truthfront

Category: prose

  • the fifth day

    An elderly man with a metal detector found the body by accident in the grassy overgrowth east of the shuttered factory. At first he thought it was a pile of old clothes but closer inspection yielded blood and decay and bone and dark brown hair.

    The responding officers roped off the area and waited for the detective, who arrived swiftly, cleanly dressed, eyes ringed with dark circles. He sipped from a metal mug and stood observing. 

    Been here longer than two days but no more than seven, an officer said. 

    Flies buzzed and officers worked to clear the ground around the dead girl. 

    Look for any kind of wheeled tracks, the detective said. Car, truck, bicycle, wheelbarrow. 

    A young crime scene assistant snapped photos while the detective stood wordlessly. 

    The afternoon faded quickly into evening, cool and luminous. Pastel streaks exploded in pre-dusk sunlight.

    The detective spoke into his digital recorder: 

    The body lay face-down, packed into the surface and limbs twisted as if dropped from above. Left forearm and hand unattached, not yet found. No automobile tracks. Tall shrubs and grasses; tracks should be easy to identify. Winged insects, snakes, reeds, muskrats. The body was likely maimed and killed, then dumped here, maybe a helicopter. Ask around if anyone’s heard recent low-flying choppers. Ankles bound together with cheap twine dug into the skin. Compound fracture in left femur.

    Medical examiners raised the body onto a gurney and the detective spoke again to the recorder:

    One eye closed, the other a recess where the eye had been. Hair long and brown, matted with dried blood, dirt. Skull broken. Her appearance and clothing suggest a female teenager at the time of death but need the ME to confirm. Muddy grit and dried blood in the fingernails of the right hand. Need time with the metal detector man.

    In the waning daylight they’d carefully loaded the body into a van and transported it to the coroner’s office. The detective stood to study the depression in the brush until the moonless dark when everyone had gone. He walked to his sedan by cell phone light and drove to the coroner for the fifth day that week.

  • The Hidden Span, by Eliot Weinberger

    The Taoist universe is an infinity of nested cycles of time, each revolving at a different pace, and those who are not mere mortals pertain to different cycles. Certain teachings take four hundred years to transmit from sage to student; others, four thousand; others, forty thousand. It is said that Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, spent eighty-one years in the womb. 

    Taoist ritual begins with the construction of an altar that is a calendar and a map of this universe. At its perimeter, twenty-four pickets, the Twenty-Four Energy Nodes, each representing fifteen days, form a year of 360 days. Within, a proliferation of markers for the Two Principles (yin and yang), the Three Energies, the Three Irrational Powers, the Five Elements, the Five Tones, the Six Rectors, the Eight Trigrams, and Sixty-Four Hexagrams of the I Ching, the Nine Palaces and the Nine Halls, the Ten Stems of the Twelve Branches…Each is a supernatural being, a gate, a direction, a part of the body, a measurement of time, a philosophical concept, an alchemical substance. As Lao Tzu said, “The Tao created one, one gave birth to two, two to three, and three to the ten thousand things.”

    Typically of Taoism, this system has an inherent flaw: a hole in time called the Irrational Opening. If, at a certain moment, which is always changing, one walks backward through the various gates in a certain order, one can escape time and enter the Hidden Span. In this other time beyond all the other times, one finds oneself in the holy mountains; there one can gather healing herbs, magic mushrooms, and elixirs that bring immortality. 

    The technique was first taught to the Yellow Emperor by the six calendrical Jade Maidens, who in turn learned it from the Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens, also known as the Lady of the Ultimate Yin. Its most famous practitioner was a very real military strategist, Chu-ko Liang (181-234). To repel an invading army, he placed hidden markers on an enormous plain to secretly replicate a Taoist altar, and then tricked the enemy troops into entering through a certain symbolic gate. Although the landscape appeared unremarkable, the army found itself trapped in a labyrinth of an alternate time from which it could not escape.

    Weinberger, Eliot. An Elemental Thing, New Directions Books, New York, 2007: 56-57. 

