The Umpire Has No Clothes

by Walter Witty

  “Simon Says I should take that as a yes.”

  He just sat there and stared at me.

  I sighed like a prisoner of war facing a firing squad’s Trivial Pursuit shot clock. “Let me try again. Are you the perpetrator, alias Sargon the Enlightened, a locksmith from Van Nuys by trade? The proverbial Chairman of the Bored?”

  The human jigsaw puzzle looked away. “The past is given as a reference, for your mind, which clings to such things. During your more recent game of kick-the-can I used a special tool steel pin tumbler padlock combined with a nickel alloy hardened steel chain reinforced with molybdenum alloy studs. My chain resisted hacksaw blades, and required nothing less than an argon plasma torch to defeat.”

  “Now that this most relevant history is straight,” I said, flourishing a charades pen, “would you mind telling me exactly why you did this thing, Al?”

  “Is it not obvious?”

  “You mean by the notes left at the scene? What’d you do, anyway, read some Buddhist text, and decide to play ring-around-the-rosie with industrial strength cable?” I paused, and watched his face for reaction. There was none. He was at peace with himself, devoid of hostility or even worry over the consequences, which might have included a life sentence playing Life, or maybe musical electric chairs. “And by the way,” I added, hidden curiosity now stabbing me like a tempered steel Top Chef Masters utensil, “where did the sayings they found come from, again?”

  He blinked at the ceiling, or maybe at the window where a Goodyear blimp drifted by, advertising a celebrity foosball tournament hosted by Simon Cowell’s half brother Colon. “They are from the Ten Grave Precepts attributed to Bodhidharma from the book Isshin Kaimon,” he declared, “The Precepts of One Mind.”

  “Uh huh.” I turned pages in my file, and read aloud. “Okay, the first precept, as you call it, is I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT KILLING. That little gem was not left at an abortion clinic or death house, Al, but at a snack food manufacturer. . . right after you picked and replaced their front door’s mortise lock with a double dead bolt. Ring a bell?”

  He gave no reaction, so I continued.

  “Next was I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT STEALING, a note left at Sterling Health Services, an HMO under investigation by a 60 Minutes crew, after their administration building was chained shut. Then it was I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT MISUSING SEX, which was taped on a high school coach’s metal office door, after a titanium padlock was clamped on it. The very next day the note I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT SPEAKING FALSELY appeared on the door of Senator Bradley Milton, and I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT GIVING OR TAKING DRUGS on the locked door to televangelist and local Teamsters president Winifred Cashdollar. Then Sargon apparently took a week off, because it was a full week later before the note I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT DISCUSSING THE HYGIENE OF OTHERS was discovered on the Studio B door of Glenn Beck, who’d been a no show for two days at Studio A because no one thought to look for him, much less bring him some bar soap. And yet all this still didn’t get much press, did it, Al, until I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT PRAISING MYSELF WHILE WASTING OTHER PEOPLE’S TIME appeared on the exit doors to the Dorothy Chandler pavilion during a game show awards ceremony. So you went on vacation out to La La Land, Al? How did you accomplish that one without getting caught? I thought those Hollywood awards shows had guards with tasers and light sabers.”

  “Even security guards do not always live in the Now, unfortunately for them,” Noonan replied with the cryptic ease of a Hollywood producer green-lighting another comic book movie.

  “The force is not with them, is that what you’re saying?”

  Al’s smile was barely detectable. “If that explains to you how a person is able to slide five bicycle U-locks into the entrance door bars while passing outside.”

  “Uh huh. . . And at the same event a note reading I TAKE UP THE WAY OF NOT BEING STINGY was left on the windshield of a Mercedes, right after The Club was locked onto its steering wheel. What was that about?”

  “The car belonged to a Mobster’s Wives star who gave her time but not money to charity. The time she gave was for her own aggrandizement, and the charity parties she attended spent ninety three point two percent on flowers, food, and door prizes.”

