in any movie. It would swallow everything he loved and there was nothing that could be done to stop it. It would not obey the laws of physics nor would it adhere to natural order. It was chaos and fluid, the stuff of final death and amniotic creation.

Philip's tears, so small and tiny, returned to the ocean. He beat his fists against the give of the ocean. He rocked on his surfboard and screamed at the sky, never stopping its mad dash.

God left him on the sandy beach, the morning sun throwing light across a dark and western ocean.

When Philip was twenty-four his firstborn was baptized in the freshwater saltwater mix where the Seagash met the Pacific. The little girl cried on her own choke.

There was a small party afterwards and through several glasses of wine, Philip thought he heard someone calling his name from far off. He very much hoped it was the divine. He needed to hear it so very badly at this point. He wasn't making enough money, wasn't very happy with the whole situation really.

When Philip was thirty-one, he quit his job to start construction. He started seeing signs all around him and knew it was time to begin. The first week he'd convinced his family he was cutting wood to build a new porch. Under the guise that he needed something to occupy himself during the transition. He couldn't afford raw lumber so he began by felling small trees by himself, alone and away from the house. His children came up with their own reasons why trees would crash not so far off, why their father would disappear for half a day and come back sweaty and exhausted and too tired to look at them.

He read the bible but never out of comfort. He needed answers, needed the word of God to provide a foundation. He dreamt of that ocean of judgement. Believed in that dream above all else.


Third Panel - The Watcher; a story of what may be

Fucking tears on my face, all over my face. My eyes wouldn't stop
because my heart beat. I bled and anguished.

I was living in the second house on the property in my little room
sleeping on old and dirty mattresses. I'd brought in a kerosene lamp
to read by, there was no electricity out to the old place, the walls
shone through bare in places, stripped to the board. It was cold and
damp inside, except for the tiny pocket of heat around me. I was
sick of my family, tired of their bullshit. I fled to the second house
to tear it apart and make it new. I'd painted what remained of the
plaster on the walls with natural earthy colors and hidden shapes,
shadow figures in pattern and texture of the surface. I
realized I could not continue being myself in the warm home. I was rebelling
against an authority that did not exist and that scared my family. I
didn't want to be a further source of discomfort, I didn't want to
suffer the growing sense of foolishness that surrounded their
individual lives. The family was disintegrating, the unit we'd become.
Dad was off consulting, another city, another project. Mom had moved
to the town of Frederick, cleaning homes, waiting for her state
respiratory therapy license to come through. My sister and I were
effectively alone and at each others throats.

I started going out to the abandoned building after dinner. I'd take a
book out with me and read until my eyes hurt and then I'd keep
on reading. I was stranded at the house for most days as there was no
vehicle I could use to drive away from the goddamn place. Sis and I
hiked up the hill at six in the morning to catch the school bus,
always a shameful ride to and fro. We'd be cold, wet and miserable
because the school months were the nine months out of the year it
rained, drizzled, down-poured consistently.

Life inside the outside was lonely but marginally better than keeping
company. I wanted nothing to do with the town, nor anyone in it. I had
a portable emergency radio I kept by my mattress side, running on
batteries, picking up mostly dead air with the occasional ghostly
voice or wail to interrupt. I liked perpetual sound, like running
water.

I'd been reading about the settlers who'd come through in the eighteen
hundreds, who'd buried the living assumed dead. Hours, they'd give
them to come back to life, if so was the case. They had a name for the
person whose job this was, to sit and wait for the dead. He'd be
tasked to stand watch out there alone while the wagon trained moved on
ahead. He'd have to catch up, hurry on back to the safety and comfort
only after knowing one way or the other. He'd last out there as long
as he could, contemplating that only he would ever know the truth in
the matter.

It was always a foregone conclusion. The dead don't regularly return
to life, but for some reason along the Oregon trail they needed a
goddamn watchman to keep an eye after these dead. This was a matter of
fact. This was of historic record. What the watchman did with the dead,
what he was looking out for, what he hoped would or would not happen.
My mind reeled at the thought because I had read it plain as day.

Stupid shivers, ran through me. I couldn't get warm enough at the odd
hours of the night. I'd woken up having to pee. I did it out a window
after I'd cracked it some. Trees swayed in place like foreign
mourners, clouds hustled sideways across the sky. Steam blew up off my
piss, pungent and warm.

The light was on inside the family house and it reminded me of a day
when all was good and right. A piece of a broken mirror shone through
a crack in the floorboards. A stack of magazines from the seventies
served no purpose in the corner. My fingers were crusted with paint,
dirt and blood, most of it in reds and browns. My left thumbnail was
cracked halfway down and I'd bandaged it over with some gauze. It
pressed with a dull ache. I'd hammered it instead of a nail I was
trying to turn in on its side and crush into the wood.

I'd been seeing this girl named Andrea. She was blonde, had a stud in
her tongue which I'd never seen before let alone felt in my mouth.
She'd come by the house, spent the night just that once. She parked up
off the road and hopped the fence and come into the room to be with
me.

She told me she loved the rundown place, that she wanted to move in,
her breath fast and heavy on my chest and neck. Then she started
talking in her sleep about fucked up shit, names of guys and girls she
wanted to screw and murder. She wouldn't stop even after I tried
shaking her and calling her name. Her body next to me, hand tight in
mine, both us on our backs, her mouth hot with hate and perspiration.
She rocked gently, started from her waist up to the top of her head,
slowly never stopping. I put my hand in between her, held her like
that. I was tired and cold and this was all I wanted at this hour,
just the comfort of her.

Andrea was an outsider like me. She'd showed up late that school year,
moving from someplace in northern California. Her parents had
divorced, she'd gone to live with her father after trouble with her
mother. She liked being trouble, dug very much the stigma that
followed. She listened to music, which I knew nothing about. She'd
sing to herself, in this pathetic sort of singsong voice like she was
trying too hard. It was cute at first, the way she'd overenunciate and
dance with her fingers, never taking her eyes off them. She was smart
about guys unlike so many girls. She lived life according to her own
take on the law of undiminished wants and needs. There was nothing
shared between us outside that bedroom. Early flirtations were
forgotten upon bodily impact, our faces lost in each other, our grip
on each other tight and desperate, for just that night. The want was
desperate, coming off immediate and answered upon like a signal flare.

We went to school together, took classes, sat apart and away from,
never found each other again. I realized I was sickened by the act,
the environment in which it took place. It was lovely never again
beautiful in how rotten tainted fetid it was.

She left in the morning, leaving behind a faint and unpleasant human
aroma. I cracked the windows and let her waft out over the course of
the day. Sometime during the night, the radio had come to life,
playing a quiet and broken sound, the voice singing in French. I may
have been dreaming.