LIES

THE PSYCHIC

2006-08-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

Detective Lauren speaks agitated “We have to make an arrest, we can’t let this woman carry on with her crime when we have substantial evidence that she will commit it and that it will lead to the death of three innocent people!” Captain Ogle responds calm but obviously not as permissive in accepting the evidence at hand, “I don’t think the circumstantial evidence is even circumstantial, how are you going to explain that based of a few simple patters detected by a psychic and confirmed by a couple of police officers, which don’t make for objective witnesses you are going to arrest a professional 43 year old woman with a wonderful career her only obvious crime being that she never managed to find herself a husband!” Capt Ogle pauses, but is breathing heavily enough to stop anyone else from talking before he continues… “And you know the supposed would be abductor and killer woman, and you are a young detective with perhaps an axe to grind because for all we know you could be a women hater; I can see now a defense council giving you and our precinct a whole new title, “misogynist central.”” “Oh Capt please you are letting your imagination go wild, its not my fault that she happens to be a former close friend of mine, who else is more likely to discover a crime than someone who knows the victims and the killer?… now Lauren does not wait for an answer, “or have you forgotten your basic training Capt, its usually someone you know that kills you, and if that is the case the most likely to be aware of your pretensions are going to be your friends, assuming that family can’t be objective on these murder matters.”

There are two other detectives in the dark and gloomy room, but they remain silent, they have already mad clear to Ogle that they are not in agreement with Lauren, they think her a bit on the unconventional side of things, and they are not very pleased with what she is proposing.

It all started a while back, Lauren had this friend Antoinette, perhaps even they were best friends, but there was Lauren’s boyfriend, and somehow Antoinette Blite found herself in a sexual liaison with him, and as it happens a million times a year throughout the world, Lauren had the occasion to catch them in the act. The friendship ended, the boyfriend got lost, and both women, at least from hearing Lauren tell it, both women seem to walk around with a Grand Canyon size scar from their mutual separation.

This was, again if one believes Lauren, an event that occurred eight years back, long enough for everyone to forget everyone, long enough for both women to have found other boyfriends or husbands, and yet they hadn’t, in fact the odd thing was how similar their profiles ran, both coming from hard edged homes, both were raised by adoring fathers, and mothers that were none supportive of their intelligent and thriving daughters. Both had found their mutual friendship because not only were they champion professionals but both could revel on how they had managed to succeed in spite of their mothers, apparent jealousies or constant denouements. And now, both could claim that the same boyfriend had separated them from perhaps their real love, each other. Yet let me be clear here, neither had lesbian tendencies, in fact they were both in love with the masculine, so much so that some times it overburdened their personalities, both in the professional world, as well as in their personal character, both lived alone, both were masochistically independent, and both had the respect of their friends and peers for being reasonable and sound minded. Neither had much book intelligence, they were doers not intellectuals, they didn’t have to prepare for their jobs, they were intuitive, highly intuitive, and they could call the shots better than most managers. Lauren had commanded national recognition for her profound ability to get to the details of a case in record times, and her case conviction record was in the 79 percentile, a seemingly impossible record, that included all her cases including those unresolved. Antoinette too was an impressive executive, she was a Vice President with a cutting edge Internet company, she had made millions for them and she had herself a handsome salary and a decent retirement full of pigs, and here was really the most obvious difference between the two, Lauren could not claim financial independence, much less on detectives pay could she claim a future with lots of pigs to retire on. Nope, in fact that had been one of their mutual points of discontent, Antoinette always business and economics savvy, commanded a spreadsheet mind, while Lauren was more prone to spend away on her family, friends and self, without giving it much thought, and so Antoinette had to help her with a loan so that she could afford her plainly impractical Karmaguia, and Antoinette had also loaned her money numerous times to cover the rent, and so forth. Which arguably perhaps gave Antoinette some right to fuck Lauren’s man, at least perhaps Antoinette subconsciously thought so, though there is no evidence that Antoinette even bothered to expect full repayment from Lauren.

And now, for the last three and half months, Lauren had been tracing circumstantial evidence of a crime that Antoinette was going to commit that maybe even Antoinette did not know she was going to commit. Lauren, not unlike Antoinette was superstitious, but not so much in a genuine way, much as many people in the Western world are superstitious, they will visit a fortune teller, have a set of tarot at home and occasionally pull a card to see how the relationship or the job are destined, or even reading the horoscope to comically feel good about themselves, in all a harmless belief, never bothering to mystically dwell in the underpinnings of the metaphysical craft. So one day, about three and half moths ago, really precisely three and half months ago, Lauren went to a Psychic. The psychic was named Habakkuk, and he had been Lauren’s official psychic for many years, so much so that they actually had lunch at least once every two months or so, and even shared a mutual passion for red wines. They laughed a lot together, and Lauren admired Habakkuk life style, he was so out of the ordinary, something that would have been very difficult for her, so she felt that it took lots of personal courage to be so different, Habakkuk dressed in robes, red and golden robes, wore a head scarf, was a skinny man, strictly vegetarian, but had nothing against beef nor did he admonish those that consumed it, he simply felt that beef grounded the spirit too much and his had to be flighty and light, and so it was that he didn’t eat meat, in fact having grown with a fanatic vegan mother, Habakkuk had been one of those rare human beings that had never tasted the meat of any animal, though some could speculate that the larvae or protein from a fly or an occasional worm might have been unnoticed in his vegetables; but for that, Habakkuk was a spiritual man, and he did curse himself for his wine consumption, he couldn’t help himself, to Habakkuk, wine was something that tied you way back to some angelic truth that couldn’t be known from, by his terrestrial self, he suspected that he would never find out precisely what the riveting connection was with wine and the angelic, but he knew that it stretched through times and culture, and he often spoke of this incredible harmonious connection that had to have eventuated at some critical historical point, for Habakkuk the invention of wine led to many strange conclusions, the foremost being that wine had been a blur point where all of humanity had for an instant synchronized upon divine aspirations and not a touch of evil had touched that micro second of intense joy and global communion, and from that moment, richness with the textures of the divine human spirit had jolted the senses and some one had to invent wine to represent the moment; yes according to Habakkuk wine was the only evidence that we had of an earth wide human communion instant; the ruby red, laced through angling souls.

You could blame Habakkuk for Lauren’s current obsession. A session of psychic reading, “I see a woman… she has adducted a family, I see a woman… she is violent of rage, I see a woman she is going through irrevocable madness… I see a woman… hurting to hurt you Lauren, hurting to touch you Lauren, I see a woman… inching her way into you from long absence, I see a woman discrediting your profession…” and suddenly Habakkuk stopped talking, tears had covered his face, sweat had dampened his head scarf, he opened his eyes wide, wide open and he rounded the table to hug, hug, Lauren, whom was already herself in heavy throttled shock!! Lauren was in fact so stiff that the hugging being begged by Habakkuk was a clumsy reaching for bones, he couldn’t get her arms or fingers to close around him, and perhaps what is worst, after coming through his trance, Habakkuk barely remembered what he said, he knew that it was bad because of the feelings that were transversing throughout his body and soul, because he knew that his tears were droplets of tragic truth and not of happening joys, and because he sensed Lauren’s shocked condition as it was connected to him as catalyst. Habakkuk, did not know what to say or do, psychics are not very good at being good friends, they are certainly detached, they really don’t belong to this world, mostly they dream there way through it, so while Habakkuk could sense that something was disproportionally wrong with his fortune telling, he could not endeavor to reassure or to calm or to help Lauren, she was on her own, he did not understand the world that he predicted happenings for, he did not understand that world, which was also why he could walk through it, looking wholly alien and not notice himself.

Now Lauren was asking captain Ogle to obtain a warrant to bring Antoinette in for questioning, this she was asking even as Antoinette had not committed the crime that she was going to commit and this even as the circumstantial evidence was highly suspect. Antoinette’s deviation from her routine of years, Antoinette had stopped drinking coffee, she had stopped attending social functions, she used to go for a seven mile run, in the past with Lauren, both were fanatics of the loner sport, but now only Lauren continued with the sport, Antoinette had abandoned it apparently approximately three and a half months ago, about the same time that she abandoned social functions and coffee, something in Antoinette had changed, and most disconcerting was the fact that she was no longer so charged at work, peers noted that her intensity towards projects was gone, that she did the bare minimum, that she avoided conflict, that she did not comment on strategic issues, that she was there but really not there, and that this unusual behavior for a woman that had the sumptuous top level office, for a woman that had marred the lives of others to get there, for a woman that had none of the passivity of a good southern woman, this woman had changed three and a half months ago. Three and a half months ago she became absent from most of her daily routine, though she still showed up to work. Her boss, however, was now beginning to lose his patience, and though she was part owner of the company, her stocks did not guarantee her a job, and he was preparing to oust her for, of all things, negligence or lack of participation.

Habakkuk had started a strange chain of events with his vision, Lauren immediately after she awakened from her shock thought of none other than Antoinette, and had immediately started the investigation to conclude that there was a different Antoinette within Antoinette, and this difference was drastic enough and timely enough to warrant police attention. Now all Antoinette wanted was for our Abraham Lincoln look alike Habakkuk, moustacheless but bearded and in robes to be able to carry out a suspicious experiment that he only hesitantly suspected might be able to tell him if Antoinette was indeed a murderer to be. According to Habakkuk in the old days, when Habakkuk speaks of the old days he is usually somewhere in the seventh century BC, now Habakkuk noted that back then it was not unusual to place a suspect in an aged wooden box like hut, and to have Psychics walk about rounding and reading the suspects energy to determine if he was bad, a bad man. Surprisingly, according to Habakkuk, whom while unable to convey anything of modern history, he didn’t even know that he looked like Lincoln, nor did he know that there had been a civil war, or for that matter a second or a first world war, but if you speak to him of the seventh century before Christ and even beyond that backwards, he seems to posses incredible knowledge, and according to him there was something very strange about the wooden box happenings, never in all of his knowledge had a woman been put in the box, never. Antoinette then stood to make woman of the year, even as she might not be aware of it, certainly such an ancient tradition being revived at this point in time had somehow an elongated connection to the past, and Antoinette, according to Habakkuk, must have somehow been deigned to link a communal practice from the seventh century BC to the present. Habakkuk noted that these kinds of bridges between centuries were rare, and often hidden from historians because history was a dead event and these were real events taking place with the same malice or goodness of intent as in their original preconceptions. In other words, what Antoinette was attempting to recreate was a genuine, not a replica event of something that took place in the seventh century, by genuine Habakkuk, this meant that the event was being carried out with knowledge of intent to sequester a provable murderer before the act. Habakkuk also noted that he was not bothered by the moral implications, the act hadn’t been committed but to Habakkuk changing the future or destiny of a person was common practice, he explained that many of his readings changed the destinies of the people that he read for, that many things that were going to happen did not happen because he, Habakkuk had read them as unwarranted or as unwanted, and that as his subjects acted in regard to his visions, they changed future histories. Capt Ogle wasn’t terribly convinced by these reassuring words from this incredulous man, so Habakkuk noted, “it is only now that everyone lives only on today that they can not envision changing future events, in the past many events were changed by ordinary people but today there is a helpless sense that ordains a none interruption of destiny, people feel that they can only govern the present, but the present is only born from the burning urges of the near present future; and so it is possible captain, to alter the future happenings, and to work as hard for them as one works to retire.” Captain Ogle wasn’t any more impressed by this, he was more impressed that the request to bring Antoinette in and lock her in a wooden hut was being made by his most admirable and frequently unerring detective.

THE WOODEN BOX

2006-08-30T22:26:00.000-07:00

Lauren had been kind enough to provide a woefully presumptions excuse for the arrest. Ogle was looking at it, looking at her, “arrest her for questioning under the pretense that there is suspicion of insider trading, and we get the Federal Government involved to help us bring her in for questioning, simply because you think her sale of some of her company stock was timed to suspiciously precisely before the stock plummeted in value? And this even as she properly notified the SEC months in advance of her intent to sell?” Lauren sat comfortably on a huge dark purple couch, she fixed her shirt a little, so as to mimic an attempt at guarding her modesty by hiding her bra, an attempt that could have been discredited by any passive observer as she was an extremely slim and fit woman with only nipples for breast. A gentle smile reached from her to the captain, “Ogle we know it is not going to stick, we know it is only pretence, but it is a reason to get her in here so that Habakkuk can do his thing, so lets not try to make sense of it.” Ogle reaches for his full head of hair as if suspecting that the happenings are going to gain him boldness, “Let’s not try to make sense of it, yeah, lets just hope that the government doesn’t try to make sense of it long enough so that we can place her in the wooden box… “Lauren”, I never would have ever though I would be dealing this type of situation with you of all people, is this how I have to pay for all those rational and well constituted cases you’ve resolve, by doing something completely out of the ordinary for me and for any sane person?!” It really wasn’t a question, Lauren knew she had his support, she didn’t bother to answer the question, she continued with her case preparations, “I have a very dear friend at the SEC, I think I can prime him so that he follows the logical steps, I will offer him my assistance, I can assure his support, his always had a huge crush on me and would do anything to marry me, he thinks am spectacular captain.” “That you are, that you are.” Captain said those words resigned to some destiny that he did not have in mind for himself.

Lauren met with Michael, a very attractive and successful fraud investigation expert with the SEC, the two had met at the gym, she took the time to remember how she had met him. He had always been at the gym at 6AM for a half hour work out, they made eyes at each other in spinning class, and each training session they would sit on bikes that tended to be closer and closer, until finally they were next to each other, he said hi, she said hi, but Lauren was immediately put off by the obvious, he had not brushed his teeth, they smacked yellow and had perhaps consumed bread in between the gums, this had immediately driven her away, after all the prior smiling had been gearing them up for a sexual relationship; she avoided him for the rest of the work out, only feeling uncomfortable with just dropping him cold, specially because he seemed so nice; she did not dare to demonstrate her abhorrence by sitting at another exercise bicycle, and so it went that they kept talking, managed to eventually have lunch, the conversations were zany and happy enough, then one day they went to dinner, and he did sneak a kiss, but she felt nothing but blah, practically she just held her mouth open, kept on thinking of those yellow teeth she had first observed, and tried as much as she could to resist any participation from her tongue, this he took as welcomed shyness from an otherwise forward woman. So Michael ended up more in love from that kiss, and she ended more certainly not in love, and thus begun their charming friendship, where he always gets to invoke his incessant love and admiration and she is happy to hear it knowing well that nothing will ever happen between them.

Their meeting was very brief, he was working on some very important case that professionally he could not tell her about; she noted the importance of his time and professional stature, by telling him that there was also an element of secrecy to her case, but that if he did not help her, she would be losing the case of her life time. He immediately picked up the phone, ordered some research analysts to get on it, and dig up patterns and circumstances, then he looked at her, with his now very clean and white glittering teeth, “well I don’t know if I can be of service but I am certainly not going to be part of losing you your most important case ever.” He immediately got up, placed his suit jacket on, looking all the million dollars that he was charged with saving the tax payers, while she cozyingly said “thanks Michael, I owe you a lunch.” Such was the parting.

Habakkuk was secretly entered into the precinct, doors were opened, led into a semi dark room, he had requested that it be a dark place, and there he was to work at the very center of the room to build his wooden box, hut like in structure. The captain walked in the room and found much to his dismay Habakkuk sitting dead center of the empty room, just sitting; trying not to show his displeasure, “How is it going Habakkuk?” “good, it is going good.” Habakkuk was really uneasy with the tone and the captains terminology, so he reused some of it, it is going good, perhaps hoping that there would be no further disturbances thanks to the none clashing redundancy but he was wrong. The quick reply and the sudden stop were not things that Ogle wanted, so he became ardent from the static nature of the reply, Ogle wanted to feel something solid, he wanted feedback, he got “good, it is going good.” And there was Habakkuk, sitting in the middle of the room not doing a damn thing, three days had parted with existence and everything was going good, captain did not like how this felt, and more he blamed Habakkuk for bringing this unnerving situation into his precinct. But after that reply Captain just looked at Habakkuk, made it a point to look around the empty room, as if saying “nothing is happening here and I aint not fool I know nothing is happening here,” and then he walked out, making very sure as he did, that the last thing he would look at was not Habakkuk.

Lauren walked into the room, day six, sitting at the center Habakkuk, “how is it going Habakkuk?” he smiles seeing her, feeling very comfortable in her presence and responds, “it is going good.” Perhaps because she knows him she hunkers down her lips, tight, and also looks around the room where there is nothing, not a thing, not a pile of wood, not a wooden box, just Habakkuk, the walls and a wooden floor, and Habakkuk sitting in the middle not even bothering to stand. But Habakkuk, senses much of what he felt from the captain, only he now feels compelled to explain, “it takes days to center the cosmic energy in space, specially if you are inside a police building, this place is not given to cosmic energy, so I have to gather energy every day and focus it on this central point so that the box will have sufficient live energy for me to read its disturbance, otherwise I wont capture a thing…” he pauses a bit and then sharply refracting a smile with his eyes glowing towards her: “can’t expect me to do such an important job in just a day or two boss.” Lauren sees her friend’s smile, she immediately reacts with warmth, it’s a heart felt relationship, they both know they are dealing with unknowns, but Habakkuk has his knowledge of the seventh century and before to keep him calm, while all she has is her faith in him and her superstitious intuition in the here and now. She doesn’t say anything else, she smiles with him, the darkness in the room lightens and she walks out, gently closing the door behind her. As she walks down the hallway, pass all those charging suits and ties and serious staring faces, she is smiling, like the girl that once walked towards a clown all smiling, and suddenly fell, only to get up and smiling even more run on to hug that big white and blue pokodotted dressed clown, with that fluffy red nose.

On the tenth day, Habakkuk asked to see the captain, “it is ready sir.” Habakkuk habitually called everyone by proper and improper names, one never knew what to make of it, his saying that it was “ready sir,” did not imply that there was any respect between him and the captain, it was probably safe to assume that there wasn’t any, only Habakkuk had a way of internally laughing when he did not have any respect for a person, hence his outward appreciation, “it is ready sir” meant this is your world and in your world you are sir, and in that world I have readied something which you need from my world, sir.

Ogle immediately called Lauren, he did not want to walk into the room without her, and so he, ensiling, holding deep breaths at bay, waited for her to arrive,. When she did, she looked at Ogle, then immediately turned her eyes to see Habakkuk, he gently motioned his entire head in her direction as if he had to displace the mass of a thousand suns in the process, and warmly nodded, she blinked, and the two men got up and she led them out through the hall way back to the room. The door opened, they knowingly through some fascinating supposition caught from some unknown, stayed right outside the door, the captain and Lauren looking in, while Habakkuk, was right behind them, occasionally looking at them or over them, and occasionally walking in small circles, holding his bearded chin. The captain and Lauren looked at each other, then back at the room, in the middle they could see a wooden box, more like a hut, made of wood, not perfectly sealed, nailed properly and looking like if it had been there since the French revolution, the dust had settled, and this box was just big enough for a single person to be able to walk around in it without touching the center but at some difficulty, that is, more than likely the person’s body would always be in contact with the center. The captain did not ask any questions, he closed the door, without asking Lauren if she had finished her scenery run through, one could suspect that now that he had seen the wooden hut like structure, that he certainly knew that he was out of his mind, and that his top detective was equally out of her mind, and that they were on a doomed course, where they were both going to lose their minds and jobs, and the only one that was going to come out of this without a scratch was Habakkuk.

ANTOINETTE FINDS HER WOODEN BOX

2006-08-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

It’s a very busy day in Antoinette’s internet company, we are in her office, she just got back from a trip to the bathroom, another telling sign, Antoinette has long black hair, jet black, she is beautiful, though her business personae dulls her essence, but you can’t miss her, precisely the opposite of Lauren, Lauren has blond hair, short, she is very slim, and her body language is curt, Lauren could have been an Olympic athlete, she looks all American, Antoinette could have made the pages of any men’s magazine, and for sure has generated many infatuations within her life time, but she is fully unaware of her beauty, even of her worth to the company, yes she has accomplished much in her lifetime but she doesn’t seen to care for any of her wonderful diplomas or her business success, she does it more because it is what she knows how to do, there doesn’t seem to be, nor was there ever any passion within her for it, no, she works, and gets the job done, but neither now, nor a bit more than three and a half months ago did she feel passionate about her work. Her history with men is equal, she has fucked quite a sum full of them, but it is only sex, she can’t seem to capture the passion of a relationship, that was Lauren’s real attraction, Lauren always seemed to have a relationship going, that is up until the incident, then relationships ceased for Lauren, she can’t seem to forgive men for their weaknesses, nor can she forget, but what comes naturally to Lauren is unnatural for Antoinette. Antoinette hasn’t ever had a meaningful relationship, her gorgeousness shines but has been dimmed by her austerity measures, she cuts everything short, she does not live to have more than a moment with a man, she doesn’t feel it is possible to release herself, she can’t even phantom why men find her so attractive, as once she was overheard “what is the big deal.” Another time, a while back, she cut her hair really short, this only showed that her beauty was really radiating from within, she looked even more marvelous, and when she regrew her hair she looked even more marvelous then too, where to watch her walk into a room was to watch faces of all sexes turn in awe, yet when she cut her hair she told a friend “I am just tire of my hair getting all the attention.” Somehow that rung true to her way of being, it was as if always she was downplaying her beauty, down playing the fact than in any room she was the most gorgeous the most wanted the one with the greatest allure, she could not comprehend that, she did not register that as an affirmation of her essence, she disdained men and women alike that admire her. We are in her office, when she went to the restroom she did not fix her hair, she did not bother to comb it, she did not bother to refresh her lipstick, now before us, her hair making chaos seems worthy of love, and her lips baring all of their sumptuousness argue that we shall lose our composure, while we wait for Captain Ogle and Detective Lauren to make their helpless appearance. Just hold still and keep your eyes on the lady with the black suit.

The intercom phone rings, Antoinette picks it up as she has done hundreds of times, her coral face not moving more than necessary, silence, then, “there is a captain Ogle and detective Lauren here to see you.” Assuming that this is merely a visit from a very old and uncomfortable exfriend, she ushers them in with civilized nobility. They enter the sumptuously austere office, and she greets them with a comfortable smile. She remembers the captain from back then, he wasn’t a captain then, but it was obvious then that he was going to be captain, and they shake hands like long known business partners. She doesn’t, however want to shake Lauren’s hand, the hesitation is obvious, neither does Lauren want to share the hand shake, both hands meet against insurmountable rejections, even as they crush into each other, forced smiles claiming anguish, something is making us both do this and we both know we don’t want to do it, and that something that is making us do it is what this captain represents, the functional greetings cease.

The captain speaks: “We are here in less than fortuitous conditions, nothing that we want, nothing that we would want to do, but it falls under our jurisdiction and both Lauren and I felt that if it had to be done, best that it be done by us.” Lauren, sensing that the captain was having an ordeal that he might not be able to overcome, stepped in, perhaps to happily to smooth matters, “Karen, I am deeply sorry before hand, but we are here to arrest you on behalf of the SEC for questions that have risen over your stock sales and their timing, which may imply that there has been insider trading and tampering with investment reports.” Yes, we had neglected to mention that Michael’s investigative diligence to help his monosolipsistic sweetheart had turned out an interesting twist, they were really on to something at the SEC level, there had been reports, by investors as well as by stock analyst that Antoinette’s company had in fact manipulated the stats on reports that would eventually determine investor confidence in the company. Antoinette, by virtue of the fact that she was the responsible party for the report was a heavily incriminated suspect. Upon finding this little nasty fact, Michael had phoned Lauren to thank her, “Why your case of a life time might just as well be my case of the year too. Thanks for the tip, I owe you lunch.”

At this point Antoinette doesn’t really know that she is really going to be arrested, she heard the words, but she doesn’t really conceive that this is either real or valid in any context; in the business world lies are told all the time, there is no reason for her to suspect that she has done anything out of the ordinary, she is not aware that there are forces that go back to the seventh century that are now governing the eventuating happenings and that such has implications which even common law can’t address, is short, injustice may be done.

Lauren reads her habeas corpus and takes out her hand cuffs, rapidly enough for Antoinette to radically change frame of mind “what the hell are you two talking about?” she looks at Lauren stiffly and “Lauren what does this have to do with?” history enters the moment, but Lauren must not let it enter, “Karen please I am only doing my job here.” All replies must stay cold and brief, Antoinette still can’t understand what she must get a hold of, “insider trading, please this is ridiculous.” Ogle speaks, “look lady we are just doing our work you have to come with us, either on your own free will or if not by force, you’d be kind to make it easy for us.” Antoinette grabs the phone out of pure instinct from the thousands of times that the business partners have helped each other, she quickly dials the president’s direct line, doesn’t wait for him to say hello, “Rick, come to my office quick!” When Rick gets there, lovely Antoinette is already in handcuffs, held by both Lauren and Ogle. Rick’s eyes open wide, “what is going on here!” Captain Ogle retorts “look what we are doing has, at least for now, nothing to do with you, you want to help the lady get her a nice lawyer.” Saying that, Antoinette shouts out something about the accusations being hailed against her, but she is rushed out by her captors. It is worthy to note here that as these two cops made their way through the hallways of Antoinette’s company, there were a few smiling faces, Antoinette had made it to the sumptuous top office, but there were a few disgruntle employees from her wake.

