"A multilayered, surprising and beautifully written novel of mythology, suspense and mystery." - Kirkus Reviews * Novel of the Year, 2013 Champagne Book Group Annual Author Awards * "This wickedly fun horror novel thrusts readers into a Nantucket setting with a mixture of local hunters, wealthy do-gooders, and a sordid family past." - Foreword Clarion Review
Monday, August 31, 2015
Floating: A chance encounter
I feel like I've been floating all summer. Longer, even.
I was splashing in Lake Burien in June with my kids, when I noticed they'd lost their kick board. Despite my admonitions, they followed me as I swam after it. They're good swimmers for their age, but I've got to be ready to go full-on Hasselhoff when they're in over their heads, which is always at grandpa's lake.
As I grabbed the blue board and handed it to my son, I noticed the only other people on the lake, two women, were pedaling toward us on a paddle boat. As I handed the kick board to my son, one of the ladies in the two-woman paddle boat said, "Are you a Baker?" Busted. But I wasn't sure for what.
"Uh. Yes."
"Which one?"
"Which what?"
"Which Baker brother are you?"
The Baker boys didn't have the most fabulous reputation during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. I wasn't sure where this was going.
"I am Eliot. Son of Gordon. Son of Edward. Our tribe has swum these waters and hunted these lands for generations, as my children shall for generations to come." Okay, I didn't say that. But I've always wanted to say something like that. Actually, my family ancestors are from New Jersey and California. And I'm dork, and it's late. But anyhow.
I told the mysterious women in the boat that I am indeed Eliot Baker. And then one of them introduced herself.
"I was your ninth grade English teacher."
Uh-oh. Double busted. I wasn't exactly teacher's pet back in those days. "I swear I'll turn in that Harper Lee paper. It's going to be so much better now that her new book is coming out." OK, I didn't say that either.
But what followed was the conversation one hopes, upon graduation, to have with a teacher 20 years after high school (C / O 1995, go Pirates!). Turns out I was considered less of a schmuck by my teachers than I'd anticipated. One of them, at least.
But then, I should have known that. She used to let me write book reports for extra credit on novels I wanted to read, from Anne Rice to Dean Koontz and Stephen King, and she'd let me put creative spins on assignments that were otherwise so tedious they'd drive me to doodling inappropriate cartoons in the margins. Somehow, all these years later, she said she remembered several of them. The writing assignments, not the doodles. And, somewhat to my surprise, she had liked me.
It all came back to me, floating and chatting about old times. Using her powers as the girls' volleyball coach, she used to set up a volleyball net for me and a group of outdoor volleyball bums a couple times a week after school. Washington State doesn't fund organized boys indoor volleyball, so we played sand and grass and didn't play other sports; it was kind of punk rock at the time. But her going out of her way, sacrificing her time to play volleyball with us, enabled something of a volleyball career for several of us after high school. I stopped playing after college, but some of us still play and coach.
But more than the volleyball, I remember how she told me, as early as 9th grade, to keep writing. That gesture of confidence helped enable a writing career for me.
"You really stood out," she told me there in the lake, 20 years older and wiser, smiling at my kids. "I knew you'd be a writer. You had a gift."
We chatted a bit more. I promised to come to her class and talk about writing and being an author. She asked if I'd written any novels since The Last Ancient. I replied the way I have been replying to that same question over the last year. "Got a couple projects that stalled. Just so busy. Had to focus on other things for a while. But I'll get back to it." She gave me a look that only a teacher can give to a former student.
"Keep writing," she said. "Whatever you do, keep writing."
The kids got tired and started swimming back to shore. My teacher and I agreed to meet up again before I flew back to Finland with my family. Didn't happen. But...
If you're reading this, Ms. Legate: Thank you. You have no idea how much I needed to hear that. I've been writing at my new job, and it's great, couldn't ask for a better gig, but it's not my soul's work. When I put down the manuscript I've been working on, I thought it would be just for a month, just to get my head clear before coming back to it. But one month became two, which accumulated more and more days to become a 9 month black hole. Having just picked it back up, I know my manuscript has miles to go before I sleep. But I have promises to keep, and so on and so forth and all that jazz.
Because fuck the metaphorical woods. They aren't lovely. Giving up and letting the Dark and the Deep consume you isn't lovely. It's a slow march into a kind of paralysis of the soul. It just gets so easy to not write. There are so many reasons not to. They all slide over you like a ton of water and next thing you know, you've sunk.
Along that unique connection between teacher and student, certain messages travel with particular electricity. Ms. Legate's refrain of "Keep writing" was a much-needed jolt to remind me I'd been putting off doing what I loved for way too long.
Anyhow. Back to floating.
Sometimes we float in life. There's no escaping it. The trick is to stay afloat, and not let the tide carry you out to sea, or let the waves push you into the deep. The trick is to learn how to float well, how to take in all the things happening below you and above you and around you so that you can come back to shore toting a few more treasures than you had before you got wet.
