Terry Persun's Magical Realism Collection

by Persun, Terry

  The moment Lewis jumped over the stone fence and burst into the pool of gold the field made, Jeffrey stopped following. He knew that Lewis was gone. Their brotherly conversation had ended abruptly, turning into a dazed mumble as Lewis broke loose and accepted common thought.

  Jeffrey had seen it happen before. “I’m heading back,” he yelled after Lewis. “Happy sketching.”

  Lewis waved. He was already turning and sitting. His pad opened, his pencil working to rough out what he’d drawn or painted thousands of times already, many of them gone into the waste basket.

  Lewis had, by his senior year, already won many art awards at school, yet he had never recaptured the field, and he never would. It destroyed him a little each time he failed to recreate the feelings behind that first visit to the field. He imagined his own destruction as a cancer, a voluntary one. He knew that each time he tragically attempted to get those emotions on paper, they pushed further away from him. Yet, he had to go back to that time, he had to try. Within the boundaries of pain and failure, of the cancer of himself, there was also security and comfort, but it was the failure, that feeling of eating himself alive, that was the part of himself he recognized easiest, and felt closest to.

  Lewis struggled with the drawing against time. The sun would disappear quickly, vanish behind the hills, and leave him alone in the dulled afterglow. He would let go of common thought, and sit, exhausted, until he felt he had to leave.

  I can see him still, sitting as a young man, his hair brushing along his face, his eyes searching as much inwardly as out, sketch pad lowered, face turned up, almost in prayer. Never could I reach out and touch his shoulder, comfort him. I often yearned for the short sentence of mobility, even if I could calm his turmoil only once, and then die.

  Like a volcano, his senses bubbled and churned and built up pressure. He shook like a tremor, two great stone plates under the ground, two brothers, grating against one another, yet bound in grit and dirt. Lewis wanted out, to reach outside himself and get away. He wanted to understand everything, transfer it to color and shape, but most of all to understand himself.

  On the way home that evening, Lewis stopped by me and pulled a pocket knife. Why he’d never done it before, I don’t know, I often begged through common thought for him to carve his name into my bark. That night, it was a conviction, a promise to himself and Jeffrey, and I suppose Brittany, as he carved his initials and hers, a broad heart, straight arrow. I would carry that heart like it was my own, trying, year after year, not to let it fade.

  Common thought allowed me to follow Lewis out of the darkened woods. Able to see him from any angle, I did as much: from left, right, above, and below, from behind and in front. There was no angle I hadn’t seen Lewis from clearly, like seeing myself, and seeing myself through his eyes. It was as though we were one. But I couldn’t escape my immobility, couldn’t reach out to offer a comforting hand, a word of understanding. Immobility has its benefits if only through the use of common thought, but often I would give up common thought and long life for the short-lived mobility of humans and their ability to reach out to one another.

  Lewis walked slowly, taking in his surroundings, letting color and shape wash through his mind. There were images in his head, scenes he would paint, not always as perfectly and brilliantly as in his thoughts, but beyond other artists, into a realm only he could reach. I know of no other who has ever shown that he or she had come so close to common thought. Somehow, Lewis was able to express it in his work. I saw nuances of the field and grove of trees in the enchanted forest, of the brook, in paintings where none of those elements were present in image.

  On his return home that night, at seventeen, soon to be eighteen, a young man past puberty, future paintings snapped into his mind as clearly as watching a slide show. His head filled with ideas, overflowed with paintings which would take years to complete. In the cooling darkness of the woods, everything from Maxfield Parish-type semi-surrealist to Mondrian and Miro, from O’Keefe to Wyeth, passed in and out of Lewis’ mind, paintings he’d seen, mixed with ideas of his own, variations of their works, brought into fuller understanding with slight changes carried out using the brush in his mind. Lewis exploded with pent-up energy screaming to escape. He couldn’t spend enough time with a brush, a sketch pad, charcoal, to release all that grew at exponential rates inside him. And although I received this second hand, through Lewis, after the fact, I know that it was that increased explosion waiting to happen that forced Lewis to pursue Brittany.

