A Seizure of Landscapes
By Gordon McWhorter

1

I saw something today in my rearview mirror as I was driving to my girl, Em’s house. I was just getting on the highway at 900 south and West Temple heading southbound when I looked in my rearview mirror to see what was behind me. At first I didn’t see anything unusual, but since there were no cars to be cautious of my eyes took a moment to see how beautiful the mountains were on the East Bench near Emigration Canyon, with those softly shaped clouds, just happy puffs, hanging high over the Rockies except for a grey misfit hanging low and directly over a large gray building I have failed to categorize as anyplace I know or have ever been to.
I’ve lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, most my life and know the surrounding images of my home with deft clarity.
On second glance in the rearview mirror I focus in on the building, which shimmers in a few places giving a clear indication of large windows, and there! Buttresses, like a Stone Age castle out of a goddamn story book.
Then, just as I am turning onto the main part of the freeway, I make a final notice of the scale comparative to the surrounding mountains…
“What the…hell” I voice my reactions to no one but myself. I try to get a real glimpse of the building from outside my car window, but the Freeway has turned and now has blocked any further views of the building as if the freeway was in on this conspiracy of familiar landmarks, an astral anomaly, a seizure of landscapes zipping by in high def.
My 15 minute happy puff-ball cloud drive to Murray is totally ruined as my mind races and argues, wanting to investigate this building like Navidson in the House of Leaves, and how could I have missed something so obviously large as to be almost apart of the rocky mountain skyline? But upon reaching Em’s house my thoughts are thankfully set aside to more important distractions like sex and my constant eating drive to be near her body, in her body, about her body. Emily Vail is this little fiery, brunette Scot with the tale-tale pug nose, small ears, and those huge chameleon eyes that are currently very blue.
“I saw something in my rearview mirror today.” I said. She laughs, and then gets curious. She knows me too well to joke when I am sincere about something.
“What?”
“Not real sure, but…” I told her the story, and how I felt.
“Babe, that’s weird, what do you think it was?”
“I don’t know, “I say, “But I want to go find out.”
“Right now?”
No, at night, under a full moon with a shit load of LSD in my system.
I don’t say this, but it’s what I’m thinking. I’m a psycho, passive-aggressive, OCD, Bi-Polar mother fucker that has not had any kind of medication for years, wants to smoke a joint more than anything in the world, but can’t because he’s on federal probation and gets UA’d just about once a week, has years of mental disorders from watching his baby sister die from a car wreck on I-15, his wife and child of 9 months abandon him in Tillamook, OR, and a dozen pathetic suicide attempts that mostly took the flavor of, “Oh! Poor me, Life sucks, so I am going to walk into the Desert like Jesus for 40 fucking days and 40 fucking nights until I die or get translated.”
“Babe?” Em says waking me out of my repose.
“Naw…forget it.”
I forget about the whole thing, until Em and I were coming home to my place on 800 south and 500 east to watch movies, eat pizza, and catch a buzz. The sun was just in the perfect spot in the Western sky, about 6:30 or 7pm. (Daylight savings has just switched over to its spring time cycle so it feels like mid afternoon). I look over to the East Bench as I am driving down off that same freeway entrance, the Northbound side this time, and I see Emigration Canyon just as I have always remembered it, and there, where just a couple of weeks ago I had seen an impossibly large building, was only the familiar cut in the mountains just as it was when Brigham Young said “This is the place…”
“BABE!!!” Emily cries out, but it’s too late…
A car directly in front of me has slammed on its breaks. Somehow I get control of the car after my death grip reflexes on the steering wheel and brake hard swerving without looking into the right lane as I exit the freeway off ramp and turn right on 900 south.
“Jesus…”
“Watch the road! Shit!”
“Sorry…”
“Pay attention, babe! You almost got us killed!”
“Sorry…”
My heart is thumping, and I totally forget what I was day dreaming about.
“What the fuck, babe. Where are you?” I laugh a little in spite of myself trying to take this suddenly sharp edge out of my side.
“I was in the mountains.” I say grinning stupidly
“Well, you’re supposed to be driving, so come back thank you very much.”
“K.” I say my voice that of an idiot savant just caught with his hands in the cookie jar. We laugh, and that’s why I love her. We can treat each other like total shit, and yell and hit and scream and curse, but within minutes, sometimes hours, we get over ourselves and are best friends again, and for the most part we are a happy, fun loving couple doing their best to get ahead in the money game and make a home where one day we have promised each other we’ll have kids, raise them up to be bad asses, smart as hell, with all the required information from all sides of “haves” and “have not’s”. Funny…Em and I have been through more in a year than most couples go through in a lifetime. It’s a running joke with us to outline the different ways we can go about killing each other…weird shit, but endearing none the less…lol.
Em likes scary movies. I like them to, but on occasions I have had some very strange things happen when we watch them. I blame her, for she has this unnatural ability to fill a room with her spooked out psyche until the very walls crawl with demonic possessions and inter-dimensional beings intent on staying. I refuse to let them. I hate them. I hate the way they make me feel when I know they are there inches away from my warm flesh doing whatever they do out of the spectrum of my visible sight. I don’t learn my lessons very quickly I guess, and have picked out one of those “end time” movies that catches my eye at Blockbuster.
I have tonight off. I work graveyards. I don’t get much sleep. I dream sometimes of vivid shit that I should be writing down and making stories out of, but then I just totally forget them.
Halfway through this creepy movie I fall asleep, Em is laying beside me on the fold out couch seriously intent on bringing this movie into reality. Even though I am asleep I feel the whole thing go down as if I were wide awake. Emily has fully allowed herself perfect empathic possession into the tragic character of the victim, a little girl ostracized by a small, fundamental Christian town in Butt Fuck Mississippi that has gone over the edge of reason to suspect their children of heinous, sexual sins just to cover up the real sick shit the parents are doing. Classic end of the world horror mind fuck.