  “Why take the risk on a second lockdown then, though?”

  Noonan closed his eyes, and sighed like Yoda instructing Jar-Jar on the sport of luge leapfrog. “Time is an illusion,” he repeated.

  I chuckled. “You won’t think so when you’re doing it,” I promised him. “You could get twenty years for this, even if you plead guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of Judge Judy.”

  “Have mercy,” he said, “on yourself. Shall I explain why you are so obsessed with guilt that you must return to it constantly?”

  “We haven’t got time for that, Al. We have to prepare your defense.”

  “Resist nothing,” he instructed me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.” He paused with gratuitous significance. “Your mind is creating a constant dialog, a background noise from which you cannot escape. You need to turn it off, and step out of time’s grip on you in the present. Only then can you know your true self, and become alive instead of just labeling and scoring everything around you. Only then you will know there is no salvation in the future, and no resolution from the past. . . there is only the Now, and it is more than enough.”

  “Now. . .” I said. “. . .Now.”

  He leaned forward, looking directly into my bloodshot eyes. “Yes, now is the time to awaken,” he said, “from your false identity.”

  “My. . . false identity,” I repeated, the epiphany striking me like a thirteen pound ball curving in from the gutter at the last moment to lay waste to ten other of my false identities. And in a sudden epiphany I realized my own choice, with time running out. The thing I’d have to decide for myself. Was he. . .was I. . . guilty or not guilty?

  Some say that Time is an illusion of the mind. Of the ego. Ironically, over time, I’ve since learned that’s true. When my trophy wife left me, taking with her the son she wasn’t sure was mine or hers, she hurled one last nagging epithet about my staying out too late, of neglecting her. Going out that door, she was crying when she stammered that maybe now I had all the time in the world. Which got me to thinking about that, until, in my misery, I gave up thinking altogether. And lost my job and Porsche in the process.

  I don’t know how much time has passed, but the one who is known as Albert Noonan goes on trial soon. I will not be defending him, nor does he require a defense. I can only complete his unfinished work, the tenth precept. And so I will take up the way of not defaming that which reflects true self-nature, in that subtle and mysterious realm of the One which does not hold dualistic concepts of ordinary beings and sages. The teisho of the actual body is the harbor and the weir. This is the most important thing in the world—the letting go of ego and of waiting and even of seeking. In the eternal present, its virtue finds its home in the ocean of essential nature, and it is beyond explanation. So let the court decide what it will about alternate universes, I know that Albert Noonan is not guilty. And when his jury has been sequestered—when they are locked away—they too will see the Truth.

  DIEry ENTRY 683: Dying with the Most Toys

  Lawyers, doctors and cable providers everywhere know that their clients, patients and lemmings dying “sooner rather than later” is not worth their time to avoid, while their own acquisition of toys is a more vital goal. If your psychiatrist or the courts have told you that you are 1) a paranoid schizophrenic; 2) a sociopathic obsessive/compulsive; or 3) a “warmongering sadomasochist psychopath with tendencies toward aggravated combat” then I (we) recommend that you continue in your quest to achieve sports gold. (See SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME in the Lossary.)

  CHAPTER 666: Satan Plays Left Field

  Hard to believe that it was just a month ago when my neighbor Phil Stewart and I were out on the lawn, grilling a pair of steaks on my brick barbecue, both of us staring down a
t the sputtering and smoke of it. Yeah, he was a big bear of a guy who liked to watch football just like your typical NRA member, and I don’t know how many times I’d poke my head out the back door and see him sitting there on his patio, whooping or cussing over some Jets game. Of course it helped that he was retired, and had already earned his gray hair. Unlike me, he was finally out of the sales game. Lucky guy, I used to think. Not only could he afford to drink Bud instead of Keystone, but there were all those eligible women out there too—the ones who’d outlived their husbands and still had their own teeth.

