Where are the words to describe the wind upon my face as it whispers in my ear universal secrets? What can I say about the sun on my face, warming, burning, beckoning me to adventures in far off places? Who can explain the true nature of the ocean’s waves, that hide great secrets in plain sight among crystal waters by presenting a simple distraction, the horizon? What surer tempo can any clock beat to compare to a man’s heart, when it finds itself in the moment of discovery?

I am born, and all the stuff that goes with it. I grew to adulthood with the same trials and tribulations any man has among the comforts of middle class. I tasted love for the first time. I was taught about reading, writing, arithmetic at school. I was taught how to handle real life by watching reruns on TV.

At the age of 25, sightly later than my peers, I found myself alone in a bar with a piece of paper that told the world I had achieved distinction as a bachelor of arts in a field, my high school counselor said, I had an aptitude for. Sitting in the quiet buzz of my fourth beer I doubted my aptitude to accomplish anything.

School was gone and I was living at home again. My parents were kind, but they had a way of turning a meal into a sort of therapy/career counseling session where they asked open ended questions, trying to get me into commit to a course of life – like them. It was hard to respond openly. I told them I spent my days looking for work and studying at the library for opportunities in my profession.

It wasn’t a complete lie. I went to the library often. It was quiet and I could read without being disturbed – novels mostly. The library was new and full of all kinds of media. Man had all but abandoned the old tried by true book. They were still there in stacks and rows, untouched. I wandered back there for the smell more than the knowledge contained within their pages.

The revelry of the moment was interrupted by the door as it slammed open. The late afternoon light startled me and the bartender. I selected this particular bar because it is quiet and dark, not just in the corners where furtive couples hold hands and conspire to cheat.

The high concentration of light assaulted the us. As I squinted against it and turned my head away from it and picked up my glass. I mused the bar had just received about three years worth of energy in that one blast. The thought made me half smile.

The door closed slowly, and out of the corner of my eye a silhouette wobbled toward me. He stopped and turned just short of bumping into me. He slapped both hands on the bar, and looked at the wall of liquor. He looked like he was trying to be casual, but I could tell, he was using the bar to support himself.

He slapped again. The bartender, who had conveniently receded into a darker corner to restock the ice while the door was open, returned and stood before the man waiting silently.

“Whiskey. “

The bartender produced a shot glass from nowhere and poured an precise shot.

One hand still holding the bar, the other grabbed the shot glass, swung his arm up, his head back, then his arm down in one fluid motion. The shot glass banged loudly as he slammed it back. Bam-bam-bam.

“Again.”

The bartender poured, then stood back. The man repeated the same fluid motion, but this time he replaced the shot glass gently to the bar, like placing a baby in a crib.

“Ahhh,” he declared dramatically. He curled is lower lip and rested his tongue on it. Then he turned to me.

One eye was closed, the other, piercing blue sat rheumy in a bloodshot socket. Brown curly hair, he had five days growth on his face. He closed his mouth and wobbled at me, as if moving would bring me into clearer focus.

“I am Quint,” he said turning toward me and offering me his hand.” The name my parents gave me was Harrison Christopher Byrne, but I prefer Quint.”

“Because of the captain in the movie Jaws?” I took his hand and shook.

“Nah,” he shook his head, “I had two older brothers I was always tagging along after. They called me little squint. Over time they shortened it to Quint. God, I miss them.”

“Trevor Wilson,” I said.

He opened both eyes and really looked at me, appraising. His eyes were so intensely blue. I was glad he had prepared me by showing just the one when we met. He turned back to look at the empty glass in front of him.

“Know anything about the movies, Trev?” he asked rolling the shot between his fingers.

“No. I’ve watched a lot of TV. does that count?”

He looked thoughtful for a brief moment. “How about steady. How steady is your hand?”

I held it before him and held it. He stared at it, one eye slightly larger than the other, willing it to move. It did not. After a few seconds he turned back to consider his glass.

He thumped the bar with his pointed index finger, and the bartender filled the glass again.

He rolled the glass between his fingers for a moment, still in thought.

“Ever heard of a second unit?”

“A what?” I replied.

“Second unit, in movies.” He said.

