Moon Landing Party

Jeff Chenette
Paper 3
The Strangers


(Charles in Charge)

He liked those quiet parts of the day that the daily commute granted. Riding the bus early in the morning when the world is still convincing itself into motion, and late at night when all the colors get trapped in the bus windows like soup.
Those were the times that Charles really felt like he was in touch with the world. Watching it all from those shiny blue plastic seats, without a voice, existing only as a pair of eyes. Examining the world as it hopes to be examined, intently, and with longing. Taking it all in as the bus rumbles through neighborhoods with post offices and barbershops, down main streets and side streets.

Everyone was a stranger even those faces that eventually became familiar. He could watch and witness and be within inches of many and never have to say a word. Charles found comfort in this.

The bus felt like a waiting room in some clinic; there was this sterile silence and hopeless anticipation that commanded the space in between the strangers, their heads pointed in different directions, all staring.

It was something that Charles kept for his sanity, these quiet bus rides to and from work everyday, he needed it after spending most of his time walled into his cubicle. Imagine what the eyes of a victim might look like while they are bricked into a wall by a gangster, just before the last brick is placed, blocking out all sunlight forever; that’s how Charles’ eyes look from within his cubicle.

He needed to be reminded what neighborhoods look like, how people move along the sidewalk or just sat on their porches content to watch the day bleed into the next. It was a simple thing that helped Charles cope with the disappointment of what his life had become. But it made him feel immensely lonely. That sterile feeling in the air, the way the bus windows always seem to fog up much too eagerly, and how far away everything looks from his blue plastic perch. Sometimes he felt that he was viewing it all in a tiny diorama that was too fragile to ever touch.

One particular evening after an exceptionally arduous day in his cubicle Charles had an interesting encounter with a stranger on his way back home. He typically arrives on the bus at the first stop and takes it to the end of the line, so he is able to witness the full ebb and flow of that quiet tide of strangers. That day he had a book out and tried to bypass that familiar loneliness with sentences, words and engaging plot lines. That’s when she sat down next to him.

Because of the book, Charles didn’t get a good look at her as she came in. This woman, a complete stranger, sat down next to Charles and let him feel her presence in a powerful, almost defeated way. Most people, Charles noticed, try to hide their presence from others when they sit next to each other. They are just comfortable enough to let two seats be occupied; their toes pointed away, shoulders retracted. This woman was different; he could sense it right away. She was not reserved, not guarded; she let her body fall into her seat as if she were collapsing onto her couch in her living room.

He had his head in his book, but he could feel her sit next to him instantly without a look. He could sense all her emotions through the air that she had charged around her, but he had no idea what she would do next.

Charles froze as the strange woman leaned her body into his. She lowered her head slowly and guided it onto his stiff shoulders. Instinctively he loosened and accommodated her weight.

Immediately he felt a warmth blossom from his chest like a flower. He had nearly forgotten how it felt to be close to another person, how something so simple could become a panacea to all the ugliness in the day.
This stranger said nothing as she rested against him; she made not even the smallest sound. He felt as if she were some rare mythical creature that he had stumbled upon in deep forest and if he flinched it would race away. He realized suddenly that he was controlling his breathing.

“God, it feels so good to be close to someone, to matter in some fragile way,” He thought as he stared through the pages in his book, still held out in front of him awkwardly. He tried to concentrate on what the words in the book were trying to tell him, but he couldn’t make sense of any of it. He stared into it like a dark ocean, letting his eyes wash over in its dark waves.

He was not aroused, there was no sexual weight in the presence they carried; she was wounded, he could practically smell the blood in the air around her, bleeding around her vision. He knew she was seeing red. Charles could tell in the way she trusted him to hold her weight that she needed protection from that far away feeling that seems to breed on these city buses.
So he did, he kept her up and tried to match her warmth with his own. Just as suddenly as she sat down, the strange woman released herself and Charles from the spell and exited the bus. He watched quietly from his blue plastic perch as her back glided down the sidewalk.
Charles smiled to himself as the bus grumbled down the road and abandoned her to the dark,
“Maybe we really are all alone,” he thought, “but we don’t all have to be strangers.”





(Charity always wins)


She had spent most of her free time at the hospital sitting at her father’s side during his last moments. They had never been close; Charity’s father was a guarded and proud man, who simply wasn’t the kind of person who knew how to let people in, but for some reason letting him go was much harder than she expected.

Charity was frightened that saying goodbye to this man would be simple, but was not comforted when she realized that it would be difficult. He was a strict and impassive man who acted more like an appointed provider than a caring father and his towering indifference to her achievements cultivated a furious resentment inside of her.

Watching her proud father be whittled down by his sickness to a nearly unrecognizable state shriveled that once all-commanding resentment towards him until it disappeared completely. She watched him waste away in his bed; his body all bent and folded like broken branches piled in someone’s backyard, and all she wanted was more time. Charity knew nothing about her father, they never had the time or the lucidity to share secrets with each other and that was what she would come to regret the most. She knew her father could never be her friend, but she was terrified that he might die a stranger to her.

They didn’t have one of those golden relationships that fathers and daughters had in television and movies. They never had those jovial conversations over ice cream under giant umbrellas or went out to movies together, all of which she had cursed him for never giving her when she was younger, but it turns out it didn’t matter as much as she thought.

The last few days she had let herself accept him as a man with limitations and good intentions and she didn’t want him to leave this world thinking that his only daughter still resented and hated him.
He wasn’t the most nurturing father and offered her very little comfort in her life, but he had always loved her and made sure that she was taken care of and she only now realized the importance in that.
Unfortunately, so late in his condition he was unable to hear her words, and Charity could only hold his hand and hope to send her messages to him through her presence, her touch. She spent the entire day holding his hand on the day he died. She become so used to how his fragile hand felt in hers that she mistook his presence as her own. She closed her eyes and tried to comfort her father as their lives mingled in the cold tiled room of the hospital.

When he died she realized that she lost part of herself. They weren’t friends and they were essentially strangers when he departed, but he was her father and he was her connection to this world.
She barely knew him, but he was her father and she lost him. His presence was no longer in this world and she had never felt so alone.