I watched my kids learn to float in the ocean not long after saying goodbye to Ms. Legate. I was terrified. There they were, these tiny, fragile beings kicking their skinny legs inside a great big ocean full of waves and eels and sea turtles. My daughter is a mermaid, she took to it immediately; my son's a little younger, and he was terrified when he first felt the sheer power of the ocean, so much scarier than the pools and ponds he's used to. But within a day they were both floating without life jackets or kick boards, looking through their masks at tropical fish, pointing and laughing through their snorkels. "Daddy! I can float! I don't need the board!" It's an indescribable feeling, to watch your kids float in the ocean the first time.
When they were done floating, they came back in, full of miracles and beauty and memories. By floating, they'd allowed themselves to grow in a new way.
I've been floating for some time now. I've seen -- and heard and tasted and learned-- some amazing things, some noteworthy things; but it's been a long time out floating, gathering, watching, and not writing. It's time to come in now. Time to keep writing. Just keep writing.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Robin Williams and the Strange Lament of Losing People We Never Knew
So long, Robin Williams. I’ll miss you. Which is rare.
See, I’m tepid on celebrities. Their tabloid lives never interested
me, and news of their falls from grace and (often tragic) deaths rarely
affect me. But a few celebrity-news-flash
no-effing-way moments have left me
staring out the window to reflect on life’s passing as though I’d lost a dear loved
one. Williams’s suicide was like that. I feel like I knew the man, having as a
kid watched him mature from Mork and Popeye to Sean Mcguire and Aladdin’s Genie.
Now that he’s gone, I realize he kind of won the 1990s’ comic entertainment title
for me, and then followed that up with some unbelievably relevant standup
comedy/political philosophy in the 2000’s. We’ll get to that.
But this isn’t all about Williams. It’s about celebrity
death in general, and how it can impact us. At one time or other, I think we
all have had a prolonged moment of silence for the passing of a childhood icon
or an adult inspiration.
The first no-effing-way
moment for me was Magic Johnson’s announced diagnosis of HIV. On November 7,
1991 my fellow high school freshman sports nut neighbor, Andy brought me the
news. It took a few swear-to-God’s
before I believed him, but once I did we went silent and just stared at my basketball court, empty and cracked beneath an overcast Seattle
sky. We couldn’t process the big picture. It felt as though every basketball
court in America had just burst into flames, succumbed to ash, and
disintegrated into the Earth; and we were falling with them into that gray sinkhole
full of things that only adults, not kids, were supposed to understand. Seeing
Magic claimed by the era’s most stigmatized disease numbed me to all further
sporting world shocks and scandals: from baseball’s steroids to the NFL’s
TBI-induced suicides; from Tiger Woods’ hormones to OJ’s and Aaron Hernandez’s
murder; even to Jerry Sanduskie’s absolute horror. I was too scarred by that 1991
moment to ever take sports so personally again. I had to listen to some Nirvana,
my favorite band at the time, and shoot some free throws to temper the bubbling well of emotions.
Fast forward to April, 1994. I’d grown into a dedicated
grunge kid with a ponytail and goatee and flannels and Doc Martins, a cliché
suburban Seattle high school junior, when Andy knocked again. It was early in
the morning and I knew, just freaking new, that something terrible had happened
from the look on his face.
“Kurt Cobain’s dead,” he said, bewildered.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No. No way. No no no no no.”
I had no words. Kurt and Nirvana were more than music to me.
They had found me at a very vulnerable time, a few weeks after losing my mother
to cancer. Rocking to Nevermind daily
for three years straight was like a daily sanity pill whose side-effects included
lifelong hard rock passion and teenage angst sublimation. Dead? Kurt? You mean, he’d never growl
out another song? He’d never team up with Michael Stipe as promised? Just…
gone? And he freaking shot himself in the
head? It was like losing a best friend. I actually got dizzy. In no way do
I wish to trivialize historical events, but Kurt’s death helped me empathize
with my parents when they’d ask their friends, “Where were you when
Kennedy/Martin Luther King/Lennon was shot?” Cobain’s suicide, and Courtney
Love’s nearly-as-gruesome-elegy at the Seattle Science Center, numbed me to all the many future deaths of my favorite musicians, from
Layne Staley to Michael Jackson. (And yet still, like an immortal cancer
culture preserved in a laboratory, Courtney Love lives).
And the last no-effing-way
celebrity death (before Robin Williams): The good doctor, Hunter S.
Thompson. Shot himself. Right when I/we
needed him most, in February of 2005, as the political shitblizzard thundered loudest
around George W. Bush’s presidency. People recall Thompson for getting twisted
on exotic drugs in Vegas and with the Hell’s Angels. People’s memories are
incomplete. Thompson started off as a great sports writer and evolved into a
uniquely skilled counterculture reporter and a passionate political journalist.
