Chapter 40: A Bright Cloud
Janis Joplin sang, “For tomorrow never comes, man . . .”
J. Edgar Hoover, R.I.P. May 2, 1972.
It’s a day that passes Jared by, except that he reads about it and hears it reported on the evening news. “American hero.” “Defender of all that is good and right in America.” “There will never be another J. Edgar Hoover.” Amen to that, Jared smirks.
Little does Jared grasp that it is the day he also dies, at least officially. Even more devastating than the day he is labeled 8867-147, this is the day he becomes truly invisible.
The Boss’s death unleashes bureaucratic chaos. Jared’s file and so his identity is “accidently” lost by a quickly promoted Section Chief within the Agency who has been coordinating the Ride and their own undercover agents inside the federal prison system and who has been personally in charge of taking Jared deeper and deeper down Inside, so far down now that he is next to absolutely non-existent. Now, no longer “next to”—he becomes invisible.
Going Inside has a way of making one somewhat invisible, he’s already experienced that—folks accept that you are “gone” but, push comes to shove, they still know where you are. They have the name of a jail or prison. They can find ways to visit, even if under highly controlled maximum security circumstances. To truly disappear requires a magician. Someone who can wave a magic wand, intone “Presto!” and everyone in the audience is awed. Who else is Jared’s magician but Steve Witson?
After the Boss’s death, Steve calls in a few favors and nestles himself inside the Agency, off in a corner where he himself nearly disappears—becomes, in Agency terms, low profile as compared to his previous high-profile Black Ops activities. He is formally relabeled Database Manager and given an office in a windowless basement where he happily spends his days with other braniacs, nerds, and assorted off-beat Agents who live and breathe information technology.
He sought this position for personal reasons. One, he just wants out of Black Ops. Two, he fears for Jared. Unexpectedly, the Ride affected Steve as much as, possibly more than, it did Jared. Steve honestly feels that Jared is a good friend, even a “decent guy.” After he dropped him off at the safe house he thought, “That’s it. Done with that!” But it wasn’t so. Every day since then he’s gotten up feeling a tug of longing for companionship, even concern for Jared. Nevertheless, truly one of the faithful, he trusted the Boss and so just waited—confident that in time he’d hear about the final outcome.
When the Boss unexpectedly dies, Steve takes the news badly. He panics. At the very moment he hears “The Boss is dead,” he’s gripped by fear for Jared’s safety. He has no way of knowing who else has a vested interest in him. There are those in the Black Ops world whom he doesn’t trust, not at all! Some he feels might actually want Jared dead—one of those prison “accidents” or a racial incident. He knows that the Black Muslims have been fooled into doing this more than once.
With the chance happening that the Section Chief gets promoted, so does Steve find his way amidst all the document packing boxes to filch Jared’s file—“accidentally.” The chaos also enables him to quite easily create the impression that he’s still in charge of Jared and the Ride. Executing flawlessly, he supplies the butler with a few knock-out drops to slip into Jared’s morning OJ, and once he’s out cold, dresses, lugs him and, reviving him just enough to function, props him up—with the requisite Agent’s dark sunglasses—at the Boss’s funeral.
Once Steve safely returns Jared to the mansion, he spends several long nights in his office creating, at times erasing parts of, Jared’s storyline. He maneuvers within several governmental databanks, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and arranges for Jared to be officially listed as transferred to Marion—here Fraticelli makes it all happen smoothly. He reassigns the detail watching the safe house and “officially” informs the butler and other staff members that Jared’s protective custody status is “ongoing, waiting for a new chief to be appointed.” They have no reason to question Steve’s authority, and so Jared’s life at the mansion takes on a very orderly regularity. Steve hasn’t a clue how long he can manage to keep all this just below the surface, so he’s monitors Jared’s situation daily.
Managing families and friends is another feat, something that does border on the magical. Here’s where bureaucracy truly trumps reality—in its power to shape “reality.” Steve convinces Mrs. Jennings that Jared is safe and on a long-term assignment with the Agency. He tells her this during a “Secret visit. Top secret. Understand, Mrs. Jennings, your son was always on our side. What he’s done is heroic. But no one must know, only you. We don’t want you to suffer. He loves you so much, Mrs. Jennings. Your son is such a patriot!
“Mr. Hoover wants you, yes, the President wants you, needs you—to keep him safe by telling everyone that you’re in touch with him. That you’ve seen him. That he doesn’t want to see or hear from anyone. Okay?”