Charity didn’t know how she made it to the bus stop. She didn’t know how she managed to convince her feet to form steps and achieve a destination. She doesn’t remember waiting on that cold steel bench under the light September rain that came down like a whisper from the clouds. She didn’t remember choosing a seat to sit down on, but she found herself sitting on a crude bus seat feeling like she could disappear and be lost forever in its slick blue color.

Charity felt so lost and alone that she became terrified that if she didn’t connect with someone at that exact moment she might be swallowed by a torrent of apathy and never resurface. So, very gently, she submitted her weight to the stranger next to her and placed her head on his shoulder.
She had no idea who he was and she didn’t care, she just needed to not feel alone; she needed to be rescued from that exact moment, that exact despair. Charity let her presence speak to him, and surprisingly, he spoke right back. At first his shoulders were stiff, but soon they relaxed and carried her wonderfully.

“Could he possible feel as alone as I do?” She thought, “Could he possible know what I know?”
She wasn’t sure, but for a time they shared a warmth, they fed a fire between the both of them that lit the darkest corners of their unclear future. She dare not look at him and interrupt this moment. She dare not blink or cough and let the fragile flame they had created be exposed to the wind.

When she heard her stop announced over the speakers, Charity quickly got up and walked out of the bus.
“I must not look back,” she thought as she regained control of her steps. “I must not let mysteries become a casualty to these wicked days”

She could feel his eyes on her back as she walked down the street leading to her apartment.

she smiled.

The Last Frontier


It wasn't just the cold; it was the lack of civilization that made my childhood unique. There's just something about the darkness that winter brings that can make you feel so powerless and small. There is no darkness like the darkness below the Tundra where even the sun is not big enough to cover its territory and the deep shadows of neglect can last for days. The sun was like a father with multiple families, and we Alaskans were the family that he visited the least.

Our streets were mostly unpaved and the all-terrain tires of our vehicles conjured up a constant cloud of dust to hover over like a fog. The crunching sounds of hard rubber and overlapping pebbles rearranging themselves under the weight of a car will always remind me of my childhood, hearing my father's truck pull in as I sat at the edge of the driveway on railroad ties.
We didn't have much, but what we had we had in abundance: trees, gravel, sky, stars, lakes, rivers, mosquitoes, wildlife. I didn't have the comforts of civilization like most kids; there were two channels to watch on the television, four radio stations (the mountains pretty much cleaved any wandering broadcast in half) and one tiny grocery store.

To say that I was isolated and sheltered was an understatement. I had a bike, but nowhere to ride it to, and everything was just so far away from everything else. I didn't have much need for media, I spent my time running through the forest in my bare feet chasing shadows, throwing rocks and chopping firewood. I would later be ridiculed after moving to the lower forty-eight for not knowing what "I Love Lucy" was.

We had no piercing city lights in North Pole, no skyline to behold on balconies. What we had to fill the horizon was the giant oil refinery. From a child's perspective the gleaming ivory towers of the refinery approached the sky like rocket ships ready for launch. They could only be seen from far away, they were not something you could ever walk up to, like a kingdom at the edge of the rainbow. And even their towering vertical structures were no match for the vastness of the terrain, their blinking lights disappearing under the endless nothing.

Growing up in such a place granted me a unique perspective. As a child, I had no idea about social structures; everyone I knew was like me, lower class. I had nothing at my disposal at which to even begin to define these social structures. There was no real wealth to be wowed by, nothing that would make me stop and realize just how fortunate or unfortunate we were.

I remember visiting one of my father's friends. I was so amazed at the fact that this person's house had two stories, awed at the simple idea of a staircase that you could not only walk up, but down as well! I completely overlooked the fact that the place was a mess with derelict cars and dead patches of grass out front. I tugged on my fathers arm when I had a chance and asked him vehemently, "Dad, is this a mansion?!!"

"No, son, this isn't a mansion," he said, but it was to me regardless and I was ecstatic that I finally got to walk through the insides of a mansion.

“I wonder where their maids are.” I pondered to myself.

There was one moment in my childhood, however, that really woke me up to the differences in how people could live. It was one of those cold winters day in Alaska that gnawed on the tips of your fingers and toes and widened your lungs. I was riding with my father in his pick up truck to the local dump where we had to haul our trash out to every week. He had a tan Mazda truck, bruised and dented from all the loads of firewood and trash that we carried in her. I rode with him in this truck all the time; it was one of those old trucks made of tough metal, like an old Russian satellite that fell from the sky.

I was in the passenger seat bundled up in my winter clothes clutching the library books that we would later return. It was shortly after we pulled into the dump grounds that we saw her. The sound of our chained winter tires chewing up the gravel as we coasted in made her jerk her head back in time to reflect the light from our headlights with her eyes.

She was like a wild animal, but she was completely human. I’ll never forget the look that she had in her eyes as her body was frozen, poised over the trash dump like a scavenging creature. It was shame; the look of shame was frozen in her eyes by the light of my father’s pick up truck and magnified by the darkness of winter. She was beautiful in the dark with her eyes like dying flashlights and her wild blonde hair a shelter for lost pieces of wilderness.

My aggravated father beeped his horn as he pulled further in and just like that she was gone, darting off into the forest with the grace of a four-legged animal.

I’ll never forget what she looked like at that instant when she turned back to look at us, the shame and desperation mixing in her eyes pinning me to my seat with fear. I was afraid; I had never known that a person could live that way. Her desperation frightened me, a grown woman living like a wild animal in the harsh conditions of my hometown.

It was at that moment that I first began to truly comprehend the differences in how people live and are forced to live.

I was at Logan international airport when I let her go.

I lost her to air traffic, tray tables, and that need to discover yourself in a place where the streets are so mysterious they can lead you anywhere.
She starts to cry as we shuffle our way on the aged carpet towards the security gates. Our footsteps are stiff and tiny, like a toy soldier march, compressed on both sides by travelers whose numbers snake around corners and into dusty sun filled rooms.

I wanted it all to be perfect like a scene from a Hollywood movie; I wanted to give her a profound goodbye, fit to remember under dim light, while staring through backseat windows, in any time zone or at any elevation. The kind where the clever soundtrack crescendos as we kiss; where the camera whizzes around us at a secret angle borrowed from heaven. And when the camera tightens up on our faces we'll know that its time for the last goodbye, and after our credits role, we'll keep the ticket stubs in secret boxes under beds.

