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He felt as if he had been dropped by a helicopter as he stood up from a crouch, a crouch that would be the result of falling from a formidable height, where the limbs of pines had scraped his sides and he felt a streak of blood trailing down the left of his face. There was a tingle in his hands, while they and his legs seemed like paws, like a tigers, ready to spring, run and pounce. He thought he could hear the thuft thuft thuft of the blacked blades of a Stealth G 19 Prototype Assault-Recon Black Dragon- Wait a minute... He banished away what was unfolding in his mind like a brochure for a black attack aircraft, with tinted windows. He was a pacifist dam it and he didn't know much about such things. And as the Defense Department brochure folded back up and was tucked away somewhere so quickly that he had began to actually doubt that it had ever existed at all and then the tingle in his limbs began to subside, causing the hum in his mind to settle into a more calm state of alert.
His head swiveled back and forth to survey the area. It was dark and moonless, but he felt he had the reality and of a panthers eyes that helped lend a glowing, but crisp resolution to the night. He was in the middle of a pine forest with some fern and scrub oaks scattered there and there, Orion loomed high in the sky, and a Raccoon was poised Fifty-two Meters To The South. It had stopped and had been watching him for three point two seconds, he could still see the dissipating trail of red heat that her eyes had left burning off into the blue darkness. Raccoons didn't taste good, but they were edible, His mind interjected, though he had never eaten a one and wasn't directly cognitient on how he knew of their flavor. He didn't even really eat meat.
His hand involuntarily came down upon a mosquito that was about to bight his arm and it was flattened beneath.
His virtual Yogi master said that it was best not to eat meat. But it was also best not to limit yourself to just vegetables because in a while, your scope of tolerance would narrow and soon that is all one would be able to abide.
"Too much goodness makes one weak," He sat palms together, his legs folded as the lotus. "One has to periodically bathe oneself in evil if one still hoped to continue to interact with it and live among those who cross it's path."
So John lived mostly on stir-fried vegetables and rice, but allowed himself some chicken and fish and some dairy, like milk, cheese and eggs. Though he hated just breakfast style eggs, They just make it much easier and much better to bake his favorite oatmeal cookies and banana nut bread with, as there is still no truly practical substitute for eggs. And the Master was right because while he lived with Mori, as a sort of compromise he had stopped eating all animal flesh completely, and come Christmas time when he tried one of his moms meatballs, he loved his moms meat balls, his joints began to ache, he began to feel flushed and was stuck over the toilet throwing up for the rest of the night, while Mori stood smugly behind. So he began chicken eating as a compromise, at least chickens weren't mammals. He didn't have much respect for live chickens anyway. Human kind didn't even bother coming up with a kind of disguise name for chicken, like beef for cow and pork for pig and veal for whatever tortured baby animals that constituted veal. There was a spreading religious movement that considered all mammals to be sacred animals, each containing a soul being congruent in the eyes of God. As far as religions went, this seemed slightly more fair to him.
As his intellectual mind hummed to itself about the Mammalian movement, a more alert part of him heard an electric car pass, going southwest on a road one point seven kilometers in the south easterly direction. Though john was confused as to why he was standing in the middle of the Long Island pine barrens, he knew this from the species of deer that stood frozen just a little ways behind, was indigenous to Long Island, Block Island and that classified little island with all the viruses on it like the bubonic plague and small pox and any new lethal variations of death, he also knew that he needed to make a phone call.
John was from Oregon and has never been on the east coast before. Though Boston University was one of the schools he had applied to.
"Venison," he said softly as he began to trot off for the road and the deer began to trot in another direction, far away from him. He did feel urges every once in a while for a Big Mac.
THE BLACK ASSAULT CRAFT LANDED IN A CLEARING. The pilot cut the engine and the quiet black blades quivered and slowed to a stop. The woman seated next to him gave him a dismissing glance and he opened the door and dismounted the helicopter, standing at ease in the woman's view. She faced ahead, her eyes fixed on the vidscreen and the quiet white noise static that was soon to wash away. Her black gloved hands folded together in her lap waiting.
