Going Home

When Charlie moved into the shed on the morning of the 21st January 2021, it was raining furry animals and didn’t look like stopping anytime soon. The date was significant, being his seventy-seventh birthday. Charlie hated rain, damp, cold and dreamed of being in a Sri Lankan beach hut with a beautiful native woman. This not being the case, he made do with settling into his new home and making it as cosy as he could. The shed was ten by eight and contained the following items. A fold up bed that turned into a chair. A desk come bureau that was compact yet adequate. Shelves holding various items needed to maintain a modest style of existence, tinned food etc. Shelves holding prized possessions, books, nick nacks. A small, yet efficient, wood-burning stove on slate slabs for both heat and cooking. Three  windows that let in whatever light was available. An old afghan rug that had seen better days. A medium chest filled with assorted clothing. A paraffin lamp and tiny battery operated radio.

 Charlie lit his stove which duly roared and crackled, sat in his bed-chair, lit up old faithful, his pipe, with ‘Moghul Dusk’ and puffed to his heart’s delight. It had been an eventful life and wasn’t over yet. Of course, the trials of age and decrepitude were irksome and at times, of some concern. His recent visit regarding the cancer was what he had expected.

Charlie’s mind was a sanctuary to order and simple solicitude. Having worked in various servile establishments all of his adult life, surviving with little or no defects to his bonhomie and joi de vivre, he was a man content in his skin, able to meander through the maze of existence with little dust accumulating upon his sanguine shoulders. Relations with women, as far as he was concerned, had always been honourable, filled with love, learning and vast quantities of laughter. Of course, there had been arduous times yet never without reason and always came with lessons that were salient. Why he was alone at this present juncture God only knew and Charlie trusted God implicitly. If he wasn’t meant to be with someone it had to be right. For now.

His relationship with the divine was as with an old, somewhat curmudgeonly friend. Someone who was always coming round at unexpected moments when Charlie needed space, or even worse, those rare occasions he might be entertaining. The Lord seemed sublimely unaware of proper timing. Of course, it was a double bluff Charlie had accustomed himself to, learning to ride the wave of serendipitous ‘accidentally on purpose’ revelations.

It was at this precise moment in the space time continuum that Dolores knocked at his door. As anyone with a modicum of hutzpah may know, Dolores is a name of Latin origin and roughly translates to ‘Of the sorrows’. Names being highly significant in the human psycho drama, it was to prove to be somewhat apposite yet, mysteriously intangible, tantalising. Dolores was no other than the Goddess, the one and only, the divine in female form, come to test and tribulate the entity residing within the aging corpus of our hero. The Goddess was dressed in furs and satin adorned with brocades that glistened, tumbled as stars in the firmament of her flame-red tassels.

Charlie wasn’t sure for a moment what was going on. Perhaps she was a lunatic, a drunk, a vagrant, although she seemed far too splendid in style and motion to be so described. He looked at her and waited for his brain to make some movement, some semblance of formality, some embarrassing yet reasonable approach to cogitation that might give a clue. Nothing happened. Dolores entered his pupils with her adamantine gaze and sought his jelly fear, the girding globular crux lurking in a morass somewhere deep down amidst the glistening viscera;  unimaginable vortices, channels that do what they do and there she waited.

A songbird piped up a melancholy air through the sheeting deluge and laughed at Charlie’s opacity, his blank confusion, his look of apoplectic torpor. Finally, a vague smile seemed to arise from some faint memory perhaps, lighting the rest of his hirsute, well-worn visage. He managed a feeble ‘Hello.’ to which Dolores winked, lithely slid past her victim into the sanctum sanctorum, lounged on the Afghan by the wood-burner and made herself at home. Charlie closed the door against the storm and shivered. His brain was not computing, yet a virility of blood and manliness ran down a green hill athwart and meandered to pastures that needed no memory, no wondering. He turned and gazed at the glorious creature in his den, who somehow seemed as dry as his kindling.

            ‘Who are you?’

Delores smoked a thin cheroot and brought out a snifter from an emerald clutch... and snifted. She gave Charlie the stare and he was speechless. She smiled and he managed to flump down in his chair.

            ‘I’m every woman you’ve ever loved, Charles Maguire. I’m here to take you home.’

Charlie saw himself gazing, knew he was listening clearly, yet the idea came to him that maybe he was already dead and he wondered how it had happened. Perhaps he’d fallen into the ditch behind the shed, the one he threw all the spare wood into, or maybe he’d slipped in the rain and bashed his head. It didn’t seem to matter. He’d long ago made peace with death and felt no regret at its inevitability. Besides, what possible use was there in regret. He’d lived a useful, pleasant enough life. No children but plenty of love and a fair bit of fulfilment. There was a sense, recently, that he was approaching the cliff edge yet he had no compunction to end the game prematurely. The final moment... would he be conscious for that oxymoron?

            ‘How quaint. I’d always thought Death would be more ominous somehow. Are you sure you have the right person?’ He filled his pipe, relaxed far more perhaps than he should for someone in his position, deciding that she was a lunatic after all. ‘What shall I call you?’

            The Goddess spoke and Charlie imbibed her tones, her sensuous vibrations. He was, as many men in similar contexts, a simpering child, a fool who’d never learnt the first thing about outer beauty and the dangers thereto, no matter how many excruciatingly painful lessons. The Buddha may have pointed to the earth as a sort of grounding of his undoubted normal sexuality, being only mortal, as a way of earthing his lust, projected into scintillating form, and rightly come to test his enlightened state. That early version of creation spawned myths with gay abandon, embedding their stamp, technicolour sediments upon a future humanity to look back upon in astonished befuddlement and ignorance. Myths that shook the realms of Man and his children, his woeful progeny to pause in sublime anticipation. What of? The roaring silence. The peace that does not pass, but stays, it being a corollary of silence, a cousin, nay, a sibling joined at the hips. Of course, Gautama could have loved his glorious female projection. Instead he pointed to the ground. Being even in his infinite nothingness, a product of patriarchy etched into his fibre, into his manhood that would not rise to the occasion... why? Out of wisdom, love, profundity? What more profound lesson to send his sons than to make love with the feminine aspect of his own lust and... pacify it? Nope. Blame woman. Perhaps he should have wandered further East and bumped into that buffoon, that laughing clown who fled on the back of an ass to signify his utter frustration at the imbecility of existence. He who relayed so simply, ‘Know the male, but keep to the female .’ Unite in a harmony of dance that knows no sorrow.