What mother wouldn’t?
“Great! God bless you, Mrs. Jennings. It’s mothers like you who make America great!”
Oh! Jared’s mother so wants to believe. Prays with her Chester’s picture in hand. “Our boy’s back on God’s mission, Dear! Thank you, Jesus!”
Steve ensures that occasional letters are mailed—typed and with an expertly forged signature. He further manages to secure assistance from a former Marine buddy who’s involved in developing a highly secret computer-based voice recognition technology and thus has Jared “call” his mom monthly—always with very brief messages, but very convincing.
Aaren was unsure how to proceed after her last visit. So when Steve calls and says, “Leave him alone. I’m taking care of matters,” she has little choice but to wait. She throws herself into a new cause—inner city preschool education. She goes back to graduate school, teaches part-time, and faithfully devotes herself to new practices: yoga, meditation, and focusing on developing personal relationships, but as a celibate. She wants to still tap but harness the wildly erotic energy once released through Wargasm and ply it to transform her heart: purge, purify, prepare me, O Loving Mother! Each day one of her meditations centers on envisioning Jared and herself as a happily married couple.
Char’s situation is a bit more difficult to handle. Although she’s used to getting letters returned and not knowing whether he gets hers at all, she’s distraught that she doesn’t have any clue about where he might be. She contacts her state senators but gets little response—Steve is a step ahead of her, he’s nothing if not a master of managing the most minute details.
She sees the country, even the anti-war movement, going into a phase of denial as everyone keeps accepting Nixon’s talk about bringing home troops and ending the war. It’s as if they’re saying, “Honey, he’ll be home soon. Just wait.” So she’s absolutely relieved when Steve contacts her—just the fact of his making a personal visit provides a bit of comfort.
True to form, Witson lies like a bandit. He’s under my direct control. He’s in protective custody. His case is being reviewed. See, with Mr. Hoover’s passing, there’s a lot of red tape to cut through. He’ll be home soon. These are lies she wishes were true, so they become her truths. As Steve suggests and she agrees, it is best for all if she focuses on her new role as parent. He convinces her that her letters are getting through—“Of course, given the situation, I can’t get any back to you. But I’ll keep him apprised of your love.” Cleverly—and leveraging without any qualms what he has come to know is her greatest fear—he says, “Yessir, certainly, trust me, I will not mention the boy.” With bureaucratic skillfulness, Steve conjures up a cloud of mystification, and it settles around Jared’s family, Aaren and Char, and the whole world Outside.
What happens when you disappear? Jared knows that something has happened over which he has no control. Hoover’s dead. The mansion is quiet. The sentries are gone. He’s not getting any mail, certainly no visits. In a moment when he observes himself observing himself—pretty trippy, man!
—he watches himself ease back or back off or do something that just settles him into the place. What’s going on out there? Who cares? He turns inward.
Invisible. Unaccounted for. Living off the fat of the land inside a Safe House. Karma, man, karma!
He spends a year inside the safe house, still doing time—one way to describe it. But unknown to all, in reality, Jared’s been living inside a Bright Cloud.
Karma, man, karma!
Bright Cloud—another kind of Inside, a misty veil of mystification settles around Jared. In a curious way, Jared’s whole life could be explained by understanding this Bright Cloud.
What it’s like to live inside the clouds? As a child and as a man, he’s often daydreamed with clouds. In San Francisco during his graduate school years, he was near ecstatic the first time the clouds descended and swooped up the city. He’d been leaning out his second-floor apartment, a common flat with bay windows in an uncommon town, and was fascinated by the tumbling fluff coming in off the ocean. Something was happening that he had never heard of nor even knew existed.
Fascination: Creamy balls, huge and ghostly, big patches, lagoons of clouds, at times tiny wisps falling steadily like snowfall, at others quicksilver avalanches, all coming onshore. The street was soon immersed inside an embrace of wet, chilly clouds that snuggled him, kissed his cheeks with shivers of coldness—he loved it! He longed to run naked through them, for as the banks of clouds tumbled down the street, covering everything and everyone from the ground up to the sky, the world was rendered invisible—truly, he could not see five feet in front of himself.
Now, as real and tangible as Frisco’s clouds were, inside the manse a Bright Cloud engulfs him. It emerges, arises most magically and mystically from the hibakusha—which glows! There’s a fleeting moment when Jared chooses to enter the Bright Cloud. It is a fateful choice—Matt would have mused, watching him enter, Karma, man, karma.