“I’ve seen credits in the movies, I always thought it was some Hollywood thing. Two cameras: close up on her, close up on him. The second unit was the the other one, ” I replied.

“We almost right,” he said. “When you see a movie of far away places, a french cafe, a turkish bazzar. They don’t really put the stars there. They are in Hollywood. They take the star stuff, mix it with the second unit stuff and it looks like the stars going places and doing things. Kind of a bummer for the star. The second unit gets to do all the fun stuff.”

He took a sip of his drink. “I’m putting together a team for a low budget flick. It doesn’t pay especially well, but you get to see the world.” When he turned back to me he was back to seeing the world with the one eye.

“What do you think. Want to join?”

Absurd, I thought. Then I thought of the library, my degree, my parents and all they offered.

“How long will it last?”

“Not long,” he said looking down at the bar, calculating. “Maybe three weeks.”

I thought: Three weeks was like a vacation. I could see the world while examining my options. I could tell mom and dad I had a job. The pressure would be off. It was perfect.

I stuck out my hand. “Deal?”

He turned back to me and looked at my hand a second.

“Deal, ” he said with a shake and firm grip.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Now,” he stuck an unlit cigarette into his mouth. “Now, we have a drink.”

***

• * *

Black. All is black. Nothing, dark, complete. Feeling – gone. Memory – gone. Thought – nothing. Just black.

Rasssssp. Nothing, that is, but a scraping sound. Black nothingness devoid of purpose or intention. I wanted to wake and rejoin the land of the living, but the black had me. It was was like my entire being was chained to a floor. Black floor. Black chain. Heavy. Black is heavy. I tried to pull my conscience up and out of the black to…to…to…more black. There might have been movement, but I did not feel it.

Rasssssp. Black has an irritating way of allowing you to sink down toward the abyss. That is all you desire, yet you know there is something else there. It is the not black. I desired that too, and pulled on the black chain and tried to take the black with me. It moved a bit, but the effort was heroic.

Rassssp. My eyes snapped open and I raised my head with a start. The opposite of black flooded in and burst upon all my senses at once. With sudden intake of breath, intense pain radiated out of the center of my being. I closed my eyes to shield myself from the pain, to find the black again. It was dark, for sure, but the black would not come back.

I lay in that position for a few moments and concentrated on the important things, mostly to stifle the roar of the world. I was still shackled to the black. Deep down I was there. In the now, I was here. I was in two places at once and felt the tug of that heavy black chain. I felt like a drowning sailor, attached to a chain that would take me to the bottom of the ocean, and if I didn’t swim against the pull with all my might, I would perish.

I tried my eyes again. The light was not that bad. Head movement was the part that caused pain, so I looked around with as little movement as possible.

We were in a room like a small apartment. I was on a sofa. A blanket covered me. The bright was blinding, yet I struggled to keep my eyes open. I refused to succumb to the black any longer.

He was across the room in the kitchenette. In his boxer shorts and faded plaid flannel shirt, he was bent toward one of the drawers, steadying himself, peering in. He had a cigarette hanging limply from his mouth and he was muttering to himself.

“What are you looking for?” I asked raising myself up on one elbow.

“Light.”

I thought about the incredible brightness around me and wondered who would desire anything like that.

He stood and turned toward me. One eye half open, the other closed. With hooked hands he clawed toward his face.

“Oh, a light,” I realized he just wanted to smoke. I felt in the pocket of my jeans and fished out a lighter and held it out.

He focused and shoved his body away from the counter. He tottered toward me and snatched at the lighter. He caught it on the first try. In a single movement of his arm I heard, snick. He stood like a statue for a moment.

He inhaled deeply and closed his eye. He held his breath for a couple seconds then exhaled completely.

A couple seconds later he turned to look at me. The look was blank. He half closed the one eye and half opened the other, carefully maintaining the balance of light. In that moment I imagined the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembling themselves and falling into place above his head. As the last one fell into place, he said “Now, where were we?” he said expecting no answer. “Ah yes, we are collecting the team for an adventure. There is a lot to do, so we’d better get moving. ”

He reached down to the heap on the floor and tossed my fleece lined denim jacket at me. It landed softly on my face and I closed my eyes. I willed myself up. My head hurt, but the black was receding.

He turned and put my lighter into his shirt pocket and started poking around the floor for his clothes.

