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| Ithuriel's Spears, Chinese Houses |
(All photos April 19, 2015)
Since you still believe that what I am telling you is pure fiction, I have woven two stories together, one fictional, the other “real,” just to see if you can figure out the difference.
Friant Dam was built during the nineteen forties, the canals branching from the reservoir diverting approximately ninety-eight percent of the water from the San Joaquin River for urban and agricultural uses (about 15 percent for urban uses, the rest for agriculture). The river, which had once flowed from headwaters high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, down through the valley to the delta and into the San Francisco Bay, died at a sinkhole thanks to the dam, and the Central Valley’s wetlands, once replenished periodically by the river's overflow, dried up. A problem with drainage of agricultural wastewater began to plague the west side of the valley due to an impermeable level of clay a few feet below the soil. The drainage water, contaminated by trace elements in the soil like selenium, also contained varying levels of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and defoliants, depending on the crops. The corporations that had received the water for a fraction of its cost thanks to the taxpayers ended up convincing the government to dump the contaminated wastewater in a wildlife refuge, causing strange deformities. Many blackbirds, for instance, were born with two heads or three legs.
During the time when the problems with drainage water were becoming apparent and the city was dubbed one of the worst in the state for air pollution, my mother remarried. The city continued to receive surface water from the reservoir to recharge the aquifer but existing recharge basins were not adequate to accommodate population growth, so the farmers near the city were allotted water for irrigation under the rubric of "recharge"; they also of course used abundant chemicals on their crops. My new family consisted of my mother, my older brother (who had moved to another state), my stepfather and my stepsister. We continued drinking the water and breathing the polluted air without a second thought, and my parents paid their taxes on time.
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| Fairy Lanterns |
One weekend, my stepfather found a fishing hole in the Kings River. While my mother and stepfather fished, my stepsister and I explored the area, helping each other climb over the slippery rocks. As we were heading back, I decided to follow a different route, taking a faint path along the river instead of climbing up a steep slope, even though it appeared that our progress might be blocked by a jagged wall of rock. Finally, we came upon a small promontory that jutted into a deep pool, and we could not go any farther. I helped her over to the promontory, and we both gazed silently into the deep green water, pointing now and then at the shadow of a trout.
She was the first to turn back. She took two steps and screamed, leaping into my arms. Spiders with long, spindly legs and bulbous, spotted abdomens were crawling out of a crack in the stone, marching towards us, five, ten, twenty--they just kept coming as we scrambled up the face of the rock wall, finally stopping on a thin ledge. As we huddled together against the rock wall, I told her to close her eyes and stay still until the spiders passed, and soon a few spiders were crawling on us, their legs like tiny gentle fingers. I watched her as a spider crawled over her cheeks and eyelids, her face relaxed but absorbed in the myriad touch of the spider's legs. I was surprised that she remained so composed. I closed my eyes again, terrified at first, but then as I felt the touch of tiny gentle legs I experienced an unexpected sense of peace. The spiders passed over both of us in a minute without injecting their venom into either one of us.
I thought that we had opened our eyes at the same time before we slid down the stone wall together and dashed, laughing hysterically, up the trail on the steep slope, returning the way we had come. I realized that if we had not been so terrified, we could have just leapt over the crack and avoided the spiders altogether, and I grabbed her hand. When I revealed my insight, we both burst out laughing again. She leaned on me, giggling between gasps for breath, then screwed up her face to mimic me.
We liked to read to each other. We especially liked reading children's poems and nursery rhymes, humorously trying to "figure out" what they "really meant." One time we even wrote a poem together about a deep-sea fishing trip that we both abhorred:
DEEP SEA FISHING
Nothing would stay put in those heaves.
They stabbed and stuck, with spiny gills,
needle-like teeth; sharp fins sheared
through burlap--I wanted to murder
them there. Lingcod gorged
on snapper even in my sack,
tails protruding
from insatiable maws,
heads stuck
in dead throats--and me,
with hopeless legs, clinging
to the railing
while the deckhand chuckled,
and the whole world rolled,
unable to leap into the waves.