As Jared steps into the Bright Cloud, he is aware of his karma: born on August 6, 1945—the day Americans dropped the Atomic Bomb. The day a revolutionary new mythic story was written, revealing that humans possessed the powers of the gods—who were made instantly defunct at the moment of atomic blast! As Jared often tells people, at that moment of blast, “We humans came to possess the fire of un-creation! We can now claim that we control life, reality, existence at the atomic level—by uncreating it, rolling it back down, a revolution of devolution. We are the un-creators!
With that blast, we freed ourselves from the illusionary entities called gods. We no longer need the language of religion or theology. We alone are the masters of our fate.” Revolution of devolution!
He goes on to talk about “the Bright Cloud.” As he sees it, the Bomb threw up a great mushroom cloud. It was dirt filled, bone filled, gorged with all forms of pulverized life and vaporized existence, but from its center shone a brightness pure, unblemished, lily-white—“a virginal fire: the atomic heart and soul of humankind.”
He relates how he first became aware of the Bright Cloud. On his sixteenth birthday while in the minor seminary he read the scripture for the day, which also happened to be the feast day of what the Roman Catholics call the “Transfiguration.” With ardor—always gripped by the awesomeness of the scene—he recites by heart the passage from St. Matthew’s gospel, verses memorized from the Catholic’s Douay-Rheims bible:
And after six days Jesus taketh unto him Peter and James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart, and he was transfigured before them. And his face did shine as the sun, and his garments became white as snow. And behold there appeared to them Moses and Elias talking with him. And Peter answering, said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here. If thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. And as he was yet speaking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them. And lo, a voice out of the cloud, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear ye him.
From that moment on, that Flash! of insight, he realized that the Bright Cloud is a tangible presence. Jesus had one. Moses had his Cloud manifest as a pillar of fire. Since that day, Jared has preached and taught that America and all of Western culture, and so all of Christendom, entered the atomic Bright Cloud of un-creation that same day, August 6, 1945.
“On that day the leader of the best and the brightest brains, whose communal identity was that of America and Western culture and whose mythic story was that of the Warrior Hero—this leader initiated a true revolution!” He pauses to let it all sink in. Then, “Just as we Catholics believe the communion wafer is transubstantiated into the mystical body of Christ, this leader acted as High Priest and transformed earthly matter into a new mythic body—which he named as Destroyer. This leader—Robert Oppenheimer—as he beheld the first successful atomic bomb test, said ‘Now, I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.’ He was quoting the Hindu goddess, Kali.”
Many often find Jared’s words to be harsh. “I didn’t make this up! Listen to Oppenheimer. He’s the true revolutionary—not Che or Castro, Mao or Lenin, Samuel Adams or George Washngton. Listen! Blast! and the atomic bomb changed the identity of Americans into the Atomic People. In a way Hoover didn’t grasp, on that day the world became America—through the amazing act of uncreation. The “world” was uncreated and from that day forward all the world is America and all people are Atomic People. Listen! There are no longer any gods of cruelty—there’s just us, cruel humans. We, the People are now We, the Destroyers.”
Few like hearing this. Jared is always amazed at how much Americans are beset by historical amnesia, as if “We didn’t drop the bomb! Not us—we’re the good guys.”
“We did. We did drop the Bomb. Vaporized people. But more, listen to Oppenheimer. What does he mean by Destroyer? Simply that the Bomb doesn’t allow for anyone to be singled out as ‘the enemy.’ Atomic war with nuclear bombs dropping all around the Earth means that everyone dies—the bomber becomes the bombed. Fallout drifts with the jet stream, killing everyone. The Bomb doesn’t recognize political boundaries, doesn’t stop at national borders. It’s almost laughable: the Warrior Hero creates the ultimate weapon that kills everyone—himself included!”
This is why Jared was so moved, so undone when his Uncle Sam gave him the hibakusha. Jared silently spoke to the hibakusha: Out of this bombastic revolution of the mind, heart and soul are you fashioned, your metal melted, fused and beaten. He didn’t know then whether Uncle Sam had any inkling about what the hibakusha meant to him. But Jared immediately valued it as a key for his own revolution—whatever it was to be. He trusted Matt’s meaning for karma—accepted and kept the hibakusha with him as he went Inside. Now the hibakusha guides him inside the Bright Cloud.
