What are we all of us in this for? he wondered. Except to be an asylum and home and provide a playground for some head-struck murderous mongers and cheerleaders of executive-class techno violence? His neighbors back home, he knew, would fight tooth and nail against that kind of raw destruction and desecration of their lives by such invaders as we (us). Was it not all to benefit and allay the fear of existent or not terrorist bogeymen in the world at large, then? He wondered. Was it not, after all, the work of God that was being carried out, to falsely claim, after a dozen or more years, to irrationally avenge scores of millions-strong somehow unquestionably frightened and momentarily inconvenienced Americans in street and townhouse, slaving, tax-bled rabble demanding recompense for the intentionally uninquired? None of that seemed to compute if you were over two.
Did Smedley D. Butler, America’s most-decorated soldier in an era now roughly eighty years in the past, in fact have it just about right when he raved about war and militarization? Well, if war was, or is in fact “a racket," generating a mean, dirty, unjustifiable giant wave of sanctioned crime – way beyond your standard, work-a-day racket by business that everyone encounters and loathes each-and-every day online and in most kinds of flimflam transaction, then he, Alva A. Crystal, for one, vowed not to participate – to be yet another racketeer or resigned accomplice!
And, accordingly, at the end of the next pay period, he was filling out his walking papers from the military and facing the predictable music. He reckoned he would need a place to hang out in relative seclusion once he got back stateside and began to simmer down. In fact, he became increasingly certain of that from one day to the next. Because, the America he knew was not going to tolerate an apparent “turncoat” ever – and especially not one kicking back against the pricks, on carefully-reasoned grounds. But, he had a right to a meaningful life, too. So, why couldn’t others be made to see it and happily free themselves, more or less as he had?
Or, was he just crazy, he wondered. and the values 9/11-stricken America so violently went ballistic over and exported and forced on others worldwide the same as those supposedly as spouted by some vengeful ballyhooed Messiah, who was supposedly the model of thought and conduct for everyone, everywhere? Is that the same reality their acclaimed God miserably died for, so worthy to be preserved and proliferated? That sick and rotten formula for a world? Every cell in him knew that it wasn’t.
And if so, then, he, Alva A. Crystal, self-commanding, sovereign citizen of the universe, must opt to indignantly secede. Because, if that was what sanity was about, then he would be proud to be insane, thank you, and urge others to bravely follow suit, changing their/his country’s direction and whole reason for being back a full 180 degrees.
The lesson he gleaned? “Being too full of yourself and your own thoughtful conclusions tends to push everything and everyone else right out of the picture. He must live more largely than that now. Now the funhouse mirror that confused him for so long had shattered and fallen to the floor, and he could see! So, walk straight!”
He had found a different direction for his life – as an evangelist for his new and powerful belief, no doubt shared in principle by multitudes of others, perhaps even a majority of his fellow Americans. Citizens.
VI
The Woman Thang
The wanting/needing women thing was something Colonel Alva could identify with. And he deceived himself thinking he had learned at least a trifle of the minds of women through his few trials and tons of errors. During his Air Force years, he didn’t have time to regularly work to please and keep one of his own. But, there was a certain network made ready for “single” uniformed officers that he seemed to get involved with everywhere he had found himself based, meaning that there were always “off-base women” around. (He found the term amusing, seeming to imply that the women were off-base!)
But then, when he came back out into the more natural world, and did have ample time to devote, he decided to do something about his lack of companionship and elected to go about remedying it scientifically. So, he went online and set up a series of encounters that amounted to interviews. OK, almost interviews, essentially without words in one or two instances.
In doing so, he found himself in unexpected demand with members of the opposite gender – though never so much as he would like to flatter himself.
When he’d first gone to visit his eventual finalist and later second wife, Felicia Foster, then living in a modest home near her recently-widowed mother’s truly palatial digs on the outskirts of Charlotte, following, for him at least, mind-blowing weeks of endless emailing, followed by breathless daily love-fests by phone throughout the month of April. The words of her sister Polly on his first visit went scarcely noticed. They were: “You are about to find, Sir, that there are two Felicias.” And so, to his regret and torment, he had!
Maddeningly dense at times, it took him only a little while to discover what his new sister-in-law had been referring to. Before long, though, once the wedding was past and Felicia had joined him in his private seaside “Swamp-Hilton," lost in his gator and spider-haunted own private Florida, he began to get what Felicia’s sis was driving at. In fact, on a drive around and through the never-ending mangrove tracts, dodging or flattening the more-than occasional presumptuous possum or snake, she began her own rather tortured flashback utterances regarding bygone mates, in the course of which she seemed in a sort of teary trance, utterly inconsolable and suspicious of him, resisting every attempt he made to snap his fingers and break through.
At first, her tale of woe took her back to her young womanhood, returning home with their two small sons only to find all the doors to their house locked and her young husband and someone shacked up inside. More than once. Husband #2, a mad charmer, took her to sweet home Alabama to pose as the hetero bride she was to avoid gay shaming.