I wonder if his passion ultimately killed him. For a whole week, I blamed Bush
for Thompson’s suicide, figuring Thompson just couldn’t handle a political evil
he decried as worse than Nixon, who Thompson believed was the nexus of ethical
degradation and moral bankruptcy.
"Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today,
compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that
we finally need him?" Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Thompson killed himself while half of America watched in
horror as the other half voted a second time for George II, after he’d crushed
and snorted the electoral college in 2000. We needed Thompson, or someone like him (Maureen Dowd?), to bring
some clarity to a fundamentally insane situation and time. A few vintage Thompson
articles were pumped out to such effect. He seemed to be regaining form at
exactly the moment when an asymmetrical country stuck in an asymmetrical war needed
some geometry. And then he offed himself. Damn. The same man who inspired me to be
a writer—by doing things with words and stories that Nirvana did with guitars
and lyrics, and Magic did with a basketball; the man who turned me on to
politics--that guy put the gun on his chest and pulled the trigger. Just like
Kurt. No no no no. I drank five
fingers of bourbon that night in H.S.T’s honor.
Around that time I watched Robin Williams do standup in San
Francisco, all of it hilarious and much of it political. The routine was a big risk
considering that comics, musicians, and journalists alike were being hung with flaming tires
and branded as subversive communist Sharia puppy-killers for saying anything
other than HOW HIGH??? no matter how
idiotic or repulsive the order to jump.
“Some men are born great, some men achieve greatness, some
get it as a graduation gift.” – Robin Williams, Live on Broadway.
So now Williams is gone. I waded yesterday morning into the
river of Facebook elegies, and I found it to be a stronger current than I
recall following the passing of Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffman and almost
even Michael Jackson, amongst others, and I get it. Robin felt like someone we
knew. We grew up with him and watched him change, struggle, succeed, mature. He
evolved from an untethered goofball to a comic genius and dramatic powerhouse.
There was something comforting about his bearded face in a sensitive movie, and
something exciting about his crazed grin in a wacky one. We grew up watching him
like he was our talented but wacky uncle everyone rooted for, but worried over.
So long Robin. You’ve joined the small family of celebrity
souls who reside in my heart. I’m sure you guys will get along great.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Review: Obscura Burning, by Suzanne van Rooyen
The exquisitely written and deftly plotted Obscura Burning, by Suzanne van Rooyen, delivers
readers into that dreamlike state immediately proceeding shattering emotional trauma;
the kind that forces you to pick up the event’s fragments and piece them
together with a sense of shutter-eyed fascination over “What really happened?” tempered
with “Do I really want to know?” I met the author at a book reading at FinnCon
2014 in Finland and I’m so glad I did, otherwise I’d have missed buying her
exquisite novel.
My reading experience made me recall Robert Louis
Stevenson’s writing process for The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The two authors and their works
share little resemblance (Obscura
Burning’s plot is more reminiscent of dark urban fantasy millennial movies
like Butterfly Effect and Vanilla Sky, mixed with Donnie Darko, Melancholia and
Groundhog Day), but the purgatorial sense of being trapped between realities and
mental states until a difficult choice is made recalls how Stevenson reportedly
conceived his classic tale from a nightmare, and then he revisited and nurtured
his nightmare night after night into a coherent narrative—dream-drafting, you
might call it. Indeed, the dream logic rabbit hole that Obscura Burning launches readers into steadily transmutes into a
freight train chugging along crooked tracks of well-researched science fiction logic
and real world emotion towards impending apocalypse, as we follow protagonist Kyle
comprehend the details of a tragedy that killed his lover, or their best friend,
or neither or both, depending on the periodicity whims of the mysterious planet
Obscura that rose in the sky the day of the tragedy.
Upon turning the final page of Obscura Burning, I found that
the story, its characters, and especially its climax lingered, haunting me all
the way to my own dreams the following night, when I had an Obscura-inspired
nightmare. Folks, when a novel drills that deeply into your psyche, you know
that something rare and excellent has been achieved.
In reading the sad, thrilling, enigmatic, and deeply
psychological scenario of competing realities, I was lulled into a state of
consciousness that straddled dream, nightmare, and vivid fantasy by Rooyen’s beautiful, elegant writing style – replete with cliché-free imagery
and metaphor and analogy – and her masterful plotting. The novel’s
philosophical underpinning is powerful but subtle, and it corkscrews so
effectively that its plot twists are both unexpected and satisfying.