The road was narrow, black and dark, with a single broken yellow line that seemed to grow thinner as it disappeared around the bend. He looked one way and then the other just as he was told to by his mother, though he did not intend to cross the road.
He considered following the car that had heard pass, it would have a phone, but simple math told him that the car was long gone and he felt it moving farer away. He looked in the other direction, which was pretty much the same; the road and the yellow line curved out of his view, but a fresh waft of wind blew the faint smells of tobacco, some spilt beer, and also the sound and vibration of Jukebox music that sounded like Leonard Skynard.
Along the road posted in intermittent distances, were signs stapled to trees that read;
POSTED
New York State park land
no entry
without a permit
John put his hand to his breast pocket and felt the laminated rectangle beneath the denim that he knew this was his permit. He was not breaking the law, but wasn't really sure if it would matter if he were. He knew also that this land was near to national labs, Brookhaven National Labs. These words smelled almost of a home to him. A dim and murky temporary home. He could roughly recall the whitewashed walls, the cold plastic, white tiles to the touch of his bare feet and the cot he had slept on in the corner of his room. There were only a few books and other sparse personal belongings that seemed to now to belong to another persona. His identity was something obscured like a dream almost a few moments forgotten, as the mind beckoned toward consciousness. He had sex on the bed in that room and on the leather couch in an office down the hall with a dark haired woman who liked to keep her black gloves on as she ran her hands along his pale naked body. Her body seemed almost artificially firm, slightly too young for an older more handsome than beautiful face.
His real home was a town outside of Portland Oregon, where it rained more and a significant part of a large forest still stood not too far from the city. He would often trek down an abandoned logging road, in Mori's Jeep to loose himself among the towering, ancient trees.
As his feet carried him on, the distant thumping of music was gradually growing more pronounced, possibly loud enough to be heard by virgin ears, though the smoke, the stale beer and the lady's perfume registered on the enhanced senses. Also he thought he could almost hear the whispering thoughts of a disorganized group of people, but as he wasn't sure he was ready to believe this, so they soon faded.
Sweet Home Alabama.
His feet slowly crunched on the gravel of the side of the road. He had been tracking a loud internal combustion engine approached from behind and as johns shadow slid sideways across the trees, a faded blue American pickup truck passed him, with three long unfriendly beeps on the horn. It's breaklights brightened the pines around and an apparent clearing as it slowed and pulled in and to a stop just around the bend. The engine became still, two unseen figures exited the tired struts of the truck gave with the decresion of the weight and a pair of doors slammed in quick succession, feet crunching on gravel, with the continuation of conversational interaction that he advised himself, wasn't important enough to hear.
He kept his pace steady, but time became more gradual, his feet seemed to move slower, the hair stood up on his knuckles, as a comforting tension returned to his limbs. His senses became heightened to the thousands of lifeforms sliding around him and the switches in their minds that constituted the decision that they were ready to make. His feet raised and slowly fell, bringing him closer to the thumping of the music. The next and the next and a raccoon crawling on a treebranch to the left of him, a buzzing, a tree looking at him sadly with the eyes of a swami.
Breathing in deeply, he stopped slowly raising his arms up to the black and stardarkened sky, he stretched up his spine, with his elbows creaking as they became straighter than they ever were. This was of his past life, this was what he associated with peace and pacifism. It was part of a Yoga warm up and he wished he could stop here to do a nice calming two hours, a headstand, shoulderstand, cobra, swan, locust, bow, but the need that was buried like something vaguely hot inside him was to make a phone call, and thus, he continued on.
From behind a thinning band of trees the patchwork darkness of the shingles of an old faded brown building began to come into his view. On the front, a red and black neon sign read the RENEGADE HONKYTONK, with a small confederate flag with its white starred cross and red background, was lit above. His feet crunched to the gravel of the outskirts of the parking lot, which contained a tight band of gasoline consuming pick up trucks, with the few electric cars, seeming out of place and greatly in the minority. John viewed riffles hanging on racks in the backs of these Broncos, Fords and Chevys and he thought that this all looked pretty illegal, but something that wasn't all too uncommon in the back woods, from where he came, where the out numbered white trashy types seemed to band together as if showing off what America was once all about.
