by Don Webb
I could feel things sprouting at the base of my spine. My teeth had begun to move independently. I felt emotions that were analogues of lust and fear and the part of you that waits to plummet down on the roller coaster. It felt like the rush of smoking salvia divinorum or whiffing roach killer. I am still in my house dying, none of this is happening. But for once in my life, denial didn’t work.
“I got the big picture, cousin. I saw all the angles. I saw every angle from Yr to Nhhngr. I could control the path of all that bio-stuff. I could use God’s technology. I’m not rightly sure what god—here is where it gets tricky. I don’t know if I am delivering cows to the slaughterhouse door or helping beautiful butterflies out of their cocoon. That was when I lost it. I just had to find out, so I made the little box for Fenster to find. I mixed an old Baptist hymnal with the Typhonian Tablet, tossed in a little Albert Pike and a smidgen of the Fifty-Book. Then I made simple diagrams showing all the angles. Humans picked up where they had stopped four thousand years ago. Now little sluggy is almost there.”
“So you are giving me the Scooby Doo speech and now the monster comes along and eats me? That’s my life?” I asked.
He smiled. “I’d’ve made it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids! No, neither Fred nor Wilma will save the day. No Mystery Machine. Nein, ein Held wird kommen. Auf vier Pfoten, although I suspect some of us will have more than four paws.”
“If it weren’t for whatever drugs you have given me, I could deny this whole scene. What did you slip me, DMT with salivinorm chaser? Maybe a little old-fashioned LSD so I’ll be as crazy as you when you slice me with a butcher knife?”
“You are very stupid. This is not about you being a little sacrificial lamb, cousin. It is about a new world. For one instant as an artist I saw I could sculpt the whole world, so I did. I used family money and a little Texas town, and then fate threw me you as the first person to visit my gallery. Well, not fate really; when our great-granddad James Scott began playing with weird notions about Druids, someone in England sent him the Typhonian Tablet. Some poor soul had translated them for certain English Rosicrucians, then hanged himself. Dr. James couldn’t read them very well, but he didn’t have my advantage of being crazy. You will be changed to be able to view my art. It is what I sold my soul for; so to speak, I am making you into the perfect audience.”
With his left hand he pointed to the sky, which shone pure and orange and smelled of burning wax; with his right hand he pointed down at the earth, which was weeping greenish mercury. “So tell me, cousin, what hath God wrought? Slaughterhouse or paradise? Did our ancestors’ ancestors stop making the stone circles because they were unworthy, or because they were afraid? What do you see and smell and hear that a little crazy human like me can’t? Do you worship my sculpture of space and time, mind and soul? Or should I worship you?” He fell to his knees before me, and as he bowed his head the weird crown of flatware fell from his head.
I could feel what all the angles were doing to me; my perception shattered and then re-formed in more dimensions than before. Goodbye, 3D.
And the air smelled sweet like souls separating into their separate parts, and I could hear the gentle pops of the eyes of the mealy little humans around me, and the hairs on my arms began to move independently, and I began to see into time, just shallow pools at first, and there was great-granddad getting his package from England, and his chestnut mare rearing in fear of the book, and there was the One who would Come in Its polychromatic polychronic poly-gendered terror-beauty.
I stood free from the chair, my feet sinking a few inches into the mercury-like liquid. I breathed in the new heaven through my hollow teeth and I sucked in the newly charred earth through my roots and I called out to my Beloved who lures me into a thousand painful deaths of ecstasy, now at the end of Time.
(For James Ambuehl)
Lavinia’s Lament
Even my own cunt
was a mystery to me
brought up without wommin folk.
(You cannot imagine what it was like in
Massachusetts in those days.)
I just knew that boys were Different from me.
I had had a few giggling conversations
With girls on nearby farms.
Then came my wedding day
And my father called down
My husband-to-be.
In waves of colors, not of this Earth
In angles not of man’s world
He came
and he had me
and he had every cell of me.
I bore Him twins as He willed.
One for the world of men
One for the world-to-be.
I died but my soul did not go
to my lover.
