It was a humid saturday afternoon. And I can remember it perfectly.The jingle of my car keys, the satisfying chunk of the car door as it  closed. The click of the sandals against my heels as I made my way up the driveway…and then, clearly,  distant windchimes on a dry breeze, like church bells…blurred vision as I fell to the hotblack asphalt. The heat of the ground against my cheek, the wavy convection lines dancing on the asphalt just beyond my twiching feet. I smelled roses and cherries and tasted iron in my mouth as laughter bubbled in my chest. Laughter, because it was all somehow…very funny.  And my entire body felt tickled as if a woman’s fingers were brushing softly across the inside of my elbow…then abruptly there was the stabbing pain, the darkness and the cold…..

……The doctors told me I was lucky. They told me that aneurisms generally left lasting damage. Now in this hospital bed, as I pulled the dinner tray to me, things were different. They felt, sounded, and tasted differently, like a blockage I’d never noticed had been removed. Until now I’d been hearing but not listening. Tasting but not savoring. Sleep walking. And with all this time, in this bed, between visits of the nurse. All this time gave birth to a horrible brooding, an introspection. Memories came flooding back as if high resolution glossy photographs.

    One of these was the image of the coarse dry skin between his father’s thumb and forefinger…His father’s hands had always been so inexplicably rough for a man who’d never once known manual labor. As a boy he awed at how the skin of his father’s hands felt plastic and inanimate. He also remembered the way his mother had sat silently and tightlipped night after night at the dinner table. Her eyes saying more than she ever would: A life unfulfilled. He remembered Kara’s eyes when she’d whispered to him that she wanted to give him a child, long before either of them were ready for such a move. And then the memory of the look in her eyes when he reacted. As he chewed, the bland hospital food tasted differently than he’d remembered peas and carrots…It wasn’t a new flavor, but rather as if there was simply more information behind the flavor that had always been there…information he’d just previously ignored, passing it off as “the blandness of peas and carrots”. Even in the carrots and peas, the memory of Kara kept resurfacing.  She had wanted to give him a child, and in turn he’d yelled at her, turning her eyes from emerald pools of reflexive adoration, into the eyes of a frightened animal, cowering. The thought of her made his chest sink in, and his breathing heavier and erratic. Now on his lips was the saltyness of his own tears…and then the image of his mother crying into the calloused hands of his father as he lay in his funeral casket…’Too little too late” he’d overheard a relative say. 

    The faces of his closest friends emerged from his memory as if selected from a lineup of ‘forgettables’. He remembered those few women, that had silently (and in their own softspoken way) offered him the promise of a new beginning, and the way he’d ignored it, speeding through life like a restless child flipping through the pages of an over-read comic book. And the eyes…the look in all their eyes. The honestness in their voices as they’d spoken words of wisdom. He now saw the value they’d seen in him that he’d not see in himself….and the realization was too much. An overwhelming feeling of appreciation and gratitude descended upon him causing his chest to heave with the shame of his own stupidity. He sighed heavily, straightened his posture, and chewed defiantly, intent on tasting everything thoroughly. Intent to never again ignore even the blandness of peas and carrots…

