Dear Readers of Astralreflections,

Last week this blog was shut down by someone. A good guy in Toronto, John Black, repaired it. The next day, it was not only shut down, but obliterated. John could do nothing.

So I phoned Blue Host, who told me to phone Sitelock who only the day before had emailed to tell me my security subscription was over and I was vulnerable to attacks. The very next day the website disappeared. I wonder who did that?

Anyway, there is no column for last week or this week.

This is the third time in a year the Astralreflections bloc has been shut down. Every time you shut down, you lose readers, so it’s very disheartening even when you do repair it.

It’s almost like a little clip from God, saying OK get out, it’s time. I’ve written this column since 1980, I’m 78, and it’s time to explore.

I don’t know if I will continue it. My biggest regret in shutting down: for the past year I’ve been working with my Chinese counterpart, Chengxi in Beijing,  to create an A-to-Z course of astrology lessons. We have completed all the input/text, but are only halfway through editing the video, of which there must be about 100 hours. Shutting the blog down would certainly reduce the number of people who might hear of or read about and join the lessons. I’ll give you further updates on this.

For now, I am publishing this week’s blog for no other reason than to finish inserting the rest of my 1969 story.  It’s below this message.

If you want to have the entire book, email me at suningem@gmail.com and I’ll send you a PDF.

I might just write a few things each week, and throw the site open to other psychics, spiritualists, occultists and astrological writers and discussions.

IF YOU WANT TO CONTACT ME IN FUTURE, MY EMAIL IS SUNINGEM@GMAIL.COM.

Otherwise, may peace, prosperity and understanding be with you and yours, always.

Tim Stephens

 

Here’s the remainder of the “1969 Story” (plus 2 poor poems at the end):

 

THE 1969 STORY

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

She shoved me violently into her bedroom closet and pulled the doors shut. It was one of those louvered doors that have slats. But what about your pants? I thought. She only had socks, a shirt and panties on. 

I heard muffled words. After a silence, the bedroom door opened. I saw Berry, in her blouse and underpants, walk slowly across the room and stand in a corner. 

“You weren’t supposed to come until tomorrow,” she said. “I…didn’t expect you.”

A huge cop, maybe 6’2” or 6’4” entered and sat unhurried on the bed. It puzzled me: here was the police, come to question her about everything up the coast, yet he sits on her bed, in her bedroom. And she “expected” him? I looked — no gun or holster, though metal handcuffs hung from his belt. Even in the closet, I could smell his wool uniform. He was maybe fifty (I can’t tell ages) with black hair brushed thick, helmet style, back from his forehead. From what I could see, his eyes shone. They were dark, but they shone with a diamond-like glitter, and seemed to be fascinated by everything they lit on.

Berry looked not so much scared as worried. Grief. Yes, it was grief. This was her lover? But she stood in the corner? My chest was a washing machine of emotions.

“The police talked to me. It won’t be long before they talk to you. Did you do it? Did you shoot your brother?” The tall man asked the question as though he was an interested friend, but it was an accusation, too. 

She said nothing.

“You’d better prepare an alibi.”

“Why, because you shot —?”

“Don’t, Beryl,” he said with a command two times bigger than her. “You know I did not.” He paused. “I might have to have you examined again.”

I saw her eyes glance my way for an instant.

“You are getting into dangerous territory, Beryl. You aren’t stable. I think you’re starting to go insane again. Come here, let me examine you.” His voice was deep but melodic.

Was this her father? Is this what fathers were like?

She didn’t move.

He sighed and stood up slowly. He went and stood over her, bending at the waist.

He said, with syrupy contempt: “You’ve been a little whore all your little life. You are here to service me. Your dead mother will tell you the same thing. She wanted you to service me. You were born to service me.  And look what happened to your brother for defying me.”

“You pig,” she said. It came out frightened, almost reluctantly yet with such frightened contempt that it almost broke my heart. Then, surprisingly, she started to scream. He slapped her and she stopped.

He knelt before her. She stood as if frozen, and he then inserted his fingers in her waistband and slowly pulled her panties down.

“Let me see if you’re still dirty…”

Like a madman I threw open the closet doors — they were those slatted kind — so hard one door went flying onto the floor.

“STOP! STOP! STOP!” I yelled. The cop’s surprise instantly turned to an angry, impatient look. He rose to his full height and began to advance on me, slowly, step by step. 

“Who are you, little boy?”

“LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU ASSHOLE!” The asshole part wasn’t so loud, as I was running out of the room. I ran to the kitchen and threw open a couple of drawers — I found a long knife, grabbed it and turned, to face the giant. 

But there was no one there. I snuck carefully back to the bedroom. The door was closed, and locked. I pounded on it. “LET ME IN!” I yelled. “LET ME IN!” Suddenly the door flew open. He towered over me. I saw Berry on her face on the bed, her wrists locked over her bare bum in the policeman’s metal cuffs.

“You’d better leave,” I said, holding the knife with two hands, shaking a bit, “Right now.”

He leaned toward/over me, and his eyes glistened with interest, with a sort of black fascination.

“Are you the boyfriend? Do you know she’s insane? Maybe you’d better leave.”

I was speechless, but mostly because I was thinking. There she was, behind him, lying on her face with her handcuffed hands.

“Perhaps you’d like to join us. Have you ever had everything from a woman? Asshole sex, you’d like that? Humm? Would you like to see her eat my shit?…has anyone ever felt you up? Inside?” He raised a thick finger and circled it in the air. “Humm? Do you like that? Do you want to see how big my cock is and how small her cunt is?”

With a sort of crazy fear, I leapt forward and plunged the knife at his gut. I could feel it go in. It was sort of like popping a balloon, there was a brief resistance, then, phtsloop, as it burst through the clothes and the skin. I pulled the knife out quickly, sort of shocked and frightened by my own actions, and jumped back. 

He was still standing, and his arms rose in threat. So I guess it wasn’t a mortal wound. 

“I’ll break your neck you little fuck.”

“Are you the father?” I asked loudly. (Strangely enough, I was trying to be civilized.)

He stepped toward me, contempt in his eyes, holding one hand on his left side. His steps were so deliberate that I backed away. Suddenly he shoved me and slammed the door shut.  

But I threw myself against the door before it shut closely enough to be locked, and it opened a foot from my attack before he stopped it. I put my foot against the door, so it remained half-open. But my bare foot screamed with pain as the door crushed it. I couldn’t let him shut this door, so I began stabbing through the opening, trying to find him. It must have worked to some degree, because the immovable door moved another 6 inches or so. That was enough to get my whole arm and shoulder in the door, while simultaneously stabbing like crazy. It was a foolish thing to do. I don’t know why he didn’t grab my wrist at some point and wrench the knife from my hand. Why didn’t he?

But he did seize my arm and yanked me into the room, throwing me on the floor. I leapt to my feet almost instantly.

“Okay,” I said, “I have a knife. You don’t. You’d better leave.”

He looked at me with bright, shining eyes.

“You’re a little boy. I could take that knife and carve out your guts.”

I didn’t know what to do. Berry remained silent. The giant stood between me and the door. Suddenly, he rushed me. I jumped on the bed and Berry bounced up in the air, and for some reason the knife flew out of my hand and I ran toward the door and out. I could hear him after me. I thought of the front door, but it only led to a hallway and the delay of an elevator. I saw the balcony doors were open, so I ran a step in that direction, then stopped.

As I hesitated between the front door and the balcony — it was less than a half or quarter second — he came charging at me, so I used a trick I’d learned at school. I fell to the ground curled up, on my hands and knees, and he fell over me, on his face. I used his confusion to run into the kitchen again and grab another big knife from the same drawer as the first. I stood there and waited, in the kitchen. It seemed almost unfair, I could see, even when he charged me, that he did not have the knife. Maybe he figured I was an easy prey, or he was in such a rush to catch me that he didn’t stop to find the knife in the bedroom. Would he go back and grab the other knife now? I realized suddenly that he had originally, minutes ago, only wanted to kick me out and hope I’d never come back. Not even any violence, maybe. But now he was wounded, and I had a knife, and it made me feel sad for him. 

