Chapter 1. Circling Winds
Some see death in life. Some see life in death. We don't fear but worship it, flee from it but walk toward it. Who doesn't search for clarity, for meaning? Something to live for, something to die for. Some of us who glimpse our immortal journey become drunk on the promise of nirvana. We try to steal ourselves toward it, to assassinate the incarnate for the reincarnate. I will stand here one last time. I will stand on this road just one more time before I close my eyes and this story will be lost to man-kind. Listen to my story now before we are lost once more.
It,
Was a memory,
Save City.
I was haunted by its landscape all my life.
It wasn’t a city really it was more like days misspent. A few tired thoughts in an unbreakable pattern of sleeping. When you slept, it was hard to wake up again, like you were trapped in some deep haunting dream and couldn’t for the life of you pull yourself out of it. You could feel it consume you like the motion of a great wave pulling you further out to sea, laying you bare and blinded on its vast green ocean tide. But lay awake too long, trying to avoid the rush of that deep blue, and an ice cold would creep into your mind like the storms that had raged around you – rising from nowhere to hunt you down relentlessly and unexpectedly they would catch you out – freeze you – paralyse you, I remember, the dread of that September; How I wanted to sleep for it was a cotton wool existence where I could convince myself that it had all just been a dream and that I would soon wake up in the restful bed of my youth, redeemed. I could find comfort in my blessed ignorance and nestle down in the calmness of my cradle, safely within the parameters of the childhood mind. I slept for many years over, a hundred it would seem or more - a wintry hibernation from myself that devoured all the seasons to follow. But when I awoke to the twilight of my life, my eyelids were fixed open by the cruelness of time and it made me bare eternal witness as it ticked on by.
There I was rendered sleepless. I felt like I was being watched. The eyes in darkness shone around me. They fenced me in. There was something at work; something in the air, the trees, even the buildings that lay depleting around me and it was growing stronger. I couldn’t see but I could feel it controlling me, invading me, rushing through me like I was as thin as the air. Finally I was hung, helpless like a puppet on a string; tangled up in the very threads that had once animated me until I am suspended lifeless. The thrashing stops, the web weaver hovers and strikes and poisons as it tangles the last morsel of my consciousness, cocooned and preserved. The blood runs out of me and dries and I sway insignificantly in the breeze.
She, was attached to me or somehow I became attached to her. I have a sense of lightly walking along when she walked straight through me without giving it a second thought. This is all I knew in that moment; I knew that the air I had been breathing until that very second had been poisonous and for the very first time, I breathed freely as I breathed her in. I fell, quite heavily to the ground gasping as my lungs grew accustomed to the memory of a remembered life and in that moment, the essence of my heart spilled out into the street and was carried along on the fringes of her skirts, unbeknown to her, my heart was a tangle. As I lay exhaling every word I'd ever spoken spilled from me like theoretical vomit, I called out 'Eliza!" and I watched despairingly as the fringes of her skirts disappeared with my tangled heart.
The next thing I remember was the splash, it made a mighty noise but the wringing ocean and the sharp squawk of the gulls suppressed the sound of a body as it smashed against the white peaks and was swallowed whole by the ravenous ocean. Only the elements awash in the water would ever know what had happened to the lifeless corpse that now dissolved; my flesh became fish food, my bones became salt returned so efficiently to the petri-dish of existence. I remember that I watched my body plummet, a diving sea bird after the prey of immortality and then it smashed into that water head-on and sank, a dream slowly consumed by white-cap fangs until it was finally drowned and digested by the earth from which it was born.
A soft silence again prevailed over the embryo dawn; a smouldering fog began to rise from beneath the ground aiming for an honoured place in the chorus of the clouds. My shoes softly touched down on a lonely tarmac faded and pock-marked by time. I am home again. I gasped as I closed my eyes, swallowing the earth matter that had caught in my throat, threw my head back and listened to the timeless beat of its infernal life.
Save City.
Save
City.
Save
Me.
Chapter 2. Death's Kid-Gloves.
Death is a silent void. It's like opening your eyes on a moonless night and seeing nothing. You only know your eyes are open because you can remember making the decision to open them but try as you might to see your hand in front of your face there is nothing there to see - well that's not entirely true; I can feel my hand moving around so I know it is there, but I cannot see what it is that I feel and so cannot prove that it is my hand. Seeing, you must understand, is nothing more than an extended feeling and existence is merely a sensation, the meaning of which constantly changes throughout your life and beyond it, depending on who you are watching and more importantly who is watching you. Don't be scared though, it's not a terrifying darkness; it's a kind of a tingling, tickling sensation on your scalp, it's one of those mornings when you never want to get out of bed - you snuggle down and close your eyes and just smile, hoping never to be interrupted again. You are, in death a baby in a swaddle nestled into the bosom of time.
