Tag Archives: Blake

by serialjones | February 22, 2012

Forbidden Truth #168: Grotesque

Dean had been right when he delivered his confessional to those gathered around the table tennis court, that they would know what had happened within a few hours. It turned out to be a lot sooner than that.

Shortly after Dean ascended to the main house and made his escape, Mick stuck his head through the open door. He was trying to call his brother Gene to hustle up, that Jerry had to be at the airport when they called out the names on the standby list or he would be dropped.

Gene nodded, began to bid a hasty Happy Holidays! to the members of the downstairs party. Scilla waved impatiently. She was too preoccupied with the old man and what he knew about any of this.

“Here we go — I am ready to kick some ass! Who wants to play?” said Staycee Gellen, but there was no response. Her soft voice and unfamiliarity with the sporting challenge struck little fear in the hearts of the other players.

Scilla turned from Blake. She was quite confused. “Harlan? Where’s Dad run off to?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t know what he’s talking about in that speech he gave. Lies? Who did he lie to? About what? I know nothing.”

“Wait!” shouted Blake, as best he could. “Just wait, everyone. Please. Be quiet. Please.”

Gene stepped in front of Blake on his way to the stairs, where Mick had just implored him again, with ever increasing urgency, to either hustle up the stairs or throw Mick the keys to the van so he could drive Jerry to the airport.

Blake grabbed Gene’s upper arm with both his hands.

“Dean gave you my little deerskin bag, didn’t he?”

From the door into the main house, Mick said, “Hey, let the man go. We gotta get our brother to SFO or he’s gonna miss his flight. Come on, man, let him go.”

Gene brushed off Blake’s hands and turned to go up the stairs.

“Later, man. I have to talk with Dean, but first I gotta get my brother to the airport.”

Then Gene smiled and waved at Flo: ”Great talking to you. Keep looking for the truth. Stay brave. Don’t let ‘em scare you into silence.”

“Come on, Gene. Jerry’s already out at the van. And Mom and Maggie, everyone. We’re all waiting on you.”

To his hostess, Gene said, “Scilla. Great party. Thanks for having my whole crew.”

“OK.”

“No. It was great. Really appreciated.”

“I insist that whoever has my little deerskin bag, that they return it immediately.” Blake’s voice was void of any expectation that his stern pronouncement would produce anything.

Then Candice spoke up. “My dad did have it. He told me it was a present for Harlan for when he turned 16. He told me he got it for him, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell…” She turned to Scilla, “…my mom. That’s ’cause Staycee and me– Well, I don’t want to get into it, OK?”

Blake’s reddened. The skin stretched across his face as tight as a balloon just before it pops. “He told me he doesn’t have it anymore. Please! Who has my little deerskin bag?”

Perhaps Candice and Staycee were carried on their memories back to that drizzly spring day when they had the escapade at Dolores Park, with Farley Ralston and his crew and the police and the homeless guy, the dog running off with the deerskin bag in its teeth and Dean and Chato in that unexpected embrace on the sidewalk. As they had laughed at the homeless man’s plight with his rain-pants that would not stay up, they now laughed at Blake as his voice went tight and tiny. It seemed they wanted to contain their mirth but the backs of their hands were not sufficient to damn it up.

This only increased Blake’s frustration. “I want my little leather bag and I want it now!”

“Gene, Bro, just throw me the keys then, I’ll take good care of your van. We gotta get Jerry to his flight. Come on, man.”

Gene took one more step up the stairs. He put a hand on Blake’s shoulder. In a soft voice he told him, “I have your little bag. Man, we should talk. You know? In private. Just you and me.”

“Are the contents disturbed? They were not intended for you.”

“Like I said, we should talk. But I gotta get my family rolling. Seems like we been trying to get to SFO for hours. So, OK, man, we’ll talk, but later.”

With that, Gene bounded up the stairs.

Scilla turned to Blake.

“What’s this all about? Aren’t you the man who spent the night with us in April? The homeless man my husband brought home from his cult that night? What are you doing here?”

“Aunt Scilla,” said Josh, “this is Uncle Burton… He came with us. He’s spending Christmas with us. Uncle Burton, this is so uncool, what you’ve done. My dad’s gonna be mad at you. You have some problems, Uncle, and you ought to see, like, some geriatric professionals or something. This is so not cool. You messed up this Christmas. These are nice people here, and you messed it all up.”

Blake put on a smile that stretched nearly ear to ear. It was rubbery in its grotesque shape, and stubborn. It froze to his face as if it were stuck there. Then the smile collapsed and his countenance collapsed, ancient with fatigue. “I need to sit,” he said. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Who’s surprised? I mean, after all that you’ve done.”

Scilla was not at her most compassionate. Her trouble with Blake’s machinations was compounded by the pieces of the puzzle Candice now supplied, as she told how she and Staycee had discovered the deerskin bag in Dean’s underwear drawer in her parents’ bedroom. “A long story, Mom, don’t go off on me with this, OK?”

Staycee squeezed Candice’s hand and whispered into her friend’s ear a barely audible “Thank you” for not incriminating her in the telling of the story.

All this made Blake more upset: ”He took what I had given to Harlan, and he did whatever he did with it. He gave it to that man with the silver hair. I don’t know why, I don’t know why.”

Dewey suddenly stood and went upstairs. No one questioned this; the look of urgency on his face suggested he was on his way to the toilet. But as trivial as his exit appeared, it was, nonetheless, duly noted along with everything else, by Josefina Sedgewick, her thumbs still dancing over the keypad of her smartphone.

Dewey, though, did not go to the toilet. He went to his dad in the living room, where Mitchell sat with Dewey’s mom and his Grandpa and this semi-stranger, semi-relative Uncle Hank.

Dewey hung back for a moment and waited for a break in the conversation. The adults were energized by a discussion about old-growth redwoods. It seemed Hank and Flo lived near an old-growth grove. There appeared to be cordial agreement about the majesty of these giants, along with some different angles on the rights of property owners and whether a two-thousand-year-old tree has any legal standing in a sane political society. After Grandpa asked the rhetorical question, “Yes, but are stoned hippies sitting in trees in protest the most rational way to settle these notions of legal philosophy?,” Dewey saw his chance to interrupt.

“Dad. Uncle Burton — he’s downstairs. He’s done something weird.”

“Just now?”

“No, not exactly, though he is being a little weird right now. He’s downstairs with the table tennis. I guess he, like, angled for the Colfaxes to put him up? You know, to take him in as like a homeless guy or something, in need of a place to stay. Back last April. And he never told them he was, like, related to us. It’s really pretty weird. Aunt Scilla is seriously not happy with him. They’re all down there in the garage.”

“Excuse me.”

As Mitchell stepped down the stairs he walked into what appeared to be more of a courtroom, with a full-open-throttle cross-examination of the alleged perp by Chief Prosecutor Priscilla Colfax. With his booming voice, those tight-knit eyebrows casting daggers of shame to anyone within range who might be questioning whether they had done the right thing of late, Mitchell quickly commandeered the proceedings.

“Uncle Burton! What have you been up to? Come on. Out with it. What’s this all about? Did you insinuate yourself into this family’s life? Why would you want to do something like that?”

Blake sat in one of the folding rental chairs. He stretched his legs out as if he were sleeping on an airplane, his hands carefully folded in his lap. He closed his eyes. His upper lip quivered with an involuntary spasm. His mouth opened but what came out of it was mostly mumbled and incoherent. “All by… by zeezearch, ina deerzin bag.” He opened his eyes. They had a distant, crazed look in them. “Zere’s two Mitchells now, zere’s one zere and…” He tried to rise up but fell back onto the chair, bounced off it and landed on his side on the garage floor.

“Oh, my god!” said Mitchell, “I think he’s having a stroke! Someone, call 9-1-1 — Quick! Who’s got a phone down here?”

“I’m on it!” said Josefina.

“I’ll get Hank.” Flo bounded up the stairs, taking two steps with each stride.

Minutes later, the sound of sirens rose and fell with ever-increasing volume as they approached Regan Street.

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Tagged as Blake, Candice, Dewey, Gene, Mick, Mitchell, Priscilla, Staycee

by serialjones | February 17, 2012

Forbidden Truth #165: Christmas Soap

Dean had never felt his way before. He had been embarrassed on dates as a teenager. He had been embarrassed, by the pre-accident Scott, for his relative naïveté so many times that, had the process not been arrested, it would likely have etched lifelong lines into his self-image. And Scilla, a few times early in their relationship, had certainly humiliated him, mostly when he competed with her around math skills, before he threw in the towel and took a subordinate role to her in this region of intellect.

None of those incidents compared to this nightmare.

He was not able to answer Scilla’s question: ”Is this all true?” Did not know how to answer it because the answer was too easy: Yes. One word, Yes. Knowing the answer was not the hard part. Saying it was. It was all true.

He had ruined the most important relationships in his life, those with his wife and children, by betraying their trust in him.

