Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Dan the Doppelganger

This is a revision, a bit more fleshed out, the other was merely a skeleton of what I intended. I may revist this again in a few months.

"The day of wrath, that day will
dissolve the world in ashes,
as David and the Sibyl prophesied.

How great will be the terror,
when the Judge comes
who will smash everything completely!

The trumpet, scattering a marvelous sound
through the tombs of every land,
will gather all before the throne.


Death and Nature shall stand amazed,
when all Creation rises again
to answer to the Judge. "

- Giuseppe Verdi: REQUIEM


She arrives to Lime's coffee shop at exactly the same time each day. She purchases the same thing consistently: quarter coffee with a bagel and cream cheese. Every once and a while, however, she may delve into scrambled eggs, which trigger long dormant memories of her mother. Mom would always shake them in the most perfect of circles, but to our fledgling little Gemini, they were the same circles as those she made in the sand as a young girl, the same circles she created in love triangles during college while frolicking naked on her dorm room floor, and the same unifying circles that wrapped around her finger before her untimely divorce.

She always sighs, flips through the menu, then sets her head in her hands for approximately 7 minutes. Her menu is always stained, it always reads the same. Somehow she always misses the popular lunch specials and is always too early for the "Dinner Delights" menu. Her bagles are never heated though they advertise them to be, which frustrates her occasionaly . . .but it does not matter.

The man sits alone in his stuffy, hotel room and sees her arrive like she does at the same time, every day. The peaceful churn of the dryer and the Verdi requiem haunting his room seem to be unable to drown out the continous stream of recent sorrows ricocheting against the tacky, wallpaper. He perks up as she sits to read the menu. He has discovered something is not right at our fair diner.

As the fog rolls low over the ocean, a schism in the universe, an abberration, seems to be moving with it, calling for a resolution to this disruption.

"Come on . . .the same fucking bagels with cream cheese spread 2/3 end to end," he rambles to himself in a very calm, low voice.

He rubs his nose and coughs. The slurp of lemonade burns, it is tart, and its acidity blisters his tongue. Resting it on his arm chair, he closes his eyes. He can feel his pulse rising like the nearby tides, the pulsating drums of his own venom brewing against the vasculature, revealing the many tasty poisons in his blood, its sweetness fiending like a mongoose before its serpent.

Our lovely woman now looks out the window, peering through her reflection, saturating the rain as it hits the pavement, calling for a reckoning. Her tears are always the same; the same texture, same riverbed, same crease leading down the mountainous terrain of her sensuality. He is always inside her, and "her other" is always nearby. She is unaware of it.

We should be thankful for this.

The smoldering cigarrette blossoms like a cherry tree in the dim hotel room as he dismantles smoke alarms, and exhales behind crimson curtains. "Damn it, there are two of 'em! Both living in the same dimension, at the same time. That isn't fucking possible, man."

This anomaly is freakish, somehow contributing to his internal debate about the reality of a deity. If such a thing could happen with two reflections of the same woman appearing in the same coffeeshop, on alternating days giving the same looks, always picking at the same cold, bagel with the same bitter, cream cheese. . .then this meant more than everything. It essentially explains all the wrongs in the rights of reality, proof beyond a doubt of things greater than this small, insignificant world. Given this groundbreaking realization, the cold, confused man has become obssessed with anatacids, Fox Soccer Channel, and his former girlfriend now eating across the street at Lime's coffee shop. It took awhile to figure it all out, but he has now got to the heart of the issue. He has made a disfiguring discovery.


As the jukebox changes to the sound of "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen, the woman gets up from her seat and heads to the door of the ladies restroom, which is covered with pictures of limes. Upon entering, the cool ocean breeze ripples through her hair as she gargles salt water and spits it out. Looking in the mirror, she feels like she is lifting off into space, crawling through time codes and time tunnels, soaring through dimensions and dimensions becoming different people in different places on different planets. Maybe she is a president, an ape, a nurse, a doctor, a nerd, a lawyer, an artist, the possbilities were endless, and this knowledge led her to a new decision. It is to make this reality, this dimension, the best of the many. Maybe this is our purpose, to bring all the dimensions in space and time together. If one makes all their different selves uniform, then all her future and former selves become the gateway to reaching something akin to nirvana. Just thinking of such an outcome, squirms like piggies in her chest, there is this feeling of union, of clamping down on the entropy that has dismantled her life. It is a burden lifted.

The daft character focuses his night vision goggles, which are altogether unnecessary, but bring a certain complement to the magesty of vocal heroins belting through his silver stereo. He smokes the last of his cigarette and blows the smoke again through the haze of sunlight peering out from the cloak of the fog. Looking through the emerald glow of his goggles, he can see her twiddle her thumbs and lift up her skirt to scratch her knee. He begins to remember being with her. His heart races everytime he sees her enter and exit. At the end of the day, he assuredly did not expect to see her again, espcially Lime's of all places. This whole situation was mere coincidence; a fluke, as he did not set out to find her, he merely had wanted to get away from the creditors. He never knew she came here to have breakfast until a week ago when he began this vacation. But sure enough it was her car, it was her mannerisms, that appeared out of no where. Yet, there was something was different about her from day to day.