I'm not entirely sure how long I have been here; as you would expect there is no way of time-keeping. I remember the fall, and the sensation of falling lasted a very long time and was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. I waited for images of my life to flash before my eyes, a touching black and white film reel of my existence, but it didn't happen. The only things that flashed before me were rocks followed by sky followed by ocean as my rear-end spun around my head in an out-of-control orbit but my mind remained steady, watching from a distance with a detached interest. The life-flashing does come, but not until you arrive here, suspended somewhere in a moonless night with all the hours of existence on your hands.
On occasion, voices whisper to you; they sound like the voices you heard in your head when you lay awake at night mulling over the details of your day. These voices whisper to you politely asking questions about your life, for example one came to me a while ago and asked me what my fathers name was and I gently answered and then it was all quiet again. That question was easy but sometimes they ask you harder things or embarrassing things. Come to think of it, it feels like it has been quite some time since I last heard a voice. Not that they are on a schedule of course, but it has been a while since I heard a voice. One moment, what is that? In the distance, can you see it? I'm not sure if I am seeing light over there or if my mind is playing tricks on me, which it does from time to time… yes, I’m right, it is light and it's growing bigger. It looks like a doorway filled with light, it's moonlight, like spilled milk pooling over a dark floor and now there is a figure standing in the light space. I can’t see it’s face but I can tell it is looking at me.
Come toward me, the figure says but I am not sure how and then I feel myself moving. I am moving toward the light and in an instant I find myself standing before a man with long silver hair and soft, red, kid-gloved hands. I find myself standing in my own body in the doorway of light and as it has been a long time since I have seen my body I take a moment to look it over and it is kind of how I remember it but softer. Are you Jesus? I ask the back-lit figure and he replies with a laugh. Buddy Keats, I'm here to take you back. We have a problem with your recollection. What do you mean? It seems Mr Keats that your version of events are not exactly right. I'm not sure what you mean, I say, and who are you again? I mean Buddy Keats, that you are a liar, not just any old liar but such an expert in lying that you have even fooled yourself and you almost fooled us. We are collectors, collectors of all life stories, this is our library but we can only deal in truth so we cannot admit you. We retrieve your life at death but you my friend are a curious conflict so we must send you back to collect the correct story. And what if I can’t find it?
Chapter 3. Figment of AFatherNation.
My father’s unlocked door sighed gently when I reached for it as if it knew I was having second thoughts. I stepped inside expecting warmth but was mugged by an even heavier cold than that which lingered, begging on the stoop outside. I stood alone consuming the stale smell of my childhood, old particles of myself crunched under foot as I barely shuffled forward resisting, until the very end, the forces that had summonsed me here.
A parent’s home is never quite how one remembers it. I recall my mother, a young, sad woman sitting at her piano by the lounge room window. As she stooped over, her bleeding fingers divined the melancholy language of Chopin like she was encoding her deepest secrets with those keys and I remember her being bathed by the glorious morning light that licked in through the bashfully parted drapes. That vision told me that she was blessed and I knew that she would not be judged in death but would be preserved and cherished as she had never been here on earth. She played those minor notes as if there were no other language created and from my bedroom upstairs, I listened to her tinkling echo for hours into the evening, the somber soundtrack of her existence escaping the house when she couldn’t, slipping through the open windows and into the moist evening air. She was a weaver and she wove her agony like silken thread in and out of windows and doors until finally she had cocooned this entire town with her bruises.
I awoke from my recollections to find a familiar face waiting for me. She had heard my father's door open to the wind and come to close it again to save him from a chill.
"I know you." I spoke with ungraspable arrogance.
We walked solemnly to my his room, a stark, wooden affair that seemed hollower than ever before; A suitable metaphor for my father - a hollow man dying in a hollow room and I wondered what happens when an empty man dies. What happens when a guilty man passes over? Can the equilibrium of life ever be reset if he does not face-up to his sins? I stopped in the doorway and eyeballed the room I had avoided for so many years. “Isn’t it strange how the faithful like to surround themselves with dark wood as if they live in a coffin, always ready for death. The faithful always seem so ready for death”. I turned to see the kid-gloved man standing in the doorway behind me, his long silver locks gently blowing in a breeze that didn't exist for me. And are they? I asked him and he nodded toward my father and rubbed his gloves together as he faded away.
The girl was nursing the old man. She was shy but kind as she tended him and displayed the soft nature of those who survive on the deaths of others. She kind of smiled in my general direction as if to promise not to leave me alone with him and then she leaves us anyway as he begins to stir. I stand frozen in the doorway, bracing it as if expecting an earthquake to strike at anytime. He opens one eye like a dragon in wait and he sees me before him.