In the short time it took me to sit up and assemble myself, he had dressed, filled a small backpack with a few personal items. and gathered a pile of equipment into the middle of the room.

Hi cigarette became a nub, which he stubbed out at an ashtray on the kitchen counter. He shoved another into is mouth, patted his shirt for the lighter and lit again. He ran a hand through his hair to comb the stray ones down.

“All right. I think that is about it, ” he said and started to attach straps and lift bags.

I stood, accepted the kit and adjusted the balance of each item until the pile was distributed between us.

He opened the door and started walking down the hall. As I closed it behind me and followed, I thought I was forgetting something, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

I thought we’d be walking to his car, but when he set the bag down twenty feet from the corner, he stopped my question with, “its the bus for us.”

We stood there in silence. Within less than a minute of waiting, then looked at the time on his wrist watch, then scanned down the block to look for the approaching bus. Nothing.

He looked at his watch again, then started to walk away from the spot. He stopped me as I started to collect the pile of things that lay at our feet. Don’t trouble. I’ll be right back. He rushed off in the direction of the corner, then in a moment had disappeared.

I stood quietly. I looked up the street for the bus, then to the corner. Nothing.

Amid the street noise I stood. The last 16 hours had been a blur mostly, the colors of life smeared by alcohol. Three weeks! That sounded perfect, but here I stood at the same bus stop I had less than 24 hours ago before I met him. The only difference was…was…was….

A jumble of thoughts rolled through my head as I stood there. I could not say it was anything as concrete as a question or a conclusion. It was a gray misty swirl of the stuff between those two extremes.

Seemingly from nowhere a dog jumped through a nearby bush. I hadn’t noticed where is came from, I just heard the rustle of leaves as it jumped into the sidewalk, took a few silent steps toward me, looked at my face, then sat before me.

He was a dog of unspecified origin. His fur was soft, medium length and multi colored including a beautiful chest of snow white. His look was expectant. His mouth was open in a sort of smile. His tongue stayed where it belonged.

He sat, I stood, and we shared the moment. After about 10 seconds, he suddenly whirled around savagely and started biting the clump of hair at the base of his tail. There was a mashing sound for a small bit, then gentle licking to smooth the hair back down, then he turned again to look at me.

From down the street I heard the diesel motor of a bus and started to look around to catch sight of Quint. The street was full of dog, cars, and people walking, but the commander of my journey was nowhere to be seen.

I do not carry a wrist watch, but I wished I had a prop like that so I could look at it and make some sort of worried noise. I continued to look around as the sound of the bus neared. The dog never took his eyes off me.

The whirring sound of the bus warned me of its imminent arrival. I picked up the collection of things at my feet. Why is a mystery. I stood and looked to the corner again and saw just heads walking the other way. I looked back toward the dog, but it had disappeared.

As I gazed toward the bush of dog origin, the bus stopped and gave a loud hiss then a squeak of brakes that announced its arrival. The doors opened and people started to get in. I turned my my interest back toward the door as Quint arrived and grabbed one of the bags from off my shoulder.

Mutely, numbly I followed him onto the bus, where he paid for both of us and found a place where we could sit together with our stuff in a heap at our feet. The motor roared and we where thrown together as the bus accelerated into motion.

The sound of the bus in motion was loud and there was a fan on somewhere that made a forced air sound without providing any air movement. It was stuffy and close, and even with our equipment providing a buffer between us and others, I felt I was being smothered.

“Fair bit of luck getting this bus. ” he said looking about.

“Why?” I responded. Buses ran all day long, spaced out in a endless chain from morning through night.

“The number on the bus number was 23, two prime numbers with one being even. Very lucky,” he said with a grin. “I have a good feeling about today.”

“Why, last night you told me you had it all planned out completely. “

“I did and I do, but there are a few things we need to do first before we head to Portland. We have to get the script, a couple stunt people, and some other traveling supplies. I want to stay on schedule and it never hurt to have a little luck on our side. You wouldn’t deny us a little good fortune, would you?”

“Of course not,” I replied,” but after last night I thought of you as a we-make-our-own-luck kinda guy.”

“I am.” He winked, “but a little luck never hurt.” He put his head back, closed his eyes, crossed his arms and smiled to himself. I thought I heard him humming to himself as we rolled on.