I watched him scramble to his feet. He charged into the kitchen at me, without the knife. I backed up. He slowed. I retreated until my back pushed against the stove. He came at me step by step. His eyes were on my knife; I figured he was waiting to grab it. Suddenly, eyes wide, I yelled, “BERRY! NO!” He turned, or his eyes did, just for a quarter of a second, but that was all the time it took to plunge my second knife into his gut. This time, I yanked the handle up and down, to do as much harm as I could, while his fist pounded my ear so I swam in dizziness. His hands tried to gouge out my eyes. I jerked my head away and jerked the knife, too, stabbing and stabbing as fast as I could, while wrenching my face from his fingers. I wanted to stab his face, but I was scared to change anything.

I felt/heard a numb popping sound, then I couldn’t hear anything. But he sank to the floor, trying to take my head with him. I yanked free and watched. He hissed at me, and snarled. Bending over, I stabbed him in the leg and the crotch, still wary of his hands. I didn’t know how to immobilize him, but I wanted to search him for the handcuff keys. Finally, remembering how I had rescued Berry from the black pool, I jumped in the air and came down with both knees on his chest and stomach. I could feel and hear the air looping out of him. Before he recovered, I grabbed the key ring on his belt and somehow wrenched it off. I looked at him: he wasn’t going anywhere. Still, as I unlocked Beryl’s handcuffs, I kept my eye on the bedroom door. 

Freed, Berry sat on the edge of the bed. I began to dress her; she let me. It was like I was dressing a child. I loved her. She was muttering something, but I couldn’t hear. As soon as I had her socks and panties and white blouse on, she stood and said, “What happened? Where is he?”

“What?” I still couldn’t hear, from his fists smashing my ears.

She said it again, louder.

“He’s lying on the kitchen floor I hope.” She rose, picked up the knife lying on the lush grey bedroom carpet, and left the room. I followed. She hurried, then threw herself to her knees beside his body and began stabbing. At her first two blows/stabs he jerked his head around and hissed like a snake, as if he would bite her. So she stabbed him in the face. Then he was silent. She stabbed his face maybe 20 or 40 times, and then his guts and his loins and his thighs maybe 30 or 40 times — especially his loins. (I’m exaggerating a bit, but there were a lot.) Finally she let go of the knife while it was still inserted, and sat back and put her arms around her knees and began to rock back and forth.

Then she said, in a loud, odd, almost manly voice: “Every year I discover, I learn, more parts of me, more crevices and caves of my heart that he has destroyed. Every year I discover more rot, more bent and twisted branches of my experience, more WRONG views of reality he has caused.” She pulled the knife out of him, rose and — “God, why did you do this? To me!” She threw the bloody knife on the white tiled floor.

I stood with my mouth open, astounded. Who ever talked like that? Eventually her long fingers, pressed into rigid service to shade her eyes from view, lowered and wrapped round her knees.

I had, until now, seen her as vulnerable, and every time I pitied or worried about her, my penis stirred again. But now: what was this speech? Why was she different? It was like she was Shakespeare or something.

I was going to spit on him, then didn’t. Everything was like – like when I saw Dietmar get shot. Everything was bright and clear, but also strangely painful to my eyes. Not sad like after I killed the RCMP — but dead — and nothing around me accepted me, not the stove, or the fridge, or the tiled floor or the walls. I looked at Berry and she was curled up beside the dead cop. Not on her side, but on her feet and bum. I wondered if she would reject me like the floor and stove and walls did, if some kind of repulsion toward me would crawl over her skin. 

“You have to go,” she said.

“What?” It seemed like her voice was muffled.

“You have to go now. I killed him, not you. — He was still alive! Still alive! — You saw, you know. I killed him, not you. So you need to run because they cannot connect you to any of this or anything in the woods. I have to call 911 now. Don’t worry about me. I killed him because he — hurt — me. So they will forgive me, they will. So you know you saw I killed him, not you. You hurt him, but you didn’t kill him. You need to run. Get all your stuff, everything that connected, connects to you then go away as fast as you can because I have to dial 911 now.  I have to. You see, I’ll take both knives and paint them with the blood, of my hands, not yours oh sweet baby. I’ll just tell them I stabbed him but I was so scared I ran and grabbed another one, one in each hand. And I stabbed him and stabbed him. I stabbed him in the face. We will we will we will follow the other plan, you go home now go quickly, please. And he shot my brother. Because he loved me. But I knew he shot my brother and I was scared he would murder me. So I am blameless. I am free. And he wasn’t a real police. He was just a prison guard. Go!”

A prison guard. That’s why there was no gun or holster. A prison guard.

“I’m sure to be freed. They can’t blame me. And you’re free too because — you know? — Don’t worry, because HE shot the RCMP. HE told me. HE told me. NOT YOU! NOT YOU!” She grabbed my head with both hands. “NOT YOU!”

Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. 

“You  see,” she said gently, “we are both free. Just go. Don’t worry please don’t worry little pumpkin.” But I did worry, precisely because she was saying ”little pumpkin” and “sweet baby.” Looking at her, I started to cry. I fell to my knees and threw my arms around her thighs. 

“No! Don’t! Blood, blood on you!”

I un-embraced her and sank back on my haunches.

“Now, go. Get ALL your stuff.”

She was — I tried not to think of her. I grabbed everything that could point to me, which was little as we’d already filled my backpack. I did a quick roundabout through every room, then went to her, she was on her knees on the white tiles, hanging onto the kitchen phone with her hands newly bloody after the bathroom.

“Did you phone them?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

I love you like… Like it breaks my heart all the time, I don’t know what it means. You break my heart.” I started crying again. “ Do you know what it means?”

“No. No you can’t hug me now, you can’t touch the blood.” But she took my head in her bloodied hands: “Don’t cry. Oh my sweet baby, don’t cry. My… hero. Hero. Yes” — she nodded up and down — “my hero. Yes, oh my God. My sweet baby.” Tears streamed from her round blue wondering eyes. 

I just stood there. Man we really fucked this up. This stinking bleeding mangled carcass, this love, this whole thing.

“Go. Go please. Please God go. No — no — hand me a towel! A towel!” She began vigorously wiping the knife handles at the very second we heard sirens outside. But then she couldn’t help it, I guess, and she began stabbing the carcass again, fiercely, using both knives, she stabbed his arms and hand and mouth and stomach and crotch. He jiggled like a balloon filled with water. Suddenly she looked up with horror and pointed at me: “Blood! Blood!”

She jumped up and pulled me to the kitchen sink. She frantically rinsed my hands, then put her wet hands on my face, rubbing. Her breasts swayed like sacks of sweet pudding. Even in horror, she was my antidote. “Your shirt – blood! Your pants – !”

I tore off my T-shirt, crumpled it up and shoved it in my pack sack. My new jeans were so dark the blood just looked like patches of water. I pulled on my jacket and zipped it up. Suddenly I remembered that that RCMP had my name written in his little notebook, which must be back at the tent or in that cabbage patch. Hopefully the bears ate it. I stood still, stunned into thought.

“GO! GO! GO GO GO!”

She ran to me at the door, her hair and eyes wild.

“I do love you, I do love you, John.”

I ran out the door and hit the elevator button. One elevator was on the 11th floor and it started crawling up toward me. The other elevator was on the ground floor, and I saw it slowly rising. The cops would be in one of them. If I only kept my nerve, and that 11th floor elevator arrived first, empty, I was fine, home free. I decided to wait — by the stairs — until it opened. I could always dive into the concrete stairway and run down it before they saw me. The strange thing was that I held my nerve as the first elevator climbed, until the doors opened. But as they stood open, and no one emerged, at that very moment I panicked and fled into the stairway, and down. So I hopped and skipped down 22 flights, then peered around the corner into the lobby. It was empty so I sauntered out the front doors and passed the cop cars, two of them with a cop in one. An ambulance, without any sirens, pulled into the driveway as I left.

I still had the $50 Berry had given me, so I walked two blocks to Robson Street, bought a 7-Eleven hotdog, and caught a bus to the ferry and up towards Sechelt, I got him to drop me off near my house, which you probably remember is on the highway.

I wondered, on the ferry, staring at the sparkly water, what it would be like to drown. Of course I wouldn’t, as that would just get me to hell earlier, and throw away all hope. Sometimes, nature just takes over. Like those huge trees that fell so slowly that night we fled the campsite.