A sturdy looking and timeless biker type, with his stomach hanging over his Harley Davidson belt buckle, wearing a clip on holster holding an old oiled 45, skeptically watched johns unmotored approach. He looked the bouncer or a poster of the old segregated south, standing next to a sign that said no Niggers or other undesirables allowed, and than innocuously above a simply drawn happy face, as if painted to welcome the desired and to offset the tension.
"Can I help you?" he asked at johns approach, in a polite way more like a receptionist than a Hells Angle.
John choose an eye. "I need to use the phone."
"Mitzumi's out-of gas?"
"I've been dropped from the sky by a dragon."
The man frowned a bit while taking this in. "I can't see as there is a phone in there that you can use."
There was one of those blue outdated signs that had a white icon that suggested the shape of a phone. The gatekeeper picked up his riffle that leaned against the building as if he had just found it there, he stroked it's barrel.
John felt sorry for the neglected forty-five, that was cozily sheltered in the mans gut, also for the man who may have stood a better chance using it at such close range, while a kind of distant, happy anger began building up inside.
He made to move past the man, to the door, but felt a sturdy hand coming down on his arm.
"You don't happen to have a little nip blood in you-," he sniffed twice, "-you seem to smell almost Japanese." The man smiled.
john cackled in an odd way. "Not that I know of."
"Name?"
"My true name?"
The man shrugged.
"John," said john, while he moved past the man.
`My true name' turned in johns mind as he opened the door to a small anteroom housing a dirty cigarette machine and telephone with an out of order sign taped to the receiver and also a crossed out sign that said no smoking. Kind of like a no no smoking sign. It said that it was the law. john hated cigarette smoke. This is something else he had tried in the years time that he spent with his vegan girlfriend. It seemed that lots of hardcore vegetarians smoked.
Mori had smoked a thin, sweet smelling Japanese cigarette that he could never remember the name of. He just wanted to see what it would be like to be a smoker, he figured he'd smoke for a few months and than quit and maybe enjoy a cigarette from time to time. When he had taken up yoga his virtual yogi master told him that smoking counteracted everything that one was trying to do in yoga, and though one could eat meat, drink alcohol and do most any thing else in moderation, one should never smoke. So he had thrown out his Camels and moved out of his girlfriends apartment, left school and joined the CIA to either help keep America great or at least do the best he could to make the world a better place in his own covert ways.
He filled his lungs with the stale air, breathed out until his stomach constricted and tightened and that breathed in again. With all this smoke in the air it was like doing anti-yoga breathing.
It all seemed to make some kind of sense to him at one time, but he had changed and metamorphosis into a higher being and being in search of a higher enlightenment than any Buddhist monk had ever achieved, was bound to pervert or evolve ones goals.
The other part of him seemed to think that this one was thinking a little strangely, but he figured that something was up and let it pass for the time being.
The door swung open behind him.
"There's another phone next to the bar," said the bouncer.
"I am the Antiyoga."
"Be whatever-the-fuck-ya-like as long as you're no fag.
John turned away from the man, who's presence seemed to propel him into the smoky inner-chamber of the bar. The jukebox seemed to jump a few steps louder, a few faces looked up from their beer, chess and hatchet throwing games, glaring at him. This place and all of it's faces seemed to disturb him as if he were feeling someone else agitation. His face moved to the bar and followed it to the left past two woman to the other phone on the wall and than to the mans hairless hand that was holding the receiver and speaking both loud and nonchalantly at the person on the other end. It didn't look like the conversation would end any time soon, but john moved to wait behind the man. The man wore a suit, he was standing toward the wall, his hand leaning on the worn wood. His end of the conversation seemed weak and john made a point of not isolating the woman's voice on the other end. The mans utterance droned on in his ears.
He waited like this for a while and the further of the two woman at the bar began devising eye contact with him. John ignored her, beginning to move closer to the man on the phone, imposingly closer. John felt as if he had this mans mind in his hands. The man at first ignored this, but as if on cue, he soon swung around, flailing the phone away from his face.