His only living parent, his dad, was upstairs talking with Maggie’s mom about the old days in the printing business. Ho-hum. He meant no offense to the wonderful old working-class guy, but Dean had so little in common with him that it was scary to think how thinly frayed their lines of communication had gradually become, with every college class, every degree, every meal in a place like L’Olivier or conversation around the arts or current events that Dean shared. His father would have found any of these foreign and rife with discomfort. Each one of these had thinned, and continued to thin, the fabric of those connections.

There was a residual sweetness preserved in the bond. Just upstairs, Dolores, his dad’s Mexican-American second wife, had been laughing with Maggie’s mom and telling stories in English. When they got to one of the punchlines, delivered in Spanish, Dean’s dad and Gene’s mom teasingly objected: Aha! Not fair, out with it in English, if you don’t mind. Por favor.

Then they all laughed. Glasses were refilled. And it was sweet to see them all having fun together. But these were not the people Dean dedicated his daily life to.

The juice, the real love charge, the power supply that sent love rippling through him every day was in the three people whose trust in him had just been torn into pieces and scattered all over the garage floor.

Dean wanted to get down on his hands and knees and collect all the pieces and put them back in place and start over again.

He wanted to find again the deerskin bag on that sheet of paper with Harlan’s name neatly calligraphed on it and leave it there till the boy came downstairs for his breakfast that April morning. Dean could then direct him to the daybed, and tell him that the guest had left something for him. He wanted to sit at the breakfast table and eat his cereal and watch his son unwrap the three little objects. He wanted to go to the kitchen drawer where they kept the household scissors and hand them over to his son with an admonition that he mind the edges and the sharp points as he negotiated the quirky corners of the objects he found in the little leather bag.

And Dean wanted to preserve for Candice those final days of her innocent childhood before she learned too soon (and is it not always too soon?) that adults will sometimes lie to and betray the ones they love. And sometimes more readily than they would their enemies.

Dean also wanted to share with Scilla what he had found on the daybed, and how he had heard Harlan and Blake talk in the middle of the night, that he had heard their voices but he could not make out the words.

But he had done none of this. This was the salient fact of his dilemma. He feared that the reticulate of connective tissue that suspended the family from chaos was not strong enough to receive this fact.

Dean knew, though, as dysfunctional as his psyche felt as he leaned against the fender of Flo and Hank’s van, that he might be able to reinforce that webbing of connection by telling the greater truth, that the reason he had stolen the bag was a simple and ancient one, one known to millions of men and women who have committed far more heinous crimes than his, when they, too felt within them that terrible sense of disequilibrium when facing the loss of influence over their child to forces outside their control.

It should serve to mitigate the pain that the emergence of this drama is actually often a sign that the parent has successfully launched their child. But, too often, this only exacerbates it.

Dean knew this was why he was jealous of Blake. He knew this was why he stole the property that rightly belonged to Harlan. This was the wrong that eclipsed the wrong of Blake stalking him in order to gain access to his son. And it eclipsed the wrong of Gene Cassidy disclosing to all who gathered around the table tennis game the existence of the little deerskin bag.

While Dean did loathe Blake for setting all this in motion, he loathed himself more.

“Dean. Talk to me.”

Scilla drew closer and tentatively touched him on the back. He pulled away from her touch. His body convulsed with reverse peristaltic waves. He wondered if he was going to throw up on his guest’s car. He made a gagging sound and hacked, a sickly sweet drool that he wiped away with his sleeve.

But he had a plan. It was not a highly inventive one but it was a plan for action. He knew what he needed to do. He had only one course of action. There could be no other: Cop to the thievery and the manipulations, and fall on the mercy and pity of those he had wronged. If he kept out of his account that one damning part, his jealousy of Blake, he might be able to tell a version of the story that would not lower him into even greater humiliation, even though to do so would speed the healing. He could not pay that price.

With the simpler confession, he would hope that the three people he loved more than any others had it in their hearts to forgive him. It was time.

After that, he would need to find a hole with a flat rock to cover it, needed to crawl into the hole and pull the flat rock over him. But now: time to fess up.

He turned and faced the crowd. He opened his mouth, but before he could get a word out, Estelle appeared at the door at the top of the stairs.

“Come on, Ward. We gotta go to Grandma’s.”

Dean’s convulsive breathing stopped suddenly when he saw two things. The first was seeing Ward shoot a look at his mom and then back to Dean and then to Harlan, and back to his mom. It was an unambiguous nonverbal communication: Ah, Ma, please don’t make me miss the good stuff. Harlan’s dad is about to get real and I want to be here to see it.

But Estelle snapped her fingers. “Come on. Traffic could be hairy and we don’t want to keep Grandma and Grandpa waiting dinner on us. And I’m sure your dad’s getting antsy out in the car. Come on. Let’s go.”

Ward grudgingly ascended the stairs with a single look back at his friend. Dean saw Harlan roll his eyes.

The other sight that brought him to some stability was seeing Josefina’s thumbs hard at work on her PDA. He had no idea if she was on Twitter or Facebook, or checking celebrity gossip or post-Christmas sales announcements or something else that had vacuumed up her attention in the midst of their drama. There was no way to tell, till she stopped and looked up like a court recorder pausing while a witness fell silent.

Dean immediately got it. He had become a character in the reality Christmas soap opera she was composing for her followers. He found this amusing. But the amusement was like an aspirin treatment for head trauma, better than nothing but certainly no cure. The pain roared back in.

There is nothing left to do, he thought, but go ahead with this confession. He took a deep breath and then he spoke:

“I know I have disappointed some of you. I have spoiled my wife’s Christmas after she worked so ver hard to put on a splendid show. That was not my intent. Please believe me, Scilla. Neither was it my intent to disregard the wishes of Josh and Dewey’s Uncle Burton. I know this is all going to sound confusing, but in a few hours, probably as you talk and piece this together, you will be able to figure out what happened.

“Nor was it my intent to steal the property of my son. I set a very bad example in doing that. Or, perhaps, the property of Uncle Burton. This will all be revealed. It was not my intention to ensnare my little girl and her unwitting friend in my manipulations. But my biggest error was not letting the gift left by this man into the possession of my son. I was afraid. I was afraid to let my son, who I thought was too young, be given something by a man whose motives I knew too little to trust. This one error led to a whole chain of events in which I kept information from my son, my wife, my daughter, her friend. And I lied.

“My only hope is that, once I find a space to retreat to where I might, perhaps, burn off my shame, that those of you who can, will return me to your hearts where I will be forgiven. But right now, I need to be alone. Please respect that.”

Josefina, with her big eyelashes and bee-stung lips, finished off her dictation, aimed her phone at Dean and took a few pictures as he hurried up the stairs, on his way to find that hole with the flat stone cover, that he might scrunch into his shame till he felt once again that he could face the world.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Everyone is a Journalist

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Tagged as Blake, Dean, Estelle, Gene, Harlan, Josefina, Priscilla, Ward

by serialjones | February 16, 2012

Forbidden Truth #164: All True

It was while Dean and Blake where having their discussion at the top of Regan Street that the confrontation took place between the tinfoil hat conspiracy nuts, on one side, and the academic rationalist and crime stats analyst on the other.

Or, if you prefer, the truth-speaking rationalists with the courage to look at the facts, as opposed to the bright but hypnotized truth-deniers.

Really, take your pick. We seek only to report incidents that evolved from the inevitable encounters between types of personalities that were fairly common in educated families during this era in U.S. history.

As Blake and Dean entered the house, leaving the Cassidy brothers on the porch to reload their cardiovascular systems with nicotine, Dean said to the old man, “Please, be discreet. Please. There’s a lot at stake here. We’ll get that stuff back to you, if you let me take over. OK?”

“Yes, well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

“I am serious, man. Do what I say. First off, don’t go blabbing about anything, or I will tell your nephew and niece that you’re a stalker and maybe even a child molester.”

“That’s not true!”

Dean put his finger to his lips in a “hush” gesture as they moved through the hallway.

The living room was different. There were many empty chairs. Gene’s, Flo’s, Gene’s brothers; Darryl’s was empty, too. Mitchell was still there but his face looked even grumpier than usual. He seemed intent on discerning patterns in the molding where the wall met the ceiling.

Scilla was still in the kitchen, where she had been when Blake arrived with Mitchell and Artis. Flo and Artis had been in the living room, gushing out their reunion emotions when Dean and Blake went out. Now, Artis was in the kitchen with a plate of food, talking to Scilla and Francesca about something. Barry and Shiloh had gone. The vibrance of the party, too, was gone. The jolly tone had been deflated.

Darryl came out of the bathroom shortly after the sounds of flushing and basin water rose and fell from behind the closed door. Dean nearly bumped into him. Close behind Dean was Blake, as if he were a goat being lead to a county fair exhibition hall.

Darryl’s eyes were moist and red-rimmed. He gave Dean a brave but weak smile. Then he looked at Blake, turned back to Dean and said, “Now, who do we have here?”

“This is… Uncle Burton. Mitchell’s uncle.”

The older men shook hands.

Dean told Darryl they were looking for Gene Cassidy.