My brother Paul looked at me with curiosity, disapproval, admiration and appraisal. My mother stood there, and said nothing, except “Well, come eat.”

CHAPTER NINE

I never saw Berry again, at least alive. I was supposed to maintain silence, not contact her for — we really never set an exact time. I went back to school. It was May. I had no heart for it, so after a week I simply didn’t go. Finally, I emptied my bank account — $ 67 — and the next day I hitch-hiked to the ferry, and got to her apartment building by 11 am or so. I remembered her instructions, so I went to Robson and called her number from a pay booth. No answer, no machine. I returned to her building.

I buzzed, but no answer. Over the rest of the morning and afternoon I buzzed every few hours. Nothing. Finally I stepped quickly behind someone entering, and went up the elevator to her floor. A police notice was on the door, calling it a crime scene. A woman came out of her apartment, and saw me standing in front of the police notice.

“Oh, she’s not home,” she said. “Poor thing. She’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Oh. Oh, nowhere. She fell from her balcony the same day the police were here — about two weeks ago, I think.”

She saw me staring at the door, which had been forced, then crudely screwed shut.

“I think she was doing something illegal in there, because the police had to break down the door. But that’s all I know,” she said in a confidential whisper. She hurried away.

I went outside and around to the side yard. There was a low spot in the lawn, maybe half a foot deep but with gradual sides. I looked up. It was right under her suite, way up there.  I sank to my knees. I pulled up finger-fulls, then fistfuls of grass. It smelled sweet, pungent, like her. I rubbed grass over my face. I stuffed my mouth and began eating it. I pulled as much grass as I could, and stuffed it in my pants pockets, all 4 of them, and in my shirt pocket, and rubbed it on my neck and chest. Then I just lay down. The earth smelled sweet, moist, I could almost feel her in it.

For awhile, I didn’t leave Vancouver. I slept in the park that was nearby. Over time, I filled my pockets with small rocks and took them to that apartment building’s side yard, and quietly laid them in a circle. I had envisioned a heart shape, but that seemed cheap, or dorky, so I did the circle. Once completed with the thin necklace of stones, I stood in it and wished I could touch her or join her or feel her or see her. But, nothing. That night, I lay down in the circle, which seemed in my dreams to be a heart shape. She came in my dreams. I asked her why, but she said nothing. Then she seemed to say, in a muffled or gentle voice, in a sound that seemed to float around her, like the lightest, softest of ribbons nudged by a soft breeze, “You are forgiven.” Like that, not “you’re” but “you are.” It was like her “mustn’t” from weeks ago. 

It probably wasn’t true — how could I be forgiven? The next morning I ate three hot dogs at a 7-Eleven, then sat on the beach until sunset fled and night nibbled at me, and then I went back and lay down in the circle, in the dark. I did this for a few nights, then a rough hand grabbed my shoulder, waking me from a half-sleep. Police. They thought I was a bum, so I asked them where a shelter was and after they told me, I left peacefully. But I didn’t go to the shelter. I went down and lay on the beach and watched the black water. A bit later, I snuck back to “Beryl’s place” — I had named my circle — and I lay down in it.

The next night, they put me in the cop car. I didn’t say much, and I had no I.D. — on purpose — but I answered their questions in a friendly way, because I didn’t want them to suspect I was nuts, and take me to the looney bin for examination. I told them I was from Calgary, and was just bumming around. This was the third year of hippies, so I “fit in.” 

“Why do you keep going to the same place?” The cop was sincerely curious. “That spot isn’t protected from the weather.” 

I told him I wanted to be near the exhaust fans, because they keep me warm. I couldn’t even remember if I had seen any exhaust vents near my circle.They took me to some kind of social welfare set up. I knew the situation, the process, since our mother was poor. As soon as I could, I slipped away and went home.

In July, I snuck up to the tent-cabin again. On the way, I saw they’d pulled the cop car out of the side path. I reached the tent, going around the whole area first in case cops were watching. (I knew it wasn’t likely.) The tent-cabin was smashed and broken, flaps of canvas like useless wings lifting softly in the wind. There were claw marks on the door, now lying in the dirt. The interior was trashed, the foam bedding chewed into a thousand fluffs. I went to the skunk cabbage patch. There were a few clothes, scraps and loops now, and his boots, chewed and half gone, with blood stains but no flesh. So the bears got him. And maybe coyotes or wolves, and then weasels and mice and eagles probably cleaned up the rest. I saw a boot print on what was a muddy patch that had dried hard. Looking closer, I saw a couple more, under a salal bush. So the RCMP (or someone) had been here. No note book, though that didn’t mean anything.

I went home. I’ve begun praying; first time in my life. I prayed that Berry might return. Maybe even in another body. Whatever God could do. Please. And to forgive me about killing the RCMP. And I’ve promised to be good, do good. (Though I haven’t done anything “good” yet. Too tired.)

And I’m completely bored, excruciatingly, vastly bored. Sometimes I think I’ll turn myself in for the RCMP murder. But I haven’t yet.

CHAPTER TEN

I’m sorry, I lied. I told that whole story about going home and visiting the Beryl camp again because it helps me forget what really happened. When I sauntered out of Beryl’s lobby, and walked past the police cars the night I stabbed her father, I didn’t turn left towards the park; I turned right, to have one more look up at her apartment, way up there, before I left.

She was on the balcony. She was on the wrong side of the railing. I shouted. She threw herself forward and down, down. Her blouse flapped around her and you could see everything about her, then she hit. I was already running so I only saw the lump of her, the arms and thicker legs and the chest of her and the hair of her and her head and face, all of it whapped into the ground with a deep muffled thud. I was only 5 feet away when she hit. It was like her face turned into a doll’s face, what was left of it, watching you but empty. I had run as soon as I saw her up there and I didn’t remember running.  I didn’t feel anything but evidently I cut open my knee on the little cement wall surrounding the apartment lawn. I threw myself on her. She was all awkwardly bent, soft and yielding but with hard bones sticking up. I grabbed her. I threw my legs around the sack of her. I later realized my eyes were closed. I was weeping like a baby.

They tried to pull me off her, but they couldn’t. For a while, maybe minutes, time had disappeared, they left me alone. Then they tried to pry me away from her again. But I wouldn’t let go. Now my whole chest seemed to empty out, as if a roaring wind blew through it. That made me cling to her even more tightly.  If this wind was taking us to heaven or hell, I was holding on, I’m going with her. Now they tried to get me to let go of her again. This time they kept talking to me, but I didn’t answer, I couldn’t answer, I didn’t even know what they were saying.

After that a lot of things happened. Evidently they called in reinforcements, and three huge police grappled and pinned and pulled me up and peeled Beryl away from me and separated us. Fucking assholes!

“Let me go!” I yelled, “I can help her! I can pull her up! I can pull her up! Magic! Magic! I’ve got magic! Let me — God dammit, let me hold her you assholes! Let me hold her! Magic — I can pull her out! Out again! Fuck off! Fuck OFF! FUCK YOU ASSHOLES! LET ME GO!” 

I twisted and fought, but they held me down and handcuffed me. I had to watch them lift her broken body onto a stretcher and take her away.

They put me in Vancouver General for psychiatric observation. The doctor told me I’d be there for probably a week, but it depended on how I did. I didn’t say anything. There was just nothing to say to any of these people. A woman came in two days later and wanted to talk to me about grief. I said I had no grief, as in a funny way I didn’t. It was like I had this feeling, almost real, almost a vision, that I was going to step into a big wide bright tunnel and it would be like a powerful wind, picking me up. I’m flying into that big pipe and somehow there I will become everything Berry was, We would be melded together. And right after I had had one of these visitations with Berry, so to speak, I looked at the grief woman with a bright smile and said I was OK.

“I see you haven’t talked much,” she said. “It must have been very hard for you. Was the young lady your sister?”

“No.”

“Oh?”

“You haven’t seen any police reports? Yeah I was fucking an older woman if that’s what you want to know.”

“I really want to know how you’re doing, and what do you think of all this.”

“I don’t think,” I said, “I never think. I don’t have thoughts, mostly.”

My mother came to the hospital, and they released me.