  • perpetual calendar

    The captain climbed atop deck from his candlelit desk to the makeshift helm attuned to wind, current, lodestar. Both sky and sea limitless and unexplainable. His crew sleeping in concave quarters, a quorum of young and ambitious sailors paid handsomely but told not a word of their destination or what will happen there. A band of runaways and criminals sworn to nothing but the next meal and warm bed. The ship’s presumed fate is known only to the captain: A prevarication in the south Pacific, meandering without end and losing rations but gaining invaluable time and distance from his pursuers. Not fully enfeebled but peg-legged and castrated from torture and thus amenable to the remoteness of the sea, its unpredictable whims and scant violent miscreants. In other words: his equals. 

    He laments his few hours until mutiny or otherwise chased down by the king’s armed frigates to capture and chain him back in the island cage, a fate far worse than execution, which will undoubtedly fall upon the adolescents he’s recruited aboard. He’s vowed to die over further subjugation, madness, with his deeds or accused acts against the crown already forgotten to him after more than one month at sea, forty days and nights that obliterated time and its concepts apart from the perpetual calendar above.

  • 33rd St. blues

    Frozen ground, cold noon shadows. We ramble by a massive alabaster plinth bearing the weight of a suspended human city block, a marvel of design and commerce and a thousand abodes shimmering godlike yet supplicant to the endless blue above. Skyscraper as man incarnate, sacrificial tribute, an iron will of angles looped and jutting. The smell of people. Prices on first-floor windows and above recessed doorways dark as night in the shade of 33rd Street’s dubious inference. Neal Cassady passes on horseback with a rifle. The pink of his cowboy boots explodes in alleyway sunlight, both man and horse steaming breath while the retinue slumps behind wraithlike and bejeweled in glittering sequins, none older than ten and all armed.

    A madman on the corner paces barefoot orating lies that take winged form and fly up beyond the steel and glass towers to incontrovertible truths that urinate on our heads.

  • Crepuscule in the city

    With a sky like creamed fire hewn by low smoky clouds the man appeared at the corner and I marched toward him with my head down, his body an approaching shadow against the brick façade in that electric dusk. My eyes stuck at my hip rather than in my head, the perspective askew in a diagonal upward awareness dreamlike and dizzied as we merged, the man and me, I could feel the energy of his menace and see the faded red and white checked pattern of his shirt, cotton, dank, ragged. In that sallow crepuscule of summer, the air was warm and dry and charged with anonymous violence wrought from the gods solely to entertain themselves with the malleable human experience.

    The sounds of our shoes clapping concrete swift and strident like the echo of my heart in the luminous hum and from his left hand a flash of light born of an odd fluid motion and the blade whistling past and then dissolving back into his pocket as quickly as it had emerged. He walked past to turn the corner and was gone to the cool trickle of blood on my arm and in his wake the scent of atrocity and other like bouquets. With each remaining step toward the waning light I plodded a course of total loneliness with the laughter of the mad and a broadening crimson trail behind me, and I had never felt more alone nor further from home.

    Waking breathless from the dream in the twilight of the unknown I felt the wound on my arm closed up to that strange indirect realm and I confused the sweat on my body with the sweet tackiness of blood. Shapes of a more familiar world materialized from the shadows to welcome me back from violence into violence.

  • three sevens

    Vacancy. Room 18 is still vacant. Everyone knows about it but nobody sets foot inside. I don’t think anyone can. Why don’t they tear it down? Folks come from around the world just to see the door. The town’s never been the same since that night, what, seven, eight years ago now? Still seems like last year. I remember the cameras from the news stations. Suited people from all over, moving a thousand miles an hour. I’d go get a coffee and there’d be a crew of them, hostile with one another but pleasant, like siblings who hate but love each other. They were indifferent to us locals, mobilizing to yet another place where something terrible had just happened. A routine day at the office. Make no mistake—those people are hunters, packs of wolves. At night you see their eyes glow in the distance, then a minute later they’ve surrounded you, camera lights like suns. They are tireless. And then they are gone, the sated beast shuffling away in the dark.