“Who?”

“My friend. The guy with the black and silver, actually more silver than black, hair?”

“Oh. Yes. Maybe downstairs. He and Flo were talking. I think they concluded that it would be better to carry on their conversation elsewhere. And that is fine with me.”

“Ready for another scotch on the rocks, Darryl?”

“You are telepathic, Dean.”

“Hardly. Kitchen counter. Help yourself. Make it a double, if you need to.”

“Thanks. I ‘m overdue.”

Dean led Blake down the stairs to the garage. Flo and Gene were standing at the table, each with a paddle held up, ready to receive a serve. Josh was at the other end, ready to hit the ball.

“Whoa, two against one,” said Dean. “That’s hardly fair.”

Josh curled his fingers around the ball. His paddle hand motioned to his opponents.

“Don’t worry about me, Uncle Dean. These two challenged me. I’m not gonna back down.”

Gene looked up as Dean and Blake stepped to the floor. “It’s a handicap. We’re lame, both of us, unless Flo here has concealed a serious talent. You know I am lame. Now, darts, I will kick ass. But Ping Pong, I’m a klutz. Josh here is the winner. The champ of his rooming group. Did I get that right?”

“Only ’cause the real killer player had mono. But, yeah,” Josh conceded.

“And he’s held the table longer than anyone today, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So we get a handicap, two against one,” Gene concluded.

Then Gene took notice of Blake.

“Hey, I’m Gene Cassidy,” he said to the old man, extending his hand.

“Hey, Uncle Burton. How’s it going?” Josh said to his uncle. “You guys just get here?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Your mom and dad are upstairs. Got a little tournament going, eh?”

Dean was very tense. He had told himself several times how it was important that he refer to Blake as “Uncle Burton.” He felt conspicuous. He had an intimacy with the old man that would not seem natural if he had just met him. Yet he did not know how to keep the old guy on a tight leash while pretending that he did not really know him. And there was Harlan, staring at the old man and looking like he was on the verge of making a connection to that night in April.

Dean was too uptight to adhere to his own counsel. As the old man stood beside Dean, he introduced him to Gene Cassidy.

“Blake– I mean, Uncle Burton, is the uncle of these two guys over there, your opponent and that other fellow, sitting down there. Great-uncle, if I have it right. Do I have it right? Great-uncle, huh? Hey, Dewey, how’s it going? You winning any games? Or do we call these matches, as in full-sized tennis?”

Dean had thrown out this drivel in an attempt to bury the mistake. Cassidy might not pursue it if Dean managed to pile enough verbiage on top of his blunder.

But Josh was bright. He heard it. So had Harlan, from the way his head rose up and his eyes grew even more piercing than they had been.

“Hey, uh, Uncle Dean?” asked Josh, “How did you know that Uncle Burton used to be called Blake?”

Dean glanced over at Gene.

Oh, shit, said Dean to himself. He knew that look on Cassidy’s face, the dawning recognition: Is this the same Blake of the little deerskin bag?

For what felt like several seconds of awkward silence in the makeshift game room, Dean hoped that Gene would not vocalize this thought. But his hope was in vain. Out it came.

“Is this the guy? The guy who left the little deerskin bag? The same guy? This could be some story! He’s their uncle? Or great-uncle?”

“Are you in possession of my property?”

“I never said that, did I, now?”

Both Gene and Blake then looked at Dean, who was so paralyzed by the horrific confluence of recognition that he said nothing. As the paralysis subsided for a moment, he opened his mouth to speak. He looked over at Harlan. Then he looked at Blake, and Gene. At Josh, Dewey, Candice and Staycee.

There was nothing he could think to say with these people all in the same room. They looked back at him with faces twisted into puzzlement.

Gene, out of what seemed a defense of unspoken accusations, continued, “Anyway, didn’t you give it to Harlan? I mean originally? Wasn’t that like the original plan? Then he must be the owner of it now. It should be his property. I mean, if you gave it up?”

“Just tell me this,” demanded Blake, “Do you have it now? And if you do, and I want you to tell me the truth, then what are you doing with it?”

Dean turned his back on the crowd. He could not stand all those eyes looking at him. He saw his relationship with his two children about to be shredded. He was so broken by the revelations that he did not know where to begin. Should he try to explain to Harlan and Candice, try to justify himself? Perform triage on the greatest hemorrhaging, and then hope for the best?

Or maybe he should address everyone there, find some way to justify his existence to them all, including his nephews Josh and Dewey, and Ward, and even the lovely biracial Josefina with her coppery skin, enormous eyelashes, her moist, bee-stung lips.

To whom does he begin to justify his way out of jeopardy?

Well, how about Priscilla Colfax?

The door to the upstairs opened and Scilla stuck her head down in the direction of the ground floor party.

“Is Ward there?”

“Yo,” said that kid.

“Your parents are here. Time to go to Grandma’s. But it is way too quiet down there. You people OK?”

She took a few steps down the stairs.

Even Scilla, relatively clueless when encountering the nuances of relationship dynamics, could tell there was something amiss. She descended, one slow step at a time.

“Dad,” asked Harlan, “what’s going on? What’s this all about?”

Dean stood up tall but he kept his back to the crowd. He walked with slow steps, the deliberate, studied walk one sees patients take in the halls of convalescent hospitals as they wonder How much of my previous mobility am I going to get back?”

Scilla walked up near her husband but she held back, as if he were radioactive.

“Dean? Come on. What’s wrong with you?”

Dean said nothing. He spread his palms on the fender of Flo and Hank’s van. He leaned over and bent his head.

Harlan then broke the silence: “Mom, look, here’s Blake. Remember him? This is him. He spent the night last April? Dad thought he was some homeless guy and he brought him home. Remember? He’s really Josh and Dewey’s uncle. Weird, huh? I guess he gave me something but I never got it. I think Dad took it and gave it to Gene Cassidy.”

Then Candice added what she knew: “It was a little leather bag. With some stuff in it. Dad lied to me about it when he wanted to get it back.”

Scilla turned back to him.

“Dean. Dean. Talk to me. Is this all true?”

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Still Getting Mono

Lies My Parents Told Me

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Tagged as Blake, Darryl, Dean, Gene, Harlan, Josh, Priscilla, Ward

by serialjones | February 14, 2012

Forbidden Truth #162: Plots

Dean knew that Blake’s question was skewed toward the rhetorical and did not require an answer. He chose to answer it anyway.

“No. Not such a bad thing at all. But conniving ways are not good, regardless of the ends desired. You wangled an invitation from me for a meal and a night spent on our daybed by setting up a presentation that was, in fact, based on a lie. Is that what you presume to teach a 15 — actually, he was only 14, a 14-year-old kid, when you met him – Is it?”

“Not all of it was a lie,” Blake replied quietly.

“No matter. You hosed me about all of this, or most of this, anyway. And, I’m sorry, but I am a little pissed.”

Blake looked meek. He snuggled deeper into his coat. The sun was pretty much set and the bitter, early winter night had descended without much subtlety.

“Can we go back to the house?”

“Not quite yet. First, tell me this: what did you talk to my son about that night? He came down the stairs to use the bathroom and I was in there. He tried the door. Then I heard voices, yours and his, but I couldn’t make out any words. What did you talk to my son about?”

“Oh, not much, really.”

“Is that so? I seem to remember being in the bathroom a long time. And always, in the background, the murmur of a duet of voices. Maybe 20 minutes? And you say you talked about nothing?”

“It was a long time ago. I don’t recall so well anymore.”

“The general tone, then, what was the general tone? The main theme?”

“Why don’t you ask your son? He’s much younger, and likely possesses a much better memory than do I.”

“I did ask him. He didn’t want to talk about it. Curious, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that big an issue.”

“Ho! So you say.”

“Look, it’s simple. I know things. I have been studying things.”

“Who hasn’t?”

“Ah, but not the things I have studied. I may not have all the answers, but I do have some questions, questions not a lot of people have been asking. I think these questions don’t get asked because people are afraid that they might not like the answers. Maybe their view of things would have to change in uncomfortable ways.”

“Yeah, right.” Dean knew he sounded sarcastic. His only regret was that he thought he did not sound sarcastic enough.

“No, I’m serious.”

“I’m sure that you think you are.”

“No, please. Listen. I know things. I may not have all the answers, but I have more of them than most people.”

“Answers to what?”

“Name it. Give me a question. And, look, this is not a psychic party trick. Don’t ask me where the other orange sock is, that kind of thing. Ask me a real question.”

“OK, fine. What are chemtrails, then? I see them crisscrossing the sky here all the time. They aren’t jet plane contrails. They act quite differently. What are they all about? I saw a science fair project last spring, by a couple of bright high school kids, talking about these plumes left by unmarked jet planes. They said a small plane flying through the plumes took a sample. They found aluminum and barium and some other pulverized metals I don’t recall. What’s your answer to that?”

