Dark and Stormy Night

A few good times before it ends. He soon rests suspended and unexpected in a frozen morgue. Body shivers inside a slanted tomb both wet and hardened, because that’s what water does here. The chill doesn’t damper his dream of the embrace a week before. He made love to the woman. He communed with her lips. Formaldehyde as any professional in the field would tell you, is not necessary in this unique concordance of climate and depth. She allowed him to enter her to an acceptable depth, measured and proper considering the number of dates they had enjoyed and one she did not. The death record should indicate the cause of death was by avalanche, but nobody official has ever written that before and they all agree to asphyxiation. Her hips provided a point of reference upon which he could fix himself and balance down upon her like he had seen rocks balance, arranged so magically in urban gardens. They pay professionals to balance rocks like that. Professionals are needed to extract corpses from back country frostbite parlors, using hoists and helicopters and spirits hardened with morbid experience. Did the last moment of ecstacy between him and her happen in a La Quinta or at a Best Western? And at what elevation did she envelope him? He can’t recall what floor though the synapses still fire for some time. Electricity travels with less resistance as he approaches absolute zero, so thinking moves very fast. Thus all this remembering of her breath against his neck, warm and wet and soft and wet and warm. Rigor is something beautiful like a good joke found with nobody around to whom to tell it. She has a great ass he guiles his glove. And nipples are not just for babies he tells a tree trembling alongside. He feels like running naked down to mount’s base for some hot chocolate and marshmallows. Doesn’t the world think that would be worth it Seeing him lope naked down the slope, his flesh clinking between his legs like an icicle between two greying pistons, and if only the world would value such absurdities The world would make sure he would be only inches from the top and that hot sun. But he’s down deep, she’s reading about him now and the world isn’t having him any more.

Submission to the CL Literary & Writing forum Passing Time project

Page 1

Will it be the tango or the paso doble? Two men sit across from each other at a maple conference table overlooking the Potomac. One scratches something down on a cocktail napkin, a figure with many zeroes, and passes it across the table to the other, his french cuff brushing the polished top. Who knows how the cocktail napkin (where are the cocktails) came into the picture?

A glimpse down. The figures roll around in his mouth like an incantation.

“To be wired to a Swiss account?”

“As soon as you lower the value of a life to $6.9 million.”

A moment’s hesitation and then a nod of approval. This is how it’s done on the beltway. People in the know call it the K Street waltz (okay, so it’s a waltz.) When the Environmental Protection Agency dropped the value of a single life from eight million to something south of seven, a lot of money was going to be made.

Someone has to start making money first.

Those that did were wearing this . . . the Classic French Collar (No. 2505), made of the finest cotton from the Nile Delta, this shirt is worn by both Wall Street and K Street types, and even EPA technocrats with fat Swiss bank accounts.

Pearl buttons. Single-needle throughout. Men’s sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL.

Colors: Blue with White French Collar - a classic look. Any other combination . . . well, it wouldn’t be a classic.

Page 2

He was a simple bus driver with a hankering for the life of the gentleman hunter. Those Minnesota woods called out to him on the eve of every open season. Though he was still a bus driver at heart, a regular Ralph Kramden, he could afford a better rifle, a better car and a bevy of employees/servants to carry his equipment and ammunition up and over those hills and down into those valleys in search of that prize trophy to hang on his wall.

He was an unsteady shot and bagged little more that a four-point buck, but he always looked dapper in his Tweed Shooting Jacket (No. 2106), the same classic jacket worn by English gentlemen hunters in the Scottish highlands.

His lack of skill at the hunt was more than made up for by his talent at dismantling electric trolley lines like the Pacific Electric Red Cars in Los Angeles. Mass rail transit would become little more than a memory, a page in a scrap book that your grandheirs might point at and ask about.

“Grandpa, what’s that?”

“Why that’s an electric trolley we used to get around town on just after the last big war, but some big companies ripped it out and made us buy their buses and use their gasoline.”

Where did the Pacific Electric trolley go?

To the moon, Alice, to the moon, on a stack of crisp Benjamins as a matter of fact, all padding the profit margin of General Motors and Standard Oil and Firestone Tire.

In the grand scheme of things, be the hunter not the hunted in our Tweed Shooting Jacket (No. 2106.)

Men’s sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL
Color: Grey

Page 3

OJ with a splash of Tia Maria. A gentle breeze slides off the Carribean. Sunrise isn’t too early to smoke a Montecristo No. 4 is it?

The sights, smells and tastes betray the presence of real movers and shakers here. Back home they are accustomed to living and working in what they call the “nose bleed” section of the risk-reward curve. They are the men, and a few women, who manage hedge funds.

No, they don’t have calluses from clipping at bushes all day. They generally pay people to do that while they sit, watching the market move up and down, bothering to look away from their Bloomberg monitors only to make a quip to their associates about oil futures.

In the Caymans, at the annual pow wow of fund managers (invite only), the living is easy and their attire shows it.

The Viscose Jacquard Linen Jacket (No. 2609) is tailored to let that cool trade wind in but not let market cap value out. Jackets like this are worn by a different breed all together.

Men’s even sizes: 38 through 48
Color: Blue with Creame stripe

Page 4

“Where did your watch go Senor Lansky?”

The man doesn’t answer but only rubs a pale strip of flesh around his wrist. The man’s first name is Meyer and you know the rest . . , a man of considerable means though you’d be pressed to get him to admit it.