The Pendulum was a running group. Well, it was on the surface. It was a running group that played a game called “Hounds and Hares“. Karl had first heard of the game in stories his father recounted of playing it in the streets of Moscow during the ‘recent unpleasantness’. His father, you see, was in Moscow during the seventies as a ‘research scientist’,  and even as a boy Karl knew there was more to that title than his father let on. Karl had found The Pendulum group during his medical rotation in Jakarta. They met early one Saturday at a local park. The people were friendly and all smiles, mostly expatriate professionals or military. No one really talked about what they did, not at the beginning of the hash that is. The games started off normal enough. A designated group of ‘hares’ took off running in many different directions into the city, and the group that lagged behind (the hounds) had to follow their tracks to the end of the race. The tracks were fairly obvious (if you knew where to look), usually as a series of predetermined chalk marks on the asphalt. The marks served as “trail markers” that indicated whether paths were good or bad. The first group of “hounds” to find where the “hares” had all convened, won. The termination of the race was generally at a pub, where there was open bar for all participants. There were always less participants at the end than there were at the beginning, as if nature itself had selected those fittest for their grand celebration. But, noone ever said what they did or who they really worked for. The best of the hashes were those on which the hares cleverly set false trails, forcing you to think on your feet as you ran. Karl had quickly become addicted to the game, participating more frequently, until soon he was running with the Pendulum twice a week.  Eventually the more skilled players invited him to smaller more secretive games, played at night where the tracking was much more difficult. And the trail markers themselves grew less overt until soon they weren’t chalkmarks, but bits of debris on the ground. A curiously crumpled tincan here, a precariously perched rock there… all things “out of place” for those aware enough to notice. At the termination of these advanced hashes, the stories came out. Stories (always told in the third person) of clever escapes, isolation, and near misses. Some stories were more macabre, of fallen friends, torture, or imprisonment.  Geopolitics, economics, and business were also at the heart of many a discussion. At these pubs, the advanced hounds passed around newspaper clippings and books like “The Tracker” , “Falling Through The Earth“, “Foucault’s Pendulum“. Stories about people learning to pick up on the subtle clues we all left as we passed through the world of things… And what Karl learned on the hashes began to awaken in him a keen sensibility to things and smells. Like he was more alive. One evening after returning home from work, his girlfriend in the shower, he walked to the rustled couch where her book lay face down. He felt the warmth of the seat, and as if in a trance, tracked her movements from the last hour through the apartment following each subtle clue, until finally he reached the bathroom where she invited him into the shower for their own celebration.  He noticed fingerprints on beakers at work, he could identify his lab assistants by their perfumes and the sound of their steps. And several weeks prior, noticing something in the eyes of Michelle (his lab partner) he impulsively asked how long she’d known she was pregnant. Her stunned reaction had confirmed his suspicion. It seemed that he’d become host to a growing awareness of a world just beneath this one, one more real, subtle, and nuanced.  The floating world.  At the termination of last night’s advanced hash he was approached by a man, who (until now, Karl had only silently admired). One who’s quiet presence had gravitas which somehow commanded respect. If those men had been wolves, this man would be the elder Alpha…The man had kind eyes, and a methodical baritone voice.  He went by the moniker “Aleph“… and by the nights end, the Aleph had invited him to the hash of a more advanced group of “hounds”. “There are higher consequences and greater rewards” he’d said slowly. “There will be some familiar faces…and some unfriendly ones…quite a bit of travel, and many new experiences.”. 

The waitress placed an old-style glass bottled Coke in front of Miles, and a plate of sausage in front of Chris. ”The rest is on its way…”she offered without even looking at them.

Chris: “Your girlfriend better get here by the time her food does…”                                        

Miles ignored Chris and set his lit cigarette in the lip of the ashtray. The wisps of smoke fashioned a question mark in the center of the table. Miles was too preoccupied with the Coke bottle to notice. He quietly admired the weight and look of the full bottle before finally taking a sip. ”…for some reason Coke tastes so much better from these bottles.” he finally said. Chris rolled his eyes as he stabbed a plump sausage with his fork. Sausage juice and oil squished out in protest.

Miles: “I can’t believe you are gonna  eat that shit…”                                        

Chris looked at him indignantly. “Don’t start with that shit. We been comin’ here for 6 years. Pro’lly twice a week. You and your girl always open with the same old shit. Aren’t you vegans supposed to be openminded? You’re like a Nazi with this ‘meat’ stuff…”

Miles: “I  *am* open-minded…Jen put me onto this vegan shit…I’m just spreadin’ the gospel. You are just my friend so I’m trying to tell you what the fuck you are putting into your body.”                                   

Chris: “I know exactly what the fuck I am putting in right now…. ITS MEAT!…prob’ly from a cow, and it tastes goooood…”

The “good” came out as a cow’s moo.

Chris: its not like its….cyanide….or anything…so do me a favor and chill with all that shit when she’s not around…”              

Miles shrugged it off and picked up his cigarette and puffed…He sipped his coke thoughtfully. “You know Hitler was a vegetarian!?”

Chris: “Ok…now where the fuck did that come from?”                                       

Miles: “Cyanide. ….. Nazis.” he said, gesturing like the words themselves had conjured this trivia from deep within… 

Chris: “…sounds like bullshit.”

Mike: “Nah…its for real…something about being stuck indoors…some gastrointestinal issue…you know that guy was prol’ly in the closet right.”

Chris: “Hah…yea with the bombs, the S&M, the torture, the general moodiness…and the veganism. I can see it…”.

Chris smirked as he bit into another sausage. Miles donned a mocking German accent:” ‘Herr Hitlah why dont joo have a girlfriend?’ 

Chris: “Heh, yea…and he was a writer right?…”                                       

Miles: “Yea…and had a cat…”

Chris: “Yup…Really quiet sensitive type…If he was alive now I bet he’d have a blog: Mein Blog…..or a secret Myspace page with a self-portrait photograph, his shirt off, taken from his iphone…”

Miles nodded slowly as if caught in a revelatory daydream. “favorite music: Cat Stevens and Ramstein. favorite book: The Color Purple….yup…and those boots…Hitler was completely gay…we should write this all down.”