“Well, yes, that one, we’re still working on that. We have solved only part of it. Our working hypothesis is that some very powerful entities, including multinational corporations, are using taxpayer-funded programs to control the weather. Find out who benefits from aberrant weather and you will find a connection to your chemtrails. Some more exotic hypotheses speculate on biological warfare experiments, or mind control, even the culling of excess population. The interface with HAARP technology is getting a lot of attention from our research group these days. These hypotheses suggest that the geoengineers are testing its efficacy on nature and human communities.

“But, please, that was an easy question. None of this is secret unless one gets most information from the government or the mainstream news. The really important stuff is mostly censored from those sources of information. And they are the sources people trust. This is why so many of the more curious have turned to the Web for their information. It is because of this censoring. This is why Internet censorship will be a huge issue in 2012. What we need to know is all there, for those willing to look.”

“I did look. We had a team looking into this.”

“And you discovered?”

“Well, yes, some unanswered questions, but mostly a lot of paranoid guessing, a lot of conspiracy plots.”

“Then you looked in the wrong places.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about that.”

“I do.”

Dean had come to despise this old man. People who acted as if they had all the answers irritated him. Too often, the goal of their knowing seemed to be a calculated effort to make others feel less informed, if not downright stupid.

Dean was beginning to shiver. The sun had gone down. He wanted to go back to the warm house he loved. And he wanted to go back in time to the moment, maybe just a half-hour earlier, when he felt as good as he had for months. From the party, the joy, the humor he exchanged with Scilla. He wanted to go back to the simple pleasures of the reunion.

He had been the maestro at the podium, conducting Scilla’s magnum opus. It had been so good. They had absorbed the Cassidy Clan. She had been gracious. They were going to survive the elasticity of those parameters that she wanted fixed and predictable. She thought she needed that predictability to feel OK at the party. Yet the parameters were gone, and she still seemed OK. She was getting it, was surrendering to the spontaneous change of circumstances. He had hit a peak of exhilaration he had not known was available to him at a family Christmas party.

And now this.

He so wanted to return to that feeling, but that wasn’t possible. The only thing he could return to was the warm house. And the coming chaos caused by his secret scheming.

He motioned to Blake in the downhill direction, toward the house.

“Let’s go get warm. Hey, sorry to give you all this crap, but — ” As they began to descend Dean turned to Blake. “Let me see. How can I put this? Did you… did you leave something for my son before you left that morning?”

“Uh, yes, as a matter of fact, I did.”

“And what did you leave?”

“The code to my entire body of research.”

“The code to your…”

“Yes. In three wrapped containers in a little deerskin bag. I put it on the daybed.”

“On a piece of paper, with Harlan’s name calligraphed on it.”

“Yes, exactly. So he told you?”

“No. I took them.”

“You what?”

“I took the paper and the little deerskin bag.”

“Why? Why would you do that?”

“Oh, come on, Blake! Or should I call you ‘Uncle Burton?’”

“I don’t care, my name doesn’t matter. But why did you do that?”

“And why do you have to ask me that? You talked to my son for 20 minutes in the middle of the night about something that you both shrug off as no big deal but neither of you wants to talk about. OK? And I have no idea what designs you had, or may still have, on my son. And you wonder why I took control over this mysterious object and that artsy printing, written like a lover to the object of his affection? I cannot believe you are surprised at my efforts to protect my son.”

“Dean.”

“Blake. You stalked me. I was suspicious of your motives. I knew something wasn’t right. It smelled fishy. Let me ask you a question. Do you have children?”

“No.”

“No. Then there is no way for you to know what was going through my mind that night. And you likely will never know.”

They were nearly at the house.

“There is nothing in that bag that Harlan cannot handle. You must give it to him.”

“I no longer have it.”

“What? No! Don’t tell me that!”

“I just have told you that.”

“Then where – where is it?”

As they walked up the steps from the street to the porch, Jerry and Mick Cassidy came out the front door. They each had a cigarette in one hand and a disposable lighter in the other.

“So, uh, when’s your flight?” Dean asked Jerry.

“Ah, what a nightmare. They took the plane off line and cancelled the flight. Mechanical problems. I guess that’s better than a crash but, still, what a pain in the ass. They wanted to send me to Dallas/Ft. Worth to connect with a Denver flight, but I opted to try and get on a non-stop from SFO at 9:30. I gotta call them back in a bit and see if I’m on standby. Sucks, man. But what the hell — Merry Christmas, huh? Won’t be sayin’ that when I’m draggin’ my ass around the jobsite tomorrow. But, hey, what the hell!”

“So, uh, where’s Gene? Do you know?”

“Oh, he and your sister-in-law, that’s the doc’s wife, right? They went down to the table tennis party. I guess that was her dad? The old guy in the white shirt and tie? I guess he had some problems with something they were saying. Our brother, though, you know, Dean, he does talk some crazy shit. Secret government plots, and all that. He can’t hold back sometimes, you know? Hey, is it OK if we light up on the porch?”

“Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

Dean turned to Blake, who was one step behind him on the stairs.

“I’ll get your little deerskin bag back.”

“With the contents undisturbed?”

“Pretty sure, pretty sure. Not one hundred percent, but pretty sure. See, the guy I gave it to is here. Let’s go find out.”

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Improving Your Memory

95 Percent of Opinions Withheld

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Tagged as Blake, Dean, Jerry

by serialjones | February 13, 2012

Forbidden Truth #161: In Pieces

“My. What an extraordinary coincidence,” said Uncle Burton. “As we were walking up your street, I was thinking how familiar it looked to me. That was last April when I spent the night here, wasn’t it?”

Mitchell was one of those serious people whose brows knit together even when they are relaxed. Most jokes fall flat on this kind of person. When they do laugh, it is usually with incredulity, as in, “I cannot believe that someone would…”

Upon hearing his uncle recall, in front of Dean, that he had spent a night at 667 Regan earlier in the year, Mitchell released those eyebrows from their scowl and sent them wiggling.

“What? What did you say? I don’t believe this. You… you what?”

“Dean here was kind enough to feed me, and let me sleep on a daybed just inside the living room. They had a screen, with hard working elephants carrying logs.” Blake turned to Dean. “Am I right?”

Mitchell shook his head, as if to clear it.

“And why did you do that?” he asked Dean.

Dean could not answer his brother-in-law. He had been taken into another state of emotional being by Blake’s presence, his relationship to Mitchell, his declaration that this was all an extraordinary coincidence… Dean’s mind went off its rhythm like a mechanical thing in need of a tune-up.

As we know, Dean was a student of human behavior. But he reeled, at first defensively, fighting against the truth of what he was seeing and hearing, and then scrambling for ways to keep Blake from inflicting severe damage onto Dean’s family, and, by extension, onto Dean himself.

Does he shield Blake from Scilla? And how?

Harlan. How could he shield Harlan from Blake? Or Gene Cassidy? Candice? Even Staycee was downstairs.

The layers of secrets Dean had worked so hard to keep from his family could all be laid bare by one or two remarks from Blake before his first sip of Colfax mulled wine.

How could Dean protect the people he loved from the presence of this old man?

Clearly he couldn’t. It was impossible. He was done, and there was going to be a crisis. At that moment, everyone else at the party was enjoying its natural pleasures. But Dean had a strong foreboding that a good number of souls in that house would be witnessing some ugly revelations before the night was over.

Something within him was in free fall. It was the collapse of his willful efforts to control his son’s experience. And to manipulate his wife’s knowledge of Blake’s visit. Even to entangle Candice in his web of deceit.

He slumped into a posture of jellyfish weakness. Not only in his psyche, but in the very muscles that had been — just moments before — strong enough to lift and tote and stand solid. They now quivered, weak and flaccid.

Out of the collapse, though, there emerged a new idea. An insight.

He had seen in Blake’s eyes a look that told him something. The old man is lying. He had lied to him that night in April, and he was lying to him now. The look in the old man’s eyes was the look of a liar.

Maybe there was something Dean could do.

All of the chaos in his inner world churned while Dean hung up the coats and scarves of the newly arrived guests.

Artis had entered first. She was now in the living room, having her poignant reunion moment with Flo and Hank. Mitchell followed reluctantly, glancing back at Uncle Burton and Dean, his eyebrows back in their comfort zone of tight little fleshy visors. To Mitchell’s back, Dean said, “The kids are all downstairs, if you want to say ‘hi.’”

Blake brushed by Dean and said, “My, my, what a coincidence. I think I’ll say ‘hi’ to Harlan. You say he’s downstairs? Is that the door straight ahead there?”

“Well, yes, but — could I ask you something first?”

“Sure, sure. It’s Dean, isn’t it?”

“Dean. Yeah.”

“And…?”

“Not here in the hall. Let’s go outside.”

Dean took Blake’s coat, still warm from his body heat, from the hanger in the hall closet and gave it to him. He pulled out his own polartec jacket and motioned for the old man to go out the front door.

“Let’s take a walk, shall we?” Dean opened the door.

“I’m a little winded. We had to walk a ways uphill from the parking place. Lot of hills here.”

“Just a little walk. Let’s take a look at the city. There’s a nice vantage a couple blocks up the hill. We’ll go slow.”