At first, the novel seems to slide more into psychological
horror territory with its preoccupation on grief and the notion of free
will and choice. Kyle, the protagonist, a closeted gay pyromaniac from the
wrong side of the tracks and with a penchant for self-harm, is racked by guilt
guilty over the (on-again-off-again) deaths of his lover and their best friend,
the details of which are hazy to him and them both. As he learns that a
momentous choice he and they made coincides with the date that the time-warping
mysterious planet, Obscura appeared
in the sky, his feelings are further complicated. He realizes that the fate of his friends-and perhaps the world-- rests on
his choices, past and future. In short, he recognizes that it’s not all about
him; that even though his life is hard, people around him are still affected by
his choices. It’s a powerful moment we all face at some point in our late
teens, and it’s rendered with powerful clarity here.
But then Obscura
Burning corkscrews, the way a dream can shift in one night. Now it’s not
all about choice. It’s about science and time travel and the multi-verse. And
then it’s not all about that, either. It’s about love and friendship, it’s
about redemption and responsibility, and something else and then something else
again that would be a spoiler to mention.
Through Kyle’s dark, poetic soul we must figure out what is most
essential in love and life in order to stop a cataclysm promised by the burning
blue planet that will rise closest to Earth on July 4th. The sense
of doom is nerve-wracking as the calendar pages flip forward and backward,
closer to and further from that date.
The characters are in their late teens and dealing with
death, sexuality, poverty and impending apocalypse, so this novel is for the
older set as well as for anyone who appreciates good writing and a good
psychological mystery within their dark urban fantasy.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Free Fiction: The Fellowship of the Chicken: or How not to Climb a Mountain
Fellowship
of the Chicken:
How not to climb a mountain
We should have killed the chicken.
Sure, we’d made other sacrifices to
climb Malaysia’s Mount Kinabulu, the highest peak in Southeast Asia at thirteen
thousand four hundred thirty-five feet. But in retrospect, they were all far
too metaphorical and full of empty overtures to abstinence to suit the
occasion.
The gods prefer blood. Otherwise,
they’ll take your sweat, your tears, your pride-- even your mind.
It had seemed like the will of the gods when, after agreeing to
reunite my band, The Phat Hobbits on a Japan tour with some old buddies who’d
made it big, my Southeast Asia tour book fell off my coffee table and cracked
open on my apartment floor to a picture of Mount Kinabulu. As I gazed into the
image of Kinabulu’s sharp, other-worldly stone peaks veiled in crimson ghost clouds,
my three-man punk brigade watched me grip the cursed gold ring dangling from a
chain around my shoulders. We all murmured, “Mount Doom,” knowing what must be
done. We were in Seattle, our shire. We had to go to Malaysia, our Mordor.
Flying from Kuala Lumpur by way of
Osaka, we hitched a ride at the Kota Kinabulu airport with a local wearing an
old school Supersonics hat. We
Seattleites interpreted it as a sign. As he weaved through streets crammed with
rickshaws and street vendors, we broadcasted our intentions to conquer Kinabulu
(without mentioning the cursed gold ring dangling over my chest). Nodding
reverently, he described the mountain’s beauty, its power--and its danger. Some time ago, three Englishmen climbed the
mountain and were never seen again.
Intrigued, I asked for wisdom that would preclude such a fate.
“You
must sacrifice a chicken.”
Nick the drummer and Tyson the bassist shrugged
awkwardly, eyes pressing me, their front man, to lead on. I asked if the
chicken had to be a virgin in earnest, but my friends snorted. An almost fatal
mistake. The warm evening went immediately cold inside the van. The local
slammed his brakes, veered onto the grassy shoulder, and scolded us through
crooked, angry teeth that Mount Kinabulu is a mystical place, its gods to be
respected.
Go to the sacrificial chicken
ranch. Buy a chicken. Slit its throat. Only then could we begin our journey.
In that moment we became more than tourists. Nodding
silently, we looked out the window of the mini-van with our best thousand yard
stares. Blood, sweat, death… it was
on.
Outside the van at the hostel, Nick broke the spell
when he suggested just pouring a bowl of chicken Panang onto the ground,
ghetto-Shire style; one for the gods, one for the Hobbits. We laughed. An even dumber almost fatal
mistake.
The gods do not tolerate japes--and
will punish the infidels who dare.
After a long night of dancing,
karaoke, and drinking the Malaysian eight-point-five infusion, Anchor
Special Brew, we and our hangovers set off on a two-hour bus ride for the
hike of our lives, a non-technical but extreme-inclined five-mile ascent we’d
been told was more challenging than Yosemite’s legendary fourteen-mile Half
Dome hike, which I’d once completed with little difficulty outside of the
marmots that stole my summit sandwich.
The awesomely terrible kung-fu movie
blaring on the bus’s TV monitors cut off in mid-spinning-helicopter-death-kick
as we hissed to a stop. Peering through beer-soaked eyes out the window, I
experienced a species of dread only the gods can instill. Shrouded in
slash-and-burn farming smoke, the looming god mountain’s glowering stone head
and crouching green bulk suddenly made me nervous about upsetting local
deities. Bumping off a chicken seemed within bounds; breaking eggs to make
omelets, I reasoned. Even Tyson, a recently converted Buddhist, rationalized it
as not killing but cultural observation in an admirable display of moral contortionism.