            ‘Dolores.’ She offered Charlie the hip flask. He took it as from a dear and cherished friend.

            ‘This is good.’ He gave it back and watched her, watched her every move, every shape of her and waited with enjoyment in all his being.

            ‘You’re having too much fun, Charlie. Aren’t you afraid?’ He took his time before answering.

            ‘A little, but far more fascinated, intrigued, exhilarated.’ He leaned forward. ‘What’s the story? What happens now? Do we vanish and wake up somewhere else? Do I have to go through trials?’ Charlie got up and placed more logs in the burner.

            ‘You’ve made it nice in here.’

            ‘It’s suits. Only just moved in but as you know everything what’s the point of the pleasantries, Delores?’ Charlie lay back, took a puff on old faithful and closed his eyes. The doctor had been kind with his ‘Plenty of years’. Not that he was finished. There was still life in the old mongrel, but it wasn’t the body, the blessed coil, it was something else. A knowing he’d always understood, respected since childhood. Romany blood has a way of coursing through the years to make itself heard. It can’t be avoided.

            ‘God, Charlie, you’re so implacable it borders on the boring.’

            ‘Depends on the situation. Sometimes, boredom is the most beautiful of possibilities, at others it can be a bottomless pit of despair. As to the notion of anything being boring per se, surely a divine being is far beyond the need for earthly ignorance wrapped up in tinsel and adrenaline.’

            ‘The Gods play, Charlie. All the time.’

            ‘Then they are unworthy of the nomenclature. But again, as my friend Einstein was fond of saying, “Everything is relative.” Definitions are hazardous yet seemingly unavoidable in this duality. Now, unless you have something to relate, delectable Delores, it’s time for my siesta.’ Charlie laid his pipe down with care, settled into his chair as comfortably as it would permit and waited.

            ‘I know your views on imagination but surely there must be something you’d like to ask. Perhaps a wish to be gratified, a certain question resolved that has been lingering for a few decades?’ Dolores seemed a little piqued for a deity, yet one could never tell with such sublime entities what’s real or otherwise. Take the outward appearance of Jesus with the taxmen. To ordinary mortals it would suggest that a man of God has anger in his frame. This ignorance is understandable, yet to those who are in the loop, the appearance of anger is merely a gesture; one that has no inner drive, no emotional force behind it. Saviours, after all, are merely thespians in disguise. Charlie knew the being before him was capable of untold divine duplicity and it was always best in such instances to hold something back and he did. A smile of having scored the first point appeared behind his whiskers. The gleam of mischief sparkled in his Irish eyes.

            ‘The thing is, Delores, what do I need? I have more than enough and I’m ready and willing to meet the void. Do I care about the demons of the Bardo? Am I able to withstand the blinding light of Krishna in his glory? Is there anything apart from the brain’s hallucinations and chemical alleviation of the final nothing? How do I know unless I experience it? So come on, out with your petty shenanigans and tell me what it is you’re here for directly or be on your way.’

            ‘Charles Finley Maguire, you’re a peebrained dimwit and an unscholarly numbskull to boot. I’m here to offer you all of my love, passion, all of my wisdom, fecundity. Have you nothing but the fear of extinction is beyond your measly ken? What’s happened to you? Where’s the diver into the murk who never stopped at the gates of hell but leaped over with gusto and a grin on his chops?’ Charlie chuckled and looked into the fire of his wood burner.

            ‘I’ve grown old, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’ He paused and gazed at his guest with adoring eyes. ‘Well, there you have it, Dolores, I’m tired. I’ve done everything I need to do...’

            ‘Everything?’

            ‘All that I can and believe me, I know my limitations. I know my karmic abilities and potentials.’

            ‘And sexual desire?’

            ‘What about it?’ Charlie’s eyebrows puckered at the mention of the subject. A distant gleam rose from obsidian depths.

            ‘Is that ancient well dried up, Charlie?’

            ‘Never believe a man who says so. Are you offering your whiles, Dolores? This chair opens into a slim little mattress that would just about take your ample beauty and I, as you know full well, am a man like billions of others.’

            ‘Maybe.’ Dolores paused, kept Charlie’s gaze and the two of them waited and breathed awhile. The silence was golden and sparkled. ‘I’m not sure your heart can cope with the experience. How about when you were twenty eight? That was a good year for you. The year of the spirit and the shining.’ Charlie was about to protest that he wasn’t interested in the multidimensional aspects of creation but it was too late. He wasn’t in his shed anymore. The cold and rain had vanished. He was in the picture postcard of his dreams. A beach somewhere, perhaps the South Pacific, it didn’t matter. It may have been a Hollywood set, the dark side of the moon, an unknown star in the Beta quadrant. You know the place. It’s in your top one hundred. The warmth. The smell of heat. The white sand and all the other epithets of glorious colour, sound, and something else; disbelief at the stunning beauty of the earth.

             ‘Now entertain conjecture of a time...’ Charlie was in a hammock, swinging gently. He was tanned and muscular, hair was blonde from the rays. His youthfulness emanated, drank at the portals of elan vital.

            ‘Dolores... why am I naked?’ It wasn’t really a question and certainly not aimed at anyone. The sea murmured back as he gazed at the approaching mirage. Out of the shallows she rose, similarly untrammelled by habiliments. She sauntered, meandered, dallied through the loving water with a dance, a song, a poem in every movement.