“Why have you waited so long…” The earth trembles. A whispering mess of bones and ligaments gestures me to a hard chair by the bed for there is no comfort in his presence. I follow the orders of this thing. My eyes slowly wash over his emaciated remains; I take my time because I know it will shame him, he is a cadaver sitting for Da Vinci, this is his last gruesome portrait to be forever be remembered as this pathetic arrangement of bones. The vultures hover at the windows and I have awaited this moment my whole life and maybe more and I savour it with all the cruelness that life has bestowed on me.
“Why have you waited so long to come home?” I shrug as if to show him how cheap his effort is, “I'm almost out of time my son and I want things to be right between us. You’re my son, my flesh. I’ve lived my life in your service.”
“Shall we rewrite history? Is that why you have called me here?”
Be nice to me, an old man taking his last breath!”
“I’m here to watch you do that, I'm here to make sure that you do.”
I thought after all these years you’d have changed. I don’t want to die with my son as a stranger.”
You killed my mother.
Your mother died, too soon. When she took her life…
She did not take her own life… you squeezed it from her with your filthy hands.
He looked at me with stinging eyes and swatted his hand toward me, “You always lived in fantasy land. Even when you were just a boy, you’d come home from school telling stories.”
You shamed her out of existence.
My father went quiet, almost like he was revisiting his crime in the mirror I created.
"How long have you got?" I looked at my wristwatch as it counted down the final minutes of our aquaintance, I was hoping to reschedule to a more convenient time.
“I remember when you were a small lad and your mother was happy, you’d sit in front of that television set… what was the name of that show you loved? Some kind of ninja story… you’d jump up and perform all the fight scenes along with the show. You were such a joyful boy then.”
“You accuse me of stories? You have one pathetic anecdote and you turn it into a life-time tale. You were never even there.”
Of course I was there – you were too young to remember.
I remember! I remember! You left me in charge of saving her life!
The years away from me haven’t softened you any. Your mother poisoned your mind against me.
I breathed in deeply but rather than filling with air, my lungs filled with hate and constricted until it crushed my chest. “She never even mentioned your name.”
I rushed at him and grabbed his frail face in my strong hand and I squeezed his cheeks until his dehydrated lips pursed. I imagined I could keep squeezing until his bald head exploded in puff of volcanic ash. I let out a spiteful sigh and pushed him away running past the incoming nurse to break free of the stench of our past. When I was finally outside I was able to breathe, doubled over as I heaved the emotion from inside me. Save City blew cool air into my ears and whispered kindly to me. The way she touched me with her gentle breeze reminded me of my mother’s hands running fingers through my hair. “It will all be alright…” her distant voice soothed and I suddenly found myself displaced in time and walking on the foreboding hill that rose behind the township.
The air was low and cold but as I walked through the suffocating cloud, it disappeared around me. How things had changed from when I was a boy. I remember running through brightly lit trees, my arms bare in short sleeves but this city was now foreign to me, it was cold. It was as if the sky had become too heavy to float and the sun had been banished to the outskirts of town causing time to drag on, winter had become an eternal season. A fall-out of a global climate crisis or just the way it was always meant to be. The ice was persistent and biting in May, June or December. The sun had died, falling permanently behind the hill that seemed to grow taller every day as if it were giant standing upright after many years hunched beneath the weight of the sky. The town lay forever gripped by the shadow of Cannon Hill as did my own existence.
In a moment that lasted minutes and decades all at once, I found myself standing at her grave. I was a boy again, sitting beside the only cold connection I had left with my mother; a concreted portal to world of decay and worms where she now lived on without me. Suddenly I started sobbing so hard that I could no longer hold myself up against it the dark tidal wave of grief that came bearing down on me. I fell against the cold stone and slid down to the ground but as my burning eyes reached up searching for the comfort of her name, it was gone. The name on the grave now read Eliza. I recoiled in horror and cried out, my voice echoing around the clearing and then gone, souvenired by the trees. I quickly lost consciousness and blackness was my dream.
Chapter 4. Vernon Butterfly, The Conjuror and the Fool.
While I lay sleeping, a babe nestled in the clammy arms of death, I dreamed of my own fall, a suicide from a great height. The splash made a mighty noise but the wringing ocean and the sharp squawk of the gulls suppressed the sound of my body as it smashed against the white peaks and was swallowed whole by the ravenous ocean….. I had a sense that I had seen this death before. I watched on as my body plummeted, a diving sea bird after the prey of immortality but then it smashed into that water head-on and sank, a dream slowly consumed. I turned around in disappointment at the loss of my own life and was shocked to be confronted with my mother standing behind me. Are you watching me mother? I cried like an invaded teenager. No, she responded and she raised both her hands and she pushed me so hard in my chest that I stumbled backwards and fell. As the cliff from where I had been standing quickly reduced in size, I saw my mother lean over and smile at me, she raised her hand again and waved at me like I was on the bus going to school. I hit the water and it felt like nothing.