They descended the stairs and began to walk slowly up Regan Street.

“First, let me say, Merry Christmas,” Dean began. “You are always welcome at our house.”

“Thank you.”

“But I need to tell you. I know this is no coincidence.”

“Oh, but the synchronicities. Remember that coffee house, the one near the hospice where we went the night I met you –”

“The JavaPort –”

“Right, right. Didn’t we talk about the strangeness of synchronicities that night?”

“Yes. All fine and good. But that doesn’t mean that my meeting you on the porch of the hospice was an accident, does it? I know it wasn’t. What were you up to that night? You weren’t just looking for accounts of near death experiences, were you?”

“But I was.”

“OK, maybe, but not only that. There was something else. What was it?”

Blake continued to protest that it was all pure coincidence. But Dean could see, especially as they reached the top of the hill and the old man was gasping for breath, that his resistance was crumbling.

“Wait – Sorry. Could… we… stop? Smoked too much… cheap hash… in my 20s… doing the expat thing in Marrakech. And the heart… it’s racing… out of control. Whoa.”

Dean felt no remorse for his proposed route for the colloquy, even as difficult as it was for the senior in putative poor health. Dean doubted most everything Blake had told him.

As the old guy gasped for breath, he pressed his hand flat to his chest. He assured Dean that he just needed a moment.

This Dean believed. He could tell that Blake’s state of physiological compromise, induced by the walk up the steep hill, was real. There was no spare energy to carry on a ruse. If the truth was going to come out, it would come out here.

“What were you really doing on the steps of the Karma Light Fellowship Hospice that night? What was that all about? You were waiting for me, weren’t you? You stalked me, didn’t you?”

“It was all for a good cause. Man, please let me catch my breath. I am very thirsty. You didn’t bring water, did you?”

Shiny white, worm-like little deposits of foamy saliva had collected at the corners of Blake’s mouth. Dean felt for the old guy, but he was not done with him.

“We’ll go back to the house real soon and I’ll pour you a nice tall glass of mineral water, bubbly or plain. But first, you tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s for a good cause. I, I…” Blake could not go on.

He paused, took several deep inhalations that revived him somewhat. A few more. He stood up straighter then, and stared out in the distance at the city’s lights twinkling in the wintery air. He took another deep breath and began to speak.

“I know some things. I am not going to live a whole lot longer. That was no lie. I do have a bad heart. Congenital. And, also, I put it through a fair amount of dietary abuse. And a lot of stress. A young woman even broke it in pieces once, more my fault than hers, probably. This old ticker’s been used. But I do know a lot.”

“About what? This is the age of information, man. It used to be when some old person died, a library was said to go up in flames. But not anymore. We all know a lot. Sorry, Blake, but I am not convinced that what you know justifies you stalking me and my family. My boy was just 14 years old when you spent the night here.”

“What I know is what is not crap. Information? There is too much information, Dean. We are living in a vast river of information. But it’s like the American River. You know that place? Where gold was discovered in 1848? You can stick your head into that river and you will be amazed at the tiny flecks of golden light that float in that body of water. Pyrite. Fool’s gold.

“Well, I can separate out the fool’s gold from the real gold in the information river we swim in nearly every day of our lives. It is harder than determining what’s real gold in the American River. Anyone can learn that in less than an hour. But I have done the real sorting. Truths that are forbidden to us are available to us, if we know where to look for them. But this could change, and very soon. The internet itself could be censored. Soon. But, while we still have access to the truth of what is going on, we need to know where to look. Certainly you know this.

“Many people ask the right questions but do not pursue the answers to their satisfaction. Like, why does U.S. foreign policy remain largely the same whether it is a Bush or a Clinton or or an Obama who is president? I know why. And why have ranchers reported over 100,000 livestock mutilations, performed with a surgical precision unknown to our species? And why is none of this in the mainstream news? I know the answer to that one, too. I know about past lives, about the origins and manipulations of consciousness. I know a lot. I have separated the speakers of truth from the propagandists. The fool’s gold from the treasures. And, in the event the web becomes censored, controlled by what they’re calling the 1% these days, I am going to ensure that the research goes on.

“Soon, I believe, I am going to have my full death experience. I am not afraid of it. In many ways, I look forward to it. But I have one last mission. I must find someone very young to whom I can teach the means of discernment, how to differentiate the lies and propaganda from the truth. And to preserve the most indicting facts that tell the truth of the world that we live in, and who controls it. And their plans.

“I have been on a quest to find this person. One day, a few years ago, I was at a family reunion in the Santa Cruz Mountains, near Mt. Hermon. It was a barbecue, a picnic. Mitchell and Artis were extolling the talents of your son. They both said they thought he might be one of those highly intelligent kids who could be fast-tracked through a first-rate college before he was 17, if his parents pushed it. A prodigious intellect. Open-minded, too. With a bit of the rebel’s temperament, I gathered, from hearing them describe him.

“It was then that I knew Harlan had been chosen to be my successor, to share what I know. Not just what I know, but my technique, my pyrite-detector and my gold detector, if you will. Harlan Colfax is the young man who will carry on when I am gone. I sought him out, and found out about his family and made some contact with him.

“So, I ask you, Mr. Dean Colfax, was that such a bad thing I did?”

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Marrakech, Past and Present

How to Start a War

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by serialjones | February 10, 2012

Forbidden Truth #160: Enough Chairs

Darryl’s assessment of Dean was reasoned and detached, as objective in observing his own family as one could hope from a man whose adult life has been devoted to the scientific method.

He watched as Dean moved between kitchen and dining room with a delighted buoyancy. He brought platter after platter, bowls and baskets out to the dining room table, now positioned against a wall to serve as the buffet. And to a side table, a full punch bowl and a tin tub from Mexico filled with bottles of beer and sparkling cider, nestled into party ice. Then several bottles of wine.

Scilla had told Darryl that they chose to put out paper plates for the food, but that they had rented glass stemware for the wine. Every three-piece set of flatware they owned, stainless and silver, the kids had bundled with a paper napkin and put in a wide basket. It was as if the event were catered. Dean and Scilla told Darryl that if all worked out, they would not have to hustle into a fork-washing chore in mid-party.

“Well, leave that to me. As the grandfather, I should have the clout to set the two kids at work on that task if a need arises.”

Yes, Dad, we will see.

Before he had delivered everything to the table, Dean brought a scotch on the rocks for Darryl, perfect, exactly the way the older man prefered it. No mulled wine, no punch, no bottled beer for Darryl.

When Dean was finished with the dining room, he brought five CDs to the stereo. He told Darryl he had burned them with Christmas music he had found online, obscure pieces like Spike Jones’ “Barnyard Christmas,” with some oldies grooved so deep in the collective memory that they would never again sound fresh, like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” The Jackson Five’s “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus” was bundled with scores of other tunes Dean had found, all of them secular Christmas songs. In a quiet voice, he told Darryl that the only condition Scilla had insisted upon when Dean proposed the mix was that none of the songs be religious.

He threw all five in the CD changer and pressed shuffle.

“We’ll let that robot be our deejay for the party.”

Dean was having a fine time. He liked the way his father-in looked at him as he tipped his scotch in a toast to the newly cherished son-in-law.

Soon the place was filling up. His own dad and Dolores were settled in, Scott and Hazel had just arrived. This was all going to be great fun.

As he moved about in his bustle of obligations, he saw that Flo and Darryl avoided eye contact and had selected chairs as far from each other as they could be. Dean enjoyed playing with the trope that he was the conductor for his wife’s magnum opus. In this role, he was confident that he had the power to mix Darryl and Flo together, to generate interaction between them, if he manipulated things only slightly. But he decided to leave them alone. Small steps.

The initial reunion had gone splendidly. Tears, hugs, some reconciling efforts, but in the ebbing of those emotional waters, the old faultlines were once again exposed.

Just as well to leave them apart.

Scilla pulled him into the kitchen at one point. She was quite troubled. She liked the party, but it had evolved in ways that she had not planned for. Dean told her not to worry, to surrender to it if she could. She gave him one of her impassive expressions, the lifeless face dumbed into a blank stare. He gently repeated his suggestion. His own conducting was going well, but the composer was not pleased with her creation. Someone had snuck into her study and messed with the composition.

“What is the problem, Scilla, other than that the party does not have the shape that you expected it to?”

Scilla shuffled deeper into her dumbfounded state. Dean pitied her. She wanted to complain about something but could find nothing till she came up with: ”There won’t be enough chairs. Or paper plates.”

Dean countered her. “Mitchell and Artis are running late. He just called, mostly wanting to know if Dewey and Josh and Josefina were here. I told him they were, not to worry, no underage drinking and all that. His uncle still needed to shower. Barry and Shiloh just told me that they’re heading out soon, going to their friends Mark and Chet’s place in the Castro for a drink before it gets too late. That frees up a few chairs. Even if the neighbors are still here when Mitchell and Artis and the uncle arrive, it’s only, let me see, seven, nine…”

“Dean, what good does it do to have a place for someone to sit if there’s no food for them to eat?”