At the Timpohon Gate park
headquarters we received our mandatory guide, whose unpronounceable name contained
a “G” so we called him Gandalf. The lean and quiet man could have been thirty
but was probably fifty considering the wise glint in his eyes. First thing, I
asked where we could get our hands on a live chicken.
Surprised, Gandalf informed us in
broken English that usually only locals perform the ritual and we were too late
to locate and kill a chicken properly. Tyson the Buddhist cursed.
“Dudes, the shire leaf has addled
your minds,” said Nick, a blonde marathon runner and rock climber. “We’re only
twenty-nine. Let’s stick it to this Malaysian mountain god.” Tyson and I
glanced at one another’s developing paunches and said, “Hellz yeah,” but with
about as much confidence of success as Faramir riding to meet the Orc legions.
Our fears proved justified. Within
seconds of passing through the trailhead we realized that this wasn’t so much
an inclined path as it was a suicide run on a stair climber at level twenty.
The steep trail quickly transformed into earthen stairs, each step requiring a
hop to surmount. Within fifteen minutes I was sucking air, and begged my
friends to slow down. Regroup. Reconsider?
After thirty minutes my legs began
to wobble. I paid no heed, figuring they just needed to warm up. Determined to reach the overnight camp as
quickly as possible (fast hikers like we once were could beat four hours) I
ignored pain, fatigue and nausea as I’d done on countless northwest hikes up
Mount Si and Granite Mountain and around Mount Baker. Hell, I’d even done Ranier, a god in its own
right named Tahoma by the local tribes. Gradually my place in line dropped from
leader, to middle, to last--to dead weight.
Soon, it was not the pain in my
quads and lungs that unnerved me, but the boiling sea of Anchor: Special
Brew raging within my belly.
Noticing my pale complexion and my hand upon my chest, Nick asked if the
Eye of Sauron was upon me. Turning, I
began, “Guys I don’t feel so--” before doubling over, convulsing.
Leaning over a wooden rail, I
unleashed a flood of acidic Malaysian lager upon the green ferns and bulbous
orange carnivorous pitcher plants surrounding the trail. My compatriots turned their heads
respectfully on their fallen comrade.
“King’s Foil, Fro?” asked Tyson,
holding out a bag of salty nuts.
“We must get him to Rivendell,” said
Nick, doing annoying bouncy stretches on the cursed mountain steps. “The ring
has taken its toll.”
I tried to respond, “The fellowship
is unbroken--” before succumbing to another yellow waterfall. The Lord of the
Rings references were all that stood between abysmal despair, but I wasn’t sure
how much longer the idiomatic dam would hold against the flood of F-bombs and goddammits I so wanted to unleash.
My digestive system emptied itself
along another mile of the incline we hobble-hiked up before I collapsed against
a tree, chest heaving and sweat stinking of booze and failure. I apologized to
Gandalf for desecrating his mountain. He
didn’t seem to judge me. Sitting down, I
wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into as the ring hung heavy around
my shoulders.
Getting up was when things really
got ugly. Hiking’s cardinal rule is to
always stay hydrated. Binge drinking at
the discotheque followed by heavy vomiting constitute an automatic violation of
that rule. I quickly learned why as
steel braces locked my quivering legs in place.
Attempts to remove them from the cramped position were futile; no such position existed. My leg muscles twitched and convulsed in
grotesque waves beneath my skin, eliciting horrified oohs, aah, and stop
that!’s from the Phat Hobbits.
And two and a half vertical miles
still remained to the overnight camp.
“Maybe you’re more of a dwarf,” Nick
accused, performing a few jumping jacks for good measure. “Natural sprinter.
Over short distances, very dangerous.”
I looked to Gandalf for counsel. The
man of the mountain shrugged and smiled, sweat-less in his white sneakers and
faded jeans.
“You maybe no die if climb,” said
Gandalf. “But getting dark. Go back good idea.”
My hand went to the ring beneath my
shirt. The years in thrall to it had weakened me, but I refused to let it drag
me back down to the bottom. Not again.
Willing myself to stand, I said, “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
Unable to speak intelligibly, I
tried to make my heaves and grunts sound optimistic as I lurched along like a
wooden puppet, jerking my spasmodic legs up the mountain one at a time. The
pain was excruciating, but I was starting to feel like kind of a badass.
Then, strapped into a woven basket
stuffed with potatoes and dead chickens with lolling heads, a wispy-haired,
ninety-pound porter woman literally jogged by us in sandals for what Gandalf
said was her second trip that day to the summit camp, Laban Rata. Before I
could ascertain whether my manhood still remained, a British woman with a gray
ponytail and her adult son passed us and said, “Sure feels good for an old lady
like me to pass a young buck like you!”