CHAPTER 11

I lied again. Here is what really happened: When I saw Berry plunge to the earth, I stood in plain full shock for maybe 30 seconds, then, as if waking up, I ran to the buzzer wall and swiped my hands over all 100 or 200 buttons. Someone buzzed, and I went in. I ran up the 22 flights to the 23rd floor. It’s not that big a deal, any teenager could do it.

Running up the stairs seemed normal enough. But as I opened the door and stepped into the corridor, I locked into a strange kind of automatic mode. I knew what I was doing, and what I was going to do and I also felt I had to do it. Not that anything was pushing me; rather, I was drawn. It was sort of ecstatic, comforting, but like a kind of dim ecstasy. 

I tried Berry’s knob, I saw the knob, brass I guess, all greased with various fingers and palms, and it opened right away. I was furious that so many hands had touched it. I walked in with that same feeling of determination and destiny, but angry, too, at the violation. It was almost as if I was walking in some warm yet rushing wind type of cocoon. They all looked at me. The balcony doors stood directly opposite from the entrance. To my right I hardly saw the bedroom, but saw that someone was in there. Several uniform cops, and a couple of men in suits were at the kitchen entrance where his bloody carcass lay. I could smell their uniforms, and the stench that came now from the dead man. I could smell the carpet, and the drapes, even the glass door as I approached it.

“Hey, assholes,” I yelled, “Keep your fucking hands off her door knob! — There’s another weapon on the balcony,” I cried loudly, lying. I hadn’t stopped, I passed them all in their surprise, and now I was at the balcony door, which was open and breezy. One fast step, two, and just as a cop’s foot, landing, shook the balcony, I jack-knifed over the rail, my feet on the concrete lip. That aluminum railing seemed a little frail now.

“STOP!” I shouted at the cops. Three were now on the balcony. “If you come any closer, I’ll go off.” They surrounded me in a horseshoe formation, but kept several feet back. I shifted right, to be over her body. I looked down at her white legs. A huge ache, almost like a big bucket of water, sweet and agonizing, filled my chest. A warm May breeze flapped onto my back and neck. It would grow dark soon. I could see far, between the buildings, across and over the blue bay, all the blue light amazed me, it was so beautiful, even the balconies with laundry and cheap plastic furniture and bikes.  It was a very bright  twilight.

“Don’t do this, son,” one said. Another said, we can work anything out. And don’t you want to be home with your family?  Stuff like that. 

I studied all their faces, every one, for a long time. They were very real, so real it was strange, almost frightening.

“By the way, I killed the RCMP up in Gibsons. I shot him. Call them. Me, no one else. NO! Don’t come closer.” I watched the blue twilight, shining twilight, the kind I used to run and laugh in, playing hide and seek. It was so beautiful, that twilight, that light. 

“One more thing,” for some reason I was shy in saying it, “that man in there raped his daughter, that’s the one who just killed herself. He shot his son, and raped her, so we killed him. I killed him, then she killed him. We killed him.”

“Please God, bless Paul,” I thought as my brother came into my mind.

I knew what to expect, in a way. I had fallen almost 40 feet when I was twelve. Falling isn’t horrible or screaming fear. Actually, it’s sort of pleasant, and you don’t really have time to be afraid. Everything flies past you. The main thing about falling is it’s final. From the first shove off, it’s over; you can’t go back up. My fall took awhile, and as I fell, I muttered, or it was in my mind, talking to God, “Please God — Beryl bring—.”

THE TRUE END.

ADDENDUM: Below is a more detailed recounting of the five days spent at the tent with the perfect little lady. Only if you wanted to know more:

She began to climb  over the jumbled logs. I followed. Our progress was slow, groping with our feet and searching for handholds before we took another step. Often, we crawled. At some point I noticed we weren’t going in the direction of the road, but toward the far end of the cut.

The truth is, I would have followed her no matter where she was going. I had no will to go anywhere on my own. Our sodden clothes snagged a few times; my jacket pocket ripped open. Finally, maybe ten or 15 minutes later, we swished loudly through some salal (it sounds like walking through aluminum foil) walked round a large slab of granite forming the foot of a rock hill, and came upon a clearing. There stood one of those tent-cabin structures, with wooden lower walls and canvas upper walls and roof. The day had faded, so the canvas stood almost white in the blue twilight. The moon was starting to shine.

I followed her inside. I sat in a chair and began shivering again.

She turned on a kerosene lamp and a propane stove. 

Her back to me, she mechanically peeled her “rich lady” yellow outdoor clothes off, dropping them on the wood floor with sodden plops. When she was naked except for underpants, she looked at me with an irritated, worried brow.

“Can you get your clothes off?” 

“Not uwuwuwuwu sure…” I shivered so violently it was hard to speak. I caught a glimpse of everything under those wet panties, the swell and black hairs poking and everything. Her breasts were blue and pale in the darkening air, swaying like bells. They were stand-up-ish, if you know what I mean. Her body shone white. Her beauty seemed to me to be something God, or the sun or moon had concocted; or maybe she was an angel in human form. I didn’t really care which.

I stood up and tried to take off my clothes. But I couldn’t undo anything. She grabbed a huge sweater from a pile, donned it and came to help me. I was shivering again. She threw a blanket over my shoulders, then fumbled in a wooden box, undid my boot laces with a fork, then pulled my boots and socks and jeans off. I kept my underpants on as best I could by hooking my stiff thumbs into them while she pulled my jeans. She moved a chair to the little stove, hot now, sat me in it, rearranged the blanket on my shoulders and laid a towel over my head. I was shivering so hard I couldn’t breathe, so I pointed to my chest and throat. She understood. She grabbed another big sweater and pulled it over me. She pulled me to a bench, covered me with blankets, laid me down and lay beside me, rubbing and hugging me tightly. Finally the shivering stopped. I felt her leave the bench. I rolled over and watched.

She peeled off her wet panties and began to dry herself. But she didn’t rub anything. She gently dabbed herself dry. It seemed too delicate, too precious and selfish — yet it fascinated me. (Maybe that was how wealthy woman dried themselves?) She pulled on some dry running shoes and a housecoat, then turned to me. She made me stand and shuck my wet underpants — up and off my erection. (I’d been erect since I stopped shivering and rolled over to watch her.) 

I kicked them off. Suddenly, I wondered: is she going to – want to – ? Could she be interested? I smiled, happy and ridiculous, my whanger standing up against my stomach.

She watched my eyes a moment. Hers filled with tears, then she stopped it. Her face went rigid. 

“Please, put that away.”

I grabbed the blanket off my shoulders and bunched it over my crotch. She put another blanket on me. When she wasn’t close, but a few feet away, each time she moved something changed, like the ocean changes under the shifting clouds and sunlight.

Her wrists were small.

She moved in and out of the tent-cabin, collecting the sodden clothes and taking them outside. Her movements were delicately precise, as if she could feel the air around her like water in a tub. When she walked, her hands moved with a slow, understated back-and-forth motion. There was something odd, self-focused about it. 

She gave me a power bar. I sucked on it and surveyed the room, the sleeping bench, an eating table, and a rigged up sink affair. It was a pretty big tent.There were three chairs, a rack of books, a guitar, various camping stuff and clothes. For the first time, I noticed a man’s boots in one corner, beside a tin cooler. And standing beside it, leaning into the canvas, a rifle. 

She looked at me.”Will you take that away outside and hide it somewhere?” Her tone was flat. 

I don’t know much about rifles, but looked bigger than a .22. I was thinking of the dead man, that Dietmar Stoltz. I picked it up and surreptitiously tried to sniff the barrel — they say you can tell that way, if it’s been fired recently. I couldn’t smell anything. She saw me.

“You must go away,” she said, “you can’t stay here.”

“How come?” 

“It’s…difficult for you to stay.”

Why are you here?” I asked.

“I’m hiding.” She studied me, not to see my reaction to this joke, but just to plumb me. There was a kind of judging and not judging in her eyes. “You can stay here to dry, but you…can’t stay — if anyone comes, you must run away,” she said quickly, as if she didn’t want to say it, or it embarrassed her. “Run away or use that thing.”

“What??”

She indicated the rifle on the floor. “Especially if a tall man in a uniform comes. Run away. Or — use that thing.”