Habakkuk was waiting, he had not been notified that Antoinette would be there, but he was there. Ogle looked at him with long and estranged eyes, Habakkuk did not wait for appreciation or commentary, he looked at them and said “today is the day.” Captain Ogle and Lauren, after years of working with each other knew what to do, they walked Antoinette straight into the room, element of surprise, there was not going to be any immediate SEC questioning of this prisoner, and Lauren and Ogle knew that there was much that could happen if they did not hasten to carry out their intended plan, so they walked her into the room, and when Antoinette saw the wooden hut like box, and she turned her head every which way, fully aware that something uncivilized was happening and that she might as well be a character in some Kafkaes novel. But neither Ogle nor Lauren were here to give account, they rushed her into the wooden hut, and Lauren said “you will have to remain here for a few hours until we are ready for questioning.” The captain tried to ease the situation some by saying, “sorry it is not a better cell but the prison has been full ever since they have us putting everyone that smokes pot in jail we can’t get any empty space.

Karen is still remarkably unsullied by the chain of events, she still believes that reasonableness will come to its senses and halt all these nonsense. But in the dark of her wooden box instead of reflecting upon the crimes of which she is being accused, she begins to study the wooden walls, she touches them where some splinters find refuge in her, and she smarts the ouch, but moves her hands up and down throughout the structure to conceive some form of escape or as if to feel it and understand it. The wooden box does not release any information to its victim, Antoinette breaths upon it, occasionally her body touches it and you can hear the wood make a sound like the murmurs when wood touches a chimney, yet Antoinette’s body and essence has not accepted any form of defeat, her essence ekes passion, edges passion into the dusty wooden structure, and at no point does this passion not cease to touch the center of the wooden box, from every body contortion the center of the wooden room oscillates and rings through the cosmic that the superstrings must release this woman, this woman must be released.

Karen hears the door open and close.

She hears footsteps. Then silence.

Habakkuk, looks at the wooden box, he is not searching for anything, he knows precisely whom and why she is inside the box. Antoinette from the other side nears her ear to the wood so as to make out any sound, she knows someone is there, she doesn’t speak, some how she knows it would be inappropriate to speak, the room unfolds before Habakkuk, it appears as if the real walls that consume this space have disappeared, now there is only Habakkuk in an huge empty space, with this wooden box before him. Antoinette clings her ears to the wood, more splinters remind her that there are limits to their mutual unity, breathing now heavily she presses her lips against the wood, hoping that the wood will talk to her but her sumptuousness has no effect here, the cosmic might not be urged by sensual magnificence and specially not by a sensual magnificence that has relegated itself to the business world. Habakkuk, walks around the box, her lips feel him walking through the tremors that rise through the wood, tremors, he walks, slowly, always staring at the wooden box, walks around it once in thirtyfive minutes, walks around it, once in fortyone minutes, she continuously inching her body and lips and cheeks into the wooden essence, he walks around one more time this time in one hour and thirty two and a half minutes, then he stops, not in front of the side where lies the door to the wooden box but rather coming at it from behind it he arrives next to it. He begins to touch it, just as from the other side she is touching it, as he presses his right hand on it, so is she pressing her right hand upon it, and then his cheek touches the wood as he attempts to listen to the vibration of the superstrings, the centered cosmic energy radiates towards him so well that he places his lips upon the wood and just as he is doing so, unknown to both so is Antoinette her lips plugging away the porous surface of the wood, Habakkuk senses something and pauses, he inches backwards, then proceeds to walk around the wooden box, feeling with his hands as he goes, and then he pauses by the door, a crevice that would allow him to see her, if only there were light in the room, but the room is still dark, she breathes through the crevice, he breathes through the crevice, he places his palm to catch her breath, and then places his palm, with her breath held within, against his heart.

Habakkuk, walks out of the room after thirteen and a quarter hours precisely, both Captain Ogle and Lauren are anxiously waiting for him. He looks at them, a nondescript look and remarks with obvious exhaustion, “it is she.” And he walks out, captain and detective staring into each other.

THE 7TH CENTURY BC

2006-08-30T22:23:00.000-07:00

A river swings and riddles its way through the city; plenty of stagnant pools inundate in swirls of transient smells, whirlpools tell the passage of fish fishing, the sun is brightly shining, and in some places you can see many ways deep into the troubling waters, we could be anywhere in the world, we are however in the land of Chaldea, a place that meant the end of Assyrians, those magnificent cultural and powerful tormentors, that were doomed here, by name and by destiny.

A small canoe like boat, obviously held together by poverty, makes its way, within, we find a collection of water snakes that have been unfortunate enough to find themselves readied for human consumption. Snake eaters were everywhere in these lands, it was not considered a delicacy it was as cattle are to you today, this little boat, with an eight year old boy that was working hard enough to be a man, and his mother were doing their daily load, to then deliver it to the city dwellers; they themselves were not city dwellers, they lived in the caves, near the sandy foot hills that lined the city, one could not be a city dweller on income from snake trapping.

“Are we going to catch that one” The boy said this as he could see a very long green and black patterned snake swim before the boat, they were parallel to each other, the mother provided propulsion using a stick to move forward while the boy kept the boat parallel to the snake by using a paddle, they hardly spoke to one another mother and son, they mostly seemed to signal with their eyes and eye brows, gestures, even slight head movements could insinuate entire paragraphs of meaning, this was part of the snake catchers traits, the silence it was said would ensure a minimum disturbance of the prey before its death. Our child’s mother strikes the blow, she waits, and waits, tracking snake, it has to surface for air, it lifts its head, having no other real predators, it thinks the boat inconsequential, then the blow to the head collapses upon it, and boy hastily dives into the river waters to wrap some rope around its body, and between mother and son they pull the thing on board, and spend the next three hours cutting it up so it fits and to ready it for market.

It is late afternoon now, the boat comes to the edge of a landing spot, the boy ties the boat to a stump, and the mother, motions her head so that he will stay by the boat guarding their snakes from pruning thieves. The boy sits, looks at the broken up snakes, the blood mixing with the warm river water that has climbed onboard, the boy lets his toes touch and wiggle into snake skin, he likes the mushy feeling, he looks at the sun, attempts to stare directly at it in a sort of blind defiance, then he turns to see his mother, her long and dark skinny body, covered by a single robe that is also green and black like the snakes body, showing only her ankles, the only remaining tribute of her former beauty; she is arguing away some merit of payment, her hands showing tense discussion, then she walks away from the trader, her head saying that it hasn’t been a good payment settlement, but her flustered moment ends as soon as she catches the eyes of her son, she yells, they may talk in silence on the boat, but when on land they speak in shouts, “Habakkuk, get those things of our boat, can’t get any good money for it today, get it off boy before the price keeps going down with the sun.”

Yes, this is our boy Habakkuk, here in the seventh century to provide prophetical witness to the downfall of the Assyrian empire. Today, this boy and his mother would make little money from their snake catch, unfortunately the legal prosbul that would be passed in the first century BC was not yet in place, so boy and his mother would not be able to borrow some money, because debts could be forgiven every seven years, and so the snake catchers could barely keep the nine brothers and sisters some how fed for now.

EVIDENCE OUT OF REACH BC

2006-08-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

The captain pounds his fist on the desk three times fast. “Ok Lauren now what, now what other great proposition do you want to make!” The captain was referring to the troubling tumbling of events, Antoinette had been taken out of the box and placed in a cell with a bunch of pot heads, while they waited for Michael to come interrogate her for those drummed up charges that had somehow turned out to have some validity but that the captain and his best detective did not have any knowledge of, and now, while they waited and while they were waiting for, or best let me let the captain tell it… “we don’t have much time, you haven’t made any sense out of “it is she!” Lauren, it is she! And now you come to tell me that Habakkuk has disappeared! Disappeared! After conveniently pointing out a triple abduction and homicide suspect, that has yet to do so much as pick up a knife to butter her bread!” Now, Lauren wasn’t particularly happy at the events herself, she wasn’t smiling cutely or trying to rearrange her blouse, she was a bit red on the cheeks and it wasn’t from blush, she didn’t wear any makeup anyway, but she had natural blush on, and it could be from shame or anger, she could have expected any number of things, but not that Habakkuk, her key visionary witness, and in fact the only prophetic witness she knew, had disappeared, not a word, and to be frank, Lauren was no intellectual, she was streets smart, she wasn’t about to do what might be the right thing; to obviously look for him or clues in the seventh century BC.

Habakkuk, had disappeared, neither Lauren nor Ogle had wanted to question him after his arduous thirteen and a quarter hours rendezvous with Antoinette; they felt it was inappropriate to interrogate him for evidence, really they knew then that he wasn’t going to answer any questions. We have really not such a long pause here, the captain and Antoinette have not pause, “Captain don’t you think it suspicious and now more so that Habakkuk has disappeared from sight. Instead of us sitting here shouting at each other perhaps we should be searching the meaning of that remarkable coincidence, our key witness to a crime has disappeared, and has disappeared right after identifying the criminal and right before he was to testify his findings from the wooden box before you and me.” Antoinette was now no longer treating this as something unusual she had now managed to arrange her mental constitution in such way that one more fantastic event, say that an earthquake killed three monkeys in Africa would somehow be connected to this case. The truth was a little more realistic, this case was probably only connected to the seventh century BC, nothing in between, just the seventh century and the twenty first century AD were involved. The captain speaks, “are you sure he has disappeared?” “Habakkuk is a man of ritual captain, he does the very same thing every day, he doesn’t deviate from he has told me as much, he believes that because he is an ephemeral creature he is able to deliver prophecy, the only way he can arrest his ephemerality so as to remain in the here and now, is by way of ritual, constant, incessant repetition of the same act over and over is mandated or he would simply disappear from these century…” Readily Lauren places her hand to her mouth she realizes what she has said, “Oh my god!…” “we took him out of his routine. We took him out of it when he had to concentrate on the wooden box, he hasn’t been following his routine for a minimum of 11 days!” Ogle is really had enough of this madness he says firmly, “Lauren we are dropping this case.” That is all he said, and he put that period there himself and large. Lauren follows him down the corridor, trying to be somebody behind those large and tall shoulders, “captain, don’t you see, don’t you see, Habakkuk might have gone to another century, he is not avoiding us, we took him out of his routine, he could be anywhere now, he might be trying to get back to us.” Captain Ogle, ogles Lauren with a certain degree of condescension and utters, “and what should we do Lauren, hop on an inter departmental memo and try and get him back from across time!” Lauren pauses, the distance between her and the captain has now gotten a little larger than that between their space, she goes back to her office, sits down, after getting a cup of coffee, she is thinking, we don’t know what she is thinking yet, but she is very serious about this case now.

Her phone rings, it is Ogle’s office, not Ogle, his office, his secretary, “Yes.” “Lauren, the captain has requested that you release Antoinette Blite, immediately.” “But I can’t do that the charges are from the SEC I can just erase them like that.” “Captain said you would say something like that, and he asked me to tell you to revoke those charges and release her immediately, he is not concerned with the paper involved.” Lauren doesn’t respond, instead she slowly hangs up the phone, a beautiful arc and hand movement that would have orchestrated well in a modern dance performance; she doesn’t take her hand off the phone, she picks the handset up again and rings Michael’s office, he is not there, again she hangs the phone up with entrancing performance art mechanics, only this time she releases the handset, and picks up her cell phone instead, calls Michael to his cell phone, he doesn’t answer, she leaves him an urgent message.

Lauren has made it home finally, after stopping over at Habakkuk’s place to talk to his landlord, who is now also worried about his sudden disappearance, she hasn’t however seen anything unusual nor did he act in any way other than as himself the last time she saw him. Lauren is trying to puzzle it all together in her head, she feels it in her gut, Antoinette is in something really bad, what is going to happen and when she doesn’t precisely know, the phone rings, it is Michael, Lauren is not into saying hello even before this case she was like that, “Michael listen to me I need you to drop the charges against Antoinette, and give me a release notice.” “Lauren, your not serious are you, I can’t just order an investigation, place all the appropriate bureaucratic requests, and then, just issue a please cancel all that. Why am I telling you this, you know all this. What is going on are you dropping your secret case as well?” “Yes.” “Lauren, was there no paper work on your case?” “None.” Michael is a go getter, he is going to Washington some day, he knows when things have gotten out of the way, and should be avoided, he doesn’t need any more evidence to redefine his relationship to Lauren, “Listen I love you Lauren, and you know I would do anything for you but I can’t be involved in any way in some case that doesn’t have legal underpinnings, and I am sorry for whatever is happening over there, but there is ample evidence against Antoinette, and against the CEO of her company that could lead to the shutdown of their entire operation, and this is likely to reverberate throughout that industry, that is if these crazies are anything to go by. You can see why I can’t stop it now, there are other egos involved, and this looks like easy prey, we can’t say no to such careless criminality.” Lauren, “Yes.” And she hangs up the phone.

Lauren doesn’t bother with dinner that night, she just goes to sleep, and somewhat surprisingly sleeps the sleep of the just.

NINE LEAVES INAMORATA

2006-08-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

Fortunately today was Sunday, January 19, 2003, and Lauren could relax. It was true that most cops had to work on weekends, this is why they pride themselves in not having a routine or a normal nine to five even though they have meager wages, cops are fond of saying that their jobs aren’t the nine to five labor of their fellow citizens; in order to say that with the amount of pride that they fluff on top of it, cops have to accept a longer work week and unspecified nocturnal and diurnal randomly disruptive schedules. This allows for a certain sense of constant physical and mental discomfort which is fundamental to the essence of being a cop. But fortunately today was Sunday, January 19, 2003 and most detectives were of the habit that Sunday could be a normal day off.

Lauren, amidst all of the eventful happenings, had not forgotten her normal routine of preparing the coffee maker so that it would automatically produce the caffeine feast that she needed to jump start her day. She walked over to it, followed by her cat, Loki, oh yes, she had a cat, a male cat, but right now she was trying to get to her coffee while Loki was trying to catch her attention saying something to the effect, “city living is fine, I like being an indoor cat, but I don’t get to see many rats, and I need some nutrition now or I am going to die a cold death.” Well the truth was that Loki wasn’t probably saying it like that but I have to try to emphasize that look in his eyes, here he is about five feet down from Lauren, lovely thick white and black cat, with sort of olive green eyes, the eyes are looking up at Lauren as Loki’s legs keep pace and try to even trip her, and the eyes are saying “food.” “food.” really that is all Loki thinks that Lauren is able to understand, and Lauren herself knows only three states for Loki, food, play and sleep, food, play and sleep; this is all Lauren really knows about Loki, though she does sense that he is a very affectionate cat, but she also senses that that could go away as fast as the food or if some drug dealer killed her in one of those wild police shooting events; then Loki would find comfort with another cop, maybe even the captain. Still Lauren loved Loki’s independence from her, she respected it and admired it, what she did not know was that it wasn’t independence, it was indifference. Loki was indifferent to everything that went on in Lauren’s life, including the fact that Habakkuk had disappeared.

After stumbling a couple of times and unfortunately crossing over and between her, the feet body of Loki, Lauren halts, places her heads on her head then reaches down for Loki, “oh no baby, I forgot to feed you last night, oh no I am sorry my baby, you must hate me now, oh please don’t hate me now, I love you, you are my baby boy.” I would like to tell you that the expression in Loki’s eyes changed from seeking food to some sweet lovable expression of tenderness and forgiveness, but his eyes kept precisely the same stare which could be now only translated into “you’ve kept me from being a wild natural animal, I need a rat, you ain’t got any rats here, I am tired of coachroaches and flies, now I am reduced to having to listen to your pathetic baby talk which only maternalises you, just so that I can convince you to feed me.” More or less that was what Loki was saying even as cats only have two very definite and never altering stares. In one they are saying nothing, just looking, leaving everything blank in their stare, this so that their masters or enemies can fill in the blanks with whatever meets their expectations; and look number two is a severe widening of the eyes, which does not contract, but merely looks as if their eyes were actually engulfing their entire little heads, and when they get this very look, their jaws squander and their body stiffens and through what appear to be gravity like contortions traveling at the speed of light, they tell you with these physical evolution of a stare that you are bothering them, that they are not going to listen to you and that they don’t care if you are one of the good guys just because you think you are one of the good guys.

Lauren was of course a detective, she was used to seeing dead bodies, so a conjured image of a cold dead Loki cat on her floor, did not prevent her from putting him back down and proceeding to get her coffee. She sipped the hot liquid a couple of times, then uttering a breath that had been consumed by her lungs the day before, she felt some respite, enough at least to save her cat from starvation but not the tuna from her cat.

While Loki ate tuna almost as if guarding it from Lauren, Lauren sat at her dining room table, seeing through a window while a beautiful tree plant flourishing with nine leaves sprouting, rising vehemently with the aid of nine firm branches, kissing the ceiling, and obviously saying to Lauren, “please raise your ceiling a couple more feet so that we can continue to grow,” but more this plant was telling Lauren to please water her, because Lauren had not watered her in two weeks, and Lauren suffered heavily from a guilt complex that she had to constantly address, however here the huge plant inside of a large Indian faced pot, was at a severe disadvantage because Lauren, had an ongoing feud with her plant, and not watering her was a guilt that she could endure. And enduring not watering her plant was how Lauren told her self, “Not guilty your honor! I am not guilty!”

See the plant had always been one of Lauren’s favorites, she loved the way in which the buds forming from each branch produced the seemingly circular nine leaf arrangement, Lauren, remember, was mildly superstitious, and the number nine possessed spiritual suppurations, and the mathematical association and the looped geometrical relish gave Lauren enough of a sensual nudge fund of tenderness towards the plant; this even as she had not bothered to name it nor bothered to look up the plants real Latin name, though then it is doubtful that Lauren was even aware that plants were all Latin by virtue of baptism.

But see Lauren and the plant sort of became hostages of each other through a casual event. The casual event was brought about by a more tragic event, Lauren’s mother’s death. Lauren’s mother died of apoplexy, a stroke paralyzed half of her body, and Lauren due to the importance of her detective work did not have the time to care for her ailing mother. Lauren felt guilty about this for as her professional obligations kept her away from her mother, this did not keep her mother from suffering and from wishing to see her daughter. Then one day, Lauren’s mother died. She was found dead, alone in her apartment. Lauren had received a call from her, earlier that day, but she was in a meeting, she stayed in the meeting, her mother died alone some time during that meeting.

Lauren had time to go to the funeral, and there she wept a good while, part of her watching herself weep and the other part of her weeping. Why Lauren could be outside of herself in these types of situations was also the reason why she could be a detective and why Lauren could never have a lasting relationship with a man. I mean here we are, you and I at Lauren’s mother’s supposed funeral, and Lauren is watching herself weep! Makes me want to ask! “Have you wept long enough Lauren! Ah, have you exceeded the standard time for weeping Lauren!” But of course we cant ask Lauren this question because this is all after the fact and now we are just like detectives trying to figure this Lauren character out; through the circumstantial evidence of her life includes people that can’t add any detail like Habakkuk.

Anyway, sorry if I get mad but it is difficult for me to remain an objective observer when any correct person would have chopped her neck off. Anyway, Lauren’s mother, whose name was Maria, was burned, I mean Maria was cremated, and her ashes were picked up by Lauren’s estranged sister Audrey; which unlike Lauren had been extremely close to her mother physically and spiritually. Lauren and her sister did not talk much, Lauren was a detective always looking for the wickedly bad in people and her sister Audrey was a pastor, nurturer and seeker of only the good in people. The two could not be further apart, one shot guns the other wore crosses, there is a distance there; one was a loner, the other loved to be around people; Audrey loved nature, Lauren loved the city, Audrey had a son, Lauren never wanted children. I could go on but lets just summarize, the only thing that these two sisters had in common was their mother, they both by birth certificate had the same mother. And sorry to add more clutter here, but while they had the same mother, and even by birth certificate the same father, the reality was that Lauren’s father was not the same man. A simple DNA test would have proven that, but Lauren was born in the fifties and in those days cuckolding could not be technically proven, DNA would have to wait for fingerprints to be discredited. Now it has been said, and I think it true, that women that are unfaithful to their husband, through some form of medium womb conductance, urge characteristic similarities between the child and their husband so as to ensure his support, but in an unusual act of defiance, Maria had apparently made her womb conductance to nurture the lover that she could not have!

This strange rendition of love between Maria and her lover did not unfortunately translate to a unifying principle between mother and daughter, rather than uniting them the two became uncomfortable with each other’s emotional attraction to one another, so much so that they could not cope with it and maintained their mutual distance! The mutual distance was attracted by the daughter repelling the advances of her, lover, loving mother.

One day, a while back, Maria had called Lauren to tell her that her circle of metaphysical friends had had a wonderful reunion, and that in this event they had summarized each others cosmic numbers. Lauren still lacking metaphysical knowledge dared to ask what the meaning of all this was, and Maria responded that the cosmic number is what determines if you reincarnate or if you get to move on to higher states of consciousness, or if you are closer to being a Buddha of your own or if you must still admire other Buddha’s more. At the time of this particular conversation Lauren was working her way through an intense pedophile case, and the idea of the Buddha life, or the mystical was as far from her as possible, and so when her mother Maria said, “9, nine means that I don’t have to come back to this life, nine, 9 means that I am not coming back here…” And Maria’s voice was so happy, and Lauren was partially reading the list of witnesses of the pedophile case, while saying, “good ma, that sounds really good ma,…” and in such forgettable way that very relevant conversation ended.

Relevant because the plant had nine leaves, relevant because it was Lauren’s plant, and relevant because Maria was telling Lauren that she wasn’t going to come back. The latter which could be interpreted by any rudimentary psychologist as unrequited lover abandoning project, “My beloved lover I am leaving you for good.” But then one day it became relevant to Lauren, one day she was talking to Audrey on the phone, and at the same time that she was talking to Audrey she was looking at the majestic plant, and she felt something, and uttered, “ Audrey I am thinking of getting rid of the nine leaf plant, its just so big, I don’t know, I am going to get it out of my apartment.” At the other end of the phone line there was a silence, and long enough to justify Lauren’s calling “Audrey are you there?” Audrey responded in a very low tone, “Lauren, you can’t get rid of that plant.” “Why?” “Because mom’s ashes are in there, I placed them there when I went to your apartment.”

And so it is that the plant is still in Lauren’s apartment, and as a way to defy her duties and sentiments, often it is that she doesn’t water it.

But it is Sunday, January 19, 2003, and all this is the past, and we are now more concerned with the future and more concerned with it than even the present, and to put a stop to our wondering through her apartment, Lauren has decided to go for a walk she is pensive, and so we must follow her.

A RELIGIOUS PRIEST

2006-08-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

In the 7th century BC there were no Christians, there weren’t any Muslims and for sure there wasn’t a Church of England though there were more things in place to make the Church of England than to give rise to the prophet Muhammad and to the prophet that got himself a last name attributed to his capital punishment, Jesus Christ. Only the Buddha was more close to being born, somewhere in the 6th century.

Immediately I like to apologize to you for observing obvious matters such as there being no Jesus in the Seventh Century Before Christ; obviously! But what you must appreciate is that at this point in this plot I am just as lost as you are, I might have a couple of inklings more than you but that isn’t much to go on. You probably think I thought this through and that this is just another fiction of my mind’s eye. But as I tell you this with all honesty, I am just an avatar for a supraconsciousness that permeates all of human existence and somehow wriggles its way through all of us; except that some of us are more susceptible to it because we are less given to possessing a strong character. Some how these medium wishes to tell you of these very real events, and somehow you wish to hear them, even as you might not know that you want to hear them, at some level you have requested them, and I am just the messenger boy. In short the least important person here, since I am neither the originator nor the recipient, just a delivery boy, the least important person here is me. So when I say the obvious, Buddha was about to be born in the 6th century, I am just looking for clues just like you are, only I am looking for clues to decode the message so that you can read it.

Now with that important aside out of the way lets carry on.

In the 7th Century BC, there was only Habakkuk.

We are near a temple, I don’t know much about the 7th, so forgive me if I don’t know what faith or rituals this temple is here to assemble, but it is a gorgeous testament to the architects of the times. Maybe they slaughter bulls and goats here, maybe they take virgins and disrobe them by gently removing 500 meters of cloth from their sanctified bodies before a full moon, and tenderly release their spirits from their skins with ruby studded daggers, they sing.