Reality tightened its grip on my perfect scene with creaky knuckles, squeezing out all the perfection until we were left in the trashy basement terminal that smelled like a cheap hotel or stale bowling alley. The AirTran terminal was the only one located in the basement level, sandwiched between baggage claims belts, car rentals and rows of metal baggage carts. The ceiling sagged and the carpet held color from a different decade, but just barely. It was filled with ominous halls that looked as if they might lead straight to the principle's office or the dentist's chair.

I could forecast the tears before they would appear because of that slight twitch in her left cheek that always gave her away, and the fact that she kept her face from me; hid her eyes away in a futile attempt to reclaim some sort of control. The people behind us were coughing violently and the ones in front had that tired glazed-over look of frequent fliers in their eyes. I tried to banish them from my peripheral vision as I held her close in those last few moments.

It always seems that I meet the really important ones right before some impending defeat. My skin heavy with the extra weight of desperation, my eyes nearly caked shut with apathy. The charges were set at the foundations of my everyday life, and that’s when I met her, when I had nearly convinced myself to withdraw into my misanthropic tendencies. She entered my life and offered something better. I guess that must have added an extra watt or two to her already brilliant halo.

I remember seeing her smiling at me from the edge of the room while I danced in that dark nightclub with friends. A very fleeting glance that could very much have been just my imagination, like being in a still room and catching an angle of the sun in such a way that individual dust particles reveal themselves to you for just a second.

Her smile shone brilliantly between dancing heads like a sailing particle softened by sunlight.

I could feel her dangerous red crosshairs focus on my back, despite the dim light of the frosted light bulbs, despite the way the alcohol filled my toes and directed the dance in my feet. I could feel it there, I could feel the itch in her trigger finger; but I didn’t run. I didn’t hide behind a bush or crawl into a ditch.

It wasn’t long before our lips were learning each other’s secret names. It wasn’t long before our voices found the hidden power to paint the back of our eyes with foreign sunsets. It wasn’t long before we could pantomime the rest of our lives with eyelashes under blankets. It wasn’t long before she had to leave me.

She gave me that wild summer that I had always hoped for, one that slams its fists into the monotony of life, disrupting the topography of neighboring towns. Full of romance and recklessness, the kind of worth remembering. She saved me from the towering apathy I had building up in my bones only to see me off like a decommissioned battleship.

Saying goodbye was easy, it would be living with that goodbye afterwards that would prove difficult. I could do goodbyes easily because I was a loner and being the loner means never being attached. Goodbyes without attachments are a cinch.

But she was different; she was new. She was something I had never witnessed before. She made me feel things I had never felt before, made me feel things I was beginning to believe I didn’t have the capacity to feel. Twenty-eight years of living and she was the only thing I ever knew how to love.

I wanted to cry for her, to assure her that a loner like myself could be capable of all the same emotions, but I was composed and efficient as I consoled her shaking body and wiped away her tears. I wanted to give her that last image so she wouldn’t have to wonder on that nine hour flight where my tears where. Where they still asleep in bed, oblivious to the alarm? Where they nestled between crates in the back of a train car or stuck in traffic?

But I was unable to show her a single tear before she disappeared in that jungle of magnetic wands and mechanical x-ray eyes.

She was this beautiful new thing that had me convinced that I had a place in this functioning world, but was she still not enough to make this highly decorated champion of detachment shed a tear for a such a great loss?
Immediately I began resorting to my old ways, I tried to convince myself to cry, tried to imagine myself as one of those regular people who could cry at the idea of losing their significant other to the torrents of destiny. I wanted to be able to do this simple thing, for her, for me, to know how it feels to feel something so real.

I avoided the accelerated walking belts on the way to my car because I wanted to utilize each step back, like a pounding drum beat summoning the hidden emotion to the surface.

I wanted to call her up and say tell her honestly that I was able to transform my often-retreating emotion into the silvery shape of tears on my cheek.
I wanted to give her that kind of assurance while she was floating above the clouds; I wanted her to hear this after the beep: “Honey, there’s a hole at the bottom of the Red Sea that ends at my eyes and its feeding color to those roadside gardens at the entrance of small towns that spell out words like ‘welcome’ or ‘thanks for visiting’ in local flora.”

And she would say. “You’ve just made the entire plane thirty pounds lighter and we may soon float up into uncharted currents and give power to cloudy days”

But I started to lose hope as I made it completely out of the airport and reached to open the door to my car. Was my twenty-eight years of cultivated detachment too battle hardened to undo?

As I fired up the engine and tried to follow the exit signs out of the immense parking garage I realized that I had difficulty seeing them. My vision had been blurred by the army of tears that was now charging out.
I could finally imagine what that sunrise might look like over the field of the last battle, that orange one that revolution came in on.

It felt good to finally know a real goodbye. It felt good to feel the sting of absence, to miss something, someone specific.

While I was walking through that narrow corridor back to my car I remember hearing the slick, formally dressed voice of our governor coming down from the ceiling. He spoke with exhilaration about the joys of our state and his words were matched by the clever tiled ocean art on the floors. I listened as he told me about all the great things you could do in Massachusetts, as he described the beauty that the seasons bring. But the end of his dialogue was a sharpened spear that pinned me where I stood.

“Welcome friends to Massachusetts,” he proclaimed with a huge gust of pride, “My home, your home.”

When I met Marta she was hanging around in the branches of a tree singing as loud as she could some ridiculous sounding song that she was obviously just making up.

“Oh God, oh God! You’ve got on the best pair of shorts that I ever have seen! Oh God, dear God, did you borrow them from your little brother? Oh, they look so keen! “

I don’t think she noticed me down there watching her; she seemed much too concerned with the arrangement of her posture among the branches as she belted out her songs. She lay on her back peering upwards intently, as if there were some great secret waiting to be discovered there in between the sky and the glittering leaves and the only way to get it to show itself was to sing as loud as you could into its ears.