  Many thought she was beyond his reach. Even Jeffrey had expressed it that night on the old tractor road, but Lewis was driven. He planned and watched. He deduced that Brittany was pursued primarily by the egotistical athletes, the pushy quarterback of the football team, Ben Johnson, the state wrestling champ, Greg Botini. Other kids let her alone as though there was a cage around her, an envelope of energy. Yet, Brittany did tease the jocks, she even dated some of the other kids, Larry, Jeffrey’s long-time baseball-playing friend for instance. It was the “Lonely Beauty” syndrome Lewis had seen in movies. Brittany scared the boys, all of them except those few who were so sure of themselves that they actually cared more for her as a monument to their virility than they did for her as a person. Lewis knew, one day when he over heard Brittany telling a friend, “I don’t think he really cares about me, the me inside,” that he had to strike, had to overcome the banks of his own shores.

  “So,” her friend, Sue, had said, “he’s cute. Any girl would date him.”

  “I’m not about to be any girl,” Brittany retorted. “There are other guys.”

  “Haven’t you already dated most of them?”

  “Fun-ny, Susie slut. That’s because most of them are jerks and I drop them as soon as I find out.”

  Lewis eavesdropped while standing near a friend’s locker. Although I couldn’t connect with common thought that far away, I can see him standing there with his books, his ever-present sketch pad in the pile, his head down. Welling up inside him was the pressure of fear, excitement, lust, all the things associated with young men on the verge of pursuing love for the first time.

  When Brittany left her friend for class, Lewis did the same. “Oh, I gotta go,” he said, rushing off to fall in behind her.

  “Where to? Class is this way,” his friend yelled.

  Lewis heard, but didn’t answer, didn’t stop.

  Brittany’s blonde hair swayed with her body as she walked. Lewis had seen her move, talk, smile, many times in his mind. Now, following her, those memories helped to bring her to life inside him. The longer he followed, the more he filled with her, the greater his conviction that he needed her for his art to survive. “Brittany!” The ice was broken.

  She stopped and turned. They had talked before, but her face betrayed her, that she saw something new, unusual in Lewis. “What’s wrong?”

  Lewis swallowed and his knees felt weak, there was a twisting in his groin.

  “Lewis?”

  “Brittany.”

  She smiled at him. “Are you all right?” She stepped closer and put her hand out to touch his forearm. He felt the same sensation he always did with her touch ever since the time she touched his head after he returned from the hospital.

  “Will you go out with me? Saturday?”

  “Are you serious?”

  Lewis felt like he was about to fall over. “Yes. Why? I’ve always wanted to. Since we were kids. Since I got back from the hospital,” he exploded.

  “When was that?” she didn’t remember.

  His heart sunk. “It doesn’t matter. I need to go out with you.”

  “Need?” She pulled back her hand and looked at him quizzically. “Is this some kind of dare. Is someone making you do this?”

  The thought that someone would have to make anyone ask Brittany Sholes on a date was ridiculous. Lewis laughed, “God, no, Brit.” The laugh calmed him, steam oozed out his ears, nose, and mouth, the pressure subsiding, the stillness after the minor eruption settli
ng in. I imagine his eyes getting softer, more inviting. “Brittany,” he repeated, “I’ve always wanted to date you. I just didn’t seem able to ask.”

  Bam! The truth came out so evenly that, in Lewis’ memory, Brittany appeared to be overwhelmed. Lewis hadn’t been the first to tell her such a thing, even he knew that, but he was probably the first person she considered a friend to do so. It must have been a new feeling for her, because she said yes.

  “Yes?”

  “I like you, Lewis, you’re nice.”

  That night Lewis rushed home, threw his books onto his bed and ran up the old tractor road. When he approached, his arms spread wide. He hugged my trunk, his face close to the heart he had carved before the school year had started. “Oh, Brit, I love you so much. I knew it would work.”