I didn’t want to admit I knew nothing about rifles, so I only said, “But who might come?”

“I don’t know! No one! I don’t want to deal with this! Please!” She shut her eyes and shook her head.

“I – OK.”  

She knelt and handed me an opened cardboard box of bullets. She put the rifle in my hands. She looked at me and her eyes were tired. They didn’t seem like endless blue mysteries now — they seemed like jelly over fear.

I pulled my wet boots on, then took the rifle outside with my bare legs, only the sweater on, and took a walk with it, looking around in case anyone was about. It was the shiny side of night before it goes all dark, just light enough to climb somewhere and hide the gun.

***

“Is someone else staying here?” I asked when I returned. She looked at me, surprised, then studying me.

“No.”

“What about the boots?”

She ignored me, or hadn’t heard.

That night, she lay down on the sleeping bench, her back to me, and said I could sleep with her — there was only one bench. She was quiet, maybe depressed — but she’d just tried to kill herself, so I guess it was normal to act that way. She’d given me a big sweater, but otherwise I only had the blanket. She faced the wall, so I lay behind her.  I think I stayed awake all night. At one point I put my hand on her bum and she didn’t protest, so I left it there all night, afraid to move it. My erection kept poking her back and bum. Finally, I disappeared from myself. 

SECOND DAY:

I woke, happy as a new groom must be the morning after the wedding, when the whole world is filled with flowers and sun and green grass and birds and a huge new freshness. I was pretty certain that when you had sex with someone, you had to marry them. Though we hadn’t had actual sex. 

She was sitting at the small table, unmoving, hands in her lap, frowning. She must have risen when I finally slept. Faint yellow and bluish patches lay on her arms and chin. 

“Please don’t stare at me,” she said, while watching me with fragile eyes. They were sunken, and red.

“Is this okay?” I said. 

”What?”

“Well, I’m looking at the wall, and not staring.” Feeble joke.

Then I had a severe, terrible thought: I imagined while I lay facing the wall she would grab a knife, and stab me to death. But I fell asleep again, right there in the morning. I was in the ocean. I was drowned. I was looking up, and everyone normal, my brother and mother and the RCMP and teachers and the kids at school, they were up there in a boat, and I would never be able to speak to them again, I had become a fish. And then I was sinking, slowly, unable to stop, sinking. 

I woke again and jumped off the bed bench, ready to stay awake. I looked for some food, and remembered the strange compulsion that had sent me down the road to this cut of massacred logs, and the shot man, Dietmar, and the rifle propped there against the tent canvas that I’d now hidden in the hill above. I went outside. I wondered about leaving this place. My jeans hung, stiff and damp. I pulled them on.

“Do you have a 4×4?” I asked, trying to sound conversational.

“I don’t know,” she said irritably. Then: “No… Nothing…” As if she too was puzzled that she had no vehicle.

“I mean, I just wondered how you got here, and what — are you here for long?”

“I don’t know,” she said, as if she felt hopeless about it.

“Is there a road that comes into this cut from behind? I – were you here with a guy who died? I mean that man” (I pointed, offhand, at the boots) “did he die?”

Her head snapped up swift as a bird’s. She stared at me, her eyes were wide and round and sharp. 

“I forgot to tell you yesterday,” I said. “I saw a man get shot. He died. His wallet said Dietmar Stoltz. I didn’t see who shot him. Here, I’ve got a locket he had on him.” I went outside to my still wet, hanging jeans to fish in the pocket. It wasn’t there. I looked around on the ground. Nothing. I went inside, disappointed that I couldn’t show her my treasure, my “evidence.” Maybe it was at the bottom of that cold water pool we almost drowned in. As I entered she opened her hand slowly, palm up on the table — there was the locket.

She stared at me for a moment, as if the world astounded her. Suddenly, her face collapsed, crumpled into a pile of wet, red folds, like a scarlet prune. I was in shock. I didn’t know what to do. I had wanted to say, for awhile, that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but at this moment she wasn’t beautiful. Her red, horrible, crumpled face frightened me. But I guess I did know exactly what to say, because it poured out of me, unexpected: 

”I’ll do anything for you,” I said. “Anything.”

She said nothing.

“Was he your brother or husband or something? Please tell me. Please be happy. Please, be happy.” I wanted to cry. I knelt beside her chair, my hand went shyly, lightly to her bare, tiny forearm. It was sprinkled with black hairs. 

She turned her head away, and down.

“Is someone threatening you?”

“No. No. That’s not —” She looked at me, alert. “But yes! Yes but no! Crazy, eh?” She laughed weirdly, her face still crumpled and wet with tears. She turned, physically scraping the chair legs, to sit facing away from me, face in her hands.

“Can I make some tea?” I asked, to help her relax. I hovered over the small table.

She didn’t answer. The lamp’s flame was almost invisible in the canvas-bright sunlight.

I wasn’t really looking for tea, I was walking around in a circle. I sat down at the table again. 

“I can’t find anything.” I looked at her. Then I took a huge chance, a huge step: 

“You are so beautiful,” I said. A swarm of feelings had been running around my head for hours, even yesterday. A swarm like a thousand bees, pushing me toward her. It was the strangest yet most pleasurable thing I had ever experienced. It was her; she somehow — I can’t describe it. 

“You need to go home now. Please don’t tell anyone about me. Please.” Her voice was quiet and vulnerable.

“Yes, I will.” But I didn’t move. “Did you sleep at all?” I asked softly. It was concern, but also, If she said no, it meant she had felt my hard-on. 

She looked at me, her wet, wide stare absorbed me.

“Oh, I forgot! My name’s John.”

She said northing.

“What’s yours?”

“Beryl. Please stop talking.”

“That’s the name on the locket!” I inhaled. “You — was he your husband?”

She stared at the lamp flame.

I stood up again, and started searching for the tea bags. My mind was running down several tracks at once. 

I went to the camp table and sat down opposite her. She sat as if utterly defeated, hands in her lap. We must have sat there five minutes. Then she flung her head up and looked at me and smiled and reached out and took my left hand. She clutched it so tightly it was painful, and her knuckles stood out, white and boned.

“How old are you?” she said softly but with a kind of terrible happiness.

“Sixteen.”

“Ah. You -” she stared into me, then laughed.

“You couldn’t kill anybody, could you?” she said lightly and brightly, wiping the wet from her face.

“No,” I guessed.

“No, of course not.” She laughed. “Of course not! You silly thing! Do you want me? Is that why you’re here? Is that all you want, just me?” She stared at me with shining eyes. I resented her mocking tone. Maybe I was seeing the real her for a moment. But that made me feel lost, confused.

“You saved my life,” she said softly. “So you can have me.”  I could only stare. Her face changed on me. She looked like an angel. “You can have me, Mr. Sixteen.” I am the most cautious person in the world. Every time there’s an opportunity, it whizzes by me before I respond. In this case, it was awkward, how could I stand up and say, Okay, let’s do it! What could I do? Open my arms? Leap on her? What a horrible tangle that could make, considering how small and delicate she was. I realize now I was in the mood to adore her, not conquer her. I got verbal:

“So how how old are you?” I challenged.

She said nothing. She got up with a fierce sort of speed, and stood there, and then, I imagine from embarrassment, went out the tent flap. From outside she called: “Nineteen!”

I thought for a moment, then pursued her. She was standing by the fire circle. I stood there, looked around, and waited for my own voice to come: “Why do you say I can have you, when… You know… are you you making fun of me?”

She stared at my pants. It was one of those stares that has nothing to it.

“Where — what — where is he? — his body?“ she asked.

So I told her the whole story, the shooting, the unseen shooter, finding the locket, the police, even my strange walk here. “But first,” I said, I’ll only tell you what happened if you tell me. Was he your brother, or husband, or —“ 

“He…was my brother.” 

She watched the horizon as I related everything, then we both were silent for a long, long time. Maybe a half hour. She was seated on a log, so I sat beside her.

But I added one lie: ”Well, they caught his murderer,” I said, to cheer her up, and to tell her she wasn’t in danger, and a bit to show off, that I knew things. Then I realized it was wrong to tell her she wasn’t in danger, when maybe she was.

“I mean,” I said, “I thought they did. I don’t know.”