Husband #3 was a romantic ne’er-do-well lacking the means to satisfy her extravagant spending habits, in addition to the onerous semi-annual taxes on his extravagant house. On top of which, he turned out to be a freethinker, whose remarks offended her religious sentiments when he mercilessly blasphemed her beloved televangelists, or God’s anointed. The last straw, she wailed, was when she had caught him settled into the company of glossy purloined porn mag whores. Needless to say, he was soon flat out on the bricks, and she had to content herself with the begrudged possession of his deluxe house.
Hers had been a hard lot, to be sure.
But, now, safe with her dashing retired Colonel, things were definitely headed up – until they weren’t.
An easy, sweet-humored companion by day, when fully awake – and they even enjoyed all the same sorts of things – by night, she could never sleep. Never. She was next to him late as he drifted off, but never when he awoke. Having somehow survived purely on diet soda and sugar candy her entire life, she would eat actual food only rarely, perhaps for show – no doubt considering a half-gallon of diet soda a full diet, somehow. She eventually slept away the daylight hours, an average of fourteen a day – which he learned was the privilege of an heiress.
Yet he clung for as long as he possibly could to his chosen myth, that he’d found the perfect and fawning, absolute love of his life. And, despite all, cherish her he most certainly did.
He had to find a way to help her find and receive energy and nighttime peace; that he knew. He had to find and work with a medical or dietician ally to instill a decent regimen for her. But, as soon as he had arranged for such, she returned to her mother’s side, as the old society maven began to die by stages.
VII
The Berserker’s “Familiar Entities”
And then there were Colonel Crystal’s “entities." It turns out regular people, and in fact, all solid, bodily stuff (i.e., “solid matter”), he’d learned from his dabbles into modern physics, were, in reality, not solid at all, but were instead, as he was by now accustomed to understanding such, a sort of super-fine mist, containing almost infinitely more that wasn’t there, as w
e would reckon it, than what was.
And that which animates us and gives us – and more than likely every other “thing” there is, he inferred – both each our recognizable portion of heft or, at least potentially, awareness of, was what adepts, those not completely convinced otherwise by the doctrine of “materialism” or “positivism," refer to as spirit. (Which scientists in general, however, tend to frown upon). Spirit, as Colonel Crystal had come to regard it, was found literally everywhere throughout the universe, that is, deeply permeating all of space (which is now more often being referred to as space-time) and only intensifies markedly in density when it comes to what are traditionally considered “non-living” sorts of entities, i.e., rocks, soil, defunct once-living matter, etc.
In his peculiar or particular understanding, he thought that even in instances and places where no mist-like matter was even discernable by human senses, there could yet exist intellect in partial or complete vacuums, consisting of concentrated energy if at frequencies different from those at which humans are normally equipped to detect, and, thereby making up “disembodied” intelligence, (at least, from our perspective). That is, possibly fellow conscious entities, or diffuse awareness, likely to make up the so-called “spirit world," regardless of its or their origin or nature.
In fact, he reasoned, such may, actually be “solid," fully embodied beings in the context of some other dimension or world we don’t know about, much the same as we are in ours. Or, in another sense, they might perhaps be inhabitants of “anti-matter” realms, as opposed to our own cloudlike or misty so-called “matter” – from whose perspective our “material” world could itself be normally undetectable “anti-matter." Meaning, he reasoned, that since no thing is said ever to be truly created or destroyed, just transformed, the life formulas and consciousness of the “deceased” possibly exist all around us as what we call “ghosts” of once “solid," sentient earth plane residents like ourselves, perhaps enjoying now an anti-matter physicality of their own – something like Chinese people conceiving of us on our side as standing upside-down, and vice-versa. Also meaning that the famous “heavenly host” of intelligent beings may well exist too, all around us and right smack here where we are, perhaps protecting and aiding each of us, their “heavenly guests?” – or, maybe – who knows? – thwarting us and making us stumble. Or being blissfully unaware. Such was the gist of what Colonel Alva Crystal, in his own nit-picky stubbornness, believed, substance-wise, and mind-wise, of the world in which he, and by now billions, trillions of souls lived.
* * *
Two wide doors (entryways) of understanding, opened for him, he imagined, neither of his own volition, had convinced our crusty, now ex-Colonel of the reality of conscious entities at various vibratory levels, or frequencies. For the Colonel, the first door to the invisible realm of spirit was opened by a being he came to refer to simply as his “Benefactor," a descriptive name he bestowed because the person (or spirit) to whom it attached remained for the now several years of their known contact completely anonymous. Might this Benefactor, he wondered, be what is commonly called one’s guardian angel? Or, perhaps even an all-seeing, ultra-powerful eternal portion “out-there” of himself on a different energy plane, a sort of “higher self," invisible and other-dimensional, but real as anything? Or even, per chance, both of these identities or personas at once? Or perhaps it could be a “person” of the “Creator” of all, as many would pronounce it, leaning on their old, traditional source. How could he, or anyone, know for sure? It somehow never even occurred to him that the world as a whole could have a “Benefactor."