We acted out the poem, rocking back and forth together as we recited it for our parents, who both smiled and clapped when we were finished.
My stepsister had secretly started delving into the occult and soon tried to get me involved as well. She had obtained a deck of Tarot cards, unbeknownst to our parents, and was also reading a book on the Qabalah. One night, she tried giving me a Tarot reading.
"Do you have a question to ask the cards?" she asked.
I thought a moment. "I'd like to know what's going to develop in a special relationship that I have," I grinned, elbowing her ribs.
"Intriguing," she murmured. "Let's see what the cards reveal to us."
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| Path 29 |
She began dealing out the cards on her bed. The first card, called "The Moon," showed a lobster crawling up onto a path that emerged from the water and snaked between two towers. Near the water, on either side of the path, two canines were howling at the moon, which hovered about the path, as bright as the sun. The moon’s eyes were shut as if it were in deep concentration or meditation.
"Is that good or bad?" I asked.
"The lobster is a creature that connects your dreams with your conscious mind since it can live in the water and on land. This is a time when the moon has dominance. Your path is set, and your way is clear, but you must be careful of your bestial nature."
"Why, miss fortune-teller--you're scarin' me," I mused, making a ghostly noise and pushing her down a little toward the pillow.
"Pay attention, and don't interfere," she commanded. "This is serious."
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| Path 27 |
The next card she dealt was called "The Tower." Lightning was striking a tower and knocking off its crown. A man and a woman were falling head first out of the tower.
"Uh-oh," she muttered.
"What do you mean, 'Uh-oh?'"
"Oops, I'm not supposed to say that. Well, anyway, this means upheaval in your life. But you might benefit from it."
"How can I possibly benefit if I fall out of a tower and land on my head?"
"It'll wake you up, maybe, if it doesn't kill you," she smiled.
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| Path 31 |
The next card she dealt was called "Judgement."
I squinted at the card. "Does that mean I'm going to die and rise from the grave?"
"Look more carefully at the card, idiot. The coffins are floating in the water, a symbol of the subconscious, where your dreams come from. The souls are being reborn, rising from the confinements and limitations of the physical world into the spiritual realm. Their focus is all on the angel who is blowing the trumpet. They are sensing a greater life."
Just then we heard car doors slamming. She quickly gathered the cards together and hid them in her dresser while I dashed out into the living room, quickly turning on the t.v. and diving onto the couch as our parents stumbled through the door.
One night, our parents went out to a movie with the next door neighbors, and we were stuck at home babysitting the neighbor's six month old. She decided to take a shower while I fed the baby, who wasn't at all happy with a bottle. The baby screamed in protest, pacified by the milk only a few seconds at a time. While I was struggling to keep the bottle in the baby's mouth, smoke started pouring from the oven. I ran with the baby to the bathroom door and pounded on it with my free hand while my stepsister was blow drying her hair. She opened the door immediately and grabbed the baby before I could even yell "smoke." I rushed into the kitchen and threw open the oven door; a large patch of grease had caught on fire while an apple pie was baking. I threw baking soda on the fire, which hissed and went out immediately, and sprinted back to see how the baby was doing. My stepsister had gently placed the baby on our parents' bed. Her towel, held firmly under her armpits, covered her budding breasts but hung loosely on her buttocks, her back still moist from the drops dripping from her hair. The baby had stopped crying as my stepsister leaned over it. For the first time I wanted to touch her. I had an overwhelming urge to pull her towel away and gaze at her naked body. I stepped toward her as she picked up the baby, and she handed it to me while I grunted about a fire in the oven. She went back to the bathroom and finished blow drying her hair.