She fell thoughtful. Then she stared at me, that same meaningless stare. “Was it a big man, the one they caught? Like a huge man?”

“I really don’t know. I just lied. I’m sorry.” 

“Of course, of course, it couldn’t just …. Of course.” She looked at me: “Did you see? Did you see who shot him?”

“No, just him. He died alright. But before, he said to go find the girl. I mean, you know — maybe you’re the one I’m supposed to find. I’m almost sure of it,” I added, remembering the odd, subtle compulsion that had led me here. Obviously, God had wanted me to find this beautiful 19-year old. And did He want me to marry her, then? 

“Now that I’ve found you. I mean I wasn’t even looking for you, and I don’t know why I came here. He said, this Dietmar, he said, ‘Get the girl.’ Or ‘Give the girl.’ I can’t remember. Is that you?” I wanted her to confirm God’s intentions. 

“The girl? Just… `the girl’?” she asked me anxiously, looking in my eyes with her round, blue wondering ones.  I felt a strange sad fear, as if someone was going to hurt those eyes soon. .

I rose.  Large dark bags hung under her eyes. Her face seemed to flow with blue and green shades in the daylight. I walked restlessly around the cold fire pit. I stopped and looked at her, direct.

“Can I sit beside you?” I said. It meant a lot more than when a few minutes ago I’d just been sitting beside her.

She looked at me, like a horse looks at a snake, but softer.

“I just want to — I dunno, hold you.”

“No. No,” she said, curling into herself. “I have no feelings,” she said. “Please don’t touch me.”

But she didn’t protest as I knelt on the ground beside her. Then I laid my left arm on her leg and leaned my side into her thigh. I was near her black, curly-haired crotch; every single hair was imprinted in my mind from yesterday. A major erection pushed up against my jeans, then without warning stuff gushed out and wet my stomach and made it all sticky. I had put on my wet jeans this morning, so I couldn’t shift my waistband, everything was stiff, as if glued. I hoped she hadn’t noticed. I pretended nothing had happened, and I stared at the bushes as I sneakily tried to rub it off the front of my jeans. But there was white cream everywhere.

She grabbed my hair gently and looked down at me.  I had casually laid my hand over the creamy stuff. She looked directly there.

”You mustn’t,” she said. The women on the coast said, “you can’t” or “don’t you,” not “mustn’t.” I could tell she was upper class, just from that — and the space-age clothes, too.

She tried to smile at my predicament. But tears quietly ambled down her cheeks.

She put two delicate fingers on my nose and guided my face to look directly at her.

“John? That’s your name?”

“U-huh.”

“Please don’t get your hopes up. You think you can want me, but I’m….” After a silence, she cocked her head, as if to say, Do you understand? Yet her eyes were wild, looking away. “That’s… just the way it is. Leave me. Go away,” she said firmly. “You can’t help me. You can’t do anything. Go away. I don’t WANT you. I just don’t want you.”

For a moment, I just heard the words. Then the earth seemed to change character around us, the sunlight shivered in the trees. Everything was the same, green trees, dirt, plates of rock, blue sky, but blackness shone out of it all now, everything was tinged with black.

“What kind of things?” I said. “What kind of things I can’t ever do? I can do anything!”

“Bad. Bad things,” she said softly. 

“With Dieter?”

“NO.” She drew herself up and stared at me with tired eyes. “You will never understand.” She kept staring. “Please, leave me. You need to leave. I don’t want you.” She turned away.

“So go kill yourself,” I said, jumping up. “I don’t give a damn. I saved you, but  all you can do is insult me. I don’t care, go kill yourself!” Some maples chattered in the wind, in the bright blackness.

My body did a kind of weird dance around itself. I ran from the fire pit, from her, into the scramble of salal and scattered logs and ferns and cut branches. I ran until I smashed my shin and  stumbled over a log and went down. My face scraped against a broken stub and my arms were caked with wet slime. I smacked my face but good, and my right eye exploded into red and white fireworks.

I heard a scream. I pulled myself up. With my good eye I could see she was making her way across the mess of logs. She wasn’t screaming now. “Oh, fuck you!” I yelled, standing up. “Fuck you! I know you probably killed him! So fuck you!” I turned and tried to run away again, but I couldn’t see, and after only a few paces I tripped, went down again, into a dark, earthy, clayey place, wet and smelling good, actually, of green something. And I just lay there. And I wondered why I had said that, I know you probably killed him. Why did I even think that?

She was grabbing my arm and pulling. No deal. 

“Oh get up!” she  said impatiently. This embarrassed me, so I got up quickly, without her help, and anchored my butt against a log.

Tears were drying on her cheeks. I felt sorry for her, but I was determined not to talk. I crossed my arms and stared at her chest.

“Oh my God,” she said, “You’re a mess.” She reached out and put her fingers on my cheek. I would have brushed her hand away, except she did it in such a no-nonsense manner. There was a question in her eyes — the same look as on the dead man when he came running down the road and stopped, bewildered. When I saw this in her my eyes must have widened, so she looked back at me with a different surprise.

“What’s wrong?” Her voice was quiet, as if something snaked around her senses. 

“Nothing.” But I was feeling this strange “point of no return” thing, as if I was stepping into her spell, and I’d never get out again. She was ordinarily beautiful at that moment, and yet she was almost ugly, and one part of me was terrified, another part thought I was experiencing some sort of hallucination — where all the world is the same, the leaves and rocks and sky and her cheeks and eyes haven’t changed a bit, and yet they all had taken on a strangeness, potent and powerful, more powerful than anything human, anything so puny — and a third part of me was rejoicing at all this, rejoicing that I was falling deeper in, that I was entering some strange land, and even another part of me heart-achingly just wanted to be with her, to hold her and say don’t cry. At my “nothing,” she tightened her lips and looked away.

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“Why? Why do you say that?” she said, looking at me intently. The wind riffed against her blouse, making furious little waves.

“Because. It’s – it’s scary,” I said.

“What’s scary?”

“This feeling… I’m feeling…. I wish you were scared, too.”

I saw her chest subside, and something went quiet in her face.

“What I’m doing,” I started to explain, then waved my hand impatiently at the ground in front of me. “I mean, what’s going on?” I looked at her and then up at the sky; we were in a bluish cool shadow.

I felt her take my hand and gather my fingers, and she walked me back to the cabin.

Once we were in the tent, I suddenly and awkwardly tried to grab her shoulder, to kiss her. She pulled away, bent her head and curved her chest inward at this, sort of rolling her shoulders forward and together. I tried again: I went up to her and pressed my crotch against her and pawed her breasts, and she pushed my hands away and pulled her legs together, retreating, and then she gave up, she let me paw again; and finally I was sucking on her nubbly nipples and she pulled me toward the bed-bench, and her flesh was coming out all over, out of the shirt and out of her pants and I smelled her and – well, in a way it was over in a flash. A golden flash, I couldn’t stop it, until it spewed its load, as we say at school, everywhere but the right place. I hadn’t even been able to peel my wet jeans all the way off.  So I took them off now, frustrated, and lay beside her and she held me and it was wet all over. She said nothing. We lay there all afternoon. I lay in bliss, waking and sleeping. Once, after a long while, awake, soaking in her body, she turned to face me. She watched me in the darkness; I could see her eyes. She touched my erection.

DAY THREE

In the morning, she was almost chipper. She laughed a little at my bruised face and black eye. Large, faint patches of bruised yellow and bluish-purple coloured her shoulders and lower back, and her thighs and breasts in front. I looked at myself. Only my knees were bruised, yellow and green, from the rock.

She cleaned my face with a damp cloth, and as she did this, standing in front of me, I touched her. But she slapped my hand. “You had your turn,” she said.

 “Just once…”

A minute later she said, “You’re right. You saved me.”

I said, “You saved me too.”

We fell into a silence. I could smell the forest outside, and the canvas walls. She looked exhausted but every pore on her face spoke to me, drew me. She watched me gazing at her. I turned away. “Hey, I can do anything, you know,” I said cheerfully. “I can do anything. What can we do? Let’s start a garden!” 

Then, suddenly I said: “Will you marry me?”

She said nothing, so I said, “When I’m close to you, inside maybe six or eight feet, everything disappears. Everything else.” 