At the periphery of the Bright Cloud is the world of time clocks, calendars, meals, exercise, and so on—all physical necessities. In that world Jared moves as if on automatic pilot. To the mansion’s staff he is a compliant and easily cared for guest—he makes few requests and never a demand. Although he appears physically calm, his interior life is anything but. Living inside the Bright Cloud is quite similar to living Inside prison. The boundary between dreaming and reality doesn’t exist. While he’s aware of Outside events, he progressively disconnects from contact through media.
A year will come and go, a year achieving what the monastic year of novitiate was meant to, namely, transformation—deep spiritual revolution. At times he spends hours, even days, in silent meditation. At others he writes like a madman. There are blissful periods, even weeks, when all he does is walk around the grounds, totally fascinated by the simplest of things: a butterfly, a soft breeze, pebbles on the patio. Then dark times, nightmare days and nights, shaking, feverish, in prayer, exhausted. His whole life unfolds, refolds, and folds back in upon him—suffocating at times, snuggling him like a newborn at others.
Kali: It is during these bleak horrifying drops into the pit of darkness that he begins to sense a deeper meaning to what Oppenhe
imer meant by quoting the goddess Kali. At first, Jared thought he quoted Kali because there simply was no goddess in Western mythic thought—in the Garden of Eden there is no Mother Goddess present, only a Father God who creates all. But in these Bright Cloud moments of darkness he senses Her majestic presence yet—and this baffles him—in Cloud-thought he thinks She is Kali, but she always appears with Aaren’s face!
Jared is back in Marion. He is beating the hell out of the young black inmate. He turns to the knocked-out Witson but sees Aaren sprawled there, blood dripping from her mouth. He looks back at the black inmate, only now it is Aaren looking up at him. “Beat me, Master! I am yours! Beat me!” She is passionate, erotic, and he finds his cock out in his hands, the baton is his cock, he beats her with it, as she moans, Oooh! and Aaaah! The sounds of orgasm.
Then it all flips over. Witson yells, “Aaren, stop that!” Jared drops the baton, bolts over to the mirror above the sink—he is Aaren!
The dark moments trouble him no end. As back in San Francisco, during these moments he cannot see five feet in front of himself.
More than once, Jared’s heard Matt’s chiding chuckle echo through a dark moment, “Karma, J—karma, man. What are you going to do?”
Inside the Bright Cloud Jared begins to live as an individual at once acutely aware of his very particular identity as Jared Jennings—as a distinctive human being—but simultaneously as acutely aware of his very particular communal identity as part of a greater human presence. No name comes to him: not God or Evolution or any other familiarly capitalized word. Rather, he is a presence within and expressing a fuller presence.
He remembers and senses himself as still part Friar Otto and linked to that communal presence as a monk. He clearly knows himself still as 8867-147 and linked to that communal presence as American prisoner, as American outlaw. In a Bright Cloud moment he muses and Earthfolk is a word that whispers and then emerges as his heart begins to beat in rhythm and harmony with all living things: flowers, bugs, animals, the mansion’s staff. As Earthfolk he feels eternal, sensing that the human family never dies, never will, as the Earth herself never will. There is, was and always will be parent-child-parent passing down from eternity into time. He grasps with a fervent sigh that humans are the consciousness of Earth, and that this is a consciousness that can creatively celebrate all other living beings and life forms. It is a consciousness that can play with other living creatures in a special way, that human consciousness can become imagination! And when it does, consciousness then becomes conscience!
Amazing! We humans are the conscience of the Earth. Jared jumps up and down, sprints madly this way and that, feels his heart about to burst through his chest, he touches his face, lips, looks up to the sky, opens his arms to let it flood through him, use him, take him as a painter’s brush and imagine. Imagine a world of harmony, peace and justice, of ecstatic, honoring orgasmic love between men and women . . . He’s bursting at the seams, explodes into exhaustion, sleeps restfully on the lawn.
Imagine! It becomes quite clear to him that the monastic life is a communal way of imagining. That war is a communal way of imagining a whole series of characters: enemies, heroes, cowards, predators. That peace is the imagining of a different set of characters, resulting in a different ending to the story. “War is simply a choice!” he shouts as he walks around the mansion’s periphery. “Simply a choice. Imagine war or imagine peace.” John Lennon, a true revolutionary!