A ragged, jagged nail caused annoyance. As her teeth and tongue grappled with the sharp unevenness, her brows furrowed.

Reports all have a life of their own. All reports are meant to communicate. They direct and teach. They issue warnings and edicts. They are devoid of empathy, sympathy; unable to sing. And Janice had seen more than her fair share. Her work exposed her to countless reports, some that reoccur like crop reports and missile silo allocation. Others are one-offs meant to provide a glimpse into the eternal.

Who wanted these reports? Mostly tax collectors, sometimes accountants and Occasionally politicians when they wanted to provide the imitation of science while manipulating a segment of the population.

Janice was none of these. Her training in psychology led her to the edge of a career in the medical professions. A chance, short affair, with a sly professor taught her more than she ever wanted about the nature of human beings.

People were messy, complicated, but not in a Sunday afternoon jigsaw puzzle sort of way, more like tsunami. After she learned people were motivated by a mere hand full of ideas, mostly fear based, her passion waned.

Reports aren’t dumb. But this one didn’t make sense. Janice eyes scanned for patterns, flaws, anything to help her mind make sense of what she was seeing.

But there were no flaws. The obvious was being stated with simple clarity. Aliens had landed in Nebraska and the government was exerting great effort to keep that information secret.

Stupid nervous habit she scolded herself while smoothing the edge using her teeth as a smoothing plane. A mere single page was not a conversation. It was merely a conspiracy theory dreamed up by paranoid idle minds. Her’s was not idle, nor paranoid – or so she thought.

It was like the back of the dollar bill only in reverse. The image on the bill contained the illustration of a pyramid with an invisible top. All that stuff building block upon block until…nothing. This report stated a single fact, floating above a plane. But where was the support? Invisible, yet it had to be there.

Aliens! Why not fairies and elves? America. Nebraska?! Why not Los Angeles, the land of the waking dream, or New York, the land of the waking nightmare. Betty and Barney Hill would want to shake her hand.

In an unusual move, she pressed the buttons that would generate hard copy. A finger pointing, guilty!

Question of the day: Is Tolkien’s Hobbit story a retelling of Stevenson’s Treasure Island?

There was this man.  And a table.  Then there was the blank white page.  The all absorbing white of nothing and everything.  Then there is a voice.  The gentle words of a young female.   When he focuses his attention on her, she is just finishing a statement, but the words don’t make sense.  The eyes are waiting for a response though.  Nod and smile, frown.  Was she talking about something good?  He paused hoping she would telegraph some sort of prompt, some indication, of what she expected.  A moment frozen in time.  Without changing expression, he nods almost impercepibly.  It is enough and she continues her verbal stream of conciousness.

At his feet, another female.  Not so young, and of a completely different character.  Both are outgoing. This one is both younger and older at the same time.  Today she chooses the guise of matron-de-maison.  Her words are emphatic and expressive, but he cannot comprehend what they mean.  Their eyes lock and he meets two green eyes that express everything and nothing.  He tries to nod, but she just stares.   He blinks, but when his eyes open the direct gaze confronts and confounds.  Perhaps she only needs reassurance and reaches to give a gentle pat.  You are not alone.   She opens her mouth again and the sound of a symphony rumbles forth.  It is short, but in that space there is a theme, a statement of fact, that his coffee soaked mind cannot comprehend.  She stares.  He gazes,  but does not try to pry deeper.  She is patient, but being older now, she knows her mind and needs.  She softly pads off.  He hears the strains of the same symphony seconds later, distant, from another room.  Now he has time to contemplate.

For a second they are in distant Egypt standing in front of four monstrous statues of ruler kings or gods.  Man, God?  They argue the grosser points, but conclude nothing.  They’ve been down that path before and decide not to waste an afternoon quibbling over trifles.  At least that is what he thinks.  And they are gone before she has a chance to change his mind.

This is the edge of reality.   The west.  It is the place where the setting sun dips unto the endless sea and all things are possible.  Kings and paupers ride the same rails; tracks laid down by their great-grandfathers completing an epic journey from every corner of the world.   Kings look like beggars and beggars are wraiths of the winds.  No difference.  More on that later.