“There’s plenty of food. And not everyone’s here for dinner.”

“And what if the Cassidys come? How many will that add?”

“Scilla, calm down, OK? It’s a wonderful party. Open your eyes. You’ve pulled off a miracle. The Reunion. I did not believe it was a good idea. But it was a wonderful idea. It is a wonderful party. All you need to do is get out of your own way with all this pessimism and let it happen.”

Scilla sighed and turned to leave the kitchen when she nearly bumped into Scott, who carried an unopened bottle of beer.

“Hey, oops! Sorry. You got an opener, man?” he asked Dean.

“There should be a church key tied to the tub handle where you got that beer. But here.” Dean handed him a corkscrew with a bottle opener in the handle. Pfft.

Scilla took her worried face out of the kitchen and back into the party. Dean was leaving to join her when the phone rang.

“Dean, man!”

“Hey, Gene, Merry Christmas!”

“And to you.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“So, hey, guess what? We’re on 19th Avenue and Jerry just checked his flight. It’s delayed, they think about two hours, so we’ve got some time to kill. Could we take you up on that offer and swing by?”

“Uh, yeah, hey, love to have you. You guys hungry?”

“Naw. We been eating leftovers since we got up. But I will have a glass with you if you’re in. We got a crowd here, though. Is that still OK?”

“Yeah, sure, of course. So who’s with you?”

“My two brothers, my mom, Maggie, her mom. Enough for a basketball team plus a sub.”

“Parking is pretty sucky. You may have to do Sanchez.”

“No prob. We’ll figure it out. It’s a holy day. Hail Mary, full of Grace, help us find a parking place. Uh-oh, scowls from my mother and my mother-in-law for that one. Still, I betcha it works. See ya soon.”

Dean took one of the tall IPAs and the corkscrew with the church key in the handle and popped the top. It was the first alcohol, other than a few tasting-sips of mulled wine, that he had consumed that day. There had been no need. He was buzzed enough on the house full of people that he had not thought of alcohol.

But now he had to tell Scilla that the party was about to grow by another half dozen, and with the Cassidys, some of her least favorite people in their social world.

He found her in the dining room and gently led her back toward the kitchen, murmuring the news of the impending arrival. When he told her, she stopped in her tracks and gave him a look he had never seen in her before. It was surrender, that which he had urged her to adopt just moments before in the kitchen, but it was not the go-with-the-day’s-happenstances surrender that he had intended.

It was more like a capitulation to a bitter fact about her husband’s machinations that, if Dean could articulate it, would go something like I knew that you were going to ruin my Christmas party. I knew there was no way I could stop you. You have been out to defeat the whole project from the moment I proposed it last summer.

“Scilla. Stop. It’s going to be OK. Gene’s brother’s flight is late. They’ve already eaten, they’ll come by for an hour or so and be on their way. Please don’t give me that look.”

“What look is that, Dean? What look do you think you see?”

He did not answer her.

Dean was surprised then, with how gracious she appeared when Gene’s family arrived. She had never met his two brothers, and she had only seen Mary and Paula, his mother and mother-in-law, in passing, perhaps two or three times. Scilla welcomed them at the door, took their coats, led them to the living room.

There were plenty of chairs. Josh and Dewey and Josefina had joined Harlan and Candice and their guests downstairs in the garage, where they were playing table tennis and listening to non-Christmas music on the family’s portable CD player. There were enough chairs upstairs for the Cassidy clan. In fact, all the chairs between Flo and Darryl had been empty until the Cassidys came in and filled them.

Dean took requests and returned presently with glasses of wine, bottles of beer and mineral water. The Cassidy invasion had been absorbed. All was well.

Flo and Gene found themselves sitting next to one another.

“Excuse me, your name is…?” she asked him.

“Gene. Gene Cassidy.”

A look of recognition flashed over her face. “Oh, you’re supposed to be… I’m supposed to have… some things in common with you?”

“Really? Are you a textbook editor, too?”

“No, oh, no.”

“Didn’t think so; kidding you.”

Flo chuckled. “Scilla says…” She made a point of not getting eye contact with her father. She lowered her voice and tilted her head closer to Gene’s ear. “Scilla says you have… shall we say, an open mind about some things… like 9/11?”

“Yup. I can definitely go on that jag.”

Dean had just handed out the last glass of wine when the doorbell rang.

When he opened it, Mitchell and Artis, in unison, cried out, “Merry Christmas!”

Then Mitchell stepped into the house and gestured behind him to a figure on the porch. ”Dean, this is my uncle, Burton Cartfaler.”

Dean stepped back. He had to get his bearings. For a moment, he thought some aberrant neural current was distorting his perceptions of Mitchell’s uncle. Had he drunk that IPA too quickly? Then he realized his perceptions were sound, knew this by the look of recognition in the uncle’s eyes as he reached out his hand to shake Dean’s extended palm, with a greeting of “Merry Christmas.”

It was a shared recognition. Dean knew this man. He wanted to retreat but there was no place to go. He dropped his hand. His back banged up against the wall.

“Blake!”

Mitchell turned to his uncle. “You know my brother-in-law? And I thought you stopped using that name years ago? Or is that just what you told us? What’s going on here?”

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Design the Perfect Party Space

Exhibition Table Tennis

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Tagged as Artis, Blake, Darryl, Dean, Flo, Gene, Mary, Mitchell, Paula, Priscilla

by serialjones | July 29, 2011

Forbidden Truth #20: Foreign Cinema

It is time to tell you about the conversation Dean had with Blake, the guy he met that Wednesday night on the hospice steps.

Dean, you may recall, stumbled leaving his volunteer job that night, stumbled first over the old man, and again with the inquiry about near-death experiences.

Dean answered the old man with stoic silence. He bent slightly, sucked in his lips and looked at the guy. The grey beard was streaked black, trimmed close. His silver hair neat above his ears. Well-groomed.

He may be indigent, thought Dean, but he has been staying somewhere with food and plumbing.

“You know something about this, don’t you?” he said into Dean’s silence. “You have a few questions about this, don’t you? Been there? Car wreck? Could be heart attack, getting to that age. You go through the tunnel, too?”

“No. But I sort of know someone who did. You had one?”

“Yes.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee or tea? There’s a place near here.”

“I would like to take you up on that cup but I’m afraid I cannot. I should not spend any more time out and around till I have figured out where I am sleeping tonight.”

Dean then made the hospitality offer, at that point, his boldest act of assertion against Scilla’s control.

Less dramatic on the surface, but perhaps of greater importance in the saga of the Colfax family of Regan Street, was what Blake and Dean talked about once they settled into their seats at JavaPort, most of which Dean excluded from his account to Scilla.

Dean recounted the story about Rory McGinnis and the green banana. Blake was attentive, studious. Then Blake told of his own, similar, almost-post-life journey during his second heart attack.

Dean drank in every detail. Then his face darkened with the reality that, aside from a handful of people, he had to live alone with these new notions. He said as much to the old man.

“Ah, but open up your eyes. This is already changing. Either that or we, that is, myself and the dozen or so people I live with in New Mexico — my fellow researchers, as I call them — are crazy. Isn’t that the way it is in scientific discovery? We never know who’s the genius and who’s the crazy till later. I mean, we may all die not knowing if we were crazy or onto something.

“But this is how we see it: we are leaving the mechanistic universe. That old story-line goes something like, ‘The material plane is all that exists, there is no soul, we are living meat hanging on animated bones while we burn off metabolism, then we die into an empty void…’ This is the old paradigm. It is shifting. Repressed facts are coming out.”

The old man’s face smiled and the neatly cropped beard opened with the grin.

Dean showed interest but the confidence of the guy was starting to irritate.

“OK. Let’s say you and your crew are not crazy. That you are onto something, OK? Maybe a few thousand people are going to buy this paradigm shift, as you call it. That is not major change, man. You still got all the scientists on one hand, and the fundamentalist and casual Christians who all still believe in heaven and hell on the other, not to mention all the other religions.

“What you are talking about is a small group of people sharing a belief system. OK, maybe you are into a cutting-edge thing. I don’t know. But that is not a paradigm shift.”

The old man sipped his drink and grinned at Dean. Dean filled the silence he had created by continuing.

“What if I told you I did not know anyone who held that viewpoint? Doesn’t that make you feel you may be hoping for something rather than describing it? I mean, I know a lot of people, some of them, like my friends Gene and Maggie, long story there, have kind of strange ideas about political conspiracies, nine-eleven, JFK, you know, and they are into astrology and the tarot, kind of boho, you might say, but I don’t think they see any hopes for some large-scale shift of collective thinking. I mean, you know?”

The old man did not seem to take offense at Dean calling him on his idealism. He stared into his drink and took another sip with a serious look on his face that returned to one of bemusement as he withdrew the lip of the cup and set it down before replying.

“But you seem downright blasé about what happened to us tonight. If you were not already living out this sort of thing you would call it a miracle. That blasé attitude can only hold if you have already embraced something other than a random, chancy, mechanical cosmos.