Chris:  ”‘Racially motivated genocide, is the perfect cover for the latent homosexuality of a political writer.”

The waitress passed, catching the tail end of Chris’s last comment. She paused for a moment and with disgust she eyed Miles who was accidentally holding his cigarette wedged between two really effeminate fingers which dangled from a limp wrist. He noticed immediately, and stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, cleared his throat masculinely, and corrected his posture. Chris too adjusted his posture and diverted his gaze.  The two sat in silence for a moment, avoiding eye contact. In an attempt to break the awkwardness Miles forced laughter and began to continue on about Gay Hitler.

Chris: “-No! New topic…and next time she comes back flag the waitress… I’m gonna get one of those stupid bottled cokes.”             

In the height of his panic he screamed “Please Sir! We have no wish to die here…we are not thieves…your bungalow hacienda looked warm and inviting, and we are just so cold…” His last word was sucked out into snowy silence. They’d ducked behind the snow covered wood pile when the man had fired the first shot. The rest of the world was bright and still.The man yelled back “Hacienda? Why’d you call it a Hacienda?”Handel peeked up slowly from behind the woodpile. The man was still pointing the shotgun, although less aggressively.Handel yelled back “Well thats what it is…isn’t it?”

 After a pause, the man’s gun relented and pointed at the sky. He sighed. “You can come out…but no funny business…” Handel looked down at his sister who was just beginning to uncurl, her hands unclasping from behind her head. She looked up into Handel’s uneasy grin. Minutes later the three were trudging back through the snow towards the man’s home.”I am Artemus…Artemus the Architect” he said plainly and without pomp.”I am Hendel” Hendel offered “…and this is my sister Greta”.Artemus nodded at her. His eyes were warm and calming…a luxury she appreciated after the events of earlier that day.”So whats your story?” Artemus inquired.”Our car broke down this morning, and we passed under an overpass to find help, and when we came out the other end we found ourselves…” Hendel paused. “…here.” Hendel continued as they ascended the stairs, shook snow from themselves and hung coats. “When we started back, the bridge and overpass…were just…gone.” Artemus smirked, his back turned. Hendel sighed…”Its like some kind of nightmare…we’ve been chased by a group of evil little children, a two headed dog, and a group of hookers.”Aretemus listened as he cleared a place for them on a couch near the fireplace.”Yes…the ‘hookers’ you saw were the Furies…they are relentless…you should’ve known  not to approach them, scantily clad as they are in this weather.”As Artemus spoke Hendel and Greta were taking in the decor of the den. The walls and ceiling were large dark wood pillars. All around were photographs, sketches and technical drawings of complex patterns. A photo of tangled scrap metal, another of woven teflon, another of computer circuitry…baskets , molecules,  rug designs, and sand paintings.”What is it that you do?” Handel asked.”I design cities…but my love is of labyrinths…” Artemus said, motioning them to sit. Hendel glanced at his sister who was also taking in the room with reverent awe.”Well, perhaps you can help us get out of this strange place we’ve managed to wander into…” Handel said, his voice tinged with sarcastic desperation. Artemis went off into another room to prepare tea. ”….yes…perhaps.” he said softly on his way out.

She collapsed into him, and then rolled bunching linen under her arms and across her chest, turning the sheets into her evening gown. She exhaled loudly and rolled onto her back.

“Wow” she said to the ceiling. She heard his mouth crack into a smile of self satisfaction. She rolled onto him and rested her head on his chest listening to his lungs. She lifted his hand from where it lay limp on his stomach and fashioned it into a clasp with hers. They lay there in the inky black of night straining their eyes to see their hands…and soon their imaginations had conjured a likeness that would suffice. They each imagined his large black hands with their large hairy fingers, calloused stony features, and thick fingernails. They imagined her soft white small delicate fingers interleaved with his like piano keys alternating soft, hard, soft, hard, black, white, black, white…from pinky to thumb. And as if on cue he spoke finally.

“I cant believe you let us do that to you?”

A pregnant pause.

She spoke up at him from the pillow of his chest.

“What do you mean?” she inquired, knowing already what he meant.

“Well, it all seems so very destructive doesn’t it?” he began.

“Well actually its very CONstructive if you think of the potential causality.” she quipped.

“no no no, I mean the act itself…allowing my brutishness to intrude on your…” he paused to find the words…”your virtue…”

He was being poetic again, and she smiled with a slow blink as if he’d caressed her with the words. He was waiting in the dark for a response from her. She was using the darkness as a veil now, she simply wanted to hear this writer develop his thoughts aloud. “‘Virtue’?” she asked mockingly. “…your euphemisms are sometimes too flowery.” she lied.

