James Rozoff's Blog, page 30

A Séance From "The Sleep of Reason"

What's better than a séance in the middle of an abandoned church cemetery on a cold November evening? Here's from my upcoming novel, The Sleep of Reason:

Mindy and Russell parked their car at a designated spot a short distance from the entrance to the JFK Prep grounds as per Doug’s instructions. Doug and Izzy awaited them there, wearing serious expressions that conveyed their concern. Together they walked a short way to the gates of the site that had been the start of the town of St. Nazianz. Over a hundred and fifty years of growth and change had made it something utterly different from what it had started as, but some aspect of the vision remained. From its start as a religious sect seeking a new way of life, it had been taken over by a Catholic order that had used the place as a seminary. And when this had shut down, it became a prep school. But it was decades since it had been used for much of anything at all. Such places lend themselves to the creation of stories and legends.“We will attempt a séance,” said Doug. More for Mindy’s sake than the others, he explained, “One cannot call a ghost into being. Either it already exists or it does not. The dead have passed on to the undiscovered country, or simply ceased to be. We’ll set aside any theological arguments regarding where we go when we die because, frankly, they have no bearing. As Johnny should have explained to Dave, a ghost is not the spirit of a dead person. It is merely a creation of a psychic trauma, a ball of emotional energy formed in the intensity of a person’s dying moments. Memories may be burned into what we call a ghost. Typically they are rather simplistic creatures, acting out a scene that is significant to someone who was once alive. Occasionally, they can be a rather sophisticated facsimile of the person they were formed from. Obviously, most people do not create ghosts at all when they die. Ghosts are quite rare, the intensity of the event would need to be quite profound.“Johnny reported to me the events in Manitowoc. He informed me that they had encountered two separate entities resulting from the death of a single person. One was formed of grief at the betrayal of his wife and friend, the other a desire for justice due to the same event. I’m afraid what we have here is a similar dual or even multiple entities formed by an extreme emotional occurrence.“I’ve been aware of this site, heard rumors and unsubstantiated stories. I knew the potential for trouble existed here, but I had no real cause to pursue the matter. I knew enough about it to warn Johnny to stay away, but perhaps I didn’t know enough about Johnny to appreciate the temptation it would present. But in the end, I will not hold myself accountable for the choices that others have made. We will however deal with this situation as best we can. We have need of the abilities Johnny and Dave possess, and we will not abandon them if there is something we can do. But be warned that there are obvious risks.”Doug looked around at the others. When Mindy had shown in her gaze her obvious commitment, he turned to look at Izzy, and so did Mindy. She was fairly convinced Izzy had a good heart. If there was anything he might be lacking, it might be courage.In the event in the Apostle Islands, he didn’t appear overly eager to confront such things. But perhaps that too might be an act he put on for her benefit.“I thought we were here for Bingo,” said Izzy. “Yeah, I’m in. But I’m going to need a vacation after this.”“Did you get something acceptable?” asked Russell.Izzy reached into the pocket of his thick flannel jacket to pull out what appeared to be a necklace. He placed it in Russell’s waiting hand.“A rosary. Where did you find it?”“Where do you think we found it?” asked Izzy.“We took them from the hands of Gregor Soeldner,” said Doug.“You dug up a grave?” said Russell, looking horrified at the idea of holding an item that had been in the clutch of a dead man for over a century.“It’s not as if we had much choice,” said Doug, “or much time. You said you needed an item that was cherished by one of those in question. Gregor Soeldner was in charge of The Association after the death of Anton Oxner. There’s no guarantee he’s in any way a part of this, but I figured he was our best chance of discovering something. And as far as finding an article or relic from someone, I imagine that something that someone wanted to be buried with must be pretty important to them.”“What about Oxner? Couldn’t you find anything of his?”“We thought about it. It turns out he was buried under the altar in the chapel. Izzy couldn’t bring himself to go digging up an alter for such purposes, and I have to say I was uneasy about it myself. Let’s give it a go with this and if it doesn’t work, we’ll go from there.”“Alright,” said Russell. “Let’s find a proper spot and we’ll do this. Any ideas?”They eyed the grounds from their spot in the empty space surrounded by buildings.“I wouldn’t mind doing it indoors, if we could,” said Mindy, feeling the chill of the evening.“Where?” asked Izzy. “Somehow a church doesn’t seem to be a proper place for a séance. And the other buildings seem a little too new to be related to whatever it is that haunts this place.”“The cemetery,” said Russell, a degree of authority in his voice. This was an area where his knowledge exceeded the others’ and he needed to assert the fact.They walked towards the gravestones that cast shadows from a full moon that shown behind them. The chill in the air seemed to cut past Mindy’s clothes, penetrate her skin and take residence in her bones, making her feel older than she was. It felt as if her innermost self was not protected the way she was used to feeling, the soft hidden aspects of her were being exposed to a chilling and unfriendly outside force.They followed Russell until he reached the center of the graveyard of perhaps two hundred graves. He stood before them and turned, his body blocking the rays of the moon that was sinking towards the horizon. It made him appear like a radiant saint, but the rays were all behind him, his form a blackness within the light. Whatever discomfort he normally showed was missing now: he now appeared as the scientist making sure the elements of his experiment were accounted for.“Form a circle,” he said. They did, with Russell to Mindy’s left, Doug to her right, Izzy in front of her. I occurred to Mindy at that moment that she really didn’t know these people. Izzy was no longer the joking person he was, Russell had lost his discomfort, even Doug had abandoned his always-on stage persona.“We’re going to have to hold hands for the duration of the séance. We must maintain the circle throughout the séance, this is most important. For that reason, we might as well sit down, make ourselves comfortable. If one of us were to slip and break the connection, we would be unleashing God knows what on the world.”There was not much space between graves, so that when they sat down, Mindy realized she must be sitting on top of some long-dead soul. Several graves down she noticed the freshly dug grave from which Izzy and Doug had claimed their relic. When she joined hands with Doug, she could still feel bits of dirt on his hands. She had hoped in vain that the hand that Russell offered her was not the one that gripped the rosary beads. The feeling of the beads that Russell gripped hard against her hand felt to her like teeth ripped from a corpse.“Now what?” asked Mindy.“Now we wait for Russell to make a connection to the object in his hand,” said Doug. “And if there is a living entity, or reasonable facsimile of same, perhaps it will provide a link to said entity.”“You all must be receptive to whatever thoughts my pop into your head,” said Russell, “because perhaps those thoughts will not be your own. If all goes well, we will soon be experiencing a blending of selves, so that we will be very much aware at the same time of things that we are not perceiving with our ordinary senses. We must all be both open to such perceptions and yet retain our personal integrity. This is not a matter of life or death, but a matter of success or failure, as well as just plain good manners. You’ll understand as we go.”Mindy tried to silence her thoughts, tired to block out the outside world. She was acutely aware of the hands that held hers, that she held. She was both holder and holdee, she though, a link in a chain that was more than the accumulated links.Gahhh! I’m thinking. I should be emptying my mind of thoughts, allow myself to be receptive. Now I’m thinking of thinking. And the cold ground, I can’t sit like this for long.She tried to shift herself slightly, all the while being acutely aware of the hands she was holding, realizing that as she held on to them that they held on to her. She was holding hands of people who were probably busy trying to silence their thoughts in order to be open to something outside or inside of them. Four individuals joined together, and she couldn’t help thinking their minds should be no more distant or unreachable than their hands were. And all at once she had the feeling that her consciousness was not in her body but somewhere in the middle of the four of them. No, it wasn’t her consciousness! It was theirs. It was hers, but they were all sharing the same thoughts in the same way that people sitting around a fire were all sharing the same warmth and light. Except that she was the fire. Sort of. It wasn’t really so important to try to explain it as it was to just experience it.She was aware of her body a few feet away, felt that she could return to it anytime she wished. It wasn’t effort that kept her where she was now, just a state of mind. She only hoped that she would continue holding the others’ hands, detached as she now felt from that body.And as she looked upon her own body, she now looked upon the others in the same fashion. She felt that she was able to return to any of those as easily as she could her own, that they were just houses that could be entered as easily as opening a door. And it seemed that each house was as empty as her was.Curious, she attempted to peer into the person that was Doug Slattery, magician, collector, man of wealth. She wondered what lay beneath the artifice and façade he showed to the world.It shouldn’t have been surprising that she witnessed in him the same trepidation and concern that she felt, being in the same position as she was. But she realized that was only the concerns of the moment. There were great depths of experience and memory there to be delved into. Not thinking of the consequences, she delved in a little deeper.And there she felt lust. Not merely physical urges but the frustration at withholding from acting upon such urges. And behind the lust and the frustration were deeper emotions, fear of being dislike by someone he had loved, fear of rejection and betrayal. And even beyond that was a deeper fear, a fear of being wrong, of believing he knew who he was and what the world was and the crushing pain it caused him to realize that he had been living in a fantasy world. All these emotions and sensations existed in him at once and were stacked upon each other, showing to her the complexity of a person and the myriad influences working upon even the simplest decisions. And anger welled up in him, akin to the sense of betrayal she had seen. She quickly retreated from the house that Doug’s life force had built about him, sneaking out through a side exit, careful not to slam the door.She was again in the middle of the circle, again aware of the openness, even vulnerability, of the others. She was not sure what she should be focusing her awareness on, but knew it was Russell who was the driving force behind whatever it was that was going on. She suddenly became quite attuned to him, felt the concentration towards another awareness that allowed him no time to be aware of the others. She tried to align her awareness with his, to see what it was that he saw, aid him in his search. Again she found herself entering the house of another, so to speak, permitted herself to step past set boundaries.She felt herself quickly swept up as a leaf in a breeze. It was thrilling until the realization of her helplessness set in Her psyche was in the grip of forces more powerful than she’d ever experienced, lifting her to tremendous heights, separating her from the rootedness she was familiar with. But the fear of falling quickly accompanied the thrill, until she dared to look down. She felt herself falling, prepared herself for a drop that would crush her against a rocky bottom.But there was no bottom. Whatever ground she had been standing on had been swept away, leaving a deep dark pit into which she was speedily descending.Again, her presence had been detected by the residence of the domain. Russell understood what she was doing, pulled himself back from his search. Within his mind he constructed for her a floor for her to land safely on. But even as her feet reached the ground, she felt herself opening up. Russell was probing into her as she had done to him. She experienced moments of her childhood popping open from long closed boxes. The unwelcome attention of her older brother’s friend, the humiliation of a boyfriend’s betrayal. She felt helpless before Rusell’s probing, couldn’t understand the cruelty of it. And then in an instant he retreated, leaving her psyche to herself.It was then that she realized what to her felt like an assault was no different than the innocent probing she had been engaging in. She understood now what Russsell had meant when he talked about good manners. Learning proper boundaries was a matter of social etiquette whether or not one was talking about physical space.
She was back in the cold, dark cemetery again, but she still felt as if she were in the middle of the group rather than her own body. Until she looked in between the ring of hands and saw a bluish glow arising from the ground between them. She was then aware that she was back in her body, still holding hands with Russell and Doug. She noticed Doug Squeezing her hand hard and didn’t know why until she realized she was trying to tear away from the circle, trying to get away from whatever it was that was rising in their midst. She forced herself to stillness as best she could, tried to look at the others to gain strength from them. Each of them reflected the bluish light that came from the center of the circle.