The watch?

It’s a Cape Cod 1936 (No. 1107) with a havane crocodile strap. Senor Lansky feels naked without it, but it was an acceptable sacrifice given the dire circumstances. He gave it to a hot blooded idealist named Fidel Castro just an hour before in exchange for one more week to get his affairs together in Havana, make arrangements for passage to Nassau and transfer a fortune to various shell companies and sheltered bank accounts back in the Old World.

Yes, it was an acceptable sacrifice but one that doesn’t sit well with him. Why don’t you see for yourself how hard it would be to part with your own, even for half-a-fortnight of financial freedom?

The Cape Cod 1936 (No. 1107) comes with a matching crocodile skin humidor box. Tick, tick, tick . . . time is running out both for you and him.

Submission to the CL Literary & Writing forum Seven-in-Seven project.

“What do you do down in that hole?” I would ask my mother.

“I catch up a lot on my reading,” she said.

“What do you do down in the hole other than reading?” I asked my mother a few days later.

“We have a ping pong table,” she said. “When I’m not reading I play ping pong with Lisa.”

“What do you do down in the hole when you aren’t reading or playing ping-pong?” I asked my mother a few days after that.

“We practice doing our job. We call them drills, like you should practice your multiplication drills,” my mother answered.

At this time of frequent Q & A, I was eight years old, my brother five, and my mother was part of a grand experiment in how to better protect the United States from nuclear annihilation. Captain Hudson was a missile woman who swooshed effortlessly between the surface world of mediocre report cards and Cub Scout den meetings, and the subterranean realm of launch and command duty of a Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo.

“What do you practice down in the silo?” I asked after one of our den meetings. I slid off my itchy, bright yellow scout kerchief.

“Lisa and I practice turning keys and checking codes against other codes,” My mother looked annoyed with my question. Tomorrow she was going back on alert and down into the hole for a three-day shift.

My mom’s back-and-forth duty lasted for six years and was part of an Air Force program called Project Hera. The idea of putting mothers down into ballistic missile silos was born from a fear among the high brass that men were not fully dependable when given the duty of turning the keys to launch their Minutemen and Titan II rockets. Launch would be requested via an EWO or Emergency War Order on the occasion that all-out thermonuclear war were to break out. One four-star suggested that perhaps mothers, threatened with the potential vaporization of their own children on the surface, would more likely launch the missiles in a timely fashion, perhaps early enough to catch their counterparts in the Soviet Union still mulling over whether to launch their own missiles from their holes in Siberia. Thus Project Hera was born.

During alerts, my school teacher father did his best to raise us with help from nannies supplied by the U.S. government. I was well cared for and the Air Force saw that I didn’t fall through any cracks or down any holes.

Mom was still a very present and engaged parent. After she slid out of her uniform, she would effortlessly take on the uniforms of wife and den mother. Both mom and dad would help me on school projects such as dioramas and adding to our growing fleet of model rockets - our family hobby and the most common activity of our cub scout den.

I recall being so proud of a two-stage rocket my mother and I built. It took us over two months to build and perfect the design, and we were hosting the debut launch for the whole pack out on the air base’s soccer field. Dad set up the launch pad while mom hooked up the wires of the ignition system to the battery in our Volvo wagon. The rest of my friends had taken up their positions behind large pieces of plywood, anticipating a large and fiery debacle. Mom had the arming and ignition switch in her hand while we crouched behind the open door of the Volvo.

10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . .

Capt. Hudson handed the switch to me, saying, “This is your launch, not mine.”

I turned the arming key and pressed the launch button even before the rest of the den reached “2.” The rocket shot into the blue, and we never found it again even though the pack searched the neighboring forest until the darkness came and young guts began growling.

So it was with great amusement that thirty years later, while walking with my mother back to her Volvo station wagon after attending our democratic party precinct caucus, that I again asked her that same old question.

“So what were you really doing down in that hole?”

Mom just looked at me. We were both fatigued from the confusing caucus process and our discussions with our precinct neighbors of who would be best to take that 3 a.m. phone call, whether the most qualified would be Barack or Hillary.

“Lisa and I would mostly talk about you and your brother. We wondered which one of you two would marry her daughter first.”

I have a faint memory of Capt. Lisa Bonasera’s daughter, though I can’t remember her name. We moved from that Midwest air base many years ago.

“Would you have done it mom?”

“Done what?”

“Turned the keys and sent the missile on its way.”

“Of course not.”

I was shocked by the abrupt answer, her admission of insubordination.

“Why not?”

The newly assigned legislative delegate for Hillary Clinton looked at me again, this time with a bemused scorn.

“Did you forget I am a mother?”

Project Hera is therefore an unqualified success.

There are preemptive wars,
glorious wars,
fruitless wars,
asymmetric wars,
cold wars,
world wars,
tribal wars,
culture wars,

R.O. Shipman

It is a shocking thing to realize you know a killer. His name is Joseph Njonge, but until only a few days ago when his name was uttered by a chorus of news anchors, I had known him as just “Joseph.”

I took to Joseph as a friend almost instantly. He was one of two nursing assistants most often assigned to my 93-year-old grandfather’s wing at Garden Terrace Care Center. My grandfather was being rehabilitated after some serious health problems last year, and Joseph could always be relied upon to help with dressing him, cleaning him up, assisting him in the bathroom and other services indispensable to the helpless and infirm. I was thankful to have Rose, the other nursing assistant, and Joseph around. They always came promptly when I pushed the help button.

