BOMB!!!

Cerulean blue
Both the crystal sky
And the soft-lapping waves
There is not a single cloud in sight
There never was
You thought you were setting me adrift
But I was already
At sea

In the bathroom, which was right where he’d said it would be, Corrin flicked on the light and breathed a deep breath. The time was neigh: important, before beginning a dance, to ensure that you are well stretched, making sure your apparel is in proper working order, to optimize performance. Corrin undid a small caravan of bronze buttons and slid first pants, then panties down to her ankles. It had been ages since she’d taken the time to trim and groom certain nether-vegetation-growths and a bushman (pun) would have winced at what her new-found nudity exposed: sprawling expanses of curly foliage even the world’s most renowned adventurers could have lost themselves in. There wasn’t anything she could do about that now. What was, well, was. Reaching over she tugged a few squares of toilet paper off a well-oiled roll and dabbed herself clean, after finishing sliding first a single finger and, once alleviating her fears of unused-tightness, added a second for good measure. No pain. A good sign. With a second helping of teddybear-soft paper she removed whatever round one had missed, satisfied that she’d done all there was to do and pulled her garments back up into place, listening for signs of movement outside the oaken door and hearing none. He would still be leaning on the counter, eyes focused on the last patch of space she’d existed in before exiting, object permanence, awaiting her return. Were they thinking the same thoughts, some undiscovered secret-neural-network, both of them imagining a mutual, passionate, bodily entwinement? Oh, but what about work? How long had she been gone? Could look at your watch, Corrin. No. Don’t do that. If you know how late it is already, how little time the two of you have left before the return trip then that’s all you’ll think about. Suck romance through the worry straw and all you’ll taste is air. Better to not know. Leave it to the mystery that brought you here in the first place, leave it to this enigmatic white knight. He’ll take care of you. He already knows everything, a hell of a lot more than he should, which, you know, is kind of eerie, or at least it would be under different circumstances, but… Oh, Christ! How do you explain what’s happening here? How can something so unnatural feel so… well… natural? Corrin… seriously? Do you even care? Go with your gut on this one. What does your gut tell you?

Gut says, “Honey, baby, the tables of loneliness have finally turned.”

Gut says, “Here is exactly what you’ve been waiting for and you are the dumbest human being to ever grace the hills and valleys of God’s green earth if you walk away now.”

Gut is very wise.

How can you ignore advice like that? And hey, if you wont listen to reason than how about your loins? Didn’t you say before that even if all this ended up being was a good, honest, no-strings-attached fuck that you were in, all the way (ha ha!) anyway? So what are you worried about? Just because there’s much, muchmuchmuch more to his man than you can guess at doesn’t mean… doesn’t mean anything. God! Why the hell are you obsessing over this? Who cares about work! You’ve been stuck in limbo for seven, seven years and regardless of what’s going on here the simple fact of the matter is that you. are. here. Not there. Even if you go back that part is over. You’re animate again and if you’re gonna move then you may as well move forward and if the end of this game is all smoke-and-mirrors, outside of all these little fantasies of yours, then all the more reason. Give into the uncertainty, Corrin. Give in to the mystery. Give in to nature.

Just let it all go and go.

So she did exactly that: she shut off every and all brain function that contradicted “logic,” visualized it, as she had so recently visualized her Teller’s-Row-Purgatory forever-and-a-day-ago, and pushing it behind her took an over-exaggerated, bold step across exactly three white linoleum tiles and relinquished it to whatever realm discarded things come to exist in, bring herself back to the “now.” That done she turned to the most likely place on the wall, above the sink, where a mirror would reside, to check her hair, skin pigmentation, general beauty suchandsuches, but encountered only wall. So, naturally, she let those worn eyes of hers scan about the remaining wall space and to a mild surprise saw no reflective surfaces of any kind.

How… odd.

“E.?” There was no answer, at least not a vocal one. She heard a scuffling of shoe soles outside, close maybe but hard to tell. She called his name again, this time what may have been a grunt wafted toward her but she couldn’t transfix the point of origin. She walked over to the door, talking as she turned the knob.

“Why don’t you have any mirrors in here?”

His answer came immediately, the first syllable skipping not a single beat of the cadence their joint vocalizations created.

“Because I don’t like what I see.”