A Fictional Trip To The JFK Prep Academy

Here is basically chapter 7 of Sleep Of Reason. It is heavily influenced by a trip I took to the JFK Prep School I visited last summer, but is after all a work of fiction. Pictures of JFK Prep to follow.
 Once trimmed evergreens reached upward but could not reach the height of the building’s three stories. While the large building still appeared in good condition, nearly every window in it had been broken. The driveway wound away to the right and they found themselves in the center of a collection of buildings.In front of them was a structure rocks that housed within it a statue of some religious figure. Beyond that was a field between the buildings, a thin covering of early winter snow shining bright in the otherwise dull November day. To their left was what appeared to have been a dormitory, to their right a church with an impressively large steeple. In front of them, beyond the snow-covered clearing, was a cemetery with a quite orderly quantity of tombstones all of a similar size. Johnny signaled for Dave to park at the edge of the drive.“This place was originally founded by Anton Oxner, a Catholic priest who left Germany looking for a place to practice his religion as he saw fit,” said Johnny. “Of course, you pretty much say that for everyone who came to you country, can’t you? Anyway, he came here with some followers after a little disagreement with the powers that be in the Catholic church with the intention of building a communistic community, someplace where nobody owned anything and everybody had to do some kind of manual labor. As a liberation theologist, the story attracted my attention.”“A liberation what?”“Liberation theology. I could fill you full of a lot of church doctrine, but basically it’s a movement within the Catholic Church that’s committed to social justice and peace. Of course, such an idea has it detractors. Anyway, these people, they came to be known as The Association, they created a well-functioning community here. And Father Oxner, he was a great healer, both a doctor and—some said—someone who could heal through miracles.”Johnny’s willingness to believe was something Dave envied, but he was also a little weary of it. He had seen what too much belief could do. It had almost cost Mindy her life.“What is it with cults and the supernatural?” asked Dave.“This was not a cult,” said Johnny, a little perturbed. “Anyway, cult is a term the majority use to describe minority groups, groups whose viewpoints never make it into the mainstream. What people call a cult is a group of people who follow an idea without bringing that idea into the collective consciousness. All movements begin as cults, all begin as a single thought in a single person, actually. But what we call ‘cult’ in an intense desire for change that becomes frustrated. The world calls belief systems that have lost ‘cults’. And such frustrated desires for change lead to a spiritual festering of sorts, a coalescing of spiritual energy. So it is only natural that such a gathering of spiritual desiring would produce what people call ‘supernatural’ activities. But that is not what we have here. This was a thriving community.”“If it was so thriving, what happened to it?”“Chastity. While certainly an admirable virtue, it can be taken to extremes. But the community that lived here was so successful at it that they eventually died out.”Johnny exhaled deeply, watched his warm moist breath disappear in the crisp cold of a November Morning.“From what you’ve said, Oxner died a long time ago. These buildings, even the church, the look to be much more recent,” said Dave. The buildings he was looking at seemed to have been built in the thirties or forties.“Like anywhere else, time keeps moving on no matter how interesting the history it buries. After The Association, they sold the property to another religious order. In one way or another, it has survived up until perhaps thirty years ago. Even now, there are hopes to re-open the church. And throughout its history there have been reports of unusual events.“Like what?”Well, the miraculous healings. In more recent days, ghost sightings. The usual. A nun who committed suicide, the victims of a pedophile priest, a student who was beaten to death by classmates, his body hidden in the attic. Stories made up to frighten others, mostly. But the place has gotten enough notoriety to have its own episode on some haunted places show. People coming in with their odd instruments and special cameras. C’mon, let’s check out the church.”They walked across the field full of snow and crunchy grass to the church’s side door, which was surprisingly unlocked. It was lit only by the day’s dismal light diffused through stained glass windows. It felt even colder inside, but Dave figured it was just the night air that lingered longer in the brick building.In the relative darkness, Dave could feel a certain unease rising within him. He knew if they were to encounter anything that fear would tinge his senses so that he would not be able to fully trust them. Fear warped his ability to see things as they truly were, created  barrier between himself and reality. But as he felt a subtle fear creeping into his consciousness, he was also aware of a fleeting revelation that he had been able to observe: most people live their lives in fear, perceive the world around them through a lens of fear, never able to see life for what it was. At least he was aware of the existence of this barrier that fear created. He just needed to remember no to stick too long seeing things from one perspective. It was like first learning to drive: even if you’re afraid, never permit your awareness to be stuck on a single focus. Remember to look in the mirror, in front of you, at the speedometer. Keep with the routine regardless of the fear, and you’ll be okay.“Ghosts can’t hurt you,” said Johnny. Apparently, Dave’s apprehension had not gone unnoticed. “Ghosts can’t do anything physically to you. The only damage they can do is by getting inside your head. Don’t let that happen.”“And what if I can’t notlet that happen.”“That way lies only madness. If you give them power over you, they can cause you to hurt yourself, jump out of a window or slash your wrists. That is why you must stay in control.”“What if I don’t have a choice?” Dave was not so frightened as he was concerned to take every precaution.“You always have a choice. Remember that. Now snap out of it. We’re in a church, it’s not going to be one of those encounters. We’re talking about a priest, for heaven’s sake.”Priest or not, Dave felt very uncomfortable. A church in disrepair where one can see one’s breath is a disturbing place to be. One would think God would take some care to its upkeep.The sun shone through the east windows, giving a glow to the colors and images of the stained glass. Some saint that he might have recognized had he paid more attention in catechism was pictured in that imprecise and awkward manner that older church art used. The light that filtered through tended to highlight the darkness and shadows it did not touch, leaving the better part of the church shrouded in mystery. The place felt deserted of whatever made it a place for worship: whatever frail and ineffectual spirits may have filled this place in the past, it was now abandoned and left to other forces. But something still remained of it former spirit: while seemingly none of the windows in the old school had been spared, the windows here were all intact. Whatever damage done to the church had been done by time and weather rather than vandals.What kept the church from the abuse the school experienced, Dave did not know. Perhaps it was the attitude people had towards churches, perhaps it was some spiritual force or something in the very makeup of the church that protected it, Dave was unsure. And when he thought about it, he was not really interested in knowing. Some things should remain mysteries. Some things are beyond what a human needs to know, should know. He found himself retreating somewhat from the boldness he had felt of late, found himself welcoming somewhat the walls and ruts that had sheltered him the better part of his life. Perhaps it was just being in a church for the first time in a while that brought back memories and attitudes from his childhood, when respect for the world that adults had created was still strong in him. Perhaps it was some remnant of faith that still belonged to him that spoke of trust rather than evidence. But perhaps such a faith was something that locked people into little boxes, kept them praying to little gods. And perhaps faith after all was not clinging to a belief in small things but a conviction that an honest search for truths would not go unanswered.He looked around towards Johnny and found him kneeling in a pew, his tattooed head bent in reverent prayer. Dave found himself envying him for having found answers that satisfied him. But he remembered that those who seemed to have found such answers had usually found them through great loss and sacrifice. Dave wasn’t sure if he was willing to go through such ordeals, wasn’t sure if he could survive them. Answers seemed to be provided only after an agonizing process that tested nothing but a person’s ability to endure. Life’s rewards were given only after seemingly endless suffering that changed a person, altered their very essence until they became something quite different than what they would have intended. Dave wanted to forge his own way in life, wanted to become what he wanted to become, not be shaped by an invisible hand. Perhaps in the end it all came down to the same thing. Perhaps our will and desire to be who we are meant to be permits us to endure trials we never would otherwise. It seemed that only in a church could he come to such unsatisfying answers, as though he were trying to fit together two ideas that did not mesh.Not knowing what to do while his friend prayed, he kneeled in a pew behind Johnnyn and searched his mind for some sort of prayer. Fragments of long unused prayers floated in his mind like flotsam in dirty water. They were individual items, artifacts without purpose. Dave’s yearnings for a higher power had always left him feeling incredibly alone, like an unwanted child. In such times, a feeling of unworthiness crept over him as though it were the only response that might gain approval. He felt himself again willing to abandon any essential part of him for some recognition from God, but he was unsure how to let go.“So you’re a praying man, too, eh?” said Johnny, done with whatever communion he had been involved in.“What? Oh, I don’t know. I’m not even sure I know how to pray anymore. When I was a kid, I could say the prayers I was taught, but they never really meant anything to me. Now, I can still recite the words, but it seems that it’s not me that’s saying them, just some pre-recorded message that comes out of some part of myself, some thoughtless action performed by a lower brain function.”“Aw, you’re just in between places right now. You’re not a spiritual child anymore, but you’re not quite a grownup yet. Sometimes you just have to hold on even when you don’t believe in what you’re holding on to anymore. Sometimes you have to hold on to empty and distant memories, even if it feels like there isn’t any ‘you’ left. I think that’s what faith is all about, doing what you need to do even when the feeling isn’t there anymore.”“Is that really faith?”“Well, faith is jumping off a cliff, knowing you’re going to have to fly. Once you’re falling from a cliff, flapping your arms like a madman isn’t really faith, I suppose, it’s just the logical consequence of faith. It’s where the devil waits to tempt us, it’s the forty days and nights spent in the desert. It’s that experience we all must have in our time on earth of what life would be without God. We all have to be tested.”“Why?” Dave wanted to ask, but remained silent. He didn’t want to sully the greater faith of another with the constant doubting of his own. Part of him was afraid of doing so, afraid to find out that his doubt would prove the stronger. But there was something in The Bible about not putting God to the test. He would have to live with a certain amount of unanswered questions, that was part of faith.“C’mon, Dave,” said Johnny. “There’s nothing unusual about this church, at any rate. Let’s wander the grounds a little and see what we can find.”They walked outside the church, making footprints on the light layer of snow that covered the grounds. Moisture was visible in Johnny’s breath, and a hint of steam rose from his bald head. Behind the church was the grouping of white gravestones, uniform and identical. And yet they seemed to sit like buoys on the ocean, as if they were rising and lowering as the ground seemed to ripple ever so slightly. It must have been some optical illusion caused by the slight snowfall, the breeze, or some unknown source of heat that excited the air molecules. Perhaps it was the cold that caused his eyes to blur up with tears, but as he walked through the path that led down the center of the tombstones, the ground seemed rather unsteady beneath him.Beyond the rows of gravestones sat a smaller building, hardly larger than a tool shed. Johnny seemed to know where he was going, and Dave had little choice but to follow. “This is where Father Oxner was buried,” said Johnny. He opened up the door, waited for Dave to enter. His eyes adjusting to the inner darkness again, Dave found himself within a small chapel with enough pews to seat perhaps a dozen people.“I thought this was Oxner’s mausoleum,” said Dave.“I said this is where he is buried,” said Johnny.“Where…?”“There, under the alter,” said Johnny, using a quiet, reverential tone.“Why there? Why not a grave next to all the others?”“Anton Oxner was an important man. He was trained in medicine, but they say his abilities in healing went far beyond anything medicine could perform. His reputation spread far and people were known to visit here from as far away as North Carolina and New York. It was an ability that soon spread to the other brothers here, to a lesser extent. So respected were their healing abilities that the town did not even have a doctor of hospital until after their passing.”Dave scanned the little chapel, waiting for Johnny to receive whatever information he was searching for.“There’s nothing here,” said Johnny. “Nothing I can pick up on anyway. You?”“Me? No, I don’t feel anything.”“We’ll check out the dormitories, then,” said Johnny, a hint of disappointment in his bearing. “They were built long after Oxner and The Association had all died off. Still, there have been enough reports of ghosts to make it worth a look. Of course the stories could be nothing but bunk. Give somebody a good story, and it’s only natural to add a ghost to it. Then again, if there is some kind of ghostly presence, maybe it results from something that happened after the passing of The Association.”Again, disappointment seemed to arise in Johnny. As they made their way towards the Dorms, Dave asked, “This isn’t just a visit for curiosity’s sake, is it? What are you looking for?”“I’m looking for healing. I’m looking for a miracle. Maybe it’s too much to ask, but if miracles do happen, I’m open to one.”“What’s the matter, John? Asked Dave, quite concerned.“With me? Nothing’s the matter with me.”“Then who?”“Julie.”“And who’s that?”“She’s the one who did the imagery on me,” Johnny said, looking at Dave as if he were not used to talking about the subject. For a moment, Dave could catch a glimpse of the man behind the tattoos.“She’s still alive? I’m sorry, I just got the impression—“That she was no longer with us? You’re not far from the truth. She has advanced ALS, Lou Gerhig’s disease as you Yanks know it. I used to make fun of her when the symptoms started, called her clumsy when she tripped over her own feet. And then she was diagnosed with ALS, and I couldn’t forgive myself for teasing her. But she just kept on smiling, as though it wasn’t going to slow her down. At first I thought she was just in denial about her illness, about how deadly it was. I didn’t find out until later that the smile was one of her symptoms. Uncontrollable smiling. Not the sort of thing you’d think would be associated with an incurably fatal disease.”Johnny said no more, and Dave would not allow himself to ask any more questions. But this revelation suddenly changed the situation. He had been depending on Johnny’s experience in such matters, but now he wondered if Johnny was emotionally compromised. But there was little time for him to dwell on the matter: they soon arrived at the dormitory. Again, the building appeared structurally sound but was missing many of its windows. A No Trespassing sign was posted prominently on the door of the building, but it did not seem that it was going to effect Johnny.“Is this a good idea?” asked Dave.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” asked Johnny, opening the door. There were too many doors and too many windows for whomever owned the place to attempt to keep people out with anything other than threats. They entered the darkness, Johnny pulling a flashlight from within his jacket.

Yet Another Snippet From The Sleep Of Reason

Here is a brief look at my newest novel-in-the-making, The Sleep Of Reason, along with a brief setting of the scene:

Mindy, in search of her boyfriend Dave, visits Russell, a man with psychic abilities. When she arrives at his house, she finds that he lives with his parents and is acutely agoraphobic, so much so that he does not leave the bathroom. As a scientist, Russell sometimes uses big words and talks of concepts beyond Mindy’s desire to contemplate.
“Russell?” asked Mindy. She had waited a moment before speaking, then realized his attention was so intense that he might not ever notice her presence.Russell looked at her for the briefest of moments before shifting his gaze ever so slightly to the side. His gaze constantly shifted, as though he were intensely aware of his inability to maintain eye contact.“Hello, Mindy,” he said, and as he spoke his stare shifted downward. His non-verbal cues were so acute that Mindy had no need to discuss his situation. Everything that needed to be said she could read in his discomfort.“I’m sorry,” she said, nonetheless. She couldn’t help wondering what he had experienced to bring him to such a level, what had frightened him enough to shrink his world to such a small existence.“It’s not so bad,” said Russell. “My life is still much more full than many people’s. Although my physical life is rather restricted, I live a very rich life otherwise. I reach out to people all over the world, go to places that others could not even imagine. From this little room I can make connections to the entire world.”Whether Russell was referring to connections made through the internet or through his abilities, Mindy was not sure. Both had possibilities that neither she nor the world could yet fully imagine.“Please, come in,” said Russell. Mindy had been hovering awkwardly outside the door. It was a larger than average bathroom, but was still only intended for one person at a time. Still, Mindy forced herself to enter. It seemed that what they had to discuss needed the privacy of being in the same room together.“Did you bring what I asked?”Mindy reached into her purse and pulled from it a cheap item made of plastic that looked like a miniature urn with a pedestal.“Here,” said Mindy. She handed him the object. “This is known as the cup and ball trick. It’s the first magic trick Dave ever bought. Right from Mr. D’s shop down on Glen Ellyn Road. If you’re looking for something that Dave is connected to on a very deep level, I imagine this is as close as you’re going to come.”“Good,” said Russell. “Something from his childhood. Something related to magic, which is his passion. I don’t think you could’ve come up with anything better. Although you too match that description,” he said in passing, not allowing Mindy time to respond or even think too much on what he said.Russell set the magic trick down on the back of the toilet. “I told you I was a scryver. Do you know what that means?”“No.”“Scrying is the ability to see things through the reflection of a surface which is capable of reflecting more than one image. Some people use mirrors, others water. The crystal ball is a popular method for scrying. The object is to gaze into something that allows your mind to focus in ways that it would otherwise not. Physically, it involves overcoming the body’s natural coordination of accommodation and convergence, but with it comes a shifting of the habitual neural pathways the mind is used to using. New mental pathways are formed, like water rising above the riverbanks and spilling into new avenues.”Russell stopped talking in order to assess feedback from Mindy. It seemed that his ability to gauge feedback had come from intense practice at it, as though it was a learned rather than natural behavior. “Does that make sense?”“Don’t worry about it,” said Mindy. She had no desire to be lost in explanations. She just wanted to know where Dave was.“Just think of it as one of those Magic Eye pictures,” said Russell, his ability to gauge feedback obviously limited. “It looks like a repeating pattern of nothing much, but if you are able to force your eyes into behaving differently than they have been trained—not an easy thing to do—you will be able to see something you never would have thought was there. It’s the same thing with scrying. You have to divert your gaze from what you have been trained to look at in order to see what you are not ordinarily looking for. Let me show you. Like I said, it can be done with a mirror or even clear glass, but I prefer water. It seems to be more organic,” he seemed to be attempting humor.Much to Mindy’s chagrin, Russell turned around and lifted the lid of the toilet, bent over, and stared intently into the water. Mindy didn’t come any closer.“Uh, can’t we do this in the sink?” asked Mindy.“Right,” said Russell, looking embarrassed. “I’m afraid I don’t get much company. I’m not used to being around people anymore.”“How long have you stayed here?” asked Mindy, still unable to get used to Russell’s inability to leave. No, it wasn’t his inability to leave that unnerved her, it was his ability to stay. Whatever his fears, she couldn’t imagine staying in one room like this.“A couple of years, I guess. I’ve been in the house for longer than that, though. Like I said, though. It’s not so bad. I have friends from all over the world. I get around in ways that people in times past couldn’t even imagine.”Mindy listened to Russell’s explanation and couldn’t accept them, could not believe he accepted them himself. He knew he had a problem, but he was unwilling to deal with it. When Russell was done helping her, perhaps she could help him. She couldn’t allow another soul to limit himself in such a way. Perhaps all he needed was a gentle nudge out the door.Russell made his way to the sink, mindful of the limited space in the room and of Mindy’s presence. In a moment, the sink was filled with water.“Each and every wave and ripple on the water reflects back to me a different angle, a different perspective,” he was explaining to her but talking to himself as well. “It’s impossible to be consciously aware of them all, but each of them excites a certain reaction on the observer. What the result of such reactions is, I cannot say. I was not usually given the results of whatever experiments I was involved in, but then again, I lived it. There are two ways of seeing the world, scientifically and experientially. Some favor the one, some the other. The trick is to keep them in balance.”
Russell was lost in his own thoughts as he seemed to be loosening the grip his conscious mind had on his potentiality. That which made Russell who he was seemed to be unraveling in order to open up new possibilities. The idea both frightened and intrigued Mindy. Russell must have had a great amount of experience letting go of his defenses while participating in experiments, such that allowing himself free reign in front of Mindy would be no big deal. She imagined what it would require to see past one’s everyday image of the world, and she thought it similar to erasing all of one’s past history until one was like a young child whose thought process had not yet developed. She tried following Russell, letting her mind wander in ways that she had not permitted it for many, many years. She found the idea a little frightening yet intriguing. It felt like…trusting. Not trusting some other person, not even trusting herself exactly. It felt like trusting life, trusting the outside world and her relationship with it. She found herself experiencing a freedom, as though she were able to fly, or at least float, like the myriad pre-programmed reactions that she had stored up were sandbags that she were releasing from the hot air balloon that was her consciousness.