I wait in the rotting earth
for the Gate to be Opened.
Come, dreamer, and eat the fruit of
This rotting orchard.
Come, poet, and cast the words as
Word that sets all free.
The Gold of the Vulgar
Tonight I want a warm flop. I can’t take the cold anymore. It makes a skeleton out of you. Freezes you down to the bones. And if I don’t make three bits selling pencils . . . I’ll make it somehow. I hitched to Telluride ’cause I’m on my way to in Arizona. It’s supposed to be warm in Arizona. I read in the Amarillo Globe News that last year in ’31 Arizona had 420,000 boxes of citrus. You gotta be pretty warm to put up 420,000 boxes.
See, I’m an educated man. I shouldn’t be selling these damn pencils. I’m an astronomer—just what the country needs in this Depression.
Yesterday I had a chance to make some real money. But I turned it down. A man’s got to be soft in the head to work at the Brunckow Mine. The beautiful bronze yellow ore called calaverite has long since played out. Told you I was an educated man. Calaverite is a gold telluride, hence the name of this burg. This city of death, too many hoboes and bums died here. Even a newcomer hears about that. Even in this city of death. Fifteen deaths. Maybe more. Captain Macphedius and Slim aren’t as choosy as I. Maybe they’ve just been hungry longer. Telluride ain’t got a soup kitchen and damn few churches to beg by.
It’ll be morning soon. And warmer.
“Say, Mister, you want to buy a—oh, sorry, Captain, I didn’t recognize you in your new duds.”
“Pencil business looks pretty thin, Robert. Care to let me buy you breakfast?”
I’d never seen Captain Macphedius without his army coat. He’d been in the Expeditionary Force. To listen to him, he was the one who won the war. We walked to Mary’s Hashatorium.
“Anything you want, Robert. Anything.”
I wanted ham and eggs but I knew I couldn’t keep down proteins on an empty stomach. So oatmeal with butter and sugar. And God’s own brew, coffee.
“You should’ve joined us out at the mine. I could still get you on. Mr. Brandon listens to everything I say.”
“You seem to be getting along pretty well, Captain.”
“I never thought I’d be wearing new clothes again. It’s like Walter Winchell said yesterday, ‘If we have four more years of Hoover, Gandhi would be a well-dressed man.’”
The captain was too loud. Too nervous. It didn’t jibe with his prosperity. I asked, “What are you really doing out at the mine?”
A cold light flashed in the captain’s eyes.
“Why, we’re mining for gold, son.” He pulled a small leather bag from his shirt pocket. “See?” It was full of golden nuggets. Probably pyrite. He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself.
“You’re paid very well for a miner.”
“Oh, Mr. Brandon doesn’t care for gold.” He’d said too much. He put some money on the table. “That should cover it.” He left. I finished my oatmeal and risked finishing his biscuits and gravy. It was a mistake.
Have you ever thought about Colorado? You have lots of time to think when you’re trying to sell writing sticks as a step above charity. Alexis de Tocqueville thought the gigant
ism made this an inhuman land. The great rocks and valleys. The San Juan Mountains are old ice-dissected volcanoes standing 13,000 feet above sea level. It’s a mite hard to breathe up here, or maybe that’s a lifetime of living in the lowlands for you. The Ute are full of sky gods. You’re closer to the sky up here, maybe too damn close, maybe it don’t take a lot to achieve escape velocity, especially if you aren’t weighed down by food. There is something strange in Colorado; it does not belong to the rest of the planet. You can see it in the eyes of the settlers—especially the miners who spend most of their time alone. They are confronting the spirit of the place, that great psychic entity. And like the Ute before them—it has conquered them.
Speculation is a great thing. It takes the edge off poverty and misery. Some rich folks figure that there’s nothing in the minds of us down-and-outers. But they’re wrong. The mind grows keen as the body withers. I kept wondering what they were mining at the Brunckow that was more precious than gold.