Yet discovering himself as Earthfolk is not simply a utopian insight or a dip into some Pollyannaish innocence. For the undeniable basic movement of reality—dreams and waking states—is that the Bright and the Dark dance, and he must go from one partner to the other. He’s brought squarely into the dark recesses of the human imagination—of his own mind and that of the greater human imagination. He confronts the simple yet disturbing fact that this Bright Cloud is somehow linked to the Atomic Cloud. That to understand Earthfolk he has yet to plumb the depth of his relationship with Kali, the Destroyer. “Fucking-a, Aaren! Goddamn you woman, it is you, you I have to plumb!” He chuckles, worries, wrings his hands, smiles, sighs, “Aaren!”
Aaren: He imagines her, meets her, but more than that—when she is about, he is alive with a heartfelt passion. Amazing! Inside the Bright Cloud he feels drawn, strongly pulled by a heartfelt desire for him. Inside the Bright Cloud he doesn’t so much venture forward as respond to this wondrous invitation to…all that his mind registers is what his heart so tenderly feels…“to be loved!” All about him is Aaren, and she lingers and is present with him as he grasps what it means to be loved. Aaren who betrayed him. Aaren who sliced his heart with her stiletto. He now feels through all that and senses the desperate love that drives her towards him, lures him towards her. Liquid Fire! Jared knows that love has always filled her heart. Karma!
Love that comes to him from his family. The presence of his brothers and sisters is heartfelt as he pictures his family, gathering around a fabulous table rich with food and drink. There is laughter. There is frivolous and serious conversation. Then their mother enters, arm in arm with their father Chester and their brother Joseph. Surrounding the table on rising platforms are seated all the thousands of souls who are ancestors to the Jennings. Jared’s heart is so full and rich: “It is good to be family!” All of a sudden his eyes are their eyes, he sees down through generations, lives flash before him, time with its storyline of joy and heartbreak, war and peace, sin and redemption, stream before him. He is within this stream. It is a stream that has been and will be and is most joyously alive in this moment of their familial embrace.
Love that comes to him from Char. It’s a difficult journey they are on, hand in hand. In scene after scene, they find one another, rejoice in the discovery of their love but then are parted. The parting is always around an event of childbearing. She dies in third childbirth and he is left to raise the children. In another version, off to war, a soldier not to return, leaving her pregnant and alone. In yet another scene, they are an old couple, childless, pained that their lives are barren; a sad distance grows between them.
There is so much pain, so much heartbreak with loving Char. For long periods within the Bright Cloud he walks with her, is parted from her. Theirs is a shared bereavement.
“Why?” He is in tears.
“I don’t know. I truly don’t know.”
“I want to give you everything. My body, my soul. I love you. Why do we suffer so?”
It’s a scene wherein they are aware of their troubled history, of their story.
“Forlorn lovers? Doomed to never love? Is this it?” she laughs with a hint of desperation, resignation.
What is it that I’m feeling? Jared asks himself, but not her. He must find this out on his own. He looks at her in a moment when she isn’t looking at him. That’s it! It’s an insight that is weighted with its own dread and fear. “You’ve looked at me and your look . . . truly, I knew that you were seeing me, could see inside me, my soul, you know how I feel about that, your look makes me real.” She’s waiting, unsure. He says, “I must look at you—you must accept my look!” Pauses. “I want to look inside you, not just be a cock inside you.” She smiles, he melts.
It is then that they relive her abortion. He watches her undress, slip into a hospital gown and lie down on the gurney. In the operating room it’s all done with dispatch. There is blood, there is the sound of a gurgling suction machine, there is flesh squashed and deposited in a pan, which is quickly removed. She’s not looking at him, she doesn’t want his look. He’s looking at her and his heart beats with a savage lust to kill and dismember her. His anger is molten. He pushes the doctor and nurses aside, stands above her, hunt you down and . . ..!
Now she looks at him—it freezes the scene. He looks at her receiving his look, and he sees through her eyes that it is he who has aborted life. He who has not given birth—to their life. She speaks softly, unafraid, “Jared, it is we who give birth.” Imagine that! He chokes, cannot speak,
something changes—he sees himself as Char, his body as her body
“Forgive me, my love,” he prays as he kneels before her, places his hand upon her belly. “Forgive me for never having looked at you!”
Char pulls him tenderly into an embrace. It is so profound that it shakes Jared to his mythic roots as a male. It takes them back into Eden where Adam did not embrace Eve. Where he lied to her, telling her that she had no mother, no Goddess Mother, that she came from his rib—that the male body is the birthing body. Theirs is an embrace of the lie—that men should not look at women, not become mothers.
“When you look at me, truly look at me, see me—see me as Char and as Mother—then we are born as beloveds,” she whispers tenderly.