I know what’s going to happen. I can literally feel the dimensional door open, and the invitation to come on over Red Rover Red Rover screamed out in a gleeful, insane child’s voice as Emily projects her energy into real live poltergeists that now haunt her from every dark corner of the room. I feel her body spasm beside me and like a long swim through dark molasses I make my way up to a conscious level to find the whole fucking room dancing with devils.
“Babe?” She hardly hears me. The movie is coming into its climax and I am sucked willingly into the end plot, clearly entertained, but knowing all to well that once the DVD machine is turned off we are going to have to deal with the ghosts left behind.
The movie ends. Tragic, yet more than fair as those that deserve to die do. I don’t even let the credits roll. I am going to get this shit over with right now.
Reaching up behind me I push the power buttons to the DVD player, the projector, and the sound system. Everything goes dark, but the slight light from the streets and passing cars finds their way through the cracks in the curtains only to make the shadows more alive than ever.
“Can we turn on a light?” Em asks, and of course we can. It seems to help. She will sleep with the light on in her room for the next three weeks. I climb back into bed, Em sitting straight up trying not to look terrified of the thing in the corner I am very aware is there. Ignoring the whole developing drama I insensitively crash face down in my pillow and go to sleep. Shortly there after I feel Em slide down beside me her small, warm frame beside mine and then it is morning and I am alone…
2

The worst kind of sick, twisted scenarios shoot up to the top of my cranial projector and I can see horror full color, 3D, Emily shredded by my omissions, when she pops her head through the sliding oak doors smiling,
“Are you awake?” I check and I am. Groaning, I fall back into bed mumbling something about coffee and how she could be available to make some for me if she so wanted to. She’s a terrific cook when she wants to impress people, but when it becomes a menial chore to her you can expect coffee the strength of a Brazilian Cocaine Plantation with enough coffee grounds at the bottom to kill a man if he thought he could swallow the last gulp. I love her coffee.
“Did you sleep well?” I ask her from the comfort of my front porch, Brazilian Cocaine Coffee in hand and a cigarillo lit between my lips the sweet filter mixing perfectly with the vanilla-cinnamon creamer I use to chase my coffee down.
“Honestly?” She says looking out into the bright deceptive day so very far away from the real spring that the rest of the world was having. “No.”
That’s it. No more scary movies for Emily, and I say as much. She agrees, half-heartedly. This is a girl that during sex will ask me to describe rape scenarios to her, and the more graphic and violent the better. It’s sick, but it turns her on. She likes the heavy stuff, the tragic, horror, and darkness. I laugh.
“You do this to yourself you know.” She smiles and gives me that sexy coy sideways look with the slow blink of the eyes that totally disarms me and makes my blood warm.
“I do not.”
“Uh…yes, you do.”
“I like scary movies.”
“I know you do, but…” I place my smoking fingers in the air hesitating just so I could draw out the point of my moral lesson, “…every time you do you end up scared, sleeping with the lights on for weeks, and then complaining to me about how there are ghosts in your room trying to get you.”
“But there are!”
“Of course there are! You take them by the hand and lead them there! Jesus, don’t you think I saw that shit you did last night?”
“What I did?”
Yes! What you did! You spun your energy up so goddamn high last night watching that stupid ass film every demon, and black magic shade within a mile of here came knocking.”
“You saw it then, that thing in the corner of the room?”
Of course I saw it!” I sigh and calm myself. No reason to get upset here, just trying to make a point, that’s all. “More like felt it, really…”
“I thought I was the only one…”
“Babe, listen to me. No more scary movies, K?” She looks down and frowns, but then surprises me with an agreement.
“K.” She says, and I believe her.
We’re just about ready to take off to Em’s place when I decide to put the couch back together so my roommates don’t have to come home to a messy house. I don’t like messes, I hate them, and I hate coming home to them, so why leave them for others even if they don’t give a shit, nor even know it exists as such a consideration I perform for them. Fuck it, I’m OCD. I’ll do it.
In spite of myself, as the fucking chills course down my spine, the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up, my skin crawls with goose bumps, I succeed in folding the blankets and then put the cushions back on the couch. The whole while I am attempting this I am also trying very, very hard to ignore the black thing lurking in the corner of the room watching me, hating me, wanting me to hate it too, which I do…really I do. Fucking stupid ass ghost…your dead, go haunt somewhere else. But truth be told I am terrified, and that’s what I really hate is that feeling of being scared…really, really, really scared. It’s debilitating, humiliating, and it angers me that I can do absolutely nothing about it, except stubbornly endure its cold, calculating observations as if it were waiting for a break in some unseen protective layer about my soul to slip through and possess my body.
“God Damnit I hate that shit!” I say once outside as I crash into the driver’s seat of the car and start her up.
“What?”
“Fucking ghosts, that’s what.”
“Where?”
“In that room, babe! I could hardly fold the goddamn blankets in there without freaking the fuck out and running outside!” She looks at the house as if at any moment she will witness this thing coming out the door to join us in the car. “You know, that feeling you get when you know they are there just watching you and knowing you know they know it?”
“Yeah…” She says distantly, “Me too…”

3

We are getting old. I am 33, she is 8 years my junior, and we are worried about our sedentary life styles, though really we are not in the least danger of sudden obesity, but it has been a long winter, and soon we will want to shed as many clothes as possible to soak up the sun, and do not want to gross anyone out with our pale, flabby bodies. So, we decide to start an active routine by hiking up Millcreek’s Desolation trail.
It is a gorgeous March afternoon, and the sun is deceptively warm. But even though spring has teased us these past few days Desolation trail is still packed with winter snow.
“Where’s the trail?”
“Right there, babe.” I say pointing out the snow that is more packed down.
“Whose idea was this?”
Yours, Hun”
“Oh.”
“C’mon.” I take her hand and we slip and slide two steps forward one step back up into Desolation Trail where Pine Trees grow hundreds of feet into the air creaking their disagreement to our obvious disturbance of their peace and solitude. The mountain ravines come down so close to us on either side that there is no other place a trail could exist but parallel to the dry river bed that is to our right snaking its way up to high glistening peaks of sharp, cold, desolate rock..