It was a week before I saw the captain again. Mr. Inschloss the pharmacist had been letting me flop in the back of this store in exchange for sweeping up. I was putting a green cardboard Christmas tree in the window when the captain walked in. His face was yellow rather than the miner’s red. His eyes were glassy and he pitched forward slightly as though drawn by a different gravity from the rest of us. He asked Mr. Inschloss for a hundred quinine sulfate tablets, four tins of Paris green, and five bottles of beef tonic. I picked up my broom and walked outside to sweep up the cold boards. As the captain left I said, “Are you fighting the plague out there, Captain?”
“Hello, Robert. Can I talk to you awhile?” He flopped down on the sidewalk swinging his heels in the dust. I hunkered down beside him.
I said, “I haven’t seen Slim in town for a while.”
“Haven’t seen Slim. No, I guess that Slim doesn’t much want to come into town.”
Gently now. “Something happened to Slim?”
“Something happened to Slim? I guess Slim’s further along with his work, that’s all. His shaft’s deeper than any of ours.”
There was a motion in the glass behind me. Mr. Inschloss was watching us. Maybe I should get back to work. To hell with it.
“Why so much Paris green, Captain?”
“The lice. The lice are terrible.” He pulled off his hat. Throughout his salt-and-pepper hair were red running sores. There were flakes of bloody scalp caught in the hair and a sickening sight of tiny movement on every surface. The captain’s hair had been his pride. He used to say that his mane brought him women the way a lion’s attracts lionesses. I knew the first thing I’d do after the captain went away was to wash and wash and wash.
“I don’t think you should put the Paris green directly on your scalp. That stuff’s pure poison. It’s for—less advanced cases.”
The captain smiled dreamily as he replaced his hat. “Pure poison? We’re beyond that sort of thing. You should visit us sometime. I’ve told Brandon all about you. He’s holding a pick for you. I’m surprised it’s not calling to you.” He was watching the valleys of dust his heels dug. He studied them the way a man’ll read a newspaper.
“Captain, what say you and I and Slim catch a train to California? It’s bound to be a lot healthier picking oranges. Warmer on our old bones.”
“I can’t leave now, Robert. We’re getting close.”
The captain stood up and shuffled off toward the mining supply store. I leaned my broom by the doorway and went in. Mr. Inschloss handed me an unwrapped bar of carbonic soap. He asked, “Is he a friend of yours?”
“He showed me the ropes when I hit Telluride. Yeah, I guess he is a friend.”
“I’ve never seen such afflicted hair. You’ll want to wash carefully. I’m going to spray some pyrethrum powder. What does your friend do?”
“Miner.”
“Ach, I should have known. Gold fever.”
The Brunckow Mine is located ten miles outside of Telluride near the pitiful headwaters of the San Miguel Rio. Brunckow was the first white man to die there. Any number of locals will tell you that the mine is cursed—that shadowy figures pass between the cabin and the shaft in the moonlight. In fact, when the mine is not being worked, it proves your manhood if you can camp there by night. Nobody questions that new people acquire the claim to work it. It once had a rich vein. And the lust of gold is—well, understood here; it is the reason for the place’s existence.
I bummed a ride from a drummer. He was hitting mines further away to sell snakebite cures and gold detectors. He’d drop me off at the Brunckow, then pick me up on his way back to town. Brandon, he asserted, was too smart to buy his gadgets.
The cabin had recently been repaired. New shingles here and there, a new porch, and a wind charger’s thin metal blades spun light into the cold desert. There were four spades leaning against the cabin. I knew that one of them was for me.
Suddenly I didn’t want to be here. My merely intellectual curiosity vanished. I was alone.
Mr. Brandon opened the cabin door. He didn’t look surprised. He was paler (and perhaps even a little more jaundiced) than when I’d last seen him. “Come in, Mr. Lyons. We don’t get many visitors here.”
I went in. There was a small fire going with a pot of beans. There were biscuits, butter, and honey on the table. “Have a seat. Mr. Macphedius tells me you used to be an astronomer. He said you’re on your way to Arizona. Are you hoping to work at Flagstaff?”
“There are far too many out-of-work astronomers even in the best times; the Lowell Observatory commands the best.”