The door opened with the tug of her arm and there he was, not two inches away. She opened her mouth to say… but it didn’t matter what she was going to say, the words so newly sprung across her language centers were instantly erased by the oddest sensation in her chest, just to the left of her breastbone, around the place where she’d once been taught her heart to be. It wasn’t painful, more like a weak, playful punch but it pushed the air out of her lungs and every thought save one out of her head.

Standing directly over E. Tromal’s left shoulder, as if he’d materialized out of thin air, wearing the last blue suite, hounds tooth and neatly pressed, she’d seen him wear, hair combed back poorly, a bit of those persistent curls renegading forward over the baby-soft skin of his forehead, with a warm, welcoming smile and two bright, shining eyes full of nothing but love and longing was Charles, her Charles, a hand held out to her…

“Charles…?’ She heard herself say, the words rolling out her mouth on the last two puffs of breath her lungs had to give.

“Go to him,” E. Tromal whispered, so delicate, so soft, compassionate even, with a loving smile of his own.

That smile reflected itself on Corrin’s face, lips pulling back as the light, once of loneliness but never again, faded out of her eyes. The knife slid effortlessly out of her as she sank, gracefully, peacefully, to the floor.

He stood over the body for a moment, the dripping edge of the knife mimicking the corner of his right eye, a tear for every drop of blood claimed by gravity and what lay below. He never wept fully, was hardly conscious of his crying at all. For that brief period, a matter of seconds, he was all love and understanding, an altruistic euphoria sweeping over and through him… and then the internal mechanizations of order were beginning to grind once more, as naturally and organically as they always had.
The time had come to get to work.

He set the knife in the sink, turning the hot water tap on to keep the blood from coagulating on the blade and bent over the body, tugging off the watch, looking for more jewelry, finding none (which he’d anticipated), going through pockets, collecting every bit of non-combustible metal he could find; the left hip pocket yielded the second piece in a matching set of engraved nuptial rings (he’d later tie them together with a small bit of twine) which he carefully set aside. He was thorough because he had to be. This body was not long from the furnace and all traces had to be erased to avoid Bigger problems. It was tedious work and slow going but he didn’t mind.

It’s amazing how even something as morbid as the disposal of a human corpse can become routine, he mused. Any passion this rite may once have held, or any ill-ease, even paranoia, had long since fallen away. He could have been taking out the trash, bathing, urinating, any one of these common activates so mechanical that they’re more often than not done without conscientious motion, the body animate of its own accord, temporary breaks in mental/physical symbiosis. E. Tromal’s mind wasn’t really mechanical in its separate ward so much as if he were the machine itself, operated by some heretofore unidentified third party, pulling levers, accelerating and breaking, giving quick or subtle turns of various steering apparatuses. He could feel his muscles tighten and loosen by gas-powered belts.

Eventually a thought did appear, starting as a horizon-speck and creeping cautiously forward as he finished cleaning and walked with an experienced, nimble step down the concrete cellar stairs, the body slung sack-like over his shoulder, bobbing with the slow staccato motions of decent. It began as a hum, quiet, without emphasis or emotion, bass and minor as the darkest funeral dirge, a lone lament void of pleasure. Lyrics weren’t far behind:

There is nothing so certain, sang he
No nothing more certain could be
There is nothing so certain
In all of this world
No nothing so certain as me.

Click.

“Everything has its core, its center, the axis ‘round which all else spins. For the Earth it’s a roiling ball of molten ore, gyrating and flexing like Elvis’s hips to the hum and pitch of gravity’s sweet, natural hymn. For the solar system it’s Sol, our sun, a pulsing sphere of white-hot chemical reaction, the most basic and beautiful metaphor of cause and effect. For certain Hindu sects it’s Vishnu, the embodiment of order, a balance between the creative powers of Brahma and the destructive forces or Shiva: Brahman in three perfectly choreographed movements. For Christians, Jews, and Muslims it’s the One True God. Regardless of name and creed, He is the source of all meaning in this world, a hell to avoid and a paradise to attain.

“Existentialists say that there is no meaning but what we ourselves create. Neo-existentialists say there is no meaning at all. Yet Buddha held up a single lotus leaf and everything changed.