She came to me, and put cool soft hands on my cheeks. “We’ll see,” she said, “we’ll see.” She  touched my hair, and left the tent. After a minute, I followed. She was far away, on the other side of the clearing. I let her be alone, but I stayed outside in case something threatened her. I thought how silly I must seem to her, to talk about gardening when there was a murder, maybe of her close relative. Maybe we should be solving the crime. 

We stayed apart most of the declining day. 

That night, we slept on the bed bench again. I was amazed that paradise was this simple, this easily found. I was amazed, too, that a woman could be an angel. Every inch of her floated in indescribable beauty. She pulled me to her softly. I never knew paradise was so — so — 

DAY FOUR

The next day I was chasing her around the tent on hands and knees, barking and growling while she whooped and ran and laughed. 

“Stop! Quit it!” She laughed.

“Quit what? Grrr, grrrr,” I growled into her sweet belly.

“No, please, not now. How can you have so much in you?”

I grinned proudly.

She smiled as I lay on the floor. She knelt beside me. “Don’t leave,” she said. “I’m sorry. Don’t leave. I need to …stay for awhile.”

I exhaled loudly. I wasn’t going to leave. It hadn’t even occurred to me.  A small part of my mind sensed a trap in all this bliss, but who could call heaven a trap?

But I did leave, because we were running out of food.

“Oh, yes,” she said, her hand fluttering about her forehead. “We’ll go shopping. We’ll go shopping soon,” she said. But she didn’t have a vehicle. Again,  how did she get here? Someone must have dropped her off. Dietmar? The tall man in uniform she had mentioned? But it seemed like nagging, so I didn’t ask these questions.

I left the cut and her tent and retraced the entire weird road, then the trail back to the hydro cut, and home. The house was empty. I’d timed it so Mom would be at work, Paul at school. I shucked off my clothes and put on dry ones. 

I shoved some extra socks and underpants in my haversack, then I filled it with most of my mother’s fridge and cupboards.  I really cleaned them out, except for things like flour and eggs, because 1 couldn’t carry them. I got cheese and crackers, a bit of cooked beef, some potatoes, half a plastic jug of milk, half a box of cookies, crackers, a box of cereal, two handfuls of tea bags, a bunch of sweet potatoes, a loaf and a half of sliced bread, a jam jar and the peanut butter jar. I left a note: “Sorry.” Outside, leaving, I turned around and saw just the side of the decrepit little old house as it crowded the road. I felt sad.

The whole journey took a good five hours. As I trudged back, I imagined her opening her arms, delighted by my gift. (She wasn’t, really.) That night, she silently turned on the bench and let me come into her. I could hear her low, deep fast breaths. 

As the fifth day came, her face grew more normal, less turned inward. More and more her eyes seemed to fill with comprehension, as though she were beginning to see the world. I was like a thirsty dog in July, and her eyes were a puddle of water. I searched them for answers. She didn’t like me staring at her, so I kept sneaking peeks all day long.

At some point, I said or did something embarrassing. I don’t even remember what it was. She turned at my words, looked at me, and burst into laughter. It was a long, high laugh. When I kept frowning, she made a sound like a little “wooo,” her eyes widened, and she burst into another song of laughter. Seeing my anger wasn’t going away, she pouted to hold the laugh in, put her hand across her mouth and her eyes apologized as she tried to turn the laughter into a smile. But it crinkled right across her jaw, and her eyes teared and a “wooooo” came out again.  Finally I laughed, happy.

Wherever she went, I sat on the floor at her feet, with my head and shoulders leaning against her thigh. Evidently she wasn’t a walker, nor a hiker. She didn’t want to go anywhere. Maybe she was hiding. I thought nothing of it. I would go out in the morning and afternoon for a climb or a walk. Partly, I was looking for this man she mentioned. I didn’t carry the rifle; I’d hidden it. The bears were awake and hungry so I spent an hour outside rigging a food cache from some rope and two trees. 

A couple more days passed. The sun shone; it only rained at night, you could hear it on the canvas. I slid it in her beautiful swell in the dark, too, and lay in the dark watching her.

“Did you?” I said after one afternoon.

“What?”

“Kill him.”

She looked at me calmly and thoughtfully, as if contemplating something about my nature. “You’re a strange one,” she said.

“Why?”

But she didn’t answer. She smiled and put her hand absently on my cheek.

THE END OF THE ADDENDUM.

***

 

POEM
SECRET SKY

I.

Secret sky, Sun fired, hot as a dog’s back in summer; Moon wombed, clearly pregnant but stubbornly secret.  

Joyous sky, friend of my days, lover of my skin; but not simple. You, sky, burdened or buoyed, old friend, by knowing unshared and I by wounds unhealed. Were questions unsheathed, the swords? 

In your blueness you answer nothing; and your blueness, when we want to touch a thing, turns infinite. It is easy to be touched by infinity; but impossible to touch it. God’s joke. In Tarot, the dog barks.

Your clouds, sky, your clouds, like little girls spreading their flounces.

On the Dover docks, scratches on the boats, the hieroglyphics of survival. Fish souls, swimming souls, flexible souls, with their fingernails of despair leaving scratches on the hulls.

Ships slip through waves, ship and wave feeding each other, laden with questions unexpressed, answers like water, never grasped. But sensed, as water thinks, flowing by, sensed as these clouds swell and slip, the unspeaking Moon herding dreams carried by virginal blue-swelling bellies pierced in waves by ghost trains; in our deepest cynicism we are  innocent newlyweds to this old sky, virgins to its designs. It controls our sight, from the gold mornings of childhood to the hysterical stillness of twilight; windy, unfurling clouds writhing/dancing in the torture of their own beauty, to frozen skies hard as steel — 

We built churches, only to find adoration is its own exquisite failure. We built churches to net answers, as fishers do fish; but our churches became cages for spirit, then we bewailed the inevitable merger of caged priests and penises. 

God do you ever answer except with — how small, limp the word beauty is — we look for clues here and there, but find only scratches.

II.

We lie on this hill with this woman, I and these two friends who are strangers, waiting. 

We are waiting for an important conversation. We are waiting for the answer. We scan the tidy fields, careful but abandoned, wide ditches carefully laid by quiet men. We are waiting for the  embrace of a pick-up, a bus or train or plane. These two friends, I don’t know them. I touch the woman’s shoulder, diffidently. She stirs slightly or does she? She like everyone is God but I am unable to claim passion. One of us says “The coroners are missing.” A wind sighs inside me, hollowing me. I realize the day is dead and empty. Where have the explainers fled? For how long? I pull a string from the earth and it says: “Liar.” The clouds fold within like Bohm’s explanation, like marbled morals. Are we in Dover? Is this my childhood? If dreams trump logic, logic is just another dream; worse, it denies itself. Denies its parent, that bellied man who huffed and whacked his way through a jungle of rituals to clear the thighs and plant his corn, the copia of seed burnt Aztecs shouted, raged and wailed and finally flung against the gods who tore them limb from limb who stripped the muscles red, pulsing, from their screaming thighs: the seabirds swirl in Dover, crying in French, announcing the ships of regret.

On their swollen bellied hulls as they float in rotting harbour, incomprehensible scratches from forgotten battles, hieroglyphics of tales no one remembered to tell, in languages lost. Languages that were just a dream, after all. Even these are more revealing than you, secret sky. 

These scratches, warm now, dry now in the sea-scent sun — answers once? Questions, once? Q & A surrounded by a dream, attacked by sciences of fantasy, by armies of opinion-mongers, crumpled noses smearing the glass of God’s exclusion.

This woman (blonde, slim, racoon mascara, watchable) — I see the everyday cotton of her white sleeve, folded by a shift of her arm — will I love you after time > forever, or will I lie bored, waiting for you to leave? White fabric twisted gently, swelled by an indeterminate breast; in my second mind, trains of desire rush, carrying the freight of fantasy, thump, thrum. We wait, us four, for a bus, or train, or boat; we need to leave for home, find home > where, we once thought in dreaming youth, nothing lurked. Is she the answer? I cannot miss this bus, or plane or boat, I fear aloneness in this perfect place, but I run back into the pension, to find myself, rank and mad in the mirror, to brush my teeth and wash my armpits for this watchable woman. Inside the cold walls I race, panicked, unable to locate cleanness, the sink is smaller than my head, panic shrills the seconds.