“Like some beans to go with your biscuits? So you’re not the best. West Texas State Normal School, wasn’t it? Canyon, Texas, but you lived in Amarillo. I met an art instructor—a Miss Georgia O’Keefe. They didn’t keep her because she wasn’t the best, didn’t teach by the book, you see. I think Miss O’Keefe will go somewhere with her art someday. I see no reason why you shouldn’t with your astronomy. I’m a patron of the learning. That’s why I’d like you to work for me.”
“As an astronomer?”
“As a miner. You could save up someday to build your observatory. Like Lowell. He made money with his books. Did you know he was a student of Oriental occult lore? I’ve got a copy of his Occult Japan around here.”
“The captain said you were having trouble with lice.”
Mr. Brandon’s hair looked fine.
“A remarkable family, the Lowells. Poets, politicians, educators, inventors, diplomats. A huge flowering of genius all leading to Percival Lowell. Percival Lowell builds his own observatory to find Planet X, and they did two years ago.”
“Pluto.”
“The god of the underworld. Precisely. You see, there are more connections between mining and astronomy than you might think .Lowell was the key. He studied occult tradition, then went looking for Pluto. He came to Arizona to look for the furthest planet.”
“But he didn’t find it. He died fifteen years before.”
“They still found it at his observatory. His name was Percival—named after the knight who found the Grail. Do you know Wolfram van Eschenbach’s Parzival? The Knights of the Grail live from a Stone of the purest kind. If you do not know it, I will name it for you. It is called ‘lapsis exilis.’ The insignificant stone. The exiled stone. Have you ever considered the number of aerolites that fall here on the western side of the mountains?”
“Well, there’s Meteor Crater.”
“And the Canyon Diablo meteor and a 980-pounder at Peach Springs and the Santa Ritas falls. There was even an explosive bolide here on February 24, 1887.”
“Seems a lot better than chance. I think I will take some beans. That what you’re mining for? Meteorites?”
“Not exactly. But you’re close to the idea. I knew you might understand when Mr. Macphedius told me about you. Mr. Macphedius and Mr. Baird—they aren’t men of the mind. They’re not prepared to house what we might find here.”
“So what are you mining for?”
<
br /> “I do not seek the gold of the vulgar. Although I suspect an actual physical substance in this mine; I seek only the Medicine of Metals.”
“Alchemy? But I thought—”
“—that it had to do with retorts and alembics. No, any work may form the basis of the Quest. I have spent all my life looking for the place to begin. It’s here. I can see by the changes the Stone is working on Macphedius and Baird. The Stone is the Impossibly Other. That’s why I want you here.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’re an astronomer, used to straining your mind to try to take in the whole universe. Yet you’ve lived on the bum for two years. You’re adaptable. I inscribed your name on a spade and you’ve come. I’ve got to have you. I may not be big enough to hold what we’ll unleash.”
It would be at least an hour before the drummer came back. I wanted to slow Brandon down—dim that horrible godlight in his eyes. Most of all I wanted to rid myself of some feeling that I was here because of some hocus-pocus he did on a seven-dollar shovel.
“How’d you pick this place?”
“Because it’s haunted. I’ve seen the ghosts! Think about it. Every mining community has ghost stories. Central City, Gold Hill, Black Hawk, I’ve been all over the state. Cripple Creek. They all have ghosts. It’s because something works on the miners as they dig. Some Hidden Power changes them, makes them immortal in a mindless way. But I will find out how to make connection with it. Here, I will perform the Great Work!”
“Where are Slim and the captain? What do they say about all this?”
“They’re sleeping in the mine. We prefer to work at night when we can feel the other miners working with us. You must stay. You must see.”
I rose from the table.
“Mister Brandon, I think you’ve been out here too long. You’re right about one thing—this is an alien section of the world. The rules are different here. You can look at any of the life forms and know it’s different. But I don’t think you can cross that gap, and if you could I don’t think what’s left would be human. Now I’m going to go and wake up Slim and the captain and try to get them to leave, and I hope for your sake you’ll think of doing the same.”