I groaned. They chuckled. And the
gods positively guffawed.
At a jungle clearing I peered into
the smoky green valley from which we’d ascended, drinking cold canteen water
and breathing the fragrant ancient wood and the purple and gold and red exotic
flowers. It was beautiful. The base of the mountain looked small beneath us. Hope
bloomed in my heaving chest.
Until I discerned the granite peak above the tree
line. Formidable, mocking: An impossible distance. The gloom of the mountain’s
shadow crept into my heart, made darker by the gold ring swinging over it.
Repentant thoughts pierced my brain.
Be merciful, ye gods! I’ll mock thee
not. I’ll sacrifice a wilderness of chickens. Show pity!
Then I remembered--I’m an atheist.
Game
on, Kinabulu.
And so I continued into increasingly thinner air, cursing and muttering
at the ground, the sky, even a pretty blond passing hiker whose vague
familiarity ignited a pleasure-pain burning in the ring. There was no joy in this push. No communion with nature, no appreciation of
my excellent company, and certainly no productive inner reflection. It was a battle, vicious and primal: Me vs.
the Gods-I-Don’t-Believe-In, winner-take-all.
At long last I glimpsed Laban Rata
at the far edge of my tunnel vision. There, upon that great wooden deck
suspended over the misty green jungle abyss nearly eleven thousand feet above
sea level, we could shower, gobble Tylenol and nap before commencing the
one-and-a-half mile final push to the summit for a fabled Kinabulu
sunrise.
Nearly in tears, with over four traumatic miles and
seven excruciating hours behind me, I hobbled up the last few steps towards
sweet, level ground.
Cramping, sweating and dizzy, my body escalated its
insurrection to blind vengeance: Take that (spasm)! And that (contraction)! And
THAT (spasmspasmcontraction)!
I collapsed against a boulder, legs rippling as though in
mid-electrocution. Nick poured water
down my throat and worked my legs like a corner-man, unlocking enough
circulation that they momentarily stopped rolling on themselves like hungry
corn snakes.
Nearby, the graying ponytail lady
and her son played hopscotch. They pointed at me, waving. I crutched along on
Nick and Tyson’s shoulders to the lodge, somehow keeping my other four fingers
extended in my return wave.
My friends dropped me into a wooden
deck chair like a sack of moldy apples.
“You look freshly violated by
Boromir,” said Tyson, wiping his sweaty bush of black curls from his eyes.
“And micturated upon by orcs,” said
fair-haired Nick, groaning at the sudden twitching in my right quad. Walking
away with deliberately evil springy steps to the food kiosk, they asked loudly
where they could get in on some hopscotch.
Unable to bend my knee to remove my
steaming Timberlands, I looked up and noticed a tallvblonde lady was leaning
against the deck’s wraparound rail and staring at me. We locked eyes. With
ginger steps she treaded towards me, staring at my ruined legs. Grave concern
darkened her long, angular face, elfish and pretty despite its salty sweat
streaks.
“You alright?” she asked in a
pulse-quickening Australian accent.
“Would you believe yes?”
“No. I passed you an hour ago on the
trail. I’m a Doctor of Physical Therapy. Mind if I look at your legs?”
Hallelujah!
Damn the chickens and the gods they fed, the summit was as good as conquered!
And with it my curse, left to wither and die in that cloud of purple smoke
below us. I mouthed a thank-you to the
blue Malaysian sky as the Aussie angel pulled up a chair beside my knees.
But the Gods had been saving their
greatest prank for last, I learned, as her name rolled off her tongue and past
her straight, white teeth to shake me like thunder in a dungeon.
Sally.
Somewhere above I heard chortling,
deep and malicious as cracking glaciers. The golden burden around my shoulders
sagged as her expert fingers kneaded my flesh.
Nick and Tyson were questioning my
capacities as a hiker and a man when they stopped behind me, dumbstruck. Sally
introduced herself, and Tyson’s hand froze in mid-extension, aborting his
handshake. Nick dropped his water bottle, and didn’t pick it up as its cold
clear liquid bled onto the wooden deck. Sally instructed them to procure
electrolytes and bananas. Nick followed orders in a daze, jaw agape, but Tyson
narrowed his eyes.
“All that glitters is not gold,
Halfling,” he said.
“That’s William Blake, retard.
Tolkien said, ‘All that is gold does not glitter,’” I said.
“Stay the path, ring-bearer!” Tyson
said.
The ensuing silence swelled with a
life-long friendship’s worth of crippled promises and kidney-punched dreams. And
Sallies. So many Sallies. Tyson kept looking at us long after the silence grew
awkward.
“What?” Sally and I said together,
as though we’d been doing so for years. Something about our vocal harmony
injected fear into my friend’s heart.