The quality of care was heads above the chronically understaffed care center we had had my grandfather in before Garden Terrace. After that first experience, we were naturally wary of what would happen to my grandfather once we left the facility for the night, so several nights we would stay at the center well into the evening making sure grandpa wasn’t sitting in his own waste or had rolled off his bed and onto the cold linoleum below. After a couple of weeks of seeing Joseph and Rose in action, and getting some feel for their approach and attitude toward care, we felt a more at ease leaving grandpa in their care.

We still spent many hours at Garden Terrace wheeling Grandpa to and from the rehab room, around the rhododendron gardens outside, and between his room and the communal dining room. As I am the “free son,” working as a freelance writer and a part-time fitness instructor, I became my grandfather’s care advocate and often helped with many of the functions normally done by the nursing assistants. Joseph and I became something of a team.

During lulls of activity, we talked of his life back in Kenya, cars (he was proud of his BMW), sports and music. He was always friendly with me, had a fantastic smile and seemed to move through the day with a swagger and ease that to me meant his mind was still moving to the rhythm of the savanna - a welcoming embrace off all events and people around him. Our conversations did much to inspire the writing of Three Frames of Africa.

I remember one time when we were both sitting in the dining room at dinner time. The residents of our wing all were wearing their bibs. Some were capable of shoveling food into their mouths. Others needed help guiding spoons full of mixed veggies over lips in tremor, to clean up occasional spills of fruit punch, or to wipe threads of drool from slumbering mouths. If the Mariners game wasn’t on, we would turn it to the Discovery Channel and watch Cash Cab, the game show that takes place in a New York taxi cab. Joseph and I were a team, an invincible duo of Manhattanites trying to get to a swank watering hole in Soho from some corner uptown. Where I lacked an answer to a question, Joseph would provide. When Joseph didn’t know the answer, I always did. Talents combined, we never missed any of host Ben Bailey’s questions nor a video bonus.

Just at those points when we were most pleased with ourselves for keeping our streak of success alive, Gladdis at the near table, who was a Broadway dancer in the 40s (she’s shown me the pictures as proof), would wake up and say she knows such and such building that was passing outside of the cab’s window, or that a man by the name of Harold Perriford kissed her on the exact corner on which a team of cab-conveyed contestant was being delivered either victorious or defeated. At such moments, Joseph would turn and smile at the thought of this angel who can remember a romantic rendevous from 1947 as if it happened yesterday but can’t remember what she just had for dessert.

So what transpired that mid-March evening that has put Joseph, wearing an orange jumpsuit and whispering to his counsel, up there on my TV? Someone strangled a 75-year-old grandmother named Jane Carol Britt and shoved her body into the trunk of her Mercedes. The authorities say they have a positive DNA match between tissues found underneath Jane’s fingernails, probably the result of struggle, and my friend Joseph. I did not know the victim though I imagine we might have passed each other some time in the halls of Garden Terrace during my grandfather’s two-month stay. Another report I read indicated that they had found Jane’s Costco membership card in Joseph’s wallet.

I cannot imagine what would drive Joseph to kill Jane Carol Britt. What does it take for one man to kill? I still try to work out such machinations in my mind. Did Jane utter something carelessly and in so doing, flipped a switch in Joseph and turned him into something other, something capable of strangling the breath out of the?

By going through all the possible scenarios that would come closest to making sense, I, in fact, put myself in Joseph’s place. I become for a moment the kind killer. The real question I am asking is what would drive me to kill. I don’t know the answer to this one, so this is my street shout-out.

KOMO News Coverage of Jane’s murder and Joseph’s arrest

Oh, and if you are not familiar with Cash Cab . . .

Hollowness is the last day of the quarter, sitting at my desk, studying for the last final, my eyes bleary from reading paragraphs barely more substantial than a corpse’s whisper. I feel the sun coming down upon me through the blinds, a pattern of dark and light, dark and light projected against institutional carpeting. The light feels good and the dark doesn’t so I draw the blinds up to the ceiling and crack the window.

Summer slides in through the mesh screen and over the sill accompanied by the sound of numb evenings spent on a southern shore. Bob Marley’s “Jamming” is rising from a room on what I guess is the second floor. I’m standing in my cell on the third. I think I hear some Beastie Boys from another open window across Oxford Circle, an awkward cacophony of sounds meeting over the cars of the last few frustrated souls who can’t yet make a clean break from academia.

And then I see her down below, the girl whose name I can’t now remember, walking toward the parking lot. Under one arm she carries an ironing board and under the other an abused six-string guitar. I recall that guitar and playing a few sloppy power chords, and then sleeping with her until the morning after a night of too much beer and too many happenings no longer remembered. As she opens the door to her VW bug, she slides the bucket seats forward, resting the guitar on top a hamper of folded winter clothes, and I feel damned by my lack of remembering anything between us. I can see she has gained the freshman ten over the past year and maybe a few more.

Though she is that girl - the one I would awkwardly smile at from across the Dining Commons, but never found a good enough reason to talk to.

I open the window as far as it will go and feel the heat of the sun on my face. All that has come before burns in a majestic auto de fe, all the sleepless nights, and the books uncracked, all the second-hand smoke inhaled in rooms sealed tight from the February cold. It all burns this summer day. Emerson Hall is empty now of its life. We few are the last and cursed holdouts.