  “Tell me about Mrs. Newman, Phil,” I said, salivating over thoughts of my own retirement. “How’s she taking to widowhood?”

  “You mean since Harold died of the Big C? Not good, Wally, not good. She doesn’t come out of the house much now. At least I never see her. She was always going out to get things for him, right up to the end when they moved him into the hospital—remember? No more. It’s a shame, pretty woman like that, too. And you know Carl Smithers? Remember when he told us he was going on vacation to Bermuda?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Heard about that. Seems his boss insisted on it, as I recall. Ain’t his wife due, though?”

  “Not anymore,” Phil replied, turning his Wal Mart Porterhouse with a long stainless fork. “She’s already delivered. Twins. Something about congenital defects, I understand. He can forget about that trip.”

  “But that’s just. . .awful, Phil,” I said.

  “You should have seem HIM. I met him at the drugstore last night, and he was like a different man, buying pain killers and non-hallucinogenic diet pills. I don’t think he’s ever going to Bermuda, Wally. You can tell by just looking in his Bob Costas eyes. It’s not what’s there, it’s a factor that ISN’T there, anymore.”

  “Tell me, Phil,” said I. “When did she—”

  “Just about two weeks after Harold died, I guess.”

  We ate our steaks well done—against the advice of some putz on TV—then I suggested we watch a ball game together before I had to pack for another trip. And I forgot all about Phil’s bad news until a few days later when he met me in the driveway to tell me that Stephen, a neighbor on the opposite side of my house, lost his job at the plant.

  I thought about that. See, I knew Stephen had a son named Caputo, who was enough of a lookalike to make me envious of having a little replica of my own to pass a pigskin to. Unfortunately, Caputo had gotten into trouble with the law recently when he got caught suspiciously selling a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup that proved to be full of steroid filled needles in the high school gym. Apparently, Colbert had been trying to run with some jocks from the Republican Guard football team over on the west side of town, and they’d threatened him with wedgies if he wimped out. That’s what Stephen told Phil, anyway. Which explained why Phil said Steve kept repeating the word “innocent” as if he were trying to convince HIMSELF too.

  Anyway, after my brief talk with Phil, I had to leave for Hucksboro.

  I suppose the mind does funny things to itself, but the genesis of the theory that began to form in my own mind started with what Phil told me, and continued to grow when I considered that in my travels I’d often noticed how the western side of the metropolises I visited were run-down. Why is it that rich people invariably cling to the north-eastern quarter? I wondered. It seemed to be true everywhere I went. Heading due west, I found poverty and foul-smelling tenements. Heading northeast and I discovered yuppies and condos, “littered” only with tennis courts and private clubs. Did the city planners decide this? In our own town, it was certainly not the case. Residents on the west side seemed simple victims, mostly, to poverty and escalating crime. That there was more to it than this didn’t register with me at first, until I started thinking about poor Rod on my left. And Harold on his left. And Ray on his left.

  Of course, in looking at a map left meant west. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west. Light comes from the east, DARKNESS from the west. And what was darkness? It’s something we sought in the early pioneering days, killing buffalo from the windows of passing trains. We sought it, the “wild” west, and said “go west, young man” but didn’t add “because your deeds are evil.” And the west caught up with us too, moving its darkness east.

  The pattern? Take note. Left to right. West to east. It’s as if a great bronze gong clanged inside that usually inactive majority of my brain. I began adding it up, too. Every nuance of broken records, every incident out of left field, every not so subtle mystery involving killer tornadoes. And I got to thinking. What if, now, an EVIL were about to take over a town. From which direction would it come? And would it move like a rushing fullback, delivering its parcel of addictive terror quickly? Or would it move methodically, taking its time, sure of its victims?

  When I got home, I knew.

  I invited Phil over for another barbecue that night, and as the charcoal slowly flaked and whitened, I took in a breath, stretched, and then. . .I felt it. It had already started nibbling at my lawn, browning it with cool, autumn air. The trees crackled their leaves, resisting, but still it came, like a virus. And just as it had come to Carl, to Harold, and then to Carville, three cranky old farts down the street. On my left.