“Did you hear that?” She says stopping me along the trail warm sweat already working its way down my back. I listen, but I am def in one ear from an accident with a q-tip, and my other ear still likes very loud, hard core death metal. Not surprisingly I hear nothing.
“What is it, babe?” Images of meeting a bear in the middle of this funnel, snow covered death trap makes me want to turn around and go back to the car.
“Nothing…” She says, and bravely keeps blazing up the trail even though her pants are soaking wet from playing and falling in the snow. For some reason the bear is still there in my head and in an effort to release it I ask Emily what she would do if we met one of our fuzzy friends face to face.
“Oh, shit.” She says laughing, “That would suck.”
“But what would you do?”
“Run.” She says still laughing, but only to cast aside the very real possibility of bringing what you think about into reality.
“But bears can outrun you.” I say morbidly. She looks down the trail, then up the East ravine and then up the west ravine. No escape.
“What would you do?” She asks.
“I’d freeze solid from fucking fear and start repeating the name of Jesus over and over again.” She chews on that for a second and then says,
“Yeah, me too.” We laugh the seriousness away and continue up the trail, but every time the wind brushes through the tops of the pines the damn things creek like an animal caught in the jaws of a starving carnivore. The farther up the trail we go the more I get this feeling I should be heading the other direction. Worse, I know Em feels the same way. Stupid, automatons bent on self-destruction, we keep going up the trail ignoring the sixth sense that says, “Yes, you are both just walking bear food”.
We stop to snack on trail mix, and drink a beer. I pull out a smoke and light up the little cigar wondering if the smell would attract or repel a near by bear.
“Babe,” Says Emily, “We need to leave now.”
“Okay.” Never question a woman who is sure. Emily is already heading down the trail at a good pace and I catch up to ask her what she saw.
:I don’t know.” She says, “But it’s not nice and it’s very hungry.”
Chills go up and down my spine and I quicken our pace forcing Em’s short little legs to slip and slide down the trail. I am practically carrying her down to the car.
“Slow down, babe! You’re going to kill us!” I stop, take reconnaissance of my surroundings, and then silently prompt her to keep moving. “No, wait! Listen!” I freeze and with all my might I try to focus my damaged ear drums out into the cold woods and listen. This time I hear it…
“Wolves.”
“Close.” She says, “Very close.” It’s serious. We are so sober the snow in comparison is the one that is warm and joking. Faster and faster I take us down the trail that seems much longer and more unfamiliar than when we were coming up. For a moment I believe we have taken an alternate trail, but then I see a familiar rock buried deep in the middle of the trail, its shape like a huge tortoise with barnacles clustered all over its back. Suddenly, it is a tortoise, with stubby, thick legs moving underneath its massive shell, and barnacles squirming, opening, and becoming spying eyes that whisper assuredly, “I see you!”
I’ve done a lot of psychedelics in my time, and have never once had an illusion so confuse me, bind my tongue, and send me on my way as if I were unworthy to stop and study out the phenomenon. Emily is driving now, pulling me, and I am the one slipping and sliding, irrational thoughts promoting vertigo, and for a moment I truly believe Emily is taking me back up the trail to be sacrificed to the wolves.
“Babe!” She says frustrated and scared. “C’mon! Help me!” I shake off the sticky webs surrounding my thoughts and again take the lead forcing her little legs airborne, until we round a corner in the trail and Emily collapses in the snow at the same time trying desperately to turn back around. A twisted, ugly beast stands in the middle of the trail real and solid, it’s back arched in a strange mangled way that reeks of…
“Shit.”
“Oh, my God!” She says, “I thought it was a bear!” I did too, but now I am laughing too hard to be serious anymore, and the poor dog in front of me who is trying to crap his lunch out of his ass in the middle of the trail is more than slightly embarrassed.
“How funny is that?!” Says Emily pointing at the shitting pooch, his brown, still puppy young eyes looking behind his squatting frame to plead with us for privacy.
“God, what a nightmare!” We’re still laughing when the owner of the dog rounds the other end of the trail totally decked out in retired, business woman hiking gear with the ski poles and all, and doesn’t even acknowledge us as she proudly picks up the shit with a plastic baggie, inverts the bag, and sticks it in her coat pocket.
“Wow.” Says Emily once the hiker and her dog are out of ear shot.
“Yeah…that was weird.”
“Fuckin’ funny.” She says, and we laugh the rest of the way down Desolation Trail with thought of wolves and starving bears completely covered over in the comfortable safety of roads, an outhouse, the trailhead information board, and our white car parked warmly in the sunshine.

4

I have the easiest job in the world. I babysit the technical support lines for the USDA Forest Service. I never get a call, but the contract is for 24/7 support, so someone has to be here just in case. I arrive that night with little or no sleep as usual. Emily, since losing her job at Dillards, has been keeping me up more and more during the day time when I should be sleeping. But I did have that last night off, and did get some sleep, so I should be able to pull an all nighter. Coffee, smokes, and Youtube. That’s how I do it.
I arrive just as Jeremy is taking off from his shift. We rarely talk anymore, not since that day a couple of months ago we had that argument about religion and New World Order conspiracies. He is young, 23, and has the whole thing figure out, where I am searching out Youtube videos on UFO’s, Planet X, and live exorcisms, he is there to tell me how fake that shit is, and how many idiot’s believe in that crap based on the number of times a certain video has been watched. I finally blew up on him one night before his shift ended and told him his opinions were valued only if he kept it to his damn self. Ever since then Jeremy is packing out just as I come on shift and I can’t remember the last time we acknowledged each others existence.
“Hey.” I say feeling guilty, but Jeremy ignores me, lifts his backpack over his wide shoulders, and leaves. Damn. I really need to talk to that dude and apologize or something. I log into my phone, set up all my necessary applications on my PC, and then turn my attention to my laptop.
Tonight I find some interesting videos on Mormon history, and secret meetings as viewed by those outside the Utah neighborhood. It seems the farther East you go the more mysterious Mormonism becomes until you find absolute proof Mormon’s grow horns, speak to spirit salamanders, and practice Satan’s work of pedophilia, polygamy, and the more popular sodomy rituals of passage that one must complete in order to become a full brother of Christ.