Eventually all that terrible singing wore her out and, taking advantage of the silence I shouted up after her, “Hey there!” I yelled with my hands cupped around my mouth.

The tree wiggled nervously and let loose a few leaves which trickled down around me, and then a face discovered itself amongst the branches, “Hey yourself.”

There was a pause as she eyed me casually, surprised to see another person and somewhat annoyed by it as well. “Do you need something, stranger? Do I KNOW you?”

I laughed and said, “Uh, no I don’t think we know each other but, uh, things are kinda odd right now and you’re the first person I’ve seen for days.”

“Uh huh,” she said almost to herself as she tried her best to reclaim her position in the branches.

I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t, she just lay there looking up at the tiny pieces of sky through the shade of leaves.

Confused, I called up after again, “So, don’t you think that we should do something? I mean shit is like seriously fucked up right now. Don’t you think we should try and figure out what’s happening?”

“Do what you want, fella, I’ll just be up here enjoying myself, okay? Thanks, buh-bye”

Frustrated, I tried a few more times to attempt conversation with the strange girl in the tree, but at that point she had decided to ignore me completely. She was a stubborn girl if I’d ever seen one and there was no way I was gonna get through to her so I laid down at the base of the tree and started to sing as loud as I could.

“The Revere Heights Supper Club, don’t you want to join the Revere Heights Supper Club? Supper has never been so grand; come on and take my hand! Bring your best forks and spoons, first we’ll taste the world, then we’ll taste the moon!”

The tree shifted again, sending more leaves cascading down as the girl in the tree pointed a terrific grin down at me.

“You’re fucking retarded, that song is terrible, you sing like an elephant trapped in a garbage disposal unit.”

“Just trying to speak your language,” I said coolly.

The girl in the tree laughed wildly.

“Am I really that bad?”

“That bad, “ I said still laying on my back.

“Haha! You know, people have been telling me that all my life. I used to love to sing as a child but it made everyone around me insane, so I was forced to stop. I’ve been afraid to sing ever since. I guess I figured that since no one was around now was the best time to see if I had improved, you know, like somehow”

“Nope,” I said and then paused, “unless of course, at some point you were worse, but I simply can’t imagine such a supreme level of discord”

The girl in the tree let out a warm sigh, numb with sunlight, and watched as it lifted up through the leaves and carry off into the sky.

“So, what’s your name, stranger?”

“Winston, what’s yours?”

“I’m Marta,” the girl in the tree said affectionately.

We sat there silently for a little while longer, our bodies positioned separately in and beside the tree.

“Hey, Winston, you wanna know why I’m up here, up here in this tree?”

“Sure, Marta, what brings you to this tree?”

“I’m here because I’m protecting it, looking after it. Some people say that trees are the guardians of the forest, that the soul of the forest is hidden in its trees and that they look after all the creatures that live there. But this guy here, he ain’t fit to look after anything right now. I don’t know if you noticed, Winston, but things have been disappearing, here one minute, gone the next.“

“Yeah, I noticed that too.”

“Well, this here is the only tree that I’ve seen for days, Winston, and its branches and its leaves and the way the sunlight plays hide and seek in its belly, it reminds me of home; it reminds me of the little house I grew up in back in Kansas and I NEED it to stay right here, right where it is. So I’ve appointed myself its guardian.”

“So you’re gonna guard it by laying up there on your back, singing like an idiot? What if it disappears while you’re in it and you fall and break your back?”

“No, I don’t think that that will happen. I have this feeling that as long as I stay up in this tree that it won’t be going anywhere. That if I stay here to care, to whisper in its ear that none of this is really happening, it will believe me. “

Marta sighed and rolled over onto her belly, letting her arms dangle off the sides of the tree limb, resting her chin sweetly against its bark at an angle that pierced heaven.

“I just feel that if I leave it behind all alone, with no one to cherish it, to appreciate it, it will lose what little meaning it has left and vanish just like the rest. For some reason, Winston, I am still here and you’re still here and there’s some meaning behind us, some purpose, because we are permanent, and all the things that we own we give purpose to and they stick around just like us. So I’m doing what I can, I am telling this tree to keep me in its branches and it will keep me in its branches for as long as I’m here.”

“But how long can you stay up there, Marta? You can’t stay up there forever, you know. Is this how you’re gonna deal with all this? It’s a rather immature way to cope.”

“Forever? Forever? That’s just the thing, Winston, who can say now how long forever will be? Who has that say anymore? It could be tomorrow. Forever could end by the end of this sentence……..”

Our bodies tightened and our eyes darted in a pause immediately afterwards; that last statement came out as if she had spoken the boogeyman’s name out loud.

When we were both convinced that forever was still intact, we shared a small, somewhat defeated laugh. The weight of everything was starting to seep in through our watertight hull, causing the metal of our hearts to rust.

I had to do something; I had to offer her some relief from the pressure. If we were gonna survive this, we were gonna have to hold on to those precious intangibles that made us who we were. To get through this madness we were gonna have to seek out those tiny mysterious within ourselves that dull the cruelness of the world around us.

“Look, here’s what we’ll do; we’ll love this single tree with all our hearts, with enough love to last three whole lifetimes. We’ll scar it with a love so heavy that it will never forget us. Never forget us, so that it can’t possibly be anywhere but here, right here missing us with all that it is.”

“And just how do you plan on doing that?” she said curiously wide-eyed.

“Come on down and I’ll show you,” I said.

The girl in the tree excused herself from the tree and straightened herself up beside me at its base. Before she had a chance to complete her skeptical stare I grabbed her and kissed her on the lips, holding her to me like a force of nature, my fingers stretched through her hair like tiny tributaries.

I kissed her like the end of the world, guiding us to our knees slowly as I gave her a language worth memorizing. Promising her with the softness in my lips that we are breaking free, that we are airborne and perfect for the moment.

At the other end of the kiss (my very first end of the world kiss) we were on our knees at the base of the tree where I pulled out my pocketknife and stuck it in precisely, making the shape of a heart with our two names trapped inside.

“There,” I said weakly, “Now we are all three lovers anxious for another day. We have a secret worth remembering, worth keeping till the end. This tree will not go anywhere.”