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| Ithuriels' Spears, Chinese Houses, Pretty Face |
A few days later, while I was stretched out on the couch listening to the stereo, she stomped into the room with her bathing suit on, pushed a tape into her Walkman and pressed play. She exercised intently, swinging her legs and arms as if she were fighting an invisible enemy, while I leered at her, trying not to show any surprise on my face. I got up slowly. When I took a step toward her, she began kicking her right leg back, rhythmically, following the instructions on the tape, glancing at me with a frown. My laugh, which she could not hear, was strained, as I turned and slinked out of the room.
I was still seventeen, and she had just turned fourteen. Soon, she started avoiding me. My presence was charged with an ambiguous, threatening energy, so I locked myself in my room after school every day, drawing pictures of her that I never showed anyone, writing music for her that I never sang, even going through her room when she wasn't home. At that time, I passed out occasionally from terrible headaches and intestinal pain. I didn't know that I was suffering from celiac disease that caused debilitating stomach pain and made me feel self-loathing, intense sadness and lack of connection with other people at a time when my hormones were shifting into full gear.
You see, gentle reader, confidante, psychiatrist, that was the first time I ever poisoned a relationship. I have always been in denial about my inability to function in a way that provides adequate support for the people I love. I now believe, alas too late, that it is morally wrong for a chronically ill person to have a serious relationship--unless the other person goes into the relationship with the full knowledge of what it means to be in that situation. I am not feeling sorry for myself--I am simply being honest.
No doubt John Blackmore noticed my moral and physical weaknesses at some point. I’m sure he has used them to justify his actions.
My stepsister died when my stepfather pulled out from a gas station and the car stalled. A Mac truck collided with the car, killing her instantly. While my stepfather was in the hospital in serious but stable condition, my mother and I visited the funeral home to make arrangements. The funeral director motioned us into a room with numerous wooden and metal caskets. While the director discussed prices with my mother, I stumbled into the lobby and stared at a grandfather clock, the pendulum swinging smoothly back and forth. As the pendulum swang upward I noticed her body for a moment reflected in the glass of the grandfather clock, her hands crossed over her chest.
I tiptoed into the room and stared at her face, composed but pasty, like a wax figure, her body emptied of blood and pumped full of chemicals. She did not appear at peace; instead, her face was slightly screwed up as if she were contemplating an unexpected, difficult proposition. I wanted to touch her face as gently as a spider, but I was suddenly afraid that she would move or that her ghost would appear, so I stood still, without breathing. My mother, without being specific, had claimed that she had died mainly of internal injuries, and I scrutinized her without seeing any signs that she had suffered pain. Though repulsed by the life-like aspect of her corpse, I wanted to touch her one more time. Before I could pick up her hand, my mother and the funeral director strolled out of the casket-viewing room, obviously in agreement about the arrangements. My mother and I stayed only a minute longer after she confirmed that the body looked presentable.
We had to visit the cemetery to decide what kind of vault to bury her in. One kind was cement and would last fifty years. The other vault was reinforced concrete and would last about one hundred years. The latter was twice as expensive. When asked for her decision, my mother looked flustered, started weeping, and opted for the expensive vault. I wanted to tell her that my sister didn't need any vault at all, why would she? But I didn’t say a word.
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| Ithuriel's Spears, Tarweed |
At the funeral, my stepfather got up out of his wheelchair, and my mother propped my stepfather up by the elbow. My stepfather reached into the casket and grabbed his daughter’s stiff, lifeless hand, and he would not let go. My mother stared at my stepfather's face, both of them sobbing. Next in line to view the body, I charged out of the chapel, gasping, a tear scalding my cheek, unable to go back in. I stared at the door as if it were locked or too heavy to open, until the funeral director, with a dignified, pitying smile, approached me on the sidewalk and opened the door. I stood a few feet from the casket, grimacing as tears streamed down my cheeks, until finally I tore myself away from the body.
I met my first wife in high school. She had open sores on her face from a severe case of acne, which she kept picking. She also had a haircut that made her look more like a boy than a girl. She was outgoing with a few people, revealing quickly to anyone who got within range that she hated her stepmother and that her father gave all of his attention to her pretty blonde step-sister, which seemed terribly unfair to me since I had watched a zillion hours of t.v. and was in the habit of questioning parental authority. I was attracted to her immediately.