  Of course, nothing worked, not yet, only that he managed to get a date with her. Nonetheless, Lewis had broken through. It wasn’t just excitement and love for Brittany which broke through, but his personality. He had asserted himself. It may have been the first time other than once, when Jeffrey pushed him to the point of a fight, the two of them wrestling on the floor of the forest, leaves sticking to their sweatshirts, dirt kicked into piles until they both tired. Somehow, that may have been a start of his opening up, though, because they both tired. Jeffrey was no longer the stronger, only the more aggressive. They got up and actually shook hands afterwards, in congratulations of Lewis’ expressing aggression, or for mutual respect, it didn’t, at the time, matter why.

  Lewis’ personality was let loose for a while, you might say. After so many years of being locked up and pushed around, the escape inevitably came with no written instructions and few social guides.

  After kissing the heart, each initial actually, one, two, three, four, Lewis let go and ran to the field. He leaped entirely over the stone fence, not touching the top flat stones at all, and slammed excitedly into the field. It still being winter, the ground crunched under his feet. The bent weeds and grass from fall winds and rains, stood stiff against his legs, unrelenting in the cold air. Nonetheless, he twirled in ecstasy, saying “Brittany, Brittany, Brittany,” over and over until he became dizzy. Lewis slowed and walked further, towards the opposite end of the wide field, through the taller, uncut weeds, towards the dark clutches of his enchanted forest. As he walked, the grasses and weeds, trees and ferns, became part of his thinking. He slipped into common thought, to him a meditative realm of calm. He wished he’d not left his sketch book home, but when he looked skyward, he realized it was getting too dark for that and the enchanted forest would be even darker, with the pines looming, protectively, overhead.

  Lewis ran part way to the enchanted forest anyway. The pine clearing opened before him, with little underbrush and the thin brook worked into the forest floor. Darkness swooped down and became ominous when he entered the pine grove. His eyes adjusted slowly as he walked deep into the clearing. He found the rock he first sat near and kneeled next to it. In front of him was the tree the old raccoon had plumped out of. For a moment, as Lewis turned his head to listen to the running water’s trickle under thin bands of ice along the bank, he thought he glimpsed the raccoon. His reaction, instead of pulling back, was to fall deeper into common thought, only slightly askew, into the animal version, nonetheless still connected to me. His reaction was more than mere falling, it had elements of instinct, elements of a deeper knowledge as to what he was doing. I felt within him a confidence and understanding which hadn’t been there before. The memory of the raccoon had drawn it out. A set of perfect circumstances had arisen, the right person in the right place at the right time: Lewis, the enchanted forest, in a deepening darkness where illusions coming from within easily slipped out into reality, exposing themselves to the physical world.

  Lewis had not actually known that the raccoon had died quietly near a bush. For some reason, he never wandered in the direction of the carcass, even one time when he smelled the fading body and wondered of its origin. But, for the second time, it had been the raccoon who had opened Lewis further. It seemed that each time the pure opening of Lewis’, shall we say heart, or soul, happened, a bigger part of him became available to more of common thought, and equally, more of common thought opened up to him. And it was his progress to this point that allowed him to project, no, recognize, the raccoon. For after all, in common thought, as along the thread of time itself, the raccoon had never really left that spot. In many senses, it was at the bottom of that tree, the kerplunk sound of its body landing on the soft needles, its appearance, its movements, its openness, all of it together being the key to Lewis’ full understanding, his conversion to door opening as a way to live as opposed to door closing. Even Lewis’ newfound personality of a higher degree of aggressiveness (and this, truly, is where I am leading) was as much a part of his understanding and acceptance of common thought, as it was the well-known egotistical human opening of the personality. Lewis, opened within and without, embraced common thought in a visual sense, around its raccoon-shaped body and ran blindly with it, into the realm of human personality. The combination almost exploded inside him, the explosion not showing through, because as he kneeled near that rock, as he saw the raccoon out of the corner of his eye and in his soul, as he listened to the brook gurgle under leaves of ice, like a tai chi dancer, he was calm on the outside.