The words open him up, split him, and then heal him. “It is so, I am your beloved.”
Jared and Char—coupled as Beloveds.
Love that comes to him from the Master. Cray hears, “There’s just too much love here in Attica?” He goes to Jared’s cell, tells Arnold to leave. Arnold’s no fool, he knows how crazy Cray can get.
“Do you mean that?” Cray’s words threaten.
Jared had just dropped off into a snooze, exhausted. He blinks blearily at his interrogator. The question hangs there.
Cray runs nervous fingers through his hair. “Did you say that to the inmates?” Jared’s look tells him all. “Sweet Jesus! You did.” Pause, searching his own soul. “Lord Almighty, they didn’t kill you?”
Jared grunts, gets up and walks over to the sink, splashes some water on his face. What’s the big deal? he wonders, but just then he feels the back of his neck explode. “It’s not right! It’s not right!” Cray yells, screams wildly as he pummels Jared with a hard wooden baton. “Jesus loves me, not you!” Thud. Whack. Blood all over Jared’s shoulders. Unbelievably he’s still somewhat conscious. Survival rage rushes through his body, his arms whirl around and Cray is heaved backwards, crashes into the bars. More crazy-eyed than ever, Cray is spitting bits of foam as he denounces Jared, “You weren’t supposed to be the one! You aren’t the one!”
Jared’s heart has stopped beating, he can’t feel anything. Then in a weird gesture that totally baffles him, Cray drops to his knees; the baton bounces on the floor, rolls over and idles next to Jared’s foot. “Love me!” Cray pleads as he lowers his head, half-prostrates himself before Jared, “Love me as you loved that kid in Marion.” Jared bends and picks up the baton. There’s just too much love here in Attica . . . He tosses the baton through the cell door and out into the corridor.
“No more, Cray. No more suffering, man.” Jared sidesteps him, doesn’t know where’s he’s going, steps out into the corridor, turns and looks at the sobbing, pitiful creature. “There are no masters and slaves. There is no love at the core of violence. Jesus didn’t die for anyone’s sins.” As he finishes, Cray lets out an earth-jolting scream and throws himself full prone on the ground, “Father! Father!”
Love that comes to him from Matt. “I told you—couple’s karma.” Matt laughs quietly. Jared: “Me and you, the couple you mean?” Matt sheepishly grins. Jared strives to understand. “Something we did in the past or are to do . . . Okay, hell, I’m never sure I get your karma spirituality stuff, man. Can you help me out?”
“What’s more to say? What happens to us is less important than what we do with what happens to us. That’s it.”
“Okay, wise guy, fuck, what did we do?”
“Stopped the war.”
“Fucking-a, Matt, don’t go there. Nixon’s the story, he and Ellsberg. Their duet.”
“Yep, couple’s karma, dig it?”
“After all this, you’re saying what?” A long silent pause. It hardens. For the first time in a long time there’s a palpable distance between them. Jared senses that Matt is slipping away, leaving him. “Matt?”
Matt’s face is slightly twisted by consternation but his eyes twinkle, “Jared, my brother in crime, we did it! Dig that—we’re outlaws, outside the law. Free! Man, we’re free.”
Jared starts but can’t find the words; his mouth’s ajar, he looks dumbstruck.
“Lighten up, man, we’re free. Dig it, we’ve got to do something with that.”
Love that comes to him from Quinn. It happens again this morning. “What are you doing today?” He knows he means, What are you going to screw up today? “I’m going to try out for football.” His father stops his coffee cup in mid-flight to his lips, pausing for emphasis, stares at his son. “You?” He hears, You’ll just screw that up too!
Jared and Tony are throwing the football around. “Hey, give me that!” Quinn rips the ball from Tony’s arms. “Go out for one!” he yells to Jared. Tony looks at him, terrified. Jared runs. Quinn throws the ball. Jared drops it. “You screwed that up you little punk. Get over here!” Too scared to run away, the younger boys gather around Quinn. Quinn slaps Jared upside the head. “Can’t you do anything right?”