Oh there! I spot him, before the temple is our boy and friend Habakkuk. He is staring at the goings in the temple. He approaches an Elder that is robed in sun yellow habit, Habakkuk tugs as his robe and the Elder holds it back as if this peasant were only going to cause him grief and malice; but Habakkuk does not know how to read the physical objection, and tugs at the man to ask of him what is happening in the temple. The elder replies with less hostility but still caught in some caution zone in-between sentences and worlds, “Thundering Unicorns, stars moving through the mortal night berating the diamond snakes and swallowing their evil...” The elder’s eyes were glowing like diamonds, and he seemed tranced though drugless, perhaps drugs would be more a requirement of later Western civilizations that would become so real that they could not enter dream states. “…the dawn is for us, for they, they are the damned… deaden ears hear, blind eyes see, virgins give thy long hair to the raging fires so as to seduce them…” Habakkuk, could not tell this but it was seemingly possible to believe that the trance had also induced sexual arousal within the robed elder, but for Habakkuk, he was a little scared, a little dizzy from the words, and so he took to observing and what he saw was merely a temple or synagogue or mosque that had five marvel columns, supporting an ornate circular but flat ceiling and seven layers of foundation which were observable because of their stair case whirls surrounding the temple. A chorus of young girls, five of them and alternatively aligned with the columns, though occasionally they would rotate counter clockwise and vice versa, slowly, while all holding the same seemingly bronze bowl, though Habakkuk did not know if bronze had already been discovered, and the girls, all in white tunics, rose and sat several times in slow motion, and then from the vessel each drank a bit of the liquid with the help of the others, as if they were sharing bull’s semen or goat’s milk; regardless some heavy white substance, and there the chorus would agitate itself as the one of them would sip the liquid. Perhaps, a semi intelligent anthropologist, would determine that this was some kind of a puberty ritual. It certainly lacked the spiritual overtones, that would be required of Thundering Unicorns, still the Elder did not seem as much interested in the girls, nor in his own state of being, but he was instead, seemingly glorifying something, his hands were now swirling up in the air, and he was looking at the heavens with his eyes close, and his robe was dancing with the wind, and Habakkuk was now sitting on the ground, running his hands through the sand, looking all the much like a bored little boy.

Habakkuk finally gets up and suddenly feels nausea, uttering a rancorous sound, he vomits digested snakes, and falls flat on his nose, hitting an edge rock that lacerates his forehead while acquiring a nice bloody nose in the process. This little scene serves to interrupt the ritual, the god’s must wait due to the fallibility of the human attention span. The girls place the bowl vessel down, run over to assist the fainted boy, while the old man takes account of the event and walks away in any direction. The girls meanwhile argue which one will take this boy home to allow him recovery, the vomited snakes and their hideous smell is not even noticed.

The humble home of one of the girls, whose name we never learn, they don’t call themselves much by names around these parts, they seem to talk to each other and the recipient seems to intuitively be aware of whom and why they are talking to him, so that the use of a name would seem something redundant or at least out of the way. Habakkuk is laying on a bed of rock, he doesn’t notice the back pain, he doesn’t take notice of discomfort, the rock doesn’t bother him, nor do I think they have mattresses in this era, so I guess no one would notice it, though there are two counted pillows by the rock bed. The girls mother is rubbing brush over the head wound, and the nose bleeding has stopped. Our little boy starts coming to, his eyes are watering as if crying but he is not crying, he sees the girl’s face first, she seems to him beautiful, he hears her calling him to come through, she moves her hands over his face, feeling it’s warmth, feeling the sweat, his breath still very much alive with dead snakes, she touches his lips with her fingers, her mother looks at her daughter, sensing in her a new maturity, the boy appears to still be coming through, when he vomits yet again, the mother utters, “how much snake skin did you eat boy?” the girl looks up at her mother sort of asking her to remain silent, Habakkuk rolls his head back and utters, “they disrobed the statue of the virgin, they disrobed the statue of the virgin,” daughter and mother stare at each other trying to make sense of the crazy uttering, “they took the statue of our lady from the darkness, they took the statue of our lady from the darkness,” mother and daughter are now truly lost, Habakkuk moving his head back and forth, slowly catching air while his murmurs utter, “…the monks have gone into hiding, the monks have gone into hiding…” the girl places her hands on Habakkuk’s stomach, his visions appear to cease, but as if the silence and confusion needed to be sealed shut forever, “…it is forbidden, it is forbidden, the three monks are hiding… two of the monks have women hair… it is forbidden…”

Just as quickly as that has been said, Habakkuk coughs violently, fevers ache all over his body, his cells are making war against him, he is lying on a bed of nails, he has red spots, big, little, star like spots with tiny little black centers that purple throughout his porous peripheries just like galaxies, only they are sores on the matter that is our Habakkuk. The Wise-One awakens him, “Habakkuk! Habakkuk!” his wide eyes open to the realm, “Habakkuk you can’t go on, you have to cease now or you are going to forget yourself.” Habakkuk stares at the room, walls of curtains with complex Indian patterns, candles and incense fervently burning, he is wearing a yellow robe, and his metaphysical comrade is wearing an orange robe, “ here drink this elephant dung tea, it will help your earth matter…” The tea is in a long spoon with a deep base, the monk smoothly twisting his hand in accordance with Habakkuk swallowing,” “Where am I.” “Your in Sopara Habakkuk, your in Sopara land of Indian, your in the 21st century AD, today is January, 20th of 2003.”

Having answered Habakkuk’s question the monk could have stopped but he sense that Habakkuk needed more to consecrate his physical adjustment after such a long journey. “You wanted to confirm the geometrical and emotional allocations of a local event within the ages that have transpired to confirm it’s present and future subjugation; I have been your guardian in this voyage of the spirit and you have been a brave soul.” He pauses and continues sensing that Habakkuk has recovered enough for questioning… “Did you confirm?” Habakkuk looks into the Monk’s eyes, straight at them, alert now, much alert now, “Yes my spiritual friend, I have confirmed the destiny of the moment.” The monk motions his head in approval, and then gets up and reminds his spirit friend, “You have a plane to catch to America, it leaves tomorrow, I was thinking that maybe you weren’t going to make it, but thankfully I was wrong.” Habakkuk lifting his body slowly, “the time will come when I can’t accomplish travels like these anymore, but such a time is not yet.” Spiritual friend smiles… “Well your going to have to explain away all those spiritual punishment spots around your body, but I don’t know how you will accomplish such a deed.” Monk had not seen the Western world, nor did he wish to, nor would he comprehend it as Habakkuk did, he was in fact in awe of Habakkuk for willing to endure such material excursions.

In his heart Habakkuk sensed that he had not a choice, he had been forsaken to the material world, there were others that had too been forsaken to that world, the world of the here and now, the world that today rings Monday, January 20, 2003; and Habakkuk had known that some had burnt themselves in it, that some had been to fragile to endure it, that some were wrongly born into it, and so he punished himself for being able to tolerate it; he was one of the one’s that had made it alive here, he hastened to leave Monk’s presence, he hugged his divine spirit gently, he did not wish to contaminate himself with any more spiritual aspirations; he knew that he was now needed here, Lauren was in his mind, he did not wish to be more spirit at this time, the gentle and fleeting hug was warmly understood by Monk. The channeled mysteries were finally emptied by a roaring of jet engines flying an Airbus 300 through the inhibiting atmosphere.

OGLING REALITY

2006-08-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

We have probably not been fair to Captain Ogle, ignoring him as we have even as from the cast of characters he appears to be the only one that is representing reality and is worried about the here world in any genuine sense. I mean Michael just cares about his career path, Lauren is fascinated by the possibility of a triple abduction murder case, Habakkuk is out astroplaining; while we are all trying to figure out what is going on here, and Ogle is the only one of us all that really cares for normal every day life and is trying to save it, and yet we hardly know anything about this Ogle the man.

Captain Ogle is tall, a six feet two inches tall black man, that is rather normal looking with large eye sockets but disturbingly smaller eyeballs. He has a strong sense of self; that is he seems to be aware of himself without having to ask the question “who am I?”, he is not insecure enough to be a reflective person; the Captain doesn’t go home to read “ten easy ways to become yourself” or “how to tantra your mantra”; Captain doesn’t read, he watches a lot of television, that is something him and Lauren have in common, the extent of his reading is memo’s, emails and reports; he loves, loves hockey, so he reads and watches just about anything hockey! hockey! He even ponders into the dangerously unpatriotic thought that he should have been born Canadian. I would add that he drinks a lot of beer, as most grounded spirits must, but I don’t think it will add anything or detract from his character relevance.

He was married, two times fast, has three children, a daughter that he adores from his second marriage and two boys from the first, which he has sort of abandoned, though he pays attention to them once every six months. Captain blames his work for this lack of parental attention towards his sons, and he also blames his work for the failure of his marriages, according to him, “cops are a special breed, they just shouldn’t get married.” That if they don’t get married then the special breed won’t reproduce and go extinct, this doesn’t hit him; or maybe, as he has well proven, they may reproduce anyway. When he weakens from his stance of lonely foot-soldier for the law he ends up dating the newest rookie, and this usually ends any possible success in the poor woman’s career. “Don’t date the captain is a wise saying that makes the rounds, but every rookie tends to think that they are making a wise move that will surely guarantee fast promotions; the truth is that they weren’t really cops.

Ogle knows nothing else but how to be a cop, and he has invested so much of his life in being a cop that everything that he relates to is out there, crooks, murderers, wife beaters, drug pushers, child abusers, and then there is the Law! Captain Ogle believes in the law, oh he thinks “the law is all fucked up!” but he dares not pass judgment upon it beyond commentary, he is after all, its enforcer. The truth is that he doesn’t know very much about the law, he has a couple of lawyers on staff that constantly tell him things like, “You can’t place Antoinette in that hut like wooden box, it is even against the Geneva convention, and it could qualify as torture.” The legal council staff were always irritated by Ogle because he always wanted to violate a law in order to enforce another one. “Captain you can’t place a wiretap without court approval, besides any evidence gathered without prior consent is inadmissible in court.” The captain simply replied, “I am not going to use the evidence from the wiretap, I am just using the wiretap to get to more pertinent evidence.” A lot of things went undocumented in Captain’s precinct, but he got the job done, he was admired as a results oriented cop, that led a group of officers that was always sweating to get the bad guys behind bars and often succeeded.

And so it is that our captain doesn’t have much internal soul and heart definition that we could much describe here, he is a rather shallow character as anyone that merely cares for the immediate reality would; and so it is rather amazing that Lauren has managed to get him this far, and that is a credit to her; but equally it is evidence enough, that he has always had a fondness for her, that he can not explain because that would require that he stop going to the shooting range on Friday nights, and that he stop bowling with some of the guys on Thursdays, and that he stop going to church on Sundays. Yeah, he went to church, and more often than not, and he liked it too, and his fellow parishioners liked him, and his pastor thought well of him and often invited him to the charity gatherings and festive activities; and somehow, even as ritualistic as the mass was, somehow when Ogle carried his bible, there too he carried his faith. There he somehow forgot that he was a cop, reading his bible he knew where the law came from, and reading his bible made him feel good, but he also knew that he did not understand it; and so he attentively listen to the sermons, to see if some how all those cries for more loving in the world, for greater decency to thy neighbor, for heeding the lord’s testaments, to see if any of it would some how ripen him into community with his own spirit and that of his peers. The intent was there.

And that is how real the external world was for Captain Ogle, and now, he was wholly unaware, as equally surprisingly so was his pastor, but now he was wholly unaware that Lauren, Antoinette and Habakkuk, were messing things up enough so that soon he would be involved with thundering unicorns, the sacred and forbidden statue, three hiding monks, two of which had women hair, and that was forbidden, and hopefully just hopefully if things could get real enough so that it would be something sensible enough for the captain to grasp, a triple abduction and murder case. Oh yes, Captain Ogle was dangling himself before a World Size Case, we can only hope that for the best of all, the Akashic Records are not wrong.

FIVE DEAD PARROTS & A HOSTILE WITNESS

2006-08-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

Because of all the goings on, we were unable to follow Lauren on her Sunday walk, but she has just gotten home, today is Thursday, January 23, 2003 and she is not happy, and she is not happy because she just stepped on a pretty, green parrot, which allowed her to ungracefully pirouette and supinare. Not necessarily with intent to blame, she immediately suspected Loki and searched for him while she ungracefully got up, and there he was, sitting on the couch, not saying a word, not looking like “hello mom and I so happy you are home,” it was more clear from that look that Loki was pleased that he looked so different from Lauren that there was no way that they could be remotely related, evolution could in no way make such a clear division from same origins, and now Loki was also looking as if he were condescendingly saying, “Lauren why are you falling all over yourself like that for.” Only it was doubtful that Loki had ever bothered to learn Lauren’s name. The one thing that was obvious was that Loki did not feel guilty about the dead little green bird, and so he, after acknowledging Lauren’s fall, merely closed his eyes as if really needing a nap after watching such a ridiculous suited woman pirouetting.

Lauren gave Loki the dirties look, made some kind of heavy breathing insinuation, and then proceeded to take her low profile medium heel shoes off, and to the bedroom she went. Walking through the door, she immediately stumbled upon four parrots, one was darkest yellow, one was to the extreme red, another blue with oranges hues, and the most precious was vivid, but vivid violet. Lauren’s eyes widened for the parrots all had one thing in common, they were all dead and suffering from a bad case of ruffled feathers.

Lauren made a lip face that wrinkled and frowned and walked into the living room, Loki opened his eyes, she managed to grab his tail before he sped off uttering a meow, which is probably best left without translation here because we don’t want to piss off the bitch anymore than she already is. Lauren sat on the couch, searching inwardly for some coherent picture of the day’s events; imagine migrating parrots, swoop down for a quick meal, they mistake an open window for a passage to another dimension, they end up in front of Loki cat, he intuitively senses that he has to play with them and so just having fun kills them. When they stop moving he jumps on the couch and goes to sleep. Seems like a fair police assessment of the situation, only Lauren begins to raise her head to review what she obviously already knows, all the windows are closed. Now she has lived in this apartment for over eight years, and she doesn’t have a chimney but she checks again anyway, and reconfirms the lack of a chimney. She then walks around the place looking for more dead parrots, perhaps suspecting some kind of a merciless massacre. But fortunately she doesn’t find any more, the phone rings, rings, it takes a while for her to acknowledge that the phone is ringing, she picks it up, the voice on the other side is none other than Habakkuk’s.

“God damn it, where have you been! Where are you?!” frustration all over, her hands running through her body as if trying to find an itch to scratch or a tumor or something, “how could your leave me like that…” Habakkuk is not a fast talker, he is generally in a good mood and infinitely patient, and so he doesn’t absorb all the tension that is being unleashed his way, “Lauren I had to review the Akashic archives to make sure we were on the prophetic right track, and I am afraid that we are.” Lauren is used to Habakkuk talking senselessness and so she doesn’t bother to try to understand the implications of his comment, instead, she tries to normalize the conversation to reacquaint herself with her friend that is now adding comfort to her life, so sort of giggling, “Its so good to hear your voice; I just got home and found dead parrots all over the place, my cat must a had a hedonistic day.” But Habakkuk’s calm voice ceases to be calm, “Lauren…” sternly toned, “Lauren did you say you found dead parrots?” “Yes.” “What colors and how many?” Lauren has paused her conversation, her fingers are touching her lips while her eyes are quixotically trying to grasp something, “Lauren, what colors? what colors? Lauren, and how many? tell me now!” Yes, this is your psychical advisor on the other end of the toll line, “one is green, one is yellow, another blue with orange, another red…” pause “…and one violet…” silence, she is counting, Habakkuk is somehow aware of it, “…five, five parrots total, and they are all dead.” Pause, even Habakkuk is actively silent, “What does this mean Habakkuk?” He replies without an apparent desire to do so, “Lauren, they were trying to tell you something, they had come to tell you something, maybe they didn’t know that you had a cat, or I fear worse, someone didn’t want them to talk to you.” Without waiting for a reply, Habakkuk continued, “Lauren stay there, stay there, don’t move, I am coming over be there within twenty minutes.”

Lauren stayed in place for twenty minutes, she could have been a patient in a mental institution with no mirrors, she did not know that she was standing there, she could not see or feel herself standing there, and she didn’t move nor hang up the phone, till the door bell ribbetted her ear drums. She recovered immediately and was wide awake and opened the door only to assume another shock full face. “What happened to you! What, what are those bumps all over you!” She kind of forced her friend to walk in, assuming a nursing sort of nurturing tone, she used her hands to feel the reddish purpling sores, bubbling all over her friend’s body and face, “what happened Habakkuk, tell me what happened?”

Habakkuk smiled so as to comfort his nurse, “I am ok, its just a punishment, I had to be punished for using my cosmic awareness for earthly matters, I shouldn’t be helping you solve this case, this is not allowed, this is the first punishment, there will be more.” Lauren was now in full force again herself, “Habakkuk, you can’t do this to yourself, I can solve the case without you, we have Antoinette, there have to be clues, nothing happens without evidence, everything that leads to a crime starts before the crime, you don’t have to get yourself sick for me.” “No, I want to do it, this is important, you must resolve it and you can’t do it without my help for much of the evidence is out of reach.” Having said that Habakkuk saw the dead green parrot, and walked over to it, moved it with his fingers, and searching said “where are the others?” “In the bedroom?” He hastened over, felt the dead avian creatures, “Your cat did not kill these parrots, they have no fractures or lacerations, something else killed them; five of them, Lauren five is not a coincidence, they were messengers, and the violet parrot was special.” Lauren never needed Habakkuk to prove anything he was saying, from where he left off her truth commenced, “There were no windows open, Habakkuk, the door was locked, there are no vents or passages that they could have gotten in through.” At this point Loki came out doing his lazy lion walk and both Lauren and Habakkuk turned to see him, obviously going to get something to eat while thinking, “See bitch, I had nothing to do with all that.”

Habakkuk adds, “They didn’t have to come through anything, they came here from the seventh century BC, they spontaneously emerged into our century, this they accomplished through a pure desire seduction which was coerced by the destined events.” Lauren didn’t ask for further explanation, Habakkuk kept on looking around the apartment, “someone knows that we are investigating Antoinette, someone doesn’t want us on this case, they killed the parrots before they could talk to us.” Lauren responds “What are we going to do now?” “Well cats absorb negative energies, whatever energy killed the parrots had to have been mopped up by Loki, maybe I can ask him to show me his essence; within it must be a signature of the dark energies in him.” Lauren moves to get the Loki cat, but Habakkuk reaches for her arm and halts her, “no, not yet, we have to wait till it is around three in the morning, cats only release their essence at about that hour of darkness, but come 3 in the morning I will ask him to show me his essence.” Lauren, knowing how hostile Loki could be, asked, “Will he just show it to you.” “There is no way to guarantee that he wants to cooperate with us, let us just hope that he likes you Lauren, if he does he will want us to resolve this murder mystery.

HOSTILE WITNESS TESTIFIES

2006-08-30T22:06:00.000-07:00

There were many things to talk about between Lauren and Habakkuk, but they sat in the couch watching Loki cat sleep, unaware that they were waiting to talk to him at the opportune hour. They were both tired, their eyes were sore, their flesh inelastic, the passage of time linear, the dead parrots comfortably rotting on the floor, occasionally Lauren worried about Loki cat not liking her. She knew that Habakkuk was semi aware of the tension between her and her cat, it was much the same as the tension between her and her lovers; she could not be intimate, she had lost her sensuality, she could only love through caring and perfection; she cared a lot, about everyone, her friends could never say she wasn’t attentive, on the contrary she was overly attentive, this was her way of consoling her inability to feel loved. She thought often, that Loki cat could see right through her, and because he saw her as she really was, this was why Loki cat could only offer affection grudgingly. Yes, they both lived together but that did not mean that they were not two separate planets orbiting the same house, that is all. Loki cat was well taken care off, she made sure he had the best medical care, the best meats, real meats, cat food was an interesting aside, just in case Loki felt that a human’s idea of cat food would be an exotic excursion, as it was, Loki cat mostly ate meats, and had a connoisseurs preference for chicken, and Lauren always satisfied his gluttony as a way of telling herself, that it was nothing compared to the trauma and hardship brought about by children. Lauren of course loved children, she just couldn’t bring herself to love mothers, to her mothers were an abomination of nature, there was something horrible in the entire enterprise of motherhood, and when Lauren saw a pregnant woman she felt nauseas in the plural.

The captain was sort of like all these things too, only wholly imperfect in execution of the Lauren way of life; fact is the captain didn’t know it, here were two lonely souls, scared shitless of the world, and the only way that they could cope with it was to nurse the world, to save it so that it could remain what they feared.

Habakkuk was wearing a head scarf, but from his forehead you could see mounts of cresting sweat pools, the sores too were visible, apparently growing more obnoxious towards the scalp, one couldn’t tell, but he was just sitting there, and Lauren knew that he wasn’t sleeping, what Lauren did not know is that Habakkuk had sacrificed his right to sleep, from here until his death he would suffer the punishment of insomnia, he had gone to the Akashic archives, he had to have known the consequences, full blown consciousness, never a dot of sleep, he could close his eyes for consolation, but till mortality revoked the punishment he would be awake.

Still he was calm, you could hear the murmur of his heart as equaled to the cosmic background radiation, something of him had been with the universe since the big bang, of course we have all been here with the universe since the big bang, even hockey players, and perhaps more of them then so as to get all of that commotion going, but the difference was that Habakkuk had established a sensual essence gravity that reached back to his primal origins and even overreached to the wake of his forward time line; hence the reason for his prophetic skills. These sea of a self that he had become had in it the prophetic advantage, but it was a treacherous advantage; you can be aware of the future and feel and touch it, but if you react within the present reality based on future knowledge and multi dimensional awareness the proximity to variables may desotonate you!

I used the word “desotonate” so that you can grasp the implications, the word hasn’t been recognized yet, you won’t find it in any worldly lexicon and yet in the near future it will be one of the most used words to describe a person that self destructs because they feel too much. Of course you can already intuit that desotonate means just that, just the sound of the word has this nitroglycerine back and forth cadence that urges a tremor to burst, that is, when everything in your body starts crackling, the emotions quartering you. The reason why desotonate is not in the dictionary yet is in itself interesting, it is because we have not evolved to the point where we can grasp that the self is nothing more than a feeling. Everything else that you perceive of self is just an interesting aside. We all have to potential to desotonate if we feel ourselves through the consequences we call universe. Habakkuk had indeed begun a desotonation process, how could he go on without any sleep, why was he willing to astroplane under such perilous condition, and to risk so much, and still hold himself together? Well even that has an answer, the truth is that Habakkuk by giving himself to the universe had become so much apart of the universe that now the universe was afraid that Habakkuk would desotonate and so by canon act, the universe was holding him together as a cosmically selfish act of self preservation.

Lauren awakens the sleepless man, “it is three am, it is time.” nudging him some more, she feels his body wounds breathing, he opens his monolithic eyes, immediately the room inundates his sprit magnificence, Loki cat raises his head in awareness that a light receptor has just flooded the room, Habakkuk closes in on him, the black and white leathered cat looks on ominously but doesn’t retreat. Habakkuk gently picks him up like planets are held by space, raising him almost as if he were raising a child on the verge of ritual execution, raising him high with his arms; Habakkuk utters “I love you Loki cat, I love you, I am with you, thy long inundated tail touches every trail through time, you are a ravager of indifference, you’re a vessel of eternity, I adore thy mastery of self for within you reside the evils deaden! within you all darkness frails! within you lies the gathering precious prose of the Akashic record; oh sublime correspondent of the infinite awareness, message me your essence… message me your essence…” Slowly dwindling vocal sound we reach complete silence.

There is no point in saying here that Lauren was in shock, we are not concerned with her, Loki cat begun to excrete an aura that from him, equally spiraling in amassing circularity, inundated the room with an orange, reddish hue that had some permissiveness of yellow, and within that huge full aura, you could see some very definite points, almost eights in shape, five points that looked like an eight, the eights were green, yellow, blue orange, red and violet; around them was a wanting zero, the shape of an amorphous oval having some difficulty holding itself together, a zero still in its incoherentness though circling them tightly while oozing the color pink. Again there is no point in describing Lauren’s current condition, the magnificent Loki cat jerked his body ferociously and overthrew himself, digging his overly large nails, from lack of a scratch post, into Habakkuk’s injured flesh, then darting to the closet to hide. The separation allowed the room energy to return to what anyone of us would see when we walk into a normal room.

Lauren nears the still body of Habakkuk, still holding position, she touches him and he collapses, on the floor, he rolls over under his own muscled force, this calms the situation, then in a flash movement he careens past Lauren, opens the window and vomits snake flesh! After some moments, he turns around, his flesh sores all gone, he is a splendor, energetic and confident, jolly and sardonic, “Lauren I don’t think Loki cat likes you very much.” His wry smile delivering the punch, Lauren despondently loosening her arms, “yeah, I know, I’ve always known it.” But then realizing that Habakkuk was glowing, “hey wait a minute, you told me that Loki would not cooperate if he did not like me, and obviously he has, your looking awful good and happy right now!” “Yes Lauren my darling, I am good, Loki cat was kind to me, he imposed those ever healing evil arresting energies upon me, and grateful I am, needed much the boost, and yes he showed me the murderer of the messenger parrots, but he did not do so because he likes you.” This was the thing about Habakkuk, he could be so honest, and he somehow did not care whom he injured in the process, and somehow the fact that he did not seem to care made it all the more tolerable, specially with that wonderful ageless smile, “Lauren, Loki cat is not drawn to you, he doesn’t love you because he knows your incapable of loving him; you have too many fears and he only loves those that can love him, yet he released himself to me to sort of unburden himself, and to be truthful he needed it.”