From somewhere down below comes the wail, “No Woman, No Cry.”

On my birthday, I decided to treat myself to a glass of the best Cabernet Sauvignon from Bordeaux. I know it to be the a wine that ages well. This is important to me as I have collected a wide variety of wines, many well over a century old, and it seems fitting that I should drink a wine on my birthday that accepts the burden of years with grace. After several glasses, my mind has a tendency to both rest and wander. The wine has an added benefit in that it deadens the ache in my ankle.

I sprained the ankle this afternoon when I fell from a ladder I had climbed to clean out my gutters of leaves. I live on the edge of a forest and autumn is beautiful here. The trees try to pick a color and stay with it, but they obviously fail. The leaves on one branch turn red, another yellow, and still another improbable purple. It is a rebellion of color here in the forest before the winter arrives. I’m forever raking up leaves and digging them out from the gutters that line my roof. I’m lucky not to have a broken leg, but the enduring ache has me concerned. I wonder if I should go see a doctor about it.

I do not welcome guests to celebrate my birthday. I haven’t for many years. Almost every single person I’ve know is gone now, buried, most all forgotten except a special few. Parties are such a bore and this isn’t a modern development. I have no nostalgia for soirees of the past. Those were equally a bore. For example, Madame Geoffrin was a loathsome host as was Arnobius of Sicca. I just refuse to party now. It all seems hopelessly redundant.

Caligula’s parties of course were renowned for their expense and the spectacle, but I missed out on those, being in Ethiopia at the time. Moreover, I heard they were considerably overrated. Gossip has a way of amplifying spectacle into something completely opposite of what it is in fact, and I think of Caligula’s parties in such light. There was as much quality celebration in those marble halls as there is now in my glass of red wine, and the effect on my bank accounts is considerably more muted, even counting for inflation, in the fermented grape.

The ankle has me worried though. The wound is six hours old now and the swelling remains. At first it turned red, but is now a sickly bluish. I imagine tomorrow all might become black. The ankle rests, elevated, on two pillows stacked on my ottoman. May I add that’s a completely ridiculous name for a piece of furniture? In all my travels through that empire, I have never seen any prince make use of such a piece of furniture.

I had thought to use ice to bring down the swelling, but ever since my beloved Christine died of freezing in the little ice age, I recoil from the touch of ice. I do not even use it in my drinks like moderns are accustomed. So it will have to be alcohol tonight to take off the edge.

The wine numbs me but I feel I cannot yet sleep. My mind is still too restless. Out of a complete lack of necessity, I’ve never had to visit a doctor in all my life. I’m not familiar about how to go about it. Well, there was that case of that physician attempting to dress my wounds at the Battle of Trafalgar. I amazed him when I rose from the deck, bleeding out from a nasty piece of cannon shrapnel in my gut, and dove into the sea, swimming from my ship, Leviathan, to Admiral Nelson’s ship, the HMS Victory. I was assumed drowned by the crew of my old ship, and something of a half-fish-half-man to those aboard the Victory. I suppose you had to be there.

I imagine doctors these days don’t accept payment in gold, so I’ll have to exchange my last Confederate gold ingot. They’ve so far kept me afloat in the world, helped pay off the adjustable rate mortgage and keep the lights on. I’ve used the stuff judiciously, making sure not to appear with so much of it in hand as to attract suspicion. I wonder, now that I’m fresh out, if I must find employment and whether such a search will require me to update my resume.

I read my obituary in the newspaper. At first I’m not sure it is me, but a closer investigation of the photo shows that the man who is dead is truly me. I am mooning the camera in the photo, and my distinct violin-shaped birthmark is visible for all to see.

The waitress who is pouring coffee into my mug shrieks in horror as she peeks over my shoulder at the page. She begins to scream, “Donald, Donald, you’re dead!” whereupon the short order cook, who is wearing an eye-patch, clutches his chest and falls halfway into the pie display case, his head buried in a strawberry shortcake heaping with whipped cream. Indeed, Donald Slutsky, owner of the St. Ignatius Café is also dead, his smiling mug, both eyes twinkling, beside my gleaming moon of a bare ass.

According to Donald’s wishes he is cremated, his remains released to his ex-wife Gladis who keeps the box-like urn near the back of her bedroom closet for two months, the appropriate mourning period she believes. After the sixty day black time, she empties the ashes into her refuse bin and uses the box to hide Ziploc bags of illicit pharmaceuticals such as Percocet and Vicodin she has started to pilfer from the hospital in which she works as a registered nurse.

It is under the influence of fifty milligrams of Vicodin that had been stashed safely away in her ex-husband’s urn that Gladis injects air through an IV tube into the vein of insurance salesman Reginald Swan. The air is an adequate amount to stop his already weakened heart. The family man had taken a nasty descent down the stairs into his basement and broke his femur and collarbone, thus explaining his presence in Gladis’ emergency room the night of his demise.

Luckily, two weeks before, Reginald’s wife Margaret had taken out a million dollar life insurance policy on her husband. With the sudden windfall delivered in a single check from her husband’s employer and insurer, she and her two children, Allison, 15, and Ruben, 12, hop on a flight to St. Lucia in the crystal blue Carribean. It is on this flight that Allison in seat 19C meets Michael in 19D. Michael is eager to be Allison’s lover whenever her mother and younger brother are down on the beach just below their timeshare condo.