Underground at the JFK Prep School

A brief excerpt from my upcoming novel, The Sleep Of Reason
From what the flashlight’s beam was able to tell them, someone had good reason to be weary of trespassers. There was graffiti on many of the walls and hardly a window that hadn’t been smashed. In the thirty plus years the dorms had been in disuse, generations of young partiers and adventurers had visited, some in search of scares, others with a desire for destruction. Shattered glass was everywhere on the floors, but Johnny trod over it in search of some kind of hope. He seemed to know where he was going, worked his way past rooms until he came to a door and stepped inside. Dave followed him as he walked down a set of metal stairs. Wandering around a vast basement, Johnny pointed the flashlight at an open door that led to a tunnel that appeared to be longer than the building itself.“There’s a series of tunnels that run from building to building,” said Johnny. “Steam tunnels. The central boiler’s somewhere below the prep school, and all outbuildings were heated by that.”Evidently, Dave couldn’t help thinking, Johnny knew quite a bit about this site. It had been no spur of the moment idea to visit here.They walked along the tunnel, two large pipes to the right of them. Dave couldn’t help thinking they must have been plenty hot in the day, but now the air in the tunnel was as cold as the outdoor air, though stagnant. He could see his breath when the light allowed. Reaching the main boiler room, they took a turn down another tunnel, Johnny walking as though something was leading him on. Dave too seemed to feel or hear, or sense something, but he did not share Johnny’s compulsion to seek it out. He wasn’t sure which of his senses was being played upon, but there was something subtly unsettling.They moved on down the tunnel, following pipes leading to some other building, he wasn’t sure which. His sense of direction was thrown off here beneath the ground. And like the impression he got that the graves were rising and lowering, the tunnels seemed to shift in front of him. He knew it was in his head, was certain, but that didn’t make him feel any better. If whatever supernatural forces around here were able to get inside his mind, it could be as deadly as if they were able to touch him physically. He now knew what Johnny was hoping to find, but that didn’t mean that’s what they wouldfind. And this didn’t seem the place to find anything good. Dave stayed close by Johnny, not wanting to be far from the light. He was starting to regret trusting Johnny, regret trusting Doug and Izzy and everyone else involved. Johnny might be working for Doug, but he clearly had his own agenda. They all had their own agenda, everyone but Dave and Mindy, it seemed. They seemed to be the only two who had no vested interest in any of this.“Slow down,” Dave yelled, too loudly. The narrow hall echoed his words, and he had no desire to call attention to himself.“Look,” said Johnny, from somewhere up ahead. He raised his flashlight towards the ceiling, revealing pipes heading upwards. “That must be the church above us.”“So? Now what?”“The tunnel still goes on. To where, I don’t know. Let’s follow it.”“Let’s not,” said Dave, attempting to hide his growing worry in sarcasm. He was concerned that Johnny’s desires might lead him to act unwisely. He wished Doug were here now, or Izzy or Mindy. He had no desire to explore any further but his only choices were to abandon Johnny or stay with him. He couldn’t imagine trying to drag him away. Perhaps Dave would have chosen to leave Johnny behind if he had any faith in his ability to find his way out again, but the tunnel system was far larger than he could have anticipated and it felt like something was actively attempting to confuse his senses. Not wanting to leave a comrade to face the consequences even of his own bad decisions, he resolved to follow but continue his complaints in the hop of changing Johnny’s mind.“This place looks dangerous,” said Dave, trying to plant seeds of doubt, “ ghosts or no ghosts.”The smoothness of the walls gave way to a harsher surface, as though they were now entering an older underground chamber. He suddenly realized that there were no longer any pipes in the tunnel they were following. The floor was less even, and Dave suspected that they were now walking on a cobbled floor rather than cement. Dread arose in him—along with a degree of anger—although he was not sure if there was any rational reason for it. Wherever they were, it was larger than any underground chamber should have been, especially if it was not part of the twentieth century additions. The ceiling was visible in the beam of the flashlight, but its features were unclear. It appeared rough-hewn, almost as if it had been carved out a handful at a time.“We must be somewhere close to the graveyard,” said Johnny. “Maybe even under it.”“We should go,” said Dave. When Johnny did not answer, Dave looked at him, found that Johnny was not paying attention to him. His gaze was towards the ceiling. Dave followed his gaze but saw nothing. Johnny, forgetting Dave’s presence, turned off his flashlight.“Johnny?” yelled Dave, allowing the anger that he had been keeping in check to find expression. “Turn the damn light on. I’ve had enough of this shit.” Dave was losing his cool, permitting himself to lose his cool, and was ready to say or do anything he could to get back into the daylight and the outside world again. But Johnny continued to stare towards the ceiling, saying nothing.
How could he notice Johnny in the dark, Dave asked himself, and then became aware of a soft bluish glow that emanated from above. He looked up to see lights swirling slowly, at length beginning to take individual shapes. They were human, or at least in the shapes of humans.

My Friend

I really wanted a donut tonight. The weekly habit had been established. On Thursdays my wife works late, so I would get home from work and walk my dog to the bakery. I’d take her most days, but Thursday is the night I try to get some writing done, so I often treat myself to a little something from the bakery down the block.
Old age has prevented Bella from taking the robust walks we used to take: sometime recently she began sniffing more than walking. So the trip to the bakery usually takes a little while, but the trip home is much quicker since she’s anticipating the cookie I’d buy her.
The owner of the bakery is a dog-lover, so much so that he told me I could bring my dog in the shop anytime. I don’t bring her in unless the shop is empty, but sometimes I’ll go around the corner and walk a little further until the place empties out.
The two regulars that work there know her by name. And every time I go in they head for the dog bone biscuits that I’m always buying her. If there are other customers there, I’ll tie Bella’s leash to the water meter outside of the building and enter alone. And as I exit with Bella’s bone, I’ll often hear the woman behind the counter explaining how Bella carries her own treat home.
That’s my favorite part of the trip, the part where Bella walks fast enough that people still mistake her for a young puppy. I’ll give her the white bag with the cookie in it and she’ll grab it in her mouth and carry it as lady-like as Jackie Onassis would carry her purse. I don’t know how that got started, because she’s never been very lady-like. I really think it is a way of showing off for her. I think she likes to show all the other dogs on the block that she has something they don’t. I know it’s not very good manners on her part, but I can’t help appreciating her sassiness.
We usually hit the bakery around the time the traffic is heaviest. And I know it is a weakness on my part, that I am no better than a mother of a child beauty contestant, but I take an immense vicarious joy at seeing people in their cars turn their heads to look at my dog and smile. On any given day I’ll get at least a couple of people’s attention. Sometimes I’ll get a whole carload looking Bella’s way. Sometimes a dog with his head out the window will look at Bella with an expression of surprise. Sometimes I’ll get oohs and aahs from pedestrians. I’ll occasionally even get the kind of smiles and comments from a pretty young woman that I so sought after when I was a younger man.
Near my house is a music store where parents are often in their cars waiting for their children to finish their lessons. Usually they are too busy staring at their phones to realize what they’re missing. It makes me angry sometimes, makes me rant under my breath about how people are too lost in technology to see the beauty that is around them, meaning of course, my dog.
When Bella gets inside the house, she runs through the living room into the dining room and looks into the kitchen. She has to make sure that if anyone is home that they see what she has. I’m sure it is vanity on her part. After this, she will drop the bag on the carpet so that I can pull the cookie out and hand it to her so she can eat it. She used to just rip through the bag, but she has grown delicate in her old age.
I wanted to get a donut tonight, but was unable to bring myself to enter the bakery. They’d have walked over to the jar with the dog cookies in the shape of bones, and then I’d have to explain to them that Bella isn’t around anymore. I want to tell them, I feel they would want to know, but it’s going to be a few weeks before I can talk about it without losing my composure. It’s not that I want to share a sad story, I’d just like to think that others besides myself appreciated my dog for the wonderful creature that she was.
I can’t buy her any more cookies, can’t take her on any more walks, but I’d like to give her something. And so I give her my time and my thoughts, I write a little story and post it on my blog so that the memory of Bella might live on inside the soul of someone who chances to read this. Most dogs are wonderful, and unique. So was mine. So was Bella.