  The pine grove, miraculously knowing how different Lewis was, just as I and the raccoon, squirrels, birds, and probably brook water knew, helped Lewis to hold to the image, to grasp it. For Lewis, the enchanted forest stood tall to its name. He focused, was it inward or outward, past or present, on the raccoon and it came further into view, even though the remaining light would have caused the opposite had the raccoon still been alive.

  The raccoon waddled to within a foot of him and, for a second time, licked Lewis’ fingers in the present time (or was it a repeat of the past?) then used its key, a key which had not been used for nearly eight years. Another explosion occurred inside Lewis. Suddenly the enchanted forest was a realm of colors linked to emotions, colors bursting into intimate recognition to particular elements in nature, not just tree or stone or bird, but particular, individual tree, stone, or bird. He tossed his head back, sat down on the icy cold ground which forced a chill into the images he saw. Then, just as the feel of ice can be cold or hot, Lewis saw heat. Saw the color of it, and made it, and the cold, part of himself.

  The raccoon was gone, the sky black. Common thought swirled around Lewis and through Lewis as easily as wind or thought. Tears crept down his face. When his eyes focused, he stared at his own hands, barely able to see them in the pitch black color of the night, under the canopy of evergreens.

  CHAPTER 5

  “LEW, DON’T TAKE THIS DATE THING to heart. She’s just being nice to you. Probably feels sorry for you or something.”

  “Say what you want.”

  “I’m only trying to help out my brother. You’ve gotten cocky lately, because of this date thing.”

  Lewis laughed out loud while combing his hair.

  “Well, I don’t find it so funny.”

  Lewis turned and leaned his face close to his brother’s. “You’re jealous,” he said.

  “Asshole,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, but I don’t like it.”

  “Nothing’s gotten into me.” Lewis walked past Jeffrey, the sharp odor of cologne lingering in the bathroom doorway.

  Jeffrey turned. I saw the vague shape of Lewis walking down the hall through his eyes, but felt nothing. I believe I get this far because they are twins. As Lewis passes windows or house plants I see him, and always, I have Lewis’ senses and emotions to guide me. If odor lingers in his nostrils, it must in Jeffrey’s as well.

  “You know what you are?” Jeffrey yelled down the hall at his brother’s back. “You’re arrogant, loud, egotistical and snotty.”

  When Lewis turned, Jeffrey’s angry face appeared in view. “More like you than you’d care to know.”

&nb
sp; Jeffrey, in a flash of realization, let out the truth, “More animal than me.”

  Lewis slapped the wall with the flat of his hand as he ducked into his room.

  Jeffrey walked behind him in a huff, “Brittany’s too much for you. You’ll never keep her.”

  Lewis tightened up. He knew, at this point, that he must keep her. She was too important to his art. As chauvinistic as it sounds, Lewis needed Brittany, not because he loved her, but because he needed her. She was fuel for the fire inside him. And without that fuel, he would fade to embers.

  If I could have sat with him and explained how she only came into mind right before or right after he communed with common thought, would he even have listened? After all, what he felt for Brittany was not healthy for him or her. Nothing could be done. As much as I cared, I could only be a spectator, intimate though I was.

  Lewis said nothing back to Jeffrey, so Jeffrey repeated, “You’ll never be able to satisfy her enough to keep her. You don’t have it in you.”

  “Look in a mirror, Jeff. I am you. I’ve got just as much in me.”

  “What’s outside doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s inside. That’s been proven before. And, I’ll tell you right now, she’s out of your league. Being cocky for a few days doesn’t prove anything.”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “What?”

  “It has to work between us.”

  Jeffrey’s facial expression suddenly changed to confusion. “I don’t get you.”

  Lewis told him, “Without her, I die.”

  “You’re weird, Lew. You’re nuts.” Jeffrey backed away, his hands raised to keep Lewis back. “What if I told you I liked her too?” Jeffrey played his trump card. “Who do you think would win her?”