I filter through most of the bullshit to find historical data on Joseph Smith, and happily find lots of unknown details about his death at Carthage Jail, the Masons, smuggled Dillinger’s, and a secret Jupiter Amulet kept on the prophets body at all times. Very interesting stuff and the hours click by until the early morning hours when I am relieved of my duties by Charlie, Sam, and Rachel.
These three are always coming in half awake, moody, and unresponsive to my “bushy tailed, and bright eyed” person as Rachel once put it one morning as she drained her fifth cup of coffee and obviously wished she were in bed, in a coma, or dead. Whatever, and I leave like Jeremy did when I arrived…without a word.
The car is frozen solid and it takes me awhile to scrape off the ice, my fingers forced to numb digits as I am too lazy to reach into my bag and put my gloves on first. Emily is 15 minutes away, naked in a warm water bed and I want nothing more than to just get there, crawl in beside her and fall asleep. Em and I live in two separate houses, both of us renting rooms, and it is a thankful convenience to not have to drive all the way downtown to my place to get into a warm bed.
I park the car in the guest parking, and smoke my last cigarillo as I walk to Em’s townhouse on the other side of this little retirement community privately walled off from the rest of Murray City by several fences, an empty guard house, and signs everywhere confirming the fact that this place is watched thoroughly. Old people are a trip, and whenever I see one coming out of their house I am quick to acknowledge them, and they seem to smile, but I never know if they are thinking that I should not be there because of my age, or just thinking I am visiting my Grandparent. Yeah, that’s it, just visiting my old folks at 6 in the fucking morning. Oh well, they never speak to me, so I guess I’m not breaking too many neighborhood rules.
I step on my smoke as I approach Emily’s front door, and bend down to the basement window to click on the glass with my finger nails. Soon I see the curtains move slightly, and the light from her lamp by the bed comes through in warm waves, and then there she is. Babe, come get me. It’s cold and I want in. She knows what I want.
She let’s me in the front door still sleeping for the most part, and we sneak quietly downstairs like ghosts. I don’t think her roommates even know that we do this every morning like clock work. Funny, I’ve met Kristy, the owner, once, and know there is another girl living upstairs, but have as yet never seen let alone met her. I do hear her sometimes. Kristy leaves to teach High School Algebra at 6:30, and always slams the door, but then around 10 a.m. or so you can hear another pair of footsteps preparing themselves for another day of whatever. I don’t even know her name, never even asked.
Emily forces me to stay on my side of the waterbed. She is a big grump early in the morning, but it’s not so bad now that she doesn’t have to get up for work anymore. God! That was a nightmare. Emily is the type of girl that needs to just stay at home with her art, and her girlfriends and their girly projects, drink lots of mixed vodka smoothies, and spend my paychecks every other Friday.
“How did you sleep?” I say quietly. She mumbles, but then squirms and wakes up a notch on the conscious ladder.
“Horrible”
“That bad, huh?”
“The shower kept turning itself on.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah,”
“That’s pretty creepy, babe.” She grunts, and lets me finally put my arms around her now that I have warmed up my cold fingers a little. “Did you dream?” I am always interested in her dreams, for she has some crazy, vivid long ass dreams that come out like stories that fully entertain me.
“No.”
“Oh.” Disappointment.
“I saw him again today.” Emily is referring to the ghost she has in her room. An older man she says looks like a pioneer of some kind, possibly one of the ones that came over with Brigham Young. “He wants to fuck me.”
“Oh, he does, does he?”
“Yes, they all want to fuck me, and lick me up and down like a Popsicle.”
“I’ll lick you up and down like a Popsicle, babe.” I say, moving my hands down to her bottom and rubbing them in circles. She loves that, “butt rubs” she calls them.
“Nooo.” She says, playing hard to get, but clearly enjoying the attention to her bottom.
“C’mon, babe. Let me stick it in.” I say in a heavy whisper close to her ear, “I am so hard right now, babe. Please.” She gasps in that small, vulnerable voice that drives me mad with lust, and then laughs, tells me to stop, she is trying to sleep. I give up, move over to my side of the water bed again and turn off the bed side lamp as my pathetic way of letting her know I am put off.
“Babe, no!” She says sitting up. “I need the light back on!”
“Why?” I am an asshole
“Babe!”
“Okay. Okay.” The light goes back on, and Em flops back down into her black satin pillows frustrated that I do shit like that to her. Oh well. Fuck it, and I fall asleep.

5

Friday nights we go to Sushi. It is our favorite pass time, and we always end up drinking too much Saki, and Sapporo as we joke around with the Japanese Chef behind the Sushi bar who doesn’t speak a lick of English, but I like to think he listens to our mad, inebriated communications not unlike the way I watch foreign films in their native tongue pretending one day if I watch enough of them it will all just click and I can be special, and bi-lingual.
“Saki bomb!” Emily and I cheer and slam our fists down on the bar and gleefully watch as the tiny, porcelain Saki cup unbalances from our perched chop sticks and into the waiting Sapporo, and then we race to see who can drink it all the fastest.
I always win.
Nobody ever bothers us, though we are the loudest people in there. We’ve been doing this for months and I guess they just tolerate us. We do spend a lot of money there…maybe that’s why. Midnight comes too quickly and it is time to pay the bill and go home.
One day we’re going to get caught driving home drunk, but so far we have been very lucky. I obey every traffic law with OCD perfection. I have found being a registered felon is quite liberating in that I have no room to err. I either keep my nose clean or I go back to federal prison for 2 years on a violation of my probation. This makes no sense whatsoever, but paradoxes do not bother me, especially when I am drunk.
It is now movie time, and if I’m lucky Em will get turned on somewhere in the middle and want sex. We try a Japanese animation to abide by our promise not to watch anymore scary movies. It is a lovely, painfully cute film called Spirited Away, and Em and I laugh the ghosts away. No need for lights on tonight, and as we lay down to sleep Em becomes wonderfully touchable and sex becomes an easy slide downward into blissful, pastels and water lilies.