            ‘I don’t know, Charlie, do you want some speedos?’

            And so time was spent in wonder and a blessed emptiness that needed nothing, nothing but the enjoyment of the fruits of the earth. A nothing that obliterated thought. Charlie closed his eyes and the nothing was there and he slept. He slept for a hundred years or maybe a thousand. The tides rolled over his bones and swept away his memory. The sun and the moon jigged, had children out of a union that was superfluous. The children moved on, changed their forms and people populated the earth and died in their billions. The day waned and stars popped into their places, beamed. Out of their twinkling came a sound, a moan, a cry for understanding, a longing for completion.

            Charlie awoke and walked barefoot to the water’s edge. He was dressed in suitable attire; white, loose fitting summer casuals. He couldn’t see Dolores and it came to his mind he might never see her again and that was alright. He walked and wondered about his life and the lives of others he had known and loved and wondered who they were and why they were and there was no end, no answer to any of it. Everything is a mystery and a bafflement and nothing is real. Or so he thought and to call it thought is to overlay what is gossamer, to define opacity needlessly. The lines that crisscross between the real and the other vanished with the gentle sway of the shore and its lapping that sang the same song over a million billion years.

            ‘She was lovely and fair as a rosebud in summer,

             But twas not her beauty alone that won me.

             Oh, no, twas the truth in her eyes fondly gleaming

             That made me love Mary, the rose of Tralee.’

After a mile or so, a figure appeared in the distance, an old Tuareg woman. Four foot nothing and a face hidden beneath the black covering of her tribe. She spoke with a nasal twang that grated on Charlie’s ears, yet he listened as she told him, in Tuareg, of his betrayal of woman, his duplicity in relationships, his lack of honouring the feminine. Finally, she spat a dark goblet of hawked phlegm before his feet and wandered on. Charlie watched her fade away into the distance and continued with his meandering. After another mile he paused, swam to a boat that was moored in the shallow waters and slept in its gentle sway.

On waking, his grandfather, Seamus Maguire was busy in the boat with a rod and line. Slipping the eye of a worm through with the crisp, shiny, silver hook, he wiped the surplus gunge from the creature’s innards onto his sailor’s denims, smiled, twisting his tongue with his efforts. Seamus was a man of few words and prone to the ball of malt. The gleam of drunkenness was upon his glassy eyes. They were deep and sparkled with the Maguire mischief Charlie had inherited.

             ‘Did you think you’ll get away with your usual scheming and bluster, Charlie boy?’ Seamus threw the line into the still water with a lackadaisical effort that seemed to bely his masterly worm murdering. He leaned back against the side of the small boat, a nineteenth century, twenty-foot German affair with a small mast and rudder. ‘Have you no idea at all why you’re here and where you are?’

            ‘An old lush of a grand daddy who never caught anything but a cold is asking me the where’s and why fore’s. I’m waiting for the denouement and have nothing to add to the insanity of the situation.’ Charlie lay easily in the stern and watched his father’s father with a bemusement, a fondness that brought warmth. ‘Tell me what you’re here for, old dad and don’t mess with the mystification. I’m ready to hear all sorts of nonsense if it has a bearing on the present calamity.’

            Seamus opened a hamper by his side, threw Charlie a wrapped meat pie, tucked into another, opened a bottle of something dark and musty, took a good swig and handed the bottle  to his grandson. He picked up the fishing rod, munching his mouthful of pie and old whiskey, looked out towards the horizon. His face a ripe apple covered in bristles. Gaps in his mouth showed where teeth must once have been, a long time past.

            ‘The bastards never make it easy, Charlie. You might think this is only about yourself and that wouldn’t surprise me, knowing the self-obsessed, vainglorious runt you are, but there are more things in heaven and earth, me old darling.’

            ‘Grandpappy, you don’t sound like an angelic being to me. You’re as miserable as when you lived and breathed. I’m wondering why you’re appearing in that decaying corpse and not Michelangelo’s David.’

            The waves of a friendly, warm wind brushed their acquaintance and they paused to savour its breath. Paused to connect with the intimacy of the moment, reflect, each in his manner, look at one another as actual beings in this awful cosmos that is so glorious and chaotic. Gunslingers before the final showdown, they looked at one another with a composition meriting the direction of Carol Reed, or maybe a young Hitchcock. The eyes searched, found nothing and both returned to the pie.

            ‘This is delicious. I know it’s all make believe, Grand Pappy but then, what isn’t?’ Seamus gave no response, chewed his ball of pie around his gob. Charlie swallowed another portion, wiped his lips with his hand, laughed at his grandfather and his grandfather caught the strain and joined in with abandon.