Within two months, it becomes obvious that Allison is with child, having missed her monthly flow, but having instead that “motherly glow” that Margaret laments she sees emanating from her daughter. Tests confirm Margaret’s intuition. Abortion is considered, but Allison protests, wanting to keep the coming bundle of joy and responsibility. A compromise is struck when Ruben confides to his mother and sister that his best friend in sixth grade is adopted and he isn’t weird at all.

Eight months later Allison gives birth to a seven pound, ten ounce hermaphrodite. The doctors are quite perplexed, having failed to notice the unusual development during standard ultrasounds. These same doctors write a research paper theorizing that certain chemicals in the drinking water on the island of St. Lucia may have something to do with the hermaphroditic development in fertilized human embryos. Their research goes far in explaining what had so far been a great mystery - a cluster of intersex births occurring in paradise.

Thus Dr. Manuel Molina, the preeminent expert in abnormal prenatal development in Latin America reads the abstract of the study between a break in his classes at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He books a flight from Mexico City to Hewanorra International in St. Lucia. Unbeknownst to him, he caries a stowaway Mexican cucaracha in his briefcase among his important papers and collection of macabre sonograms. While in transit from the airport to his suite at the Jalousie Hilton Resort and Spa, the roach escapes and plants several egg cases inside a dried out apple core discarded under the drivers seat by the tropical taxi driver.

A Miss Eve Pascal, nascent swimwear model, gets into the same taxi two weeks later after the van her agency has hired experiences two simultaneous flat tires. Four baby cockroaches scamper up her long legs causing her to shriek in surprise and disgust. The driver, already unnerved by the delicate movement of Miss Pascal’s slender gams and the beads of perspiration bejeweling the ridge of her slightly upturned nose like a fleshy crown, jerks the steering wheel to the right and guides the taxi into a poorly placed cinnamon tree.

As Miss Pascal lies in the back of the crumpled taxi, she discovers that neither her legs will move nor can she feel the cockroach looking up at her in ignorance from the vantage point of a bloodied knee. She realizes this is what paralysis feels like and begins, in her mind, to make a wager. In this wager she surmises that she believes in God because she may very well be dying. She does not want to deal with the consequences of not believing in God if she does indeed go all the way. A passing small boy, the son of the a vendor of trinkets on the beach, holds her hand through the crushed door frame.

A minute after making this wager, she asks the taxi driver if he also believes in God. He does not respond because he has been cheated out of his chance to shimmy up to the card table for one final hand before his casino closed for good.

Miss Pascal returns to New York after two weeks of care in Tapion Hospital. Luckily, her paralysis is temporary and she is fortunate to meet her future husband, a spinal surgeon by the name of Dog (I can’t explain this). The going in the marriage is tough at first, she is away on photo shoots so often, and he puts in hellish hours at the hospital. Still, Miss Pascal and Dog make it to the two year mark. Unfortunately, Miss Pascal has an assignment to do a swimwear shoot on the Serengeti on their second anniversary. She is bitten when her photographer asks her to wade out into a stream during the rainy season. A crocodile mistakes her for a migratory wildebeest.

The truth is both Miss Pascal and her entourage are miles from quality care. The bush guides throw the fading model into their swiftest Range Rover, but she dies several hours into the race to the nearest doctor, her blood staining the backseat. Eve has bad luck in backseats.

Dog receives a phone call bearing bad news from the other side of the world. He takes the call while he is attending a conference on emergency trauma medicine in San Diego. A friend sees the man shaking in the lobby of the convention center and asks him to sit down. Dog explains to him what had happened to his wife in Africa and declares that he would not be attending the next presentation on the subject of shock management.

Dog screams out to a janitor in a fit of agony, “God is in a lover’s quarrel with the world!”

The janitor simply says, “I know man!”

This friend returns to his home of Seattle and discusses an old and smelly idea with another professional acquaintance. They have discovered that they can make mice hibernate, essentially have the rodents turn cold-blooded, by forcing them to breath hydrogen sulfide. They believe they can duplicate an identical effect in humans. By forcing humans to go into a state of suspended animation, they can save thousands of severely injured people who would otherwise die because they cannot receive satisfactory trauma care within what the doctors call the “golden hour.”

After years of testing animal subjects with the gas that smells of rotten eggs (actually smells worse), these scientists begin to test the science on human subjects. Two test subjects walk into their lab for the first round of experiments. One is named J_____ and the other is Rube. J______ agrees to be put into suspended animation as long as he has exclusive rights to write about his experience. Rube, who believes he is dying from a third relapse of lymphoma and is completely bald from several rounds of chemo, wishes to give the end of his life some meaning by allowing the researchers to learn from their investigation. The two lie opposite from one another as the nurses insert the anesthesia drips.

J______ asks Rube if he believes he will dream while he is in suspended animation for three days. Before Rube can answer, the doctor, the very same man who sat Dog down in San Diego and listened to him talk about supermodels and crocodiles and shock, replies that neither of them will dream. The brain will remain in what he calls a “basal state.”

Rube disagrees. He tells J______ that he believes that they will indeed dream but it will be their souls that are dreaming, not their minds. The scientist smiles a bit mockingly and asks J_____ to count from ten . . . backwards.

10 . . .

9 . . .

8 . . .

A page begins to come into focus.