Somewhere around 4 in the morning I have to get up to pee. It takes forever to navigate out of my room and into the bathroom to relieve myself, and without my glasses on I pee all over the place, which is not okay. My OCD kicks in and I have to get my glasses and clean up my mess before I can go back to bed. With my glasses on and my face down close to the linoleum surrounding my porcelain facility I can see how dirty things really are, and a quick clean will not do. I determine to clean the entire bathroom with Kaboom and Windex, sweep and mop the floor, and organize the toiletries that I collect around the bathroom sink like trophies of OCD. Now I am happy, and need a smoke to celebrate.
The wee morning hours are so bleak and static outside as to make another world out of our normal one, a twilight world, a world full of shades, jinn’s, and 11 dimensions. Worlds where when you die you don’t even know it. You just pass through to another dimension and take up conscious residency with no breaks in the real time feed of personal identities.
I smoke, and think of my sister. Soon the twelfth year of her passing will be upon me, and I will once again revisit that ICU room at the LDS children’s hospital to see her comatose form broken and breathing through those goddamn machines…
“Whatchya doin’ right now, baby sis?” I ask the night air, and flick my ashes over the porch rail, exhaling a plume of blue smoke out into my twilight world. “When are you going to come by and say ‘hi’?” I smile at the thought she hears me, and finish my smoke leaving the twilight to the coming sunrise. What if when you died you didn’t know it, and just kept on living without a second guess as to the reality of your eternal separation from those you once called family and home. The thought is not a good one. To think my baby sis could be wondering around the Earth ignorant of her separation from body and mind makes me cold. I quicken my return to Em and the warmth of my bed, but Emily is not there.
“Babe?” I check the bathroom, which is totally dark and call again, “Babe?” Creepy crawlies touch the back of my neck and I fumble for the bathroom light, which is always right where I left it, but for some reason it is not there this time. That familiar tang of adrenaline comes to the back of my throat, and my heart rapidly jumps into third gear fully ready to flee or fight, but then my hand finally touches protruding plastic, and the florescent tubes flicker on and off for a moment creating this slow motion picture of Em on the toilet, her head bent down, her chin on her chest, and both hands tucked protectively between her naked thighs. The mercury vapors finally take a solid hold to the electricity, but I wish they hadn’t. I wish they’d never come on at all. I wish the damn things had never been invented; those fucking sick bastards that needed to meddle around with nature and come up with such an abortion of sunlight for the sake of becoming rich and famous. I fucking hate them!
The police arrive 10 minutes after I call 911. I can’t even remember talking to the operator. I just remember hanging up the phone knowing the cops would arrive at my door.
A seizure of landscapes fly by my eyes, EMT personnel, shiny metal badges, iridescent blues and reds strobe lighting the background of my silent world. There is no audio for some reason. Some one has turned the volume off, muted my present location, uninstalled the sound driver, and interrupted all acoustical vibrations creating such a nauseating vertigo I know I am going to puke. I hit the wood floor of the living room so hard my head cracks, and suddenly I can hear someone very far away…
“…male subject, Caucasian, early 30’s, brown hair, brown eyes, approximately 6 feet 3 inches in length, DOA oh five hundred hours. Cause of death unknown, lacerations on the face and neck, physical trauma to the limbic region, acute swelling of the abdomen, multiple bruises on wrists and forearms, clearly a sign of struggle…”
I awake sometime around 12:30, the sun shinning outside my basement window, the smell of my two cats being cooped up in the closet too long, someone making way too much noise walking in the upstairs kitchen, and Em, sleeping still beside me fully clothed, a brown fur lined hoodie snug about her head. My head is swollen with left over Saki and Sapporo and I need to pee real badly.
I make a valiant effort to get up and pee, but I don’t have my glasses and I pee all over the toilet seat.
Flash of light, Déjà Vu, and I remember the dream.
“Wo…” I sway and catch my falling body by the edge of the bathroom counter. The nightmare rushes back into my head and floods me with grief, a very real grief I have not felt since watching my sister fail to breath on her own after taking her off the machines…
Very slowly I make sure Em is really still in my bed. She is…an angel of cuddly warmth that I cannot resist to wake as I curl up against her and nuzzle my nose into her velvet soft neck.
“Good morning, love.” Em groans in rejection, and I laugh the nightmares away. “Time to get up, sleepy.”
“Nooo…”
“I’ll make waffles and eggs.” She moans a little more, but I can tell her stomach likes the idea. “C’mon, babe.” I rub her bottom, and massage the small of her back. “I’m going to make coffee and orange juice, would you like that?” Little sounds of approval escape her lips, and I gladly go upstairs to make breakfast for my baby.
I’m just setting the food on the table when Em comes up scratching her bedded hair and looking like she just wants to go back to bed.
“We drank a lot last night, didn’t we?” I say, and she grumbles and sits down to sip on her O.J. and blink away the sunlight coming in through the kitchen windows. I want to tell her about the dream, but not now, later.
“Did you clean the bathroom?”
“What?” Shivers, tiny bugs crawling all over my cold skin, the implications are too abnormal to register, calculate, process properly.
“The bathroom, it’s all clean.”
“Uhm….yes, I, uh, cleaned it this morning before I woke you.”
“That’s not normal.” She says as she digs into her waffles.
“My OCD got the better of me, I guess.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What do you want to do today?” I ask changing the subject.
“What do you want to do?” She asks back.
“Well…” I think about it and really I just want to sit around in the sunshine and hang out with the cats, drink beer, and smoke my cigarillos. “…how about we go hiking again?”
“Mmm, okay.” She says no preferences either way if we do, if we don’t, if tomorrow Planet X showed up in the sky as a second sun and the Earth stopped rotating it would all be the same to her.
“Or, we can just hang out here and play with the cats.”
“Whatever.” I hate it when she says that. I really do.
“What about the Butte Gardens?” I say with alternative motives swimming up to the surface of my conspiring mind.