Tony’s smart—Quinn is like his older brother. “You’re really strong. You threw that a mile. Are you going out for the team?” Quinn grabs Tony, squeezes his throat. Jared grabs Quinn’s hand and tries to pull him off Tony. “You’re nothing but little girls,” and in one powerful swoop Quinn knocks the younger boys to the ground. “Don’t move!” he growls threateningly. Jared and Tony wiggle closer to one another, bonded by fear of their neighborhood bully. Quinn starts throwing sticks, leaves, pieces of newspaper on top of the kids. He takes out a match, strikes it, it goes out. Takes out another, and as he does Jared quickly gets up, heart racing, words stumbling from his mouth, “Don’t hurt us, please. Don’t—” Before the sentence ends, Quinn grabs Jared’s left arm, twists it up behind his back—crack! like a small branch being snapped in two.
Jared is so shocked that he doesn’t immediately respond. Tony scrambles away and high-tails it home. Jared bursts into tears. “Aw shit, kid, you really screwed everything up.”
Inside the Bright Cloud Jared sees Quinn as never before. Tearing the world apart. Torturing people. A presence of endless pain, neverending suffering. Cray and Quinn: Jared accepts that they believe that love is at the core of violence. “Really screwed up, man! Really screwed.”
Love that comes to him from Aaren. Love that comes from the underside of hate, a subversive hanger-on to evil intentions. He listens to what she has never shared with anyone, never, ever.
“You want some of this!” He’s delighted, she’s so young, wagging it, he’s hard as a rock, ready to come, waiting for her lips. She’s ten, he’s twenty.
“You want some of this!” He’s excited, has her trapped, ankles tied to the bed posts, she flails at him with her girly arms, his iron-grip athletic hands press her down easily. “Say yes!” He threatens. She wants to spit but fear clamps down her tongue. “Say yes!” Violently angry. Say yes! Sayyes!
“Yes.”
He’s a high school senior, star football center, she a freshman.
Inside the Bright Cloud, she wipes away the mist, opening a mirror into time. “You want some of this!” Did he say that? She turns and sees him—what’s his name? Jared? He’s mocking, fooling around, prancing on the stage, showing everyone that the gun is a dick. Who the fuck does he think he is, motherfucker!
“This is Aaren.”
“Hi, I’m—”
“I know who you are,” not kindly spoken.
She finger-beckons him closer, his eyes light up, she knows those eyes, “You fucking hypocrite,” she whispers heatedly, “You’re a motherfucking rapist at heart!” He can hardly move—what?
“You want some of this!” She’s standing, and a Sister and a male Wargasm fucker are kneeling, all tongues out for her pussy. To her: “You want some of my cunt?” To him: “You want some of my clit to suck?” Ha. Ha. Ha.
Aaren appears, sitting right there in the mansion’s living room. For some reason he realizes that he’s not surprised. “I know about your fantasy about me.”
“I’m sorry,” he kneels down in con
fessional repentance.
“Get off your fucking knees, asshole! Don’t you see, don’t you get it? Don’t confess, profess!”
What? His stupid look is just, well, too idiotic!
“You’re a fucking fool, Jared. Look at your life, just a fucking fool’s life. Man, you don’t get it, do you? That you’re the worst rapist of all!”
What?
“All this nonviolent rape. All this Sweet Jesus rape. It’s soul rape, you stupid motherfucker. Guys like you make it possible for the hard-asses to rape us without pause. Why do you dream your little fantasy about me?”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“Stop it! Stop it! No more! Jesus motherfucking Mary Mother of God, when I’ve been raped good and hard there’s at least been lust, raw violence, bile! But you’re just puke. You lay me down and gently, slowly, tenderly, sweetly stick it in me, get your pleasures and off you go. You never even know I’m there!”
“But—but Aaren,” he’s desperate, a forlorn yearning that sends thunderclaps throughout the Bright Cloud, “I love you.”
She drops her own atomic bomb, “No! Never! Stop! Don’t you see, it’s your love that’s killing me, hurting me—it’s the blanket you throw over my eyes as you rape me. Jesus, Jared, don’t love me, worship me!”
Jared is baffled, hangs in the air. Aaren: “I am Kali, goddess.” Patiently, she reveals the significance of the fact that Oppenheimer quoted Kali. “See, what the warrior scientists on the Manhattan Project did was an act of worship. They revealed to the world the face of their mother goddess, the dark mother, the Destroyer. In the West, in our Biblical tradition, the traditional teaching is that there is only a Father God, as in Genesis, there is no Mother God. But on August 6, 1945, She was revealed in an act of supreme Warrior worship—an act of total submission, of warrior self-annihilation. I know this sounds weird, but think about it. Oppenheimer chose the right words as he celebrated the presence of the devouring Mother. He used the Hindu Kali because in the West we pretend we have no Mother God, but we do. It is She, the Destroyer. It’s She we’ve been worshipping ever since The Garden. Face it. Deal with it! We Christians have a Mother and a Father Goddess. They’re both un-creators, not creators.”