Habakkuk calmly utters a silence and proceeds “…and yes, I did tell you that he had to like you to help us, but in truth there are exceptions to such things, in this case the exception is that because he doesn’t care about you, that he isn’t within you or a genuine part of your essence he wanted us to know because he doesn’t really care… …he is not within, so he doesn’t care to protect us from whatever destiny we are altering.” So full of himself is Habakkuk that he bubbles on… “isn’t that strange, even souls that don’t like us maybe helpful.” Lauren finds herself a bit fragile, why does she need Loki so much, she feels cheated, raped by simple statements, “why am I so afraid!” tears washing up on hands attempting to quell them. Unfortunately Habakkuk wasn’t in the mood, “Oh forget it Lauren, your dealing with a Western world issue, don’t take it personally, it is not you it is your people, you can’t help it, besides we got what we wanted out of Loki cat, we don’t have time to water our insecurities right now.” Having said that Habakkuk tells her, “I have to check on something’s, will clue you in tomorrow, why don’t you check on the…” here Habakkuk make an accentuating tone change, “…on the number one hostage.” The door closed. alone, Lauren reflected “the number one hostage, the number one hostage”…, “Oh my god, Antoinette, Antoinette! shit, I am part of the dirty plot!” Looking all the mean that she could she went and showered, not an ounce of sleep, not an ounce of sleep, and drove herself to work with only this in her mind, “number one hostage.”

Meanwhile the five dead parrots continued to rot.

ANTOINETTE'S SAVIOR

2006-08-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

As Lauren got to the precinct she realized how early it still was, so she made for her desk and plopped her head on it, where sleep took charge of her for about an hour, then a voice awakened her, “coffee?” this was obviously more like the third time the voice had uttered the word “coffee”, Lauren recognizes Danny immediately, he is the precinct’s unofficial comedian, unofficial care-taker of all, and officially the coroner. Lauren has awakened but she hasn’t responded, she has a melody in her head that is making her feel good, younger and carefree, her mind conjuring words somewhere that ring, “we girls are being washed by the sun’s watering rays, we girls are being washed by the sun’s watering rays…” but Danny doesn’t give up, he has always been attentive towards Lauren and realizes that she is not all there and needs either electric shock treatment or coffee. Finally she acknowledges him, “yes, coffee would be nice.” He stops leaning on the door frame, and goes to his endearing task; returning almost immediately.

They remain silent while he hands her the coffee, and she seems to be redefining her relationship with him, she knows that he is the one that never ceases to make sure everyone is somehow happy, his days are spent diagnosing corpses and telling the living humorous stories that some how are always genuine, and warming even as they storm unrest from the norm with their wit; and yet Danny is a loner too, he hasn’t married, is rather antisocial outside of work, hangs around his computer or creating animated film clips to show to his friends at the precinct, that’s where he is really always at, the coroner and his bodies and his buddies are all in that one nesting ground for criminal handlers. Danny has been there for as long as anyone can remember, he is fifty three, he has a Chihuahua, a dog that only he can stand, and he is the medium by which all events and peoples are somehow tied together here, only no one knows that, or if they know it they don’t say it, but as detectives and captains and beat cops and criminals come and go, they all register through the Danny medium, their stories recollected when needed, their unresolved nature there to assist with continuity.

Lauren sips her coffee, he has sat down without asking for permission, “hey the whole place is lit up with talk about you.” Holding her cup tilted right up to her lips, “what are they saying?” that maybe the stress of the work has gotten into your wiring, that maybe you should see a psychiatrist, you know those types of things; your two investigators haven’t been very helpful lately, they seem to be rather busier digging you a grave.” Lauren smiles, “And what do you think Danny? …you think I’ve lost it?” Danny rearranges himself on the chair so as to look like a country squire, “Well I know that you are not going to see a shrink so I am not sitting here to tell you that you need to see someone, but the rumors warrant some attention, at least to prevent that they remove your case load.” That was the beautiful thing about Danny, he could be so realistic and nonjudgmental at the same time, a difficult twist here, Lauren please pay attention to reality, Lauren your case load, indeed what Danny was doing was throwing her an anchor, and Lauren repeated the anchoring word in her head, “case load,” yes Lauren the damn case load, Antoinette isn’t your only case, you have others, your work has been suffering your negligence.

A large tall dark man walks in, greets them both, he doesn’t seem happy to see Lauren and Lauren had already suspected as much, Danny senses the suing tension and greets his way out of the office. Ogle draws himself close to the desk but remains standing, “Lauren, Michael has leveled more charges against Antoinette, I have ordered that he request a transfer to a federal facility, I cant hold her here anymore, why I feel guilty every time I see that woman here,” Lauren interrupts “Captain listen to me, I have some very good news, Habakkuk went back to the seventh century BC and inspected the Akashic records and has confirmed that we are on the right track.” The captain yelling and pounding on her desk, “what are you talking about Lauren! What is going on inside of your head!” Lauren, feisty, replies, “Captain they killed the five parrots that were going to tell us something leading to the Antoinette case!” The captain reaches and grabs Lauren’s shoulders, “What case! What case Lauren! You don’t have a case, your talking about a woman that you brought into detention without just cause, and now your talking about parrots that are dead because they were going to snitch!” the captain pauses long enough to catch his breath, “Your off! Your off Lauren, I don’t want you in here anymore until a clinical evaluation clears you back for duty.” Lauren yelling, “Captain don’t do this to me, I need to clear my name, I know this is crazy to you now but we are trying to save three people from being murdered!” The captain looks at Lauren with disdain, and he realizes that he has to place distance in-between or else he is going to kill her so as to wake her up.

Lauren is left standing in her office, then it hits her again, “the first hostage.” Lauren is holding the first hostage. She runs for the phone and rings Michael, surprisingly, and maybe because of the early morning hour, he answers, “Hello Michael its me, I need your help, I need you to release Antoinette…” knowing he was going to put a negative on that she continued, “I don’t care how you do it you must release her!” Michael is at the other end dealing with a thousand issues, “Lauren I am not having this conversation with you!” Hangs up and that was that!

Lauren is not in a position to listen or think right now, she knows, some how she knows that she has to release the “first hostage” she is aware that there is something colluding to include her and everyone around in some centuries old plot, and she has to get the hostage out in order to make sure that she herself isn’t also the killer. There is one hostage, she is the hostage taker, it stands the test of logic that she could be Antoinette’s killer, and certainly what happened with her ex boyfriend is motive enough. She calls Danny.

His warm and loving personality, holds her for an instant. “I need your help.” He doesn’t bother to evaluate he just says “sure what do you need me to do.” Moments later she reaches Michael, invites him over to her apartment for dinner to forget about the Antoinette case, and everything that happened between them. Michael arrives at around seven pm, he has a bottle of white wine with him, Lauren only drinks red, but he is fortunate that today he could have forgotten to brush his teeth and she would still sleep with him. Lauren has made a very delicious Pasta Primavera, it has massive amounts of cream and prosciutto and peas and Lauren’s favorite vegetable, asparagus. Sourdough bread, and of course the disgusting white wine.

They chat about many things, both profusely avoiding the case, after much chatting and laughing and agreeing how foolish they have been for not sleeping together, they manage to launch themselves on the couch, and well just fuck the shit out of each other. I wish there was something more thematically correct, gentle loving, caressing, silk kisses, but no, these two just went at each other immediately and the whole thing did not last long enough for Lauren to have an orgasm, nor for them to consider birth control, though she was probably eternally on the pill, always ready Lauren for the magical event that would never arrive due to her reasonable selectiveness. Today Michael got his girl, and he was definitely satisfied, he got up not more than minutes from coming, and said to her, “your wonderful, I got to go.” Michael, I may have forgotten to mention was married, and he had to get home at a decent hour.

There is the kiss off and Danny comes out of hiding. Lauren is not romantically inclined so she immediately wants to see the pictures, Danny hands her the digital camera, “oh yes great, these are perfect, you’re the best Danny.” She gives him a happy kiss on the cheek, and he wipes it, he really didn’t enjoy watching all that.

The next day, Michael is happy to receive Lauren in his office, he believes that they have broken new ground and it is all sneaky cute motels and salamander alcoholic evenings, but he is a little wrong. “Lauren avoids him at the entrance to his office, she doesn’t want to kiss him, just walks past him with that, and sits down, “I am here on business.” Michael is a little slow when it comes to emotional relations, “Hey if your mad because I had to leave so suddenly last night, please forgive me I promise I will make it up to you.” “Michael, our days of friendship are over, I didn’t want to sleep with you last night, I did it for my job and I’ve always been aware that I never wanted to sleep with you and last night certified my distaste of you.” Lauren was being so direct so that she could forgive and respect herself after the act; she throws an envelop on the desk, “open it.” Lauren waits to watch with some satisfaction the fainted look in Michael’s face, the social climber that suddenly realizes that he has taken a false and perhaps fatal step in his career path. She doesn’t wait however for him to speak, “Release her!” she then gets up, confidently, walks towards the door, and before closing it, “release her, you have twenty four hours, else Ann will have to see those pictures and lose her chocolate candy home.”

MICHAEL EMBARKS ON A GOOD CRUSADE

2006-08-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

Well I like to tell you that Michael is embarking on a crusade to save his relationship with his beloved wife, but the evidence doesn’t support that, him and Ann have been married since college, over seven years now, they hardly sleep together, he cheats on her, she has had a couple of affairs herself, though to her credit of greater intimacy, but in truth, they have sex once a month almost, and they go out to dinners and social gatherings a lot, their families are so right for each other, and the families think that they are so right for each other, and all the business partners thinks this is the perfect couple that they have to oblige if only for the sake of civilization, only Michael is in it for his career, Michael loves power more than he loves sex, more than he loves his good looks, Michael will someday be a fat slouch somewhere with lots of money in the bank and lots of friends to talk about all that money. Ann on the other hand just never knew what to do with herself, being with Michael made Ann somebody, Ann never really knew who she was or what she wanted to do in life, she had a nice job selling real state, it was an aggressive business, but Ann was not aggressive, she didn’t want to sell one more house at the end of the month, she cared for her customers, saved all the money that she could on the loans, made sure that somehow everyone got the best deal, and when things didn’t work out and a house didn’t sell, well it was just another day. Ann just had no goals, she went to church, liked it a lot, had no other hobbies or activities, she had been and continued to be a true friend to many, and she was certainly a true friend for Michael. If he needed his ego padded or if he wanted to conquer the world, he could always go to her for strength and contrast! She was passive and he was a happening, and he thought that she envied him; in all truth, she just did not know what to make of him, he was a comet, always going at high speed in some direction, beyond that, the sex was painless and the chocolate house had all the amenities, they didn’t have children he thought she didn’t want any, she thought she didn’t want any with him.

But again, Ann was not the reason Michael was trying to save his marriage, it was his career he was fighting for, he somehow believed that Ann would always be there, he even went as far as to believe that their marriage would survive every catastrophe, this he thought because they had been together since college, it just did not make sense for two good friend to separate! There was no tension, sure no passion, but it was all so convenient and comfortable, a golf course couldn’t possibly look neater.

Michael calls his boss, Rochester Allen, or as he was known to his friends and business partners, no difference there, “Roch”, Roch was a jolly fellow, happy as could be about anything and everything, “never had a bad day in my life,” liked everyone, had no opinions about anything except he had a very commanding personality and knew well who moved the chess pieces and why, and he did not quiver to stay up front with whom ever was ahead of the game. His claim to fame was that he knew how to lead a case, get the right people on it, and win it! Michael was his protégée, every egotistical Washington insider needed to have one, he had nurtured Michael from the get go, and he was proud of him and knew that he could always count on him to protect his back and to lead a bloody charge, so that Roch could sit it out on the sidelines while managing it.

The one thing that was most beautiful about them was their mutual honesty. There were no secrets between the two men, they told each other everything, their crooked deals, their wives sex habits, their mistresses, their mutually hated peers, their secret objectives, so when you hear Michael telling it like it is, please don’t act surprise.

Michael enters Roch’s office, grand old styled green carpet, oak desk, mahogany bookshelves, undoubtedly covered with books that had never been read, a stack of paper work here and there, and an illuminated darkness. Behind the desk, a man wearing a noticeable belly, balding, white hair what was left, a set of spectacles that made one imagine a printing master, a ruffled tie, loosened shirt neck, and a pin stripe suit, with a vest, a silver vest at that. On his desk a martini glass with a partial load of the proper contents, you don’t tell this man not to drink his martini wherever he wants to have one.

Michael sits down without shaking Roch’s hand, solemn, “I got some shit mucking things down river,” Roch replies, “well tell it like it is.” “This bitch at the 44th precinct is using me, and has the goods on me, set me up last night, has pictures promising to show Ann, very compromising situation internally, well I need not tell you more.” Roch sits back, he has heard this things before from every imaginable angle, no surprise here, “Why is she doing this to you.” Michael rubs his temple, “I was helping her with case, you know that Internet company case, Antoinette, you gave the go ahead to make something of it…” Michael was no dummy, by saying you gave me the go ahead meant that he was marrying Roch to the case and hence the problem, but then Roch was less of a dummy, “Hold on their son you told me you were working on something big and headline grabbing, but I don’t know what that is yet, so don’t embark on any steamroller yet that you aren’t going to be able to drive.” Well I did say that they were good and serious buddies, but remember the old Ambrose Bierce saying, “friendship is a ship that holds two in good times and one in bad times;” we were getting on the bad times ship now. Michael took a few paces back, “yes, I am sorry I took some liberty there, did not mean it to sound like that.” Continuing, “Lauren wanted this woman behind bars for some murder wrap, only problem is we dug up some investment irregularities which implicate the CEO of her company and could, once we release it to the press breakdown many lives, now Lauren has thrown me a curve and wants me to drop the charges but there are already three departments involved, and frankly we are the least important. But if I don’t throw the case and drop the charges Lauren is going to show some compromising photos to Ann, and I don’t thinik, knowing Lauren, that she would stop there.” Roch grabbing his martini confort zone, “and so you want me to stop the investigation?” Michael not wanting to say what he was saying, “yes.”

“Well you’ve really gotten yourself into a hot one now, but let me see how I can help here.” Picks up the phone, requests all the pertinent information on the case. Lawyer Perry a deep hooded intellectual with zero pretensions for dressware enters the office. Both men greet him, Roch speaks, “Perry what’s the low down on the girl and her boss.” Well it seems that she was only involved from the perspective of approving signatory, she probably doesn’t know anything about the insider trading, and if I were to conclude this before a jury or just a judge I would bet that she would come out of it with only a reprimand, but her boss will burn for sure, she is guilty of negligence but he is guilty of a premeditated case of misinformation wholly fashioned to rob investors.” Roch speaks, “can we drop the investigation on the girl?” Perry replies without trying to make sense of the request, “not without halting the entire investigation, Antoinette leads to the CEO, she has to be charged so that we can guarantee her cooperation through a plea bargain.” Roch has won many large battles, another large battle lost inst going to be noticeable in his life, Roch knows that he is where he wants to be in life, if he doesn’t move one more step up he is ok with that, “Perry, can we drop the entire case.” Again Perry is just an academic intellect he just replies, “There is no reason why we can’t drop the investigation right now, we can say that there is not sufficient evidence to bring it to trial, we can even note for emphasis that only 26 percent of these types of fraud cases ever go to trial and of those only 7 percent end in conviction; if we don’t pursue this case we are saving the tax payer money.” While all that sounded good and fine Roch had been in this business far too long, he knew that the academics argued semantics, so when Michael self servingly remarked “That’s wonderful! Lets just drop the case and stop wasting good tax payers money.” Roch interjected, “Perry, what consequences can we expect if we cancel it.” “Well sir, if we cancel the investigation we can’t guarantee that the other investigative departments will do so, I would risk saying that they wont, there are careers to be made from this case, its an Internet company, the players are arrogant, the crime has been committed and should be fairly easy to prove, someone out there, some future major or senator isn’t going to let this go by, this is their case.” Roch knows he has to get more specific and personal, “And if they don’t Mr. Perry?” “Well sir if they don’t let it go we might be investigated for dropping the case. And if we are investigated for that we might be investigated for how we adopted the case in the first place, and my intelligence tells me that there are some serious ethical violations there.” Roch sits back, turns on one of those Cuban revolution blazing cigars, Perry looks on having never sat down, Roch remarks, “Well Mr. Perry as usual you’ve earned your keep, please leave us alone now.” The permissive Mr. Perry, bows his head for both of the men and walks out with sternly puritan grace.

“Michael, let me think about this, I will let you know my position in the morning.” Michael respectfully acknowledges the necessary time lag, and leaves terribly insecure with himself. It just wasn’t all that he expected.

The next day Michael gets to his office, the 24 hour notice is almost up, on his desk is an envelop. “Dear Sir, your services are no longer required, we recommend that you hand in your resignation. Your current case load will either be distributed to your peers or canceled, based on relevance and urgency.” Mr. Allen regrets any inconvenience that this might cause you, and hopes that the separation of services may be amicable, but he expresses his understanding for any feelings which you may express on this matter. The letter was signed, “Department of Human Resources”

Michael called the head office, he had slept with Roch’s secretary and she was rather grateful and still thought that it could mean marriage and subconsciously a change of class status, and so she told him that Roch was indeed in, but had remarked that no calls or visits were to be accepted from Michael. He then called human resources but all they would give him was the accounting clerk so he could make the necessary final payment arrangements. He then went to Perry’s office, Perry welcomed anyone he had no office politics, when he saw Michael arrive he looked from underneath his glasses as one looks at a man that one has secretly condemned to death. Perry did not say a thing, Michael clenching his teeth, “Perry what did the old man say.” Perry was not amused at the lack of greeting, he had never gotten used to the forbidding casualness that Michael often displayed for the lower ranks, “Squeeze me Michael, what are you talking about?” “Well about the case yesterday, the Antoinette case!” Why he was bothering to remind Perry was part of the condescension that was unrelenting in Michael, Perry made it a point again to look from underneath his spectacles as if saying I don’t need this eyeglasses to see right through you, and noted in academic and official defiance, “Michael you know the regulations I can’t talk to you, according to our morning memo your no longer with the organization, and you wouldn’t now ask me to violate regulation by asking me to give you information that is legally within the confines of this department?” Michael rested his hand on the back of the chair as if trying not to punch Mr. Perry, and with his mind all over the place, he responded, “No Mr. Perry there is not a point in us talking, none at all, sorry to have imposed upon you.” With that said both men disregarded each others presence sufficiently to make leaving unnecessary or redundant, still Michael walked out of that building, or should I tell you, he was escorted out with all his belongings in a box and his official badge removed.

Within the hour of Michael’s very strange walkout, Captain Ogle received a call from SEC, it was no other than Roch, the men knew each other, Captain Ogle was not pleased to get the call, he was sure he was going to get yelled at for whatever impropriety, instead he was pleasantly surprise, “Listen I think your holding someone there for us, we have decided to drop the case, it was an irregularities investigation that has hit a dead end, you receive a cease and desist order within the hour, if you could please start the release process, don’t want to keep an innocent person sequestered!” The call ended almost immediately, Captain Ogle felt that his guardian angel was being awful supportive, and he breathed some mighty fresh air.

THE CONSEQUENCES NEVER CARED ABOUT ANYONE ELSE

2006-08-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

I would like to tell you that Lauren did the right thing, that she destroyed the digital photographs, that she saved herself the embarrassment of being seen naked with that sweaty palms pitch man expert Michael. I would like to tell you that, just as I would like to tell you that I like our protagonist, I don’t. I don’t know if I am the only author in the world condemned to write about a character that I don’t particularly like and that hitherto remains the protagonist even as I have wanted to give Antoinette more life within these pages, because I like her better, I feel her better, I relate to Antoinette. Did Maria Shelly like her Frankenstein, cadaver resuscitated from death into leading protagonist? What of Bram Stoker and his Dracula, hard not to fall in love with a creature whose life is punctuated by blood, I must suppose that Oscar Wilde loved his Dorian Grey, but what a rot he was. Me, I despise Lauren. And now I can despise her even more, because she ended up delivering the photos to Ann.

Lauren could never really forgive herself or regain her respect after fucking Michael, how could she, it would be wrong to expect her to forgive herself, Michael is such a non character, non person, useless for any of societies’ objectives, and in some minute way, Lauren was aware of all that, and she was now aware that she had imprinted herself with his essence, because everyone we touch becomes a part of us, and everyone we fuck more so, and now, a bit of Lauren was in Michael, which might be bad or good depending on your perspective, but worse, a part of Michael would now forever be within her, through this universe, and through any other dimension where her essence would write her signature; there would be Michael.

Unable to come to terms with this absurd fact of the universe, Lauren sort of redeemed herself by allowing the delivery of the photos to Ann. Now Ann was not so idiotic as not to be aware at some level that Michael was a cheat and a louse as any man that wore socks while having sex naturally was; but the photographs presented a genuine problem, she could not deny it and still respect herself; all the other times the evidence wasn’t staring at her in the face, she would have honestly destroyed them and kept her chocolate factory, after all Ann was married to Michael because she did not want to look at life, you could only marry a Michael if you could only look the other way, Ann was always looking the other way; but this time, she knew that someone wanted her to see those photos, that someone would always be saying “Here look at these, this is your husband, LOOK, Look!” and when someone is telling you to look with all that intensity, you just can’t keep looking the other way. Ann left Michael.

While I am giving you the bad news I must as well tell you now that Michael did not take it well. You might say “Why would you expect him to take it well.” Because he did not love Ann, she might have been no more than a sock he used once a month, so I kind of thought he would just go to a hotel and sleep off the inconvenience of having lost both his job and his wife within forty nine hours. When Michael got home however, the only thing that was there of Ann’s was Michael in his compromising pictures, with Lauren seemingly enjoying the non orgasmic affair. Michael should have taken the contortionists look in Lauren’s face as a compliment to his manhood, instead he had it clear like a hammer to the head, that Lauren had conned him. Instead of getting himself a whiskey, which is what I would have done, he yelled, “I’ll fucking kill the bitch!” He may have repeated that many times more, through his long day and night at the house, but I don’t know, and you don’t know, because we left, we went to catch up to Habakkuk and his doings.

Just when you think you know a person something happens to let you know that you don’t know anything about that person. We are in a whorehouse, Habakkuk is here, he is fucking a whore. The act doesn’t merit description, he is there, he doesn’t make any noise, it is very obvious he is perspiring, he doesn’t want to touch her, he is touching her, his kisses faint through her thick flesh, she has huge thighs, disconcerted nipples, one of her breasts hangs lopsided, just like one of her large dark eyes, she had a generous portion of make up, underneath is her flesh trying to breath, and so the makeup cracks like earthquakes fault running from her face throughout her breasts, which also sparkle because she has sprinkled herself with star dust, her red shoes are on the floor, her bra somewhere lost in the stained sheets; Habakkuk diligently seeming to satisfy himself, pumping away, the whore bursts into tears, screams, she bites her own hand to quell her screams, afraid that they will come rescue her from this magnificent mastodon, finally Habakkuk too comes, and his body immediately stiffens, he refuses any of her caresses, lays there next to her stiff like a coconut that won’t crack but has been cracked! Stiff.

You can tell from the whore’s expression that she hopes she gets pregnant from this, Habakkuk is probably thinking that he has caught aids, but most strange, he had refused to use a condom, had had to pay forty three dollars extra for whore’s dangerous inconvenience, and now she was attempting to caress his hair, and hoping that she was pregnant with his child. It wasn’t until Habakkuk got up, silently dressed, and walked out without saying a word, not a one word, it was only then that the whore remembered that she was a prostitute, and that nothing had changed. She didn’t cry, she stayed on, comforted by the wet bedding, and somehow knowing that wherever she went in the universe, her signature would have a little of a prophet in it.

While prophets are good at the foretelling of magnanimous events, they are rarely very good with everyday life. By helping Lauren, Habakkuk had become a basic human being, he had reduced his metaphysical signature and his stature was more that of a common man, he of course knew this and when he slept with the whore he knew that he was sacrificing his goat. Prophets call their penises goats because they know that they will never use them, and that if they do fornicate it is a sacrifice and not a ritualistic sacrifice, but a carnal sacrifice which has no merit in the metaphysical stock exchange. The whore was a suicide pill for Habakkuk at the metaphysical level, he would never obtain higher origins, he would never visit the saints; he was about to become Moses, aware of the promise of the divine glory, but never would he experience it; he had sentenced himself to a metaphysical free zone, slowly over the coming months, he would grow more earthbound, where he might even reach such carnal levels as to like American football, eventually though the rot would consume him, the prophet saw himself, on the streets of New York, searching the garbage cans for bagels or doughnuts, he would not be wrong, you may know it now, perhaps the only prophecy which hitherto we can count to come true. See him there, in an alley, next to a garbage bin, dead, with a coke bottle holding his hands clenched.