His jeans were not too worn.  His cheeks, while red with exposure, were clean.  He had delicate hands and wrung them nervously as he paced back and forth in the park.  He was nervous.  He was like an animal trapped, but there were neither bars nor locks.  This was a trap of his making, his choosing, his will.  He simply made up his mind one day that inside was better than out, because if he remained out any longer, he would become the lonesome wind itself.

She was there too.  She sat in a box inside a box inside a box that held glimpses of fragments of ideas caught at the moment of formation.  The glass barrier that separated her from the outside world provided a safe glimpse of reality.  The glass that held the empty aquarium was so thick that even sound was muted to almost silence.   Someone had bored a couple small holes for meager communication and exchange.  Some communication, some exchange.  She watched his pacing because the world outside excited and scared her.  Her vantage, like a housecat’s staring at the world through a suburban picture window, provided the stimulation without the terror.

How does a balloon that floats free to the uncharted reaches of space tether itself to earth again?  To look into his eyes was to see a raging storm on the sea.  Dark, ominous – terrifyingly powerful.  How can a man, that has eaten such a storm, walk into a building without scrubbing the walls bare and drown all within.  Yet, here he stood outside the fortress pondering that very notion.  The wind that howled in his ears merely yearned to  bring back the thing lost.  A thing that had, for him, no name.

It might as well have been petticoats.  He might as well have been in knee length pants.  He held her hand and she pulled him through a crystal maze.  She knew about his penchant for destruction and pulled him back anytime he floated too near one of the blazing cases.  The cases was like ice on fire.  The items they contained were like golden flames.  Each one was a burning question.  Desire, mystery, truth.  Behind the thin glass he saw answers, but they were not sensible as they had been described to him.  The images were crazy, dappled drops of color, like a lens out of focus.   The words of the adults as they walked from one dazzling room to another were scattered.  It was like taking a drink from a torrential waterfall, opening his mouth for a sip, and being rewarded with the crashing of ton-upon-ton of liquid.  Smothering and refreshing he allowed his senses to be battered while trying to allow there merest particles drip into him.   He closed his eyes to the merest slits and let her carry him along. He’d let her carry him anywhere.

Her name was Cleo.  Like Cleopatra.  Her father, being a student of history, loved all things Egyptian.  Although he died never having seen the mother country.  He dedicated too many hours to the study to the exclusion of all else.  Alas, he was not a man of letters and could not afford the leather bound volumes that great historians had devoted countless hours to. He had, in his desire for knowledge of this mysterious land, traveled to the lending library of the largest town in their county.   He found, in a poorly lit section, a number of books whose opening pages promised to describe in great detail the history of one of the worlds great civilizations in the detail worthy of a poet historian.  The trouble, he found, with poet historians, was they were just that, only more-so.

The tomes stopped him in his tracks.  He had come up against a wall of epic proportions that he knew he could never scale. Instead, he had to take satisfaction from travel-logues.  He drank in the pictures of men in pith-helmets standing in front of heiroglyphic walls and statues of ebony men with the heads of animals.  He learned about the popular voyages of the later day explorers and retold them to his daughter in the evening before turning out the lights to sleep for the night.

His studies changed one day when he read a small advertisement in the margin of a pulp magazine called “unexplained worlds”   The magazine published works of fiction as if they were fact, and described the mystery such topics the “Donner party”, “Lizzy Borden” and how the pyramids were built, well as the location of treasures buried around the world throughout time.    The advertisement read, “Strange but True, the lives and loves of the pharaohs alive at your fingertips.  Send 5 cents and Self addressed Stamped Envelope to …”

Although skeptical, he found the price of admission not too high, and so sent for the prize.  Several weeks later he received a response.  His block writing unmistakable on the front.  On the back, where the flap touched, was a stamp seal of an Eye.  Inside were three page manuscript retelling of the story of how[edit – boy god cut up – girl god  finds all the pieces -] and a single hand stamped heirogiyphic symbol – the eye of horus – and its meaning.  It concluded with an ad to obtain more secrets of Egypt by sending 5 cents and a Self-addressed-stamped-envelope to the same p o box as before.  They further instucted them to draw the “seal”, eye-of-horus, on the inside flap of the envelope.