Marta looked up at me in bewildered shock and remained that way for a few moments before reaching back and slapping me in the face.

“I suppose,” she said, “Because this is most likely the end of the world and you are most likely the last man on Earth, that you think you can get away with pulling a stunt like that, but you’re dead wrong, mister. You haven’t even held my hand yet, I don’t even know what kind of car you drive.”

"I ride the bus," I said slowly, trying to interpret the authenticity of her attack.

"Oh my, we're doomed."

I will no longer be posting art here, there is a new journal called pastedstars where I'll be putting all that from now on.

Do you know that soft place moments after you open your eyes from sleep? When the weightless static from the land of dreams still clings to your outline, before the stern decisiveness of the real world shakes the dust of your dreams off your pajamas? When half your eyesight is still sleeping, still holding its head underneath the pillow where it can still hear the crescent whispers, the pinhole sighs. That soft place between two very different lands stretched out like a comet’s tail, that is the exact area that we, the Walkers, now find ourselves.

We haven’t left, we haven’t gone anywhere new; the world around us has been gutted and frozen in mid-stride. We are exactly where we were before, but where we were before is having second thoughts.

All the predetermined and the absolutes, all the laws and definitions were lost in the fire, drifting upwards and away in a voiceless dark smoke. The boundaries that we once knew have dried out and coiled up empty like discarded reptile skin.
The colors are all on fire, spreading out like outbreaks of acne, distorting the geography of the land, the elevation of the sky. The spectrum has stretched its arms wide threatening to smother the landscape with rosy cheeks. There are colors and sights that now populate our vision which have never before been revealed.

Were they hiding somewhere under the carpet all this time with our lost quarters and forgotten marbles? Have they been waiting for this moment? Are they dancing their fevered dance in the skies with steps they have been saving up while lost down there with the dust and the countless patterns of dark?
Are they now rushing to tell us secrets that have been buried for ages in a language that we’ve all forgotten to speak?

Nothing is static, everything is changing and the world is turning itself over and over, searching for a pattern, a combination that fits. It is thinking to itself out loud, wondering who or what it is that it wishes to be and we are trapped in the middle. Watching with wide eyes and walking feet as the sleeping world looks frantically for itself.

And that song is still there under everything like a determined splinter under skin. It beats and thumps so deep with a pulse on a never-ending vein stretched to the ends of the world. Its there, eerie and persistent in the shadows.

I suppose that it’s a natural instinct for us to walk. Now that we can’t rely on our surroundings to stay put, why should we? Standing still while it moves on? We don’t want to be left behind do we? If the crowd moves, so do we move. There must be a reason it goes where it goes.

There must be a reason.

I carried Crowley’s empty beer bottle with me for weeks. Or what I thought were weeks. I was afraid that if I put it down that it would disappear. That if I discarded it and forgot about it shortly after it would have nothing to hold it together anymore and would disperse in a million pieces of disconnected thought.

There are still relics here and there; scattered pieces of the world overthrown that have refused to pass on. Instinctively, most of us have started tiny collections of relics that we keep with us in sacks or backpacks. No particular reason why, other than it seems like an important thing to do. At the very least a reminder of what has left us.

Just in case we forget.
There is no telling how long things will…………..be this way.

I had the urge to leave Crowley’s beer bottle behind and then come back for it, as an experiment, to see if what I feared would happen did happen. But I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t risk not looking into its glassy brown face, not feeling that familiar weight I’ve had in my hands since the beginning.

So instead I left behind pack of cigarettes that I had found, let my mind and feet wander a bit and then came back to where I had left it.

It was no longer there.
Gone and I wasn’t surprised.

So determined, I stared at that beer bottle ferociously, examining it’s details madly, memorizing all its features. I made up stories about it, gave it a past and a future, a family and a personality. I constructed memories of intertubing trips to the country with friends, of embarrassing moments in grade school and a general dislike for breakfast pastries. I pressed my thoughts into its surface with all my might and hoped that it would be suitable enough armor to protect it from whatever threatened to steal it away.

I still carry Crowley’s bottle with me today along with Matilda’s keyboard and other relics that I’ve come across. All of them with stories and real things made up to fool the devious teeth that wish to crunch them apart. They occupy my backpack like a tiny traveling family.

Hold on, hold on to what you’ve got. Our memories seem so foreign to us, so hard to capture in the space of our minds. There is nothing to compare them to; the reality where they are kept has ceased to exist. They have no context to be brought into, no shape to hold onto, and no weight to keep them from blowing away.

Hold on; hold on to everything you’ve got. The Walkers don’t know why, why they walk. The Walkers have no place to go, the Walkers they don’t belong. Don’t know where, where it is they go and all they have is that song. All they have is that song….
And they follow.

I edge back into my chair and lean my beer to my mouth. This is the only way we could possibly hope to occupy this space right now and I'm loving every minute of it. We are life brothers in our hate for the mascara boys but deep down the simple fuel we are sharing is basic human jealous; what we wouldn't give for a chance to be that shallow.

The night clings to the glass doors with vibrating colors and draws my steps from under me. I often find myself walking long after I've started movement, not knowing a destination, just thinking abstractly through footsteps until suddenly I am somewhere else. The sudden aberration has taken me outside to a sea of grass under the open jaws of the sky. I can hear the pounding of the bass in the background tickling the edges of the doors and windows.

I drop down to my knees, bottle of beer in hand, joints bent, closer to the grass. Falling backwards cautiously so as not to spill my beer, I clamp my eyes shut and listen intently. I hear things so much better out here, under the sky and away from the distraction of those awkward shuffling bodies.
In the presence of some music I feel so completely in touch with all the strangers in the room, as if we're all connected in some supernatural way, sharing the same moment, beating from the same core. Inside we're being stimulated in completely different ways, but collectively, we're all under the same spell.
Times like these are really the only time I ever really feel connected to anyone, and in the end we all leave strangers, but when we're all under that spell, under those dancing lights, it's so reassuring to be alive.

But then there is the music that can only be best appreciated in solitude. Away from the taint of the rest of the world, from their silly haircuts and their t-shirts with clever slogans. Away from their flash cameras and swinging elbows. This type of music is playing inside tonight, so I rescued myself from the crowd and settled myself down here, covering the grass, where the music sounds best.