“Not again, Fro. We’re here to
destroy the ring, not to wield it.” Tyson marched off towards Gandalf.
Sally continued pouring electrolytes
down my throat and rubbing the vipers out of my legs in my infirmary-like room.
A warm, drowsy blanket of helplessness and attention enveloped me as I rested
against my pillow, marveling at her. We’d showered off the Kinabulu grit and
she emerged beautiful in that severe, calculated way that Sallies always are.
There was a knock at her door.
“Hey Fro, lights out. We’re
summiting in a couple hours,” said Nick, poking his head into the doorway.
Tyson joined him and they entered the room.
Sally nodded at me with the stern
prompt of a nurse, and I said, “Guys, I’m done. Dr. Sally says it’s too
dangerous. Bad things could happen to me. Things with lots of syllables.”
“Is Dr. Sally staying bedside?”
asked Tyson.
“Yeah, I got some wicked blisters.”
Sally wiggled turgid pink bubbles on her big toes. “Go on. I’ll take care of
your friend.”
Awkward silence, then, “What?” Sally
and I said in unison.
They chanted, “Come back, come back,
to Mordor she’ll take you.”
And they wouldn’t stop chanting, not
when I threw my pillow at them, or my shoe, not until I threw a half-empty
Gatorade bottle that bounced against the door frame did they leave.
“You’re a lot more mature than your friends,”
Sally said (as Sallies often do), straddling my knees to rub my thighs. “Is Fro
really your name?”
I groaned at the exquisite pleasure
and pain of her touch.
“Sort of. It’s Fernando. Long story
short, we’re Lord of the Rings dorks. Hence, our band name, The Phat Hobbits.
We got kind of quasi-big locally back in the day after high school. I’m the
front man so people started calling me Fro. Oh, and I’ve got a pretty sweet
afro if you didn’t notice. Anyhow, we’re reuniting to dive head-first into
early mid-life crises. Kind of lucked into a last-minute gig opening for some
old friends around Japan. Could be our big break.”
“I admire you artistic types. Never
had much imagination myself. But I find that fantasy stuff kind of stupid.
Here, how’s that? Does it hurt when I press here?”
Of course it didn’t. Like her
predecessors, she knew nothing would hurt until my final, inevitable amputation
from her life. Then the pain would explode all at once.
Each Sally--all four of them since
middle school, like some many-headed preppy serpent, each my older, smarter and
wealthier better--nursed me after a bizarre injury. The last Sally--Professor
Sally, seven years and three university degrees my superior--rushed to the
stage after Tyson knocked me out with an ill-advised samurai-bass-chop.
The timing was catastrophic. We were
opening for a band whose label promised to sign us after the tour. Tyson had
quit his cushy video game programmer job and Nick had left his neuroscience
lab. Saying adios to Starbucks wasn’t
exactly tearful for me.
But within a month, Professor Sally
and I were innocently saying “What?” in unison to questions like: You’re not making the tour? And you’re
leaving the band? And you’re moving in together? You’re getting married? And
moving to Boston? And going into Sally’s father’s real estate business?
She’s leaving you for a divorced tax
attorney with three kids and a hairpiece?
Whatwhatwhatwhatwhat?
I lied when I said I was an atheist.
I believe in goddesses, and their names are Sally. But like Galadriel, with a
ring they’re Beautiful and Terrible as the Morn: All shall love them and
despair! Well, me at least. Tyson and Nick tried repeatedly to bludgeon me back
to my senses with foam swords, but I just blabbered, “She’s a professor you jamokes! She knows what’s
good for me!” Gives us the precious!
“Ever been to Sydney?” said Dr.
Sally, unwinding the piano wire-tight IT bands stretched between my knees and
hips with her strong thumbs. “We’ve got an ace music scene. I’m heading back in
two days to move into my new place. You should come. Here, how’s this?”
“Oh. Oh, wow. That’s good. Why would
a girl like you be moving into a new place alone?”
Dr. Sally began confessing things to
me, many of which I’d heard one Sally ago, concerning fatigue of academic types
and of men being intimated by her brains. Then it progressed to deeper
insecurities, like how Dr. Sally had started wearing turtlenecks to cover up
the deepening wrinkles on her neck. Wrinkles she was pulling down her shirt
collar to display, allowing a glimpse of the white pink wonderland beneath. I
understood this signified her intentions to wear me for similar purposes for at
least two years, maybe five. The glands of failed musicians are renowned
amongst Sallies for their anti-aging properties. Grinding our guitars into
paste yields a potent aphrodisiac.
“Down under?” I said, eyes closing,
submitting to the power of the massage, the glory of her will. “Never even
thought of it until now. But… Maybe?”
