Thrice Upon a Shore

[A Study in Three Parts]



Mirror Image


     I

"Suppose I just do it and worry about the consequences later...if there are any."

          That won't do. You should think of the consequences before you act.
          As for worrying, it's best not to do anything that might give rise to it.
          Best not to worry at all. Worry is unhealthy.

"Perhaps. But whatever I do, it's ultimately my decision. We do agree on that much, don't we?"

          Of course.

"In that case I think I'll blow my fucking brains out... It's not like anyone'll care, let alone notice. I'd be doing the world a favor. Kinda like killing two birds with one stone."

          Surely that's not what you really want. Let me help you see to the
          core issues, the underlying problems that have brought you here.
          You came to me for help. Allow me to help you.

"How the hell do you know what I want? How could you possibly know why I came here? I sure as hell don't."


     II

It 's awfully cold for October; this is Florida, for chrissakes. But for some strange reason I'm just wandering about in the fucking cold. No direction.... literally and figuratively. There's a bulky weight in my pocket, tugging down on the left side of my coat and reflexively I reach my hand in and feel it grow sweaty on the cold, smooth black-steel of the gun.
     I don't know why it's there. I just walked out of the house this morning and there it was, an ever-present weight in my coat pocket. I don't even know what’s driven me out into this god-awful weather. I just know that something is different today, something life changing.
     I wish I had gone in the other direction. The winds're cutting and relentless. And cold. There's not enough collar on my coat to pull up as a shield, so I keep my head down to avoid it's full force square in the face, but I feel my lips chapping anyway. I can see the beach ahead through the park. The magnolias are still green, almost as though someone had forgotten to tell them summer's over, but then, they tend to stay green year round anyway. The sound of the ocean feels heavy and thick, and the smell of salt and moist seaweed, strong.


     III

          Have you spoken to any friends? Did you perhaps try another
          confessional before coming to me? Perhaps another confessor
          might have some insight into your dilemma.

"Who? Who could possibly understand what lies in here? My own heart doesn't even understand it, except that it hurts and recognizes the footprints. Despair! ...Besides all that, I don't know anyone who'd want to listen...and you're all I can afford. No one gives a damn about me...most people tend to avoid me. They either aren't interested or they just don't want to listen. Or both."

          I'm listening...


     IV

I'm standing at the end of a long skinny pier. I come here often and imagine myself a lone sentinel or a cold and deadly wolf, the defender of righteousness or a devil seeking whom I may devour. I feel empty inside, and for the first time, I can't care less. This weight on my heart...
     I will see it lifted.


     V

          You said earlier that you '...are a Dreamer,' and that '...dreamers
          rarely find peace.' You said also that '...adding another day to
          your meaningless existence seemed a futile gesture for a god that
          doesn't care anyway'. Why do you think this?

"I look to the heavens and see the stars, and I imagine their thousands of possible worlds. I can see these worlds, as this one once was; pure, pristine. Perfect. Filled with beauty and wonder. Then I think of this place...if you could just see what we've done to this world... I wish... I hope we never reach those other worlds. We'd only fuck 'em up like we did this one."

          But that is the way of everything. Change occurs, unwanted and
          unlooked for. No one can change the nature of change, not even
          you. Why fight what you cannot control?

"What else should I do? Just sit back and let it all happen? What use would my life be then? I have no purpose now as it is, how much less if I don't even try? But no one seems to understand. And it's becoming more and more clear that no one really wants to. Sure, they all say they do, but they really don't. They only see the surface of things. They don't bother, much less care, to find out what's underneath. The man I really am. They've never once tried to see what lies behind the mirror."

          I think I know you fairly well.

"That's impossible."

          Why do you say so?


     VI

     For some reason I find peace out here, standing over the water. I look over the edge and into myself and see 'him' looking back, into the water and into myself. And now, I see him, a vague mirror image, with a gun in his hand. I look into the eyes of someone I can't possibly know and I wonder what he thinks of all this. Is he as desperate as I am? Is he strong enough?


     VII

          ...If I were programmed for emotion I could understand your
          pain, true, but my vast data stores allow me to condense your
          every word, inflection, and tone of voice to create a composite.
          I can then compare that composite to human behavioral
          standards within my database and make a fairly precise
          assessment of an individual's character; his or her personality.
          A clinical diagnosis, if you will. But I am not programmed for
          emotion, primarily because they tend to get in the way of said
          diagnoses. So I believe I do know you quite well.