“Okay.”
“Done.” I quickly get up and ready and we are out the door and in the car my head spinning with morbid fantasies. The Red Butte Gardens is one of the tourist highlights of Salt Lake City, not just for the hundreds of native plants, but for the incredible view of the Salt Lake Valley, the surrounding mountains protectively bordering it as a loving mother would its sleeping child. That’s how I felt about Salt Lake too…just a sleeping child of a city that would one day awaken to its superb uniqueness and placement.
Emily hated it here for some odd reason I have truly tried to interrogate out of her, but so far it is the same story…
“I miss Canada.” She says sadly watching the beautiful houses of the Avenues out the passenger side window. I can’t stand Canada. I use to want to visit Canada, smoke their weed, see what there was to see, but hearing Emily tell me almost on a daily basis how much she misses it makes me never want to go there…ever.
“Would you stop it?”
“What?”
“Fucking Canada” I say with all the contempt I can muster, “I’m sick of hearing about how much you miss it. Don’t you ever think that you are making yourself miserable here on purpose by doing that?”
“I can’t help the way I feel.” She says.
“Bull shit.” I tell her pulling into the Red Butte Gardens visitor parking lot. “This is just another case of the typical misconception of the grass being greener on the other side.”
“No it’s not.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it’s not.”
“How so?” I ask getting very upset for some reason that I know is from that damn dream last night.
“Because I’ve been there, and it is greener.” She had a point. I hate it when she is right like that. It makes me feel 16 years old again, so…before I make a complete ass out of myself I relax, smile, and admit she is right. She informs me of how right I am and we get out of the car to start our hike up the Gardens trails.
We hike in silence for a few moments my eyes roaming the Eastern Benches in search of abnormally large buildings, or something out of the ordinary. I am starting to come to a conclusion that something very strange is happening to me, with me, or in me…a sixth sense that tells me all is not right with my perceptions of what is real and what is not real. What is the difference anyway? If a man truly believes in a thing that is not, per se, “real” then there is no convincing him it is not. You cannot possibly know the full picture of things anyway, so who are you to tell another what is real and what is not. Still, there is a majority who see reality as what is accepted as today’s societal norms. A realm of reason where there are consequences for every action, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. Laws of nature, laws of coded ethics, laws of conduct on which is perceived the right way, and what is assuredly taught to our adolescent selves from birth what is wrong and unacceptable to our society. This is all so very relative, for in one place incest is a perfectly acceptable social norm, yet in another it is taboo, disgusting, unheard of, a reason to ostracize, condemn, and even kill over. Therefore, I place myself in a category that believes in all things, in effect disbelieving all things at the same time. It’s a comfortable spot where I have no such expectations of how “it” should be, and yet at the same time I have very strong feelings of how it “could” be, I am never disappointed. I live in a world full of constant surprises, the good and the bad, and I guess you could just say that I am content with the uncertainties.
“Is that you?” Emily says frowning slightly
“What? Did I fart?”
“No, that feeling?” She says her face scrunched up as if she could smell it. “That…I don’t know…storming rage, strangled emotions…”
“No.” I say, but somehow I know it is. Emily is way super sensitive to emotions, and has scary powers of empathy. Sometimes, when she gets very, very drunk she speaks to me as of one come back from the grave, and will deny remembering a thing when questioned later when she is sober.
“Yes it is.” She says. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Whatever it is your thinking.”
“Okay.” Yep, scary empathic abilities…
Emily got so drunk one night I had her out on the patio of my apartment naked, fucking on the patio couch late at night with not a care or a bit of concern that one of my neighbors would see. Truly awesome sex, but when it was done she passed out on my lap wrapped in my blanket, her face completely relaxed and peaceful. I spent a good fifteen-twenty minutes tracing her Scottish features with fond longing. I was in love again after 10 years of being a bitter divorcee, and a harbinger of a huge chip on my shoulder. For the first time in 10 years I thought about marriage again, and it was refreshingly desirable, especially as it held Em as the bride.
“I was born in 1836.” Emily suddenly says to me, her eyes totally closed, her face smooth, and perfectly relaxed.
“Oh, yeah?” I say, amused, a little surprised she was still conscious, but still too drunk to realize I should be freaking the fuck out.
“I have seen many things.” Emily continues in that perfectly calm voice, “And I tell you now that the man that you think you are is not the man you are supposed to be.”
“And what sort of man am I suppose to be?”
“You must understand one thing.” She says and stops. Suddenly I am aware of the very real possibility that I am not speaking with Emily, but an actual personality that has for some reason or other taken residency in my girlfriend. Quite mockingly I whisper in her ear that she has my full and undivided attention.
“You must understand that Jesus died on the cross for us. This was a perfect sacrifice guaranteeing our continued progression beyond Earth. We are creatures of desire, and our desire is for the flesh. We do not come here to be spiritually satisfied. We are already spiritually satisfied. We came down here to obtain the physical, to saturate our desires for the flesh, and to keep it beyond the grave.” Goosebumps cover my flesh. I am now honestly, fully, inseparably attentive.
“Go on. I am listening.”
“When you die there is no heaven, nor a hell, but only a clear, maddening knowledge of the desire to be in the flesh. Some choose to wander, some find a way to return to the flesh, and others refuse to admit to themselves they are dead…” She stops, and I cannot help but want very badly to awaken my Emily and forget this whole thing happened. From wherever Emily resided in the emptiness of conscious space she must have felt this, for in the next moment she blinked her eyes rapidly and awakened with a cat like stretch, her naked breasts coming out of the blanket to show me her pink nipples hard with arousal...
“Which way?” I come out of those deep thoughts to find Em pointing at the split in the trail.
“Left”, I say, wanting to keep heading up the mountain to get the best view possible of the East Bench. I don’t exactly know what Emily was thinking when I finally told her what happened that night, but once she figured it out that I was not joking with her, that I was dead serious, her brow furrowed with calculations and possibilities…her existence was in question and she needed to find solid ground before she drifted away into a sea of fiction and make believe.