The Lost Boy in Aisle Five

Happy Birthday sings the staff of Pigs and Pokes Supermarket. Thank you, thank you all, I say back. Rose the night manager tells me to make a wish and this I do. I wish you all happiness and success in the new year I say. It’s the very same wish I declared aloud last year on this day.

I’m not supposed to tell people my wish, says the young daughter of Roberto the bakery chef. All these American customs are hard to keep straight I answer back. Several of my friends laugh and others tell me to blow out the twenty-three candles, each representing a year in my life, but it is hard to know how old I really am. Twenty-three is about right I think. All these things were decided for me, including the date of my birth. All boys like me are said to have been born on New Year’s Day.

So have you found what you are looking for asks Roberto’s young daughter. I am confused at the question. You were lost and looking for something she says.

Ah, yes, I was a lost boy, but I have found a new home here with you good folks at Pigs and Pokes. So, that means I’m not so lost anymore. She looks satisfied with my answer. Roberto hands me a slice of cake on a paper plate and says his daughter’s name is Justine and she is in sixth grade. They just finished a unit on Africa at her school.

I slide a piece of cake into my mouth. The sweetness of the icing shocks me, numbs my mouth to any other taste. I feel an instant headache coming on.

It is also my brother’s birthday, as he was also lost like me, wandering across the countryside, our feet blistered and our mouths dry. We survived, two among many, and made it all the way to Kenya. I remember his call to me from the Kakuma refugee camp using one of the aid worker’s satellite phones. He wanted to know how the airplane flight had been, and had I thrown up like it had been rumored all air flight caused. Such losses of face are of great concern among the survivors.

I said it was not a problem. I could tell he was quite worried about this thing. Just come to America I said. Your feet will feel like they are planted upon a shifting table floating in the Nile. Flying was just like surfing. This I knew he understood because we had seen several surfing films in the camp to prepare us for the shock of going to America. We believed we would both be going to Hawaii.

It is sad for me to think again that his plane crashed only two miles from the camp. Sometimes since that day, I see Abraham in the aisles, dusting the tops of boxes of breakfast cereal or turning jars of apple sauce so that their labels face out. Now he is cutting the plastic strap from the stack of newspapers and setting them beside the magazine rack. An article lies below the fold about a speck of light in the sky where ghosts go after an acceptable probationary interval.

A Planet in the Dark Coal Sac of Night

So what good can come from the people of the dark side of our planet you ask? We know that for one, they are excellent musicians and artists, having honed their skills in the caves in which they huddled for warmth during the time of the great geologic tumult. The earthen walls proved to be both an ideal canvas for their natural pigments, and the caves themselves lent themselves to the whites, what we used to call those that dwelled in them, as perfect concert halls for their drums and flutes. The acoustics in many of the larger cave systems are unmatched even by our own opera halls here on the continent of the sun. Of course our halls are designed by the intellects of men. That they are rivaled by natural formations in both beauty and function is proof that there exists a higher being, so says I, Uwele the Wise.

It is our minds and the perpetual light of summer that gave us an advantage in some sense over those who lived on the dark side. We wandered the earth to exchange ideas and goods, yes, sometimes we wandered to make war upon our brothers and sisters, but mostly we traveled in peace our historians say. It is with the great geologic tumult of ten millennia past, that we put down our spears and shields and built the great walls to protect our city-states and channel the molten rock away from our homes and markets. This was the first ever public works project in history. Many died to build the great walls of granite, but countless more were saved. The walls allowed our societies to flourish, to develop art, philosophy, and new methods of commerce our world had never seen. Over the centuries we invented and perfected automobiles and aircraft, and reality television programming, all with the cooperation of our white brothers from the side of perpetual dusk.

Over time, the ashes were swallowed by the great sea and our white brothers came out from their caves. What surprise must have overcome them to see their brothers of the light having built great cities and monuments to progress They sold whatever small trinkets their troglodyte craftsmen could fashion in exchange for the technical bounty of dark-skinned progress. By happenstance, as the volcanoes bellies cooled, we discovered we needed our melanin-deficient brothers to maintain our city buildings and keep them clean. We needed them to work our fields and weed our gardens. We needed them to buff and polish the marble tiles in our foyers as we were gone on vacation to the Riviera during the infernal season.

Only now do we enjoy the rich rewards of cooperation between light and dark. We have allowed our white brothers into the inner sanctum of progress, having employed them to build the great orbital telescope we have named Uhuru. It is a part of the creator’s plan, so says Uwele, that the skilled artisans of the darker side of our world, that the whites have polished a great mirror that has entered into an orbit of our world. Through it, our eyes are extended far into our celestial neighborhood. It is with great pride, that I can announce to you the pinnacle of advancement - the identification of a world similar to our own at a distance that makes the head swim. It would take over twenty years for the light shining off Uwele’s wise brow you see here to reach this other world. This world has water, and mountains, and rivers and light. It is warm and probably teeming with all sorts of odd and wonderful life.

This blue speck is just more proof of the existence of a being greater than us. There is no higher aspiration for either dark or light peoples. So says Uwele the Wise, Prime Minister of our beloved world.

Mother and Daughter on Safari

“So what is the cause du jour?”

“Trachoma.”

“Tacoma? I thought this soiree was to benefit African war refugees.”

“Trachoma is a disease which causes blindness. It blinds millions in Africa. We’re raising money to fight Trachoma in Nigeria.”

“So why are we in a Moroccan joint, and what is there to see in Nigeria anyway?”

“Morocco is in Africa.”