A soft silence prevailed over an embryo dawn; a smoldering fog began to rise from beneath the ground aiming for an honoured place in the chorus of the clouds. The sensation of something tickling my face started to bring me around and then I sat bolt upright with a gasp. I found myself covered in dead insects and started to swat madly at them.
“Stop it, STOP IT!” A voice chastised me and I swung around to find a man sitting on the ground not far from me. Something in the way that he held himself was not quite normal and when he placed his fingers on his temples and rocked as he shouted STOP IT, STOP IT! it was evident he was not, normal. It wasn’t rare in a place like this to find children, weird children, secreted away from society by their over protective parents.
“Who are you?” I ventured in the most calming voice I could muster while still picking dead things from my shirt.
“I am Vernon...” he kept rocking with his eyes closed and his head down, “You are Buddy Keats” he chanted as if he were a medium. He stopped moving and looked up at me, looking me straight in the eye with an accusatory manner. Vernon, when not moving or talking, could have passed for a surfer on route to the beach. He was likely in his forties although it was difficult to judge given his odd disposition. One moment he seemed to be with you and then next he would cry out in terror. He had long dreadlocks which I suspect had formed naturally rather than intentionally and he wore board-shorts and a Hawaiian printed shirt that was buttoned up incorrectly. He was completely out of place and time as the nearest beach from here was a good two days drive away and while I found my woollen jumper was inadequate against the chill, he was almost naked, his feet dirty and bare and non reactive to the ice.
“How did you know my name Vernon” I tried to sound friendly.
“We. Knew. You. Were. Coming.” He spoke one staccato word at a time as if each word were its own sentence wrestled deeply from within his imprisoned brain. I gathered that he must have known my old man, considering he was up here by the church it wouldn’t be surprising if he were some small town pest that Dad had let shadow him. My father was always trying to grow his flock, sane or insane didn’t matter, in fact the more insane the easier to control.
“What’s with these bugs?”
I was doing you a favour!” He snapped, “turning you into a butterfly”. He twizzled one of the carcasses between his fingers, brushing the wings against my nose. “You were dead a minute ago, and I was going to turn you into a butterfly so you can fly to heaven! but now you are alive again”.
“ I’m not dead but thank-you anyway, I’ll let you know if that changes.
Oh It changes. IT. CHANGES! And suddenly Vernon let out a blood-curdling scream that made me jump backwards in shock. The volume was chilling and it seemed as if he were being attacked by some unseen voodoo.
Vernon then suddenly quieted, shrugged and leaned over resigned to his scattered insects. One by one he touched each of the perfect little carcasses and one by one they came back to life and in a tiny moment we were both surrounded with the glorious colour of beating wings I could feel my hair moved by the strong breeze they created. Vernon sat crossed legged smiling up at his happy creation. “How did you do that?” I yelled over the din of wings and wonder. In disbelief I jumped up into the colourful brood, “Just like that,” he said clicking his fingers as if it were perfectly normal to do such things “Just like that, it is life”.
When the butterflies had dispersed, I sat down beside Vernon and hugged my knees into my chest, “Do you live around here?” Vernon nodded.
“Your mother is not here anymore”
That’s right; she died when I was just a boy.
“But she is not here anymore.
What do you mean here?
He pointed to the plot where we laid her to rest decades ago. “You let her go”
“Yes she is, here.” I looked at her grave and remembered that I’d lost her name for a moment, for a moment, that rectangle of compost belonged to someone named Eliza. My eyes crawled over her tombstone like insects of death and I confirmed that her name had returned Eleanor RIP. I looked back to Vernon.
“You. Slept. For. A. Very. Long. Time.” He drew out the word very.
I went over to my mother’s grave and I ran my fingers over her name in demonstration to Vernon. “If she is not here than where is she?”
He. Had. Her . moved. You. let. her go.
When?
Long. Time. Ago.
While I was away?
Nope. While. You. Were. At. School.
But that was years ago!
I TOLD YOU!
I retraced my steps back over to Vernon who still twizzled one butterfly in his fingers. He looked up at me and gestured to the bug. I. Killed. It.
I kneeled down to him. Vernon, you weren’t here then.. when I was at school.
Yes. I. Was. Always. Here.
I left Vernon with his confused mumblings deciding to head back to my father’s bedside. I wondered aloud about Eliza and from behind me came a voice Who is Eliza Keats?
I swivelled around and Vernon was gone.