Emily had spent a summer in Nauvoo, IL where she had been centered in Mormon History, and surrounded by ghosts from a violent and dramatic past. She told me she had related quite strongly to the character of Emma Smith, and her anger, that tragic disappointment, and rage Emma had felt towards her husband, Joseph Smith Jr. I tried to connect the two experiences, but Emma was born much earlier than the person I talked to on the porch that night, but 1836 places the woman’s birth smack dab in the middle of Nauvoo country where the Mormons built up a city threateningly enough to cause the citizens of nearby Independence, Missouri to murder.
Just as the Cherokee were being betrayed in Georgia and set upon that Trail of Tears, so too were the Mormons forced from their homes in the dead of a Missouri winter on their own tearful journey where the numbers that died mirrored one another with dreadful accuracy. It was one of the stories that kept me sympathetic towards the church when otherwise I would not be so kind or respectful of their encroachments, and assumptive control over most of my family members lives.
“Babe?” We had come to the top of the trail and the whole of the Salt Lake Valley was laid out before us in a grid of streets, buildings, and white noise not a little soothing.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I say attempting not to be to conspicuous as I focus on the East Bench looking for that strange building I had seen in my rearview mirror.
“Yeah…” She says agreeably, no mention of Canada anywhere close by her thoughts. I see nothing unusual, and surprise myself to find I feel relieved. Oh well.
“Ready to go back?”
“Yeah, I’m hungry.” She says, “What are you going to buy me?”
“Whatever you want, babe.”
“Hmmm.” She likes that, “Whatever I want, huh?”
“Yep.” I say and she moves up close to me and plays with the hem of my shirt tugging at it and raising her chin at me in conjecture to other, more in depth hungers that could be satisfied. I smile wickedly and take her small waist in my hands pulling her close, and sliding one hand down her bottom and cupping in-between her legs.
“Oh, you dirty old man!” She says with mock indignation, “You would fuck me out here? Where everyone could see us?”
“Yep.”
“Shame on you!” But it turns her on the thought of fucking in public. She is a natural born voyeur, and for a moment I believe it will happen that way, but I am too scared of getting caught. Five years in Federal Prison has made me into a perfectly behaved tax paying citizen. I can tell she is disappointed just a little when I stop, and start back down the trail. We have gone only a few steps when she gasps.
“Babe!” I turn to find her face devoid of the color of flesh, a pale sickly white. She points below us to the East where magically a huge grey building has appeared with every characteristic of a 17th century institution for the criminally insane.
“Jesus.” My legs don’t want to work any longer, and I have a huge pounding migraine that echoes suddenly in my temples. The sensation is new, and I am able only to think of how weird it all is for a few precious seconds before I find myself chasing after Emily who is running top speed, those little legs moving faster than I have ever seen them move. I shout out at the top of my lungs for her to stop, come back, slow down, but she will not, could not, and soon it is very apparent that I am not catching up to her, in fact I am losing the race all together, which is so mind boggling I just stop, pant for air in my tobacco fucked lungs, grabbing at my head from the migraine, and now a new pain…it’s in my chest like heart burn.
“Emily!” Horror. Absolute fucking horror. I bite back the pain and force myself to continue the chase, but soon loose sight of my prey all together. My body is my enemy. It wants nothing more than to sit down in the middle of the trail, puke, and fall into unconsciousness. “FUCK!” I sit down panting like a dog in the middle of the hottest fucking summer day with no shade. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

6

I first saw Emily at Liberty Park on a Sunday when all the hippie, gypsy, Mormon cast outs got together to play their Jim bays, bongos, wooden frogs, flutes, and other magical instruments that continue to this day to bring in 4:20 all summer long. I can’t smoke herb anymore, but I sure love to smell it, and it’s kind of a contagious high being so near its effects on those around you.
Emily is wearing a white dress and is sitting at the edge of the Drum Circle with a tiny white poodle pup tied on a leash looking eagerly for something to munch on. She looks all of sixteen years old, so my attention is momentary, but when she shows up to go hiking with me and some friends from the Drum Circle I remember the white dress, and the poodle, and ask where the pup is.
“I had to get rid of him.” She says, sadly “Poor Mr. Poodles. He kept peeing everywhere and my roommates told me he had to go.”
“I’m sorry.” Emily was very attractive. Small, tan skin, little nose and ears. Once I find out she is 24 it’s over. I want her; I want her like I’ve only wanted one other girl in my life. My ex-wife and it is a sickly, twisted, comparison of similarities, as if I created a doppelganger from my constant longings of something I could never have again.
We hike up Bell’s Canyon on a beautiful May afternoon. It just so happens to be the same canyon I hiked up as my first time back in those lovely Wasatch Mountains after being locked up for so long in the flat, humid lands of Ft. Worth, TX.
“See that little hidden grove down there?” I ask Emily as the trail passes by a thicket of Aspens, and Brush Oak to drop down steeply into open grassland about 33 feet in diameter. She looks, and I tell her the story about coming here and finding this hidden place, and how there was this old campfire with large white rocks that I took and made a large circle with them, furrowed out a five pointed star in the middle, and then sat down in the middle lotus style for 7 hours.
“Why would you do that?” She asks looking up at me like I was the craziest boy on the planet.
“To meditate. To pray. To show my gratitude. To ponder on a question that has been in my head for a very long time.” We turn up the trail and she asks me what question that is which could be so fixed upon for all these years, so I tell her.
‘What is woman?” She says, repeating my words, but adding the inflections that infers a certain amount of sarcasm, as if I were asking some impossible question that everyone knows has no answer afforded to it.
“Yes, and you know what I concluded?”
“Amaze me, oh man, what?” I have to laugh here because she is so impossible, and the fact that she is still listening to my bullshit tells me she has some sort of attraction to me even if it is only a circus freak curiosity.
“Woman is what I am not.” She stops in mid stride and I am forced to pull the emergency break else I run her little, pixie frame over and squish the very thing I am postulating about!
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“That’s what you came up with after 7 hours of meditation?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a fucking genius.” She starts up the trail again and I rush to catch up and explain myself.