“So here’s a hypothetical for all you open minds out there. Suppose, for just a moment, that nothing is random. Everything is connected, like the spokes of your childhood bicycle, lines intersecting, radiating outward, forming a whole, a divine wheel that never quite stops spinning. All that you see, from the tenement crack house on the corner, to the gutted warehouse in the back waters of the Ukrainian Village, to the chateau in the French Alps, to the summer cottage by the lake…”

The el bucked, not hard enough to dislodge the Sony tape recorder from his hand but enough to sever his line of thought. “De-railed the train” crossed his mind only to be tactfully discarded. The high pitched whistle-squeak of electromechanical motion filled his ears again, a subtle poetry all could hear but few would ever appreciate. “This is the music of progress,” he thought, “and no one is tuning in.”

It was well after rush hour and the car was sparsely populated. A black couple was holding hands and snuggling in the back behind him, their eyes blind to anything outside their bulletproof love bubble. To their left, a vagrant stared with unseeing eyes at the vibrating roof panels with curiously dilated pupils. There was a quaint aroma canvassing the air about him, like burnt urine or evaporated hope, his grizzled, graying beard decorated like a Christmas tree with bits of old food and the pieces of words he may have spoken in a better life. Toward the front of the car a family, clearly of the tourist genus (Vacationus oblivious), sat in huddled amazement. The father was deliberating over some pamphlet, face squinched up like an irritated ferret. His wife and daughter say open mouthed, marveling at this space-aged shuttle from the future.

“Look at this, honey,” Father Ferret said, his face returning to its sapien state of rest as he passed the pamphlet across the bewildered teen to her. She gave it a cursory glance, face more that of a constipated giraffe, before giving it back. He took it, face unable to keep from re-rodenting itself in further contemplation.

None of these people had taken more than a peripheral notice of the anorexic, shaggy-haired and bearded man sitting island-like in the mid-car sea of unoccupied seats, boldly pontificating into his small, silver tape recorder and until that moment it had been an equal ambivalence. Now these six set pieces had James Panderwell’s undivided attention. There was a certain unavoidable level of annoyance he felt when pulled unwillingly out of his head but it was an ignorable fungal growth, like athlete’s foot, that he could easily scratch and forget. He did this by scanning them one by one with the microscopic precision of a well-trained eye, storing anything deemed worth remembering into his mental catalogue. Having long ago decided that the world stage was his one and true muse, James wasted no time in milking its many idiosyncrasies for all they were worth. He did not record these. This was partly due to the stream he’d been working on an a latent desire to leave it uncluttered by abstract, unrelated thought. More than that, though, it was because he had conditioned himself to operate on two separate levels. The tape recorder was reserved specifically for these diatribes. He had always considered himself an idea man, existing primarily in the realm of ethereal dream-stuff theories and opinions were made of, something separate from the plane of reality in which these tangible beings and objects dwelt. For them it became a form of absorption, a mental sucking-in of information like gasoline through a pump or blood through a mosquito’s proboscis. His brain was a sponge, swelling against the tectonic plates of his skull; the blank page the bucket into which he occasionally wrung it dry.

The train pitched again, this time with the loop-leaving timidity he had been subconsciously waiting for before continuing.

Click.

“The freshly budded leaf in a spring you didn’t see coming, the stray rain drop that streaks across the lens of your glasses, the waste-land arctic tundra of the Yukon, and the scorched, cracked earth of the Sahara, all of it, even if only in some minute, seemingly insignificant way, is but a cog in the great-spinning wheel of life. There is no such thing as coincidence. Everything that happens happens for a reason. All is purpose. All is ciphered lines of organic, spiritual code for which it is our duty as sentient, rational beings to decipher line by tedious line.

“Isn’t that what religion is for? To give us a kind of ‘how to’ approach to self discovery? Universal awareness? The answers are out there. Every religion says that, to some degree or another. The answers ARE THERE! And we MUST seek them out! We do this by applying doctrine, by living within the white-lined boundaries of one dogma or another, by being moral, virtuous, and true. It’s all there for a reason and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the meat I’ve been sautéing here for you today. THAT is the proverbial ‘heart o’ the matter.’ If everything has its core (and it most certainly does), then the core of man, HUman BEings, is the life-long search for the almighty ‘why.’”

Click.