The sky is mimicking driveway experiments with oil and water, spinning and swirling, gaining and losing ground, sky versus cloud. A mythical battle above our heads.
The music builds up like the lungs of the big bad wolf and slowly lets out a sound capable of blowing down houses. I remember thinking how perfect a moment I had just found for myself, out there in the night with the soles of my shoes exposed to the passersby's. It would be awhile until everything in the world agrees this fondly again, I thought. At the time I had no idea just how accurate this thought would turn out to be.

When the song finished I got up and walked back inside. Immediately I noticed that the crowd had gotten smaller, yet this was only the second act and the headliners had yet to reach the stage.
The band started into it's next song as I found my way back to Crowley. At this point he had gotten a two beer jump on me while I was outside so I had some serious catching up to do.

I stopped by the bar and ordered two beers, one for each hand and as I walked back to Crowley he grinned with approval.
"One of those lil' darlings for me?" he inquired in the middle of a sloppy lean.

"Hell no," I said keeping the beers away from him, "these lil' darlings are mine."

We're both pretty much the same height yet somehow he finds a way to peer down at me in contemplative way and finally follow through with a nod.

"Damn, I like where you're heads at. Starting now I'm gonna double fist my beers all night."

I laugh and hand him one of the beers as we reclaim our spots on the railing, watching as the headlining band warms up below.

"I'm fucking serious, Winston, you got it straight! We'll start a revolution! Double-fisting our booze right into our grave! Why bother with one beer when you have TWO perfectly good hands?! We'll be the pathetic heroes of well-bred frat boys everywhere! They'll have our picture framed in the den right above the fireplace like generals, right there in between John Belushi and Spuds McKenzie,"
He says while looking straight into an invisible geometrical shape that he makes with motions of his hands.

"It'll be great! They'll share false stories about us that could never EVER possibly happen. Like the time you skated down devil's spine in the middle a snow storm on one ski or when I learned kung-fu in one day by reading the inside of a bathroom stall and saved the entire country of China from the Japanese with a single roundhouse kick!"

I take a swag of my beer and watch him silently as he winds down. I've got one leg and two elbows leaning on the metal bars of the railings.

"It'll be fucking great is all I'm saying, Winston. Fucking great.......all I'm saying. John Belushi? Spuds Fucking Mckenzie? That's good fucking company, my man, wouldn't you say?"

"Never knew dogs could have middle names," I say while turning my attention back to the band.

Somethings wrong. Something feels all wrong.
Looking down, I'm puzzled by the lack of a crowd this band has pulled in. I swear to God, there were more people here for those shitty mascara boys. There's no way that's possible, these guys haven't toured in years and the college radio station has been promoting the shit out of tonight's show. How the hell could the local rejects pull more bodies in than the headliners?

I try to yell over the music and bring it up to Crowley, but the words get lost in the distortion.

I bring my attention back to the music and I notice that the crowd is not at all acting like a crowd at a show should act. They're moving around, not still and fixed on the performance like they should be. There's movement down there and the crowd is getting smaller by the minute. More people are leaving, not walking out the exits but just disappearing somewhere beyond my sight.

In delirious curiosity, I turn back to Crowley, to see if he's noticing what I'm noticing, but it seems he has slipped away too and all that remains is his beer. He left his drink behind, with beer still sitting in the glass. Out of all the years I've known this kid, he would never do such a thing; he's the kind of cat that would bring his beer into the bathroom with him. Pure moxy, this kid's got.

At this point I'm hot and that strange feeling starts to swell inside me. This is it, isn't it? Something is happening, my body can sense it, like a silent air raid, painting the town red. I close my eyes and I can hear Matilda typing within the music. Far, far in the background like a puppet master looking down on the stage, above everything. My stomach is lost at sea, I'm losing sense of direction. I can almost feel her slender wrists typing around my head.
"What have you been trying to say all this time? Are we plugged into the universe, is this its sound?

I gather myself together and open my eyes just in time to see the bassist carefully put down his instrument and walk off the stage, almost as if in a trance, eyes nearly dead. And Just like that the music had been divided, and the sound is shaved down to a dull caged animal. It's not long before the rest of the band follow in the same trance-like manner and soon all that's left is the drummer pounding with black magic precision against his drums.
The music has wilted and turned translucent. The drums are all that remain and they pound so thick inside my body and fill my head so deep with thoughts that the room begins to feel like a giant domed tent and everywhere around me is the swirling soup for the spell being cast.

I try to reach out and grab the air, make it my own, because suddenly everything is eluding me, but my arms barely respond. My eyelids have gotten heavy and my skin numb. Again, my feet are taking me someplace undefined but this time it's different, I'm becoming a casualty just like everyone else. Soon, I'll find out just where everyone has gone.

My steps take me down the stairs. I don't even feel my feet on the ground, I just glide nearly undefined. At the bottom of the stairs I make eye contact with the drummer whose terrified eyes shine like the creatures at the bottom of the ocean. He pounds one last beat on his drum kit before collapsing in a heap completely asleep.
The silence gives way for the most erie thing I've ever heard; someone else's song deep-coded into the background. Not coming from any one direction, but slithering underneath the landscape like a devious snake. It announced itself out of nowhere like the monsters in horror movies that come up behind their prey through the floor gathering like dripping water into one spot and then suddenly sending it's menacing shadow to cast to the edge of the frame.

It had been there all along, building up behind the music of all the bands, invading like the greeks with their trojan horse and now the horse has crumbled and the enemy has been revealed.
The fall of the kingdom has begun.

Its sound.

Its sound was the darkest kettle black and screamed through the trees like a witches rave. It was stimuli that invaded through the ears yet was beyond approach and could not be interpreted. I could hear it, but I could not assign a melody or grasp dialogue. I couldn't anticipate chord progression or breakdown layers. I could only submit myself to its wicked power, let it wash over me and work it's twisted will, whatever it may be. It was the most ancient of all music, caressing the sincerely basic and primitive parts of my mind, stimulating the places that I had forgotten. I knew that it was working in places so deep within that I could never hope to pull anything out that I could recognize.