“Think about it. I went out looking for two things tonight, a place to stay and an opportunity to do research on the near-death experience. I got them both, and more conversation than I bargained for. This is chance? Yet you do not show any amazement at what has happened. And not just to me. By your own admission, you sought someone you could talk about this to. These two friends of yours, Gene and, what was it?”

“Maggie. Former girlfriend, now one of my best friends. And, yeah, Gene, her husband. They would be perfect to talk to about this stuff but they live in Marin. I don’t see them as much as I’d like.”

“So you have been walking around with this need, this request, though it felt more like a frustrated yearning, right?”

“True, that.”

“And you trip over me…? Quick, run the odds on each of us wanting the same thing and you trip over me? OK, I went to a hospice and the door was locked and I felt tired, the old ticker gets to racing at times, so I sat on the porch and out you come. That’s the causal rap. But what are the odds? Astronomical. You may not know it, but you are living out a reality different from the one you present to your conscious mind and to most everyone you know.”

Busted. Dean, nonplussed, went receptive. Exploiting this attention, the philosopher rowed them into deeper water.

But soon, Dean sat up, disenchanted. He wondered if he had made a mistake. He found himself regretting his impulsive hospitality, as his new friend rolled on about extraterrestrial aliens working up plots between the governments of our planet. He spoke as if these e.t.s were commonly accepted figures, like free agents for sports teams.

The old guy recognized the look on Dean’s face. He touched his lips with his napkin. The beard bristled with a wince of embarrassment. Dean was somewhat relieved to see this.

“One minute,” said the old man. A hand, darkened with liver spots and wormy veins, reached into the backpack, fumbled around for a moment and came out in a tight fist. The fist went under the table. He kept from Dean’s view whatever it was he held there. One hand then pulled reading glasses from a shirt pocket, pinched them on the bridge and shook them till the temples loosened. Lenses secured, the old face bent down and looked at what appeared from Dean’s angle to be a page creased with quarter-inch folds.

“Do you have something to write with?”

Dean flipped open the manbag and grabbed a pad and pen.

“Neal Greenman. No. Grossman. Neal Grossman.” The beard looked up. “Sometimes I can’t read my own handwriting.”

Then the beard dipped back down to the page held below the table top.

“Yeah, Grossman, Neal Grossman. He wrote an academic paper, something to convince you educated folks about some things. It’s called, let me see, uh, ‘On Materialism as Science Dogma.’

“Read that pup. See what it does. Google it, print it up if you like, or shoot some links around the blogosphere. Friends, co-workers, whoever. I mean, why not? If you like it, that is.”

* * * * *

Dean replayed the conversation while sitting in the living room on the day bed where Blake had slept. Alone in the house on a Saturday afternoon in early May, good time to sweep and mop the kitchen, crank up the soundtrack, maybe Graham Parsons, and get down to it. But that conversation swam back into his mind, accompanied by a mild nausea around the deerskin bag he had not given his son.

Then the phone rang. Scilla. She was giddy with enthusiasm. Flory Nornwasser had texted her. She has a new man in her life! Would we be free for dinner at Dosa next Saturday? Or maybe Foreign Cinema? Could Dean check their current menu?

Flory Nornwasser. Anxiety spikes.

“Oh, and guess what I found out? You know Harlan’s science fair project? You won’t believe this. He is doing it on UFOs! You must talk him out of this. Promise me?”

Anxiety on anxiety! Did that old man corrupt my son?

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Tagged as Blake, Dean, Flory, Harlan, Priscilla

by serialjones | July 9, 2011

Forbidden Truth #5: Hardworking Elephants

Mr. Lizard pulsed its turgid vessels as if it had a separate heart. This was not garden-variety horniness. Oh, sure, Dean had played around in his boxers while he ruminated, and, sure, he had gotten farther along than he had intended, and this was not the first time this had happened. But something that Scilla had said about her unhappy dinner party at Casa di Barbolo had gone right down to Mr. Lizard and put a little more heat into that tumescent organ: Flory Nornwasser thought Dean was HOT. Or so she said after guzzling merlot.

Dean firmly put his fingers around Mr. Lizard’s neck. Then he put them up to his lips and spat on them and returned to his pet till his boxers were sticky with ejecta. Victory and foolishness combined.

Victory in that he had provoked release without rocking the bed. He had learned to do this after suffering through three or four awkward inquisitions on the subject of masturbation. Scilla called it “soft-core infidelity.” His subsequent efforts were clandestine and not at first successful. Oh, they weren’t entirely unsuccessful, in that she thought she had exacted obedience after the last of the inquisitions. But his efforts were unsuccessful in that they had awakened her a few times. Sitting upright, startled, she shook him, saying, “Mbake uph! Mbake uph! The Bev’s shdaking, I feel an eartsquake!”

After years sleeping with Scilla, he could understand bite-guard speech. He went along with her alarm, complied with her request that he look in the Chronicle a few days later for the earthquake report that never appeared.

No false temblors rocked the mattress and soon Mr. Lizard coughed up the hot semen, helped by the recent memory of Flory Nornwasser at a party, on a sofa with Dean, her unexpected interest in the unnerving near-death experience Bert Quant had told him about over coffee at the JavaPort. The green banana and the mobility of the soul. (Patience, good readers, we will explain this later.)

As Dean spoke, Flory had nodded, opened her little pretty mouth a few times to inhale for speech, waiting for him to pause. Lips the color of Red Hots. When she did find an opening, she bent over and touched his forearm as she released her words. Modestly dressed but with the top two buttons of her cobalt silk blouse undone, he could see the suggestive curve of both her breasts, framed at the top by a black pearl necklace and at the edges by fine lace that suggested a nineteenth century widow ready to receive visitors. Flory and Steve’s divorce had been dramatic, with serial deceits and, finally, an arrest for drug use in a motor vehicle before the breakup settled into the banality of property distribution and honest grief that, for Flory anyway, soon morphed into relief. It appeared that she was ready to move on.

“I believe there is a soul and I believe it survives our death,” she said in a whisper before removing her hand from Dean’s forearm. The recall of those words, accompanied as they were with the soft, mostly chaste touch, more than the lace-framed little breasts, warmed Dean to his climax, though the breasts, the pretty little mouth, were not insignificant.

And no faux earthquake.

The glow of victory led to a problem of foolishness as Dean had now to contend with the emission. He rose and walked awkwardly to the bathroom while the swamp inside his drawers migrated down his legs with a devilish tickle. It was only a few broad steps, open the door and into the bathroom connected to their bedroom. Squeeze the handle of the door, pull it tight, turn the knob to secure the pin, privacy achieved. He turned on the light and sighed. He dug around the hamper, found a pair of drawers.

“Dessie, man, I am not there yet,” Dean said to himself as he sat on the john and played janitor to his waistline.

Then he heard footsteps coming down the stairs. One of the kids was likely heading for the parents’ bathroom. The one between their bedrooms upstairs must be occupied by the other kid. This happened two or three times a year. Dean leaned over and scooched upon his knees and rose up high enough to turn the lock at the center of the door knob so its wings were horizontal.

The stocking feet stand outside the bathroom, the hand on the knob meets resistance from the secured lock. Silence. The feet pad away.

But wait. They don’t go back upstairs. They turn toward the living room. There are voices, the cracking voice of the fourteen-year-old Harlan and the rough tenor of a joyous hard life lived by the odd man who was bedded down on the daybed behind the Japanese folding screens of grey elephants bearing logs between their tusks and trunks, obedient to the workers under hard jungle hats who poked sticks at them.

Dean strained to listen but he could not make out one word of the conversation. Only the music of their dialogue. He put on the dry boxers, unlocked the door that faced the stairwell and slipped back into bed.

But now the doubts crept in. Scilla, had she been right? Was Harlan being seduced? How could a father go out there in his drawers and tell them to stop talking? Why was the boy not going to the bathroom? He must have noticed the bathroom light was out, heard the door bump in its frame as its opposite that led to the parents’ bedroom opened and closed. Was the old man seducing him?

Harlan had charisma. His face glowed around eyes seductive and intense. His forehead was like Dean’s, the straight, dark brown hair and full lips were from Scilla, he had Grandpa’s thick, curly lashes, Grandma’s dad’s pointed chin, Grandad’s open lobes, and so on. But these were mostly, except for Scilla’s dad, unstriking, even plain, people. In Harlan, these traits conferred a masculine beauty. Harlan did not care about this. He was a very bright young man who, throughout his life, would be more interested in the pursuit of truth than in parties, glamour, social networks. He had not yet realized that his good looks would cause many people to overlook his intellect. No one could predict that his early teen freshness, a kind of charisma many of us once evinced, would mature into a gorgeous man. His looks would be envied. Yet they worked as an impediment that frustrated his mission to bust open secrets and bare the truth.

But, lest we get ahead of ourselves, let us return to the moment.

Dean lay paralyzed in his thoughts. The boy will attract predators. Poor vulnerable kid. He begs for more independence while he looks so vulnerable.