A smile marionetted the corner of his mouth as the train broke through from subterranean darkness to the dying amber glow of evening, the light turning his drawn cheeks into miniature models of Arizona’s Painted Desert mesas. The echoing electric shrieks had changed as well, the car wobbling with the thick, heavy clacks and clunks he’d been taught trains were supposed to make. It occurred to him that the el had made two stops during his monologue and he hadn’t noticed. Another rift in the assimilation diagram.

Click.

“The world is in a constant state of flux, seasons of perpetual change. Nothing is permanent save the certainty that today has no real relationship to yesterday and tomorrow’s a whole ‘nother ball game. Man-made constructs such as time do not hold sway against the prevailing winds of the natural order. Objects exist when stripped of their names and concepts never exist at all. A blue-print and the resulting building are as different as paper and stone.”

It was an entirely new thought but continuity had never really bothered him all that much. As long as each idea was completed before the next began the order was more or less irrelevant, just like the passage of days, form Sunday to Sunday, midnight to midnight. Maybe he should record that too. He did and the smile-puppeteer pulled the strings a little more.

The train ground to a halt at Damen Avenue. As rodent-man and family stood to de-board James gave them a grinning wave of thanks they would never understand. But they didn’t have to. Like a passing billboard with a clever tag-line in a foreign land only the line itself, the one that made you chuckle for an instant, that you wrote down to tell your friends, remains.

The doors hissed shut and they lurched into the future.

He glanced back at lover’s row and the never-ending bum. There was something here, he could taste it, alkaline on the back of his tongue. It happened from time to time. Not clairvoyance, a parting of the veil, but a gut feeling that more often than not paid off. Careful of his footing, James switched to the other side of the car where the seats faced the remaining three. If there was a moment on the prowl he didn’t want his back to be the only witness. The couple noticed this, his grape picking eyes, and grew self-conscious. The bum had no idea. James took in every detail systematically, as if he would be quizzed on them later, his life on the line. The lovers became more uncomfortable, shifting and turning, trickling gin and out of half-hearted gossip but unable to stop their eyes, on a piece, from gravitating toward him every few seconds.

Click.

“I developed a bad habit of sorts as a child. Actually, I developed quite a few but on in particular strikes me now. I grew accustomed to the idea of patience. It seems like an admirable trait but don’t be deceived by appearances. Maybe it is, when used in moderation but that wasn’t the case with me. I did nothing. Ever. To ensure that I got the things I wanted out of life. It’s more arrogance than anything. Not fate. Not destiny. Rather a sense of entitlement, that I was owed certain things and it was only a matter of time…”

As if on cue, the bum’s eyes shot wide. Perhaps a demon had waltzed across his booze-battered psyche or there had been a synaptic misfire in the relaying of some epiphany. Whatever the reason, a second later both of his arms sprung upward to embrace some camouflaged divine truth in tandem with a quick, ear-splitting shriek that forced the couple to mold into a single being in a tight-armed grasp and James to jump back in his seat.

“…until everything worked itself out.”

Click.

The bum drew back into his previous silent mode of contemplation and the train chugged on through the Western stop in a tainted state of normalcy.

A part of him wanted to know why. Of course it did. That was the end-all be-all. Why had the bum exploded like that? What had gone on in that shattered brain of his? For all James knew the cure for cancer was in there, a workable plan for world peace. Yet this desire was quickly quelled. IT was the mystery more than anything that lit the fire under his engine. Such an outburst, when left unexplained, gave rise to a panorama of if’s that made him giddy. Answers were usually best left unfound. It was always better to not know for sure.

Maybe that’s why no human had ever found the ‘why.’

A robotic voice, droll and uninflected, cut through the clack-hum.

“This. Is. California. Doors open. On. The right. At. California.”

James stood to de-board but didn’t waste a wave of gratitude on them. The train came to a stop and the doors parted. He hopped off onto the platform, floorboards reassuring solid and immobile beneath his booted feet. He skipped his way down the rusted stairwell and once on the street put a kick in his step and whistled his way south.

I wake up every morning
The sun shining the same way it always has
Though it never lights the same world twice
Touches the same skin
Lights the same eyes
Inspires the same artist
Its permanence is nothing but a series of moments
Fleeting
Like smoke
Thoughts we may have entertained or
The Self
I wake up every morning
Not to look at the sun
To contemplate it and the world below
To make sense of it all
To help you understand
To find myself
Or what that even means
I wake up
Because I have no choice

What you call cowardice
I call the only way