On our second date I drove her in my late father’s Dodge to a performance of a choir at her church. The minute the performance ended we rushed out to the car and drove to Sky Harbor, a picnic area above Millerton Lake. On the way, we stopped and gazed at the sunset for a few minutes at a vista point along the road. We could see the top of Friant Dam etched between the hills, and beyond that the lights of Fresno were beginning to form a galaxy in the haze. I hugged her as the grass swayed in the gentle breeze, the crickets chirping and a woodpecker hammering the trunk of a nearby oak. At that moment, as I kissed her, a sexual charge coursed through my body, beginning with my toes and rushing into my cheeks.
(A decade later I would drive out to that point to bury the letters of my second wife below an oak tree, so filled with bitterness that I hardly cared that I had stopped there once many years before; I wanted only to rid myself of every last trace of the woman who had ruined me and terrorized my son. Then, twenty five years after that first stop, I returned again at sunset, the Dodge junked long ago, my father and stepsister in a cemetery that I no longer visited, my first wife remarried and living in San Diego, my son attending college. The grass swayed in a gentle breeze, the crickets chirped, and a woodpecker hammered the trunk of a nearby oak while I gazed at the lights of Fresno in the distance.)
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| Chinese Purple Houses |
Our son was born nine months and two days later. The hospital room was cool, dim, undecorated. The nurse, cold and uncommunicative, seemed unaware that she would be remembered for a life time. Knowing nothing about the author, I read Kafka short stories between contractions and held my wife’s hand during the many long moments of agony. In the delivery room, the light glared on the tile and the stirrups and the metal table, the black doctor spoke with a German accent, and the nurse provided the doctor with a huge needle that he inserted into her vaginal area. My son's head emerged quickly, and the nurse groaned, muttering that something was wrong. The rest of his body soon followed, covered by a slimy cheesy substance. The doctor clipped off the placenta as if he were cutting off a toe or a finger. The nurse took prints of feet and thumb and handed the baby to his mother, who was weeping uncontrollably. The nurse mentioned that the baby had a harelip and cleft palate, which meant nothing to me, then she checked on the spelling of the name. I stood in my hospital gown with the mask still across my face, noticing the odd clefts in his top lip, the gum beneath the nose balled like a tiny head and blanketed by the thick skin extending from the nostril. I had a bizarre suspicion that all babies were born that way but that nobody ever mentioned it. The nurse reiterated that our son had a bilateral harelip and cleft palate, which still seemed Greek to me, and claimed that our son would be seeing a doctor very soon as she left the room. My wife continued weeping while I stood there awkwardly, finally taking the baby in my arms.
We occupied a tawdry one bedroom apartment in the El Dorado District, also known as Sin City, in the Twentieth Century Apartments. Neither of us had a job at first, but my wife soon found employment as a seasonal employee with the Internal Revenue Service as a file clerk. I stayed home and took care of the baby. Even though I cut a large X into the top of all the nipples, it often took more than an hour to feed the baby with the bottle. I would sit naked in the rocking chair because it was so hot, while my wife slept, the feedings usually at eleven, two and four-thirty in the morning. I was still painfully shy and seriously depressed and didn't mind that we never went out. I was also suffering from the inability to digest milk and wheat; all I knew, however, was that something was clogging my plumbing, trapping gas and making it impossible for me to belch. Every now and then while feeding the baby I would have to wake up my wife and go into the bathroom and throw up just to clear my digestive system a little.
The landlord unexpectedly knocked on the sliding glass door one day with an offer. We could live in a two-bedroom unit rent free if we would manage the apartment complex. Since we were not making ends meet on what she earned at the IRS, we agreed.