The voices. One cracked from the froggy bridge between kid and unambiguous teen, while the other voice, not mellow and saintly as it had sounded over the course of the evening, now beguiled its listener with self-centered purpose.

Dean could not sleep. Nor could he estimate how long he lay there pondering the dangers. He wanted Scilla’s advice and then fell into depression thinking this crushed his new victory. He wanted to awaken her, tap her intelligence, make loud conversation with her to spook the molester. He had no idea what time it was when he heard a strong, steady piss stream in their toilet, a gurgle of wash water in the sink, the door out to the stairwell opened and closed, then footsteps disappearing up the stairs.

Dean napped, suspended above, then just below, waking consciousness. He rose before the alarm, slipped into his sweatpants and went out to have a friendly chat with Blake. His plan was to “accidentally” wake the guest as he went about getting coffee going. Bring him a cup as a goodwill offering, sit with him, take a reading.

But when he stepped around the screen with its hardworking elephants, the bed was made and Blake and his pack were gone. On the pile of neatly folded bedclothes was a small, dark brown leather bag. It rested on a piece of paper with “Harlan Colfax” neatly calligraphed. Dean took the sheet of paper and the bag and went back into the bedroom.

Scilla awoke as the alarm went off. She pushed the button that cut the uh-uh-uh-uh of annoying beeps. Dean pulled open the bottom drawer of his dresser and shoved the sheet of paper and bag to the back. He piled undershorts over it, took one pair, stood up, looked at Scilla as she removed the sleep mask, pulled out the bite guard, and set it in the little half-oval case on her bedside table. She pulled out the earplugs and looked up at her husband.

“You want first shower?” he asked, holding the boxers up.

“No. Go ahead. I’m fine.”

She lay back down and shut her eyes. The new day at 667 Regan Street kicked into action.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

What is Insomnia?

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Tagged as Blake, Dean, deerskin-bag, Flory, Harlan

by serialjones | July 7, 2011

Forbidden Truth #3: Not Tonight

It was no comfort to Dean that he had predicted his wife’s response to the stranger. Scilla smoldered in silence as if cued. She left Dean to warm up Tuesday night’s leftovers, a spicy Cajun shrimp pasta she thought had turned out rather nice. She went into the living room and tried to engage with Candice about her dance rehearsal. The daughter was cranky and snappy at her mom.

Dean could hear the tone from the kitchen, though not the words. Seemed that Scilla’s pique had rubbed off on the daughter. All of it, too predictable.

After dinner, Dean and Blake cleared the kitchen table and joined them in the living room. Priscilla seemed to want to find something forbidden, or at the very least sinister, in the guest. She seemed to hold it against Dean that, in fact, Blake was turning out to be no problem.

He was polite and grateful. He smiled tight-lipped to conceal the gaps in his teeth. While they talked around some safe subjects, Harlan came home, was introduced, shot a quick, curious glance at his parents. The kids hung in the living room, out of curiosity, not habit. Straight to their rooms upstairs for some study before the lights went out was the household norm.

To everyone’s relief, the guest emitted no odors that would suggest poor bladder or sphincter control. In the warm, lighted house, his clothes looked fresh, his wool shirt even smelled new. Dean saw himself, an older version, in the way Blake seemed to want to know everyone, including the kids, without taking creepy liberties.

Dean had just settled into bed, his head caressed by the soft pillow. He was relieved to think there would be no quarrel because Blake and Scilla had gotten along well, seemed genuinely to like one another. He made her feel smart and even witty, no small feat.

Dean closed his eyes and felt a smile settle over him. He listened to the familiar sounds as Scilla put on moisturizer and got into bed and put her sleep mask and earplugs and bite guard in a little pile on her lap.

“You’re not asleep, I hope.”

“Mmm. No. Resting.”

“We need to talk, Dean. Now.”

Dean opened his eyes and slid up against the headboard.

“What?”

“You know what. I don’t appreciate what you did tonight. What is wrong with you? You do not do this kind of thing. Or you didn’t.”

Dean flushed with anger and defensiveness. Despite his mental preparations he could think of nothing to say.

“What, you picked this guy up on the street? He’s homeless, isn’t that what you said? You just started to talk to a homeless guy sprawled on some porch, all set to die? And then you invite him to our home? A guy who could have been a pedophile? A serial murderer?”

Dean’s rehearsal on the way home became worthless. Just as well that he had not had more time to waste on it. He did see an opportunity though. He knew he was growing in new ways. He knew he had to challenge his wife’s dominance over him, had to scramble the old game board. But he did not know how to proceed at this moment as he leaned against the headboard.

He had found a new emotional distance from her attempt to lambaste him. Triumph, a tiny one, but still. Out of this detachment a thought exploded in him. He got it. He detected something he likely would have overlooked had he surrendered and fallen defensive at her harangue. Something had not gone well at the dinner party with Scilla’s ex-co-workers.

“Well, we seem to be safe. Do you disagree?”

“That’s not the point.”

“I have another question for you. How was the dinner at… where did you go?”

“Casa di Barbolo. Dreadful place but, you know, it is what it is. It was mostly awful. They all wanted my opinion of Fukushima. They sneered at me. The derision, the scorn! …I don’t know why they include me in these parties. I think they all hate me. Or most of them. Maybe not Vera and Flory. But she, Flory, guess what she said. She downed a glass of merlot in two gulps, filled her glass, then she sat there with a stupid smile on her face. Then she touches my arm like she’s my confidante and she says, ‘Your man, he is sooo hot!’ Can you believe it? What do you say to that? I mean, is that supposed to be a compliment? If I thought you were attracted to her, why, I would have gotten up and left.

“And then the teasing. Why am I still keen on nuclear energy? Why would I want to go back into that field now that this has happened? Oh, Dean, it was awful. And the food sucks. And the plates. I think they’re plastic. I don’t know why I went. And then I come home to a cold, dark house and some homeless bum. Not one of my better days, if you want the truth.”

Dean felt for his wife. Social events were not her strong suit. Nuclear engineering was. He pitied her. She was dependent on this circle of former co-workers and this was clearly a setback. He stroked her arm. She tapped the top of his hand to express a tepid gratitude, tepid because she was not finished with the homeless houseguest.

“So, do I have to worry now about you befriending derelicts?”

“He’s not a derelict. Come on, Scilla, you know me better than that.”

“Knew you, you mean. This is not how we do things, Dean. Admit it. You never would have invited anyone, not my sister, not your brother, even, to our house without consulting me first. A homeless guy? And what is this ‘research’ he is working on?”

“OK, first the homeless part. He told me he had recently lost his apartment while he was in New Mexico. A dirt truck crashed into the building when the brakes failed. The police put up yellow tape but someone broke in and took his things. All he owns is what was in the backpack he had. Spent a month with a friend, sleeping on the couch till the guy fell in love and wanted his new girlfriend to move in. He has no money. All of it was hidden in the furniture that was stolen. He’s going to hitchhike back to these people he knows in New Mexico, his fellow researchers.

“He says he’s on a quest, to put the sum total of his research into the hands of a worthy recipient. ”A young heir.” He will know when he finds him. Or her, he says. He told me he did not want to bother me anymore. We were outside the Fellowship. He shook my hand, turned to walk away, tightening his backpack by pulling the straps as he bounced up and down to get it balanced right. It was cold, the wind was bitter tonight. So I offered to take him to JavaPort for a hot beverage.”

A little flakey with the truth but Dean could live with that version. Maybe that rehearsal had helped after all.

“What does he research?”

He said, ‘Paradigm shift. Hope your family’s ready for the paradigm shift.’”

“Paradigm shift? Oh, what a crock.”

“There’s more. I asked him about this death thing. If he was dying, sitting on the porch of a hospice with a diseased heart, wouldn’t it be dangerous to hitchhike to New Mexico? ‘I am not dead yet,’ he said, laughing. He is heading out early tomorrow. All went well, did it not? Hey, give me some credit.”

Scilla was unaccustomed to doling out credit to Dean, especially for asinine decisions like this. Her response? She put on her mask and earplugs, and held her bite guard in front of her mouth, now opened with indecision. Would she respond or insert the molded plastic? She spoke, as if into a handheld microphone.

“It was a really bad idea. I do not like it a bit. It’s not about him. It’s about this challenging me, this showing me up lately. And I hate to hear you use the word ‘Fellowship’. Anything you do with this outfit hits me like an affront. Including that homeless guy, in spite of who he turned out to be.”

Dean took a breath to respond but the earplugs were in, the mask was on, the guard in place. All the communicating orifices in the head were stopped up by their respective sleep aids. His hand caressed her leg, rubbed inside her thigh, partly in affection, partly exploration: might the little quarrel’s residual tension be released with a quick episode of lovemaking? The couple was adroit at the expedient little screw. But her hand gripped his fingers firmly and held them. They almost hurt. Then she let go.

Dean knew this signal, had received it hundreds of times: not tonight, my love, not tonight.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Nuclear Power after Fukushima

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