Dark and Stormy Night

So far I’ve toiled hard to not become one of the denizens wasting hours on social networking sites. You know the sites and maybe some of you readers may be big-time users. The Facebook, the Myspaces and now the Twitter. They seem like traps to me along the information superhighway, capsized peach crates propped up at one corner with a carefully positioned twig, a moist strawberry or slice of cheese visible in the shadows near the back. If I can only just get past that flimsy twig . . .

My defenses broke down because I was invited to view a photo album of a friend’s trip to Fiji. The album was only viewable on Facebook, which forced me to log-in and compose a password combination of seven digits or letters. It was simple enough and I hadn’t planned on telling the site anything about me or establishing my own profile. Just a simple in an out job to see a few photos of colorful jungle parrots, maybe a bathing beauty or two or three on a white sand beach, strangers in an cabana bar with bloodshot eyes, and yes, all that was there. There was also an enticing link to a list of Facebook profiles, photos included, of people who the site said I had graduated high school with some twenty plus years ago.

Some faces I recognized at once, some were completely unknown, and many plied that neutral zone of mental space between either poles. These photos elicited unvoiced thoughts like these:

“Yeah, I kind of remember him.”

“Jesus, did she get fat.”

“I was sure that guy wasn’t going to make it past 25. Guess I was wrong.”

“Where did that dude’s hair go?”

I found the profile of my best friend my senior year. I hadn’t really heard from him or seen him since our sophomore years in college because we went to two different schools and that’s just the way life goes. I’ve never been the type or temperament to have lifelong friends.

So my friend is one of the world’s leading authorities on nineteenth century European philosophical thought, specifically Kant and Nietzsche. He is a full professor at a liberal arts college back east and travels all around the world talking about earnest and pondering deceased white guys and the things they thought so much about. For some reason, he’s a big hit in Cairo, talking about his field of expertise. The thirst of thinkers in the Nile delta must be unquenchable. My old friend is also a big hit in Caracas and visits the faculty at the universidad there for several guest lectures, light discussions on morality and the lack of an empirical basis for time independent of both materialistic substance or human perception.

I think back to that time around our second to last meeting. I would head up to his campus because his school was generally esteemed as a party school and mine was not. We each took a tab of acid on the tongue and talked for that hour before the LSD started to hit. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about but for some reason I recall distinctly us chatting about what we planned to do at school and in the years after. He said something about studying philosophy or, if that didn’t work out, psychology. He appeared uncommited to anything, a typical free agent freshman/sophomore, like he would just flow with the current of life to wherever it took him. I privately wondered how the study of philosophy would ever prepare one for life out there in the world.

And somehow that current of life propelled him to a place where people know of him, look forward to his lectures, make travel arrangements for him, wait for him to turn in their grades and comment on their dissertation proposals. I think it’s wonderful and I knew he would be a success even with a father who liked hitting the bottle much too hard and much too often.

I partially filled out my own Facebook profile, but the site refused to accept my first name as I wanted it to appear. I tried several times, but Facebook wasn’t having it. This refusal broke the social networking spell that was being so subtly cast. I had no real need or desire to talk with these people who I don’t really know now and probably didn’t know even then. Why fool myself into thinking that I did? I immediately closed my browser and went on with my day, unburdened by this set of old faces trading e-mail addresses and recollections of lakeside keggers and tripping sessions brought on by vinyl floor tile. It was all in our collective deep past, but really did those things even happen?

I stayed at the same hotel in which David Carradine hung himself just a short while ago. The Nai Lert is the nicest hotel I’ve stayed at in Southeast Asia. At the time I was working for an equity mutual fund that wanted to invest in a low-cost flash chip maker in Thailand. As I had been through Bangkok a few years before while passing on my way to the southern islands for scuba diving, my boss felt I was somehow more qualified to take the trip to that steaming cauldron of a city and its Malay neighbor Singapore. The firm booked two nights at the Swissotel Nai Lert.

I’m not a big fan of Bangkok. The last time I had been there on vacation I earned a nasty cough from inhaling all the exhaust billowing from the dense traffic of taxis, tuk-tuks and tourist buses. My throat had been so raw I found I couldn’t breathe the pure air in my tanks without sudden and violent bouts of coughing, and this was discovered at one hundred feet under the surface of the South China Sea. So no, I wasn’t looking forward to the three-day due diligence jaunt.

But the Nai Lert was beautiful and the air was better than I had expected.

Now the Nai Lert is in a nice part of town nearby Siam Square. These are not the slums of Bangkok, nor are there many working people living here. Mostly the population is made up of transient westerners, embassy and hotel support staff. On my first morning I woke up early, still suffering from lag, ate a full breakfast of french toast, melon and cantaloupe, and then made my way to the lobby to rendevous with the car the company said it would send for me. After about twenty minutes of waiting it was clear the car wasn’t going to come, and all the taxis were being pre-reserved for the numerous nocturnal entertainers, some women, some men and some not-so-anchored either way, who seemed to have been released from their cells above, trickling down through stairwells and elevators to the molasses-like flesh conveyer that is Bangkok morning traffic.

After five more minutes, I decided to start walking toward a taxi stand I had spied the night before a few blocks to the east. Doing so I passed through an alley with deep gutters, the type common in Asian metropolises which suffer sudden downpours in the wet season. In these gutters were men, all men with physical bodies misshapen by what I believe to be leprosy. Where these men should have possessed arms and legs, there were stubs of various lengths. I believe the reason they were in the gutter and not on the sidewalk was because it eased locomotion, the gutter being essentially a curb with a 90 degree angle upon which their stubs could get traction.

I walked toward the lepers thinking they would not leave the security of the Bangkok gutter, but as I neared, several looked up at me, some with ghostly eyes cursed with glaucoma. They popped out of the gutter with bowls clenched in their teeth looking for some trifle or coin from me. I wasn’t more than two hundred feet from my soiled plate of french toast and maple syrup.

I didn’t know what to do then. I could spread a few Thai baht here, some more baht there, but there would always be more upward pleading and flagellating through gutters so as to deliver more bowls at my feet. The whole thing sickened me, though at the time I couldn’t figure out exactly what about it did.

I dropped a few coins and stepped over a few more bodies - you had to step over some of these men the way they strategically placed their torsos across the earth between me and the taxi stand. I did finally get a taxi which delivered me to the flash chip factory fifteen minutes late. Over apologies and tea, the company’s CFO and I watched as the line workers started their shift with ten minutes of Tai Chi led by none other than David Carradine captured in digitized video glory moving with both grace and strength.

So this is what I think now. I ask myself why would a guy who appears healthy and centered both spiritually, mentally and physically through training and meditation, a guy who I believe wasn’t hurting for money or fame (if he cared about that) or the affections of a sweet, probably younger thing, would hang himself from some appendage of the Nai Lert.

I think he might have stepped over those same lepers. Maybe his car didn’t show up on time at the set and he decided to stretch his legs only to discover a little bit of hell on earth. Some people don’t know how to handle that. They feel way too much for their own good. I didn’t know the man but he seemed like the type to keep things silent and bottled-up inside until those spears thrown at him by shaolin monks, those tiger blows, those swift strikes of bamboo staffs and that burning cauldron that the uninitiated must embrace, all those things made him numb and scarred up inside, so numb that parts of him began falling off. And what good is a five-star dragon death strike if you don’t have the arms to pull it off?

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.