"Going on a trip? Can we help you?" (the clatter of her keys)
"So strange… your words… orphan voices accusing me of your birthright…"
A threefold gate of infinite layers of brass, iron and impenetrable rock blocked his path, an all-consuming fire of blue light circling it. Joseph lights his wand on fire and like a teenage cheerleader dancing in the state championships, he causes two great black clouds to rise to the nose-level of the giant.
"The gate? It closes at 5 sir… we’re not open as late as the mall…"
"Oh, dear, dear daughter… we’ve fallen so far… from our mutiny… all of us… from them I go… on an errand unholy… to a vacant room, or some such place… shhhh… this is a secret… once I find it, you can come too… all of us… as soon as I pass… I will send for you…"
"I’m afraid the gate is closed sir… at 5… we’re not allowed to open it… by law… there’s an alarm…"
"Are you my daughter? Do you want to escape this tartarian gloom? Take your infernal key… and unlock the forbidden… here you are in perpetual agony and pain… release your gate and reveal the bliss… let me coax your lock open…"
"Sir! Please! Sir! Don’t… no… I… no…"
"Whoa there… no… leave her alone… Kathy…"
"Come to me my ravished daughter…"
"Kathy… open it… open the gate…"
"But…"
"Let me pass…"
"Kathy… open it!"
"Oh! Stay away…"
"Permit me passage…"
"Just a moment sir…"
"Hold on… wait a moment…"
She opened the gates wide for him, and at that moment, time and space were lost, as Joseph stepped out into Chaos incarnate and anarchy’s brood. It was Epicurus’ wet dream, a case study in the facets of chaosology, probable systems rapidly impacting as a range of elements glided by in a meteorological ballet of stardust. Energy never dies, but here on earth, it becomes bodies. You could be swallowing a piece of Leonardo Da Vinci’s eyeballs with your next breath. Joseph, perplexed by the creation of embryos from ether and debris as unnumbered as the deserts of Cyrene, looks out from his vantage point in utter and complete awe.
My next obstacle. “This is the world only half done.” Little Chicken Little will have her retribution. Joseph steps out in the mall hallway, collides with several impatient shoppers and falls over a woman’s parcels. It is a horrendous, unfathomable fall, his arms spinning, his feet attempting to run, his body twirling uncontrollably. For ten thousand fathoms, right into the Leviathan, the deep end of Poseidon’s bathtub, where Neptune and Triton lather each other up in giggling, flirtatious sea sponge melees, slapping each other’s asses like fraternizing sports heroes, pinching nipples, tickling scrotums, exfoliating each other with cleaners from Syrtis. Joseph goes right by, bouncing off of Neptune’s shoulder like a drunken fly, neither god noticing. Joseph’s able to slow his descent by clutching the ribbon from a riotous cloud from within the woman’s bag.
“Get away from my pillows, I just bought those.”
He takes his leave, pushing the cloud back on course, and swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies through the stunning sounds and voices and bodies and bags and objects until he reaches a central location, where all paths meet. There, he sees familiar faces, Orcus and Ades, Rumour and Chance, Tumult and Confusion, Discord and an old friend who drowned in the Aegean Sea some years before but allegedly rises on full moon nights and abducts expectant virgins. The word cannibal has been used but Joseph has always believed it is meant metaphorically, due to the primal nature of his long-lost friend’s actions.
“You crazy kids, who’ve been born from the infernal abyss, who swim in chaos, I am no spy,” Joseph announced, standing on a fake wood bench in front of an ornate fountain (enter to win, you could be the lucky new owner of a garden fountain from Homestead Landscapes) and raising his arms. “I’m an explorer, you know, an anthropologist. Yet, I want nothing from you, I do not visit to exploit your secrets, your customs, your beliefs. I only want to make it through this desert of want but I can’t seem to find the door. Would someone mind telling me where the border of heaven and earth is? I need to revenge my life.”
“I know who you are,” a particularly decomposing old gentleman said, stopping in front of the orator. “You’re that guy on the news, the one who’s lost. I know a thing or two about life, I feel like I’m losing land to an invading army, to be honest. I own this mall, although probably not for long, if those damn corporate buggers get their way. I’m in the middle of a hostile take-over, so I’m wreaking all sorts of havoc around here. You’re welcome to stay; it would be my gain. But, I can show you the way out if you want. None of these doors lead to heaven, though.”
Joseph, seeing the skeletal finger pointing, did not remain to reply, but seeing the shore after a night in stormy seas, runs headlong into the crowd, knocking people over, dodging angry arms, more endangered than Jason and his buddies against the jostling rocks of Bosphorus, feeling quite like a homesick lord captured in Charybdis, but finally making it to the door, the phantoms of sin and death seemingly riding on his coat tails like castaways, but also paved before him the broad and beaten path over the whisky twilight of the dark abyss between night and day, whose simmering chasm was bridged from hell to earth and the central highway of the transportation of perverse spirits copulating with the tempted and the punished, except from dead Nietzschian lantern carriers and good seraphim guarding the grand grace of heaven. Joseph, whose crimson wings were unfurled and flapping in mad gyrations, clung to the lowest ring of Jacob’s stepping stool, like a giant staircase above all the beanstalks of folklore, and witnessed the Hubble constant expanding out from the blank expanse of the storm of ions and eons like it was fetus emerging from the womb of nothingness.
* * *
A small tinkle of rain, very moderate, quiet, the kind of rain that clings to felt but does not wet trousers or require pedestrians to carry umbrellas, the perfect walk in the rain kind of rain. Its tiny beads cling to the one window, darkened by a black curtain, a small spider web crack forming on the lowest pane. Inside, the uneasy owner of the harmatiological establishment wipes clean glasses with a dirty rag mechanically, eyeing the man sitting in one of his booths, sipping a pride and true alcoholic beer (six-percent by volume) that arrives by truckload at three in the morning every Tuesday by way of the mountains and is manufactured under moonlight by men he’s never met. His name is Bernard Quigley; he owns and operates The Blue Moon Speakeasy & Tobacco Bar. Bernard…
“BurrNaard.”
Bayernaard.
“BuurrNnaarrd.”
BarrrNNaarrd.
“BuurrNnaarrd.”
BuurrNnaarrd.
“BurrNaard.”
BurrNaard.
“BurNaard.”
BurNaard (spelled ‘Bernard’) allows the resistance to hold special meetings and engagements at his establishment from time to time in exchange for protection and secure clientele. He operates a criminal business for a hush-hush subculture. If the Sections ever found out BurNaard would be retrieved immediately and re-educated thoroughly, it has made him a suspicious and humor-deficient man who listens carefully and finds conspiracies in the timbre of voices. At least once a night the place is closed down and everyone sent home because BurNaard believes an agent is present.
Arthur Dodger finds him amusing, he purposefully changes his tone any time he speaks to him, especially when ordering a drink: “BurNaard, I would like a BEER, a BEER with ALCOHOL in IT, can YOU get me a BEER with ALCOHOL in IT?”