And this is why I despise Lauren, and maybe you are getting the picture too, Michael and now Habakkuk.

Before visiting the whore, before that dismal and tragic event, Habakkuk had consulted his spiritual adviser. Lola. Lola was a fat lady with all the charm in the universe pounded thick inside of her. Lola was flamboyantly colorful, her gestures were always earth moving trucks and she read the Tarot for everyday common folk, that never really got any of her readings, and life never quite turned out the way she meant for it to turn out because her paying customers did not know that you could not buy your fortune, nor can the future be divined through the interaction of a paying customer and a fortune teller. Money was a grounding force, money cashed in the future NOW. But it would be wrong to expect Lola’s customers to comprehend that, and it would be even more wrong to expect Lola to tell them, Lola was here to help a few prophets with her localized energy gifts, her paying customers were how she paid the rent in this dimension, she wasn’t kidding herself and her true friends knew it, and Habakkuk was a true spiritual friend, and while he had far surpassed her mystically and metaphysically, and had certainly been much closer to being a Buddha, in the near, here, his eternal curve didn’t materialize. Lola guided our blind prophet well throughout the years, she had predicted Lauren’s entrance, she had predicted the five dead parrots, and she had told him that he needed to find the sacred statue. And now, when he needed to find the Pink parrot killer, she told him he would have to go to the whore with the red shoes.

To the unaware of some of the weirdest laws in the universe, this could only mean the possibility of a venereal disease and/or sex without the inconvenient psychological entanglements of a relationship; to Lola and to Habakkuk it meant the loss of his virginity. Prophets and mystics in order to reach the height of their spiritual prowess and to admit within themselves the cosmic so that they may reach full awareness must absorb their entire essence in carnal abstinence. The energies which carnalize the here and now are extremely tense and constantly rub with everything else in order to excrete the material, in order to walk among everything one must extract oneself from the tensions, and this mandates a definite proclivity towards maximum abstinence. Habakkuk for instance, performed a strange ritual, the entire purpose of which was the absorption of his semen by mentally inducing it to ascend through his spine ending in essence on his frontal lobe. But now Habakkuk would not be able to do that anymore, his essence would be stained with that of the whore with the red shoes. Understanding his destiny from there, at least in part, Habakkuk kissed Lola on the lips so that their rich saliva’s could contravene, and, enriched with each others fluids, they parted aware that they would never see each other again; and knowing that the only person who could change that was Habakkuk, wasn’t going to change it. Why was he doing it? Why for Lauren? Why!!

Whores are common creatures throughout the history of the universe, there are whores everywhere, part of their frequency rate factor is due to the Akashic records, whores channel weaker energies for the medium to collect, whores hold weaker energy like an oven keeping something warm, until someone comes to pick it up, the someone can be a source that delivers the awareness of the collected weaker energies to the Akashic records, or it can be very low earth energy awareness that is meant for local but common consumption. A whore holds all the human energies of all the men that have entered her essence, and within those male energies are all the feminine energies that they have copulated with, and even some registration of massive platonic energies, and the whore medium passes these on to those that touch them, creating a greater sense of the disparate communities via the accumulated energies, of scum or wisdom that pass their way. The only way to get to Pink, was through whore energies because Pink was a pervert. Habakkuk had gone to the whore with the red shoes to collect Pink’s essence, this he did because only the one that killed the parrots, knew what they were going to tell Lauren.

THE AKASHIC RECORDS

2006-08-30T21:53:00.000-07:00

You can know too much about a thing and then the mystery is gone and before you know it the thing itself is gone.

The Akashic records were born when you and I were born, they were born when Gilgamesh was born, they were born when Adam and Eve were born, they were born before Buddha and Jehovah before everything that lives inside of a human was born. That is, before culture, before history, before science, before philosophy before all those parasites, there were always the Akashic records. They may not have been full of anything, a record can be empty, partially empty and full, except the Akashic records never fill up because they don’t take up space in this dimension, and the dimension where they are is so much everywhere that it doesn’t get full unless of course the universe were to get full of matter or of something like dark matter. But since it is unlikely to the most extreme of probabilities, unlikely that the universe would ever fill up with all the missing matter that scientists can’t seem to find, not because they haven’t been diligent in their search, but because all that dark matter isn’t there, simply isn’t there, but scientists can’t seem to be able to tolerate a force, something that pulls or coerces the universe apart, without having some large gargantuan real thing there to blame it on. Then, only if scientists are unsuccessful at finding all the dark matter, then the Akashic records are safe from predatory injunction through the scientific method.

Fortunately for us, the Akashic records are safe from the reach of scientists for nothing is more blind to the Akashic records than that which is trying to see and measure everything and then, more tragically, to prove it. The universe, and, specifically, the Akashic record, doesn’t care about proof, it cares more about necessity of being, it cares more about the desire of the desires of things, subjects and beings, than it cares about correlations of cause and effect. If you want magic the Akashic record will give you magic, if you want wisdom, the Akashic will give you wisdom, if you want a pig to fly then your pig will fly, see within the whole expressions in the Akashic archives anything is possible, even mundane things, like a boringly gravitating man such as Sir Isaac Newton.

The Akashic record never speaks on behalf of anyone, equally it never surmises the contents of its archives into categories, or table of contents nor does it allocate chronological factors to things, there is no alphabetical, species, numerical, calendar order within the Akashic records, the 7th Century BC happened yesterday, tomorrow and today, it doesn’t know, it doesn’t have any basis to place that knowledge in a contextual frame, to the Akashic record the 7th Century BC and the 21st Century AD happen to have spoken to it, happen to have placed their essences within the records, when they did it, the Akashic records immediately inundated everything else with it, the centuries are all published as one in SENTENTIA.

I don’t know, nor could I know it if there are hundreds of thousands of Akashic records, because just as the Akashic records don’t know anything about the things, events, persons and subjects within, neither may we know what if anything are the Akashic records; we can feel them, we can draw this book from them without prior knowledge, just simply by feeling the records you can draw from them their infinite elements, and you can do so from any point in space time, and you can do so from any dimension, there is only one element, only one element, you must be a sentient life form, you must be an emotion based life form to have a library card, so that you can check out the records.

The Akashic records give you access to everything, the only problem is that you have to be really detached from time and matter to get access, partial detachment gets you through the door, reach high levels of detachment as Habakkuk had once accomplished, and you get even more beautiful awareness of the on goings in the universe. But when you get that information it is not cataloged, so you see the sacred statue that should have never been witnessed by your eyes, that was grievously unveiled to sun light, and you see the Monks running away fearing the end of the universe, equally you see five dead parrots on a floor, somewhere, you see a cat. You would be wrong however to make the connection between the dead parrots and the cat, but it would be a comprehensible conclusion, the Akashic records don’t care about Loki’s innocence or your need to find a murderer, they don’t understand why you would even bother to make associations when they are all so temporary.

This is the thing about the Akashic records, they don’t know what associations you will make, nor do they care, you’re free to make them, if they become relevant to you then, then they are only relevant to you. Habakkuk was immersed in some serious association events, but equally he could be involved in some other associational event with all the same exact elements. The Akashic record doesn’t really dislike or like Lauren, nor would it feel bad if Lauren and Habakkuk ended up with child, the only thing that is clear is that the child is not yet part of the Habakkuk record, only the associations which Lauren and Habakkuk may make can produce the child which then will become a part of the archives.

But while all of that is interesting, vast storage, fluid connectivity to all things, space point independence, timeless indifference, the most interesting and most intriguing and most wonderful fact, is that the Akashic records pace one human with all humans, one century with all centuries, one idea with all ideas, the Akashic records, a timeless thing, synchronizes the mindset and heart sense of generations and civilizations so that what any experience all become aware.

This is the intrinsic and difficult aspect of it, the Akashic records release their information of the ages and of the very present towards any and all of us instantly. Imagine that you are reading this book, yes, imagine that you are reading this very book, you’re flying somewhere, and while moving through the paragraphs something clicks in your brain, makes some free associations, yes you have just had a classical thought, an original thought, if you were able to just now conjure some very original idea, the Akashic records have already stolen your copyright. It has already placed that very original idea in the Akashic records, and it has already dispersed it instantly to any and all sentient beings living in the universe, they all now have the capacity to think what you just thought, they now know it at some level, even if they are not aware that they know it, they now have changed as that idea has changed you, and you and all those lives living their human existences, past and present, have now been flooded with your original association which has been exponentially exposed throughout the universe; and your idea might then even become something genuinely real and even part of the material world, if enough of all those expose to it choose to act upon it.

And you are not going to believe this, this very part, this most horrifying of parts, the average person, of which none of us are part, is the greatest beneficiary of the Akashic records. The intrinsic serenity of the average person comes from their endemic awareness of the Akashic records, the average person doesn’t bother to have too many insecurities, which is what creative and thinking types possess in grand, but the average person just waits till all those great thinkers, bother and tinker till all those original artists create new associations, and when these associations reach the Akashic records, then they are worthy of the common folk, and only then do they become an intrinsic part of normal life which is a really comfortable place, where such once astonishing things as cubism and existentialism became rather dull.

It’s as simple as that. That is all the records do, they just absorb everything that is an emotion, idea, thought and association and they store it in a medium through the immensity of the Akashic record, which then immediately alters every feeling being so as to harmonize the medium.

I have personally speculated on this matter, more so than Habakkuk, and I may risk telling you something that you already know and just don’t know you know it, but I think the medium that holds the records is a multidimensional expression of the combined essences of all the living sentient beings in the universe. How else can you explain how the medium instantly transfers all new experiences, the replicating memory cells have to be the combined expression of those that are sentient beings. This would also instantly explain why there is no time factor involved, all beings that are sentient communicate through feelings within the same quantum medium. As much as it might bother me to say it, and not to discredit Habakkuk, there isn’t such a thing as the Akashic Records, that is merely a way for Habakkuk to explain to himself how it is that he becomes aware of the Seventh Century BC while being in the 21st Century AD; and it is how he can feel justified in detaching himself from normality so as to access the awareness of the records which actually don’t require any astroplaining to reach them because he, Habakkuk is carrying them within him. It is in fact a dreamy state that gives you access to the Akashic records, and not some dirty ritual, nor some complex sacrifice, just simply being sleepy can trance you right into the records, and if you are inspired to desire then, there is everything before you, or for sure the associations that you wanted to review.

See the only way that the 7th Century can affect the present century is if it is here with us, the interpolation of effects through time are never instant, but the seventh century, Darwin, Copernicus and Genghis Kang, god rest his soul, are all here, within us, in you, and not somewhere in another dimension, and they are instantly affecting us and instantly we are affecting them, more so we are keeping them alive, much as they have given us the inspiration to live, if only through some perceived sense of continuity through all the disjointed events. In sumMaria, there isn’t anyone of us excepted from all the awareness that is stored in the Akashic records. This awareness or knowledge, if you will, simmers throughout the human consciousness and only the insecure have to think their way through life.

THE CONSEQUENCES HAVE TRAGIC SIDE EFFECTS

2006-08-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to find good detectives, in any given profession there are the redundant practitioners: people that know the rules and know how to repeat them; and there are the innovators, people that break the rules and know how to create them or recreate them. Lauren was a rule breaker, even as she was conservative in all other aspects of her life, her investigative procedures were innovative, and less you doubt them, I put forth the evidence of how she was willing to listen to Habakkuk when any other normal career minded detective would have ignored him and done well to do so. So it is that we find ourselves in Ogle’s office, not far from the Akashic records by any measure, but at least in a place that has found some form of comfort zone in the normal everyday act of pursuing criminals.

“Well Lauren,” Speaks the Captain, “we sure scraped the bottom with that one.” “Yes Captain,” The term captain as she is using it now, carelessly but firmly implies she is trying to keep her job, “mistakes were made, procedure wasn’t followed, I think it is possible to imagine that we pursued a case that had no motive, and that had far fetched witnesses and suspects.” Ogle, was not above being on top when the situation afforded him the pedestal, and more so when the opponent was a cocky woman that could outdo him at every turn, “A case that had no motive, Lauren! We didn’t even pursue a case Lauren, you’re sitting here acting like you’ve only made mistakes but you haven’t made any mistakes you have jumped off reality Lauren, you’re no longer here, and you’ve almost made me hop on your blood thirsty trail of a woman that doesn’t really have any fundamental flaws other than those that we couldn’t all go to jail for!”

Lauren of course, still believes that her attitude has been proper, that her boss is wholly wrongheaded, and that given enough time she will prove him and the system all wrong, she just needs more time, more time to investigate, more time to access files and witnesses, and eventually she will be vindicated. This is classic Lauren, for if Lauren had been, for instance, to dinner with Bacchus, she would have told the God of Food and Wine, that he was drinking and eating to much, that gluttony was an abomination and that he was bound to have a heart attack, closed arteries, high blood pressure, etc. And that would not even be the terrible part, she would not have told Bacchus, that she thought she was completely 100% correct, but rather would know it in her heart that through his heart failure, brain fart and mortal obesity, Lauren’s puritan self was convinced, that Bacchus would not only find out that she was correct, he would be so far busy proving her correctness through every illness known to excesses and hedonism, that eventually the post of God of wine and food would be eliminated by the universe and some angel would be made nutrition expert and life extensor. An oddity considering that Gods depend on people to die to worship them. And yet Lauren did not doubt this, the fact that she was killing a god did not much matter to her, she was right, that is all that mattered to her. So in keeping with that righteous attitude, Lauren continued her dialog with the captain, “Yes, you are right sir, it was sincerely awfully careless of me, I certainly learnt a lot these last few days, I am just sorry that I put you through this, and I am more sorry for myself;” she pauses, her head descending as if motioning grace, “Captain I still have so much to learn from you.”

Ogle wasn’t stupid, but he could believe in a compliment if it served him to keep one of his top detectives, which he needed to maintain a world class investigative team, so he walked over to Lauren, feeling a bit more powerful than he should have, “Hey kid, you just made a few bad choices, but you are on the right track, we are winners you and I, and we will continue to catch the bad guys, and beat the bureaucrats and make this the best precinct in all of these United States.” Lauren didn’t really care for all of the connotations that the captain had attached to all that, but she cared that the one that mattered was attached, she was still a detective, she could still wear a badge, carry a gun and have access to all the necessary research and documents to catch her triple abduction and murder criminal.

The captain was nice enough to oust Lauren out of the office, “Now take the day off, go on, you need a rest.” She did, smiling like a little girl that has been left off the hook for fucking the boy next door. She nears her house, an ambulance forces her to pull over so that it can pass by, a fire truck forces her to pull over to also pass her by, a cop car pulls her over, the officer recognizes the driver, “I think you better come with me ma’am.” Lauren, sensing that something is wrong and having complete faith in the arm of the law, parks her car and becomes a passenger with the nice patrolman that has picked her up. They reach the ambulances and fire trucks, her window is closed, it is drizzling slightly, the window remarks her lightly red natural lips, her medium eyes increasing with proximity, her house in flames.

I would like to say in flames, the house, with the parrots within, and with Loki, was completely up in smoke, there was hardly any wall standing, a remarkable explosion had taken hold of the place and had embarked on complete erasure, not a memory. Not that Lauren would have many memories, she was a child of the instant, whatever played the moment that is what she was playing, she did not lose anything here that could not be replaced at your local home depot; but for one thing, she slams into the ground off the side of the cop’s patrol car her eyes awash in tears, “Oh my Loki, oh my Loki I love you, where are you, please tell me that you are alright, Loki come back to me, Loki please forgive me, Loki, Loki,” the nice cop guy with the bad news tries to calm her, equally to respect her because her mountain of suffering also carries a badge that towers over his, “it’s ok Detective, it’s ok, everything is going to be ok.” “No it’s not, not it’s not going to be ok, where is my Loki cat, where is my Loki cat,…” Too difficult to tell what else she is saying.

The fireman’s Chief approaches, obviously notified that it was one of their own; firemen and policemen share a spiritual address, but the fire chief didn’t like Lauren, he knew of her, he hadn’t liked how she had handled some pyromaniac case a few years back, he held her responsible for all of his men that had died putting out those fires, six in total; she had told him that there wasn’t enough evidence; and I must say I sort of shared her opinion on the matter, here are a few hotels, all belonging to the same slum lord, the hotels were inhabited by low-lifes, by destitute types, by welfare recipients, by out of date retirees, and then one day they all started to go up in smoke; many died, but the fire chief only cared about his six men, and it was unfortunate that old ladies and old men had also died, but they weren’t his men, just poor taxpayers that is all; and so he wanted to avenge his men’s death, and the cop that had refused to chase down the suspected arsonist, was sitting down, crying on the pavement, like a chicken with her head cut off, and so he took a manly approach. “Hate to tell you this ma’am, but I don’t think there is much left of your home, you must have left the gas stove on, an electrical spark, someone carelessly throwing a cigarette could have ignited the place, there was enough concentration of gas to plow the entire place and lucky we are that the neighbors didn’t get it too.” Chief takes his hat off scratches his white hairs. Lauren was no alien to those words, the fire chief was only repeating the words that she had used to nullify his concerns when she had obstinately refused to further investigate the fires as an insurance scam. She looked up at the fire chief like an angry leprous dog that doesn’t have the energy to attack, “Yes Chief, luckily the neighbors didn’t get it too.” Her eyes awash in tears heavily blended and welded with mascara; her hands touching the pavement, her beige dress, somewhat torn, her gold necklace, tarnished against her salty white blouse, her nylons suffering the end of their existence, the false sun extricating freckles across her aging face.

There was one nice thing about Lauren, she did not fight battles that weren’t worth her time and effort, she could have reacted with extreme anger, but she knew that the fire chief wasn’t going to react favorably, Lauren was aware that the cost of attempting to drill some sense into the chief was too exorbitant, she grabbed a hold of her shirt, blew concentrated snot out of her nostrils, and I might add, that was with considerable effort, and then she proceeded to walk over the ashes of her home but not righteously shoeless.

She kept on looking for Loki, silently here and there, a bone, a hair pile, a jaw, a tail, his collar which said “if you find me please call this number…” but nothing, there was nothing, and there was nothing else that she wanted to recover, not a family album, not a ring left by her grandmother, not a letter from some former lover, nothing, just Loki, and just Loki wasn’t anywhere.”

She rung up Habakkuk, he came over, he too walked over the place, then walked over to her kneeling self on the neighbors grass lawn. “No my Lauren, I am sorry, not a sign of Loki there, I did detect heavy concentrations of gas traces, cooking gas, it apparently caught fire and flamed the place down, Loki could not have felt any pain, he must have passed out from the gas before falling victim to the explosion, no one could have survived awake the concentration.” Lauren closed her eyes, gently opened them, “thank you Habakkuk, I understand.”

Habakkuk stood before her silently, and after a couple of quarters of an hour had passed, he gently touched her hair, caressed it and said, “Lauren, this was no accident, Antoinette was here.”

Today was Saturday, February 01, 2003

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 02, 2003

2006-08-30T21:46:00.000-07:00

Captain Ogle had not had a good night’s rest, his mattress kept on talking to him, and the last thing anyone ever wants is a mattress that talks. Ogle had told himself that he was going to replace the unsupportive mattress which only knew how to irritate him by creating a three point support infrastructure which only served to remove any center of gravity from his body, so that Ogle’s brain had no option but to become a gyroscope for the night to maintain an ever changing skeletal discomfort. So he wasn’t happy, and so maybe that is why he reacted so violently to Lauren’s suppositions. Or maybe it was that he felt fat; after showering he had taken a closer view of his anatomical self and well, he was rather looking like a worn old mattress. Regardless it seemed at least that Lauren, having lost her home to an explosion, and on top of that her cat, it seemed at least that Ogle could have been more sensitive.

Instead here he is standing and yelling at the poor woman, “No, Lauren, No! I won’t have it anymore! There is no case and you are completely mentally ill!” He pauses, Lauren has long lost much of her puritanical perfection, her clothes are not crisped, she has aged a few years in the last few hours, she is not as alert as usual, why else would she have brought the captain her supposition and Habakkuk’s that Antoinette had blown up her house in retaliation for her earlier arrest. The silence after his shouts remains, she sort of searches herself internally and gets up from the couch where she had been sitting, and calmly walks out. Captain follows her with his eyes, as she exits he disapprovingly moves his head in negative directions, and sits down. His coffee burns his tongue, and the sudden pain irks him to think, “what if she is right, what if Antoinette blew up the house, she certainly had a reason to be aggravated, Lauren had wanted to lock her up, she could be retaliating…” but after another sip of his coffee the Captain a little more awake, violently shook his head so as to toss any thoughts off into the eternal abyss.

I think we could have stopped Lauren, I think we could have helped her understand that this was not the thing to do, going to Antoinette’s place was certainly going to only exacerbate matters more. But then we really could not prevent this from happening, Lauren suffers from fear of abandonment, when she was young life changed all the time, as soon as she got comfortable with something her parents had to move, as soon as she had found that perfect boy, they had to get a divorce, as soon as she was about to be honored class valedictorian, her mother fell in love with a man that lived in Hawaii of all places, and when she got to liking Hawaii they split up and she went to live on a chicken farm in Kansas, and finally they stopped moving, but living among all those chickens drove her to exclude them from her cuisine, and never to eat another egg in her life.

The unfortunate road conditions of her early life, drew her to become detached from everything and to adopt a perfect life wherever she was, and the perfect life was more or less catalog based, from New York mostly, some of it seemed Parisian in style, but on her salary how could that be, and she carried herself intelligently and based all of her attachments on her brain functions, and so it was easy for her to abandon everything and everyone on a moments notice; and somehow she felt that this was a way not to hurt anyone, for the thing that Lauren feared the most was to make someone hurt like she hurt within.

But there was some attachment, her home, even as it was simplistic, decorated with that anti aesthetic Swedish assembly line furniture, she liked it, and no one else needed to like it, and this was the first home where she had lived more than five years, but what she was really missing was her Loki cat, she was missing him something big, her heart ached. Yes it is true that she seemed detached from Loki, but it was also true that she loved him with all her heart and more than she had ever loved anyone in her whole life. Her fear of abandonment meant that all her relationships were detached because at any given point her lover of the time was going to leave her. How could he not, at some point he would realize that she was all brain controlled and could not muster enough emotion to create the bond that takes place between peoples guts when they are in love. Ah, ah, she wasn’t going there, and she might not have been aware of it, but what attaches people together is in the gut, completely in the gut, in fact the medium that transfers all of the Akashic record’s sentiments from one sentient being on to all the others, is a cosmic gut connection, a gut connection that detectives cross to internalize when they walk into the scene of a crime to make an essence connection to the killer so that they can home in, a gut connection that goes past and isotropically through the stomach; hence the reason so many sensitive and loving people have stomach problems all of their lives, they are being torn apart by their incessant interactions to the multiplicity of humanity’s woes and throes. And here is the reason why Lauren never calls in sick to work, is always fit, and never has any physical problems, even her period is a nice and tidy day affair, and that is that. The concept of “I love that you need me,” has never touched her independence.

And of course, the universe always does it’s best to prove us right, and so her fear of abandonment was justified by the fact that eventually all of her men would get bored with her indolent perfection and leave her; and not because they did not see something deep in her, they did see something deep in her, a chasm for their organ.

Lauren was then able to restrain her feelings and convince herself that it had been for the best, and she always wanted to remain friends with all of her former lovers, which were only lovers by mental apparition and not gut feeling, so many of her best friends were ex lovers, even Joe, the guy that had cheated with Antoinette, who also later turned out to be gay. But there was something more behind the mask, when her relationships ended, behind the door of her private and empty bedroom, her tears and mind would ache, her heart would say, “No Lauren why did you do this to me again, why have you left me cold, here, again, no, not again Lauren.” and her anguished heart would bleed, a day, a month, in whole isolation of the world, a world that could not be a witness to her suffering nor could love her.

Yet, when she was abandoned her masochistic side realized that she wanted to keep the relationship above all things, but it just could not be. And now that Loki cat wasn’t there anymore, now she wanted him more than anything or anyone in the world, she was now obsessed with it, and Antoinette was about to find out how obsessed Lauren could become, specially now that she knew firmly that Loki had not left voluntarily, now she could genuinely miss him and love him, now that she felt his absence, now that he was torched by gas flames.

When her car parked in front of Antoinette’s place, the sun was bright, the day seemed happy, unless of course you’re Lauren, in which case you’re not very happy and right now your not having a good life. Lauren walks up to the door, and coldly knocks, more like pounds on the door with the weight of her righteous authority. Unfortunately Antoinette was home. She opens the door, her gorgeous dark green eyes looking through the screen door, her physique unravaged by time clearly cuts a passionately attractive silhouette, she is not wearing any makeup, she was working from home, and the lack of makeup only makes her more attractive and closer to going to bed. Right now she is staring at her nemesis, a woman that she once felt she betrayed but now only feels anger towards. Lauren stands there; Antoinette, “I am afraid I am busy right now, don’t bother telling me why you are here,” oh how could her sweet voice sound so precious uttering those nasty words, “I don’t have time for your drummed up charges, amazing that they still let you keep your job.” And having said that, and allowing not one word from her unwanted guest, she begins to shut down the door. However if there is something endemic to a cop is that they don’t like anyone shutting the door on them, as soon as one of those cop DNAs senses that it immediately goes to break down the door, and Lauren did not even wait to check for possible witnesses, her perfection was being dropped for a little satisfaction instead.