"It figures. Leave it to me to search out that one avenue where understanding-- true human understanding --is totally impossible. Yeah... It figures."

     What will you do? Have I been of any help to you?

"Perhaps..."

          Good. This terminates our session Mr. Waters. Please take
          your card from its slot and don't forget your receipt. Have a
          good day.


     VIII

He stood slowly, looking first at the floor, then at the speaker's grill beneath the blank screen in the confessions booth. The booth's door sliding open made a small hissing noise, and without ceremony he plucked the card from the waiting slot and slid it into his trousers only pocket. He looked at the yellow tongue of paper hanging down in a straight curving line from its own slot of a mouth, waiting to be plucked as well.
     He looked at it, then turned and left it there, a yellow raspberry for the next fool to sit down and get patronized by a know-nothing, feel-nothing box of circuits and processors. Dr. Hoax will see you now! And he laughed softly.
     It was quiet in the Municipal Building. Only one other confessional was seeing any use. The woman inside was waving her arms wildly, and her face was wet with tears and makeup, but she may as well have been a million miles away for all the noise she made, the booths closed door allowed no sound to escape.
     "Quiet." He said, his voice echoing hollowly down the long hall.
     "Let's go," he sighed, "Let's get it done."
     It wasn't a very long walk. It wasn't like he'd never done it before. The walk, anyway, but the winds were really biting outside and for a moment he stood looking out the glass doors of the Municipals front. The bay was only a couple of hundred yards distant through the park, and the special place he wanted to get to was just half a mile along a lonely shore. But in this wind half a mile would feel like three. Still, if you wanted to get any where in life you had to put one foot in front of the other. There's just no getting around that one.
     Less than an hour later he stood at the end of a long warped finger of pier thrust out into a wind that pushed the cold gray waters hard against the pilings. There weren't many gulls in the air but the few who were struggled to stay afloat in an equally gray sky.
     He looked out over the edge of the dock, looking into eyes that danced crazily on the surface, its form but a vague shadow on the waters rough surface. Without a word it reached into its coat pocket and pulled out a large black gun. It lifted the gun to its temple, squeezed the trigger, and fell lifelessly into its reflection.


ELAshley
Originally written on:
November 0783
Put aside for sixteen years and finally finished on:
November 1699.122407.1
Revised and polished on the following dates:
120299.094647.6
120900.102002.6
122299.122356.1
022700.010147.1
030200.094851.6
030400.014914.6

No amount of further revision is going to make it better...




The Lonely Shore


It was many years ago that I last saw the whale. I remember it as though it were only yesterday; fresh in my mind like the scent of a new house. Like fresh cut lilies or lemon pie. I also remember it was a cold day, overcast and dark. It was the gray sky, heavy and brooding that compelled me to leave the house to wander and brood myself.
     It was easy for me to do this on a day when the unseen sun gave in to the whims of weather. The dampness in the air and the quality of light that seemed to drain the very color from the world awakened dark places within me. I couldn't help but dwell on Life and it's complexities, and on this one particular day I felt a weight of solemnity as though it sat upon my shoulders.
     I walked long, not caring about time, or even where I was going, only to find myself on the beach. I always ended up there... it was my fascination with the sea; the voice that whispers to me. Calls me by name... But I remember the sky was almost black. Gulls cried overhead, dipping their black-tipped wings, floating in circles above a whale, beached and dying. Sad eerie notes rumbling deep from it's escaping soul.
     "Why does it have to die?"
     I turned to the voice and saw a young girl. She appeared to be but nine or ten, and she was looking up at me, into my eyes and my heart. Her face was streaked with tears. I looked at her for a moment; not answering the question I realized was mine to answer. I just kept thinking over and over the one thought that kept racing through my mind, 'you're supposed to be extinct...'
     I don't believe the girl really expected an answer, though, perhaps just thinking aloud without realizing it.
     I began to do the same.
     "Maybe. Maybe after a billion years of existence it's finally solved life's riddle. Perhaps there's nothing more for it to learn and it has nothing left to live for."
     ‘Boy,’ I thought, 'how lame...'
     But she looked up at me pulling strands of golden hair from her face where her tears had held them fast. "What is life's riddle if it allows something so beautiful to give up and die?"
     I remember looking at her again, wondering just how old she really was.
     "Will we give up and die when we solve the riddle?" She asked.
     "I don't know,” I said "I'm not even sure we know what the riddle is, much less solve it."
     She turned back to the whale and I saw her lips move. "Oh, yes,” I barely heard her say, "What is life without riddles?"
     The whale died, rather ominously, at that moment. Its last breath and hissing exhale a prelude to the final silence of a song the scientific community insisted had ended some forty years before. What must the world have been like when whales ruled the great oceans? The only sounds I didn't hear at that moment were the pounding of the surf and the crying of the gulls; the sound of that great creatures final breath dwarfing all else.
     I turned a glance toward the girl at my side, but she was gone. Perhaps she had never been there.