I soon found myself standing by an ominous black door. It was sunken into the black walls like a retreating soldier who had just watched his platoon get massacred. I had never noticed a door here before, it's face like a mask in the dark. Had this always been here?

I found myself reaching for the nob. All around me in the club what little people who were left were crumbled on the floor deep in sleep. I stepped around them carefully with someone else's steps on my way to the door.

The door opened and inside the room was a giant whale's belly. It was like nothing I had ever seen in this world before; the edges were smokey and burnt, barely tangible like a memory from the womb. Like looking through a peek hole in some seedy downtown hotel down a dimly lit hallway, greedy with the dark. The floor was decorated with the sleeping bodies of all those in the crowd that had disappeared. The walls, or what should have been the walls of the room were pulsating with the dreams inside them and were warm with life.

I fell to my knees and felt myself slipping away. That strange song was slipping in and out of the air spiraling around me and tightening around my neck. I could feel it's scales tempt me to the floor. The walls were breathing and thinking my thoughts for me, my vision shrinking and swallowing itself like a cannibal.
I was drifting into a place where I knew I could never come back from.
As I fell to the floor, my face was greeted with a strange yet instantly recognizable surface.

Matilda's Keyboard.

The weight of my face activated the letters, and the crunch of the keys somehow made it into my vanishing skull for one final message.

"WAKE UP"

I regain my senses and slowly gather myself back up on two feet. I am the only vertical object, my shadow lost in the dark. I squint and try desperately to find her, Matilda, among the motionless bodies but she is nowhere to be found. Not a trace, only the cream colored keyboard that I found with my face. I manage to find Crowley's sleeping body and shake him violently to try and bring him back, but I already know that it's hopeless. I had gotten close enough to sharing his fate to know this absolutely.

I'm sitting there in the near dark room, indian style amongst all the sleeping bodies whom just moments ago were having conversations, inhaling nicotine and shifting weight between feet. I give myself sixty seconds to shutdown and take all of this in, memorize this little scene and all the details. Arrange them meticulously like a skeleton holding it all together forever in my mind. Giving in to the towering helplessness wailing inside me, I let myself be overwhelmed. I feel like I was just birthed and I'm flailing around on some hospital bed completely unsure of everything, all my senses and the air in my lungs are telling me lies with crooked mouths. I feel completely alone.

I give myself sixty seconds to deal with the situation, afterwards I get up, grab the cream-colored keyboard and go back upstairs.
Leaning two elbows and one foot on the metal railing I calmly finish Crowley's beer and listen to the silence.

(END CHAPTER ONE)

Today is Monday, April 10, 2006. I woke up to this day with the sun on my left and three pillows under my head. The start of the workweek, I ponder through morning minutes with languid steps, I am a syndicated rerun of excess and preparation. Preparing for what? Life. Life called my cell phone at 10:10 AM this morning, Monday, April 10, 2006. It had the voice of my father in its lungs and it told me a story through paper and envelope about a young man being declined for a second time admission into the school that he dreamt could help him.

My languid steps stopped; I was awake. Maybe for the first time in a long time, I was awake. I was everything that I was supposed to be, at that moment; that moment with those words still spinning in my ears. All my hopes, fears and dreams came up to the surface and were humming, tickling my head, brightening the edges of my ears. I have been waiting for this story, the story about the boy and his hopes and his college, all my life. Everything up to this point was a bad montage of birthdays and mistakes and kisses and rugburns, and paychecks and lost socks, which finally brings us to the point where he hears this story from the voice of his father with a one hour difference in time zone and twenty degree elevation in weather.

I want to thank you and the board members involved in this decision, I would like to extend my thanks to that collective lot of important people. I feel like you have given me something powerful, something to build a life upon. I feel like today is the first day of my life and my eyes are soaring and they can see through everything. All the facades and wicked details that haunt our imagination and snuff out our mysticism, I have pulled them out of their hiding spots and arranged them against the sky. I entered my vehicle and attempted the commute to work, trapped in the army of cars on asphalt and I could see through all of it. Faces sleeping awake going in predetermined directions, giving up on fantasy, owning magazine subscriptions and carrying personalized checks. Because of you I was free of all of that! My face doesn’t look like that. It now carries my features.

On my way to work I realized that there was no way that I could possibly place myself inside a cubicle for an entire day, I am my own person and I refuse to give that away. Not to anyone. Not today. So I called in sick and drove home with the windows down and my music antagonizing fault lines, I bet you imagine that rejection would have the opposite affect on me? That I would bury my head in bed sheets and make phone calls in a rehearsed voice. Well you have no idea who I am and what I am capable of, this rejection will stay with me for my entire life. I am galvanized, I have fire on my fingertips, my blood is perfect in my veins, and I love everything. I am standing perpendicular to the Earth exactly as I should be I have a name but it doesn’t do me justice.

I would like you to know that your wicked science has created Godzilla. I will move past this and I will achieve great things, I will step haphazardly on your towering skyscrapers, I will turn your citizens against you. I am thirsty, I am ravenous. I am standing up for myself. I refuse to except your rejection of my potential, it is now against my religion.

I have sacrificed so much to maneuver through life this far; The person who I am and the person who I want to be are two separate universes, but the person who I someday hope to be was the one who was attending your school in the Fall. I have been desperately holding onto the idea of this person, while I have been forced to be the one who has to pay bills on time and learn to tie ties, check voicemail and reluctantly decorate cubicles. The one that I know nothing about, the one that I am most of the time. It’s been keeping me alive, this idea of me at your school, assuring me that the world can be more than just distant and insincere. That it can be accurate and honest enough to have me doing what I love doing and what I should be doing, all the while being who I should be.

Perhaps it’s an illogical romantic view, or perhaps I’m naive to think that a school can actually teach someone something that they wish with all their heart to learn. Either way, I will get to where I wish to be. I have made some bad decisions in the past, I attended school at a place that offered me zero insight on how to be an illustrator, but because I’ve always been poor and without the financial help of my parents, I compromised, and in the end I came out empty-handed. Four years of my life traded in for a gaudy piece of geometrical paper with my name on it while I remain the same person that I was at the beginning.