Some see death in life. Some see life in death. We don't fear but worship it, flee from it but walk toward it. Who doesn't search for clarity, for meaning? Something to live for, something to die for. Some of us who glimpse our immortal journey become drunk on the promise of nirvana. We try to steal ourselves toward it, to assassinate the incarnate for the reincarnate. I will stand here one last time. I will stand on this road just one more time before I close my eyes and this story will be lost to man-kind. Listen to my story now before we are lost once more.
It,
Was a memory,
Save City.
I was haunted by its landscape all my life.
It wasn’t a city really it was more like days misspent. A few tired thoughts in an unbreakable pattern of sleeping. When you slept, it was hard to wake up again, like you were trapped in some deep haunting dream and couldn’t for the life of you pull yourself out of it. You could feel it consume you like the motion of a great wave pulling you further out to sea, laying you bare and blinded on its vast green ocean tide. But lay awake too long, trying to avoid the rush of that deep blue, and an ice cold would creep into your mind like the storms that had raged around you – rising from nowhere to hunt you down relentlessly and unexpectedly they would catch you out – freeze you – paralyse you, I remember, the dread of that September; How I wanted to sleep for it was a cotton wool existence where I could convince myself that it had all just been a dream and that I would soon wake up in the restful bed of my youth, redeemed. I could find comfort in my blessed ignorance and nestle down in the calmness of my cradle, safely within the parameters of the childhood mind. I slept for many years over, a hundred it would seem or more - a wintry hibernation from myself that devoured all the seasons to follow. But when I awoke to the twilight of my life, my eyelids were fixed open by the cruelness of time and it made me bare eternal witness as it ticked on by.
There I was rendered sleepless. I felt like I was being watched. The eyes in darkness shone around me. They fenced me in. There was something at work; something in the air, the trees, even the buildings that lay depleting around me and it was growing stronger. I couldn’t see but I could feel it controlling me, invading me, rushing through me like I was as thin as the air. Finally I was hung, helpless like a puppet on a string; tangled up in the very threads that had once animated me until I am suspended lifeless. The thrashing stops, the web weaver hovers and strikes and poisons as it tangles the last morsel of my consciousness, cocooned and preserved. The blood runs out of me and dries and I sway insignificantly in the breeze.
She, was attached to me or somehow I became attached to her. I have a sense of lightly walking along when she walked straight through me without giving it a second thought. This is all I knew in that moment; I knew that the air I had been breathing until that very second had been poisonous and for the very first time, I breathed freely as I breathed her in. I fell, quite heavily to the ground gasping as my lungs grew accustomed to the memory of a remembered life and in that moment, the essence of my heart spilled out into the street and was carried along on the fringes of her skirts, unbeknown to her, my heart was a tangle. As I lay exhaling every word I'd ever spoken spilled from me like theoretical vomit, I called out 'Eliza!" and I watched despairingly as the fringes of her skirts disappeared with my tangled heart.
The next thing I remember was the splash, it made a mighty noise but the wringing ocean and the sharp squawk of the gulls suppressed the sound of a body as it smashed against the white peaks and was swallowed whole by the ravenous ocean. Only the elements awash in the water would ever know what had happened to the lifeless corpse that now dissolved; my flesh became fish food, my bones became salt returned so efficiently to the petri-dish of existence. I remember that I watched my body plummet, a diving sea bird after the prey of immortality and then it smashed into that water head-on and sank, a dream slowly consumed by white-cap fangs until it was finally drowned and digested by the earth from which it was born.
A soft silence again prevailed over the embryo dawn; a smouldering fog began to rise from beneath the ground aiming for an honoured place in the chorus of the clouds. My shoes softly touched down on a lonely tarmac faded and pock-marked by time. I am home again. I gasped as I closed my eyes, swallowing the earth matter that had caught in my throat, threw my head back and listened to the timeless beat of its infernal life.
Save City.
Save
City.
Save
Me.
Chapter 2. Death's Kid-Gloves.
Death is a silent void. It's like opening your eyes on a moonless night and seeing nothing. You only know your eyes are open because you can remember making the decision to open them but try as you might to see your hand in front of your face there is nothing there to see - well that's not entirely true; I can feel my hand moving around so I know it is there, but I cannot see what it is that I feel and so cannot prove that it is my hand. Seeing, you must understand, is nothing more than an extended feeling and existence is merely a sensation, the meaning of which constantly changes throughout your life and beyond it, depending on who you are watching and more importantly who is watching you. Don't be scared though, it's not a terrifying darkness; it's a kind of a tingling, tickling sensation on your scalp, it's one of those mornings when you never want to get out of bed - you snuggle down and close your eyes and just smile, hoping never to be interrupted again. You are, in death a baby in a swaddle nestled into the bosom of time.