Outside, lying elbowed on the grassy hill under the sun’s implacable sky. In everything implacable! Implacable as swords! Sharp as insults! Hard as edges striking thighs! As stones smashed into eyes! As cold eyes striking uncertain boys! Boys whose large eyes judge in — judge in — silence, God — You who are judged for your silence by an infinity of creatures who, even being instruments, do not know it, and judge without knowledge. Judgements are only party favours, black crepe torn loose from festive walls by the wind, blown in splatting sail, starved-flat snakes twisting in puppet convulsions of celebration, folding sail, to finally die, exhausted, on the stubble-cheeked sidewalk. But perhaps they are correct judgements! Correct! In these clear mists, what is correct? Correct! Sidewalks, do they dream? Do they seek direction? As the black crepe sighs onto the cheek of its lover cement, trembling with desire to die in ecstasy, seeking the oblivion of judgement, does it seek answers too? Or is the crepe red as a penis? God, are You a sidewalk > a sky > a rock > are You a direction?

Or are you directed by a thousand venal priests, penises disdainfully opening the eye of reverence? To spew a million dead prospects with every shudder of final delight? 

III.

The man who, suddenly on an afternoon, walking with his wife, is crazed by the intense beauty of all other women, that woman near the olive barrels, with voyages in her eyes; this one, plucking tomatoes, with archetypes playing like violins in her smile (what regrets, tragedies and lost bedrooms what sad abandonment carved that inviting, wounded smile?) this one passing in the aisle conscious of his averted stare whose averted stare speaks of a censored message and maybe a return but drifting also away on a sea-song of lust clean and white as a wave breaking or a branch’s flesh new-whittled by the boy’s penile knife, white before it browns from no other sin than age; tho the sin is regretting age

In each face he sees a perfect future as if choices were like cards, each a picture of an event never lived, but never meant to be lived again, or before — to live again like a cool ember blown on, a first hint of birth, swelled female belly mouthing angels’ thoughts; he takes his child lovingly in his cathedral arms…

All futures are ships on an ocean, on clouds: suddenly, like shrill visions, a silver ship parts the hysterical sky, drops like an ejaculation from the madness above; it lands on the gravel at the drive-in movie, hidden beside the concession stand; with his pop corn, the boy faints in a monster’s arms. Silver tables and silver implements and silver silence. He returns, eating popcorn; popcorn pops and spews from his belly; (because nothing ever ends) (no adjustment ever un-adjusts; everything grows beyond its time) (no twig straightens) (no minuscule moment of molestation ever disappears; it grows like fungus through every sequential moment, year, flesh, growing flesh, love and black inspirations plague the boy, until his cock spews weak, sadly, unendingly weighting his flight into manhood, into future, felled by air things, his heart staked like a watchdog at the gate of desire; like a round bowl turning on itself, hungering after its own emptiness. Or, worse but easier, softer, a kind of love, eating others to make them hungry.

IV.

How Does One Know? To act is knowing, the only knowing. I am paralyzed by the prospect of knowing the watchable woman and not knowing. Do you want me? I hurl such questions at you now, enraged by my paralysis, wind rising, joying in rage — dumb with dumbfounded-ness or dumb with shock or dumb with acceptance and further dumbed by convention, you do not answer.

Is there another escape? To burrow beneath our sense, your unspeaking statements, my ranting sense, is truth there somewhere? Below?

Sky, mother of my childhood, canvas of my fantasies, director of my maturity, is the earth any wiser? Any comfort? It’s possible all herein is mine, and when I die I will possess it.

V.

The moon’s mad eye pulses through my nights. A slow seducing wink as clouds join the joke, feathering it, a mad slow orgy, a staring eye in a blue night.

Don’t you think I know what you are doing, you harvester of dreams, plowing the sky like a licker of fate (or of crotches)? (For what is sex but fate?) Planting madness and reaping the weeping joys, lighting young men’s heads (jack-o-lanterns) with the crazy swell of breasts and the succulent swells of bellies, girls with seeds of cities — all for nothing? As you wander through that secret sky, pushing clouds with your staring eye-dignity, do you whisper to Him, does he share tidbits with you? And these girls who pour forth future cities and arrange them in their hands, do you share with them, deep, bits of his whispers — does it gossip, this sky? When it hides behind those tiding clouds, does it utter breathless tales of sin and embarrassment?

VI. 

Scratches on the boats, the hieroglyphics of survival. Fish souls, swimming souls, flexible souls, all with fingernails of despair leave scratches on the hulls.

The horizon shifts with childhood memories unlisted in my ledgers, incongruous nuances, whispers of sense slowly turning like dumb acrobats, but when the tiny bright moment of revelation fades, so does the sense, to drift like wisps over the farms, an evening fog dressing the sweet damp fields, dewed into bedsheets for God, a night with God, the bright Moon shearing the dark into angles of light, the corner of the table pontificating over the kitchen floor, casting its stark politics, a wedding trail. But this is only fate; where is the answer, the reply? Into this the hawk of accusation dives, whether to conquer or disappear doesn’t matter; that the accusation is made, a shrill thing: only the thing. That anything exists, even for a second: that’s everything; though the next second needs another. These lip-glossed, eye-shaped harpy women, they clutch in their preying beaks the scavenged truth. All truth is old. Only lies are shiny and fresh. Invention outweighs existence, and the invention becomes itself. The Sun is black, and bombs implode: the future’s horizon is only the past re-jumbled. Is this why you won’t answer me, because even the question has never made sense, no, the question has never been discovered, not by man: is there a sense beyond, that we can only scratch at, like the scratches on the boats made by fishes’ fingernails? What were they clutching at? Escape? Deliverance? Congress? Coitus? You, sweet fogged farmed field, what is your question? Or are you struck dumb by your own beauty? (The Moon, that fat whore, smug in her grace, strokes your furrows with her lascivious light.) 

VII.

Maybe if I had the eye of the bird. Every bird is hawk-eyed, even the sparrow.

Sky and vision ring with silent tufts like the quick little slap of death or

Violent wisdom crashing into implacable windows;

In the blank eye, emotions round and perfect: polished mirrors, mirrors don’t have to feel: intelligence high above my feverish grunts and queries. The Sun is your lover, brave birds; the Moon is mine.

Felled by air things, first incarcerated, then abandoned, by my loins;

My heart staked like a watchdog at the gates of Desire; like a bowl turning on itself, eating its own emptiness.

Or the bowl of her lips o’d with scarlet hesitancy, hungry with curiosity, but

Hesitant to ring

my pungent plow;

or let it furrow her honey-weeping thigh-brow.

But fuck is easy, safety is not. In the social, the heart, the opinions, the options, the words, the stances, the air, the soul:

Her perfect expectations deny entry to the long hallways of her delicate house,

The hollow bones of her flight, fusing nuance.

Will my dog nails click on her long hall floors, will my black throat howl in her bowelled basement? Or sit, student, in her school of misty morals?

Nature, are you ashamed of the bush, the grass, the flower? Why then do you cast us in shame? Why do you grow priests to make us guilty? Did God want priests? Or did priests want god? 

We are born in you; we die in you; we are your genius; at our height we cannot match the bird’s eye.

You are responsible: Answer.

Answer.

VIII.

I lie, elbowed on the grass bank beside the watchable woman, waiting, teeth unbrushed; I wait for everything I do; to end. So I do; nothing.

What happens when the angels close their eyes and refuse to see?

 

JOURNEY –
A POEM FOR JILL

The windows sob with rain.

On the table, an empty bowl hugs itself.

Have I dreamt? How long?

Teenagers dream a street, swathed in sex/screens/silence/songs.

Does my mind’s terrible wheel, 

Grinding on so long, so long,

All the way

That’s been a lost way so long, 

Is the road low?

Are there birds? (Angels who didn’t make it?)

Rain plops on the bed of bright leaves

Bright as inspiration’s slippery wing

New as an angel sighing through my window: for a moment, elusive, it buoys the earth, 

tilts its flight through me, light as a breath unbreathed, torturing ecstasy into engraved bracelets at the September fair.

NOT A POEM:

Order is just the shirt of chaos turned inside out. It itches, either way.

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