She immediately tore through the door, pounded herself on top of Antoinette, had her pinned to the ground straddling her body, and swiftly she took out her gun and placed it where Antoinette’s beautiful nose ended in nostrils; so abrupt was the action that they were now tainted with vividly dark red blood, gorgeous colors, “Listen to me bitch, I know how you are, nobody else seems to know or care, but I know how you are, you can’t get over on me, I am going to make you pay for everything that you’ve done to me, and to everyone else! And don’t you say a fucking word to anyone about my visit here or I will kill you sooner than I have to.” Antoinette was not used to that kind of management style, and yet she did not seem as frightened as she appeared more bothered to have Lauren on top of her, and too she seemed uncomfortable with the aches that had risen from the fall and the gun barrel. But she did not say a word, just remained there, until Lauren, perhaps now feeling uncomfortable with her latest achievements, spat on her face, got up, stood for a second through a cold stare, and then walked out.

As Lauren was leaving, a curious black and white cat looked through the screen door, almost made her out, but really didn’t though he detected her scent but was no more curious to inspect it for he turned around stepping over Antoinette, who was still laying on the floor, perhaps catching her breath, and then around her, where he smelled her blood, and then gently started licking it, as if assisting in the best way he could. Antoinette caressed Loki to reassure the kindness of his nursing tongue, and they both stayed there, on the floor, a good while, resting, oddly resting.

NOT ENOUGH PAIN TO GO AROUND FOR EVERYONE

2006-08-30T21:43:00.000-07:00

“The only thing I want to do is kill her…” crying man tears, “kill her, she has destroyed me, everything that I have worked for, all that I have dreamed of having, and now, my marriage, my career all in ruins, help me doc, please help me.” Michael would have probably gotten more from Brad, his psychiatrist, more attention, more care, if he hadn’t used the word “Doc” it was such an ugly term, so lacking in appreciation for all those years of education and all that profound understanding of the psychological principles that make us all tick in the most intriguing of manners; but Michael was never sensitive to those things. Brad responded professionally, “Hey, hey, common now, this is not the Michael that I know, you’re more together than this guy, your bright, you got to where you are because you are good, others might have never done it, you’re not liking yourself right now but that is not a reason to mutilate everything that you have accomplished; just because Lauren comes into the picture and destroys it.” Michael still crying like a baby, “Doc, how can I not see it that way, everything is lost, everything, even Ann.” Michael could say “…even Ann,” in that manner that denotes that that certainly wasn’t expected, she needed me, I made sure that she needed me, how could someone that is a parasite abandon the host with such sureness of mind? That was what Michael was saying, Brad opted to ignore that as the answer might just force his patient to commit suicide and there was such a thing as a suicide rating, a secret rating among Psychiatrists, how many patients have you lost to their own hand? No one ever answered honestly of course, but every psychiatrist was subconsciously aware that even if they lied, they had to be within 20% of the truth or else; or else something which they didn’t comprehend would testify against them: The Akashic Records! These records never had a problem when a lie was within 20% certainty of the truth, but if it went much further than that, you would see the face of the person that is being lied to, doubting your every word, though not knowing why they are doubting you, the Akashic simply doesn’t resound the lie as a truth beyond the 20% margin for error that you are allowed, you can lie but you better not be lying all the way, the con man intuitively knows it. Tie your lies to the truth, build a lot of truth-based walls all around your lie, and when you have a lot of truth all surrounding you, you may then fool even the Akashic record, which means that you will get away with it, but telling a direct lie without farming it will certainly open you wide to the Akashic resonance essence that permeates through any of our gut instincts.

The Akashic record senses references and when you tell your lie, we all do a reference check to the Akashic, the Akashic then sort of doesn’t complain, or it doesn’t respond, if it doesn’t respond it means it doesn’t make sense and we lose gut touch with the Akashic record because a lie doesn’t have any real sense connection to it and so we react baffled, but we don’t know why, and some of us will figure out that this is a lie or that we are being fooled and some of us might have so much invested in the lie that we may have to believe it anyway.

After being called “Doc” Bradley probably wanted Michael to kill himself, there have been many psychiatrists that have already killed their patients by urging them on to suicide, a psychiatrist is the perfect murderer, this specially so when they have been lovers with their intended victims, you can hear their excuses to the cops, “terrible thing to have her go by her own hand, terrible, if only I could have helped.” Yeah Doc, you helped alright. But Brad was a very ethical man, and even though Michael was obnoxious enough, he just ordered electric shock treatment. “Electric shock treatment Doc?” “Yes Michael, it did get a lousy reputation for some time but now it is “popular” again and there have been some very positive and even impressive results, it is just not the way they used to do it, we don’t shock you like they did in the old days, we are gentler, the patient has to participate, you will be treated with great care, and any sign of distress will be dutifully monitored.” “Well Doc, if that is what is best, I trust you, you certainly need to help me stop thinking that killing Lauren is my reason for living.” Saying this you could see a cynical smirk drawing itself through Michael, Brad however ignored it, and quickly scribbled on his patient’s chart, “Shock therapy!” Just like that, with an exclamation mark, and more troubling for a doctor, he wrote it in such a way that any two year old would be able to comprehend it, “Shock therapy! Three sessions.”

Lauren, unaware that she had sent “kill me! Please kill me! Kill me please! Please somebody kill me!” notices to the Akashic Records, where sensitive and/or particularly insecure people could pick up the message and become unaware killers, Lauren was going through her own traumatic moment. Crying, gulping tears, her neck and eyes heavily swollen, the lamp in her hotel room partially drained from proximity to her, and Audrey, calming her, “It’s not like that Lauren, this is not your fault, you didn’t kill mother, you couldn’t have killed her, she died of natural causes, Lauren please you are a good person, you help people, I have always been envious of you, come on Sis, its ok, everything is going to be ok.” Lauren delirious, “no, NO, its not, NOT, ok, nothing is ever going to be ok anymore, bad things always happen to those around me, Loki cat is dead, and I caused Antoinette to kill him by listening to Habakkuk and putting her in jail, and now,…..” inaudible words barely reaching our ears, “and now I have killed our mother, I have killed her, I was the daughter that would bury her, I was the daughter that couldn’t love her, she deserved so much and all I gave her was grief….” Audrey “please stop blaming yourself, we all feel guilty after a death, it is normal you can’t call yourself a killer because someone dies…” softly whispering into Lauren’s ear, “…hey its now you and I kid, and we need to be strong for each other, we are all we got.”

Audrey was being as supportive as she could be but, “No, no, how could I have failed to realize that the explosion had taken my mom with it, the only remembrance of my mom that I had with me, how could I have allowed such violation, no, no,” heavy coughing, wiping her nose while her whole body trembled, Audrey feeling helpless, “Audrey she blew up my mother that witch, she blew her up.” That her mother had been cremated and only her carbon remains had been within the nine leaf plant was not something that Lauren could rationalize at this moment, Audrey let her cry while she packed up some of her clothes, then the bell rung. Audrey answers the door, a nun in a black tunic holding a rosary, speaks, “We’re here to help you Audrey, your church has explained everything, we have a comfortable place waiting for her, don’t worry, she will be with us and with God.” Audrey had called her church up and made arrangements for her sister to be taken to a catholic convent, Audrey’s church was not given to a particular faith, she was a pastor but she thought that her sister needed a place, for spiritual retreat, that would not in any way identify with the family, the two sisters helped her walk to the car, Lauren was too far gone to resist anything, even a spiritual retreat, the nuns did insist that she could not take her gun and holster, it was left in the hotel room for Audrey could not even bring herself to touching the iron death menace.

Why would Habakkuk be in a shopping mall now, he has certainly changed since we have last seen him, he is going down the automatic escalator, he is following the most gorgeous little girl, curly dark burgundy locks, brown eyes, she is toying looks at him; she can’t be more than four or five, has a darling face, and what appear to be nice parents, though who can tell now-a-days. The parents are busy hunting for a perfect gift that you don’t want to give, for the person that you don’t really care about, nor want to care about, but have to be proper with, and so they are mostly disconcertedly distracted through their social ordeal. Habakkuk, dressed very much like a pimp, with shiny black and white shoes, a stunning silk olive suit, a green artsy tie, and at least two rings that look to be pure gold from what I can see. While the parents are distracted, he starts to talk to the little girl, who takes an interest in his massive gold Rolex watch, she wants to touch it, he lets her, then while she is playing with it, he lifts her with one arm, teasing her, and telling her that she is the cutest little thing, and that he wants a little girl just like her, and even dares to ask her if she will be his little girl, and she smiling says “but I already have a daddy and a mommy.” “But do they have this for you today,” he takes out a Mickey mouse doll and places it right up to her little nose, rubs it, causing her to laugh, and before you know it they are in the parking lot, next to a black sedan, she wakes up from the fun and games and begins to cry, he places his hands over her mouth and gentle brown eyes, “now shut up, shut up, you can go back to your parents soon, first you have to take me to the white orchids.”

“Arrhahhahdhdh! Arghghhhghhg!” The shock of electricity bemoans having to go through Michaels body, “Arughthsush! Aifhfhfhf!” the energy feeling misused. Floyd, our EST Attendant, is indeed enjoying this, and enjoying this so much that he is not writing down all of the treatment sessions, to the point where there are still three left, three treatments left, and yet, “Akhshhshr”, But from those Michael bloodshot and bulging eyes and bleeding reindeer nose capillaries, one would dare say that he might not last the first official treatment; well for sure not with his brain intact. In this world there are people like Floyd, you wouldn’t like him as a person, he has the ability to be right about everything, he has the facts on everything and anything, he doesn’t need you for conversation, and he has never met anyone that he could not torture, including his wife which fortunately likes it; and while he might make a less than endearing friend, as an Electric Shock Treatment attendant, he is a fairly balanced and likable guy. “Akskksososohjdh!”

TWIN JUPITER'S

2006-08-30T21:42:00.000-07:00

Habakkuk is a polite fellow, our little girl a bit feisty and they decide to like each other even as they are not supposed to; so they don’t officially, but they do a marvelous job at reaching for each other. “I need a bathroom, I need to go to the bathroom.” She was a sharp little girl dangling luminous curls but she had an obnoxious tendency to repeat herself; and Habakkuk became partially contaminated of this symptom, “Again, again, you just went, just now!” Maria, Maria didn’t respond, she just pouted, her lips curling as if they were going to burst into a spiting choir, her hands rubbing her legs as if to mitigate blood flow; Habakkuk would get a little nervous, “ok, ok, just wait till the next gas station.” In order to ignore her digestive decomposition she made conversation “Why do I have to take you to the white Orchids?” Maria had never bothered to question the existence or her knowledge of the whereabouts of the white orchids, neither did Habakkuk, a man, experienced in multidimensional memories and beings, question her necessity or lack of naiveté. “Maria, someone is in centuries old trouble and I have to help them, and now the white Orchids are near them.” Maria, crosses her eyes, almost, wriggles her eyebrows as if she felt there was just more here than she wanted to understand, twitching a cheek she asked, “Is that where the statue is?” Habakkuk, not a man that was easily surprised, cluttered his face with surprised expressions, “How do you know about the sacred statue?” Maria, playing with her socks, “I saw it at the place where the white orchids are, I saw it there.” Habakkuk, pausing, placing his right hand to his chin, “What did it look like Maria? Tell me what it looks like.” The tense changed was intended, Habakkuk wanted to know if Maria had a historical annotation, if Maria was one of the little girls in the 7th century BC, in particular the daughter of Helena, who had saved him during his astroplaning disaster. “I didn’t see the statue, I didn’t see it, it was covered up in old cloth, all covered, dirty, very dirty, I didn’t touch it, honest.” Maria pauses, Habakkuk is deep in feeling, then she continues, “Why do I see all those things? Why do all of those things touch me? And who is that ugly cat?”

Habakkuk understood, it was the sacred statue, and Maria was Helena’s daughter, the very daughter that only slightly older in the seventh century had touched his lips, only now she was not aware that it was him, but they both had a similar vision, their eyes were from the same essence, this is why they felt such natural mutual comfort, “I need to go to the bathroom,” “Oh yes, yes, we are here now.” But now Habakkuk was more urged to find the white orchids, before the sacred statue was unraveled, before something terrible could happen. Lola, his felicitous tarot reader, sent him a psychic message that was only a thought in his mind, “Lauren was missing, Antoinette was missing, Loki cat missing…” the medium offered up some clutter too, from other influencing energies that wanted hamburger for lunch or carnitas, and now that Habakkuk wasn’t a vegetarian anymore, rather more a pimp that really liked Mexican food, a carnitas burrito sounded really good, he felt the calling. Still, Habakkuk, jingling with Lola felt her energy nearer than the burrito, so he breathed worried lungs and searched for his little girl Maria. She walked out of the bathroom, and equally longing for him felt herself joyous upon seeing him. Somewhere within her subconscious, there was that little boy that she rescued so many centuries back, they met under strange circumstances, but she wasn’t missing her parents, she actually felt she had more in common with this stranger that had kidnapped her than with her own parents; parents after all were only vessels to get us to and fro.

Before all this was happening, Antoinette had managed to get herself off the floor, Loki having satiated himself with her delicious sweaty blood, was now her roommate too. They are on the couch, he is on her shoulder feeling her waist long black hair, and purring from the purity of the experience; two days have passed since Lauren’s inopportune visit, and it was obvious that the visit had only helped to bond Loki and Antoinette more, they both had something in common, both of their bodies could quietly lay on the face of the earth and cover it all with their essence, both were Jupiter symphonies moving through melodies of space, both drifting in the event driven universe, drifting. Antoinette had drifted to her high powered career position, her lack of resistance to things, her actual indifference caused an appealing neutrality that gravitated all of those worryingly-business personalities and events towards her, and yet she belonged to no one and none of it; she was mostly disturbed by her peers, she would do her best to be alone in her apartment, endless days with herself, she swam in her Jupiter essence, the music, the bath, her hot chocolates, her readings of esoteric history, she was amazed by anything from the Victorian period, she was subdued by the fashion of the 16th through the 18th century, she had some strange dreams in which she imagined herself closing a full moon, with goat’s milk, closing a full moon with her naked breast exposed under a white tunic, her nipples cold with passions for moon dust, her vessel lifting arms unsealing dark gorgeous perspiring hair for Luna’s eyes; her irises clinging mirrors of her love hanging high over the round altar. And Loki, was like the moon too, this huge essence of black and white cat, with the serene eyes of the night, that held themselves without a blink so as to unsettle any rival into concern for his safety; and yet Loki was a harmless creature, he worked for the Akashic record, as a memoryless transference point, scooping curiously through this century, the goings and happenings, without a precursor for knowledge, Loki was the perfect conscript for the Akashic records to review the details of the universe. Now, these two, almost inert, sedentary creatures, helplessly attractive to everyone else due to their brilliant indifference to the world, now these two were poised in some struggle not of their own doing, both accused by Lauren of crimes that they had not committed, at least to the best of our knowledge.

Antoinette, caressing Loki, not smiling, she doesn’t smile much, she feels and shows sweetness but not outright smiles, she doesn’t really seem to know how to smile or to cry, perhaps she is terrible at both; her smiles and cries mostly acts perhaps, unrehearsed by her naturalness which might not have a need for them, but for the social showing; she talks to Loki, “hey my Loki, what are we going to do now you and I?” Loki keeps his eyes locked on her with tenderness, these two are a mountain chain, Loki’s silence monitors Antoinette’s thoughts, she is remembering when she walked into Lauren’s place. It had all been so harmless, she wanted to review her old friend’s goings, she was trying to understand an incomprehensible internment in a wooden hut, she was trying to find out what had happened to Lauren over the years; she remembers lighting a candle, and she remembers reading Loki’s eyes as distressed, as he stood beneath her by her feet near the gas stove, he was saying something to her, the candle didn’t want to light, then she felt a darting flame blue, swiftly pass her by her right, the kitchen red and white checkered table cloth, caught the darting blue flame, she dropped the hesitating candle; Loki perhaps knowingly or not, jumped on her shoulders, she tried to pry him off but his clawing nails only dug deeper into her neck and back, and out she went, speeding away in her vehicle, when the whole of a bang arched its way from the house reverberating through her head. Loki cat staring back at that burning house, his eyes reflecting a calm unknown to man.

Antoinette brusquely placed Loki to the side of the couch, Antoinette nor Loki had room nor need for etiquette, she had to find Lauren, she knew she had to find Lauren, Loki wasn’t so certain of that necessity, but since he had to remain a silent observer, the consequences were his to endure. Antoinette lit up the bath with candles, made herself some tea, and when the bubbles had ripened with the water steaming atmosphere, she sunk her silk body within, to feel the buoyant universe, as she listened to Jupiter orbit the sun.

Meanwhile, Lauren came to life fully blind, a very dark, dark room, not one kilometer of light, quantum would not and could not happen in this room, her bed was a single, she felt with her hands a night table, no lamp, a dark, dark room, she could not see her fingers, Lauren was not afraid of the dark, cops can not be afraid of the dark, Lauren was becoming afraid of this darkness. If she could have seen herself, she would see eyes shut with swollen and overused nerves and capillaries, she could have used all the makeup in the world, only in this darkness she did not need it, just like she did not need time, how long had she been there? was this her first wake up? she remembers something about a convent, something about a convent, she doesn’t remember that she knows how to play the piano, methodically and mathematically, but still she knows how to play it; still she doesn’t remember this, her fingers right now only serve her to pull out some crusting layered mucus from her nose cavities, which she wipes off on the sheets, she feels her vagina with her hands, yes it is still there, she touches her thighs, yes Lauren they feel normal, muscularly tight, all those exercise hours work to take away the flesh; she grabs her nipple based breasts as if doing an exam. I am feeling almost uncomfortable here, but I have to continue reporting, she places her hand in her butt, she scratches a very intrusive itch that circumvents her orifice, it doesn’t go away, fortunately there is no one else in the room, she farts! The fart essence destroys the scary dark, Lauren feels better, she feels more gutsy now, she smelled herself, a tangible object, she has inundated the room with her smell so that now she is everywhere, and nowhere in the darkness where she goes is she not there; she takes deeper breaths, and doesn’t bother, for my sake, to contain another fart! The air ripples, I can’t really see her face, everything I have described is based on feeling and smelling and hearing what I get from the room, and from Lauren in it, but her face takes on a stronger character now; the farts really helped, she seems ripe with confidence, she gets up from the bed, and starts touching the walls with her hands searching for a light switch, the walls are tarnished yellow, the paint has wrinkles, the walls have cracked protrusions and crater clusters but there are no vents, none of the cracks reach to the other side of the world, there is no fresh air, only what manages to replace the stale air through the door margins. Her piano fingers touch a switch, a spastic dash of frail light fills and vacuums the darkness out of the place, where, to nowhere.

Lauren feels accomplished, she feels like she is making progress, she has a gown on, long, white gown, she touches the metal door knob that holds the mobility of the door secured, the door swings open, Lauren realizing that she is now free, searches back at the room and sees a gold and red cross centered on top of the wall, a gold and red cross with some dark shadows, a gold and red cross, she memorizes the cross as if she had seen it before; she dashes out.

Precisely out in the hallway, on a bench against her wall, two nuns are counting rosary beads, two nuns in black tunics, counting rosary beads; they are full of fatty tissue and are holding much water unevenly through the voluminous frames of their bodies; they are surprised by Lauren’s exiting certainty; they rush up to grab her, she didn’t expect it, she seems surprised too, they try to arrest her two arms with their four hands, but this girl has had to arrest men that were twice her size; the nuns are dispatched in a disorderly manner and they immediately and somewhat irreverently call upon god for assistance. Lauren, not waiting for the succoring to reach heaven, dashes through the hallway; she is aware that every hallway ends in an opening or a stair case or in a way out; she dashes, this is a long hall way, she finds the stairs, spiraling rounds them out nicely, she hasn’t lost one bit of her cheetah abilities, and finally reaching grass, her naked feet sink feeling its morning dew; it is morning, a gorgeous dawn is taking place, she hears birds chirping; she walks on, no convent is going to hold this woman captive. Only just as she nears a central and rustic water fountain, she imagines she is dreaming this, a circle of nuns is closing in on her concentric center, closing in, tightening the circle, Lauren can’t place this situation in the here and now, nuns surrounding her, all these white and black tunics closing in, with rosary beads in hand all of them; and so she tries to make a dash for it but the marauding mob of nuns distorts the perimeter formation and concentrate, wholly trouncing upon her! Before there was sun, but now all Lauren can see and feel are tunics and nuns and rosaries all on top of her. Finally a voice of calm enters the rattling scene, “Hold her down, move aside, hold her, move aside.” “Yes Mother Superior Adelaide” “Yes Mother Superior Adelaide” and in Lauren’s brain, “Yes Mother Superior Adelaide” and the dispersing words clear a path to the sun, which just happens to gloriously and distressingly persistently sit behind the veil & wimple of whom we now know to be Mother Superior Adelaide.

Lauren, being held down by three unassuming nuns, looks up at the head master of the tribe, she who speaks with full authority, “Lauren, we are here to help you, you have suffered much trauma, you are not fully yourself now, you will be yourself again some day soon, right now you are not in any condition to be on your own, it would be unmerciful of us to let you be, we must help you, God wants us to help you and Audrey too wants us to help you and we want to help you; please, please understand.” Mother Superior Adelaide, does not wait for Lauren to reply, besides, from the captured Cheetah eyes that Lauren is throwing around there is nothing to discern. “Take her to her room and this time lock it!” Lauren is really too pissed off to say anything, she still doesn’t believe that this is really happening, she is just waiting for the dream to stop, she is just waiting, in a few seconds she will wake up! She doesn’t wake up, instead she sees the gold red cross, she sees its black shadow, she is violently thrown on the harsh unpadded bed, and the light is hushed out!

SWEANEY'S & THE CONVENT OF THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY

2006-08-30T21:38:00.000-07:00

We are in a airy restaurant, Sweaney’s, large atrium, sunny day, a string quartet is playing a melody from the baroque period, a gardener is tending to some ostentatious flowers, which are yet rough enough to live outdoors like wild dogs; the grass resounding vivid green, the white wicker tables and chairs adding to the richly quantifiable atmosphere, I am sitting on a bench, waiting to be seated, I doubt that I will make my turn, I have been told by the very pretty hostess, which surely must have other career prospects and does this merely to keep busy while she masters in the history of the Manchurian dynasty, but I have been told by her, as she whipped away some of her long brown hair from her hazel eyes, that it will be approximately an hour wait. Some of my waiting mates have taken to talking to me, I haven’t the time really, but I accept their charming demands for my short attention span, “this wait is always like waiting for Godot, only the food is so delicious it makes it wholly worth it, and the staff is so nice,” this was an old lady, had probably been coming here for years, to her this must have been the place where she could just hide and say, to herself, “there isn’t a problem in the world, a spring garden swelters all,” something like that, she was a bit bothered by the smoke from my cigarette, I plainly tell you I used the smoke more as a shield to keep these cute people away than from the habit which I did not posses.

From my bench I can see a very good looking waiter, wearing platinum blond hair, white shirt with black bowtie, his blue eyes overwrought with directness and freshness of mind, he is physically lean and gracefully energetic, an Olympian athlete easily, but he is not that, he studying political science at the local university and he has ambitious projects in mind, one which entails his work for a very secretive organization that not unusually hides under the guise of an Non Governmental Organization. An NGO given to hiring good looking types like him that win naturally in the social world. The waiter job is an added cover, the university degree a forgone necessity, his real job at the NGO, Specialist in European Affairs, when he is not being a waiter, a university student, and an employee of the NGO he takes the time to learn languages. So far he has mastered French, German and Greek, he is currently having an interesting time learning Russian, studying a language for him is like when you and I drink a warm glass of milk, it doesn’t taste that good, warm milk that is, but it is tolerable and easily doable.

As you might have guessed I am not here at Sweaney’s to have breakfast, as always my priority is to work for my reader reporting the events that comprise Lies, and so while I would like to try the eggs benedict, a weakness of mine, I am rather urged by having to listen and monitor our man Andre, as is his name, and John, the pudgy forty five year old, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, a green vest, if you can accept that in this not cold morning, he even has a burgundy handkerchief hanging decorously from his breast pocket and corduroy brown pants, and the entire dislocated fashion ensemble is finished off by thick black frame glasses, and somehow it all matches. Our man John has a rough face, it is obvious that he has done some heavy drinking and living in his time, and it is equally obvious that now he serves a more subdued, wise role working for this very secret organization.

