TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
5-6-2023
1
As the night fell upon the drunk tank, Lucy had at final-stop resigned to fate, scrawling lines on strips of toilet paper, full moon insomnia illuminating behind her eyes, pen kept in the pockets they didn’t bother to search, frantic to coordinate as tomorrow’s hangover began to creep like the melting of ice upon her reprieve of bottleship. In the aperture of the window, the moon lopes in its year-passing dance. Subtle changes come over the paper by its moods, its progression across the forest of stars, each greeting it makes, each microscopic movement a new congress of celestial meaning making itself clear to her, translated by the drawl of her pen, the interference signal she catches thusly - between the records of what happened to her and the moonlight’s crystalline refractions, the truth recorded via the synthetic waveform between:
June 9th, 1960 - Strawberry Moon. I hope this letter finds you well, or at least vindicated in your unchanging course. I can tell you about the happenings that transpired the night I was hiding behind their radio - the mother sang to the boys, while they nursed other people’s wounds behind their backs. The knives used in the attack were buried safely. I can attest that there is a ceremony to it. They believe that rust reclaims the metal to the Earth, and that the soil is a groom substance to the moonlight. I can tell you there will be another attack tonight. Upon the walls of their big purple house on the prairie, the living room has no television, but an enormous mural of the lunar procession across the sky. The family believes that they are a compromise position, between the nomad and the settled. They believe that just as their lunar guide cycles across the sky, they walk in long circles across the whole of life. You will recall that when the previous attack took place, the report spoke of their dancing across the field.
The happenings in the jailhouse as of late are quite suspect in this regard. Two of the older cousins have sat in the furthest cell for some time, not once leaving in the past few nights I’ve been in and out of this place. They keep throwing kites to some of the greasers that step through the cells adjacent. I saw a few of those men at the bars by the tracks. One’s a car thief, the other two have no consistent occupation, but were booked for petty robbery. I have reason to believe the matron of the family is partially coordinating the criminal element of the city. Killings seem to be reserved for the bloodline however, and always in line with the cyclicality of the moons. What seems to you to be accidents or random violence, are in fact, the well-planned score-settling of an organized family network that choreographs its actions carefully, both by the pace of their celestial paganism, and by the needs of a sophisticated racketeering outfit.
I implore you to seek again, the nature of the wounds sustained by the two murder victims of the last month. As a witness, though my weakness to spirits made my testimony unusable to authorities, I can speak to your privately - there was nothing savage about their movements. The men who killed that boy did so like Russian dancers. There was something elegant about it, the way they moved and swooped, galloping in upon him. They had very long blades that glided in and out smooth. They put their whole arm into it and never faltered, like they were sawing on a fiddle.
2
The radio crooned with whiskey turning, Lucy spoke through the golden nib of her father’s vacancy. A drunk wheels upon the street outside, through the soft fog-a-descent from the gaslamps, footsteps echoing along among the quiet uptown boulevard. Ice clinks in solidarity. It’s too early for the good ‘ol boys to have left their safeties, just her drinking alone with those who’ve been at it since daylight. Paper unfurled, father’s typewriter pushed aside, on the mahogany desk she writes:
June 11th, 1960. Strawberry Moon departs. Looking through father’s records, I found the diaries of several who were present in those earlier years. I find it striking, the forms of thought that mutated within the imaginations of those men, explicated for me. The moon had not been recognized at that time yet. I find a stark lack of mention of the celestial goings-on among these men. It’s as though they existed in a kind of perpetual twilight. As much as I fail to understand it, I can recognize it, if for no other qualities, than those qualities which are present in their lacking.
Looking through my great-grandfather’s writings in particular, he describes this curiosity rather briefly:
“The inhabitants use neither greenback nor specie as currency, but bibles and their pages. An intact bible contains great value - I had only had chance to lay eyes upon one during my visit to the governor’s estate - and pages, perfectly fungible with each other, make up the smaller denominations of trade. Exchange takes place only at the edges of the settlement, the women and the unworking, and even many of the men, only ever passing their affairs with this novel currency. For the grander picture, it makes this whole town is a great infarction, the land stops all flow of commerce in this arterial cavity. Commerce stops to circulate circuitously within this bible-page trade. Naught goes up nor down, merely enriching the gatemasters who run tolls at the floodgates. It’s a trick. They only take tariff in goods, and exchange for local currency. Local currency loses its value as its exchanged for local goods. And so it goes. Bible after bible is used like this. The local shopkeeps seem to guard it more jealously than any other.”
Later on in the same book, I found another passage of note:
“I’ve never seen any race more terrified of the night than those anglo-saxons which dwell in this outpost. I once saw a man crush a whiskey glass in his hand at the mere mention of passing through the town by lamplight. His friends were concerned only that he had bloodied his hand, taking his fear to be without notice. I dared not attempt my errand, lest I be taken for a practitioner of magic crossing those sacred lines.”
Two waves of migration? Remember what we talked about during our last meeting - we’re both uncovering the same elephant now.
3
It’s only now, as the engine hums in a castrated frustration, that Lucy can hear the soul of man in its latest development. Ten thousand machines burn the same fuel at the same interstice of time and space, and she can hear it, developing like the picture in a magic eye illusion. Each car has its own unique frequency of vibration, transmitted both seismically and auditorily through the world around them. From her vantage point at the center of the interstate’s traffic jam, enough information becomes present for the commonalities to form that unified center of the bell curve, the fattest center now the signal, clearer and clearer the longer it went on. Her boyfriend was still rambling, anger bubbling, as the picture clarified itself. The radio hummed - “wonderful, wonderful” across half a dozen cars synchronized through open windows, multiple grades of petroleum layering themselves across the forward-view - bitumen, gasoline, naphtha. A jet streaks itself overhead. The hip flask is hot to the touch.
4
A watch left on the wrist, while occulted molds overtake his hands, the nailbeds broken out in a fungus that had spread, now a carpet across the top of the hands, towards the metallic band. They can’t do much for him now. One puts a cigarette in his mouth, the other will bring him coffee and cold cut sandwiches, leaned as he is, against the faltering wood of the old house. They wouldn’t waste furniture on him. The others watch, wait, on the sagging couch below the window. Between their heads, he can look upwards, at a blue sky that streaks orange with sunlight, at white and gray clouds, at the occasional bird, at the sounds of passing cars, the unanswered knock of a salesman. When he opens his mouth to speak, he coughs detritus. They already promised to bury him in his uniform, though he’ll never know that promise will go unanswered - his “last time” driving him down the winding path out of the concertina-fence of the army base when he still had his vital sugars intact will not go unanswered, another escort planned already, under plastic sheet, doctors carrying sidearms, colonels and federal employees riding bitchseat like secret service hanging off the side of the limousine.
The hip flask is hot to the touch. They’ve asked Lucy to mow the lawn while they attend to the interior. Multiple grades of petroleum layer themselves across the frame - bitumen, gasoline, naphtha. Lucy counts the hours, watching the sun set in discrete time intervals she marks with her fingers set against the tops of the evergreens. The general is meeting with the moonlight clan today. The hairdresser ran out of barbicide. Her boyfriend is gone again, missing down the opaque alleyway that proceeds from the backdoor of the auto shop. The cycle of life will continue thusly, amongst the vermin stepped over while feral boys yip and hooray, dancing like wild horses between the searchlights and concertina, bounding over railroad tracks, blades reflecting the light of the Buck Moon, trusting in the river to render away that which is Caesar’s.