Worship me! As Aaren says this, everything, “Just fucking everything became clear!” Hoover fucked up. He tested me by the Ride but the revolutionary he really needed was a woman. A woman who was confident in herself as Destroyer. One stronger than any of the male gods of violence. He needed Aaren, not me! To un-create the Old World, bomb it into submission if need be—Aaren was there all along, waving to him, talking with Steve—Aaren the Weatherman bomber!
Worship me! Of course, the Revolution I’ve always wanted is the one countering the Bomb. But I can’t do that. Not by myself. Only women can release the goddess energy that both destroys and heals. Only women! Fucking-a, man, it’s Aaren.
Out loud, skipping around like a ten-year-old kid: “Aaren! Aaren! I love you! I need you! With you, we are the Revolution!”
Revolution: Within the Bright Cloud, Jared looks at Aaren and beholds all that he knows violates the First Commandment, “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me.” On that day he feels that he’s ready to leave, but just doesn’t know how. He accepts that he has to be patient, wait, be a bit more like Matt.
Finally, love that comes to him from himself.
“Your leaving the monastery killed dad.”
“Your plea for Conscientious Objector status is denied. America, love us or leave us!”
“You draft raiders are worse than the average criminal who strikes at the taxpayer’s pocketbook. You strike at the foundation of government itself! Five years, maximum sentence, no parole.”
“You’re a felon now, Jared, classified as a ‘violent felon,’ you’ve thrown away your life, your career. Aren’t you sorry—at least for Mom?”
Bruiser loves you, baby! Dikbar and Sally and the black kid at Marion, not to say the boys now dead at Attica. “There’s just too much love here in Attica!” Man, are you insane?
“Agent Jennings,” he rises, steps towards the podium, The Boss leans down to pin the medal on his chest. “Good work, son. America is proud of you!”
“You’ve got to leave this place.”
“But I did, Albert, I left, but look where I’m at now.”
“Did you really leave?”
“Don’t fuck with me, man.”
“Something’s still not right, Otto. You’ve got more work to do. Sorry.”
This is a joke, right? A dreaming joke, right?
Outside: As he wanders through the Bright Cloud there are revolutions of unexpected turns. Hoover dies and Watergate happens the following month. If he were alive The Boss would have given up the ghost upon hearing how the mightiest man in the world pulled himself down into the gutter. Going to China is a mere blip when those cut from Hoover’s cloth hear about the arrest of the White House “plumbers” at the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate hotel in D.C. “Nixon must be mad. Simply mad,” so many say. How else to explain it? If Jared had not unplugged the TV and stopped reading as he wandered through the Bright Cloud he would have laughed and confessed, “Not by student protestors. Not by draft resisters and draft board raiders. Not by our nonviolent acts or the violence of the Weatherman. No. Can it really be true? Nixon morally implodes. His paranoia—sent amok by Daniel Ellsberg’s lonely heroic act—did what no one else could do.”
Nixon ended the war! Certainly not you, Jared. Blessed are the peacemakers, man, blessed be Tricky’s Dick!
The Paris peace talks are on and off. Hanoi and Haiphong suffer the longest bombing of the war as Christmas passes while Jared is inside the Bright Cloud. The beginning of 1973 brings Roe vs. Wade—possibly triggering his Bright Cloud scenes with Char? Then Lieutenant Colonel William B. Nolde, the last American to die in combat in Vietnam, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. As such, the war ends, POWs start coming home—“Operation Homecoming.” Yet did or does anything ever really change on the Outside? Is there ever truly a revolution that is other than one on the Inside? The siege at Wounded Knee in South Dakota—71 days long, from February through May of 1973—gives the lie that America has done other than turn its attention to destroying another people, now not gooks but the ever-ready Hollywood savage, the Injun, the Red Man, the savage native.
Yet, it does happen, exiting the Bright Cloud, at least for Jared. Without his having a hint of the shift, and in an early morning Black Ops raid that Steve Witson knows nothing about—totally eluding and evading all of his computer tricks, taps and traps—Jared is, once again, drugged, dragged out, and dropped off somewhere.
It happens on May 17, 1973—the first day of the televised Watergate hearings.
PART IV: DREAMSLIPPING
Kill the dove! Page 40