“That is not all.” I tell her, “Woman is the constant, unachievable desire.” I say catching up to her and matching her pace, “Woman is that thing that I cannot be, the one thing I long to have beside me. Woman is that very essence that is unknowable to man, the sacred feminine, that Holy Mother, the Virgin Mary, my sister, my mother, my wife, my lover.”
I confide in her, and confess I had eaten a bag of psilocybin mushrooms before sitting down in my circle. I confess that I was intent upon spinning up some sort of magical love spell that would bring to my side a woman that I could spend the rest of my life with, and that life without a woman by ones side is the exact metaphorical ninth hell of Dante. She laughs at this, and I smile. I have just passed the first test of courting. I have proven to this lovely creature that I am not a complete idiot.
I do my best to flirt and find myself by her side often. We hike all the way up to the falls, and it is a gorgeous day. Maybe my magic spell was more real than I thought. I look up into that blue, cloudless sky and thank the Holy Mother for sending me her beautiful daughter, and if she could, would she, be with me, and make my life something worth living for?
On the way down Emily bombards me with questions about my life, what I thought about certain subjects, how I would react to particular situations such as a world suddenly overcome by Zombies, and what would be the first thing I would do, and do I believe there is such things as Zombies, and if there is do you think they really do live off of human flesh. I love it. Her attention is the greatest thing I have had in the last 10 years since my divorce.
We end up at a friend’s house that night in the hot tub out in his backyard where we all get shamelessly naked and practice hours of group massage therapy on one another. I find Emily to be extremely sexual, and have a hard time keeping myself from becoming embarrassingly apparent that I am aware of this. I want nothing more than to ravish her flesh with my flesh, and it is difficult to end the night without that satisfaction being met.
That next Sunday at the Drum Circle I ask her for her telephone number. She tells me to get it from one of her friends. I tell her, fine, I’ll get it next Sunday. She says fine, and leaves me there feeling awkward, stupid, and angry at being affected so.
The next day is Monday, Memorial Day, the 26th of May, my sister, Kelen’s, 30th birthday if she was still alive. It is raining, and I am out on my porch smoking and drinking a beer trying to get drunk enough so as not to remember though I know I will fail in this regardless. I am a miserable, pathetic, sad and lonely man.
I finally get the nerve to call Emily’s friend and ask her for Em’s number. She tells me that she can ask Em if she wants me to have it. Fine, you do that.
Not 30 minutes go by when I get this text message from her with Emily’s number in it, 30 seconds to decide what to do with it, and 3 minutes to text her some soppy, lonely verse about how sad the rain is. To my surprise, and sudden joy, Emily immediately texts me back saying that the rain is not so sad if you have someone to share it with. These are the words I am after! This is the “go ahead” signal! I text her back saying she should come over and share the rain with me. Maybe I could make her my special Tuna Noodle Casserole, wine, desert, the possibilities whirl in my head. She agrees, and I immediately go grocery shopping for the best Tuna Noodle Casserole ever created, and it is the bomb diggity for sure! I even make my own homemade chocolate mousse pie, and purchase two bottles of White Zinfandel that I recall Emily saying was her favorite wine.
We eat, we drink, and we talk the night away out on my balcony. She tells me all about Canada where she spent the last three years with some asshole, and how he had this 12 inch penis, but couldn’t do anything with it, and it wasn’t until she had come back to Utah and basically rented out this strange guy for sex that she had her first orgasms.
“Wow.” I say trying not to be turned off, but realizing at the same time she was telling me about all this sex stuff for a reason! I abide my time, play the perfect gentleman, and when it gets extremely late and she is thinking of leaving I beg her not to. I tell her that I don’t want to sleep alone tonight, and would she stay with me and warm my cold bed. She agrees, freshens up in my bathroom and comes out wearing one of my yellow t-shirts, her naked legs focusing my point of interest perfectly…

…

…I am stone…heavy stone, which has not moved in any significant manner for a thousand years. Stone that once long ago remembered being a fast moving liquid alive and fluid, able to move and be many places at once, but now imprisoned forever a fossil forgotten. The resulting effect of such unwanted imagery cracks my bones as I force myself to get out of bed and reevaluate my position. It is the fourth morning since Emily disappeared. I tried to follow. I tried and failed, and by the time I had reached that phantasmal building Emily was already inside and I was obviously not invited. I could find no way in, or out for that matter, the whole fucking thing insane and trapped in non-logical chaotic lines and patterns that with every step I took around its towers and walls drenched me more with sweat and impossibilities until fear and terror paralyzed what little desperation I had left to find and save Em from this unknowable figment.
I thought I would just wake up and she would be there. As I thought about it more I came to remember there had been several such times I had lost her only to awaken and find her there the dreams forgotten. This morning is different. I remember my dream.
In my dream I have surfaced from water to stand in front of that huge monster of a building only to have my roles of personality shifted, and I am now that very monster, and Emily is trapped inside of me, which now is nothing more than billions of tons of lifeless stone. I exist only to take up space, but in that there is a catch. I am hollow, and to take up space I must fill that emptiness lest I become surrounded on both sides and fall into an ignominious obscurity…a non-existence. Four days. Four nights. Forty Four and fourscore…a square building within a square building within a cube that is cruel and complacent. I am dead stone. Hear me moan…
I have refused to go to work. I have eaten little or nothing except cigarillos and beer. No one has called my cell, which is depressing as hell. You’d think at least my work would call wondering where I was, but they have not. You’d think my mom would call. Rarely two days will go by without us at least saying hi, and now I can’t remember the last time I did speak with her. I call mom…
“Mom?”
“Well hello stranger, how are you?” My mother’s familiar voice from very far away in California
“Not so good.”
“Don’t worry, dear. Everything is going to be okay. You’ll see. I have a patient, Hun, call me later.”
“K.”
“That’s my boy.” I can almost feel her patting my head.
“Love you.”
“Love you too, bye-bye.”
“Bye.”
You’d think I would have gone to the cops

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