He sent off his money immediately, but it was weeks before a response arrived.  He was not disappointed when he opened the response several weeks later. His hands shook as he turned the envelope over in his hands.  There on the was another heiroglyphic symbol that looked like a bird facing the reader.  Like the owl, it promised mystery and secret knowledge, and her father finally had a source for his lifelong pursuit.

“Come and sit,” he’d say and pat the wooden chair beside his table. “Look at this,” he said pointing to a crudely stamped symbol.  As she looked, he began… “In the land of the pharaohs, the sun set in two places every night.  The sky disk in the west, and the flaming son on Earth in the temple along the white nile.”…When he first started telling her these stories, he’d read from the page, but after several issues,  he found he had a voice of his own in telling the story.  His words wove a rich tapestry that captivated Cleo.  It was like being transformed into a different world.  It was colorful and described the intrigues of Gods that walked upon the Earth.

He always ended these evenings by asking if she could describe the symbol he showed at the beginning of the story.  She’d describe what she saw, “it was two wavy lines like the water”

“That’s right, but there is more ” he’d reply as he leaned closer.  This was not father telling daughter a story, it was a co-conspirator telling profound secrets.  Since the death of her mother, they’d always been close, but this bound them in an even more special way.  Years later, Cleo could not talk about her father without getting quiet and her voice distant,  until her words faded and she was left in thoughtful silence.

When he died, there was not much of an estate.  He left a small bank account with enough to cover the expenses of his funeral and a few extra dollars.  The remaining amount provided the basis for an impromptu, but creditable wake at her house exactly twenty-one days after his death.

 

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!  Pause. Bang!  He types as fast forward as he does back.  That is a starting point. Now the wizard tells the user what he is about to do, but when it doesn’t happen the way the novice expects, the wizards face is blank as stone.

Where does this stuff come from?  I wonder and I ponder, but no amount of logic can prevail against the worst, the words.  Blah blah blah says the inoccouous stuff that leaks from the walls.  It is reminicant of music, but not quite.

So, there I was…sitting next to the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and she farts.  Not a dainty whoops, but a big ugly frat-boy type fart.  No apologies needed, she turns to me and smiles. Then wrinkles her nose and waves her hand in front of her face.  “Wooh” she says.  A few seconds later I realize why she frowned so.  Wow!  In the moments until the noxious odor dissipates, I sat there stony faced with a goofy smile on my face wishing it had been merely a frat-boy fart.

I was looking for a boat on craigslist the other day.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but there was no limit to the beauty and crap out there – all overpriced.  What am I looking for?  Well, I’d like something to bop around the local waterways.  I am not in a hurry.  You may recall that I had a small taste of nautical life when I got that inflatible kayak a couple years ago.  No way to turn it.  I was always careful to fill it using the little air pump I attached to my car’s cigarette lighter. Invariably during summer – the only time I used the thing – it would deflate 10% as soon as it hit the water.    Chris, my nephew-in-law, borrowed it one time, but the water was a mile from the car.   He used the foot-pump to get that sucker filled and lo – when he dipped it into the water it didn’t pucker and dip.  I adopted a new overfill attitude from that moment on.  But it really didn’t last.  The season was over.  By the next year I knew exactly what to do.  When I arrived at the campsite, I went about turning the yurt into my little home-away-from-home.  That accomplished within minutes,  I pulled my kayak bag from the back of the car.  No need to use the car pump.  I was on vacation, therefore I needed to get green and natural and healty and anti-city, so I pumped using the foot pump I kept for emergencies.  Whoosh – whoosh – whoosh.  I know, you are expecting a  “and then it burst on me” type ending.  Nope.  It filled fine and I put it on the side of the yurt to wait until we all went to the lake.  Vacations and gin and tonic being what they are, I didn’t go near the water for two days.  On that third day, in preparation for a nice water outing, I collected the foot pump, water sneakers, paddle and life-vest.  Next was to bring the kayak into the open so I could use it as a basket for my trip to the water. Yup – flat.    Just the bottom, but that is where the stability was.    So, now I think I need a new way around.  I saw a canoe for $400 – see about the price of a new one.  I thought if I got one of those little electric outboards I could putter anywhere.  So much for green, natural healthy and anti-city.  Vacation is over.