            ‘Well, you  charlatan, you slouch of weasel made human, I’ll be seeing you.’ Seamus rose with a strength belying his demeanour, jumped into the shallow water that reached his knees and strode magnificently out to sea. Charlie watched as the appearance of his blood kin seemed to vanish with the shimmer of the water and the electric light on the horizon’s rim. He knew and he didn’t and he wasn’t bothered and he was. Grandpappy stirred the delicious porridge of a past that needed not to be cooked, let alone eaten. Wild as Kilkenny mountain scrub land, a legend of the troubles, Grandpappy was not someone Charlie would ever  consider as a harbinger, an emissary and yet here he was, if only apparitionally, seemingly alive to the ridiculousness of the dilemma. Perhaps that was what made Charlie eschew the facts without trepidation. Here was an anomaly embedded into his body politic. If he was dead, the theory sauntered, then there was nothing for it and if he wasn’t, all the better. In matters metaphysical, Charlie was nothing if not laid back. Happiness is a form of insanity the Greeks had concluded, as it was so ephemeral, the consequences of an existence mired in inimical spontaneity, mayhem, could only be the result of a similar malaise on the part of the creator’s psychology. Charlie reached with his right hand to his breast pocket, laid his index and thumb upon the dry, familiar tones of the Havana that waited for the moment to aspire and effervesce. The air resonated with cigar molecules sifting into his nasal cavities, his nostrils flared with delight. A wave of melancholia crackled into Charlie’s frame and he smiled. The lips rise at an angle that cannot be gainsaid, cannot be overdone. Too much and a grimace contorts the visage psychotically, calling to presence a demonic alter ego, a shaft of darkness that electrifies nerve endings into an untimely, somewhat sickening manner. A tad too little and the lachrymal glands seem to start their downward trajectory, free-flow in stinging manner. Centre stage lies the unmistakable dignity of a loving arch. Why? Why does this ever so slight upward mobility of the corners of a gob conceived in glorious practicality and logic for digestion and communication, imply a sentiment of profound arrival? Charlie mused and had lit the cigar early on in the proceedings. Pondering was made famous by the Irish. To wit, the poets of his fathers, drunken romantics that flew from Woman into the malt and the musing.

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.[1]

As he turned back from gazing at the mist his Grandpappy had become, there she was again, Delores, this time with garments on her golden frame, a short summer frock and bonnet, vermillion scarf, dark glasses. No shoes. Charlie smiled a bright set of perfect whites and sat beside her.

            ‘Dolores, you’re a sight for clear eyes. When does it begin?’

            ‘What, exactly?’

            ‘The interrogation?’

            ‘It doesn’t. That’s not why you’re here, Charlie.’

            ‘What then?’

            ‘It’s up to you.’

            ‘Up to me?’

            ‘Hm, hm.’

            ‘I have to start.’

            ‘If you wish.’

            ‘And if I don’t?’

            ‘You have all this.’

            ‘Is that it?’

            ‘Whatever you want.’

            ‘What about you?’

            ‘Whatever you want.’

            Charlie paused. A frown snaked his forehead. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind. He wasn’t sure what he’d had in mind but this wasn’t it. Where was he, what was going on and what were the rules? Perhaps he really had fallen, was in a coma. If that was the case what had he to lose by playing along with his damaged mind and who was he to say it was damaged? Too many unknowns. Charlie loved mystery, the unknown, at least he’d professed, believed he did. Here it was in all its technicoloured profusion. It seemed a little ominous, disconcerting. Somewhat demonic. To not know one’s part in a world of chaos and possibilities was one thing, to not know anything about anything was something else.

            ‘Who are you, Dolores? Don’t give me the usual Hollywood guff. I want the truth.’

            ‘Are you sure now, Charlie?’

Charlie knew the weight of the question and paused to savour it. The mind is a sanctuary full of demonic presentiments that are perhaps imaginary. In fact, he pondered, perhaps the mind itself is imaginary. A word such as ‘mind’ can encapsulate a miasma of droplets, multifarious raindrops, technicoloured, opaque, or cataclysmic in their horror at the mere idea, the mere whisper of the possibility of existence as a reality. To whom, and whence and where? What is anything? Then there’s the minutiae and the macrotia. Do they intermingle, co-exist? ‘Is all that we do or seem but a dream within a dream?’ And who cares? Basically, who cares? The Buddha? The Boddhisatva? Krishna? Christ? All the saints and martyrs and the little people... what about the little people? They are as numerous as the grains of sand that make a mountain... the past lives, present and future and who says what means anything? What are the laws? Physics? Hah! Physics vanishes up its own arse until nobody gives a fuck or a rocket to Mars. A new form of eco-brainwashed generation has grown up in a dead and dying panorama that has no meaning other than hedonistic pleasure, while what’s left of civilisation eviscerates into molten lava and ash. You can look through both ends of a telescope and the thing is the one instrument. What one looks at is either this or that and who gives a shit? The person looking?  And has he/she defecated recently and how did he/she wipe her/his arse? Did they self-define and did they have a clue as to what the ‘self’ is? And who gives a faeces? The little people? What about the others? What about the big people and what makes them big? Karma. All is Karma and nothing can be what it is not and everything is what it is and there is only love and death and both are the one mystery, ineffable, unknowable... except by those that know. Or maybe not.

            ‘Sock it to me, Dolores.’

            ‘It seems there’s been an error in accounting.’

            ‘I’ve seen the film. Niven. Useless actor. As palatable as a limp lettuce.’

            ‘A minor demi-God in the sixth heaven entered a hypnogogic state with unforeseen results. Usually there are a million and one checks, protocols that are in place for such an occurrence, but every few million years a glitch is thrown accidentally on purpose, a sort of non-accidental accident. Of course, it’s not an accident but deemed to be as near as can be in the ineffable mind of the unknown. All possibilities are obviously seen and known before they are manifested, yet even the unknown can occasionally throw up a double blind that allows for possibilities beyond the possible and impossible. But not really, so to speak.’

            ‘I had her, I had her I had her aye ay...’. Charlie nimbly leapt into the crystal water and swam and swam and dove for a while and there she was, Delores. She was in the boat and somehow underwater at the same time and she was in his head and he knew her and she knew him and there was nothing to say. Charlie was feeling hungry. He swam back to the shore, walked to the shack that had appeared, ordered a steak, chips and a Scandinavian larger. The waiter was a little Indian street urchin about twelve or so. You could never truly guess an urchin’s age. He could be thirty. His name was Aarnav, shortened to Arnie, spoke impeccable English with a ridiculous upper class accent, occasionally going into Dick Van Dyke cockney. Charlie took the only seat available and was reading ‘The House at Poo Corner’ when Arnie returned his order, laying it with exaggerated panache on the tacky plastic table.

            ‘Anything else, sir? Perhaps a little company?’