The Sleep Of Reason Chapter 8

A lot of the writing I've done on this book has been without a conscious filter. I'll be curious to reread it and discover if it has any value. I'm sure it will have to be substantially edited, but I'm convinced that the most interesting writing is not done by the critical mind. At any rate, the title, The Sleep of Reason seems appropriate:
Chapter 8
Unable to fight the desire for company, the temptation to contact Dave again struck her. To resist the idea, she decided to check Doug’s office to see if she could locate any information on Russell. That was the answer to her worry and doubt: distraction and possible knowledge to be gained. Doug seemed to hold Russell in high regard, despite Russell’s humble, even meek demeanor. And there was a quiet confidence in Russell, she had seen that. Mindy had access to Doug’s office but knew it wasn’t good form to go snooping around on the boss’s business. It wasn’t proper to go sneaking through drawers and file cabinets, but she needed more answers than she was getting. She trusted Doug because she had to, not because she wanted to. If Doug was not happy with her digging for information she would be willing to take the consequences. She and Dave’s decision to stay with Doug had been a tentative one, one that hung on a fine balance (?).She entered the office located behind the display counter. She was allowed access there, but the way she intended to search the place was not something she wanted to be discovered. She opened drawers in Doug’s desk and found each of them to be stuffed with various papers, business cards, and other items. If ever a man needed a secretary, thought Mindy. Izzy’s description of an absent-minded professor came back to her and the state of Doug’s desk supported the idea. It seemed that Doug was always in pursuit of something, books, magic equipment and collectibles if not ideas. But it was Doug’s approach to life, to follow his inspirations faster than he could assemble them into a neat whole. She’d read somewhere that a messy desk was a sign of intelligence. If this was true, Doug was the next Einstein.There were several times she thought she saw the name Russell written, but Doug’s hastily scribbled writing was open to interpretation. It was only when she found a list that she knew she had what she was looking for. On it were names of people, some she recognized, some she did not. Among the names was an Alan Clifton, which had been crossed out. Also listed was Jonathon Sinclair, Isadore Collins, and Russel Slater. And listed on the bottom were the names Dave Morse and Mindy Virgilio. Next to the names were the persons abilities. By Izzy’s name was the comment: ability to weave a narrative from incomplete information. Next to Johnny’s was the ability to interact with psychic residue. Next to Russell’s was a list: scryving, astral travel, rudimentary telekenesis, etc. Next to Dave’s name were the words “dream visions”, while next to Mindy’s name was a question mark.What was she doing on the list? She didn’t have any abilities. Did she? No. At least, she hadn’t exhibited any signs of any yet. But she thought of the discussion they had had with Russell and Doug. They had said the very fact that they saw things others didn’t was the reason for Dave acquiring the ability to see things in his dreams. If that were true, and Mindy had seen things that others don’t, then it would only stand to reason that she too would have some ability as a result. But what? She really didn’t care to know. Now that she had found Russell’s name, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to ask him questions. But she realized it didn’t really matter what she wanted, she needed answers.
Returning to the sales counter, she sat herself in front of the computer monitor. Without experience of locating people online, she typed Russell Slater into Facebook just to see what would turn up. There was exactly many matches, but she recognized his face among the crowd. Mindy took a chance and sent a friend request. She was surprised when a moment later she heard her computer sound loudly, letting her know her request had been accepted. She saw a familiar image on her screen.Checking his page before deciding to initiate a conversation, she noticed 5,000 friends. “Russell?” Mindy typed.“Mindy. How are you doing?”“Fine. I was just alone and thought if you weren’t busy you might be able to answer some questions.”Mindy received a request for a video chat, which she accepted. A familiar face appeared, friendly but awkward, almost childish yet obviously intelligent. She couldn’t tell what it was behind him, she almost thought it was a mirror.“I’ve been wanting to talk to you and Dave,” said a voice that reminded her of a (Promising child) young man who sought to sound older than his years. “Russell likes to keep his new recruits to himself.”Mindy couldn’t help thinking there was something missing in Russell. He seemed to be the stereotypical egghead who possessed vast amounts of knowledge while lacking basic social skills. There was a certain amount of awkwardness to him that he strived to ignore.“I was thinking the same thing about you,” said Mindy. “I’ve only ever seen you through a television or computer screen. It’s like Doug keeps you in a box.” Mindy laughed, but humor did not appear to be one of Russell’s strong suits.“I don’t get out that way much,” said Russell, avoiding looking directly at the screen. “There’s really no need to, not when technology can provide all the communication necessary.”“Well that should be good enough for the questions I have. It’s not just you Doug keeps things from. “And what is it you wish to know?”“Well, I feel awkward even talking about such things. It’s like something you’re not supposed to talk about, something you keep secret. I can only talk to Dave and Izzy about it because they experienced it too. They’re in on it. But to talk to someone like you, someone I don’t really know…”“Let me assure you that there is nothing you can tell me that will surprise me. You had your first encounter in April? What is that, like six months now? I have more than two decades worth of research into aspects of reality that most people never encounter.”More than two decades, Mindy couldn’t help thinking. Either Russell looked incredibly young for his age or his experiences began when he was quite young.“Well, back when all this began, Dave began to have dreams. I was quite willing to believe that they were just that, that maybe my friend I’d known most of my life was beginning to unravel. Hell, Dave was willing to believe that too. It wasn’t until we both saw things we couldn’t deny with our own eyes that we had to admit it wasn’t just madness. We were seeing things that others don’t—we were seeing things that others would call crazy.”“If one person sees something unusual it is not to be believed,” said Russell. “If two people see it, it begins to appear true. If everyone sees it, it is undeniable. That is the way the human psyche is constructed. And now you have others, people like Doug, and Johnny and Izzy and myself who agree with your story. Now it’s even harder to deny what you have seen. And you would like to, wouldn’t you?”“Yeah. I guess I would. But failing that, I’d like to understand it. It seems like we are in the middle, not being able to doubt it, but not being able to understand it.”“I’ll help you as best I can, although ultimately it is up to you to perceive the truth in whatever I say. Your ability to see, to understand, makes you more able to move your way through the world. And when I say you, I mean anybody. Knowledge is power. The more clearly you perceive the world you live in, the greater your ability to affect change in that world. Because Dave was able to see things beyond the accepted paradigms he acquired powers that did not exist within that paradigm. He catches glimpses in his dreams of things he couldn’t possibly know. That is a power, but it is one of perception. Izzy has an ability to gain knowledge through creating stories. He takes isolated facts, perceptions, and from them he has the ability not only to weave a narrative, but to a certain degree shape that narrative. Johnny has an ability to see the remaining spiritual echoes of perished souls. In this way he is able to alter the emotional atmosphere of a given area.“Yes, but ghosts and demons…” Mindy realized she had cut him off before he got around to Doug. She wanted to know what abilities he had, but was already committed to another line of thought. “It’s like we’ve entered a different universe where all the laws are changed.”“Watch this video,” said Russell, sending her this message on her Facebook page:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4“It’s something I share with new recruits. It will help you understand. A little.”Mindy clicked on the link. It was a video titled Test Your Awareness: Do The Test. It showed two teams of 4, one team in black, the other in white. She was asked to count the amount of passes the team in white made, and she was quite happy when the video confirmed her count of 13. Her feeling of pride faded, though, when the narrator asked if she had also seen the moonwalking bear. There was no way something like that avoided her sight, she thought. The video was then rewound and, her mind now no longer busy counting passes, she clearly saw a man dressed in a bear suit walk into frame, walk into the middle, turn around and walked backwards off screen. She couldn’t believe that this was the same video, could not believe she had missed something so obvious. It was a trick, nothing more. She returned the video to the beginning, watch the part she had originally watched. Again, a man dressed as a bear walked into frame, again moonwalked his way off it. There was no way she did not notice it, there must be some kind of trick.“That can’t be real,” she said.“It’s just a simple case of misdirection,” said Russell, exhibiting a degree of satisfaction with the result. “You as a magician’s assistant must be familiar with the concept.”“Okay,” said Mindy, retreating from the specific example but not the overall concept. “But that is a lonnng way from what we are talking about. It’s a big difference from a simple case of misdirection and a colossal prank by God. How is it that people can not only be fooled once but consistently by some sort of misdirection?”“Because human consciousness is not what we like to think it is, at least for the most part. We have some dim awareness, some small degree of something we like to call intellect, and we arrogantly presume it is the deciding factor in how we see, what we do. We amuse ourselves in playing a trick on a dog, searching for a ball that we have not thrown, all the time feeling ourselves intellectual superiors. But the truth is our intellectual superiority is of a fractional degree, and our amount of interaction with the universe exponential. The vast amount of dealings with the outside world is actually done on primitive levels. A scent, a color, a person’s relative height all influence our behavior much more than we ever permit ourselves to see.“The psychological term for it is the illusion of knowledge, the belief that we know more than we know. The thought that the simple model we created of the universe is the universe. Because it works, because it keeps us moving, we accept its reality. And when things that do not fit into our model pop up, we rationalize them, dismiss them because it would be too much of a bother to incorporate them into our unsophisticated model.”“So what the hell does this have to do with ghosts? And devils? And God knows what else?”“I’ve got another video for you to watch.” Again, he sent a link to her Facebook page:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA37cb10WMUFeeling the frustration rising in her, Mindy nevertheless clicked on it. It was a video of a mass of ants swarming in a circle.“What is it?” “Ants have the ability to follow the scent of the one in front of them. In such a way they are able to send out scout ants in order to find a source of food. Once the food is found, the others follow the scent in order to find the food. It’s an ingenious system. And it works. That is, until something throws a wrench in the system. That’s what happened here. The ants all followed one another but somehow ended up circling back upon themselves. Now stuck in the loop, a circular mill, it is called, they will continue to follow each other blindly until they drop dead from exhaustion.“Their system was a complex one,” Russell continued, “but imperfect. Humans are smarter, but not by as much as we would like to think, not when compared to any vast span. We have little more understanding than ants in the grand scheme of things. What we see—or think we see—are mere glimpses of what truly is. We see the world in a way that works for us, it is functional vision, at least as long as we need to know how many times the basketball was passed. Ghosts, demons, they’re like moonwalking bears that most of us don’t see. Do you get it?”“No.”“I think you do, actually. You begin to understand, at least.”“But the bear wasn’t actually a bear but a man in a bear suit. Does that mean what we mistake for ghosts or demons, while being something beyond the basketball game we normally are involved in, it is not ‘really’ a ghost but some manifestation of human energy?”“That’s not really where I was going, but I think the analogy holds.”“I don’t even know what it was I said.”“I think you understand, in some manner. Ghosts, demons, tulpa, they are all products of human psychic energy. They are products of the human subconscious, manifesting themselves in a way humans can understand. You see, most of what we think of as psychic energy takes place not only in the sub-conscious but outside of the individual. We think of ourselves as separate and distinct, but much of the time our minds work like computers that are working on the problems of other computers. (clarify) We are synapses in a vast brain that does the thinking for us all.”In his excitement with the ideas he was communicating, he momentarily forgot his discomfort with direct eye contact. He stared at Mindy, and in that moment realized how completely lost she looked. He cast his eyes away and muttered, “Sorry, I got a little carried away. But you have broken through the walls that society, that fear has placed upon you. You will grow to understand the misconceptions that most of us suffer under. Don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the concepts, it will come. It’s a far more complex paradigm than your mind is used to using, it’s only natural that it will be a little unbalancing.”“Should I be taking notes?” said Mindy, attempting a little humor in order to lighten the conversation.“No need. These are the sort of things that you won’t forget. They are abilities, like riding a bike, not bits of data like a locker combination.”Mindy realized that whatever conversation she had with Russell, whatever he could learn from him, would not be the simple answers she had hope to gain in order give her peace about her and Dave’s position. The answers Russell had were so large that they would totally reshape her perspective, take years for her to feel some sense of balance again. She was beginning a journey that she knew would not be lightly completed. The seeds that had been planted in her mind were not (easy flowers) but oak trees. Enough of concepts, for today at least,” Russell said in a manner that showed he was not completely devoid of humor. “Perhaps there are other answers I can give you that aren’t so involved.”Mindy thought it over for a moment, unwilling to be sucked in again to explanations that were beyond her. “Tell me about Doug. What do you know about him.“He’s a hobbyist,” said Russell, “playing with forces far beyond him. He was fortunate to have a degree of insight and enough money to follow his interests, but that means little in the big picture.Mindy was alarmed. This was not something she wanted to hear.“That’s not to say he’s a bad guy or anything. “And to be fair, such forces are beyond any of us. He’s well intentioned, I believe, but he has no idea what he’s involved in.”“And what makes you so much more knowledgeable that Doug?” asked Mindy, almost defensive of Doug because of her need to believe he was someone who might be able to take care of them.“Because this has been all mapped out long before Doug took in interest in such things.”“By who?”“By the government, among others. By advertisers and marketing firms. By anyone who has an interest in determining how you think and feel, in what you believe. Billions are paid each year to get your mind to see the many choices of bottled water you have rather than seeing the lakes and rivers that are being polluted.”“Is it really that bad?” asked Mindy. She was beginning to sense the amount her perceptions were shaped by others’ perceptions, but perhaps she didn’t want to admit how little in control of her own life she was.“Those who rule have always been interested in shaping the perceptions of those who are ruled. But never in the history of humanity has their reach been so great. Advances in technology and psychology have enabled the messages of the rulers to permeate our consciousness that no other society could have imagined.”There was a lot more Mindy wanted to ask, but she found herself delving in too deep again. It was best that she stick to the shallower water, at least for now.“And what about you, Russell? Where did all of your information and insight come from?”“I worked for various governments. Oh no, not as an agent, more of a guinea pig. I had certain talents that attracted attention. But this is one field of study where the guinea pig is apt to learn as much or more than those who study him. I wasn’t a mere test case like Ted Kaczynsky, a man without innate talent that they simply experimented on. I had more value, was fortunate to be left more or left intact.”“Ted Kaczynsky? The Unibomber was the subject of government testing?”“Yeah. I’ll send you some links about it. Don’t go sticking your head down too far into that rabbit hole,” Russell laughed, showing a capacity for humor for a second time, “the truth is so tangled in the fantasies of those that survived it you’ll end up driving yourself insane.”“But back to me. When our government discovered that the Soviets were conducting scientific experiments into psychic phenomena, we decided we should look into such matters as well. Again, always with a military angle. And when the Soviet Union fell and there was no money left for them to pay for such programs, we permitted some of their scientists to emigrate to the U.S. and continue their experiments. I had certain innate talents that were recognized—how I’m not quite sure—and I was recruited into their programs. You may laugh to think of your government spending your tax dollars on such studies as telekenesis and astral projection, but the people in control are always looking for any way to expand that control. The U.S., U.S.S.R., even the Nazis were looking for supernatural means of obtaining military victory. That’s why I say Doug is a hobbyist. By the time an idea makes its way into a newspaper or some mass media film, it’s already been thoroughly explored by the military.”Mindy heard voices outside the shop door. She wasn’t sure if they were about to enter, but she took the moment to end the conversation with Russell. He had already given her more information than she could possibly digest. She had wanted answers, as well as a diversion from worrying about Dave. She had gotten neither. “I think I hear people coming,” she said. “I’ll let you go, now. Thanks for the information. When I can stomach it, I’ll be back for more.”“Sorry I overwhelmed you,” said Russell.“Not at all.”
Mindy returned home later that evening, receiving a text from Dave that they had arrived at their destination and were so far both alive. Alone for the evening, she threw a pizza in the oven and sat herself in front of the television. TV had always given her a feeling that she was somehow connected to a vast world out there somewhere, but now she wondered exactly what it was she was connected to. What once bathed itself over her subconscious, uncritical mind now seemed to her a less than innocent diversion. She couldn’t block out the idea that as she was staring into the screen that something was staring back at her. It left her with such an unnerving feeling that the television was off before the oven timer sounded.While eating she stared instead into her laptop. She went to check Facebook but got out when she noticed Russell was still on. She really had no desire to bite off more of the information he was willing to provide when she already had so much to digest. She went to bed early, her thoughts busy with assembling ideas Russell had provided, her cell phone next to her in case Dave reported back.

She awoke in the middle of the night to a message from Dave that told her they had encountered and survived a ghost. He would see her after the show the next night, perhaps driving all the way back.

The Sleep of Reason Chapter 7

My writing has for a time been inevitably detained, but I am now back on track. Here we are being re-introduced to a character who played a prominent part in Perchance To Dream:


Chapter 7
 
Mindy looked at her cell phone absentmindedly, her attention being constantly distracted by the dozens of monster masks displayed across from the counter she was leaning on. The masks were of the vintage variety: Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and others she did not recognize. Mindy knew they hadn’t sold a single one since she started working there, but Doug liked to have them staring at him when he was in his store. Doug was a man with the resources to create whatever environment he chose to inhabit—no matter how strange—and was not afraid to do so. He was an overgrown child, Mindy couldn’t help thinking, wasting money that could have gone to more worthwhile goals. Still, it was people like him who made the world a little more colorful. As far as Mindy knew, Doug didn’t spend his wealth on scholarships for poor children or other charitable deeds. But every child that walked into his store—whether or not they had a cent to spend—was treated to the elaborate displays that had to cost far more money than they brought in.
And flock to the store kids did, always looking for a little amusement. At least in the summer months. This was the Wisconsin Dells, Water Park Capital of the World! But while there were plenty of indoor water parks and other sources of amusement available in November, there hadn’t been a customer for the better part of an hour now. Mindy was needed here—that’s what Doug said—but she couldn’t help thinking she could have gone with Johnny and Dave. She really wasn’t sure of Doug’s priorities, but in the final analysis Doug was the one who signed the checks. Dave and Mindy could work there or quit (which was a possibility never far from her mind), those were the options. And, for now at least, staying seemed the path of least resistance. While Doug was resistant to questioning, there was still the chance of learning a little more from him or one of the others. Presumably that’s what Dave was doing now as he travelled to…what was the name of that town again? Manitowic?
Of course although there was no large throngs of vacationers, there was other business to tend to. Doug’s business went beyond the little store selling cheap tricks to tourists. Doug knew all the important players in performing and collecting magic. He was always on the lookout for rarities and investment opportunities. And so Mindy minded the store.
She stared at her phone while thoughtlessly rolling a coin across her knuckles. It was a skill magicians prided themselves on, something that demonstrated their manual dexterity. She could always do it more smoothly than Dave and it had always annoyed him. There wasn’t much that provoked annoyance in him, but he took magic very seriously and was competitive when it came to skills related to the trade. So Mindy had kept in constant practice in order to have that thorn to press in his side whenever he got to feeling too smart for his own good.
She resisted the urge to text him, didn’t want him to know she worried about him. He was with Johnny, who knew a hell of a lot more than she did concerning such matters as they were now caught up in, but she was not one to delegate tasks when the safety of loved ones was concerned.
She was stuck somewhere between wanting to contact Dave and not wanting to lay bare her concern when she was startled by the opening of the door. She turned to face it and saw Izzy, the man who had introduced her and Dave into what lay beyond The Beyond Show. They had shared a frightening adventure, trying to prevent a replay of a mass suicide that had occurred some thirty years before. And while Izzy accompanied them on their quest, he did not reveal he accompanied them at the request of Doug, did not reveal that he had orders to keep an eye on them. He was a spinner of stories, weaving the most absurd plots and passing them off as truths.
And yet she liked him. At least part of her did. There was some truth to him that transcended her normal criteria, got him past her barriers that kept many others out.
Izzy was a middle-aged man of Native American ancestry, though of what tribe Mindy never got around to discovering. There was a lot that Izzy was never really clear about, a lot of things unspoken despite the fact that he was never at a loss for words. For Izzy, it was always about stories and the details didn’t matter much. There are bigger facts than the truth, she’d heard him say. To trust Izzy, you had to believe the stories he told, had to want to believe them. Or at least you had to find meaning in them. And Mindy did. Well, more or less. Maybe. She wasn’t really sure. But it felt good to believe him, felt good to think that every unanswerable question in life could be explained with a story.
But if it felt good to go along with his stories, she would never let him know that. There were still too many answers her intellect required regarding him. And the others as well. Still, it was good to see him again, good to get her mind off of worrying about Dave or at least have someone to talk to about it. Putting aside whatever instinctual urge she had to be combative, she said “Where have you been?”
“Didn’t Doug tell you? I’ve been on an important mission for him.” He was carrying what appeared to be two hat boxes and lifted them up for her to see. Setting them on the glass counter that separated them, he opened one and lifted from it something that Mindy for the briefest of moments nearly mistook for a severed head. After the initial jolt of surprise, she recognized it for what it was, yet another mask for the collection on the opposite wall. While its appearance was entirely human, it was as frightening as any of those that were on display.
“What is that?” Mindy asked, revolted by the fleshy face that stared at her like an executioner’s trophy.
“That, my dear young girl, is a Tor Johnson mask” said Izzy, rather pleased with himself, “star of such fabulous masterpieces as Beast of Yucca Flats and Plan 9 From Outer Space.” There was a certain amount of satisfaction he seemed to get from his triumph, as if he himself had a childhood tie to whatever black and white B-movies spawned such creatures.
“But wait…there’s more,” he said, and produced from the other box an even more revolting acquisition. “Behold, the Moleman!”
“That looks nothing like a mole,” said Mindy. “It looks like…a meal worm with leprosy.”
“It’s a mole man,” said Izzy. “And look—“ he reached back into the box and retrieved a pair of rubber hands. “The whole set. And in mint condition!”
“That was your big important secret mission you were on for Doug?” And here I was worried about worrying about him, she thought. She had imagined him facing something on the order of what they had faced on Devil’s Island, facing something along the lines of what Dave and Johnny were likely facing at that moment.
“Well, more or less,” replied Izzy. “You see, that was the missing piece. This Tor Johnson mask is the rarest of them all. Now Doug has the complete set.”
Izzy carried the masks over to the far wall and reverently placed them on the shelves. Mindy watched him, becoming disgusted with the whole situation.
“How am I supposed to trust someone who has nothing better to do with his time and money than acquire hunks of rubber from his childhood fantasies? Asked Mindy.
“Oh, you misunderstand,” said Izzy, turning to her with the look on his face turning quite serious. “These masks are more than mere curiosities. They are imbued with the desire for the mysterious of a million young boys now men, their sense of what is possible lost to them but remaining in curios such as these. Each of them separately have an acquired power of perception into realms most of us could never access without an object of power such as these. But together they can open vast portals into worlds most humans could never imagine. Let go of your conscious mind for a moment and see if you can sense the potency that resides in these cultural artifacts.”
Mindy tried to relax her mind, let go her thoughts and preconceptions in order to grasp some sort of sense of what Izzy was saying. But as she did so, she noticed a familiar glimmer in Izzy’s eye.
“You Bastard! You’re just having fun with me, aren’t you?”
A smile spread wide across Izzy’s face, amused at having put one over on Mindy.
“That’s not funny,” said Mindy, never at a loss for ways of expressing her displeasure. “Dave’s off God knows where, dealing with God knows what, and here you are screwing around. How am I supposed to trust any of you when you don’t treat things seriously?”
Izzy had a few laughs to get in before he could respond. “Gallows humor, Mindy. You can’t stay sane when dealing with things so far beyond comprehension without blowing off a little steam. And besides, who’s to say there’s not a degree of truth in what I said? Those masks, the fact that it’s a complete set, it’s important to Doug for some reason. If it makes him happy, makes his mind a little lighter, who knows what positive outcomes that might effect (?)”
“You know, your time might be better served helping me understand things a little better rather than having fun at my expense.”
“I tell stories, Mindy, it’s what I do. Hopefully you can learn something from them, but that’s not really up to me. At any rate, I’m not really the one to ask. I was the newest of the group until you and Dave came along.”
“Yeah, but the rest aren’t here, and I doubt Doug would tell me anything even if I asked him.”
“Yeah, Doug treats things on a need to know level, pretty much. It’s not so much that he’s keeping things to himself, at least I don’t think so. It’s like he’s afraid of sharing what he does know, afraid that his interpretation might not be the right one. Or he needs to hear your interpretation in order to know if it agrees with his. It’s not so much he’s hiding something as that he’s just more concerned about seeing things correctly. He uses everyone else as his feelers and he doesn’t want to bias our feedback with his own. And I don’t think it’s being a spoiled rich kid, although from what I’ve heard he’s got plenty. No, he’s reminds me more of one of those absent-minded intellectuals always in search of answers to the point of forgetting to eat or sleep.”
“And you’re willing to bet your life on your impressions of Doug?”
“I’ve got a healthy sense of self-preservation. And I’m not much of a gambler. Doug pays the bills, so I’m willing to play along. But I don’t think he’d be too willing to sacrifice any of us. He took it hard when Alan died. Stopped all work for a couple of weeks, supernatural and otherwise.”
“And what about Johnny? Is he okay?”
“You don’t have to worry about him. He knows what he’s doing, or so I’ve heard. And he’s a lover, not a fighter.”
“A lover?”
“Yeah. A religious man. And he’s got a girl. A real looker, I’ve seen a picture of her. But he happened to fall for a wild one. She wasn’t the kind to settle down, and he wasn’t the type to stop loving her. Had every reason to, too. She had a bit of an addiction to…well, dangerous living, mostly. I don’t know if you can blame somebody like that, it seems to be the way they’re wired or something. But she would leave him, go on a bender for a week, a month, a year. Then she’d show up on his doorstep when she’d run out of other options and he’d always take her back. See, he had an addiction to, an addiction to her. Some people are like that, some people love completely and never consider leaving no matter how much it cost them. So he’d always take her back. And she’d be good for a while until domestic living got to be too much and she’d be off again.”
“Mind you, I’m just telling you what I’ve been able to piece together from Johnny and Doug and Al, but I’m rather talented at piecing together a story if I don’t mind saying so.”
“Do go on,” said Mindy. She wasn’t sure how close to reality Izzy’s stories got, but they were always of interest. And she was always able to get insight from them. It occurred to her at that moment that what he had was an ability comparable to Dave’s. As Dave was able to gleam truth from dreams, Izzy seemed to gather truth from stories. Mindy was willing to gather information in whatever way was available.
“She was an artist. Raychel, that’s her name. Truly gifted, as you have seen.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, Johnny, of course. That’s all her work.”
“She did that?”
“At Johnny’s insistence. Never had a tattoo in his life until he met her. And I don’t know his full intention, but that never stopped me from giving my own spin on things,” he gave her a smile. “I believe he wanted to encourage her talent, to allow her to find a constructive outlet for the urges of freedom she could not contain. Or perhaps he wanted to show his commitment to her, to demonstrate that he was hers completely. I believe on some level that by his choice of subject matter he sought to keep Raychel’s thoughts fixed upon spiritual themes. They’re all Bible related tattoos, you know. I’ve seen them all, more than I wanted, actually. Ask him and he’ll show you too, if you’re not the squeamish type.”
Mindy hadn’t pegged Johnny as the religious type. Nor the one woman type either. She had misjudged him, but she forgave herself for it.
“And did he win her over? Did she ever settle down.”
“Oh, she settled down, alright, but if it was Johnny’s doing, I couldn’t tell you. She got sick, so sick that bad behavior was no longer an option. For a while Johnny took care of her, but she got so bad he couldn’t do it by himself. He still visits her. She’s in a hospital in Marshfield. Johnny still regularly visits her. She’s still the only woman in his life. I’ll have to pay her a visit with him sometime. I’ve been meaning to.”
The story Izzy told her made her stop worrying for a while about Dave, made her worry for Johnny instead. She couldn’t imagine allowing herself to be treated like that, but part of her respected the sacrifice Johnny was capable of.
She wanted to get Johnny and Dave out of her thoughts for a while, wanted to do something constructive rather than worry about others. So before Izzy decided it was time to go, she thought she’d pepper him with some more questions.
“You weren’t there when Doug asked us to join you guys. He said we society is undergoing a sort of paradigm shift, that our way of seeing life is no longer a sufficient tool for the reality of our current situation. Is this true?”
“That’s Doug’s story, which I think is more or less true. But the more opinions you get on the matter the closer to the truth you’re going to get. Here’s my take: Every story starts out simple, but if it is a good one, people add to it, make it more complicated. If too many stories are told around the central story, it’s hard to keep the message consistent. People lose track of the many little details. So the old gets swept away. The story starts fresh, with the essential elements remaining, the ones that deal with the reality at hand.”
“A reboot,” said Mindy.
“Yeah, like that. Like an animal that sheds its skin, humanity is carrying around a big shell of dead stories.”
 
“But if you’re looking for a better understanding of what’s going on,” said Izzy, as if in answer to her thoughts, “you should try talking to Russell, then. It seems he’s available anytime Doug calls him.”
“Do you know how I could reach him?”
“No, but you could probably find him doing a little searching. Nobody stays hidden from those amazing little devices attached to all-seeing satellites that constantly roam the sky,” he said, staring at Mindy’s cell phone that still sat on the counter.
“So you suggest that I search the internet for a guy name Russell?”
“There’s got to be something around here that might give you a little information. Somewhere in Doug’s office, perhaps. I’ve got to be going. I just got back from Philadelphia with those masks and I’m off to Denver tomorrow on another piece of important business. I’m earning my paycheck this week, let me tell you.”
Izzy was already heading towards the door when Mindy stopped him. “Why? Why send you to conduct a business deal when he could just do a deal over the phone and have the items shipped here? Why send you all over the place?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a bit of a story teller. I can be rather persuasive with the right sort of people…and there was a little more involved with the Philly trip than just a couple of masks. I’ll fill you in on it when I get back from Denver.”
He turned his back on her and walked through the door. She could perceive in his posture and in his gait that there seemed to be more to his travels than the purchase of collectibles. His shoulders appeared hunched as though he had been carrying a great weight, and Mindy found herself forgiving him for his rather mean joke at her expense. If he was too tired for talking then he was tired indeed. She wished he would stay longer, wished he would share more of what he knew, but she didn’t want to keep him from whatever rest he required. Perhaps Dave and she had yet to see the worst of what this line of business had to offer.

Dystopian Fiction Part 2 (Maybe)

I've been concerned that my Amazing Morse books are far too linear. I don't have a problem with this novel, tentatively titled Homo Ex Machina. In this book, the chapters tend to peel away towards a beginning. Here is one of those layers, giving part of the story:


He walked from work to his home, feeling at peace with himself and the world. He was different from those he worked with, but he considered it to be a good thing, considered that that which made him unique made him slightly superior to the Cargill Crew. His frame was long and wiry, his features narrow and pointy. His nose ventured far past his angular face, demanding attention. His ears were larger than they needed to be, and his eyes nearly bulged from his face, as though they were straining to peer from behind the shadow of his nose. His fingers were unnaturally long and thin, as though designed for the intricate work they were required to do. His walk looked rather ungainly, but appearance belied the speed and grace that moved him forward. The others that he worked with, The Cargill Crew, were much blockier, their features more obvious and exaggerated. Having only them to compare himself with, he was quite content with his own appearance.
His stride contained an air of superiority to it, not of arrogance, but of an earned knowledge of his specialness in the scheme of things. It was not a disdain for those around him that kept his nose up and his head tilted up, it was merely an awareness that those he passed on the street had nothing in the way of conversation that would contribute to him in any way. His ability to think was simply greater than those around him, and that was that. When he spoke to his co-workers, he found their ability to comprehend matters to be unsophisticated. When he tossed a lofty notion into the air, their response would be to drag it to the earth. Sure, there had been Bill, but that was long ago. Bill, too, was different from the rest, just as Mim was. He did not look like Mim, but he wasn’t like the Cargill Crew either. They were both unique, and so could relate to each other in ways they could never relate to the rest. But Bill was gone, and Mim was alone in his existence. He didn’t mind it; he didn’t mind being unique because he felt it made him special. And so he walked through the crowd of workers returning to their abodes as one alone in a crowd, able to ignore the unsophisticated chatter that engaged their unenlightened minds. So he was surprised when a voice far away cut through his reveries as it sounded like it was addressed to him.
“Hey, you. You. Come here.”
Mim spotted an unusual looking man standing in the shadows of an alleyway. The mere sight of him took Mim off guard. He looked quite unlike the Cargills, looked vaguely like his old friend Bill, only shaggier. He looked quite out of place on this somewhat busy street, somewhat alien to the whole of Mim’s environment. If there had been anybody about at that instant, he would have ignored the man and walked on as he felt a certain suspicion about him. He did not have the feel of belonging, did not seem to be a part of the community in which Mim lived, the small environment that he had ever known. But there was nobody about at the moment, and Mim, if a trifle self-satisfied, was a caring and thoughtful enough person.
“Are you talking to me?” Asked Mim, taken aback a bit by the attention and the person who was giving it.
“Come here. I have something to show you. You’ve never seen anything like this before, that’s for sure.”
He was a little bit pushy, and Mim didn’t like that. But Mim was not the kind to be rude. If this man wanted a moment of his time, well, Mim could afford it.
As he walked towards the alley, the man drew back as if leading him onward. He stopped at a plastic box that was perhaps two feet tall and three feet wide. The man drew Mim’s attention to a hole in the box. Mim looked inside and saw a furry face looking back at him. The face drew an instant response from Mim, bringing a smile to his face. He had never seen anything like it before, but knew that he liked it. The man, noticing the smile, began his patter again.
“Move back, I’ll let him out for you.” When Mim stepped back, the man opened a door on one side of the box. To the thing inside, he said: “Come on out.” It stepped out, walking on all fours. Behind it was an appendage that swung right and left with an energy that was contagious. All of it, including the appendage, was covered in soft and friendly hair that made you want to touch it. Two eyes peeked out from beneath the brown and white fur and found an instant pathway into Mim’s heart.
The man spoke again. “Sit down.” The thing sat. “Shake hands”. The thing raised one of its limbs in the direction of Mim. Mim, excited but nervous, could not bring himself to grab the offered appendage. “Lay down” the man continued. The thing lay down. “Roll over”. The commands were simple enough, but somehow the simplest of actions by this thing had a fascination for Mim. When the man finished with his commands, Mim wanted to ask him to continue. The thing lay their quietly, looking into Mim’s eyes as though waiting for him to start giving commands.
“You like it?” asked the man as Mim continued to stare.
“Yes. Very much.”
“Fifty credits and it’s yours.”
Mim began to get a little anxious. The whole situation seemed a little unusual and thus made him suspicious. Whoever this man was, he was not part of the day to day existence of the factory or the town. He was an outsider and somehow that made him a little threatening. He didn’t know why, but he somehow imagined that there might be something wrong with talking to such a person. He got the feeling that if somebody were to see him talking to this man that he could get into trouble. He didn’t know who would be watching or what the problem could be with talking to someone a little different, nevertheless he felt an uneasiness. He felt suddenly that he should go and found himself taking a step back towards the street. The man, sensing he was losing his audience, said to the thing from the box: “Speak”. It uttered a sharp cry in response. It seemed to call to Mim, and something responded deep within him. It was the birth of a new emotion for him, a tenderness that had never been called upon before.
“Speak” the man said again, and the thing made its noise.
“Shake hands.” The thing lifted its front appendage towards Mim. This time Mim found himself shaking hands with the furry thing that sat in front of him, despite himself. He felt the things fur as he did so, and in a moment, found himself petting the thing on the top of its head. The thing responded warmly to Mim’s petting.
“Fifty credits for a new friend. Quite a deal, eh?”
Mim stared at the man. There was something a little unusual about him, something a little unnatural about the friendly tone he had in his voice. Mim was torn by his situation. He had no desire to leave behind this creature, would very much like to take him home. But he felt the situation rather odd, and the idea that he might be doing something wrong again occurred to him. But the man was rather insistent, and Mim was not used to dealing with people who had such a characteristic.
“What do you say? Isn’t it cute? Surely you have fifty credits you can spare.”
“I don’t know. It’s very amusing, but it doesn’t seem quite right.”
“I assure you, it’s 100% artificial.”
Mim looked again at the furry face in front of him. There was something irresistible about it. If he had been prone to self-reflection, he might have realized that the traits that he appreciated in this creature were quite similar to his own. It had an enormously protruding nose, as well as ears that stuck far out from its head. The two seemed made for each other, like two characters drawn by the same artist.
Unable to find a way out of the situation he was in, and appreciating the idea of owning this thing, Mim reached into his pocket for the credits.
“Thank you. Enjoy. Just remember to return it to the box when you’re done using it. Just say “kennel”, and it will return to it.”
The man scurried into the alley and soon was lost from Mim’s sight. Mim was left standing by his new purchase staring up at him.  “Kennel”, he said, and the thing dutifully obeyed. Mim felt uncomfortable with the idea that he would now have to carry this thing through crowded streets to his home. Again, the self-conscious feeling welled up in him, as though whatever he was doing might be disapproved of by unknown watchers. But the man assured him that it was 100% artificial. Peering out from a corner of the alley, Mim waited until there was no one in sight. He then proceeded to carry the rather large box towards his house.
His house was at the far end of town, furthest away from the factory that was the heart of the community. So far was he from the center that the yard of his house bordered on the wall that ringed the town, encircled the entirety of everything he ever knew.
He arrived home nearly exhausted, unused to such physical exercise. He was greeted as always by his Mate/Mother, who was always there to welcome him home with a smile and warmth.
His Mate/Mother was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair was of an impossible brightness, going beyond what one would call blonde towards platinum. Her lips were shiny red, as though perpetually moist, and the bright white dress she wore was always spotless, both concealing and appealing. She had been their always, from his earliest memories, never changing. She was closer to him than anyone, always willing to listen to him, never demanding anything. But though she was the nearest and dearest thing to him, he oddly found that he did not wish to share what he had found today with her. He talked to her as he always did but made no mention of the box he brought home. And she, good mate/mother that she was, asked no questions about it. She merely smiled and shimmered, and that smiling and shimmering seemed to bring light and freshness into the house. She asked what it was he wished to view, and when he told her, she immediately awoke the viewer and played for him the news of the world outside. As the viewer came to light, mate/mother slid into the background.
With the viewer providing the background excitement, Mim turned his attention to the box he dragged home. He stuck his nose close to the hole and saw his newfound friend staring off into space as if he had been switched off. Mim opened the door to the box, but still the thing remained motionless. Mim remembered what the man had said to the thing, so he said: “Come.” The thing came to life at once and exited its box. Mim began to put the thing through its paces, reciting every command he had heard the man say. He wished now that he had asked more questions, wondered what else this thing could do. He looked inside the box, hoping to find a manual that might help him understand what else he could make this thing do. What he found inside the box was not a manual, but a collection of tubes and wires that apparently fitted into…fitted into what? This thing should have a name, it was almost life-like. He thought of the dog’s distinguishing characteristic, its large nose, and decided Pinocchio fit him well. He had read the story of Pinocchio in a book, one of the few books he had ever read that had not been a manual. In a way, the character in the story was as real as any person he knew in real life. Realer perhaps even than his mate/mother, who after all was not very solid. She was friendly and caring, but Mim wondered if she had any life of her own. As beautiful as she was, she somehow seemed less than real. Less real even, perhaps, than a wooden puppet he had read about in an old book.
Pinocchio it was, then. Somehow, having given this thing a name made it more real, more real, perhaps, too, than mate/mother. He at least was solid—Mim could reach out and actually touch him, unlike the shimmering, smiling woman that awaited him and greeted him. The tubes and wires in the box concerned Mim, though. Perhaps Pinocchio was a little too real. Any ordinary toy would not require such apparatus. He felt foolish for trusting the stranger he had met in the alley, should have known that the whole situation was a little odd. If he wanted to buy a toy, he knew he should buy it from the store. If he wanted to trust somebody, he knew he could trust the machine. Looking back at it now, he couldn’t believe he had acted outside the parameters that had been set for him, can’t believe that he had stepped afoul of the laws that had governed him his entire life. He couldn’t imagine what had made him act the way he had. Sure, the man took advantage of his unwillingness to be rude. Mim’s life experience had never prepared him for someone acting so far outside the laws. But surely Mim should have known better, nonetheless. Then he looked again at Pinocchio and he knew the answer to the question. There was something about its face that spoke to Mim, spoke to him of emotions that had only been hinted at by all of his previous experience. There was a word he encountered in one of those few books he had encountered that had not been manuals, and the word was joy. He did not understand it then, was not sure if he understood it now, but he thought that he was getting some kind of appreciation of it now. This thing was not merely alive, it was willfully alive.
Not that he supposed this thing was alive. The concept of being alive was perhaps not one that Mim was familiar with. Useful, sure. Functioning. Mim knew he was these things and had always been proud of that. But alive was not quite a term that meant anything to him. But the first tentative strands of understanding were reaching from the word joy to the feeling within his chest, an initial encounter of experience and understanding had been made. Like the first feet through a forest making an initial path through the wilderness, a link had been established, a hole in a dam. Mim was beginning to feel something new, something beyond the world he had ever known. Something that would forever change the view of life he always knew. Alive. The concept was born, however naked and helpless it began its existence.
It was something more than amusement, but not useful. It existed apart from the machine, and yet had value other than as a way to distract and relax him. He felt that that might mean trouble, but he didn’t care at the moment. Such thoughts went on inside his mind, but not at a conscious level. He was not accustomed to actual introspection, but it did not mean that such thoughts did not occur. It merely meant that he did not realize that they did. They worked on a deeper level, closer to emotion than thought. He would have had no frame of reference for it anyway, no way to process thoughts that did not have to do with his usefulness. All of his life had been vested in his usefulness or in the satisfaction of immature and unsophisticated desires. While he gloated to himself that he was vastly superior to the Cargill Crew, in terms of emotional maturity, he was very much like them. His superiority lay in the service he supplied to the machine, he was a more sophisticated cog.
But this thing, this Pinocchio. It existed for its own sake. It existed and was happy without purpose, without serving the greater good of the machine. (If it served something, it was a far greater machine than the one he knew.) But while such unarticulated thoughts pushed through his mind, he was too busy taking joy in his new possession to pay them any mind.
His viewer remained on but he did not notice it. He spent the night with Pinocchio, putting it through its paces and seeing what other instructions it would obey. It was not until late that night that Mim uttered the word “kennel”, and his friend retired for the evening.
 