I'm not entirely sure how long I have been here; as you would expect there is no way of time-keeping. I remember the fall, and the sensation of falling lasted a very long time and was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. I waited for images of my life to flash before my eyes, a touching black and white film reel of my existence, but it didn't happen. The only things that flashed before me were rocks followed by sky followed by ocean as my rear-end spun around my head in an out-of-control orbit but my mind remained steady, watching from a distance with a detached interest. The life-flashing does come, but not until you arrive here, suspended somewhere in a moonless night with all the hours of existence on your hands.
On occasion, voices whisper to you; they sound like the voices you heard in your head when you lay awake at night mulling over the details of your day. These voices whisper to you politely asking questions about your life, for example one came to me a while ago and asked me what my fathers name was and I gently answered and then it was all quiet again. That question was easy but sometimes they ask you harder things or embarrassing things. Come to think of it, it feels like it has been quite some time since I last heard a voice. Not that they are on a schedule of course, but it has been a while since I heard a voice. One moment, what is that? In the distance, can you see it? I'm not sure if I am seeing light over there or if my mind is playing tricks on me, which it does from time to time… yes, I’m right, it is light and it's growing bigger. It looks like a doorway filled with light, it's moonlight, like spilled milk pooling over a dark floor and now there is a figure standing in the light space. I can’t see it’s face but I can tell it is looking at me.
Come toward me, the figure says but I am not sure how and then I feel myself moving. I am moving toward the light and in an instant I find myself standing before a man with long silver hair and soft, red, kid-gloved hands. I find myself standing in my own body in the doorway of light and as it has been a long time since I have seen my body I take a moment to look it over and it is kind of how I remember it but softer. Are you Jesus? I ask the back-lit figure and he replies with a laugh. Buddy Keats, I'm here to take you back. We have a problem with your recollection. What do you mean? It seems Mr Keats that your version of events are not exactly right. I'm not sure what you mean, I say, and who are you again? I mean Buddy Keats, that you are a liar, not just any old liar but such an expert in lying that you have even fooled yourself and you almost fooled us. We are collectors, collectors of all life stories, this is our library but we can only deal in truth so we cannot admit you. We retrieve your life at death but you my friend are a curious conflict so we must send you back to collect the correct story. And what if I can’t find it?
Chapter 3. Figment of AFatherNation.
My father’s unlocked door sighed gently when I reached for it as if it knew I was having second thoughts. I stepped inside expecting warmth but was mugged by an even heavier cold than that which lingered, begging on the stoop outside. I stood alone consuming the stale smell of my childhood, old particles of myself crunched under foot as I barely shuffled forward resisting, until the very end, the forces that had summonsed me here.
A parent’s home is never quite how one remembers it. I recall my mother, a young, sad woman sitting at her piano by the lounge room window. As she stooped over, her bleeding fingers divined the melancholy language of Chopin like she was encoding her deepest secrets with those keys and I remember her being bathed by the glorious morning light that licked in through the bashfully parted drapes. That vision told me that she was blessed and I knew that she would not be judged in death but would be preserved and cherished as she had never been here on earth. She played those minor notes as if there were no other language created and from my bedroom upstairs, I listened to her tinkling echo for hours into the evening, the somber soundtrack of her existence escaping the house when she couldn’t, slipping through the open windows and into the moist evening air. She was a weaver and she wove her agony like silken thread in and out of windows and doors until finally she had cocooned this entire town with her bruises.
I awoke from my recollections to find a familiar face waiting for me. She had heard my father's door open to the wind and come to close it again to save him from a chill.
"I know you." I spoke with ungraspable arrogance.
We walked solemnly to my his room, a stark, wooden affair that seemed hollower than ever before; A suitable metaphor for my father - a hollow man dying in a hollow room and I wondered what happens when an empty man dies. What happens when a guilty man passes over? Can the equilibrium of life ever be reset if he does not face-up to his sins? I stopped in the doorway and eyeballed the room I had avoided for so many years. “Isn’t it strange how the faithful like to surround themselves with dark wood as if they live in a coffin, always ready for death. The faithful always seem so ready for death”. I turned to see the kid-gloved man standing in the doorway behind me, his long silver locks gently blowing in a breeze that didn't exist for me. And are they? I asked him and he nodded toward my father and rubbed his gloves together as he faded away.
The girl was nursing the old man. She was shy but kind as she tended him and displayed the soft nature of those who survive on the deaths of others. She kind of smiled in my general direction as if to promise not to leave me alone with him and then she leaves us anyway as he begins to stir. I stand frozen in the doorway, bracing it as if expecting an earthquake to strike at anytime. He opens one eye like a dragon in wait and he sees me before him.