            ‘Bugger off, you dirty, little runt.’ Charlie smiled as he said this and tucked into his steak with gusto. Arnie sat and watched as Charlie munched and seemed untroubled by his rudeness. ‘If you’re about to start with the karma debt eating dead animals brings about, I’ll wallop you.’

            ‘My favourite is Sri Lankan mutton curry, old stick. I suppose you know none of that debt business matters here. It’s all off the record, so to speak. You can do what you bloody well like. Have a hareem, young girls, boys, old ones, depending on one’s fancy. Thing is, old man, nothing’s out of bounds here. It’s a sort of Disney Land paradise.’

            Charlie swigged his larger in gulps, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, burped, opened the cigar box on the table, took out a Padron and placed it under his nose, smelling for the sickly, sweet scent of authenticity. Arnie ran round with a golden lighter. Charlie lay back in his chair and inhaled.

            ‘It’s not generally done to inhale, old stick.’

            ‘I told you to bugger off.’ Arnie beamed a smile of black broken teeth and ran away singing in aforementioned cockney:

            On the road to Mandalay,
            Where the flyin'-fishes play,
            An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

A green mist appeared about a foot or so above the horizon and shimmered translucently. Charlie watched as a fly landed on his nose, he buzzed it off automatically. He looked at his hands, his arms, the rest of his body. In a dream one has little time to reconcile what one is thinking, seeing, doing. Here was a dream that appeared, to all intents, to be as real as whatever usual reality consists of. A conscious awareness of being in the present and awake, able to cogitate, surmise, imagine, make sense to a degree. Yet not enough to truly know what the hell was going on or where he was. The disconcerting state of not giving a damn and being pleasantly content, lacking any stress regarding the predicament was not lost on Charlie. A weight had been removed. The weight of something called incertitude, a numbing despair. The usual proclivity for human psychology to be undeniably in constant fear at one’s mortality was gone. The shimmering in his purview seemed to be coming closer, transforming, morphing into a vista that appeared to be taking shape quite close, say about twenty yards from the beach-bar where he sat and sipped his larger. It was an old Moroccan souk with all the colour, flurry of market stalls, sellers, suitably attired locals who ogled Charlie in various ways. Some whispered conspiratorially, some laughed ominously, or so it seemed to Charlie and most ignored him. The smell of animal carcasses and the hum of flies mixed in a sickly manner with the aromas of various incense and created a desire to urge in Charlie’s delicate viscera. The square abounded with cafe stalls filled with small, dark Moroccan, men drinking green tea and smoking hubble-bubbles. 

Out of the darkness of distant alleyway came a man dressed in white with a fez, smoking a cheroot. He smiled at all before him and walked with a surety, a gait that spoke of leisure, power. Approaching Charlie, he sat in the chair now waiting for him, caught the eye of Arnie carrying a silver platter with distinction and years of practice. He rotated the platter on a digit, winked at the man in white, proceeding to bring two lagers on his platter to their table along with some pistachio nuts.

            ‘Have you been here long?’

He was, of course, the Fat Man from Casablanca. Charlie took out the silver cigar case that was in his jacket pocket and lit up a Camel. The smoke was good in his lungs, having waited patiently a few years for the experience, he savoured it before thinking of a reply. The sun was high, hot, and sweat a reality in this other reality. Charlie wondered why. It trickled coolly down his left arm-pit and vanished somewhere. The right arm-pit had not formed such a droplet yet. Where do the droplets go? The pores of the arm-pits are of a different hue and resilience than most of the body’s other skin textures, yet all was perfect, synchronous. The follicles of hair in this universe of matter one called one’s body did what they were designed to do, grew old, died in their allotted time and place. Nostril hairs, the gunge of the inner recesses played miniscule yet absolutely necessary parts in the grandiosity of creation while we who inhabit the matter pay such deference to miracles and the miraculous.

            ‘I’ve been thinking...’ The Fat Man continued. ‘It seems to me that although consistency is essential and chaos an intrinsic part of the equation...’

            ‘Perhaps you could have done a better job?’ Charlie added as if to finish the sentence.

            ‘Precisely.’ The Fat Man puffed at the nargileh by his side, a satisfied smile upon the folds of his, cosmos-weary chops. ‘I’d like to start again, Charlie. I want your advice.’ Charlie watched the flies; one in particular. The flies and the heat and the smells. Ah, the salvation of the senses. What would we be without them, he mused. Nothing but automatons. Lardy automatons. The thought was not pleasant and he moved in his mind to the moment. Ah, yes, the moment. And in this moment, where am I? Am I really here and where is that? Is this what the comatose, the brain dead have to endure? Do all those who die come this way? Oh, the questions and here was the man himself, maybe, asking Charlie’s advice. To hell with it and on, on with the dance.

            ‘ Well, I’d get rid of death for starters and the stupidity of aging.’

            ‘Ah...’ The Fat Man looked around for Arnie and snapped a porky finger and thumb in his direction and lo, he appeared. Arnie came without a whisper, floated, danced, sung a kirtan in ancient Sanskrit delighting all the onlookers, everyone except Charlie. Even the man himself gave a few dinars extra for the sojourn into the mystic and Arnie bowed with the grace of a prima ballerina leaving an extra-large G and T with perfect squares of ice and a twist of lemon.

            ‘I’d do away with speech and bring back union with the one. Forget all the forays into progress, civilsation and the human experiment. Why give the poor bastards free will if you know beforehand they’re going to make a pig’s ear of the whole kit and kaboodle?’ The Fat Man didn’t answer. He looked into some middle distance, surmising fondly. The seconds of one’s life amount, add up and trickle into minutes, hours, years, decades. Before you know it, it’s nearly over and there it is, who were you? Living is unexplainable, why explain what is a passing ephemera? Why not enjoy what one has been allotted and to hell with it? But then perhaps that is the knub. If we are here for nothing but hedonism and appetite, what about the suffering? What about death, disease, old age, decrepitude? What about injustice, war, the lovelessness of most people’s lives? What about the infinite possibilities for Man’s spiritual evolution and the waste, the inordinate waste that seems to be obscene? Does God really need so many copies of him/herself? 