“Mmmm” he hummed in agreement. He continued on unfettered “Nonetheless…You women spend so much of your existence cultivating your ’softness’…physically, socially, and emotionally; only to then allow us to ravage you physically and emotionally…and you love us for it, like our roughness is….is scratching an itch in only the way roughness can…”

His words, breathy and baritone in his chest silently aroused her, and she answered him by throwing a leg over him and sitting up on him…towering above him in the darkness…And when he was ready she emphatically thrust herself upon him. He’d been right of course, there was a sick duality somewhere in that darkness…his roughness and her softness thrown violently together…and that, he figgered, was the whole trip. And with this realization her back arched convulsively, and his hands were solid and steady at her hips. They meditated together in this way for what felt like hours…mutual completion. And when they were done, and she lay again softly at his side (the part he loved most) all he could think of was an old oil painting that had hung in his father’s study when he was a boy. It was of two snakes: a red and black one…feeding on one another from the tail up…

When he’d started, he didn’t know shit about architecture. Sure, he’d pause to admire a building that caught his eye, but his understanding of “the why” was spotty and adorned with platitudes. But he still appreciated buildings nonetheless…and every since he was a boy, he’d specifically liked train stations. On this trip he’d seen many of them. He slept in them. Ate in them. Pissed in them…waited in them. And all this time he spent in them made him more aware of them. He discovered that each had its own look, smell, manner, presence, and charm. And perhaps like a woman, each held the light differently…some in their cheeks and on their lips, and some in their eyes…but each invoked in him a certain kind of quiet awe…like being in a great cathedral. These were great hollow spaces that were like sanctuaries for a pensive silence. But this one was somehow different than all those before it. The morning’s light spilled in through large windows in the ceilings, filling the great room with light like fine grey powder. The invisible powder floated like snow, falling first on the great clock in the center…before floating down…down…down onto the benches and people as they buzzed along to wherever. He was the only one stopped in that shower of grey. Grey that was bright and strong…strong enough to flush away the anticipated black of tomorrow, replacing it instead with a sliver of optimism. All this misty grey was jailed by carved limestone and concrete with the stone carved faces of gargoyles keeping unflinching watch from high on the walls. And the air was crisp and still, reminding him of weeks prior, in the mountains, where snow squealed and crunched under the rubber of his boots. That day had been white, and he’d heard himself alive in that silence…his breath…his pulse…and the leathery strains of his satchel’s straps. But that was then, and this was now…and this silence was a bit different. It didn’t absorb like the snow had. Instead, this quiet reflected his noises back at him, but not without first dusting them with grey before setting them afloat in that cascade of light. Light that brushed past crestings, bas-reliefs, and intaglios in its descent, softly strumming each as if harp strings, making them sing individually but harmoniously in a perfectly tuned orchestra of silence conducted by noone…All this, for an audience of those select few that simply chose stop and listen.

At 23 Khai had been exiled from the reservation. The naivete of youth (or perhaps just the shock) had allowed him to go through the motions with a disassociated calm. His mother had cried into her apron, her father (if he’d been alive) would probably have just looked on knowingly with an arm around is mother. His two sisters looked up at all the grownups trying to comprehend the reason for the heavy mood. To them, he was just going on another trip. Khai had tossed the worn Army-green rucksack over a shoulder as the Elders supervised, as if he were some freshly fired employee gathering acoutrements from his office. Now at 26, and in this bar, through the foggy lens of cheap beer and solitude he realized he was stuck in “perpetual audition” for a new Clan… a new Tribe. He’d known since boyhood, with the certainty of intuition (before the Elders even told him so) that the great Tribes sent scouts out into the world, secretively searching for new talent to buttress their ranks. And with his gift for introspection he saw now that for the last three years he’d suspected every new person he met of being a potential scout. Every new experience and encounter subconsciously became an interview. His mannerisms, dress, and conversation custom tailored to project a desired image. The subtext of his conversations screamed for acceptance. And all this was tiring the part of him that was non-renewable…wearing him perilously thin.

This particular insight was more profound than any of those revealed to him on any Vision Quest the Elders had sent him on. He chuckled at the irony before gulping down the last of his cash, his worldly belongings in the rucksack at his feet. All this insight, and self-awareness came at such a price…and to what end?… He tossed the rucksack over his soldier, nodded at the bartender, and set out into night, with no particular destination in mind…no warm place to stumble home to…”‘lone’ but not ‘alone’” he whispered to himself…

And today, as if a King, he would summon subjects to his door. At his beckoning: food, wine, arms, or even women. All of this at the touch of a button as if he were some divinely appointed aristocrat. The woman on the couch told him her price…She puffed her cigarette, legs crossed with such deceptive grace. She calmly cataloged all that she would allow him to do, and for what prices. Her womb so cheap, he wondered if she knew her children would one day find sanctuary there. The smoke from her cigarette swirled around her head. A whore’s halo.