He found himself a little distracted the next morning at work. For the first time in his existence, there was something besides his work that occupied his thoughts. As he worked on the Cargill Crew, he would often find himself paused in his task while thoughts of a furry face crept into his mind. Cargills were not the first workers to have come through this factory, he had worked on several others before them. He realized now that Pinocchio was something similar to them, a bio creation. He wondered where he had been made and why. Prying his long, slender fingers into the back of the neck of a Cargill, he retrieved the chip from the defective worker and replaced it with one more up to date. From time to time they were prone to breakdowns, even such sturdy and unsophisticated models as these. Mim decided he would check Pinocchio for a chip tonight when he got home. He was curious to know where and when he was made.
If the Cargills appreciated the work he did on them, they did not show it. Not that they seemed to mind. They simply came to him when they were told there had been exhibiting signs of dysfunction. They were all and all a foreign species to him. While they functioned quite well in work-related situations, there seemed to be no other way in which Mim and they could relate. The Cargills seemed almost to have a built-in set of reference points, as though their choice of amusement had been programmed into them. When two or more of them were together in a non-work-related situation, they could instantly talk amongst themselves and be amused by things Mim simply could not understand. There was a certain kind of humor they shared, but it was nothing Mim could find funny. In part, Mim was frustrated that he had no relationship with the Cargills. They neither recognized him as an equal nor as a superior. They simply came to him when in need of repair and left when they were fixed. Mim would sometimes become frustrated by their lack of thankfulness at the repairs he did to them, restoring them as useful parts of the machine. But they paid him no more attention than he did the wall that stood behind his house, the border of all he knew. To them, he was simply another part of the machine, like a forklift or a computer. No need to thank a computer, even if it is vastly smarter than oneself.
Arriving home that night, he greeted and dismissed his mate/mother in a moment. It was Pinocchio who would share his downtime. He had learned how to make it interact in ways other than responding to commands. By petting its head, he could elicit squeals of enjoyment. By scratching him along the side, he could make his rear foot move reflexively. By throwing one of his socks, he could get the thing to retrieve it. They could wrestle in a playful manner, and Pinocchio would chase and be chased at intervals.
Exhausted, Mim lay on the ground. Pinocchio sat still looking at him. After a time, Mim decided it was time. Brushing back the fur that was on the back of Pinocchio’s neck, Mim subtly let his trained fingers search for the area where he suspected a chip would be located. He could not locate anything as obvious as the exposed chips of the Cargills, but his sensitive fingers at last discovered a bump under Pinocchio’s fur. Mim’s professional curiosity began to take over, and he went towards the kitchen to find a knife. Locating again the bump, he carefully cut a line down the back of Pinocchio’s neck. “Just as I thought”, said Mim. “Biomatter.” Somebody was playing with things they shouldn’t have been, and Mim would get to the bottom of it if he could.
Pinocchio did not utter a sound or move reflexively away as the knife cut into its fleshy neck. That it was capable of feeling pain the same way Mim was did not enter Mim’s thoughts. He did at once notice, however, that Pinocchio was more than just a contraption of wires and chips. His suspicions were confirmed. Peeling back the loose flaps of skin, Mim spread open the insertion point with strong, practiced fingers.
At the base of the skull he could detect something whose geometric lines were in opposition to the biometric smoothness elsewhere. Amidst the red of blood and tissue could be seen the square corner of something foreign to its surroundings. Reaching in with his other hand, he encountered the hardness of technology amongst the smoothness of flesh. Teasing it out, he eventually removed it from Pinocchio’s neck, but wires still connected from it deep into the neck flesh. Mim was at a loss for what to do at this point. In all the work he had done on Cargills and others, he had always had comprehensive manuals that would guide his actions. Here, he had no clue as to what he was doing, wasn’t even sure if he should be doing it. But there was a certain amount of incongruity to this chip. Despite the fact that he had been dealing with the interface of flesh and technology all of his life, he somehow felt that this thing did not belong. While the chips enabled the Cargills to better perform their duties, Mim saw no reason for the presence of one here. Before allowing himself time to think the matter through, he gave a yank on the chip. His fingers were surprisingly strong and were able to hold onto the chip through the blood as the wire pulled taught. At length, the wire pulled from Pinocchio, leaving the thing free from whatever control the chip had had over it. With this action, Pinocchio let forth a horrible shriek and collapsed to the ground. Its body jerked convulsively and wild howls came from him. Mim stared on in horror. “I’ve broken it”, he thought. The thing continued to howl and convulse. The emotion that only recently had started to grow in Mim had now been replaced with another new emotion; fear. He had never truly experienced it before, had never felt the pain of another as his own. Cargills never experienced pain—at least they never exhibited it before. But there was no restraint on the little creature that lay before now. What it felt it did not hide. Its suffering was even more obvious than the happiness it had earlier exhibited affected Mim more deeply. Here was the flip side of what Mim had felt yesterday, the pain that accompanied joy. He wished he had never experienced the joy, that it was a Trojan horse. As the thing writhed on the ground, Mim found he had to look away.
He turned his head, walked to the couch and sat in front of the viewer. Mate/mother turned up the sound at his request, but he could not make the sound of Pinocchio’s agony go away. He sat in front of the viewer throughout the night, unable to sleep. When the cries had died away somewhat, he made himself look again at the object of misery. He found that it had soiled itself, had contaminated his rug with shit and urine. It writhed in its own excrement, heedless of anything other than the pain of its own existence. Mim returned to the couch, unable to watch. He rocked back and forth, repeating to himself: “I broke it. I broke it.”
With the coming of dawn, Mim was still rocking on the couch, Pinocchio’s limbs still jerking as it sat in its own filth. Mim, not knowing what to do, left it alone until it was time to work. He hoped when he returned home, the thing would be gone, a bad dream that vanished upon awakening. At work he appreciated the utter apathy of the Cargills, no longer caring that they did not appreciate the work he did.
Mim returned home later than usual, having been in no great hurry to relive the experience of last night. He found little Pinocchio still lying where he had left him, whimpering now through lack of strength to howl. The puddle beneath him had grown. Mim, despite his distaste, felt that he had to clean up the scene a little. The smell was intense, but he soon had his carpet and Pinocchio looking a little better. Despite his fear and revulsion, he found himself giving the little thing a pat in an attempt to comfort it. And Mim thought he could sense some response. The whimpering, while not lessening, found some kind of steadiness to it, as though it sought to ease its pain by stabilizing it. After a time, Mim walked away to get some food in his stomach. He again had mate/mother turn up the sound of the viewer to keep his attention away from the sound in the other room. As he ate, he found distraction in the news of the day. So he was frightened out of his wits when he discovered something touching his leg. He jumped from the couch; cast a glance to where his leg had just been. He saw there little Pinocchio, standing on shaky legs and looking at him. Horror welled up in him as though he was looking at a ghost. In front of Pinocchio sat a piece of Mim’s dinner that had fallen from his plate when he had jumped from the couch. Unsteadily but instinctually, he lowered his head and grabbed it with his mouth and swallowed it.
Settling down, Mim realized that Pinocchio may be capable of fixing itself. Whatever he had done to it, it didn’t seem to be permanent. He wasn’t sure how long biomatter could exist without any chip in it, had never seen anything like it before, but apparently this little thing seemed to be doing all right. No sooner than he thought this, though, than Pinocchio released another batch of excrement on the carpet. Mim regretted ever taking this thing into his house, but he really didn’t know what else to do with it at this point. Figuring that it would require sustenance just as he did, he put out a plate for him and shared a little of his food. He also put out a little cup filled with water. The thing ate and drank as quickly as it could manage in its weakened state, taking time out only to relieve itself once again on the carpet. But in time it seemed to be contented, and laid down on the grown and closed its eyes. Seeing that Pinocchio had apparently stabilized itself, Mim was immensely relieved. He had no idea how long it was capable of suffering, perhaps forever. Curled up as it was in sleep, he saw again before him the same sweet creature he had met the day before. He cleaned up the floor, and Pinocchio did not bother him again for the rest of the night.
Mim awoke to a much refreshed Pinocchio. Freed from the chip, however, he no longer obeyed any of the orders Mim gave him. He was operating under his own impetus, now. Still a little shaky, he was nonetheless eager for Mim’s attention in a way he was not before. Mim was a little overwhelmed by the attention, tried to avoid the creature’s lunges. But he soon realized there was nothing to fear from his furry roommate, realized the attention he was giving was rather like the attention that Mim originally gave to Pinocchio, if a little over the top. He wasn’t sure what to make of such attention, had never received anything like it before, except perhaps from mate/mother. Yet mate/mother, however friendly, had always followed his lead. When he wanted to talk, she seemed pleased by his attention; when he was tired, she left him alone. But Pinocchio was persistent. He did not ask for but demanded attention. Mim found such an attitude irresistible. While he fought off Pinocchio’s attempts to overwhealm him, he was only fighting off the worst excesses, allowing his long nose to at times pierce the defenses. It was a battle he didn’t mind getting the worst of. Mim went to work feeling better than he had the day before.
He returned to yet another mess made by Pinocchio. Not only was their excrement on the floor, but he discovered one of his shoes had been turned to shreds. Mim could not understand this random act of violence, could not understand what motivated Pinocchio. He stared at him, but Pinocchio only stared back with a fierce look in his eye. When Mim came toward him, Pinocchio ran, one of Mim’s socks in his mouth.
Mim was angry—but as he ran after Pinocchio—he realized he wasn’t as angry as he might have been. He knew Pinocchio’s actions had in them no mean intentions and that what he had done was done in innocence or in fun. Assuredly, he would have to set some boundaries for this creature if they were to live in the same house, but as he chased after him, the sock dangling from its mouth, he couldn’t help appreciating the attention that Pinocchio gave him in his need to call attention to himself.
Mim had lived alone all his life, not counting Marilyn, who didn’t really count. For the most part, the people with whom he worked were merely people with whom he worked. He had tried socializing, tried to fit in with the others, but it never worked out. They were different from him, different as if they had been born that way, different as if it had been programmed into them to be the way they were. And they all had a sameness of difference, all of them acting differently together. It was as though they were all joined together by some invisible network, one that left them unable to deal with others outside of it on an individual basis. Mim had tried talking to them on a one on one basis, tried to call one from the herd, as it were, in order to engage him in some kind of conversation that would interest both of them. But each of them lived within an ecosystem beyond which they had no desire to explore. The music they listened to was the music played in their bars, the shows they watched were the shows all of the others watched, their sports team they cheered for the same as all the others. There seemed a wall between them and he, and Mim was never able to cross it. And so the camaraderie of the Cargill Crew was something he could never share, and it left him feeling even more alone than he otherwise would have.
He was left with his attitude of superiority, which gave him some consolation. He knew—even if he was every bit as much part of the machine as any of the Cargill Crew—he knew that his part in the machinery was a greater one than theirs. He knew that he was a more valuable part than they, knew that in the hierarchy of the machine that he was placed more highly, but he knew that he was missing something for all of that. Knowing that he was more, that he was better than the others, did not compensate for knowing he was different and apart from them. He knew he belonged, was a working and useful apart of the machine, but that did not give him a sense of belonging.
But here was this thing, this creature, who knew nothing of fitting in, of belonging or of being useful. And yet it existed for its own sake and relished its own existence. MIM truly did not know what to make of it, and yet he could not resist it. Its enthusiasm spread beyond itself, filled Mim with the same enthusiasm. Mim KNEW that the thing felt by Pinocchio was the same as he felt inside himself, knew without having a name for what it was, that this mutual experience or shared feeling existed. And in sharing, the separateness Mim had always felt but never articulated, was overcome. He was now a part of something larger than himself, shared in something that flowed beyond the boundaries of his body. Yes, he was also part of the machine, he knew that. But this was something different. He knew his existence as part of the machine was contingent upon his usefulness. He understood that he was just a cog in a complex process that could be plucked out and replaced with another should he malfunction. And perhaps too, should Mim be unable to care for Pinocchio, that Pinocchio would be happy to find another to share with and care for him. But Mim couldn’t help thinking there was more to it than that. He couldn’t speak for Pinocchio, but he felt that the relationship he had with his fuzzy friend was not something that could be easily replaced by another. There was something unique about his friend, about this friendship, even if there were a million other creatures just like Pinocchio. And too, the relationship between the two was different from the actions of two cogs linking between each other. Cogs pushed together, met at their edges, never went beyond that. The force that turned them did not come from themselves. Mim and Pinocchio, their relationship was beyond the boundaries of themselves, reached beyond the external to a shared internal state of being. They were not two distinct entities, but similar beings guided by a force that flowed through them both.
Again, the concept of “alive” crept into Mim’s consciousness, although he had no words to describe it. He “knew” nothing, merely lived it, lived as if whatever he had been doing up to this time was something other than living. Lived in a way that it were as though something new had been born inside the shell that had previously been him.
The months passed as Mim gradually trained Pinocchio to live in a way that was tolerable to him and the machine. He knew he must protect his friend from the machine, knew that he was separate from it. He knew this because Pinocchio in no way was of service to the machine, and Mim had seen what became of things that were no longer useful or functioning properly. Mim had never before thought of himself as anything other than part of the machine, yet now he was acting in ways contrary to it. He belonged to something different now, even if that something different consisted of nothing more than the relationship he had with an animal that cared for nothing but its next meal and the causing of mischief. Pinocchio was gradually taught to do his business out in the back of the house rather than the floor of the living room. He more or less was trained to obey some of the orders that had originally been programmed by the chip Mim had removed. But Pinocchio still had a mind of his own, occasionally grabbing an article of clothing from Mim when he felt that he deserved more attention than he was getting. Also, Mim could not get Pinocchio to stop his interest in what lay beyond the fence in the back of his house. Mim had never stopped to consider the existence of anything that lay beyond the fence before, felt it to be as much a barrier as the sky was. It was the edge of the world to him, or at least the end of the machine, which was the same thing after all. But Pinocchio had a curiosity to what lay beyond that Mim did not. It seemed that whenever Mim left him alone in the back of the house Pinocchio would start digging a whole as if to try and tunnel under the barrier. Mim sensed somehow that this was a dangerous thing, tried to instill in his pet the fear that he felt regarding the fence. But the thing had a will of its own. This is what Mim loved about it, but it was not something he was used to. Perhaps he himself had never truly had a will of his own, had never even thought to do things for himself other than in distraction and amusement. But Pinocchio did not conform to the rules of the machine; it was a delicate balance for Mim to maintain this independence in his friend without provoking a response from the machine. And the wall was beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. He knew that, knew it without having any reason to know it. Knew that the boundaries of the machine extended to the fence and ended there. It was almost as if Pinocchio knew this and was pushing the boundaries the way he had with Mim. But the machine was not so forgiving as Mim. Mim tried to keep his friend from trouble, but had no way of sharing his apprehension. In most every other way, Mim found Pinocchio’s mischievousness endearing, but this one act of defiance provoked in Mim an anger born of fear.
No longer was Mim concerned with his separateness from his co-workers, nor did he dwell too often on the fact that he felt himself to be a superior model to those with whom he worked. Instead he spent what moments he had for outside thoughts on the creature that awaited his return home each night, He felt sorry for the little creature that was forced into its little crate each day, even while he was stuck in the small room where he worked. And each evening he would spend with his friend, ignoring the viewer and even Marilyn.
One Sunday, the weather was nice enough that they spent the better part of the day outdoors. Nobody lived near him, so he felt safe in allowing his animal to roam the yard. Having worked a full week, Mim was tired and did not notice the time Pinocchio spent digging a hole near the fence. He fell asleep leaning against the side of his house, and Pinocchio was so busy that he never bothered to wake him up. When Mim finally awoke, he looked around and found himself to be all alone. Panicked, he patrolled the enclosed area, to find the hole Pinocchio had dug while he was sleeping. He looked across the fence to see his friend’s furry face looking back at him. He tried to convince him to come back, but Pinocchio was distracted by the whole new world that he had to explore. Even as Mim was pleading, he heard the buzzing sound he had been dreading. He didn’t know what it was that motivated the Stingers, did not know why they did what they did, but he knew they defended the machine. They defended the machine by ensuring parts that malfunctioned were removed from the system. Poor Pinocchio was not a part of the system at all. There was nothing Mim could do, no way for him to broach the fence that was much too tall, far too sturdy. He could only beg and plead with his friend who looked at him through the fence and wagged his tail with excitement. The Stingers were closer now, and Mim’s anxiety was apparent. He urged his friend to come back to him with promises of food, but Pinocchio reacted to the danger in Mim’s voice rather than the words. He gave Mim a look of uncertainty, and at that instant, the stingers hit him. Little bird-like instruments shot tiny missiles into the flesh of Pinocchio, and all Mim could do is stand and watch. He didn’t know what the stingers were, did not know if they were flesh or machine. He did not know if they were machines designed with a purpose or simply malevolent creatures of nature. He only knew he despised them.
He watched his friend die, watched and was helpless to do anything about it. The only relationship he had ever known that was not of frivolity or purely functional was gone. The only genuine tie he ever had to another living being had been severed. At that moment, he despised the world around him. And as the machine was the only world he had ever known, he despised the machine. How long he sat there at the wall, he did not know. He could do nothing for his little friend but was loath to leave him lying there all alone. He eventually felt the need to turn his back from him, though, felt the need to remove himself from the pain he felt. But the physical space he put between himself and his friend could not ease the hurt he carried. It followed him into his house, taking the place of the friendship he had had. He could not sleep that night, knowing his friend was still out there, beyond the wall, all alone, unprotected.
Mim felt another new emotion, and he longed for the days when he had felt none at all. Grief overwhelmed him, covered all the things he had once found of interest with a grey film. Pinocchio was not “broken”, not “malfunctioning”. He was gone, and he was never coming back. He was gone, and it didn’t make a shred of difference to Mim whether or not his usefulness to the machine. He did not know a word to describe it, but he was useful to Mim. More than useful, there was no word Mim could use to describe what Pinocchio was to him. But nobody cared. It felt as though something inside of him had been shot by the stingers and was lying motionless next to his friend, never to rise again. He had no words to describe what he felt, no frame of reference for what he was going through. There was nobody he could talk to, no one to explain to him how he felt. And then it occurred to him to talk to mate/mother. He knew she wasn’t real, wasn’t real the way Pinocchio was real, real the way he was beginning to realize he himself was. Even through his pain, he began to realize a growth in his awareness, began to understand that he was in some way more real than he had ever fully appreciated before. And some part of him knew that although he was in the depths of misery, he did not want to go back to the smaller world he had inhabited, did not want to be the person he used to be before Pinocchio came into his life. It would be an insult to his friend. Mim would embrace the pain he felt as though in doing that he might remain true to his friend. He would rather carry the emptiness inside him than forget. He would never forget.
All of his relationships proved hollow to him now, yet he needed someone with whom to unburden his grief. He thought of mate/mother. She and Pinocchio had been on separate sides of his life, as though they were pulling him both in separate directions. He had grown apart from her since he brought him into his life, and it seemed that she were aware of that fact, acting in a suspicious and disapproving manner. But he needed someone, could not bear the ordeal alone.
He called and she was there. At her appearance, he burst into tears, telling her of his friend, sharing with her now all the things he had kept hidden from her until now about Pinocchio. And for the first time in his life she expressed her disapproval. Following his loss, Mim could not believe now this new turn of events.
“It’s for the best, Mim. That creature had no part to play in your life.”
Marilyn had never spoken to him in this way before. She had never spoken to him in anything less than supportive tones. Now it almost seemed as though some jealousy were being revealed. She did not sound at all herself.
Mim’s emotions were at full boil. “How can you say that? He was my friend. He was…he was beautiful. I…loved him.”
He did not know where the word “love” came from. He had used it with mate/mother before, used it effortlessly and without thought. But as it arose to his lips now it brought to him new worlds of meaning, crystallizing into the sense of loss that he now felt. Suddenly his relationship to mate/mother came into question. Although he had known her his whole life, he now wondered if he knew her at all.
“He was not part of us, Mim. Not part of the whole. He had no place here.”
Again, Mim’s perceptions were altered, and he found himself questioning his relationship to the machine. He knew nothing else other than the machine, and yet he found himself questioning it, as one who has felt profound loss might question life itself.
Mim suddenly realized that he knew something that was not the machine after all. Pinocchio was his connection to something beyond the machine. And he found this connection to be wonderful, the machine to be very ugly. There existed something beyond the machine! And then it occurred to him that his relationship to Pinocchio was also beyond the machine. If that were so, could he also not be part of the machine? He felt torn, confused, angry. He was a part of the machine, that he knew. He was also something else. He belonged to something else. Something that remained even after his one link with it had been severed. The pain inside told him that the death of Pinocchio did not end the awakening that he had brought to life. But mate/mother was part of the machine, was the machine. He realized that now. She spoke of the machine’s desires. She kept him who he was, who the machine needed him to be.
Mim was on a path now that led him to a life he had never known, was not supposed to know. He couldn’t see where that path was taking him, did not know what lay at the end, but the direction was written now into his soul. He felt almost a tearing inside of him, as some part of his being was separating itself from his more solid self. Like a slug stepping free from its shell, like a prisoner stepping free from the cell he had always called home. It was a mental effort that translated to the physical world. And following this profound rending came a myriad of voices. Marilyn was still talking, giving him instructions in the manner of a stern mother. But behind it came the other voices, all speaking to him, demanding his attention, seeking his obeisance. Like maggots in his brain they crawled through his consciousness, crowding out his own thoughts. The neural pathways that together constructed who he was were being clogged by thoughts not of his own making. Like silkworms, they spun webs round the flow of his identity, drowning him in a thoughts not his own. Though he fought against them, the voices at last took control of his consciousness, leaving him a mere observer to what took place inside his mind.  