Finally, the Fat Man sighed. It spoke of a distant, resigned despair, something akin to not remembering a dream one was enjoying the moment after one wakes to being. Being in the body may be all one knows of who one is and, after all, we can imagine, dream, hypothesise, but ultimately all one ever returns to is the body. This body that ages, pains, defecates. The obsession with waste matter is not merely a childhood memory of one’s first true creation. Perhaps there is inherent in the fractals of matter, deep within the structure of its creation, a desire to return to the first mummy, the nothing that is everything. Inbuilt obsolescence on a grand scale. All returns in decay to its origins. Existence, matter, pusses, suppurates. Matter, (the Mater, Mother), is, defacto, a form of exhaust and exhausting.

            ‘The thing is my friend...’ He moved laboriously. The body chosen taxed its internal structure to its limit. Condensed mechanics creaked, rubbed against one another with consummate resilience but even the hardiest of materials, whether real or psychic, have at their roots a physical engagement that cannot but assert intrinsic laws upon time and experience. Decay is the order of everything that appears. ‘Suppose one were to look into the undergarments, so to speak, of the passage of our memories and ask simple questions regarding what one remembers. The infinitude of possibilities boggle. Far better to do as Kahayam advised and get drunk, wouldn’t you agree?’ His mouth tried to smile but the weight of a billion years of weary observations left the almighty somewhat tarnished in his communicative contours. They showed disdain as easily as signposts to Samarkand from a small village somewhere in rural England. ‘Words are such liars. They mimic time’s obsequiousness and have a rigidity that is, on the one hand fragile yet unbounded in its immovable transience.’

            ‘”Talking bollocks”, an old friend used to say, is a good name for an indigenous tribesman with a bad case of verbal diarrhoea.’ Charlie motioned Arnie over for another pint of unreal larger and cheese and onion crisps. Arnie skipped away with a twinkle, a tumbling of mocking laughter that left Charlie catching the cadence of the dance, if only in his mind. There was something so appetising about a waiter with no worries. The waiter who appeared on the surface to be nothing but a waiter, yet knew so much, wished only to share, to engage, to move the plot to more interesting, intriguing, exciting, perhaps passionate liaisons, dark romantic entanglements. The Fat Man was obviously affecting Charlie’s cortex, bringing up heroic elements that surged with eternal desire. For what? To be heroic. Why? Good men don’t dwell on the past. They bury it and squeeze the varmint with stomach muscles that crunch, digest, supress, condense into a nut, a stone, a cancerous potential for some possible future. To hell with death, Come. Come at me and I’ll take you on with swagger and a grin, a joyous ‘See if I care!’ swashbuckling bravura. Hurrah! Hurrah for the courage to be sublimely stupid. Death doesn’t care a fig how we face its gorgeous mouth. We can laugh or cry it makes not a morsel of odds. Its not death one should fear but the shadow of its coming. Charlie ruminated in a second and moved on. The brain does so. It farts, burps, leaves a trail that  can be recorded somewhere no doubt, will be imbibed, sold to the gullible and the prosaic. Perhaps the artists and the enlightened are the only patrons of what may be termed the truly religious. That which demands discipline not imposed but free. Can such a thing exist? Can a forcing of events, circumstances, time itself, into the shape and substance of one’s inner daemons be a matter of wanting, desire? The Gods make no effort. Not even when flatulating. Basic humour always speaks of the earth. The rich, brown earth that contains all that is moist and nutritious, vital to growth and fecundity. We came from the mixing, conflation of gasses and blood. Viscera that co-mingle, dance to create. Ah, creation. The source of God. The idea of being that came from the nothing that is everything and to which it will return. Why? Why not. The big bang or the steady state? The symbolism of the two forms of defecation. Nisargatdata called the universe a spit of Brahma. There you go. Expulsion and explosion. Then there’s the return. Implosion. Good thing it’s not reciprocated in the natural order. Who’s wants to implode waste?  Only Brahma can inhale and exhale such profundity.

            ‘Your ruminations show a discernible amount of self-inquiry that has led you absolutely nowhere. Maybe what you need is to slow down? Find something that has more substance and less meaning. After all, storms don’t last forever.’ The Fat Man heaved, rose, looked at a fob watch that appeared in his hand. ‘A quarter to two. I’m late for a date. It’s been a pleasure, Charlie, and I can’t wait for the next instalment.  It would be enjoyable to talk more informally. Perhaps at my house? Arnie will bring you when needed. Farewell, old friend.’ He waddled off, a firefly in a whale’s suit. Something about him a la Chaplinesque made Charlie chuckle. He must have psychically heard the murmur, turned with a deftness belying his rotundity and winked. Charlie finished his drink and looked around. The air was scented with lilac and patchouli. Figures moved, breathed and none of them important; none real. Merely appendages to swell a scene. Arnie came with a missive on a silver platter. A call to adventure from Delores. She waited it said, for his response. Charlie moved through the souk and enjoyed the psychedelia. Everything coagulates, he considered. The epochs roll down a valley and pass on, on to somewhere else, some other time and place, another moment in the stumbling that leads to darkness. How to navigate the times and make sense of anything when there was nothing to make sense of? Surely the silence of oblivion was a far better place than he had ever known. It’s coming, Charlie. It’s coming. Run! Run like the devil and drink with old Khayyam till your liver rots and dangles from some gloriously high branch.

