TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
10-18-2022
The sun gathers its lifeblood in darkness, while the wretched of the Earth crawl the razorlands for the barest of trinkets and blessing. Artificial lights buzz white, filaments yellowing, the neon occasionally casting a puddle of color all across this desolation. A patchwork quilt of it all is draped across this land - in daytime a desert of the forgotten, at night comes alive as all those scared of the light come out in the safety of shadows. Here - they light embers of cigarettes burning alone in the black, mirrors of undisturbed puddles in track-marked gravel divining back at them, raw meat torn out of the victim hanging from that tree in the flashlight of the sandy trail, dim nightlights illuminating scarcely the scurrying of those rejects of the outer-world just beyond the thresholds of the elderly and paranoid who came here to “get away from it all”. There’s a bar, headlights will blind you. She’s drinking herself to a pickled nothing beneath the incandescent lights. There’s another one dessicated - no, stop. The car won’t stop grinding away. The engine’s seized in the parking lot. Another man penetrating that one - hey “heroin”, don’t say it! They can’t find it anymore. Stop, stop, run. She’s trapped. Alone. She steps out of the bar for a smoke break. Beyond the shelter of the buzzing sign above her, the licking of the flames of those forest-hounds lapping up puddles of putrid beer from the floor, silence, black shadows cast like theatre curtains over the pines. She’ll never learn the strange, terrible language spoken by the wind in their boughs. She’ll never know the way through that twisting maze of highways leading to some world of permanent light, the promise of daylight dignity promised by the city she’s only seen in the cornea reflections of second-hand faces.
"He hasn't shown up yet." Morningstar said. Coffee steams in the center console of the silent patrol car, a warm tension rising beneath the blanket of night.
“Yet here we are.” I said.
“Don’t be impatient. You told me about the sphinx, regarding this. Don’t make me regret trusting your intuition. If you want me to rest like some fucking riddle fucking stupid desert cat, I’ll do that. But don’t make me fucking regret it.”
“Sixteen… three… two…” Voices cut through the static of our FM radio tuned to a supposedly dead station, the ghosts reading row by row the numbers of magic squares. The correspondences become maddening. The empty forests stretch on for so long, when one flies above the curtains of treeshadow, there stretches an endless canvas to an event horizon, blank white paper (only enhanced when the winter makes an honest void out of the land) scrawled over by the inks of our imaginations running wildly beyond our control. We chase it like a tiger by the tail, each day a new sunrise dawning, the previous wasted and another tally on the wall. The numbers add up, geometries trivial to fit together. It’s never a question of what, but what to do. The prison can be understood so smoothly, the warden provides blueprints, histories, full overviews of every speck of dust. Interpretation comes to us like a drug. Studying is no help, as we onanistically delude ourselves to think there will be some salvation as we spend each morning in the haze of what we left behind, still floating up there, half-visible behind the perpetually overcast skies. No - this is the only answer. It could only be. Brutishness comes so naturally here, a car pulling up crammed in all five seats with corn-fed sons of the soil, grins leering up and down the fake wood siding of the bar. It’s the only way to make a difference. The skull cracks open like shoveling coal. Sixteen tons, gunshots ring out and if no one hears it, does it make a sound? A body is rotting. Flowers grow through it and for the first time, we see in color as occult vapors rise from its gaped mouth, eyes, nostrils, wounds…
“Wait. I missed that.” Morningstar said, pawing at the radio as if it would make a difference.
“We can’t rewind. What difference would it make? A hundred maps and they all lead to the same place. We spent all day - what did that give us? A hotel room full of numbers? We can follow every path between them, over them. There’s one territory and one rule. You’re acting like a junkie.”
“I know, but that… Whatever. Fucking fine. There’s a name in here. A face. We can’t find the prince if we don’t know his face, now can we?”
“The face will be the same. The numbers all lead to the same place.”
“At different scales! This territory -”
“This territory is a desert without wind. Do you think the pines care?”
“I wanted you to write it down, I wanted you to write it down! We can’t even see his face now, how am I - fine. Nevermind.” Morningstar said, seething through clenched teeth, almost crushing the coffee cup in his hand.
“Liar!” I said. “Liar, liar, fucking liar! All we have here is the god damned repetition of the world, number after number, hour after hour. It won’t help us! Nothing will! We can’t even lie. They’re going to strip us bare, fucking move, out of the car!”
“I’m not leaving.” He said, boiling down to ice. “Go off if you want. I’ll see you at the hotel. I can’t sit here for this. I need to break it up. All it does is repeat. It’s the same song, the same numbers.”
I whipped around and left, stalking out of the car door. A single patron smoking in the dim light of the porch noticed our car now, acknowledging and ignoring as the cherry-ember barely illuminated enough to see the police heraldry behind.