"Do you fuckin' mind man! He yelled in a manner out of step with the clothes he wore.
The hairs stood up on johns knuckles, time seemed to slow. "I need to use the phone."
"Well you'll have to wait."
He felt the need to cease this mans phone holding wrist and squeeze, but this guy didn't seem to belong here. He decided to be cautious, think things through.
Someone begin to sharpen a Blade on a whetstone. He turned around to find a man running his knife back and forth, up and down, his eyes looked into johns in an unsettling, but playfully sort of way.
A hatchet thumped against the wall. The man who threw it yelled a fuckin' aaa and slid his arms around his blond girlfriends naked waist and pulled her to him.
The man turned around to resume his conversation.
john waited some more. He thought of his true name, it took form in his mind like some irregular shape, phonetically it only contained some of the letters of the alphabet, real to him, but he more he reached for it the more it seemed to pull away. He knew that man at the door was no gatekeeper, but a bouncer. He remembered a story where a man, or a boy needed to give the gatekeeper his true name and this would give him power over the main character of the story. His eyes again came into focus to the woman's deep brown eyes at the end of the bar and it seemed as if she was in his mind thinking his thoughts with him. Looking away, he motioned for the bartender and he took his time getting to john. He becoming impatient and started banging his hand on the bar. john caught a few people looking over in the periphery, the man on the phone didn't notice or he intentionally ignored him. The banging didn't seem to disturb the bartender, he just lingeringly finished what he was doing and came over just the same.
"What can I get you said the man from beneath his shaved balding head and from behind his dirty glasses.
Give me a pitcher of your darkest ail, sir," said john in a mock English accent.
The bartender turned and than nonchalantly handed over a pitcher of some dark German ail, his flabby arms had a black faded tattoo of the angle of death. John gave him a ten in paper and told him to keep the change. the man slid him two glasses.
"In case somebody wants you to share some of that with them."
John shrugged and nodded uncertainly as the feel of the bar began to agitate him slightly and the cigarette smoke began to make his eyes watery. It bothered him that everybody seemed to know more about what was going on than he.
As his feet carried him to a table, he remembered his recruitment. Walking through the student union, he sat at a folding table sandwiched between a table that said Marines, with a marine in dress uniform, behind it with a sword at his side and a table that said PGLBA, The Portland gay, lesbian and bisexual association. His table was one he had never seen before, it had a thin black man in a blue suit sitting behind it and the sign red CIA which did not elaborate on it's full name, knowing that it was imposing enough. It seemed that no one stopped at this table. It seemed as if this table didn't actually exist at all and that to anybody else it was some oddly placed unacademic like person waiting for him to pass.
These times were like the distant sixties all over again except that North American soldiers were all over the world and not just in Vietnam and while this was going on, the States seemed always on the brink of breaking apart into more autonomous smaller pieces, Which is what the Glams wanted to have there own tidy little states, they owned the police, but the military was still in the capitals hands and occupying half of the world.
In short these were strange and troubled times and though John had tried to transcend them with Yoga, Physical pacifism and some good old fashioned violence in virtual space. John knew that India, the home of his virtual yogi had let tigers go extinct and had dropped big bombs on people. John was confused and just seemed to want something more. The man asked him to sit down as he was still peering into a small notebook screen and then he slowly looked up to john as if he knew he were coming all along.
And as he thought these thoughts he drained a few glasses of beer glancing at the phone and the man who's conversation was going on for ever and seemed to be placed there especially to agitate john. He knew nothing as to why he was here save for needing to make a phone call. It seemed silly to him. He had barely remembered being flung from a helicopter and the whole prior day, before this night seemed lost to him. He knew had had sex with the black gloved woman on a bed of pine needles, as he pushed away he thought of them pricking into her behind, the sun was directly above them and burning the back of his neck. She moved with him at first, but he was designed to keep going until even a pro would wither and shutter behind him in something that seemed to pass for a mixture of pain, exult and a fleeting cozy feeling that today's opiates could bring in a more lasting, but less actual sense. He felt a detached brand of anger. He thought of his little cat, she was in his room now, at the lab and was probably waiting to be fed.