Aromas are deep within our body memory. The scent, feel, brush, of fresh, new cloth  has a delicacy, a possessive harmony which is empowering, albeit, perhaps unconscious to begin with, yet the mind remembers such fragments and holds them in cryogenic stasis. They fade ever more distant and yet, and yet... the chimera, the hazy shadow of something never quite  forgot, dances in that other place, the abyss of bits and pieces, that seemed, in the original moment so real, so substantial, perhaps, itched, scratched, did not fit well, remained in the space one moved through, towards a destiny written so many aeons ago. No. It will not do. Words cannot bring to life the reality of reality. The aroma, taste of the smell, the smell of the taste, the actual physicality of sense in the now, upon the tongue, the skin, the nostrils imbibing automatically with a precision guided by the stars and the atoms that replicate the stars, resonating with the cosmos in synchronous, unfathomable, stupendous profundity. Words fall into chasms of dark, useless annihilation at the glory of that which cannot be expounded. A scent. A thing that is not a word. A word that is not a thing that can be tasted and yet, through pain, through experience and a holding on to experience, one may gather knowledge that is perhaps useful or not. This is the way of falsity and excess. I want this, not that. I desire more of this that I want, less of that which makes me urge, vomit, repels my finer sensibilities. Oh, how sensible I have become. Perhaps Gautama ruminated in a similar fashion, thought Charlie, as he meandered, traipsed through the slimy alleyways of his befuddled brain.  He said something about the subject. Some parable about eating the apple. Yes. The description cannot compare with the actuality. What can words do? They run around like metaphors and similes, snakelike, wormlike, greasy little squiggles that won’t stop, sit still, won’t come to any end, any decisive end, conclusion, finality. There’s always one more, one more thought, idea, concept. Empty shapes invented for secrecy, possession, and harmful communication. Cyphers that separate, unite the privileged and the empowered. Ideas. Ideas to enrage, suppress, impute, confute. Ideas to assimilate, inseminate and suppurate. Ideas that degrade the original, can only ever degrade, no matter what one tries to do with the little shits, the bastard parts. This part and this part make this part that means this part according to some other part that has been handed down ad infinitum and the apple has not even been looked at, smelled, tasted. It is forever dangling just beyond one’s conceptual reach. Away with words.

Getting old was not something Charlie ever considered except in passing. Passing a mirror, a window, a photograph that seemed unreal in its ghastly reality. The flesh worked. The body worked, mostly. It tasted as well as ever, defecated, imbibed. The organs and senses deteriorated gradually, perhaps, yet there was as much enjoyment as ever, perhaps, more so with the knowledge of the years that looked behind, beneath the surface of the illusion. Age is a delicate friend that asks only to be cherished in the moment. All the insignificant years of waste that one may have, could have, should have. Pah. It cannot be undone except in death. Death sees to all rumination and hypotheses. Sorry. No more time. A slither of something from this dimension and gone. No more. No wondering, no pondering, no wishing, hoping, wanting. Not that we know of. And it happens to us all. To each and every one. How ignoble, sublime, and ugly. How devastatingly obscene that this palace of light, delight, gossamer, this enigmatic garden of horror and wonder should be such a tease. It ends. It is full of pain, ignorance, is pornographic. Say something, Charlie. Say something that has never been said. Falmadoombugney.

The souk went on forever and the stench of humanity. Arnie came to Charlie’s rescue and grabbed his hand, pulled him roughly, made him run, shove the ghosts of ghosts that peopled the mirage. He ran with Arnie, raced him. Raced the little runt and they laughed as they ran and their teeth shone, the one’s they had, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that this was merely an interlude, a passage from one point of meeting, watering hole, to another that had yet to be encapsulated, yet to be envisaged, created. The moment is always enough. The breath and the pain in the body as it heltered, animated the sinews that moved, enjoyed the moving and all put together for this moment and this moment alone.

They stopped by a door that asked old questions. Questions doors have been assigned since the idea of door emerged. What is behind me? Am I open? Am I the door you seek? It seemed alive. Not in a mystical sense, nor in a tawdry magical manner. Rather it spoke of time. Time that dawdled and stank of dust and insects that lived in its bulk. Lived and died and vanished. Dust that stuck to time, stuck to the fibres of time, pulled it, skewered it, made it shine with it’s legacy. All came through this door. All pass through me. The portal, the entrance, the womb of passage from one dimension to God knows where and yet, we all know that door, intimately, and must give up our fear, our desire to move on, walk by, pass the chance to know and be known.

Arnie looked into Charlie’s eyes and held his gaze, smiled. Perfect teeth showing this time. A smile of love and friendship, of compatriots that have weathered the storms and tribulations and know one another. Know deep down into one another, the recesses, and the wars of all that must pass, all that is ever known from sharing something close to death, close to pain, close to a hoped for, yearned for, dreamed of love, a friendship that has to pass, die, and come again in another time and place, another form that is merely the continuance of the saga in another time and place.

            ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ Charlie waited for an answer and knew it wasn’t important. The answer was in the space between them and needed no sound, no visual, auditory, tactile confirmation. We think we are merely what we think and nothing more and we are so much more. There is a mystery within the space between a friend and a lover, a mother and her daughter, a son, grandmother, servant, stranger, a cosmos. There is the same space between suns, moons, planets, galaxies. The same knowing and understanding and silence. It speaks. It needs no interpretation. No intermediary. No bloody words.