John, administers the official look and Andre approaches the table, smiles, they make smallish talk and I slightly hear, “beautifully sculptured…” “wrapped up…” “flying to London soon are you?” “vacation” “will you pay a little service for our Lord?” “Yes, I think I will.” “Charming.” John crumbles up what appears to be a letter that he has been reading, crumbles it up revealing blue ink and rough handwriting, he places a twenty dollar bill on the table that far surpasses the cost of his coffee and croissant, and walks out administering a “have a good trip,” on Andre’s shoulder. Andre greets the warm good bye and quickly goes to clean off the table making sure to recover the crumbled letter and posits it in his waist short white apron pocket.

That night, in his small room, where there is no kitchen, just a bathroom, hardly any furniture, just loads of books about everything political and historical and an inordinate amount of Günter Grass novels. Andre attempts to restore the letter, he uses lemon water, and out come the words, “convent of the holy Virgin Mary” “Mother Superior Adelaide.” “Take to Yorkshire.”

Our boy Andre, knows precisely what to do just from these simple instructions. He searches the Internet quickly, and is pleasantly surprised, though he thinks it a bit sanctimonious that the Convent of the Holy Virgin Mother Mary,” has a web site, with pop up windows that sell holy candles, crosses and saint baseball type cards. He, however, is only interested in its location, it is near the observatory, on one of the pruned mountains that are not more than a couple of hours drive from his current location. It is approximately 8:30 pm on Monday, February 10, 2003. He picks up the phone, his boss from Sweaney’s answers, the greeting is short and Andre speaks, “I have to leave the country, family emergency, my Aunt Claire is dying of cancer, it is of immediate concern to the family that I join her.” Andre’s boss was in love with Andre, there was nothing to it, Andre could come and go as he pleased, and now with a family emergency even more so. Yes, Andre was gay too, but he hadn’t come out of the closet yet.

Andre, got his flashlight and played with the on and off switch a few times to confirm reliability; he methodically calculated the time of his arrival at the Convent of the Holy Mother Maria, at about 2 am, he knew that the Mother Superior would be waiting for him, by the fountain. While he killed some time, comfortably he picked up a book, started reading it, having first made sure to reserve his trip to England.

Mother Superior Adelaide had decided not to sleep tonight, she seems a bit uneasy, something not having anything to do with her faith or calling is keeping her tense, she is not in the mood for prayer, she has finished looking over the convents financials and they are healthy; she always knew that she was good at economics, this only proves it beyond doubt. She decides to review her convent’s website, and while she is indifferently reading the statistics on site visits, she is surprised to see two site visits in one day, that has never happened, the site mostly exist to satisfy her craving for technology, it is her hobby, her way to forget the lord’s work for a few hours, here and there, but its usually a hit a week or two, and those are probably accidental, but today there were two hits, she is puzzled, she notices from the stats report that they are local, within the country that is, she looks away from the monitor, wondering the significance of such an avalanche.

Antoinette has printed out the location of the convent of the holy Virgin Mary, she is mapping out the route, she has every intention of going there tonight. Loki, sitting on top of her computer monitor, looks on somehow aware that they are going for a little drive tonight, and he is willing to accept that, he just wants to be near Antoinette, he loves her, Loki cat loves her.

Meanwhile Maria and Habakkuk are trying to figure out something which they could have easily found on the Internet if only either one of them were computer literate. But Habakkuk did not know anything about computers, nor could he relate to technology and he rightly suspected from his vast amounts of awareness that the future, future did not have scientists and computers, more explicitly the future would not have any technology, so Habakkuk was not going to pay attention to a momentary hiccup in the space time continuum. Unfortunately, because of his Luddite attitude he had to use all of his and Maria’s intuition. Habakkuk emphatically, “Are you sure the white orchids are near nuns?” Maria was already irritated by the incessant questioning, “Yes, yes! Yes! I told you already there are nuns, lots of them, all over where the white orchids are, I see them caring for them, see a round fountain, the white orchids are near there, and a church too.” Habakkuk can intuitively surmise that it isn’t a church, by his measure it has to be either a catholic school or a convent, he keeps on channeling intuition and continues to harass Maria a bit so she can clarify her visions, he knows the hour is nearing, he knows whatever must eventuate has to happen tonight. He is hurried for time but to divine the near future you must remain calm, Habakkuk remains unwillingly calm.

Maria eats another doughnut, Habakkuk doesn’t now understand the importance of nutrition, it is late at night, they are sitting the hours in a hotel, he aware that it will come to them and she unaware that this is so damn important, she just likes Habakkuk, she likes being near him; he gets an idea, grabs the phonebook and opens it up to catholic institutions, there, he puts it in front of Maria, she starts to look at it between sugared bites, she doesn’t ask Habakkuk for instructions, she just looks at the pages, he turns them, she, secretly, even from herself, more following his fingers turning the pages, then she innocently holds his hand, “Why is this name in pink?” Her little fingers amounting to a pointer, gently gliding over the letters, “convent of the holy Virgin Mary,” Habakkuk reads the name, and kisses her on the cheeks, remarking in the sweetest of voices, “Maria, the aura of things always changes with events and contacts, this place has something that has recently changed its essence so it hasn’t conformed to the yellow pages standard, it hasn’t been subdued yet by simmering reality.” There were some big words there, “subdued”, “reality” but Maria seemed to understand what he said, she was quietly aware that not only are there colors in words and numbers, but that the tone of a word also spells its meanings, she understood completely well. And she started to cry. “You don’t need me anymore?” she was asking, she was hoping that the Pimp would say that he did need her some more, she wasn’t asking, she was hoping. “Wiping some tears with his lovely fingers, Habakkuk placed his palms on her face, as if covering it, only her eyes visible, her lips up against his palm flesh, “Maria holy Maria, you saved me so many times already, you are my savior, you come to rescue me when I most need you, I take you with me wherever my soul goes, we will see each other again, maybe then I can help you or hold your love, for now we must part.” Maria almost fainted with calm from hearing the melodious words careen through her gut, she stood up, “I love you Habakkuk.” The Pimp, goatee and all, smiled then they walked out together, and he gave her precise instructions of what lies to tell the cops and her parents. He said “it would be difficult for them to comprehend any of these matters, best not to try,” they made it to a police station, he kissed her on the cheek, begged a few minutes before she went in, and as he sped off, she waved her little hand into the darkness.

Loki cat got into Antoinette’s car reluctantly, he did not like changing his surroundings, he wasn’t looking forward to this trip, he felt that Lauren was somehow at the other end, his eyes were looking green and hostile, he was mad at Antoinette, he did not know precisely what she was up to, but he knew that she was trying to put her puzzling experiences together in a comfortable structure. She was still dazed by the hut, the explosion of Lauren’s place, even this cat she had with her, she knew she wanted to keep Loki, she felt strangely like a woman around him, but not in a bestial way, rather she felt like a spiritual woman, he had something this cat, something that helped her reveal herself to herself, she opened up around him, she was usually not very aggressive, and now, unbeknownst to Loki, she was speeding away towards this convent, unaware fully of anything, other than the fact that she had gathered, that Lauren was there, being kept there for a spiritual retreat. Antoinette wanted to understand things, Loki just wanted to be near her, he was now in the passengers side of the car, not liking the moving parts all around him, not liking the mechanics, the arbitration noises between shock absorbers, breaking liquid hydraulics, and conditioned accelerating explosions, racketing incessantly disturbing temperatures with 180 degree concatenations so as to make circles through the four wheels. Loki didn’t like any of that, he would prefer to be riding a cloud than this hard edged, I am here on the ground, BMW. Loki was a beautiful sentient being, he would have preferred a Rolls Royce, something that would take the hits for him, equally, Loki knew that here on earth, to go anywhere you had to use these metallic contraptions, and in the universe it was also true that to go anywhere you had to make something go around and around full circle. But Loki wasn’t thinking all of that, instead he was watching Antoinette, the shadows and lights fell on her green dress and her hair, Loki would jump on her shoulders right now, but he feared she needed to concentrate to drive this contraption, he nested himself on the chair as if it were her lap, he felt her, the shadows and lights dazzling his senses with her beauty.

After being thrown into the hard and impossible bed, Lauren lay there for a few minutes, she was still trying to figure out how a group of nuns had tackled and clobbered her, she wouldn’t think it possible, maybe an act of god; but then, laying there in her light pant suit, Loki hated the fact that she never wore dresses, and always wearing light colors, as if saying, “look at me I am clean, no dirt on my white clothes, I am clean,” Some puritan cry obtuse in relationship to Antoinette that was more into the darkness and the moon, her greens were dark greens, often wearing blacks, but not Lauren, Lauren could have easily married Mr. Clean. She got up, and started to feel the walls again, circumventing the room with her athletic body, touching the wall with her nipples, feeling the corners, wondering why she was here, occasionally pausing with her fingers upon some cratering situation, touching it more as if reading brail, as if the walls were ancient constructions of complex hieroglyphics that would, when read by the blind, reveal to her the nature of her plight. But to her the wall felt more like bad cement, bad moldings, a bad finish, her fingers felt paint that had hardened too fast, wrinkles of nasty convergence, this is what Lauren felt, the walls indeed could have revealed to her every nun and priest aura that had slept there, they could have revealed to her the saints which had slept on that bed, these walls had in them all the history of the room, but Detective Lauren had not in her the sensual awareness to feel what she was touching, so she finally turned on the light, and again what she saw was the same yellowing room, with the cross, and a door that was locked, and a bed that was fit for only one of anything.

Lauren leaned against the door, mentally determining if she should break it open, she knew she could, she moved her head, when she heard distinctively the noise from a car horn, a car horn. Now Lauren could imagine that someone had come to rescue her, yes, someone had come to rescue her, she decided not to break the door down, instead in a short spur of happiness she threw herself on the bed, and curled herself into the fetal position so as to retain that good feeling, and equally despising the nuns for not giving their prisoner the use of a nice pillow. Lauren loved pillows.

Car horns are not selective of their audience, they perform a sort of isotropic trouncing dance, which is intended to disturb, to call attention, so their sound passes through the ambient air like a shock wave of horrors tied together so as not to be a menace but rather a menacing warning. Horns stop everything, Mother Superior Adelaide did not flinch, did not alter her mood, did not even allow the horn menace to enter her body, all of her atoms were vibrating at just such a frequency that nothing could get in to bother her. Yet, she moved her tongue, yes I did catch her doing that, maybe because the mouth is such a huge crevice that her atomic shields could not wholly cover the gap, maybe her asshole too was unprotected, but she obviously had a tight one, however her tongue moved, generating some excesses of saliva which she was forced to swallow, even as she kept her lips tightly packed together, the saliva kept on generating itself from the stimuli breeding tongue, and Mother Superior Adelaide must have drank a whole pint of her stuff, creating a perfectly recycled tension.

And there she waited, she waited for the nun on nightly watch to announce the presence, Mother Superior Adelaide was not aware that she was doing just that, she was a creature of habit and protocol, she did not know it, she could not get up until the proper introductions were made, until Nun Cornelia would pound on her door, yelling “Mother Superior Adelaide, there is someone here to see you!” Even as this was happening however Mother Superior Adelaide was not responding, mandating a frustrating repetition “Mother Superior Adelaide! There is someone here to see you.” Mother Superior Adelaide’s round, and almost popping out eyeballs, dilated, “Yes, yes, I will be right there, but who is it?” Nun Cornelia put her fist to her forehead, she knew how much the Mother Superior did not like imperfection, and of course she was adamant about knowing who was calling either by phone or at the door, and now as calumny would have it, Nun Cornelia had yet again made the mistake of not asking the stranger at this strange hour what the matter of business and what identity might they possess. Mother Superior Adelaide had already surmised all that, and in a tone that was quizzing through thin air, “Cornelia, find out who it is and what they want, and have them wait in the library. Thank you!”

The truth was that Mother Superior Adelaide needed the extra time, she didn’t know that she needed it or why, but she did, it was like going to a funeral or getting ready for a date, you needed extra time, just a little extra time for those things that happen in other dimensions.

THE END OF THE WORLD IS IGNITED

2006-08-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

Andre was not one to violate the code of rules, he insisted that he would wait by the fountain, and he was angry that Mother Superior Adelaide had not been at the water fountain as planned, which was why he had blown his horn, if she wanted showmanship she would get it, “Mother Superior Adelaide” cries nervous Nun Cornelia, “Mother Superior Adelaide it is a man, he refuses to say his name, he says you already know it,” Cornelia utters these last words with a mightier tone as if to say again, “he says you already know him,” Cornelia pauses again as if to figure out the possible implications, “mother superior already knows him,” but before her thoughtless brain can begin to manufacture the logic algorithms required to develop gossip material, Mother Superior brusquely passes by her, easily jolting Nun Cornelia’s aura; this has an immediate effect, Cornelia does not really know why she is still standing there, she looks at her watch, “Jesus it is 215am!” Nun Cornelia realizes her watch duty was over at 2am and goes to get some sleep.

The round water fountain has not been maintained for years, it has algae everywhere, the water is green, the pump still recycles the water, spiraling up and down from beginning to end via rusting tubes, and hiccups copper water and whatever is let through a grudging cement orifice. The nuns regularly bring buckets of water so as to compensate for those aberrant water children that evaporate or simply overthrow themselves into the surrounding growth as they attempt to keep the weeds and selfless yellow flowers green. Andre is leaning into the metallic hunk that is his red roadster. He looks up and sees Mother Superior approaching, she is doing a very precise and rapid stern walk, her hands covered by her tunic, she does not take her eyes away from his, only the serene night seduces their mutual stare.

Antoinette is approaching the convent, Loki has made it onto her lap, he is acting strange, he is calling for her attention, attempting to climb to her shoulder, he is flexing his nails and paws as if trying to sink them into her but not, Antoinette attempts to ignore his restlessness, she is wondering what she is going to say to Lauren when she sees her, she is aware that Lauren is not in a sound mental condition. Loki cat continues to attempt to grab Antoinette’s attention, she pulls over, the nails on her neck mandated, it was as if Loki were saying, “pull over lady pull over or your neck will be lacerated by these here rat killer blades…” but Loki wasn’t saying that at all, Antoinette thought he might be car sick, so she pulled over and opened the door so Loki could breathe normal air and vomit or shit as she suspected he needed to. But Loki did not attempt to get out, instead he used the opportunity to destroy Antoinette’s dress while climbing to her shoulder and nestling his head within her hair, once there he started purring, purring, his nose was very wet, she felt the moisture from it, Antoinette looked at her watch, but really didn’t read the time, she caught herself thinking that Loki was sick and needed her, and she said to him, in the most giving way with her barely audible voice, “Loki you are more important to me right now than anything else, you’re the only one that matters, I will take care of you…” those reassuring words seemed to alter nothing within Loki, this was because Loki had already given himself completely to her. So there they were, both on the side of the road, he kissing her neck with a wet nose and urging his paws into her flesh, and she caressing him, trying to put him more within her and then Antoinette realized that Loki was telling her something, that he was transferring something, Loki after all had a direct hot live connection to the Akashic record, and his purring was just transferring awareness of something, Antoinette felt it, she did not intellectualize it, she just felt Loki telling her things, and she was subconsciously aware that the only way to get it all out of him was by corresponding his love, by hugging him more, and the purring did intensify as she caressed him, and told him how much she loved him, and Antoinette felt the universe touch her, and she now really did not care about Lauren or the convent nor anything else for that matter, she had her Loki with her, that kind of nullified everyone else.

Loki made Antoinette aware of the Akashic record, Antoinette was never herself looking for such a thing, she did not even know it existed, she was so mystical she wasn’t mystical, she had the amazing ability to be in touch with her emotions so much that she did not need knowledge or information to get through life, she just intuitively guided herself, in some ways, Antoinette had what she needed from the Akashic record already within her, but what Loki had given her was an insight into why the convergence was centering on the convent, and why they were connected to the 7th Century BC. Antoinette saw in her minds eye, a statue, she saw the end of the world, which interestingly did not seem as cataclysmic to her as it might otherwise seem to you and I; and finally, finally she saw three monks running away. Her minds eye had felt Loki rather well, she continued to hug him, and then felt that maybe they should proceed to the convent. Loki seemed in agreement, however he insisted in staying on her lap and Antoinette didn’t want to resist. They drove on.

Apparently there had been some form of separation between Andre and the Mother Superior because when Antoinette’s headlights struck the two of them by the fountain, Mother Superior was handing the statue covered in silk blessings to Andre. Antoinette did not know what to make of that image that had just come into view of her lights, a nun handing something to a man, from the dashboard watch it was five minutes to 3am, Antoinette did not turn off the car but merely pulled right up to them, and got out. Andre panicked and swiftly ripped the statue from Mother Superior Adelaide’s grasp, she almost fell, he rushed it into his trunk where more padding afforded rest for this ageless statue, and he quickly roared the car to life and edged a fast reverse and then a faster dusting squealing forward, only as he was exiting another car was embarked on a speeding entrance, and well they collided into each other, both drivers hitting the breaks with less optimal force than they had before accelerated, and Loki cat heard this riveting separating kinetic jugs of maladjustment colliding energy barriers, and squashing metallic songs of twisted maledictions, stuck his leg up in the air and started cleaning himself.

The Pimp got out of the car, he did not even bother to apologize for the rude entrance, Andre was all juzzled and muzzled by the shock, his roadster had less protection the Habakkuk’s crash proof Volvo, and besides, Andre did not wear a seatbelt, Habakkuk did, Habakkuk had never wanted to die in this life, he considered it unworthy of his death energy, he just didn’t want to die here, Habakkuk did not pause, he went over to the driver’s side of the roadster, and through the window saw Andre bleeding from head wounds. Habakkuk picked up a rock, Mother Superior Adelaide and Antoinette and Loki all watching, and he broke the remaining goodness the window possessed, and immediately reached for the knob-pulley to uncork the trunk. Andre continued to bleed profusely, and Habakkuk rounded to the back, took out the well wrapped statue, and held it towards the night sky, arms high, “I got it, I got it for you.” It was during this exalting moment that a circle of nuns trounced the poor Pimp, and sat on him at least ten commandments worth of them; the only thing that the squashed man could review was Mother Superior Adelaide holding his precious statue. His lips spoke spitting some resented dirt, “You must give me that statue, I have to return it to its appropriate place, the world will end, the world will end.” And just as he said that, and just before passing out, Habakkuk noticed that Mother Superior Adelaide’s aura was pink, and that it was contaminated by red shoes and five parrots.

Antoinette was sent to the library, there a more composed Mother Superior Adelaide caught, her, offered her some tea, Antoinette accepted it, coldly, Antoinette, remember, had come here to resolve some matters of her own, now she seemed more riddled, and she did not know what to make of these events. Outside the convent walls Andre continued to fill himself with death. Still Mother Superior Adelaide does not seem to be bothered with it, she sits by Antoinette, “Why are you here?” Antoinette not demonstrating any fear, just simply stoically confused, “I came to see Lauren, maybe speak with her if possible, but can you tell me what just happened?” Mother Superior Adelaide paralyzed all her expressions and responded like an American businessman, “Nothing happened, two cars crashed, unfortunately on our premises, we will report it to the appropriate authorities in the morning.” Antoinette, bleeding irreverence, “in the morning! You will report it in the morning! don’t you think that the police should be here now?” Mother Superior did not like strangers, and more she did not like pretty sexy gorgeous women, she hated them, she hated them! “Your name is Antoinette correct?” “Yes but what does that...” “Listen up pretty Antoinette, I surmise you best get on home now, you really aren’t supposed to be here, Lauren’s family doesn’t want anyone to disturb Lauren’s much needed spiritual retreat, we are comforting her here, and if you care for her, then you will leave us alone.” Antoinette caught the “leave “us” alone,” this alerted her to something sinister, she reviewed the room through a careless movement of her head, “I see, you’re probably right, I should let poor Lauren rest, she has been through so much already, let us hope that your administered kindness can put her right.” Mother Superior Adelaide rose her head so that her chin would point slightly upwards, there bearing her frontal neck anatomy, which was still covered by her tunic, as though she was saying to Antoinette, “you cannot strike at me, I am in control, I exposed my venerability to you as a gesture of defiance.” I don’t know if Antoinette felt that, but I sure did, and then Mother Superior Adelaide speaks, “Such a nice cat, good thing nothing bad happened to your cat tonight.” Antoinette, “Where is Loki? Where is my cat?” “Your cat Ms Antoinette,” making a point to note that there wasn’t a wedding ring on her, “your cat is in the kitchen, I told Cornelia to give him some milk, he seemed frazzled by tonight’s events. You can pick him up on your way out.” On your way out now, she meant. “Yes, I think I will go now, thank you so much for the tea.”

Antoinette left her seat, and Mother Superior Adelaide followed her with her eyes, she was admiring her body, she wanted to kiss that body, she was trying to conjure images without clothes, she hated the fact that she could not have that body, feast upon it, she wanted to fuck her, she hated that fact, she thought back to the whore with the red shoes, she felt so dissatisfied by the whole experience, she wanted to kiss Antoinette, she knew that such would never happen, she jerked her body when that little matter registered and ended up spilling some tea on her tunic. Antoinette made it to the door, turned around sensing she was being watched, then flowing herself out the door yielded, and “whack!” blank!

The serene woman’s body plummeted to the ground, Nun Bertha looked on at her, not in a sexual way, Nun Bertha had never had a sexual thought for any living thing, the universe had made sure of that, only one copy of this thing and never again, big fat and ugly, any additional detail is just getting into gore, I am not into that, look up Stephen King if you just want that. Bertha looked at her, twisted her arm to review the frying pan that had struck the head blow, and with an approving nod, “done it, works good.” Then she turned into the library, “Oh Bertha I can always count on you, thanks, thanks indeed, she is nothing but trouble.” “Don’t you worry Mother I will lock her up in the basement, she won’t be bothering you for a while.” “Yes, I guess that is best for now, till we resolve the matters at hand.” Bertha didn’t have much vocabulary, when you saw her turn towards Antoinette you just saw a Mameluke warrior preparing to drag living men to their deaths.

Bertha loaded Antoinette’s languid body on to her shoulder, and hiked it down to the basement. The basement was cold, dank, the floor was made of cobblestone and it seemed a bad river of water run through it, there was only a little light hanging from its own power chord, a little window was strapped of freedom by iron, the basement, yes this was the basement, Bertha unloaded her cargo as if it were a sack of potatoes or a bull’s thigh, the bad river water immediately clung to the dark green dress, and some to her hair, her legs white from veins that were lacking the fervor of Antoinette’s blood flow. Bertha searched for a rope, there was none here, she looked up the black cement staircase and decided she did not want to haul her fat glob up there with her varicose legs to search for a rope, instead, showing signs of ingenuity, she decided to rip Antoinette’s dress, “too pretty anyway she doesn’t need to look like that here,” and used it as a rope, she restrained her hands and arms, and was done with that, leaving Antoinette with just her deep purple underwear which served only to warm anyone watching but not her. The dirty water took a liking to her flesh, and Bertha did not notice none of that, she was busy trying to figure “How do I shut this bitch’s mouth, Lord?” When again the Lord’s answer came in a creative spur sweating out of Bertha’s pock-marked skin, she took her right shoe off, revealing a grimy white sock, and with it, she shut tight Antoinette’s mouth, and left her there, in the dankness.

Mother Superior Adelaide waits for sunlight, meets with the cops, none of the nuns heard the cars crash, nor do they know where the Volvo driver went, Andre is dead, the saintly convent is not a suspect, the cops leave and take the mess with them. Mother Superior Adelaide enters the room, there laying on the bed is Habakkuk, she sits on a wooden chair by his side, she pulls her rosary out of habit, and keeps on rolling over the beads with her antiquated and arthritic fingers, the pain long absconded by Mother Superior Adelaide’s maturity, she did not allow herself to feel pain or to be sick. The rosary ended with the cross and looped back with the cross, she counted beads, she didn’t say prayers, she hadn’t prayed in a long time, she was looking at this man, she sort of knew of him, not through him, but through the Akashic records.

While all that was happening Lauren had gotten away, well sort of.

It was while Mother Superior was talking to the cops, explaining how no one had seen anything, Captain Ogle had personally attended the crime scene, he was short one homicide investigator, didn’t even know where she was at this time, he suspected probably out in the countryside getting some needed rest and time to figure herself out; so while Lauren had been gone for more than forty-eight hours, Ogle didn’t consider her missing, he considered her crazy. As soon as the words, “man dead… Convent of the Holy Mother Maria…” as soon as that was noted in the initial call for police assistance, Captain Ogle, through years of experience knew that he needed to be at the front of that investigation, convents and crimes are a dangerous mix, for if something goes wrong the mayor’s office will firstly blame Ogle and then fire him. These things were delicate, very delicate.

Captain Ogle arrived at the scene with Danny, both of them watching some drizzle from outside their car windows, they came upon the Volvo and the Roadster, two perfect contradictions in car design, the Volvo was designed to protect everything inside the box from the outside world, and the Roadster was designed to make the driver feel everything outside the box, as much as possible. It is then perhaps no contradiction that these opposing design rules were bound to wreck once they met. Neither Danny nor Ogle bothered to check in at the convent’s door, they simply went straight for the metallic collage, and looked at Andre with as much impact as he was looking at them, none. This was just another dead man in an endless list of dead men. Captain Ogle believed that death was so much a part of life that he even had a secret deal with himself, “I will die in the line of duty.” Yes, captain Ogle believed that the only honorable death for a cop has to be in the line of duty. He believed this with all his heart, in part the reason why he did not much care for his wives and children, he was a man with a bullet waiting to happen to him. Who would fire it, he did not know, how and when, tampoco, but he knew, he knew that for him, any other death would be insufficient, it would fail his cause.