“Oh?”

“What are you doing Samantha?”

“Taking a photo of that fine waiter’s ass. I have one of these new cameras with a four megatrixel lens. I can take a picture of just about anything and keep it stored on my phone to look at whenever.”

“Are you back on heroin Sam? I haven’t seen you act this way since you entered rehab.”

“Hah hah hah. Oh my God, heroin? You’re so dramatic mom. I’ve always been this way, maybe the uh — smack— just brought it closer to the surface. No mom, I’m not. Want to look at my arms? How big of a check did you write these guys anyway?”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“What? Mom, it’s not like you’re made out of money. Planetarium guides don’t earn squat.”

“I’m an assistant professor and three hundred is enough to buy a thousand doses of Azithromycin.”

“I guess we’re not junkies. We’re pushers.”

“Did you read we discovered the first planet we think is in the Goldilocks zone?”

“Huh?”

“A planet we think might have all the right conditions for life. Everything there is just right.”

“I don’t know if I would get too excited about it mom.”

“And why not?”

“Everything here is just right and we still fucked it up. Half the world is going blind, and the other half is pushing drugs on the other, and . . .”

“Maybe I should call your counselor at Mt. Jude.”

Aunt Melinda had warned us about the man everyone on the island called Blue. The man called Blue had a tendency to act a bit crazy. He was unhinged at the place where his soul touches the world. They hinted this to me, though not in specific and deliberate words, but the way my aunt and uncle talked about him, they loved Blue too. You could gauge their love whenever he would drop by their cottage. Their eyes lit up like the first burst from a roman candle on Independence Day. Blue was in communion with the essence of life, he knew what it meant to be alive in the most vital way possible, and this made the man very special.

When I was ten, I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “ironic,” though I’m sure I had heard it used between adults. Of course, I know now what it means. I can now say with some confidence twenty years later that it was ironic that Blue, the man who was most alive of all of us, was laying on the couch in our Hobbit hole with his life flowing out of him and onto the floor.

No, he had not been swimming down at the beach as he was known to do, even at night. That’s not why his jeans looked wet. At first I thought it looked like water, but the funny thing was his jeans were becoming wetter and wetter, and it became clear this water was coming out of Blue.

I tried to wake my brother, but he was in another of his deep, unshakable sleeps, so I sat on a rung of the ladder leading up into the loft. From that perch I watched him.

That water looked red. That seemed funny too.

*

Every summer through the seventies, my family would fly on an airplane or drive in a station wagon to visit the extended kin in the Pacific Northwest. Several uncles and one aunt, all on my father’s side, were passing the time on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. The island in 1979 was a place that still felt more wild than tame. Sure, there were paved roads and cars and utility poles and telephones and every few square miles a TV, though not many. Thinking back, it seemed to be a place that wanted to tear itself from the military-industrial complex, but unable to do so, settled for a wet, salty mote between it and the rest of apple pie America.

Not that there weren’t apple pies on Vashon Island. There were pies, pies grown from organic apples without any added sugar, and there were a lot of apples too - hanging from trees, the trees assembled in massive phalanx formations preparing to attack the pear trees, themselves lined up and prepped for the assault.

Vashon people were hippies for the most part. Earth, air and water lovers to be more specific. The women and girls wore long cotton skirts and dug at the earth with hoes while barefoot. After a day of work in the garden, her man, if he wasn’t off drinking or playing guitar or making money, because even hippies need that, would wash her feet in water pulled from the well and warmed in a kettle on top of a wood-burning stove. Her feet were black from the black, peat-like, soil that, if I remember right, sort of appeared like wet coffee grounds.

Of course, sometimes the roles were reversed. The men worked the gardens in tattered boots and second hand clothes from the Salvation Army store. The women were out smoking, or drinking, playing stringed instruments or gossiping. When the man took off his boots at the door, the woman would ask them about what they had planted, how the rhubarb was coming along, while massaging the knots from his back.

And then sometimes they just got high in the evenings while the sun came down, or they screamed at each other about this thing or that until nearly midnight. They thought that they were healing the earth.

The kids that sprung from the carnal unions on Vashon would run down the beach in summer naked as the day they were born. Actually, I imagined that they had been running ever since they had dropped from the womb of their earth healer mothers, and their mothers were still running after them to this day. They only reason these wild children hadn’t been gathered up was because the beets needed harvesting. I watched these children running along the shore from my place on the top deck of the ferry, a large metal drum that shakes and rattles while rapt in a Sisyphean dance across the water.

*

My uncle and aunt lived in a cottage just above a beach covered in pebbles the color of slate. Just a few hundred feet above them on the hill was what the island people called Bag’s End. Since the concept of private property was somewhat ill-defined on the island, it was unclear whether anyone owned the land outright. It seemed to be hippie-zoned for communal use. Mostly, the islanders built greenhouses and gardens in Bag’s End, but many of these structures were bare skeletons now. The plastic walls were ripped and flapping in the breeze. Now, some of the people were still using theirs to grow vegetables, while others were being used for flower cultivation. About half of these were being used to grow pot, and then there were the ones that looked to be growing wine bottles. The empty green and smoky brown bottles were lined up like rows of tomato plants, and cobwebs had been growing for some time between them.