            Charlie opened the door and walked into the marbled cool of a sweet-scented hallway. Birdsong entered his ears and the light of childhood. The light of things that have passed and are always present. Paraphernalia here and there. Mirrors and furniture that laughed, welcomed, told tales. Shiny surfaces asking for allegiance, forgiveness, a glimpse. That is all we ask. A glimpse. Are we nothing but dust motes? And what is a mote? Pieces of this and that, fragments of flesh. Death in dance mode. Motes are mute murmuration of a passage of time. Another life, another iota, morsel, minutia. Death is mute. A substance that is material is all that remains of the vehicle that has disintegrated and may be breathed, unconsciously, by other vehicles. The mother is the giver of life and death. The conduit between dimensions that is not merely a passage of symbolic significance but profound, actual Mystery. It vibrates to the resonance of the perceiver who knows its essence. It is Earth in matter, moist fecundity. The dark we come from and to which we return is the womb, the holy grail. The patriarchs could not hold the love, the all, the Mystery of God that is Woman and wandered in the deserts, lost and forlorn and in despair. Losing the fructifying power of that which is the place of life and death. The mote. In Arabic the phonetic translates as death. In French it is mort. That ‘m’ sound. The first, surely, of all who are born. The mother sound. The love sound, gratitude, warmth, love, love, love without words. Sound that is truth, union, mystery. Not signification but communion. Mah... mah... mah... The mother, my ma mah... All that I am. All I know. Love and love and love. Glorious one, union, no separation, no boundaries. I am all there is. And I am beautiful.

It couldn’t last.

Destroyed by the mmmm male. The master. The father who is always further, always distant from me and mine. He who brings the sorrows and the pain and the dark. The fear of the dark and the monsters, the myriad parts that never fit ever again, that tumble, break with sharp, deafening noise and sound of anger, hatred and war. Wah! Wah! The sound of my pain as I learn to howl and scream my separation and mood. I have fallen, oh Lord, and it is dark in the me, in the mire. The mire and the myrrh. In Arabic it is murr, meaning sour. The patriarchs created a language of abuse, of derogation, of spite of the mmmmother, of mmmMary, of she whommmm... whommmm... wommmmb. Oh, how I hated thee when I could love thee no mmmmmore. Another time, another place and perhaps we can change the rules. Change the dynamics and create a song that is sweet, full of harmony. Perhaps. Wait, wait awhile. Do not rush. Go sweetly into the night, into the dark, with no obfuscation, no fear in the eyes and spleen, no curdling of the sap into poison. Commme. Commmme with Charlie. Commmmmm.

Delores was making some waffles and the coffee, smoking, wafting, deliberating its specific density, extrapolating. Light can change as much as the weather. There’s a light that shows up the tawdry, a light that comforts in a warm, birth-blanket, a light that is of the late seventeenth century rural idyll, a pastoral light that has tales knit in its folds. It speaks of Rose and Coleen and sweet Caroline in her braids and her tassels. Which is it? This light in this space created by mind. Delores’ hips were dextrous, imbibing the air molecules ferociously, a gorgon gormandizing the flow of the Tao as they smooched and swayed. The universe is feminine in design and origin. How could it be otherwise. Well then, what is feminine? What is the spark that divulges being and birth, undoes the silence of the void? It is creation’s wish. A desire to flower, to open, to open to all the light!. Call it explosion of an urge. A movement out of the dark into the glorious sucking light. Come. Her hands played the violin with cups and spoons and the audience were mesmerised as Bach’s cantatas evinced, phosphoresced the dead and the dying in their multitude.

‘Milk?’

‘Nope.’

‘You look tired, Charlie. You look old.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sit down.’

Charlie sat and she massaged his shoulders, massaged his pain, his misery, stuck in the vortices between limb and sinew, with love. The message is in the massage. He sank into her. Sank into her soft giving and he took it all. There’s a time and place for everything and this was a taking time. His eyes dozed into the dimness behind his lids and he knew why things came to an end, knew why the dust settles and a long road winds into distant vistas. He knew why descriptions attract minds that are seeking escape and refuge, entertainment from the moment, escape from the insanity of the power of the moment. The moment opens wide, opens into all dimensions, and extracts the poor little me into a vacuity that cannot but curdle the insipid, pathetic brain.  It can’t take it. It can’t take the light of a million suns. Obviously. It fuses, explodes. A three watt bulb raped by a megaton bomb. Behind the light was the nothing the light hides and behind the nothing?

‘It’s time to go back, Charlie.’

Sound is not something that the ear can hold on to. Not in any real, essential way. What we hold on to is memory and the gist of the sound, the message behind the sound is sometimes caught, perhaps a small percentage, say fifty and the rest is lost. A sea of sound collectors mingle with those dust motes and hide the pieces that no one ever cares about, no one even knows about and they join together, mingle, compose sonnets and arias, descry the beatitudes of a Christ that were never heard by the multitude.

‘Consider the time that marks your sorrows and the time that is filled with your joys. The one is a grain of sand blown by a morning breeze, the other in the silence of the night and in between are the heartbeats of your comings and goings. Let them be as they will and give not your face to anger and bitterness but gaze in gratitude at the Lord’s creations.’

‘It’s way past time for the journey home, Charlie.’ Delores of the sorrows lit a Camel and flounced on a sofa belonging to Louise Quinze. The fragrance of her radiated, filled the wide expanse of Charlie’s beleaguered mind. He looked at her, stared at her, the way you stare at something you know you’ll never be able to understand, not in a million years, yet you love it anyway, breath it, want it so badly it makes your guts twist, curl, heavy with the knowledge. He knew she would never be anything other than a separate entity he could never truly know, could not be made one with, not in this recurrence. It was too vast. The possible and impossible and the space between.

‘I have to sit down and think this through, Delores.’ Again the knowledge of the body, the weight of it and its cadence, it’s density and inner intelligence, spoke to him. His body spoke to him as it moved in this place where he presumably was, is, yet knew nothing about. Who truly knows anything these days? They’re so conglomerated, incongruated, diluted to a watery bile that has so little of the divine left in it. Is that possible? Is anything, no matter what it is, not still  divine, no matter what meaning we humans give to it? Is it not all God, for Christ’s sake? Yes, it is. It’s God playing. God plays all the fucking time and he fucking laughs. He fucking laughs at the fucking silliness of our pathetic fucking sentimentality and emotional fucking ignorance and his fucking laughter is filled with a fucking love that we know nothing fucking of. Thank fucking God.

TBC

[1] Patrick Kavanagh "On Raglan Road"