Danny looked at Andre’s bleeding amber with no further commentary than an empty “poor chap” and “this was no accident.” Danny knew that this was no accident, he looked at the tire marks, he looked at the entrance and exit possibilities, and he calculated that neither car would have made it in a side by side entrance, he also concluded, and rather quickly that the death car rally had been initiated by the Roadster because Volvo types aren’t fun loving people, they are more likely to be preventive and paranoid. Yes, Danny thought these two had some common aim, and that common aim was so closely knit that they met in precisely the same point, space and time because of it. And therefore there was more to it all than that. Further, Danny surmised that the nuns, however dutifully asleep could not have maintained their dream states from the sounds which the two masses permeated when they collided. Besides, certainly the dogs would have barked at the nuisance.

But Danny did not say any of these things to the captain, instead he said, “Will have to get some body parts to the lab to see the time of death and causes.” This was the only thing that Danny would say to the captain because his protocol was just that, I am here as a doctor, these detective guys are the ones that have to figure out what is wrong with those living and I have to figure out what is wrong with the dead. Danny didn’t have the patience for detectives who tried to tell him what the cause of death was, and Danny had all the patience in the world to watch detectives make mistake after mistake even as he already could have every clue to the crime in his head. Why was he like this? I don’t know, but if I had to guess, and it irritates me to think that he could know facts about a crime and not point them out, but when I think of why he might act in such a way, it calms me; I believe it’s because Danny doesn’t believe that cause and effect are necessarily the best factors to judge results by. In some philosophical quandary for you and I Danny purports to believe that cause and effect are merely side effects and not cruxes to axiomatic conclusions. In Danny’s world perhaps it was the impossible that had more to do with the crime. Many times he would tell Lauren, “Sure Lauren, if that is how you see it, it could have been like that.” Lauren, who loved Danny’s incessantly wonderful personality, did her best not to laugh, but something in that phrase made her laugh, “Sure Lauren, if that is how you see it, it could have been that way.” Of course Lauren always thought that she had the facts, the evidence, and to a large degree that was why she was an excellent cop.

As Danny continued to play with Andre’s body, and then went back to the car with his samples, Mother Superior Adelaide was forced to look at Andre’s crustily bloodied mangled head. “Mother Superior do you recognize this man?” Mother Superior Adelaide cringing tears, “no, no, dear god bless his soul, how could this happen to such a young man, his mother, I must help his mother.” Ogle eyes her with kindness, he doesn’t think that a nun can kill a person, yes he is an experienced cop, but he is more likely to think that a Chicano or even a Black man like himself is more likely to kill than a nun, it is an institutional belief, and it seems to work and Captain Ogle is not aware of it as such, he just thinks that it is unlikely that Mother Superior Adelaide is a murderer or has a reason to lie to him, hence probably why there are so few Mother Superiors in jail today. Much to the benefit of dead Andre, the Mother Superior begins to pray and, with such intermediary, god starts to listen; which is probably why Captain Ogle takes note of the rock inside of the car, practically on Andre’s lap. He looks cockeyed at Mother Superior, and remarks, “How do you suppose that rock got there?” Carelessly, Mother Superior stops praying for Andre, “Good question Captain Ogle, perhaps he was carrying it with him, some people have pet rocks you know.” Ogle smiles at her final remarks, “I don’t think it was his pet rock, see how the glass has caved in and shattered towards the inside of the compartment. Initially his head must have smashed into the driver’s window, which could explain his head wounds, but that would have pushed the glass outwards, and…” as he is looking inside of the car he notices that the trunk pulley has been, well, pulled; and he walks to the back of the car, to find a partially open trunk, inside padding with obviously something missing; “there was something in this trunk, it has been taken,…” he points throughout as if explaining to Mother Superior Adelaide but not necessarily, maybe just to see what her reactions are, maybe just to begin to convince himself that this is a real crime scene and not just another hapless car accident. “It would seem someone wanted what this man had in the trunk, it seems there might be a cause for murder here.” Mother Superior Adelaide blesses herself thrice, clasping her hands together, “please god not in your sacred house, not here, god may these maledictions not be occurring in your house lord, we, your servants would never allow it.” Proclaiming this loudly enough and slowly enough so that Ogle may benefit from her prayers.

Ogle looks back at Danny, unaware that Danny has already connected the entire crime scene to the convent, unaware that Danny is now listening to a Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, Danny is tapping it out, he is feeling it, it’s his way to say, I know what is going on here, it’s not my job to know it, “strawberry fields forever…” It sort of bothers Captain Ogle that Danny can remain so far away from the crime scene, that he doesn’t care, that irks him. A patrol car arrives, Ogle orders them to secure and guard what he now considers a crime scene. And this is about the time that Lauren was busying herself with an escape.

She had finally decided to feel in control again by breaking down the door and running through the hallway, only when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw the cop and the coroner, she saw Danny and Ogle, and the two incidental cars and Mother Superior Adelaide, and for some strange reason instead of coming out, instead of calling to Ogle for help she opted to run and hide; and as she was searching for a hideout she stumbled into the basement. She closed the door behind her, yes the place was dank and dark but this was the sort of place perfect for hiding, she walked down the concrete stairs, and as she was walking stumbled into a body and fell. Lauren got all scared, “oh my god, oh my god!” She touched, and realized immediately that some woman was tied and gagged, and Lauren, Detective Lauren kicked into high gear, she began to search for a light, candles, matches anything; in the dark, her head hits the light bulb, she traces the cable to a switch not a foot away from the light, switches it on, sees the woman lying there, “Antoinette?” pauses as if to calm herself, “Antoinette?” She rushes over to her, she doesn’t dare remove any ropes, she has to first figure out what is happening here, she stares at Antoinette’s sumptuous body, a masterful oil on canvas, Lauren starts to cry, she holds Antoinette, holds her with her head on her lap, she is not thinking here, she is caressing Antoinette’s face, she is touching it so as to feel the splendor of this captivating woman, Lauren touches her neck, she is still alive, she touches her neck a little longer, she touches her face, Lauren kisses her face, Lauren, unscrupulously sobbing, kisses her face while the sock is still obtusely hurting Antoinette’s lips, Lauren runs her hands through her upper body, she is massaging Antoinette, gently, Lauren keeps on crying, her tears wash-up on Antoinette’s breast, and linger and fall from there, and some fall on her, and her hair, and Lauren rocks her head gently, crying Lauren, keeps on crying.

Suddenly she hears the lock, the door opening, she instinctively searches for a deeper hiding place, hides behind a barrel, an old oak barrel, she hides behind it. From above coming down is the heavy breathing Bertha, she is holding something, while she stingily thinks, “I forgot to turn the light off.” She reaches Antoinette, “Look at you pretty thing, you need to eat something, Mother Superior Adelaide doesn’t need any more dead people today.” I can honestly tell you that Mother Superior Adelaide had not ordered this feeding! “Yes, we have to feed you so you can feel well again, we wouldn’t want to cause any hardship to Mother Superior Adelaide with that pretty body of yours.” She might as well be talking to a corpse, for all we know Antoinette could be in a coma after that blunt frying pan smashed into her head. Nun Bertha moves Antoinette by grabbing her through her hairy armpits, “I see we don’t shave there either.” Bertha had importantly found something she had in common with Antoinette. Lauren looking on, is still trying to squirm her cries by compressing her lips with her fingers, but she can’t stop crying. Bertha, removing the gagging sock, begins to force feed Antoinette grist, oddly Bertha licking the silver spoon clean after each Antoinette’s mouth moment, and equally taking the time with her rancorous vocal chords to sing, “Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower sweet it’s the fruit of the poor lemon that’s impossible to eat…” (Reader, repeat ad nauseam a few times, I refuse.) …as her arms pull up Antoinette’s torso, and a large silver spoon gets shoved into Antoinette’s mouth, over and over again until the run off from her mouth becomes incessant and the victim begins to cough violently, Bertha holds her down as if to stop the convulsions by force, and Antoinette continues to jerk her body while ceaselessly coughing, her eyes open slowly, trying to make sense of the new world order, and then her dark eyes stare stark wide open, at this Bertha thing, and her body paralyzes, stiff! Bertha caresses her hair, then wipes her patient’s mouth with her large stubby and clumsy fingers which harbor dirty and uncut fingernails. “there, there now you are feeling better,” the pale skin paralyzed, the face paralyzed, staring at this ogre, “you’re much better now, yes, yes, Mother Superior Adelaide is going to be happy to hear that you are doing well…”

Unfortunately, Bertha felt the entire athletic weight of Lauren fall upon her with Olympian consequences, both women struggling equally strong from opposing ends, one through raw muscle and anger, and the other through pure mass of fat globules and potato agility; Antoinette’s rigidity ceased, and she slid up against the cold wall watching, she didn’t dare to scream, she was motionless, not even bothering to attempt to remove her dress ropes and not knowing which of these two women was going to kill her.

Then Lauren, after losing part of her pinky, from the second joint forward, to a ferociously manicured bite from Bertha the Ogre, Lauren began to fist pound the Bertha essence, the whole while her half finger spurring a juicy bloodletting all over Bertha’s face, and this even as it was brutally obvious that Bertha’s face could not take any more pounding and still be called a face; Lauren kept on administering one brutal blow after another, Antoinette was pretty much expecting to get the same treatment, and was horrified when she saw Lauren’s anger lift Bertha’s head by her ears and slam it against the cement, one, two three times; where then one of Bertha’s eyes indecently popped out from the heaping spoonful of skull shocks; while Antoinette tried hard to press her back closer and closer to get through the wall, hoping that the wall would let her through to the other side via quantum teleporting, but unfortunately Antoinette, gorgeous as she was, was still too large for all the divined goodies of quantum to take effect upon her. She stayed in the basement.

Lauren finally realized that there was no further momentum to subtract from Nun Bertha, and she then searched towards Antoinette who was still insistent in bleeding her back through the wall. Lauren did not get up from the fat tub-like Bertha body, but rather exhaustively climbed over it and crawled towards Antoinette; who at this time would have probably preferred being forced-fed grist by Bertha. Lauren reached Antoinette’s feet first, Lauren couldn’t talk because in order to move she was using all her energy in exertion, all you can hear is breathing and perspiring and gasping noises, she unwrapped the violet purple dress roped feet; Antoinette continued rubbing wounds into her bloodied back, she was convinced that the wall would soon accept her; Lauren pulled herself up through Antoinette’s thighs, finally reaching her upper body, she forced her to roll over on her back, a horrid sight it was to see that the wall had actually been equally trying to get into Antoinette, and had had more success in that process, perhaps due to a more sincere desire, Antoinette after all was merely trying to escape. Lauren then undid the dress rope from Antoinette’s swollen wrists and hands, and finally collapsed her face on Antoinette’s bloodied back.

They both fell into a slumber of exhaustion. The basement just stood there in silence, watching these two women, and feeling less empty for it.

HOW CRIMES GET SOLVED

2006-08-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

It is true that the majority of crimes never get solved, that the majority of criminals are never labeled criminals, but Ogle is not the type of person that would be able to accept that, else he would not be doing his job, he has to believe. So when Danny came up to him and told him that the lab results put Andre dead circa 3am in the morning, Ogle couldn’t stop thinking about the rock and the trunk and so he decided to get his best detective on the case. When he couldn’t locate Lauren through her cell phone he decided to call Audrey to ask where she might be. What he heard put some dampers into his investigative approach, “Captain she wasn’t feeling well I thought it best she take a rest and with some lovely help from the sisters at the Convent of the Holy Virgin Mother Mary she is getting the spiritual treatment which has been lacking in her life.” Ogle rubbed his head, maybe hoping that doing so would change what he had heard, “Convent of the Holy Virgin Mother Mary” it didn’t.

At least the lab report supported the evidence of an accident. Or so Danny reported to the captain, “Andre died of wounds perceived, by us coroners, to be caused by car crashes, and he was not touched by the rock, as I might have supposed which would have implied that a rock thrown at a moving vehicle might have created the conditions for the accident. More disturbing perhaps for you and your investigators Captain is that apparently the rock was something that did check in after the accident and for sure not before or during.” “Are you certain of that Danny?” “Yes sir, a moving vehicle would have created a scratching pattern on the shattered glass, there was no such evidence, the car was still upon the rocks impact, further evidence that the point of breakage and the point of where the rock landed inside of the compartment are perfectly aligned, had there been movement the trajectory of the rock and its landing site would not be perfectly aligned as is precisely the case.” Captain Ogle was always impressed and soothed by Danny’s lab reports, they were always so impeccable, they added so much comfort and he needed a lot of comfort right now so he wanted to hear more certainty, so he asked on, “Did you find anything else?” “Yes we did, and that is the part that I did not want to tell you sir.” Captain Ogle makes a quick impatient face and flaps his fingers, “come clean Danny!” “Well sir I did a cross check for fingerprints to the pulley and the trunk and the FBI crime lab report concretely shows a perfect match with one called Habakkuk.” “Fuck!” “Fuck me some more Danny!” Danny complied “Besides that the Volvo is registered under his name.” “Shit!” And the captains desk got a bruising too. Danny felt that he should go since this was now really the part of the case that had to do with the living. He didn’t say goodbye or excuse me, he just walked backwards refusing to give his back to the captain, until he had long cleared the office door.

While the captain was busy putting together an investigative team that now would not include his best detective, things continued to happen at the Convent of the Holy Virgin Mother Mary.

Mother Superior Adelaide is in the room waiting for Habakkuk to come to, but she hears a wild knock at the door, so she deposits her thoughts in some mental savings account, and goes to open the door. Habakkuk is not in a coma he is just profoundly asleep, the reader might have noticed that he has not had time to rest, we can do this because he is not a member of the actors guild, he can even drink alcohol within the chapters and no union can stop us. Right now we need him to rest. Mother Superior Adelaide opens the door and before her is this egg type face, cracking all over with uncooked yoke leaking in every direction, it is Cornelia, she is bursting with something to say, she wants the Mother Superior to come more out of the room, into the hallway, “What is wrong with you sister?!” Nun Cornelia’s egg face cracks into woes, “Sister Bertha is dead, she is dead Mother Superior DEAD!”

Mother Superior Adelaide and sister racing to the basement, the door opens, fortunately the light is already on, as they move down the stairs they see quite the scene, two bloodied women, one on top of the other, could easily both be dead too, and the fat glob Bertha missing one eye which lays by her side, missing one eye which lays by her side, (all together now sing with me,) missing… oh stop it you guys this is serious. Mother Superior Adelaide is not singing, she walks slowly towards Nun Bertha or what is left of her here on earth, right about now she probably has already been recruited in some heavenly choir which will soon be introduced to a lemon of a song; Mother Superior Adelaide still with us touches her neck, leans her head on her chest, she hears nothing, she senses death. She rises, while the wobbling egg follows her over to Lauren and Antoinette, who are not dead, just worn-out; Mother Superior Adelaide first uses the tip of her shoe to feel their bodies, and just as she pricks their flesh with her overly clean white shoe, the bodies partially move but collapse again. “Help me Cornelia, help me lets grab this one.” And so they grab Lauren and drag her up the stairs and drop her in her old room. And then they go back down to the basement, and pick up Antoinette, and also drag her up the stairs, not caring how much bruising is done in the process, and posit her next to Lauren in that bed that is made for only one of anything. They sort of create a locked door situation by using some furniture to secure the door that someone had earlier broken down; and then they rushed back down to the basement.

There, Mother Superior Adelaide looks at Nun Bertha with a sort of “what a mess,” feeling, and then without asking for further help from Cornelia she takes the body and drags it near the staircase. Together they clean up the bloody mess. “Now Sister Cornelia you just follow my lead and say nothing you understand.” Cornelia pouting a little as if not being able to say anything to anyone is really going to be a difficult life long challenge, “Yes Mother Superior Adelaide I swear by you on the holy bible.” Pointing upwards and forward Mother Superior commands, “Go ring the assembly bell!”

The entire nun cadre assembles in the mess hall, obligingly reverent and mostly silent, I count about thirty of them, Mother Superior Adelaide takes center stage, they all surround her, “There has been a couple of unfortunate accidents in this convent in the last few hours; two cars have crashed within our sacred premises, the police are kindly taking care of that matter, but now sisters, now I must tell you some terrible news, our beloved sister Bertha has fallen from the basement stairs and taken herself to our lord.” The nuns all stare at each other, incredulous phrases fly like doves in a central plaza, Mother Superior Adelaide ushering a few tears, “…it is a most unfortunate of happenings, these events taint our convent, trouble us, and cause us grief, we must pray for forgiveness, for the love of god, and for our convent…” Spiritually the place ratooned with prayers and the nuns turn to each other for blessings, and “Sisters, I pray with you, we are as one…” they all turn towards their loving leader Mother Superior, “…we must, we must for god’s graces and for his sake not taint these walls with more policemen, with more investigators, with more outsiders and strangers, such vibrates and shakes the holiness of our foundation, we must purge this place of strangers who only seek to dilute our faith with their secular ways, we must bury our Sister Bertha in silence, and grieve her in our solitude and carry her into eternity within our hearts.” “Yes, yes…” the clamor does the rounds, the nuns want peace and devout silence, they are with their mother superior, and in procession they go forth to dig a silent grave, and there they place the body of their fallen sister without a tombstone. A session of prayers follows and a brief mass where they promise to plant a big oak tree on her grave.

While all these is happening parallel to it in the same convent, our beloved Lauren and Antoinette have woken up to find one another covered in blood, at first their eyes were trying to affirm that they were seeing what they were seeing, then their hands decided to affirm as well that they were feeling what they were seeing, and the two bloodied women began to gently kiss, covering each other with gentle saliva happenings, reaching for comforts of the body, mindful of the strange fragrances produced by sweat, blood, tears and warm sweetness pouring forth as drawn by one another’s essence. Lauren whispers love into Antoinette’s ear, and a sucking moment of her nipples, and then a touching of their spiraling breaths, and their bellies rubbing without space in-between, their thighs intertwined involved in feeling, the bed accurately made for one of both; when their external barricades too, began to noisily tumble down, it was Habakkuk searching for the statue.

What he saw when he looked in was not a statue, it was better than that, frankly he liked what he saw, he wasn’t into moving sperm up through his spine anymore, he was in fact so busy noticing the embrace and the flesh sins before him that he did not even notice the blood, nor panic did he, he was seduced; only Antoinette reached to cover herself with the blanket, Lauren knew this guy so she was just a little startled, she kind of realized that this might be a little out of character, “Habakkuk!” “Lauren.” But when Habakkuk said “Lauren.” he said it sweetly, he was looking at her nipples and trying slowly to catch more eye stuff, that’s probably why Lauren turned into and held Antoinette as if they were both going to guard against this vile man through their mutual aura embrace. Habakkuk alerted by the defensive maneuver realized that they were not there for him, and said explicably, “I am searching for the statue, the sacred statue.” Lauren was really no longer superstitious, she really wasn’t into this sacred statue thing anymore, something about being a murderer and sleeping with another woman that just stops all superstition, cold. She looked at Habakkuk like one looks at an adolescent that is still trying to figure girls out, she then turns to see Antoinette while uttering backwards, “You’re searching for the sacred statue…” she looks more closely at Antoinette, who has now figured these two know each other, and Lauren kisses Antoinette, she gives her a fat juicy kiss, and Antoinette returns the wet kiss, and suddenly a Loki cat enters the room and jumps on the bed between them, the bed, remember, that fits only one, and Loki just sits there like he was home again.

Loki does bring more sense into the two lovers, they realize that they have been prisoners in this convent, they quickly grab Loki, holding hands they stand up to face Habakkuk, “Habakkuk we have to get out of here, forget the statue, forget it, we need to get out of here.” Habakkuk insistent replies, “Lauren we can’t forget the statue, the world will end, the world will end Lauren.” Oddly Lauren had somehow lost her ability to want to rescue everyone, “Habakkuk the world is going to end anyway, fuck the world, we need to get out of here before those nuns spot us again.” She looks at Antoinette who really hasn’t figured anything out except that she really likes Lauren, “If he wants to stay he can stay, we are getting out of here right?” Antoinette responds by kissing Lauren on the cheek and smiling while bringing herself closer to her arm. They search a closet and there they find three monk tunics, which have been there for eons, maybe all the way back to the seventh century, they put them on, Habakkuk too, Antoinette grabs Loki cat and the three monks, two showing a bit of women hair, run away from the convent, pass the water fountain and head for safety.

As they make their way through the loosely vegetated hills that surround the convent, they hear sirens roaring. They look back to see three police patrol cars reaching the convent. They make it to Antoinette’s house, and there they sleep the sleep of the just. Habakkuk and Loki on the couch of course.

The next day, after the two lovers kiss each other breakfast, Lauren goes back to the police station, Captain Ogle can’t believe his eyes. “Where have you been?” “On a spiritual retreat Captain.” Ogle could see his detective was looking rather warm and calm and happy even, for some reason he had never seen her happy before, she was happy now, this was the first time he had seen Lauren truly happy, he felt good about feeling her this way. “I did hear that you were in a spiritual retreat at a convent, I went there to save you, but they denied that you were ever there.” He said that somewhat quizzing her. Her joyful self responding, “Ogle you know I am not very religious, wouldn’t catch me in any convent, please.” He mustered up a vociferous laugh, to join hers, “yeah, you in a convent… can’t imagine that.” But then jolted by instant recall he abruptly pauses, points his finger at her, “Hey, hey wait a minute, your friend Habakkuk where is he?” Lauren gets serious too, “Habakkuk? Habakkuk?” “Yes, yes Habakkuk, I have a warrant out for his arrest, we think he caused an accident, we found his finger prints all over the place, his car, a Volvo killed some guy at this convent where you were supposed to be. And now I have a warrant for his arrest for skipping the crime scene, possible manslaughter, and, and not notifying police.” Lauren returned to her happy self, poking her fingers against the wall, “I don’t know cap, don’t know where he is, we sort of lost contact, maybe he is back in India, he likes to go there a lot, something about the food, he loves Indian cuisine.” “Oh horseshit Lauren you’re trying to protect him, I know you.” “Am I really captain, now why would I do that, I don’t even know anything about this car crash, you’re all surprises today, I am telling you, go to India, you will find him there, it’s a good bet.”

Upon returning to Antoinette’s place, which was now hers too, Lauren advises Habakkuk to go to India. He said he wanted to go to New York instead, he had never been there. “Habakkuk why didn’t things turn out as we thought they would?” Asked Lauren. “We changed the future when we interfered, tellingly the future is always changing, one day we go to our fortune-teller Lauren, and just by her becoming aware of what is going to happen to us she changes everything.” Antoinette had now heard the whole story, they were all sitting sipping some delicious tea and wafting cucumber sandwiches, they humored over the events, Antoinette giggled a little at the thought, “…predictions change the future…” then she paused and asked, “Habakkuk will this thing the Akashic remember Bertha’s and Andre’s murders?” Lauren got a little shiver from the comment, but she was equally curious, Habakkuk responded, “They will be recorded in the Akashic Archives for all to witness.” Lauren concerned, “How will all those that will witness the Akashic judge us Habakkuk?” Lauren had never killed anyone in the line of duty, so she wasn’t used to her new self, Habakkuk responded sincerely, “Don’t worry Lauren, you and I have no judgment awaiting us, when ever anyone gains access to the Akashic records and sees all the crimes that we have committed, they also see all the crimes that they have committed and humanity has committed; it is the surest path to forgiveness, in essence all those that review the records forgive everyone so as to forgive themselves.” Lauren became a little superstitious again and breathed a sigh of relief. While Loki just watched as if nothing had changed, not the future, not the past and certainly not the present.

Habakkuk borrowed some money for a ticket to New York and went on his way. Antoinette and Lauren sat on the couch kissing and fondling one another, when Antoinette got up and said, “I got you something.” Lauren joy stricken, “What did you get me?” With that, Antoinette grabbed her monk tunic from a nearby chair, and from one of its pockets extracted a cross. Lauren immediately recognized it, Antoinette jumping next to her on the couch, kisses the cross and hands it to her, “Its from the room where we first loved.”

Habakkuk bought a ticket to New York. It did not take long for him to arrive, while landing he saw that remarkable and so precise Lady Liberty, her arm reaching high above “torching the heavens,” her expression emotionless and characterless, he remembered an almost identical statue from circa 7th BC. Habakkuk, once, had never been to New York, now he had, and like most new comers, Times Square was a spot he had to witness, he went, with only pennies enough to buy himself a coke, it was a snowy winter. He went to see the grand center capital of the world, he looked all around at the dizzying lights and graphic depictions of the best life, and he somberly caught his shoes on the pavement, falling unpleasantly into freshly powdered snow.

The lies end here