He reached into his pocked for a snapshot of his virtual yogi master and concentrated on his peaceful likeness. Though slanted toward the east, his face was noncultural. He seemed to be both son and father of all the peoples of the Earth, his black on black eyes looked to have beheld a millennia of truth. His references of good and evil seemed to be only a bridge from his own amity to johns more terrestrial and biased mind. john was beginning to feel calm.
A woman's hand and diamond tipped silver nail implants clawed around the handle of his pitcher, lifted it and filled up the empty glass. Foam washed over the sides. John looked up at her and from this angle, form beneath the makeup and the softness of her flesh this woman looked like an aged Mori.
"You mind if I sit." She pulled a chair and sat.
"You may as well drink my beer at my table."
"You like British ail."
"Yep."
"Ever been to England."
"No... not really... You?"
"Yeah-"
So had Mori.
"The beer is great there."
"You can get it here."
"Less alcohol." She took out and lit up a Virginia Slim. It wasn't Japanese, but thin just the same. This woman seemed an American version of Mori; her body was about the same size, thin thighs, softer stomach, fuller breasts, rounded face. Her eyes and hair were more brown than black, but there might be some oriental blood in this one. She looked as if Mori might have, had she begun to show the signs of pregnancy.
The woman's eyes never wavered from him, so john nervously glanced over her shoulder to the man on the phone. He glanced up and john thought he saw a glint of red in the mans eyes. The man smiled a sharklike fuck you smile and turned back up to the wall. John slipped the picture back into his pocked and moved to get up, but this Mori's hand came to firmly grip his wrist. It calmed him.
"What's the hurry?" Her grip tightened.
"I need to make a call."
"Sit," she said calming him more.
He sat.
"Who's the photo of." She gestured to his pocket.
"My father.
"That's nice," she said, peering into and trying to break the ice in his eyes. "I haven't seen my dad for years."
"What is your name?"
"What does it matter," she said, leaning forward, showing off her sonorous cleavage, the warmth of her hand still on his wrist. "There's a room in the back, I'm not too expensive, I just need to pay off some of my virtual life this week."
"Like your virtual rent and virtual food."
She got up and smiled. "There may even be a phone,"
He sat before her speechless, before his refinements, he was never very good at sex. Just after the foreplay, when two pairs of hands would remove all the clothes, he'd feel the beautiful warmth and silky closeness that two bodies create, he'd just clumsily get inside her, and manage one or two thrusts and in the middle of the third, the release, his body withering above a rigid, dissatisfied Mori or reasonable facsimile there of. He used to try to masturbate in the bathroom, before she got home, so he could last longer and make her happy. He used to try to detach himself from the arousal and the enjoyment, reciting the names of presidents in appropriate seriousness in his mind; Richard Nixon... Woodrow Wilson.. George Washington, to keep himself going a little longer, but-. He hated thinking about it. wondering if this Mori could read the presidents in his mind.
Her hand slid down to his, she got up, pulling john with her to lead him toward a scarred wood door that stood next to the far corner of the bar. Men's eyes looked up from their beer and games to watch them pass. John wondered how many of them had been inside of her. As the door closed behind him, he heard the thump of a hatchet hitting a wall.
The room was bare, save for a pine post bed, some empty hooks on the wall and a nightstand. There was a pre-Raphaelite painting on the wall of a redheaded woman who lay dying on a bed with others waiting around her.
"What's the matter."
"No phone."
She sauntered behind him.
"I said maybe," she said, slipping out of her shirt--he heard it flutter, trailing down to the ground
"That your painting."
A "yes," drifted over his shoulders.
"who did it."
She began massaging his shoulders, draining away some of then tension. "Dante Rosetti, he was preoccupied with the girl in the painting.
He felt a single diamond edged fingernail draw a thin line of blood across his throat.
"You like it this way?"
He stood immobile, quiet. He heard the rattle of chains. A handcuff closed around his left wrist as she softly bit the scruff of his neck.