Part of me knew that things would go
south soon after going down under. That I would feel compelled to explain why
her taste in music, movies, and art was so shockingly awful it precluded
friendship with cool people. She, in turn, would castigate my dreams while
milking dry my own urban insights until the night when, years or months later,
she would regurgitate them at a gathering of shiraz-drinking pseudos that would
include an older, established, unattached professional standing inappropriately
close to her.
As Dr. Sally massaged my thighs with
her palms, I knew I would sacrifice everything for her while guzzling a Mickey
Finn of admiration, sexual gratification, and deep pity for the frozen hole in
her core. Gradually, my testicles would vanish and I’d shrivel into a hunched
and spiteful thing, religiously polishing the ring to which I would be bound.
But who am I, a Phat Hobbit, to refuse my fate as ordained by a Goddess?
“I live alone in that big house. And
my dad always needs top salesmen for his mining equipment business…”
My
name is Fro, and I am a Goddess addict. Each drop of suffering on Kinabulu
obviously represented the final stages of Goddess withdrawals. I’d heard those
can be deadly. Perhaps the expedition--the whole tour even--was merely the
cruel joke of a divine bully with a magnifying glass atop a mountain. Perhaps
this Sally would be different. This Sally was my savior. This Sally was my
fate.
My finger ached for the ring. And
the numb relief it promised.
Dr. Sally removed her shirt. Crawled
into my bed. Her door blew open. Drawing the covers to her chin, Dr. Sally
screeched as Nick and Tyson entered, followed by Gandalf, who was holding a
plucked chicken carcass wrapped in ketchup packets like a profane suicide
poultry bomber.
“Come on Fro,” said Tyson, tall and
hefty. “I can’t carry it for you. But I can carry you!” He pulled me thrashing
feebly from Sally’s arms.
“Kill the chicken, Fro,” Nick said,
handing me a metal butter knife on which he’d scribbled in black marker, Sting. “The mountain demands sacrifice!”
As Sally hollered, Gandalf solemnly
laid the naked avian offering on the plastic bedside table. Holding my eyes
with ageless Malaysian wisdom, the man of the mountain nodded while my band
chanted like Elmer Fudd: Kill da
CHI-cken, kill da CHI-cken, kill da CHI-cken, killdachicken!
I raised the butter knife, but
paused when Sally screamed beside me, “Your friends are idiots! You can’t reach
the top! Come back to bed you moron!” My hand wobbled.
Precious!!!
I drove the knife deep into the
chicken’s ketchup-packet heart, over and over, splattering red upon the white
walls, over my face, even on Sally. I stopped when I heard no more screaming or
chanting. Only my ragged breath. The chicken resembled a slashed and battered
red heart with a ludicrously grinning beak.
Gandalf nodded as my friends dragged
me from the room. Sally made to get up, shirt or no shirt after me, but Nick held
out the mangled chicken carcass like a talisman, stomped his foot, and
bellowed, “None shall pass!” Sally
stared on, pulling the white sheet back tight against her chest. Darkness
filled the expanding space between us like the rush of ocean between a freed sailor
and his siren. The pain returned to my legs as I hobbled back to my own room.
Exhaustion clubbed me into dreamless
space. Waking up sucked. Every cell in
my body--my very soul--begged to stay in bed.
But succumbing to such trivialities as altitude sickness,
sleep-deprivation, alcohol poisoning, severe cramping, chronic dehydration,
depression, and, quite possibly, post-traumatic stress and a re-fractured heart
was no longer an option.
My friends hauled me into my
stinking boots as my quadriceps bubbled and writhed in protest. Gandalf led us
on, pensively chewing on grass.
My memory of that final climb is vague. Thin, elusive air. Some ropes; slipping on
bare rock; surprising cold; a sensation of floating high above other living
things. For a few hours we were
suspended within the stars, our chorus of labored breathing the only indication
of things besides the mountain and the gods.
And then we reached the highest peak
in Southeast Asia for sunrise. As the
eastern sky reddened in crisp flame, a full moon descended on the opposite
horizon. Silhouetted against the rising
sun, Mount Kinabulu cast the shadow of an ethereal pyramid directly beneath the
moon, a geometrically precise rendering of the all-seeing-eye on dollar
bills. The Eye of Sauron, come-to-God.
Staring into that big silver orb, I stopped cursing.
In that superimposed image of setting moon and rising
sun on the eternal mountain, all of us climbers intuited cosmic balance, a
truth. The English lady shared her M&Ms with me, laughing. I casually removed
my old gold wedding band from around my shoulders and flipped it to Gandalf,
who smiled and playfully punched my shoulder for the gift, worth roughly his
year’s salary. Nick and Tyson just breathed with me in synchronicity.
Every cramp, every humiliation, every drop of sweat
was forgotten in that moment. Sitting in
the freezing winds at the peak, I did not feel cold. I hated no one, nothing. For a brief moment I was at total peace,
humbled before the eyes of the gods.
And somewhere in the heavens, I
heard laughing.
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