The reason Bag’s End was called Bag’s End is because the place had a real Hobbit hole fit for habitation. My uncle had built it in 1971 from wood scavenged from a nearby abandoned house. My uncle was a gifted woodworker, having built sail boats with only a saw, hammer and chisels. He was building a large wooden tug boat in a garage off the cottage. These weren’t toys. They were the real thing. The Hobbit hole was real too and had a kitchen with running water, a living area with a couch and a faded Persian rug, and a small loft in which two small earth healers could sleep comfortably. It was even wired for electricity and had a lamp hanging from the ceiling.

Blue was dying in the Hobbit hole during the summer of 1979.

*

“Don’t go near Blue,” my Aunt said. “He’s a little different, kind of crazy if you know what I mean.”

“Crazy” as a word was an abstract concept to me at the time, though at least I had more of an idea what that word meant in concrete terms. I knew more about “crazy” than “ironic.” The coyote that chased the Road Runner was crazy. If I didn’t want Blue to drop a lit bouquet of dynamite on me as I ran along the beach alongside the wild, naked children, I knew I should keep my distance.

“Blue’s a good guy though with a good heart,” my aunt added while we pulled radishes from the garden. This was several hours after my Aunt had first warned me. She had a habit of gathering up threads of conversation hours after they had been cut. It made the air ripe for confused glances and awkward silences. The whole of the island loved Blue. Again you could see the affection everyone had for him in the way they acted, out of kindness giving him fruits and vegetables, laughing at his jokes, sharing with him a few hand-me-down shirts.

One thing I never understood was how Blue earned the name Blue. I don’t think that was his family name. His hair was fiery red and it looked as if he had never had it cut. His beard was equally ruddy, though darker with dirt. He looked like a Viking who had missed several meals.

*

I was watching Blue as he was losing his grip on the gym rope of life. He would look at me from that couch. His chest heaved up and down like rapid tides, and he seemed to be going in and out of consciousness. Sometimes his eyes would roll back up into their sockets. Coughing would bring him back. The blood was starting to pool under him and soak the carpet.

If I left him here to run down to my aunt and uncle’s for help, I would leave this crazy, wounded man with my younger brother who was sleeping, without worry or knowledge. It was a risk I was incapable of accepting. If Blue, in a fit of rage and pain, did anything to harm my brother, my parents would never forgive me.

Still, if I didn’t do anything but watch Blue die, I would naturally feel guilt too. For a minute, I calculated how much time would be left before the sun would come up and tried to figure how much time, assuming a rate of blood loss, I could wait things out until things became clearer in my mind. I considered for another minute that this was all a dream. I pinched myself hard and Blue moaned.

I am unable to explain why I did this next thing. I walked over to Blue and laid my right hand upon him, just about at the place where I guessed the wound was in his body. If I thought hard enough, concentrated as if Blue’s life depended on it, I could find the power to heal the man that the islanders all loved. I had seen something like this special power in a comic book.

Blue moaned again, and his eyes rolled around in their pockets like billiard balls. I felt the warmth of his blood on my hand, and watched as his lips started turning blue. Just then, I heard scratching at the round Hobbit door as if a crazed animal was trying to break in and finish Blue off. There were a pack of wolves rumored to live on the island - horses would be found half devoured on ranches in the island’s center - and my first thought was Blue had met up with one.

My uncle burst into the hole, breaking the door in, the pitiful latch left twisted. I can still remember him, only half-inside his farmer pullovers, pushing me away from Blue and telling me to get back up the ladder into the sleep loft. Soren, my uncle’s German shepherd, sniffed at my fingers and began licking the blood off of them while my uncle rolled Blue onto one shoulder and took him out to a van that was pulling up the dirt road that cut through Bag’s End. This turned out to be the island ambulance, though like no ambulance I had every seen before. Instead of red crosses, it was festooned with images of skeletons in Uncle Sam top hats and dancing teddy bears - things only later I would associate with the Grateful Dead.

My brother slept through it all, blissfully ignorant of the mortal drama.

From my aunt I was to learn that Blue had gotten into a fight at an establishment in Ruston he did not normally frequent. Something transpired between him and the barkeep, perhaps a flash of the danger and craziness came over Blue, frightening the patrons and infuriating the management. He was a long hair in a world still governed by men who took their marching orders from the rhythm that was the mainland life. He was shot in the melee, and took along with him a .38 slug in the upper abdomen back across on the ferry, leaving a pool of blood on the stairs to the upper deck. Somehow he crawled like a wounded animal into the Hobbit hole.

Blue did survive though having lost almost his entire hematic volume. He would never be the same and would never be allowed to wander the earth again. He was admitted to Western State Psychiatric Hospital and died there just about a year later. I believe it was simply impossible for Blue to live several floors up from the earth and in a locked room. The islanders knew something like that would be the death of him.

*

It is my hope that this recollection puts into some context my remarks during the orientation lecture for first year students. When you had asked us if any of us had practiced the “healing arts,” either as nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, psychotherapists, counselors or any role like that, my comments were, I think perhaps it is best to say, given in jest. In no traditional way have I practiced medicine. If I had achieved anything like success during the odd occasion described herein, I may choose not to endure the adventure of which I so eagerly want to partake, that is to receive a degree from your esteemed school to practice medicine.

I understand that after I had provided so casually to the rest of the class this story (though not in such detail), several students have asked that I be removed from the program or be given another option with which to advance my education here, but with minimal contact with other students. I respect their concern. I don’t wish to make anyone uncomfortable. My hope is that I can win their hearts and minds over the next year.

Yours Truly,