An early awareness of this “go to (or come to Alva) Entity” pronounced by him his “Benefactor” had occurred while he was still casting around for clues during his relatively brief interim stay back in the upstate New York of his boyhood, after returning from the Middle East and before moving to his new, more exotic and obscure section of the South. It involved the “Benefactor” quite cordially letting him know that he/she/it was infinitely understanding, capable, and caring, had and would always be there for him .
One night, deep in the dead of a rural northern New York winter, Colonel Alva had jumped into his car, parked outdoors, to drive to a meeting he had expected to attend. The temperature at the time stood at a really ghastly, record-shattering -35 f., and, in such condition, he had worn his car’s battery down almost instantly, the starter after a second or two producing nothing but a disheartening “click” when he turned the key. Going to the meeting didn’t constitute any sort of emergency or necessity for him, but still, he did loft a request to the heavens based on his desire to attend and share in the anticipated benefits of comradeship.
As he sat there, two-thirds or three-quarters frozen, a sudden conviction entered his head out of nowhere that the next time he turned the key, the engine would start, no problem. Although there was no outward reason to believe it would. Yet he was mysteriously made so certain of this certainty – of this done deal – that he looked at the key in the ignition, now colder than frost, with his momentarily ungloved hand on it, and smiled, savoring the moment.
Then he turned the key and the car – impossibly! – did start right up as robustly as on a summer’s day, with no hesitation at all. And he drove through the glistening, crunching snow in the drive and entered the street knowing full well that the “miracle” wasn’t that the cold engine had started smoothly and easily, but that he was somehow given to know for certain it would beforehand.
Some of the many to whom he told this true story suggested that it was God, the Almighty, universal Creator, who had intervened. But Colonel Alva pointed out he hadn’t the slightest evidence to justify making the giant leap to that conclusion. He didn’t even know whether the universe had even been “created” as we understand the word at all. Maybe it had evolved, for instance. Or maybe it was just a reflection in a mirror. Had his own “Benefactor” created the universe at some point? He had no idea, and no provable way of knowing. (Nor, he told himself, did anyone else). Settled.
Since the dawning of his awareness involving the frigid battery and what seemed an incontrovertible “miracle” without benefit of clergy – and very likely on many occasions earlier that he thought he could recognize looking back – Colonel Crystal’s “Benefactor” had produced all manner of otherwise unaccountable or highly unlikely “miracles” solidly in his favor. Yet, without even once identifying herself/himself/itself as God or the milkman, or saying, “Colonel C., you have to repent on pain of eternal suffering," or laying down any other condition whatsoever, like “clean up you room," or “worship me and obey me” – or “slay the Alalekites."
Because, unlike those other so-called offers of favor that others speak of, this manifested love, this most wonderful gift of assurance to him, of acceptance and personal caring from One with seemingly limitless power and consummate knowledge, was truly unconditional – as true gifts must always be. At least, that’s how he saw it. And it proved you don’t have to join a club to receive the benefits of The Benefactor.
* * *
But then, a second confirmation of a different sort, emanating it seemed, also from a different vibrational dimension, a parallel universe, if you will, or maybe from some unknown part of this one of ours, also arrived during that brief, magical time before he came down to Steinhatchee.
Within half a week after his very favorite, most-loved relative and confidant (his maternal aunt – her failing health the unspoken reason he had settled for a time back near his old home in the first place) had died at an unusually advanced age, ex-Colonel C., as her executor, entered unaccompanied her just-vacated, intimately familiar residence in Penfield town. On the occasion of his first visit to the house that week, he entered and walked through until he came to an inner door, which was closed, to the bedroom in which his relative had passed away two days before. Without hesitation, he pulled the door open, went in, and stood just one step inside the room, next to the bed, thinking his own not too profo
und thoughts. At that point, something amazing happened.
There came of a sudden from high up in the room a sharp, very loud “Bam! Bam! precisely twice, the exact sound of those awful “clackers” pre-adolescents used to scare the liver out of their elders for a time about a generation ago. And that distinctive sound, that he’d heard only a couple of times back then, emanated from no identifiable source except up in or near the ceiling.
Pretending that the shocking, sudden sound from nowhere, was somehow his aunt’s acquired way of letting him know that she knew he was there (which he was convinced, after thinking about it, she was), he addressed her gently and briefly, and then left, all but forgetting that small incident, seemingly trivial at the time, in the rush of that week’s events.
But then, a couple of days later, he was back again at his aunt’s house, and heard the same sudden, sharp, startling sound again, this time in the kitchen, where he had paused to think for a moment before proceeding farther into the residence. And again, the sound came just twice in rapid succession, identical to the sound, also up near the ceiling, before. This second time he took as his confirmation, considering that on each of the two instances, the unexpected double rap had been identical, and each time, came from overhead in the room where he was at that time and not in the other or any of the more distant rooms of the house. It had to be her, he thought. And so, his confidence in a continuance of life and reason after the end of fleshly life, was for him powerfully affirmed – a second fabulous gift he was made aware of from another dimension. And so it became his special, personal awareness of that other dimension, in addition to this vexing one, that he wanted to serve by spreading the truth and his growing conviction regarding the U.S. military and its desperate need of redeployment to again serve the interests of the nation.
Colonel Crystal's Parallel Universe Page 3