Around this time, the baby had his first operation: The doctor stitched up the bilateral harelip. After two days, however, the tension in the lip proved too great; the stitches began unraveling at the bottom. We immediately phoned the doctor, but it was Saturday and we could only contact his exchange. As we were driving down the street to the hospital, the baby began squealing. My wife unbuckled the baby from the car seat and placed him face down on her lap, the baby's favorite position for sleeping, trying to position the head so his upper lip would not touch her leg. Suddenly the baby let out another scream. Blood was spurting onto the diaper that covered her lap. The lip on one side had ripped like cloth all the way up to the nostril. The baby wailed for a few minutes longer but calmed down before we reached the hospital. The plastic surgeon stitched up the lip again. A week later the lip came apart because the doctor had not waited long enough for the lip to heal before stitching it together.
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| Hooker's Onion |
However, the new couple did not pay their rent on time the first month; in fact they only paid a fraction of the rent by the deadline. They swore up and down that they would get the money to us later on in the month but only paid another forty dollars. The next month they didn't pay anything at all. In fact, the under-aged girlfriend came to the door and asked for a few dollars to feed her children; she was dressed in a ratty housecoat with holes large enough to reveal bare skin underneath. I forked over ten dollars. She returned two days later in the same housecoat, and I told her no, I had no money, which was the truth. Grimacing, she stumbled away, pulling the housecoat tightly around herself. After the deadline the third month, the owner instructed us to provide the delinquent tenants with a three day eviction notice.
I filled out the form in triplicate and knocked on the sliding glass door, the only door to the apartment. The tenant, skeletal and pale, pulled it open, his eyes magnified by the thick lenses in his glasses. In the front room a black Harley leaned against a wall and two sickly children sat on a futon on the floor in front of a television. The only other furniture was a small table with no chairs in the kitchen. The tenant screamed at me to get the hell away from his door, using a few other choice words, and threatened to burn down the apartment complex if I ever came by again. The tenant then wadded up the eviction notice, tossed it on the ground, and slammed the door shut.
This came as a surprise to me. I had expected the tenant to be reasonable. I called the owner and described the tenant's reaction, suggesting that the owner call the police and complain about the threat. The owner called back in a few minutes and claimed that the police wouldn't do anything. That afternoon I picked up garbage around the parking garage since I hadn't spent a lot of time cleaning up the complex. All afternoon I felt oppressed by the chain link fence with barbed wire that the owner had placed across the back of the apartments in lieu of garage doors. I felt like I was trapped in a refugee camp. I was free to leave but had nowhere else to go. We would all stay until the bitter end.
That evening through my window I watched the owner chat with the evicted tenant. The tenant made a sweeping motion with his arm, and the owner frowned, staring at the ground, digging his hands deeper into his pockets. They were not arguing, and when the owner turned to leave, the tenant stooped down to inspect a broken sprinkler. The next day at eight in the morning, the owner called to tell me that I was no longer manager. I could see the formerly evicted tenants moving into the other two bedroom unit after I hung up the phone.
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| Ithuriel's Spears, Fairy Lanterns |
That evening when I got back to the apartment, I spent an hour meditating and envisioned a tall white tower with two people, a man and a woman, falling out of it. I went to my closet, remembering that my stepsister had let me borrow a New Age book, along with a book on the Tarot, a few weeks before she died. I remembered the cover was blue or green and the front showed a man sitting in the lotus position. My closet library was in complete disorder, so I had to rummage a few minutes before I found it. CHAKRAS was the name of the book, which was blue all right, and strangely the man sitting in the lotus position was also blue. Six circles were spaced at intervals along an invisible central pillar corresponding to the man's spine, and the man had a many petaled rainbow-colored flower as a hat, or what might be mistaken as a shower cap.
I noticed a green star in the heart center, formed by interlocking triangles, one pointing upward and the other downward--the Star of David. I remembered the same symbol in a glyph my step-sister had shown me before she died in the car accident. What was it called? The Tree of Life, a symbol of ten different spheres or states of being which had emanated from the one pure Source of being. The Tree, I remembered, represented man and God, both microcosm and macrocosm. The symbols on the Tree resembled the chakras, except that they were arranged in three pillars, not one.