Rozoff The Magician

I don’t believe I have yet to acknowledge the influence my brother Tom has had on my book, The Amazing Morse. While I had been carrying the plot ideas in my mind for a while I had yet to figure out who the main character was supposed to be. It was not until I realized that my protagonist should be a magician that all of the other elements really came together. Let’s face it, there is something a little spooky about magic and magicians: they’re always cutting people in half, sticking swords through them, decapitating heads, etc. And look at the posters I have on the Magic Posters page: they’re chock full of ghosts, demons, and the macabre. The themes of magic and escape have so fired my imagination that I have made a series out of what began as a single story.
Delving into magic started me delving into my childhood, when I worked as an assistant for my brother as he began his magic career (nearly forty years later, my brother is still earning a living doing magic).
Even before I started writing The Amazing Morse, I wrote this little blog entry for a now dormant website forum. If you are familiar with my book, then you will see how much it was influenced by my real-life experiences. Here is a little reminiscence I did that ended up being a little altered and put into Chapter 4 of The Amazing Morse. The picture I’ve added, since it is referenced:
 
How to Handle a Heckler
 
     Say what you will about Robespierre, he knew how to deal with troublemakers. Abuse of monarchical power? Off with his head. Crimes against the state? Off with his head. Complicity with foreign powers? Off with their heads. A crude but effective way of handling interpersonal relationships. But of course nowadays you can’t use a guillotine to solve your problems. Can you?
     As mentioned previously, I was an assistant for my brother, the magician. We performed for a variety of different audiences, young and old. Adults were generally polite and receptive, but it was the kids that really got into it. They were loud and very interactive, but that was part of the show. My brother Tom would anticipate their outbursts and play off of them. But there was generally one kid in every audience who needed to be the center of attention. Like a drunk at a stand-up comedy club, he could really ruin it for those that just wanted to sit and watch the show. He knew the secret behind every trick, he had seen it done before, and better. Every crowd of children has its Eustace Scrubb. 
     My brother was adept at steering the show away from such children should the need arise, but he would always give these Dudley Dursleys ample amount of time to voices their complaints. And then the moment would arrive when a volunteer was needed from the audience. It was at this point that the skeptic  would suddenly buy into the act. It was always he that would jump the furthest from his chair with his arm straight out, screaming loudly. And he would always be chosen. You could see the look of disappointment on the other children’s faces as this  kid, like Augustus Gloop with a winning Wonka bar, walked proudly to the stage. It is quite a sad thing to see a group of children’s faces as it dawns upon them that life isn’t always fair. When the volunteer came to the stage, my brother and I would prepare for the next trick. Hidden at the back of the stage behind other props stood something tall and imposing covered by a black cloth.  It would take the two of us to carry it to the front. When it was in place, my brother removed the cloth, revealing a guillotine, its blade glistening in the stage lights. At the same time that the confidence ebbed from our volunteer’s face, the disappointment would lift from the those of  the children in the audience who had wanted to help. My brother would then have our volunteer recite after him:
Tom: I, Eustace Scrubb…
Eustace: I, Eustace Scrubb…
Tom: Do hearby give Rozoff the Magician…
Eustace: (Nervously) Do hearby give Rozoff the Magician…
Tom: Permission to sever my cranium…
Eustace: Permission to, uh…
Tom: Sever my cranium…
Eustace: Sever my cranium…
Tom: From the rest of my anatomy.
Eustace: From the rest of my anatomy.
Tom: Now do you know what you just said?
Eustace: Uh, no.
Tom: You have just given me permission to cut off your head.
(Laughter from the audience. The children would be able to maintain their illusions of justice for a while to come, at least.)
     Then Tom unclasped the head stock and invited the volunteer to place his head in the space provided. The look upon the victim’s face was not unlike that of Louis XVI’s some two centuries ago when faced with the same situation. His face would turn pale as though the body was unwilling to supply blood to something that it would not be attached to for much longer.  But Eustace would summon up the courage to kneel before the instrument of death. Each step was another recognition of his own mortality. Placing his head into the jaws of this beast, hearing the clasps being closed, realizing his head is now locked in securely with no chance for escape. But after all, this is just a trick, something for the amusement of the crowd. Something the magician has done many times before. And yet…
     This was, unfortunately, just the beginning of the torture for our poor volunteer. The key for any magical act is to draw out the anticipation of the audience. With Eustace’s head now firmly locked in place, Tom began his banter with the audience, warnings to the audience members up front that they may get splattered. He would instruct Eustace to reach around with both his hands to grab his ears, “just in case”. Then he would move to the guillotine and grab the chain which held the blade. He began the count: “One, Two, 3 days ago…”, he interrupted the count,  “…I tried this trick and it left the stage a bit of a mess. So I’m going to put some newspaper down to keep the floor clean.” He held up the newspaper with a headline that proclaimed: “Magician has accident, head rolls into crowd”. He then placed it under our volunteer’s gaze. Then to the volunteer he would say: “You may get the impression that the ground is suddenly rushing up to your head. It is just an illusion. On the count of three…one, two, three.” With that, the blade came down, little Eustace said his final prayers, and the trick was over. Still alive, Eustace was freed from the guillotine and given a document that stated he was now an official magician’s helper. He would walk slowly and unsteadily back to his seat, and remain unusually quiet for the remainder of the show.
In writing this, I realize that the whole thing sounds a little cruel, but it really didn’t play out as bad as I portray it. After all, I myself was the initial guinea pig for the trick and I came through it just fine (note: please do not look at pictures from the previous blog).   

Dystopian Fiction

Here is a sample from a book that I hope to get around to publishing before long. I feel I need to do it soon because it is a book that regards a dystopian future and day by day I see it coming true. Just as today Brave New World does not have the same bite it once did, I fear this book will lose some of its impact just because much of what I feared when I thought of it years ago has come to pass. Basically, it contains all of the things I feared through the years regarding the future. I was thinking of calling it Homo Ex Machina (Man From The Machine), a play on the famous Latin phrase Deus Ex Machina (God From The Machine), but I'm not sure if my Latin is correct. And hopefully the word "Homo" in the title won't bring forth the negative connotations that it did when I was in Junior High:


Night had fallen on the first truly warm day of spring. Mim’s body and mind were in tune with the weather, experiencing as primitive man once had the change of the seasons.  The electronic distractions that normally filled his leisure time held no interest for him tonight, so in touch was he with the world’s resurgence. The breeze that whispered to the plants to come to life again awoke something in him as well. He was content to watch the world outside his window and experience his connectedness to it.
He went to bed early simply because the conditions were so perfect for it. He had had a tiring day and the thought of the comfort of his bed appealed to him. It was a clear sky and he would be able to stare out his bedroom window at the world within his view. From his bedroom he could see the fence and the wilderness that lay beyond. The soft breeze was refreshingly cool after the unexpected heat of the day. All conditions were right for relaxation and sleep.
Yet when he slipped beneath the sheets, he noticed that the subtle discomfort he had been feeling had not vanished as he hoped it would. It had been with him all that day, though his conscious  mind had fought to keep it from surfacing. It flitted subtly at the edges of his awareness, yet it was driven back as if by some sub-conscious censor. “How odd this uneasiness is”, he thought to himself, for he was an honest man who had nothing to fear. So he set his mind to pursue this thing that was lurking around and behind his thoughts. He tried to focus his thoughts on this thing but his thoughts  just seemed to obscure it more. So he tried to tried to relax all thought in order that this thing might appear from the crowd. But when his thoughts quieted, this thing began to rise from his subconscious and a great wave of fear overcame him, and for a time he backed off. He was curious as to what remembrance could be so frightful to him that his consciousness would prefer it hidden. Some part of him cautioned him to just leave it alone, that it was best not to know.  He now wished he had stayed up later, watched more TV. He wanted this feeling to leave him, wanted to tear it from his mind. But he knew that it lived somewhere in his psyche and would never leave on its own. He would either have to face it or lock it away in one of the many dark rooms where he never went.
He did not wish to face any challenge like this at such a late hour. Night was a time to put away one’s worries, to rest from action in order to regain one’s strength for the following day’s problems. But there was some idea or memory that would not give him peace. He did not like the idea that there was some aspect of his life that he was not coping with, some disease within him that fed and grew stronger while he ignored it. And so he concentrated his attention on this discomfort, seeking to convert emotion into thought. He followed the strands of this sensation, hoping to link to it with his reasoning mind. Again a wave of fear shot through his mind, seeking to disrupt the process. Vague memories began to appear into his thoughts, things he could not make any sense of.  The only thing he could understand was the fear that accompanied these images of the past, so vague in form yet vivid in impact. The fear increased as the remembrances came to him, until at length fear overwhelmed him and he again ceased his efforts. He fled the thoughts, preferring to keep them buried than having to deal with them. So strong was the fear that his instinct for self-preservation decided that running away was preferable to confrontation. He would live with the feeling of unease. Perhaps with time it would subside.
But the fear did not subside, it grew until it raged within him with a voice so strong it was all that he could hear, all he could feel. It sucked whatever perceptions he had in the dark night from his eyes so that all was darkness around him. The connection had been made and the door to this dark closet burst open. Memories like flotsam on a wave of fear rushed over him as he curled up in his bed. He remembered now, remembered the first time he had felt like this, remembered the first embrace of madness. He remembered his meager attempts to cope with the outside world, trying to behave normally  as the flames of madness consumed him from the inside. He remembered his collapse, remembered them taking him away to a place where his worst fears were realized. He had been mad, out of touch with reality, dangerous to himself and others. With treatment and drugs he was in time cured, sent home to live a normal life. But it was happening again. With the return of the memories came the return of the madness. The fear that strove to redirect his thoughts had now gained control of him. The voices in his head had been reawakened, whispering lunacy to him. They slithered on his skin like snakes or unwelcome lovers. The animal in him strove to run away--anywhere--out into the night. But he knew there was nowhere to run; the thing that he feared was within him, and he would not escape it.
Their was no ebb to this tidal swell of madness. No current of thought could enter his head that could withstand the wave of fear that constantly crashed upon him. that was not instantly swept away. There was no interruption,  no brief reprieve that could give shelter to hope or change. Time itself seemed to cede its dominion over the world to this fear of madness, this madness brought upon by fear. For in Mim’s mind the two were separate yet one. Only a distorted mind can grasp such contradictions. He did not know if madness brought about this unreasoning fear or if terror drove him to madness. In his mind, it was a single entity with two faces. Madness brings its own unique clarity.
Morning’s first light brought some dim hope, if not relief. It symbolized change, for what it was worth. It marked the passing of time, demonstrating his ability to survive. Night had seemed endless. His body and soul had become a dwelling place for vermin that craved intimacy. His night was spent swatting at bugs that could not be squashed.  How many sunrises had Mim lived through without notice? But this dawn was eternal, its experiences surpassing all the memories of his life. His previous life was some distant memory with no colors or lasting impressions. His madness was all, excluded the outside world. Everything on the outside him was veiled by a wall of insanity, jealously guarding him from any influence but its own.
As morning advanced, some instinct towards motion stirred in him; humans seem to have within them some force that propels them onwards even when conscious thought cannot. While escape was impossible, movement might give some sense of normalcy, some illusion of flight. He arose slowly from his bed without any real idea of what he was doing or where he would go. Habit led him to the bathroom where he prepared himself as he normally did. In the shower, he scrubbed at his skin in the vain hope that his cleansing ritual might reach deeper into him. It did not touch his inner stain, but he clung to the thought of routine as a way to achieve normalcy. If he performed everything as he always did, habit may get him through the day. He needed to get through the day…which would be proceeded by night. He couldn’t afford to think of that right now. He could not afford to think that this unending day would lead to another unending night followed by…He just needed to concentrate on now, needed to act and survive. When we are on survival’s edge, there is no thought to waste on tomorrow. He performed his morning rituals as though he were donning a disguise or plastering over some gaping ugliness. He was concealing his inner disintegration the only way he knew how. He needed to throw whatever exterior signs of normalcy onto the barricade that separated his madness from the outside world.
For the first time in his life he felt his complete aloneness. He realized now that he had always been alone, but he had never felt the compulsion to actively separate himself from the world. He had never known intimacy, but he had always felt at home in his surroundings. He always dealt with people in a friendly way, even while maintaining a slightly lofty air. In the past he felt that, in his social interactions, he was freely giving of the riches of his personality. There was no barrier between him and others save the fact that he was made different and slightly better than they were. Now he had no feeling of superiority; he was a malfunctioning unit in a well-running machine. He could not let his defect be known. His first repair had been extensive enough. On a lesser worker, they may have taken a write-off and simply brought in a replacement. Fortunately he had been a valuable enough commodity to warrant the expenditure. But a second break-down might demonstrate that he was not cost-effective.  They would take his chip and that would be it.
He looked through the kitchen cupboards for some kind of breakfast food. Normalcy. He had no taste for food but he knew that he ate breakfast every morning. He chose some bread-like substance and began to chew on it, letting his jaw muscles perform the task they had been doing his whole life. He found swallowing uncomfortable, but forced the food down. Chewing from habit and swallowing with effort, he ate a portion close enough to what he ordinarily would eat to satisfy him. He still did not know what he would do with himself, but thought it best to go outside. He needed to get away from himself even if it meant exposing himself to the outside world. He would simply walk and see where that would take him. He opened up the door to his house to find a piece of paper on his porch that said “Jesus saves”. He unfolded the paper to find the full message: “Jesus Saves at Consummart”. Below that there was advertising  for the local food store with an image of a happy Jesus pushing a shopping cart full of groceries. “Very well“, he thought to himself, “I’ll buy some groceries”. Even though he had no thought for food. Normalcy. Act like a normal person would act. Act like you would act if the voices in your head weren’t drowning out reality.
He pushed himself outside the door and in a moment found his body locked into a stride as he walked down the street. It was still quite early, and as it was a Sunday, there were no Cargill about. They would all still be resting from their night at the tavern, regretting their free time and the pain it had caused them. By Monday morning, they would be ready for the drudgery of work again.
Not that he worried about Cargills anyway. He would have to malfunction very badly indeed to have one of them notice anything. He was more concerned with the monitors, and others like him. They would know how a well functioning Mim would behave. He passed by a few people on the street. Anxiety spiked in him until they passed from his sight. He threw back furtive glances to see if thy were looking at him. He carried his madness around with him like some hideous physical deformity that for some reason the world did not yet notice. So far, his barrier was maintaining.
Dread approached him as Consummart came into view. Walking through nearly empty streets had been a severe test of his stamina, now he would have to walk under the monitors, perhaps interact with people. As he approached the automated doors, he sensed the voices within him getting louder, multiplying. The door slid open in front of him and was about to close again before he summoned up the will to walk in. There were people inside, and although they did not notice him, he had no idea what he would do if they did. He conquered his urge to flee, knowing that that was the sort of behavior that would call attention to himself. Normalcy. He walked aimlessly, thinking he should grab some items but not knowing what he wanted. It seemed that all of the merchandise was screaming at him, extolling their virtues, or trying to tempt him with their charms. A box of snack cakes seemed to know his secret, telling him that he was a fraud and a defect. He rushed past the aisle; too fast, he noted to himself. He was losing control now, everything happening too fast. Habit was giving way to instinct, routine giving way to self-preservation. He found himself within the produce section and the call of  exotic birds thronged inside his head. He heard a rippling stream and voices that spoke of wilderness. He heard drumming and primitive chants and, before he knew that it had happened, he found that he had fallen to the floor. And all the while the noises and voices grew louder and more manifold. He lay on the floor , covering his ears and shouting “No, no.” He could hear the monitors turning to observe him. There was no normalcy now, no barrier. There was no self-preservation, only fear, panic, dread. They would come for him now.