“Why have you waited so long…” The earth trembles. A whispering mess of bones and ligaments gestures me to a hard chair by the bed for there is no comfort in his presence. I follow the orders of this thing. My eyes slowly wash over his emaciated remains; I take my time because I know it will shame him, he is a cadaver sitting for Da Vinci, this is his last gruesome portrait to be forever be remembered as this pathetic arrangement of bones. The vultures hover at the windows and I have awaited this moment my whole life and maybe more and I savour it with all the cruelness that life has bestowed on me.
“Why have you waited so long to come home?” I shrug as if to show him how cheap his effort is, “I'm almost out of time my son and I want things to be right between us. You’re my son, my flesh. I’ve lived my life in your service.”
“Shall we rewrite history? Is that why you have called me here?”
Be nice to me, an old man taking his last breath!”
“I’m here to watch you do that, I'm here to make sure that you do.”
I thought after all these years you’d have changed. I don’t want to die with my son as a stranger.”
You killed my mother.
Your mother died, too soon. When she took her life…
She did not take her own life… you squeezed it from her with your filthy hands.
He looked at me with stinging eyes and swatted his hand toward me, “You always lived in fantasy land. Even when you were just a boy, you’d come home from school telling stories.”
You shamed her out of existence.
My father went quiet, almost like he was revisiting his crime in the mirror I created.
"How long have you got?" I looked at my wristwatch as it counted down the final minutes of our aquaintance, I was hoping to reschedule to a more convenient time.
“I remember when you were a small lad and your mother was happy, you’d sit in front of that television set… what was the name of that show you loved? Some kind of ninja story… you’d jump up and perform all the fight scenes along with the show. You were such a joyful boy then.”
“You accuse me of stories? You have one pathetic anecdote and you turn it into a life-time tale. You were never even there.”
Of course I was there – you were too young to remember.
I remember! I remember! You left me in charge of saving her life!
The years away from me haven’t softened you any. Your mother poisoned your mind against me.
I breathed in deeply but rather than filling with air, my lungs filled with hate and constricted until it crushed my chest. “She never even mentioned your name.”
I rushed at him and grabbed his frail face in my strong hand and I squeezed his cheeks until his dehydrated lips pursed. I imagined I could keep squeezing until his bald head exploded in puff of volcanic ash. I let out a spiteful sigh and pushed him away running past the incoming nurse to break free of the stench of our past. When I was finally outside I was able to breathe, doubled over as I heaved the emotion from inside me. Save City blew cool air into my ears and whispered kindly to me. The way she touched me with her gentle breeze reminded me of my mother’s hands running fingers through my hair. “It will all be alright…” her distant voice soothed and I suddenly found myself displaced in time and walking on the foreboding hill that rose behind the township.
The air was low and cold but as I walked through the suffocating cloud, it disappeared around me. How things had changed from when I was a boy. I remember running through brightly lit trees, my arms bare in short sleeves but this city was now foreign to me, it was cold. It was as if the sky had become too heavy to float and the sun had been banished to the outskirts of town causing time to drag on, winter had become an eternal season. A fall-out of a global climate crisis or just the way it was always meant to be. The ice was persistent and biting in May, June or December. The sun had died, falling permanently behind the hill that seemed to grow taller every day as if it were giant standing upright after many years hunched beneath the weight of the sky. The town lay forever gripped by the shadow of Cannon Hill as did my own existence.
In a moment that lasted minutes and decades all at once, I found myself standing at her grave. I was a boy again, sitting beside the only cold connection I had left with my mother; a concreted portal to world of decay and worms where she now lived on without me. Suddenly I started sobbing so hard that I could no longer hold myself up against it the dark tidal wave of grief that came bearing down on me. I fell against the cold stone and slid down to the ground but as my burning eyes reached up searching for the comfort of her name, it was gone. The name on the grave now read Eliza. I recoiled in horror and cried out, my voice echoing around the clearing and then gone, souvenired by the trees. I quickly lost consciousness and blackness was my dream.
Chapter 4. Vernon Butterfly, The Conjuror and the Fool.
While I lay sleeping, a babe nestled in the clammy arms of death, I dreamed of my own fall, a suicide from a great height. The splash made a mighty noise but the wringing ocean and the sharp squawk of the gulls suppressed the sound of my body as it smashed against the white peaks and was swallowed whole by the ravenous ocean….. I had a sense that I had seen this death before. I watched on as my body plummeted, a diving sea bird after the prey of immortality but then it smashed into that water head-on and sank, a dream slowly consumed. I turned around in disappointment at the loss of my own life and was shocked to be confronted with my mother standing behind me. Are you watching me mother? I cried like an invaded teenager. No, she responded and she raised both her hands and she pushed me so hard in my chest that I stumbled backwards and fell. As the cliff from where I had been standing quickly reduced in size, I saw my mother lean over and smile at me, she raised her hand again and waved at me like I was on the bus going to school. I hit the water and it felt like nothing.