"I can tell you do. I can read your mind."
His hand took hold of her wrist and turned her arm behind her back, he felt her shoulder pull slightly away from it's socket, bringing the sounds of muffled gravel. Her
arm was about to snap. She let out a small yelp, in pain or arousal, but seemed to take for granted that this was just part of the game and that he would soon let up. He held back and was soon about to. The handcuffs rattled, pulling at his wrist. Relaxing his grip slightly, he felt her arm loosen, pulling back into it's socket. She began to breathe more easily, but something inside wanted, to both fuck and hurt her, he wasn't quite sure of the difference.
He tried to bring in a few calming breathes, but just seemed to pull in some hot and chalky air, some smoke, some perfume. He thought of his pitcher of beer on his table outside and thought that a small drink would clear his thought even as it began to dehydrate him, but the thumping of the music and the confinement of this small pine box seemed to make things more impossible. Things seemed just chaotic, a little too much out of order. Too much disorder.
"Who the fuck are you?" he said in a harsh voice that jumped at his own ears in a way invoking great fear.
"Lisa," she said weakly, giving john her name in a way that told him she was growing frightened and ready to forfeit, to crumble, he was coming ready fuck her less harshly, possibly to just have sex now, as he calmed down a step. There was a noise at the door. His ears in a more heightened mode picked up the hum of a camera watching from behind a pinhole in the far corner of the room and he heard the snap of Lisa's thin arm, and before she could make a sound, his other hand was holding her mouth, while grabbing hold of her head, he twisted it and there was a larger snap and she crumpled to the ground, like Mori might have, before a play formed in his mind as to exactly what had happened.
The door began rattling angrily and he moved toward the sound...
His heart was beating quickly, sweat crept down his face and blood stood wet on his hands. He moved to the end of the bar, stepping over the body of a dead woman.
It was an old style pay phone that had New York Telephone in black white and blue across the top. He needed to scan the directions, steps marked 1... 2... and 3... The sound of the jukebox was overbearing. He couldn't understand how that man was talking on the phone all this time with all that noise. As he thought of destroying the Jukebox, not only it's volume but that of the man with the broken wrist and the five crushed ribs, probably even a punctured lung, was responsible for the bubbling blood coming from his mouth, John wasn't sure and this reassured him, all began to lower in volume or to be channeled away from his consciousness. As a few writhing broken peripheral figures began to fade from his notice, the phone number, revealed itself to him just as his fingers needed to find each square on the small twelve squared keyboard.
The woman's black gloved hand let the phone ring twice and she pressed the button. The small vidscreen, which was showing johns POV, danced just beyond the helicopters black tinted windshield, white noise static for an instant but a cartoon blank screen of blue veiled over it, with the black letters reading almost apologetically: AUDIO ONLY.
"Hello John," said the woman. "You just did the locals a big favor.
Silence...
"There are a few bugs to work out, but I think you are just about ready for a real assignment, but I'll have to ask you to render aid to the man with the punctured lung, he's one of ours."
"And the woman in the back?"
No reply...
He dropped the receiver which dangled and arched against a worn track against the faded paneled wall. In an act of forced restraint, he did not destroy, but unplugged the jukebox and as the first aid program began to expand in his mind, he slowly realized he was able to heal and resuscitate almost every body here.
He was lying on a bed of pine needles, on a shelf, above the icy banks of a small pond, he had been breathing slowly and deeply and doing the sponge, the punctuation of his long Yoga routine as his actions of yesterday stood vague and unreal to him like some mountains on a map. He heard a deer walking on the other side of the pond, a fish jump, a sedate breeze washed against his face and he heard Elaine's footsteps padding upon a beaten path. He thought of her black gloves. He knew that something was up, because though he hadn't heard her approach in an extra human way, he was beginning to forget what his real name was, he was once again just plain lower case john.
His true self thought of strangling her and keeping her gloves as a memento, like the deer paws, hanging high in the Renegade Honkytonk, but his mind flared red as if an implanted warning as to how impossible this action might have been.