I was accepted into Ringling School of Art and Design after high school, and last Fall, at The Art Center in Pasadena, but despite my efforts and determination I was unable to afford tuition at either esteemed school. Massart was different, Massart was where I belonged, a place that a solitary unprivileged kid like me with a passion to succeed could better himself and get to where he hopes to someday be, without being bullied by high tuition costs and intimidating outside loans. I colored my hope with your college and I took a chance because that’s how I live my life. I gathered my belongings in the trunk of my tiny car and I drove from LA to Boston. The most important thing in my life is not my true love, its not my careful collection of vinyl records, it’s not the greatest plate of spaghetti I’ve ever consumed, its learning, gaining knowledge and becoming something that I can be proud of. It’s saying to a stranger one windy day in August, that “My name is Jeffrey Arthur Chenette and I am an Illustrator.”

This has been my obsession, my passion. How do I get to that windy day in August? I thought that it might be through the careful guidance of your esteemed school, but I suppose now that it will be through the willful and intricate dedication of my self-education. Maybe the growing suspicion that I’ve had over the last few years is true; maybe these colleges with their 4-year and 2-year degrees are simply inflated ideas that have expired years ago. Maybe I don’t need your omni-realized intuition to tell me who I am. Maybe these are for weaker people have easily accessible pockets ready to be reached in. I am hesitant to list the accomplishments that I achieved on my own because I don’t want to be that ignorant child stomping his foot on the floor proclaiming that you’re stupid for not cultivating my passion. But I will say that I’m baffled that you can label me “not good enough” or “not at the level that I should be” so easily. Because, in truth, can’t we always be better than we are? And perhaps I know my limitations, and maybe in my mind the best way to transcend these limitations is through the education that you can offer me? Where else am I supposed to learn than from the people who proclaim that they can teach me? And now more than ever in my life I am ready to be taught because I have tasted life and I know how easy it is to become hushed in it’s presence and I’m ready to fight, to get back to my identity. And what does one do when he’s been let down by the one hopeful image of himself?

I don’t know, all that I know is that right now, at this moment in my life where the battle lines have been drawn and the front lines are fluctuating everyday; I have more motivation and desire and heart in me than I have ever had before.
I want you to know that your lack of interest in my potential made me scream at the top of my lungs with my windows down. And I want you to know that I am a person who is capable of screaming at the top of my lungs. That’s who I am; I am Jeffrey Arthur Chenette and I not good enough to be a student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, but I am myself and I am still standing. You will not take that away from me. No one will.

And do you know.........

how the vampire creeps in black and white film?

he has a name in greasy latin spoken like cobwebs and his fingers headlight his path like stemmed knives. he doesn't hop and he doesn't slither, he doesn't charge and he doesn't strut. No, he inches. the vampire inches with his fingers gnarled and coughing, withered nightmares of thunderstorms and diseased trees. He wants to touch you with those fingers but just barely, where the outermost superficial fiber makes contact almost telepathically. like a shudder in the dark. because it's the only part of his body left with any feeling, out in front of him like the antennas of some elusive subterranean insect.

Do you know how the vampire creeps in black and white film?

Right now I love that the best of all things

Someone has kidnapped the SUN.

Someone has kidnapped the SUN. No one seems alarmed. This is just 'one of those things' they say. Words like "torrential" and "outlook" are parading out in sentences formed aloud. As words, they've never seen such success. Such a limited agreement between lips and teeth that has now been breached, but we won't let ourselves cheer them on. We sidestep their golden moment because we've lost our SUN and that loss swallows the sky in grays and dull blues.
Thankfully, RAIN is caring enough to try and fill SUN's absence. To keep our mind off his kidnapping.

But I'm concerned, no one seems worried about where SUN went, who took him away, or perhaps the idea that he might like it where he's at now more. Will we ever see his shining face again?
Something should be done, someone should help. I know we act like we don't care, but deep down don't we need him just a little? Just a little?

Maybe SUN got fooled. Tricked by shiny wrappers into a strange black van parked near a fence that promised things which could never be true. Maybe, years from now we'll have to draw recreations of what SUN may look like when he's aged to maturity (and isn't that always awkward, maturity).

Maybe SUN lost too much money gambling and had to 'disappear' for awhile to dodge the HEAT. Perhaps he'll reemerge in a year with a new life. He'll have this awkward beard which won't match his face and a strange new manner of speaking that he'll pick up while holding his breath underwater. Of course, we would like to think that he'll learn his lesson, and became a better, more stable person, but we all know the intimate allure of those silly felt tables and napkins that stick with condensation.

Perhaps SUN just met a girl and fell in love. Dropped him clear of the face of the EARTH. Maybe she touched his cheek and HE got burnt. Maybe he didn't know what to do about it. He always thought that all he could ever hope for was to sit there alone in the sky. That the spot in the sky that he took up was the only way to define him.
Long ago he accepted the fact that all he'd ever be is a small spot in the sky, alone with his thoughts and hopes and passion that could never hope to reach another living soul. He would sit there quietly all his life and make up stories and teach himself to laugh and ponder wondrous ideas. And always he wanted to share everything that shined inside of him with something, someone, but he was alone. Until the day he swelled so deep with a singular life that he radiated out in all directions. To him nothing had changed, but all around there was a difference. Life showed signs of pulling through, colors magnified, EARTH softened, the WATER loosened and danced.
SUN accepted the fact that he was alone and somehow learned how to love everything anyway, even though he knew of nothing else but where he was. And his love formed yellow rays that shine down on us.............but..........maybe.............SUN has found a new love, a TRUE LOVE.
and maybe that's who kidnapped
OUR SUN.

The Clouds Collapse like sleeping animals and hide his escape.

"If I don't come back," he'd say to his nimbus companions, "Remind everyone of my love"

Just like that, she's taken him away from us. He's off somewhere now, no doubt, writing horrible poetry and skipping over things like a child. He'll look at a blade of grass obnoxiously like he's never noticed it before and he'll tell her stories with happy endings.

I tell you, we have to save him! If his presence means anything to us, we have to defy the nature of our species and come together to pull him back to where he's safe and beautiful. To that tiny tiny spot in the sky were he can be magnificent
and alone.

Where he belongs.