A soft silence prevailed over an embryo dawn; a smoldering fog began to rise from beneath the ground aiming for an honoured place in the chorus of the clouds. The sensation of something tickling my face started to bring me around and then I sat bolt upright with a gasp. I found myself covered in dead insects and started to swat madly at them.
“Stop it, STOP IT!” A voice chastised me and I swung around to find a man sitting on the ground not far from me. Something in the way that he held himself was not quite normal and when he placed his fingers on his temples and rocked as he shouted STOP IT, STOP IT! it was evident he was not, normal. It wasn’t rare in a place like this to find children, weird children, secreted away from society by their over protective parents.
“Who are you?” I ventured in the most calming voice I could muster while still picking dead things from my shirt.
“I am Vernon...” he kept rocking with his eyes closed and his head down, “You are Buddy Keats” he chanted as if he were a medium. He stopped moving and looked up at me, looking me straight in the eye with an accusatory manner. Vernon, when not moving or talking, could have passed for a surfer on route to the beach. He was likely in his forties although it was difficult to judge given his odd disposition. One moment he seemed to be with you and then next he would cry out in terror. He had long dreadlocks which I suspect had formed naturally rather than intentionally and he wore board-shorts and a Hawaiian printed shirt that was buttoned up incorrectly. He was completely out of place and time as the nearest beach from here was a good two days drive away and while I found my woollen jumper was inadequate against the chill, he was almost naked, his feet dirty and bare and non reactive to the ice.
“How did you know my name Vernon” I tried to sound friendly.
“We. Knew. You. Were. Coming.” He spoke one staccato word at a time as if each word were its own sentence wrestled deeply from within his imprisoned brain. I gathered that he must have known my old man, considering he was up here by the church it wouldn’t be surprising if he were some small town pest that Dad had let shadow him. My father was always trying to grow his flock, sane or insane didn’t matter, in fact the more insane the easier to control.
“What’s with these bugs?”
I was doing you a favour!” He snapped, “turning you into a butterfly”. He twizzled one of the carcasses between his fingers, brushing the wings against my nose. “You were dead a minute ago, and I was going to turn you into a butterfly so you can fly to heaven! but now you are alive again”.
“ I’m not dead but thank-you anyway, I’ll let you know if that changes.
Oh It changes. IT. CHANGES! And suddenly Vernon let out a blood-curdling scream that made me jump backwards in shock. The volume was chilling and it seemed as if he were being attacked by some unseen voodoo.
Vernon then suddenly quieted, shrugged and leaned over resigned to his scattered insects. One by one he touched each of the perfect little carcasses and one by one they came back to life and in a tiny moment we were both surrounded with the glorious colour of beating wings I could feel my hair moved by the strong breeze they created. Vernon sat crossed legged smiling up at his happy creation. “How did you do that?” I yelled over the din of wings and wonder. In disbelief I jumped up into the colourful brood, “Just like that,” he said clicking his fingers as if it were perfectly normal to do such things “Just like that, it is life”.
When the butterflies had dispersed, I sat down beside Vernon and hugged my knees into my chest, “Do you live around here?” Vernon nodded.
“Your mother is not here anymore”
That’s right; she died when I was just a boy.
“But she is not here anymore.
What do you mean here?
He pointed to the plot where we laid her to rest decades ago. “You let her go”
“Yes she is, here.” I looked at her grave and remembered that I’d lost her name for a moment, for a moment, that rectangle of compost belonged to someone named Eliza. My eyes crawled over her tombstone like insects of death and I confirmed that her name had returned Eleanor RIP. I looked back to Vernon.
“You. Slept. For. A. Very. Long. Time.” He drew out the word very.
I went over to my mother’s grave and I ran my fingers over her name in demonstration to Vernon. “If she is not here than where is she?”
He. Had. Her . moved. You. let. her go.
When?
Long. Time. Ago.
While I was away?
Nope. While. You. Were. At. School.
But that was years ago!
I TOLD YOU!
I retraced my steps back over to Vernon who still twizzled one butterfly in his fingers. He looked up at me and gestured to the bug. I. Killed. It.
I kneeled down to him. Vernon, you weren’t here then.. when I was at school.
Yes. I. Was. Always. Here.
I left Vernon with his confused mumblings deciding to head back to my father’s bedside. I wondered aloud about Eliza and from behind me came a voice Who is Eliza Keats?
I swivelled around and Vernon was gone.