    Fleeing. Home he fled at age seven. He remembered the vividness of the dead person in some bushes near the busy avenue. He thought it a strange place for someone to sleep but upon closer inspection saw the man’s eyes were open and drained of life, insects all over him. He returned home frightened and changed. He didn’t know where he was running to, anyway, guided only by an internal voice that told him to leave. He withdrew from family after that, told his mother he didn’t want to see her. She laughed but acknowledged the seriousness of the situation after he locked himself in his bedroom all day and night. She went to console him or offer her apologies but his indifference shook her. The next morning she found him dead in the basement, an apparent falling accident. Toxicology results indicated he’d consumed bleach from a bottle spilled nearby. It was a terrible tragedy, by all accounts. No one dared to ask aloud why the child would do such a thing. 

    Relics. Ornamental blades lined the old man’s walls. His house was a relic and he was a relic, old and retired so long that he retired twice more. Then he retired from life. His daughter spoke at his remembrance, she herself old. My father never meant to hurt anyone, she said. He outlived everyone he knew and angered everyone else. Ha ha. But he had a good heart, he was misunderstood. The daughter looked out to the seven people assembled in the front yard of the old man’s house. She held a hand at her brow to block the morning sunlight. Her dress was handmade. Thank you all for coming, she said. Then everyone shook her hand and departed but the daughter remained, beginning the momentous task of leafing through the house’s cabinets and boxes, crates of paper, closets, bookshelves. She found a note her father wrote to her when she was a child and a pair of her dead mother’s diamond earrings. She found sandwich baggies with locks of hair, children’s teeth, personal letters, old photos. She found tucked in a kitchen drawer an oversized envelope filled with 20 thousand dollars cash.

  • The Consumption of Zagreus

    Zeus secretly begot his son Zagreus with Persephone before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. One midnight, The Titans, Zeus’ enemies, lured young Zagreus away with toys. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and he undertook several transformations in attempts to delude them. He became Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw. 

    Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’ heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she breathed life; so that Zagreus became immortal. His bones were collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.

    Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths. Folio Society, London, 1960, re-published 1996: 118.

  • Paraquat

    The detective walks from the bar out to the heat and darkness. Sudden silence. Jasmine in the air, the fecund scent of a nearby creek. The scent of herbicide, the scent of engine exhaust. Birches scatter the wide field toward faraway hills—the trees appear as individual clusters but are one organism. Gravel and century-old pavement beneath his boots. Endless landscape awash in moonlight. Headlights approach from the distance, then the cataclysm of a tanker rig blasting through midnight. Silence returns gradually and the detective walks to the Jeep, driving south from marsh country with the wind whipping through the open vehicle.

    Fifteen miles later he glides into an office park with few cars in the lot. Building C, Unit six. He parks at the entrance curb and kills the engine, then walks to the door and presses the button. The door buzzes open and he approaches the darkened front desk. A man appears in the shadows to his left and greets him apologetically. 

    Sorry to startle you, he says. The lights have been out all day. Follow me. 

    The detective follows the man down a hall into an office lit by a floor lamp connected to a portable electric generator. 

    Have a seat, says the man. 

    No, thank you, says the detective. This shouldn’t take long.

    After a pause the man nods and leans over to pull open a desk drawer. The detective hates moments like this. Anything could be in that drawer. He holds his breath. The man lifts a folder from the drawer and reaches it across the desk for the detective to take.

    It’s all there, says the man. Military record, current registered address. Names and addresses of family and friends, names of closest colleagues in the police force. A dozen or so photographs.

    Thank you.

    Destroy everything when you’re finished. I don’t want any more part of this.

    The detective reaches into his rear pant pocket and tosses the small roll of rubber-banded cash at the man, who drops it, picks it up, drops it again. 

    The detective returns down the dark hall and outside to his Jeep. He wraps the folder in a towel from the back and secures it underneath the seat. He drives south and east with the moon’s guidance toward a most elusive goal: the confrontation of an injustice and the finality of its resolution.