After finishing breakfast, she always writes for a n hour while sipping and sipping on her coffee, scattering her thoughts onto the canvas of God. She feels his voice, her internal character telling her what to write, giving her detailed schematics on how to escape the simple reminder of her former relationship. She wants him back, yet cannot figure out how to change things. She believes it is her fault, thinking about her tardiness, her distance, her unending conflict with her ex-husband. It eats away at her like Bob Goodman eats his custard pie.

But it is more than that. Fear eats away at her. Ultimately, she fears loss, she fears losing, and she fears moving on with another man. Her last marriage was long gone, it was her life, but the memories will not go away. All seems transient and elusive. The thoughts will not come, a mental block prevents progress on her latest short story due by the end of the semester. She decides she needs to run some hot water over her face, maybe this will waken her right brain, make the neuronal connections hot like molten lava, so they may fire in procession and create a circus of words, metaphors, and visuals to being others into her life. She moves forth. Across the way, at the hotel, the man's body lifts like a leviathon facing its aggressor for the first time.

All is set; all is ripe for the taking. Therefore, he makes the call.

The other is not at Lime's, she is at home and unaware of the break in the space time continuum. The soft voice pretends to be a potential employer looking to interview recent college graduates. Her excitement shakes his receiver and she accepts, asking questions of when and where. The voice reminds her to meet him in ten minutes at Lime's Breakfast Diner, and so she rushes out her forest green door throwing on her new business suit. However, this is not a real interview, it is all a test by our gentlemen in the lowly lit hotel room. He wishes to discover if his hunch is right, to see if this is all supposed to be happening. He is aware of the consequences but remembers what awaits him at home: the lost love of Lime's most dependable patron and a stack of bills as high as the Golden Gate Bridge.

Just thinking of their meeting makes him smile soundly, and so he closes his eyes again to imagine the implosion of the universe. The grin is not as sinister as it is kniving. But someone must do it. Someone must shut off the TVs, shut off the hatred, shut off the constant beguiling obsession with material things, shut off and fill up the empty hole of our civilization. He is simply a player in the doppelganger of our Lord, our Savior, the explicit duality of man. He is doing the will of God by exposing His one glaring error; that being His inability to regulate all of the dimensions He has created to amuse Himself. Each has its own freewill and nature will find away just as atoms and molecules disappear and reappear out of nowhere. God cannot stop it. The same people do not encompass the same space, but each character experiences its own life, displays his or her's own free will. The probability of a meeting between two of the same person from different dimensions is simiar to the probability of being hit by a piece of an airplane while sleeping in your house at 5AM after a threesome with three of the hottest pornstars of all time after flying 3 jets at lightspeed across the galaxy like the Millenium Falcon.

But with time, anything can degrade, anything is possible.

So he sits back and sips on his wine. The beauty of the vocal chorus contrasts the peril ahead for the 10th dimension. It is soon to be extinct, and our other protagonist, our young lady, may then live out her other lives as a prison guard perhaps or maybe a liason to the pharmaceutical industry or in the 3rd dimension as a bag lady hurdling Bison in the Golden Gate Park. These are all possibilities. If all ends, all may not be possible, however.

She sees herself in the restroom mirror, looks down at her hands, enjoys the ocean breeze again, then leaves the restroom to complete her transcript.

Like slow motion, she moves to her boothm, the coffee and bagel undisturbed, and her other is facing her, across from her. They both stop. Ghosts from other lives bursting from their skulls, dancing in midair, with their hair on end, now free to haunt and be haunted.

It is an atom bomb times 1,000; everything evaporating as these paranormal spirits move through the crusty yellow ceilings.

Everything is a furnace, a grass fire on the great plains of Wyoming, and it leaves the daft fellow across the street with his with eyes aglow and his mouth gaping wide.

The goggles are the only thing holding his eyes in their sockets.

Daft Fellow in the Dark

you are soft spoken like
crimson shifting into
rectangular configurations
with spectacular displays
of nationalism
its flags now
set half staff
a loud sound moving
down the street
while
two shadows of light poles
duel as
gentlemen
in england
settle scores
and continue their
whispering to one another
about
positions
of power of
wanting
of fucking
for change
for a glimpse
of temptation
sitting quietly
in a leather coated
desk chair
with night vision
glasses strapped
oh so tightly there
in the dark
in his hotel room
dreaming of all the positions
they could tangle
with angles
of the misfortune
seen and glimpsed
as we retreat
into
dagobah
into the swamps
of your illusions
infusing him
with hallucinations
about
love
life
philosophy
oneness
loneliness
wrapping its
vest around this disability
in the library
of her excuses
where he reads
all he needs
to know about

the truth

Sunday, March 12, 2006

The Doppelganger

Going to do a doppelganger story. Name: Smith O'Reilly.
Two stories, polar opposites, funeral two sides of the service, both opposites. A funeral of doppelgangers. A convention of doppelgangers. Duality. Dichotomy. Story of man who accidently killed a man, learns he enjoys, killing spree? Too cliche. Just some ideas.

Monday, March 06, 2006

work in progress



I have a story to submit after final exams, then try and keep this project on its two feet. Here's a pic of me doin a reading at school in Friday with my nigerian friend, Joe, who is also in my program.

enjoy.