  I shivered, and held my hand over the rising heat.

  “What is it?” Phil asked, seeing me stare up at the trees bordering the yard.

  “How long did you say it was after Harold died that Carl’s wife delivered, Phil,” I said, evenly.

  “What? I don’t know. About two weeks. Why?”

  “Because it was about two weeks later that Stephen lost his job, that’s why.”

  Phil laughed. “So?”

  “So I’m next, Phil. ME. And I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe it won’t be much. I remember Mrs. Walker on the next block lost her poodle around election time. Maybe I’ll get by with an abscessed tooth. But who’s to say it won’t be bad for me? Really bad.”

  I broke off. Phil was staring now.

  “Look, I know this sounds paranoid. But have you ever noticed little things, like how if the battery in your car fails, it’s usually the left cells go bad first? The frost in your freezer, building up on the left? Or let’s say you lay a piece of bread in a dark place, liberally buttered—which way does the mold spread? I’ll tell you. . .from left to right, or west to east.”

  Phil was really staring now. “Now hold on, you ARE sounding paranoid, buddy.”

  “It carries over to bigger things too,” I explained. “Engine falls off a plane, and which one is it? Duplex catches fire, and which side gets gutted before the fire trucks arrive? It’s out of the WEST, Phil. Out of the WEST. And it’s evil. Can’t you feel it?”

  Phillip Stewart squinted into the deepening twilight, a tight smile playing on his lips. “The only thing I sense, good buddy, is a couple of steaks smelling insanely delicious while I stand here being asked to imitate Rod.”

  “It’s not funny, Phil,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s why I’ve got to get the hell out of here.” I pointed up at the gnarled oak which overshadowed the western side of the house, swaying. “Because IT’S coming, Phil. Very slowly, steadily somehow. But it’s coming. And I’ll bet if you took a thermometer over there it’d drop five or six degrees. I don’t know how or why, but—”

  “Only the shadow knows?”

  “Yeah, Phil. Maybe. Only the shadow. But listen—I figure I’ll have until morning before it touches the house. So I’m taking a vacation, starting tomorrow. Maybe even Bermuda, I don’t know. What I’m saying is, if you’re not leaving. . .if you’re still gonna sit over there watching the Saints versus the Sinners, will you at least keep your eyes open, Phil? Will you promise? Just keep your eyes open?”

  I called Phil a week later from the Buttswallow International airport. I wanted to apologize for saying all those crazy things, like warning him about Satan’s next big blitz, and just to tell him to save a cold one for me when I got back. But then I asked him about my hous
e. And he told me about some moving company. Complained they’d broken some clay player statues of his, wheeling out of my drive with their big semi. After I took a deep breath, I said: “Phil, listen to me. I never hired any moving company. Phil, you there?”

  Which brings us up to date. It’s five days later now and I just got home to file my report with the police. Already, though, I’m considering my original idea again about selling the house and moving to the Bible Belt. Think I’m crazy, right? Well, let me tell you why. Seems Phil took my advice to get away after all, because two days ago he flew off to see his brother in California on Western Air Lines.

  And Jon’s still waiting.

  DIEry ENTRY 684: Purchasing Back Your Soul

  Finally! You really should know by now that your god is not great, especially since said god is in rehab after an incident involving an underage Nike employee, a Chia pet, and a gallon of moonshine. If you now want to extricate yourself from a cult that claims the perks of deities, you need to cancel the contract you’ve made with Satan, the prince of the power of the Nike Air. Why continue on this quest for damnation, including by land and sea? Mother Earth (i.e. Nature) is pissed at you for not playing by the ten golden rules, and you need to make amends. Imagine the peace (that passes all understanding) which will descend upon you once you’re free of the hellish grip of sport, in all its deviant manipulations of your time and sanity.