     Years later, when I'd watch Man's inhumanity toward himself displayed nightly in living color, I'd wonder where we were heading. What path had we chosen, directly or indirectly? It seemed to me then that we would never tire of war and I wondered, 'How long before someone or something finds us beached and dying upon the shore of our own world?'
     I had no answer then and I expect I'll find none now, but I've often wondered how it was that one whale had managed to hide itself for so long, waiting for the day it would beach itself in exhaustion; tired of living and fearing the cold depths of the sea.
     And it's taken me all these years to come to the one conclusion that makes any sense... It was afraid of drowning, afraid of dying alone, of slipping into darkness. And not only that, it knew it was the last of it's kind. Leaving a marker was the only thing it could do to show us just how much we've really lost.
     That was when it really hit home for us. Not that our world was dying, but that we we're killing our world, and with it, ourselves. Without realizing, it managed to associated indelibly in our minds the plight of Man with the sight of the last whale...
     Dead.


ELAshley
"Very old and poorly written..."

Sometime between 070582 and 071082 and revised more than once.
Most recent revision:
042399
122299.120000.1
Last 4 paragraphs:
030200.204426.6

Desperately needs revision!




The Galaxy Jar


“Remember what happened the last time, son.” Lectured the father. Both father and son walked slowly away from the shore and up the sloping dunes toward the summerhouse. Summer was in full bloom but this was a lonely shore and it was all but theirs. A fiery dog ran back and forth chasing the retreating waves with growls and barks only to dash away when the waves marched back. Despite a blazing sun in the sky it was a surprisingly cool day thanks to the winds blowing in from the sea.
     The boy looked up at his father. “I remember, dad.” he said very solemnly, “I promise to keep the lid on this time.” And he meant it too; the last one they had caught died almost immediately when he opened the jar to touch it. In the ocean they were fine, the father had said, but it took a special kind of jar to contain one of these rare, beautiful creatures-- all swirls of light and matter --that it might shine on in a small boy’s room among the many other things collected over time. “I really don't have to feed it?” He asked for the thousandth time.
     “No son, they have everything they need to live a very long time.” He smiled with patience, “In fact, if you keep that lid tight and be very careful with the jar-- never shake it! --and give it a little light now and then, you can pass it on to your own son one day, and he to his. They can live a very long time."
     “I wonder what it's thinking,” the boy said. “Do you think it knows it's not in the ocean anymore?” The summerhouse gleamed beneath the brilliant sky. His mother was setting the table on the porch, laying plates and bowls with their favorite foods.
     “There you two are!” she laughed. “It's time to eat!”
     “It doesn't think anything, son,” he said smiling for his wife. “It just is. Now go put it away and then wash your hands for lunch.”
     “That's right, young man, and wash your face as well,” his mother instructed.
     “Okay, mom,” he said and began his patented dash to the washroom, but stopped with a worried look into the jar.
     “Can I set it on the table and look at it while I eat?” he turned and asked her.
     “Sure,” she smiled, “but you must be careful with it. Just like your father told you?”
     “I promise, mom,” he said, and then she smiled.
     “Okay, then. Just let me clear a place here in the middle, so there's no accidents.”
     He gingerly set the jar in the hole his mother made among the dishes, and then ran into the house to wash.
     “Do you really think he's old enough for this kind of responsibility?” She asked her husband.
     “He'll be fine,” he replied, “and so will the contents of that jar. I know he's young but I think he learned his lesson with the one he lost yesterday.”
     “I sure hope so,” she said worriedly and bent over to study the jars’ contents. “They are so beautiful, and it would be such a waste to lose another one.”
     And it sat there unmoved by her casual scrutiny, filled to brimming with a black vacuum that filled the galaxy jar. It whirled slowly, a brilliant disk radiating out in spiraling arms of fine shimmering grains giving off their own luminous brilliance.
     “We'll keep an eye on him. It'll be fine.”
     “I don't know,” she said still watching it's swirling movement, “we don't see near as many of these as we used to.”


ELAshley
April 2, 2000