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| Ithuriel's Spears |
Ever since her death I had found it impossible to believe in the existence of the soul or in any rational order in the universe. I looked at my books stacked on one another, the ones on top threatening to cascade down to the floor. They were more like junk than a collection of the greatest wisdom and imaginings of the human race. Suddenly I saw a book that my step-sister had given me as a gift, called THE MYSTICAL QABALAH. On the cover was the Tree of Life. As I gazed at the cover, tears streamed down my cheeks. I hadn't noticed the book in years. I had begun reading it several days before my stepsister died and had never finished it, the descriptions of the different spheres seeming nonsensical to me at the time.
I looked at the spheres in the central pillar. The second sphere from the bottom represented the astral plane, my sister had explained, called Yesod. There was a naked man standing in the middle of the sphere with a moon over his left shoulder. The sphere was violet, a rainbow forming its border. "You just like looking at naked men," I had joked when she pointed it out to me. Now I realized that the naked man represented the spirit in a particular state of being, the rainbow representing the aura, all of these associations bubbling up into my conscious mind from seemingly out of nowhere.
"What do you do when you discover that you have an eternal soul?" I asked out loud, another tear sliding down my cheek.
The next morning my wife heard screams from the apartment of the new managers. She picked up the phone and dialed 911 after I had jokingly suggested that we call the police. She informed the police that someone was getting beat up. In fact, the new manager was yelling, threatening to shoot his buddy (the one who had helped him get the apartment) for sleeping with his girlfriend. Someone else had also dialed 911. Before the police arrived the new manager's buddy threw open the door and ran out in cut offs, screaming at the top of his lungs. He was never seen at that apartment complex again. The police arrived a few minutes later, leveling shotguns at the door. After the police entered the apartment, they tossed the place for drugs and guns and handcuffed the new manager, encouraging him to proceed a little faster to the car by butting him with their rifles.
A detective knocked on my door and asked if I knew anything about the person who had been threatened, describing him as a white male, with a ponytail, Fu-manchu mustache and no chin. He was wanted in connection with the robbery of a 7-11 two months earlier. I told the detective that I knew this guy would try to get high on everything, even downing whole bottles of vitamin C for a rush, and that, according to one source, the guy beat his girlfriend (who had also disappeared) practically every night. The detective gave me his card and told me to call if I saw the suspect again. I did see the suspect again two years later on the street with the same girlfriend. After chatting for a minute with the suspect, I couldn't help smiling, and Mr. Fu-manchu got a wild look in his eye and hissed, "Are you laughing at me?" As the conversation disintegrated, the girlfriend stepped in (a role she was obviously used to, or at least good at), and we managed to part without any further loss of dignity (and without any loss of blood).
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| Ithuriel's Spears, Tarweed |
After the police left that day, I inspected the apartment of the Fu-manchu suspect. The door was unlocked, so I walked right in. The place was trashed, with cigarette ashes and dirt and food on the floor, every room littered with beer cans and permeated by a vaguely urinous odor. Something was missing: some reason that had brought us all together for a few months in one apartment complex, leaving nothing but trash. I surrendered to the cushionless couch, musing about why my son had been born with a birth defect. (The doctors couldn't supply a satisfactory explanation, only something about the defect being caused potentially by many different factors, environmental and genetic, even though the defect had not shown up before on either side of the family). I trudged back to my apartment as grass was sprouting in the cracks in the sidewalk and weeds were flourishing in the flower bed, the dandelion seeds slowly drifting across the lawn.
After we moved, my wife complained more and more that I didn't wash the dishes or take out the garbage often enough. One night, as I was feeding the baby, she railed at me for writing songs while other people walked all over us, for forcing her to support them, for doing nothing to keep us from going down the tubes financially. She was right. I could only sit on the couch cradling the baby as it sucked the bottle while she screamed at me. I had poisoned her against me.
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