In the bedroom, she commanded him to disrobe and in doing so, wrote a most trite prologue for their sordid little story. After he’d been engorged, and she was exhausted from the failure of each of her “tricks of hastening” she pleaded with him to quickly write an epilogue. She begged for him to concentrate, to think of the words that would conjure an end, no matter how mediocre. And in that moment he heard in her voice, the true reasons for her plea. She pleaded not for fear of missing her next appointment, not because her phone buzzed relentlessly in her purse on the nightstand. She pleaded because her face was beginning to flush. She pleaded because she’d stopped looking at the clock. She pleaded because the rehearsed chorus she’d sung in a monotonous high G had now become a more truthful low D, with more crescendo and with breathier pauses. With this realization he cradled the nape of her neck in the palm of his hand. As his fingers closed behind her ear, he felt her exhale, her body completely relaxed, a most honest acquiesce…and soon, she was weeping quietly with each sob in time to some sick metronome.

He never did write his epilogue. She had stolen the stage and written a perfect little story in a single draft. It didn’t need his edits, just him, as a foil. And the ending was as it should’ve been…with her crying.

Such a shame! It was the first time in years that he’d felt ‘at home’ anywhere. And as he lay his keys on polished mahogany, and kicked his shoes off (as he had done so many times within the last two years) something was definitely different. The restlessness he’d thought was gone, wasn’t…the wanderlust had begun to rear its head again. He found himself shopping for camping backpacks, and leather bound journals, rugged laptops, and passport wallets…all the provisions for an exodus from the known. His bed was less comfortable. His friends, less familiar. He’d wondered if life was inherently this banal and if he’d simply just ignored it before, some self-induced delusion. One thing was certain…someone, somewhere had flipped that switch again. Home was not home. ‘Comfort’ was elusive, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, leaving him tossing and turning. When people spoke, he heard only lies, grinning warmly to mask his distrust. Such a shame, he was just beginning to settle in…that switch had once again been flipped and he found himself with only one acceptable option…

The pigtailed girl smelled of berries. Not the artificial ‘berry’. This was no perfume, no gum. She smelled of fresh strawberries with their sweets and sours and stems. This smell had the imperfection of truthfulness. The white wine on her breath complimented it. She was attractive in her plainness…like a tomboy. Her hair was pulled into tiny one-inch pigtails, and her face and eyes sparkled in the candlelight with the remains of her stage makeup. When she laughed, she laughed with her entire body. When her Icelandic tongue rolled it’s ‘R’s, it tickled his insides, and she saw it, and it made her smile even more. He was in awe of her…she smelled amazing, like Iceland itself he’d imagined. As she recounted the story of how she came to play French Horn in Bjork’s show, she’d casually put her arm around him, in a mock huddle. He listened raptly…She was so warm, like a small sun, with him trapped silently in her orbit. They hovered in this orbit, oblivious to the cd-release party that buzzed noisily around them. And when the time came for him to stand and make for the bathroom, she tugged gently at the tails of his blazer, the fabric bunched in her little fist, clenched as if to say “please don’t leave me”. With a smirk, her fist relented, freeing fabric, and freeing him to make his way alone out into the crowd. He walked taller…prouder…lighter.

Minutes later he was at the bar refueling, when he smelled berries again. He turned to see her smiling, arms outstretched, frozen in the prelude to a hug. She stood silently, swaying gently, cradled by the darkness of the crowd. A vision dreams were made of. And in that moment, he doubted his good fortune. The silvery cold of hesitation welled in his chest and flashed in his eyes. And she saw it. He watched it shatter her. And before he could react, before he could pick up the pieces, she was gone, fading backwards into the crowd, recoiling from the steely cold of his uncertainty.

He would search for her of course…but only in vain. He even waited a bit, until soon he’d known in his gut that she was gone. With stiff upper lip he turned his collar up against New York briskness and stepped out into pre-dawn chill. His hard soled shoes clacked hollow against cold concrete, echoing his solitude out into the night. The city, jealous mistress that she was, fought for his attention now. She pulled out all the stops: beggars, sirens, noisy crowds…”just let me hold onto this one a bit longer…” he pleaded with the night, for soon even the memory would fade, as she had, into the dark…taking with it the smell of her berries…her warmth…her irresistible pigtails…her wanting of him…and all the good that would’ve come of it.